Faerie Wars 01 - Faerie Wars (21 page)

'What did they tell you?' Henry asked. They were alone in the house. Mum had gone shopping and Dad, despite the fact it was Saturday, had taken himself off to the office. Both had stressed they would not be back until the afternoon. Henry suspected it was a deliberate give-the-children-time-to-talk-things-over sort of thing.

'Well, I didn't actually ask them about Chester,' Aisling said. 'I mean I
hinted
but -- '

'Oh, come on, Aisling!' Henry said tiredly. 'We're going to have to talk about it some time.'

'Talk about what?' Aisling asked.

'What's happening between Mum and Dad.'

'What's happening between Mum and Dad?' Aisling asked brightly.

Henry felt like strangling her. 'Did they tell you Mum's been having an affair with Dad's secretary?' he asked brutally.

'Oh, that,' Aisling said. 'It doesn't mean anything. Mum's not gay.'

'Mum's not gay?' Henry echoed.

'No,' said Aisling sniffily. 'How could she be? Besides, she told me last night.'

'Mum told you she isn't gay, but she's having an affair with Anais Ward? Didn't you see the tiniest little contradiction between those two statements?'

'No,' Aisling said. She glanced around vaguely, like somebody looking for an escape route. 'Don't you have to go work for that old poop Fogarty or something?'

Henry ignored it. 'They told you they were splitting up? Dad's going off somewhere and we're supposed to stay here with Mum?'

'Won't last long,' Aisling told him confidently.

'What won't?'

'The thing about Mum and Dad living apart. Mum's not serious -- it's just an early menopause or something. It's not like it's another
man.
She's just at an age when women like to experiment. You're a boy - you wouldn't understand. It'll blow over and then Dad will come back. They mightn't even get as far as separating. They both said that would take ages because Dad has to find a flat. Mum could have stopped with Anais before then.'

He'd never thought of his sister as Brain of Britain, but this was dim even for her. 'And you think Dad will just ... forgive her?'

'What's he got to forgive? It's not another man.'

Henry gave in. Aisling seldom made much sense and today she wasn't making any at all. But then everybody coped with these things their own way. Aisling obviously wanted to believe everything was going to be all right, nothing was going to change. Or if it did, it wouldn't change for long. Then she could get back to the important things in life, like persuading Dad to buy her a pony. 'OK,' he said.

'OK what?' Aisling asked suspiciously.

'OK, it's not happening.' He got up and started to shrug on his jacket.

'Where are you going?'

'To work for that old poop Fogarty,' Henry said.

For some reason it made her angry. 'Maybe if you stayed home a bit more, this whole thing might never have happened!'

He stared at her, speechless for a minute. She was just back from a week at her damn Pony Club, she treated the house like a hotel and she was telling
him
he should stay home more? Before he could think of a suitable riposte, something bitter and hurtful, she said, 'What do you do for that dreadful Fogarty person anyway? I mean, old man living alone, no wife. What's somebody like that want with a young boy coming round two or three times a week? You sure it's
Mum
who's the gay one in this family, Henry?'

'You shut up!' Henry snapped. He took her by the arms and shook her, so her head bobbed like a rag doll. 'You ... just ... shut ... up about ... about everything!' But some half-buried part of him knew she wasn't talking to him at all, wasn't talking
about
him. She was just shouting aloud to drown her own fear, trying to hold someone else to blame for what was happening to their parents.

'All right,' she challenged. 'What do you do?'

The thought that popped into his head --
We rescue fairies --
was so ridiculous he almost smiled. With a huge effort he managed to make his voice sound calm and reasonable. 'I clean his house, sometimes his shed. He lets things slide a bit. I think he's over eighty.'

But Aisling was in no mood for calm and reasonable. 'That all you do?' she asked, in his face. 'Just cleaning?'

'No, as a matter of fact. Not just cleaning.'

Absolute triumph took command of her features. She stood looking at him, waiting.

What the hell, Henry thought, she's not going to believe me anyway. And there was some sort of poetic justice about telling her the truth. He tipped his head to one side and this time actually did smile. 'As a matter of fact, we rescued a fairy. Little fellow with wings, name of Pyrgus.' Then, before she could recover, he headed for the door.

As he closed it behind him, he heard her sudden explosive shriek. 'You're the fairy, Henry!
You're
the bloody, bloody, bloody fairy!'

There was a few feet of tired lawn in front of Mr Fogarty's house to match the few feet of tired lawn at the back. The grass looked grey, as if it were slightly blackened by soot. It seldom needed cutting -- the soil was poor and badly drained -- which suited Mr Fogarty fine since he didn't like working at the front where anybody could see him. Henry once offered to cut it for him, but Mr Fogarty had the idea he was too young to handle a lawnmower. Weird thing was, the old boy owned an incredibly powerful lawnmower, far too big for the amount of grass he had. It was greased and oiled and wrapped in plastic towards the back of the shed.

Henry thumbed the front doorbell, then rattled the knocker. Sometimes it took Mr Fogarty as much as five minutes to answer his door, sometimes he wouldn't answer it at all, so Henry had to go round the back and hammer on the kitchen window. But today his reaction was immediate.

'Go away!' called Mr Fogarty's voice from inside. 'Go on -- push off!'

Henry bent down and pushed open the letterbox. 'It's me, Mr Fogarty,' he said patiently. He straightened up and waited.

After a moment the door opened a crack. Fogarty's rheumy old eye peered out. 'That you, Henry?'

'Yes, Mr Fogarty.'

Fogarty opened the door a little further and stuck his head out. He peered both ways along the street, then reached out to grab Henry and pull him inside. 'Where the hell have you been?' he hissed as he slammed the door. Quite unexpectedly he gave one of his rare feral smiles. 'Got somebody I want you to meet. Come on, come on.'

Henry followed him to the living room. Like much of the rest of the house, it was full of cardboard boxes and stacks of books. You had to step carefully to get from one end to the other. Mr Fogarty had taken to sticking brown paper over the lower windowpanes to stop his neighbours looking in, so the room was always gloomy. For a moment Henry didn't realise there was anybody in it except for Fogarty and himself. Then there was a movement to his left and a red-haired boy about his own age pushed himself out of a tattered armchair. 'Hello, Henry,' he said.

'Hello ...' Henry said uncertainly. 'Do I know you?' The boy had cheerful, open features and a peculiar way of dressing Henry hadn't seen before. His clothes were dark and loose, a bit like the military gear some kids liked, but the wrong cut and colour.

The boy stuck out his hand and grinned. 'Pyrgus,' he said. 'I'm Pyrgus Malvae.'

Henry frowned, wondering who Pyrgus Malvae was. Then it hit him like a thunderbolt. 'Pyrgus! It's you! But ... but ...' He looked round at Mr Fogarty who was grinning broadly as well. He looked back at Pyrgus. 'No wings?'

Pyrgus shook his head. 'Not any more.'

'And you're ... big!'

'You noticed?'

Henry took the proffered hand and shook it. The skin felt surprisingly hard and rough. He glanced over his shoulder at Mr Fogarty. 'How did you do it?'

'Didn't do anything,' Fogarty said. 'It just wore off.'

'Sometime in the night,' Pyrgus said. 'I went to sleep that little thing with wings and woke up normal.'

'Wow!' said Henry. He couldn't believe the solid boy before him was the same delicate little creature that had been sitting on his shoulder a couple of days before.

Fogarty's eyes glinted. 'Other thing is, you have to call him Highness. That's
Prince
Pyrgus you're shaking hands with.'

'Don't listen to him,' Pyrgus said.

Henry grinned now. 'You're not a prince?' Pyrgus didn't look like a prince.

Pyrgus sucked air through his teeth uncomfortably. 'Actually, I am. My father's the Purple Emperor. But nobody calls me anything but Pyrgus.'

'Lot of things happened since you skived off home,' Fogarty said sourly. 'Pyrgus says Faeries of the Night must be behind the UFO abductions.'

Henry blinked. 'Wait a minute -- how did we get to UFO abductions?'
And what are Faeries of the Night?

Pyrgus said, 'Mr Fogarty has been telling me about how your people are getting kidnapped by small beings with large eyes and thin limbs. Faeries of the Night use creatures like that -- in my world we call them demons.'

Demons, Henry thought. Pyrgus was as big a nutter as Mr Fogarty. Carefully he said, 'And Faeries of the Night are what?'

'Bit hard to explain,' Pyrgus said. 'They're sort of different from Faeries of the Light.'

Henry started to feel like he was drowning. 'What are Faeries of the Light?'

'My lot,' Pyrgus told him cheerfully.

'So you see why it's important you're here,' Fogarty said to Henry.

'No,' Henry said.

'So we can send Pyrgus
back,'
Fogarty told him patiently. 'We were going to help him for his own sake, of course, but now there's another reason, isn't there? He gets back to his own world, he can get his old man to close down the portals the demons use. Stop the whole abduction business.'

'I see,' Henry said. Portals. Fairies. UFO abductions. Demons. He glanced at the brown paper stuck to the windows. He supposed it wasn't all that much more of a lunatic asylum than the one he'd just left. 'It's important I'm here so we can send Pyrgus back.'

'Good,' said Fogarty impatiently. 'Now let me show you how we're going to do that.'

As they followed Fogarty towards the kitchen, Henry whispered to Pyrgus, 'There's no such thing as flying saucers.'

Still frowning, Pyrgus said, 'But Mr Fogarty told me six million Americans were abducted last year. Americans are people -- right?'

'Yes. Yes they are. But it didn't happen. Mr Fogarty just
thinks
it happened.'

'Why does he think that?' Pyrgus asked, bewildered.

Because he's barking mad, thought Henry.

'What are you two whispering about?' Fogarty asked suspiciously. He hated people whispering.

'Nothing, Mr Fogarty,' Henry said.

There was an enormous blueprint on the kitchen table. It showed a piece of machinery like nothing Henry had ever seen before. Two symbols were marked 'tesla coils' and seemed to be electrical, something borne out by what looked like a drawing of a power pack. But there was conventional machinery as well, the sort of cogs, levers and wheels you might see in a Victorian flour mill. Strangest of all was a circuit diagram labelled 'Hieronymous Machine'. A spiral antenna emerged from one end, emitting -- or absorbing -- a little lightning flash with 'eloptic radiation' written beside it in Mr Fogarty's neat block capitals. Henry checked twice to be sure, but no part of the Hieronymous Machine was connected to the power pack. He looked up at Mr Fogarty. 'What is it?'