Texting the Underworld (5 page)

He opened the snack sack to show her. She poked the popcorn with a cautious finger, sniffed its aroma. “I like this better than the other thing. But mark you!” She fumbled at the leather bag pinned to her tunic and pulled out a small stack of cards. “See what I found in my sleeping place! These little skins offer many interesting facts about your world!”

They were ancient Trivial Pursuit cards. Ashling plucked one off the top and read, “‘Vidal Sassoon was . . . the official . . . hairdresser of the 1984 . . . Olympics.' What are Olympics? What is 1984?”

“Banshees can read?”

Ashling shuffled through the cards. “Oh yes. Nergal taught me about these little marks, but with him it is all names and numbers and places. Nothing as interesting as . . . oh.” She flipped a card over. “What is baseball? It causes eighteen thousand fack-ee-all injuries each year in U.S. kids aged five to fourteen.”

“I think that's
facial
injuries.”

Footsteps sounded behind him. “Conor O'Neill!” Fortunately, it was only his science teacher, Ms. Alexis, who took a broad view of rules. “Shut that door, on the double!”

“I have to go,” Conor said.

“I will come with you.” Ashling shuffled her cards. “I have many interesting facts to relate. This baseball one, or I saw one about killer whales.”

“You can't come in. You have to go home now.”

“But what if you are the Death?”

“Then . . .” Conor swallowed. “Then you can come back. Please. I have to go.”

As he grabbed the door handle to close it, Ashling waved merrily and skipped back across the street, clearly with no intention of leaving.

“Who is that girl, Conor?” Ms. Alexis asked when he walked into the science lab.

“She's . . . my cousin.”

Javier hiked himself up on his lab stool to peer out the window. “That's not any cousin I've seen.”

“Another cousin.” Conor sat down, wishing Javier would shut up.

“You don't have—”

“You don't know all my cousins, okay?”

Javier-silence. Big-time.

Ms. Alexis stood over him. Then she hunkered down to eye level, never a good sign. “Is everything all right at home, Pix . . . uh . . . Conor?” she asked beneath the classroom hubbub. “Do you want to go to the nurse? I understand you wore a helmet—”

“I have a slight concussion,” Conor said, defiantly not looking at Javier. “But I'm fine.”

That didn't convince Ms. Alexis, who immediately sent him to the nurse's office. The nurse determined that he didn't have a temperature and his pupils didn't look funny and he didn't have any bruises that seemed like he'd been hit—which he could have told her, but she always looked for them anyway. She made him sit for half an hour, then released him for his next class.

He'd had high hopes for language arts, because they were reading a book he really liked. But Ms. Clayborne was in a droning mood, a real book killer. Plus, he was sitting in the sun. The radiator was right behind him, pumping heat.

He smelled woodsmoke, heard a flute tune like a lullaby. It was sweet . . . lonely . . . distant . . .

The bonfires still scent the air, although they've been ash and rubble since daybreak. Cattle moan in pens nearby. Someone plays the flute, a lonely air.

The scent and music fade as he runs out of the king's enclosure, stolen sword at his belt, although the scabbard is his. Without a thought for spirits or raiders or beasts, he plunges into the woods. The footpath is a shortcut, the scouts have told him.

The moon dims any stars that could guide him. He keeps it to his back, hoping that will help.

An hour scuds by. Two. Moonlight dapples the woods, and he keeps losing the path. The spirits' fault: They brush against his face, howl behind him. Fear of them drives him to run without thought, without checking the moon. At last he stumbles into a clearing and stops, horrified. He's seen that boulder before. He's run in a circle.

Slumped on the ground, sword across his knees, he traces the engraving on the scabbard with one finger. He has been proud of this scabbard. But possessions mean nothing to him now. He has to find her before they do. He struggles to his feet, ready to run.

Shouts in the distance. He sets out toward them, grateful to have a direction. A girl screams, fearful yet enraged, over and over and over . . .

Except that wasn't a girl screaming. That was a bell.

The
bell. Language arts was over, his classmates jabbering and laughing their way to the door. Conor tried to shake his head clear before anyone figured out he'd dozed off.

“I get it now.” Javier stood there grinning. “You went outside with your grandfather last night, didn't you? So you didn't get any sleep and now you're all zombified.”

Conor shook his head, still buzzing with moonlight and a girl's screams. He felt sick.

“Dude.” Javier lowered his voice. “What the
heck
is going on with you?”

Conor got up without a word, collected his books, and abandoned a silent Javier for the third time in one day. Study hall was next. He went to the office for a library pass.

He still heard that girl screaming.

It was a dream. So why did he feel so awful?

The school library had a whole shelf of books about Ireland. Three from the end he found what he wanted:
Ancient Celts,
with spirals on the cover that reminded him of the scabbard in his dream. He sat at a table and flipped pages until a heading caught his eye:
Niall of the Nine Hostages, founder of the Uí Néill.

The Uí Néill, pronounced
Ee Nay-ill,
eventually turned into the O'Neills. In the fifth century, they'd won land in Uladh (pronounced
Ull-oo
) from people called the Dál Fiatach—pronounced
Dahl Fyet'ugh
—who weren't happy about it. Uladh later became Ulster in northern Ireland.

Conor got out his notebook and copied a map of fifth-century northern Ireland with all its tribe names, the spellings so weird it felt like one of his fantasy maps.

Ashling must have lived—and died—around that time, speaking an early version of Irish.
How come we understand each other?
Conor wondered.
She must have a universal translator, like in StarQuest Galaxy.

Somehow that wasn't comforting.

He wore his helmet on the way home, too. Javier sat three seats forward, talking loudly with James Johnson and Mohamed Ellis. Olivia was in the seat behind Javier and kept punching him in the shoulder.

Conor got stuck sitting with Andy Watson's best friend, Michael, who was so tall he had to keep his knees out in the aisle. But Andy had stayed after school and wasn't there to incite violence, so Michael left Conor alone.

Conor plastered himself to the window and watched South Boston slide by. Was this the last time he'd be on this smelly, noisy bus?

Javier laughed at something.
Maybe I'm imagining things because I have a brain tumor,
Conor thought. He pictured himself having some kind of a fit and dying, right there on the bus.
They won't be laughing then,
he thought.

His blood went hot, and he was furious. Ashling had to know who was going to die—it made no sense that she didn't. She was holding out on him, not playing fair.
If somebody's going to croak, at least tell me who so we've got a fighting chance.

He'd get it out of her. He didn't know how. But he had to do it, or he really was going to go nuts.

Conor met his sister walking home. Her mouth was full of Fruity Foolers, a jelly bean she favored because it looked sweet and tasted so sour it almost sucked your cheeks down your throat. In response to the sugar ban at home, she kept a three-ounce pack of them in the waistband of her underpants at all times.

Maybe it's Glennie,
Conor thought.
Then
I'll
be the one who's not laughing.
“I love you, Glennie,” he said as they went up the front steps to their house.

“Mo-o-om.” Glennie dropped her backpack inside the door. “Conor's freaking me o-o-out.”

Their mother appeared at the top of the stairs, zipping up her jeans, still in the sweater she'd worn to the clinic. “Conor, stop freaking out your sister.”

Conor took off his bicycle helmet and hung it on the banister. “I only told her that I love her.” What if his mom was the one, and she died mad at him? “I love you, too.”

“Pixie, are you feeling all right? Why did you wear your helmet to school?”

“Because he's a dweeb,” Glennie said. “Do we have any cookies?” She asked this every day, even though she knew the answer.

“Have a banana,” Mom said. “And don't call your brother a dweeb.”

“When I grow up, I'm eating cookies for
breakfast
.” Glennie stomped off to the kitchen, where she would dispose of her empty Fruity Foolers bag in the wastebasket, wrapped in a wet paper towel to escape detection.

Conor hauled his backpack up the stairs. He evaded his mother's attempt to feel his forehead and hesitated outside his bedroom door, waiting for her to go downstairs and gather up her stuff for nursing school. All was silent behind the door—maybe the banshee was gone. Maybe he'd imagined the whole thing. Maybe—

He opened the door. Ashling was ensconced on the beanbag chair, his windbreaker on her lap, Trivial Pursuit cards scattered all over the floor. She was brimming with news.

“Mark this!” She ran the windbreaker's zipper up and down, up and down. “It's the silliest thing I ever saw. And hear this!” She scooped up a handful of Trivial Pursuit cards and waved them at him. “Alexander the Great's hearse was pulled by sixty-four horses. Who was Alexander the Great?”

“Some Greek guy.”

Ashling chose a card, flipped it over. “Anne Boleyn had eleven fingers. Who's she?”

Conor had to think. “Um. A queen. She got her head cut off.”

Ashling beamed. “With an ax?”

“I don't know. Maybe.” Conor remembered he was ticked off. “But listen, I can't sit around talking about axes and things. You have to tell me who's going to die and what we can do about it.”

Ashling's face went stolid. “Who would be ‘we'?”

“Me. My parents.”

“What would they do about it? Your father doesn't even think I'm real. And anyway, as I
keep
telling you, even the Lady can do nothing to change this.”

“And you don't know who the victim is. I don't believe that.”

“Believe. There is no way for me to know. I can only accept and wait, and you must do the same.”

“We're talking about somebody DYING!”

Ashling picked up a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards. “That's nothing new, Conor-boy. It happens every day, thousands upon thousands of times.”

“Not in my family.”

“Lucky you.”

She flipped over a card and brightened. “President Gerald R. Ford survived two attempts on his life in seventeen days.”

Conor stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. He racketed down the stairs, out his front door, and into 36B, his grandfather's side of the house.

“Don't dalk 'a me wor a sec,” Grump said around the glue cap he was holding in his teeth. Hunched over the workbench that dominated his living room, he eased the nose cone onto a miniature Firehawk missile. Pulling his fingers away, he examined the set of the cone and let out his breath. “That'll do it.” He stood up, half-glasses at the end of his nose, checkered shirt taut over his belly. “Hey there, kiddo. Got your Shanaya map?”

“Grump, we have a banshee.”

Grump dropped into his easy chair. “So I hear. At least that explains the helmet. Your pop says it's all my fault for filling your head full of garbage.”

“It's not your fault. The banshee's real. It's just that she disappeared when I tried to show her to Dad. And somebody's going to die. And”—might as well get it all out—“and I keep hearing a flute and I probably have a brain tumor.”

Grump picked at the dried glue on his thumb. Removing the glue took all his concentration. Conor waited. Then Grump said, “I gotta say, kiddo, this is the first I've heard of a banshee hanging around socializing before the Death.”

Something like a Firehawk missile exploded in Conor's head. “You . . . you don't believe me?”

“Oh, sure, kiddo, I believe you. At least . . . well, you know I believe in banshees, right? It's just . . . you been under a lot of pressure lately, worrying about exam school and stuff, and—”

Without a sniff of warning, eighteen hours' worth of pent-up anxiety burst from the depths of Conor's inner being. He stood there, wailing, arms at his side, not even trying to keep the tears and snot from running down his face. He hated crying in front of Grump—impossible as it was, he wanted Grump to think he was brave, not a disgrace to the O'Neills, who used to be kings.

He'd figured Grump—with his Ireland birthmark, a red spot for Dublin—would believe him without question.

Grump didn't move, didn't bustle over to pat Conor on the back and tell him it was all right. That wasn't Grump's way. He sat in his easy chair picking glue off his skin until Conor ran out of tears, then beckoned him to a footstool and handed him a box of tissues.

“If y-you don't believe me, I don't know what to do.” Conor blew his nose.

“The good thing,” Grump said, “is that I seriously doubt you have a brain tumor. You're tying yourself up in knots about this Latin School baloney. If the idea of going there bothers you so much, kiddo, there's no reason you have to go. You got the O'Neill Spark—you'll do great wherever you are.”

“Dad wants me to go to Latin School and then BC.”

“Your pop wants a lot of things he ain't got. So does your mum. They're good people, hardworking. But”—Grump leaned forward and gazed earnestly into Conor's face—“they ain't you.” He sat back as if he'd said something monumental. He focused on the glue again.

“Dad says I need to get out there.”

“Well, he's right about that. You gotta get out there and bend some rules.”

“
You
think I need to get out there?” Double-crossed again.

Grump blew air out his nose. “Oh, cripes. ‘Out there' don't necessarily mean Latin School. Anyways, you gotta stop listening to everybody else tell you what to do, including me.” He ruffled Conor's hair. “Quit worrying, kiddo. It'll all work out. Out of curiosity, what's this flute you keep hearing?”

Conor gulped back his misery and told Grump about running into moon-dappled woods, fire and music behind him. About the sword scabbard. The girl screaming.

“Huh.” Grump rolled the picked-off glue into a little ball between thumb and finger, concentrating on it, making it perfect. “And this scabbard, you say it had spirals and stuff on it? Did they look like anything in particular?”

Conor shut his eyes to recall it. “Not really. Some of them might have looked sort of, I dunno, like a duck or something. There's an eye and kind of a beak. It has a hat on.”

“Here.” Grump dug for his notebook and pencil, which he kept stuffed under his chair cushion in case of brilliant ideas. “See if you can draw it.”

Conor leaned over the table next to Grump's chair and did his best. A thin line in a single spiral, thickening into something like a bird's head in the center, with an eye and an upward-curving beak, sort of a fat torpedo shape at the top of the head.

“Yep. That's a bird all right.” Grump braced his skinny arms to heave his belly out of the chair. He shuffled to the bookcase and ruminated, selected a book, leafed through it. “Ha.” He held the book out to Conor.

And there, in a color plate, was the scabbard from Conor's dream. The caption read, “Bronze Scabbard, Armagh, c. fifth century. Crested bird-head design.”

“That's it! That's the scabbard!”

“You must've seen it in this book,” Grump said.

“I've never looked at this book. Really, Grump. I swear.”

“Kiddo, you could've come in here when I had it lying around. You could've been five or something, and it stuck with you.”

Conor looked closer at the photo. It was the scabbard, no question. Maybe Grump was right and he'd seen this book before. “What's Armagh?”

“It's a city in Ulster, northern Ireland.” Grump replaced the book on its shelf and plunked back down in his easy chair.

“Where the Uí Néill and the Dál Fiatach lived.” He was careful to pronounce
Uí Néill
the way Ashling did,
Ee Nay-ill,
and to add the guttural sound at the end of
Dál Fiatach.

Grump blinked. “Where'd you learn about them?”

“In a book at school. I looked it up today, because—”

“No, but how'd you learn how to say those names? They ain't pronounced the way they look.”

“The banshee, Ashling. She said she's one of the Uí Néill. Or she was, when she was alive. She got killed by the Dál Fiatach. They put an ax in her head. And the Lady kept her as a servant.”

Grump eyed Conor as if he were an unstable batch of rocket fuel. “The Lady. You didn't read that in any book at school. And I know I never told you about her, because your pop would have my hide.”

“Grump, I told you. The banshee's real. She's in my room, playing with the zipper on my windbreaker.”

“You sure she floats and goes invisible and all that? She's not some smart Irish girl who climbed in the window?”

“I saw the streetlight right through her.”

“Huh.” Grump furrowed his brow at the photographs on the mantelpiece: one of Conor's dad at age ten, face aglow, showing off his straight-A report card. One of Conor's gramma. And that other picture, the one of the little girl. Grump threw his ball of glue into the fireplace. “Cripes. Must be my time.”

“What time? Whaddaya mean, Grump?”

Grump looked straight at him, and Conor realized what he'd been trying not to know, ever since last night. “No. It's not you. It can't be you.” To his shame, he started to snuffle all over again.

Grump held out the box of tissues. “Holy macaroni, kiddo—you'd rather it was Glennie? Or your mum or your pop?”

“I d-don't want it to be anybody.”

“Me neither. But it's my time if it's anyone's, and there's no arguing with the Lady. I learned that good enough when Jeannie died.”

No, no, no . . . I am Conor O'Neill, and I'm in 36B Crumlin Street . . .

The old man gripped Conor's shoulder. “Kiddo. I know we don't talk about her much, but I think I gotta tell you about when we lost our Jeannie. Think you can handle it?”

Conor nodded. He always felt braver with Grump's hand on his shoulder.

But Grump took his hand away. Leaning back, he gazed up at the faded picture of a black-haired five-year-old on the mantel. “We were at the playground, see, and my little Jeannie fell off the swings and hit her head. I had my back to her, talking to Kavanagh, so I didn't see her fall.” He closed his eyes. “But I still see the blood and her just lying there, not even crying.”

He rubbed a hand over his face and took a shaky breath. “O-o-okay. Somebody calls the ambulance, and your gramma gets there and I'm standing around because I don't know what to do. And there's this shriek, like nothing you ever heard. Everybody's thinking it's an owl or something that flies because it came from overhead. I look up and a wisp of something white disappears behind the trees.”

Conor wished he had Grump's hand on his shoulder again.

“Your gramma goes off with my little Jeannie in the ambulance. I'm leaving the park with Brian—your pop, he was six then—and I see this redheaded girl standing outside the fence. She has on a green dress and a red cape, which she's using to wipe the tears off her face. She looks me right in the eye. And then she disappears,
poof
. Brian never even noticed her. I thought I'd gone nuts.”

It sounded like Ashling. “Grump, this is supposed to be Ashling's first death.”

“Maybe it wasn't her. But it was somebody. I couldn't think of nothing else for months after that. Your gramma wanted no part of it, but the first time I got the money together I went to Ireland to find out what I could. And of course I figured out the girl was a banshee. I spent my life waiting for one of 'em to show up again.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, deep in thought. “Never heard one when your gramma died. Maybe because she only
married
an O'Neill.”