Texting the Underworld (2 page)

Something revealing must have shown on his face. “Where's the big scary spider?” Glennie said.

Conor strode to the door. “Da-a-ad! Glennie won't leave us alone.”

“Glennie.” Their father was in the kitchen, working on his Internet accounting course. “Go to your room and do your homework.”

Glennie threw back her head for better volume. “I can do homework here. It's reading.”

“Go to your room.”

“Da-a-ad.”

“Glennie, I have homework myself. If I have to come up there . . .”

Glennie kicked her book to the door. “If I had a little sister, I'd let her do homework with me.”

“No you wouldn't,” Conor and Javier said in unison.

She slammed the door behind her. Then she slammed her own door. They heard her throw something against the wall.

“That book's going to be a wreck,” Javier said.

They settled in to work, Javier on the beanbag chair because he could concentrate anyplace, Conor at the desk. They worked their way through five algebra problems. Conor screwed up one in such a complicated way that Javier actually whistled in admiration.

The door banged open again. Conor was about to call his father, but the visitor turned out to be Grump. “Doing anything?” Grump asked.

“Algebra,” Conor said.

“Great, great. Listen, kiddo, I'm gonna need a hand with mixing fuel tonight. Mr. Danson can't come, and I figure you're old enough to start taking some responsibility around here.”

Ever since Grump sold his convenience store, he and a friend had built model rockets and shot them off at the park. Grump said rocket science was an important educational tool for children, but nobody's parents would let their kids come within a hundred yards of the launch site.

“Grump, I—”

“How about you sneak out around midnight and I meet you in the backyard? Can't do it in the daytime because . . . well, let's say your mum's not that big on rocket fuel. Javier, you're welcome to come, too.”

“Grump, it's a school night. They'd never let me—”

“What part of
sneak out
don't you understand?”

“How'm I gonna sneak? They'll hear me go down the stairs.”

“Conor, kiddo, do you or do you not have a fire escape right outside your window? Best alternate route known to man or boy.”

“It creaks. It's not safe. It's too high. And . . . and it creaks.”

“Not if you go at it the right way.”

“I don't know what the right way is.”

“Time to find out.” Grump headed for the door. “I'll see you later, kiddo.
Hasta la vista,
Javier.”

“That means ‘see you later,'” Javier said carefully. “You will not see me later. I'm going home and staying there.”

“Suit yourself,” Grump said. “Sayonara.”

Javier's mother called just as the boys finished their algebra. On his way out of the house, Javier stopped to help Conor's dad get rid of a virus on his laptop. Then he was gone and Conor could relax into his customary B+/A– work on social studies and language arts. He got it all done in time to pull out his notebook of maps and create a seaport for the Land of Shanaya. His mom came home, so he scurried into his pajamas before she swept in to say good night.

When she was gone, Conor settled onto his window seat to battle soul-sucking demon warriors on his cell phone. He was about to turn off his phone and go to bed when a black dot slightly bigger than a pencil eraser emerged from the far corner of the ceiling. It skittered and scuttled until it was over his bed again. And then it halted, preparing to drop.

Conor almost thought he'd wait until his parents went to bed and go sleep on the couch. But that would be wimpy, especially for someone with the O'Neill Spark. Instead, he made careful preparations: took off his slippers for increased agility, buttoned his pajama top up to his neck, then opened the window so he could throw the spider out, in case it was only playing dead and had revenge on its mind.

Pre-algebra book in hand, Conor climbed up on the bed, never removing his gaze from the enemy. He bounced slightly on the mattress, willing himself to slap the book on the ceiling before the spider saw what was coming.

The spider froze, sensing danger. Conor had to do it now.

No, now.

Now. Really. Go!

AhhAHHahhAHHahhAHHahh . . . !
A sudden wail—monstrous, insane—exploded outside Conor's window.

It was as if all the sorrows of the universe had erupted at once. It was a car alarm from just north of hell, a jet screaming into Boston Harbor, all souls lost. Subway wheels shrieking on a track known only to rats and zombies.

Every nerve in Conor's body twanged a great twang, and he found himself on his back on the carpet. He watched the spider scurry across the ceiling, unharmed.

The wailing stopped. The universe righted itself.

Somebody on the street below bellowed, “
Another
car alarm? Are you
kidding
me?” The front door slammed downstairs as Conor's parents ran out to confront the owner of whatever vehicle was wreaking havoc on Crumlin Street. Glennie, of course, slept through it all—nothing woke her up unless she wanted it to.

A red-blond head poked through Conor's open window. “Sorry, boy,” the girl said, floating. “And now, I suppose, that's a cry wasted.”

She drifted, steadying herself with a hand on the window sash.

Conor blinked, thinking maybe he'd hit his head.

Because he was pretty sure the streetlight was shining through her shoulder.

Not behind it. Not around it.

Through it.

The girl wafted in over the window seat, her body solidifying. By the time she'd settled herself in his Boston Celtics beanbag, she was as totally there as a middle school principal—except for her right foot, which remained translucent. As he watched, the foot floated up as if she were sitting in a swimming pool.

“Look at you now,” she said to the foot. “Why ever would you be doing that?” She used both hands to press her leg down and trapped the wayward foot with her other one. “There. All fixed.” She looked brightly at Conor. He lay there on the carpet, organizing his thoughts.

She couldn't have floated in the window, he decided. There must have been a ladder out there. It was nighttime and his room wasn't lit very well and he hadn't seen her right.

“Who are you?” He sat up, so he'd look like he was taking charge.

“Oh good, you speak the Tongue. I was afraid we'd not understand each other.”

“What tongue?”

She frowned. “Our own, of course.”

“English.”

“I never heard it called that. Is that what you call it?”

“It's what it is.” Conor stood up, wobbled, and sat down on his bed, forgetting to check for the location of the spider. It could be crawling up his back for all he knew. “Who
are
you?” he asked again.

“I beg your pardon, you asked that already, didn't you? I am the daughter of Maedoc, called Ashling, I don't know how many years dead.” She pointed at his cell phone. “That is a little computer, is it not? I was watching you from outside. What are the little creatures that jump?”

“It's a video game,” Conor's mouth said, although his brain yelled
DEAD? She thinks she's DEAD?

“Vid. Ee. Oh.” Ashling tasted the word, rolled it in her mouth. “Vid-ee-oh game.” She surveyed the room. “This is strange and lovely. So clean! Is it that you're noble, or is it that everyone lives in such a way?”

“We're not noble.”

Concern flickered across Ashling's face. “Not a son of the Ee Nay-ill?” Or that's what it sounded like, anyway.

“My father's name is Brian. Brian O'Neill.”

Ashling's face brightened. “A son of the Ee Nay-ill, then. Descendant of kings.”

Grump talked about O'Neills being kings, back in the dawn of Ireland. “There are a million O'Neills,” Conor said, feeling he should apologize. “I don't think we're noble anymore.”

Ashling stuck her pointy little nose in the air. “The Ee Nay-ill,” she said, “are always noble.”

Conor thought of Uncle Ralph drinking Budweiser and belching the national anthem.

Ashling stood up and walked around his room. She was wearing a green ankle-length wool tunic with a thin leather belt, a red wool cloak open in front, and rough leather shoes. Her red hair hung to her waist in a thick braid, a green ribbon woven through it.

She floated up for a closer view of the solar system map on his ceiling. She seemed real—sturdy and solid and muscular. But she was totally floating.

“
What
are you?” Conor asked. Why wasn't he freaking out? He should be running out the door.

The girl landed in front of him. This time her hand stayed in the air, raised as if she were the brainy kid in class. “Did you see that? How I floated? And, mark you, I just learned this . . .” She faded to invisible, then unfaded, except for her left foot. “An amazing thing, yes? Yes?”

Conor's rear end seemed to have become part of his mattress. “What are you?” he whispered again.

Although he was beginning to think he knew.

“Not supposed to tell what I am.” She wasn't very tall—Glennie's size. Standing there, she could stare straight into his eyes as he sat on his bed. Hers were a merry blue—O'Neill Blue—but with an odd wedge of gray at the bottom of each iris that for some reason made him cheerful. She smelled of woodsmoke on a chilly night. “But I don't see why I cannot tell
one
person. Promise not to distress yourself?”

“I . . . I don't know.” He thought he might be distressing himself already.

Ashling startled him with a wide grin, gleaming white except for one brown tooth on the side. “I am a banshee, of course. Your family's banshee. Sent by the Lady to . . . to . . .
Ach,
you
will
distress yourself, will you not?”

Sent to . . . what?

To keen—like mega-weeping.

Before a death in the family.

Conor's nerves erupted with another mighty twang. “Am I going to
die
?”

“You are distressed. I knew it.” Ashling patted his shoulder. “Calm yourself. It's not so bad. I died once upon a time, and now here I am, all new clothes with a ribbon in my hair.” She gazed earnestly into his eyes. “Anyway, it might not be you. I've no idea what Death I'm sent for, see. I'll feel it when it's about to happen. At least, I hope I will. In the meantime, I'm compelled to keen for any death that happens near you, the Ee Nay-ill. It's part of my training.” She frowned. “At least, I think it is.”

“You haven't always been a banshee?”

“Of course not. This may be my one and only time. But I shall be very, very good at it. The Other Land will talk of me long afterward. They'll say, ‘
Ach,
if only she'd stayed, what a wonder she—'”

“I was about to kill a spider before.”

“I know it. That's why I keened. And a marvelous keen it was, worthy of—”

“The spider didn't die.”

“I know it. That was odd.”

She's a screwup as a banshee,
Conor thought.
No matter how great she says she is
.

But he was dreaming, of course. He must have fallen asleep over his video game. He should yell for his mother, have her tell him, “It's only a nightmare, go to bed.”
I am Conor O'Neill. I live at 36A Crumlin Street, South Boston, Massachusetts, thirty-two hundred feet from Boston Harbor.

Ashling's raised hand fell to her side. Her foot reappeared. She crossed the room to inspect his wall map of Greater Boston, Massachusetts. “I wasn't supposed to appear to anyone,” she commented. “What a strange design this is on your wall! But you had the little men jumping, and I so, so, so wanted to find out what they were.” She knuckle-rapped on his window, then tested the heft of his hockey stick.

He pinched himself.

Ow
.

He hadn't believed Grump's Irish fairy tales for years—not since the one about the kelpie, the fairy horse that drowns and eats you. He'd stayed out of the water one whole sweltering July until his mom figured out what was going on and made Grump say that kelpies were another of his old stories.

His dad said a boy Conor's age should be ashamed to believe such baloney.

Maybe kelpies were real. Maybe Grump
did
smuggle guns to Irish rebels.

Another pinch.

Ow.

He was pretty sure this banshee was real. Weird.

He wasn't a shivering scaredy-cat. Weirder.

The spider didn't die.
“Nobody here's even sick,” he said. “You've made a mistake.”

Ashling raised the hockey stick over her head, brought it down in a vigorous chopping motion. “
Umph
. Odd shape, but a good club nonetheless.” She shot him a look—analyzing him, amused, with a touch of lofty pity for his fate. Conor might have been a fly struggling in a web. “You may think what you like, but the Lady does not make mistakes.”

“Who's the Lady?”

“I don't know that she's a
who
. She rules the Other Land, where the Dear Departed pass through and are counted. Where I've been until now. She it was who offered me my trade.”

“What does that mean,
your trade
?”

“She kept me to entertain her—oh, I don't know how many lifetimes—when everyone I knew had been reborn many times over, lost to me, lost, lost, lost in the World.” Her voice rose. “And I am no bard, and yet I must tell the same old tales over and over and over and over.
Ach!
What a fate for a daughter of the Ee Nay-ill!”

“Shhh.”

“And now at last, at
last,
the Lady has said if I serve her once as a banshee she will send me back to the World. I will have a new human life.” She tightened her grip on the hockey stick, fixed him with an intense gaze. “I would do anything—
anything
—for a new life.”

“You mean . . . Cripes. You mean you'll be reincarnated?”

“I have heard it called that, yes. And this will make up for the life so cruelly taken from me by the dreaded raiders of the Dahl Fyet'ugh.”

Conor's brains went floaty. “Dahl Fyet'ugh,” he repeated, trying to match the funny guttural sound she made at the end.

Ashling scrunched up her face and slammed the hockey stick down on the beanbag chair as if beheading someone. “Curs!” she shouted. “Sons of no mother!”

I am Conor O'Neill, 36A Crumlin Street . . .

A chair scraped in the kitchen. “Pixie? What are you doing? Are you all right?” The stairs creaked.

Conor leaped to crack open the door. “I'm fine, Mom,” he said in a loud whisper—Glennie was most likely to wake up exactly when you didn't want her to. “I dropped my pre-algebra book. I was killing a spider.”
Why don't I tell her we have a banshee?

Because there's no such thing as banshees.
He imagined the expression on his dad's face. Good enough reason to keep this to himself.

His mom's blond head appeared at the top of the stairs, her brow furrowed. “Go to bed, Pixie. It's late.”

“Yeah. Okay.”
Don't call me Pixie.

“Moira,” his dad said from downstairs. “The kid's fine. And stop calling him Pixie.”

“Good night, Pixie.”

Conor sighed. “Good night, Mom.”

When he turned around, he half expected the room to be empty. But Ashling was still there, still brandishing the hockey stick like an ax. She grinned, showing off her one brown tooth. “‘Pixie'?”

Conor was embarrassed. “My name's Conor, but they started calling me ‘Pixie' when I was little. Because I was so scrawny”—
like I'm not still
—“and sometimes my eyebrows peaked up so high Grump said I looked like . . . well, a pixie.”

“Your eyebrows peak up when you're unnerved.” Her grin broadened. “Like now, Conor-boy.”

“I'm not unnerved.” But then he saw himself in the mirror. The eyebrows never lie.
Cripes. They're practically in my hair.

He got his eyebrows under control and tried to deepen his voice. “So, these Dahl Fyet'ugh. They killed you.”

“And my brother before me, demons that they be. Maybe the rest of my family, too, but I was too dead to know.”

“How . . . ?”

“A raiding party as we drove our cattle home from afar, an ax in my head as I defended the little ones.”

She didn't look much older than he was. Conor rubbed the back of his head, which felt like it had an ax in it. “Holy macaroni. I bet that didn't tickle.”

“Didn't
tickle
? It was an ax in the head!”

Conor felt his eyebrows peaking up. “It probably hurt a lot.”

His visitor dropped the hockey stick on the rug and replunked herself down on the beanbag. “But then I appeared before the Lady to be praised for my bravery, which bested any in the history of . . . What is
holy macaroni
?”

“Something my grump says.” But there were bigger questions, weren't there? “Does . . . does everybody get reborn after they die?”

“Not everybody.” Ashling kicked at the hockey stick, peevish. “Not me, for example.”

“Most, though?”

“Most. They go through a gateway and we see them no more.”

“Do people know that they lived before?”

“No.
You
know it now, of course.”

Conor's eyebrows shot up toward his scalp. “How . . . how many times have I . . . ?”

“How should I know that? I am Ee Nay-ill, I don't hang about keeping records. That's Nergal's task.”

“Nergal?”

“He's Babylonian.” She said that as if it explained everything.

“But . . . I don't remember any other lives.”

“Of course not. Look at you, you're white as a new bone knowing what you know now. Imagine if you knew
everything
. You would be holy macaroni.”

It was time for bed. The world was more out of control than he'd ever suspected.

“You want to sleep,” Ashling said. “I shall sleep, too.”

“Banshees sleep?”

“It seems we do. I'm tired, in any event.” She pondered for a second, then said, “I don't seem to be hungry. That's good, because I'm not supposed to eat anything.”