Texting the Underworld (4 page)

Glennie half smirked, flicking a bit of granola off her pink skirt. Glennie often wore skirts, as well as ruffles and hair ribbons, in order to distract everyone from her soul-sucking true identity. Today's temporary tattoo, on the back of her hand, was of a pink bunny with a wolf looming behind, ready to spring.

“Mom,” Conor pleaded.

“Glennie, you stay right here and eat your cereal.” Mom swooped past the sink to give her smoothie glass a drive-by rinsing, then headed for the door. “And no telling the girls.” Glennie's jaw jutted out, making her look like a fluffy blond version of Dad and Grump. Her parents ignored her and steamed out of the kitchen, Dad to the stairs, Mom to the coat closet in the front hall.

Hand on his bedroom doorknob, his father fidgeting beside him, Conor hesitated. What if the banshee got mad? Would she turn into a wraith, bringing death to all who saw her? But Ashling hadn't said
he
couldn't tell anyone. So she wouldn't mind, right?

Still, he found himself tiptoeing across the carpet to the game cupboard, his father close on his heels.

“Must be a pretty small banshee to fit under the eaves,” Dad said.

“Shhhh.” Conor pulled the door open and stood back so Dad could see.

“How small is this thing, Con?” His father stuck his head in the cupboard to scope it out, reemerging with the baffled look he reserved for his children. “Do I need a magnifying glass?”

Conor almost whacked his head on the doorframe swooping in there. Empty. He jumped out again, and the banshee wasn't hovering near the ceiling or outside the window. He flung himself on his knees to look under the bed. Not there, either.

“Conor,” his dad said. “There's no such thing.”

“She's gone.” A thought occurred to him. “Or she's invisible. Hey, Ashling, if you're here anywhere—”

“Oh, cripes, Con. You were dreaming.” His dad turned for the door.

“No, look, there's her butt print on the beanbag.”

His dad took him by the shoulders, gazed deep into his eyes. “Listen, kid, Grump's nuts about this banshee business, and I know you think a lot of him. But it's all an old man's stories . . . like the kelpie that summer. I'm not letting this garbage take over your life, okay?”

“
WooOOOoooOOOoooOOO
 . . .
” Glennie, out in the hall. “I'm a
baaaan
shee and you're going to
croooooak . . .
”

Conor's dad lifted his eyes toward the solar system on the ceiling, seeking calm. “Glennie, pack up your stuff for school.” He headed for the hallway. “Get dressed, Con. I gotta go and you're gonna miss your bus.” Almost out the door, he turned back. “Oh, hey . . . I got the money together for hockey next winter. Tryouts in six weeks, Katie Miller says.” His face was aglow with sudden enthusiasm, never a happy sight for his children.

“Dad, I'm lousy at hockey.” Every day in a skating rink, all summer long. He'd rather die.

Except not really.

“Katie says there's twenty-six kids trying out, but you skate pretty good, so I wouldn't worry.”
Glow, glow, glow.

“I don't
like
hockey.”
Don't let him talk about Boston College. Don't let—

Too late. Worse luck, his father for once had actually heard what he said. “Listen, Con.” The glow gave way to fatherly seriousness. “My grades didn't get me a BC scholarship, but yours might. You go to Latin, play hockey, you'll be golden.”

“I know that, Dad, but—”

“Plus, your college fund's growing—ain't huge, but I'm not blowing it on trips to the old country like
my
pop did.”

“I know, Dad. I really appreciate it, but—”

“I'd like to see you get out there, Con. Off your beanbag and out of the house.”

“I go to Adventure Boys every week.”

“Because of Javier. Something on your own, that's what they're looking for, these admissions people.”

“My maps are my own,” Conor ventured.
Unlike hockey,
he might have added if house rules permitted talking back.

Dad looked baffled again. “Half of them maps ain't even
real,
Con. I gotta go. Give it a try, son, okay?”

Conor watched the door close, then turned around and—“Gah!”—inches from his nose, Ashling was RIGHT THERE, her face solidifying. He stumbled backward, landing on the beanbag chair.

“You told,” Ashling said. One of her hands was missing.

Conor got his breath back. “You didn't say not to.”

“I trusted you to use the wits you were made with.” Ashling pulled a large comb, intricately carved out of bone, from a leather bag pinned to her tunic. She dragged it roughly through her hair with her invisible hand. “The Lady said to me, Show yourself to no one, tell no one what you are, but did I listen? No, for there was a vid-ee-oh and a lovely human and I wanted to see and feel and find out. Then the next thing I know he's told MORE humans and one of them may be the dying one.” The comb caught on a knot. She worked at it. Her hand reappeared. “It's a tragedy, that's what it is. A disaster. A horror. A cata—”

“You didn't say,” Conor insisted, but then he thought,
Lovely human?

“You didn't SAY, you didn't SAY,” Ashling mimicked. “Potent Mother Maeve, what a hare-head.” She untangled the comb so she could waggle it in his face. “I shouldn't have told you, and you must not tell anyone else. Best if they don't know what's coming, boy, you see?”

“But what am I going to do?” Conor wanted to keen like a banshee himself. “Sit here and let somebody die?”
What if it's me? Mom and Dad would think of a way to stop it.

“Nobody can stop it,” Ashling said, as though reading his thoughts. “And the Lady has sent the best of all possible banshees to see it through. That's that.”

The kitchen was empty when he ate his breakfast—which was nerve-racking, because what if he choked? He chewed each bite of cereal twenty-five times and didn't drink any juice until he'd swallowed what he had in his mouth.

His heartbeat kept pounding in his ears. He could feel weak spots in his brain, ready to pop. Congestion was building up in his lungs, he knew it was.

Back upstairs, he sat down on his bed and opened his map notebook. But South Boston did nothing to calm him this time, nor did the Land of Shanaya—not even the antigravity vehicle port and the Twelve Mountains of the Skull.

He shoved the notebook into his backpack. Then, strictly observing house rules, he descended to the front door with a tight hold on the banister, every footfall safely centered on its stair.

Which is worse, mockery or death? After a profound inner struggle, Conor decided he'd rather be teased than dead. So he put on his bicycle helmet before he went out the front door.

“Hey!” Grump was on the porch, hanging wet socks on the railing. “Lookit you with your helmet on! Your mum finally letting you ride your bike to school?” Apparently, the helmet made up for Conor's cowardliness at one a.m.

“Uh.”

Inside, Glennie shut the hall closet door and thumped around putting on her backpack. Time was short. She'd be out in less than a minute.

“Ha!” Grump winked at Conor. “Moira doesn't know, does she?” He slapped Conor's shoulder. “I knew you had it in ya, kiddo. So where's the bike? Gonna ride it with the backpack on?” Beaming, he leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “You done with the Mountains of the Skull? Come by and show me after school.”

Conor nodded and sidled toward the steps. “I'll see you later, Grump.” He made it to the sidewalk. Glennie opened the front door.

“Hey, kiddo,” Grump said. “You forgot your bike.”

“He's taking the bus,” Glennie said. “Why's he got his helmet on?”

Conor pretended he didn't hear them. He kept his helmeted head down and aimed for the city bus stop.

Which was 1,276 feet from 36A Crumlin Street. He knew this because he'd measured it.

He had walked approximately 750 feet by the time Glennie caught up with him. “What the heck?” she said. He didn't reply. When they met the other kids at the corner, he told them he had a slight concussion and had to be extra-careful for a few days.

“Yeah,” Glennie said. “Pixie's got a soft head.”

She had a sneezing fit before she and her friends set off on their 823-foot walk to the elementary school. Conor made her promise to have the school nurse take her temperature as soon as she got there. “Dweeb,” she said. Her friends giggled.

“What the freak is the matter with you?” Javier said as the bus headed for the next stop, his calm, precise voice barely audible over the chatter. “You don't really have a concussion, do you?” He leaned in and whispered: “Is this about staying out of Latin School?”

I can tell him. Ashling'll never know.
Conor whispered back: “There's a banshee at our house. Somebody's going to die.”

“That is very awesome.” In a lightning change of character, Javier clutched his throat and made a gagging sound. “Oh no! It's me!” He slumped against the seat in front of them.

“Quit fooling around.” Conor thumped Javier on the shoulder. “This is real.”

“Sweet,” Javier said. “Hey, look out there! It's an Arcturian slime creature. Ready phasers!” He aimed his finger pistol at the drooling bulldog tethered outside the newsstand.

“Nerd alert,” Andy Watson, a large and cool eighth grader, said from the seat behind them. His cool friends snickered.

“Ignore him,” Conor said.

“I am,” Javier said, shooting. “
Pshoo. Pshoo.
”

“Try ignoring this, Pixie-poop.” Andy punched out his fist, stopping it an inch from Conor's nose. “You better keep that helmet on.”

“Oh, shut up, Andy.” It was one of the mysteries of Conor's life that fists didn't scare him. You never knew what a spider was going to do next, but Andy was totally predictable. His fist never made contact with your nose if you stared at him hard enough.

“
Shut up, Andy. Shut up, Andy,
” Andy said in a baby voice. “Big brave Pixie-poop wif his helmet on.”

“Pixie-poop, Pixie-poop, Pixie-poop,” Andy's friends chanted.

Fists were one thing. People chanting “Pixie-poop” was something else again.

“Ignore them,” Javier said.

Conor stared out the window, the rims of his ears burning. An old lady in front turned around and glared at him, as if the noise were his fault.

“I got the slime creature, by the way,” Javier said, relentless in nerdiness. “Twenty battle points. Your turn.”

Conor marveled for the gazillionth time at Javier's total lack of concern about people making fun of him. Nobody took Javier seriously—he was way too short, his face too angelic, his eyelashes too long. He often spent recess fixing the computer in the principal's office—an act that was so far beyond nerdy that it left most of his classmates speechless. Javier didn't care one way or the other—call him a name, he'd shrug it off and keep talking.

“Are you coming to Adventure Boys tomorrow?” Javier asked him, upping their joint nerdiness factor by about ten. Fortunately, Andy was busy harassing a kid across the aisle and didn't hear.

“Yeah, I guess.” The Adventure Boys leader, Mr. Phillips, was going to ask how Conor was doing on his American heritage badge, and all he'd done was check a history book out of the library. He'd managed two badges so far: house painting and family life. He'd chosen them carefully—he'd had to paint Grump's kitchen anyway to earn his new cell phone, and that counted for both badges.

The cell phone had a GPS mapping application that told him exactly where he was in the world at any exact minute, so that was one good thing that came out of Adventure Boys.

Javier had seven badges and was working on two more, aiming for the coveted designation of Bravest and Best Adventurer. He hoped this would impress the scholarship committee at computer-geek heaven, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He'd learned first aid, built a digital circuit, and observed live insects in their habitat (the dumpsters behind the school). He'd wanted a bugle-blowing badge, but his father put his foot down.

“We're going to learn how to make doughnuts tomorrow,” Javier said.

Great,
Conor thought.
Maybe I can die from a heart attack.

Walking into school (one-point-seven miles from 36A Crumlin Street), shoving his helmet into his locker, Conor tried not to worry about who might be dying at that very moment. He distracted himself by crumpling up a school dance poster somebody had taped to each seventh-grade locker and chucking it at a wastebasket six lockers away. He missed, but at least that was one normal thing in this horrible day.

“Oh thanks, Conor,” Olivia Kim said. “We worked hard on those posters.”

“Right. Like I'm going to a
dance
.” Conor snorted. Javier, however, folded his poster carefully and stored it in his back pocket.

“What're you doing?” Conor asked.

Javier smiled at Olivia and headed for social studies.

Further distraction came when the guidance counselor, Ms. Wright, pulled Conor and Javier—along with Olivia and their classmates Marissa and Ifraho—out of social studies to talk to them about exam schools. The entrance tests were a good six months away, but she handed each of them a booklet of sample questions that would help them prepare. “It's never too soon to start getting ready,” she said. “This is your future we're talking about.”

Conor opened the booklet. The first thing he saw was a long word problem concluding, “Which equation, when solved for M, would give Matthew's speed in feet per minute?” He could blow that one big-time.

He slapped the booklet shut. “What if we get in and then decide not to go?”

“Why ever would you do an unacceptable thing like that?” Ms. Wright sent an evil glare in Javier's direction, clearly not recovered from Javier's declining his math and science school invitation the previous year.

“My mother's okay with me going now,” Javier said. Ms. Wright gave a skeptical sniff.

“What if,” Conor persisted, “I dunno . . . if you got sick or died or something?”

Ms. Wright eyed him fixedly. “I saw you wearing a bike helmet this morning, Conor. Is there something wrong with your head? Why have we not been informed?”

“I have a slight concussion. It's no big deal.”

“Well, then, dying is unacceptable,” Ms. Wright said. “Back to class now. And
study that book,
all of you.”

When they got back to social studies, the bell was just ringing. Ricky Desmond sashayed out of the room in front of Conor, pinkies raised delicately in the air, proclaiming, “Ai'm going to Lah-tin Skewl.”

“Shut up,” Conor said. “It wasn't our idea.”

“Yeah.” Marissa was as red as her new plastic purse.

Conor stuck with Javier, who stuck with Olivia, Marissa, and Ifraho, all through special projects day in math class, which Conor couldn't blow because he'd take his whole team down with him.

He got a pass to go to the bathroom and, in defiance of school rules, sneaked a call to his mother at the clinic where she worked, to make sure she was all right. Then he called his father's cell. Then he called Grump.

“What's up, kiddo? I got glue drying.”

“Are you okay?” Conor asked.

“I'm outta sight. Why?”

“Just asking. You're not igniting anything today, right?”

“Nope, ain't even finished the rocket yet. What's going on, Conor? The world scaring you again? And what was with the helmet, for cripes' sake?”

“I . . . gotta go, Grump. I'll see you.”

“See ya, kid. Stop acting like a weirdo.”

To make himself feel better, Conor located himself on his cell phone GPS. Sure enough, there he was at Barbara McMichael Middle School, one-point-seven miles from 36A Crumlin Street.

At lunchtime, Conor sneaked back into the boys' restroom and called everyone again. His grandfather, who had caller ID, picked up the phone and said, “I exploded the house. Quit bothering me.” Then he hung up.

Javier bustled in as Conor shut his phone. “Andy Watson and Janet Morrow got caught making out in the janitor's closet.”

Conor was momentarily distracted from his troubles. “Gross.”

“Yeah. That place
stinks
.”

“No. I meant . . .” Conor took a good hard look at Javier, who turned a shade redder. “Gross that they were kissing.”

“Yeah,” Javier said. “Gross.” Avoiding Conor's eyes, he bared his teeth at the mirror and scrubbed one of them with his finger.

“Tell me if anybody comes in,” Conor said. “I gotta call Glennie's school and see if she's okay.”

Now Javier was the one taking a good hard look at
him
. “You're making a cell phone call during school hours?
You?
”

Conor retreated into a toilet stall, punching his speed dial.

Glennie was fine. But when Conor emerged from the stall, Javier was still doing the good hard look thing. “Dude, why you so strange today? I mean, jeez, calling your family during school hours, a helmet on the bus.”

“I tried to tell you and you wouldn't believe me.” Conor headed for the door.

“A
banshee
? That's your explanation?”

“Leave me alone, okay? I gotta get something to eat.” He walked out, leaving Javier-silence—signifying data analysis—in the boys' room.

Everyone was outside for recess, but Conor sneaked to the cafeteria down in the basement, scoring a bag of popcorn and a fruit cocktail. He sat up on a table to eat, putting his feet on a chair in a burst of lawlessness. Munching, he eased his nerves by pondering whether the Land of Shanaya should include a northeast forest of carnivorous spruce trees.

A flash of color out the ground-level window caught his eye. He froze, then stood up on the chair to see better.

There, sitting on a sunny stoop across the street, was a red-cloaked figure with a long red braid.

Popcorn bag between his teeth, fruit cocktail syrup all over his hand, Conor raced upstairs to the side door. Opening that door was a rule violation beyond his wildest imagination. He took a deep breath and opened it anyway, keeping his feet firmly inside the threshold to make himself as law-abiding as possible. He beckoned furiously to Ashling. She skipped across the street, beaming.

“What are you doing here?” Conor whispered.

“Oooo, what is that?” Ashling leaned in the door and sniffed the remnants of the fruit cocktail. “Very pretty, but it smells like rot.”

Conor was not to be distracted. “
What
are you
doing
here?”

“Is this school?” She peeked in at the worn linoleum and iron staircase, eyes shining. “I saw a picture of it in your sleeping place, so I could think myself here. Ooo, you are holding a little sack in your hand.”

“I thought you were supposed to keep hidden.”

“No one is paying me any heed. Open that sack. I want to see.”

“You . . . this can't be what you're supposed to do.”

Ashling smiled as if they shared a secret. “The Lady will never know. And if the Death comes near, I am sure it will call to me wherever I am. The Death might be you in any case, and then I'll be right here. Are you going to open that sack?”

I am Conor O'Neill and I am at McMichael Middle School, one-point-seven miles west of 36A Crumlin Street . . .