Texting the Underworld (6 page)

“Do you think you can get Ashling to tell us who the Death is?” Conor felt a ridiculous surge of hope. “Maybe it was Gramma and the banshee's just late getting here.”

Grump gave him a tired smile. “Nice try, kiddo. I don't think banshees fall behind like that. Anyways . . .” He swallowed. “See, I'm content to die—honest, I am—but I ain't quite ready to see the banshee's face.”

“Maybe later.”

Grump looked him straight in the eye. “Listen, kiddo: Banshees don't stick around long. The Death'll be soon.
My
death, with any luck.”

“Grump.” Conor ran out of words.

Silence fell on them like a blanket. As they sat and watched Crumlin Street darken outside the front windows, Conor lost track of how long he'd been there. Grump switched on the light next to his chair. Then the front door slammed at 36A, and Glennie whammed her hand on Grump's door. “Supper!” she yelled, then slammed back where she came from.

Grump gave Conor's shoulder a friendly slap and pushed out of the chair again. “I gotta wash up. I'll see you over there.”

“I'm not letting you die,” Conor said.

“It ain't your decision.”

At supper, Conor got into a fight with Grump about how much butter he put on his bread. “What about me?” Dad said. “I got arteries, too, you know.”

Conor couldn't think of what to say, but Grump rose to the occasion. “Conor's a weirdo,” Grump said.

When Conor went upstairs after supper, Ashling had the door open a crack, sniffing. “That smells very good. What is it?”

“Canned ravioli.”
Don't get too friendly. She's here for Grump.

Ashling returned to the beanbag chair and her Trivial Pursuit cards. To take his mind off his troubles, Conor settled into his homework—he had social studies, language arts, and pre-algebra. Usually, he and Javier texted a bit while they did homework, but tonight Javier probably hated him. He'd have to blow algebra all by himself. Still, he took his cell phone out of his backpack and turned it on, just in case.

When Conor thought about it, he had to admit he hadn't been a very good friend that day.

Something was humming in the silent room. Too early in the year for a mosquito. He almost thought it was that flute tune, but it was so faint he couldn't be sure.

Okay, this has
got
to be my imagination.
He did his best to ignore it, and actually managed to do his algebra with six problems in such a tangle of
x
's and
y
's that his teacher would never unravel them. He closed his book with a sigh. Ashling laid down a fan of Trivial Pursuit cards at her side. “You are worried, Conor-boy,” she said.

“It's my grandfather, isn't it?”

“Conor-boy, I don't know who it is. I keep telling you.” She scooched closer, her face serious. “Anyway, death is a glorious thing, especially in battle. And it's not the end. Why would you fear it?”

The question was so surprising that it took him a minute to think up an answer. “For one thing, it hurts. Plus, you never see your family again. Also, what if you get reborn as a squid?”

“It's sickness that hurts, not death. And you may be happy as a squid.”

“You're still a squid. And I don't care what part of it hurts, it still hurts.”

“Maybe you'd be a bird. That would be a wonder.”

“Okay, but what about missing my family?”

“You won't remember that you miss them. At least”—her gaze dropped to the Trivial Pursuit cards on the floor—“at least not if you're reborn. And even if you stay with the Lady, as I did, the memories fade.” She got interested in rearranging the cards, head bent so Conor could only see her nose and the top of her red head.

“Huh,” he said softly. “You
do
miss your family.”

She bundled the cards into a stack on the floor to tidy them. “Miss them? I barely remember them.”

Conor slid off his desk chair and hunkered down next to her. Something glistened on her cheek. “I didn't know banshees could just plain cry.”

“Nor did I.” She swiped at her cheek. “Potent Mother Maeve. Must be because I have a body again. I've not done this for centuries.” A tear ran down the other cheek. She let it go. “I am almost enjoying it.”

“How long since you saw anyone from your family?”

“I saw my father . . . oh, it must be many hundreds of years ago. I don't know the numbers.” She flipped the top card off her Trivial Pursuit stack and made a show of studying it, although Conor doubted she even saw it. “I tell myself stories about my life—how I died, that I was betrothed to a man who stank, how I danced with . . . Well, never mind that. But I can't remember how it
felt
: the touch of my mother's hand, the sound of the children's voices. I know there was pain and sorrow, but it's all so distant from me now.”

“That's good, isn't it?”

She smiled thinly. “Yes, I suppose. But the joys are distant, too.”

There was that mosquito-flute sound again. Conor tried to shake it out of his head, but failed. “What
is
that music? It's driving me nuts.”

“What music?” Ashling sounded subdued.

“Shh. Listen. Don't you hear it? And . . . and there it is, that sweet, smoky smell.”

Ashling looked up. “I do smell smoke—is it not your own cooking fire?”

Conor shook his head. “You don't hear the music?”

“No, none at all.”

“It's
constant
.” Conor shut his eyes to catch the tune. Sure enough, it was the same one he'd been hearing all day. He whistled it.

She wrinkled her forehead. “I used to know that tune, but I can't remember . . . Where did you hear it?”

“I told you. It's in my head and I can't get rid of it.”

“Whistle it again.”

He did.

She shook her head. “No. I cannot remember. Perhaps something I heard from my father . . . I don't know.”

“What happened to your father, anyways?”

Ashling didn't answer, but whistled the flute tune under her breath.

“Hey.” Conor jiggled her elbow. “I asked, what happened to your father?”

She gave her head a shake. “I don't know where he is. I am sure he's been sent back again and again. He could be you for all I know.”

“Holy macaroni.” He was just Conor . . . Could he be Maedoc, too? A big hairy guy in furs, who fought with a sword and had his eyebrows under control—how could that guy be him?

“Or maybe not.” Ashling took his chin in her hand and gazed into his eyes—for a minute, the whole world was merry blue with wedges of gray. Her breath was on his cheek, smelling like woodsmoke but also the fresh air when you came out of the subway. His stomach gurgled.

Ashling let go of his chin.

“So?” Conor said.

She fumbled for her comb. “You may be somebody, but I don't know who.” She started unbraiding her hair. She wouldn't say anything more.

Conor changed into his pajamas in the bathroom, head spinning. Who
was
he? And who was Ashling—a monster threatening his family, or a girl who missed her dad?

It was too much; he couldn't figure it out; it was no fair that he was going through all this. No fair at all.

But one thing was almost certain: Whatever she was, monster or girl, Ashling had come for Grump.

She wasn't going to get him. He, Conor O'Neill—who used to be somebody else, maybe somebody brave—he would not allow it.

There are drums behind the flutes. He moves closer, watching the dancers circle a bonfire, hand in hand. There is Ashling's red head—she's holding hands with a woman on one side, a brawny young man on the other. Radiant with firelight and happiness, Ashling smiles up at the young man, who smiles back.

She should stop dancing, leave that traitorous pig behind, come to stand safely at his side.

The drums thunder. The dancers circle. He stays where he is, watching, his blood beginning to burn.

“What did Sir Walter Raleigh lose in 1618?”

Conor sat bolt upright and tried to focus on Ashling's grin, her tousled head sticking out from the game cupboard.

“His head!” Ashling crowed. “What's the longest—”

“Ashling,” Conor croaked. “Give it a rest, okay? I have to go to school.”

“All right then. What were President John F. Kennedy's last words?”

“Do you think you might be a little obsessed with death?”

“He said, ‘My God, I'm hit.'”

Reincarnated hairy guy or not, Conor left the house with his bike helmet on. Glennie pretended she wasn't with him as they walked to the corner. Which was fine with him—today's temporary tattoo was a large black widow spider on her cheek, to spite him.

Javier rode the bus with James and Mohamed again, so Conor didn't get a chance to apologize for being a bad friend until they were at their lockers.

“That's okay.” Javier didn't take his head out of his locker. “Maybe there's something wrong with your brain after all.” He walked off to homeroom without waiting.

It was a long morning, a stony-faced Javier two or three seats away in every class. At their usual lunch table of seventh-grade boys, he and Conor sat at opposite ends.

Before they were even halfway through their American chop suey, Andy walked by and snagged the chocolate cupcake off Javier's tray. The entire table froze. Javier just sat there, lips pursed, poking at his chop suey as if examining some insect habitat.

Conor got up, walked over to Andy's table. Andy grinned at him, his mouth full of cupcake. “That's attractive,” Conor said, and grabbed Andy's own cupcake off his tray. He walked back to his table with body, honor, and cupcake intact.

It was a tricky moment, handing the cupcake to its rightful owner. Everybody knew that Javier should have been the one to take it from Andy. Conor thought for a second that Javier might refuse to accept it from him.

Andy now had had time to swallow. “Hey, Pixie-poop,” he yelled, voice hoarse with frosting. “Where's your helmet?”

The rims of Conor's ears caught fire. Javier's mouth quirked up at one corner. “Ignore him.”

“I am,” Conor said.

Javier took the cupcake from Conor. “Not sure I want this thing,” he announced in a loud voice. “It might have lice.”

“Nah,” Ifraho said. “Lice hate chocolate.”

“Eat it,” Conor said. “Chocolate feeds brain cells and I need help with pre-algebra.”
Help blowing pre-algebra,
he thought. Javier, thinking the same thing, choked slightly on his first bite of cupcake.

They walked back to class together.

Conor didn't call home at all that day, although he kept wanting to. After school, instead of going to the lunchroom for Adventure Boys, he went back to the library. He did an Internet search for “how to get rid of a banshee.”

He got a lot of video game answers at first, but after re-Googling a few times he found stories about old Irish guys shooting at banshees or otherwise driving them away from their loved ones. The loved ones always died anyway.

He got sidetracked into the Greek myth of Persephone, who had to stay in Hades, the land of the dead, three months of every year because she ate three pomegranate seeds. He thought about buying a pomegranate to see if that would send Ashling back to her version of Hades, but came to the conclusion that eating food from a place probably meant you had to stay there.
Don't feed her. She'll be in the game cupboard forever.

He read and read, searching for anything that would help. His nose was three inches from the screen, hand cramped on the mouse.

“Banshees again?” The shock of Javier's voice just about drove Conor's spine through the top of his head. “Is there some new game I don't know about?”

“Holy macaroni, creep up on somebody.”

“I didn't creep.” Javier pulled up a chair and sat down. “You're the one who's acting weird, remember?”

“I'm not acting
that
weird.”

Javier picked up the bicycle helmet and presented it as Exhibit A.

Conor said, “There's something wrong with my brain, remember?”

“Yeah, right.”

Javier-silence. Conor went back to surfing for banshees, but it was like trying to act normal with a black hole sitting next to you.

At last, Javier said, “Mr. Phillips wants to know how you're doing with American heritage.”

“I got a book out. I'm working on it.”

More Javier-silence. Then: “This is nuts. Conor, why are you freaking out about banshees?”

He didn't believe me before. He won't now.
But then Conor had a brainstorm. “I'm making up a game about them.”

The black hole closed with a snap. “You are? That's great, why didn't you say so?” Javier scooched his chair closer. “I could write the computer code. I got that book for my birthday.”

“Yeah. Cool.”

“This is awesome. It could be in the Land of Shanaya, right? I could help with the story line if you want.”

It was getting late. Conor logged off the Internet, grabbed his backpack and helmet. “C'mon. Let's go home.”

• • •

“Did you ever see
Darby O'Gill and the Little People
?” Javier asked as their bus lumbered away from the curb. “It's this old, old movie about this Irish guy, and a banshee comes for his daughter. He has a wish left over from a leprechaun and he wishes to die instead of her. Then the leprechaun rescues him from the death coach.”

“I don't think I believe in leprechauns.”

“Well, you don't believe in banshees either.”

“No. Right.” Conor leaned the front of his helmet against the window and watched a paper cup dance down the windy sidewalk. A kid caught up with it, stomped it flat, and left it there.

Javier-silence, a long one. Then: “You're not really making up a game, are you?”

“No.”

The bus hit a pothole and the other passengers hooted at the driver, who was laughing. This was good, because the noise swallowed up the silence from the other half of the seat. But the silence was still there when everybody calmed down.

Then: “I don't see why you have to lie about it,” Javier said.

“Hey, I didn't ask you to butt in.” Conor closed his eyes, wished for a time machine to take him back to Tuesday. “Go . . . go talk to Olivia about her dance poster and leave me alone, okay?”

“Jerk.”

They were silent the rest of the way home, a double black hole. They got off the bus without a word, parted with neither good-byes nor promises of texting.

Conor couldn't worry about Javier. Halfway home, he stopped dead (but not really) and thought about Darby O'Gill. It came to him what a brave O'Neill would do—like Darby, he would go to the Other Land in place of his loved one.

Maybe Ashling would find a way to make death not hurt.

If the loved one was Glennie, it made sense that her older brother would step up to protect her. If it was Grump, though . . . Even Conor had to admit that there was something unnatural about a kid taking the place of an old man.

But wasn't that an excuse? Could he stand by and watch Grump die, knowing he could have prevented it? Wouldn't he hate himself the rest of his life?

Darby O'Gill stayed on his mind as he walked the rest of the way home.

When he entered his room, the world was upside down.

Or Ashling was, anyway. She was standing on the ceiling, braid dangling straight down, tunic skirt tucked between her knees. She was tossing Trivial Pursuit cards into the wastebasket, missing every third time because she was barely aiming.

“Kill something,” she said as Conor closed the door. “I am going mad. I have read most of these little skins and even some of those things.” She pointed at his bookcase.

“Why didn't you go out?”

“You didn't want me at your school.” Her tone was sulky. “And I can't walk about attracting attention, and I can only wish myself where I've been before or if I've seen a picture. I went there”—she pointed to his Grand Canyon poster—“but people were everywhere and they screamed when I made myself visible. I am ready to keen and go home. Someone has to die
now
.”

“Nobody's dying. At least . . . listen, Ashling. What if I told you to take me instead of whoever it really is. Could you do that?”

“No.” Ashling drifted down from the ceiling, righting herself slowly until her feet touched the rug. Her braid was coming apart. “No, I cannot do that.”

“Why not? Darby O'Gill did it.”

“Who is Darby O'Gill?”

“He's this guy from your country, Ireland.”

“I don't know Ireland. My country was Uladh.” As the library book said, she pronounced it
Ull-oo
.

“It's called Ulster now, and it's part of Ireland. Anyways, this guy's daughter was dying, and he had a wish from a leprechaun, so he wished he could take her place.”

“Do you have a wish from a leprechaun?”

“No.”

“There you are, then.” She began to unbraid her hair. “Conor-boy, I cannot take the wrong person to the Lady. I don't make the decision, and anyway that is not the bargain I made to get my life back. Besides . . .” She bit her lip and got out her comb.

“Besides, it could be me, anyways, is that what you're thinking?”

She didn't answer, only combed. Conor watched her, too stupefied to work on his Land of Shanaya map or start his homework. As the comb moved through Ashling's hair, chaos became order. She redid her braid, the green ribbon woven just so.

He could see why she did it. It was calming.

Ashling gave her braid a final tug and tossed it over her shoulder. “It doesn't matter who it is, of course. Makes no difference to me. No difference at all. None.”

Conor went downstairs for supper, then came back up to describe it for Ashling. For someone who didn't eat, Ashling was awfully interested in food, even when it was fish sticks. She went into her cupboard while he did homework—not all of it and none of it well. Finally he gave up, took out his map notebook, and started giving the Land of Shanaya its carnivorous spruce trees. He got so involved—trees with mouths turned out to be a hoot to draw—that he barely noticed when Ashling came out of the cupboard and stood by him, watching.

“What is that you're making?” she asked.

His pencil skipped, and the tree he was working on got an extra-wide maw. It looked amazing.

“This is a little like the pictures on your wall,” Ashling said, “which you have never explained.”

“They're maps. And I'm drawing one. With carnivorous—that's meat-eating—spruce trees.”

“Maps?” She shook her head, baffled.

“A map shows you where you are.” He pulled her over to his map of the United States. “See there? That red dot is South Boston; that's where we are right this minute. And see, if we went west—toward the sunset—we'd reach Albany and then Buffalo and Lake Erie.”

She wrinkled up her face as if he were talking algebra.

“It's a . . . a picture, like what you'd see if you were a bird, high, high, high up in the air,” he said desperately.

Her face cleared. “Ah. So what place are you making?” She dragged him back to his desk.

“It's a place I thought up in my head. It doesn't exist.”

“You are making trees with mouths.”

“Carnivorous spruce trees. They're not real either. I . . . thought they'd be fun.”

She was silent, studying his work. “It is like the tales the bards told.”

“It's not a tale. It's a place.”

“Yes, but such a place! Danu, the mother goddess herself, would be honored to live in this land you have made.”

Conor flushed with pleasure, even though he had no idea who this Danu was. “There's Twelve Mountains of the Skull and an antigravity vehicle port,” he pointed out, in case she hadn't noticed. Ashling nodded solemnly.

But then she asked: “What is ‘fun'?”

“Huh?”

“You said you put mouths on the trees for fun. I never heard that word.”

He didn't know what to say. It was like describing how to breathe. “If something's fun, you like doing it. Fun is what you like to do best.”

“I liked to slaughter hogs.”