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Deadend

Prologue

“Loonie, hold my arm,” said Rork’s gran.

He caught up to her and held out his arm, wondering at her asking for help. She was a small, compact woman, less than five feet tall, agile and energetic into her eighties. Rork towered over her, and she had to reach up to take his arm. It was rare for her to ask for help, and he noticed she was flushed, her lips pursed with breathlessness.

She’d insisted he drive her to forage for nettles in the woodlands surrounding their Highland village. They walked slowly through the spring-soaked grass, one of her hands in the crook of his elbow, the other resting in the pocket of her pinny as her sturdy shoes crunched windfallen leaves. Heg-beg, she called nettles, and lopped the tops to use in concocting a tonic they drank each spring – Rork, his father, and his gran.

Rork scrabbled for his smartphone in the back pocket of his jeans. He wanted to write a few notes to help him code later.

His gran squeezed his arm. “Rork, the Fergus,” she said, “that machine language will wait. Right now, I need you to keep an eye out for —”

She was interrupted by a thought or a spasm and stopped walking for a moment, standing still and closing her eyes.

“Gran, are you —?”

“Don’t,” said his gran, holding up a hand. “I can’t abide any fussing. It’s why I —”

She didn’t finish her sentence.

Chastened, Rork kept silent. Her urgency unnerved him, and he concentrated on looking for nettles, a tall plant with serrated leaves and stinging hairs. The plants were not easy to harvest, which was why he carried a pair of gardening gloves and kitchen shears in his backpack.

His gran dragged on his arm. Rork slowed his step. The muted sun pierced the cathedral of oak, pine, and ash trees, casting into beatific light a small clearing to their right. His gran breathed out with effort. She gave Rork a reassuring smile and linked her arm tighter with his.

Rork and his gran stood under the canopy of trees for long seconds, minutes, inhaling the tang of ancient pine. His gran relaxed her grip on his arm, her eyes flitting about the clearing like Small Blue butterflies, rare and striking with their bright blue wings, white margin, and dark fringe. Rork loved his gran’s curiosity. Her interest in the things around her. Even the nettles were worthy of her wonder. But worry prickled the back of his neck. She seemed slighter. Less. Should he say something to his father? His stomach knotted anxiously. His father was the opposite of curious. His cold indifference made Rork want to run away from home. If it wasn’t for his gran, he might have.

His gran’s eyes, like balefire, found his. “I especially feel your grandfather in the woods, in doing the tasks we used to do,” she said with a shake of her pin-curled head. Rork had only a dim memory of his grandfather, how he used to tease Rork about his tousled head of hair like flame flower.

“Life and death go side-by-side, you know, loonie,” said his gran. She chuckled softly. “How that man could natter.”

Woodland light burst into smaller particles, twinkling.

Rork didn’t understand. It wasn’t like his gran to dwell on the deceased. Usually she only remembered them during the high holidays, and he felt her wavering at his side, like a boundary was blurring between past and present. What was she trying to tell him? What was she preparing him for?

Rork tried to lead his gran to a fallen tree to rest. She braced herself with one hand on the tree but remained insistent, pointing to a clump of nettles just off the path. While she waited, she lifted her face to the sun-dappled light of the clearing, her other hand resting on the front of her pinny, fingers poised near her throat.

Rork crouched down to pluck the veined leaves. Although semi-cultivated, nettles grew best in patches near busy areas of a trail or outbuilding. The garden gloves stretched tightly on his hands but protected him from the many stinging hairs. He followed the vine-like stems, crawling along the loose earth to reach for more leaves. In warm weather the plant’s catkins would grow tall with budding brown or yellow flowers. He hoped his gran would be happy with the harvest. He thought it’d make enough tonic to see them through the winter. Maybe she was in need of tonic? And that was the purpose of the outing? He hoped so. He was concerned about her. She didn’t seem herself, and Rork hoped the tonic would restore her. He was looking forward to an afternoon in the kitchen with her.

The kitchen was his gran’s domain, a place where she was quietly and emphatically in charge, and Rork had many happy memories of helping her bake bread or oatcakes, cauldrons of soup or mince and tatties. Endless cups of tea. Steam from the stove and fragrant food, much laughter. Rork and his father had only basic kitchen skills. When his father was home, he would wander into the farmhouse kitchen for a cup of tea and a taste of whatever they were making. Rork would catch his father’s eye over the head of his gran, and there’d be a moment. An out of the ordinary, isolated moment. A moment when they felt like a family. Rork was happiest in his gran’s kitchen. She was the connection between his father and him. The only language they spoke.

In the woodlands, Rork sat back on his heels to gently arrange the plants in his backpack, careful not to crush the soft leaves. They reminded Rork a little of mint but without the distinct smell. Still, they were wonderfully fresh and green, like shade on a hot day. He got to his feet unsteadily, his hiking boots shifting in the soil.

“Gran,” he said, opening the pack wide for her to see the verdant pickings. Looking up, he saw her perfectly illuminated by the sun’s rays, light dispersing around her in a hazy halo that seemed somehow to also buzz. Or maybe Rork imagined it, but words stuck in his throat at the unexpected sight of his gran—glowing.

“Och,” she said, barely above a whisper, as if in surprise. “Are you coming for me, then?”

Rork grew alarmed. Who was she talking to?

Suddenly, his gran folded to the ground and lay peacefully on her side, head pillowed on the bend of one elbow.

“No!” yelled Rork, startling the birds from the trees. He cinched the backpack and flung it onto his back. In three frantic strides, he was lifting his gran in his arms, holding her gently under her knees and head. Her cheek rested on his chest. He lifted her, lurching back the way they’d come, willing the car to come into sight. She was heavy with collapse, and fear made Rork’s heart race. The sound of his own panting was loud in his ears.

“No, no, no,” he kept saying. With superhuman effort, he got her into the backseat, laying her tenderly on the cushion, using the backpack as a bolster against the door. As he made final adjustments, his gran gripped his hand fiercely. Surprised, Rork sucked in a breath and stared into her opened eyes.

“Find a way —” said his gran. Rork leaned nearer. He could hardly hear her.

“What?” he asked.

“Find. A. Way. To. Connect,” she said, haltingly. Her eyes stuttered and closed, and the strange buzzing from before returned.

Rork climbed into the driver’s seat in shock, not sure what to do or where to go. His clumsy thumbs could hardly operate his phone. “Da,” he said, his voice breaking as his father answered. “It’s gran!”

“Bring her home,” said his father, abrupt as always, somehow understanding what Rork was too incoherent to put into words.

“But Da —”

“Bring. Her. Home,” repeated his father, and then added in a gentler tone, “I’ll call the doctor.”

Chapter 1: Keening

In his bed, a chatter of voices finally roused Rork from an abyss of sleep. Where were the voices coming from? His eyes flicked around his bedroom. Had he left the TV on? No, the screen was blank. Computer? Was his Beta group trying to connect with him? No, he saw zero bubbles of dialogue. Were there guests in the house? Immediately he dismissed that thought. The house creaked with emptiness. He knew he was alone.

His eyes blinked and blinked, sticky with sleep. No, the voices were originating from inside his head, a fact that might have caused him more alarm had he not been numb with loneliness and grief. Rork forced himself to remain motionless on his feather pillow while he listened to the insistent wail between his ears.

The babble wasn’t unpleasant exactly. His head didn’t hurt. He felt no screaming or piercing pain, but the clamor did make him feel slightly bristly, as if something important was just out of reach, like the year of the Boer War, which Rork had missed on a pop quiz the previous Monday at Bellie High School, the only secondary school in his small village on the North Sea coast of Scotland. It was a date he should have remembered since it was the year his gran had been born.

Thinking of his gran caused Rork’s heart to squeeze. He had a vision of her in the light of the kitchen window, her face a crescent of smiles each and every morning. Like layers of buttery, his favorite Highland pastry. For Rork, food and memory always seemed to intertwine.

He levered his legs out of bed, the reality returning that his gran had passed away two long, desolate weeks ago. His days were now empty of light, empty of smiles. His eyes were covered by a film of sorrow. Even food was tasteless without her.

He rattled around, alone, in the large, draughty former boarding house he and his gran used to share with the brooding threat of his father’s regular arrivals and departures. His father was a mason and traveled with a crew, often staying away for days, weeks at a time. He was his gran’s only child, arriving later in her life. She had admitted to indulging him, letting him “go wild.”

There was nothing wild about Rork, who considered himself cerebral, appreciating the math and algorithms needed for programming language. His father was the opposite. He was physical, taking up all the space, all the air in a room.

Rork bustled around his bedroom and tried to ignore the prattle of voices. It had only been his gran and him during his father’s long absences, and now he had no one. He definitely couldn’t confide the strange voices to his father because his father already thought Rork was a hopeless headcase.

Yet the keening persisted.

Rork heard it while he ate breakfast, sitting in the gloom of the back kitchen with a bottle of new milk, which he poured over his oatmeal in a smooth, white stream. His gran had always saved him the cream.  

He heard it as he got dressed, splashing his face in the sink as he hopped from foot to foot on the cold tile floor in the bathroom he shared with his father. His gran used to say he had a chin that could cut glass. Chiseled and prominent like his father’s, it made him look more resolved than he usually felt. Yet it was one familiar feature in the mirror during this changeling phase of his life — no longer a boy but not quite a man.

Rork sat on the closed toilet seat and clutched his head. He began to wonder if something was seriously wrong with him. Maybe he had an ear infection? Or a brain tumor? He ran his hands through his thick, ginger hair, which sprang out from his head in erratic coils. His skin was hot to the touch, flushed by spots of color. Rork groaned. The last thing he needed today of all days was to get sick. His father was expected. Later today his father would wheel his gray ghost of a car into a parking spot in front of their terraced, corner house, and his broad shoulders would shadow their front door. It was hard enough enduring his military-like interrogations without feeling peely-wally.

Rork was having a tough time adjusting to life without his gran. Mornings were the worst, coming down to the kitchen to find it chilly and bleak. No gran. No whistling teakettle. No fiddle music. Rork would duck beneath the doorframe, clutching his upper arms and steeling himself against the silent void. His green and briny eyes would fix on the kitchen window, life going past without his gran. He missed her wrinkled cheeks. He missed her twinkling eyes. Her pin-curls. Her head so downy he could see the pinkness of her scalp when he’d bend down to kiss her good morning. But most of all he missed her laugh. That clear, gleeful peal that gave joy to his awkward, wretched teenaged life. Without her, each day was a purgatory. He’d give anything for a chance to reunite with her, if only for a cyber-moment.

Rork put the kettle on the stove to boil. Still, the papers needed fetching. The dog needed walking. Perhaps some fresh air would help him clear his head. His father wasn’t expected until almost dinnertime. Also, he felt — although he’d never admit it out loud — that the voices were compelling him somewhere. The voices were strident, foreign, and calling over each other like a street bazaar in a strange city. Rich with intrigue and excitement but also confusing, incomprehensible, putting him on alert.

Rork reached for his jacket and shoes in the back hall. His gran’s housecoat hung on a hook by the door next to the dog’s leash. She’d called it a pinny. He hesitated on seeing it. His gran had been the conduit between his father and him, especially after Rork’s mother passed. His gran had been the only one who could manage his father, playfully teasing him into seeing how rigid and impossible he was being. His gran conceded that the service and life had changed his father. His gran always shook her head at this, making a tsking noise with her teeth. She never went into detail, but Rork had always wondered. His father, she’d said, had been such a carefree loon, mad about soccer, disappearing after dinner to the fields behind the school, coming home long after dusk. Gran would cajole Rork’s father into the bath with the promise of thick, hot chocolate, which would send him into a spent sleep, dreaming about soccer.

Rork had a hard time imagining his father as a carefree schoolboy. His mind was fixed on the memory of bringing his gran home after foraging for nettles. How they’d helplessly watched her slip away. How stubborn his father had been about keeping her at home. It was easier for Rork to be angry with his father than deal with her loss. While they’d hovered helplessly, his gran had spoken softly to herself, but the words hadn’t made any sense, as if she spoke to an unseen someone, reliving moments of her life. As a young Scottish lass or quinie. A wifey. A mother. The doctor offered no help. She was of an age, he’d said, but she’d looked so small in her confection of a bed. Rork had lain as close as he dared on one side of her, almost stupefied with worry, while his father paced between the candy pink walls.

“How she delighted in this room,” he’d said. “I promised her she could die here. It was what she wanted. I promised.” Rork wondered who he was trying to convince.

In the small hours of the night, his father finally succumbed to exhaustion. He carefully laid down next to his mother on her other side, looping an arm lightly across her body, which managed to encompass Rork’s shoulder. Rork was aware of the presence of his father’s hand, the warmth of it. The physical contact was a jolt after years of distance. Ever since his mother disappeared from Rork’s life, his father had retreated into the maze of his body, denying himself any kind of sensory connection, threatening Rork with his world of deprivation. His gran presented their only lifeline.

Breathing sonorously, Rork and his father lay near his gran like bookends a long, lingering night as the moon and the sun switched places in the sky. Rork watched his gran’s eyes move rapidly behind their lids, her face twitching in a range of gestures. Joy. Determination. Sorrow. Longing. Rork knew she’d lived a full life, and she’d always been there for him. Rork dozed, dreaming of the sun and buzzing. By morning she was cold, taking light, laughter, and language with her.

Since that night, his father gave little away. Stern. Unbending. In truth, Rork wondered sometimes if his father even liked him. Or wanted him around. His father’s piercing blue eyes would sweep over Rork, veiled with something. Regret? Disdain? Rork shuddered as the stoniness leeched into his bones. He feared dismissal from his father, so he protected himself by shutting down around him, his conversation reduced to monosyllables, grunts. It was a terrible pattern. Rork grew more and more recalcitrant, while his father grew more and more autocratic. Only his gran could have helped them break the cycle and taught them how to communicate with each other.

Frustrated, Rork grabbed the leash and slapped it in the palm of his hand.

Rork’s father was perennially stoic, never showing emotion of any kind, which made Rork even more self-conscious, embarrassed even, at just how much he missed his gran. Her absence was a daily punch to the solar plexus. He could hardly breathe. He felt like the shell of a person. Worse, thoughts of regret nagged at him. Why hadn’t he noticed how sick she was? Why hadn’t he made himself more useful to her? She’d tried to prepare him at the end, and he’d been oblivious. In his own world, as his father said. He’d wondered, too, what her last, mysterious words had meant. “Find. A. Way. To. Connect.” Find a way to connect with others? Connect with his heritage? What had she meant? And who was she talking to at the end? He wished he could ask his father, but the risk of scorn was too high, and he didn’t know how he’d find the words. He wished he could go back, do-over, re-program his last moments with his gran, so she could tell him.

Pathetic.

“Angus,” he whistled. The dog, a West Highland Terrier with curious, dark button eyes and permanently alert ears, skidded around a corner. Rork looped the leash around the dog’s neck, and he and Angus stepped out into the street.

The village was hushed and quiet. The milk truck was still making its rounds, stopping and starting with that queer hum between the neighborhoods’ terraced houses. Rork squinted into bright sunlight, his head skudding with the racket made by the voices, and turned away from the village, heading for the outer boundary where the road dead-ended. The colors in the sky hadn’t resolved themselves yet and were trapped in splotches of pink, purple, and mauve above a rim of trees, but the air was bracing and a little breezy and carried with it, as always, a salty hint of the sea.

Rork stepped over the barricade and walked the Castle Farm path, his spirits lifted momentarily by the sudden change in landscape. One minute he walked along the stone dyke, bordering the sleepy village. The next he was in open fields and farm pasture. The only problem was he had to walk past the cemetery and Morag the Crazy One’s gatehouse at the turn in the lane.

He kept his din-wracked head down, hoping to avoid contact with her, but, of course, she was in the front garden, talking to herself while she tended to her marsh orchids and ragwort, her hair ethereal and white against the morning’s low clouds. She usually wore her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, but today it flowed past her shoulders in a floating curtain of hair.

“Aye, aye, Rork, the Fergus,” she said, eyeing him with rheumy eyes.

“Aye, aye, Morag.” Ferguson was his surname, and “the Fergus” was a pet name his gran had given him. It meant something in Gaelic, but he’d forgot. Morag and his gran had been great friends, though Rork could never figure out why. His gran would visit Morag at her cottage as the sun set on May Eve or Lammas, streaking the sky with confectionary light. She’d come home strange, touched almost, musing about her husband or mother when Rork would bring her nightly hot water bottle, as if Morag had somehow peeled back time.

Angus resisted the tug on his leash, interested as he was in rooting around and lifting his leg on every weed and tuft of grass, so Rork was forced to stand there, awkward and flustered as Morag stood in the jungle of her garden, her arms akimbo and looking to the woods in the distance. As she turned toward him, Rork could hear her singsong voice muttering a song, a chant, or some other incantation. There was something vaguely familiar about the lilting melody. Angus coiled the leash around Rork’s feet, and Rork had to stoop to untangle himself.

Morag bobbed her head in his direction, a scowl between her eyes as she watched his face for some kind of reaction, but Rork didn’t know what exactly to make of her nattering. And frankly, the less he knew about the inner workings of Morag’s mind the better. Most adults he knew were superstitious, so he thought the ditty or chant might just be a sign of that. His gran would box his ears for leaving his shoes on the table. Bad luck, she’d say. His father, too, when he was home, was forever tossing salt over his shoulder.

But then Rork stopped thinking. The wailing in his head grew louder, filling his skull. What was happening? he wondered, shaking his head. Then a strange shaft of light opened behind his eyes, like a rip in a fabric, and he heard a distinct voice calling him.

He looked at Morag who was looking at him in a funny way. “Did you say something?” he asked.

She looked at him like he was a ghost or something. “No, loonie,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

Morag made a small movement towards him, but Rork backpedaled, sticking his hand in his pocket. He gripped and ungripped the flashdrive that he had a habit of always carrying with him and impatiently tugged on Angus. Begrudgingly, Angus lifted his head, and they trotted away from the cottage and Morag.

Morag the Crazy One called after him. “Aye, aye, Rork. You hurry. She’s calling you.” Muttering to herself she turned up the garden path. Rork was glad to see the back of her.

As the sun rose in the sky, the temperature soared to nearly ninety degrees, the windless air thick and humid. It was unusual weather for coastal Bellie at any time of year but especially late summer. The lane became hot and dusty, now skirting the pasture on the left and deep woods on the right. Saplings planted beside the lane only provided brief spots of shade.

Angus panted heavily. Rork struggled to get breath into his lungs as well. He felt pressure inside his head and out. The hot sun hit the back of his ginger head like an anvil. On the other side of the pasture, Rork caught a glimpse of one of the castle’s towers, a tall, crenulated turret rising above the surrounding forest with a gleaming blue slate roof and pale, sun-bleached stone covered in ivy.

His classmates told stories about seeing a pale figure in the window of the turret on moonlit nights, insisting the castle was haunted by the tragic niece of the Duke, locked away in the tower because of a scandal no one really knew details about. Rork thought the tale too fanciful and didn’t join in the embellishing, focusing instead on his sketchpad and computer.

At school, he was taking his “A’s” in advanced technology and web development, and his instructor thought he might have real talent for web coding and design. As a matter of fact, he had a small cult following in the blogosphere where he went by the ironic epitaph “The Fergus.” He would experiment with Beta sites, and his following would test and critique.

His gran hadn’t understood Rork’s fascination with what she called his machine language, but she had bought him his first computer. He won his next computer in a coding contest and built it custom to his needs.

His father complained that Rork always had “his head stuck in a screen.” Rork spent hours in his room thinking, coding, recoding. Trying to get the sequencing he wanted. His father was more of an action-oriented man. Another way they were disconnected from each other. It was really too bad Rork couldn’t develop a program for communicating with his gran in the afterlife so that she could continue to guide him.

Rork kicked a stone in the path. It thudded ahead of him. The keening was getting more insistent. He felt as if his head was going to explode. His head throbbed with the ebb and swell of voices, unrelenting in their urgent need of him. The sun made it worse, as if all the solar rays were focused on him. He looked around. He was too far along the path to return home easily. If only he could get out of the sun. Get relief. He reached a wildly overgrown section of path where branches dangled, heavy with leaf clusters and seedpods, and where the forest exuded lushness like dense breath in his face. Rork bowed his head beneath the sharp branches and pushed his way off the path and deeper into the woods. Branches brushed against his chest, legs, and back, when suddenly the temperature changed. He got goosebumps from the swift transition — from sweltering heat to a cryptic coolness that seemed almost otherworldly. Briefly, he felt relief.

Then the sounds in his head grew shriller and more alarming. He couldn’t see Angus, but he could hear him, growling at the end of the leash. Angus, acting more crazy than he’d ever acted in his life, dragged Rork farther away from the trail and deeper into the woods.

“Angus, stop. Stop!”

Rork’s large feet tripped on a tangle of low plants and crosshatching tree roots. Off-balance, he reached out and grabbed a sloping ash tree to steady himself. The tree’s bark was chilled and damp to the touch. Despite the intensity of the sun beyond the trees, he could just glimpse Angus through the undergrowth, snuffling about in the dirt.

Rork blinked in the shadows, trying to get a sense of where he was. He’d only stepped off the path, but he felt half-lost in the thickness of the woodland. Glossy-leaved rhododendron overhung a rough trail, leading deeper into the trees. Rork walked a few paces forward, pushing aside the rhododendron’s evergreen-like leaves, and came into an open area. A bog grove! The ground was spongy and loamish, carpeted in hummocks of spaghnum moss. The space was vaulted with trees, forming a thick cover that shielded the low-lying foliage of bog myrtle, heath rush, and the pale green twayblade, or fen orchid, tacky with its own kind of beauty.

A circular bench had been built around a large oak in the middle of the grove. The bench was gray, its wood split by age and neglect. Tree stumps ringed the grove in a loose circular pattern interspersed with white heather. The flowers were tiny points of light in the dark and shadowed space.

The keening sharpened inside Rork’s skull. He stumbled forward and sat on the old bench, pressing his fingertips into his temple. One voice in the confusion of voices was growing higher-pitched and garbled.

On the far side of the grove, away from where he was sitting, was a large fire circle. Flat rocks had been moved out of neat geometry and were covered in moss. Rork saw indentations in the ground: a circle within a circle within a circle.

The bog grove gave him a feeling of awe. He wished he could show his gran. Even though she hadn’t had much use for kirk, he thought she would appreciate the mysterious space. Despite its decay, the grove felt alive, filled with the loves, losses, and conflicts of people who had gathered here over time. The ground, carpeted with bog moss, was pungent with this other-feeling.

“Aye, aye, loonie,” his gran would say. “Everything in this life has a story.” She’d rub the middle of his forehead with the pad of her thumb. “All you have to do is pay attention.”

How often had he stared at the bright blue eyes behind her gold-rimmed glasses, trying to read the network of fine, spidery veins in her cheeks, exquisite as a motherboard?

Rork peered deeper into the grove’s gloom and saw a gap of light between two of the largest oak trees, flagstones barely visible, almost buried in mulchy earth. A path led beneath a tangled arbor. He got up, his long legs taking him across the grove in a few strides. Angus yipped and yipped, as if in warning, pulling at the cuffs of Rork’s jeans in a dogged attempt to prevent him from following the light. Even Angus understood what was out of the ordinary.

Chapter 2: Banshee

Rork ducked beneath a thorny arch and entered a forest room that emitted a warm glow. In the center of a patch of weedy grass he noticed a stone pier about waist-high on which stood a curious metal sphere that looked like a deconstructed globe. Bands of copper ringed the globe, creating multiple lines of circumference. There were also metal-stamped images of stars, planets, suns, and moons. The copper rings crisscrossed in a celestial framework of longitude and latitude. The rings of the sphere twisted and turned, rotating in and around each other, making a rhythmic grinding sound.

Standing next to the sphere was a luminous figure with the silhouette of a slight young woman no taller than five feet. She wore a long, flowing gown cloaked in a wrap of a sheer drapery fabric tinted violet, the exact color of the sky in the last, lingering moments before the sun finally set. The figure was singing, twining her voice with the sphere’s music, her notes crystalline, staccato, and piercing. Her singing made the pressure in Rork’s head even more intense, like his skull was going to split. He felt as if the sound was going to spit his brain out of his cranium like a seed. He shielded his eyes as if that might shield him from the pain.

The figure turned at his arrival into the alcove. “At last,” she said. “We were wondering what was taking you so long. We’ve been calling you all morning!”

She smiled at him, her eyes sheer blue, her face pale as bone. Her eyes reminded Rork of the clearie marbles he’d used to shoot as a boy. His eyes were drawn to the gap between her two front teeth.

Rork felt time skip. His jaw gaped. His long cheeks drained of color. Disbelief froze his body, locking his long legs at the knees. Soundlessly he opened and closed his mouth. His entire body seized like an operating system that refused to work. Only his nose twitched. He smelled a sweet smell like butter-sugar.

The figure looked like a teenager, maybe the same age as him, seventeen-ish, but so fair she was almost transparent. Her skin was the blue-white of a bleached skeleton. She flung a corner of the wrap over her shoulder, covering the indent at the top of her throat, and raised an eyebrow as if waiting for Rork to say something. They stared at each other in the unreal tranquility of the forest room, the sphere’s gritty whining in the background.

Finally, Rork swallowed as some sensation returned to his legs. “Who are you?” he croaked.

She cocked her head to one side, narrowing her eyes. “I am a banshee, messenger of the living and the dead.” Her voice made him uncomfortable inside. She nodded her silvery head. “My name is Bryonna, but my friends and family call me Boo.” Again he got a glimpse of gap teeth.

Rork’s brain went blank. He must not be hearing properly. Had the keening dislodged a small bone in his eardrum?

“Did. You. Hear. Me?” asked the figure.

Rork saw her mouth move, her eyes regarding him. The part in her hair shimmered in the low light, but the gist of what she was saying escaped him. He shook his head, wondering if he should just leave, push his way back through the trees to the safety of the path. The feeling of being lost intensified. Vaguely, he remembered letting Angus off the leash in the bog grove. Why had he done that?

“Did. You. Hear. Me?” the banshee asked again.

The words began to penetrate the fog in Rork’s brain.

“Did. You. Hear. Me?” She stepped towards him.

“Aye, aye. Boo. A banshee,” said Rork, holding a hand up, forcing himself to reply. He felt unreal. He stepped backwards a few steps.

“Yes,” she said, “messenger of the dead.”

“Banshee. Messenger. Living and dead,” Rork replied, his voice not like his voice at all.

“Your gran sent me,” said the banshee.

“My gran?” Rork heard his voice ascend into a higher register. He felt dizzy and light-headed. He wanted to sit down.

“Aye,” said the banshee. “She thought we could help each other.”

“Huh?”

The banshee hesitated, eyeing him. “You’re the Fergus, right?”

Rork nodded.

“And your gran passed a fortnight ago?”

Rork nodded again.

“Whew,” she said. “For a minute there I thought I’d transmitted to the wrong grandson.”

He stared at her. “That would be bad?” he asked, wondering.

“Very bad,” said the banshee, grimacing, her heart-shaped face almost comical. “You see, I’m not actually a banshee yet. I’m only a banshee-in-training.”

Rork’s eyebrows shot up into his high forehead.

The banshee put one hand on her hip, watching him. “Your gran didn’t tell me you were slow,” she said.

“I’m not slow,” said Rork. He squared his shoulders and glared at the banshee, puffing up his chest. Immediately, he wanted to prove to her his worth, but words stuck in his throat. She was a harbinger of death, and he knew enough about banshees to know he didn’t want to get on her bad side.

“Well, I don’t get why you’re not understanding this. Didn’t you wish to be reunited with her?”

Rork stared at her, letting the words sink in. “Iamnotslow,” he repeated, feeling overcome despite his bravado. He sank to the ground, perching at an odd angle on the stone slab underneath the pier, legs splayed out in front of him.

“My gran?”

He ran his hands through his hair, a nervous habit, and the curls stuck out from his head in a disordered halo. The keening had settled into a low hum, superseded by the banshee, luminating.

“You’re a banshee,” he said, ticking off what he thought he had heard on one long, tapered finger. He looked to the banshee, his mind struggling for some sense of coherency.

The banshee nodded in quick bobs, her movement frenetic, charged by the strident energy of the voices. She crouched down next to him on the slab, peering closely but keeping her distance, the sugary-sweet smell of her filling Rork’s nostrils.

“You’ve been in touch with my gran.”

The banshee nodded again.

“You shuttle between the living and the dead.”

The banshee smiled into his face. The sweetness almost made his mouth water with a hunger that felt more like yearning.

“I must be dreaming or hallucinating or something,” said Rork. He knocked on his forehead with the rounded end of one fist, flesh hammering the flat plane of his cranium. He found the pounding strangely calming.

He dropped his arm and looked sideways at the banshee. “Who did you say was calling me?” he asked.

The banshee clasped her hands together in her lap. “The dead,” she said. “Your gran. Others who have crossed.”

Rork snorted, wanting to believe, at least in a way, feeling a glimmer of something. Maybe hope.

“It’s true,” Boo insisted.

“But it sounds like noise.”

“You don’t understand the language.”

“It’s a language?”

“Yes.” The banshee slanted her clearie eyes at him.

Rork fidgeted, bouncing one extended knee. He levered himself upright and began to pace the grove. He glanced at the sky, the fading sun. He worried his father would be looking for him. Keeping his father waiting was never a good idea. Their relationship was rocky enough. How could he explain what was happening to him? He could never seem to find the words his father wanted to hear. As he paced, the fingers of one hand tapped on his right thigh as if it were a keyboard, typing “o-k” over and over, while his brain attempted to process his thoughts and feelings. Find. A. Way. To. Connect.

He considered the banshee, watching him, pulling on a strand of her long silvery hair. He thought he must be going crazy. He’d heard loneliness could do that to a person. But there was another part of him that soared at the idea. What if the banshee really did exist? And she could make it possible for him to see his gran again? Wasn’t that what he’d been wanting? Was the banshee the way?

Rork turned to the banshee. “My gran was trying to reach me?”

“Yes,” said the banshee.

“How is she?”

“At peace. Mostly. The other side is not all that different from this side, except there are no boundaries of time or chronology.” The banshee let her wrap slip from her shoulders. Bare skin shimmered. She added, “She wants to see you, too. She worries about you.”

Rork grunted. “She’s the one who died.” He continued pacing, his boots scuffing the ground. The banshee pleated the chiffon-like fabric of her gown between two fingers. “I don’t get how I’m supposed to help you.”

He swung his long arms, speaking to the trees and bushes rather than the person? woman? girl? sitting calmly in the alcove’s center. “You’re a banshee, and I ‘live in my own world,’” he said, regurgitating one of his father’s favorite gripes.

“I’m only a banshee-in-training,”  said the banshee, her eyes like two small crystal balls. Rork glimpsed the space between her front teeth, and the sight of it was a buoy to his growing optimism. Could he believe her?

“Besides,” said the banshee. “I need volunteers. Especially an intermediary. That is, someone with imagination who can hear the voices.”

“What for?”

The banshee sighed. The sound of her exhaling echoed between his ears louder than the cacophony of other voices.

“In order for me to become a fully-fledged banshee and earn my hood, I have to complete a couple of assignments that have to do with life and death. And Rork, you’re the only one who can help!”