Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 29 ‘The Rock Star’
‘Look,’ said the Rock Star, ‘she’s awake.’
Inteachán opened her eyes.
‘Where am I,’ she asked the Rock Star. His eyes were hidden behind giant sunglasses.
‘Where we want you to be,’ he replied. The Rock Star smiled.
‘We know all about you, Inteachán,’ he sneered, ‘and your silly baby quest to save the world.’
Inteachán didn’t respond. The Rock Star continued.
‘We know you are the puppet of that old doddering fool of a professor. He says where and you race off on your fool’s errands.’
Inteachán still didn’t respond. The Rock Star loomed large over her.
‘Mac may think he knows what is going on but let me tell you he hasn’t got a clue.’
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Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 28 ‘A Pair of Cowboy Boots’
Inteachán found herself slipping into a noise-induced daze.
She felt weak and tearful. The high-pitched noise surrounded her now, bathing her in pain.
Through slowly unfocussing eyes Inteachán could see that the fox had now slumped to the pavement.
‘I’ve got to get away,’ she strained. ‘I need to find somewhere to hide from the sound.’
But there was nowhere and Inteachán began to pass out.
The last thing she saw was a pair of cowboy boots standing next to her head.
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Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 27 ‘The Fox began to Howl’
The city at night is a dark and dangerous place. Revelers and ruffians vie for space. People die in dirty alleys while others walk past and laugh.
Inteachán could handle the city. She knew where to walk and when. Day. Night. It was all the same to her.
Inteachán turned right onto Charles Street Great. St Margaret’s Avenue was just up ahead. She stopped.
A large fox was rooting through a plastic bag full of rubbish.
The city was full of foxes and Inteachán knew she was perfectly safe.
Suddenly the fox stopped what it was doing and Inteachán saw it wince. Shaking its head from side to side the fox began to howl.
Inteachán crouched into the shadows and as she did so she could feel a pressure building in her ears.
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Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 26 ‘The Suicide Plot’
‘Why Croke Park?’ asked Inteachán. ‘Isn’t that rather a strange place for the Summoning to be started?’
‘Not at all’, replied Mac. ‘As you know, Croke Park stands in Ballybough and Ballybough is one of the darkest parts of Dublin.’
Mac looked at Inteachán.
‘There is an old cemetery in Ballybough where the City’s undesirables used to be buried. Thieves, robbers, highwaymen and suicide victims, hence the name, the Suicide Plot.’
‘The worst thing of all,’ continued Mac, ‘was that each corpse had a stake driven through its heart so that they couldn’t further bother the residents.’
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Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 25 ‘An Ancient Ley Line’
Inteachán placed another piece of bread on her fork and began to toast it on the open fire while Mac spoke.
‘There is an ancient ley line called St. Michael which extends out from Ireland into Europe and then the Middle East. This line intersects with various sacred sites dedicated to the saint himself.
The most famous amplification point for this particular line is Skellig Michael, the rock that stands in the Atlantic Ocean. Unbeknown to everyone but a few, Croke Park is another amplification point.’
Mac shifted in his armchair and Inteachán felt a slight shadow descend.
‘If the Horn is blown at such a point of amplification then who knows what will happen next.’
Mac looked at Inteachán.
‘It won’t,’ said Inteachán before he could speak.
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Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 24 ‘The Biggest Band in the World’
‘But there’s nothing in the box,’ said Inteachán.
‘I know,’ said Mac, ‘but I needed to be finally sure.’
Mac looked concerned. This made Inteachán feel concerned as well.
‘Tomorrow night at Croke Park the biggest band in the world will be performing in front of 80 000 people.’
Inteachán had seen posters for this everywhere. Lots of hats and large sunglasses.
‘At the climax of the set the lead singer intends to blow the Horn of Donn Cuailnge and start the first part of the Summoning.’
‘The Summoning?’ asked Inteachán.
Mac smiled.
‘I haven’t got time to tell you everything now,’ he said. ‘Suffice to say we need for that Horn to not be blown.’
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Inteachán – Book One: The Song of the NotBeSpeak 1: 23 ‘The Fomhóire’s Howl’
Inteachán starts to climb the slippery rope. Her small arms are strong. She pulls herself hand over hand. What was once a simple sigh is now a deafening shriek. A shriek that will consume her if Inteachán doesn’t get away.
The rope sways violently. Inteachán climbs faster. The shriek swells again and now starts to fill the night. With a final kick Inteachán is free of the darkness. Quickly now she unties the rope and lets it fall to be swallowed by the Fomhóire’s howl.
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Terminal Transit – Irish, Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, Horror Novel
Synopsis
A brilliant research student discovers a plot fulminated by demons from another dimension and kills himself in the process. The fate of the world is left in the hands of an elderly academic and a mysterious orphan.
Using the facts surrounding Ireland’s economic collapse in 2008 as its starting point, Terminal Transit is an apocalyptic adventure dealing with death and destruction in a Dublin slowly devastated by demonic intervention.
Can the end of the world be avoided?
Or is this planet simply scheduled for Terminal Transit?
Terminal Transit,
Chapter II ‘A New Signal’
Verse 2
The audience never came home from the homecoming concert. Not one single member. For a country well versed in statues bleeding, springs springing forth at the roadside, and many other modern-day miracles and mysteries, the disappearance of the audience left everyone totally baffled. A thorough forensic sweep of the stadium didn’t reveal a single, solitary clue. The newspaper headlines took up the story.
‘VANISHED, PRESUMED DEAD’
‘WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?’
‘AND THEN THERE WERE NONE’
‘WHO HAS SEEN OUR CHILDREN?’
‘LOST IN MUSIC?’
‘A NATION MOURNS’
‘‘MY BUS WAS DELAYED’ SAYS LUCKY ‘SURVIVOR’’
‘IT SHOULD’VE BEEN ME!!!’
‘THE NEW DISAPPEARED’
‘(WITH OR) WITHOUT YOU?’
ROCK BAND IN CONCERT MYSTERY’
‘PROMOTERS BAFFLED’
‘THE CONCERT OF DOOM’
‘WHO ARE THE5?’
And has always happened at the site of any disaster, friends, families, relatives and complete strangers marked the tragedy with candlelit vigils and public masses. And then the posters started; handwritten, typed, taped, photocopied, cheaply printed – the faces of the missing were stuck to fences and lampposts and anywhere else that a poster could be placed. Handbills as well, flyers, holy cards, medals, banners, balloons, photographs, portraits, paintings and bouquet. Like countless doom-weighed blossoms falling from the most hopeless of trees, the streets around Croke Park very quickly filled with these petals of despair. Though he knew it was helpless, Mac carefully pinned his card with the rest of them.
Loss always hits hard and holds firm and deep and long and even after a lifetime of solitude Mac now found he was unable to deal with a brand-new loneliness. There simply is no substitute for presence. Not ever. Mac had first met desolation the morning he lost Sibeal. The choking crushing numbness of her death broke him into a million desperate pieces and forced him so deep into his grief-shaped heart that he thought he was sure to drown in the throbbing, choking pain. It took him years to fish himself at least partially free, one lonely saddened sodden piece at a time. And each piece he rescued became a new word in a new sentence and then a new sentence in a new paragraph and then a new paragraph on a new page and then slowly these new pages grew to be new chapters. And so the Miscellanea became eventually Mac’s carapace, his shell, and like an elderly tortoise discovered on some far-flung archipelago, Mac carried the weight of his barely-repaired life heavy on his bent back. It was a price to pay and an obviously obvious weight to bear but it was something. In fact, it was everything. Now, Inteachán gone and his integument ruptured, Mac feared for the pieces of his frangible heart once more.
‘I’m a selfish cowardly fool,’ he told himself. ‘That a man should send a child to right the breaking world.’ The urge to punch his face with a bony fist was almost impossible to resist. Or pull the last of his straggled hair free from his temples.
‘I had no right, no right at all.’
Mac’s eyes filled with tears.
‘And now she is gone like all the rest.’
As he walked across Front Square the morning after the concert Mac felt that the world was now only different in every imaginable way. He knew the First of the TheFive was here. The disturbance was unignorable and as if his original burdens were not enough, Mac now carried the fact of Butler’s fears coming true like a sodden overcoat clinging stupidly to his sorry shoulders. This fact was a distant bell that tolled everywhere he listened. It was a newly damaged nerve that caused his eye to always gently twitch. It was a trouser cuff that kept getting caught on the heel of his shoe.
The tread of each step on the stairs as he returned to his flat weighed heavier now, only slightly but enough to feel the difference each day. In the same way, lifting a cup to his lips, a fork to his mouth, or the sheet at night to cover his shoulder, each and every ordinary movement that accounted for the passing seconds of every day, seemed to have acquired a new and denser gravity than before.
***
That night Mac dreamed he was alone in an empty black desert. Five bright black moons hung low in the endless sky and glimmered like the deadliest of precious metals as they sped through the darkness like the bearings of some infernal gear. Ahead of him loomed seven vast dunes. The temperature was way below zero but even though he was only wearing his pyjamas Mac didn’t feel the cold. The sand gathered between his toes and started to swirl around him as a sudden wind appeared from nowhere and picked up speed.
‘wE R heer,’ said the wind as it licked Mac’s face. ‘wE AV wated 4 This MOMENt for orl tiMe.’
Mac turned his head to one side to stop the sand blowing straight into his eyes.
‘fliNcH nOt,’ said the wind. ‘BeHOLd ouR MAjeSTi!’
The wind gripped the sand and drew it up into the air like a swarm of angry bees. The sand around Mac’s feet eddied and whirled as it formed a column around him and then Mac found himself being lifted off the ground. The wind forced the column higher and higher until Mac found himself floating in the black mouth of space.
‘AlL tHIngs b4FOR uS FaLL,’ screamed the wind. ‘VaST GALAXiES AnD SINGEL trEES. ALL R aS NUFFiN 2 OuR SPLENda. Wee thrUGH a tINy PEBBel acrOSS thE VASt and broKE thE DINOsorS.’
A comet issued from the column and streaked out into the black. Mac followed it with his eyes until he couldn’t see it any more. The wind laughed softly, delighted by its own artistry.
‘ThaTz tHe COMet THAt 3 FOOlish pEEPING Men wiTh teESCOPes WIll FOLLOw TO a FIND a BASTArd BAbY.’
Mac’s mind whirled. He found himself saying things that were not his thoughts.
‘But surely the principles of the galaxy are such that you should be keen to seek balance and not redress? For who has caused you such grievous harm as to render all discourse irrelevant.’
‘NoT wont NO DIScouRse. Not Us. Not ALL. ONLy WONT iLL AnD deSTRUCtion.’
‘That may be so,’ ‘said’ Mac, ‘but ultimately such intent merely signals only malice. Can such energy ever result in maintaining the equilibrium?’
‘Is SUcH. TRUe SEd! MALicE onLEE ORLL. NoT ELLSe heeR. We NO ONlee wUN THINg wICh is HArM.’
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Terminal Transit – Irish, Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, Horror Novel
Synopsis
A brilliant research student discovers a plot fulminated by demons from another dimension and kills himself in the process. The fate of the world is left in the hands of an elderly academic and a mysterious orphan.
Using the facts surrounding Ireland’s economic collapse in 2008 as its starting point, Terminal Transit is an apocalyptic adventure dealing with death and destruction in a Dublin slowly devastated by demonic intervention.
Can the end of the world be avoided?
Or is this planet simply scheduled for Terminal Transit?
Terminal Transit,
Chapter II ‘A New Signal’
Verse 1
Priory Hall.
Two words that stand as a simple testament to an ignorant nation’s stupid, craven greed – that special kind of breathtakingly galling greed reserved for the self-appointed nobility of this ridiculous island; the bankers and builders and business leaders and breakers and burglars and broadsiders and backsliders and bastards and bollox and buffoons and landlords and layabouts and kiters and cutpurses and swindlers and sweat drippers and debt collectors and drubbers and tally men and tossers and sewage hounds and arse lickers and no-gooders and politicians and pie-dippers and chancers and swindlers and shitflickers and not ever once forgetting the plain and simple good old boys from back in the day.
Now, as befits maps and mythologies everywhere, this particular broken beacon of a building forespeaks, speaks for, speaks of, denotes, indicates, screams, ‘this is a broken country.’ At night the wind laps this particular folly like a poisoned tongue on a mouth of broken teeth. Follies used to be architectural indulgences, used for the flashing of wealth and the winning of bets.
Now, the same indulgences related to the winning of a different bet, one that has nothing to do with anything other than avarice. The same bets that forced a government to add a levy to all insurance policies. The same bets that allowed the country to never learn from its mistakes but just kept making them again and again and foolishly again. But not anymore, the country has run out excuses and these mistakes will be among the last that the country and, indeed, the world will witness. For these same bets have now been collected by a brand-new bailiff.
Priory Hall stood empty now, a monument, a gravestone, a mausoleum, and a warning to the people who passed it by, not that they knew it yet, that this particular gravestone now stood as a marker as well to what was about to commence, indicating in no uncertain terms that the end was beginning.
In one of the many badly designed flats on the fourth floor of the building a black, shiny, unknown stone of clearly alien origin sat glowering on the bathroom floor next to a leaking toilet bowl. The flats of Priory Hall had been closed down due to fire safety issues but clearly the inspectors responsible for closing the building had not factored in alien cosmogeology as another reason for declaring the properties unfit for human occupation. A trail of liquid waste flowed out from the cracked toilet pan. All this piss and shit and spittle and drip and bodily issuance wet the shiny stone which, in turn, due to its peculiar porosity, added its own cosmic foulness to the now freely flowing stream of sewage.
Now on the move, the porous flooring and cheap bricks were no match for this unholy water and in very little time the main waste outlet system was breached and as the flow got greater so did the pressure on the already broken system and in very little time the sewage began to puddle and pool on the grass above the pipes.
Inspired, suffused, attuned, the natural world met a new stimulus with the black stone’s outflow and as the sewage seeped into the earth around it so the hated hectares of Priory Hall became the site for a total recalibration of an old burden, Fallopia japonica, more likely known as Japanese Knotweed. As this new flow continued and found other new water systems to infect so the roots and shoots and rhizomes, the small delicate flowers with petals like crystals, the broad oval leaves, and the red stems began to assemble aggressively all over the city with a vigour never experienced before.
Japanese Knotweed has always been one of the most voracious herbaceous perennials known to gardeners, posing a chronic danger to foundations and flood defenses, forming dense and deadly colonies that choke the life out of their riparian rivals for light and space. This new alien stimulus imbued the weed with a renewed compulsion, an urge to begin further accelerating, out-stretching, entwining, redoubling its unsighted efforts to bury this pathetic island beneath a vast sea of its ruby racemes.
Across the history of the planet, cities normally surrender themselves to the natural world long after their final desertion. For example, waves of sand will eventually level even the tallest towers. Other architectural edifices inevitably fall inwards towards their own cancerous centre of gravity, as if opening their own navels and ingesting themselves. All civic buildings of import and significance eventually lose these same values and become the halls of apes and other primates whose behaviour on the whole speaks of a more measured approach to city life than those of the previous occupants. Fountains fall silent, choked, strangled, barren, and unable to sing anymore.
Slowly, troublingly, desperately, inexorably, inspired by the black stone’s issuant, the weeds of Priory Hall began to exert their new cosmic choke on the now barely breathing city.
BARNABY TAYLOR: Curiosity is Currency 