Two Choices

‘What is that?’

‘It’s mint,’ Dod informed me. ‘We grow it in the gardens. We’ve herbs, and fruits and veg. Even some flowers, just to brighten the world up a bit, grey as it stays these days.’

The existence of gardens here set my mind to wondering what else this old keep contained that I had not yet discovered during my three months here. Dod handed me a mug, a cloud of minty vapour dragging after it and steaming up around my face, filling my nostrils with a warmth that cooled.

‘Did you know the grounds here were built as a military fortress?’ Dod told me. ‘So. Try not to worry about your mother and brother. They’re much safer here than in your isolated cottage.’

‘Still,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen what’s out there. They’re rabid, barely human. Something’s wrong with them.’

‘Like demons in human skin-suits, as Conor put it.’ Dod chuckled at the silliness of such an idea. ‘I don’t think it’s merely a matter of minds lost to depravity, though. Something’s done this to them, whether by nature or human intervention.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, when those cataclysmic events converged on our planet all those years ago, the world was rebalanced in the aftermath. There’re forces out there we don’t understand, something’s...fundamentally changed. You mightn't even know what I refer to, being born in this time.’

I nodded. ‘My father spoke of something similar. But still…how will we possibly fight them if they find us? There’s so many, and they fight with no care for self-preservation.’

‘They fight mindlessly, so we must use their mindlessness to our own advantage. The complete opposite of their approach shall be ours. We will be wily and cunning, striking only the shrewdest blows to their operation while minimizing risk to ourselves.’

I sipped on the pleasant tea as I rifled through a multitude of questions that came to me. ‘How much do you know about them? How do you plan to do that? And who are they?’

‘Well, someone is surely directing these attacks. Someone who is not mindless, someone with a desired outcome. This country is still very much a free-for-all. It isn’t a bold leap of logic to assume their goal is simply to gather and hoard supplies, while eliminating those who they would otherwise have to share those resources with. They want power.’

He had sidestepped my questions. I fixed my eyes on his. ‘I asked how you know about them, not what you assumed.’

‘You’re sharp, Seamus. You don’t suffer much bullshit, do you?’

I didn’t really know what he meant, so I stayed silent, inviting him to go on talking.

‘A sharp mind and a sharp hand, too. I’m guessing you can use that knife on your belt.’

‘To skin a hide, yes. Not for much else.’

‘You’re different, Seamus. All you’ve known is this world. There’s no sense of mourning for what was with you. Sorry, that was a poor choice of words.’ The grief for my father was a dormant resident in the pit of my stomach, but it had risen up and lodged in my throat in an instant. Swallowing it was like a swallowing a jagged rock.

‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that you don’t miss what you never had. The only other here born in this time is Conor, and, well, I think you understand why I wouldn’t ask him to help me in this. He’s younger than you, in age, yes, but even more so in maturity, and dare I say, intelligence.’

‘Help with…what?’

His lips curled into a surreptitious grin, his eyes aglint. ‘You understand, Seamus, that we must strike at them in our own way. I’m asking you to help me, Tom and Twitch too. I have to think tonight, refine my ideas, but tomorrow morning, meet us in the gardens by the glasshouse, and I’ll share my plans.’

I awoke refreshed, having slept more soundly than I had in some time. Dawn was still swamped in grey when I found the gardens, a series of plots separated by trellises. Some were hung with fruits, others were dense with flowers, roses I think, though their vibrant colours were muted by the pervasive fog. I didn’t have to wait long for the others to show up.

‘You found it!’ Dod said, coming down the path through the feathery vapour.

‘I did.’

Twitch, a surly bulldog of a man, strutted after him, a crooked rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth like a limp appendage, hairy tobacco sprouting from the end of it, a mug of steaming black tea sloshing in his hand. His cigarette wagged as he greeted me with a sharp nod and a customary, involuntary twitch of one eye. Tom was taller and more graceful, but then anyone looked graceful next to Twitch. He was cupping a mug of green-hued tea between his hands and against his belly, like he was revering some holy chalice. ‘Mornin,’ he greeted me, though his thick accent made the word come out more as marnin’.

I nodded to them, and was saved having to engage in menial conversation by Dod’s brusqueness.

‘C’mon, into the glasshouse,’ he bid us eagerly.

At a table under hanging vines and surrounded by plant-beds, he talked to us of his plan. He went on avidly at some length, covering different outcomes and problems we might encounter at each step, and any contingencies he had thought through. Tom made some useful insights and suggestions, Twitch mostly grunted, and I remained silent. Dod assigned us various responsibilities. While he spoke, I debated and assessed the necessity of his plan. An overarching theme overrode all my concerns and negated them; I had seen the animalistic work of these half-men on the roads. Their aim was not merely to rob and threaten a beating. They sought to destroy, to ravage, to violate human life in the vilest manner. What they left in their wake, they burned. And regardless of whether they were inculcated, brainwashed, or somehow intentionally shorn of their connection to humanity, one thing was clear to me. They were evil. “Shorn”, I’d heard others refer to them, shorn of empathy and morality. The thought of them out there, in numbers, sent ice down my spine. I shuddered.

‘Are you with us, Seamus?’ It was Dod.

'Yes.’

‘Not a bad plan, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, so. Seen as I have the necessary quantity of tea already, we only need two more things; we need a boat, and we need to practice our best Saxon accents.’

Four days later I found myself on my knees on the slick deck of a boat. I swayed with the sea’s choppy motion and stared at the blood on my hands. Rain poured down relentlessly, washing the blood to streaks of pink. Twitch and Tom had brought Dod into the cabin and were treating his wound as best they could. Everything had been going smoothly, too smoothly. After a swift three-day hike across the countryside, we had come to the coastal town of Dunmore East, and there took our pick of several blue fish trawlers. All the while on our journey, Dod did his best to train us to speak with the cadence and ridiculous lilt of a Saxon. He assured me mine was good, better than the others', even though I’d never heard the accent before. We talked only like that to each other for long stretches of each day, much of it spent mocking Tom for his attempts. We boarded our chosen vessel and set off up the coast without a hitch, never encountering another soul.

Once, my father and I had gone years without coming across other people, and we had lived in a sort of effortless flow of routine doing. He had said to me, ‘Enjoy every moment of this fine stretch of time we’ve had lad, however long it lasts. You know, before, to live as we do now was impossible. Life was a tangle of unwanted problems, and almost all of them, meaningless at their core.’ Then he had looked at me sadly. ‘But even in this world, no life so clean and orderly can go on forever. There will always be change, some disruption that will come bidden or not to our orderly little world. It’s an inevitable fact of life, in this time and the time before.’

I feared he would be right again, that our luck would change. My fears manifested less than an hour after we had set off up the coast. Another boat followed us. Then night came, and with it a thick fog set in and hovered above the sea, and the boat that followed us disappeared from sight. We had hoped ourselves saved by the darkness, but no, quite the opposite.

Men came clambering up onto our boat in the pitch of night, seawater slewing off them. They weren’t the shorn men we knew, and they spoke in a language I’d never heard. Not that I needed to in order to understand their intentions. They came at us wielding slick gleaming knives, yet in the end we defeated them much more easily than I thought we would, even after one of them stuck Dod with a knife. For they were fatigued from a long and freezing swim, and Twitch was not.

He went at them a safe distance from their knives with a length of rusted chain, the metal links in it each bigger than a man’s fist, lashing it at their legs to knock them down and then unleashing relentless repetitions of arcing whips on them. I had managed to extricate Dod from that furious onslaught, dragging him to safety. The last man had struggled to his feet, his face pulped and glistening black with blood, and Tom picked him by the scruff and launched him over the side of the boat.

‘Bloody Spaniards on the east coast of Ireland,’ Tom muttered disbelievingly, coming out of the cabin to join me under the slewing rain. ‘Come on, hup with ya lad,’ he said as he put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Dod’ll be fine.’

I looked up from my hands as the last of Dod’s blood flowed off them. ‘But what of the plan?’ I asked. ‘Dod’s part is yet to be played. What’ll we do?’

I did the maths in my mind even as I asked the question. Dod had the most convincing accent. Tom the least. And Twitch…well Twitch wasn’t meant for a more discreet task such as this. I gulped. That left me.

‘Let’s get inside and talk.’ He had a note of urgency in his voice, and I looked where his gaze roved, squinting into the ominous bank of mist above the dark turbulent water. The blurred shapes of Dublin Port were emerging.

My accent had held up as we’d pulled into the port and our goods were inspected. We were four Englishmen delivering tea, among some other items, from England. Dod had made whatever mendacious prearrangements were necessary so that our arrival was expected, and so far I’d gotten by saying no more than a few words. As we had known, there was just enough cargo that an extra man was needed to deliver it all in one trip. The others waited on the boat while I helped lug the goods to a warehouse. And then we would hope that our plan unfolded from there over the coming weeks.

One of the workers motioned to me with his hand to stop as I went to unload my trolley. He picked off the top box of teabags and put it into my hands. ‘Bring it inside, main building. Upstairs.’

I tried not to panic. ‘Aw’right. Why’s that?’ I asked, cutting the ts from the ends of my words.

He glared a moment. ‘Left out the door. Follow the main path.’

I bobbed my head obeisantly and left the warehouse, trying to mask the pounding of my heart. Everything would be fine, I reassured myself, as I strode through cones of white light. I walked for what seemed like an age when finally a three-story, grey-bricked building became visible. I took a breath before I entered and shoved through the door. There was an empty reception desk and an aura of quiet in the building that suggested the air had been undisturbed for a while. I walked around the wide desk and looked left and right down a dimly lit corridor. There were stairs to the next floor up and one below directly behind the desk and across the corridor, and I made for the flight going up.

I stopped at a sound and tilted my head. It took me a moment to recognise it, and as I did, a curdle of dread rose in my gut. Another less faint scream floated through the air. It came from below, again and again, tortured and raucous, each scream more desperate than the last. I somehow found the will to move my body and left the muted shrieks behind. The second floor was completely dark, so I kept going to the third and there I saw a faint light emanating from a room down an otherwise unlit corridor. I arrived at a door with a pane of mottled yellow glass set in it, light from within spilling out in a turtleshell splatter on the wall.

‘In y’come,’ a woman’s voice drawled.

Surprised, I entered.

The room was a simply furnished office, and a grey-haired woman sat behind its desk, lit up in a flaxy glow of lamplight. The desk was littered with papers and a map.

‘Finally, some tea that isn’t fifteen years out of date.’ Her voice was deep for a woman’s, the gravel of a frequent smoker baked into her accent. I approached with the box, placing it on the desk. She inspected me with dark eyes.

‘You’re d’youngest soul I’ve seen in years. You must be innocent still, without pain.’ I didn’t think anything in my demeanour changed, but she said, ‘Oh. Or not perhaps.’ As I pulled back from the desk her hand suddenly darted out, quick as a lizard, and snatched my wrist in a vice-grip. I yelled as something sharp and unseen nicked my palm. Then with another sharp yank she pulled my hand in and licked the oozing blood from my palm. I recoiled with a jolt, horrified.

‘What are you doing!?’ I yelled, backing away clutching my hand.

‘Now you’re mine,’ she said huskily.

She wiped her mouth. She opened it and took a teabag, held it under the light.

‘Ah. A cuppa tea and a smoke. Nothing settles the voices in my head so well.’ She worked a cigarette from a pack, a neat white stick, not like Twitch’s hand-crafted abominations. She lit it and sucked on it while she stood and went to a side table where she opened a flask and poured hot water into a cup over the teabag. She set it on the desk to brew and sat down again, looking at me with an unreadable gaze. 

‘So young,’ she muttered approvingly. ‘I’ll give y’two choices, lad. Stay of your own volition and next time you wake up, all your pain will be gone. The power to do such a thing for another was bestowed on me when the world was rebalanced. I may enter another’s dream, and there, smote their fears, eradicate their pain, their grief. You join us, help us remake the world.’ She ashed her cigarette and sipped tea with a sigh. ‘Or, you go,’ she gestured towards the door, ‘but know that I’ll come to you in your dreams anyway, with different intentions. You’d do things, things to your own kin, things you couldn’t live with. But live on you would. This I promise you, is within my power.’ She took another swig of her tea, and despite the thundering of my heart, I felt my lips curl into a grin.

‘Not yet convinced, I see. Do you think people allow me to lead out of respect? Nay, lad. Fear. Fear.’ She nodded, exhaling, smoke streaming from her nostrils and purling around her face. ‘Most come to realize, I can...unburden them. If only they let me rove their minds freely while they sleep, without resistance. So you see, you can gain a lot, or you can lose everything. A simple choice.’

She drank deeply, and at that I managed to stop myself shaking with anxiety. In a way, our plan was unfolding right before my eyes, just not in a way we could have predicted. The woman coughed. The last third of her cigarette fell from her fingers as she grasped at her throat, great heaving breaths suddenly seizing her. Her eyes came into the light, bulging at me as she clawed her neck bloody. Her face went purple and then her features froze in a rictus. She wheezed a last time and slumped to the desk.

I ran.

Down the stairs two at a time, down the spotlit path, heedless of who might see me. I waved frantically at the boat as I came down the jetty, the walkway tilting under my scamper.

Tom helped me onboard and grasped me by the shoulders.

‘What’s wrong? No one’s comin. You’re grand.’

‘Need to go,’ I panted.

‘Alright. Twitch! Get us gone! What happened Seamus?’

I slumped down on the deck as we pulled out, and relayed everything to Tom.

He looked at me, dumbstruck. ‘What’in the good fuck.’

I’d hauled myself inside the cabin and there on the harsh wood floor I’d slumbered. I’d dreamt I’d been walking a winding country path in dusk, mist coiling in. A figure appeared on the path and a familiar rasp wafted to me.

‘Two choices I gave’ya lad. Two choices.’