Lowrie followed the driveway into the door. At least he presumed it was the driveway. It was difficult to pinpoint beneath the treacherous carpet of weeds.
“Okay. Here we are.”
Meg took a deep breath and climbed into Lowrie’s head. She could feel the strain tugging at her essence. There were only a couple of possessions left in her, then it was back up the tunnel.
Maybe coming here was stupid. A waste of energy. They could be halfway through Lowrie’s final wish now, instead of risking both their immortal souls on a silly stunt. Then Meg thought of someone laying a finger on her mam, and her resolve returned.
“Okay,” she beamed at Lowrie’s half of the brain.
“Knock, knock. Wallop! Bye-bye. Couldn’t be easier.”
Meg raised her now arthritic finger to the buzzer. But it was gone. There was a bell-shaped gap in the paintwork, but no bell. Another repair neglected by Franco. She rapped on the frosted glass. It stung her knuckles. Lowrie’s feelings were beginning to surmount her own.
“Someone’s coming,” said Lowrie, taking control of his mouth for a second.
Meg blinked a bead of sweat from Lowrie’s eye. Her own nervousness was sending the old man’s sweat glands into overdrive. She pulled back a fist. As soon as the door cracked open. Pow! He’d never know what hit him. It might cost a few centuries in purgatory, but it’d be worth it.
A shadowy figure was loping up the hallway, diffracted by the bubble glass. It was Franco, all right. No doubt about it, even with the pane’s distortion. Come on, fat boy. Open your mouth and say cheese.
The door swung open. A face appeared. Meg swung.
And in the time between swing and impact, time seemed to decelerate. Just long enough for the head to speak.
“Hello, Finn. I’ve been expecting you.”
Odd, thought Meg. Franco never called her Finn. Only missy. Also, how did he know it was her? And why was he slobbering? Then the punch landed and Franco collapsed like a sack of pig dung.
“Nice one,” enthused Lowrie. “Now, off we go.”
But Meg couldn’t go. There was something wrong here. She strode into the hallway of number forty-seven, slamming the door behind her.
Franco was writhing on the floor. Whining and slobbering.
Slobbering? Whining? Suddenly it was all too clear. She squinted at the fallen figure, using her own eyes this time. And there he was, floating inside her stepfather, his bestial face twisted by hate.
“Belch!” she exclaimed.
Her enemy did not answer, except to snarl and spit. Clearly his human half took a backseat under pressure.
“What are you doing here?”
Belch squinted through a haze of pain.
“I’ve come for you, Finn. The Master wants your soul.”
A small figure in white popped out of Franco’s head and began to hover over the fallen figure.
“There is no need to provide the target with information. Just get up and do your job.”
Meg nodded at the white-suited hologram. “What the hell is that?”
“Do us both a favor, Finn, and squash it like a bug!”
Elph managed to look injured. “After all I’ve done for you. If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been turning spits long ago. Now, finish siphoning and get these two.”
Belch opened his mouth and began to suck. Glittering orange strings erupted behind Franco’s eyes and flowed down the demon’s throat. With every gulp Belch grew stronger, more there.
“Uh-oh,” said Meg and Lowrie together.
Franco was changing. As his life force was devoured, his body paid the price. Deep lines etched themselves across his forehead. His eyes lost their shine and sank into his face. The flesh on his neck drooped and sagged. It was still Franco, but twenty years older.
“This is not good,” muttered Meg. “I have to do something.”
Elph whirred across the room, hovering not two inches from Lowrie’s nose. He chuckled, purely for effect, since holograms have no sense of humor.
“What you will do, Meg Finn, is fail. Then you will return below with us. My creator will be exalted above that buffoon Beelzebub, and your old man will die unfulfilled. That is what you will do.”
Meg snarled. For once Belch was right. She should squash this annoying thing like a bug. She grabbed a vase from the hall dresser and hurled it at the flickering hologram. Of course it passed straight through, shattering on the crown of Franco’s head. The result was spectacular. What you’d expect when a vase hit a head was: Ow! Possibly a small gash. Concussion at the very most. Certainly no more than that. What Meg got was a sudden unearthly light display as the vase’s contents distributed themselves across Franco’s head. The dust fizzled and crackled, sealing itself like concrete to her stepfather’s face. Franco screamed, and Belch howled. It was a grating combination. Glasses popped in the kitchen, windows shattered. Even Franco’s precious TV tube succumbed to the sonic waves, imploding into a thousand pieces.
Franco writhed on the hall floor, scraping at his own face, but it was no use. The dust had adhered itself in a viscous sheet over his entire upper body.
Elph watched dispassionately from a height. “Hmm. Interesting. Violent allergic reaction of the painful kind.” The hologram ran a match on the word allergy. “Only one hit: Allergy. A malignant spirit may display signs of discomfort when it comes in contact with a blessed substance.”
Meg retrieved a section of the vase. There was a brass nameplate near the base. Now she remembered. It was her mother’s vase. From the crematorium.
“Mam,” she whispered, a tear slipping between her lashes.
Elph nodded. “Blessed ashes. I would concur with that analysis.”
Meg aimed a kick at Franco’s leg.
“You wouldn’t even put the urn in the glass case.”
“He does regret that now,” noted Elph.
Franco couldn’t answer. He could only share the pain inside his head. He wriggled and jerked for several moments before the agony knocked both him and his demonic lodger unconscious.
Meg gave him another belt on the leg. “Serves you right. You two belong together.” She slipped the shard into Lowrie’s pocket. “Thanks, Mam. You saved me again.”
Lowrie took control of his mouth. “Let’s go, Meg. Before we all run out of time. That monster won’t stay down forever.”
Meg blinked away her tears. It was true. She could feel herself fading away by the second, and they had a long way to go for the last wish.
“Okay, Meggy,” she told herself in her mother’s tones. “Get a grip. You’ll have all eternity to mope about. Finish the list! Only one more to go!”
She pointed a stiff finger at Elph. “And as for you. If I ever see you again, you’ll be pulling that lens out of your ear.”
“Me?” said Elph innocently. “How would you ever see me again? I’m stuck with these two.”
But as soon as Lowrie’s back was turned, Elph blinked, flashing a blue laser down the old man’s frame. It was totally painless and only lasted a millisecond. But it was the one thing that could save the moron, and therefore the hologram itself, from the wrath of the Devil.
After the target and the human had disappeared down the hall, Elph rewound the last few minutes’ video in his head. The girl had made a remark. Something that could be important. He scanned the videotape for the appropriate moment. Finish the list, the girl had said. Hmm. What list would that be? And could it be the key to her damnation?
Elph stopped himself. There was no point to supposition. He would put himself on energy-save mode until the idiot host awoke. He blinked once and disappeared. And there was no sign of life in number forty-seven except the blinking red light of a standby button.
LOWRIE HAD GONE MENTAL, AND RENTED A CAR.
“Might as well,” he reasoned. “I’ve a feeling we don’t have a lot of time left.”
Meg had the same feeling. She felt about as substantial as the morning dew, and her strength was fading w
ith every mile. The Belch thing had shaken her. Who was the Master? And why did he want her soul? Meg had a dreadful suspicion that she knew the answer to both these questions. She could feel the tunnel now too. Its pulse pumped through her body, pulling her. Reminding her.
Not just a car either, to get back to their transport. A Peugeot coupé. All wheels and exhaust. Generally Meg would have been hopping around with excitement, pressing every button on the dash, but not today. Today neither passenger nor driver had the energy for anything besides essentials.
“Your last wish. Spit over the Cliffs of Moher,” said Meg, a slight chatter in her voice. “What does that mean?”
“Exactly that,” responded Lowrie, pushing the stubby gearshift up into fifth. “Like in the song.”
“What song?” Lowrie rolled his eyes. “Youngsters. What song?
Didn’t you learn anything in those schools?”
“Just math and reading. Nothing useful like spitting songs.”
Lowrie tapped out a rhythm on the racing steering wheel, and after a few bars he began singing in a grating Dubliner’s kind of a voice.
“To have lived a life to the full,
A man must have broken every rule,
Slept in a ditch,
Married a witch.
To have lived his life to the full.
To appreciate life as much as you can,
You must kiss the sweetheart of another man,
Spit right over,
The Cliffs of Moher,
To appreciate life as much as you can . . .”
“I could go on. There are forty-seven verses.”
“No, that’s all right,” said Meg hurriedly. “I get the picture. So we’re doing this all because of some old song?”
“My father used to sing it to me. Every night at bedtime. It was our own lullaby. Mother didn’t approve. The ‘marry a witch’ line annoyed her slightly.”
“I wonder why.”
Lowrie chuckled. “Not very politically correct, I know. But I have done that and all the rest in my time. Slept in a ditch and so on. But I didn’t actually . . .”
“Spit over the Cliffs of Moher,” completed Meg. “So what do you need me for?”
Lowrie rubbed his chest. “The climb. I don’t think I can make it.”
“More climbing,” grumbled Meg. “That’s just great. I hope heaven is worth it. I suppose I should be grateful your dad didn’t know any songs about toilet cleaning, or we’d be doing that too.”
Time was of the essence. Elph knew that, so he decided to give Belch a little help regaining consciousness. A “little help” consisted of a level-three positron shock to the hairy rump.
Belch spasmed. Franco spasmed too, seeing as Belch was still occupying his body. The dogboy sat up sluggishly.
“Arf?” he inquired dopily.
“The target struck your host with some blessed ashes. As a malignant spirit you are highly allergic.”
“Sore,” moaned Belch, apparently abandoning complete sentences in favor of single words. “Itchy.”
“Quite,” said Elph, without the smallest trace of sympathy. “Now get yourself out of that body. We have work to do, and very little time in which to do it.”
“Woof!” agreed Belch. He took a deep breath and attempted to slide out of Franco’s body. It was no use. Something was holding him in. He tried again, face twisted with effort, but the spirit could not detach himself. “Stuck.”
Elph chewed an electronic lip.
“I was afraid of this.”
“Arf?”
“The positively charged ashes are repelling your negative demonic force from all sides, creating an impermeable ectoshell.”
“Arf?”
“You’re trapped. Stuck in that body. Which is a pity, since you’ve already drained most of the life force.”
Belch studied his new fingers. They were yellow and wrinkled. Franco had aged thirty years. And he hadn’t looked that good at thirty-five.
“Stuck? Noooo!”
“Noooo!” mimicked Elph dramatically. “Grow up, idiot. Our mission is still the same. Find the old man. Stop the girl. Nothing has changed. As soon as we are successful, you’ll be your own two selves again.”
Belch picked a scrap of stale food from Franco’s dressing gown and stuffed it into his mouth.
“Food,” he growled. “Good.”
Elph rolled his eyes, another affectation. “For Satan’s sake! We have more important things to think about than you feeding your face. Our strength grows weaker every minute.”
Belch concentrated for a moment, stringing a sentence together. “Finn is gone. We don’t know where. We’re too late.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, oh moronic one. I, unlike you, take precautions against such eventualities.”
Belch’s head was beginning to hurt. He didn’t know whether it was the hole in his skull, or the hologram’s continuous insults. “What . . . precautions?”
Elph felt the need to deliver a lecture. “The ecto link and help program comes complete with a wraparound laser scanner. The very latest, not even available in Japan, something about corrosive side effects on skin tissue. So before the old man left, I scanned his frame. I can do a three-sixty reconstruction. Maybe we can learn something.”
“Woof,” said Belch.
The hologram blinked and a computer reconstruction of Lowrie McCall appeared in the air before them. It consisted entirely of a matrix of green lines.
“Not very lifelike,” mumbled Belch.
“I’m running the program on a minimum memory, powered by the very limited electric pulses of your brain,” retorted the hologram. “I could improve the rendering but it might knock you unconscious. Now, Finn mentioned something about a list. . . .”
Elph rotated the laser model. “I’ll just activate the X-ray tool. This uses over a hundred megabytes, so you may feel a tiny pinch. . . .”
As usual, Elph had understated the pain factor. Belch fell writhing on the floor, his eyeballs jittering like dice in a cup. In midair, Lowrie’s clothes became transparent. The contents of his pockets became instantly visible.
“Breast pocket. Enhance,” ordered Elph.
Lowrie’s pocket grew to the size of a sheet of paper.
“What have we here?”
Belch didn’t answer, too busy slapping out the fire in Franco’s hair.
“Grid reference Xl, Y3, Z4. Enhance and unfold.”
Everything disappeared except the note. It grew to the size of the wall, and unfolded along the creases.
“Incredible. Based on residual ink traces on the reverse side, the program can accurately reconstruct the writing.”
Fascinating, Belch might have said, if he’d been in the mood for sarcasm, and not blubbering with fiery agony.
“This would be the list. A Wish List, if I’m not mistaken. Very common among the terminally pathetic. I’m surprised you don’t have one, considering the mess you made of your life.”
Belch’s brain felt like a bruised orange. Spit turning couldn’t be worse than this.
Elph ran a hinged finger down the list. Only one more to go, Finn had said. The last wish was . . .
“Spit over the Cliffs of Moher? Why? Surely nobody would actually want to spit over a cliff.”
Elph shut down the program. “Then again, these Irish are a strange race. Spitting over cliffs is exactly the kind of activity they would enjoy.”
He turned to the quivering mass on the floor. “The Cliffs of Moher. Where are they?”
Belch searched his last few brain cells—the remaining couple not fried by Elph’s meddling. The Cliffs of Moher. They did sound familiar.
“School trip,” he gasped.
“Say no more,” sighed Elph. “I will search your memory files. Pictures say more than your vocabulary ever could.”
The hologram was silent for a moment, mentally thumbing through old experiences. Belch was glad of the respite.
“I have located these cliffs,
” said Elph, all too quickly. “The island’s west coast. In the area known as County Clare.”
“That’s right,” said Belch. “County Clare.”
“Of course it’s right, imbecile. Your own memory told me. To disagree would mean arguing with yourself.”
Belch risked a warning growl. Once they were in hell, he would make sure this nasty little gremlin got what was coming to him. “So what do we do now? Just fly off across the country?”
“No, cretin. You are trapped in a human body. We are restricted to terrestrial transport. Does this human have a car?”
Belch chuckled. “Franco? You must be joking. He never goes anywhere farther than the bathroom.
Elph blinked. “Then we must acquire transport.”
“Acquire?”
“Yes. Acquire.”
Rissole O’Mahoney was taking a spin around the neighborhood on his Honda Goldwing. He wasn’t going anywhere special, just giving the local lads a chance to drool at his jet-black speed machine. You could get away with that when you were the hardest man in the area. Nobody else would draw attention to the fact that they had an $8,000 bike parked in the driveway. But who’d be crazy enough to touch Rissole’s bike? No one who wanted to live to ride it, that was for sure. Even the birds were too scared of Rissole to poop on his bike.
There was a drizzle coming down. The beginning of a storm, the chap on TV said. So Rissole decided to head on home and put the bike under a tarp. You couldn’t be too careful. Not with all the acid rain around these days.
He twisted the throttle a bit more than was necessary, pulling the Honda in a tight curve. Then he saw Franco Kelly standing in the road before him. In a dressing gown and slippers! The damp had pasted his hair to his skull, and his undershirt had molded itself to a protruding belly.
Rissole put the bike in neutral and coasted over to his neighbor.
“Howye, Franco . . .” he began, then stopped. It was Franco. He was sure of it. But the man seemed to have aged thirty years overnight.
“You should give up that drink and start taking a bit of exercise,” advised Rissole. “You look like a shadow of your dad.”
Rissole chuckled. A shadow of your dad. Witty and hard. What a combination.