Arthur Quinn and the World Serpent (2 page)

‘Well, this is it,' said Joe as they pulled into the drive.

Arthur didn't want to admit it but it was true – the house was nice. It was red-brick, boxy but modern-looking. The most prominent feature was a large floor-to-ceiling window at the upstairs landing. There was no front lawn, just a stone-paved driveway. It was nice, all right. But it wasn't Kerry.

They got out of the car and, as Joe got to grips with the seemingly complicated unlocking procedure, Arthur took in his surroundings. The estate was reasonably new, with only a handful of other houses in it, all identical apart from the colours of their doors. There was an open grassy area in the centre of the estate. He heard the thump of a plastic football being kicked and followed the sound. In the far corner, a boy of about seven or eight with curly brown hair was volleying the ball against a garage wall. As the ball bounced past him, he turned and noticed Arthur. The boy waved excitedly.

‘Got it!' Arthur heard Joe exclaim behind him and he turned. Joe pushed the blue door open and Arthur followed him inside.

As expected, the interior of the house was as modern as the exterior. All open plan, white walls and cream carpets. The kitchen, on the other hand, was all stainless steel and flowing curves.

‘It'll be like living in a spoon,' commented Arthur.

One good thing downstairs was the forty-six-inch LCD HD television hanging on the living-room wall. There were three bedrooms upstairs: the large master with a king-size bed and two big single rooms. Arthur and Joe took a single room each, leaving the master bedroom unoccupied.

For the rest of the day, they unpacked. With the addition of his favourite posters, Arthur's new bare white bedroom now had a bit of life and colour in it, but it still didn't feel like home. Later they ate take-away pizza in a silence that was broken only when Joe eventually spoke. ‘Looking forward to tomorrow?'

‘Meh. You?'

‘Yeah, Arthur, actually I am. This'll be good for us.'

‘So you keep saying.'

Arthur went to bed early, even though Joe offered to rent a DVD for them. Apprehension over his first day at a new school kept him awake until after three, but he eventually fell into a fitful sleep.

In a time before written history, in Asgard, the realm of the gods, it is said that the great wolf Skoll chases the sun across the sky and that this is why the sun changes position throughout the day. If this is so then Skoll has just begun his chase, for it is dawn. The sun is still low on the horizon and the sky is a deep bronze colour.

Twelve gods and twelve goddesses reside in Asgard, ruled over by the one-eyed All Father, Odin. None of them stirs this early in the morning. They continue to sleep on their soft feather beds in their great halls. All of them are sleeping heavily after the enormous feast they enjoyed the night before. They ate wild boar and drank sweet mead till their bellies were full. All of them rest. Except one.

The Father of Lies leaves his hall and squints up at the brightening sun. The heat of it still hasn't reached the earth and a light dew has formed on the ground. He pulls his black cloak around him tighter against the cold, then makes off in the direction of the sea.

He has many names, the Father of Lies. The Sky Traveller is one; the God of Mischief is another; the Trickster God is another still. But his true godly name is Loki.

Asgard is a land of contradictions: beautiful yet barren, fertile yet rocky. As Loki makes his way across the rock-strewn fields southward, he recalls the feast of the night before. He spits on the ground, remembering the insult that the other gods inflicted on him.

A giantess from Jotunheim, the land of the giants, was the guest of honour. She was an ugly, dreadful beast, but powerful and strong, so the gods meant to befriend her. When Loki arrived at the feast, he was taken aback by the very sight of the giantess. She was obscenely fat, with lank red hair stuck to her brow with sweat. Warts covered her nose while blisters covered her hands and she had a shadow of thick bristles above her lip. Loki, being the God of Mischief, couldn't resist commenting on the vile woman.

As soon as he entered the banquet hall, he bounded onto the long feasting table and announced in his loudest voice, ‘I knew we were having wild boar tonight, but I didn't expect one as wild or as boarish as that!' He pointed directly at the guest of honour, the giantess, to gasps and stifled laughter. Suddenly, the giantess leaped from her bench (the only bench large enough for her was a full-sized table) and strode down the hall towards Loki. She picked him up in her sweating, blistered hands and, before he could protest, she pulled a needle and thread from a pocket in her ragged skirt.

Loki wanted to scream but never had a chance. The pain was excruciating as the giantess went to work on him with the needle and thread. Most of the other gods looked on in awe, but All Father Odin didn't even look up from his meal. As far as he was concerned, Loki had insulted their guest and would get his just desserts.

When the giantess was done, she dropped Loki to the ground and went back to her bench, muttering apologies to the other gods as she passed. Loki struggled to his feet and pawed at the stitches that now bound his lips tightly shut. As he strained to tear the binding, a couple of the other gods started to laugh. Then more joined in, and more, until finally the entire banquet hall of the gods was full of laughter. Guffaws directed at him. Even the great Odin managed a chuckle.

Red in the face, Loki stormed out of the hall. On his return home, he managed to free his lips, but all he could hear was the echoing of the laughter in his ears. He vowed he would have his vengeance and spent the night forming the perfect plan. Now, early in the morning, he is putting that plan into action. He starts to smile at the thought of it, but his lips still sting from where he tore the thread out and the smile turns into a wince.

The sea rises into view before Loki, shimmering and golden in the morning sun. The waves lap the shore lightly. A handful of small vessels are docked, tied to an out-shooting rock, but no fisherman or captain is in sight. Loki is glad of this as he walks over the sand towards the boats. He could have easily tricked any sailor present into giving him a boat, but he is anxious to set about the task at hand.

He picks the lightest-looking vessel to make it easier to row alone. With a quick slice of his knife, he cuts the rope securing the boat to the dock, climbs in and pushes himself away from land with the single oar.

Loki hums a tune to himself as he rows out onto the calm sea. He continues to row until Asgard is but a slim line on the horizon, then puts down his oar and stares into the clear blue waters.

His stomach rumbles at the sight of the cod and other sea fish swimming in circles beneath his boat. He hasn't eaten breakfast yet but that doesn't concern him now. He hasn't rowed all this way for mere cod.

All of a sudden, the schools of fish scatter. A predator has entered their waters. A sea serpent, about two feet long and with ribbed fins on both sides of its head, swims underneath the boat. Without a moment's hesitation, Loki takes hold of a net in the stern and drops one end into the sea. He watches as the net unfurls itself slowly in the water in front of the sea serpent. At first the serpent slows and turns away from the net. Then, for a reason unknown to itself, it looks up and sees Loki. The Father of Lies smiles at it from his boat. The serpent stops moving, hypnotised by the grin, and Loki pulls the net towards him, catching his prey.

Caught in the net, the sea serpent is instantly knocked out of its trance. It wiggles and shifts between the twines, making things awkward for Loki. He opens the net and drops the serpent on the bottom of the boat. It squirms towards the edge but Loki grabs it by the head, holding it down.

‘Stop!' he commands.

The serpent at once relents. Loki grips it by the neck and holds it towards his face. As he stares into its slitted eyes, the fins by its head fan out threateningly. Its tongue licks the air and Loki mimics it with his own long tongue. The serpent's jaws shoot open, its fangs exposed.

Loki smiles then cautiously inches his index finger towards the deadly fangs. The jaws snap closed before he has a chance to retreat, piercing the tip of his finger. In intense pain, he drops the serpent to the bottom of the boat where it resumes squirming.

‘That hurt more than I anticipated,' he murmurs as he takes a tight grip of the serpent again. He pins it by the neck to the base of the boat. The serpent screeches piercingly.

‘You're lucky,' Loki tells it. He traces his bloody fingertip over the serpent's scales, drawing strange lines. They are the magical runes, letters and symbols designed to cause and trap magic. ‘You will be my first. The first of three.'

When Loki is done, he lifts the serpent towards him again and looks directly into its eyes.

‘I will call you the Jormungand.'

With that, he throws the serpent back into the sea. The water instantly starts to foam where the serpent entered it. Loki laughs hysterically and leaps up and down in his little boat, already rocking in the bubbling water.

The foaming grows more violent and spreads rapidly. Loki, thrown from his feet by the motion, holds on to the sides of the boat as it rocks over and back frantically, laughing all the time.

Just as the boat is about to tip over, the water abruptly calms. Loki stops laughing, out of breath. No birds caw overhead. The only sound is the soft lapping of the water against the side of his boat.

He looks into the water. It's darker now than it was, with a light coating of foam on the surface. Then he sees it: the serpent – his serpent, the Jormungand. And it is huge. Vengeance will be his, and that vengeance will destroy not just the gods but all the worlds.

Arthur woke up in a sweat, panting. He grabbed his mobile from the bedside cabinet and checked the time. It was 3.16 a.m. He sighed and collapsed back onto his mattress. So he'd only been asleep for sixteen minutes but had already had that crazy dream. That strange laughing man, the weird rocky land and now a giant snake thing!

He turned over and tried going back to sleep but soon realised that his sheets were damp. In fact, they weren't just damp: they were soaking. How did I sweat so much in a quarter of an hour, he wondered to himself as he got out of bed.

He left his room and followed the unfamiliar hallway downstairs to the living room. Arthur and Joe had piled cardboard boxes here which had yet to be packed away. He switched on the light and scanned the labels on the boxes.

‘Office/computer stuff … Plans … Games and DVDs … Bed and soft stuff, etc.'

He opened the box of bedding to find it nearly empty, as Joe had only thought of bringing one set of sheets each. However, there were a couple of large beach towels tucked away in the bottom. Arthur thought they would do for the night – or what was left of it.

He made his way back upstairs. As soon as he entered his room again, he was hit by something that he hadn't noticed when he'd left. His room smelled like the seaside – that strong briny smell of seaweed and salt water. As he moved closer to his bed, the smell grew stronger and more pungent.

Somehow his sheets were damp with sea water, not sweat. He pulled them off in a hurry, replaced them with the beach towels and climbed back into bed. As he turned over to sleep, he feared that his dream of the strange man in the boat had something to do with the damp sheets. And if that was the case, then what was that huge snake thing and why was he dreaming about it?

Brown. Arthur's new school uniform was brown. A brown itchy sweater, brown stiff slacks and brown uncomfortable leather shoes. Seeing no way around it, he put the uniform on and went downstairs to breakfast. Joe was already gone. He'd left a Post-it with instructions for how to get to the new school and a €20 note – ‘buy yourself something nice'. Arthur wasn't hungry and left early, deciding it would be best to meet the principal before school started to keep the inevitable earth-shattering embarrassment to a minimum.

The October air was frosty and Arthur could see his breath condensing in front of his face. He yawned, still exhausted from his fitful sleep, although luckily he'd managed to catch a few hours after waking from that bizarre dream. He looked around at his new estate. Across the road a businessman with a laptop bag was getting into his Saab. At another house an old woman in a dressing gown was letting her dog out to go to the toilet. The dog ran around the lawn in quick circles, clearly not pleased about being watched by its owner. And at the house in the far corner the boy from yesterday was sitting on the wall, watching him and wearing an identical brown uniform. The boy jumped down and ran to his front door.

‘Stace! Ash!' Even from across the street, Arthur could hear him calling into the house. The boy looked back at Arthur then ran inside, repeating the names.

Arthur shrugged his backpack over his shoulder and walked on. After only a few steps, he heard a door slam and turned to see the boy running down the street towards him, carrying a football and followed at a much more leisurely pace by two girls.

‘Hi!' exclaimed the boy when he reached Arthur. He slowed and walked nonchalantly next to him.

‘Hey,' said Arthur.

‘Did you move in?' The boy was panting from his sprint as he spoke.

‘For a little while, yeah.'

‘I'm Max. Max Barry.'

‘Arthur.'

‘Hi, Arthur!' He pointed back with his thumb over his shoulder. ‘They're my sisters. Do you like football?'

‘You will soon,' said one of the sisters who'd just caught up. She looked about Arthur's age and wore her auburn hair in a neat ponytail. She was also wearing the ugly brown uniform. ‘I'm Ashling. Ash.'

‘This is Arthur,' Max spoke up for him. ‘He just moved in.'

‘Yeah, we gathered that, Max,' said the other sister. She was just like an older version of Ash – probably about seventeen – and was wearing a different uniform. ‘I'm Stace, Arthur. Or Art, or Artie? What do you prefer?'

‘Well, my mum always called me Arthur.'

‘Arthur it is then.' She shook his hand.

Max was bored of all the introductions and, as they turned the corner onto the main road, raised the topic of football again.

‘Yeah, it's all right. I kind of prefer basketball, though,' Arthur answered.

‘Oh, well I love football!' Max went on. ‘My favourite team is Arsenal and my favourite player is Fabregas. Do you know him? Fabregas? He's really good. Do you want to play football with me some time? Ash and Stace won't play with me and –'

‘Soooo,' interrupted Ash as she clamped her gloved hand over her little brother's mile-a-minute mouth, ‘you're going to Belmont?'

Arthur raised his eyebrows, slightly perplexed. She nodded to his uniform. ‘Oh!' he exclaimed. ‘Yeah, I am. Sorry, I'd forgotten that was the name of the school. Sixth class.'

‘Me too! You're going to love Miss Keegan. Every Monday she does this thing where we study something in the news; it's so much fun. Stace goes to the secondary school –'

‘In fact that's where I'm going now,' interrupted Stace, turning off in the opposite direction with a wave. ‘See you later.'

‘And Max –' Ash continued.

‘I go to Belmont too!' yelped Max, struggling out of his sister's grip. ‘And I'm in first class and my teacher is Mrs McKenna and she's kind of old, like really old, but she's nice and sometimes she lets us play –'

‘Football?' asked Arthur with a wry smile to a giggling Ash.

‘Yes!'

Arthur took the ball from Max's arms and squeezed it as if to test its strength.

‘Can you dribble the ball?' he asked Max.

Without a moment's hesitation, Max knocked the ball from Arthur's grip to the ground and tapped it from one foot to the other.

‘That's all right, I guess,' Arthur said with the apparent knowledge of a talent scout, ‘but most footballers manage to dribble the ball while running …'

‘I can do that too!' Max dashed off ahead of them, controlling the ball as he went. A couple of pedestrians had to move against the wall or on to the road to avoid a head-on collision with the young footballer. ‘Out of the way! Sorry! Thank you!'

Ash and Arthur burst out laughing. It took a few moments before Ash could catch her breath enough to speak. ‘You've got a fan there.'

‘Looks like it,' laughed Arthur.

‘So where are you from? Why'd your family move?'

‘I'm from Kerry. My dad got a job here. He's working on that new Metro tunnel. Not as interesting as it sounds.'

‘And what about your mom?'

‘She, uh … she …' Even after all this time, Arthur found it difficult to force the words through his lips. He looked at Ash and it suddenly occurred to him that she wasn't Paul or Dave or even Louise; she wasn't any of his friends from home. And that loneliness he had felt the previous night lying in bed came back to him. Ash was becoming blurred in his vision, as unwelcome tears filled his eyes. He looked away, ashamed of the poor first impression he was making, and looped a finger through the ribbon tied around his wrist.

Ash stepped forward and shyly patted his back. ‘It's all right. Moving can be tough. So can … other stuff.'

He looked back at her, nodded and smiled weakly. They walked on to the bus stop, talking about nothing important at all.

Max was already sitting in the bus shelter when they got there, out of breath and clutching his football to his lap. ‘I win,' he said through gasps, smiling as Ash tousled his hair.

A bus approached from the end of the road and stopped at the traffic lights. ‘Just in time,' said Ash, counting her coins for the bus fare.

Then a strange thing happened that afterwards they couldn't explain. Déjà vu is an unusual feeling – like you're reliving a moment for the second time, as if the moment is a scene from a movie on repeat. But what happened to Arthur, Ash and Max was the opposite. Time didn't feel as if it skipped back, but rather that it skipped forward. When Ash looked up from her coins, she realised that the bus had somehow managed to pass them by and that they were the only ones left standing at the bus stop.

‘Did that just –' She stopped mid-sentence when she saw who was crossing the road towards them. Arthur followed her gaze. The boy was also wearing the Belmont uniform. His hair was cropped close to his head, a pale, almost white blond, and his eyes were a sparkling, icy blue. He strode across as if all the world's share of confidence had been funnelled directly into him.

Arthur, who'd always been quite shy and modest himself, took an instant dislike to the boy crossing the street. He knew it was totally irrational to dislike someone before even meeting them – in fact, his mother had always warned him not to judge a book by its cover – but the cockiness the boy exuded simply striding towards them put him right off. No one should be that sure of themselves, Arthur thought.

‘Will!' Ash gave the boy a brief but caring hug.

‘Late again?' he asked when he stepped back. Max bounded up to him, starting to chatter away about football, but to no avail as Ash spoke over him.

‘We missed the bus,' Ash explained. ‘It was really weird.'

‘I wouldn't worry about it. Who's this?'

‘Oh, sorry! Will, this is Arthur. He just moved in across the road from us. Arthur Quinn, Will Doyle. He's in our class too.'

‘Hey man, how's it going?' Will offered his hand. Arthur went to shake it in the usual way, but Will's hand moved in a rapid succession of hand motions and grips that Arthur had only seen in American music videos. He couldn't keep up. When the onslaught ended, Will sat down on the bus-stop bench. ‘So, you're coming to Belmont?'

Arthur nodded silently.

‘Cool, cool. It's not bad. Good gaff.'

‘I'm sure it is.' Just then another bus pulled up. While boarding it, Will jostled past the others to get to the back row first. He lounged across two seats, keeping Ash and Max entertained for the whole journey. Arthur, meanwhile, pretended that he was very interested in the view outside the window.

Joe had spent all morning in the Citi-Trak prefab office poring over the plans for the Metro. He studied blueprints, maps – both geographical and geothermal – computer-generated images of the finished tunnel (complete with smiling passengers) and the white foam-board scale model that took up the length of three desks. Two junior engineers – Ruairí and Deirdre, both fresh out of college – were on hand to answer any of his questions about the site.

Ruairí was quite short and unshaven, with a ruddy complexion. It was clear from his overhanging pot-belly that he enjoyed a little more fast food than was healthy. Deirdre, meanwhile, was much taller, with a slender build and her hair tied in a bun. She wore thick, round glasses and it was clear to Joe from the moment he met them that Deirdre liked Ruairí quite a bit but Ruairí was too wrapped up in his work to notice.

Joe finished scrawling a quick note for himself then tapped a smooth mound on the model. The mound had little foam paving stones to indicate the pavement that would eventually be placed there, as long as things went according to plan.

‘So this is where the latest cave-in was?' he asked as he tapped.

Ruairí nodded. ‘That's where the latest – and worst – cave-in was. Though thankfully no one was hurt.'

‘How can that be?'

‘That no one was hurt?'

‘No. The cave-in.' He pulled out the geothermal mapping for the mound area. The red and yellow swirls on the image showed layers of mud, bedrock and limestone below ground level. The mapping went three hundred feet underground, deeper than they were drilling for the tunnel. If something that would cause a cave-in had been there, it should have shown up on this image as a black space between the waves. Yet the image showed that the ground should have been solid rock all the way down. ‘There's nothing here that indicates a cave-in was even possible, let alone probable.'

The engineers looked at each other in silence. Joe caught their look.

‘What is it?'

‘Well,' said Deirdre, ‘there's more …'

In the open as they were, the wind howled against them, chilling them to their bones. Joe and his junior engineers were standing beside the mound in bright yellow hard hats. Tape cordoned off the mound, which was as even and smooth as it appeared in the model, as if no cave-in had happened underneath.