Chapter 3

The Underwater Train

OISÍN’s head told him to run. The problem was his legs. His legs were rooted to the platform as if they had decided it was time he learnt what scared stiff really meant. Oisín looked at his feet so he wouldn’t have to think about the ravens, but he could feel them looking down at him, could feel the hairs on his neck stand straight as soldiers. The Book of Magic could sense them too. It was squirming in his pocket as if it wanted to get out. Oisín wasn’t sure if it wanted to get away from the ravens or to join them. Stephen and Sorcha hadn’t noticed yet. Sorcha was happy with her Maltesers (she had reached the sucking-the-chocolate stage). Stephen was playing intently with his mobile phone. The air around them got colder and darker.

Just when Oisín’s brain had almost convinced his legs that it was time to get moving, he felt Granny Keane’s hand on his shoulder. Her face was smiling tightly but he could feel her hand shaking. He had to tell her.

‘Gran –’

‘It’s the train!’ Granny Keane said, without hearing him.

‘There’s no train,’ Oisín said. ‘The clock still says it’s twenty minutes away.’

But when he looked at the platform, the train was right there, as if it, rather than they, had been waiting all this time. It looked like a normal DART train with the same green checked cushions and yellow stripe on the side. Something wasn’t right, though. It was eerily empty and hadn’t made a single sound as it reached the platform. Oisín was beginning to feel like he didn’t have enough hairs on the back of his neck for all this strangeness.

Stephen didn’t seem bothered. He hurried Sorcha into the carriage and waited impatiently for Oisín. Oisín’s legs were still staying put. He couldn’t leave Granny Keane alone on the platform, even though she was planning on taking the 130 bus back to her own house in Clontarf.

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ he asked.

A flicker of longing flashed across Granny Keane’s face.

‘No, dear, I’m staying here,’ she said, patting Oisín on the shoulder. ‘But you must go. Just remember –’

‘Come on!’ Stephen said, yanking Oisín by the arm.

‘Wait!’ Oisín said.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Granny Keane said quickly, as if she knew what Oisín was thinking. ‘I can look after myself. But you must get on the train.’

Oisín looked into her deep green eyes. He had a thousand questions for her and he suddenly wished he had asked her about the Book of Magic as soon as he’d found it. What was it doing in her study? How could a book move? What was a Keeper? And what did it all have to do with the Morrígan?

Oisín struggled to find words to ask at least one of the questions, but before he could, Stephen pulled him into the train.

‘Come on, Slowslime,’ he barked, pushing the door-close button impatiently.

‘Just remember your name,’ Granny Keane said as the doors shut. ‘Remember your name.’

Before Oisín could ask what she meant, the train had started to pull off, and in a second Granny Keane was left behind.

Sun streamed into the carriage. Oisín had forgotten that it was daylight and was surprised to see Stephen’s face illuminated. He was even more surprised to see how worried his brother looked. Stephen ran to the window and looked out. When he looked back in relief, Oisín realised that Stephen had seen the ravens on the roof all the time, but he hadn’t wanted to alarm Sorcha. Or to believe it himself. Stephen liked things to be normal. Normal didn’t include his loser little brother or a roof full of ravens. It certainly didn’t include magic books.

‘What is that thing?’ Stephen said, looking suspiciously at Oisín’s Book of Magic.

‘Just a book,’ Oisín said, his voice catching. He wished he hadn’t pulled it out of his pocket.

‘Look, it’s another birdie,’ Sorcha said, pressing her nose against the window.

Stephen swallowed hard. Flying alongside the window was a raven with green eyes. Except these ravens were like ants. Once one appeared, it wasn’t long before there was a trail of them.

‘They’re flying us home,’ Sorcha said excitedly, seeming to have forgotten about the raven that had pecked her.

‘Stay away from the window,’ Oisín and Stephen shouted together.

Already, more ravens were appearing, blocking out the view of both Bram Stoker’s house and Fairview Park with their dark, shadowy wings. Oisín wished the DART would go a little faster but it seemed, if anything, to be slowing down.

‘Déan deifir,’ he whispered to the train.

It was what Granny Keane always grumbled when she wanted her bus to hurry up. The DART didn’t seem to care, chugging along at its normal speed. But the Book of Magic did, shifting in Oisín’s fingers as if shaking off a long sleep.

Stephen’s eyes bulged.

‘Give me that thing,’ he said, moving towards Oisín.

Oisín stood on the tips of his toes, trying to face Stephen eye to eye, which was hard, as Stephen was a lot taller than him.

‘Listen, Bookmaggot, I’ve got hurling practice tonight and I just want to get back home without any trouble,’ Stephen said.

Oisín wished that the Book of Magic wasn’t acting so strangely. It had started to flick through its pages, as if it was getting ready for something.

‘Give that thing to me!’ Stephen said, lunging for the Book.

‘No!’ Oisín said, ducking out of the way.

Stephen grabbed it out of his hands. Oisín caught his breath. In a moment, Stephen would see the inscription in the Book and then he’d never get it back.

‘It’s mine,’ he shouted desperately.

He didn’t know why he said it. It wasn’t as if he thought that the Book could hear him. It wasn’t as though he expected the Book to do anything. But that’s exactly what happened. It snapped its pages shut on Stephen’s finger and leapt through the air into Oisín’s hands.

Oisín could feel something changing in the air, the tiniest of shifts. From the look on Stephen’s face, it seemed that he could sense it too. The DART slowed down to a standstill. The ravens crowded closer. There was a clicking sound, the small unlatching of a carriage. And then the train started to move very quickly.

‘They’ve gone,’ Sorcha said, as the train suddenly shot through the cloud of ravens.

Oisín turned around. He could see the swarm of ravens coming after them. What he couldn’t see was the rest of the train. Their carriage was running away on its own.

‘Goodbye, Killester!’ Sorcha shouted out.

A world of trees, houses, washing lines and annoyed people waiting on Killester platform whizzed by.

‘It must be an express train,’ Stephen said to himself, still trying to cling to a shred of a normal explanation.

The Book of Magic fluttered in Oisín’s hands.

‘Bye, Raheny!’ Sorcha shouted out as more disgruntled passengers were left on the platform at Raheny.

Stephen paced up and down the carriage. He realised with a jolt that they were the only people on it.

‘Bye, Kilbarrack!’ Sorcha chirped.

‘We can get off at Howth Junction,’ Stephen said, running his fingers through his hair. ‘The train will have to stop there.’

All the trains stopped at Howth Junction, no matter where they were going.

‘Bye, Howth Junction!’ Sorcha called out.

Oisín gulped. Instead of following the regular tracks, the carriage had veered off on its own. Oisín ran to the front of the carriage and looked out the window. There were the same wooden slats disappearing underneath the train as it powered along, but they looked a lot older, as if they hadn’t been used in a very long time. The carriage kept going, travelling so fast that they couldn’t see the ravens behind them any more.

Stephen strode forward and tapped on the window to alert the driver. The driver’s compartment was empty.

‘We’re going to the sea!’ Sorcha cried excitedly.

‘We’re not!’ Oisín and Stephen shouted at the same time.

Sometimes, though, seven-year-old sisters can see things more clearly than their older brothers.

‘We are,’ Sorcha said stubbornly. ‘We’re going up Howth Head.’

She was right. Somehow the carriage was cutting through fields, trees and roads, all the time getting higher and higher. Surprised cows raised their heads at the green blur that had shot by them, but it was gone before they could let out so much as a moo. In seconds, the carriage had cut a path through the bright pink rhododendrons of Deer Park and was rushing towards the summit of Howth Head. If the carriage didn’t stop, they’d fly off the edge of the cliff, the sea hundreds of feet below them.

‘Stop!’ Oisín whispered. He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to the Book of Magic or the train. Neither of them was listening.

The carriage zigzagged through the gorse fields and kept climbing up the hill, not showing any signs of stopping. Sorcha looked out the glass window with a very serious face. Stephen jabbed at his mobile phone furiously, but it didn’t have any signal. The edge of the cliff loomed. Stephen dropped his phone and held Sorcha’s hand. He looked back and offered his other hand to Oisín.

Just as Oisín was about to take it, the pages stopped flapping and the Book opened at its centre. Three small words shone out clearly on the page, coming from the mouth of a bright speckled fish. It took Oisín a second to decide. He wasn’t sure that he trusted the Book. He wasn’t sure that the strange words wouldn’t turn them into tadpoles. He wasn’t even sure if he could read the small spindly handwriting. What Oisín was sure of was that he didn’t want to plummet off the edge of a cliff without doing anything.

‘Téigh faoin uisce,’ he read quickly.

It was as if the train knew what he was saying, like it was a horse waiting to be tapped on its flank. The train dipped sharply down on a ninety-degree angle, flinging the children against the glass. They were too amazed to scream. One after another, tracks appeared on the cliff-face, as if they were appearing just for them. The tracks continued into the Irish Sea, running along the sandy bottom until they disappeared from view. Oisín knew that the carriage was going to follow them and sure enough it did, plunging into the water and chugging along the seabed, as if this was a perfectly normal thing for a DART to do. It showed no signs of slowing down and the windows seemed happy to stay shut.

‘What’s that?’ Stephen asked.

Straight ahead was the strangest looking seaweed forest Oisín had ever seen. It looked like it was made of mist, and towered towards the surface. The tracks continued through it and the DART brushed through easily. The train was through the misty seaweed in under a minute but something seemed to have changed in the air. Oisín had a strange feeling, like when he entered somebody else’s home for the first time and he caught the particular smell of the house. It was as though he had opened a curtain and now here he was, in magic’s house. The Book of Magic settled into his palm, calm again.

‘Look at the fishies!’ Sorcha said, running to the window.

She didn’t seem too bothered about what had just happened. Stephen sat on the floor, in shock. Things were so not-normal he didn’t know where to start. Oisín could understand why. It wasn’t just that the DART was travelling underwater. It was that the fish that swirled around the carriage were some of the strangest he had ever seen. There were bright little minnows that flashed on and off like Christmas lights. There was a huge salmon with goat horns on its head and long yellow seahorses that stretched out their necks like trumpets. Oisín had wanted to be an oceanographer when he was eight and had read lots of books about the sea, but he had never seen any creatures like the ones in front of him now. A strange sort of thought crept up on him – that these were the kind of fish you could never find in the Irish Sea, maybe even the kind of fish you could never find in this world.

Stephen buried his head in his hands as the carriage made its way through a gigantic kelp forest. The seaweed was as high as Liberty Hall and just as strange as the fish: towering lavender and turquoise stalks that swayed with the current, prickly pink plants that recoiled as the train went past, bushy blobs of yellow seaweed that puffed in and out.

The DART pulled out of the seaweed forest and continued along the ocean bed, as if it knew exactly where it was going. After about ten minutes, it started to climb out of the water, pulling back into the air and stopping at a sandy beach. The doors opened slowly.

‘We must be in Wales,’ Stephen said, struggling to keep his voice from shaking.

Oisín looked out the window at the strange island they’d arrived at. He’d never been to Wales but he had a feeling that it didn’t have any palm trees. He knew Wales had mountains, but the white one in the distance looked much too big to be in the United Kingdom. And he was very sure that there weren’t any volcanoes in Great Britain.

Stephen punched his fist against the window. He clung on to the one normal thing left: this was all his brother’s fault.

‘You did this,’ he growled, glaring at Oisín and at the Book in his hands. Oisín didn’t bother answering. He hadn’t meant to make the train go underwater. He hadn’t meant for the ravens to see the Book. But he had a feeling that there was no turning back now.

He held the Book of Magic in his hands, and for the first time, he felt how heavy it was.