Tales of Darkisle E-Book

Dave Rudden

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'My kind of book.' R.L. Stine, author of Goosebumps Sent home from school early for troublemaking, 11-year-old Conn hangs out at UCD's National Folklore Collection while his Aunt Doireann finishes up her work. When he spots a case marked 'hazardous', Conn just can't stop himself from lifting the lid … Inside lies the ancient skull of the Abhartach – an undead sorcerer of terrible might – and Conn has just set his spirit free. Can he defeat the monstrous mind-controlling Abhartach before he regains his full power? 'Wise, funny, thrilling, and scary, Conn of the Dead is a wonderful new type of adventure. Dave Rudden is a storytelling genius.' Pádraig Kenny

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

The Darkisle Will Return In: Nell on Earth

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

About the Author / About the Illustrator

About Gill Books

This book is dedicated to you, you weirdo.I hope you like it.

The Darkisle rises from the ocean like a tooth from a jaw, a black and jagged spur of rock covered by dead and dripping grass. It doesn’t show up on satellites. It does not ping radar or trigger alarms.

The Darkisle, like evil, is not easily mappable, or detectable, or explainable.

But you know it when you see it.

How do you kill a zombie?

You probably think you know the answer. You’re probably an expert in zombie-killing. At least the zombies you see in movies and games. They’re not even usually called zombies any more because zombie isn’t a word that scares anyone. They’re called biters. Or walkers. Or shamblers. Or creepers.

But whatever the cool new name is, the monster underneath is pretty much the same.

Tattered clothes. Rolling eyes. Chomping mouth. Skin that’s salad green or bruised purple or white and wet as sausage meat.

And the rules for zombies have pretty much been the same forever too.

Don’t let them swarm you. Don’t let them bite you. Don’t let any of their fluids get on your fluids (definitely don’t let them use your toothbrush).

Aim for the head.

And, above all, remember: a zombie might look like your friend, or your mam, or your cool Aunt Doireann who sings along to death metal when she picks you up from school.

But they’re not that person any more. They’re just teeth inside a face you used to know.

You know the rules.

But what if a zombie learned them too?

Picture yourself in ancient Ireland. An Ireland so ancient that the only calendar is the sun in the sky and scratchings in stone. An Ireland so ancient that the whole island is a forest, a great and sprawling wood full of wolves and stags and tiny villages listening to things shriek outside their walls. Picture an Ireland so ancient and hostile that the Roman Empire took one look and decided to turn back.

Picture a mountain, tall and jagged, red and black as a scab.

On this mountain stands a zombie.

Maybe the zombie on the mountainside was once the kind of zombie you’d recognise. Maybe his clothes were once tattered. Maybe his eyes rolled and his mouth chomped.

Maybe, just maybe, he had loved ones who knew him.

But that’s not the kind of zombie he is now.

Now, he is the Abhartach.

Av. Her. Tock. You pronounce it like you’re angry at the word. Not just a creature risen from the dead, but a creature who can raise the dead himself. Shape them. Mould them.

Do you know how oysters make pearls?

If they get a little piece of grit in their mouth, they produce a protective substance to wrap around it, building it up layer after layer after layer, until the whole mass gets bigger and rounder and harder. Like a pebble rolled into a snowball.

The zombie on the mountainside has done this too, but he has done it with …

Bits.

(Conn, that is disgusting)

(Wait! I’m just getting to the good part)

(You’re getting to body parts!)

(That’s what I meant!)

Where was I? Oh yes.

BITS.

You know the bits I mean. Animal bits. People bits. All stolen from a hundred graves across ancient Ireland and gathered around a single zombie like a duvet on a cold, cold night.

There is no head to aim at. No one mouth to avoid. Now, the Abhartach is a heaving mass of arms and legs and tails and heads – a clot of flesh the size of a house, gnashing and writhing and chanting spells to draw more and more parts to his old and murderous bones.

(Conn!)

This is a zombie who’s studied. A zombie with plans. A zombie who knows all the rules and all the weaknesses, and plans to make sure they never apply to him.

He is a haystack of horrors, raising dozens of arms to the sky and screaming through a hundred mouths—

(CONN!)

Conn pauses mid-story.

His classroom is about as far from old and haunted Ireland as you can get. The walls are bright yellow. Art projects dry under the pale October sun. Irish verbs conjugate themselves on posters. A screensaver happily wanders back and forth over the fancy new digital whiteboard.

And his teacher Mrs Crawford has her head in her hands.

‘Conn.’

Conn is standing on his chair. He isn’t sure when that happened. It felt appropriate to the dramatic nature of the story.

Thirty pairs of eyes watch him hop down and straighten his jumper, which he has pulled over his head to mimic a cloak of wriggling body parts. This felt right for the story too.

‘Yes, miss?’

‘You were supposed to be presenting a history project.’

One of Conn’s classmates is having a small vomit into her school bag.

Conn blinks. Tries to ruffle some hair back into shape.

‘My Aunt Doireann says that history and myth in Ireland are very similar—’

‘I know,’ Mrs Crawford says. This is not the first time Conn has presented a project like this. ‘You’ve said.’

She points at the door.

‘And I think Principal Cross would like to hear that explanation too.’

Conn isn’t sure about that at all, actually. But he knows what Mrs Crawford’s expression means, so he heads to the office anyway.

This is Conn O’Cathain at 11 years old.

Conn’s face is an explosion of freckles. His dark hair points in nine different directions. The laces of his ratty trainers untie themselves immediately after he ties them, so now he doesn’t bother. Whenever he runs – and Conn is always running – he is eternally on the verge of tripping up.

Four bodies’ worth of energy in one skinny body. Limbs like the action figure you’ve had since you were four, where all the give has given, and now the joints swing around like they’re barely attached.

Conn O’Cathain has never sat still once in his life, and he isn’t sitting still now, squeaking back and forth on the chair outside the principal’s office until Mrs Smith, the school secretary, has to tell him to stop.

Conn stops. For eight seconds. Then he starts again.

If there is a loose thread on Conn’s uniform, he will fiddle with it. If there is a piece of paper in front of Conn, he will shred it to confetti. If you tell Conn to keep an eye on something, or wait somewhere for a minute, it is guaranteed that when you come back, he will have wandered off.

Or made friends with four dogs. Or climbed onto a roof.

If you ask Conn’s teachers, they will say the boy is half whirlwind, half blender, leaving a trail of chewed pen lids and straightened paper clips everywhere he goes.

‘He’s his own worst enemy,’ Mrs Crawford will say, shaking her head.

If you ask Conn’s mam, she will agree with them. She and Conn’s Aunt Doireann are sisters, the kind of sisters where they look like the same person drawn by different artists. Doireann is like a drawing of an anime character – all movement lines and enormous eyes. (Very like Conn, in fact.)

Conn’s mother is soft lines and watercolours, except when she’s cross. Then she’s a flat, sharp pencil sketch with no colour at all.

Conn’s mother is cross a lot.

‘Conn is … a handful,’ she will say, though only when she thinks Conn can’t hear her. ‘He means well. But he’s a handful.’

Nobody asks Aunt Doireann what she thinks of Conn, but if they did, she would say, ‘He’s the best.’

There are only two occasions in Conn’s life where he’s able to stay still.

The first is when he is telling a story. Then all that mad, crackling energy is redirected out of his gangly limbs and into his long, freckled face. His huge eyes get huger. He seems to grow taller. His voice, normally too loud, too muddled, the words tripping over themselves in a race to get out,

S

L

O

W

S

D

O

W

N

to a perfect storytelling pitch.

The old storytellers of Ireland were magic, Aunt Doireann has told him. There’s a bit of that wild magic in Conn as well.

The second occasion in Conn’s life when he’s able to stay still is when he gets bad news.

He’s about to get bad news now.

Principal Cross invites Conn into his office and asks the boy to sit down.

Cross is a great last name for a principal. Conn’s always thought so. He isn’t sure where you get principals. Probably you grow them in vats. Or maybe there’s a school somewhere. Yeah, a training camp, where everyone is called Principal Strict, Principal Annoyed or Principal Mean.

Principal Cross does not suit his name at all. He’s a small man with a soft voice and a wide frame, like a comfortable, overstuffed couch. He remembers students’ birthdays. Lets classes watch movies on the last day before the summer holidays. He’s even been known to randomly shout ‘NO HOMEWORK’ on a Friday afternoon, if he’s in a particularly good mood.

Today, that good mood is nowhere to be found.

‘Conn, you know that the school talent show is in a few weeks.’

Conn has already worked free a button on the office armchair. If you left him alone for 10 minutes, he’d have the whole thing dismantled.

‘Conn?’

‘Sorry, sir. Yes, sir.’

‘And I know that you have entered. Haven’t you, Conn?’

Conn can’t help but beam a little. He hasn’t just entered. He was the first to enter. The little box had barely been put on the secretary’s desk before Conn jammed his application form in so hard he knocked the whole box over.

Principal Cross looks down at his desk for a moment, and Conn feels he has to fill the silence.

‘I’m very excited for it, sir. I’ve been practising. Preparing.’

He really has been. Voice projection. Proper growling. He has a bit where his hand comes off, but it’s a fake rubber hand, and there’s just this gorgeous squirt of fake blood that made Conn’s mother shriek when she saw it, though that could have been because the blood went all over the curtains.

‘And it’s one of your stories you plan to tell, is it?’

Conn puffs out his chest proudly.

‘They’re not my stories, really, sir. They’re Aunt Doireann’s. She’s an expert in old Irish mythology, sir, and she says the best bits are the gross bits, and the spectacular bits, and sir, she says that if we led with the mucus and bile and arterial blood of history, more students would grow up to be historians. Sir.’

‘Mucus,’ Principal Cross repeats softly. He’s gone a little pale. ‘Right.’

He rallies, takes a deep breath and looks around. It’s a very neat office. A wide, antique desk. Pictures of old classes, long graduated. Visiting celebrities and sports days.

‘Conn, the St Michael’s Talent Show is an institution. It’s not just attended by the students and their parents, but by local councillors, clergy, sometimes even the media. We got a wonderful write-up in the Irish Times last year. The paper of record. Did you know that?’

Conn does know that. It’s framed on the wall over the principal’s left shoulder.

Principal Cross sighs.

‘And, normally, I do not like to get involved with the actual performances. I think it’s usually best to let the children be themselves. That’s the charm of it, really. It’s not a competition, after all.’

Conn is doing his best right now. He knows he should be listening intently. There’s presumably a reason he’s here, after all, and there’s usually a reason adults talk, even if it doesn’t seem so at the time.