Short Story: Vanishing Act

VANISHING ACT

There was a gadget in the old Star Trek TV show that de-materialized people and then re-materialized them thousands or millions of miles away.

This sounds like a fun way to travel; no waiting in queues for visas, no expensive airline bookings, no rotten flights for the air sick or those afraid of flying...

But it wasn’t really much fun when it first happened. That was when the “gift” first manifested itself. “Gift” did I say? Curse, more like. 

I didn’t notice at first, going to University College Cork and adjusting to hostel life for the first time has a way of distracting you. Attention-grabbing peers, the academic course load, etc. etc. also didn’t help.

Anyway, I had a history of losing stuff since I was a wee colleen with flame-red hair in pigtails. So I chalked up the mysterious vanishing of sundry study materials and some of my personal kit to a natural propensity of mislaying my possessions and didn’t give it much further thought. Big mistake, that.

These minor disappearances could be overlooked but what happens when you lose a would-be boyfriend? And no, I don’t mean he was pinched by a rival in love.  Niall Flynn literally vanished into thin air. And it was all because of me.

The first thing he said to me that fateful day was “I didn’t just miss the lectures in the faint hopes of catching a Leprechaun, did I now?”

We were stretched out lazily on the lush greensward of the rolling Irish countryside, in the shade of a Rowan tree. The university – and the lecture hall where we were currently supposed to be– was a decent distance behind us.  There was also a decent distance between us.

As a good Catholic girl on the verge of her 18^th birthday, I’d make sure he wouldn’t be catching me any time soon. At least, not too early in our budding relationship...

“I’m a country girl, you know,” I replied, “I need to be out and about in the fresh air from time to time. Being shut up in that stuffy cage was getting to me. Any ways, haven’t we been studying the same old stuff for far too long?” 

When Niall didn’t reply, I continued hopefully, “Any road, we could borrow Moira’s class notes, couldn’t we? She owes me big time.”

“Still, tisn’t right Kathleen,” sighed Niall in his deep, gruff voice. But despite the disapproving words, I knew he’d surrendered to my need for truancy.

“Maybe we should just enjoy this beautiful morning and not think too much of what we’re missing. It’s not such a big deal anyway, cutting the occasional class.”

“Ahh, you’ll never change, Kath,” he declared dismissively, “I just wanted to say...”

But what Niall wanted to vouchsafe never made it to me.  Having pins and needles in my left leg, I shakily got up from my prone position to take a seat on a convenient tree stump nearby. I slithered stiffly on the slippery turf and landed heavily on top of him.

“You’re a very forward young lady,” chuckled Niall wryly, once he’d managed to get back the breath I’d knocked out of him.

My eyes screwed shut in embarrassment, I pushed him away.

“Oh, get on with you, it was just an accident.”

Anticipating a ribald retort, I didn’t look at him and pointedly busied myself with dusting my jacket and skirt free of grass stains. When no comeback was forthcoming, I turned to look at him from my tree stump. What I saw shocked me into silence.

Most of Niall’s athletic bulk had faded to a milky, indistinct outline; very like a smudged pencil drawing in the act of being erased. He was fading fast into nothingness, 90% gone except for a pair of frantically jerking tennis shoes beating an irregular tattoo on the turf.

Stifling a scream, I lunged for his sneakers. One of them came off in my hand, revealing an impressively large sock-clad foot that completely vanished before my disbelieving eyes. Then the other foot did too.

I was left holding a single white Adidas shoe, wondering how on earth was I going explain all this to the authorities. Then the sneaker in my hands vanished too.

A somewhat rational consideration of these strange goings-on returned after some deep-breathing exercises I’d learnt from a Yoga instructor. Clearly, the power seemed to be in my hands only, for the clothes in contact with my body hadn’t vanished.  A small mercy, at least my clothes or my person hadn’t vanished too. I’d have to be careful not to touch myself or my clothes.

Ever tried to sling a satchel and a backpack on your shoulders without using your hands? Let me tell you this isn’t easy, but I managed it somehow. I made it back to the hostel on foot, not daring to rummage for taxi or bus fare. Luckily, the caretaker let me in and my roommate Mairead O’Flaherty answered the door when I kicked at it with my left foot.

She took one look at my puffy tear-stained face and bedraggled appearance and burst out, “Dear Lord, Kath! You look a real sight! What on earth did Niall do to you?”

Little did she know that it was really the other way around; what I’d done to Niall. Mairead was all set to take my hands in commiseration, but I pulled away in time.

“Don’t touch me! It’s very dangerous, you’ll  be very sorry you did!”

A somewhat incoherent account of the events of the afternoon followed. Mairead didn’t believe me until I de-materialized our alarm clock before her incredulous eyes.

The next few days were a nightmare as we tried everything from rubber gloves (they vanished) to holy water in fruitless efforts to rid my hands of their unwanted power. Ancient Celtic rituals as performed by a practicing Wiccan didn’t help either. We did establish, however, that my clothes, if worn fast enough, didn’t vanish and the power of my hands didn’t work on my own body.

On top of it all, the campus was soon swarming with the police investigating Niall’s mysterious disappearance.  I considered confessing, but Mairead dissuaded me on the grounds that (a) the explanation was too unbelievable and (b) Niall might not be dead after all.

She was almost as fed up of doing things for me, as I was of being unable to use my hands.  Then Mairead came up with a simple solution I hadn’t thought of before: just ask Mum.

We tracked Mrs Louise Donnelly down to The Hart and the Harp pub just as she was settling into her first Bushmills of the evening. Through strong fumes of Irish whiskey, a tearfully rambling explanation poured forth.

It seemed the old pagan goddess Danu, angered by encroaching Christianity in the Celtic twilight, had cursed a priestess for abandoning her sacred rites under the influence of a Roman follower of the Christos.  The curse would manifest itself in every fifth daughter of the female line whose touch would send anyone to away to the land of their fathers – like the Roman who’d fathered a girl child with her priestess.

The curse had seemed to die out over time. Now it looked like it had been merely dormant and back to life once again, in my unfortunate person. And my father, Michael Donnelly, was Boston Irish, currently away in America on business.  

From this, we deduced that Niall was by now somewhere in the USA. A subsequent trawl through American news sites on the web revealed an unnamed Irish national who appeared to be suffering from dissociative amnesia. He’d been picked up by the police in Boston, Massachusetts, who initially thought he was a vagrant.  A student ID card found on his person revealed an undergraduate from University College Cork who had no explanation for his presence in the US without a visa or any record of entering the country. This mysterious case had left the baffled Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) scratching their heads.

Our further researches did reveal a (temporary) cure for the curse; a potion involving leeks, shamrocks and other arcane ingredients brewed in a copper cauldron under the light of the full moon. We returned to our friendly Wiccan practitioner who was only too happy to provide the same – for a fee, of course.

The trouble with the potion was it was infernally smelly. It took a massive act of will not to gag as I swallowed the foul concoction, it left me with a colossal case of bad breath afterwards. I must have spent a small fortune on mouthwash and breath-freshening lozenges.

We celebrated Niall’s eventual return to Eire with a round of parties and a night out at the pictures. It was a romantic comedy called “First Love” as I recall – the kind of chick flick the old Niall wouldn’t have been caught dead watching.

For his recent experiences had changed him. For the better, from my point of view. He was much improved boyfriend material now.

Despite extensive research, Niall was unable to fathom the cause of his involuntary passage to the United States. Less fortunately, certain gentlemen from the US intelligence community were able to do so.

This explains why I’m frequently out of Ireland, in sundry political hot spots worldwide. The kind of places where US covert assets need to be evacuated in a hurry, just a few steps ahead of the hard squad.

It’s all in a good cause, the CIA says. 

I’m not too sure about that but as the American taxpayer is now footing the rather hefty bill for my continued higher education, I’ve got little to complain about.  Plus, I get to travel to interesting places free of cost and make (frequently) fascinating people disappear.

My most ambitious assignment to date was to de-materialize a U.S Navy SEAL team from a place I'm not allowed to talk about. I'll never forget that particular job, even if the SEALs concerned did - to the extent they required extensive psychotherapy to recover their memories and retraining to recover their deadly skills.
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But that's another story, for another time...

THE END

Afterword

This short story had its genesis in an original idea and rough first draft written by my 15-year-old daughter, Shreya Vaish for a writing competition. This required extensive rewriting and editing (by me) but still didn't win anything; probably because the subject matter and setting weren't distinctively Indian. 

Not wanting this piece go to waste, Shreya suggested I put up this story on my blog and graciously threw in a co-writer credit too. So I can't claim sole credit for this work you've just read, but thanks anyway, Shreya.