Texting the Underworld - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellen Booraem, a native of Massachusetts, now lives in Downeast Maine. She is the author of The Unnameables (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults), Small Persons With Wings, and Texting the Underworld. All of Ellen's books have, among other awards, been picked as Best Books of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. In addition to being a writer, Ellen is also a mentor and a writing coach. She lives with a cat, a dog, and an artist in a house they (meaning the humans) built with their own hands.

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Chapter One

Death stalked the spider, pre-algebra book in hand.

The spider was slightly bigger than a pencil eraser and definitely wasn’t poisonous, this being 36A Crumlin Street, South Boston, Massachusetts. But it skittered and it scuttled all over the ceiling—if Conor didn’t squash it now, who knew where it would be after supper.

He thought about getting his sister to kill it. But Glennie would call him a wimp and would tell all her ten-year-old friends at school. And they’d tell their older brothers and sisters who went to Conor’s middle school. There would be sniggering, maybe even a new nickname, and he hadn’t quite lived down the old one.

Which was “Pixie,” by the way. Who nicknames their baby boy “Pixie,” for cripes’ sake? Brian and Moira O’Neill, 36A Crumlin Street, that’s who.

The spider was over his bed, preparing to drop itself and hide in Conor’s actual, personal sheets. He weighed the book in his hand—three-quarters of a pound, easy. It would squish twenty spiders that size. But what if he missed? He pictured the vibration shaking the spider onto his face or, worse, down his neck.

Standing on the bed, weapon at the ready, he imagined himself high in the mountains, Conor the Bold versus the Invader from Planet Arachnid, humanity’s fate on the line.

If only it were a humanoid invader. That would be something resembling a person, and people weren’t scary.

Not like spiders or snakes. Or heights.

Or depths.

The world was a lethal and unpredictable place. He felt this in his bones, in spite of the twelve totally uneventful years that had been his life so far.

The bedroom door slammed open. “Supper,” Glennie said, then saw that her brother was standing on his bed with his pre-algebra book. One side of her mouth curled up in a half smirk, hot pink with her mother’s lipstick. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She stepped closer. “Oooo, a big scary spider. Want me to get it?”

“Shut up.”

“Wimp. Javier’s here, if you care.” She left. The spider scuttled away to the corner, where Conor would have to clear off his desk to get at it.

Defeated, he headed for the stairs.

Grump was coming in from 36B, the other half of the house. “Hey, kiddo,” Grump caroled as they headed into the kitchen together. “How’s the Land of Shanaya?”

Conor’s hand-drawn maps—some of real places, some not—took up fourteen extra-large spiral-bound notebooks. Grump loved the troll-infested Land of Shanaya, partly because its existence annoyed and baffled Conor’s dad, but also because it was proof that Conor had what Grump called “the O’Neill Spark.” Which went with the O’Neill Blue Eyes. And the O’Neill Black Hair, at least on Conor, his father, and Grump before he went bald.

“Shanaya’s good, thanks, Grump.” With his grandfather standing there—big, beaming, confident, glasses perched on the bulbous end of his nose—Conor felt braver about the spider hovering over his desk. It was, after all, roughly the size of a pencil eraser. He took his place at the kitchen table with head held high.

His dad shook his head about Shanaya but would never criticize him in front of a guest, even if it was only Javier. Everybody said Brian O’Neill would be elected to City Council within five years. Tact and relentless cheer were his campaign strategies.

“How about them Red Sox, Pop?” said Dad, no doubt choosing the most un-Shanaya-esque topic he could think of.

“Bums.” Grump tucked his napkin into his belt.

“It’s only April. They lose early, they win late,” Dad said.

“Baloney,” Grump said. “I’m telling you—”

But then Grump shut up tight and listened as a car alarm went off on the other side of town, faint but with that echoing, anguished-yeti quality so common in the Irish neighborhoods of Southie.

The sound made Conor shudder. His dad frowned but said nothing. Everyone stayed quiet until the noise faded.

“What does it take to turn off a car alarm?” Dad’s tone was fiercer than you’d expect from a tactful, cheerful person.

“That,” Grump said, “was no car alarm.”

Dad dished up the green beans and canned corned beef hash. “How was school today, kids?”

Grump stuck to the topic of yeti-like noises. “Burt Kavanagh thinks he had a screech owl outside his house Saturday.”

Glennie eyed her hash and made a beautifully accurate retching sound, violating the house rule on disgusting noises at the table. In the name of her mother—out at nursing school, and therefore present only in spirit—she was banished to the front hall for ten minutes by the kitchen clock.

Conor took a bite of hash and commenced to chew it fifteen times, a house rule that everybody ignored except him. His mother said digesting unchewed food was the chief cause of flatulence in the American male. Conor didn’t think chewing made him fart any less often, but a rule was a rule.

“Of course,” Grump continued majestically, “that was not a screech owl.”

“So, Javier,” Dad said, “what badge you working on in Adventure Boys right now?”

“That was a banshee,” Grump said. “Kavanagh’s uncle died in his soup Saturday night. He lived right next door to Kavanagh.”

“I’m going to die in my hash,” Glennie’s disembodied voice contributed from the hall.

Javier, who normally would have been eating something home cooked and spicier two streets away, smiled into his green beans. His parents and two older brothers had gone to the airport to greet a visiting cousin from San Juan. Javier had stayed behind to do homework. The reward for his virtue was eating canned hash with Conor.

Also listening to Glennie, which Conor could have told him was no reward. But Javier didn’t have a younger sister. He thought Glennie was a barrel of laughs with fluffy blond hair.

In reality, Glennie was a soul-sucking demon warrior.

Conor reached chew fifteen and swallowed. “How’d Mr. Kavanagh’s uncle die in his soup?”

His father sighed.

“Heart attack,” Grump said through a mouthful of unchewed hash, in direct violation of house rules. “Suppertime. Fell over with his face in the shinbone stew.”

“Cripes,” Dad said.

“Cool,” said the spectral voice from the hall.

“Tell us about banshees,” Javier said, even though he’d certainly heard Grump talk about them before.

“There’s no such thing,” Dad said. “I heard a cool fact today. Did you know—”

“A banshee,” Grump said, “is an ancestral spirit, often a girl who dies too soon and then she comes back and keens when somebody in her family’s about to bite the big enchilada.” Grump liked to use Spanish terminology when Javier was around, to show he was okay with the neighborhood not being all Irish anymore.

“Enchiladas aren’t Puerto Rican,” said Javier, who hardly ever spoke Spanish outside the home. “They’re Mexican.”

“Ain’t Irish,” Grump said. “But that’s perfectly fine.”

“Keening is Irish mega-weeping,” said the spectral voice. “Like if you had to eat hash all the time.”

“Glennie, get in here and eat your...