Prince of Hazel and Oak. John Lenahan

I missed the actual ceremony, apparently I had graduated high school. I forced myself to show up for enrolment at the University of Scranton but after just one day I knew I couldn’t face it. What could a college professor teach me? What did they really know?

      All food tasted like cardboard and, even worse, when I slept – I didn’t dream. I remembered once telling Fergal that some of the Real World was like The Land but covered in a grey film. Now all of it seemed like that.

      And then there was Essa. I knew it was unfair but I couldn’t help comparing her with Sally – and Sally didn’t match up – how could she? It didn’t take a soothsayer to notice my thoughts were elsewhere. Sally finally had enough. She said I had changed, and she was right – we broke up.

      I suppose I should have gotten a job but that seemed even more trivial than university, so I spent my time staring at the walls. I couldn’t even stomach watching television.

      The trouble really started when the electric company turned off the power. I hadn’t opened any mail, let alone paid bills, but darkness forced me to do something about it. I had the PIN numbers to Dad’s bank accounts (well, he didn’t need money any more, with him living on top of a gold mine). I can remember standing in front of the cash machine as Dad’s words swirled around in my head, ‘There is nothing back there for you.’ I hated it when he was right. I punched the buttons and withdrew a wad of cash. I didn’t think I could feel any lower – I was wrong.

      The police showed up at the house that evening with a search warrant. They had been monitoring Dad’s bank accounts, waiting for me to do exactly what I did. Forensic specialists in plastic jumpsuits took samples of the carpet, confiscated my clothes and all of the weird weapons in the house. When they finished, a policeman told me not to leave town, like he was in some old TV cops show.

      Word of the police raid spread through the neighbourhood like wildfire. The authorities, it seems, weren’t the only ones who thought I had committed patricide. I didn’t know what to do. Sally showed up as I was packing in preparation for making a run for it. I decided to tell her the truth. I sat her down and told her everything (playing down the Essa stuff) and amazingly she took it in her stride. She told me that she believed me and wished me luck. Two minutes after leaving the house, she called the cops and told them I was crazy. The only crazy thing I had done was to come back for her.

      A uniformed officer and a badge-brandishing Detective Fallon were standing on my front porch when I opened the door with a bag over my shoulder. It was Halloween. The first thing I said to Detective Fallon was, ‘Don’t you have a policeman’s costume?’ The first thing he said to me was, ‘Conor O’Neil, I have a warrant for your arrest.’

      ‘Here’s how I see it, Conor,’ Detective Fallon said as he paced around the interrogation room. ‘Your father – the mad one-handed ancient language professor – was a strange man. I’m not saying that to make you angry, but I’ve done some research and you have to admit he was, at least, unusual.’

      ‘You won’t get any arguments from me on that one,’ I said. ‘Pop was the weirdest guy in town.’

      ‘I also heard that he used to make you sword-fight with him just to get your spending money.’

      ‘Strange but true.’

      ‘So one day you just had enough, in the heat of one of your fencing practices—’

      ‘Broadswords,’ I interrupted, ‘Dad hates fencing.’

      ‘OK, in the heat of one of your broadsword bouts you flipped out and accidentally killed him – then you panicked and buried the body.’

      I laughed, ‘You don’t know how many times I came close to doing just that, but no, that’s not what happened.’

      ‘Conor, we found your father’s blood on the carpet.’

      ‘He was injured when we were attacked. I didn’t do it.’

      ‘And we found traces of blood in a splatter pattern on a leather shirt.’

      ‘That’s not Dad’s blood.’

      ‘The pathologist disagrees. She said the shirt and the carpet had one of the most unusual DNA patterns that she had ever seen.’

      ‘That’s ’cause the blood on the shirt came from one of his relatives.’

      ‘I thought your father was an orphan?’

      ‘So did I!’ I said, throwing my hands in the air. ‘Look, I’ve explained all of this. Haven’t you been listening?’

      Fallon sat down and sighed, ‘To be honest with you, no I haven’t. As soon as you start going on about hobgoblins and dragons I just glaze over. I figured if I let you ramble on with this cock and bull story you would get it out of your system and we could get down to the facts.’

      ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Detective Fallon …’

      ‘Call me Brendan.’

      ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Detective Fallon,’ I repeated, ‘but those are the facts.’

      ‘OK, Conor, I’ll humour you. Tell me this thing from the top and I promise I’ll pay attention.’

      So I told him the truth. What else could I do? I knew it wasn’t going to help but lying wasn’t working either. I told him the whole tale about how Dad and I were abducted and taken to The Land of Eternal Youth – Tir na Nog – where I found out that Dad was the heir to the throne. Unfortunately, because of an ancient prediction saying that ‘The son of the one-handed prince would be the ruin of all The Land,’ everybody wanted me dead, especially the unlawful king – Dad’s nasty piece of work brother, Cialtie. With the help of a mother I never knew I had, we escaped Cialtie’s dungeon and hooked up with an army that was preparing to forcefully oust my slimy uncle. They had scary information suggesting that Uncle Cialtie had hidden a magical bomb that was threatening to destroy everything. Dad and I and a couple of others snuck into the castle before the attack and disarmed the bomb. Cialtie was dethroned but he got away.

      ‘So,’ Fallon said with a quizzical look on his face, ‘you saved the world?’

      ‘I had help.’

      ‘And when in all of this did you cut your uncle’s hand off?’

      ‘Just after Dad reattached his.’

      ‘I take it all back, Conor, you are insane after all.’

      After listening to myself I wondered if he was right. It wasn’t the first time, since my return, that I had grappled with my sanity. The only thing that had kept me from going over the edge was the stuff I had brought back with me: my clothes, Fergal’s Banshee blade and Mom’s present. Many a night I sat and just touched them, wishing they could somehow transport me to The Land. But they weren’t with me now, and at that moment I wondered if I had imagined them, too.

      I think I would have lost it right then and there if Fallon hadn’t unknowingly thrown me a lifeline. He reached into an evidence folder and placed in front of me a paperback book-sized sheet of gold in a wooden frame. ‘What is this?’ he asked.

      I picked it up. ‘It’s called an emain slate,’ I said, feeling my throat tighten. ‘My mother gave it to me.’

      ‘It’s solid gold.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘We found faint writing on it. What’s it for?’

      ‘Anything written on this slate appears on its twin.’ I picked up a pen from the table and clicked the ball point back into the chamber, with the blunt end I wrote the contents of my heart. I wrote, ‘HELP!’

      ‘And you are saying your mother has the other one in this land of yours.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘So how is she?’

      My