She blinked, and the light disappeared.
The change from outside light to murky shadows played tricks on her eyes. Sara took a deep breath and trudged forward to find Fiona and Brenna. They’d stopped about thirty yards in, where the tunnel widened into a room.
Candles that previous visitors had brought rested on any outcropping available, the colored wax dripping down the rock walls to give the cave an even spookier air. On the far wall, a stone altar of sorts held even more candles.
“Well, that’s creepy as fuck,” Fiona muttered.
“Can you even imagine how old that altar must be?” Sara whispered.
Brenna turned off her flashlight app and dug a lighter from her pocket. She set to work lighting any candle that had a wick left.
The flames cast more shadows on the walls, shadows that danced and swayed with any hint of a breeze. Sara wished for the cell phone flashlights again.
“See any ogham writing?” Fiona asked, peering closely at the rock that make up the walls of the cave.
“Mm-mm,” Sara murmured in the negative.
The three crept around the edges of the room, looking for any scores in the stone that might be the ancient alphabet. The only ancient thing Sara saw was dirt.
“Who the hell said you’d find ogham here?” Fiona muttered.
Brenna shrugged and pulled out her phone. “It was a couple of people, but I guess they could have been messing with me.”
They were silent as Brenna scrolled through her messages and Fee and Sara continued to study the walls.
“Oh,” Brenna said after a minute. “This one says to look up.”
Sara craned her neck to squint at the ceiling. Long, rectangular stones spread out side by side, spanning the length and width of the cave. Even without the light from the candles, she’d have known they were ogham stones. Her heart had skipped a beat and then ran off without her as soon as she’d seen them.
“Yeah, yeah,” Fee whispered. “That’s what we’re here for.”
Out came the phones again. With the light from flashlight apps blazing, the girls could see slash marks on all corners of the slabs, telling a whole story they couldn’t yet understand.
“Well, I didn’t expect that,” Sara said. “How the hell are we supposed to get that back home with us?”
Brenna kicked a wooden crate that someone had left behind and nodded when it didn’t crumble under her feet.
“This could maybe hold one of us. Sara, you’re the smallest.”
She carried the makeshift stool to the edge of the cave. Together, the cousins supported Sara as she teetered on the rotten wood while photographing every inch of the first stone. When she was sure she had everything, they moved the stool to the next so she could start the process again.
When she was about two-thirds of the way, tottering on the edge of the crate, a cold wind roared down the tunnel into the room and extinguished every candle, plunging the cave into darkness. Sara couldn’t hear her own yelp over the shouts of her cousins, and then the wild cackling and shriek in her head.
Brenna recovered first, flipping on her phone’s flashlight within a fraction of a second. The thin ribbon of light through the darkness did nothing to soothe the prickle at the back of Sara’s neck. As she fumbled with her phone, that prickle turned to an ice cube and slid down her spine.
“Do you feel that?” Brenna whispered into the darkness.
“Yeah.” Fiona didn’t bother to lower her voice, her tone cranky and put out. “It’s the Cailleach, the bitch.”
“Here?” Sara did whisper. Her arms and legs prickled with goosebumps. She shuddered.
The wind that entered the cave circled the room, speeding into a full-blown dust devil. The wild rush of air was barely audible over the mad wailing and singing resonating between her ears.
The voice. That was the voice Sara shrieked when someone died. Notes tripped and tumbled over each other, a mad crescendo that filled her brain. Hands over her ears didn’t help. The sound was only in her mind.
Or was it? Brenna and Fee had hands over their ears, too, and anguish on their faces.
Candles fell from their perches. Litter from past visitors whirled into the vortex.
Sara’s trembling fingers nearly fumbled her phone, but she caught it and smashed at the button for the flashlight. In the additional light, she could see the little carton she’d used as a stool scoot across the dirt floor.
“Let’s get out of here!” she cried.
The tornado chased them through the tunnel and exploded out the cave’s opening, shoving all three girls into the trees. Sara stopped short when something grabbed her hair and yanked, nearly pulling her off her feet. Her hands scrabbled at the strands, trying to free them from the unseen fist.
“Here,” Fiona said. “You’re tangled in the branches.”
Only the tremor in her voice gave away Fee’s fear. Her face was a stone, betraying nothing.
“Feckin’ bitch,” she spat. “If she thought that was the way to celebrate some kind of reunion, she grossly miscalculated.”
“You think she was happy we were there?”
“And together,” Brenna added, her breaths coming in short bursts. “I could feel that, somehow. She was howling in my head, thrilled to bits that we’re all together.”
“There ye go,” Fiona said.
Sara tipped her head forward, a rush of relief coursing through her. She was free.
None of them looked back as they tore down the hill into the farmer’s field. Sara only registered the pounding of her feet on the green grass cushion below. She didn’t remember taking a single breath until she was seated in the car with the door shut behind her.
Brenna started her car and stomped the gas, tires spitting grass and pebbles before finding a grip. No one spoke until she’d pulled back onto the main road.
“I think we may have messed up. She was really chuffed that we were there and all together. Like, she was crowing in my head.”
“How could you tell?” Sara had heard the shrieks in her head, the same ones she vocalized in the night before someone died, but they hadn’t sounded happy. They were terrifying.
“I don’t really know. I just…feel it somehow. We may have made her stronger again, like a jolt of caffeine or something.”
“That’s the last thing we need right now if we’re trying to keep people alive while we figure this mess out,” Fee groused.
Sara’s dad handed his credit card over to the cashier with a grimace. “I can’t believe it’s costing this much to print those pictures.”
Sara had taken over three hundred photos of the ogham stones in the cave, but they were nearly useless on her phone. Only after brightening the images with a photo editor were they able to make out any of the lettering.
“That’s nothing compared to the work ahead trying to translate this mess. We can’t even be sure we took the photos in the right direction or order, and we didn’t even get photos of all the stones. It’ll be like putting a puzzle together before we can even convert the hash marks into letters. And then we’ll have to figure out the English version of the old, old Irish words.”
“Maybe you’ll really get your money’s worth out of this trip if you can figure out how to turn this into a project for one of your college classes,” Dad teased.
Sara’s phone vibrated in her back pocket. Her heart fluttered, knowing before her brain did that Ridley had texted.
She sighed and leaned against the counter where the cashier was bundling her printed photos. The text was actually a picture of Ridley on Gran’s couch, Blue in his lap and a cat on each shoulder. The look of contentment on his face was enough to steal her breath.
The only thing missing is you. A text finally followed the image, and Sara nearly squealed.
We found something really amazing today. She typed out the words quickly. A cave with ancient ogham stones. I think we may have most of the story now. We just have to translate it.
His response cam
e almost immediately. Hurry up. We miss you.
Four more days. They had four days to figure something out, or she’d have to go home and fight Sealgair and the Cailleach on her own.
She flipped through the photos on the way home, amazed at how well they’d come out. Some of the darkest corners of the stones would be hard to translate, but perhaps they’d get enough from the rest of the photos to pull together some kind of attack plan. Or at least understand the destruction before they were forced to cause it.
The grans and her cousins were already seated around the kitchen table when Sara and her dad walked through the door. Fiona smirked from the cushy armchair and nodded to the ceramic garden stool. Sara rolled her eyes and perched on it while Sean unloaded the pictures onto the table.
“Oh, my,” Niamh whispered.
Sara passed out another sheaf of papers, the most complete ogham alphabet she’d found online. “I guess we just each take a photograph and start translating it into letters.”
Silence fell as everyone began to work, lifting only when someone needed a drink or a snack. Sara stared down at the paper she’d been transcribing. Nothing even remotely resembled English. She wasn’t even sure she’d stopped and started words at the right places. She’d counted on spaces in the hash marks to serve as spaces between words, but who even knew? All they could do was keep going and hope that something useful came out of it.
Only twenty photos in, everyone lost steam. Eyes were burning from staring at the images and hands were cramping from holding pens and pencils. And Sara’s butt really hurt from sitting on the stupid garden stool.
She looked at her phone to get the time and saw that they’d worked through dinner time. Her dad’s stomach growled loudly at that exact moment, reminding everyone else that they were also hungry.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Fiona announced. “I’ll go get some food from the chipper, and maybe we can start again after we’ve eaten something.”
“Chipper?” Sara asked.
“Fish and chips. Or chicken. They have burgers if you want one. I think ye can even still get a deep-fried Snickers bar.”
Not even the hangover had turned her stomach as much as the thought of a deep-fried Snickers bar.
“I’ll try the fish and chips. That sounds really good.”
And it was. When Fiona came back with piles of fried fish and crispy, thick-cut fries wrapped in brown paper, the whole crew separated everything out and dug in. Sara hadn’t experienced such decadence in her life, not even working at a greasy spoon diner.
“You should put these on the menu,” she told her dad around a mouthful of cod. “People would go nuts for them.”
“Maybe I’ll just turn the diner into an Irish pub and sell Irish breakfast, too,” he teased.
It didn’t sound like a bad idea to Sara at all. She could only imagine what her Ireland-averse mother would have to say about that.
“So, I have a question.” Sara chewed her lip, afraid of the answer that was coming. “How will we get photos of the rest of the stones? Maybe there’s something important.”
“I’m not going back there,” Fiona said around a mouthful of fries. “Not a chance in hell.”
Sara shuddered at the memory of the shriek in her head, her heart stuttering at the idea of going back. Of facing down the Cailleach again.
“I guess we see what we can get out of this. If we need more, I’ll go back.” Brenna sat back. “But just me. We can’t take a chance on making her even stronger by going together.”
“Is that safe, love?” Brigid asked.
Sara couldn’t believe anyone would willingly go back into that cave—not even people who weren’t banshees.
“She won’t hurt any of us. If she wanted us dead, she’d have let Sealgair have us a long time ago.”
After the wrappers were thrown away and plates washed and stacked, they got back to the ogham stones. Sara abandoned the stool to sit on the floor, and her backside thanked her profusely. They worked until well after midnight, when Sara thought she might just go blind, before giving up and going to bed.
They’d only gotten through fifty of the photos. She’d have to spend the rest of her vacation in Ireland translating if she hoped to find any help before going home. Even if they managed to get everything written down, they’d need to separate the words and then start translating all over again.
But at least they had this. She hadn’t known what to expect when coming to Ireland, but she hadn’t expected to find this much.
Her last couple of days were a blur of ogham and Ireland. Her dad wanted her to see as much of the country as possible, but Sara was desperate to translate the stones. While he drove from one city to the next, she squinted at photos and transcribed the carvings.
Dublin had been a thrill apart from all the others. The city teemed with life, just like any city she’d seen in America, but there were also quaint little historic corners where she soaked up the culture, music, and even another cider. But only one, while her dad frowned with concern.
“What? It’s legal here,” she assured him.
“I’ll be your dad wherever we are,” he retorted. But he did so with a smile, and offered a clink of glasses as silent approval.
The end of her trip came too soon, but also not soon enough, as she thought about Ridley waiting for her at home. Ridley, and Blue, and, in just a few weeks, college. That all awaited her, if she could figure out how to break the family curse and maybe not die in the process.
17
The stack of papers had seemed endless, but Ridley was about to sign the last one. He stopped just before his pen hit the page. This would really mean the end. His father was gone.
Charlie O’Neill had already been laid to rest in a short ceremony that only Ridley, the preacher, and the sheriff had attended. Ridley suspected that if the sheriff hadn’t been the one to bring the bad news, he wouldn’t have been there either. The rest of the town either didn’t know or didn’t care that Charlie was dead.
Truth be told, Ridley wasn’t sure he cared either. He’d tried for more than a week to feel something besides relief that he didn’t have to dodge punches and glass bottles and terrible insults anymore. Didn’t the old man deserve at least one good memory?
Ridley couldn’t think of a single thing. Even sober, Charlie had been mean.
He signed the last dotted line with a flourish and glanced at his phone for the time. Two hours. Sara would land in two hours, and he’d have someone to talk through these feelings with. Someone to hold him and tell him it was okay to be glad.
“Well, that’s that.” Lauren Welby, the attorney he’d found in Burnsville, stood and held out her hand.
Ridley took it without thought. She continued to speak, but most of the words bounced around him without really sinking in.
“Get those back taxes paid, and the house is yours. The truck, too, though I doubt it will be much use to you.” She wrinkled her nose at the thought of the beat-up Chevy with three flat tires that had been on the list of Charlie’s effects.
“Yeah, thanks,” Ridley muttered.
He’d have to sell the truck to handle the attorney fees. As for the taxes, he had some money socked away for a home of his own. Would it be worth paying the back taxes and keeping his house from childhood, or should he just let it and all the memories inside the walls go to the government?
He had no idea what to do. And still two hours before Sara got home.
After leaving the lawyer, he walked down to the end of the block to the barber. With all the changes coming around, he figured it was high time he got his hair cut. Wouldn’t Sara be surprised? Maybe she’d hate it. She’d never really said one way or the other. Had never once criticized his long hair or the scruff on his jaw. Hadn’t turned her nose up at his few tattoos or his always dirty jeans.
She’d always made him feel more than good enough for her, even when he didn’t think so. She’d love the haircut, he knew. Maybe she’d run her fingers through t
he length on top, or rub them over the bristly hairs at the back of his neck. Ridley couldn’t wait to find out.
He picked up Blue from Aine’s house and drove down to Cedar City. He still hadn’t even been in his dad’s house since the day he’d left in June. There might not be any walls left, for all he knew.
The little cottage looked the same as he remembered, but surely it hadn’t been so run down when he was a kid. Hadn’t it been new and clean at some point? As hard as he tried to remember a time when the house had been presentable, all he could picture were yellowed walls, creaking hardwoods, and doors hanging off their hinges.
With a deep breath, he opened the front door. Blue took off into the house first, nose in the air and sniffing for a target that was no longer there. The stained couch and recliner from his childhood lay wilted along the walls. The ancient television was gone, probably sold at some point over the summer for one more bottle of booze.
The kitchen was a biological hazard. The old man hadn’t washed a single dish since Ridley had walked out. Flies buzzed over rotten food, the stench dragging bile into Ridley’s throat.
What could he even save? Would the house be better bulldozed and started again from the ground up? He could work with his hands, no problem, but the memories that seeped from the walls and the ceiling couldn’t be remodeled, no matter how hard he tried.
With a sigh, Ridley returned to his truck to retrieve the box of heavy-duty garbage bags and a pair of his work gloves. The only way to find out if anything was worth saving was to start throwing out whatever wasn’t.
Two hours later, Ridley was up to his elbows in the refrigerator, tossing out everything he got his hands on. The contents had gone rotten weeks before—the jug of milk, bags of fast food leftovers, and a few things he couldn’t identify.
The buzz of his phone in his back pocket startled him into dropping a plate of molded something onto the linoleum floor. The plate cracked into three large pieces, and whatever it held oozed through into a big, green mess.
Shriek: Legend of the Bean Sídhe Page 18