A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  Here Ringbone reached a hand into his pouch and brought a doeskin lump into the firelight. He unwrapped the bundle carefully. This was part of such a weapon, he said, handling it with reverence. It looked like an outsized ring of ancient iron, pitted with corrosion, paper-thin with age and three fingers in diameter. Michael had seen a few others like it, kept as heirlooms by the tribes to remind them of what and who they had once been. Knights, he thought. They went from being Knights to being savages, and it is still there in the back of their mind after all this time.

  'Temuid gewenian,' Ringbone said at last, replacing the artifact in his pouch. We will return. And his story was done.

  Michael took first watch, and built up the fire to keep their last night in the woods at bay.

  IN THE DRIPPING, bird-loud morning a two-hour walk brought them within sight of the little river and the wet, massive stone of the bridge. It darkened as they approached, the early light thickening into the gloom of evening. They passed the humped shape of Michael's hut as the first stars rose. As though it had been a dream, and the time lost in the Other Place had been returned to them.

  There were cattle lowing in the meadows beyond, and here Cat kissed Michael goodbye.

  'I'll come back,' she said, and was gone.

  NINE

  'TIME,' CAT WAS to tell Michael, 'is like a lake. You can go and haul out bucketfuls of its water, throw them about, drink them, pour them off, and then go back to the lake and find it the same level as before, with even the ripples you made wiped away.'

  He walked in the door of the house the same evening he had come out of it, the grime and mud of two days in the Other Place still upon him. He was late for supper, and Aunt Rachel threw her hands in the air when she saw him.

  'Jesus, Mary and Joseph!'

  After that there was the broken flask to explain whilst his grandmother folded her heavy arms and listened to his lies and half-truths with what seemed to him like perfect comprehension. Grandfather and Mullan remained smoking thoughtfully by the fire, though Michael saw Pat's old eyes range along the dirty length of the shotgun barrel speculatively.

  A bath was drawn and he was hustled into it. He had dirt ingrained, it seemed, even below his clothes. When he snuffed at his arm he smelled mint, girl and woodsmoke. He let the steaming water cradle him and wondered where she was now, in what world, under which trees.

  There was cold pork in the game bag, he remembered. He would dump it in the morning.

  A different morning, in another world. He had left a wood minutes ago where the sun was slanting high and bright in the sky, and yet here there was blue darkness outside the window and he could see the flash and tilt of lanterns in the yard as the men went out for their nightly check of the stock.

  He was tired, though. Sleeping in the wood seemed somehow not like sleep at all, more like a semi-conscious awareness. He yawned in the hot clutch of the bath.

  Where was he being taken? What was this place she brought him to, with its monsters and forests? And how much of it was here, in his own world? Was there a barrier wearing thin between the two, or was it merely him, his fancies that no one else could see?

  Something had bent that trap in the wood, something big.

  And he had seen the hideous shape in the yard that night. He had dug up the skull of one of its kind.

  No. It was both real and unreal. It was there, waiting for him, and Cat wanted him to enter it, to view the marvels. To travel Wonderland.

  SCHOOL TOOK HIM.

  It was a marvel the way the days flew, flitted, tumbled past sunlit and ordinary, and wore downto autumn. The turning of the year seemed to have arrived in a wheeling rush. Now it would slow again, as Michael waited out the waning days within the confines of the schoolroom with the smell of chalk, the must of books, the voices of other children. But always, the knowledge that there was more—a whole world mere heartbeats away—there, brooding in the corners of his mind like a pot bubbling on the back of the stove.

  Grammar, algebra, trigonometry, Irish, religion. These he was taught, plodding in unison with the rest of the chanting class and eyeing the amber-pale field, the crops cut now, beyond the narrow windows.

  History, prehistory, the taking of fire from flint and wood, the flora and fauna of long-vanished wildernesses, tool-making, burial rites, the construction of dolmen. These he taught himself in a crazy-quilt of patchwork reading and talks with Mullan. It was a dappled, magpie education, riddled with gaps and deep in the wrong places—but wholly necessary, he was coming to believe. It fed his growing appetite for strangeness, but nourished his fellow pupils' belief in his eccentricity. Miss Glover seemed to him a confused mix of encouragement and censure. She had lent him books, but they were the wrong books and he returned them unread. Nothing she did seemed to suit him, and he remained determined to dig deep in his own chosen fields of study, scraping only desultorily at the topsoil elsewhere. From bafflement she passed into irritation and anger. Michael began to be kept behind after school, remaining alone in the ticking silence with thorny mathematical problems on his pad, Miss Glover baleful and intense at her desk and the bright day wasting away outside.

  Again and again this happened, his. grandparents and his aunt adding to the punishment when he got home so that he began to feel caged, surrounded, savage. He even wondered if Cat had put some spell on him, blunted some self-preserving instinct to do as he was told.

  For she had gone and left him. There was no sign of her by the river or the bridge, and the wood was empty. Perhaps, he thought, it was something to do with the season, but the wood seemed deserted of almost all life. Birds had never been common there, but there had always been other things—rabbit droppings, squirrel-gnawed nuts, owl leavings. And the tracks, of course. Now there was nothing but the rising wind in the trees. The husks of ten-foot giant hogweed swayed brittle and fantastic down along the river and the air was full of the onion-smell of ramsoms. The roof of Michael's hut had fallen in on itself and the embers of their fire were black, stonehard and cold.

  There was something here, though. The hut had not collapsed. It had been torn down, the supporting sticks splintered and smashed. And here, in the ground beside it, a blurred footprint, man-like but with claws at the end of the toes and no arch at the instep. Padded, like a dog's.

  Michael straightened from his perusal of the ground, staring out at the blank faces of the surrounding trees. They were nearly bare already, and the wood was full of falling leaves. He felt he was not alone, that there was a watcher out there, unfriendly, malevolent. He no longer trusted the gun as a defence, not since he had shot the thing in the wood that night and heard it blunder away unharmed. Different rules operated here. That was another reason to seek out Cat. He needed to know things, things he had not found in books. How to fight werewolves, for instance. How to ward off evil.

  THE EARTH SLOWED, wound down to a darker season. In the hedges be-dewed spiders' webs swayed and swung like strung pearls, and the early light caught them in a dance of linked gems. September trickled by, the air full of the flitting leaves and the first coolness falling on the world. Soon the mornings grew sharp, white with frost, the grass crunching underfoot as Michael set off for school. And in the schoolroom itself the breaths of the children would be little clouds until their body heat and the labours of the stove had generated a comfortable fug inside. October came, snapping at Michael's sleepy limbs when he threw off his bedclothes and chilling the water in the taps. In the Fay household the first fires were lit, cautiously at first, like the trial of a newly knit limb, and then banked up as the cold snap remained. Michael loved. those mornings, coming down to porridge in the big kitchen, the table crowded and full of talk, the fire leaping red and friendly out of the opened range. Then there would be the crispness of the air outside, the way smells seemed to hang in the air, frozen. Treacle and creosote, dung and hay, oats and pipe smoke. They pervaded the mornings like some tangled perfume, and underlying them was the tang of the cold, the fallen leaf.
Autumn, and winter creeping up on its shirt-tails.

  To spend such mornings in a schoolroom seemed to Michael worse than a crime. He chafed and fidgeted and shifted, cursed under his breath and felt his mind lock up and seize. He received extra lines for not paying attention at least once a week, but that was far preferable to having a note to take home. And then Rachel, afterwards, watching him like a well-fed hawk and keeping him at the table until the stupid letters that were supposed to be numbers had resolved themselves. By then, of course, it was dark and the day was gone. He could stand out in the back yard with a pool of lamplight spilling out of the door at his back and listen to the river churning in the night, the call of an owl, the squeaks of the wheeling bats taking their last flights before winter hibernation. That was where he was meant to be, where he belonged—with Cat beside him. And he would dream of her at night, her fingers tight on his shoulders and her body answering his in the leaf litter and the rushing trees.

  October passed by and November inched on to the stage, dark and damp. Michael always thought of October as a beautiful month, a coloured tumble of warm days mixed in with the bite of crisp cold and the end of the long evenings. A harbinger of what was to come, but a benevolent one.

  November was a dark month, a cold month, when there was likely to be the first flurry of snow. It seemed to Michael to be the end of the year, a limbo time that would not end until Christmas— or midwinter, depending on how you looked at it. November heralded the real start of the cold, the days that made walking to school a chill misery. It was during the night of one of these days that Michael lay in bed listening to the wind pounding the gables. The gale had swooped down on them in the afternoon so that he had had a weary battle home from school and had arrived soaked to the bone with wind-driven rain, his cheeks glowing, schoolbooks beginning to crinkle with damp. He lay now with the covers pulled up to his chin, looking out of the window at the foot of his bed and tracing the glimmer of the racing clouds beyond the black shapes of the farm buildings. One of them had a tracery of rectangular light shining faintly around the cracks in its door—Mullan looking in on Fancy, probably rubbing her down with a twist of straw. She always got sweated up on stormy nights. The other buildings were dark. The wind was a roar overhead that whined around the roof and made the rafters creak. It pushed at his: window, trying to get in, and circled in odd draughts around the floor, for this was an old house, well acquainted with the seasons. It seemed to have compromised with the wind, allowing in the little eddies and draughts but standing hardy as a crag against the worst blasts. If he closed his eyes Michael could almost believe himself to be at sea in some storm-racked ship, the hull groaning but adamant, the wind bending the masts. An unknown shore to his lee and the surf booming white and murderous at its foot.

  Except he was not imagining that sound: banging close by, and a rattle as his window shook.

  He sat up and was immediately dazzled by the silver moonlight flooding in the window. The moon was up and half-full, the clouds galloping past its horns, but there was a shape silhouetted at the window sill, perched there with one hand spread against the glass and two green lights glowing in a tangle of hood-like hair.

  'Let me in, Michael. '

  'Jesus!' he blessed himself.

  The window was thumped again with an open palm and the face turned to look back down in the yard. He saw the profile then, the one he knew. Her eyes seemed to ensnare the moon, like a cat's eyes reflecting lamplight.

  'Michael, please! They are here, below. They smell me. Let me in!'

  He was paralysed. She crouched on the sill like some tensed animal waiting to spring, and that awful radiance made her eyes like those of a fiend. The moonlight sculpted a savage skull out of her face, light and dark with the hair whipping round it.

  'Please!'

  The spell snapped at the pleading in her voice. He leapt forward over the bedclothes and fumbled at the catch. There was eagerness, fear in that face an inch away on the other side of the glass—but something else also. Triumph?

  He shoved the sash window upward and immediately the storm blasted into the room with him, pelting gleefully along the walls. Cat's eyes were fixed on him like two unwavering candles.

  There are worse things than sinners in the world.

  Why was he suddenly so afraid, shaking with fear and cold, and she sitting there on the window ledge as though she were about to pounce?

  'You have to invite me in, Michael.'

  'What?'

  'This is an old house, and the faith in it is strong. I can't come in unless you invite me. Ask me to come in. Quickly!'

  I'm a fallen woman. I'm in mortal sin, Michael.

  Why were these things in his head?

  'Michael! Ask me inside!'

  'Come in, then. I—I invite you in.'

  She was over the threshold in a second, banging the window down after her. At once the storm receded, becoming a distant roar in the roof. Michael edged away along the bed until the headboard was at his back. Her eyes were still green, luminous. She looked like some sleek predatory animal, the black mane falling around her face. There was an overpowering musky smell about her that was as heady as wine. Some far voice of calm in Michael's head wondered what kind of thing he had invited into his grandparents' house.

  She crawled up the bed on hands and knees, the moonlight behind her and those eyes alight. But as she left the window their glow faded. She was grinning at him, her teeth a white as a flash in the shadow. Her hair brushed his-face as she straddled him, leant down and nuzzled his neck, licked him there, kissed him hard on the mouth so that he could feel the bruise of her teeth. Her smell was all about him; intoxicating.

  'I told you I would come back.' The voice was as low as a purr.

  'Who's outside? Who's after you? The wolves?'

  'Yes. They're prowling the edges of your world. They chased me from the border of the wood. But it doesn't matter. I'm safe here. They cannot cross the threshold. I must stay here till morning, Michael.'

  She unbuttoned his pyjama top and kissed his chest, moving up and down on him so that a delicious tension built, like a charge of static electricity.

  He heard the wolves howl outside in the yard... or was it merely the howl of the gale? He tensed, but Cat soothed him with low words. In one swift movement she pulled her shift up over her shoulders and he saw her nipples dark against the paleness of her skin, her navel a blur in the shadowed muscles of her stomach. She was thin, the bones of her pelvis sharp and the line of her ribs visible. He ran his hand over them, feeling the bones.

  'Are you all right, Cat?'

  She paused, smiling—a real smile with less of the predator about it. A forefinger touched his nose.

  'Strange times, Michael. For everyone. On the Other Side all is astir, everything in the air.'

  'Will you take me there again? I want to see it. I want to go back.'

  She seemed suddenly tired. The electricity died. Her skin was cold under his hand.

  'Let me sleep. Let me in beside you tonight.'

  He thought of his grandmother in the morning. Tomorrow was a school day. Again that feeling of being trapped surrounded him.

  He tugged her down beside him and pulled the covers over them both. She pushed close, that black hair in the hollow of his neck and shoulder.

  'Dawn will see me away,' she said quietly.

  Away again. 'For how long? When will you come back, Cat?' She mumbled something, halfway towards sleep. Out in the yard the stable door slammed shut. Mullan coming back into the house. The wind was a shrieking banshee about the buildings, pushing at his window.

  'Cat, I'm coming with you. I'm going too. I don't want to stay here any more. Cat?'

  Asleep. He kissed the top of her head. Her face was buried in his flesh so he could not see the smile.

  IT WAS THE black hour before dawn. The wind was still battling round the farm as Michael dressed by candlelight, Cat sitting naked on the bed with her arms around her knees, watchin
g him. He chose his clothes with care: warm, outdoor things, thick socks and sturdy boots. He thought of his grandparents, Mullan, Sean, even his Aunt Rachel.

  I'll be back before they know I'm gone, won't I, Cat?'

  She shrugged, pulling her shift down over her head. And finally he thought of Rose, that Devil's grin of hers which was so like this girl's. Where was she? Was there a place on the other side of things where she remained yet, watching him? In a different kind of hell, perhaps. That was another reason to go.