by Paul Kearney
'Your eyes. They gave me the shivers for a minute there. Have you not been sleeping?'
'I'm fine.' And an edge crept into his voice.
Mullan looked away hurriedly. 'There's something funny about this ... You weren't out and about in the night, were you? You didn't see anything?' And now his old eyes were fixed on Michael's, though he seemed uncomfortable with that contact. 'Are you sure you're all right?'
The invitation to speak was there, and for an instant it was crowding on the tip of Michael's tongue—the horrors and the wonders he had been a part of. But if he spoke of them then his chance to live normally in this world would be gone. Nothing had happened to him. He had seen nothing. He was only a boy.
'I have to be going to school.' And he turned away and set his face to the road and the morning walk. Soon he would be in a musty classroom, staring at books, listening to the other children snigger, feeling the teacher watching him.
As Mullan was watching him now. He could feel the old man's quizzical gaze on his back as he strode out of the yard on to the road.
A passing car made him leap into the air with fright, and his hand went to a sword hilt that was no longer there.
Home sweet home, he told himself, and there was a deep and abiding pain at the thought. He shut down the workings of his mind, the vision of the unending days ahead in this place, living this way. And he trudged off to school like a man ascending the scaffold.
HE LABOURED THROUGH the passing days like a sleepwalker.
But he missed Cat. He missed her face, her quicksilver grin, her barbed comments. He missed her body next to his in the nights, the joy of joining himself to her. He lay awake through the nights, unable to sleep in the too-soft, too-warm bed. He waited for her to come tapping at his window and went down to the river hollow at least once a day, hoping to see her lithe form splashing there or hear her singing off in the trees. But the place was dead, empty. All that was over. There was only this present reality, the world he had been born into with its maddening rituals.
School was a numbing ordeal to be endured. His teacher, Miss Glover, took him to task for not paying attention, but when he looked at her, the words dried up. He was left alone, the other children avoiding him out of some youthful sixth sense that told them he was less than ever one of them.' He grew to be a silent, awkward figure, at ease only in the outdoors and in his own company.
BY HIS FOURTEENTH birthday he had taken to missing school to work for some of the outlying farms. His precocious strength and morose demeanour served him well. He looked older than his years, and his eyes were those of a pitiless savage. He hoarded his wages, for there was nothing he wanted to buy, but some far voice in him said that he had to get away. He was too near to the Other Place here, too close to the old bridge that was the way across. He considered returning sometimes, and sat for hours by the river, torn and agonized. He hated what his life had become, and yet the fear was deep in him, holding him back. He had to get away from the temptation.
Before he was fifteen he ran away, sleeping in the fields at night, doing casual work, but all the time wandering eastwards. In the dark nights he had nightmares full of wolves and monsters, Cat's screaming face, the grasping branches of trees. He kept moving. There was no remorse in him, no nostalgia for the life and the family he had left behind. The choking horror of his memories left no room for it.
He made it to Belfast, and wandered the streets like a bewildered primitive. Once two men came at him from a darkened alleyway and a knife had glinted in one of their hands. He had left them lying unconscious and bleeding, his body moving into the attack without rational thought. The money on their bodies had bought him a ticket on a ship, and he had sailed the following morning, seeing the sea for the second time in his life.
YEARS PASSED.
He worked his way slowly south through England, taking jobs here and there, staying a while and moving on. Always there was that knowledge that he must keep moving. At times, near dark, he would believe himself watched, and if he was in the countryside he would see—or thought he did—shapes moving in the night. He finally conceived a hatred for trees and woods, for empty places, and began to haunt cities more and more. The pickings were better there, anyway.
There were women. Here and there he would see a face and would be drawn like a moth to a candle. But in the morning the face was never what he had wanted it to be, and he would slip away, leaving it sleeping. Whether it lasted for a night or a month of nights, the result was always the same and left him feeling desperate and lost. That was when a drink would calm him and let him see clearly again.
But gradually it took more and more drinks to get him to sleep at night. He frequented public houses, becoming a regular in half a dozen towns—the big, silent man at the end of the bar. This was before he turned twenty. His powerful frame began to pad out and sag and his stamina seeped away, though his arms remained enormously strong. He became a strong-arm man, a bouncer, a security guard; a professional thug. Often the look in his eyes was enough to stop a fight, but twice he was sacked for using excessive violence, once landing in court and missing a jail sentence by luck and technicalities. He realized dimly that his values were wrong for this world, that his sense of right and wrong was not that of the other people within it. But the bottle made it a lot simpler.
As far as he could, he kept in touch with his home country. There was trouble there, a civil rights movement struggling to survive. Tinder waiting to catch fire.
ON THE FARM the family gathered for three funerals, and the cars and horse traps extended almost a mile for every one. Old Pat Fay, found lying dead in the buttercups of the lower meadow one morning with the horses nosing at his body and a smile on his face. And not long after Agnes Fay, her heart giving its last beat as she pumped water from the well into her bucket—a job Michael had once been entrusted with.
And Old Mullan. Two communities came together for his final journey at a time when they were pulling ever farther apart. Old men whose chests had once been in arms against their like. It no longer mattered.
They had found Mullan's body down in the river hollow, his pipe lying cold at his side. Sean had discovered the corpse, and afterwards had needed half a bottle of whiskey to stop the trembling of his fingers. Mullan's face had been stretched in terror, his eyes bulging and the lips drawn back into his gums. He looked as though he had been scared to death, said Sean.
And one of the first things Sean was to do on inheriting the farm was to fell the trees in the hollow. He had never liked the place anyway. He dug drains leading down towards the river, cut and burned the thick undergrowth and felled the oaks and alder that clustered along the stream. Soon sheep were grazing there, cropping good grass right up to the water's edge.
The horses were sold, and even Rachel wept the day Felix and Pluto were taken away.
Sean did not keep the sheep in the hollow for long. A pack of feral dogs haunted it, he decided, after losing three animals in quick succession. And he sat out himself, shotgun across his lap, for more than one night watching them Sometimes he thought he heard things, or saw shapes moving the corners of his eyes. Once something big and dark splashed its way across the width of the river and he had been too paralysed to even raise his weapon. The hollow remained empty after that, the green things beginning to slow, inexorable process of regeneration.
MICHAEL HEARD OF the funerals one after the other, and though they pained him, his real grief, oddly enough, was reserved for what they represented: the end of a way of life. An older way.. a way closer to the land and the growing things, was ended, and the country was about to be raped by a new method of farming and an unending guerrilla war. The home he had known would very soon cease to exist.
FOURTEEN YEARS. FOURTEEN years after the mornings he and the chestnut mare had struggled out of the womb of the freezing river he was here, in London. He was a prematurely aged man, a barman-cum-doorman with a smoker's cough and thirty pounds of flesh he did not need. He had sunken killer's eyes and a fi
ghter's nose, blue veins knotting his thick forearms and the red lines of a heavy drinker breaking across his face. The boy he had been, even the woodsman who had hunted with Cat at his side, were a century and a world away; and neither they nor the monsters and marvels that had existed alongside them would ever return.
Or so he had thought.
TWENTY-ONE
CLARE WAS ASLEEP, and the city slumbered with her. It was hot in the room, a summer night hanging heavily in the air with the orange glow of the street lamps.
Michael padded to the window as he did so often in the nights, and pulled the blind aside to look out into the street.
Nothing.
He could feel them though, watching. Sometimes he thought that his senses were quickening again, that the old awareness was coming back and lending him another set of eyes. He sensed unseen things. At night outside his front door he would smell sometimes the reek of mould, the sweet stink of decay, and he would know they had been there.
Traffic, far off. The street was lit with the sickly orange hue of the street lights, but there were shadows everywhere.
He knew too much about that Other World. Maybe that was why they had come for him. Or perhaps it was revenge, a lust for the blood of someone who had wounded their beloved forest.
It still seemed like a dream at times, though. Brightly lit pictures spilling into his mind from another life, when he had been someone else in an impossible place. He had left Cat behind in it. Maybe Rose, too. That pain was real enough.
Impossible to separate them in his mind. They had blurred together with the passage of the years, becoming a single, hauntingly lovely face. Maybe they had always been the same. Perhaps the 'quest' he had taken upon himself had always been absurd.
Perhaps.
Michael lit a cigarette, turning to watch the sleeping girl in the bed. The sheet had fallen from her shoulder and he could see the jewel of sweat in the hollow of her throat. He had kept the windows closed, despite her puzzled protests.
Not fair to involve this girl, this lady of the city, in what he felt was coming. Hardly right. But he felt it might be too late for that. His smell was about her. He had marked her.
Clare turned over in the narrow bed, uncomfortable in her sleep. The sheet slid from her so he was able to see the curve of her hip, white and full, shadowed darkness cupped within it. Her body was soft and generous, so unlike Cat's. No scars there, no hardness on her feet, no nails broken or dirt-crammed.
And yet when he remembered Cat's flashing grin, the sheer life in her gaze, something in his chest seemed to stretch and ache, and he had to shut his burning eyes.
Still there, even now.
He wondered how the time had passed for her back in the Other Place, how quick or slow had been the passage of the years.
He had seen her, here in this room ...
Or had that been his mind chasing its tail?
Mad, he thought. I'm going mad. It was a dream, and now I'm falling asleep again, reliving it with a change of backdrop.
A trio of young, merry men meandered down the street outside singing softly. He watched them avoid a shadowed corner without thinking, and knew that the darkness there was not empty. He smiled grimly, reached for another cigarette, and then thought better of it.
So they had finally caught up with him. He wondered what it was they wanted. Were they going to drag him screaming back into the wood like some latter day Faust?
The Wildwood. It had had its beauty, its bright moments. He remembered quiet campfires, Cat in his arms. He remembered glorious dawns, the nip of cold and the exhilaration of hunting in the first snows. Ringbone's face over firelight, the easy companionship of the Fox-People.
No. It had been a savage place. He was well out of it.
He returned to Clare in the bed. She was hot, moist with sweat. He threw back the sheet and she nuzzled against him. A buxom lass, comfortable to lie with, touchingly trusting. He was content with her, now he was no Adonis himself. She would never have to catch breakfast on the hoof, fight off goblins or clean wounds.
He smiled into the dark, thinking back. Piglet on a spit. Or that first day ...
Call me Cat.
That's a stupid name.
You're a stupid boy.
He had missed that challenge, the sharpness. Perhaps he was too old to enjoy it nowadays.
Too old? He was not yet thirty.
An old sound out in the street, a sound he had never thought to hear again. The howl of a wolf.
'Jesus!' he said softly.
He disengaged himself from Clare's soft clutch and peered out of the window. Somehow it was darker than it had been.
The street lamps were dead.
He saw a flickering of shadows along the side of the street.
Far off there was the faint hum of nocturnal traffic, but the surrounding streets seemed as silent as the moon.
'Shit ... ' He backed away from the window, then turned and shook the sleeping girl on the bed.
'Clare, wake up! Wake up, Clare!'
She slept on, oblivious. He grabbed her shoulders, his fingers bruising her flesh, and half lifted her from the mattress. Her head lolled bonelessly to one side.
'Clare!'
He dropped her. No good. No good.
The time had finally crept round on him. He knew it was going to finish here tonight. All those loose ends were going to be tied up.
How? With his death?
They were coming for him, this very minute. It was not Clare's battle, so they had put her out of the picture.
Or so he hoped.
He was shaking. Where was that old stubbornness, that dogged courage? What would Ringbone think of him? Or Cat, for that matter?
They were coming for him. The big bad wolf. The bogey man. They were real. He had seen the stories walking woods at night.
God help me.
He pulled on his clothes with furious haste while his mind ran through the contents of the flat. Weapons. He needed something to fight with. Perspiration popped out over him as his clothes soaked up the heat in the room. He fiddled with the clinking keys in his pocket.
The kitchen. He pulled out the drawers, his eyes constantly darting to the windows. Christ! The door. Had he locked the door? He must have! He sprinted to it, skidding as he halted and banging it with his shoulder. The chain was on. Good.
Even as he stood there checking it, the hair rose on the back of his neck. In the little gap below the door the light from the landing had suddenly flicked out.
They were in the building.
He tried the switches in the flat. Nothing. So he would be fighting in darkness.
His mind had bifurcated. One part of him was calmly searching for weapons, gauging their strategy, sizing up the defensibility of the flat. The other was quietly but insistently denying that any of this was happening. Wolves do not prowl city streets. The Devil does not ride a horse.
The phone. He would phone the police, get people around him.
Dead, of course. The wood part of him had known it would be. There would be no help for him from the outside. It was his fight alone. The reason they had bewitched Clare.
Momentarily he wished Cat were here at his shoulder, to fight with him. She would have put some heart into him.
In the quiet he could clearly hear the thump and swish of his own heart. His hands were trembling around the grip of the big kitchen knife.
I've grown timid, he thought. I've been too far from the edge of things for so long.
In the wood he had lived with fear every moment until it had ceased to be fear and had been merely another bodily function. Fear had been an asset, then. It had concentrated the mind wonderfully.
Now his mind was clouded by it. It blurred his thinking. He wrenched a broomstick free of its head and began tying another of the kitchen knives to it with the tail end of a washing line. No crosses or holy water here. Nothing to keep out the beasts. It took faith to bar the door to them, and his home in Ireland had b
een strong with untold generations of it. But here there was no history, no strength of character. This building and the rest in the street were concrete shells, hardly touched by the lives within them. The things from the wood would need no invitation to cross this threshold.
Something scratched at the door, like a dog seeking entry, except that the scratching was at head height. There was a low growl on the other side, deep enough to hum through Michael's skull, and something began sniffing at the lock.
Other feet were padding on the landing, and he could hear the tick and scrape of the claws.
A heavy blow banged on the door. The floorboards creaked. There were scrapes and thumps. He thought he could hear breathing, coming in pants. And then the smell sifted into the flat, a rank, rotting smell of old meat, uncured hides, the stink of leaf mould and marsh.
A wind blew through the hallway heavy with the smell, and he almost gagged at its potency. It was as though the flat around him were mere illusion and what he really stood in was a damp wood, that charnel house stench hanging in the trees.
He closed his eyes. It was clearer. A looming tangle of mighty trees around him, dead leaves squelching under his feet. All quiet in the twilight,
Dusk deepening and shadows moving in the depths of the wood. The breeze stirred his hair.
No. He was here in the city, and the tiles of the kitchen were cool under his bare feet, though the broomstick was slick with moisture in his palms.
Here, in his own world. With teeming millions. Scores of people slept within earshot of him. And he knew they would never hear a thing.
There was no sound, but he could feel the heavy presence beyond the door. He left the kitchen and padded at a crouch over to the window, peering through the blinds.
—The momentary flash of a diabolic face, laughing at him. He recoiled, then cautiously looked out again.