Máire must have noticed my curiosity, for she pointed with her chin to the black night past our torch. “They say these caves connect with another system,” she whispered, though her voice was loud in the bare circle of torchlight around us. “The locals have all sorts of lovely stories about Oweynagat, like how one woman’s cow ran into here and came out again near Keshcorran in County Sligo.”
Taking the crude torch from the crevice in the rock, she moved farther back in the cave, and I had no choice but to follow her or be left in the dark. She continued to talk as we walked. She told me how the first priests to enter the region called the cave the “hell-mouth of Ireland,” how in the ancient days the three-headed monster called the Ellén Trechend flew from its mouth and plundered the land until Amergin killed it, how later a flock of tiny red birds flew out from the cave, their breath causing all the plants to wither, and how finally, in the days of Ailill and Medb, the cave vomited forth herds of pigs who could cause everything around them to decay. “And there’s yet another legend,” she said. “’Tis said that the Morrígan herself emerges from Oweynagat every Saimhain.”
I laughed at that, but Máire only looked at me strangely. “Do yeh not believe in the Morrígan?” she asked.
“Believe?” I answered. “Do I think the Morrígan’s real? Of course not.” I laughed, but her face remained serious.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “No one can survive without belief.”
It was a strange statement to make, but Máire didn’t give me a chance to ask her to elaborate. We walked on for a time in silence; it was impossible for me to guess for how long it was in that unending darkness, nor to know how many turns we made or how many passages we passed. Eventually we came to a room where the torchlight could no longer touch the walls of the passage and I could feel moving air and hear the sound of running water. There, Máire crouched and thrust the torch into a pile of sticks and peat set in a small ring of stones, rekindling what I realized was a banked fire. The flames stirred and took hold, the light seeming to push back the eternal night here, and I imagined that I half-glimpsed forms moving away with it, rustling and murmuring. Ghosts and shadows. I saw a bed of thick rushes close to the fire, covered with a soft cotton blanket. There was a basket with a loaf of bread sticking out from beneath a lace napkin draped over it, and a kettle hung from an improvised stand over the fire, with a teapot set near it.
I shivered—though maybe that was only my soaked clothes. The heat of the fire felt wonderful, and I moved closer to its warmth. “Yeh might want ta’ get out of those wet things,” Máire said, again seeming to know what I was feeling. She sat on the edge of the bed, the blankets rumpling under her, and her eyes were on me. “G’wan,” she said, “an’ I’ll do the same.” With that, she let her cloak fall from her shoulders, and began to unbutton the dress she wore underneath, her lovely moss-green eyes regarding me all the while.
And the rest I won’t relate here as I write this in the Cave of the Cats, but I will always remember it, and I can look at her now in the firelight, sleeping near me . . .
September 10 (?), 1947:
I write this while still in the cavern near Rathcroghan. Here, under the earth, I confess to not being certain what day it is. I can say that late on that first day, Máire led me back to the mouth of the cave. It had stopped raining, and I ran across the fields over the road to where I’d left my bike, with its cardboard suitcase of my clothes and belongings strapped to it under a tarp. I brought the bike back to Oweynagat. With Máire’s help, we hid my bicycle in the brush under the tree over the entrance, then carried my suitcase back into the cave, following Máire again through the darkness until we reached her room again.
Which is where we’ve stayed since . . . but for how long, I can’t tell now. I suppose I won’t know until I see a paper somewhere or can ask someone—who will undoubtedly look at me as if I’m daft—what day it might be. Máire doesn’t seem to care. We spent much of our time talking, though I still think I know too little about her or about the truth of her past.
I don’t know how much to believe of what she said, or whether I’ve found myself infatuated with a madwoman or am just bewitched entire. I feel like I should be frightened, but I’m not. When I’m with Máire, everything feels right, as if I were destined to meet her, that there was a purpose to our finding each other. I’ve never felt this way about another person before . . .
I don’t even know how to write any of this down here, but if I’m to do so, now is the time since I can write privately and not have to worry about Máire reading this over my shoulder. Máire has gone deeper into the caverns—to see after others in her care, she says, though she refuses to let me come with her or help her or even to explain much about who these mysterious others might be—and so I’m alone here with the fire near the bed. Our bed.
No one can survive without belief, she told me, and she says the old gods and the creatures of myth still live, though they diminish with each passing year. In the old times, those who followed the black-robed priests of the crucified god still also believed in the Old Ones, but now too many of them follow only the newer god. That’s why I’m here. If Oweynagat is truly an opening to the Otherworld, then maybe here I can find a way in, a path some of the Old Ones have already taken to another world where they are known and remembered, and where they live again. I’m here to help those who were left behind find that way themselves. That’s what she told me. I thought it a tale like many of those I’d heard in my travels, and I asked her why someone as young as her would help these mythical Old Ones and why they would even follow her, and she gave that laugh again. “I’m older than yeh might believe,” she told me, but I knew that couldn’t be true, looking at her face.
Yet . . . What she says is unbelievable, but I can’t hear a lie in her voice. I think she at least believes it.
And she’s told me more, words that I thrill to hear when she whispers them in my ears as we lay together. I love you. She says that I’m the one she’s waited for, that I was sent by the old gods themselves to help her. In the passion of our nights, I’ve repeated that same promise to her. I love you. But I don’t know yet what that means . . .
I can hear her footsteps away in the darkness and see the guttering light of her torch, and so I should stop and write no more for now.
September ?, 1947
Máire tells me that she’s forgotten too much of what she once knew, and that’s why she can’t be certain that the twisting passages of Oweynagat are where she can find this mysterious portal for which she’s searching. She tells me that she needs me, that she knows that I was sent to help her, and she now lets me accompany her on her walks into the dark recesses of the caverns. She tells me that she can’t open this portal without my help. How she knows this or what help it is that I’m to give her, she can’t say. “I just feel it,” she says. “An’ I know yeh feel it as well.”
Maybe I do—and that frightens me most of all. I know that when I’m with her, I don’t wish to leave. I don’t know that I could leave her.
We sleep. We eat. We make love. We’re alone down here, but we’re also not alone. I sometimes hear other whispering voices or footsteps, or the rustling of someone’s clothing in the dark, or even the clanking of arms and armor. I catch a glimpse of a fleeing shadow as we move along or see movement from the corner of my eyes; I smell a peat fire, the pungent fragrance of pipe smoke, or the foul droppings of some creature. Time passes at an uncertain pace in the world outside. I feel as if we left here, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it to be the same day that we entered or a hundred years later. Máire and I walk the passages, searching for . . . what? I don’t know.
When we did that today—whatever day today might be—everything suddenly changed. Always before, I wandered with Máire, who seems to be able to negotiate these twisting passages without becoming lost, glad to be with her but blind and deaf to whatever force drew her along.
We’d already passed several branchings of the passageway—I’ve become able to sense them: a greater darkness off to one side or another, accompanied by the touch of moving air and a subtle change in the sound of our footsteps on the uneven floor. We were passing one such branch, when a sudden impulse that I still don’t understand made me grasp Máire’s arm.
“Wait a moment,” I said to her, and she turned, her face puzzled in the warm yellow light of the torch. I pointed to the left. “We need to go that way,” I said.
She didn’t ask the question that I might have asked if our positions had been reversed, the same question I was asking myself. Why? Máire only nodded, and silently turned in the direction that I’d indicated. We stepped carefully over a jumble of fallen rock and into a narrow archway that appeared to have been carved from the living rock. The room beyond was small, the roof so low that we had to walk stooped over for fear of striking our heads against rock, but after a time, the low passage ended and we stepped out into a larger chamber. We both immediately noticed that the walls here were squared, polished, and carved with ornate swirls, like the stones of the passage graves I’d seen at Newgrange, in County Meath north of Dublin, and that the floor was flagstoned and level. Our torchlight struck fire from quartz-flecked granite, and I noticed that the carved lines in the walls had been painted the blue of a deep sky. Another stone, almost like an altar, stood in the middle of the room, held up by two smaller, low plinths. We approached it, half-expecting to see a body or skeleton laid out there, but the altar stone was vacant.
Máire started to walk away again, perhaps to explore the farther recesses of the room, but the same impulse that had led me here kept me rooted to the spot. I crouched down, and under the altar, I saw something. “Máire,” I called out. “Bring the light here.”
She returned, and together we crouched down at the altar stone. Underneath, on the flags of the room, lay a crystalline stone. The color was difficult to discern in the torchlight, but I thought it, even then, to be a vivid green like an emerald, like Máire’s eyes. The stone wasn’t large—one could easily hide it in the palm of a hand—and it was polished and smooth. Máire reached for it; as she took it up, she gasped as if in alarm and dropped the torch on the flags, where it hissed and fumed.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. Her eyes were open, but she was staring at something past me, transfixed. I turned to see, looking over my shoulder, but there was nothing there. I turned back to Máire and called her name. There was no response; I called again, and she seemed to rouse herself as if from a trance, still clutching the stone in her hand.
“Yeh di’nah see?” she asked. “The light? The place beyond?”
I shook my head. Máire released a long, shuddering breath. “I saw it,” she said. “’Tis a place beyond here, but yet right beside us. I could hear voices in the cloch, the voices of those who have held this stone before me, calling to me, beckoning . . .” She shook her head. “’Tis gone now. But I saw it. I heard it.” She looked directly at me then, and I could see the wonder and relief in her face. “This stone—’tis the key, and yeh were the one I needed t’find it.” She picked up the torch from where it was sputtering against the floor. “We can go now,” she said. “This is what I came for.”
I wonder now why I agreed with her so quickly. I wonder what other treasures or artifacts we might have found in the place, which I knew I could never find again on my own. Still, I asked no questions of her then, but followed her back out, and through the passages until we were back in our comfortable cave again—what I thought of now as “home.”
There, Máire sat down on our bed, holding the stone and staring at it. I sat next to her; the stone looked to be a crystal and it was indeed a deep green, but when I reached for the stone to take it from her for a moment, her fingers closed around it. She must have seen the puzzled look I gave her then, for she sighed and opened her fingers again so that I could see the stone: the deep and rich color of it, with veins of lighter blue writhing deep inside. I also noticed that she kept the stone away from me, where I couldn’t easily have snatched it from her; I kept my hands at my sides, even though part of me wanted to insist, to say “I found it; why won’t you let me touch it?”
“This is the key,” she said again. “I don’t know how it came to be here, or who put it here, but this is the connection, the bridge we need.”
“We?”
“Yeh and me,” she said, but there was a hesitation and I knew she meant something more than that. “You’re a walker of the land; with this, we could walk between two worlds. I just have to understand how the spell works, and how to place the power in the cloch.”
“Spell? Power?” I could hardly keep the skeptical laughter from my voice.
She didn’t seem to hear me. “Do yeh sing, Rory? Do yeh know the old tunes? Tell me yeh sing.”
“I can sing a bit, I suppose . . .” but she only nodded, her attention still caught by the stone, the cloch.
“There are things that yeh might not believe in, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” she told me. “All that I’ve told yeh before is the truth, and yeh must open yer mind to that if yeh love me as yeh say.”
September ?, 1947
Máire has spent all her time with the emerald cloch. I don’t know how long it’s been—many hours, certainly, or perhaps a day or more. She sits with it clutched in her left hand and her eyes closed, as if she’s listening to voices only she can hear, and sometimes I hear her conversing with them. She rouses herself to eat, and she sleeps. Little more. We’ve made love only once since then, and even then she seemed distracted and uninvolved.
While she explores her own mind, I’ve begun to explore Oweynagat on my own—carefully, counting the turns and drawing a crude map here in my journal as I go. It was easy enough to puzzle out the way back to the entrance, as Máire’s “home” is not that far into the complex—I did that first, because I’m starting to feel that is something I may need to know. But going the other way, back into the deep labyrinthian maze where we found the cloch . . .
For that, it’s as if Máire somehow walked an entirely different path than those I’m able to discover, which are without exception narrow and low limestone tunnels that all end abruptly a short distance in. None of the passages seem to be the deep and winding passages we walked together, all of them with branching corridors in which one could easily get lost. Yet I’ve taken every exit from our “home” cavern that I can find by the light of my torch and our fire.
There aren’t any other ways farther in. There can’t be.
But that makes no sense. Or rather, it makes no sense unless I believe that Máire somehow has the ability to find pathways that simply aren’t visible to me. It makes no sense unless I believe in magic and spells and the existence of the old gods and fey creatures. It makes no sense unless I believe that Máire is something more than what she appears to be.
Sometimes, I think I hear voices laughing at me as I stumble about, and I think I see people moving just outside the light of my torch.
But what else can I do while Máire is snared by her voices in the cloch except to continue to search?
So I’ll explore more, and see if I can’t find a more rational explanation for all of this.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m lost in a world that doesn’t actually exist, and even though I stopped going to church a few years past, I find that I’m praying that I eventually will find the way back to my own reality.
September 24, 1947
It’s been a long time since I set anything down here, and so much has happened since that I despair of ever adequately transforming it to mere words . . .
I’m currently aboard the Mauretania, en route from Liverpool to New York City. Where Máire might be, I no longer know, but I feel the loss of her still. I wonder if I’ve made the right decision, or if this is something I’ll now regret fo
r the rest of my life.
I don’t know when it was or on what day that Máire finally stirred, as if awakening from a trance. “We have’ta go outside,” she said, already moving even as she said the words, grabbing a torch and walking swiftly toward the passage that led to the entrance. “We must go now.”
I followed her, barely able to keep up.
It was night outside, the air crisp as a winter apple, the sky lit up by the cratered face of the moon looming over the horizon while the stars shimmered, jewels on velvet between the blue-white sailing ships of clouds. Máire was standing not far from the entrance, twirling in place with her face raised to the sky as if searching for something, the cloch we’d found still in her hand.
She stopped. She lifted the stone to the sky as if it were an offering . . .
...and the sky answered. I witnessed a tendril of silvery green light twisting down from the zenith, like a phantom’s rope attached to the clouds. The light was faint, but it brightened when it reached her, and I saw its cold fire wrap around her hand and forearm like a living thing. Máire gasped with the touch—not a sound of alarm but more like the cries I’d heard her make when we were together. The light from the sky brightened slightly, and a few curtains fled away above us, like fleeting sheets of aurora light touched with blue-and-red streaks. Faint marks appeared on Máire’s arms, not unlike the swirling patterns carved on the entrance stones at Newgrange or on the walls of the room where we’d found the stone.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the aurora faded and vanished again, and Máire let her hand drop as if exhausted by the effort of holding the stone aloft, but I could see emerald light between her fingers. The cloch itself was alight: a beacon.
The Crow of Connemara Page 10