The Devil I Know

by Claire Kilroy

  He shot upright in his seat and froze. ‘Did you hear that?’

  I froze too and listened. ‘No.’

  There came a battering on the door then, so loud that we both leapt to our feet. ‘Don’t answer,’ I heard Hickey warning me as I flung open the door to see what could possibly be so urgent. A menacing X was standing on the other side.

  Although he stood in the yard, putting him at a disadvantage of several inches to me, his frying pan of a face was level with mine, and I am a tall man, as you can see. I could tell before he even opened his mouth that he was not Irish. We simply do not breed men of this stature.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Desmond Hickey,’ he stated, uttering the syllables as discrete units, four separate sentences. Dess. Mond. Hick. Eee.

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘Dess. Mond. Hick. Eee,’ the menacing X repeated in his glottal accent. It occurred to me that this was the only English he possessed. That it was the only English he required to accomplish his mission.

  ‘He is presently engaged, I’m afraid. Thank you for calling.’

  I closed the door in the giant’s face and turned to Hickey, who stared at me beseechingly as if there were something I could do to shield him. Me. I was his line of defence. It had come to that.

  ‘That’s who you mean by the Tax Man, isn’t it?’

  Hickey nodded.

  ‘He’s one of your creditors, isn’t he? He’s been sent by one of them?’

  Hickey nodded again. ‘Yeah.’

  I was getting the hang of this game, now that it was over.

  There was another clatter on the door and Hickey shot past me and lashed the bolt across, as if that would prevent the giant X from gaining entry. It was the grade of bolt typically found on the back of a toilet cubicle door, that is to say, it provided no protection whatsoever.

  He looked wildly around the four walls but there was no escape hatch. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘we’re fucked.’

  There came a pattering on the roof as hailstones fell. At least, we hoped they were hailstones. It sounded like a handful of earth being sprinkled on the lid of a coffin. The focal point in the Portakabin shifted upwards. We both looked at the panelled ceiling, and then we looked at each other, two men on the edge of an abandoned building site, trapped in a container of sour air, and a giant X on the rampage outside. A giant X who could see us, but whom we couldn’t see, since the windowpane revealed only our stark reflections.

  ‘We should get curtains,’ I whispered.

  ‘Yeah,’ Hickey sneered. ‘That’s exactly what we should get right now. Curtains.’ He kicked my paint-spattered chair and it back-flipped against the wall. Then the lights went out.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked him. The blackness was welling up inside. I tried to swallow it down.

  ‘We’ve been disconnected from the generator. He’s disconnected us.’

  ‘Why? What’s he up to out there? What’s he going to do to us?’ Bury us, was my guess. Bury us or burn us. Light a fire under us. That’s what I’d have done. I listened for the sound of petrol being doused about.

  Instead, an engine started up. It was one of the machines, a digger or a dumper. They all sounded the same in the dark, or they did to me. I discerned Hickey’s form watching at the window. The engine was getting louder. His head dipped in a double-take, then he raced for the door.

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted, ‘he’s coming at us!’

  We scrabbled at the door but couldn’t locate the bolt in the darkness. The claw of the machine punctured the ceiling and we flung ourselves against the wall. It plunged through the centre of the Portakabin and gouged out a section of floor, taking my paint-spattered chair with it.

  ‘X!’ Hickey was screaming, ‘you fucken X!’ and I wasn’t screaming anything at all, as such; I was just screaming.

  The claw stabbed at the Portakabin a number of times in search of its prey, then it jerked upward and out of sight. We remained flattened there, braced for a second onslaught, but instead the machine reversed. We tracked its progress with our ears. It was heading for the gate. I closed my eyes in relief. Night air was flooding through the hole.

  ‘He’s repossessing it,’ Hickey realised, and took off clambering over the debris to jump out the broken window. I listened as he started up another machine and went booting after the repossessed one, and you’ll have read in the papers how that particular confrontation panned out. He was a brave man, Hickey, I’ll give him that. A braver man than me, which is not to say much for him. I could be dead, I realised with a flutter of vertigo when they were both gone and silence had returned to the empty site. I clutched my aching ribs and rocked. Dead, I could be dead. I could be just as dead as the other Tristram St Lawrence. The lucky one.

  *

  Larney was waiting at the castle gates when I rounded the corner, standing bolt upright against the ribbed column like a Coldstream Guard. I had never seen his body unfurled before, for he had always been the crooked man who walked the crooked mile. As a child, I had believed that the nursery rhyme was about him. I would not have imagined that he could be so tall.

  ‘Good evening, Larney,’ I said, the lie tripping off my tongue. It was not a good evening. It was a bad one. And it was going to get worse.

  ‘The young master didn’t come home last night.’

  I paused between the gateposts. The Gardaí must have come knocking. ‘No, I—’

  ‘The young master didn’t come home last night,’ he repeated, cutting me dead.

  I looked him over. Something wrong there. More wrong than usual, that is. Stroke? ‘Indeed, Larney, you are quite right,’ I said carefully. ‘I didn’t come home last night. That is most observant of you.’

  He squirmed with pleasure, he positively writhed, and I regretted my harsh tongue in the past. All he needed was to be thrown the odd word of praise. He was just a big child, like the rest of us.

  He straightened into his sentry’s stance. Remarkable. I had presumed his twisted spine was a birth deformity.

  ‘There were five men going to church,’ he began, ‘and it started to rain. The four that ran got wet and the one that stood still stayed dry. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, Larney: why?’

  ‘He was in a coffin!’

  ‘Ah, very good. Well, goodnight, Larney.’ I set off up the avenue. He shot forward to detain me and cleared his throat.

  ‘The one who makes it, sells it,

  The one who buys it, never uses it,

  The one that uses it never knows that he’s using it.

  What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Larney. What?’

  But instead of revealing the answer, he went back to the beginning and recited the riddle again in full. I gazed at the stars while I heard him out. Being civil had only encouraged him. This could go on all night.

  When he had finished, I still didn’t know the answer.

  ‘A coffin!’ he said.

  ‘Another coffin. Excellent.’ I sidestepped him, but he planted himself in my path a second time because suddenly he had grown uncharacteristically nimble. Uncharacteristically nimble and uncharacteristically bold.

  ‘There is a coffin,’ he began. ‘The mother of the person in the coffin—’

  ‘That’s quite enough, Larney. Let me pass.’ I was on a short tether where he was concerned. It took no time at all to reach the end of it.

  He sighed as if I were trying his patience and began again. ‘There is a coffin. The mother of the person in the coffin is the sister-in-law of your father’s aunt. Who is the corpse in the coffin?’

  ‘I’ll say it one last time, Larney.’

  ‘And so will I,’ he rejoined firmly, looking me square in the eye. I caught my breath at his daring and took a step back. He reached out and placed his index finger on my sternum to stay me, to literally stay me, for I could not move. That crooked finger arrested my progress. ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin, young master?’

  ‘Take your hands
off me.’

  ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin?’ he repeated very slowly, as if I were the simple one, not he. I looked down at my chest. His fingertip had started to burn.

  ‘I don’t know, Larney. Who is the corpse in the coffin?’

  He left me hanging on his reply, an insect mounted on a pin, before retracting his hand. Once contact was broken, I crumpled into a coughing heap, clutching my ribs although my sternum hurt more. Look. [Witness unbuttons his shirt to reveal a small oval scar.] He branded me. The Devil’s fingerprint.

  ‘Get back,’ I gasped when I was able. ‘Get back into your little hovel!’ Larney shrivelled into a twisted form once more and retreated to the gate lodge as fast as his limp permitted, followed by the Jack Russell, which I only noticed then, it had remained so subdued throughout this encounter.

  *

  I glanced up as I was racing away from him up the avenue to see the castle burning brightly through the trees. At first I thought it was on fire. Every light shone, every door was thrown open. Even the cellar had been breached – lights glimmered up through the grates. A search party had stampeded through each wing and floor. What could they be looking for? Me, I realised. ‘The young master didn’t come home last night.’ ‘The Gardaí were looking for you.’

  There was no patrol car parked on the gravel, just Father’s old Polo, but I stopped dead in shock when I crossed the threshold and found what was waiting for me inside. ‘Oh thank God,’ said Mrs Reid, jumping to her feet. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

  Mounted on trestle legs in the centre of the great hall was a coffin. Candlesticks stood on either side of it, twin flames burning. Mrs Reid had been keeping vigil at the head of this coffin. And she had been crying. Her plump cheeks glistened with tears. She opened her arms to embrace me. A set of rosary beads was woven through her outstretched fingers. I held my post by the door.

  The lid of the coffin was open. I could not see the corpse inside, not from my post by the door. I did not abandon my post. I looked at Mrs Reid. ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin?’ I demanded of her, as Larney had demanded of me.

  ‘Pet,’ said Mrs Reid. ‘I am afraid I have some terrible news. Your father . . .’ She blessed herself. ‘Last night. God rest his soul.’

  I was unable to piece these clues together. I looked at the coffin, and then back at her. ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin?’ I demanded again.

  ‘Come here to me, pet,’ she said, after a brief hesitation. ‘You’re in shock. I have him laid out. Why don’t you come over and see him?’

  I gestured at the pillar candles, the row of empty chairs, her rosary beads, the paraphernalia of Catholic mourning. ‘What do you call this?’ I sounded for all the world like Father. Or maybe she spoke first. Yes, I think that Mrs Reid may have spoken first, although I cannot swear to it. I cannot swear to anything, for normality had slipped out of sync.

  The details tumbled out of her mouth in no particular order, for she was as disorientated as I was. Mrs Reid and I had fallen into the same pocket of chaos. We were at sixes and sevens in there. ‘I went looking for you as soon as I found him,’ she was saying. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Your bed was unslept in. I couldn’t bring him to a funeral home – he’d have hated a place like that. Dr Chapman said it was his heart. I’ve had the Guards out looking for you all day. I knew something was wrong when he didn’t come down for breakfast in the morning. You know your father – he never slept in. The military past. That’s why I laid him out in his uniform. Right as rain the day before, not a bother on him. It was how he would have wanted to go. I couldn’t have left him in a funeral home. He was born upstairs. So I laid him out myself. At least here he’s with his people.’

  Meaning the portraits, I had to assume. The stark truth of the matter was that Father had no people left. The row of vacant chairs only drew attention to the absence of mourners.

  The candles flickered and Mrs Reid blessed herself again. I glanced at the ceiling. The wind was whistling through the empty passages upstairs, droning in chords like an aeolian harp. I had not known that it could do that. I had never heard that sound. I realised how little I knew about the castle, but that with Father deceased I was now at the helm. Perhaps it was protocol that all doors be thrown open upon the death of the head of the St Lawrence family so that the wind could sweep through and allow the castle itself to keen. For the Castle was dead. The Castle was in the coffin. Long live the Castle.

  ‘Sometime during the night, love, in his sleep. It was very peaceful,’ Mrs Reid was reassuring me, although even Mrs Reid, who never failed to give me the benefit of the doubt, must have registered that I had not enquired after his suffering.

  ‘Where are the dogs?’ I wanted to know instead. I fully understood that I was getting it wrong, that even in death I was getting my relationship with Father irredeemably, irremediably, irrevocably wrong.

  Mrs Reid clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘The dogs. I forgot to feed the dogs.’

  Father fed the dogs.

  ‘The gate lodge is to be vacated in the morning,’ I announced. This was my first edict as the Lord of Howth.

  Mrs Reid hurried to my side. ‘Sit down, love. You’ve had a terrible shock. God almighty, your hands are freezing.’ She tried to steer me into one of the mourner’s chairs but I was having none of it.

  ‘Larney has to go,’ I decreed. ‘That’s the end of it. We bury Father tomorrow and then we throw Larney out.’

  Mrs Reid stopped trying to warm my hands with hers. ‘Larney?’

  ‘Yes, Larney. Furthermore, he is not welcome at the funeral. On no account is he to show his face. I want him gone.’

  ‘Larney is gone, love. He has been dead for years.’

  ‘Years,’ she repeated to reinforce her point when I just stared at her. ‘Sure, didn’t I lay his poor crooked body out myself?’

  ‘What?​’

  Fergus, it gets worse. ‘Tristram!’ Mrs Reid cried after me when I broke free of her and fled the castle, but the poor soul was too terrorised to venture past the threshold, not after what I had told her – that I had seen a dead man. Who is the corpse in the coffin? You are, Larney! You’re the corpse.

  My brain had slipped into its default groove and was chanting the usual repetitive guff – admitting that I was powerless over alcohol, humbly asking my Higher Power to restore me to sanity, accepting the things that I could not change and all the rest of it, when it struck me that it was nonsense. That I was chanting pure nonsense and had been for some time. ‘Do you hear yourself?’ Hickey had asked me, and suddenly I did. I did not accept the things I could not change. I would change the things I could not accept. Starting with Edel.

  I set off uphill towards the rhododendron gardens. I could hear Mrs Reid beseeching me to come back until her voice faded along with the lights of the castle. It was dark and quiet then. I was at large.

  I climbed the jungle bluff and emerged onto the open slopes of the West Mountain. The city lights glittered below. Edel had made this journey first, across the two mountains from her home to mine, wearing that dress I’d been so afraid of getting dirt on, that white sundress knotted at the nape with a butterfly.

  I crossed over to the East Mountain. The lighthouses flashed messages to each other along the length of the coastline – Here! I’m over here! Where are you? I threaded my way along the bridle tracks. It was September and the heather was in flower. And we’ll all go together, to pick wild mountain thyme, all along the blooming heather. Will you go, lassie, go?

  Although it was late, maybe one or two in the morning by my reckoning, the lights burned in the house on the edge of the moors. Edel was having a sleepless night too. I saw as I approached that a JCB was parked on the driveway. As well as a digger, a cherry picker, a steamroller and one of the gennys. But not the clawed thing that had almost killed us. The giant X had successfully made off with that. Hickey had stashed the remaining machinery where he could keep an eye on it. He was circling the wagons. Edel’
s two-seater Merc looked tiny and fragile against their primitive bulk.

  I made my way around the side of the house, peering in at each window until I found her. She was perched on a high stool at the breakfast bar in her science lab of a kitchen, sheaves of documents spread out around her on the polished granite worktop. I hadn’t known that she wore glasses. I was about to tap on the windowpane when I spotted her mobile phone on the counter. I took out mine.

  Will you go, lassie, go​​? I texted.

  Her phone lit up but she did not. She read the text and returned to her paperwork without so much as a smile. It wasn’t quite the reaction I’d anticipated. There was a calculator on the countertop too, one of those office models that printed its results onto a roll of paper. It seemed unlikely that Edel should possess such a device. It must have belonged to Hickey. Though that seemed unlikelier still.

  She tapped in digits, inputting them without raising her eyes from the stacks of paper, for hers were fingers that knew their way by touch around a numeric keypad, it turned out. She frowned at the result that the calculator churned out, tore off the strip of paper and started again. The numbers were not adding up. They never would add up, no matter how she finessed them. All of the money was gone.

  I’m outside, I texted. Please meet me at your front door.

  She sat up and took notice when she opened that text, and deliberated for a few seconds before removing her glasses and slipping off the stool. I ran back around the side of the house, narrowly reaching the front step before she did.

  ‘Are you out of your mind showing up here?’ she whispered through a fractionally opened door – Hickey must have been inside. She took in the cut of me: the dirty clothes, the unshaven chin, the bloodshot eyes. And the smell. Not forgetting the smell. The fumes of stale booze on an empty stomach were enough to fell a donkey.

  ‘Will you go, lassie, go?’ I sang gently to her, thinking that . . . well, it’s difficult to know precisely what I was thinking, except that I was thinking it very strongly at the time. Thinking it so strongly that I could see it. Us. A future together. Life.