The Devil I Know

by Claire Kilroy

  ‘Oh my God, are you drunk?’

  ‘No, darling. Not any more.’

  ‘Look, it’s a bad time, Tristram,’ she said. ‘I don’t need this right now. There’s . . . well, you know the situation yourself. He’s lost everything. We’re trying to see what we can salvage.’

  ‘If you’ve lost everything, then you have nothing left to lose. Hickey has nothing left to offer you. So come with me.’

  ‘For God’s sake, how can I go with you?’

  ‘It’s very simple. Pack a bag. Or don’t pack a bag. Come as you are.’ I held out my hand, but she just looked at it.

  ‘Listen, Tristram, all this – us? It has to stop. I’m sorry. You should go home. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.’

  She tried to close the door but I held it open. I was stronger than her. Or so I thought. ‘My father died.’

  She lowered her head. ‘Yes, I heard. I am sorry for your loss.’

  ‘The castle is mine now. Come with me across the moors. It’s a soft night. You won’t need a coat. Make that same journey you made at the beginning of summer in your white sundress. You always wanted to see inside the castle. Now you may. You are its princess. You shall have your own wing.’

  ‘Tristram,’ she began carefully, and joined her palms together as if praying for the right words to come, and I couldn’t help but admire the gesture, as I had admired all her gestures, all the flourishes her hands had performed, although the solemnity of this one warned me to be afraid of what she was about to impart. She took a deep breath to fortify herself, and so did I. ‘Tristram,’ she said again, ‘I realise that this isn’t the best time for you to hear this, in light of your father’s sudden passing, but they’re going to come after your assets now, and some assets can’t be hidden. Some assets can’t be stashed. JCBs and diggers and all that junk parked on the driveway can be made to disappear, as can sums of money, but assets like a castle, assets like your grounds? There’s no place to hide assets like that. There’s no way of sheltering them. It’s unlikely they’ll remain yours for much longer, I’m afraid. All I can suggest is that you go down and strip the place of valuables while you still have a chance.’

  Hickey’s voice butted in behind her. ‘Where are the Hobnobs, love?’ At a time like this.

  She turned and I caught sight of him over her shoulder, standing with his back to us in the kitchen, barefoot in his jocks. Not that hairy after all. ‘They’re in the cupboard, Des.’ Wearily, as if they’d been over this a million times.

  Hickey contemplated the wall of identical white high-gloss units. ‘Where’s the cupboard, love?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, I’m coming.’ She turned to me. ‘I have to go. Let’s be fair about this: we all partied. But now the party’s over. Go home, Tristram.’ She closed the door in my face.

  The last thing I saw was the chandelier that Hickey had stolen from Hilltop. But why would Hickey want my chandelier? A chandelier was just a big light bulb to a man like him. It was her. She had spotted it. It had caught her eye, so she had instructed him to take it down. Strip the place of valuables while you still have a chance. ‘Keep it,’ I said to the shut door. ‘Keep the chandelier. It’s made of glass, just like you.’

  I reeled down the driveway, turned to gape at the ranch in disbelief, reeled down the driveway some more, turned to gape in disbelief some more. I reached the row of palm trees and planted myself there like one of them, still hoping that she’d relent, as if a woman like her had the capacity to relent. A woman as hard as her, a woman as brittle as her, a woman made of glass. I could see that now. I could see right through her now. Transparent as glass.

  The journey back all along the blooming heather was a series of random footholds that either rose up to meet my step or pulled sharply away. It was wild mountain time. I tripped on tussocks and plunged into ruts, checking continuously over my shoulder for her slight figure, walking backwards for whole stretches, still praying that she’d come after me, that it was a test, or a trick or, well, anything. Anything other than what it had been. Go home, she had said, knowing that there was no home. That with Father dead the castle had passed to me, and through me, the perfect conduit, and was already gone, gambled away. She had worked it out before I did. She had done her sums. Hickey hadn’t been doing the sums. She had been doing them for him all along.

  Where are you? the Baily lighthouse flashed, majestic upon its rock.

  I’m down here, the lighthouse at the tip of the East Pier flashed back. Come get me.

  I’m trying, the Baily signalled. I’m stuck.

  I stopped and crouched over at Michael Collins’s rock. The pain was a fist clenching my heart. ‘Please stop,’ I asked it, ‘please let go,’ but pain doesn’t listen, pain doesn’t obey. My mind was grubbing about in tiny circles. It was digging little holes. The sheer fall of mountain into the sea might have demarcated the end of the world and the end of mine. If I hurled myself into the black depths in full view of her home, she would never look out her picture window again without seeing the precipice over which she had driven me.

  Don’t think I didn’t give it serious consideration.

  May I have a glass of water, please?

  Thank you, Fergus. That’s better. But not much.

  And my father lying dead in his coffin with only his housekeeper to mourn him. His name was Amory but I always called him Father. He never called me Son.

  And Larney not lying dead in his coffin. That was the other thing. Dead, and yet out and about.

  The lighthouse beam swept the bay. Here! I’m down here. Please come.

  Oh Jesus, I can’t, I’m stuck.

  I felt the tremble of an incipient mental decline, a twinge on the gossamer threads of my troubled mind, alerting me that something nasty had alighted on my web, a black and ugly article. The signal was gaining strength. Rail tracks tingle before the train comes down the line and something big was coming down mine. Then my phone started fizzling. I took it out of my pocket and stared at it. The thing was fizzling like a shorting fuse. I turned around, I don’t know why. I do know why: I sensed a presence. The moors were deserted. I needed a drink. Oh God, oh Jesus, oh anyone who would listen, I needed a drink. I needed one then, and I need one now.

  *

  Larney was lying in wait for me in the rhododendrons. Larney had been lying in wait for me all my life. Larney is lying in wait for us all. We know not the hour. He had an absolute corker ready for me; game, set and match. He chose not to reveal his face, but instead called it out from the cover of the glossy shrubs.

  ‘What walks upright and yet has no spine?’

  I kept moving and my phone kept fizzling and the train tracks kept tingling away. Something big was coming down the line, something nasty.

  He shuffled out and the whole forest shook, down to the last leaf. ‘Are you not playing?’ he taunted my retreating form. ‘Are you not playing with the rough boys any more?’

  I started to run and he limped after me, the two of us threshing through the dark. He knew those trails as well as I did. Like the backs of our hands.

  ‘Answer me, young master: what walks upright and yet has no spine?’ I could feel him wheezing down the back of my neck.

  ‘You!’ he answered when I did not. ‘You have no spine.’

  That wasn’t the corker. He still had the corker up his sleeve.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ he called after me, demolishing the undergrowth in his path. ‘I’ve got a better one for you. Are you ready?’

  This was the corker. And no, I wasn’t ready.

  ‘Who is Monsieur Deauville?’

  I stopped dead in surprise. Larney stopped too and so did the racket. ‘Where did you hear that name?’

  ‘Every soul in Christendom knows that name. I’ll make you a deal: answer the riddle and I’ll let you go free.’

  I took off down the hill again, listening to him, despite myself. Considering his offer. He was hard up behind me again in no time.

 
‘But there’s a catch, young master. You have to answer the riddle correctly. So here we go: who is Monsieur Deauville?’

  M. Deauville is my sponsor.

  I didn’t speak the answer. I merely thought it. But Larney contrived to hear it all the same.

  ‘Wrong answer, young master,’ he declared with glee. ‘Monsieur Deauville is not your sponsor. Now, as I said, there’s a catch.’

  We emerged from the gardens onto the top of the avenue. And that’s when I heard it. Tocka tocka. The catch. I turned around. Larney was trotting across the tarmac. My eyes dropped to the source of the sound.

  ‘Larney,’ I said, and pointed. ‘Your feet.’

  Larney looked down at his feet. His teeny tiny little feet, not much bigger than champagne corks. He broke into a mocking jig to showcase them. Tocka tocka, tocka tocka. Not fingertips flying across a keyboard but the sound of hooves.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘oh Jesus.’

  ‘Deh,’ said Larney, ‘not doh.’

  That cultured tone. He was speaking in M. Deauville’s voice.

  ‘Deh,’ he said again, ‘not doh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Deh,’ he repeated, ‘not doh.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Deh not doh, deh not doh, deh not doh.’

  At that, I turned and made a run for it. No spine. He followed in close pursuit. We lashed down the hill together, going at it hell for leather, an Armageddon of noise on the dark still avenue. Deh-not-doh, deh-not-doh, deh-not-doh – his infernal chant was charged with the rhythm and momentum of a runaway train. Something big had come down the line, something huge.

  The man – if he was a man – was fastened to my side, his limp now a thing of the past. The faster I ran, the faster he ran with me, the two of us belting neck and neck, a race to the bottom, until I realised that I wasn’t running at all, that I was being carried, swept along, coupled to his locomotive, our limbs pistoning in sync. I screamed in the wind, screamed my head off. But he screamed louder:

  ‘Deh-not-doh, deh-not-doh, deh-not-doh.’

  The chant accelerated as we gathered velocity. We swerved around the sharp bend in the avenue, our shoulders skimming the row of tree trunks that Father had slathered in white paint as a preventative measure against traffic collisions, and this detail struck me as unspeakably piteous. White paint, God above. We were so hopelessly ill equipped, so tragically unprepared, for the calamity that lay in store for us. Then the lights of the castle appeared through the trees. I flung out both arms to steer myself towards their safety, a drowning man flailing for the shore, but to no avail. It wasn’t up to me any more. I was just a passenger. We were going to shoot right past it. Larney was taking me down to the gate lodge, down to his lair.

  But no. He clapped on the anchors when the avenue of whitewashed trees opened out into the courtyard. The staccato deh-not-doh expanded into a sentence, a life sentence, you might call it: ‘It’s not doh-ville, you duh head,’ he said in scorn before jettisoning his load, sending me vaulting headlong across the pebbles. ‘It’s not doh-ville, you duh head, it’s deh-ville.’

  What?

  I just thought the question. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘It’s not doh-ville,’ he repeated wearily to his feeble-minded ward. He now stood directly in front of me for he could spring from one coordinate to the next like a flea. ‘It’s deh-ville. Deh-ville, not doh-ville, yes?’ He sighed in exasperation at my benightedness when I failed to respond. ‘Do I really need to spell it out to you?’

  And then he did. He really spelled it out to me.

  ‘Dee. Eee. Vee. Eye. El.’

  The castle was droning, the lights were shining, the heavens were spinning, and the hells. I shook my head. The Devil is my sponsor? Again, I did not succeed in saying this. My participation in the diabolical lesson was wholly silent.

  Larney clapped his black hands together. ‘The penny drops.’

  I crawled away across the gravel, down on all fours by then. He alighted in front of me once more. Hooves. I scrambled in the other direction. Hooves. No matter which way I turned: hooves. I looked at the hooves, and then up at his glowing eyes. He now towered sixty feet high.

  You said your name was Deauville.

  ‘Don’t give me that. You heard what you wanted to hear. And look at the state of you now.’

  He executed a courtly bow and I bolted past him up the terrace steps. Mrs Reid and her rosary beads were inside. When I made it to the threshold, in disbelief that this had been permitted, that I was being allowed to go home, M. Deauville – now half the size of a man – trotted forward and performed a goatish dance. Tocka tocka, tocka tocka. ‘And you know what time it is now, young master?’ he asked when the dance was complete. ‘It is time to give the Devil his due.’

  Final day of evidence

  24 March 2016

  ‘Mr St Lawrence, during this period, would you describe your mental state as delusional?’

  Oh absolutely, Fergus. No doubt about it. Show me an Irishman who wasn’t delusional during the boom. And by that same token, show me an Irishman who still is.

  Priests must have been smaller in the sixteenth century. That is all that I can say. They seem so portly and plodding now, lumbering from one familiar haunt to the next in search of a little human contact, the battle having been lost and won, but they must have been smaller in the bad old days when holy war still raged. I took myself under the castle, along the winding subterranean passages to the priest hole. The last place anyone would look for a priest was in the bowels of a Protestant fortress.

  The first time I had been down there – the only time I had been down there – was as a boy of nine or ten accidentally coming upon it; beneath a dresser, through a trapdoor, down some steps, then down some more steps, along a passage, around a corner, up a spur that split from the main passage, and behind a wooden panel. A boy of nine or ten could slip into the priest hole, but it barely accommodated a fully grown man. I could not stand up – the ceiling was no more than five feet high. So I sat. I slid the wooden panel shut and sat in the crumbling matter that had accumulated over the centuries on the cold stone floor. Desiccated mouse droppings and insect legs; woodlouse shells and the bristles of rats. That was my best guess, anyway. That’s how I pictured my den. I had no idea what I was sitting in – I couldn’t see a thing and it had no smell, not any more, other than the smell of damp stone. I clasped my knees and buried my face and I hid, Fergus, I hid.

  I hid actively. It demanded intense concentration to sit tight. I actively willed myself into invisibility, erecting a force field with my mind, because the moment I stopped effacing my particles was the moment I would be found. By him. Deauville. He was on the prowl. Priests in the sixteenth century were small hunted men doing the job of a Hercules. No wonder the other team won.

  There was no lighting since the sub-cellar level of the castle – including the dungeon that Hickey had so desperately wanted to see, the dungeon that all the kids had so desperately wanted to see – is not wired for power. There was no running water either unless you counted the dripping wall. The priest hole was excavated into the bedrock. What would happen, I caught myself idly wondering at one point, in the event of torrential rain? I slammed the door shut on that prospect and resumed my active hiding again. And no mobile-phone signal, it goes without saying, not through all that stone, but although I switched the phone off, it kept fizzling away. So I removed the battery. No joy. Eventually I smashed the device into smithereens and scattered the shards amongst the rest of the detritus on the floor of the hole, which was not a hole, strictly speaking. It just felt like one.

  The phone contrived to somehow continue sizzling, and it quite possibly sizzles still, and may sizzle for all eternity. Frankly, that wouldn’t surprise me, but frankly, nothing could. The fraud squad swept its remnants into a bag as evidence in the ongoing effort to trace M. Deauville. Best of luck with that, lads. For the record: I do not want the phon
e returned when your investigation comes to an end, which I believe won’t be long off now.

  I lasted, they tell me, three days in the priest hole. This I find hard to believe. Harder to believe than the literally unbelievable things which I know to be true. As far as I was concerned, I was banged up in there a fortnight, licking the dripping wall for sustenance. I heard Deauville’s footsteps from time to time. Tocka tocka, tocka tocka. I can tell you a thing or two about mortal fear. My blood pounded so thickly it felt like muscle, a mass of muscle lodged in my neck pumping like a heart. Doom, doom, it went. I didn’t move an inch. There wasn’t an inch in which to move. The priest hole had no back door, no escape hatch. It was a very good place to do away with a priest. Maybe the crumbling matter on the floor was priest – another thought to slam the door on. I huddled there with my jaw locked open in panic, waiting for a knock knock knock on the wooden panel.

  Who is the corpse in the coffin, young master?

  Sweet Jesus, it’s me.

  For an extended portion of my confinement – and each portion was an extended one, and each one was confined – I grew convinced that Deauville was in that cell with me, as indeed he possibly was. When I moved, he moved fluidly around me to ensure we never collided. Sometimes I swiped the air to catch him out, but there is no catching the Devil out. And for one dire passage of time, one truly diabolical interlude, I became convinced that I was not under the castle hiding from Deauville, but already in Hell, and that this was it for eternity. Imagine. A stone cell too dark to see in, too small to stand in, too cold to sleep in, and not another soul to speak to ever again. The fear almost paralysed me. The recollection of it still does. Doom, doom. Hell.

  This is where the crucifix came in. There was a crucifix nailed to the wall. It seemed when my hands first discovered it that the sheer force of my terror had caused it to materialise. I channelled many feverish thoughts into this crucifix during that period, thoughts I would never have suspected a rational mind like mine capable of producing. I have since seen the cross in the cold light of day. I requested it from my hospital bed, but when the garda took it out of the bag, I told him that he had brought the wrong one.