‘What task?’ Shane asked.
‘Old houses are like old people: full of secrets. This house was not originally a dairy.’
‘What was it?’
‘A prosperous merchant named Michael Byrne built it.’ Thomas slowly rose to his feet. ‘The reason why he built it on this exact spot has been covered up for over a century. Byrne was a man who made enemies. The nobility regarded him as an upstart because he started life with nothing. He was only a young servant boy when he discovered the corpse of his former master, the notorious rake, Henry Dawson, who once owned Castledawson House.’
‘How did he make his fortune?’ Shane asked.
‘Some people called it peasant cunning; others said that he had the devil’s own luck. He was a gambler; he had a set of dice shaped out of human bone with which he could never lose. By the time he died, he owned a dozen properties around Blackrock, though he could never buy the one he craved – Castledawson House. The new owners, who had bought it after Henry Dawson died, refused to sell it to him. Every few years, Michael Byrne would disappear on terrible drinking binges and turn up at the gates of Castledawson House, shouting “I want it back.” ’
‘You said he had only been Henry Dawson’s servant there,’ Geraldine said.
‘When he could not get Castledawson House, he built this new house for himself directly opposite the gates of the estate where he used to work. He never forgot the hunger of being a serving boy. He gave freely to the poor. In times of cholera he walked fearlessly among the dying, administering alms and what comfort he could. They say that, for all his vices, there was a touch of the saint in him. But the luck of every gambler runs out.’ Thomas McCormack beckoned for them to follow. ‘It was a sensation when Michael Byrne was found in the cellar of this house with his own throat cut. Now, let me show you a secret known to nobody else alive.’
TWENTY-TWO
Joey
November 2009
When I woke the next morning, I could scarcely believe that the previous night’s events had occurred. I had intended merely to study in Shane’s house. Instead, I had watched a girl die, taken part in a car theft and revealed my most intimate feelings to what was either a ghostly presence or simply the empty night air. In the morning light, I knew that Shane was either a fantasist or a spoof, but his description of hordes of anxious ghosts pressing against our speeding car kept haunting my mind.
Mum said little over breakfast. The relaxed intimacy we once took for granted seemed to have disappeared. When she turned up Temple Hill to drop me off outside the school on her way to work, I was relieved to escape from the silence of the car, from her unspoken accusation that I was allowing myself to be groomed for something. I hoped that Shane would remember my schoolbag, yet I also dreaded meeting him. We all do crazy things at times, but last night Shane had possessed such a manic determination to bring me to Bull Island that he could have killed someone in the process. I didn’t want him bragging about our exploits in class, especially as Mum had gone to huge trouble to enrol me here and the last thing she deserved was more hassle.
When I entered the classroom before our history exam, Shane was there before me, my schoolbag left on my desk. I thought he was ignoring me, but then I realised that he was jotting down history notes. He walked towards me.
‘Here are those dates you were having trouble with. Memorise a few of them and Bongo Drums will think you’re a genius.’
He handed me a neatly written list. There was no wildness visible on his features now, just a parental concern. None of our classmates would believe the things he had done a few hours before, and I realised that Shane would never mention them to anyone. Last night’s anarchy was filed away in a sealed compartment. How many other such compartments existed in Shane’s life? I thought of his description of himself on the quays: a beachcomber combing for souls – how weird was that? It was an image of isolation, a solitary figure on the seashore scanning the horizon for jetsam and flotsam; scavenging the bits and pieces washed up from other people’s lives.
Then Bongo Drums arrived and announced that the exam would start in two minutes. I forgot about everything except memorising Shane’s list of dates before the test began.
Amazingly, almost every date on the list came up in some question, as if Shane had managed to second-guess Bongo Drums’ mind. I had never previously filled so many pages in an exam because everything we’d studied in Shane’s room remained fresh in my mind. Midway through the test, Geraldine glanced back at me and smiled. For a moment, all thoughts of history vanished. Her hair looked beautiful in the sunlight, her neck so white. She caught me staring back and silently tut-tutted, urging me to focus on the exam questions. Then she blushed slightly and looked away and I knew that I loved her.
At the bell there was a relieved clamour of voices. I had forgotten to bring in a drink, so at break-time I got permission to visit the shops down the road. I bought a can of Coke and was drinking it on my way back to school when I experienced the overwhelming sensation of being watched. I turned to find that an old man was following me. He glared at me fiercely, hobbling forward on a walking stick until we were face-to-face. He wore an old hat and a long black overcoat. His eyes were bloodshot.
‘Tell your friend I want it back,’ he hissed.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard. Tell him I’ll not be tricked out of what is rightfully mine any longer.’
Cars were speeding along the road, other students hurrying past to beat the bell, but I had never felt more alone than in those few seconds. What freaked me out most was that his eyes seemed oddly familiar, like eyes that I saw every day if I could only just place them. This old man’s voice never rose above a whisper, but there was a vehemence within him that was frightening. The bell had rung. I wanted to walk back through the school gates and join my fellow students strolling into class, but I felt paralysed by the piercing gaze of those eyes that seemed younger than his body.
‘Tell him I want it back, Joey,’ he hissed.
‘How do you know my name?’
‘You may be a naïve fool, but you’re a good boy. Don’t be used by him. Help me, Joey; be my friend.’
The yard had emptied. At any moment Bongo Drums would come out to check the gates.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I said. ‘I have to go back to school.’
He looked wistfully in through the gates. ‘Why did you let him lead you so astray last night?’
‘What do you know about last night?’
‘What do you know about him? It’s typical of him to groom a shy kid who’s been bullied. That’s why your mother got you into this school, wasn’t it?’
‘Leave my mother out of this!’
‘I know where you live, Joey. I know more about you than you could ever believe.’
‘Are you related to Shane?’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Let’s just say we are linked through bad blood.’
‘I don’t know what you want.’ I felt perturbed. I hated conversations where people expected you to know what they were talking about and made you feel like a fool for asking.
‘I want you to ask yourself, what does he really want from you? Why does he think he can have you as a friend when I’m the only friend he can have?’ The old man glanced towards Bongo Drums who appeared at the gate. ‘Tell him that one of us should not still be here. Tell him I want it back.’
TWENTY-THREE
Shane
August, 2007
Thomas led Shane and Geraldine downstairs, past the smashed milk bottles in the hallway. The only light came from the candle he held aloft and from the ever-weakening beam of Shane’s torch. Entering the kitchen, Thomas opened the small door that they had noticed on the first night, the one which led into a narrow sloping corridor. He glanced back to ensure they were following. Geraldine wished that she had told her gran where she was going; she wished that she had told her gran everything. She tried to send her a text, but could ge
t no signal in this basement. She followed Shane because she was scared of being left alone. Shane was fascinated by the idea that this house possessed a secret, but he was scared too. His fear arose from the odd sensation that somehow he had allowed himself to be groomed for this moment; that he had been in this cellar before if he could only remember.
At the end of the passageway, Thomas stooped his head to enter a bare storeroom. He waited for them to join him. The faint beam on Shane’s torch gave out, so that the only light came from Thomas’s candle and from the glow of Shane and Geraldine’s mobile phones. The way the walls curved inwards made the cellar feel even smaller. If they got trapped here, nobody would ever find them. Thomas set down the candle on a flagstone.
‘You think there’s nothing to see, don’t you?’
‘I would like us to go back up to the kitchen,’ Geraldine said, with nervous defiance.
Thomas sank to his knees. ‘As a child I entered this cellar a hundred times, never thinking that it contained a secret either.’ He looked up. ‘After tonight you must promise never to return here. My time has come to die; indeed, my time is long overdue. I have outlived all the others. But before I die, there is something I wish to see one last time. Feel carefully along the rim of this main flagstone. It has a tiny cleft you can grip.’
Geraldine knelt and at first could feel nothing but then her fingers found the concealed edge. Soon all three of them had managed to gain a grip on the heavy stone and hoist it so that one side was resting on the adjoining flagstone. Everyone took a deep breath.
‘We can drag it the rest of the way,’ Thomas said. When they hauled the flagstone away from the chasm that opened up in the floor, the cellar felt even colder. Thomas raised the candle and its flame flickered, leaving Geraldine afraid that it would blow out. Then the flame steadied and, as she looked down into the black space where the stone had been, she saw a second candle flame appear and, alongside it, black hair and her own scared eyes staring back up at her. Realising that she was staring down into water so still that it acted as a mirror, Geraldine shivered and moved back.
‘I’m scared of water,’ she whispered. ‘My mother drowned.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Thomas replied quietly.
‘How could you know that?’ Geraldine asked, startled.
Thomas looked at her as if caught out. ‘You told me on the first night we met,’ he said quietly.
‘I never did. I never talk about her.’
‘She drowned out in the bay, a sudden cramp in her leg like the grip of a claw reaching up from hell,’ Thomas replied, almost absent-mindedly now, staring into the well as if hypnotised. ‘Michael Byrne built his house on top of this well so that his water supply could not be poisoned by his enemies. My two brothers lived here all their lives, yet they never knew this well existed.’
‘Who told you, so?’ Shane shivered as he realised why this place felt familiar. It was the cellar he had been dreaming about for months. This was the well his father had dreamed about, seeping up through the floorboards of their old house.
‘I was told by a man who couldn’t talk.’ Thomas gave a softly bitter laugh. ‘A man related to me through bad blood.’
‘How deep is it?’ Shane was unable to stop himself from leaning over the water, fascinated by his own reflection.
‘It looks shallow, merely a foot or two deep, but it is deceptive. Should you fall, it is deep enough to drown in, deep enough to disappear for ever.’
Geraldine tried to pull Shane back, but something caught his eye.
‘I see a small set of dice down there,’ Shane said. ‘They are the strangest-looking things. I think I can reach them.’ His outstretched hand had almost disturbed the water when Thomas gripped it fiercely.
‘Disturb nothing,’ the old man hissed savagely.
‘Let go of my wrist,’ Shane snapped, ‘I just wanted to see what they were made of.’
‘They look like bones,’ Geraldine said in fascinated horror.
Thomas released his grip on Shane’s wrist. He seemed lost in a world of his own. ‘They’re relics,’ Thomas said, ‘the bones of a saint.’
‘Human bone!’ Geraldine gasped.
‘Anyone who gambles with those dice will always get their wish,’ Thomas went on. ‘I rolled the dice and made two wishes here at your age: a wish for myself and a wish for the man who became my blood brother.’ From his coat pocket, Thomas produced a small, black-handled knife. ‘He nicked our two wrists with this blade and held them together until our blood merged.’
Shane edged away from the water, acutely aware of the knife glistening in the weak candlelight.
‘What happened after you made your wish?’ he asked.
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Thomas raised the knife and flicked it with all his strength into the well. The sudden splash was amplified by the low walls, making Geraldine and Shane jump. ‘I got my deepest wish – which is the greatest tragedy that can happen to anyone.’
TWENTY-FOUR
Joey
November 2009
Bongo Drums leaned against the school gate to watch the old man shuffle off. ‘So, who’s your new friend, Joey?’ he asked wryly.
‘I never saw him before, sir. I couldn’t get away from him.’
‘What class should you be in?’
‘Double science.’
‘Tell Shakes … Mr Sweeney … that I delayed you, waffling on about my days in rock bands. He complains that I bore the backside off him doing the same thing.’
‘Were you really a drummer, sir?’
‘Not a great one, but drummers don’t have to be.’ Bongo Drums chuckled with self-mockery. ‘A drummer just needs to keep time and wink at the girls near the stage. There’s no money in music, though there’s always talk of big money just around the corner. A time comes when you need to settle down, but I used to love knocking out a living on the road.’
Gazing around the empty yard with bored eyes, Bongo Drums began to drone on about his glory days, name-checking bands that meant nothing to me. I was so fazed by the encounter with the old man that I wasn’t even listening properly until I heard my father’s name mentioned.
‘Sorry, sir, what did you just say?’
‘I said I even played with your dad for a spell.’
‘I never knew you knew him.’
‘I can’t say I really did. Dessie Kilmichael was a maverick – difficult to play with, always changing the playlist, adding in guitar solos he made up on the spot. With a normal singer you played a normal set, you knew where you stood, but whenever I gigged with your father I had to be a mind-reader.’
‘Was my dad any good?’
‘It depends on how you define “good”. He wasn’t consistent because he was chasing after a sound nobody else heard. Some nights he was a genius, setting the place alight. Other nights he’d leave the audience behind and all we got from the punters was the rubber handclap. But I’ve never heard anyone like him before or since. Dessie once told me that he wanted to write one great song that would make him immortal. It was only last year when I found some demo tapes we’d made that I realised how unique he was.’
‘You have tapes of him playing?’
‘Only rough cuts. Still, they have his magic,’ Bongo said. ‘Dessie was a perfectionist, always buying more studio time to work on his famous album that never came out. His problem was that every time he did a take he did it differently.’ Bongo Drums became aware of something in my gaze. ‘But … I mean, you’ve heard his demos?’
‘No. I’ve never heard him sing.’
‘Come off it. The night I heard you play at that retreat in Wicklow, I made the connection between your names. No disrespect, but the way you bend certain chords is a direct rip-off of his style.’
‘My mum destroyed all of his tapes.’
Bongo Drums laughed incredulously, then realised that I was serious. ‘Why?’
‘She just did.’
Bongo nodded soberly. ‘I don’t know if I could fin
d those tapes again with so much junk in my attic. Still, if you wanted me to, I’d take a look.’
I had often fantasised about finding a recording of Dad, but now, confronted with the chance to hear his voice I didn’t know if I could face the prospect of having my illusions shattered. What if he was not a genius? What if, despite all the myths, his songs were second-rate?
‘I’d like to ask my mum first.’
‘Yeah, you do that.’ The teacher was scrutinising my face, searching for signs of my dead father’s features. I wanted to tell him to stop, yet I wanted him to find my father rekindled within me. It was an uncomfortable sensation.
TWENTY-FIVE
Thomas
August 2007
Thomas McCormack remained alone in the cellar for a long time after Shane and Geraldine left, although he needed to go upstairs for more morphine before the pain became too intense to do anything except scream. His body required constant medication and proper medical care, but despite his intense loneliness and the pain, he knew that every new person he came into contact with was another potential victim whom the voices could use.
He knew this because he had been a victim once too, scared by a knife in this cellar. It had been wrong to produce the black-handled knife in front of Shane and Geraldine, but a part of him had hoped to frighten the boy away. More selfish voices inside him, though, were trying to tempt the boy back. The incessant babble of the Black-rock dead: the battle between those souls who longed to end this limbo and the others who wanted to find another victim whose body they could hijack to cling on to immortality for another lifetime.
It was hard to hear his own conscience amid all these whispering voices. Doctors in asylums had called it schizophrenia, bipolar split personality disorder. Thomas called it the curse of immortality, the loneliness of being neither truly alive nor fully dead.
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