Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  “Too feckin’ dark to read it here,” he announced.

  Michael looked up and down the street where they stood and pointed out they were coming to an intersection where several pedestrian-only streets converged and ballooned to make a large plaza. All the buildings housed shops that opened onto the square in the daytime, except for the Roman Catholic cathedral that faced them across the square. Most of the shop windows were dark now, but Michael steered the group towards one with a street light above it. Colm leaned against the wall, able to stand on his own now. Eamonn held the paper in both hands, adjusted his position to get light on the page he was trying to read, and held it closer to his eyes. Despite his inebriation, he was able to read aloud the words Sean had sent to his nephews.

  “You remember how Grandad—me and your dad’s dad—used to tell the old folktales of Waterford when you were small boys?” Eamonn had begun in the midst of the first paragraph.

  He and our aunt Sorcha—she was the wife of your great-uncle Padraig—would always argue about the truest version of the old stories. Your aunt Sorcha died before you could probably remember her, but your dad and I remember some great arguments they had. One of the things they would argue about was the gravesite of the Dearg-due. They both agreed that she had been buried in the shadow of Strongbow’s Oak, the oak where Strongbow married Aoife in 1170, and that Strongbow’s Oak had stood alive until the 1700s. The thing they could not agree on was where exactly the oak had stood. Grandad insisted that Strongbow had married Aoife in Christchurch Cathedral. That meant Strongbow’s Oak had stood on Cathedral Square and that the Dearg-due was buried there. Aunt Sorcha insisted that Strongbow had married Aoife at Reginald’s Tower, next to the River Suir, and that Strongbow’s Oak must have stood near the tower, meaning that the Dearg-due must be buried at the French Church, because that is the closest graveyard to Reginald’s Tower.

  Eamonn looked at Colm and Donal. “So why is it that your Uncle Sean wants you to send him a photo of this… this Dearg-due’s grave?”

  “He’s giving a feckin’ lecture about the Dearg-due in Prague. Read more of his e-mail.” Colm gestured impatiently at the paper in Eamonn’s hands. “He wants us to take a photo of both gravesites. And he wants us to make a pile of stones on each grave before we take the photos.”

  Daria stepped up to Eamonn and peered over his shoulder. “Why should he want you to make a pile of stones on the graves?” she asked.

  “Because that is the way to drive the Dearg-due back into her grave,” explained Annabel, who was reading over Eamonn’s other shoulder. She pointed to some words further down.

  The Dearg-due was said to be unaffected by garlic or sunlight or any of the other things that are said to keep other vampires away. It was only by raising a small cairn of stones on her grave that she could be pinned back beneath the earth and held there, until the stones were dispersed and the cairn broken up. Then she would be free to rise again from the dead to seduce and kill men.

  “I need the photos to show the cairn on each grave, to illustrate that point in my lecture.”

  Annabel read the last line of that paragraph and looked smugly at the others. “Seems simple enough to me. Why did you insist on leaving the bar so early?”

  Colm jabbed his finger at the paper. “Because daft old Uncle Sean has such complicated directions for finding the exact graves, that in order to follow his directions, we had to leave the bar while we can still figure out which graves it is he wants.”

  Annabel and Eamonn ran their eyes down the remainder of the page. Annabel, seeing the directions, nodded in agreement. Eamonn clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Feckin’ complicated is just the half of it, ain’t it?”

  Donal took the paper back from Eamonn. “Anyway, we need to go take these photos and then get home again to download them from the camera and send them off to Uncle Sean so he get a transparency made before his lecture.”

  “Get a transparency made?” exclaimed Daria. “Why not just project it from the computer onto the screen? Why does he want to make it so feckin’ complicated for himself?”

  “I don’t know, but that is his feckin’ problem, not ours!” Colm pushed away from the wall and teetered a moment but was then able to walk carefully across the empty plaza. “All we need do is worry about findin’ the right graves of the Dearg-due vampire-woman and take a photo of a cairn of stones on top each one of ’em!”

  “So, the first grave is at Christchurch Cathedral?” Daria wrapped an arm around Donal’s elbow and pulled him after Colm. Colm looked back at Eamonn and Annabel, who exchanged a glance, grinned, and shrugged their shoulders, proceeding to lock arms and follow him across the plaza.

  The shadows distorted the plaza in the night. Colm nearly tripped over the stone benches under the trees in the middle of the square and Daria lurched forward to grab his arm. He collapsed onto a bench and sat for a minute.

  “All this vampire talk in the dark is unnerving,” Daria confessed to Donal as they stood quietly around Colm.

  “Yeah, well, maybe me, too,” he agreed. “A bit.”

  Michael pulled Colm to his feet.

  “C’mon, Colm. The sooner the photos are taken, the sooner you can get into bed and the sooner the mornin’ will be here,” he urged his friend. Colm allowed himself to be guided forward and the group passed into the darker shadows of Blackfriars Street. More quietly now, their ale-fueled guffaws subdued by the hunt for the Dearg-due’s candidate graves, they followed Blackfriars as it became High Street and then merged into Henrietta Street. Christchurch loomed ahead, the streetlights near its great front doors creating pools of light that rippled into the darkness of the street.

  Michael and Colm still walked with arms stretched across each other’s shoulders. “Donal, what are the directions for finding the grave here?” Michael asked, pausing in the light before turning into the deep shadows of Cathedral Square, where it would be impossible to read Uncle Sean’s e-mail. Donal pulled the e-mail from his pocket and held it out for Daria to read this time. She found the directions and then looked up from the paper. “This one sounds like the easy one to locate!” she announced. She bent over the e-mail again and read aloud:

  Facing Christchurch, on the left side of the church, enter the square and follow the length of the building to the east end. Grandad always insisted that his great-grandmother told him when he was a little boy that the proper grave of the Dearg-due is there, directly below the last—the eighth, I think, maybe?—window of the church.

  “Vampire-woman, look out!” Eamonn said in a clear attempt to resurrect the good cheer of their expedition. Annabel laughed and even Daria and Donal grinned. Michael chuckled, appreciating the likelihood that a bunch of drunken almost-twenty-year-olds on a Saturday night were no more in danger from the Dearg-due than she was in danger from them. They filed into Cathedral Square on the left side of the church.

  The darkness there was nearly impenetrable. The church rose up beside them while a row of abandoned houses with boarded-up and broken windows faced them from the other side of the square. A tall fence of wrought-iron spikes surrounded the church, making a barrier between the church and the square. The square, paved with cobblestones, was nearly a half-foot lower than the small yard within the fence around the church. A side door into the church pierced the wall near the corner as they turned into the square, a gate in the fence providing access to this side entrance. A series of tall, narrow, but very dark windows—because they had been plastered over—pierced the wall at regular intervals, echoing the rows of narrow, spindly trees that pierced the square.

  “Vampire-woman, look out!” Eamonn called out his warning again across the empty square.

  “Vampire-woman, look out!” repeated Annabel and Daria, laughing again.

  “Yeah, look out, vampire-woman!” Donal and Michael joined the chorus. Now even Colm felt well enough to join the laughter, and the group slowly moved down the square, laughing and calling out repeated warnings to the Dearg-due. Navi
gating the cobblestone plaza in the dark seemed to take an eternity, but they finally arrived at the east end of the cathedral. There seemed to be repair work set to begin, as a portion of the square was cordoned off with traffic cones and rope, a wheelbarrow, bags of concrete mix and piles of gravel as well as bricks and cobblestones.

  They turned and faced the cathedral wall. The last window of the series rose before them. Donal marched bravely to the fence and grasped the wrought-iron spears.

  “Wait!” Daria gasped out between laughter. “You can’t climb over this fence, Donal! You’ll end up pierced and hanging off the end of one of those spear points!”

  Donal, grasping the fence, examined the sharp ends of the spears more closely.

  “I’m such a gobshite! You might be right, Daria,” he admitted, laughing at his predicament. “That woulda made a fine mess now, wouldn’t it?” He turned and looked at her. “But then, how do we get in?”

  “Feckin’ eejit!’ exclaimed Eamonn. “There’s the gate in the fence down at the door. We passed it when we first turned into the square. Is your brain so ale-addled that you didn’t see it?” He shook his head, laughing at Donal’s intoxication. “Hold on and I’ll be right back!” He darted back down the length of the square. They heard the squeals of the gate’s rusty hinges and the crunching of Eamonn’s feet on the pebbles and gravel that filled the yard beneath the windows.

  “Build a cairn of feckin’ stones on the feckin’ grave?” Eamonn exclaimed as he came up to Donal, now facing his friend through the fence. “The whole yard is nothing but feckin’ stones! Any feckin’ graves here are already covered with stones! Is your uncle feckin’ daft or what?” he demanded to know, guffawing even as his indignation burst out.

  “Well, covered with feckin’ stones it may be,” pointed out Daria, “but the stones aren’t built into a cairn!” She laughed, repeating Eamonn’s words back at him.

  “How do you want to make the feckin’ cairn, then?” Eamonn demanded to know, laughing even as he tried to maintain his mock fury. He knelt down and tried to push handfuls of pebbles and gravel into a cairn but they all ran out between his fingers like water, refusing to stay in place atop each other.

  “Jaysis! Just hold your feckin’ breath for just a minute, will you?” insisted Annabel. “We’ll get the feckin’ stones for you.” She grabbed Daria’s arm and led her over to the construction materials at the end of the square. They each picked up three or four bricks from beside the wheelbarrow and brought them back to the fence, passing them between the fence posts to Eamonn. He took them and arranged four to make a square on the ground beneath the window and then set three more atop those, making an alternating pattern.

  He looked around the square. “Feel that, vampire-woman?” he called. “We’re making the cairn! We’re pinning you back under the earth!” The group burst out in laughter, which echoed around the desolate emptiness of the square. “Feel that?” he repeated. “You’re doomed, vampire-woman! Driven back under the earth, you’ll be!” He reached for more bricks. Colm, having watched the goings-on, darted to where the girls had gotten the bricks and brought back one in each hand. He gave them to Eamonn and they were arranged atop the others, making the cairn complete. Eamonn stood to survey his work and then turned to gesture in dramatic fashion around the square.

  “Behold!” he announced. “The doom of the vampire-woman is complete!”

  More laughter filled the night.

  Alessandro’s attack startled the Dearg-due, causing her to release both his mouth and the hand she had held down. They each screamed at the other in fury as the medal pressed against her face, clouds of white steam hissing from under the medal that touched what was left of her flesh. She fell back, gasping for breath and wrenching his hand away from her face with such force that it was all he could do to keep hold of the precious medal and not drop it onto the floor. She stumbled back across the room, wordless pain and anger rising from her throat. Alessandro leapt from the bed and brandished the Infant of Prague medal as if it were a dagger. He moved toward the door, but she was quicker than he was and darted to block his escape.

  “What do you have there?” she spat at him, spreading her arms to block any attempt he might make to slip past her and out the door. The voluminous funereal drapery hung from her arms and body and made her seem much bulkier than he had imagined. A deep branding mark had been burned into her forehead by the medal, tendrils of white steam still curling from it into the air. “Nothing has ever hurt like that. Not since… Not since my husband beat me to death.”

  “It is the Infant of Prague,” Alessandro boasted, holding it up for her to see. “The image of the defender of Prague showed me your true self that night on the Charles Bridge when I touched it in my coat pocket. But I could not bring myself to believe that it was really you that I had seen. I wanted so much for the monster that I saw to not be you! But then… we learned the truth. We learned that it was you, the Dearg-due come to Prague from Ireland, and I knew that I had seen the truth.”

  “We? Who is this ‘we’ that learned I had come to Prague from Ireland?” she demanded to know.

  Alessandro realized he had made a mistake in giving her more information. “Who the ‘we’ is does not matter,” he retorted. “What matters is that we know that you and George have tricked that poor girl Magdalena into helping you destroy the city. But we will stop you before you can do that! “

  Elizabeth, in her true self, laughed heartily, tossing her head back. “Tricked that poor girl? Is that what you believe? Let me tell you the truth, Alessandro. George and I had nothing to do with tricking that poor girl Magdalena, as you like to call her. She called both George and me here. It is she who wanted us, not the other way around.” She reached out to grab his extended hand holding the medal, but he sidestepped her reach, though not quickly enough to escape her altogether. Her talons cut open deep streaks of red across his knuckles and the back of his hand, which burned as intensely as any burn he had ever gotten by accidently touching a hot pan on a stove. He thrust his knuckles into his mouth to assuage the pain, never taking his eyes off her.

  She took another step to the side, coming closer to the bed. He took a step as well, moving closer to the door. He brought his knuckles out of his mouth, holding the medal in his hand up as a shield. “Why is she moving away from the door?” he wondered. “Maybe if I move quickly enough, I can get away after all.”

  “Why is it that the three of you want to destroy the city?” Alessandro asked aloud, hoping that if the Dearg-due kept talking, he might think of a way to distract her enough to step further away from the door.

  “Magdalena has no intention of destroying the city,” the Dearg-due confessed, her tattered shroud swaying gently as she moved. “She wants to clear the name of an old witch burned by a crowd here more than six hundred years ago. It is unfortunate that the only way to clear Fen’ka’s name is to destroy the city.” She laughed, a hideous scornful cackle that made Alessandro shiver. He stepped closer to the door.

  “But that is none of your concern. Magdalena told us that you were at the Old-New Synagogue recently, trying to get up into the attic. Now, what might there be in that attic that you would be interested in?” the Dearg-due asked him. “It has been closed and sealed since the death of Rabbi Loew. Why did you think you could simply walk in and obtain whatever it was you were looking for? But now that we know you have been interfering in Magdalena’s project to clear the name of the old witch, we must stop you before you do any real damage.”

  Elizabeth rushed at him, catching hold of his arm. He twisted around to face her, bringing up his other hand with the Infant of Prague, intending to drive it into her face again. She ducked, however, and the medal was pinned against the shards of fabric that covered her shoulder. The cloth hissed and smoked and curled away from the medal as if burning, and despite the fabric between the medal and the Dearg-due’s body, the scent of burning flesh hung in the air. They stood frozen in a tableau of battle until Eliz
abeth wrenched herself away from the medal. She dropped his arm.

  Alessandro’s instinct was to jump to the door but he hesitated. “What if I can destroy her, right now, with the medal?” he thought. “Then we won’t have to wait for Sean’s nephews to build that cairn. What if they have no intention of ever building it? This may be our only chance to rid ourselves of the Dearg-due.”

  Elizabeth cringed before him, writhing about in an attempt to reach her shoulder.

  “You’ve never traveled outside Ireland before, have you?” Alessandro asked. “You’ve never had to face anyone except on your own playing field, have you?”

  “No, that is true,” she admitted, turning back towards him and letting her shoulder smoke. “I had no idea the Infant of Prague would defend his territory so zealously. But do not think that gives you the upper hand.”

  “Perhaps not entirely,” Alessandro agreed. “But enough of an upper hand that you are there and I am standing here, not on the bed where you…”

  “Where I what, Alessandro?” she interrupted him. “Where I was about to kill you? Is that what you thought I wanted?”

  Alessandro took a breath. “Isn’t that what you do, Elizabeth? Seduce and kill men?” He almost choked as he said her name in this context, facing her as the Dearg-due and not a beautiful, enticing academic.

  “I wanted you, Alessandro,” she conceded after a pause, her shroud fluttering around her. “I wanted you and I was much more interested in your body and satiating my hunger for physical love. But then, afterwards, yes… I would have satisfied my other hunger.” She looked him directly in the eye, and even now, her disguise torn away, he could feel the exertion of her power on his body. The ache in his groin sprang to life again with a ferocity that would have surprised him even under the most perfect of circumstances.

  “I want you, Alessandro. More than any woman in your life has ever wanted you.” She stepped closer. His feet refused to obey his brain’s command to run. She bent down and reached out, as if to fumble with the snap and zipper of his pants. Fireworks exploded in his mind, the roar and the colors making it impossible for him to think. He felt her talons slip inside his now open trousers.