Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  Bronagh just stood there, gobsmacked. The wind made her pant legs flap against her ankles, and she didn’t stop Niall as he brushed his way past her and began walking down the road toward town.

  “Wait!”

  Niall heard her voice right after he glimpsed a group of men waiting at a bend in the road, beyond the trees. It was too far to see any of them clearly. But one had something heavy in his hands. He looked like Donald Cremin. The sun covered them in foggy white coronas, like angels of death. No place left to run. Niall turned and saw Bronagh waving him back. She had got into her patrol car already.

  “No hanging party, then?” he asked.

  “Just get in,” Bronagh answered, looking at the men in the field already moving toward the sound of her voice.

  When they drove past the crooked turn where the trees met the asphalt, Donald Cremin was close enough that Niall could see how tightly his fingers gripped that bat.

  “Why the change of heart?” asked Niall, watching Bronagh feverishly rummaging through the glove box, finally finding a scrap of half-eaten chocolate. “You could have just handed me over to them, returned later, and filed a report. No traces back to you.”

  “Did you ever have a best friend?” said Bronagh, spitting the chocolate out the window because it had gone bad. “Someone you know so well you can think the same thing the moment before they do?” She rolled the window back up and set her jaw firmly to avoid letting this long-haired mud crawler see into her heart. “Someone who finishes your sentences? And lies for you to her own parents? Ever know anyone like that?”

  Niall thought of little Danny Egan back home. That bus. And those wax-dummy child’s legs that lived again because he drew them on paper. But he just nodded and let Bronagh continue. The car sped past the old brook at the edge of Castletownbere and continued on past the Coast Guard station. The only sound inside the car was Bronagh’s guilt, which had shape-shifted into a pair of lungs, trying to get enough air for confession.

  “When I was seven,” she continued, “all I wanted in the world was a pair of black shoes. They were shiny and had a button down the side. Deadly. Most beautiful things I’d ever seen. So I went into the shop right here on Main Street, and waited for the saleslady to take a smoke break. I took a pair, right? Put them into my book bag and walked home as slowly as I could.” Bronagh held a whole hand to her lips, as if to help the words find their way out. “They were too big. I had to put newspaper into them to make them fit. But they were only gorgeous. I went to Rosie’s house, and we took turns parading them in front of the mirror in the hallway. Then the doorbell rang. The saleslady had brought the gardaí.” She sniffled now, and not just at the memory. Because Rosie was dead and didn’t have to be. “Róisín didn’t even wait for me to blubber some shite excuse. She looked them dead in the eye and copped to stealing the shoes herself. Her father spanked her so she couldn’t walk for the rest of the week. And she never asked for anything in return. Not once.”

  The asphalt wound into serpentine turns with wet pine trees on either side. Niall recognized it as the road he’d wandered like a half-dead pilgrim two days earlier.

  “But you could do something for Aoife?”

  “Look at it this way,” said Bronagh, trying to shake off the sorrow. “She was the only one left. What would you have done?”

  “Where is she, Bronagh?”

  Bronagh pursed her lips in reply and pulled over onto the shoulder. She unlocked the passenger door and reached into the backseat for something that she threw into Niall’s lap.

  It was a plastic bag, containing the old clothes and drawing paper he’d left at the bed-and-breakfast.

  “Mrs. Crimmins said she didn’t want the likes of you setting foot in her house ever again,” said Bronagh, gesturing for him to get out. “Lots of other people feel the same way, after what you did at Sacred Heart.”

  “I did nothing. And you know it.”

  Bronagh sent him a smile as bitter as a walnut. There was no joy in her voice as she set the terms of the deal that would save them both. “Just as you know I haven’t a clue where Aoife is or what happened to her. I’m just a dumb garda. Isn’t that right?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re a good enough sort, Niall,” she said, with a sigh she hadn’t meant to let out. “Just came by looking in the wrong places, is all.”

  Niall opened the door and got out. The trees swooshed in the wind. He had no idea if they were trying to tell him something or if they just talked among themselves. “If you see her again?” Niall said. “Tell her I hope she finds what she’s looking for.”

  But Bronagh had already turned the car around and was headed back to town. Because some answers cost too much.

  NIALL HAD WALKED for hours, watching the shadows grow longer. The fog rolled up behind him like it was nosy about where he was going. Then he heard something he thought was another loose spare part from his own imagination. An engine, alternately revving up and downshifting in the curves.

  A motorcycle.

  Sure, Niall thought with a hysterical laugh, that’s just perfect. It’s Jim’s old Vincent Comet, isn’t it, coming to haunt me all the way back to shagging Ballymun? The sound bounced off the cliffs, growing fainter, then stronger again. Niall turned and saw a lone headlight. The cursed rider, he thought, rising from his grave atop the hillside every night, to torment those who refuse to believe in him. He reached into his pocket for the knife blade and held it hidden inside his hand.

  When the motorcycle came closer, Niall could see that it was black, not red.

  The rider slowed down and came to a stop in front of him. It reached up and flipped open the visor with a jaunty snap. He recognized the face.

  “Didja find who you were looking for?” asked the same young woman who had scared the life out of him once already. Her smile enjoyed that he couldn’t find one anywhere on his own face.

  “Not everyone,” Niall finally answered, pocketing the weapon as discreetly as he could.

  “Hop on back,” she said. “I’m going east. Your lucky day.”

  “Don’t think so. I want to live to see tomorrow. But thanks all the same.”

  The rider nodded, flipping the visor back down. Niall was sure her smile was still on, though, because the plastic seemed to glow from the inside. “Don’t come back here,” she said evenly, and yanked on the gas, propelling the motorcycle up the next hill in five seconds flat. He looked back down the road and saw the fog hovering there, daring him not to follow that advice.

  “Rest easy, Aoife,” he said as he walked on, away from Castletownbere.

  • 9 •

  The train was so empty Niall gave a start each time the announcer came on. He had been dozing, allowing wolves to creep into his dreams and scavenge around. Now he jumped awake and banged his head on the window.

  “The next station is Thurles. This train is for Dublin Heuston. Please note that there is no food service until the terminus. Thank you for traveling with Iarnród Éireann.”

  So this is what total failure looks like, Niall thought, looking out the window. When he’d got to Cork City, he was two euros short of being able to afford the ticket back home on the last train of the night and had to beg in the street near the taxi stand. The cabbies finally grew so disgusted one of them gave him the money, if he promised never to return. The shame had burned in his throat as he said the words. The fella had laughed as he tossed Niall the two-euro piece. It still stung.

  The landscape whizzed past outside, blurring all the evening trees into one black drape. Nothing moved out there. Niall began to imagine that Jim’s fairy-tale world existed just beyond a horizon that was already too dark for him to see. And why not? Despite mobile phone towers, highways, and petrol stations, something from the past might have survived the march of progress, if only it was hid cleverly enough. Couldn’t it? Something like a wolf’s lair. Or a golden hall fit for Princess Aisling. Or even a hidden wizard’s workshop, from which spells and incantations from
an ancient world continued to spill over into ours.

  A wizard?

  Despite his swollen ankle and aching limbs, Niall bolted fully awake. An image flickered inside his head just behind the eyes and tried to connect with the parts of his brain that didn’t want to go to sleep. Because Róisín had described something like that near the end of her diary, hadn’t she? She’d sat in a train just like this one (Niall even pretended she and her sisters had huddled in the very spot where he now sat) when Aoife confessed to taking Jim’s wallet from his corpse and finding his secret map.

  Another thought struck him harder than Donald Cremin’s baseball bat would have. What if Jim’s map hadn’t all been made up? And what if those “electrical charges” emanating from the wizard’s head and fingertips weren’t meant to be spells but a way to communicate with someone he couldn’t see?

  It couldn’t be. Niall reached back where he kept the diary and yanked it out. His hands shook as he flipped to the pages where he’d read that description. “A male figure,” Róisín had written in her jagged script, who was “operating what looked like a radio.” And there was something more, if he remembered correctly. The wizard was really a prince, whose legs were destroyed underneath a fallen horse. He was waiting only for his remorseless brother, Euan, to come murder him.

  Róisín couldn’t remember his name then, but Niall could. Because Jim had told everyone, over and over again, in his fairy tale about Euan’s wolf curse.

  The legless prince’s name was Ned.

  Niall was about to close the diary, when a single sheet of rumpled paper fell out of a back pocket of the book that he hadn’t noticed before and fluttered to the ground.

  “Would you like something from the trolley, sir?” said a voice above him as he bent down to retrieve it.

  He looked up into the eyes of a sleepy young woman balancing a top-heavy cart laden with hot coffee and sandwiches. Her uniform had what looked like gobs of old mustard on it.

  “Erm, I thought there was no service?” he said, hiding his new treasure inside both palms.

  “They never change that tape,” said the woman, winking at him. “Some tea?”

  “No thanks, love,” he said, sucking up the warmth that came with the only smile he’d got in days. She moved on, waving one hand. He waited until she was gone before unfolding the yellowed sheet.

  It was Jim’s uncensored brain, transformed into ink and poured onto paper.

  Here was the dead woman on the trail, and there the massive ice wall that no traveler could penetrate. But Niall traced his finger farther to the east, looking for something specific. The ink had smudged, just as Róisín had said, but he could still make out what it was supposed to be.

  It was a castle, with Ned sitting inside, sending his waves out into the ether for anybody to pick up. And there was a detail Róisín either hadn’t noticed or didn’t have time to write down. A set of double lines ran into Jim’s paper forest. It was crude, but it was clear what Jim had intended to portray.

  Train tracks.

  They ended near a mountain. Jim had drawn flowers all over it, as if the rock itself grew fragile beauty right out of the granite. Magic from the princely wizard’s hidden home. Almost a girlish impulse to prettify an otherwise foreboding landscape. Niall closed his eyes and took it all in, trying to remember everything he’d read in both diaries. Jim had said something to Fiona about where he was from, hadn’t he? Or had it been someone else who’d mentioned where he lived? Niall rummaged around in his bag for Fiona’s tale until he remembered he’d traded diaries with the crafty Mary Catherine. Wait a second. Had it been Róisín’s unknown radio friend, instead, who’d talked about a castle deep in the forest? He couldn’t recall. The train jerked as it slowed. It would be Thurles in a minute.

  He looked up at an Iarnród Éireann intercity map above his head, following the real tracks as they went toward Thurles, past Templemore and Ballybrophy. Then he compared the plastic map with the crumpled one in his hand and saw Jim’s clumsy tracks ending exactly where the train company’s helpful cartographer had put the next station.

  The wizard, real or imaginary, lived near Portlaoise.

  The Slieve Bloom Mountains, covered in purple bluebells in the spring, lay right nearby. Niall had played on their slopes as a boy. He and Danny had got lost there once after dark, finding their way home only because the flower petals reflected the light of the moon long enough to see the trail.

  Shaking in equal parts excitement and apprehension, Niall leaned back and closed his eyes for a second. The thrill of the chase, extinguished less than two hours ago by a group of heartless cabbies, throbbed alive again.

  If you exist, he said to the wizard he couldn’t quite see yet in his mind, I’ll find you. And I’ve more curses put on me already than you have up your sleeve, so do your worst.

  THE MOON WAS nearly down but would still shine bleakly for at least another hour, Niall reckoned, as he picked a trail that led deeper into the forest. From the Portlaoise train station, it had been simple enough to find the southeasternmost edge of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, which rose out of the ground like a sleeping creature awaiting the coming of the sun. He found his old boy-reflexes and tried to navigate his way west as he once had, using the sea of illuminated bluebells for a guide. But as the last streetlights from Portlaoise vanished behind him, he realized his first mistake.

  The month of May was coming to an end. And the few surviving bluebells he could glimpse near his boots had withered and died. All around him, the stalks had turned brown and dry. Ahead of him, there was the kind of featureless darkness only children know how to conjure up properly in their nightmares.

  “Killed off the flowers didja, ya old wizard?” he asked the invisible trail, convincing himself he sensed a presence not far away. “I’ll find ya anyway.”

  Niall had taken a few half-running steps up a hill when his eyes played tricks on him. At first, he thought he had been granted what his imagination had hoped for. Then he accepted that what he saw was real. He knelt down and touched something small and frail, which had opened all five petals to welcome him into its silent world.

  The tiniest wood anemone, newly born, stood at attention, drinking in the cold rays of the moon.

  Niall barely touched it with his forefinger, feeling the paper-thin texture, rippled like a dragonfly’s wing. Then he lifted his head and knew he’d have guidance into even the darkest part of the forest. Because the little flower wasn’t alone. As far as Niall could see, the moon was refracted by legions of white anemones lighting up the path before him even more brightly than it had been years ago, when him and Danny tried to get home before their fears got them first.

  “A starry carpet, Róisín,” he said, feeling something settle inside and give him the only rest he’d felt since picking up that strange package inside the dead-letter cage a million years ago. He steered a path toward the one part of the mountain he’d never visited, feeling the wizard’s invisible rays already scouring the treetops, looking for intruders.

  NIALL KNEW WELL enough that wizards don’t play the piano.

  And yet, there it was: expert hands conjuring up what sounded like Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.” Whoever it was chose to perform it fast, at almost breakneck speed. He also thought, if only for a second, he could hear humming.

  Of all the mythical creatures Niall had ever heard of, it was mostly mermaids who used song to lure travelers into lethal traps. Powerful practitioners of the dark arts, he imagined, would instead enchant the animals of the forest to attack obvious enemies or cast spells to paralyze a stranger like himself. But music, such as he heard seeping through the dense thicket in front of him, belonged inside a smoky saloon back in the 1920s. And as he crept past bunches of ramrod-straight wild arum, their red fruitlike seedheads bursting with spring juices, he could imagine a vaudeville musician entertaining the rabbits and deer in a peaceful grove. He cleared a mess of brambles that tore up the jeans Mrs. Crimmins had given him and cu
rsed.

  Just as invisibly as the tinkly piano sounds had emanated, they stopped.

  Damn! Niall wanted to kick himself for being so bloody stupid. He should know better than to stumble about in here without a map. If wizards did exist, he thought, they had thousands of years of experience listening to heavy-footed amateur detectives entering their lands. He cleared a copse of birch trees, which had begun to absorb the faint shimmer of dawn. The entire forest, except for a dark spot in a natural valley just past an overhang drop-off less than fifty meters away, was waking up. Niall looked around for his next route and realized something he hadn’t paid attention to earlier.

  Not once had he heard so much as a mouse clear its throat. No jay scuttled its wings, nor did any badger probe the defenses of its nest. It was as if every creature watched and waited for Niall to find what he so obviously sought. Or for it to find me, he thought to himself as he pushed on. The anemones, so plentiful and brave in numbers earlier, grew thinner on the ground and were soon gone. Fear is biological, not intellectual, he guessed. It was, he would later recall, as if they sensed what lay down in the valley below and just out of sight. We’ve led you this far, they seemed to say, and even we dare not shine the light for you any farther.

  He inched out on the promontory until the tips of his soiled boots stuck into thin air. Below, twin wisps of blue smoke competed to see which would reach a low-hanging cloud faster than the other. Niall couldn’t see a chimney, or even a roof down there, but it was too heavy a fire to be random campers. There was a house somewhere; he was sure of it. He closed his eyes and smelled what the fire was made of. There was maple, maybe some ash. Peat, definitely, and lots of it. Someone was getting cozy. Someone who lived there.