The Dark Beloved
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Book One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Book Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Helen Falconer
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Sometimes the only way to save the one you love . . . is to leave them.
Aoife, the changeling girl, has escaped from the fairy world for ordinary human life. She faces new challenges – otherworldly powers, a sister who shouldn’t exist, family and friends who had believed her dead for months.
Shay, love of her life, is her only constant. But when he tells her they can’t be together, her world collapses.
And dark forces are on the move. Shay is now in danger, trapped in his own web of desire. To save her beloved, Aoife must go back to the land of nightmare, magic and adventure . . .
A story dedicated to Alana Quinn
9th March 2001–6th July 2005
Grá: The Irish word for love, with
connotations of hunger and desire.
A grá is no ordinary, comfortable, fireside
sort of a love. It is a mad love, a wild love,
a hunger, a longing, a terrible insatiable
desire that cannot be turned aside.
John McCarthy of Kilduff
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Aoife couldn’t sleep. Maybe because the moon was so bright.
Was Shay safely at home by now?
Was he lying awake and thinking of her at this moment, just as she was thinking of him?
She imagined the quiet farmer’s son stretched out on his bed in the house out on the bog, staring out of the window at the same full moon. Kept awake by the same thoughts (he’d finally said, ‘I love you, Aoife O’Connor’). On impulse, she turned over in the bed and reached for her phone to text him, even though it was the middle of the night. But then she remembered that her phone was lost on a beach in the otherworld, and Shay Foley’s phone was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Outside the window, the moon was sinking lower and larger and more golden over the Mayo mountains, pouring into her bedroom through the bare, black branches of the ash tree. Strange – and rather sad – how the leaves were already flown. When she had left this world, it had been May: the hawthorn out, fields green and flowering. And now, after less than two days away, it was October.
No, that was wrong – it might feel to her as if she had been away for less than two days, but in this world she and Shay had been missing for five months, and everyone had thought they were dead.
And that, Aoife realized suddenly, was the real reason why she couldn’t sleep – it wasn’t the brightness of the sinking moon; it was because even though everything in this room belonged to her, it wasn’t her bedroom any more – it was her shrine.
On the chest of drawers was an embarrassingly huge silver-framed portrait of herself – last year’s school photo blown up to poster-size, smiling fakely, her long red-gold hair brushed and tied too neatly back; the collar of her polo shirt clean, white and ironed. Candles were grouped around the portrait (when she’d arrived home earlier that evening, they’d all been burning in her memory), and there was a small jade vase of autumn roses, two plaster angels, a crucifix and a lot of Mass cards.
It didn’t stop there. Everywhere on the walls were more photos of herself – hundreds of which she didn’t even remember having been taken: childhood holidays that were only a blur in her mind. It was lovely to find her whole life had been recorded by her parents with such love, but . . .
I’m wide awake now, so I might as well do something about it.
She turned on the bedside light and got out of bed in her T-shirt. She was back from the dead, and she was here to stay, and she needed to make this room fit for a living teenage girl.
The first thing she did was take down the framed portrait and stick it under the bed. There was an unnerving amount of space under there – the years of clutter had been cleaned away: old sweet wrappers, dead make-up, shoes and bras too small. Next, she swept the candles and Mass cards into the top drawer of the press, where she found all her tops had been neatly folded instead of crammed in as usual. She unpinned half the photos from the wall, leaving only the ones of herself and Carla and a few other friends – the way it had used to be before.
She checked the result. It was better, but still wrong. Her books were arranged too neatly on the shelves, all the spines turned out. There were no clothes or copy books on the carpet. The badly ripped music posters had been laminated. Even her guitar had been scrubbed – scrubbed! – and a silver ribbon tied around its neck. The things that parents do when they think their child is dead.
She untied the ribbon, and sat down on the bed with the battered old instrument in her arms. The familiar shape and weight made her feel more like herself. She ran her fingertips gently over the strings. If it hadn’t been the middle of the night, she would have struck a few chords. A lyric surfaced in her mind:
Lonely in my grave tonight,
I dream of you, I dream of flight . . .
A song for Shay, rising from her subconscious.
Outside in the night, a stick snapped and footsteps padded down the side of the house. Hastily setting aside the guitar, Aoife went to stand to one side of the window, so she could see out without being seen. A badger emerged from round the corner, plodded slowly across the garden, heaved its bulk over the wall and lumbered up the faint track that bisected the steep and stony field. Many years ago, she and Carla, in sparkly dresses with stiff wings, had pretended that very track was a fairy road. So strange how, years later, the road had turned out to be real. If she followed it now, all the way, it would take her straight across the fields as far as Lois Munnelly’s bungalow – which had been built across it five years ago – then up into the mountains, across the bog, and straight to that black pool beneath the hawthorns. And then . . .
Down.
Sinking feet-first through the icy water . . .
Down.
Was the Beloved still waiting for her, under the water, his arms outstretched?
His midnight eyes.
For a long, nauseous moment she remembered how she had felt beside him at the altar, when he had pressed her fist into the empty hole behind his ribs. No heart.
Stop. Don’t think about it.
She was safely home, and Dorocha the Beloved was far behind her – raging coldly beneath the Connacht earth. He had wanted to marry her, but Shay’s love had protected her like a shield.
The badger’s waddling form disappeared over the ditch at the top of the field. Fiercely shaking off the night, Aoife turned back into the room. Back into her life.
Beside the window stood her ancient PC, polished clean. She sat down on the swivel chair at the desk and touched the keyboard. It didn’t respond. She sat swinging slowly from side to side, staring at the
black screen. Thinking.
Her mother had strongly advised Aoife not to look at her tribute page – according to Maeve, it was ‘morbid and depressing and a bit silly’. Yet now, wide awake and restless in the middle of the night, it was beyond tempting to find out what her friends had said about her when they’d thought she was dead. After all, how many teenage girls got the chance to be at their own funeral? Making up her mind, she crouched to turn the computer on under the desk, then sat back on the chair.
The ageing PC took a while to wake – its wheezing and whirring loud in the utter silence of the small stone house – but at last the screen crawled to life. She logged on to her Facebook page, and found the link – RIP Aoife O’Connor – which had been added to her wall five months ago, in May. There was also another link – RIP Shay Foley. She clicked on Shay’s link first, with a sudden urge to see his face. A black-rimmed page came up, with plenty of kind and regretful messages from Gaelic football coaches and fellow players, including players from other teams:
Such great potential.
Fast, accurate, unbeatable on the ball.
His contribution will be sorely missed.
The Mayo manager had written:
A great loss. Shay Foley would surely have made the team.
In his tribute picture, he was on the GAA field, and had clearly just scored a point. The ball was sailing between the posts, and everyone else had their hands in the air. He himself was already in the act of turning away, long legs bent at the knee, one shoulder lowered – revealing the strong curve of his neck, the sloping line of his jaw. The silver earring, high in his ear. His black, cropped hair.
With a warm rush of loneliness for him in her heart, she checked her own tribute page.
Sweetest Aoife, RIP.
To our darling friend Aoife O’Connor from all your friends. We love you so much. You are in our prayers and in our hearts.
Thankfully, her tribute picture was much more flattering than the framed school photograph on the dresser – in it, she was wearing a dark turquoise dress which exactly matched her eyes, and her loose red-gold hair fell slightly curling around her pale oval face, as if she’d plaited it wet. A border of digital lilies surrounded the page, and a praying angel, wings slightly fluttering, knelt at the foot of it. Who had created this page? Carla?
She scrolled down, checking out the photos and videos.
Jessica had posted a clip that had been recorded in Jessica’s bedroom a couple of years ago, of Aoife singing one of her own songs and playing her guitar. It was nice to be ‘remembered’ that way – but a bit of a pity the video was so old, because it meant the song was embarrassingly bad.
Jessica’s best friend Aisling had put up a video of Aoife dancing like a lunatic with Carla at the last Easter disco, which was pretty hilarious.
Lois Munnelly had got in on the act, posting a photo Aoife definitely didn’t remember ever being taken – of Lois, Aoife and Sinead Ferguson in blue national school uniform, with their arms around each other, acting as if they were best friends. Aoife trawled her memory. When had the three of them ever posed for a picture together? Surely they’d hated each other even way back then, when they were . . . what? Ten?
Sinead had liked and commented on the Lois picture:
Aoife, we miss you so much our darling friend, you should have confided in us, the three of us were so close, we would have helped you, I will never understand but I hope you and Shay experience true love in heaven, Your best friend, Sinead xxxxx
Ugh. Crap. This must be what her mother had been warning her about when she’d told her not to look. Obviously it hadn’t taken long before Sinead had started going around claiming that Aoife and Shay had jumped off the cliff together in some kind of stupid lovers’ suicide pact.
Unfortunately, it turned out that it wasn’t just Sinead – underneath were about fifty similar posts, all from school friends who should have known better. Including Jessica and Aisling. Including, in fact, pretty much the whole teenage population of Kilduff:
Rest in peace, may God heal your broken hearts, star-crossed lovers.
Ugh.
Whatever kept you and Shay apart in life, may God fix in heaven.
Crap.
We will never understand why you jumped, but God will understand.
Aoife scrolled on down, checking anxiously for Carla’s tribute. Surely her actual best friend wouldn’t have imagined that Aoife would be so thick as to throw herself off a cliff out of love for a boy she’d only just met. Yet however far down she scrolled – and she was scanning very fast now – she couldn’t find anything from Carla, either way.
How? Why?
Had Carla not had one word to say about Aoife’s tragic death? Posted not one picture in her memory? Surely Carla had to have said something. Just as Aoife was starting to feel hurt as well as confused, she thought to check her private messages on her own page.
It turned out that over the last four months, Carla had written a great deal. Hundreds of messages, in fact.
For instance, in May:
Aoife I’m not posting any stupid RIP on that stupid tribute page because I know you are alive because I know YOU ARE NOT A COMPLETE IDIOT ENOUGH TO JUMP OFF A CLIFF WITH A BOY YOU’D ONLY JUST GOT TO KNOW!! Plus obviously you would have told me if you were in love with Shay. CALL ME
In June:
A counsellor came to our school and said I was in denial and I said im not and she said you are and I said stop denying im not in denial ☺ I do know this isn’t funny ☹ Aoife, if you are reading this get to a phone and CALL ME!!!!!!!!!
July:
You would have told me if you were in love with Shay, I know it
August:
Aoife if you have been kidnapped by John Joe and are reading this try to get to a phone and CALL ME!!!
September:
If you are murdered and reading this from the afterlife please give me a sign, I promise you I will avenge you
Earlier in October:
I wont be scared give me a sign
Only a few days ago, Carla had posted:
Aoife was that u moved my toothbrush to the other side of the sink??????? ☺☺☺☺ Move it again if it was you I’ve put it back now!!!
An hour later:
Please move it
Another hour later again:
I miss you, Aoife ☹
Aoife, smiling, with a lump in her throat, clicked her messages away. She had spoken to Carla on the phone as soon as she’d got back to the human world yesterday evening, and she couldn’t wait to see her best friend in the flesh. Before leaving her own page, she altered her status, to: I’m back, folks!!!!! Then checked out Carla’s page.
And stared.
And stared.
It was a huge shock to her, how much her best friend had changed – all the more so because it felt as if she’d last seen Carla only two days ago, rather than five months ago, in May. Back then, her best friend had been prettily plump, with soft brown hair curling to her shoulders. But in her recently updated profile picture, Carla seemed to have lost every kilo of puppy fat. She had visible cheekbones, which made her brown eyes seem huge. Her soft brown crop had grown several centimetres and had been straightened and layered, with gold and blonde highlights. Judging by another picture, where she was standing next to her mother, she had even grown a few centimetres . . .
After drinking in this transformation for a full minute, mouth open, Aoife’s eyes drifted to Carla’s profile details.
In a relationship with KD
Aoife shot upright on her chair. Surely not! Yet when she clicked ‘KD’, the hyperlink took her straight to Killian Doherty’s profile. There was the notoriously unfaithful builder’s son, as handsome as ever, with his white-blond hair and silvery grey eyes, sitting on the steps of his parents’ expensive three-storey house. This was unbelievable. Never in the history of his many ‘relationships’ had Killian Doherty gone out with a girl for more than a week before dumping her by text. Yet Kil
lian and Carla had got together before Aoife disappeared, and in the human world, that was . . . Five months ago. Unbelievable!
‘Aoife . . .’
She glanced up from the computer: someone had just called her name – although very softly.
‘Eeee . . . fah . . .’
She jumped up to go to her bedroom door to listen.
‘Aoife . . .’
But it wasn’t coming from her parents’ bedroom across the landing, where the little girl, the real Eva O’Connor, lay asleep between them in the bed.
‘Eeee . . . fah . . .’
It was coming from outside the house! With a sudden leap of her heart, Aoife ran back across the room to the window and opened it, leaning out. It was still only five in the morning, and almost moonless now, but just visible in the light from the window, grinning up at her from below, was a blonde-haired, skinny girl wearing a sheep onesie and wellington boots. If Aoife hadn’t checked Facebook . . .
‘Carla! Oh my God! Hang on a sec, I’ll be right down!’
Dragging on trackies and a hoodie over her T-shirt, she jumped up onto the windowsill like a cat and, without thinking, and despite Carla’s startled cry of ‘Careful!’ sprang straight out of the window.
As she glided through the air, it struck her that she probably shouldn’t have done this to Carla without warning. She wasn’t flying, but the trajectory of her spring had taken her far out through the branches of the ash tree, and now she was passing right over Carla’s astonished gaze. Pointing her feet, Aoife came down rather clumsily in the flowerbed on the near side of the garden wall, picked herself up and rushed back across the grass into her best friend’s eager arms.
CHAPTER TWO
‘You nearly gave me a heart attack, ya big fool!’ Carla was laughing and crying at the same time, while hugging Aoife so tight she could hardly breathe. ‘You could have broken your leg jumping out of the window like that!’