One night he came around sufficiently to find the room in darkness, stifling with heat, the only light that of four white candles that burned steadily without a trace of breeze to dance upon. Angus was poised over a basin of water, a low guttural crooning coming through closed lips and a vial of dark fluid that looked like ink held in his hand.
“Awake are ye, boy?” Angus had said gruffly. “Here, drink this.”
A drink was put to his lips and he gulped thirstily, it tasted of honeyed flowers, though, and did little to calm the raging thirst that plagued his very dreams.
Angus sat upon the floor, and through bleary, fever-impaired vision, Casey noted that he was wearing an odd sort of garment. It was white and loose, and seemed to ripple, though the air was tremendously still.
“What are ye doin’?” Casey asked, barely able to rise, the weakness invading every cell of his body.
“Conjuring angels,” Angus said, and continued to sway gently, with that terrible crooning over the water. Within the water, the inky fluid snaked out, in long slinking vapor trails, oddly taking shape, forming under the man’s dreadful chant.
Words singled themselves out in the multitude, and Casey could hear amongst them fragments of Latin and something far older and guttural, the very sound of it alone sending the hairs up on the back of his neck. There were names, ancient ones, that seemed as though they must pre-date man, must have been born in the depths of the ocean, and that the uttering of them would bring about terrible beings.
Casey’s skin crawled upon his frame, but he’d not the strength left to move. He was drifting in and out of consciousness as it was, when a sharp smell jerked him back fully.
Angus stood above him, the taper of a burning stick in his hands. The smoke stung Casey’s eyes and clogged his throat, the scent bitter and ammoniac.
The man seized his face hard between his huge hands, his eyes occluded still by the drugs or the trance he had put himself in. But the look speared Casey, fastened his soul to a point from which it could not escape, and then Angus spoke in a voice that wasn’t recognizable.
“At the darkest time of night there is a turning point. From darkness to light, from death to life, a journey completed, a new journey begun. You must make the choice—light or dark, death or life? CHOOSE, BOY!”
Casey’s body had spasmed, and he felt as though the man had seared his soul with that one look and seen inside him the terrified child who could not fathom all that had happened to the young man’s shell. It broke something in him, tore down walls with its bare hands, that look.
Then Angus said in a voice so soft, it was like a mother’s caress, “Look up, boy.”
Casey thought the man must be mad, trying to make him move now when even the slightest sussurration of air on his bare skin made his stomach heave with nausea. But in the end he managed it, and only threw up once from the effort.
“For Christ Jesus’ sake, don’t lean against the bed,” the burly man said as Casey, reeling with dizziness, began to sag back towards the support of the blood-streaked sheets. “Lean into my arm, I’ll not let ye go.”
Casey did as bid, feeling as weak as a newborn baby and disoriented by the dark, smoky surroundings.
“There now, I’ve put the bed next to the window. Look up, do ye see?”
Casey obligingly looked up, his head swaying drunkenly on his neck, muscles still weak with shock from the abuse they’d endured. At first his eyes refused to focus, eyelids thick and heavy from the drugs, but then he did see. A faint line in the north-eastern sky, and then another and another, until it seemed as if a fine spray shot of silver dusted the horizon. The name came from somewhere in the recesses of his subconscious, a place too deep to be damaged by the week’s terrors.
“The Orionids,” he said blearily, tongue sticky with disuse.
“Aye, the Orionids,” his erstwhile nurse replied, “reminds one that pain comes an’ goes, an’ so does the tiny scrap of time we call life, but the stars, they endure. It’s all a river, ye see, the sky above an’ the earth below, an’ our time in it no more than the barest ripple from a summer breeze. An’ yet for us, the ripple, momentary as it is, matters greatly. Do ye see what I’m tellin’ ye, laddie?”
The tears, when they came, were painful. He’d not cried since he was a child, eight years old, to be precise. He’d seen tears as weakness, though his father, wisely, had tried to teach him otherwise.
‘The Good Lord, in his wisdom, wouldn’t have made us with tears if we weren’t intended to be weepin’ creatures.’
But he’d never given in to tears. It had just been another test of willpower, another brick in the arsenal. And then it had become habit. His life had demanded toughness, and tears had become the hard thing. An ability he no longer possessed.
That they came now shocked him, even though in his pain and weakness he couldn’t have stopped them had he wished to. For somehow the great arched backbone of night, with its arteries and veins of stars, the limitless horizon its ribs and its pour of blood the Milky Way, reduced him to tears as the knives had not been able to. It was undeniable and inescapable, a great meandering river of light, spilling over its banks in immense billowing clouds of celestial gas and dust.
“Ye see just a particle,” Angus said, and his voice sounded familiar once again. “One of the whole. That is what we are—one step into the infinite. But a vital step, laddie, a vital step.”
The night after he cried, Angus was gone, never to be seen by Casey again.
In his wake he had left Casey with the will to survive, and he healed quickly after that. Indeed, it was only a short time later that the pucker-faced doctor discharged him from the infirmary and he took his place once again amongst the prison’s general population.
Something had changed, he knew, something in his very cells that showed in his every movement and expression. He saw the reflection of it in the faces of the other prisoners as he was walked back to his cell, heard it in their very silence. He’d gone to a place they all had nightmares about and he’d come back from the fire made of a substance that was more refined and much harder to the touch than he’d been before his baptism.
He was two days free of the infirmary when he came face-to-face with one of his captors. He said nothing, merely smiled at the man, not blinking, nor moving, so still he seemed as a statue made of stone. The man blinked several times, gave him a wide berth, and continued on his way muttering. Casey took a breath and continued on his own way. Behind him, he could hear the murmuring arise, and knew that to them, he was now a creature apart.
No one ever touched him again.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK he gave you in that drink?”
“Opium of some form, mayhap.”
“You never saw him again?” Pamela asked, her low tone like a shockwave to the web Casey’s story had wrapped them in.
“No, an’ for good reason.”
“Why?”
“Because there was no Angus,” Casey said, face turned away from her as he stubbed out his cigarette. A small wraith of smoke shivered in the air from the eclipsed coal and then disappeared.
“What do you mean there was no Angus? He healed you, he protected you—”
“Aye,” Casey answered wryly, “I was there. Still the fact remains, Jewel, that I never did see the man durin’ the day, nor outside of the infirmary.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t exist, for heaven’s sake.”
“Perhaps not, but when I tried to find him afterwards there was no record of him in the rolls. I’d a friend in the library, wee quiet man named Milton, who’d no love on this earth save books. If Angus had been in that prison, Milton would’ve found him. Though in a sense he did find him, just not in the way I’d expected.”
“What do you mean?”
Casey shifted forward, clasping his arms around his knees so that only his back was visible in the dying firelight. “What I mean, Jewel, is that the man did exist, just not in my own time.”
“When?” s
he asked through lips that felt tingly with held back oxygen.
“About a hundred an’ fifty years before either you or I took our first breath on this planet. Milton had compiled all the prison records, ye see, goin’ back to ledgers from the original prison that was situated under the foundation of Parkhurst itself. He came to my cell one evenin’, about a week after I’d made my initial request of him to look through the current records. He was shakin’ like a leaf, half-excited, half-terrified, I think. Said he’d somethin’ to show me.
“I followed him back to the library an’ the man never said a word all the way there, just kept tuggin’ on his ear the way he did when he was particularly agitated. When we get there, he tells me to sit. At this point I’m feelin’ a wee bit anxious myself, bein’ that we’re not supposed to be in the library that time of the evenin’. On the table there’s this big book, an ancient thing with its pages all grimy an’ burnt lookin’ about the edges. Well he opens it up an’ steps back a bit an’ says ‘There he is, there’s yer man.’ I looked where he was pointin’, an’ certain enough there was Angus’ name, with the same stiff letters as I’d seen in his wee herbal. I felt a bit relieved, truth be told, for at least I knew I’d not hallucinated the whole thing, or so I thought for that one second. Then Milton says, ‘Look ye, look to the head of the page.”
‘I looked an’ saw all the column headings an’ how the ink was faded clear away in some places. ‘Aye I’m lookin’,’ I said. Well Milton tugs real hard on his ear then an’ says ‘Look at the date, ye daftie!’ Despite the insult to my intelligence, I did as I was told. I saw the date an’ then I just slid down straight onto the floor, half-fainted I think.”
“Had he been a prisoner?”
“Aye, but as I said the date was a hundred years an’ more before my own time.”
“Do you know what he was imprisoned for?”
“Mm, aye, he’d murdered his wife an’ her lover when he’d caught them in his own bed.”
Pamela felt as though all the blood had left her extremities and sought shelter at her very core.
“I’m surprised they didn’t hang him.”
“I was as well. But he’d medical training—was a bit in the way of a wise man it would seem, so perhaps his skill saved his life. He became the resident doctor at the time, from what little Milton could scrounge up on him. He died of consumption after thirty years in prison, seems though he’d cared for many men, there was none to care for him in the end.”
She shivered involuntarily.
“Still an’ all, I’d have maybe thought I’d somehow seen the information, an’ my fever addled brain had twisted bits an’ pieces together an’ given me a fine set of dreams, but for that he’d given me a wee amulet. ‘Twas chased silver, with a leather thong to hang it about my neck, an’ he’d filled it with ground bits of wood betony an’ a wee cross of rowan tied about with red string. He said ‘twas for protection from evil, both high an’ low, by which he meant spiritual an’ physical. Aye, dinna’ wrinkle yer forehead at me, Jewel, I read up a bit on such things after. I wore that amulet between my shirt an’ chest every day until I got out of that damned prison.”
“Do you have it still?”
“Aye. Ye’d best believe it goes to sea with me now.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
Casey looked down at the quilt. “I didn’t want ye to think me a superstitious fool. Ye’ll maybe not have as many of the old beliefs, not growin’ up in Ireland, but such things are powerful an’ sometimes a man needs all the comfort he can find.”
“You forget I had an Irish nanny,” Pamela said, “I was chockful of superstition and morbid stories from the time I was wee.”
“Perhaps I was attributin’ my own shortcomin’s to ye, Jewel, for I’d a tendency to look down my nose at such things when I was young. Thought I was too much of a rational man for such tomfoolery, but my Da’ said ‘twas arrogant to think that the people of old hadn’t had their fair share of the world’s wisdom too, an’ that a man should never mock what he couldn’t fully understand.
“There was a lady lived a street over when I was growin’ up, had her dead sister round for supper every Tuesday evenin’. We thought the woman was a few pegs shy of a full washline, if ye take my meanin’, but,” he shrugged expressively, “who’s to say what others see an’ feel in this world? I never looked at her the same after my time away.”
“I wish I’d been there to protect you,” she said fiercely, heart aching for the boy he’d been, furious with those that had taken advantage of his youth, who had made him achieve manhood through an ordeal of fire. And grateful to the ghost who had nursed him back to health.
“Yer here now, Jewel,” he said, stroking her hair back from her face, “an’ that takes a great deal of hurt out of the past.”
Her hand stilled on the grooves of old scars, feeling the odd quiet of twisted, wounded flesh next to the pulse and quiver of whole, fresh skin.
“My old nanny, Rose,” she said, “believed in spirits.You could only countenance half of what she said. But she once told me that we were all surrounded by ghosts, some personal, some not, and that some we could sense, while others we couldn’t. But that they were always there, nevertheless.”
“I think perhaps ghosts come to us in any manner of ways,” Casey said, long moments later when the fire had died to a vague glimmer, his voice soft as ether in the dark, “like the spirits of forgotten ancestors.”
“Do you feel your daddy around you?” she asked quietly.
“Aye, I do at times. Though it’s rare an’ it’s one of those things that ye talk yerself out of believin’ five minutes after it happens. But when they touch ye, it lingers, aye?” He looked slantwise down at her, the dawn light quenching the colors that defined his face, painting him in shades of ash and coal. “I sensed him on our weddin’ day. Thought I felt his hand on my shoulder, just large an’ warm, the way it was when I was a child. An’ I knew I had his blessin’, that he must have approved of my choice if he’d decided to make his presence known.”
“I feel that way sometimes when I’m looking in the mirror,” she said, “that if I were to touch the surface it would melt, and I’d touch fingertips with that mirror self, and maybe she’d be younger or older. Myself in another time.”
“Aye, mirrors are sometimes eerie that way. Pat used to swear he could see our grandda’ in one.”
“Brendan?” she asked, mesmerized by the way the soft, growing light lent more and more detail to Casey, and yet shrouded the rest of the room with a ghostly hand.
“Aye, Brendan. Pat scared da’ an’ I with his imaginins’ at times. He’d fix his eyes just beyond ye, as though he could see through ye to someone that wasn’t there an’ yet more there, if ye’ll take my meanin’, than yer own self was. An’ when we’d ask him what he was lookin’ at, he’d just say ‘tis only grandda’, don’t get yer ballocks in a twist.’ Well, that right unnerved daddy ‘cause it’s what his own da’ used to say to him when he’d get upset over small things, an’ Pat had no real way of knowin’ that.”
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ She quoted softly.
“Sometimes, Jewel, I think that’s too true for comfort’s sake.” He looked off out the window towards dawn, seeming suddenly weary.
“You need to sleep,” she said.
“Aye,” he said on the rise of a yawn, “I suppose I do at that.”
Moments later he was asleep, and she moved quietly about the room, tidying up, banking the fire against the chill of the night. Casey snored lightly, ghosts forgotten, the bones of his memories once again buried deep. His face was relaxed, one arm thrown above his head, the other stretched out on her side of the blankets. She hoped he was having pleasant dreams, enough for the both of them.
She knew finding her in the water had disturbed him. Always she had loved the ocean, which for a man who viewed the sea as one of the lesser circle
s of hell, was admittedly a little hard to understand. For her it was both baptism and redemption, a cleansing of spirit that nothing else could give her.
Once, when she was very young, her father had taken her to Nantucket for a holiday and they’d watched the sunset hissing into the ocean and he’d told her that they stood on the very edge of the new world. She had been frightened, believing she was going to fall off that edge, knowing in a visceral way that if she began the fall it would never end. So he’d tipped her head back so she could right herself and find her balance in the night sky.
Through a million years of dust that turned the sky bloody, one star had glimmered, a faint beacon from another time, reassuring in its very distance. She’d watched it, a quiet messenger of the infinite, steadying her breath with its brightening aura against the paling backwash of night. Then realized that it was getting larger, leaving a fire mist trail in its wake.
“Daddy it’s falling,” she’d said, remembering the horrible panic that had seized her entire body at the realization, the weakness in the knees, the tightness in the chest, the blood falling away from the brain.
“Make a wish,” he’d said, face rapt, not noticing her terror.
She’d wished, with teeth clenched and heart pounding, that the damn star would quit falling, but of course it hadn’t. It had plunged into the sea, its fiery trail no more than a vague, fuzzy outline on her cornea. And she had known then that the world was not a safe place, that wishes did not always come true, that nothing lasted forever.
“Just think,” her father had said, eyes still on the heavens, “of all the stars that have fallen, the sea is full of them. Such a fall from grace, from the heavens to the deeps in seconds.”
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 13