“My Da,” Bee said, “was a big proud fella. Strong as an ox. But thick and stubborn as one too. The route for the motorway went right through a rath.”
The word rang a bell somewhere in the hindbrain of his thoughts. He saw it, coloured in his mind, and felt the synaesthesia in him spin it off in its different directions; he smelled cinders, tasted lavender. It was a red word, fiery. He struggled to compute all of this at once into a coherent impression, and Bee seemed to notice his discomfort. She looked curious.
“You’ve heard of them?”
“It’s…like a ring. A fort?”
Bee looked impressed. “Good,” she said. “And it was well known that any man who dared to disturb the rath, even trim the plants that grew within its borders, would suffer for it. But my Da…he fancied himself as a progressive modern man. He called the fellas workin’ for him a bunch of superstitious oul Jinny Ann’s, and he took the tools and he dug up the rath himself alone, thinkin’ they‘d be willing enough to get back to work so long as he was responsible for that.”
The old woman was gone now, lost in the memory. “It was a warm oul mornin’. My Ma was three months gone with my wee sister Annie. And she sent me and Colm up to my Da with his lunch, up over the fields and onto the new road site. I didn’t want to take him because I was near sixteen at the time and I fancied myself a bit of a looker, and Colm only seven years on him, I was afraid he’d embarrass me in front of my Da’s crew. But my Ma wanted him out from underfoot as she was terrible bad with morning sickness. And so off we went, sure as God.”
She finished the last of the tea in one gulp before continuing, still making that grimace as it passed her lips. “My Da was a sight to behold,” she said. “The sweat drippin’ off him. He’d done the work woulda took three men three days in one day all himself. His fellas were standin’ round, feelin’ a bit ashamed of themselves, and my Da with half the rath dug up completely and just startin’ on the second half. Colm took him his lunch - lovely big bit of bacon, I remember that plain as day - and my Da ruffles his hair and shows him off to the lads and says this is my big lad, this is my heir. And wee Colm as proud as anything, and me a bit jealous but not mindin’ too much because a lovely wee fella from the town over had winked at me. Without my Da seein’, thank God.”
She put the cup back on the saucer. It clk-clk-clk’d with the trembling of her hands, which Danny could see now was definitely not attributable to age. Bee’s eyes were moist and she rubbed one with the flat of her palm, taking a long steadying breath. “It was the next day,” she said. “I remember wakenin’ and the house quiet, and that was unusual in itself because the wee fella was a terrible one for early rousin’, he’d my Ma distracted with it and oftentime she’d have sent him into me for me to get up and make him somethin’ to keep his gob occupied.”
“But it was quiet. And of course it was quiet because Colm was nowhere to be found. And we searched, dear Jesus, we searched high and low and in all directions of the compass. And my Da came home from his mornin’ shift in the worst of all tempers I’d ever seen him. He’d asked his lads to help in the lookin’ and when he’d told them more, they’d each and every one of them walked away on the spot, sure as God.”
“And then…” Bee said, her voice cracking. “It was the third day since my Da had touched the rath, and I’d gone back to it thinkin’ maybe, maybe wee Colm had gone there because he’d loved being shown off so much by my Da. And it was back. Back as good as new. And I went home thinkin’ that the lads had rebuilt it for fear they’d be touched too and wondering how to tell my Da, or even thinkin’ that maybe after all it had been my Da who had done it, trying to make up for what he’d done, because such an awful change had come over him, dear bless us, you wouldn’ta thought it was the same man at all. Not at all, son. Not at all.”
She looked at Danny now, right at him in a way that went down into the very depths of his soul. “But when I got home…” she began, and found herself unable to continue.
She didn’t have to.
“…no-one knew who he was,” Danny completed the sentence for her.
She nodded, rocking back and forth slightly in the chair with the pain of recollection. “And they called me all sorts, Jesus God they did. Called me all sorts of liars and lunatics for makin’ up such a ridiculous thing that I’d had a wee brother, sure did I not remember that my poor mother had lost him not four months into carryin’ him. And the boys didn’t wink at me no more. No, no they didn’t. Because I wouldn’t give it up, son, you see. I kept on remembering and I kept on talking about him. Because I…” and she sobbed, “…I kept thinking, thinking of me and him walking with that lunch to my Da, and me with my head full of boys and him with a mind full of mischief, and I thought - I thought - why doesn’t he just go away?”
Danny’s eyes widened as the implication of what she was saying settled on him. “I don’t…”
She reached across - surprisingly quickly - and showed him the teacup and the stain of the leaves at the bottom. “This?” she said, making no attempt to hide her disgust. “This brings in a few quid and gets me a bit of a standin’ in the street, son. I know it’s a lot of oul shite, believe me. But up here,” and she tapped her head, “I have it up here. The gift. You do too. You know it. And you know what I’m tellin’ you right now is the truth, and why I’m tellin’ you it.”
His gaze swung to the front window, to the garden beyond. To the mound within.
“It’s a rath…?”
“If I’d known, son…” Bee said ruefully. “Jesus if I’d only known. Oul Mr Gaynor lived here before ye and he kept that garden immaculate - I just thought it was a wee feature.”
“So you’re saying,” Danny said slowly. “That because I dug up my garden, the…the faeries…have come and kidnapped my girlfriend and son and taken them away.”
Bee met his gaze unflinchingly. “That’s what I’m sayin’.”
He nodded, slowly. “The faeries,” he said again.
“I call them the Low Folk,” Bee replied. “You say faeries to anyone and they start thinking of wee girls fuckin’ about with photographs and Tinkerbell. Trust me, son, they’re not like that. No, they’re not like that one…fuckin’…bit.”
Danny absorbed this. He felt close to laughter again, except this time it wouldn’t be on the catharsis side of madness, it would be on the psychosis side, and it would be more of a cackle than a laugh. His T-shirt was soaked with tea. Ha. It was damp and uncomfortable against his skin - he was tempted to stand up and take it off, ensuring that his mystery guest spy looking through the window now saw him start a striptease routine for his elderly guest. Ha. Ha ha.
And yet-
“Ancient Gaelic,” he said, almost involuntarily. Seeing Bee’s expression, he proceeded to tell her about the phone signal and the buried voicemail of sorts within.
“You have a recording?” she said eagerly, her eyes gleaming in the lamplight. “Let me hear it.”
Danny shook his head. “Sorry. I dropped it in Dermot Scully’s house when the Stair Monster tried to come down and eat me.” Ha ha ha ha ha. Stair Monster. Hey. This was fun.
Bee seemed to sense that the young man in front of her was beginning to struggle to stay afloat on Lake Coherence. “Danny,” she said, in a ‘snap out of it’ tone that only made her seem funnier, “Danny, I know this is a lot to deal with-”
“Fuck you,” he said quietly and calmly. “Fuck you and your fuckin’ stories, alright?”
He rose to his feet, walked past her to the front door and opened it. A warm breeze wafted inside from the outside air, despite it being long past midnight by now. “Out,” he called to her. “Out. Out to fuck, go on.”
She emerged from the front room, nothing but disappointment in her eyes as she glanced at him. She walked past and paused on the threshold. “Keep remembering,” she told him. “That’s your power, Danny…assuming…” and she cast that laser-intensity glare at him that only old ladies could fully master, “assuming
you want to.”
“Get out,” he snarled. “And take yer fuckin’ faeries with ye.”
She replied with words that chilled him to the core. The same words he’d heard whispered on the phone message. Words she couldn’t possibly have known. And seeing his reaction, his shock, Beatrice O’Malley smiled thinly. “Want to know what it means?” she said. “It means the same to you as it did to me all those years ago.”
She leaned in close. He made no move to stop her.
“Consider it granted,” she whispered.
Not waiting for a response, she simply walked away, without so much as a backward glance. He watched her go, fighting the twin urges to call her back and to call her an oul fucker.
Why had he rejected her story so vehemently? Why had he told her to go? Because what she was saying was impossible. Any more impossible than losing a son like you’d lose a pound coin between two cushions? There were no such things as faeries. No such thing as magic. The world was mundane. The world was full of stinky nappies and oil bills and inadequate parenting, not mystic swords and stolen children and epic quests. He knew this for a fact. He’d been living up to his fuckin’ ears in reality this last year.
He went back inside, though the house was the last place he wanted to be right now. Where else could he go? Who could he talk to? The only two people who didn’t currently think he was a lunatic were a post-nervous breakdown academic eccentric and the crazy bitch from up the street whose specialist subject was tall dark handsome strangers and Messages From Beyond The Tetley.
Without quite knowing why, he sought out his ‘phone, accessed his saved messages. He’d kept that first message from Ellie, the one she’d sent when he’d been wrapped up in Maggie, the one that had told him about Luke and had sent his life off in a different direction. Of course, it would be gone now too…
Except…except it wasn’t.
He felt his heart leap in his chest as he read it, re-read it, afraid to drag his eyes away from it in case, when he brought them to bear again, it would have evaporated into the ether. Somewhere at the back of his mind the irony occurred that this was the polar opposite of the reaction he’d had the first time he’d read it.
Sitting down on unsteady legs, he found the courage to go up a level in his inbox, to see a list of the messages stored there. They were all still there; over ninety he’d either not deleted deliberately or had simply forgotten to take off, little dopey ones about not forgetting to pick up a pan loaf on the way home from work, one that simply said thx 4 wot u do 4 us.
He stared at that one for a long moment, recalling it had been sent to him three months ago, on a Sunday afternoon - Lircom had asked for volunteers for overtime for the weekend and though the miserable bunch of bastards had only been willing to pay single time, he’d still had to go for it, because the store card interest was biting, and biting hard. If working in that place during the week had been bad, the weekend was an order of magnitude worse; the depression inherent in him and his workmates as they zombied their way through the shift would have made the Village of the Damned look like Club Tropicana.
Evidence. They’d have to believe him now, wouldn’t they?
No sooner had he thought this than the cynical side of him had pointed out a few sms weren’t going to convince anyone that someone existed. But in a way, that didn’t matter so much; the mere fact of their unfussy existence was an immense relief to him - they offered a link to the life he knew he hadn’t invented, and they didn’t demand he believe in some ludicrous story in return.
He went to the last message, sent to him by Ellie the day before she’d vanished; dnt 4get bout M&D’s 2nite. B good, plz?
Knowing it was pointless, and not caring, he found himself tapping out a reply to her. The former English student in him recoiled from the txtspk she employed, so he sat and he painstakingly spelled it out, every letter, every word.
I don’t know where you went. I hope Luke is with you. And I’m sorry if somehow, God knows how but somehow, this is all my fault. I will find you, both of you, and bring you home to me. No matter what it takes.
After a moment of looking down at what he’d written, he added three more words and he sent it.
Outside, the clear night was again coming to a close, just as it had on the night he’d stood out there with Ellie and Steve, drinking beer and looking up at the stars. The first night he’d destroyed the rath and incurred the wrath of the…(what had she called them?)…Low Folk. He could see rain beginning to spatter his front window.
In one smooth collection of movements, almost on autopilot, he was up and off his arse and had the spade in his hand. The night was chilly now, the rain sticking to his skin being cooled by the strong breeze, but as he looked down at that little circular patch of Earth beneath him he didn’t feel the cold one bit. He was still very far from believing what Bee had told him to be true, but he knew one thing; if this was to be his Sisyphean task, if he had to come out here and dig this fucker up and flatten it to oblivion every fuckin’ night, and if by doing so he would come one single inch closer to any answers, he would do it and do it gladly.
“What have I left to lose?” he said aloud to the world at large, hefting the spade into the Earth below as the rain beat a tattoo on the garden around him. And he worked, alone, until his back and legs ached and burned and until the earth was flat and the mound destroyed, and only then did he stagger inside, stinking and exhausted, and shedding filthy clothes as he went, manage to collapse onto his bed, asleep almost before his body impacted the mattress.
The Looking Glass
“Danny?”
“Mmm?” he grunted sleepily. A hand touched his shoulder and shook his body gently, which interfered with the dream he was having featuring mile-high waterspouts and salt and vinegar crisps. He rolled out of reach of the hand and buried his face into the lovely cool unlaid-on part of the mattress, allowing the coldness to seep in and soothe him back to a deeper realm of sleep.
“Danny,” the voice said again, more insistently.
He opened his eyes, wincing as light bounced off his pupils at what was frankly a ridiculous speed. What was light’s fuckin’ hurry anyway? Couldn’t it be a bit more sedate, like sound, or a bit sexier, like taste?
“Mmmwhat,” he snorfled, face half buried in mattress still.
“You’re gonna be late for work, love,” Maggie told him. “It’s near eight.”
He moaned at this. Shitting work. Bastarding job. Wanky Lircom. Fuck buckets, the lot of them. But his body, as though his house lacked a roof and he were being operated by a gargantuan puppeteer looming above, pivoted around until his legs dangled over the edge of the bed. He reached up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and while he was doing so he felt a succession of kisses be planted on his forehead.
“I’ve gotta run,” Maggie whispered. “Early morning meeting. Taxi will be here in five minutes.”
“You should have wakened me earlier,” he said a shade reproachfully, opening his eyes properly to confirm that yes, damn, she really was fully dressed and already in her work clothes and even had her jacket on.
She punched him on the shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ laugh you are, Danny Morrigan,” she said. “What do you think I’ve been tryin’ to do for the last forty minutes, you spasmo? I was shoutin’ and everythin’.”
He stood up. “I keep telling you,” he said. “Don’t shout. Go to the far end of the house and whisper fancy a blowjob? and you’ll hear my wee footsteps thumpin’ across the lan-ow!”
“You’re a pervert.”
“I’m a pervert?” he said, offended, rubbing a companion punch-mark on the other shoulder that had just been delivered. “Dear heart, I’m a fella. I’m supposed to like that…that filthy degrading act. That’s the role that society has assigned to me. Whereas, you? You’re a lady. You’re meant to abhor it, are you not? So who‘s the real pervert here, I ask you?”
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