I keep the grass mown, largely out of habit and, I suppose, a predilection for order that probably says quite a bit about me as a man, and then, some forty or fifty strides out, the woods begin, a dense copse of alder, beech and dwarf oak that helps shield us from the worst of the ocean winds. Some generation of previous owners had furrowed a pathway through the trees so as to link up with the walking trail that follows a long stretch of the coastline, and, while their intentions were, I’m sure, entirely practical, the path has over time taken on a distinctly romantic aspect, its narrow, winding nature, and the soft uttering of the breeze among the branches, practically insisting on hand-in-hand walks of those in love. People often speak of it in the village, having long since accepted it as part of the local lore, and I can understand why. At the high end of a lazy summer’s evening, with the late red light coming in flecks through the canopy, a loved one at your side and the nightingale in fullest song, I can imagine nowhere like it in the world.
Beyond these trees, the walking trail veers to within a few yards of the cliff edge, but heavy snatches of briar act as a natural protection, and it is safe enough for Hannah to play there, even with a minimum of supervision. She loves the woods, loves climbing and building camps and trying to identify the birds that come, by their calls as well as their plumage, loves watching the leaves change shades in the autumn and collecting them when they fall so that she can bring them into school. She’s edging into that age bracket now, beyond the baby stage and before the cocky cynicism of the late pre-teens, when the colours of the world for her have found their fire. Nature captivates her: spiders and their webs, the milky coin-sized crabs that scuttle in and out of the rock pools down along the shore, the fusion of small noise that is always there and will reveal itself and unravel if you let yourself be still and silent long enough to hear.
She can spend entire weekends outside, playing her games, exploring, imagining, dreaming, and even when the weather turns rainy, her play, safe beneath the shielding trees, doesn’t tend to suffer much in the way of interruption. In fact, rain brings something new to the equation, new smells, new sounds.
But today, at lunchtime, after two very still and dry late April weeks, the rain came in a deluge, driving her inside. Another Sunday. Christ, the fools that time can make of us. When I remember how the Sundays of my own childhood could stretch to nearly never-ending length, I am stunned at how years can be so fleeting and how they can lay themselves in layers one upon the next so that no point of the past ever feels fully beyond reach.
Alison was in the kitchen, making sandwiches. Cheese and home-made pickle, always the majority choice in our household. I had the armchair beside the living-room window, idling through one of the newspaper’s accompanying magazines. The back door must have been open, because the sound of Hannah’s running steps made me turn my head. Girls of six or seven usually run, if walking can be at all avoided, and the rain alone should have been reason enough, if one were needed. But I knew, even before I saw her glance behind her, that there was something more than rain involved.
Out of instinct, I turned my attention to the woods, thinking, I suppose, that there could have been someone there, a stranger. Southwell is safe, but nowhere is completely safe, not any more. We all watch the news, we all know the monsters that exist.
The downpour blurred the world outside, greying everything, giving the woods in the near distance a warped, skeletal pallor. I wiped a hand across the striated glass, but, of course, nothing changed because nothing could.
Hannah came in and looked at me. Her eyes were big, uncertain. I could see her working out the permutations, and there was a moment when I was sure that she had something to say, but she kept silent, and after half a minute she turned away and dropped down onto the floor in a sitting position, legs to the side, in front of the television. The screen was lit with racing from Newmarket, the sound muted. She stayed with the gallop until its finish, and I watched her and waited.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, sweetheart?’
‘Are tricks always funny?’
She sat perfectly still, her tossed, straw-coloured hair hanging in flumes down her back and around her narrow shoulders. Her voice had a forced calm that quivered along its lowest edges.
‘Not always,’ I said. ‘Some are funny, some clever, and some just mean.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
On the screen now, a woman, dressed for a winter that no longer existed and with a microphone attached to a longish pole, was interviewing someone I assumed to be the winning jockey, a surprisingly old-looking man in pink and green silks. He had a hawkish, mud-spattered face and appeared to take little outward pleasure at his victory.
‘I think somebody is trying to play a trick on me,’ Hannah said, and she turned and looked up at me over one shoulder. ‘A mean one.’
‘What happened?’
She thought about it. ‘Nothing, really. I just heard something. A voice.’
‘What kind of voice?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just a voice. But like somebody lost. Maybe in a fog or something. A woman. And she was calling you.’
‘Me?’
‘Your name. Mike. That’s what it sounded like. Over and over.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There are lots of people named Mike. Maybe it was just somebody out on the trail, calling a child.’
‘I told you. It was the woman.’
I went cold. ‘What woman?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice from caving in. ‘Do you know her?’
‘She comes to the path. Sometimes she’s at the edge of the woods. I don’t know her name. But I’ve seen her picture. In Mammy’s drawer. The woman doesn’t speak to me, but she sees me. I think she knows who I am. Sometimes, I’ll be playing, and when I look up she’ll be standing there. Watching. The others, too.’
My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat. The air around me felt suddenly reduced. ‘The others?’ I whispered, when I could, and again I turned my gaze on the window, and the woods beyond. Aside from the rain, which was coming down hard, all was still.
‘A girl, a bit older than me. With long black hair. And a tall man, dressed in black. They don’t speak, and they stand back a little.’ Ever so quietly, she cleared her throat. ‘They scare me,’ she added, in a murmur.
I ran outside. Within seconds I was drenched, and then the trees closed in around and above, shielding me. Caging me. My breathing came very loud, and the sound of the rain in the trees had a dense, rattlesnake insistence, but nothing moved. I looked around, then pushed my way through onto the path and followed it until the woods cleared and I met the trail, and the cliffs. As far as I could see in every direction, I was alone. Ahead of me, sea and sky had become one, a grey, swimming sameness that obliterated lines and seemed calm until its waves broke huge against the rocks somewhere out beyond the briar and down below.
Epilogue
Tonight, all we can do is sit up late, trying to make sense of things. Alison is crying. I’ve opened the bottle of nicely aged single malt that I’d been keeping for a night of celebration or need. I suppose this counts. Since becoming a father, I’ve largely sworn off hard liquor, but I make it a long way down the bottle’s neck before even the most medicinal heat kicks in.
‘Is this real?’ Ali asks. We’ve lit a fire, which gives the room its only light, and she studies the flames with a trance-like devotion. Shadows seem to shift the skin of her yellowed face, and her wide eyes shine. I can see what the tears have done.
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘How can it not be?’
‘Could she have overheard something, though? Even by accident?’
‘I don’t see how. We haven’t spoken of this in years.’
‘Coincidence, then. A family out walking. Maybe we’re overreacting, filling in blanks that don’t exist.’
I shrug, and empty my glass in a swallow. Then I count in my mind before reachin
g again for the bottle. Giving up at twenty-five, I pour.
‘What do you suppose it means, Mike?’
‘I think they want something. And there’s no getting away from them.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘Yeah.’
‘The voice she heard. Your name.’
‘I know. But it’s not me that they’ve been watching.’
There is something about the silence that descends on us then. I sit still until I can no longer bear to do so, and then I get up and wander through the house. All the lights are out, but I think I fear the brightness more than the dark. Because at least in the dark I will not have to see what might be waiting. I climb the stairs, slowly, trying not to make the steps creak. Hannah’s bedroom door is shut, and I lean against it for several seconds, weighing the silence beyond, then ease the handle down and push it open, just a few inches. A night light is burning, with a shade that sprays onto the ceiling the shapes of stars and crescent moons, and she is asleep, sprawled on her side at a short diagonal across the bed, having wrestled loose of the duvet, her pyjama-clad legs scissoring towards the mattress’s low corners. The curtains are drawn, blocking off the view of the woods and water, and I feel grateful for that. I ease myself into the room, spread the duvet over her again and lean in to set a kiss on her forehead. She stirs against my lips, wrinkling her nose, but doesn’t wake.
Downstairs, Alison has filled my glass nearly to its brim and is drinking from it. I don’t explain where I’ve been, and she doesn’t need to ask.
‘I’m cold,’ she says, and she moves down onto the floor and draws herself in closer to the fire. I stand for a moment longer, then sit down in my armchair. The only sounds then are the low crackle of the fire and a clock dryly ticking. The silence comes again, crushing, and I let it, knowing that it’s useless to fight. And when I am overcome with the need to hide away, I reach for the bottle and hold on. In the distance, something or someone screams or cries out. I am used to the sound of gulls, and I tell myself that’s what I’m hearing. Alison, not ready for doubt, does not look up.
*
The unexamined life is not worth living. I’ve spent years burying what happened in Allihies, but those memories are like the body in the bog. Time has stood still for them, their details remain fine as coal dust, ready after all that darkness to shine, and burn. The past will not remain the past.
By recounting my story, I suppose my hope was that I might uncover some kind of explanation. But beneath the bandage there is only the wound. Our foolishness opened a door back then, exposing something of insatiable appetite. Something monstrous.
After nine years, I’d almost forgotten, assuming, I suppose, that, having paid our price, we’d left it all behind us. But escape is never total, and we’d been wrong, Alison and I, to stop running. And now, again, it seems they’ve found us.
Hannah said she heard my name being called, and I believe her, but I think she misunderstood. I think what she heard was actually a warning to me, not a call. And that frightens me more than anything else. Because something is here, and running now is not an option. I’ve already lost a lot, but there’s always more to lose.
That’s why I am afraid.
About the Author
BILLY O’CALLAGHAN was born in Cork in 1974 and is the author of three short-story collections: In Exile (2008), In Too Deep (2009) and The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013), the title story of which earned him the 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year.
The recipient of literature bursaries from the Arts Council in 2010 and Cork County Council in 2015 among several other honours, including the Molly Keane Award and the George A. Birmingham Award, his work has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1’s Book On One, Sunday Miscellany and the Francis MacManus Awards series. He has also been shortlisted on four occasions for the RTÉ/PJ O’Connor Award for Radio Drama. Over the past fifteen years, his stories have appeared in many literary magazines and journals around the world, including Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Bellevue Literary Review, Bliza, Confrontation, The Fiddlehead, the Forge Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, London Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, Southeast Review, Southword, Versal and Yuan Yang: A Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing. This is his first novel.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2017 by Brandon,
an imprint of The O’Brien Press Ltd,
12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar,
Dublin 6, D06 HD27, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.obrien.ie
First published 2017.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84717-934-0
Text copyright © Billy O’Callaghan 2017
Typesetting, layout, editing, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd
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