Cinnfhail has too long been at the mercy of certain individuals . . . outdated beliefs . . . travesties on the Church . . . their tenure in the community . . . privy to arcane particulars . . . should not speak for all of us . . . what body outside the district would tolerate such abominations as exist here among us?
And then, of course, he had experienced a dream visit to the insane asylum that made Obadiah Byrne’s obscure fragment meaningful. He still needed to figure out the dynamics of that dream, but if genetic memory could preserve anything, it would certainly capture the horrendous fears of such events as had happened at Cinnfhail. And if it really was some sort of thought transference he had picked up while opiated by the Dream Pillow, that too could be explained. Because hadn’t he met the woman in the ruins who told him that the inmates themselves had set the fire? So there were living descendants of those wretches in the insane asylum who knew what came regularly through the pit at the end of that hideous warehouse. To “free” themselves, she had insisted about the fire. Chilling, now that he understood the choice the inmates had made.
He squinted out at a small rectangle that seemed stuck on the horizon of the ocean. It was a ship, of course, immobilized by distance, but it looked as if a single step had been raised in an attempt to climb the sky. Why do I hate religions? he thought. Was it because the history of man’s inhumanity to man was written in religious intolerance? Or was it something more personal, akin to his mother’s accusation that he had banned magic from his life because he couldn’t trust it? Space Almighty, the fatherless boy Lane Andersen had called God. She was right about him looking for magic by another name. That’s what had attracted him to this global scavenger hunt. Only it was turning out much darker than he had imagined . . . than he wanted. What would he do if he uncovered the seed religion, the archetype? How would he put it to the test?
He turned away, and that was when he saw the footprints. They were fresh and small, like a woman’s. Clumps of half-dried sand trailed the indentations, and the toe marks were deeper than the heels. Whoever had made them had hurried inland. For just a moment he reconsidered his distinct impression of hands taking hold of him as he was running out of air. His mother’s hands, he had thought; a predictable near-death fantasy. Still . . . the evidence in the sand was that someone had found him on the beach, stood over him, perhaps dragged him out of the surf. He followed the footprints until they vanished on the stones in the grotto.
***
He hadn’t had a drink since his first visit to Buskers, and that was where he went after settling up with the tour guide south of Killary Bay for the lost scuba gear. Avoiding Flann Macloy had been his chief object in this regard, but now he was feeling what had Sosanna McCabe called it fractious. Corpse-fed pagans danced in his head, and the avaricious tour guide had wanted more than his forfeited security deposit and they had gotten into a row. So, edgy and aching for a shot of exhilaration, Buskers.
Shaughnessy the barman poured him a Jameson, with a glance over the top of his half-shells that drifted to the clock. “A little pick-me-up before you go home to your supper, Mr. Andersen?” he said.
Lane got the subtle hint. If he stayed too long the regulars would be here, and that might lead to trouble. It made him even more fractious to think he already had enemies and places he shouldn’t go. He drank the Jameson and ordered a Bushmills, and that made him feel fatalistic as well as fractious.
At five-ten Enis Browne the barber came in with a nod to Shaughnessy and took a seat in the deeper recesses against the wall. Laughlin O’Brien and Noel Kelly joined him a few minutes later, entering boisterously, shushing suddenly, and migrating to Browne’s table with drinks in their hands.
They would think they had chased him out if he left now, thought Lane. He ordered a pint and knifed the foam off with a finger.
The inevitable arrived at five-nineteen. Flann Macloy’s pearly smile flashed alongside Lane Andersen as he tapped his ring on the bar, sending Shaughnessy to the spigots. “Well, well, have you come to set us straight about our sidhe, Yank?”
The pub grew quiet as a church.
“Yeah. Someone told me I could find all the ‘little people’ at Buskers.”
“You’ve not learned your manners since our last meetin’, I see.”
“Not while I’m on guard for a sucker punch. I’m a lot smarter now. My wisdom teeth are coming in.”
“Much better than havin’ your front teeth go out.”
“Don’t threaten me, Macloy.”
The shaggy-headed Irishman gestured suppressively. “Mercy, you’ve got me all wrong, Yank. It’s only in defense of women that I can be provoked. The alpha male in me just goes red.”
“Well, you’ll be happy to know that Ms. McCabe came to see me in order to put some distance between you and her.”
Macloy’s luster stiffened. “That a fact?”
“I forget how she put it, something to the effect that alpha males who think women are just moist labia surrounded by bodies and, quite incidentally, brains aren’t her cup of tea.”
“Doesn’t sound like her, Yank. However, I’m glad you’ve made your peace with the lady. You see how docile I can be?” And sweeping his pint off the bar, he rolled jauntily toward his grinning friends.
Shaughnessy leaned into Lane’s face: “If you don’t mind a little advice, leave it there.”
And that would have been the end of Lane’s confrontation with Flann Macloy had not the remarks from the table behind him continued. “Do you think any self-respectin’ faerie would show himself to the Yank? . . . drinks like a virgin . . . fights like a headmistress . . . manners of a goat.” He should have raised a glass and drunk to their gender reassignment surgery, should have given them the finger and gone home to a hot shower. If he could just come up with a quality rejoinder, he would get the hell out of there. But that possibility grew dimmer with each swallow of Guinness stout. By the time he walked unevenly across the room, coherence was no longer an option.
“I want to thank you bastards for reminding me why the Irish in the United States took a century to adjust to the United States. It took them that long to learn to live on food and water.” He nodded forward for emphasis, grabbing the crest of a bentwood chair, but no one seemed to get the insult. “Before that they drank like fish . . . stinking fish!”
“Pity they stopped,” Flann Macloy feigned dismay, and five other faces or maybe it was ten looked interested. “I’ll bet they forgot how to fight, too.”
“Fighting . . . that’s just so typ so typ . . . so exactly like you low-brows.” Someone kicked the bentwood chair under the table, and Lane’s smile canted into an odd smirk as he caught himself.
“Would you like to upgrade your skills, Yank?” Macloy reflected. “I’ve got an aunt who could teach you somethin’ about takin’ a punch.”
“I’m not surprised that you’ve put her to the test.”
“TouchÉ!” Noel Kelly’s bushy eyebrows twitched.
Macloy’s smile endured. “Well, I’m certainly terrified. Are you goin’ to thrash me?”
“I wouldn’t piss on you if your head was on fire.”
“Careful, Yank. You’re not so drunk I won’t help you to the floor, if that’s required.”
“Must be frustrating not having any other way to express yourself, Macloy. You should take up . . . take up ”
“Road bowling!” Shaughnessy suggested nervously from behind the bar. He had placed a willow cricket bat within easy reach.
The men at the table, who had taken to staring past each other as the exchange grew grimmer, laughed abruptly.
“There’s a thought,” Laughlin O’Brien took up. “Why don’t you challenge the Yank to an honorable contest like road bowling?”
Macloy looked weary. “Go sober up, Andersen,” he said. “You’ll be glad to forget this come tomorrow.”
Lane, clueless as to what road bowling was, nevertheless mistook the
shaggy-headed Irishman’s lack of enthusiasm fo
r a retreat. “Not your venue, Macloy?”
“I’ve tried it.”
“Then what are you afraid?”
(Oohs from the gallery.)
Macloy drummed his fingers. “You’re on, Yank.”
32
Brone McCabe never had dreams, as far as he could remember, because dreams are adjustments of the past but Watchers of churchyards are tuned to the present and fear the future. He had never left Thiollaney Merriu for more than a week, never left Ireland at all. And he empathized with the land like a farmer. The graves were his plantings, a perpetual incubation whose harvest was unthinkable. He curried their fallowness, kept them lightless, uprooted whatever sank tentacles to feed off them. And all the while he knew there were boundaries beneath the kinetic soil and in the tunneled stone of the grotto and under the fluid blackness of the pond that excluded him. Verboten. He had no safe passage there, no control. Wanted no control. Wanted only for the boundaries to remain intact.
He awoke suddenly this night to a change.
“What is it?” he called to Una, whose silhouette graced the window.
“The wind,” she said dismissively.
He listened; heard nothing. But this sensitive creature who was his wife, whose ears captured every breaking wave as unfailingly as seashells, and whose eyes saw past barriers of liquid and light, did not go to the window in the middle of the night just to listen to the wind. He rolled out of bed, stole up behind her. Still nothing came to his ears, except Mr. Billy’s nails crossing the floor downstairs, followed by three plaintive whines. Reaching around his wife, he raised the sash.
And now he caught the panpipe fluting. It could be the wind. Air forced through myriad stone channels never ceased improvising. But the next notes were banshee wails, chillingly soulless howls crescendoing up through the grotto, impossible for reeds made of stone to play.
“It’s started,” he said
“No . . .”
“You said it yourself when we found the coffin floatin’ in the sea. Look at the moon.”
A gibbous moon hung above the grotto like a chipped plate.
“It’s not full,” she said. “And it wouldn’t matter.”
“It’s started,” he affirmed.
She touched his arm. “Don’t go out there.”
“What am I here for, if not to see this?”
“There’s nothin’ you can do.”
“How do you know that?” He looked at her, hollow-eyed and almost aglow in that light, and thought how beautiful she was. “I can reason with it.”
“You can’t reason with it.”
“It has wants.”
“It has a purpose that you can’t change.”
“Then I’ll find a compromise.”
“You’ll find death.”
“I’ve found death before.”
She gave him a look that said she could not save him this time, though she had never admitted doing so all those years ago. Once more she hammered out her plea, low and distinctly: “Do not go out there.”
But he was already into his trousers, pulling up his braces. By the time he had his low-cut boots on, the dog was barking and Sosanna had come out of her room in a nightgown, asking what was happening.
“Stay in the house,” Brone said, sweeping past both women to the stairs. From the bottom he hollered back, “And don’t let Billy out!” The latch clicked open and a second later the front door slammed.
The women filed downstairs.
“Why didn’t he take the dog?” Sosanna wanted to know.
“There’s a disturbance.” Una’s long white hands sought in vain to hold Mr. Billy. “He thinks it’s another animal.”
“All the more reason to take the dog along, I should think.”
“A large animal, it might be.”
“That’s not what’s comin’ from the grotto, is it?”
“You heard that? In your room at the back of the house?”
“Of course. Who couldn’t hear that, mother?”
***
No magpies, no chirrs, no night things. Brone was struck by the emptiness of the stage. Nothing but the uncanny ululations through the grotto. It could be the wind it had to be the wind no single creature could make such a sound. And yet the Water Wolf was said to speak as legion, with howls shaped by the deepest chasms of the earth. Was this not its post?
It must have come suddenly for the magpies to have missed it. Those harbingers screamed at the beast’s coming but vanished at his arrival. And now here he came, foolish mortal, already on borrowed time, thinking he could persuade or negotiate. What could he do except reassure it that Thiollaney Merriu would not be breached? And how could he even say that with certainty? How could he look such a terrible aspect in its eyes and lie to the roots of his soul?
His own father had told him often enough that if the land beneath were ever breached, there would be a return such as the quick among men could not abide. And hadn’t he himself heard the marching as he lay in his own grave, neither quick nor dead? A bardoon the old man had called it, which is to say a dirge, a coronach, a musical march, only he had meant it literally. The march of the dead. Until that day in his grave Brone hadn’t really believed it, but now he did. To smell the loam and feel the tremble, to experience utter blackness and taste your own body dissolving you knew everafter that there was such a march, such a place. If there was a Mag Mell, there had to be an opposite place. The plain of joy; the plain of suffering. What wouldn’t the sufferers do to free themselves?
The panpipe fluting was mesmerizing, but he was still hoping it was the wind. Trees were moving, and that was a good sign, he thought, because he assumed that was the wind also. He entered the grotto before realizing his mistake. Just past the sarsen stones he looked back at the whole moonlit churchyard and saw that all the trees were not moving. In fact, only the old ash trees on that side of the pond were tossing and swaying. All the others were dead still, as if watching their kindred species in shock and horror.
It was like some arboreal Saint Vitus’ dance among the ash. Even the thick trunks were making impossible bends, branches whipping and bobbing in every direction, leaves trembling with separate agitations. But the unexplained energy was not originating in their upper extremities. It was coming through their roots.
It was driving out of the grotto’s substrate toward the black water, and the shadows Brone was standing in were a part of it. He sensed their instability. They were loose, unanchored, torn from some local ordinance of physics by a greater law, a force that was trumping everything warm and fuzzy and unbinding atoms with supreme disdain.
He did not know if he should speak, but he knew he was in extreme peril.
***
“The dog!” Una shouted. “Your father left the window open.”
But the animal was halfway up the stairs before Sosanna reacted.
Mr. Billy had done it before. Gone out on the roof. Though he had never attempted the leap to the ground. And now he must have felt the air coming in through the open window, or caught the scent of something hateful, because his barks guttered into growls and his nails flailed frantically on the varnished wood as he shot up the steps. By the time the women got to the bedroom, the dog’s paws were backpedaling down asphalt shingles.
Sosanna pushed the weathered sash up full. A sagging metal roof over an attached cellar reached halfway up to the shingled one, and below that was a garden where once potatoes and onions had been “set” but which Una never cultivated. Billy did his business there in the rain-softened furrows and weeds.
Sosanna got one bared thigh over the sill, but the dog never looked back. The nerve-fracturing wails coming from the cliff caused his ears to flatten as he launched himself. They heard his thunderous hit on the corrugated roof of the cellar, and then the slide, then nothing. An instant later he was bounding through the weeds toward the grotto.
***
Brone found an association for the stench. It was retting the smell of Ulster flax left soa
king in the field to rot away the unusable parts a thousand fold more intense and infused with something burnt.
The ash trees that were writhing (that had to be the word, writhing) stiffened suddenly, and the pond seemed to shudder, and the air hazed around the Pillar. Brone crept toward the water’s edge until into that respiring stillness came Mr. Billy’s distant challenge. He craned toward the house, saw the tawny streak cross the dry wash, lost it, saw it again flashing between grave markers.
“Billy, no!”
But there was no stopping man’s best friend, Brone McCabe’s best friend. In a household where instinct prevailed, Mr. Billy knew only one master, one territory, and now both were threatened by an enemy he had often sensed but never met. Cunning, death, the feral heat of aggression he recognized all of these. They had been here before. Had caused sudden silences in the trees. Had made the earth and water tremble. So he had to confront them when they invaded. Master and territory. Bloodsongs.
“Billy, Billy . . . to me!” Brone called at a dead run.
He was less than twenty feet from the pond when the green flash came and Billy skidded to the brink. An indelible second followed with a sudden lambent glow near the surface directly in line with the Pillar. There was time for Billy’s raised hackles to drop slightly and for his roar to falter, but his ears remained flat, his tail stiff. There was no further parsing of the indelible second, merely a sense that the air had blinked somehow. Blinked or warped or blurred. By the time the secondary effects began to manifest, it was over. The ledge where Mr. Billy had braced himself snarling was empty, and twin roostertails of water hung high in the air from Pillar to edge. There was a pit in the water that must have been made by two forms descending as one: Brone’s beloved Billy and something lupine and terrible. The rest of it was just sound catching up, the clunk of water collapsing in on itself to fill that sudden void, and the final hiss, like applause, as the twin furrows rained down. And one other sound. A half yelp hung in the air as Brone McCabe reached in vain for the luminous trail winding down into the depths of Thiollaney Merriu, carried to his knees and embracing . . . nothing.
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