by Sarah Rayne
I believe I’m quite mad now, thought Christian, dispassionately. I believe I’ve crossed a Rubicon or forded a river somewhere, but whether it’s the Jordan River or Charon’s Styx or the measureless sacred Alph, or something else altogether I have no idea. But if I’m mad, then I ought not to care any longer and I ought not to be still hurting, and I do care – oh God, yes, I do, and I’m still hurting. Because Fael cheated me and because I ruined Cauldron . . . I can’t bear to think about either of them. I don’t think I’m entirely alone out here. I think the leanan-sidhe are very near to me tonight.
The people of Moher told how, when the wind whistled through the stone’s smooth aperture, they could hear the leanan-sidhe calling to the shipwrecked sailors, luring them onto the murderous black rocks. People told stories of banshees, they said, the Celtic bean si, but in Moher they had their own banshees, and they were fearsome and cunning beyond belief. You heard stories of how they prowled this stretch of coast, all the way back to the days when people could not read or write; when Ireland had bards and story-tellers, and when they were regarded with as much respect as was these days given to the priests. Even Father Mack, when he had taken a drop of gin in Flaherty’s Bar, agreed that the bards had been Ireland’s aristocracy, preserving her history and keeping alive the legends. Sinead O’Sullivan, whose family had lived in Moher for longer than anyone could count, said her grandmother had told how the leanan-sidhe haunted this stretch of the coast, and her great-grandmother used sometimes to see them, washing the bloodstained clothes of those about to die, the scarlet webbed feet of them plain to see. Even today, said Sinead firmly, hadn’t you to be blind and deaf not to occasionally hear the keening voices inside the wind?
Christian knew the stories, which the people of Moher loved to tell, and he knew that they did not really believe them. It was mostly only the Irish love of a good story, and it was partly the Moher people being jealous of their own snippets of folklore. He strode on down the narrow cliff path, the wind lifting his cloak so that it billowed out like huge, ragged, black wings. He bent to the stone’s foot and slid his hand inside the crevice, his heart beating faster. Had the buskers done what he had asked them? Or had they simply taken the cash he had given them and vanished? He saw at once that the thick wad of banknotes wrapped in several thicknesses of plastic had gone and there was a moment of hideous doubt: have they cheated? Or has the cache perhaps been discovered by a tinker? But tinkers never came down here, and most people were too fearful of the stone’s eerie legend. And then his hand closed around the thin envelope, also in its weatherproof plastic covering, and relief rushed in. He unfolded the single sheet of paper.
The writing was uneven and hurried, as if it had been written in extreme haste or in difficult circumstances. The deck of a ferry boat? Leaning against the trunk of a tree or a bar counter?
But it was perfectly legible, and Christian scanned it quickly. Flynn Deverill had reached Ireland two days earlier, said the note, carefully setting down times and dates. He was making for the west coast, driving his own car, and he would be staying in Galway City at the Royal George Hotel. There was even an addition saying that the car was a scarlet Volkswagen, and an apology that it had not been possible to get the number.
Christian tore the short, highly satisfactory note into dozens of tiny pieces and scattered them into the wind. It was working. Flynn was walking deeper and deeper into the trap. As he walked back to Maise, the knowledge was like a sexual charge, so strong that he actually felt a hardening between his thighs.
As he let himself into the house, he was smiling the secret, difficult smile, and once inside with the familiar scents of the old place closing about him, he paused, listening for sounds from the turret rooms. Nothing. Then Fael must be asleep. For a moment he struggled against a sudden longing to climb the narrow turret stair and to enter her room and lie in the bed with her. And then memory flared, lighting a different plane of awareness, and he saw again the revulsion in her eyes and the pity, and he remembered that she had cheated him over the child, and the desire turned to cold hatred.
He crossed the hall and went through to the stone-floored sculleries. At the far end was a low door, blackened with age, sealed with a huge iron ring-handle. Christian lit a candle and wedged it in a metal holder, pocketed the box of matches from the pantry, and bent down to turn the handle. As the door swung inwards, a noxious breath of dry, fetid air gusted out.
Inside the door steps wound steeply downwards, and there was a dank, oppressive atmosphere. The stairwell was narrow and the walls had a faint slimy look to them. Here and there lichen and pale fungal growths sprawled over the old brickwork.
As Christian went lower there was the suffocating feeling of the great old house overhead, and as the steps spiralled around to the right, he caught from somewhere below, the sound of water dripping against stone, followed by its own thin echo. Once or twice he thought that something flitted across his vision: something that was child-sized but not childlike, and something that was hunched and wizened, with a round hairless skull and long bony fingers . . .
He did not count the steps as he went down, but he knew there were eighty-one. Nine times nine, said his mind, with faint cynicism. The magical nine times nine of all the best fairy stories. At the foot, the steps gave onto a dank underground room with an earth floor, and black brick walls. The room was bare save for the gaping black abyss at the centre that was Maise’s disused well, and that was surrounded by a narrow brick parapet. A faint mustiness drifted up out of the well and the parapet was stained and blackened, with several of the old bricks crumbling. Against the far wall was the well cover: an immense, saucer-shaped disc of clanging black iron, lipped and rimmed. In Christian’s father’s day the well had always been covered in case of unwary servants falling in, although no servant ever came down here except under protest and accompanied by at least two other people.
Once there had been some kind of investigation into the well, because it was thought that there was some danger of erosion by the sea at the foot, for the water had first turned brackish with salt, and then ceased to flow altogether. Christian could remember how it had taken two people to lift the cover and drag it free of the yawning hole. He could remember how the sound had reverberated through the entire house.
He stood at the foot of the steps, his eyes on the yawning cavern: the ancient underground well that gave Maise its slightly macabre legend. The alleged opening to the subterranean water cave, where in some other time the leanan-sidhe had held court. After a moment he moved to its edge, seeing now that iron staves had been driven into the inside of the well-shaft, to form a makeshift but serviceable ladder. The staves were rusty, but they looked sound enough. So it would be possible to climb down inside the well, would it? Could I do it? thought Christian, caught between fascination and repulsion. If I had to, could I set foot on that rusting ladder, and go down and down into the darkness? And does it truly lead to the hinterlands of the leanan-sidhe, or is that only another of the jumbled myths about this part of Ireland?
Whether or not the ancient disused well was the doorway into the legendary, under-ocean worlds of the leanan-sidhe, it would provide the means for Flynn Deverill’s death, when eventually Flynn reached Maise.
The warped smile twisted his lips, and he leaned forward over the well’s mouth. For a moment there was not the tomblike stench and the impenetrable darkness, but something else, something that ruffled the air with its sweetness . . . A stillness came over him at once; he thought there was a flash of turquoise at the darkness’s heart – the glint of iridescent wings, the sinuous bodies of eerie sea creatures with not the smallest drop of human blood in them . . .
Because this is what we really look like, human creature . . . If you came down to us, you would see what we really look like, and you would see how we are more beautiful than your human eyes can imagine and how we are more dazzling than your human soul can comprehend . . .
Christian stepped back, lifting the can
dle higher, and it was then he saw, in the ancient dust surrounding the well, tiny footprints, dozens upon dozens of them, light and swift and darting, as if the owners had traced circles inside circles inside circles . . . As if tiny creatures had come swarming up out of the well’s depths while the humans slept, and had danced and cavorted to their own chill music . . .
Rats? said his mind. Or something else? Something that’s remaining on the outer rim of consciousness, and something that’s hungry for human souls, and that lusts after first-born children . . . But Fael betrayed me! cried his mind again, and instantly came the response: but there are others. There are others you could use for the child and the bargaining.
But Fael was mine! cried Christian. I made her mine, body and soul and blood and bone, exactly as the sidh prince made Mab his own in Cauldron!
Mab.
The two things came together in his mind with such sharpness it was very nearly audible. The little wide-eyed redhead in the theatre, who had played Mab, not brilliantly, but very well, and who had certainly understood about being in thrall to inhuman creatures. Christian remembered Gilly from the Soho meetings, and he remembered the way she had always looked at him. And she would soon be here, the entire Harlequin company would soon be here. Mab, thought Christian, turning to climb back up the nine times nine steps to his own part of Maise, the smile lifting his incomplete mouth again.
Flynn had drawn a blank with his first line of enquiry, which had been to search the birth registrations for twenty-five to thirty years previously.
This did not mean that the son did not exist. If Roscius’s wife had given birth to a creature so pitifully deformed, it was not impossible that they had concealed the child’s existence, even to the extent of not registering it. Flynn thought the professor had been sufficiently well-off not to need to worry about welfare benefits and National Health or education; he had also been sufficiently unconventional, as Flynn himself was unconventional, not to have cared about the morality of what he had done. The boy would have been brought up in obscurity, and Roscius himself would have provided the education. Flynn grinned wryly, because if the professor really had done that, it meant his son was probably better educated than a great proportion of his generation.
He ate a thoughtful lunch in the Royal George, considering other methods. If he could not find the person, could he find the place? How did you set about finding a house whose name you did not know, in a place you were unsure of, and which might lie anywhere between the Connemara Mountains and the mouth of the Shannon, and which might as easily lie at the end of a wild-goose chase or the bottom of the rainbow, or the other side of Ireland altogether?
If you were looking for a house, didn’t you usually start with a map?
Flynn left the Royal George’s bar and went back out into the town.
Well no, said the assistant in the largest stationers that Galway boasted, no, you could not precisely buy Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland as you could for England – he knew exactly what the gentleman meant – but certainly there was an equivalent. Was it any particular part of Galway?
‘That’s the devil,’ said Flynn. ‘All I know is that the house I’m trying to find is somewhere near the Moher cliffs.’
This, it appeared, did not necessarily present a difficulty. There were some very good large-scale maps of the west coast, and there were several concentrating on that part. What scale would be needed? Most people had the one-inch-to-the-mile kind, which were ideal for touring, said the assistant; would they suit the purpose?
‘They sound exactly what I want,’ said Flynn.
After tumbling out and unfolding half a dozen different maps, during which time the helpful assistant several times became shrouded like Laocoon in the sea-serpent’s embrace, Flynn bought three of the inch-to-the-mile maps, and carried them back to his room at the hotel. Probably this would be the wild-goose chase after all, but it was worth a try because properties on that coastline were so sparse that a great many of them had to be identified by their name. Flynn spread the map out on the floor, and frowned over it.
And there it was, as clear as a lighthouse beam in the darkness. Maise. Maise. The house that could only belong to one person, because that person had many years ago written a piece of music for a children’s play at the Harlequin – a light, inconsequential piece of froth and frivolity that he had called Maise, which he told Flynn was a derivation of an old Gaelic word for happiness.
Surely only Professor James Roscius would have called his house Maise.
I believe I’ve got him! thought Flynn, and sat down to calculate the distance between Galway and the house called Maise which stood on the very westernmost tip of the cliff road.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The countryside surrounding Maise was the bleakest place that Flynn had ever encountered.
When he slowed the car down, looking for somewhere to break his journey and have a bite to eat, it was twilight; the heady, heavy gloaming that never fell over anywhere else in the world in quite the same way that it fell over Ireland, and that Flynn always thought of as weighed down with old enchantments and dreams.
But this was a short-lived twilight, and, as he parked the car, rain was already pattering outside the long, low building with the lighted windows and the neatly-lettered sign proclaiming it as Flaherty’s Bar. There was the suspicion of white tipping the churning waves, and a flurry of rain blew across the road into Flynn’s face. He shivered, locked the car, and went inside Flaherty’s, ducking his head under the low doorway.
Whoever Flaherty was, he – or maybe she – had managed to bring the place comfortably up to date without entirely killing the atmosphere of the old building. Flynn was ensconced at a small, round, oak table near to one of the tiny, leaded windows, with chintz curtains in a strong, good-quality fabric. There were small, candle-shaped wall lights, but there were several clearly-functional oil lamps set about as well. ‘We’ve the occasional power failure out here, you see,’ remarked the barman. Any hint of whimsy or tweeness was put firmly in place by the blackened oak floors and the worn stone steps leading down to the tiny eating area, and the smoke-scarred hearth where a huge peat fire was burning. The storm was getting under way now, and the sound of the driving rain beating on the windows mingled with the warm flickering of the flames.
All of this greatly pleased Flynn, who had a designer’s eye for a setting. He drank a pint of strong draught Guinness with appreciation, and ate a substantial supper of home-made soup, soda bread spread thickly with butter, and the kind of huge juicy prawns you seldom got in England and which were served here with light, puffy potato pancakes. Afterwards he gravitated, apparently absent-mindedly, to the bar itself and asked for a second Guinness.
His fellow drinkers were inclined to be friendly. Flynn thought only a purist would have called them inquisitive, but it suited his mission very well to fall into conversation and to ask about the area generally. He bought several drinks and after a time, judging the mood carefully, said, ‘I’m hoping one of you will be able to direct me on the last lap of my journey. I’m trying to find a house called Maise. I don’t know its exact whereabouts. Would any of you know it?’
The stunned silence that fell on the roomful of people was akin to the kind of silence that descended in remote country pubs in films about werewolves and vampires, where the unsuspecting traveller seeks food and rest, and then trustfully asks if he can be directed to Castle Dracula. Flynn found himself particularly remembering the darkly-tinged Roman Polanski film, and the extraordinary Francis Ford Coppola epic. And the look of furtive fear that was now showing on every face was exactly the look that the extras in those films wore, just before they began to talk about wolfbane and wearing a string of garlic and a crucifix, and better still beat the hell out of here sir, because no one ever goes up to the castle, and if you do you’ll never be seen again . . . Flynn took a deep breath and drank half of the Guinness in his glass at one go, because weren’t there enough fantastical nightma
res in this already without looking for the film-makers’ versions?
Flaherty himself, a genial, rotund person who had been amicably dispensing drinks and conversation, and who had, not ten minutes previously, been recounting a highly spiced tale of somebody’s daughter’s exploits in Dublin, stopped dead, and, leaning over the bar, said, earnestly, ‘Maise, did you say? That’s not a place the likes of you would be wanting to visit,’ which was so in keeping with Flynn’s half-frivolous, half-serious analogies, that he stared at the man.
‘Why the devil not?’
‘Well, because it’s a very weird place,’ said Flaherty, now busily polishing the bar counter, and evading Flynn’s eyes. ‘A bad name it has, Maise.’
‘They tell some nasty tales about it,’ put in someone.
‘What kind of tales? Is it haunted, or something?’
‘It’s not so much the house, as the owner,’ said one of the men who Flynn thought had been identified as Seamus O’Sullivan, and who was memorable chiefly for the amount of drink he had put away.
Flynn’s mind sprang to attention at once, but he only said, ‘The owner? What’s wrong with the owner? And who is the owner anyway?’
‘No one knows his name,’ said O’Sullivan. ‘And he’s not there so very often, thanks be to God.’
‘He’s there now,’ put in an oldish man. Flynn saw for the first time that he was wearing a priest’s collar, although this did not apparently stop him from enjoying what looked like a double gin. ‘He’s up there now, because we’ve all seen the lights burning.’
‘Those of us who’ve ventured that far out,’ observed Flaherty.
‘Are you not a Galway man then?’ enquired the priest, with what was plainly an attempt to turn the conversation.
‘No,’ said Flynn. ‘I’m from London.’ There was a stir of vague disappointment. ‘But I was born in Connemara,’ he said, and the disappointment perked up into approval. People looked pleased, and started to talk about Connemara, wasn’t it the finest place ever, you’d never see the like of some of the sunsets over the mountains there. Somebody – Liam O’Sullivan, was this? – said the girls there were the best as well, and this was clearly a reference to some long-standing source of merriment because a shout of laughter went up. The atmosphere lightened by the minute and there was the feeling that an awkward, potentially dangerous corner might have been safely negotiated. Flaherty was heard to remark that it was blowing up for a wild old night outside, and would somebody please to throw a few more peat turves onto the fire. The smoky scent of the peat drifted pleasantly into the room, and it was observed that it was a great thing to see Flaherty had the oil lamps to hand, because likely the power would go before morning.
