by Sarah Rayne
Flynn nudged his drink nearer to where the priest was sitting at the end of the bar. ‘Did I hit a nerve just now?’
‘Mentioning Maise? You did, of course. They’re shockingly superstitious these people, but on the whole, you know, there’s good reason.’
‘Why? Will you have another drink, Father – I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’
‘Michael MacKenna, but I’m Father Mack to everyone.’
‘Flynn Deverill,’ said Flynn, accepting the brief handshake. ‘Gin, is it?’
‘It is. My only vice.’
‘I wish it was my only vice,’ rejoined Flynn. ‘Tell me about Maise.’ Tell me about Maise’s owner, said his mind. ‘Why is there good reason for people to be superstitious about the place?’
‘Well now, he’s a very odd creature, the man who lives there,’ said Father Mack. ‘You could say that he’s almost kept the old legends going in people’s minds.’
‘How? And how is he odd?’
‘For a start he spends a great deal of time away from Maise altogether. You and I know that’s not so very remarkable, especially in this country—’
‘Absentee English landlords,’ said Flynn, not altogether in jest.
‘Oh, I don’t think he’s English,’ said Father Mack at once. ‘I think he’s an Irishman, all right. Anglicised, of course,’ he added, fairly.
‘Like me.’
‘You’re not Anglicised in the very least, Mr Deverill,’ said Father Mack.
Flynn grinned and said, ‘Thank the Lord for that at any rate,’ and raised his glass in a mocking salute.
‘The thing is, you see, that when a house – a big house – is empty for any length of time, and when it’s almost on the edge of a lonely clifftop; well then, you’d be almost certain of finding a few odd stories growing up around it,’ said the priest, sipping his gin reflectively.
Flynn, choosing his words carefully, said, ‘But does no one ever see the owner? Even if he doesn’t mix with the local people, he’s surely got to have some dealings with them? Doesn’t he eat, or drink, or buy petrol or socks or firewood or—’
‘We think he brings provisions with him,’ said Father Mack. ‘Food and so on. From Dublin or Galway, or even London, if that’s where he spends so much of his time. Occasionally he sends down orders for fresh stuff, mostly to Flaherty there, or maybe O’Sullivan’s – they’ve the franchise for milk and eggs hereabouts. There’ll be a list of what’s wanted and cash inside the envelope, almost the exact sum. He knows the price of things, your man.’
‘But doesn’t anyone see him when he delivers these arrogant requests?’
‘They’re put through the door at midnight as far as anyone can tell.’ The priest glanced briefly over his shoulder, and appeared to draw nearer to the fire. ‘You know, that’s a tough old storm getting going out there, Mr Deverill. Have you really to go out again tonight? Flaherty has a couple of rooms he lets – nothing so very grand and not expensive, but clean enough, and a bite of breakfast included in the morning. It’s no night to be driving along the cliff road, or anywhere else, for that matter.’ It’s no night to be driving out to Maise and its owner if that’s where you’re really going, said his tone.
‘I might take Flaherty up on that,’ said Flynn, glancing to the nearest window, where the rain was pattering relentlessly. ‘Tell me more about Maise’s owner. He’s a creature of the night, seemingly.’
‘Indeed he is, Mr Deverill, and whenever any of us catches sight of him it’s always after dark,’ said Father Mack.
‘Really?’
‘He prowls a certain stretch of the cliff road,’ said the priest, glancing over his shoulder and lowering his voice. ‘Wearing a black cloak the like you’d never see outside of a horror film. And,’ he added, with the Irish genius for parenthesis, ‘how he escapes notice in London – if that’s where he lives – is a mystery. Even in London you’d think he’d stand out, and you’ve the oddest people there, so I hear.’
‘We have,’ said Flynn. ‘But he does stand out there as well. I rather suspect that he trades on his oddness, in fact.’ He paused, and then said, half to himself, ‘So he prowls the cliff road, does he?’
‘He does, and always near to the place everyone believes is the source of the old legends,’ said Father Mack. ‘It’s that that unnerves them so much. Do you know the belief of the Self-Bored Stone by any chance?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Well, it’s a monolith, a good thirty or forty feet high, and it stands very near to Maise.’ Father Mack took another drink of his gin. ‘At the tip is a round aperture – probably a natural formation, of course, but I’d have to admit it’s evocative enough on a moonlit night. The belief is that if you climb to the very top and look through the hole, you’ll see through into other worlds. One version tells that you’d see spread out the chronicles of the leanan-sidhe, written in the ancient tongues of the lost tribes of Ireland. You’d be able to read the names of their victims.’
‘Engraved in gold and soaked in blood? I’ve heard of the sidh,’ said Flynn cautiously, wondering if he was about to see a wild version of Cauldron coming to life. ‘But I don’t think I’ve ever come across leanan-sidhe,’ he said. ‘It translates as – fairy mistress, doesn’t it?’
‘Near enough. You’ve retained a word or two of Gaelic, then.’
‘You were the one who said I wasn’t Anglicised. What are the leanan-sidhe? No, I’m not being polite,’ said Flynn, anticipating Father Mack’s look of enquiry. ‘I’m never polite. I’m genuinely interested in what you’re saying. You’re very knowledgeable, by the way.’
‘Oh, I’ve had plenty of time to learn about the folklore of this stretch of coast,’ said Father Mack. ‘And it makes for interesting study, you know. Around here, the leanan-sidhe are believed to be a kind of water spirit, and they’re supposed to bestow genius rather maliciously on those who see them. One version of the legend swears blind that what they’re really after is human children to steal down to their dark realm—’
‘The changeling belief,’ said Flynn, half to himself.
‘Exactly.’ Father Mack nodded briefly towards the lady sitting with the hard-drinking Seamus O’Sullivan. ‘Sinead O’Sullivan there is supposed to have had a great-aunt who was suspected of being a changeling.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘The family burned her alive when she was a year old, in an attempt to drive out the black sidhe heart.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Well, yes. He’d have been looking out for the poor murdered soul, of course,’ said Father Mack, and Flynn spread his hands, accepting the veiled reproof and indicating apology.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have dwelled too long in the blasphemous cities of the English.’
‘I don’t know about blasphemy, you’re certainly an irreverent one,’ said the priest. ‘Will I get you another drink?’
‘Let me. By way of penance.’ In fact Flynn was angry that he had so nearly antagonised this unexpected source of information. Serve you right for forgetting you’re back in devout Catholic Ireland, said his mind. When the drinks came, he said, ‘It’s an interesting legend.’
‘It is. But of course, it’s no more than just a legend.’
‘Of course not. Tell me, Father, would you know if there was ever a musician lived at Maise?’
Father Mack looked at Flynn very steadily, and then said, ‘Now how in the world did you know about that, Mr Deverill?’ and Flynn felt a surge of triumph. Got him!
When it came to it, nobody seemed very happy about him leaving the safe warmth of the bar and haring off to Maise. Wasn’t it the worst night ever to be driving anywhere, they said, and no night at all to be driving out to Maise, for God’s sake?
Flaherty contributed his mite to the persuasions, saying that the guest room could be made ready for Flynn in a trice, and appealed to his daughter for confirmation. His daughter, a buxom female, eyeing Flynn with a hopeful and appreciative eye,
enthusiastically agreed that it would not take the shake of a flea’s whisker to have fresh sheets on the bed, hot water in the ewer and a fire burning in the hearth. She added that Flynn would be made very welcome indeed. The picture conjured up by the description of the bedroom was so tempting that Flynn found himself arranging to just take a look around the locality and return within the hour.
‘And you could leave your luggage here, Mr Deverill,’ suggested Flaherty’s daughter, hopefully.
‘So I could.’
Liam O’Sullivan helped Flynn to carry his luggage in, observing that it was a wild old night and a man would be the better for staying indoors.
‘It is indeed. A pity I can’t do it,’ said Flynn. He gave Flaherty a token cash deposit for the room, bought Liam a large whiskey, and glanced round the bar. ‘And now isn’t anyone going to provide me with a necklace of garlic cloves or a newly-minted silver crucifix for the journey? Or even offer to act as guide? Even if I pay in silver ducats rather than by a pound of carrion flesh? No? No takers?’
There were not, it appeared, any takers at all, although a murmur of laughter stirred the company in uneasy recognition of the black humour of the remark, and Father Mack looked as if he might be wondering would it be appropriate to pronounce a blessing, and if so, which one.
‘Not even a sprig of wolfbane, or the fragment of an ancient rune to protect me?’ demanded Flynn, donning his overcoat. ‘Mother of God, you’re a dismal lot. Well then, in the absence of any other form of help, spiritual or practical or demonic, I suppose somebody can at least give me directions.’
The directions were provided, albeit reluctantly. It was easy enough to actually get to Maise, said the inhabitants of the bar, leaving unspoken the suggestion that even though you might get there it was anybody’s guess where you would finish up afterwards. But Flynn was to carry on down this road, watching for the potholes which would tip a man over the cliffs into the sea if he did not know they were there, and then to look for the narrow private road on the left. About three miles along, it was, and then there was the turning, and the Maise road, winding steeply up to the house.
At this point there was a pause, and the question as to why Flynn was going up to Maise in the first place hovered in the air. Liam O’Sullivan in fact started to say, ‘Would you tell us—’ and then caught Father Mack’s reproving eye, and stopped.
Father Mack said, firmly, that there was no knowing what business a man might have of a night, and no telling where that business might take him and everyone agreed there was not, that was very true.
‘Seriously though, Mr Deverill, won’t you delay until morning?’ said the priest, glancing at the rain-drenched windows.
‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ said Flynn. ‘But if I don’t return within forty-eight hours you have my permission to call out the cavalry.’ As he went out, turning up his coat collar against the driving rain, the lights in the bar flickered in ominous presage of a power cut.
From an artistic point of view the storm added atmosphere, of course, because it looked as if this was going to be the traditional journey along the long, dark, lonely road through the equally traditional raging storm. Flynn had already decided that he would have to approach Maise unseen and under cover of darkness, but he had not quite visualised such impenetrable blackness as this and he had certainly not visualised a cliff road with hairpin bends and a hundred-foot drop into the ocean on one side. He tried to see if there was any kind of crash barrier in case he skidded off the road and thought there was not.
The rattle-trap car was not suited to these conditions; before Flynn had gone fifty yards it was shipping water to an alarming degree. The rain was so violent that the windscreen wipers were virtually useless, and the headlights made only the thinnest of beams through the darkness. Flynn kept having to lean forward to wipe dripping condensation from the windows so that he could see where he was going, and even then, he ran onto the grass verge several times, grazing the nearside wing. He began to have terrifying visions of meeting another car head-on, but there was no sign of life at all and Flynn supposed no one with a grain of sense would be driving along this road on a night like this. He reminded himself that he had wanted to reconnoitre Maise unobserved.
If the rain had not slackened a little, and if he had not been peering through the murk for the turning, he would have missed it. But there was a small dip in the road and there it was, exactly as it had been described. Flynn pulled thankfully over, and as he engaged second gear for the slope, there was a sudden crunching jolt and a grating noise, and the car bounced as if it had been punched from underneath. The engine stalled and Flynn swore profusely and turned the ignition key. There was a sound like a loose tin can being rattled, and then the engine fired with an ominous grating sound from somewhere below. Exhaust dislodged by a rock? But you could drive without an exhaust, couldn’t you? He would pull onto the grass verge – always supposing there was one – and he would walk the rest of the way to the house, take a good look round, and then drive himself back to Flaherty’s using extreme care.
But as he let out the clutch again, the car careered wildly across the track, as if it was skidding on ice, and the steering wheel twisted uncontrollably out of his hands. Steering. The bloody steering’s gone! thought Flynn, who knew virtually nothing about cars except that they usually refused to go when you most needed them. He got out, kicked each wheel in turn, tried the steering again, and finally faced the fact that the car was undrivable. Which meant he was stranded. And I wouldn’t put it past that black-hearted villain to have planted a socking great boulder in the centre of his path to trap people, either! he thought, bending down to peer with difficulty under the car. Yes, it looked as if there was a damn great chunk of rock there, and a very integral-looking length of steel tube seemed to have torn away from the car’s underside. This helped Flynn not at all. He got back in, switched off the lights to conserve the battery, and considered his situation.
It was the classic horror story opening, of course. The hero stuck in the middle of the blackest night Ireland ever spawned, in the middle of a raging storm, with little alternative other than to go up to the sinister house on the clifftop and ask for help.
I’m between the devil and the deep blue sea, thought Flynn, grimly, except that in this case the devil’s almost certainly a maniacal killer, and the deep blue sea is a wild, storm-tossed ocean, probably inhabited by human-hungry succubi and homicidal siren maidens. And I wish, he thought, searching the glove-box for a torch, I really do wish that Father Mack hadn’t related that bloody legend!
He found the torch and dragged an old waterproof out of the boot. The rain had lessened a bit, but the wind was moaning like a monster in its death throes, and it was bitterly cold. The sensible thing would be to walk back to the bar, trusting to get there before dawn broke and pneumonia took hold. It would probably take a good two hours and he would be soaked to the skin before he had gone ten yards. He looked back up the track. No lights showed anywhere, and Flynn wondered if the house really was up here. And surely only a fool or a reckless hero would walk up to the dark old house on the hill and request admittance. Especially when the hero knew that the arch-villain was inside. I’m not that reckless, thought Flynn.
But there might be other dwellings quite nearby where he could get help, and if he walked partway up the cliff path he would be able to look down on the countryside a bit and see if lights showed anywhere. As long as he kept clear of Maise itself—
No choice really, thought Flynn, setting off up the hill.
Walking up the cliff path was unspeakably eerie. The night was filled with the sounds of the storm: there were shrieking voices inside the wind and eldritch laughter within the sudden gusts of rain that still tore through the darkness.
There were no signs of human habitation anywhere, but Flynn walked doggedly on, shining the torch at intervals to see his way. The rain was definitely lessening and there was a cold, clean taste to the wind. If you were unduly fanciful
– or if you had been so foolhardy as to listen to a load of superstitious rubbish from a romantically-minded priest in a bar – you might almost believe you were hearing the keening shrieks of inhuman creatures in the wind. It was very likely this that had started the legend of the leanan-sidhe in the first place. Flynn was just starting to feel pleased at having found an acceptable solution to at least one of the grisly sub-plots surrounding his archvillain, when he became aware that someone was creeping along the road behind him.
It was a very bad moment indeed. He stopped at once, listening, trying to distinguish the sounds, trying to identify where they came from. Had it only been the product of an overstretched imagination? Yes, but if that creature is really holed up in some Gothic nightmare mansion up here, then he’s going to be keeping a lookout for intruders. It’s a bit of a coincidence, though, Flynn argued, if he just happened to be out checking the barricades at the exact minute you’re sneaking up to the portcullis.
After a moment he set off again, straining every nerve-ending to listen. Yes, there was no doubt about it; someone was either behind him or over to his right, stealing furtively through the darkness. The thought of being suddenly attacked, and possibly struck down from behind without any warning was infuriating. Flynn cursed at not having brought some kind of weapon. But the torch was a large, heavy-based one, and it would deal a telling blow if necessary. The torch . . . If he can see me, let’s even the score, thought Flynn, and he swung it around in all directions.
