Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  A modern-day friar and parochial Latin teacher, Patrick had been a reluctant stigmatic who’d beheld a vision of a Christ who had denied himself. In despair, Patrick had left both his abbey and the Church that had no use for him. Months later he killed the priests over a span of five weeks, dispatching each with a savagely efficient military knife. He had, in the account he was purported to have written of his sad, strange life and unexpected crimes, likened the spilling of their blood to the biblical description of old wineskins that had burst after being unable to hold new wine. He had killed the priests, had set down his tale…then vanished from the face of the earth.

  Of course, anyone who read Patrick’s testament—in time, Pandora found it on the Internet, where else?—would know what happened. It left no room for doubt.

  As to whether or not it was true, well…sometimes things had to be taken on faith.

  III

  Clockwise around this most green of islands, their path had been dictated by the shrines themselves—four of them, it was said, one for each of the cardinal points. They’d started in Dublin, next traveling south to the outskirts of Cork, then swinging up and westward to the shadow of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, and finally north, deep into the wild highlands of County Donegal.

  These were not shrines in the Catholic sense, at least not the Catholicism of the past millennium: gaudy tourist traps whose foundational piety had been usurped by tacky commerce. Instead, Pandora imagined that these new shrines were more akin to those from the Church’s earliest centuries, so humble that they scarcely drew attention to themselves at all—the biggest difference being, naturally, that they existed in opposition to all the Church held sacred.

  In Dublin, a fourth of Patrick’s bones were said to rest behind a brick wall, concealed by a dense curtain of ivy, on a side street so desolate you would never go there by accident. The southern shrine was a flagstone on a path leading to an ancient cemetery whose ground had been deconsecrated in the eighteenth century. You had to count to make sure you had the right flagstone, but once you found it, you noticed the subtle etchings left by prior visitors. In the west, his resting place was also marked by rock, with the quarter-share of bones rumored to lie far below ground, beneath one of the solemn gray standing stones that had since pagan times listened to the lapping of the waters of Clew Bay.

  And here in Donegal, a crooked mile’s walk from the village of Glenmullen, they had been reposited into the core of a vast-trunked yew so old it had started to turn hollow. Ancient yews sometimes did that, their roots grown so strong over their first two thousand years that they began to rip the trees open…yet this was not their end, just a new stage of life. It made the grandest tomb she ever expected to see.

  A man’s bones interred the length and breadth of a land—there were plenty of historical precedents, although usually from periods of conquest and terror. After the English had disemboweled Scotland’s William Wallace, across the Irish Channel and 700 years of time, they’d drawn and quartered him and sent the pieces to the farthest corners of Britain as a failed warning to others who would dare fight for freedom.

  Like Wallace, Patrick too had been dispersed by those who killed him, but any parallels ended there. Hunted and hated, too weary to go on, this most notorious of Ireland’s murderers had returned to the only ones he knew would take him back…because even if the Sisters had not made him what he was, his transformation could never have happened without them.

  At her feet, the yew’s roots writhed in and out of the earth like a vast tangle of snakes. Pandora stepped atop them, almost expecting them to squirm, and splayed her hands across the purple-brown bark of the trunk. It may have been one shrine out of four, but this northernmost among them seemed to dominate the rest.

  His skull…surely this was where they’d lain his skull.

  “Imagine someone loving you so much,” she said, “that they would do this for you.”

  “All of it, you mean?” Ethan asked. “Or just the shrines?”

  “Of course all of it,” she said. “Imagine having to tear me apart with your own teeth. Imagine understanding that for all its apparent cruelty, and as much as you’d hate to do it, it’s the last act of kindness you could show.”

  “Hide me,” Patrick had pleaded, knowing he could not outrun the police forever. “Hide me where they’ll never find me. Hide me where they never can.”

  And so they had. The three women who, in the mists and shadows of legend, had become known as the Sisters of the Trinity did the only thing they could. Granting his wish by dealing with him as they had been dealing with much more naïve men for perhaps longer than this yew tree had been standing.

  “’Caress then, these beasts, that they may be my tomb,’” Patrick had written, quoting Saint Ignatius before his own martyrdom in a Roman arena, “’and let nothing be left of my body; thus my funeral will be a burden to none.’”

  They devoured him, body and essence.

  Lilah, his flesh.

  Maia, his blood.

  Salíce, his seed.

  But, like thousands of saints before him, he’d left behind bones.

  Or so the story went.

  That the Sisters had treated these bones with such veneration could only be an act of sublime love—not only on their part, but by extension, the scattered society of abominations of which they were a part, referred to by Patrick as the Misbegotten. Surely they’d known exactly what they were doing—both in scattering his gnawed skeletal remains, as well as sending his testament into the world. But because it was only the text, and not the original document, few believed it genuine, and most of those who did dismissed it as further evidence of a delusional mind.

  But from where Pandora stood, it was too good not to be true.

  The Sisters’ acts, she thought, were intended only for those few in whom they might resonate as lures into a hidden truth: that, as she’d suspected ever since she could remember, the thing that had come to be called God loved nothing but itself. That it had taken credit for a world it had never created, and drank in the suffering of those who groveled before it. That at least some of those branded as devils were not without honor, decency, and love, living in the darkness not because they were born there, but because they’d been forced into it and found it more welcoming than the light.

  “So…what now?” Ethan asked. “You did the legwork. You’ve found them all. What now?”

  A simple question, yet it implied a terrible burden to her. “I don’t know. Are we just supposed to go home after something like this?”

  “Well, yeah, what else?” For the first time, he looked not just annoyed, but genuinely disgusted with her. “What’d you think was gonna happen—you could hang around one of these pathetic little excuses for immortality and some flash of insight would explain why you’re alive?”

  Maybe she did.

  Oh god, maybe she did. Face it: If your free time was consumed by gathering fragments of heresy and fitting them together, if you strained to hear whispers of unholy war, if you went looking for the shrines to a mass murderer that someone had christened Saint Patrick the Fallen, then you were a freak, motivated by compulsions most people couldn’t begin to understand. Least of all yourself.

  Ethan wasn’t finished. “Once I came across this saying, I don’t remember, it was Buddha or the Dalai Lama or somebody like that: ‘Before enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water.’ I thought of you. I thought of you, and it fucking hurt. Because I knew you’d rather freeze and die of thirst before admitting that just wood and just water isn’t the end of the world.”

  And what’s wrong with that? she wanted to know. I have a life, only I don’t recognize it anymore. I was taught things I can’t believe. I have a job but the best thing about it is I can be here and it doesn’t even miss me. I’d have a college degree if I’d had the conviction it would’ve been worth one more year. Maybe nothing fits, okay…but I refuse to roll over and say nothi
ng ever will.

  “Remember those movies we used to rent?” he asked, and at first she thought of the obvious choices, baroque spectacles of blood and love and sorrow. The Crow—they’d watched it a jillion times, and not once had she made it through with dry eyes. Ethan would hold her and tell her…

  Oh. Right. These couldn’t be the movie nights he had in mind right now.

  “Those stupid high school comedies we used to laugh at instead of with?” Ethan said. “The ones where the idiot guy or the idiot girl is totally in love with the unworthy asswipe? But meanwhile, there’s always the geek who’s been right in front of them the whole time, with so much more to offer…except the geeks are invisible for the first hour and forty-five minutes. Well…”

  He couldn’t say the rest. Didn’t need to say the rest. Because they both knew everybody real lived in that first hour and forty-five minutes. They never got to the end, just kept skipping back to the beginning.

  The rest of the argument? Pretty much like that, only worse. Plenty of time to get worse, because as near as she could tell, in Ireland the clocks turned more slowly. Time enough to go from painful to ugly, then degenerate from there.

  Time enough for the best friend she’d ever had to turn his back on her, stalking across the meadows and leaving her to the remains of this suddenly cheerless autumn day.

  * * *

  She hadn’t tried to stop him as he’d set off alone, merely followed later, back into Glenmullen. The village was a woolly little place tucked among the trees and streams of a rough-hewn valley, serviced by one decent road up from Letterkenny, and the rest of any traveling done on glorified footpaths. Picturesque, to be sure, but ramshackle enough to discourage tourists who expected something cushier.

  There was no proper hotel or hostel, so they’d rented a second-floor room at a pub and inn bearing the unlikely name of The Mouth of Oran. When they’d asked Fergus and Kathleen, the owners, what it meant, they were told it dated back to when Fergus’ grandfather owned the place, and spitefully renamed it after an old sheep farmer and steady patron who, whenever he was on the premises, would rather have died than let anyone get the better of him in an argument…or friendly conversation, for that matter. The place was more pub than inn, but took care of creature comforts and food and alcohol alike.

  After the blowup, Pandora gave Ethan a couple hours to cool off—long enough, she hoped, to welcome a peace offering of a round of porters—only to hike back and discover that he’d cleared out entirely, the sad-eyed little shit. Backpack gone, along with everything that had burst from it to make such a litter throughout the room. If Fergus and Kathleen had seen him vacate, they didn’t let on. Hard to tell what they genuinely didn’t notice and what was provincial discretion.

  But they had to figure it out soon enough, as she stayed on alone rather than immediately finishing the circuit back to Dublin. Comforting, she found it, to dig in and make a home away from home like this. She would eat herself miserable each morning with Kathleen’s traditional Irish breakfast: eggs, ham, bacon, black and white puddings, fried tomatoes, coarse brown bread soppy with country butter—meal enough for the rest of the day, almost.

  Of the evenings she would listen to the local musicians who gathered around the fireplace…if not down in the pub itself, at least from her bed, as the old songs, both the lively and the lamenting, filtered up through rafters and stone. Music, she had come to understand, permeated County Donegal the same way honeysuckle sweetened the air of spring. Under this roof, it wasn’t organized and it wasn’t for pay. They just came, bringing their guitars and mandolins, their whistles and flutes, their bodhrans and their pipes and most of all their fine, strong voices, and played as the spirits moved them.

  Did they get many tourists in Glenmullen, to hear such zest and zeal? Pandora was curious but knew that asking would make it all the more obvious she didn’t belong, a fact evident enough already…and for a week, at least, she wanted to belong. But no one else here looked quite like her. Her draping bush of raven hair was an easy enough fit, while her skinny frame, her dark-rimmed eyes, her wardrobe of black tights and jeans and boots and shapeless charcoal sweaters marked her as from parts beyond. But this seemed cause for no comment and only a few disparaging glances. Maybe, with that secret shrine not far off, they had in recent years become accustomed to the sight of the types of visitors it would draw, even if the locals didn’t know why such folk had come. Surely, in a land so intrinsically Catholic, they would be loath to tolerate such a blasphemy in their midst.

  Blasphemy or not, it was where she spent the biggest part of her days—the chasm between breakfast and nightfall when the hours seemed longest. She would hike to Patrick’s yew by a different route each morning, through rain and sunshine alike, ambling down rutted lanes and trekking across pastures of grazing sheep, approaching the grove from a new direction, a fresh way of looking at it.

  Interruptions were rare, and never anything that didn’t seem part of everyday life—a farmer, a shepherd, a retiree out for a stroll. Never any pilgrims like herself, which both relieved and aggrieved her. She knew that people were drawn here, and to the other three shrines—they spoke of it in chatrooms and bulletin boards, or argued over exact locations—but she’d never gotten a sense of how many. On any given day, dozens, if not hundreds, would trudge up rocky Mount Brandon at the opposite end of the island…in bare feet, if they were particularly devout. Here, could the numbers really be so few? The shrine’s loneliness would protect it, yet her solitude here only underscored how few they must be—those who could believe in the righteousness of devils.

  Encouraged by the tranquility of the yew, she would stretch along the ground beneath it and think of Patrick Kieran Malone. The man, not the blackened saint with the blood of priests on his hands. Born a few years earlier, and in a different place, she surely could’ve saved him. Could’ve pulled him back from his despair. Yes, there’s much more to life than that god they raised you on, crushed you with, she would have breathed into his mouth. There’s more to love than that terrible god’s illegitimate son and how he tried to assert his real truth through you…through your split flesh, your blood. You’ve only confirmed what I’ve always suspected, so let’s just exist in defiance of it all. She would’ve guided his inexperienced cock into her not-much-more-experienced cunt and felt him tremble with the newness of his life. She would’ve placed his hands upon her breasts—whose modest endowments had drawn more than one look of disappointment—and he would’ve found them delightful.

  Yeah. Right.

  First the fantasies, then the sense of humiliation. As a college dropout, the last thing she was entitled to was a stupid schoolgirl crush, although she didn’t let it stop her from heading out Kathleen’s door each morning. And the fourth such afternoon, without a soul in sight, she thought what the hell, this must be what it had been building up to all along…and so while lying beneath the tree, she skinned her hands beneath the elastic of her tights to slowly, deliciously, wank herself to a silent but shuddering release.

  So was it coincidence, Ethan’s timing, or had he been watching while hidden in a hedgerow or treeline? She would never know, only suspect that, okay, probably he had seen what for him was the last straw: that she preferred a ghost to him.

  So it seemed the fifth morning upon Pandora’s approach to the yew—leisurely at first, then at an apprehensive jog, and finally a terrified sprint, certain that once she got there she would see how wrong she was, that there wasn’t really anyone or anything that looked like Ethan hanging by the neck from the yew’s lowest bough.

  IV

  She hadn’t realized it at the time, but when Ethan was still alive, still her friend, and they were together far to the south, the equinox had come and gone. Light and dark in perfect balance on the fulcrum of a single day. The land had since tipped toward night. At this latitude, the plunge was more obvious than it would be back home in Ohio, a perceptible chunk shaved off each evening. Soon the darkness would be hung
ry for afternoon, too.

  Fine by her; Pandora wanted little more than to sleep. In less than a week she’d grown accustomed to finishing each day smelling like sun and rain and the fields. Now she stank of her own sheets.

  “Not off tramping about on your all-day hikes anymore, I see,” Kathleen said to her the second afternoon she was spending near the fireplace, over pints and a book. “If it’s your ankle you’ve turned, we’ve a splendid doc just down the road.”

  “No, I didn’t turn anything, I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Today, you say, but it’s a dietician you’ll be needing soon if you keep eating those breakfasts I serve you and then go and not walk ‘em off.”

  Which brought the first real smile Pandora had let go of in days. Kathleen’s voice, like that of most everyone Pandora had heard since coming here, could turn even chiding into a kind of music. Speaking from experience, perhaps, Kathleen was on the wrong side of thickset, although surprisingly light on her feet. She must’ve been around Pandora’s mother’s age, yet seemed both much older and much younger, with a braid of black hair, as thick as one of the yew’s roots, worn down her back.

  “Now if it’s the fella situation that’s been causing you to keep to our dampest, draftiest corners and risk your death of pneumonia…? Fellas come and fellas go, and another’ll be turning up soon enough…although much as I love the filthy old place, I doubt he’ll be turning up beneath our roof.”

  This brought an insulted howl from one of the daily regulars that Pandora had chatted with a few times. Too early for music yet, with almost a dozen scattered about the place…no way were she and Kathleen having a private conversation, no matter how much the others pretended to ignore them.

  “Well, it’ll not be the likes of you, Michael Ennis,” Kathleen called over to him, “so best you take your face and all three chins, and stick ‘em deep in that glass of yours, where you’ve forever found a more welcome reception!”