by Brian Hodge
“A little, maybe. The souls of those who have taken their own lives, or died violently…they sometimes linger.”
“Does he feel anything?” Thinking of the claim that he’d been shot. “Does he feel pain? Or remorse?”
“Remorse, I most surely doubt. Pain, perhaps, but I imagine only to the point that it drives him away from what could destroy his body. They say he was wounded earlier. He would’ve had to retreat for a time. To heal. To learn. To formulate a new plan.” Could Maia read her questioning face in the dark? Perhaps she could. “What moves him is no longer his own will—that’s gone. What moves him is a fragment of God that was broken loose and dropped here a very long time ago. An avenging angel, you might call it—that’s close enough. But without a body, it’s just intent and wrath. Without a body, it has no sense of time. Until tonight, it understood blades best…so that’s what it resorted to.”
Pandora’s imagination began to fill in the gaps: Ethan rousing; slithering backwards, upwards, until he was free of the yew’s hollow core. Ethan stalking through fields, barns, stables, until he had found…what? Sickles, axes, knives kept sharp enough to slit the throats of lambs? Ethan, who could only ever hurt himself, turning these blades on others.
“They move frightfully quick,” Maia said. “But against guns…?” She pointed toward town, where a flickering orange glow backlit the silhouette of one of the taller buildings. “So you can see…he’s come back with fire.”
Please, not The Mouth of Oran. Not Kathleen and Fergus, she mouthed, painfully aware of the absurdity of it, with no idea who might hear such a prayer, much less grant it. She lowered her lips to her tea; had taken along another large serving in a glazed earthenware mug—for warmth mainly, and something to hold on to.
“You’ve seen this one before,” Pandora said. “Haven’t you?”
“It’s why I came here after Dublin. Glenmullen is very old. Very. It’s owed my Sisters and me a debt for much of its history. They’ve never forgotten that here. All the generations that have lived and died, and they’ve never forgotten. They know what I am, too, and they accept that. Maybe because I don’t need to kill to feed—only Lilah has to kill. Or maybe after all this time, they still regard the debt as that binding. If we had time, I could show you a story in stained glass that hasn’t been seen by anyone who wasn’t born here almost since Christopher Columbus was alive…
“In this valley,” she went on, “there was an ancient tradition of worship. Much stronger once than it is now, but even today it survives.”
Pandora thought again of the matriarchal figure Maia had left for her, wondering anew how old it truly was.
“It predated the Druids, although it’s said that they never interfered with it. It survived the rise of the Celtic Church—which may have tolerated it too, if they were aware of it. Later it survived the Council of Whitby, when the Roman Church declared itself the only true church…only now their survival depended on the people here taking care to guard their secrecy.
“Then, many generations back, a slip of someone’s tongue betrayed them to a pair of missionaries who’d come to the valley. If it was ever known what aroused their suspicion to begin with, it’s been forgotten…but not the depth of their condemnation. And you must remember, this was an age when heretics could be burned by the dozens.
“So the people of Glenmullen killed one of them. The other escaped long enough to pray for the wrath of God. He was heard…and answered. Maybe he was expecting fire from Heaven. He certainly couldn’t have been expecting his own body to be used as the sword of judgment.”
A fragment of God, Maia had said, broken loose and dropped here. Pandora had, of course, heard plenty about demonic possession, even if she’d had a hard time believing in it. She’d never once heard of its opposite.
“My Sisters and I had already lived in the valley for many years. It suited us. The people knew there was something different about us, even if they didn’t know what it was…but unlike the Christians of that age, they didn’t equate different with evil. Some suspected we might be survivors of one of the earlier races lost to myth…the Tuatha Dé Danaan, or the Daoine Sidhe…and we were happy to encourage that.
“So on the day the slaughter began, they sent a runner to us, begging for help. It wasn’t our fight, yet the source of their massacre was the same god who’d designed our own fate. How could we have said no? By the time we got there it had killed more than thirty of them, with no discrimination.”
For several paces, Maia said nothing; then: “My Sisters and I, and all the others that Patrick wrote of…we’ve never known why we were made what we are, not with any certainty. We only know that the centuries have given us power, and cunning. And so, together, the three of us were a match for it, barely—Lilah especially. She knows intimately how to take a body apart, and quickly. Even so, we were all badly wounded before it was done.
“The people of the valley took the pieces and buried them beneath the yew, amid the roots—the tree was intact in those days—and then they consecrated it, in their own way, in the hope of holding the spirit there. I think they knew, without us telling them, that even though it may have been beaten, it wasn’t destroyed. Can you even destroy a piece of God? I don’t know.”
“It couldn’t move to another body?” Pandora asked. “Or wouldn’t God just send another one?”
“What your parents may have raised you to believe in as God…we’ve always suspected it’s not omnipotent, nor all-seeing. It sends something like this, but then in its arrogance it trusts that the job can’t fail to be completed. And so it forgets…
“As for moving to another body, no, I don’t think it would be as simple as that. When it was loose the first time, it used the missionary, and he hated the place already. They seem to need that—a meshing of intent. They work in harmony with what they find. It could never have worked with those who loved their home. You tell me Ethan could never have done this? Perhaps not. But in the time he was here, he must have developed a terribly deep resentment toward Glenmullen.”
Yeah, I guess he did, and Pandora felt her heart sink. Because this is where he thought he’d lost me to a dead man.
“So that fragment of God…it lay waiting all these years,” Maia said. “If it recognized time, maybe its hatred might have dissipated. If it could’ve felt the passing of centuries, maybe it might have forgotten the need to destroy.”
Years ago, we used to guard that yew, same as those before us, Kathleen had said. But at some point they’d grown complacent. And so Pandora had to wonder if there wasn’t more behind the mistake in locale that she and Ethan had made than she’d first thought. If the disinformation online that she had so gullibly swallowed had been deliberate—someone, something, hoping to steer unstable visitors toward the yew.
She turned her face to the heart of the village again. Although trees blocked the view, through their thinning branches she saw that the flames had grown bolder.
“If your Sisters were here, could you…?”
“They’re coming. But it may not be soon enough.”
“Then shouldn’t you be doing something anyway?” she said. “Or…we?”
At her side, Maia’s hand found its way around hers for a moment, gave a small squeeze. “We are.”
And her hand was as warm as any woman’s, no more, no less. Another myth dispelled. Pandora thought it likely it was her own hand that felt cold as death. She wrapped both hands around the thick earthenware mug to leech the last of its heat.
“Why did Ethan kill himself the way he did?” Maia asked. “Do you think it was only because you both thought the tree was Patrick’s and he wanted to defile that for you? Or was there something about hanging that meant more?”
God. What a question. Because it had an answer.
Pandora sipped at the tea, with greed now, found it calming, soothing, despite turning lukewarm. Maybe these herbs were just what she needed. She spent a moment swamped by the sense of well-being that often desce
nds in the midst of tragedy: It will be all right. Somehow it will be all right…
“I’ve thought about it ever since I found him,” she said. “We used to talk about suicide, you know? When we were younger. When you go through that stage where you romanticize it. Except I guess Ethan still did. And it’s funny, because back then he would dwell on the idea of cutting his wrists. For him, that would’ve demonstrated the ultimate commitment: opening yourself up, literally. So if you’d told me ahead of time I was going to find his body, that’s how I would’ve expected to find it.”
Tramping through the grass. One foot after the other. Jesus, shouldn’t they be coming upon Patrick’s real shrine by now?
“But I had this poster. I thought it was the most beautiful thing, in a morbid way: a picture of a medieval hanging tree. It must’ve been autumn, but later than it is now, because there weren’t any leaves. Or winter, before the snows. It showed this huge oak silhouetted against a purple twilight sky, and from the lower branches there were all these bodies hanging from the neck. Men, mostly, but a few animals, too. Horses, dogs. I remember reading that back then they executed animals sometimes. Everything was in silhouette, so there weren’t any gory details. Whoever did it must’ve Photoshopped it, because a thing like that isn’t going to exist today…which maybe was part of the appeal. I found it peaceful more than anything. Their struggles were over.”
Tramping through the grass. One foot after the other. Though Glenmullen burned, she felt as if she could walk forever…then was drawn from her reverie when the first diffident raindrops spattered her cheeks.
“So when I found Ethan,” she went on, “even though I knew he’d killed himself out of selfishness, and a perverse jealousy, I knew it was the last thing he had to say to me, too: ‘Is this what it takes for you to want me?’”
“I’m sorry,” Maia whispered.
“Aren’t we all.” Tramping through the grass. One foot after the other. Feeling as though she could curl right up in the grass and go to sleep. “Why couldn’t I have loved him the way he wanted? Why couldn’t he have seen that I’m not anything special?”
She wanted to hear a rebuttal, expected it even, Maia telling her no, no, she was special, she was very special, that she’d seen this in Pandora the same way she had in Patrick. Except Maia said nothing. And said no more until she at last stopped walking and announced that here was the place.
A well. They had put the final share of Patrick’s bones down a well. Flanked by trees, encroached upon by dense growths of brush, even in the moonlight it looked very old. It was ringed by a wall made not by brick but stones, rough and flat and mortared together however they might fit, this ancient mouth a yard tall and less wide. In the moonlight, its growths of moss and lichen looked dark as blood.
And somewhere down its wet black throat lay Patrick’s skull. Surely this was where they’d lain his skull.
She thought of it down there, submerged, half-buried in silt, grinning up at her past, what—ribs, femur, clavicle? She wondered how his blood had settled in Maia’s belly, his flesh and seed taken by the other two Sisters. If she lowered a bucket, drew it up, drank a draught, would it fill her with any of the things for which she’d hungered?
The rain fell heavier now. Maia raised one palm, tipped her face to the sky with a smile she then turned upon Pandora. “Glenmullen has more than one defense. It will survive.”
Pandora went to her knees—not even willing the act, it just happened—and watched her arm disappear to the shoulder down the stone gullet. She reached, fingers splayed wide, felt nothing but a cold moist exhalation from below; was aware, dimly, of the earthenware mug tumbling from her other hand, striking something hard. It was too dense to shatter; it cracked, like a fallen egg, and the earth drank the last of the tea.
And she could not stand up again.
The tea…?
“Don’t fight it,” said Maia, now a weight bearing down upon her.
Right. After so many years, Maia would know all about herbs, wouldn’t she?
At first Pandora thought the sound of feet that she heard were her own shoes, or Maia’s maybe, whisking through the grass during their pitifully short struggle. She was wrong. When she saw a pair of male faces looming above, etched against the sky as grim as granite, she didn’t know whether to feel relieved because neither belonged to Fergus, or if it meant he’d sent others to handle something more terrible than even he wanted to be part of.
“Please don’t fight it,” Maia pressing her against the stones, Pandora trapped between soft warmth and hard cold, arms around her, arms that had held the countless children Maia had never borne, the same tender arms Pandora had for years dreamt of feeling, because their embrace would mean she was worth more than the world had ever given her credit for. Hold me, teach me, she would’ve pleaded from their sanctuary. Show me the world through a better pair of eyes.
But it was all one lie after another, wasn’t it, and these instead the ruthless arms that had welcomed the countless men who had come to Maia to die, whether they knew it or not…and surely deep down most of them had.
For who could fail to notice the grief in her eyes?
She would cradle the dying as if in a pietá, a virgin embracing her rotting son.
IX
With the impotent detachment of a dream, she saw. Whether imagination, or the disembodied omniscience of the dead, she saw, and couldn’t turn away. Over treetops and a steeple, past roofs of shingles, slate, and thatch, Pandora drifted with the smoke of dying fires. She ran with the blood that ebbed down muddy lanes; she merged with the shadows that lashed Glenmullen together as one, its buildings and its people and its secrets, and roped them to their fate.
And when that fated judgment befell another victim, it did so with frightful quickness, detaching itself from the dark in a blur of rain and wrath, obliterating any distinctions between Heaven and Hell.
No matter how sturdy the man’s legs, or how broad his back, they could never stand before the razored whirlwind wearing the scarred remnants of Ethan’s face—
* * *
Her eyes opened, blinking at the coldwater tears falling from the sky, dripping through limbs and leaves, streaming down her skull. A wonder she could get her eyelids over them; they felt ready to burst from their sockets.
Pandora weighed less than a paper doll; she was dense and cold as marble. She realized she was staring at the tips of her shoes as they spun in slow arcs against the grass below. A breeze, bearing needles of rain, gave her a nudge and left her swaying, gently swaying, as water beaded upon the tip of her tongue and sluiced down her chin.
She creaked her head upright, through the corrosion that gripped her neck, like a hinge that had rusted shut. Her throat tried to open for air and was all but denied, protesting with a reedy whistle. Somewhere between throat and shoes, her wrists twitched and her fingertips jittered, the most they could manage no matter how desperately she willed them to rise, rise.
Had the rope been thinner, had the noose been cinched lower, it would surely have cut deep enough to close her airway entirely. Instead, the thick round collar of it sat wedged beneath her jaw, the right side more than the left, so that she hung suspended by a precarious shelf of support.
Her heart began to hammer, and when she tasted watery blood, she knew she was biting the tip of her tongue. She pulled it from her teeth and tried to maneuver her sideways-sagging head until a grinding scrape of gristle and vertebrae radiated into her ears.
At first she thought she must be near the well, still…but with another gust of wind and a creak of rope she turned again and this time saw the serpentine tangle of thick roots. The yew. They’d taken her back to the yew.
The war within her was escalating by the moment, panic raging against the lingering stupor of the soporific she’d been fed. Her toes began to scrabble for a grip and found only air. She wanted to scream but couldn’t, felt her face bloating into a hot purple mass—meat, she was meat suspended in air, kept alive b
y the same agonizing immobility that threatened to drive her mad.
And worse yet…
She wasn’t alone inside her skin.
It glowed inside her like a coal banked beneath ashes, left for the night and then forgotten—another presence, scratching futilely at the walls of her soul as surely as her fingers scratched at air. It was male—she sensed this because it seemed in so many ways the opposite of her—and so full of loathing for itself that had it been forced upon her even on her best day, it would still have convulsed her with sickness.
Revelation, then, and not reason: A body need not be as dead as Oran’s to be invaded; near to death must open doorways just as wide.
“Patrick…?” she croaked, or tried to.
It wouldn’t answer, or couldn’t. Or its answer was beyond words and thought, and the response she got was the only kind it knew how to give—she felt flooded with its biles of guilt, of regret, of condemnation from the unforgiving tyranny of its conscience.
And she wanted to die.
For all that she had hoped, for all that she had believed, for all that was now so plainly the yearnings of a fool…she wanted to die.
Soon enough, no doubt. With each pelting drop of rain that soaked her sweater to the skin, she felt as though she gained a pound, more weight to stretch her neck until it snapped, or seal her throat completely after a final wheezing breath.
Soon she heard the sound of shoes squelching upon sodden ground. The arrival set Patrick to scurrying inside her like a rat, as if confined by walls and about to drown. She let her gaze rove about its limited range but saw no one. Somebody come to gloat, maybe—look at her now, stupid girl from America who’d let herself get played for the village idiot.
