by Jane Davitt
“Take these,” John said, juggling, and Nick took the flashlight and crowbar. “The same caves you were at earlier, is it? Come on, it’ll be quicker to run than to take the car.”
“Yes.” Nick was sure, even though he couldn’t have said how. “It looked different; I don’t know why. Like a tunnel, almost.” Then there wasn’t spare breath for talking, because they were running. He ought to have tied his boots, but they were a snug enough fit even untied that he wasn’t tripping, at least.
He was winded by the time they came in sight of the caves, but he pointed and said, “That one, I think.”
John ran faster, pulling away and leaving him behind. “Cait!” he shouted, and there was an answering cry in Caitrin’s voice, high-pitched and scared.
When Nick ran into the cave, John was already applying the pickaxe to an opening in one of the walls, widening it slightly before slipping through into the space beyond. “Get some more of those rocks free at the floor,” John called to him.
There was water rushing through the gap over the ledge that Nick moved to stand on, and he realized that the previously sealed off section of the cave beyond it was filling with the tide. Quickly, he tucked the flashlight under his arm and pried some more loose stone away, widening the gap. Cold seawater rushed out over and into his boots, and he looked through into the other part of the cave to see John, Josh and Caitrin standing chest deep in water. Caitrin’s face was pale, her teeth chattering, and Josh didn’t look much better.
“Josh, are you stuck, too?” Nick asked. He wanted to tell his brother to get out of there if he wasn’t, although he doubted it would do any good.
Josh shook his head stubbornly; he probably knew what Nick was thinking. “I didn’t know if you heard me. I didn’t know if it would work in the other direction.”
“It did,” Nick said, meeting the eyes that were so like his own. “I heard you.”
Josh had an arm wrapped around Caitrin from behind, supporting her as John worked at wedging the pickaxe into some space underneath the water.
“There’s a girl,” John said encouragingly. Nick wasn’t sure if it was to Caitrin or to the stone that had her trapped. “We’ll have you out in a moment, all right?”
“All right.” Caitrin looked at her uncle trustingly.
“I can’t get it under without seeing what I’m doing. Nick, love, shine that torch over here for me,” John said, and Nick did. “Good. Now hang on. I’ll be right back.” John gave them all a confident smile, took a deep breath, and ducked under the surface of the water.
They all held their breaths with him until he resurfaced; he gasped for air, shaking water off his face.
“Nothing like a nice swim on a warm summer’s afternoon,” John said, and Nick found himself grinning. “All right; Josh, come over here and help me give this a pull, will you? Cait, I don’t suspect this is going to be any walk in the park where you’re concerned, but hang tight and we’ll have you out in a minute.”
Josh crossed to Caitrin’s other side and gripped onto the tool’s handle with John.
“On three,” John said. “And be careful about it.”
“I will,” Josh told him, nodding, and Nick knew something had passed between them, some kind of understanding.
“One…two…three.” They pulled at the handle, and Nick could see that the stone was lifting; Caitrin gasped suddenly and stumbled back, free. “There,” John said, sounding relieved. “Get back, girl; we don’t want to drop this on you again when we let it down.”
Nick reached a hand out toward Cait, who waded through the water toward him and took it, letting herself be pulled through the gap and onto the wet ledge. “You get out of there, too,” Nick said to Josh and John.
“What, and put an early end to our swim?” John asked. “Fine, fine, if you say so.” He stepped up onto the rocks at the edge of the hidden part of the cave.
“Careful,” Josh told him. “Some of those are loose. That’s how we ‑‑”
John slipped, and the pickaxe he was holding glanced handle-first off the inside wall, which crumbled instantly under the blow, sending rocks falling into both sides of the cave.
In the fraction of a second following that one, a powerful force, bright with rage and fear and half a dozen things Nick wasn’t sure he could have put a name to, burst forth as if from nowhere. Nick could see it, a swirling mass without human form, and he knew immediately that the stories had been true ‑‑ it was just that the ghosts had been so tightly bound by whatever spell had been cast that he hadn’t been able to feel them before, not at all.
And now that spell had been broken, the rocks holding the binding in place a tumbled mass, a jigsaw puzzle that could never be reassembled. The spirits of the two brothers were free, and Nick instinctively held out his hand to ward them off, push them away from him. His other hand brushed against John’s head, and John rose from the crouched position the fall had left him in and glanced around him wildly.
John always had been able to see more than he liked to admit to when he was in physical contact with Nick at times like this; Nick supposed that capacity for a shared awareness was why the two of them had become so close so quickly back when they first met. But John would only have the vaguest impression of what was loose in the cave; Nick saw it all in vivid, nightmarish detail.
The spirits were howling, wordless screams of despair and rage ripping through the air. If they were trying to communicate they would need to calm down, but Nick wasn’t sure they were capable of being reasoned with.
John straightened and linked his fingers with Nick, which helped just like it always did. John was solid, real, a stubborn source of strength Nick could draw on, and would if needed.
“The brothers?” John said. “Can you talk to them?”
Nick shook his head, the small movement painful. There was so much anger… He forced the alien emotions away from him, projecting a receptive welcome as best he could while fending them away. They were trying to get into him, in a way he wasn’t used to, trying to use his mind and body as a haven, their own spirits shredding like wet tissue.
“Their bodies aren’t here,” he told John. In the outer cavern, Caitrin and Josh were talking in a frantic babble, with Josh attempting to quiet Caitrin’s panic. Josh was in his head still; Nick could feel him, a bright thread linking them, in stark contrast to the sticky cobweb of the brothers’ thoughts. Josh knew what was happening and could be trusted to get Caitrin away; at least Nick hoped so.
“No,” John said. “I thought you knew; they’re buried in the graveyard beside our house, in unhallowed ground. I’m guessing they were buried there because the priest wasn’t going to put them beside the mother they’d murdered.”
“Fuck,” Nick said. “They don’t know that’s where they are. They can’t ‑‑ they can’t anchor themselves here, and they don’t want to go, not yet, they don’t want to ‑‑ get away from us ‑‑”
He threw all of his and John’s combined strength of will at the spirits and felt them recoil, thwarted. Shit, this wasn’t good. He couldn’t communicate with them in any meaningful way; he wasn’t talking; he was putting up a barrier, because without it, they’d sweep through and into him, and he didn’t like to think what would happen if they succeeded. But with the barrier up, he couldn’t talk to them.
And then, abruptly, the spirits left, an aching, thrumming, charged silence all that remained. Nick leaned back against rock and felt himself start to shake. God, that had been intense and he didn’t think for a minute that it was over. The spirits had retreated or found ‑‑ found ‑‑
“They’ve gone?” John asked him, but Nick wasn’t listening. Josh. Caitrin, close and unprotected, with Josh’s mind linked to his ‑‑ God, what had he done?
“Are you okay?” he asked Josh, who’d just finished helping Caitrin sit on a rock in the part of the cave that was still dry and was wrapping the blanket John had dropped there around her shoulders.
Josh looked at him, c
learly shocked by what had just happened and not doing more than going through the motions. “I ‑‑ I think so. It was real. The ghosts, I mean. You could ‑‑ they were here, but they left?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “They’re gone.” Not that that was necessarily a good thing, because they were too crazed with anger and fear to just disappear now that they’d been set free. And why had they been set free now? Why not when the wall had first started to crumble?
“There was a symbol,” Josh said, swallowing and pushing his wet hair back out of his eyes. He was pale. “On the wall, on the inside. Could that have something to do with it?”
The wall that wasn’t much more than rubble now; yes, that could explain it.
“Something to do with what? Are you ‑‑ oh God, you were telling the truth.” Caitrin looked more than a little horrified, and Nick felt his stomach clench in sympathy for Josh, who must have seen similar looks on other faces over the years. Then the girl reached out and smacked Josh’s leg with the flat of her hand. “You were telling the truth!”
“I know!” Josh said. “I told you!” He sounded relieved and annoyed at the same time, then remembered and looked at Nick again. “They’re not really gone.”
“Not for good,” Nick agreed. “I don’t think they could be. It’s…complicated.” He didn’t want to say too much in front of Caitrin even if she did seem to be handling the situation fairly well, but he knew John, who couldn’t hear his every thought the way Josh could, had to be wondering what the hell was going on.
John, who was soaked to the skin just like the other two and needed to get out of his wet clothes, because the sea was cold even at this time of year.
“Let’s get back to the house,” he said. “We can find you something to wear, Caitrin, and give you a hot bath and a drink. I don’t think you want your mother to see you like this, do you?”
“God, no,” John chimed in. “We’ll tell her ‑‑ I’ll not have you lying, mind, young Caitrin ‑‑ but there’s telling and there’s showing up half-drowned and scaring her to death. You know what she’s like.”
Caitrin nodded, her teeth chattering audibly. “I do that. Can we go now? Please?”
They made their way out of the cave, splashing through the rising water, and with very little time to spare to get onto the narrowing band of sand by the dunes. As they reached the dry, soft sand, with Nick eying the way it was clinging to his unpleasantly clammy jeans, knowing that it would be hell to wash off, Josh froze and turned his head.
“What is it?” Caitrin asked, stumbling.
“People,” Josh said, indicating an outcrop of rock over to the left, back where they’d come from. “Over there.”
John shaded his eyes. “Aye, I can see them ‑‑ or the jacket one of them is wearing, at least. Who the hell is it?”
“It’s the people from the pub,” Josh told them. “The ones you took to the cave, Nick.”
Caitrin closed her lips firmly on whatever she’d been about to say and, as Nick watched, moved deliberately closer to Josh in a show of support he was sure Josh would’ve appreciated if his attention hadn’t been on the couple who, now they’d been seen, were walking over to join them.
“I wouldn’t say I took them to the cave as much as they took me,” Nick said. God, the last thing they needed right now was to have to deal with these people again. “Maybe if we keep walking, they’ll think we didn’t see them.”
It was already too late, though; Bonnie was raising her hand in greeting, and as they got closer, she called, “Is everyone all right?”
That was when Nick realized how they’d look to other people ‑‑ three of them soaking wet, two of them holding large tools that could easily be used as weapons. “Fine,” he said, hoping to keep the conversation to a minimum. “Your earlier visit down here wasn’t enough?” Somehow, he managed not to sound completely rude as he said it.
“Actually, we were headed to your house to ask if there wasn’t a chance you’d change your mind about attending our ritual tomorrow when we saw you and Mr. McIntyre here ‑‑” Bonnie inclined her head at John politely, “-- running off. It seemed as if there might be some sort of emergency, so we thought we’d better follow and see if you needed help.”
John shook his head. “No; everyone’s fine, as you can see.”
“Well, good.” Fred was holding a pad of paper and a pen ‑‑ Nick hoped he wasn’t taking notes.
Bonnie looked less convinced. Her gaze was moving restlessly from John to Josh, flicking over Caitrin as if she didn’t exist. “You’re not from here, are you, young man?” she asked Josh. “American, like your brother?”
“Yes.” Josh gave an uncomfortable chuckle. “That’s right.”
“We don’t want to seem rude,” John said, his tone making it clear that he didn’t bloody well care if they did, “but as you can see with your own eyes, we’re all on the damp side here and we’d like to be getting into dry clothes.”
“Of course,” Bonnie and Fred chorused. “How inconsiderate of us,” Bonnie added. “We’ll just walk with you up to the road. After all, there’s nothing to be seen in the caves, is there?”
“Water,” Caitrin snapped, following it with a convulsive shiver. “Lots of cold water and rocks.”
Bonnie smiled as if Caitrin had said something amusing. “Yes, I’m sure that’s all there is… now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” John said, his tone sharp.
Nick wasn’t really paying much attention. There was too much to think about and the annoying strangers were the least of his worries.
They walked through the dunes and across the field, the six of them spreading out, split into pairs, with Bonnie and Fred bringing up the rear and Nick and John leading the way. Because John was walking quickly and Nick was automatically matching his pace, it wasn’t long before a gap had opened up between them and the others. “We’ll get in, put the kettle on, maybe build a fire,” John said. “And I suppose Caitrin can take the first shower, but if she stays in there long, I swear I’ll ‑‑” His voice trailed off and he sighed. “No, I probably won’t. God, Nick, she could have drowned in there.”
“I know.” Nick remembered, vividly, the jolt of panic Josh had sent through to him, and his hand tightened on the crowbar he was still holding. “But she didn’t. Good thing you know how to use that.” He gestured at the pickaxe.
John glanced down at it as if he’d forgotten he was carrying it. “Aye.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, as if checking to see how far back Bonnie and Fred were, and then said, “We need to talk. All of us. For the love of God, don’t let that pair come in the house.”
Nick snorted. “I wasn’t planning on it, but they seem hard to shake off.”
“I’ll shut the door in their faces if I have to,” John told him.
By the time they reached the house, Nick felt as if every step was draining a little more of his strength from him. The clammy weight of his clothes, the reaction to the adrenaline rush of the rescue ‑‑ he wanted to get warm and dry and then not think about anything for a while, and he knew that wasn’t going to happen, which made his fatigue deepen.
Without words, he and John paused at the edge of their property and waited for the others to catch up. Caitrin looked exhausted, her face pale, and Josh was stumbling along beside her, in no better shape. Behind them, walking slowly, the two visitors looked half asleep, their expressions blank. Clouds were drawing in, darkening the sky, and a wind was whipping the thin, sharp grass of the field around their ankles. The four crossed the road to where Nick and John stood waiting. A rental car was parked a few hundred yards away, tucked neatly into a passing space, but Bonnie and Fred ignored it.
“We’ll say good-bye, then,” John said with a terse nod at Bonnie. He jerked his thumb at his niece. “Come on, you two, get into the house and don’t be dripping everywhere.”
“Go on with them,” Nick told him. “I’ll be right in.”
John gave him a look, but n
odded and followed the younger ones inside.
To Fred and Bonnie, Nick said, “Look, I’m sure you mean well, but my brother’s only here for two weeks, and I want to spend my time with him, not with people who’re just interested in me as some kind of sideshow. I’ve had enough of that.”
“That’s not what we want from you,” Bonnie said, eyeing him with a new, different kind of interest that verged on making his skin crawl. Nick wondered what Josh would have been able to sense from her. “But I suppose we’ll just have to…live without it.”
“Yes, you will.” Nick didn’t know what was going on, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He was keeping his barriers raised in case the Lennox brothers’ spirits came back; maybe that was messing with his ability to pick up on cues he normally would have, or something.
“Nick, are you--” It was Josh, come back to check on him. He’d changed into dry clothes and had a blanket wrapped around him. His eyes locked with Bonnie’s, and she smiled in a feral, deeply unpleasant sort of way. He didn’t finish whatever it was he’d been about to ask.
“Josh?” Nick glanced between them, worried.
“Oh shit,” Josh whispered. “Nick, it’s--”
Bonnie made a small, shocked gasp and stepped backward like someone had shoved her shoulder; something dark flew from her to Josh, disappearing like it had gone into his chest, and Josh staggered, then put a hand to his chest, looking down at it.
“Josh?”
Lifting his face slowly, Josh smiled in the same way Bonnie had half a minute before.
‘Shit’ was right, Nick thought, as Josh’s eyes flashed from green to a brown so dark it was nearly black.
Chapter Ten
“It’s been a long time,” Josh said in a Scottish accent, looking directly at Fred.
“Aye, brother, it has,” Fred replied. His features shifted subtly, as if another will was trying to shape them in ways this body wasn’t used to, and Nick shuddered even though Fred had done nothing more than smile.
