Paul looked at Brigit and Bunny in turn, the same stunned expression on each of their faces.
“Holy crap,” said Brigit.
Carroll bobbed nervously from one foot to the other. “Yeah, no, y’see yeah – apparently the old fella who owned this place back in the sixties was a bit of a fruit loop. Was convinced that the Yanks and the Russians were gonna blow the whole planet up or some shit, so he built a shelter out of the caves under the family farm. I don’t know how Fallon found out about it, but he bought it way back in the day.” Carroll looked around their faces and suddenly he looked very concerned. “You already knew that though, right?”
“Ah yeah, course we did,” said Bunny, “we’re just impressed by the door.”
Carroll nodded, “Ah right, yeah.” He quickly punched a code into the keypad. There was a loud hiss, followed by a click and then the thick door automatically swung itself open, to reveal a long dark cave descending into the rock. Now it was fully opened, Paul could see that the door was six inches thick. That farmer back in the 60s might have been a few cattle short of a herd, but he’d not skimped on the fixtures and fittings.
Carroll stood to the side and extended his arm. “After you.”
Bunny pointed down the tunnel with Mabel. “Oh no, dear boy, after you. And Johnny,” Bunny patted the hurley in his hand, “no funny business now, alright?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Carroll, turning to head down the tunnel like a petulant teenager being sent to his room. He clicked on a button on the wall and a string of small halogen lamps threw orange light into the darkness, illuminating the cave walls covered in a wet slimy residue.
Bunny leaned forward quickly and grabbed the end of Carroll’s ponytail.
“What’s the story?!” said Carroll huffily.
“I just don’t want to lose you again, Johnny. Not so soon after finding ye.”
Carroll muttered under his breath before he started walking slowly down the tunnel, Bunny in tow.
Paul looked at Brigit. “There better not be a lion and a witch down there.”
“Couldn’t get much weirder if there was.”
Carroll’s voice echoed up the tunnel to them. “Hurry up or else…”
With a soft squeak, the thick steel door began to swing slowly shut.
Brigit and Paul nipped in around it and then watched as it closed behind them.
“It does that,” said Carroll. “Security feature. Y’know, in case of zombies and that.”
Paul nodded. That made perfect sense.
They walked down the thirty-foot long cave, the walls drawing closer as they went, forcing them into single file. Green moss grew near the bulbs and shards of quartz in the stone reflected speckles of light. The cave descended at about a thirty-degree angle. Paul reckoned they must be about sixty feet below the farmhouse by now. As they walked deeper, strange noises could be heard coming from the tunnel in front of them. They echoed around them, mingling with the sound of their footsteps, making it difficult to make out what they were at first. Then, as they came nearer, Paul decided his ears must be playing tricks on him. It couldn’t be, but it sounded a lot like a televised football match. They turned a corner and walked through another steel door, this one propped open and leading into a cavern that was about 20-foot by 20-foot. The only source of light was the big screen TV mounted on the far wall. It was indeed showing football highlights.
Paul wasn’t a big footie fan, but it looked like a classic Manchester derby to him. He looked around in the flickering illumination the TV provided. A bed lay in the corner, with a basin and a large bucket beside it. Shelves holding hundreds of videotapes lined the walls. A worn and faded poster of a blonde woman with her sizable breasts on full display stared down from the wall. Paul had seen her on one of those I remember the 80s shows. He was fairly sure her name was Sam Fox. In front of Miss Fox and her eye-catching assets sat a cross-training machine. In the far right corner of the room, Paul could just about make out another steel door in the rock, this one closed. There was an aroma of a strong air-freshener, but it couldn’t mask the undertones of damp and a more insistent stench, which Paul guessed was coming from the bucket in the corner. In the centre of the room sat a worn sofa, it’s back to them, facing the TV. While it didn’t have much of a view and it was nowhere near local amenities, Paul had still seen worse flats than this.
Carroll reached over and flicked a switch on the wall. A similar string of halogen lamps to the ones used in the entrance tunnel blinked into life around them. A man with long ragged brown hair sat up on the sofa and happily waved his hand in the air without looking around.
“Hey, hey, big bad John.”
“Hey dude,” said Carroll, “you’ve got some visitors.”
The man let out a whoop and span around. He leapt into a standing position on the sofa and gawped at them open-mouthed. If he looked shocked to see them, it was nothing compared to how stunned they must have looked to be faced with him. Whoever this poor creature was, he was a compelling advert for the importance of sunlight and access to dentistry. Take away the long ragged beard and thirty years of wear and tear, Paul reckoned they were looking at Fiachra Fallon. He was pretty sure he had that right, but the fact that the man was bouncing up and down excitedly on the sofa, quite literally bollock naked, was making it hard to concentrate.
“Fiachra!” said Carroll, “what’ve we talked about? Put on your pants!”
The man scrabbled over to his bed and quickly began pulling on some tracksuit bottoms, clapping his hands as he went. “Yes, yes, yessy, Johnny, John boy, Johnny-be-good!”
As he did so, Paul noticed the chain around his wrist, the other end of which was very firmly attached to the wall. He’d be able to walk around the room but not much further.
Fiachra stopped clapping his hands long enough to look excitedly to Carroll. “Are they… special visitors?”
“Yeah,” said Carroll distractedly, “if you’re good.”
He started dancing about in a circle, the happiest person Paul had ever seen in his life, heedless of the chain wrapping itself around him. He kept looking over at them and then giggled away to himself with a demented glee, clapping his hands excitedly all the while. “Oh thank you, Gerry, big brother Gerry, best friend Gerry!!” Then he stopped, and for the first time the grin fell from his face. “Where’s Gerry?”
“It’s OK,” said Brigit in a soft voice. “He’s not here.”
They all leapt back when he screamed. It was the wretched sound of a wounded animal. He scurried into the corner behind the cross-trainer and cowered there.
“No-n-n-n-nno. Can’t have visitors when Gerry not here. Very bad, very bad, very bad, bad, bad!!”
Carroll glared at Brigit, who looked shell-shocked. He moved slowly towards Fiachra, holding his hands out and talking in a soft calming voice. “It’s OK, Fiachra, he’s coming. Gerry is on his way. You’re OK. He’s not going to be mad.”
“No Gerry, no visitors!”
“I know, I know.”
Carroll moved closer to him, making calming noises as the poor creature hugged the side of the fitness machine.
Bunny, Brigit and Paul huddled together.
“What in the flaming fucknuggets is this?” said Bunny. “Why would Fallon keep his own brother prisoner?”
They all looked at each other.
“I’ve no idea,” answered Brigit. “The poor thing. He’s obviously lost his mind completely.”
Paul found himself trying to look at anything that wasn’t Fiachra. “Maybe they had a falling out or something?”
“For thirty fecking years?” said Bunny. “Jaysus, Paulie, and there was me thinking you were good at bearing a grudge.”
“Shit!” exclaimed Brigit, “Carroll!”
Paul looked up in time to see the steel door in the far wall close. They ran over, Paul trying the handle to find it locked. Bunny pushed him aside and slammed his shoulder uselessly into it. Then he pushed his face up to the round window.
“C’mon now, Johnny, don’t play silly buggers.”
The light came on, illuminating Bunny’s face in its glow.
“It’s some kind of storeroom,” said Bunny, before raising his voice. “You can’t get out of there, Johnny. Don’t be daft.” Bunny started banging his fist repeatedly against the steel. It didn’t even make a satisfying noise, the steel being way too thick. “You come out of there right now, or so help me God, I’ll rip your bollocks out through your fecking throat!”
“For Christ sake, Bunny,” said Brigit, “Are threats your answer to everything? He probably can’t even hear you through that door.”
“Good point.” Bunny then proceeded to act out an elaborate series of threats through the medium of mime. The only effect this had was to start Fiachra howling again.
“Gerry gonna be mad, Gerry gonna be mad, Gerry gonna be mad!!”
Paul moved over towards him, pressing his hands out in a shushing motion.
“It’s OK. Everything is fine. We’re just playing a game.”
“Ah bollocks!” exclaimed Bunny. “Carroll just won the game.”
Paul turned to look at them. Brigit pointed glumly at the window in the storeroom door. “He opened a hatch in the roof and climbed up a ladder.”
“Shit.”
“Shit.”
“Double shite with a cherry on top.”
Fiachra slowly crawled out from behind the cross-trainer. He scurried to the sofa and grabbed the TV’s remote control, before scurrying back. They all looked at him. He smiled up at them with a wide grin that contained ten teeth at most.
“I get to pick what we watch.”
Chapter Fifty-One
“Jesus, it fecking stinks in here,” said Bunny, as he paced back and forth across the floor of the cave, waving his now useless mobile in the air.
“Smell the irony!”
Bunny stopped and glowered down at Paul. He and Brigit had decided to sit on the floor with their backs to the wall. Fiachra had already reclaimed his place on the sofa, and the bed didn’t look the most sanitary of locations.
“What’d you say?”
“Ah, work it out for yourself, Colombo, and for Christ sake, stop waving that phone around. Under this much rock, you’ve got zero chance at a signal.”
Brigit looked up towards the roof and expelled a heavy sigh. “Will the two of you give it a rest, please? We could be here quite a while.”
“Bit of an understatement,” said Paul. “I believe the previous record might be thirty years.”
Brigit looked over at Fiachra, who had resumed happily watching the football, having decided to apparently ignore their presence.
“Shush,” said Brigit, “or you’ll set him off again.”
She looked around her at the cavern they’d been trapped in for nearly an hour now. It hadn’t taken long to confirm what they’d expected, there was no other way out and both the main door and the door to the storeroom were locked. There was a keypad on the inside of the main entrance but Brigit’s testing had determined that it locked itself out after you’d unsuccessfully tried a 6-digit code three times in a row. She’d started trying to work out how long it would take three people working in shifts to input every possible combination, then she realised that somebody could probably just change the code from the other side.
She lowered her voice. “Do you think this is where they held Sarah-Jane Cranston?”
“I guess,” answered Paul. “You couldn’t ask for a better hiding place. Even if police came to the house, what odds they find this place? I don’t get what’s going on though, do you?”
Brigit shook her head. “Brophy’s book is clearly bullshit.”
“Yeah. Next thing you know, we’ll find out there aren’t really sexy vampires living in Offaly either.”
Brigit gave him a weak smile. None of them had dared to speak the unpalatable truth of their situation. Nobody in the outside world knew where they were, and Fiachra was all the evidence they needed that The Rock was an excellent place for someone to disappear completely. They’d inadvertently delivered themselves into Gerry Fallon’s favourite cage.
Brigit stood up and then dusted her hands off.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m going to try and get some sense out of…” She nodded towards the sofa.
Paul pulled a face. “Good luck with that.”
Brigit turned and slowly walked over to the sofa, being careful to walk into Fiachra’s eye-line so as not to startle him. He shot her a suspicious glance and then went back to watching the TV. As she approached, she got a better look at him now he was sitting more or less still. His skin had a sickly pale quality and there were dark rings around his eyes. His fingernails looked bloodied and chewed, as his hands absent-mindedly clawed at each other in his lap. She knew he was what 54, 55 years of age now, but he looked older. Actually, he looked as if he’d stepped outside the normal ageing process entirely. His skin lacked the creases you’d expect but looked flaky and patchy in places. He was thin but not to the point of being underfed.
“Hey, Fiachra,” she said softly.
“I’m not allowed to talk to strangers,” he responded, never taking his eyes off the screen.
“OK. Well my name is Brigit Conroy and I’m a nurse. There, now we’re not strangers.”
“Not allowed visitors without Gerry Gerry, ever ever.”
“It’s fine. Gerry is a good friend of mine.”
Fiachra looked up at her warily but said nothing.
She decided on a change of tack. “So, are you a big football fan?”
He nodded his head repeatedly and started swaying back and forth giddily, pointing at the screen. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, United are my team. Best team in the world.” Then he started singing, “Champione, champione, ole, ole, ole!” before descending into a fit of giggles.
Brigit moved slightly closer, her hand now resting on the arm of the sofa. “Who is your favourite player?”
“Rooney, Rooney, Rooney! I know all his stats, ask me anything!” His face now beamed up at her excitedly.
“Ehm… how many goals has he scored?”
“This season or ever?”
“Ever.”
“Altogether or in the Premiership, FA Cup, League Cup, Champions League or internationals?”
“The… League Cup.”
“Seven in twenty two appearances, five for United and two for Everton.”
“Wow, you really know your stuff. Do you mind if I sit down?”
He looked at her and then at the space on the sofa beside him. “It’s a free country.” Then he giggled. Brigit couldn’t tell if he actually saw any irony in the statement.
She sat down slowly and then looked around the room. “This is a nice place you’ve got here.”
“Yeah, it’s mine, all mine. Not room enough for all of us though. You’ll have to sleep in the bed with me!” Then he giggled again. Brigit tried to smile back at him. “How long have you been here?”
“Looooong time, only – I’m not really here.”
“No?”
“No. I’m in America with Sarah-Jane Cranston.” He said her name in a put-on posh tone of voice. “We’re like Romeo and Juliet. They’re gonna make a film of us!” He leaned towards her conspiratorially and she could smell the sour milk tang of his breath. “Colin Farrell is rumoured to be interested.” He tapped the side of his nose with his finger and then returned to looking at the TV.
“Do you get lonely down here?”
“Not any more, I’ve got Sky Sports now. I like Johnny, he gives me the sports. He was an electrician, so he was, ha, ha, so he was.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Yeah. He was much better than mean old Bob. He died.”
Fiachra looked away and down at the floor. Brigit had no idea what was going through his mind, or whether his thoughts were so scrambled through the years of isolation that nothing really was anymore. He suddenly looked up at her, with big soulfu
l eyes. Somewhere in there, buried under thirty years of unimaginable cruelty, she could see a flicker of those movie star looks, warped as they were.
He spoke softly, in a voice suddenly removed from the high pitch squeal in which he rambled. “Are you… going to be my special guest?”
Brigit patted his knee gently. “Sure”
And then he was on her. His chains jangled as his bony hands clasped around her throat. His long thin fingers stretching around her neck as his face became a mask of demented fury. She was pinned down on the sofa in an instant, her hands scrabbling uselessly at his forearms, which were thin but full of firm muscle. The pressure on her windpipe, the stench of his breath, the sight of his demented eyes – filled with bloodlust as they glared down at her. Small amoebas of light swam across her vision…
The hurley smashed into Fiachra’s face. He was off her as quick as he’d pounced. She could hear him scrabbling away, yowling like a wounded animal. Brigit fell onto the worn rug in front of the TV and gasped for breath, the sound of blood rushing in her ears.
Paul fell to his knees beside her, his hands cupping her face. “Are you alright?”
She nodded, her hands rubbing at her throat. She could feel her own fingers tremble as they rubbed at her neck.
“Right, ye little scuttering whelp…”
Brigit turned to see Bunny, Mabel in hand, towering over Fiachra as he cowered once more behind the cross-trainer.
“Don’t!” she croaked.
Bunny looked over at her and then back down at Fiachra, indecision etched on his face. Every fibre of his being clearly wanted to go against Brigit’s wish.
“Don’t,” she said, more firmly.
Bunny raised the hurl above his head.
There was a metal clicking noise behind them. “Don’t.”
They all turned to see Gerry Fallon standing in the doorway, holding a gun in his hand.
“Don’t.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
A Man With One of Those Faces (The Dublin Trilogy Book 1) Page 30
