by Ian McDonald
Jessica looked at his profile against the saint-light of the glass windows, saw the glowing coal of the cigarette tip trace its hieroglyphs, saw the smoke breath from his lips.
“There was a lad, from Clones town in County Monaghan. He’d been out in 1921 but he’d gone soft, taken up Socialist notions. Communist ideas. We’d had a good organisation up there in the border counties. Once. He ran a dance hall up in Clones, free admission, as long as you were prepared to listen to a bit of Socialist epilogue before the last waltz and sing the Internationale. We’d warned him about corrupting the minds of the young people. It was his own damn fault, he brought it on himself. He should have listened. We torched the place one Sunday night; mighty fine blaze it made, too. How were we to know he was inside unpacking a new consignment of pamphlets from the international Socialist movement? It wasn’t our fault; he’d been warned. He should have listened. He should have.”
The Anglican dead of Sligo looked down from their marble mausoleums without judgement or rancour, white and hard and passionless as angels. A moon rose behind the east window, filling the glass with ghosts. The cigarette, burned down almost to a nub, fell from Damian’s fingers to the tiled floor. Trapped in a web of insomnia, Jessica raged at whatever justice decreed that those with the conscience of a killer should sleep like alabaster saints while she tossed and turned, dancing with the moonlit knight.
A clock struck one. All of Sligo was asleep save her. The clock struck the half hour; two. She could hear the visions, wings beating against the roof and walls of the church like chimeras, calling her out. The clock struck a quarter to three. An idle corner of her mind wondered if the clocks chime when there is no one awake to hear them, and the tappings and scratchings of the visions were gathered up into music.
The Unending Song, begun with the first syllable of the first human cry of “I Am” that went out across the savannahs of proto-Africa and carried on across all the world, along its tangled mythlines and over its legendary landscapes, to its cities and its wild places, its palaces and prisons, its towers and tenements, its basilicas and brothels; a trickle, a stream, a torrent of voices carrying the past forever forward into the future, forcing its way out of the cracks and crevices of rational confinement: the drone and slur of a hand-cranked hurdy-gurdy, rising, falling, near and far. The music struck assonances and dissonances that summoned Jessica from her pew, across the tiled floor to the vestry, and out the vestry door into the churchyard, where the music was vast and muscular under the stars, as if the strictly Calvinist geometries of the church had created a bubble of harmonic silence. Jessica heard it as a tearing elation, a pagan joy. The music was a living thing, a torrent of silver notes tangled together by their staves into the shape of the dancer. One sure foot after another, Jessica followed in the steps of the dance along the empty streets and laneways, past shuttered shops and parked cars and houses closed up till morning woke them—step-a-jig whirligig arabesque pavane. No illusion now, she could see the music that was leading her in the dance. Silver tendrils, like summer fog flowing low and fast over the cobbles, swirled and eddied around her ankles and the tyres of the parked cars and the street lamps and the telegraph poles. She could not resist the flow had she wanted to. The music drew her to its centre, to a small cobbled court between warehouses close by the cool and mist of the river. There, in the pool of limpid silver, the hurdy-gurdy man waited with his monkey, his arm turning the crank of his instrument for all eternity. Jessica fell to her knees, plunged her wrists into the silver light. The hurdy-gurdy man’s fingers moved over the frets. The music boomed and rang from the stone warehouses that encircled the courtyard. A waterfall of luminescence poured from the sound holes of the instrument, and, with the silver light, came images: silver salmon, golden trout, leaping stags with crowned antlers, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, swans, and golden-bristled boars; winged horses, flying carpets, genies like Greek fire in bottles; warriors, thieves, queens, and lovers; minotaurs, dog-headed men, the Anthropophagi whose heads do lie in their chests; mermaids, mandrakes, brass colossi, and elephant-headed gods; bodhisattvahs and bodhidharmas, many-headed and many-armed; the Great White Whale, the Golden Apples of the Sun, the Wild Hunt; virgins and gypsies and fools, knights and dragons, medusae and andromedae; silver swords and singing swords and swords in stones; vampyres and succubi; incubi riding deer, goats, and pike; Venuses in cockleshells. Frankensteins, werewolves, Sherlock Holmeses and Dr. Watsons; Jack the Ripper’s bloody knife and giant apes on skyscrapers swatting at biplanes; Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera, Flash Gordon in a phallus-shaped rocket ship; Caped Crusaders and Men of Steel; shining silver saucers and man-eating sharks; lurking space monsters and murder-stalked motels: Jessica watched, spellbound, as the Great and Shining Show spilled from the ancient hurdy-gurdy, all the dreams that men have ever dreamed could be—swan-drawn chariots ascending to the moon, gun-metal submersibles powered by the secret energy of the atom. Something inside her was singing—a voice she had never heard before was raised in counterpoint. Beneath her fingers the silver music-stuff assumed substance and texture, became fibrous, dense, for her to mould and shape and weave. The hurdy-gurdy man advanced toward her, eyeless eyes smiling. Jessica felt her fingers, her hands, her entire body, woven into a fabric of imagination that encompassed not merely Sligo but the whole land from East to West, North to South, past to future, beginning to end. The song within her was an agony of unrequited expression as from the hurdy-gurdy handle came new shapes, new imaginings: a plank decorated with human hands, a wheel made of flesh, the rim studded with eyes, a thing shaped like a human lung with a bone beak, a pair of skin-coloured bagpipes walking on legs cut off at the knee, a boat with insect legs and a windmill on its deck. The hurdy-gurdy man loomed over Jessica, let go his music-making to take her face in his hands, turn it upward to gaze into his gazelessness; teeth parted, a smile, a word.
The bullet took him on an upward trajectory half an inch below the orbit of the left eye. One seven-hundredth of a second later the entire anterior quadrant of his skull exploded in a gout of bone, blood, and hair.
As he spun up and away from Jessica, trailing ropes of blood and brain, hands windmilling, spastic, mindless, the second dumdum impacting one-tenth of a second later shattered the hurdy-gurdy into splinters of lacquered marquetry, smashing drones, snapping wires, before entering the body in the region of the lower sternum, passing through trachea and glottis and tearing away cervical vertebrae, spinal cord, and brain stem in a spray of shivered bone and windpipe.
The impact of the two bullets flung the hurdy-gurdy man the length of the small cobbled court, fetching him up against a barrel in a half sprawl that next morning, from the distance of the warehouse offices, would be mistaken for dead drunkenness.
Wreathed in blue smoke, Damian put his gun up. Wary, cautious, he advanced across the blood-spattered cobbles. There was a sudden, darting shriek, a sudden huge shadow thrown across the wall in yellow gaslight. Damian levelled the Webley at the monkey and it was gone, escaped into one of the thousands of ratways of the old warehousing district. Damian reholstered the revolver, snapped the leather flap shut, drew his greatcoat around the black Webley.
The clocks of Sligo struck three fifteen.
Jessica looked up at him from where she knelt with the deep, dark accusation of a mirror; Damian pushed her shoulder.
“Come on. We’ve got to go. Can’t stay here—not now. Come on.”
He was halfway to the wooden gates when she said, “Why did you do it?”
“He was dangerous.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you… kill him? He had music, nothing but music.”
“He was dangerous. He wanted to hurt you. I saw him, bending over you. He would have destroyed you, if I had not destroyed him.”
“What are you talking about?” Then: “You heard the music, too, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“I woke in the church and you were gone and then, in the distance, I heard the sound of the hurdy-gur
dy and I knew that you were in danger. Come on, we have to go.”
“You heard the music, didn’t you? The real music, the true music, the music you could see, like water, like a river. You heard it, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“No! Yes! No… Does it matter? Maybe I did hear something—does it matter? We have to go. Come on…”
Jessica rose and joined him by the gate.
“You heard. Why did you kill him?”
“Because he was a danger to you. Because, for all his music, whatever it was I heard, it came from a dark heart. I had to kill him. This isn’t the time, the place, for explanations. Later, when we’re safe, up in the mountains, in a cabin with a fire and bottle of John Jameson’s, that’s the time and the place for explanations. Not here. Not now.”
They stepped through the doorway in the wooden gate and slipped away along by the river which seemed deep and full and silver and swarming with distant images.
The house was a blackened ruin; gable ends and eyeless windows, ferns cartwheeling from exposed brickwork, purple loosestrife and rosebay willow herb rampant on the mounds of rotted carpet and plasterwork that had once graced gracious rooms. Despite the smell of mould and ashes, Jessica felt a sense of welcome as she stepped cautiously over the charred timbers and smashed slates. A sense of return. A sense of home.
Damian had coaxed a fire to life in the old marble fireplace and was looping strings of Haffner’s sausages—God alone knew where he had stolen them—onto sticks to grill over hot coals.
Birds dashed and darted above the roofless house.
“Last night,” Jessica said, squatting down beside him on her carpetbag to warm her hands by the fire, “you heard something. What did you hear?”
“What did you hear?”
“Music. More than music. Music that had grown so great that it had stopped being music and become something else—images, legends, gods, heroes, every dream and vision we have ever held precious, poured out into the streets like spilled communion wine. What did you hear?”
“Something.”
“That?”
“Not that. Something like that.”
“Do you hear it often?”
“Not often. Sometimes. Hearing, and seeing, too. It’s like… sometimes, it’s like I open my eyes and for a blink, a moment, no more, I am in another place. It’s like, for a moment, it is so intense I feel I am on the edge of something tremendous; and then it is gone again. The streets are dirty, the clouds are rolling in again, and it looks like it’s going to rain. The angels have departed.”
“How long has this been happening to you?”
“Off and on, for years. Sometimes months pass, sometimes three or four times a week. Since I was about fifteen, sixteen. I can’t even begin to understand it, just that when it comes, I feel as if I am very close to something enormous and incredibly powerful, something ancient and untrustworthy.”
“Is that why you killed the hurdy-gurdy man?”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. You understand? Enough. Yes, I was frightened; because for one moment, I saw through doors that had always been closed to me before. Now, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Eat your sausages. We’ve got a lot to do.”
They tore apart their Haffner’s sausages with greasy, scalded fingers, and after eating, left the ruins of the great house through a memory of french windows, crossed the terrace, and entered the gardens. The sunken garden was a fulsome bog of dank, faintly luminous marsh flowers, the rhododendron walk a shadowy tangle of interlocked branches and leathery leaves. An overwhelming sense of someone having called her name caused Jessica to pause by the rotted turret of an old summerhouse.
“This must have been a beautiful place once.”
“It was,” Damian said.
They crossed the stile into the encircling wood. At once Jessica was aware of the birds. The dense summer canopy of leaves hid them from her sight, but she could hear them; wings flapping, beating, beaks clacking. The only sounds in the wood were wind sounds; stirred leaves, stirred feathers, the voices of birds. Damian’s course took them uphill, a testing climb through bracken and bramble, nettle, and bare, weathered tree roots. Jessica became conscious of a strange disorientation—though her eyes told her they were on a steep hillside, her body senses insisted that she was walking on level ground. When she closed her eyes the conviction was so overwhelming that, on reopening them, the resulting dizziness almost overbalanced her. The higher they climbed, the stronger the disorientation became until, as the trees thinned where the upper edge of the wood joined the base of the mountain, Jessica felt as if she were running lightly downhill. The effect vanished abruptly as they emerged from the trees. Jessica wobbled. Damian sat down on the springy turf and admired the view over the treetops of a curving crescent of fields and farms and woods; the silver by the gold of dunes and bay; beyond, the heather-grey mass of Knocknarea; and beyond it, the deeper, holier blues of ocean and sky. Jessica settled beside him. The shadowy introspection of the woodlands had evaporated in the light and air of the spirit of the mountains.
“Is this where we’re to meet your friends?”
Damian lay back, stripped seed from a grass stalk.
“Not quite. See up there?” He pointed a little way off to his left, to a stone that stood in a shallow depression in the hillside. “That’s the exact spot. The Bridestone. But they’ll see us here.”
Jessica could see that the stone slab had a hole pierced through it.
“Would you mind if I went and had a little look at the stone?”
“Please yourself. They won’t be here for a while yet.”
The small declivity in which it stood made the Bridestone deceiving from a distance. Close to, it looked taller than Jessica, taller than any man. The hole was at a height that demanded she stand tiptoe to peer through it. Coarse grass, bracken, rabbit droppings. The stone felt cold and damp. It smelled almost of sweat. She squinted through the hole again; then, for no reason she could explain to herself, put her hand through it. Bone grated against stone, and it was through. Flint-chipped stone encircled her wrist. She wiggled her fingers, one two three.
And something grabbed hold of her hand.
Jessica screamed, tried to pull her hand from the hole. The grip tightened. She battered and grazed her wrist against the raw stone until blood flowed. She screamed, swore, but could not pull free. A shadow fell across the sun—darkness, coldness, a sudden fog, a cloud of unknowing, lay across the slopes of Ben Bulben. In one instant the world was reduced to a sphere of grey—wet grass, a stone, an unbreakable grip.
A disturbance in the fog became a darkness, and the darkness a man walking toward her. He wore a pair of rough hide trousers tied at the waist and bound around the calves with thonging. Torso, arms, shoulders, neck, were a solid mass of tattoos, blue scarified whorls and spirals. The tattoos seemed to bleed away from his body into the whorls and spirals of the fog, the whorls and spirals of the unremembered past. Across his back was slung a copper shield; in his left hand he held a quiver of javelins as lightly as if they were straws. His hair was a mud-stiffened shock of mats and locks into which the skulls of birds had been worked, like beads. His face was as hollow and luminous as a consumptive poet’s, but his eyes were dark with old, old rage.
For all the fury that had set like old, dried blood, she knew the face. It was Damian’s.
The Damian-thing squatted on his hams, resting his weight on his clutch of javelins. The stench of urine was overpowering.
“Let her go,” he said. In English. The grip upon Jessica’s hand released. She pulled her aching arm free from the hole and fled into the mist. A darting darkness on the grey, something polymorphous, changing shape and form and direction, rushed in upon her, a thrum of wings, a chittering of beaks—the birds, packed into a flock so close, so tight, it was almost a single organism. Claws raked, beady eyes flashed. Jessica was driven back to the stone and the waiting, watching Damian-thing.
“You were so
vain,” said the Damian-thing in a voice like the wind along the edge of a stone knife. “Did you think that you had created me out of your dreams? I know that you must have thought that; and it is true. I am the stuff that dreams are made of, and nightmares, too, but it was not you dreamed me into being. She is subtle; she rewards with love and hate. She drove you from herself, toward me, knowing you would come to trust me and be led by me away from your protectors to her.”
“I. Did. Trust. You.” Jessica shouted. Her words struck the fog and were absorbed like rain into the ocean.
“You were meant to. I was made for you to trust me. Who can resist the incarnation of his desires?”
“You killed the hurdy-gurdy man.”
“He was made for me to kill, so that you might trust me more. You were wavering—to follow me, to go back to the city. But when you learned there was another who shared the one thing you felt made you alone and unique, you were decided, it was only a phagus—it could not really the because it never really lived. It was just a figment of your dreams plucked from the Mygmus and granted a temporary manifestation. As am I. Throughout history I have existed—the young warrior-hero, the defender and liberator of his people who dies in the glorious flower of youth.
“Before any remembering, I existed. I was Scriathach the Wolf Runner, and the Flame of the Forest. I have been Cuchulain the Hound and Diarmuid the Lover, who met his end upon this very mountain. I have fought against Vikings and battled Normans. I have been woodkernes and reivers. I have led the last futile charge at the Battle of Yellow Ford and swung from the gibbets of Cromwell and Good King Billy. The dogs have lapped my blood and guts from the cobbles of Dublin. I have been the Croppy Boy taking up his father’s pike and Barry Linden the bold highwayman. I have been Kevin Barry and the Wild Colonial Boy. I have been the United Irishman and the Fenian Lad. I was there when the French surrendered at the Battle of the Black Pig and the English came on, muskets blazing. I went down in the ruins of the G.P.O. in the Easter Rising and my mothers sisters and lovers wept for me. And I was Damian Gorman the Republican rebel, the young warrior hero of a new nation—an old, old ideal. They say this century has no room for heroes, no place for myths and legends, but the nature of mankind does not change.” He looked up, as if scenting prey, or a predator. “She is here. My work is done.”
