She girded up her courage, unlatched the back door and run across the meager patch of dew-soaked grass they shared with him. His back door was unlocked thankfully and she’d stepped into Mr. Delaney’s tiny kitchen, the smoke choking her instantly. It was everywhere, obscuring vision, disorienting her. She dropped to her knees, crawled to where the sink should be and bumped her head hard into the table and then remembered that everything in his house would be backwards to their own and crawled back in the other direction. She’d found the cupboard, felt her way up and turned the tap on by feel alone. A shriveled rag lay to the side of the sink and she wet it thoroughly under the stream of water and clapped it quickly over her mouth and nose. The smell of sour milk almost made her throw up, but she’d swallowed over the nausea and forced herself to breathe through the filthy rag.
She crawled the length of the narrow hall and found the foot of the staircase by smashing her knee painfully into it. To her immediate left lay the tiny front parlor, and here smoke was flame. The heat of it so intense that she could feel the fine hair on her arms shrivel up against the tightening skin. She’d pressed herself tight to the right wall that ran beside the staircase and crawled up the stairs, one at a time, her knees feeling like bruised rubber by the time she reached the top. Right or left? She didn’t know and couldn’t see anything in the heavy, shifting cloud of smoke. In a flutter of panic, she remembered being told that it was rarely fire that killed people, it was smoke. But then she’d heard a weak thump coming from the right and had crawled as quickly as she could toward it.
Mr. Delaney was lying in the hall outside his bedroom door, having dragged himself that far before succumbing to the smoke. He was barely conscious, eyes opening and shutting over milky cataracts. She forced herself to push down the panic and review her choices. She could stand, try to get him upright and shoulder his weight down the stairs. The problem with this simple plan being that the man weighed about two hundred pounds. Or she could try to drag him down the stairs, while crawling down backwards. Neither plan seemed to have an advantage over the other, so she’d crouched, tied the rancid smelling rag around her head and placing her hands firmly under his armpits, began to drag him towards the stairs. It was a long, hard process and her muscles protested at once, the sweat evaporating as soon as it hit the surface of her skin.
When she reached the head of the stairs, she’d laid him down for a second trying to steady her quivering arms. The fire had reached the bottom of the stairs, was rolling small, avaricious tongues up the peeling wallpaper and igniting in happy little bursts. At most she had a minute, maybe two. In desperation, she yanked on the inert man, nearly toppling them both down the stairs. He was unconscious and she was grateful for it.
By the time she’d made it halfway down, the fire had spread across the bottom of the staircase and begun to rise in a hissing sheet from the floor. It was a good three feet high and she might, alone and unencumbered, have a chance at clearing it with one good jump off the stairs but there was no way she could drag the old man through it.
The smoke had infiltrated her senses; it seemed to be stealing her hope, laying a heavy blanket over reason. She fought an impulse to sit down on the stairs and simply give herself over to the heat. And then salvation had appeared through the inferno, a bright blond head and hazel eyes at the foot of the stairs, terrifyingly familiar. She’d darted instinctively away from him, up the stairs. But he’d merely run up the stairs, grabbed the old man and heaving him over his back gone back down through the fire.
Having little choice in the matter she’d followed. In the street all was chaos, broken glass littering the pavement, shattered petrol bombs, fire roaring up into the night, casting a hellish red glow over everything. The packed rowhouses were like kindling bundled tightly together, one match would take out the whole neighborhood. People were running heedlessly, some still laying dazed in the street where the mobs had pulled them from their homes. And in the wake of the mob traveled the looters and firebugs, stealing anything of worth, destroying what they couldn’t carry and then torching the remains.
She didn’t see that bright yellow head anywhere, though she’d spotted Mr. Delaney, being attended to by a man and a woman. She saw an ambulance up head of the street, beyond the clog of the burning barricade. Mr. Delaney would be alright.
She glanced at the door of her own home, saw it was cracked open and knew she’d left it closed and locked. She picked her way across broken glass and then, looking back to be certain no one was watching, darted in. The fire hadn’t made it through their walls yet and there was an odd silence, as if the house were waiting for something, the sounds outside muffled. She went through the rooms quickly, whoever had been was gone it seemed and she turned for the door, knowing it was only a matter of minutes before the fire would breach the thin walls.
When her hand was on the door she noticed it was bare, the ring finger pale and naked. Her wedding ring was upstairs; she hesitated for a moment and then ran for the stairs. Casey had worked extra shifts at a job he loathed to put that band on her finger and she’d be damned if she’d leave it for the looters.
In their bedroom, the fire was starting to curl out from the joint of the ceiling and wall, slithering overhead like a luminous serpent. The ring wasn’t on the little bedside table where she’d left it; she turned in a circle, her mind frantically trying to recall where else she might have put it.
He was standing next to the door, having hidden behind it while he waited for her to come up the stairs as he must have known she would.
“Looking for this?” he asked and took a step across the room towards her, a circlet of silver lying against his palm. “Women are oddly predictable.”
She snatched at it without thinking but he’d closed his fist over it quickly. The bait had given him what he wanted though, brought her close enough to grab around the neck. He pulled her face tight to his and she had one of those strange, surreal moments when all the senses are heightened, all details clarified. She could see the flecks of color in his eyes—gold, green, amber, smell the sour whiskey on his breath and his sweat, rancid with terror. His fear gave her a strange calm.
“Where’s that bastard husband of yours now? Off fighting silly battles while I’m here with you.” He leaned his forehead against hers, their noses touching and his hand hard as tempered steel across the back of her head. “He’ll miss you, won’t he? He’ll grieve you for the rest of his days. I doubt my pitiful wife will even shed a tear, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Her tears can’t comfort me in hell. Besides,” he breathed out harshly and she clenched her mouth against it, “I’ll have you for company, won’t I?”
She tried to bring her knee up, but his body, so close to hers, anticipated the move and he brought his free hand up and shoved her hard away from him. She stumbled and fell back onto the bed, her head grazing the post on the way down.
“Do you know how most men would like to leave this world, if they had their choice?” He loomed above her, an open switchblade in one hand and the other hand on the buckle of his belt.
He put one knee to her stomach and leaned over her, his hair a nimbus of rose-gold as the fire spread across the entire ceiling, crawling down the walls, as if just yet it could not bear to part from the thing that fed it. Horribly beautiful in all its shifting, kaleidoscoping color. Red, orange, violet, green and blue, soft and mesmerizing at its very center. She felt herself begin to slide from consciousness, grateful that she wouldn’t be present at her last moments.
A sharp stinging on her neck brought her back around. The knifeblade was pressed against her throat.
“I’ve marked you,” he said triumphantly, “even in hell they’ll know you’re mine. It’ll be like a string connecting the two of us.”
She tried to swallow the hot bile that had risen in her mouth, but her throat couldn’t move under the blade of the knife. She was going to die here in this bed, with a man who wanted her
last moments to be filled with horror and he would make certain she was awake for every last minute of it.
“Don’t close your eyes,” he whispered, spittle spraying in her face, “for I’ll cut you every time you do. I’ll see to it that you suffer the way I have for months. Being chased like a rabbit down every hole. D’you know,” he said almost conversationally, “I dream about that bastard now, he follows me even in sleep. I’ve wondered why he didn’t just kill me outright and be done with it. He’s everywhere, can’t escape from him, can’t sleep,” his eyes narrowed, only a breath away from her own, “but now it’s him who’ll suffer, him who’ll never be at peace again, ‘cause he’ll know he killed you as surely as he’s been trying to kill me. I may be a dead man, but I won’t go alone.” He dropped his head against her chin, as if exhausted, but his hand never relaxed the grip it held on the knife.
There was very little air left in her lungs and black spots had begun to dance amongst the flame like tiny sprites, their feet snared in violet tongues. And then out of the gathering haze, something moved. She blinked, fought to clear her vision, to pull air into her bursting lungs.
He emerged in flame, like Lucifer just after the fall, one finger held to his lips. In a daze she watched his hands rise into the light, stretch toward the flame, a glint of sliced moonlight in them, saw bemusedly the hands arc down, clasped together as if in prayer.
And then a comforting veil of darkness, warm and familiar, easy as going to sleep after a long and hard day.
She shivered. Her hair was still wet from the bath and the tiny cell was far off from the warmth of the main body of the church. Against her will she approached the bed, reached down and untucked the folded cloth from about the head. She had to see for herself.
Bones tell their own story, the flesh may lie but the bones do not. She’d reason to know his body intimately and though she had tried to bury the memory of it, she’d been unable to. He’d shown her the dark underbelly of something Casey had only given her in love and tenderness. And in the process he had become a third to their two. Her own demon made flesh. In the night, while Casey slept, the shade of him would rise and she could smell, feel and see him. The bright, silky hair, the hard, clean flesh, smelling of flowers. The scent of violets still made hot acid flood her mouth.
The contours of his body were there, as present and real as Casey’s. The map made up of muscle, bone, flesh and the intricately entwined experience of the three. When death comes it takes the flesh quickly, freezing the muscle instantly. But the bone will linger, like the final fading notes of the symphony that is life. Providing, through their fretwork, the tale of a fleeting passage through time. In age they will calcify, begin to disintegrate, preparing for the dust of the grave. In youth they are soft, uncertain, tender, pillowed with cartilage.
Bone is a living organism, regenerating constantly. In middle years, it is stronger than reinforced concrete, yet more pliable and much, much lighter. Breaks, fractures, stresses, leave little more than faint lines of calcification. But if a bone is wounded from within, if germs invade and multiply within its tender marrow, then the bone will retain the visible trace of memory.
She lifted the sheet, shuddering a bit as the air swirled in tiny eddies, the smell of burning thick upon the cloth.
He lay on his side, curled inward as a sleeping child. As once he had been a child, a creature of innocence and inexperience. Perhaps even someone’s beloved son. Perhaps not.
The left femur glowed dully in the light, rippled with striations of myriad color. Dark, glistening brown—earth. Pale, polished silver—water. Delicate bubbles of transparent lilac, amber and ochre—air. Streaks of red, umber and indigo—fire. All the four elements here within a single few square scorched inches. She touched one of the outcroppings of vestigial bone and marrow, matrix and mineral shattering beneath her touch like a bubble bursting. The honeycombed insides as frail as the milk-washed innards of a shell.
A fever to begin with? Not so uncommon in a child. Favoring the leg, complaining of discomfort, not so uncommon either. But left untreated until too late it had become a much more serious illness.
His flesh, scarred by surgical knives beyond healing, had been the cover of the book. The bones, now bared, the open pages. Scored, pitted, bubbled, they spoke of a lifetime of infection raging in the blood, returning again and again to the weakened site. As if the poison he contained had been so virulent and abundant that it had needed to be physically drained. As if his own hatred had laid him waste. And identified him positively for her now.
“The constable,” said a quiet voice behind her, “had very fine bones for a man. They say a person educated in such things can see the small differences and know by the bones if it is a man or woman. But to the uneducated eye, they appear much the same.”
He crossed the floor silently, resting a hand gently on her shoulder, “Your husband is awake and being forcibly restrained in his bed. I think perhaps you’d best go prove that the rumors of your death were indeed—”
“Greatly exaggerated,” she finished softly for him. “Did you see who shot him, Jamie?”
“No,” he shook his head, “but I imagine it was someone who meant to miss.”
“A warning then,” she said grimly.
“Yes, but next time it won’t be.”
“What will happen to him now, Jamie?” she asked, nodding toward the skeleton. “He has a wife that will be missing him soon.”
“He’ll disappear, his wife is agreeable with such measures and questions can be answered in any number of ways.”
She turned sharply, dislodging his hand from her shoulder. “You’ve spoken to her?”
Green eyes met their like across flickering air and then disappeared under the constraint of lid and lash.
“Indirectly,” he said and for a second an emotion spasmed across his face, giving her some small notion of what the night had cost him. “Leave the dead, won’t you? The living await.”
He steered her toward the doorway, but she hesitated looking back in uncertainty.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Do you lay a demon to rest with a blessing or a curse?” she asked, feeling a chill spread itself in her marrow with a ghostly hand.
“Bless him for what he might have been, curse him for what he was,” Jamie replied, face impassive once again, “that ought to take care of all possible outcomes.”
She blinked, startled at how closely his words mirrored her own thoughts of only moments ago. She crossed the floor again, and stood over the bones, hands spread, mind searching for the words that would break the ties. And found them in the cries of Jacob.
‘And I said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’ She whispered it and his own words came back to her, spoken only hours ago. ‘Say my name, say it, speak it to me and I won’t cut you. Say it soft.’
“Bernard,” she said softly into the shrinking light.
Jamie, joining her beside the dead, took care of the curse.
‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’
It was only later she would think to wonder how he’d known, with such certainty, the identity of the bones.
The British came to Belfast that day. They came in armored trucks, with rifles strapped to their shoulders. Came with wariness, for the Irish were an unpredictable lot.
In Derry they were greeted with tea and relief. In Belfast, disbelief and outrage in some quarters and an exhausted resignation in others. The police could no longer hold the line in Ulster. Six thousand British troops were sent in to keep the peace or, as some thought, to keep the natives securely behind the barricades. The RUC, past history considered, had acted with admirable restraint in most areas. As with any organization composed of large numbers some policemen reacted to the riots with savagery and others with
heroism.
The British Army was brought to guard the precipice in the gorge of which lurked the specter of civil war. For one mad moment, the province had trembled on the brink of open warfare in the streets of a city in the United Kingdom. It had been heady for some and horrifying for others. Either way there was no turning back the clock for Northern Ireland, the future was here with guns and tanks, bombs and bayonets.
Under the Special Powers Act, twenty-four Republicans were interned for suspected activities. Paranoia was rife in the city, with men being lifted from their beds and women and children in the streets behind them, uncertain if they’d be returning.
In the Protestant neighborhoods, within the ranks of the police force and even in the corridors of Stormont, the rumors of a reborn IRA became fantastical. Their numbers were huge, it was claimed, a force no one could have imagined. It was the only way to explain the Catholics holding out as well as they had.
In the Catholic neighborhoods, the truth was known—the IRA was more theory than actual flesh and blood men at present. Still people were bitter that their army, their protectors had not materialized during the fiery night. IRA—‘I Ran Away’ was graffittied onto the sides of buildings and ill feeling towards the mythical army ran high. Others knew another truth: that a small band of men, dispersed in tiny pockets, armed with ancient, malfunctioning weapons had done what they could to protect the neighborhoods, without starting a bloody war they weren’t equipped to finish. The army from the South had not come. GHQ in Dublin had issued communiqués but no arms and no foot soldiers for the cause. The Republicans in the North, as they’d always suspected, were on their own.
No-go zones were established rapidly in both Belfast and Derry and woe betide any RUC officer or British army personnel who dared put a foot over those lines. The Bogside of Derry would be forever after known as Free Derry, its gritty streets home to a risen people.
Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series Book 1) Page 66
