Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘Hold everything!’ Dennis exclaims.

  Skippy, who’s holding some sort of a printout, says that he was searching online for material for this punishment essay Ms Ni Riain gave him, about the Gaelic origins of the name Seabrook, ‘and I found this site?’

  The site is called The Druid’s Homepage, and purports to be A Resource for Bards, Shamen, Mystics of Erin, and all those Seeking the Rituals of the Old Time. ‘It’s mostly about Druids and making potions out of leaves and stuff. But then in the middle of it…’ he scans down through the page ‘… names can still give clues as to the whereabouts of these sacred sites, even in the modern – oh yeah, here it is – while Seabrook’s present Gaelic translation of “Siobruth” is a meaningless back-formation from the English, it is possible that Seabrook, now home to a church and well-known school, may have its origins in Sidhe an Broga, pronounced ‘Shee an Brugga’ and meaning ‘Fairy House’. This is the name given to the cave-like chambered cairns referred to in the Old Lore as the traditional homes of the Sidhe and the entrances to the ‘Other World’. The correct term for these mounds is tumuli; they are frequently found, like similar sites such as Stonehenge in England and the Boyne Valley in Meath, at the intersection of ley lines in order to harness the power of the grid of electromagnetic energy that covers the earth. Many experts believe that these tumuli, created to astronomical specifications so precise they are still beyond the reach of our most advanced computers today, were the work of a race of extraterrestrial beings who briefly made their home among us and used them as gateways to travel through and outside the universe…’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Ruprecht says.

  ‘Aliens, Ruprecht!’ Dennis chimes in. ‘The mounds were built by aliens! And there’s one of them somewhere in Seabrook!’

  Ruprecht, wiping grease from his hands with a towel, merely grunts.

  ‘You think the mound has something to do with what happened to Optimus?’ asks Geoff.

  ‘Think about it for five seconds,’ Dennis says. ‘Remember what Ms Ni Riain told us, the old Irish legends, you know, about this race of magical beings who lived in the countryside, only most of the time they were invisible? Doesn’t that fit what you were saying, Ruprecht, about the higher dimensions, and how even though they’re right there we can’t see what’s happening in them? Don’t those old fairy-stories sound like they’re describing people, or something, who know how to move in and out of the higher dimensions? And these mounds are the gateways they built between our world and theirs, using their extraterrestrial knowledge.’

  ‘Poh, those stories are just stories,’ Mario says, ‘made up by drunk Irish people from days of Yore.’

  ‘Sure, that’s what I thought too, when I first heard them,’ Dennis says. ‘Like, why would a race of hyper-intelligent extraterrestrials want to live in Seabrook? But after what happened last night –’

  Ruprecht is not even listening any more; he has turned back to his clear-up.

  ‘– and then I remembered what happened to Niall’s sister…’ Dennis continues.

  Mario and Geoff look at each other. ‘What happened to Niall’s sister?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about her,’ Skippy says.

  ‘I didn’t? What happened down at the gym?’ Dennis shakes his head. ‘Well, that’s the most incredible thing. Niall’s sister’s a fourth-year in St Brigid’s. She’s in the drama society, and she’s got a big part in the Christmas play this year?’

  ‘What play are they doing?’ Geoff asks.

  ‘Oliver.’

  ‘Oliver, in a girls’ school,’ Mario says disgustedly. ‘That makes like zero sense.’

  ‘Anyhow, she and this other girl have been staying behind after school to do extra rehearsals of their scenes. They use a room down by the gym. St Brigid’s is a bit like this place, with a new part and an old part. The old part doesn’t get used much any more. There’s a Latin room, and a room they use for sewing classes and stuff like that. And there’s also this other room that’s always kept locked. If you ask the nuns, they’ll say it’s just an old storeroom, and that it’s kept locked because the floor is rotten and it’s not safe to walk on. But there are all these stories about it too, like that a girl hanged herself in there, or that one time a nun was cleaning ashes out of the fireplace when she saw the Devil coming down the chimney, so they closed it off?’

  The others are giving him their full attention now; even Ruprecht is dismantling machinery more quietly than he had been.

  ‘Okay, so one night a couple of weeks ago – it would have been about the same time as the Hop, I suppose – Niall’s sister and her friend are down in their room, rehearsing. They get quite caught up in what they’re doing and they end up staying down longer than they planned.’

  ‘This friend, is she hot?’ Mario puts in. ‘I have seen Niall’s sister, thanks but no thanks – however, how about the friend?’

  ‘I haven’t met her,’ Dennis says. ‘It doesn’t really affect the story either way.’

  ‘Yes, yes, carry on.’

  ‘Anyway, all of a sudden the two of them notice it’s got very cold. Like icy cold. So they decide to call it quits for the evening. They start walking back to the main door, when her friend grabs Niall’s sister’s arm and asks if she can hear something. They stop right there and listen as hard as they can and Niall’s sister makes out this very faint music playing. It seems to be coming from behind them. They look at each other. It’s after five and they didn’t think there was anyone else around. They retrace their steps back down the hall. The music’s still really faint, almost too quiet to hear, like it’s being played way off in the distance. But there’s no doubt where it’s coming from. The locked room.’

  The silence around the listeners seems to deepen.

  ‘Niall’s sister tells her friend to knock on the door. The friend says Niall’s sister should do it. Niall’s sister dares her, so the friend knocks. No one answers. The music keeps playing –’

  ‘What sort of music?’ Geoff asks.

  ‘Beautiful music. Like with harps and stuff.’

  ‘Just like in the Irish story,’ Geoff says huskily.

  ‘Anyway, they knock and then they call out, “Hello, is anybody in there?” No reply. Niall’s sister reaches out and turns the handle. It’s locked, of course. But Niall’s sister’s friend has keys. The janitor gave her a set so she could lock up the spare room when they’d finished rehearsing. She doesn’t want to try them, though. She’s afraid, she wants to go and tell one of the nuns. But Niall’s sister knows there’s no way the nuns will let them hang around to see what’s inside the room. This is their one chance. So they start trying the keys in the lock. There are forty keys on the ring. Not one of them fits. They try the last one and then just stare at the door, totally flummoxed. They can still hear the lovely music, in fact it seems to have got louder. Then Niall’s sister, without knowing why, reaches out her hand and turns the handle again. And this time the door opens.’

  Geoff, Mario and Skippy stare at Dennis moon-eyed, like three raccoons caught in headlights. From a distance, Ruprecht fondles his asthma inhaler impassively.

  ‘The friend says, “Okay, we should definitely go and get someone.” But Niall’s sister has already pushed the door open. Afterwards she said it was like the music had put her in a trance. There’s a big cre-e-e-eak. The two of them huddle together and step inside. And guess what they find there?’

  ‘What?’ whispers Geoff.

  ‘Nothing,’ Dennis says.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. The room is totally empty.’

  ‘But…’ Mario utters in a strangulated voice. ‘What about the music?’

  ‘They can still hear the music, clear as a bell. And there’s also a lovely smell, like a field full of flowers, though it’s almost winter, and the room has no windows and is covered in dust and cobwebs. But almost immediately the smell and the music just… fade away. And they’re standing in an empty room.�
�� Dennis pauses summatively, and then, ‘Ever since, Niall’s sister’s friend’s been saying that the music must have come from somewhere else. Like maybe one of the boarders was playing it in her room, and it was carried through an air vent, or down the pipes? But the boarders’ dorms are way over on the other side of the school. Niall’s sister is certain that somehow the music was coming from that room.’

  ‘Whoa,’ Geoff says.

  ‘But how is it possible?’ Mario says.

  ‘Well, they must have built the room on top of the ancient burial mound,’ Geoff replies. ‘It’s the only logical explanation.’

  Ruprecht gets up and paces about the room, gnawing his knuckles.

  ‘We know that St Brigid’s was a convent before they opened it as a school.’ Dennis is all seriousness now. ‘But what was it before that? This Druid guy says in days of Yore everyone worshipped this goddess called the White Goddess, and these mounds and things belonged to her. But when the Church came and spread Christianity across the country, it took over all the magical places for itself. Changed the names, converted the old legends into stories about, you know, God and stuff. Or else covered them over completely. It makes sense. You’re a bunch of nuns or monks or whatever, you want everybody in the neighbourhood following orders and doing what you tell them. If there’s some mystical fairy fort in the neighbourhood where weird shit keeps happening, you wouldn’t want people to know about it. You’d build your convent right on top of it and lock it up so no one could get anywhere near it.’

  Ruprecht halts his peregrinations and rounds rather fiercely on Dennis. ‘Well, even if it is the long-lost Seabrook fairy fort, even if Niall’s sister did hear music – so what? What does any of it have to do with my experiment?’

  Geoff fields this one: ‘Gee, Ruprecht, you said there might have been some hidden factor influencing the outcome last night…’

  Ruprecht opens his mouth to reply, but breaks off and turns his back on them, muttering unintelligibly and throwing his hands about like a derelict in an underpass. ‘Ley lines, fairies – that isn’t science. Who ever heard of an experiment using fairies?’

  ‘It does sound pretty unorthodox,’ Dennis admits. ‘But didn’t you say yourself that a scientist has to open himself up to every possibility, no matter how weird?’

  ‘You did say that, Ruprecht,’ Geoff confirms.

  ‘And didn’t you say M-theory is weirder than any other theory in the history of science?’ Dennis perseveres. ‘And hasn’t your Professor Tamashi always said that probably the only way we’ll master hyperspace in time to save Earth is if a superior civilization comes along and gives us the technology? Well, what if the technology’s already here? What if the aliens have been and gone three thousand years ago, but they’ve left their gateway behind? What if, all this time, the solution to M-theory has been literally right under your nose?’

  ‘Mound does begin with M,’ Mario observes thoughtfully.

  ‘Holy smoke, Ruprecht – so does music!’

  ‘All right!’ Ruprecht, as his resistance crumbles, flinches in self-disgust. ‘Say it is possible. Why would this mound – why would it suddenly stop influencing the experiment?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe…’ Dennis taps at his temple like he’s starting an old watch ‘… maybe its influence fluctuates. Maybe there was a surge at the exact moment of the first experiment, but normally it doesn’t reach any further than that little room.’

  ‘So if there were some way to gain access to that room…’

  For the first time since Optimus Prime disappeared, the pregnant sense of last night, the nearness of something overwhelming, pervades the basement again, filling the corners and slowly building…

  That’s when Skippy’s phone beeps with a new message; and each of them realizes, before he even looks at Skippy’s dumb-struck face, that he knows who it’s from.

  The night of the break-up Halley slept on the sofa. She wouldn’t take the bed, no matter how he pleaded with her; it was plain she would have preferred to go, if she’d only been able to summon the energy. Howard was surprised at the way she’d capitulated. He had expected screaming, punches, excoriation. Instead, she simply sank onto the couch as if he’d sapped her across the back of the head; she cried longer and harder than all the other times he’d seen her cry put together. And he could not comfort her; he was transformed into some monstrous creature whose touch brings only pain.

  The next morning she left. He has not seen her since. He guesses she is staying with one or other of the motley straggle of friends she has assembled in her time here – people from work, Americans she’d met on expat forums, other émigrés and cast-aways who’d found themselves stranded on the margins of Dublin life. She calls to the house when he’s not there to collect her belongings; every time he comes home from work some new small thing is gone, as if he’s being burgled in instalments.

  The house feels different without her. Though she still has clothes in the wardrobe, though her hairdryer still sits atop the dresser, her razor on the shelf in the shower, the rooms seem bare, denuded; her absence dominates the house – becomes, oxymoronically, a kind of physical presence, shaped and palpable, as though she moved out and this emptiness moved in to take up the space she left. There is a new kind of silence that the stereo turned up all the way can only fill one side of; the air that meets him when he unlocks the door now is clean and clear, smokeless, odourless, breathable.

  ‘I just wish you hadn’t gone and told her about Aurelie,’ Farley says. ‘You could have done it without telling her that.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be fair, just giving her half the story.’

  ‘You’ve burned your bridges now, though. She won’t take you back.’

  Howard sighs. ‘What could I do, Farley? If your hand’s in the fire, you know?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Something my dad used to say. If your hand’s in the fire, eventually you have to accept that the only solution is to take it out. Aurelie was the catalyst, that’s all. It would have happened sooner or later.’

  But he’s not sure this is true. If he hadn’t met Aurelie, maybe it would never have happened; maybe he would never have found the courage to leave Halley; maybe he’d have stayed with her, got married and lived the rest of his life without ever knowing what real love could feel like – how singular, how incandescent, how complete. Aurelie changed everything, and the truth is that when he confessed to Halley, he did it in part for her – as a kind of prayer to her, a declaration of faith on which to found a different kind of life.

  An attempt, as well, to conjure her back from whatever cloud she’d vanished behind. She never came back after mid-term break; according to the Automator, ‘unforeseen circumstances’ had forced her to extend her holiday. Every day Howard sees her classes trooping despondently from the Geography Room to the study hall, or carrying votive bundles of cardboard and paper to the recycling bins, their faces anxious, hopeful, like Indians doing a rain dance. He knows how they feel. Since mid-term he’s existed in a constant state of tension, braced against every moment as the one that might finally restore her. Even out of school, even on his own, shopping in the supermarket, sitting at the traffic lights, he finds himself holding his breath. But the days are a series of ghost pregnancies, delivering nothing.

  ‘Unforeseen circumstances.’ He can imagine what – who – that means. Seabrook was supposed to be a career break for her, a transitional phase; she hadn’t intended to get mixed up with anyone, especially not someone already mixed up with someone else. Now she’s wondering what she’s got herself into, and whether there’s still time to get herself out. If only he could talk to her! If only he could let her know that this is real to him, more real than anything that has happened before! Or better yet, magically transport the two of them to the time in the future when they’ve started out on a life together, the chaos and agony of these interim weeks already faded, the blizzard of flyaway moments that is the past replaced by something exhilara
ting, serene, lit from within…

  As for Halley, except for Farley he tells no one that she’s gone. Remembering what happened to Jim Slattery all those years ago, he’s haunted by the thought that somehow the boys will find out. But so far the news appears not to have reached them. In fact, he finds his classes going unusually well. The second-years in particular: thanks to his mid-term reading on the First World War, which having nothing better to do he’d continued after Halley left, Howard finds himself able to speak about his subject from a rare position of authority, and to his surprise, the boys listen. Listen, speak, formulate theories: in the limbo days after mid-term, while he waits for Aurelie to return and his new life to begin, these classes – which have so often resembled trench warfare themselves, a huge amount of labour and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain – become something he actually looks forward to.

  This weekend is his first as a single man for almost three years. He has neglected to make plans and spends most of it in his house. It feels, at the start, a lot like the times his parents left him home alone as a teenager. He is free to stay up as late as he wants, listen to music as loud as he wants, eat what he wants, drink what he wants, download porn, belch, walk around in his boxer shorts. By seven o’clock he is drunk; by eight, the novelty has worn off and he finds himself slumped over the kitchen table, watching the microwave defrost a frozen spring roll. Then he hears the key turn in the door and Halley walks in.

  Both of them freeze, she by the light switch, he at the table. It is a moment quite electrifying in its cold, untempered immediacy – not quite like seeing a ghost, more like discovering, in the face of another, that you have become a ghost yourself.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ Halley says.

  ‘Yeah,’ is all Howard can think to say. He wishes he was wearing trousers. ‘Can I get you something? Tea?’

  He doesn’t know quite what tack he should take with her – chastened? Solicitous? Tender? Stoic? The question is moot: ‘Someone’s waiting,’ she says, gesturing towards the road where an indistinct figure sits inside a car. She goes to their bedroom and begins to throw things in a box. He waits in the kitchen for her to finish, which she does in fifteen or twenty minutes – whisking back through the house and bidding him goodnight with all the warmth of a solicitor’s letter. Then she is gone, and he is left with the hum of the electricity, to go into the bedroom, if he so desires, and see what she has taken.