In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  The grey and wintry sides of many glens,

  And did but half remember human words,

  In converse with the mountain, moors and fens.’

  That was what their daddy had tried to teach them, to converse with the mountains and the trees and moors and streams. It had been pure magic and the residue of that magic was still stored in his very cell and marrow, and he felt it sparking along the pathways of his blood as he walked, an understanding that was older than time and went as deep as the bones of the earth.

  Higher up the mountainside there were patches of scree, where only lichen and moss and bilberries were hardy enough to establish a foothold. Higher still were thick swathes of forestry planted pine and spruce and Douglas fir, great stands of it like a cathedral in parts, dark and deep, and home to gods far older than those of Christianity. Above the pine was moorland, bright with the lavender mist of heather, the brown and gold of sedge and ferns readied for winter. A small herd of deer, seven in number, grazed contentedly on the heather and moorland grass, his presence only occasioning a flickering of ears and a casual glance in his direction. Ahead of him he glimpsed the feathered tops of a small pine wood, and knew he’d found his destination. He came up over the rise of a hill and then down into the lee of a small valley, tucked into the mountain’s shoulder and sheltered from the worst of the winds and mists and swift sweeping rains that came across these mountains with great frequency.

  It looked the same, a plain shepherd’s croft with the thick pine wood at its back and a narrow path that ran straight to a crooked front door. It was empty, he could see that much even from a distance, but even so his heart was pounding with a sudden onset of anxiety. He could also see that it wasn’t as rundown as he had thought it likely to be after years of neglect. He walked up to the door. The area around was still in the late autumn sunlight, and a fine mist hovered below the summit of the mountain so that the rest of the country disappeared from view. He hesitated a moment, his hand on the ancient latch, which he noted had newish looking screws fastening it to the door. He felt suddenly nervous, as if he was about to enter Bluebeard’s chamber, and didn’t know which would be worse—to find nothing changed or to find it all changed and still not know if that signified anything more than a tramp holing up here for a season. He lifted the latch and went in.

  It was as he remembered, one room, simple in its lines, just a hut for a long ago shepherd, repaired and made sturdy by his grandfather’s skill with wood and hammer and saw. The hearth, made of stone scavenged from the mountain, still stood, clean, with a box filled with dry, split pine to one side. The floor had once been hard-packed dirt, now it was tightly fitted with level pine planks. It looked almost identical to the floor in Pamela’s kitchen. There was a bed covered in canvas to keep it from the damp, and a chair, a table and an array of tin dishes stacked neatly in a small hutch. Army utensils lay neatly beside the two plates, slotted together and shining a dull pewter in the afternoon light. The table had a light glaze of dust on it, maybe enough to indicate an absence of a few months. The table was new and handmade by someone who had great skill and an eye for the grain and flow of the wood. The chair matched the table and was sturdy and built to last. There was a bookshelf tucked in beside the hearth, cleverly made from stones and well-weathered boards, the stones slotted together at each end as supports and fitted so well that the shelves sat level. There were a handful of books on the shelves and he perused the spines—The History of Ireland by John Mitchel and The Life and Times of Daniel O’Connell. There was a worn copy of The Tain as well as Cecil Woodham Smith’s The Great Hunger. There were a few paperbacks, dime store novels, and a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. On the shelf below were two books of poetry—Seamus Heaney and Yeats. The array told him little, the books refusing to confess as to whether they were the property of one person, or the leavings of years’ worth of tramps and vagabonds.

  The windows had been changed, the glass still single-paned, but new with proper weather stripping around them. Someone had gone to a fair bit of work to make this place livable for the winter. Just what sort of mad soul might want to winter over here was the question. A man would have to be desperate to seek out this sort of solitude, considering the weather could sock him in for weeks. A man on the run might seek such a place. The Wicklow Mountains had long been a place of refuge for such men for the mountains were wild and isolated enough in parts for a person to hide for a long time.

  He took a breath and put his hand to the back of the chair to steady himself. He realized now he had expected the hut to be unchanged, other than the weathering of the years. But it was clear someone had been living here recently, someone who had no small skill with carpentry. It could be anyone, though, it did not mean it was his brother, because he couldn’t make sense of that in any way. Why would Casey be living here a few hours away from his family? No, it made no damn sense whatsoever. Yet, with the carving of the horse and the drawing in the fairy house and now clear proof that someone had been living here, what was he to make of it?

  He ran his hand along the edge of the chair. The wood was sanded to a fine finish, and then oiled to bring up the honeyed beauty of the grain. It had been made with great care and the work of it must have taken weeks. He found it strange that someone had just left it here to the elements. Unless the person intended to come back and trusted that no stranger would come along to steal from the place.

  He checked the cupboards then and found only tins of beans, peas and sardines. Only the non-perishables which wouldn’t attract wild animals had been left behind.

  It was then he noticed that there was a book sitting on the small three-legged table beside the bed. There was no cover on it and it looked well worn. He picked it up and it fell open to the final two pages, the paper yellowed, the book smelling like one found in the musty depths of a used bookstore. He read a couple of lines and recognized the words immediately.

  ‘…and as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.’

  He sat down on the canvas-covered mattress, the book clutched fast in his hands. The Great Gatsby was Pamela’s favorite novel. It was a popular enough book that anyone might have had it on their person, and lay here at night reading Fitzgerald’s timeless words by the light of the lantern, the fire and the words providing an alchemy to keep the dark at bay. But that it, of all the books in the world, should be here in this hut…he closed his eyes and sighed. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know what he was meant to do. He was going to have to stew on it for a bit. It wasn’t fair to give Pamela false hope when he didn’t know a damn thing; it wasn’t as though his brother was the only man who had skill with a saw and hammer and nails.

  “Goddamn it, brother,” he said in frustration, “what the hell happened to ye?”

  It hit him with a terrible blow just how badly he missed Casey. It had happened before, and would again in the future. It seemed as if these moments ripped off the scab which had managed to form over the wound, in those in-between times, when a man felt like he was coming to a place of acceptance. Maybe you never could truly accept something when you didn’t know what had happened, he thought. The missing were the ghosts that haunted a man forever.

  He opened up his bag. He needed a bite to eat and some hot tea before he made the trip back down the mountainside. In the bottom of the bag was his camera. He’d brought it to take pictures of the hut, so that Pamela might see it was, indeed, the hut in the drawing. He wondered if he might do more damage by showing her such proof. For so long now she had hung on to hope, as frayed as the cloth of it was, and now she was moving on with her life, albeit in a way that he didn’t like. He would be the first to admit though, it was better than her waiting for a man who wasn’t returning. He understood what that kind of hope and
longing did; it put your heart in stasis, and made you numb, and the worry for him was she would grow old and eventually when the children were grown, be alone, still waiting, like an old woman in a fairy tale. Except this was not a fairy tale and a young hero wasn’t going to ride in from the west one day to return her to youth and love. He laughed a little at the image, being that Casey would have rather shot himself in the foot than ridden a horse.

  He took the pictures anyway; he could decide later whether or not to show them to Pamela. He wouldn’t mind having some himself, in case one day the hut was gone, and he wanted to show at least photographic evidence of it to his children. He took pictures of the interior and the furniture in close up, then the exterior too, as well as the surrounding area.

  Inside the hut again, he took out his thermos of tea and the lunch Kate had made for him—sandwiches and fruit, and a slice of chocolate cake, as well as a wee note tucked away in the bottom that said ‘I love you.’ He smiled, a feeling of warmth blooming inside at the sight of the note. He was a happy man when it came to his marriage; he had found a passion and a contentment with Kate which he would never have believed possible even a few years ago. He still thought of his first wife, Sylvie, every day, but the pain of that was not as sharp as it had once been.

  High on the shelf above the stove, he spotted a bottle of Connemara Mist, glowing a warm and inviting amber in the cool autumn light. He took down the bottle, uncorked it and added a slug to his tea. He sat for a time, eating his sandwiches and drinking the whiskey-fortified tea, his thoughts roaming backward in time, to when he had stayed here with his brother, and further back when their daddy had brought them more than one summer to stay. Those had been happy times, days of roaming and fishing and eating their catch for dinner and of learning all about the plants and trees and animals. At night their daddy had told ghost stories that made them shiver in their pajamas and at times lie wide-eyed at every noise that carried across the mountain. Casey had taken up the tradition of telling spooky tales on their summer alone here, but it had backfired badly and they had stayed up all night more than once, shivering and huddled up together on the bed.

  The wind had picked up while he sat eating and was whistling now around the corners of the hut, carrying winter’s tune in its notes. It was cold up here and the dark would set in early as it did this time of year. He needed to be back down the mountain and in his car before it came.

  Nevertheless, he paused, wanting to absorb the memories of this place so that he might carry them home and feel them close for a time. If he closed his eyes he could conjure the men of his family here into being—the grandfather he had never known, his father, his brother and him. Gathered round about a fire, talking of times gone by and those still to come, the smell of trout cooking in a pan and the blue smoke of an autumn twilight gathering thick outside the windows. He felt a bolt of anger that it should never be so again and that he was alone, the last man standing in his family.

  He stood, sighing, feeling a slump in his spirits. It was spooky up here today and if he didn’t relish the thought of staying overnight, he needed to be off. The thin cry of a curlew cut through his nostalgia. The lonely sound seemed a part of the low violet light that edged the horizon and the deep solitude that came up out of the timeless mountain. He went outside, shutting the door firmly behind him, the copy of Gatsby tucked in his bag. He scanned the edges of the forest and then pulled the collar of his coat up, for the air had grown colder during his brief time in the hut.

  In the periphery of his vision, a shadow slipped across the tall dark pines behind the hut, a being free of the fetters of the earth, who yet lingered amongst the rock and root and soil. Pat had the sudden sense of eyes upon him. He shook his head; it was probably no more than an inquisitive mouse, or a shrew eyeing him from the doorway of a snug burrow. Still the hair on the nape of his neck prickled, as if spectral fingers had reached out through time and brushed his skin. A liquid dusk had begun to flow in and around the tree roots, soft as a snake shedding its skin and he shivered, every nerve ending in his body alert.

  “It was a bloody cloud, ye fool,” he said out loud, the sound of his voice setting off a crow high in the branches of one of the pines. He was grateful for the noise, for it dispelled some of the eerie atmosphere. He set off down the trail, pine needles muffling his footsteps, and yet they emitted a damp hiss as well, like someone walked closely behind him, using the furled smoke of his breath to mask their own. He remembered a story from long ago that his daddy had told them, of a man who had a ghost that walked behind him everywhere, and the man had never been able to rid himself of said ghost despite the assistance of priests and shamans and wise women. He looked behind sharply, cursing himself for a damned fool with an inconvenient memory. There was, of course, no one behind him, neither man nor will-o-the-wisp ghost.

  Just before he went over the rise where the land fell away to a steep pitch, he turned back to look at the hut one last time. The low violet of the gloaming had begun to creep up from the mountainside and he could see them for a moment, a trick of the light and longing—three men, big and strong, dark-haired and long of limb, standing together in the deep shadows of the hut and the mountainside.

  “Slán go fóill,” he said, voice low but carrying across the landscape of greys and greens and rising dark between him and the men. And then they were no more, the trick of light and longing going to wherever it was such things went. He felt vaguely comforted by the vision, because he knew that some ghosts walked with a man forever, and sometimes, just sometimes that was a blessing.

  Chapter Eighty-three

  Great Hatred, Little Room

  FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE she would wish she had not turned back that day and that she had not seen what she did. Because a moment could ripple out to the very ends of your life, it could change who you were forever. One minute could become a point of no return, and you crossed a river over which you could never journey back. She knew all this and had known it for some time now. And yet, she turned back.

  Pamela was in Belfast delivering one last set of pictures before shutting down her photography business, such as it was. In her advanced state of pregnancy she wasn’t up for roaming around at weddings or christenings taking photos. She had dropped the pictures off and was walking back to her car. She was only half a block away from the car when she noticed a crowd of people down the road from her. In their midst was a young soldier and even from the distance she was at, she could see he was lost. There was no way a soldier should be alone in the Lower Falls; he must have somehow gotten separated from his foot patrol. She turned and walked toward him.

  The crowd circled him slowly, as if they were participants in an intricate dance. Time slowed so that it nearly stopped. She could hear the voices of the women. There were two protesting that he ought to be escorted to an army base. He was disarmed and he was crying, terrified out of his mind. He had committed the cardinal sin of getting lost in Belfast—one block down too far, one street over from the one you’d meant to go down, and you were a walking dead man. He couldn’t be more than nineteen years old, probably fresh off the boat and just arrived on his first tour of the world’s worst killing ground for a British soldier.

  She knew she should walk the other way; there wasn’t anything she could do to help him without putting herself and her unborn child in terrible danger. She made her mistake then by meeting his eyes. Two strangers in a strange land, locked together here in a place where time no longer mattered and space consisted of a narrow, dark city where the reaper had an inexhaustible appetite. She would look at him, for it was all she could do—hold his gaze and by so doing, give him some small sliver of humanity in this last moment of his life. Green eyes held to blue, spirit to spirit, because flesh was not lasting, and even when it was young and lovely, it was still far too fragile.

  Once upon a time, a man she loved dearly had told her it was terror that wrote with the sharpest pen, delineating moments so clearly that you could not eve
r forget them. And so it was for she knew she would always see this moment as though it had been outlined with the darkest of ink and would always remember the silver tracking of his spent tears, tracing a line from eye to jaw, where a faint furze of whiskers darkened his chin. Always she would remember the exact color of his eyes, like bluebells opening in a spring wood—a blue that rolled on forever and lasted but a breath. And though he never moved a muscle, nor so much as blinked his eyes, she sensed a nod from him, as if he understood how fate and chance wove their terrible dark patterns and would go now into that merciless tapestry with what dignity he had left.

  At last he blinked, or she did, she never knew which, and time started up with a lurch, the sound of a carbine releasing it to run again, releasing her, releasing him, the blue eyes rolling up even as he fell.

  She felt strangely distant, as if she was watching a film, an old one, where the reel was disintegrating and she was only catching flickers of the pictures as they flowed past her. She thought it was shock, or it was living here so long and seeing too much blood and too much violence.

  She backed away slowly, so that she was standing behind a parked car. Blood lust and fury did strange things to people. She could not crawl over to him, she couldn’t risk it at all, the shooters might still be around and helping a British soldier, even one losing his life blood, was considered the act of a traitor. It would not matter that she was pregnant either; they would kill her. She waited for several minutes, knowing she needed to go, but was unable to move, as if the shooting had been one act of violence too many and had frozen her here. Like an object long petrified in a bog, someone might find her a thousand years from now, staring at a dead soldier in a bloody street.

  Finally she moved out from behind the shelter of the car, scant as it was, and peered through the twilight which was fast closing in. She could make out the soldier’s outlines, and saw that he was moving a little. She crouched as low as she could manage, and duck-walked her way over to him. She pushed two fingers into his wrist and then waited to see if she could feel a pulse. She thought she did—just a weak one, a small thread by which he held to life, but she couldn’t be certain because her own blood was buzzing with adrenaline and thudding rapidly against her skin.