“Go on,” I told Elaine, jerking my head at the rope ladder. She stared back. “I saved your sorry hide tonight. How about some benefit of the fucken’ doubt?”
She hesitated, and then started to climb down the rope ladder into the cold air. She was in bare feet so she took it slow, soles sore from traipsing the city. Then again, traipse probably ‘ent the word. You have to move fast to avoid amassing that pesky mental miasma.
#
Deep underneath the Olympia Theatre, the Poddle River flows. The story goes that a huge, black pool once lay at the meeting point of the Poddle and the Liffey. A Dubh Linn. That’s where this fair city came from, pushed and birthed from its depths.
Saint Bridget and her crew are the only ones who use the forgotten river. Last worshippers of the false Roman God, they got in and out of the city undetected through an artificial watercourse built long before the True Gods graced the earth.
The torches flickered as I reached the bottom of the rope ladder, limbs stiff and aching. Elaine was shivering on the narrow brick ledge beside the water, staring at this new crowd like she was deciding if this was a fire versus frying pan scenario.
“You’re late,” Bridget said, her hands on her hips and a thick grey plait hanging over one shoulder. She wore a white, stained robed, and was flanked by two priests of similar garb. A currach bobbed on the flowing water behind them. “You said before midnight.”
I spat into the river. “You didn’t have a vision about it, no?”
I shoved Elaine towards her. One of the priests, a black woman with silver beads in her hair, stepped forward and took the girl’s hands. She murmured something soft and soothing, and Elaine shuddered, eyes closed, before allowing herself to be folded into her arms. Together they made for the currach.
I didn’t watch them go.
Bridget held out a bag and shook it in a manner that set the coins clinking. “You’d have got a lot more from them above,” she said, a look on her face like she had the knowing of something.
“Errah,” I said, taking it. “Yiz’re easier on the eyes.”
Bridget insisted on blessing me before I left. Pure ráiméis, but sure lookit. What harm.
#
The Auger on the corner of Temple Bar had stained bandages around his eyes. His hand shook as I dropped a coin into his palm. “One more and I’ll tell you of time to come.” His thin reedy voice was cracked and broken. I didn’t take the offer. Don’t know anyone who does.
The pale sun struggled into the sky, thin light breaking through the grey clouds, cut here and there by the infected glow of newly opened slices. Who knew what horrors would be dropped on the city before the blood-moon rose. I drank my bottles on the Ha’penny Bridge as it swayed beneath me, weighed down with love-locks. The distant sounds of suicides rode the wind as they found a home in the Liffey.
When we die, we go in the dirt and the worms eat our eyes. We only get this life, and I reckon I’ve lived mine as well as I could.
Except once there was a boy with a stammer. And I shouldn’t have done that.
Under the Olympia, I asked Bridget whether we were square, her god and me. She couldn’t say. What good’s a god when you don’t know which way they’re leaning?
I drained the bottle of its contents, before lobbing it overarm into the Liffey. I watched it bob on the scummy surface for a second before a white polypous limb reached up and pulled it beneath.
When I pushed, I could pull visions of Niamh from the dark. Never as a whole, only in bits and pieces. Hoarded experiences. The colour of her hair when it caught the light. The soft, golden constellation of her freckles. Skin like cold silk beneath my fingertips. A whisper against my neck. Lilies.
I hoped she was dead.
I knew she wasn’t.
The sun finally reached the peak of its arc, the only star left uneaten by our benevolent betters. They let it shine onto this writhing, glistening city, crowded with giggers and scavengers and bones and blood and everyone eking out a bit of living without ever being alive.
I know them, the great Old Ones, perfidious Albion from the lightless place outside the universe.
I know them, but who am I?
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Copyright 2020 Méabh de Brún
Méabh de Brún is an award-winning Irish playwright and author. She specialises in weird tales, ghostly happenings and Hiberno-English. Her short fiction has featured in such publications as The Stinging Fly, Banshee Lit and Mysterion Magazine. She can be found waxing lyrical about the eerie in the everyday at @MeabhdeBrun.
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Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.
http://giganotosaurus.org
Devoured Stars Over Dublin Page 3
