King of Morning, Queen of Day (15 page)

There were, let me think, yes, eight of us. Yes, eight; myself, the brother Dermot; Old Tomas; the O’Carolan boys, God be kind to them, both of them dead in the war; Noel Duignan, the big fellow, clever with his hands, if you catch my drift; Mr. Cunningham, and Dr. Desmond from down at Craigdarragh. His it was the daughter who had run off. Run off, on a night like that, and she five months’ pregnant! ’Twas a great scandal in the village at the time, you must understand, the Desmond girl’s pregnancy. Now, I know all of you read about the rape case in the papers, how they never got hide nor hair of the boy as did it. It must have unhinged her a little, affected the balance of her judgement. She always had been a queer bird, that Emily Desmond—queer bird from a queer nest, given to daydreaming and wandering off by herself into the woods, head full of all manner of nonsense. Is it any wonder, I ask you, that what happened happened? Brought it on herself, I say. Asking for trouble. But what can you expect, with parents like hers? Marry your own kind, that’s what I say; oil and water don’t mix. The mother, she was of the other persuasion; always acted like she thought she was too good for our village. She wrote the poetry, so you can imagine what kind of a woman she was. The father, Dr. Edward Garret Desmond, he was a fine gentleman, but given to great and eccentric notions. You’ve heard no doubt of Desmond’s Downfall, also known as Desmond’s Disgrace, Desmond’s Despair, Desmond’s Disaster. Well, ’twas a big story in the newspapers at the time. That Dr. Desmond. Wired to the moon, all of them. Anyway, there was a financial scandal, and he’d been forced to sell Craigdarragh. Ten generations of Desmonds grew up within those walls, and now they’re gone, sold out to some foreigner from across the water. The end of the Desmonds. Well, I reckon young Emily couldn’t face the leaving and in her half-crazy state of mind ran away, on the very worst night of the year, to hide herself in the woods. Anyway, up to Rossnaree comes the good Dr. Desmond, such a panic you’ve never seen, and I for one wouldn’t condemn him, not on a night like that. So, Mr. Cunningham turns out the boys and tumbles us out of our cosy beds. We dressed as best we could in oilskins and sou’westers and rain capes, but I tell you, even standing there in the stable yard waiting for the lady of the house to light the lanterns for us, we were mortally soaked through to the skin, and half frozen to death, what with that vicious wind howling through every crevice in our oilskins.

’Twas about, let me think, yes, eleven o’clock when we set out; eleven o’clock certainly, because I remember Mrs. Cunningham standing in the kitchen door and asking us what time we would be back so she could have the tea and fruit loaf waiting for us. And Mr. Cunningham says, we’ll be back when we’re back, and with that off we set, our lanterns swinging to and fro in the wind and the night as black and foul as the very pit of hell itself. The plan was for us to search the southeast end of Bridestone Wood. Dr. Desmond had already been on the telephone to the police station and Sergeant O’Rourke and the boys from the village were going to work their way down from the northwest. The idea was that we’d meet up somewhere in the middle. That was the plan, but within minutes we were all separated from each other, and I don’t mind telling you, this fellow was afraid. It was bad enough, what with the rain and the howling wind and me not able to see two feet in front of me, prodding out my way with this big stick I’d cut from the coppice. But the worst part of it was never knowing what I was going to find—whether the girl would be alive or dead, or what. Grim it was, grim. And I’ll tell you more, say what you like about idle superstition; there’s not a man here is going to tell me there wasn’t something strange going on in that wood that night. All those weird shadowy things moving out there among the trees just beyond the range of my lantern light, those crashing sounds in the brambles and dead bracken that always stopped when I stopped myself to listen. I tell you, it was enough even to scare Big Noel Duignan, and he the bravest fistfighter in all Sligo. Been on the circuit across the water, he had, fought for fifty-guinea purses, and he himself told me he was shaking like a kitten. But worse even than the shadows were the voices. At first they were the voices of Big Noel and the others, and I called out to them, but they would not answer. Then I thought maybe it was the lost girl, and I called out her name. No answer. Then I stood still a moment just to listen and I could hear them clear over the howling of the wind and the lashing of the trees and the beating of the rain—voices whispering and laughing, so close I should have been able to see who they belonged to, but wherever I turned my lantern I saw only the shadows, like something huge and dark flying between the trees. Well, I had no intention whatsoever of staying there one minute longer than I had to, so on I pushed, and then all of a sudden I saw this light, far off among the trees. It seemed miles distant at one moment, then so close you could reach out and touch it the next, and I thought to myself,
’Tis the faeries. This is the pixie light of the faeries come to lure me to their kingdom under the hill.
I was petrified. Couldn’t move a muscle, not even to blink, I was so scared. Then there was a crashing and clattering like doomsday itself and out of the bushes came—well, who should it be but Sergeant O’Rourke himself. And says he, “What do you think you’re doing standing there like a buck eejit with your gob open, you stupid bugger? Don’t you know you’ve been wandering around in circles for the past ten minutes, long after everyone else’s met up and moved on?” He gave me a police whistle and pointed me up the slope, where the rest had gone on, and he shouted in his best peeler voice, “You see anything, you blow like buggery, for you could shout yourself hoarse and we’d never hear you in this storm.”

So, up the slope went I, thrashing at the briars with my stout stick and calling out the girl’s name, for all the good it would do in that din, not able to see more than two inches in front of me, slipping and sliding and be-jasusing and cursin’ like a bloody heathen, God forgive me. I think I must have climbed for half an hour, then all of a sudden I was out of the trees on the slopes of the mountain. The wind was cruelly fierce now—near blew me clean away, it did—and I was so wet by now it’d’ve made no difference if I’d chucked off my oilskins and gone up that mountain bare-arse naked. My hands were so cold and numb they could scarce hold the lantern. Looking about me I saw strung out across the hillside the lamps of all the other lads who’d come out to search for the lost girl. I stood a while taking my bearings. I had the feeling of something in front of me—something huge and dark, cold and hard, which I could not see. I edged forward, cautious as a cat on a precipice, God alone knows why. I suppose it was that wood had spooked me. Then, all of a sudden, I knew what that dark shadow was. ’Twas the Bridestone.

Well, that brought me up proper and short, for this night the thing seemed twice as tall and thrice as wide as Ben Bulben itself, and think what you may, but that night, that block of stone felt almost alive, as if all those strange feelings that had been following me through the wood were coming from this heathen slab of stone. Well, my friends, there I was, standing like an idiot in front of this great stone, and it humming like a bee, I swear, with the rain just streaming down me, when I heard the sound. ’Twas the sound of someone crying—someone not more than two steps from me, else I would not have heard them over the wind. I knew this was no trick of the night. This was mortal flesh and blood. Raising my lantern high, I ventured forward with what small boldness I could muster, and ’twas there that I found her, the lost girl, sheltering in the lee of the big stone.

Well, a proper sight she was, sobbing and weeping and shivering and muttering over and over to herself these words, “Why don’t they come? Oh, why don’t they come, why don’t they come?” Just those words, over and over and over. A sight she was, hair all lank and plastered flat by the rain, and dressed in nothing but what seemed in my poor lantern light to be a old wedding dress, torn and slashed most terribly. Barefoot she was, not a word of shoes or stockings.

So, what did this fellow do? Blowed his lungs out down that police whistle, that’s what he did. And all across the hillside those little bobbing lights froze stock-still, and then came running toward me. I don’t think the girl even knew I was there until I started blowing the whistle. She looked up all startled and I saw her eyes looking square at me and, boys, I don’t mind telling you, what I saw there fair knocked the blow out of me. Her eyes were empty, boys. Nothing there. Nothing. Not even sockets. Just darkness—a dark, empty space, with things like, well, I don’t know, like faraway stars, shining in them. I can see it yet, my friends.

At the sight of all the rest of the lads arriving posthaste, she upped and ran, like the billy-o. I tell you this, if she’d been a filly in the Sligo Races, I’d’ve made a bob or two out of her. I shouted at her to come back, but, well, that was a waste of time, with the wind roaring and howling so I could hardly hear myself. So I set off after her. She went up those slopes like a prize greyhound. Never seen anyone so fleet of foot, and her five months gone. There was I, slipping and sliding and be-jasusing trying to keep up, and she was getting farther and farther ahead of me. I looked up to see where I was, for I’d lost track of my bearings again, not being a creature graced with a great head for heights, and what I saw then, well, I don’t mind telling you, it queer froze my heart. It was like mist, like a thick fog, pouring off the top of the mountain. Like a great river it was. Why, it seemed to me it was almost solid, rolling down the slopes of the mountain. But it was red, Red fog. And in a wind that would have torn any normal fog to tatters. Now do you understand why I stood paralysed in mortal fear? No natural fog, this. The Desmond girl, she stopped the same as I had, and she looked at this red fog spilling down the mountainside. Then she turned and looked at me, at all of us, struggling up that hillside in the pelting rain, and the look on her face was as if she was seeing the thing she had wanted most in all the world. Like an angel’s, that face—like a sinner at the gates of heaven. That look I will never forget—no sir, not as long as I live. Then she turned and walked very slowly, very deliberately, into the red fog.

It swallowed her up, as completely as if she had never been, and then the fog, that unholy fog, I tell you, it stopped. Stopped dead. And, just as it had come spilling down the hillside, it rolled back again, up the slopes, over the top of Ben Bulben, and vanished. Of the girl who walked into the fog, the Desmond girl, there was not a trace. We went back there the next day and went over every inch of that hillside and didn’t find so much as a hair. And that’s as true as I’m standing here. And if you think I’m a liar, you ask of the others who were there that night. They will all testify my story is true. But, you ask, as I ask, and ask myself often, what of the girl? What happened to young Emily Desmond and her unborn child? Who knows? Who will tell what happened to her? No one.

So we set our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.

For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

—2 Corinthians 4:18

T
WENTY MILES GONE AND
nothing to be done. Through rain, and rain, and pissing rain, and anagrams. The pissing rain had started two miles out of Dundalk, just where the road paid nodding acquaintance with the Catholic cemetery. With eighteen miles and the mountains before him, Gonzaga had lapsed sullenly into Nagmara. The smaller, darker man always reverted to speaking in anagrams when he was not happy. Solving the anagrams provided Tiresias, who was taller, thinner, and greyer, with a welcome intellectual diversion from the brainless formalities of boot before boot, mile after mile, through rain, and rain, and pissing rain. Where feather rags of cold, sodden cloud reached down the hillsides to touch Ravensdale Wood, Farmer Mulvenna of Jonesborough passing with his pigs and his new Ferguson tractor on his way over the border to Newry town bent down from his proud and lofty seat (a Ferguson tractor was an object of veneration in Jonesborough in 1930-something) to offer two saturated tramps a lift. If they didn’t mind sharing with the pigs in the trailer, that was.

“Sir, beggars cannot be choosers,” Tiresias had declared. “And, my dear Gonzaga, are we not the most mendicant of all that brotherhood? And is not the pig the most blessed of animals? The heathen Chinee consider doubly blessed the house that harbours a pig beneath its rafters, a sympathy unequivocally echoed by the citizens of these Four Green Fields of Ours. Do we not invite the fine pink gentleman to be our co-domiciliaries? Is it not a commonly maintained belief that, alone of all creatures, the noble pig was blessed by its Creator with the ability to see the wind? And, therefore, is it not fitting that we should also share with them this transport of delight, sharing, already, as I do, the gift of the discernment of things unseen?”

“Do youse want a lift, or do you want to stand there in the rain all afternoon gabbin’?” asked Farmer Mulvenna of Jonesborough. Gonzaga was already grubbing around in the muck and straw on the floor of the trailer for small, forgotten items for his sack. As Yeoman Mulvenna, his pigs, and his passengers jolted proudly onward to Newry town, Tiresias discoursed briefly on Chinese Taoist thought with relation to the Two Principles, illustrating his lecture with instructive fables from the Ching Dynasty. “You are aware, my dear Gogo, that in China the beggar was a person of some consequence? Many were members of mendicant guilds, and I cannot but think that it would serve us well to emulate their example. It was the established practice for a member of a mendicant order to bang a gong or blow a trumpet or in some other fashion contrive to make a general nuisance of himself until the citizenry paid sufficient for him to desist his efforts. Some, would you believe, Gogo, used to swing dead cats around their heads on a rope, doubtless causing not inconsiderable distress to the very great number of feline fanciers particular to that dynastic period. Indeed, Gogo, so well organised were the beggars of Classical China that a token annuity to the guild coffers from a merchant or householder would grant immunity from their solicitings for a whole year. I would dearly love a cup of Earl Grey, Gogo—dearly.”