Stay in the light, p.13
Stay in the Light, page 13
‘Given how similar you look, we have to explore the possibility that you’ve developed some kind of obsession with the woman.’
Mina’s weary head rose to meet Lynch in the eye. But there were no words.
‘Was it your intention to somehow replace Caroline Sheridan?’ the detective asked. ‘Is that why you were—’
‘What about the village?’ Mina stammered, cutting the woman off mid-question. ‘Did you go there? There might be more of them.’
‘We did,’ Lynch replied, visibly unimpressed by the interruption, but content to further twist her knife in Mina’s narrative. ‘No one – not even this Tom McGinty you mentioned – has any recollection of meeting you. And can I add, Mina, that it’s a small community. The tourist trade died off there a long time ago, so it’s more than reasonable to assume that somebody would remember you if you lived there for as long as you say you did.’
Mina imagined the watchers scrabbling across the village’s narrow streets, smashing through doors and windows, descending on all those helpless people – engulfing, maiming, killing, replacing. Warm blood on the coolest breeze, the stain of which would remain long after all were dead. She thought of those faces pinned to her wall – so full of character and nuance and beauty – now worn by the very creatures that had torn their lives asunder.
‘They aren’t human,’ Mina whispered. ‘You have to believe me.’
Had they already taken their pick of whose lives they would each inhabit? A whole village more bustling now than ever before, and yet there wasn’t a single human soul amongst them. It couldn’t be called a ghost town anymore, not when it was populated solely by devils.
‘I’m trying to understand your version of events, Mina. But nothing that you’ve told us lines up with what we’ve found. There’s no proof that you were where you say you were. And everyone that you’ve accused of being…’ here the detective hesitated ‘…a fairy has been more than compliant in our investigation. Which is more than I can say for you.’
Every truth had been twisted into a more convincing lie. But there was still Ciara. Mina’s grief was too fresh to be processed. She’d improvised a myriad of hopeful scenarios as to how she might still be alive but knew deep down that these were merely temporary bandages to cover the wound. The watchers had taken her identity; John’s, too. But they lacked the knowledge of their lives to convincingly support the masquerade. The simplest line of questioning could reveal what they were – it could provoke them into shifting form. Then there’d be no way to doubt the credibility of Mina’s warnings.
‘What about the Ciara you spoke to?’ she asked, clasping her hands together to keep them still. ‘Did she sell you some fucking bullshit story too? Look at the photographs in the sitting room – you’ll see how close we were. Ask her about me! And what about her dead husband? Were you talking to him too? Jesus, this is fucking insane.’
‘Dead husband?’ the detective repeated. ‘To my understanding, the man is classed as missing.’
Mina scrunched up her eyes, fighting back the tears. ‘Did you go there?’ she asked. ‘Just tell me.’
Lynch bit down on her lip before answering. ‘The house was empty, Mina. We visited it in the early hours of this morning. We found traces of blood. The door had been broken. A coat and a pair of boots, assumedly yours, were on the driveway. It begs the question why you were in such a rush to get away from there.’
‘You think I did this?’ she whispered, pressing her forehead into the table’s cool steel. ‘You think I killed her, don’t you?’
‘Why don’t you just tell me where she is?’
‘I don’t fucking know where she is!’ Mina snapped back.
The detective sat back straight, unamused by the outburst.
‘The evidence against your innocence is quite strong, Mina,’ she said.
She lifted her head. ‘What evidence? I haven’t done anything. Why would I kill my best friend?’
‘The crime scene investigation is still ongoing and these procedures take time. But, despite what you’ve just told me, there are no photographs of you to be found anywhere, Mina. We’ve discovered only two sets of fingerprints inside the house – those belonging to you and your so-called best friend. And there is also the question of all those missed calls. It presents us with the possibility that you were harassing this young woman.’
‘I wasn’t…’ Her voice trailed off to sadness.
‘There are over a hundred missed calls from last night alone. Everything that you’ve told us, Mina, contradicts the evidence that we’ve found. We have facts and we have your fairy tales.’
‘I’m not lying to you,’ Mina said, slowly swiping the tears from both cheeks. ‘Please, if I could find Madeline, she’d be able to show you that I’m not mad.’
The detective considered her with noted distrust. ‘And who is Madeline? This is the first time you’ve mentioned this name.’
‘She’s a friend. She’s one of them. But she’s not like them. She’s…’
Mina gave up. The truth was more incriminating than her silence. Everything she’d said could be used against her. Even those who the watchers had killed, they too splashed more blood on the canvas of her sanity, painting her portrait with delusion.
‘She’s what, Mina?’
The detective had spoken as Madeline would have; it was the same inflection. She stared into Lynch’s eyes, searching for something she might have missed, but this served only to make the woman rise uneasily from the table.
‘I’ll see to it that your case is handled compassionately, Mina,’ she said, pushing her chair back into place.
‘I’m not mad.’
But the woman had made her mind up. Mina could plead her innocence all she wanted. Nobody would listen. She thought of Bridget Cleary, screaming for mercy on the floor of her kitchen; helpless, hopeless, accused of being something she wasn’t.
‘Wait,’ Mina said as Lynch turned to leave. ‘Even if you don’t want to believe a word I say, I need you to do something for me. Please, you can’t understand how important it is.’
The detective wedged her folder under her armpit. ‘And what’s that?’
‘There’s a man called Sean Kilmartin,’ Mina replied, trying to temper her words. ‘He’s on the Burren right now and he’s digging down into it because he thinks he’s found some fucking lost history or something, I don’t know. But they’re down there – the changelings that I told you about. You have to warn him, please. Everybody on that site is going to die otherwise.’
Lynch stared at her – dumbfounded – as though Mina had just spoken in some unknown language.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said eventually before closing the door behind her, leaving Mina to sadly adjust to the scant space between those four walls; a prison cell couldn’t have been much larger.
She thought of a story her mum had told her once. Strange how the memory can hoard so much horror and yet jettison happiness. Whenever the tragedy supposedly occurred, the winter had been especially cruel, chasing every beast into its burrow and frosting the black fields a snow white. An elderly man – whose name sadly hadn’t survived with the tale – got both of his feet sucked into the bog. He hadn’t walked far from his back door, apparently. But no matter, the cold earth refused to give him back what was rightfully his, and when his wife saw him waving – panicked and shivering like a reed in the wind – she’d come to help, only to suffer the same fate; stuck in the same fucking mud. Their bodies were discovered some days later, too far apart to reach one another, but close enough to talk, assuming the icy air hadn’t frozen their lips shut. There were still moments – even now, years later – when Mina wondered what they would have spoken about. How long had they suffered before their cries for help had turned to goodbyes?
When does a situation become so dire that the only choice is to surrender?
12
SEAN
The nightmares lingered like a fever long into the morning, when the earliest inklings of light called the crew to arms. Judging by all those weary eyes that met his own, Sean’s restless sleep wasn’t an isolated case. Three of their number had quit, citing some conjectural trauma that they’d each held the drill responsible for – hardly cause enough to sue. They had travelled with Ellie to the nearest hospital. From there, Sean didn’t care where they went. He’d put it down to their age; weak in mind as they were in life experience, and far too mollycoddled to endure a day’s work. But secretly, he couldn’t blame them for wanting to be far from that place after what happened. No matter how many of Ash’s crew remained on site, the cold and the dark were the Burren’s long-term residents and their presence had an indelible hold over it.
Sean hadn’t volunteered to go down first. There were, after all, other – more expendable – personnel who could have acted as their proverbial guinea pigs until they were sure of the chamber’s stability. But it had been Ash who’d proposed the idea, and who was he to deny a lady’s request? She’d been upfront about her reasons. This wasn’t a demonstration of their noble benefactor’s bravery, spurious as it may have been. Her only interest lay in the headline it would inspire when the journalists came sniffing around for their stories. Playing the game, was what she’d called it, which made Sean feel all the more like a sacrificial pawn.
Ian secured the belt around his harness. ‘Right, Sean, you’re good to go. How’s that feel?’
The techie’s frosty reception had thawed with the rising sun. But morale was oppressively low across the board. This was the pivotal moment they’d all worked towards and yet it felt as though Sean were being lowered into his own grave, such was the moroseness of all those mourners gathered around him.
‘Tight,’ he replied. ‘But tight is good,’ he added, glancing down at the hole beneath him.
‘This dig is going to take longer than we thought,’ Ash whispered in his ear as she leaned in closer to turn on his hard hat’s lamp. ‘And if we’re to attract some funding, then we might as well make use of your name. Your father still has quite a fan base and some of them are probably pretty wealthy.’
She took a step back and slipped a camera out of her coat pocket.
‘We’re not broke yet, Ash,’ he said, gripping his gloved hand around the chain supporting him.
‘If you give me a half-decent smile, you never will be. Trust me, I’ll have you on the front page of every newspaper by tomorrow morning.’
‘Are we good?’ Ian asked, airing his impatience.
‘Absolutely not,’ Sean replied to which a few around him giggled nervously. ‘But let’s get it over with. The sooner I’m down there, the sooner all of you can follow me.’
‘Scared of the dark, are we?’ Ian scoffed.
It might have been better if he had overdosed on painkillers the night before.
Sean forced a smile. ‘I’m more scared of falling through it actually. But thanks for your concern.’
The hardest part was stepping off solid ground and relinquishing his fate to the chain.
‘Try to hold it steady, Sean,’ Ian said, crouched by the winch. ‘I’m going to send you down now, okay? It’s a piece of piss. So long as you don’t unclip that harness until you reach the bottom, you’ll be grand.’
After a resounding click, his new toy began to groan, loud enough to cause a few bystanders to wince. Memories of the drill were obviously still fresh in their minds. The chain unfurled, lowering him into the shaft in slow and steady increments. He kept his eyes on Ash as she mouthed good luck to him. A final photograph was snapped before his head sank beneath the surface – one for the front pages and hopefully not his last.
Sean pawed his fingers and the toes of his boots down the sheer granite to keep his balance. It was tighter than he’d expected, and every breath of air and scratch of stone reverberated around him, echoing up to the opening above and diving into the abysmal depths below. He couldn’t hear the winch’s motor anymore. Glancing up to where the daylight had shrunk to the size of a lonely star, Sean was stricken by a sudden sense of loneliness. And as always, whenever he’d no one else to turn to, it was his father’s ghost who kept him company.
He’d dreamt of him again that night, when he’d tossed and turned and soaked a cold sweat into his bedsheets. Even now, in this most singular of predicaments – when he should have been wholly focused on not falling to his death – memories of it hounded his thoughts with its grim and ghastly imagery, like a stain he couldn’t blink from his eyes.
The nightmare’s vividness was startling. He’d seen his father standing behind a vast pane of glass; a sorry reincarnation of the man he’d once adored in reality; deathly gaunt, unkempt, and with shoulders sunken from a profound hopelessness. Despite the surrealism of that dreamscape, it was heartbreaking to behold what he’d been reduced to. His eyes were so flush with terror, flitting everywhere and yet focusing on nothing. Sean had the vaguest recollection of trying to catch his father’s attention, but the man might as well have been blind.
‘You okay in there?’ Ash called down, not bothering to use the radios.
Her voice was impossibly far away.
‘Yeah, I’m all right,’ Sean replied between breaths. ‘Hanging on.’
What his father wouldn’t have given to be in his shoes and in that harness.
Missing wasn’t the same as dead. Death was conclusive. It closed the book on a man’s life. The fact of his father never being found left those final pages blank and frustratingly ambiguous. Did his remains lie skeletonised in a tomb like this one? Or was he still alive, living out his last years in one of those woodlands he’d obsessed over in his final months? One possibility Sean knew to rule out – he certainly wasn’t imprisoned in some room of fucking glass. Dreams never consorted with the truth. They were but a symptom of a man’s exhaustion, and he’d found little sleep since the dig had begun.
Sean’s boots suddenly slid down into nothing. He’d left the shaft behind him and now dangled like a bait on a hook in the darkness. His lamp illumed the myriad stalactites that grew from the ceiling, but elsewhere – as he lowered toward the chamber floor – there was nothing within reach of his light to break all that black.
‘Okay, Sean,’ Ian’s voice came over the radio, its echo scattering in every direction, ‘unclip your harness and I’ll take the chain back up. I’m going to send you down a halogen so you don’t get lost down there, okay?’
‘Roger that,’ he replied, his voice booming as though he stood in an empty auditorium.
Finally, after what felt like a long lifetime of planning and preparation, he’d made it, and the sheer weight of wonder in that moment was almost too much to bear.
‘Sean,’ Ash said through the radio, ‘hang tight until we’ve lowered the light down to you. Don’t go wandering off just yet.’
‘Okay, I’ll stay put.’
‘And don’t worry,’ she added, ‘I’ll be coming down to keep you company in a moment.’
The radio’s crackle dispersed into the darkness. Never had he known a silence to be so loud – so alive and tangible. It was as if another presence occupied the chamber with him, though Sean knew that to be impossible. And yet his senses – more alert than ever – detected something in its unseen depths. Moisture perhaps, or the faintest trace of air creeping through some timeworn cleft in the cavern’s stone. It was altogether possible that it was a figment of his own overwrought mind; a consequence of the headaches whose stubborn aftershocks had yet to dissipate. But Sean imagined a voice. And though it spoke without words, it wasn’t angry or in any way opposed to him being there.
He was welcome – that’s all he knew as he stood alone amidst the whispering dark of his discovery.
*
When Ash lowered within his reach, Sean patted up her legs until his fingers found the harness. It was all perfectly professional, of course, if perhaps unnecessary, and he was more than aware of that as he held the woman steady, waiting for her feet to touch solid ground.
‘Nice of you to join me,’ he said as he watched her release her belt, bluffing the same casual confidence that contradicted the truth of his headspace.
The halogen had already been set up beneath the shaft, linked by a long cable that snaked up to the surface. No matter how or where they moved, their shadows danced across the walls, often entwined as one. It could have been almost romantic had Ash been of a similar mind to realise it. But so entranced was she by their surroundings that Sean was no more than an idle body blocking the view.
‘It’s amazing,’ she whispered, spinning in a slow pirouette.
The Ogham monopolised her full attention. She’d had only scraps to translate before, with no grander context to comprehend their meaning. And yet now there were more etchings than her eyes could process. That archaeologist’s brain of hers must have been positively pulsating.
The empty harness began to rise. ‘You can prep the volunteers now, Ian,’ Ash said into her radio. ‘They know what they’re doing when they get down here, don’t they?’
‘I should hope so,’ he replied. ‘I’ve gone through it enough times with them.’
Their roles were straightforward enough not to raise too many concerns. Once they’d safely touched down in the chamber, they were to go about setting up the equipment; namely more lights, cameras, and even one for recording the entire operation, as requested by Ash in the case of their discovery meriting a documentary down the line. She’d also set up a video blog on her laptop in the hope of generating some interest in the idea. They weren’t simply uncovering Ireland’s history. Together, they were making it.
‘Okay,’ Ash said, having examined their surroundings with a cautious eye, ‘what do you say we get started? There might be more rooms and passages that we’ve missed, but let’s begin with what we know.’
As detected by the drone during its ill-fated preliminary scan, there was another, smaller chamber adjoining the one they now occupied, and that’s where Ash seemed to be headed. Sean knew that whatever treasures or historical clarity awaited them, he was the one who the world would hold responsible for finding it. But still he was slow to concede to the woman’s lead. Surely, as two equals, an exchange of ideas would have been more applicable to their collaboration.
