Without fail or mercy, the same silent alarms were triggered come nightfall. Alcohol helped, but a locked door was the only sure-fire way to disable them. Mina held all the keys, so she wasn’t a prisoner in the truest sense, more a weary warden who’d learned through hard experience that locks were invented for a good reason.
‘I’m having another, okay?’ she called over to the yellow one as she squeaked off the bottle cap. ‘And before you start judging me, yes, this is probably my last one.’
A tinny rattle from his cage was permission enough to pour ahead.
A dash of whiskey sloshed over the rim of her mug, staining a thin pool on the kitchenette’s counter. Though no grander in size than the coop, the cottage’s furnishings were a whole lot homelier, and its colour scheme wasn’t strictly beholden to a catalogue of cold greys. It was dissimilar in every way that Mina could have wished for. If only the tremble to her hand would cop on and realise that.
‘Ciara rang me tonight,’ she said, dabbing the spillage away with her fingers. ‘She was asking after you. I told her the seagulls were picking on us again.’
This was Mina’s self-contained fortress – a safe place whose warmth and lamplit glow spurred her mind to speak only in whispers. Its sea-facing windows were poky as two portholes and latticed into grimy quarters. A thin scab of salt had grown over their glass, sealing her inside like a wound and muddying any reflections that may have otherwise caught the corner of her eye as she now examined the old loaf of bread shoved in beside the toaster. The gulls had eaten more than she had, swooping down like ungrateful children whenever she shuffled outside in somebody else’s slippers. It was a shame to see it go to waste, especially as June had been so kind as to bake it for her. But Mina’s appetite eluded her even on those days when she was sober. The simplest effort – eating included – was exhausting.
‘Ciara told me that she’s going to check out the message boards,’ she said, firm in the belief that the bird understood her, ‘but, between you and me, she hasn’t a notion.’
Her bed was a short climb up a spiral staircase that shook after one too many mugs. She slept like a bird, up high and out of harm’s reach, with the duvet folded around her like broken wings. Mina’s nightmares had a cruel habit of returning to the coop, where that reflection of her past self was always sure to make an appearance. She’d snap awake in a pool of sweat, gripping her pillow like a life buoy and lie there, adrift in the darkest waters of her subconscious where the past circled her like a sea full of sharks. Time hadn’t dulled their teeth in the slightest.
‘Another sunset down, my man,’ Mina said, slumping on the couch and hefting her feet onto the coffee table where the yellow one’s cage had found its home. ‘I think we’re getting better at these. Soon enough we’ll be going for walks in the woods again.’
It wasn’t in the bird’s nature to doubt her. But even he must have known when the whiskey was coaxing nonsense from her lips. Mina’s gaze came to rest on the gable wall facing her – that chaotic reflection of her mind. Or, to the unknowing observer, a pastiche of pencilled portraits and printed articles dating back decades. It was here that she pinned her sketches of those who called this forgotten edge of Ireland their home. Mina had lost so much of who she’d once been, but no amount of mental torture could break the artist inside her. Facial features were memorised down to the tiniest detail, drawn and redrawn until they sometimes cameoed in her dreams. Mannerisms, too, were jotted down as though she were a zoologist studying a new strain of species, noting any subtle inflection that an imposter wouldn’t know to imitate.
There was the thin, crooked creature who squatted on his wall like a lizard whenever the sun peeped between the clouds. He wore the same woollen jumper day in, day out as if it’d been knitted through his skin. Eyebags drooped onto his cheeks like potato sacks, reaching nearly as low as his nostrils. The man’s chin was sharp as a crescent moon and there was a wonderfully mischievous glint to his goblin eyes. He belonged in some grotesque fantasy movie, grinning over a low hill of gold. She’d yet to see him without a cap sitting tidy on his crown, flattening down the white candyfloss tufts that sprouted on either side. The streak of a scar curved around his left cheek; noticeable only when the sunlight caressed it like a salve. That was important. Details like that could easily be overlooked.
With the mug wedged between her thighs, Mina reached over for the laptop. It wasn’t password-protected, thankfully. But an image of June’s daughter, Caroline, was a daily reminder that nothing she touched was actually hers. Mina was the stray that had come meowing at the woman’s door while her own cat was off a-wandering. As an added boon, they were similar enough in age and looks that if anyone saw Mina moping around the beach like some melancholy castaway, they’d have naturally assumed she was Caroline.
Same perky cheekbones. Identical nose – small as it was straight. Caroline’s teeth were definitely a shade or two whiter, given Mina’s lengthy sojourn sans toothbrush, but the woman had the same symmetrically sound face that she’d once found so uninspiring. Somehow, June’s daughter seemed to wear it better. And her smile was more than just a shape – that toothy simper that children parrot whenever they pose in front of a camera – it was the real deal, shining almost as brightly as Ciara’s used to. Suffice to say, at that exact second in time, when the camera flashed, Caroline was happy. Given how fucking miserable Mina felt, it was safe to assume that the similarities between them didn’t stretch beyond their looks.
‘Let’s see what the crazies are saying today.’ The laptop was peeled open. ‘And yes, I know,’ she added, glancing over to the yellow one, ‘we’re the craziest pair of the lot. But at least we’ve got good reason to be like this.’
The internet was Mina’s sole link to the world. She lost countless hours scrolling through its forums and threads, diving head first into the deep end of the strangest discussions, trawling for some mention of the horrors that had held her captive.
True crime seemed to be the latest fad. What had once been a harrowing snippet on the six o’clock news was now its own genre – a popular one at that. Tragedies best forgotten were exhumed and sold as easy-listening content. Wannabe sleuths cast a lurid light over past atrocities, regaling the world with the minutest, goriest details; some playing it respectfully straight, others leeching a sick humour from it; all of them cold as the killers they commemorated.
It was through one such thread that Mina happened on a particularly horrific case dating back to 1895 – the only instance to her knowledge when the watchers occupied some place in the public interest, albeit as superstitious folly and not the genuine nightmare fuel that followed her up those creaky stairs at the end of every day. Even after so many years, Bridget Cleary’s murder and trial remained synonymous with Ireland’s changeling mythos.
Long buried six feet under the Tipperary earth, she’d been a dressmaker who had earned some extra coin selling eggs from her coop. One such delivery of hers happened to cross a well-known fairy fort that the locals – her husband Michael included – knew to avoid for reasons, as they’d learned at a young age not to invite the mischievous choler of the fairy folk into their lives. This fort, so to speak, wasn’t even a woodland, as Mina discovered, but a circular rise of land that had held its shape since medieval times. Regardless, the old stories kept it sacred without preserving any explanation as to why. And when Bridget fell ill, her husband suspected that more sinister forces were at play and that his wife’s days of trespassing where she shouldn’t had finally caught up with her.
Records cited a nervous excitement; cause enough for Mina to roll her eyes. By ye olde psychiatric standards, any poor woman with a spark behind her eyes was treated like a ticking time bomb. A doctor came to prescribe his medicines. A priest stood over Bridget’s bed and read from his book: whatever revision of a revised edition the church was flogging at that point in time. But unfortunately, neither science nor religion could save the woman from what was coming.
When her ailments persisted, Michael turned to other, more delusory remedies. Bridget was force-fed sickening cocktails of milk and herbs, drenched daily in her own urine, and she even had her face held to within inches of the burning hearth. Fire, or so her husband fantasised, could coerce a changeling into revealing itself. Mina was quick to call bullshit on that little make-belief. Whenever Madeline had stoked a fire to life in the woodland, the watchers had no qualms in stamping it out and dragging its burnt bits across the living room floor.
It was a tragic testament to mob mentality that no friend or family member intervened. And the horror of the Cleary household escalated quickly. Terrorised, tortured, and weakened from illness, Bridget was pinned to the ground and asked three times to confirm that she was in fact the Bridget Cleary – a fundamentally broken action, no more convincing than a lunatic declaring their own sanity in a room of white coats. The woman could do little else but plead for mercy, sadly all too aware of the deaf ears that had already aligned with her husband’s philosophy. When the third answer failed to escape her lips, Michael did the unspeakable, certain in his faith that it was the only way to have the real Bridget returned to him. He doused his wife in lamp oil and burned her to death on the floor of their kitchen.
Madness and simplicity were blamed as the roots of the man’s actions. And yet, the jury presiding over the trial still examined Bridget’s remains to confirm that she wasn’t the imposter that her husband had so adamantly alluded to. This formality proved, if anything, that there were those who still needed convincing.
Throughout his fifteen-year incarceration, Michael Cleary maintained that what he had watched blacken on the floor of his home was not his wife, but something else. Apparently he would speak often about Bridget’s beauty and, in particular, her smile and how in those final days of her life it had been decidedly absent. The changelings, Michael believed, struggled to mimic our emotions. Like any muscle, the face’s nuances could be flexed and mastered over time. But fresh in the guise of his beloved wife, smiling was an impossibility. It was that expression – that distorted and monstrous attempt to smile as only Bridget could – that drove the man to turn against her, and ultimately burn her alive.
Few in the online forum had scratched beneath the sensational surface of it all, and none had conducted any research of their own to enhance its history. Mina, as per usual, remained a silent spectator, careful to never touch a single, sticky strand on the world wide web. But the truth had turned septic inside her. She’d kept the woodland a secret to prevent others from seeking it out. Disbelief, curiosity, idiocy – there were a myriad reasons that could invite a massacre. But the guilt of doing nothing proved a far heavier burden on Mina’s conscience. In the months since their escape, how many cars had broken down at its treeline? What if there’d been parents and children? With miles of deadland behind them, would they have walked in as she had done?
‘What do you think?’ she asked the bird, her lips pouting in thoughtful indecision. ‘Should we tell them the truth?’
Even with her inhibitions dulled by the dwindling contents of her mug, Mina knew that nobody would believe her. Desperation had grabbed one hand, her loneliness the other, and together they sought to drag her away from everything Madeline had taught her.
You survive if you are strict and abide by the rules.
And not speaking about the watchers was rule number one.
‘There’s more to life than surviving,’ she whispered, looking to the yellow one for some reassurance. ‘What am I supposed to do? Does she expect me to hide away in this fucking cottage until Caroline comes back? And then what? Do I just walk out into the ocean and dis—’
A knock on the door stole the word from her lips.
Mina shrank into the couch. Fingers slid under the cushion, touching the knife she’d stashed there; hand-picked from the cutlery drawer not for its sharpness but for its size. The act of stabbing it into another’s flesh was inconceivable, so she needed some deterrent that she could wave around like a sword.
‘Mina,’ came June’s voice.
The knife was poked back where it belonged, sheathed between the couch’s seat and a cushion.
‘Yeah,’ Mina called out, placing the open laptop back on the coffee table. ‘One sec, June.’
She staggered stiff-legged from the couch, appreciating once again how little it took to get her drunk these days. Cheapest date on the west coast, if only someone would take a shine to her.
June’s persistence in keeping her fed meant that she could be expected any night, at any hour, heedless as to how the slightest tap on that door knocked Mina’s courage down like a gunshot. Nevertheless, it didn’t open unless she was sure of who stood on the other side of it. There were some rules that no feed of whiskey could trick her into breaking.
‘June,’ she said, pinching the key, ‘do you remember the phrase I told you, so I know it’s you?’
Amazingly, the woman had yet to pry into Mina’s past and whatever reasons she had for being so cautious.
‘Yes, I remember,’ June replied. ‘Stay in the light.’
These were the first words that popped into Mina’s head when she’d pioneered her password system. She still saw the writing above the fireplace, clear as the first morning she’d shambled out of the coop, back when she thought herself the sane odd-one-out in a forest full of crazies. The reality, as it turned out, was much worse than that.
It took the strength of both hands to wrench the door open. ‘Hey,’ Mina gasped, catching her balance as she nearly fell out of Caroline’s slippers.
Unsurprisingly, June was cradling a ceramic dish covered with a sheet of foil. Her salt and pepper hair was stuffed under a red woollen hat that swamped her face like a helmet. Mina guessed that she played with colour to brighten her appearance, as her skin was pale as stone; she was probably too busy caring for others to steal a moment in the sunshine for herself. The woman’s heart was the rarest kind of treasure.
‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’ she asked, so apologetically that Mina wanted to seize her in a hug.
If June had smelled the whiskey on her breath, then she was thoughtful enough to play her supporting role to Mina’s attempt at acting sober.
The woman’s eyes sparkled in the half-light of the doorframe. ‘I was making a lasagne and I said to Peadar that it’d be as easy for me to make two seeing as all the work is already done, and he agreed with me.’
Here she held out the dish for Mina to adopt. Her mum used to do the same – forcing dinners into her hand whenever she missed one too many meals and her hips popped out above her jeans.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,’ Mina replied as she turned towards the kitchenette in the corner, already suffering the inevitable guilt for wasting another dinner that the woman had made for her. June followed her inside with the shortest steps, her shoes scratching over the stray sand that Mina now wished she’d brushed outside. But the woman passed no comment and instead did exactly as expected and made a beeline towards the bird.
‘Oh, would you look,’ she said, shaking her head as though the yellow one was a work of art. ‘Isn’t he so handsome?’
Mina lowered the dish onto the counter, careful to slide it a safe distance from the edge. Sober Mina was obviously whispering instructions in drunken Mina’s ear.
‘He’s definitely the handsomest little conure I’ve ever seen,’ she called back.
‘You must bring him up to the house for dinner tomorrow night?’
Mina laughed. ‘Do you have a few parrot recipes stashed away somewhere?’
June tittered at the thought. ‘Oh, I’m sure I could rustle up something for him. And how are you, dear? Are you okay?’
The genuine concern in her voice aroused a rare smile.
‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ she replied.
‘Is there anything you need?’
Mina offered the lasagne a short nod. ‘I think that’ll keep me fed for a few days, thanks.’
‘You know that if there’s anything at all, you can come to me and Peadar, don’t you?’ June reminded her as she cast a fond parting glance at the bird. ‘I’ll leave you alone so. I don’t mean to disturb you all the time, like I do, but there’s the best of mince in that lasagne and it’s as easy to make two.’
Mina tagged behind her as she stepped over the low ridge of sand that ran along the threshold. The woman was content to be kind without understanding how precious that kindness was to one so lost.
‘Have you anyone up in the guest house?’ Mina asked as casually as possible.
If an unfamiliar face was staying atop the hill, she needed to know.
‘Almost, dear,’ she replied, giggling at her own response. ‘A woman came to the door and, as I said to Peadar, I thought we had a visitor. She even asked if we’d any vacancies, which I thought meant she was after somewhere to stay. But she wasn’t. She pottered off towards the village and I haven’t seen her since.’
‘Had she long pale hair?’ Mina asked, slurring her words out of excitement. ‘In her late forties or fifties? Tall and thin?’
‘No, dear, she was certainly tall, but she was much younger than that. And her hair was as short as your own, but not as pretty,’ she added with a wink. ‘Are you expecting a visitor?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mina replied with a shake of her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, goodnight,’ June whispered, before closing the door behind her. ‘Let me know how you enjoy the lasagne and I can always make you another. Like I said, it’s the best of mince.’
Mina imagined the woman’s path around the cottage and up the grassy slope that led to their guest house. To think she’d carried that full dish all the way down – in the cold, in the dark – just for her. Mina looked over to the kitchenette, determined to devour it in the coming days.
It couldn’t have been Madeline who’d called to the guest house earlier. As gifted a shapeshifter as she may have been, she was never young. Those eyes of hers were too old and cheerless to peep out of a youthful face.
Mina knelt on the armrest before collapsing backwards across the length of the couch. And there she lay, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the room to stop spinning. Slippers were kicked off. Two thuds, one after the other. And then she listened to the pattering of the bird’s tiny feet on their beam.
‘I think June fancies you,’ she said, her skull anchored into one of the pillows she’d brought from upstairs. ‘Can’t say that I’m surprised though. All the ladies love the yellow one, don’t they?’
Mina’s head turned, first to the parrot who seemed to be delighting in his compliment, and then to the laptop. Drunken eyes squinted as she tried to decipher its screen at a sideways angle. Another anonymous contributor had shared a link while she’d been entertaining June. One word in its headline strained into focus. But she must have been seeing things… Mina groaned as she quickly repositioned herself with both bare feet on the floor.
KILMARTIN’S TEAM MAKE ASTONISHING DISCOVERY
She sat back, staring at the laptop screen like a rectangular rift in her reality.
‘No fucking way.’