Sean, what can you tell us about all that’s happening here?
The room around her faded into a fog of irrelevancy, leaving only that interview. A flame could have curled through a fresh crack in the stove, sparking alight her wall of papered tinder, and she’d have been none the wiser. Moving, breathing, thinking – the most rudimentary of functions shut down like a full body blackout. She wasn’t even cognisant of their absence. And when all was said and done – when Sean Kilmartin had spoken his piece and smirked at the camera like a loner enjoying the limelight for the first time, all proud of himself and his fucking discovery – Mina had risen to her feet, beckoned elsewhere by some soundless bell in her subconscious. She didn’t know where she was going until she was stood staring blank-eyed at June’s lasagne and the best of mince. Her fingers closed around the bottle beside it.
…whoever sealed it up didn’t want it to be found.
Glass and ceramic chimed as more whiskey sploshed into her mug; a familiar motion, one of the few that her body could still perform on autopilot. Drinking was a terrible idea – Mina knew that, though she’d made no attempt to prevent what was happening – and her body rejected it the second her throat got wind of what was coming.
…more a part of our reality than we could possibly imagine.
She turned in a panic to the sink, retching up every drop until only bile and regret remained, leaving her to stare teary-eyed at the whiskey foam pooling around the plughole.
‘Fuck it,’ she gasped, holding on to the counter for support. ‘This can’t be happening.’
Mina had read every article she could find online about Professor David Kilmartin. There’d never been any mention of a son. Biographies praised his darling wife and past mentors, punctuating his life with the most pedestrian of landmarks: conferences and guest lectures where he’d been treated like some kind of fucking pseudo-rock star playing his back catalogue of fairy hits. Surely the birth of a child – and heir to the man’s legacy – merited some acknowledgement, but there hadn’t been so much as a footnote.
This is what I’ve dedicated my life to finding, as did my father.
Weak and dizzy, with her throat blistering from the whiskey’s burn, Mina lurched back to the couch where the yellow one was chirping away, guiding her towards him. He’d seen her in some bad states before, but this was different.
‘I’m okay,’ she whispered as she eased herself back down. ‘I just need a moment.’
She couldn’t live like this anymore – burying the past with her bare hands while some smarmy fuck was digging it up with a full team of archaeologists. But there’d been something so eerily comforting about borrowing another’s identity, if only for a while, and Caroline’s had come with so much. The seaside home. The doting parents. A comfy pair of slippers. If the watchers were combing the country in search of her, would they be able to see past her disguise? Once Mina’s hair had grown out, there’d be no telling them apart at a distance. But there was one glaring problem – that which made Mina scrub the skin from her hands whenever she thought about it.
It’s the woodland. It’s on you.
‘Thanks a lot, Madeline,’ she muttered, holding her head in her hands.
No shower was ever hot enough. Steaming water rosed her skin and fogged the cottage like a trapped cloud but it couldn’t wash the woodland away. The watchers’ excretions had flooded the soil and dripped like sap from the branches above. It was in the air they’d breathed. It glistened atop the spring water they had drunk; bottled and divvied out like the last of a lost vintage. She cringed at the memory of her bare feet sinking and sliding through the black earth. And the thorn that pierced her skin – a syringe spitting some ancient virus into her bloodstream. Mina saw stains where there were none. It was as though the soil had soaked inside her bones, inhabiting them like a parasite, expelling a scent that would lead the monsters to her door.
She looked to the laptop screen – to the son of David Kilmartin, with his wiry arms crossed like cheap shoelaces, utterly clueless as to what dwelled beneath Ireland’s innocent surface. He couldn’t have known how his father met his end if this was the harvest of his ambitions. Mina had scattered the breadcrumbs he’d left behind him – those tangible traces of the man’s ruin. But what if his son had had access to so much more? Could he be so blind as to follow the echo of the dead man’s footsteps?
‘The fucking Burren,’ she groaned as a wave of blood rushed behind her eyes. ‘How is that even possible?’
It was too close to home – only on the south side of Galway Bay. She used to gaze out at it from the top window of her old apartment, rising amidst the rooftops where the gulls perched like little alabaster gargoyles. Mina had been dragged there on a school tour once. She’d never forgotten the sheer terror on her teachers’ faces as they watched their fragile responsibilities clamber over its rocks, listening out for the shatter of tiny ankles on the wind.
After a flurry of clumsy stabs, she’d dialled Ciara, pressing the phone hard into her ear to keep it steady. The cottage felt a short keel away from capsizing. Those old doubts and fears were simmering inside her again, hottest around her cheeks. She needed to talk to someone – to vent the pressure before her eyeballs popped out against the gable wall; the thought alone of which made her squinch them shut.
‘Come on,’ she whispered, feet tapping frantically on the floor, ‘pick up.’
It rang, and then it rang some more. But no answer came.
‘She can’t still be eating her fucking vegetables,’ she growled, squeezing the phone so hard that she’d heard its plastic creak.
There was no one else. Calling her sister only carved out the chasm that stood gaping between them, and – from what Mina could remember – their last conversation hadn’t exactly ended on the friendliest of terms. She often wondered what Jennifer would make of her now, this new iteration of an already unpopular model. Her sister never cared for who she was before. She’d probably like her even less now.
‘No,’ Mina said, placing her phone back on the coffee table and meeting the watchful eyes of the yellow one, ‘she’ll only make it worse, won’t she?’
It’d been so long since she’d seen Jennifer in person. Whenever Mina recalled old family photographs – when someone mashed their bodies into a shape resembling two happy siblings – she was often surprised by how convincing it all seemed. The homely backdrop was her mum’s making. So, too, was the warmth, even if it dissipated after the camera flash, when they’d push each other away and storm out of the room, and that was before the incident.
‘She’ll never let me forget, will she?’ Mina said, hands fidgeting without her mug to busy them. ‘Hardly seems fair. It was as much her fault as it was mine.’
Their mum had been lucky to be alive, that’s what the doctor had told her, as though life and death were decided by a lottery. Who the fuck in their right mind says that to a child? In cases like hers it took a deft hand to pick through the details, to find those shiny little pieces of positivity. Mina’s mum was asleep but she wasn’t in a coma. She’d landed hard but hadn’t split her skull open. She was alive. And most importantly – the architect of all these minor miracles – she had been lucky.
Even at that age, Mina had to respect the doctor’s optimism. Though she couldn’t help but wonder: if not being dead was the silver lining, how dark must the clouds have been?
She’d recognised the lily-white skin of her arms. It’s strange what the eyes see first. Those familiar hands. Same nail polish. Same Claddagh ring. New cuts and bruises. The doctor had swished the blue curtains closed behind them. It felt safe in the cube. The light was softer. It seemed somehow quieter; not that nurses’ shoes ever made a sound. Machines watched on, monitoring vitals without need for eyes, their sirens at the ready. Mina had hated hospitals ever since. The whispers, the languor, the sadness, the clocks. Everything looked off-white and unclean, and yet there was never a smell. Not really. Just the suspicion of one.
How many people had fallen asleep in that same bed, hooked up to those same screens? How many had never woken up?
The bruises had leaked like oil beneath her skin, leaving it marbled in a million murky shades of green and brown, darkest around her right eye. The swelling had totally reshaped that side of her face. When eventually she woke up – before she’d even realised where she was – the pain had filled her skull like a thunder.
Her mum’s glasses had the thickest frames. They were practically indestructible. And yet they were in bits. Mina didn’t think plastic like that could break. She recalled the sight of their dismembered parts on the trolley beside her. The paramedics must have picked them up. They never abandon broken things.
It was an accident; a quarrel between two sisters atop the stairs. Their mum had thundered up to break them apart – to snuff out that angry spark that forever burned between them. They were so evenly matched in size and strength that usually any such fights ended in a stalemate. But this one, so fate would have it, was different. Mina hadn’t realised she’d pushed her mum aside until she was falling, and it was too late by then to do anything about it. There was only the sound of her body crunching down the wooden stairs and then the awful silence that followed. Her mum hadn’t died that day, but a part of Mina had, and Jennifer had hated her ever since. The fact that she hadn’t caused the row was irrelevant, apparently. All that mattered was how she’d ended it.
‘Fuck it,’ Mina muttered as she jumped to her feet and padded back to the kitchenette. ‘There’s only one way we’re getting any sleep tonight.’
Jennifer’s hair was probably still blonde; any colour that wasn’t Mina’s. A safe cut stolen straight out of a magazine. As was to be expected, she’d weathered the years better than Mina had; eyes were brighter, lips smoother, and her posture rivalled a shopfront mannequin’s. Hardly surprising, without a vice to spice up her days, of course her skin was creamy as a child’s. It was like staring at a version of herself from a parallel universe – the culmination of good decisions and healthy living; the person she could have become if she’d been better. The good twin and its wicked counterpart. The one who got the job, the boyfriend, and the lacklustre life she’d always dreamt of. And the one who’d wound up living with a golden conure in a borrowed cottage.
All paths lead somewhere. Perhaps Mina should have interpreted her mum’s adage as a warning. She poured out a glass, tensing her jaw in anticipation of another surge of vomit. Her hand still gripped the bottle while she drained it dry, trembling and poised for another. The taste wrung a fresh round of tears from her eyes. Mina rested her back against the counter and looked across the room to the yellow one.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ she said to him, swallowing back her nausea as best she could. ‘We can’t let this Sean lad dig up whatever is down there.’
Nothing good ever came from beneath the earth, certainly not when a Kilmartin was involved. However many people he’d hired for his dig, none would survive if even a single watcher crawled up to greet them. If she could only get to him – make him listen to her. Try as he might to dismiss her warnings, Mina knew how to cut to the very heart of the man and make him bleed belief in what she had to say, for she was one of the few who’d witnessed his father’s final testament – she understood the consequences of seeking out enlightenment in that darkest of places. Surely no man would step into his father’s grave if he understood the horrors that made him lie in it.
‘I think it’s safe to say that Madeline isn’t coming for us,’ Mina said, looking to the locked door as she did whenever she thought of her. ‘It’s fine though. Don’t worry, we can do this without her.’