The ocean shone a liquid silver, somehow holding more light than the sky above it, where the last juicy slice of orange sunshine was being gobbled up by the horizon. Ciara was right: Mina had forgotten how beautiful it was. So enthralled had she been by memories of its absence that in the light she’d seen only shadows. That was where the horrors had lurked by day, and by night – for now and forever – they were as ubiquitous as the stars twinkling like watchful eyes in the ether.
Mina leaned in the cottage’s doorway, inviting the sea air to cleanse her ailing senses of the whiskey and the vomit and whatever other impurities she’d brought upon herself in the past twenty-four hours. Too weary to stand on her own two feet. Too wired to sleep. This was neither the heaven nor the hell of hangovers but some cruel limbo in between, and she’d no one to blame but herself.
The beach was back to its old, abandoned self – just the way Mina liked it – and the sun was a rare treat now that the bruised sky had healed its wounds. Hopefully those two women who’d stood by the wash had enjoyed their holiday together, brief as it may have been. Shame about the weather. But only a hard-line optimist would ever visit the west coast of Ireland expecting blue skies and a balmy breeze in spring. It was a miracle really that no one had trespassed on her private strip of sand sooner, though it was getting more and more difficult to count how much time had gone by since she’d arrived there. Whereas the woodland seemed to pass for what felt like an eternity, these weeks had been compacted into a single vapid memory; one with too little variety to divvy out its days.
Time had teased Mina with so many inconsistencies that she’d lost all faith in the concept. The same could be said for the jarring theory that she lived on a rock floating in some ever-expanding void. Was that really the best that the world’s brightest minds could come up with? She could feel her brain spasming whenever she’d sit by the sand and watch the first stars awakening in the twilight, wondering if life out there could be any more terrifying than what she was going through down here. Space and time – these were the two outlawed topics that she vowed to shoot down like a gunslinger should they ever try to step into conversation. But easy as it was to turn a blind eye to astrophysics, there was no escaping time. No one could.
‘We’ll be hitting the road again soon,’ she whispered, sniffing back the cold air. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll take you back to the beach someday.’
The yellow one’s cage was set by her feet. Mina cast a guarding glance towards the caves and those bastard seagulls that loitered in their cracks like white-feathered hooligans, always picking on her parrot just because he was handsome. The daylight wouldn’t keep the beach aglow for much longer and she was already dreading the walk home from the guest house. No matter how quickly dinner was devoured, night would have fallen.
‘What do you reckon?’ she said, groaning as she lowered onto her bum and stretched out her aching legs, taking care not to drag Caroline’s peacoat through the sprinklings of sand that had settled on the front step. ‘Are we going to get to Kilmartin’s kid before he cracks open some new fucking Hell gate?’
The yellow one’s head turned and Mina could have sworn he’d winked at her.
‘Ever the wishful thinker, eh? I guess one of us has to be.’
She’d resigned her afternoon to the curtained half-light of the couch, hidden under her chunkiest throw, convincing herself with the aid of mock immaturity that no monster would ever think to look for her there. Good job she had the yellow one to act as lookout – her loyal little watcher alarm.
Peadar had blamed himself for spooking her in McGinty’s pub, though nothing could have been further from the truth. His buoying presence was all that had kept her from sinking into her worst, most paranoid rendition of an underfed, hungover artist, and nobody needed to see that. Mina had hoped she’d imagined it, but even he’d marked their unexpected guest out as odd. The fact he’d not painted the bar with the blood from all three of them should have been proof enough that he was human. But rational thinking wasn’t exactly Mina’s strongest suit these days. Her paranoia had become a festering tuber whose sprouts just kept on growing.
‘You good to go?’ she asked the yellow one, still admiring his own feathers in the sunshine. ‘Come on so, let’s get you fed.’
*
Nature was never so alive than after a good downpour, when all its petals and herbs lapped up the raindrops, imbuing the air with nothing short of magic. A seasoned sommelier could ramble on for days with only a short sniff of what Mina was breathing in now – salted seaweed draped in garlands on the cool sand, the musty hum of wild garlic, and all those rhododendrons sprinkling their spices into the air. Those taints of earlier were all but forgotten, even if the hangover remained.
She tried to hold the cage high enough to break above the skinny grasses but her shoulder ached before she’d met the worst of the hill, leaving the yellow one to flutter his wings in damp despair as he ploughed blindly through the wilds. Mina had expected to see June standing by the kitchen window, whose sink faced a view of the back garden. But its glass had fogged over with steam, leaving a perfectly squared cloud by the back door.
‘Be on your best behaviour, okay,’ she whispered, holding the parrot’s cage up to her eye level. ‘We both know that June has the hots for you. And she’s cooked you something special, so you’d better eat it.’
Mina brushed her peacoat dry before tapping on the door. She expelled a few foggy puffs of air as she mentally prepared herself for the usual gauntlet of polite smiles and chit-chat. Her social muscles had weakened to the brink of uselessness, but the old couple had spoken to her more than enough times not to expect any witty one-liners. She’d never known anyone like them – so naturally warm and charitable that they made her rethink her take on the human race as a whole. Good people did exist, and the best of them never even realised how good they were.
After a short spell of no response, Mina knocked again. Standing out in the open wasn’t something she was especially fond of, and the cold on the west coast had fangs. It snapped from the shade in the summer months and now hunted its hills in phantom packs, chasing down anyone without a thick coat. Even the birds knew to hunker down when a chill mist broke the shore. When still no reply came, Mina closed her fingers around the door handle and took matters into her own hands.
‘June, it’s just me,’ she called out, releasing a waft of moist fog into the cool air.
There was bubbling and splashing within, and the nervous rattling of a saucepan lid. But June’s voice was surprisingly absent. Mina was sure the woman would have been listening out for their arrival; her excitement at having her favourite conure over for dinner must have swelled throughout the day and she didn’t doubt that Peadar was a broken man from hearing about it.
Mina crept inside, leaving the door slightly ajar. ‘June?’ she repeated, fanning the steam away from her face. ‘I think your dinner’s cooked.’
Despite being empty, the kitchen had an air of busyness about it, like a factory whose machines had just fallen silent. Colourful vegetable scratchings were scattered over a chopping board, and a warm glow permeated behind the oven’s smeared glass. A pot had been left on the hob. Its overflow had stained the countertop with a frothy veneer that was now streaking down onto the tiles. Mina propped the birdcage on the kitchen table and dialled back the heat. A floorboard creaked above her head. Her gaze lifted to the ceiling before coming to land on the yellow one. He’d heard it too.
‘I’d better go upstairs and check on them,’ she whispered, though it felt more like a moral obligation than an idea she could genuinely get behind.
The chaotic state of the kitchen and the absence of her two hosts had shaken Mina’s expectations for the evening. She’d lived within these walls in the inaugural days of her exile, before being offered the use of Caroline’s cottage. June kept the rooms pristine, forever awaiting guests though none ever came, and her kitchen ran like clockwork.
‘Something’s not right,’ she said, glancing back at the yellow one. ‘You stay here. I’m going to check it out.’
If either June or Peadar had suffered an accident, she’d never have forgiven herself for caving under her own cowardice and abandoning them. They were both elderly, and June was especially frail. A short fall could cause untold damage. There were a million reasonable explanations that didn’t need to coax Mina’s nightmares into the dying evening light.
She pushed out the door leading into the hallway where the weight of dread slowed her pace to a chary shuffle. Much like the kitchen, a sense of suspension prevailed, as if a familiar routine had been unexpectedly interrupted. A light breeze blew through the open front door, tapping its handle gently in and out from the wall. On the console table, a clay statue of Jesus Christ had toppled over. Its sloppy paint job made his blue eyes bleed onto his cheeks like tears. And in the bowl beside it, she saw the keys to Peadar’s jeep; so wherever they were, they were still at home.
Mina leaned her ear towards the front garden, listening out for the slam of a car door or the slosh of shoes through gravel, but the silence was eerily resistant. She opened her mouth to call for June again but stopped herself in the same second, ever cautious and wary even when welcome. The door to the right of the hallway was ajar; it led to the sitting room, where Peadar was known to while away his evenings. At this hour – with his customary pre-dinner drink in hand – there was nowhere else he could be. She peered her head around the corner and looked to his armchair.
Mina’s eyes absorbed the spectacle piece by piece like an art installation of oddities. The coffee table lay on its side. Whatever it once held was now strewn around the carpet – a broken glass, a splayed paperback, and scatterings of potpourri orbiting an upturned bowl. There’d been a struggle. Mina imagined Peadar rising from his chair, fists clenched at whoever had entered through the door. But where was he now? And where was June? The stillness offered no answers, only more questions that Mina shuddered to ask.
A heavy step sounded through the ceiling. The open door was calling Mina to flee – to put as much distance as possible between her and whatever had happened. She’d learned the couple’s routine in those days she’d spent with them. The reward of each hour wasn’t its capacity to surprise, but its constancy. Peadar would watch the evening news with a drop to drink while June would hum aloud to herself in the kitchen like an artist in her studio, happiest when busy, running their small, unsuccessful guest house like a five-star hotel. They never went upstairs until it was time for bed. It was June’s adorable opinion that that floor was for their guests.
With that in mind, Mina committed to spying upstairs, if only to appease her worries – to know that they were safely settling in some late visitor and everything was all right. June had mentioned an unexpected caller when they’d spoken the night before: the woman whose short hair wasn’t as pretty as Mina’s. Perhaps they’d come back, or it was possible that the pair from the beach had sought out some shelter for the night. She crept over to the first step and pressed her back into the wall to steady herself. There she held her breath and listened.
June was up there. She was talking to someone.
‘Hello. Hello. Are you after some? Some. Some.’
But who was she talking to?
‘Are you? Are you after somewhere? To stay. To stay. Hello, are you after somewhere?’
Mina’s hand held her lips shut. But she could feel the scream bubbling between her fingers. That wasn’t June. Whoever it was, they spoke without the faintest inflection. No emotion. No soul. They were but words memorised and repeated. And – most terrifying of all – the more Mina listened, the more convincing they became.
‘Are you after somewhere to stay? Please. Please. No. Hello, are you after somewhere to stay? What. What are you doing?’
Mina could feel those invisible snares of fate tangling up around her ankles as she scooped the keys out of the bowl and backtracked towards the kitchen. The horror and the heartache combined to blind her thoughts to the moment. There was only an elusive longing to be far from that vile thing upstairs, imitating the woman she’d so adored. Mina pressed the kitchen door closed behind her. The room was too warm for her to think straight. A dull, foggy feeling billowed behind her eyes as though she were immersed underwater, and for an awful moment she thought she might faint. But a quick succession of steps thundered above, jolting her back. They sounded as though they were directly above her, stomping between the rooms, searching for something. Maybe even searching for her.
‘We have to go,’ she whispered to the yellow one, drawing a finger over her lips.
Returning through the hallway was too dangerous. The eager ears of the one upstairs would detect the softest sound, as a spider is drawn to the shimmer of a silver thread. And so Mina crept out through the back door, where the last of the sunlight was sinking into the ocean like a flaming ship; only the tattered embers of its burning sail remained beneath a sky darkening by the second. She tiptoed across the gravel; slowly, softly, her teeth gritting louder than the stones under her feet as she aligned her back to the wall of the house, evading anyone who may have been peering down from the windows above. Peadar’s jeep faced the open gate, where he always left it. The urge to run and the need to not draw attention were two opposing voices arguing in her head, each trying to shout over the other.
Mina opened the jeep’s door. Its click was too loud and the creak as she drew it open was even worse. The crisp quiet of the west coast was never so delicate than in the terror of that moment, loudening those sounds that she tried in vain to smother. Mina reached between the two seats and placed the yellow one’s cage in the back. Thankfully he’d tucked his wings and kept his beak shut, understanding their necessity for silence and speed: those two timeless contradictions. She stared at the key quivering in her hand and thought of earlier, when Peadar had turned it in the ignition – the noise, the panned clamour of an engine past its prime. It didn’t seem fair, having survived so much, that it should come down to this.
‘Okay,’ she whispered under her breath, ‘here we go.’
The engine whinnied on its first turn like a dying horse. Mina clenched the key tighter, eyes screwed up, head pressed into the wheel, sick with a desperate desire to be anywhere else but there.
‘Please,’ she squealed, eyes welling up, ‘don’t do this to me.’
Another twist drew more pained nickering from the bonnet until an almighty grumble roared the jeep to life. But awakening the beast was one feat; now she had to make it move. Mina hadn’t driven since the last time she’d had a bird in the back seat. She’d been so absorbed in the engine’s shortcomings that she hadn’t stopped to consider her own. The handbrake was released – cranked down like a rusty lever – as her clumsy feet fumbled for their stations. Mina leaned over the wheel and peered up to the top windows of the guest house. June was standing there, in the very room that Mina had slept in, staring down at her.
‘That’s not fucking June,’ she said, wrenching the gearstick into first and jamming down the accelerator, spraying gravel across the driveway.
It was the woman’s face down to the tiniest crease and wrinkle. But gone was that smile glittering with kindness. She’d watched from behind the glass with the darkest, emptiest eyes that Mina had ever seen.