The clock on the wall read near noon. She wiped the table clean with her sleeve, conscious of the camera in the room’s corner watching her dribble coffee from a paper cup. The weight of the handcuffs made drinking next to impossible; she’d barely the energy to keep her eyes open never mind lift her hands. Memories of the night before scattered around Mina’s skull like marbles, and her whole body flinched whenever they cracked together. Flashes of images. The echo of sounds. Sirens and car doors slamming. That unrelenting urge to run throbbed through her legs, keeping heels high and toes pinned to the floor. But she wasn’t going anywhere.
The walls were white stone with flecks of grey by the floor where a careless paintbrush had missed its mark. The tiles, too, were coloured only by the past scuff of dirty soles; darkest around the two chairs on either side of the table, facing one another like a romantic dinner date under thin halogen light. Half an hour had passed and still Mina waited, though she’d no idea yet what for. But going on recent form, whenever life surprised her, it was more often a cold storm than a warm ray of sunshine.
The Gardaí had arrived on the scene too late to witness the dizzying heights of her hysteria. Whoever called them must have seen her barrelling onto the road, risking more lives than just her own. There hadn’t been an accident per se, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t have been, and she was probably being held accountable for that possibility. Any who’d loitered around, be it through concern or selfish curiosity, were seen holding their phones aloft, snapping the battle-scarred state of Peadar’s jeep and the trembling creature that crawled from its driver’s seat. Mina hadn’t the awareness to stop them. But there was safety in numbers. That was why the watchers had fallen back, and that’s why she made no attempt to run. For the first time in a long time, she’d been safest amongst strangers.
Footsteps and the jangle of keys approached the door only to pass it by. Mina squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to recall the extent of her freak-out from the night before. The watchers must have finally scraped away whatever sanity she’d cemented around her cracks. She’d asked everyone in the vicinity if they’d seen them, screaming at faces, grabbing any who’d averted their eyes, but none had witnessed a thing. The dark shapes had melted into the night before a single headlight had chance to cast their shadow. Bystanders huddled together, isolating Mina as the threat – this sweaty wreck whose warnings stoked their fears for all the wrong reasons. One mother even laid an open palm over her child’s eyes, shielding her from the whole sorry spectacle. It was easy to condemn when the judges outnumbered the accused.
Her head was too frazzled to count the consequences of what she had done. She’d told the Guards everything, garbled as it must have been. It was as though she couldn’t stop herself; the floodgates that she’d held shut since the woodland came crashing open, and the truth finally washed wild and free. Anyone who’d witnessed Mina’s behaviour was well within their rights to denounce her. Only after a doctor came – took a blood sample, remarked on her substandard BMI, and administered some pills that she’d snapped from his hand like sweets – did she start to utter anything resembling sense. At that stage, however, the Guards were well past the point of listening. Without patience, how could there have been any sympathy?
But the proof was there to be found – in Ciara’s home, in the guest house. Mina had warned them of what they’d be walking into, as she knew they didn’t carry firearms, and their hi-vis fucking jackets weren’t going to keep them safe. The soundest tactic, or so she’d told them, was to lock the creatures up before revealing that they knew the truth of what they were. She’d even detailed how to see through a watcher’s disguise. Christ, she must have said leaner and longer so many times that the words lost all meaning. Some had the kindness to keep a straight face. Others not so much; nudging elbows to share in the joke, as though the darkness of her situation had somehow brightened their day.
A high-pitched beep sounded through the room. Mina flinched back in her chair and gave the table one last quick wipe-down before the door clicked open.
‘Mina,’ a woman said, closing it behind her, ‘how are you feeling this morning?’
Her shoes wore a wooden heel – a stylistically ridiculous choice considering how the emptiness of the room cursed even the shortest syllable with an echo. Rusty red hair was tied back tight in a ponytail, accentuating the sharpness of her nose and giving the woman a distinctly birdlike profile. A few freckles sprinkled around her cheeks constituted the only colour on that plainest of faces. She was the kind of stranger that Mina used to sketch on a whim, only to later realise how little she liked the look of her. The woman wasn’t especially tall, but between the smart grey suit and a noticeable precision to her movements, she carried herself like a giant.
‘Tired,’ Mina replied, opting to speak more sparingly.
She’d slept overnight in a high-ceilinged cell, on a bed within an arm’s reach of a toilet seat; a room built for the sole purpose of sleeping because it offered nothing worth staying awake for. Her erratic behaviour coupled with the fact that she’d ploughed onto a busy road, driving a jeep that wasn’t hers, gave the Guards due cause to keep her overnight. This she could understand, and so Mina deferred without complaint. Besides, sad as it was, she’d nowhere else to go. They hadn’t treated her like a criminal or a victim, just a fly in the ointment of an otherwise uneventful night.
‘My name is Detective Lynch, Mina, and I’ve been assigned to your case.’
‘My case?’ she repeated, her socked feet tapping quietly under the table.
‘That’s correct,’ the woman confirmed as she dragged the other chair across the tiles and joined her at the table, placing a folder down between her elbows.
‘Is my parrot okay?’ Mina asked.
‘Yes, your parrot is fine. I wouldn’t worry about that now.’
There would never be a moment when Mina wasn’t worried about the little guy.
‘Did you go to the addresses that I told you about? You need to catch them before they realise what you know.’
‘Let’s slow it down,’ Lynch said, examining the top page as she spoke. ‘I’ve read the report on the events of last night, the witness statements, and your own deposition. What you’ve told us is certainly unusual, Mina, and there are a few grey areas that I’d like to add some much-needed colour to before we get to those addresses you gave us.’
The coldness of the woman’s demeanour caused Mina to tense up. It’d been naïve to hope that she’d be celebrated as some kind of hero – the first one to finally expose the watchers’ existence. But the detective hadn’t offered her so much as a smile since she’d entered the room. Her only reward thus far had been a tepid cup of coffee and a squeaky mattress with bedlinen light as cheap lace.
‘Firstly,’ the woman began, looking up from the page, ‘the vehicle that you were driving was not your own, correct?’
‘Yes,’ Mina replied, fixing her posture, ‘that’s correct.’
‘It’s registered under a Peadar Sheridan. And the damage to it – which was quite extensive, as listed here – was caused by…’ Lynch’s eyes returned to her report ‘…changelings.’
Mina swallowed hard as she nodded. It was weird to hear another person say it.
The woman looked at her disappointedly before she spoke again. ‘And these changelings are what people would commonly refer to as fairies, is that right? That’s what I have written here.’
‘I wouldn’t call them that personally, no. But some people do.’
‘But you did, Mina,’ Lynch said sternly. ‘Last night, when we brought you into the station, you said that you had been chased by fairies, and that they’ve been hiding amongst us and replacing people. You reiterated many times that they can impersonate someone’s appearance, that they can copy our faces, and that they’re leaner and longer. This is what you told us, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, it is,’ Mina replied, suddenly feeling uncomfortably warm. ‘I should have explained it better, I know. If you would just go to the houses that I told you about, trust me you’ll—’
‘We did,’ the woman interjected, studying Mina’s reaction.
Mina sat forward, scraping the legs of her chair closer to the table. ‘Is everyone okay? Was anyone hurt? Jesus Christ, why didn’t you fucking tell me?’
Lynch returned to her folder. ‘Peadar and June Sheridan,’ she read aloud before meeting Mina’s expectant gaze with a frown. ‘We spoke to both of them and—’
‘That wasn’t them,’ Mina snapped. ‘I already warned you that—’
The woman silenced her with a sharp raise of her hand. ‘Let me continue, please. We spoke to both of them and we told them exactly what you told us. Neither Peadar nor June Sheridan have ever met you, Mina. You said that you lived in a cottage that they’d refurbished for their daughter Caroline, and that she has been living in…’ eyes searched the page …‘Australia. Well, that also isn’t true. Caroline was there. We spoke to all three of them. But, Mina, there is no trace that you were ever there. Everything in that cottage belongs to Caroline. We showed them a photograph of you and they agreed that you do bear a striking resemblance to her, so there’s no doubt that any one of them would have remembered you.’
Mina’s breathing was growing more frantic. The white walls of the room seemed to be closing in. She placed both palms flat on the table, trying to steady herself, but still the floor kept on keeling back and forth.
‘Were you following Caroline Sheridan?’ the detective asked, her expression as sterile as their surroundings.
‘She’s not even in the country,’ Mina replied, speaking to the table and not the woman. ‘I’ve already told you this.’
‘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?