Was it not better to die in the dark than stand in the light again and let the world learn the terrible truth of what he’d done? Sean had forsaken all those young lives to save his own, and yet to what end? There was nothing left for him on the surface. This was all he’d ever had. Since the day he was born, he’d been groomed for the sole purpose of proving the sceptics wrong, never once stopping to consider the consequences should he succeed.
And yet, as he rose through the darkness of the shaft, his thoughts were not for his corrupter – the father who’d guided his child like an eager beast to slaughter, sacrificing Sean’s youth for his own double-edged dreams. Rather, they were for his mother: the sole voice of reason in a house ruled by fairy tales and madness. What would she think of her son now? She’d watched him toil in his father’s shadow, denied the light that may have encouraged him to flower into a man of his own making. But he’d been no better than a dog, fawning over a master whose maltreatment he’d witlessly misconstrued as love.
‘Nearly there, Sean,’ Ian called over the radio. ‘This storm is picking up, so you’d better brace yourself. We might have to lift everyone out before it gets any worse.’
What was more precious – to be right or to be alive? The late and erroneously lauded Professor David Kilmartin was neither. Sean had lost everything in his desperate gambit to win the approval of a dead man who’d believed more in fairies than he had in his only son.
Ian grabbed him by a shoulder strap and hauled him over to solid ground, battling against a wind that fought to knock the techie off his feet.
‘What happened?’ he shouted as he went about freeing the harness. ‘You were down there for ages. I thought you guys had gotten lost.’
Sean glanced around for the timber planks they’d used to secure the shaft the night before, but they were so few, most of them having scuttled away in the storm. The Milesians had taken such measures to bury that damnable pit for all eternity, and yet he’d neither the tools nor the time to follow in their footsteps.
‘There’s something down there,’ Sean replied, his eyes fearfully pinned to the black hole beside them. ‘It… took Ash and the others.’
Ian unclicked the harness and left it flailing in the gale. ‘What do you mean it took her?’
Both men had to throw their weight into the storm just to stay upright.
‘She’s gone,’ Sean shouted, struggling to catch his breath. ‘We need to seal this back up. Come on, we don’t have much time.’
Ian jumped in front of him as he reached down for a slab of wood, kicking it away from his hands. ‘What’s down there?’ he spat.
‘They’re real, just like I told you. But they aren’t gods, Ian. Whatever they are, we can’t let them escape.’
Quarantine was their only option. Should that chain be lowered to the chamber floor, the creature he’d released from the catacombs could climb its length to the surface. It would finally be free to sow its savagery across the island, taking more innocent lives than those Sean had already committed to sacrificing.
‘There are still people down there,’ Ian said, pushing him back. ‘We’re not closing up the chamber until everybody’s out! Have you lost your fucking mind?’
Had only the man seen its devilish eyes and suffered through those dying screams echoing through the darkness.
‘You don’t understand what’s down there, Ian! It’s not human.’
‘You’re out of here, Sean,’ the techie snarled back. ‘I knew you were losing it, but this is full-blown insanity. Head back down to the base camp. I’m calling it – you’re done. I’m getting everyone out of there. And no one’s going back down again until I talk to Ash.’
How dare he speak as though she were his confidante. This discovery was theirs, not Ian’s – the fucking handyman who worked a winch and trampled on those intimate moments between them that could have become so much more, lengthening the list of missed opportunities that had come to define Sean’s life.
‘More lives will be lost if we don’t seal this up,’ he said, gripping Caitriona’s notepad tighter. ‘Is that what you want?’
Ian charged in front of him. ‘Go home and take your fucking fairies with you. I need to get these people back onto the surface.’
The shaft was to the man’s back, less than two metres away by Sean’s estimation, though he’d hoped it were less. He looked his technician in the eye, identifying the hatred that would blind his better judgement. Sean’s fists were poor weapons for any fight, and he knew that he couldn’t overpower the man now standing between him and what must be done. But the techie saw only his employer’s weaknesses – blatant as they were – and that was Sean’s one advantage. Never in Ian’s wildest dreams could he ever conceive of what was about to happen; Sean struggled to believe it himself. But this was for the benefit of humankind. The horrors that he’d awoken must be laid to rest. Killing this ignorant bastard was just an added bonus.
‘I can’t convince you?’ Sean asked, awaiting the answer that would decide Ian’s fate.
‘Take whatever of Daddy’s money you’ve left,’ he sneered back, ‘and go fuck yourself.’
Never had an answer been so conclusive.
The storm was on Sean’s side. He could feel it pressing against his back, egging him on, adding its force to his weight. There wouldn’t be another chance like this one. Before he could talk himself out of it, Sean floundered forward, throwing his hands into Ian’s chest. The techie had come too close to regain his balance. One step, two step, three – and it was only then that he realised how little ground lay behind him. If the man had said something – a cry for mercy perhaps – then the storm had stolen his words and spread them like ashes on the wind. He’d tripped back into nothing, where the darkness absorbed his body in an instant, doomed to die when again he touched solid ground.
Sean lay on his back, gazing up at the stars, adrenaline coursing through his body, blinding him to its many pains. Or perhaps, he thought, it was the guilt that now made his heart bleed so violently. It’d happened so quickly that he wasn’t totally convinced that it had happened at all. For a while there was only the sound of the harness’ buckles rattling in the wind. And then he heard those distant voices calling to him from the chamber below – getting bolder, louder, more desperate to be heard. Sean clutched Caitriona’s notepad closer, guarding the research that would have formed the backbone of her thesis, the springboard to her bright and illustrious future in academia. It was evidence enough.
The pleas from the cavern grew more faint with each step Sean staggered toward the tent. If only he’d had the decency to warn them of the horror that their voices were drawing from the darkness, they might have had the good sense to keep their mouths shut. The shelter was as he’d left it – true to his memories of a different time, when his potential and all its pristine promises had yet to be tainted. He dragged Ash’s chair over to the monitor – to the camera feed of the chamber below – and there he slouched; his jaded eyes drawn to the chaos. The chaos that was his creation.
The students had huddled around Ian’s body like starved vultures. Sean picked out Caitriona’s pink jacket. She was buried in the very thick of them, being jostled back and forth as she fought to secure her place in line, no doubt hoping and praying that the harness would lower down like some heavenly hand. One of them could be seen tugging on the fat electrical cable that dangled down from the surface, powering the surrounding halogens, amidst whose light the shadow of their mashed-together bodies bloated like some monstrous larvae on the wall. A few were staring anxiously skyward at that meagre speck of starlight. Forty metres might as well have been forty miles. Ash had been right all along – they had discovered a tomb.
‘Sean, can you hear me?’ a voice fizzled in the silence; Ian’s walkie-talkie must have survived the impact. ‘Kilmartin, come in. There’s been an—’
He switched it off.
Sean found conversations uncomfortable at the best of times, and that one promised to be especially unpleasant.
‘There’s been an accident,’ he muttered to himself, his body twitching in sweaty spasms. ‘Accidents happen all the time.’
The crowd suddenly turned in unison. They were staring at something off screen, in the unseen periphery of Ash’s camera. All eyes had been lured in the direction of her last discovery – the fissure: the sun that’d scorched her wings. And so profound was the terror that warped their youthful faces, Sean knew that what he’d stared down in the darkness of that tunnel was in the darkness no more; in following their voices, it had found the light.
Another shadow – so terrifyingly thin and grotesque – crept across the wall with the long insidious strides of a predator stalking its prey. The sight of it fanned their fears beyond the point of containment. Bodies scattered. And yet there was nowhere to run. Common sense counted amongst the first casualties, as one of the students began climbing up the electrical cable, rising higher into the cavern with every reach. And before he’d cleared the height of their heads, another was seen to clamber up behind him. But the distance from the floor to the surface above was surely too far for even the strongest arms to clear.
In that second – just when Sean thought he would finally behold the horror of this false god with his own eyes – the lights cut to black. Those boys who’d gambled their lives to escape had, in doing so, lost everything. The makeshift rope that they’d climbed had been a series of interlocked cables, and one of those connections must have detached from their weight. They’d come so close to the shaft that the crunch of their bones on impact must have been sickening, though it was unlikely anyone had heard it over the mayhem.
Sean stared at the blank screen, assuming the camera feed to be lost, sparing him the closing act of that grisliest of spectacles. But a white line suddenly broke the black, and then another. Ash’s device must have held a charge of its own, powering itself independently without need for the main generator. The students clung together, the beams of their many torches growing from their mass like needles on an urchin. They had heard what Sean could not. And the direction of their lights revealed where the darkness was most dangerous. Did they now stare at those same glittering eyes? Were their last traces of hope trickling as tears to the chamber floor? All lights suddenly thrashed around the air like reams of white thread. Sean caught glimpses of pale flesh flashing into sight, figments of the thing that was tearing through their bodies, wasting no motion, and leaving no soul alive. And as quickly and as viciously as it had begun, it was over, and the final torch came to lie lifelessly on the ground.
‘I had no choice,’ he whispered, but there was no one left to hear him.
*
From the cot to that narrow corner desk in his father’s study to the day Ash shared with him her discovery, Sean ruminated over the million minor deeds that had culminated in this moment. The pages he’d turned, the never-ending notes he’d taken, the sacrifices made. This was the consummation of his father’s obsession, and maybe the time had finally come for Sean to share its burden with the world.
‘I won’t disappear like you,’ he muttered, imagining the old man standing behind his chair.
He reached over for Ash’s laptop and forced his eyes to find their focus. The spirit of her documentary had darkened these past hours, but Sean would finally make use of the woman’s video blog. With the built-in camera activated, he witnessed the wretched state of himself for the first time since his hopes and dreams had been mutilated beyond recognition. He groped around the bristles of his beard before his hand came to rest over his mouth, quietly heartbroken by the similarities. He was his father’s son.
‘You could have left me a letter. I don’t know why you had to shut me out after everything I’d done for you. Not once did you ever say: well done, good job, thanks for your help, Sean. Never! You couldn’t even bring yourself to say good—’
A rumble rolled through the ground, shifting and resettling the contents of the desk and toppling a crate in its corner. Was part of the main chamber collapsing in? It wouldn’t be like a Kilmartin to be so fortunate; to think that his discovery could cave in by its own accord, burying the truth and leaving him to live a beautiful lie. He repositioned himself, framing his head and shoulders in the monitor. Whatever had caused that quake beneath his feet, he refused to face it without first leaving some record of his final days. And so, before he’d chance to rehearse a single word, he pressed record.
‘My name is Sean Kilmartin,’ he began, his dead eyes locked with those staring back at him. ‘I’m speaking from the Burren, where I’ve led an excavation deep beneath its surface. I thought we’d discovered some sort of tomb or burial chamber. But it was something else entirely. I don’t know what it is. A prison, maybe, I can’t say for certain. All I know is that it should never have been found.
‘I have no scholarly credentials. But I have dedicated my life to uncovering the truth: this truth. And so I ask only that you try to believe what I’m about to tell you.’
Sean made a point of cherishing this moment – before his swansong laid bare his failures – when the world was still oblivious to the horrors both beneath and within him.
‘When Ash found this place, I’d hoped to recover some artefact or evidence to support my research, something to silence the sceptics in a way that my father never could. I didn’t mean for anyone to die. You must understand that. It’d been lost for centuries. How was I to know that something was still alive down there?’
Sean swallowed a stubborn bulge down his throat. If only he’d paid better heed to Caitriona’s warnings, none of this would have happened.
‘The Tuatha Dé Danann are real. The proof is here. And I know now that there’s a reason why we stopped believing in them, why we erased these old gods from our psyches. No matter the beauty they’d once held or the wonderous deeds they’d accomplished in their time, they’ve changed, whether they willed it or not. We had to forget. How could we ever know peace if we still believed that such horrors existed?’
Sean sat back in his chair and stared sadly at the man he’d become. Had he ever any choice?
‘Please know that I never wanted this. All I wanted was to make my father proud.’
The words had flowed without a thought, as only true honesty can. He reached a hand towards the laptop and posted his final message.
Sean was suddenly shaken forward in his chair.
Those tremors had returned, more aggressive than before. The surface was fracturing open; its loose stones crumbling into the chamber below in thunderous beats, cracking fresh wounds in the cold body of the Burren. Sean’s bones rattled from the impact as the lights outside the tent were seen to weaken. A few of Ian’s halogens – those that he’d weighted down against the wind – had been lost in the commotion. He gripped the desk, fearing that the very floor beneath his feet should cave in. A boom bellowed from all sides, and then another, loud as an explosion, but it was nothing compared to what came next.
The silence wasn’t simply broken, it was utterly and violently obliterated.