The intricate network that Christian had so carefully set up in London and that had served him so well there, served him again now.
The drifting, raggle-taggle world of the streets had its own brotherhood and its own information system, and the spider network could be extended so that its threads stretched very far indeed. Several of the itinerant musicians who entertained theatre crowds and tourists and tube travellers, had been delighted to accept cash from the mysterious gentleman who had ruled part of Soho for so long, because even with the Shadow apparently leaving London for a time, the authority still somehow held and no one wanted to offend him.
It was an easy enough task to keep an eye on the young man, Flynn Deverill, and even easier for three or four of them with Irish blood to mingle with the motley collection taking the ferry at Fishguard, and to travel unremarked to Rosslare. It was great altogether to be making this trip, and great to have the cash in your pocket, along with the fare back to England. But after the message was delivered to the Shadow they were going to try their luck in Galway City, and after that they might wander across to Dublin for a time. Hadn’t you great opportunities in Dublin; there was the Abbey Theatre and there was the Royal Dublin Horse Show, never mind all the tourists with money to throw away. And if none of it worked as well as they were hoping – if the streets of Dublin were no more paved with gold than the streets of London had turned out to be – well, they would simply take the ferry back again. And if they could find the queer, remote place the Shadow had described to them and leave the information about Flynn Deverill that he wanted, there would be the plastic-wrapped pack of money waiting for them to collect. At the foot of a certain stone it would be, the Shadow had said, and one of their number, who was inclined more to whimsy than the rest, said wasn’t it exactly like the gold at the end of the rainbow, and paid no attention when his fellows jeered and said, fool’s gold, more like, and him the biggest fool of all to trust to it!
Even though Flynn Deverill was driving his own car and they were reliant on lifts and thumbing and their own two feet, they had managed to follow him and learn his plans, particularly since he had the way of talking to people in a careless fashion. Once on the ferry he had had a few drinks down in the bar, and they had tossed a coin for who was to go in and drink with him and fall into carefully casual conversation. As far as the busker who had won the toss could tell, Deverill had been wholly unsuspicious, not to say generous with his money. He bought several drinks, until the busker, who was secretly a bit guilty about his spying role, felt obliged to buy at least one back. After drinking two large whiskies at Flynn’s expense, he made a quick calculation of the joint funds, and bought a round on his own account; not to have done so might have caused comment, and also it meant he got a third whiskey.
It was during the course of the third whiskey he found out what they wanted to know: Flynn was driving to Galway City, where he was going to book in at the Royal George.
As Christian locked the door on Fael and went quickly down the turret stair, the twin streams of hatred – the one against Flynn, the other against whoever had brought Cauldron to the tumbledown Gallery Theatre – were fusing angrily together in his mind. Two sets of enemies: Cauldron’s organisers, and Flynn Deverill. Cauldron could probably be dealt with relatively easily – Rossani would show him the way, as he had done on those other occasions – but Flynn was a different matter entirely. Flynn would die slowly and terribly.
It was possible that it would be some time before Flynn began the search for Maise in earnest, but Christian did not think that was very likely. He had laid sufficient clues, and he thought Flynn would pick them up and walk unsuspectingly into his, Christian’s, trap. And Flynn had too much impatience and too much energy not to travel out here at once, and he certainly had sufficient intelligence to have worked out Christian’s identity by now.
Christian had employed three separate groups of people to watch Flynn, but he thought it would be the street musicians who would succeed. They were more nomadic than the rest; they would think nothing of uprooting themselves for a few weeks or a few months, and crossing to Ireland. Quite a few of them were Irish to start with, and the Irish had the restless gypsy strain from birth.
He waited until he had been back at Maise for four days, and then he waited until he caught the faint chimes of midnight from the little wayside church. Midnight, the hour that looked kindly on lovers and plotters and murderers. As he walked down the deserted cliff road and onto the narrow track that dipped below the road, a storm was blowing in from the Atlantic – he could feel it and he could smell it. The ocean was lashing itself angrily against the foot of the cliffs, far below, and the sea was black and menacing, the waves topped with little froths of white.
But the Self-Bored Stone reared up clearly in front of him, and Christian paused, staring up at it. Seen like this, against the backdrop of scudding storm clouds, the old tales came vividly to life, so that you wondered whether you might not have fallen into the seductive world of myth and legend and evil enchantments. When the moon was full, the silvery radiance poured through the aperture and laid a circle of cool light on the ground, but tonight the storm was blotting out the moon, and the stone’s tip was in darkness. It made you believe that if you could but scale the stone’s heights and peer through the round, smooth opening, you would find yourself looking down into worlds you had never dreamed existed. And finding deliverance there? said Rossani’s evil voice in his mind.
Christian stayed where he was, his eyes going to the jagged cliff-edge, only a few yards away from where he stood. He thought that no one would know or care if he simply walked over that cliff tonight and was dashed to pieces on the rocks below, and with the thought, his mind rocked, he felt the wild madness seize him anew. To step into that tempestuous darkness, and to step beyond it, into oblivion and peace . . . To die . . . But supposing death was only the prince’s hag-ridden sleep after all? Aye, there’s the rub.
I believe I’m quite mad now, thought Christian, dispassionately. I believe I’ve crossed a Rubicon or forded a river somewhere, but whether it’s the Jordan River or Charon’s Styx or the measureless sacred Alph, or something else altogether I have no idea. But if I’m mad, then I ought not to care any longer and I ought not to be still hurting, and I do care – oh God, yes, I do, and I’m still hurting. Because Fael cheated me and because I ruined Cauldron . . . I can’t bear to think about either of them. I don’t think I’m entirely alone out here. I think the leanan-sidhe are very near to me tonight.
The people of Moher told how, when the wind whistled through the stone’s smooth aperture, they could hear the leanan-sidhe calling to the shipwrecked sailors, luring them onto the murderous black rocks. People told stories of banshees, they said, the Celtic bean si, but in Moher they had their own banshees, and they were fearsome and cunning beyond belief. You heard stories of how they prowled this stretch of coast, all the way back to the days when people could not read or write; when Ireland had bards and story-tellers, and when they were regarded with as much respect as was these days given to the priests. Even Father Mack, when he had taken a drop of gin in Flaherty’s Bar, agreed that the bards had been Ireland’s aristocracy, preserving her history and keeping alive the legends. Sinead O’Sullivan, whose family had lived in Moher for longer than anyone could count, said her grandmother had told how the leanan-sidhe haunted this stretch of the coast, and her great-grandmother used sometimes to see them, washing the bloodstained clothes of those about to die, the scarlet webbed feet of them plain to see. Even today, said Sinead firmly, hadn’t you to be blind and deaf not to occasionally hear the keening voices inside the wind?
Christian knew the stories, which the people of Moher loved to tell, and he knew that they did not really believe them. It was mostly only the Irish love of a good story, and it was partly the Moher people being jealous of their own snippets of folklore. He strode on down the narrow cliff path, the wind lifting his cloak so that it billowed out like huge, ragged, black wings. He bent to the stone’s foot and slid his hand inside the crevice, his heart beating faster. Had the buskers done what he had asked them? Or had they simply taken the cash he had given them and vanished? He saw at once that the thick wad of banknotes wrapped in several thicknesses of plastic had gone and there was a moment of hideous doubt: have they cheated? Or has the cache perhaps been discovered by a tinker? But tinkers never came down here, and most people were too fearful of the stone’s eerie legend. And then his hand closed around the thin envelope, also in its weatherproof plastic covering, and relief rushed in. He unfolded the single sheet of paper.
The writing was uneven and hurried, as if it had been written in extreme haste or in difficult circumstances. The deck of a ferry boat? Leaning against the trunk of a tree or a bar counter?
But it was perfectly legible, and Christian scanned it quickly. Flynn Deverill had reached Ireland two days earlier, said the note, carefully setting down times and dates. He was making for the west coast, driving his own car, and he would be staying in Galway City at the Royal George Hotel. There was even an addition saying that the car was a scarlet Volkswagen, and an apology that it had not been possible to get the number.
Christian tore the short, highly satisfactory note into dozens of tiny pieces and scattered them into the wind. It was working. Flynn was walking deeper and deeper into the trap. As he walked back to Maise, the knowledge was like a sexual charge, so strong that he actually felt a hardening between his thighs.
As he let himself into the house, he was smiling the secret, difficult smile, and once inside with the familiar scents of the old place closing about him, he paused, listening for sounds from the turret rooms. Nothing. Then Fael must be asleep. For a moment he struggled against a sudden longing to climb the narrow turret stair and to enter her room and lie in the bed with her. And then memory flared, lighting a different plane of awareness, and he saw again the revulsion in her eyes and the pity, and he remembered that she had cheated him over the child, and the desire turned to cold hatred.
He crossed the hall and went through to the stone-floored sculleries. At the far end was a low door, blackened with age, sealed with a huge iron ring-handle. Christian lit a candle and wedged it in a metal holder, pocketed the box of matches from the pantry, and bent down to turn the handle. As the door swung inwards, a noxious breath of dry, fetid air gusted out.
Inside the door steps wound steeply downwards, and there was a dank, oppressive atmosphere. The stairwell was narrow and the walls had a faint slimy look to them. Here and there lichen and pale fungal growths sprawled over the old brickwork.
As Christian went lower there was the suffocating feeling of the great old house overhead, and as the steps spiralled around to the right, he caught from somewhere below, the sound of water dripping against stone, followed by its own thin echo. Once or twice he thought that something flitted across his vision: something that was child-sized but not childlike, and something that was hunched and wizened, with a round hairless skull and long bony fingers . . .
He did not count the steps as he went down, but he knew there were eighty-one. Nine times nine, said his mind, with faint cynicism. The magical nine times nine of all the best fairy stories. At the foot, the steps gave onto a dank underground room with an earth floor, and black brick walls. The room was bare save for the gaping black abyss at the centre that was Maise’s disused well, and that was surrounded by a narrow brick parapet. A faint mustiness drifted up out of the well and the parapet was stained and blackened, with several of the old bricks crumbling. Against the far wall was the well cover: an immense, saucer-shaped disc of clanging black iron, lipped and rimmed. In Christian’s father’s day the well had always been covered in case of unwary servants falling in, although no servant ever came down here except under protest and accompanied by at least two other people.
Once there had been some kind of investigation into the well, because it was thought that there was some danger of erosion by the sea at the foot, for the water had first turned brackish with salt, and then ceased to flow altogether. Christian could remember how it had taken two people to lift the cover and drag it free of the yawning hole. He could remember how the sound had reverberated through the entire house.
He stood at the foot of the steps, his eyes on the yawning cavern: the ancient underground well that gave Maise its slightly macabre legend. The alleged opening to the subterranean water cave, where in some other time the leanan-sidhe had held court. After a moment he moved to its edge, seeing now that iron staves had been driven into the inside of the well-shaft, to form a makeshift but serviceable ladder. The staves were rusty, but they looked sound enough. So it would be possible to climb down inside the well, would it? Could I do it? thought Christian, caught between fascination and repulsion. If I had to, could I set foot on that rusting ladder, and go down and down into the darkness? And does it truly lead to the hinterlands of the leanan-sidhe, or is that only another of the jumbled myths about this part of Ireland?
Whether or not the ancient disused well was the doorway into the legendary, under-ocean worlds of the leanan-sidhe, it would provide the means for Flynn Deverill’s death, when eventually Flynn reached Maise.
The warped smile twisted his lips, and he leaned forward over the well’s mouth. For a moment there was not the tomblike stench and the impenetrable darkness, but something else, something that ruffled the air with its sweetness . . . A stillness came over him at once; he thought there was a flash of turquoise at the darkness’s heart – the glint of iridescent wings, the sinuous bodies of eerie sea creatures with not the smallest drop of human blood in them . . .
Because this is what we really look like, human creature . . . If you came down to us, you would see what we really look like, and you would see how we are more beautiful than your human eyes can imagine and how we are more dazzling than your human soul can comprehend . . .
Christian stepped back, lifting the candle higher, and it was then he saw, in the ancient dust surrounding the well, tiny footprints, dozens upon dozens of them, light and swift and darting, as if the owners had traced circles inside circles inside circles . . . As if tiny creatures had come swarming up out of the well’s depths while the humans slept, and had danced and cavorted to their own chill music . . .
Rats? said his mind. Or something else? Something that’s remaining on the outer rim of consciousness, and something that’s hungry for human souls, and that lusts after first-born children . . . But Fael betrayed me! cried his mind again, and instantly came the response: but there are others. There are others you could use for the child and the bargaining.
But Fael was mine! cried Christian. I made her mine, body and soul and blood and bone, exactly as the sidh prince made Mab his own in Cauldron!
Mab.
The two things came together in his mind with such sharpness it was very nearly audible. The little wide-eyed redhead in the theatre, who had played Mab, not brilliantly, but very well, and who had certainly understood about being in thrall to inhuman creatures. Christian remembered Gilly from the Soho meetings, and he remembered the way she had always looked at him. And she would soon be here, the entire Harlequin company would soon be here. Mab, thought Christian, turning to climb back up the nine times nine steps to his own part of Maise, the smile lifting his incomplete mouth again.
Flynn had drawn a blank with his first line of enquiry, which had been to search the birth registrations for twenty-five to thirty years previously.
This did not mean that the son did not exist. If Roscius’s wife had given birth to a creature so pitifully deformed, it was not impossible that they had concealed the child’s existence, even to the extent of not registering it. Flynn thought the professor had been sufficiently well-off not to need to worry about welfare benefits and National Health or education; he had also been sufficiently unconventional, as Flynn himself was unconventional, not to have cared about the morality of what he had done. The boy would have been brought up in obscurity, and Roscius himself would have provided the education. Flynn grinned wryly, because if the professor really had done that, it meant his son was probably better educated than a great proportion of his generation.
He ate a thoughtful lunch in the Royal George, considering other methods. If he could not find the person, could he find the place? How did you set about finding a house whose name you did not know, in a place you were unsure of, and which might lie anywhere between the Connemara Mountains and the mouth of the Shannon, and which might as easily lie at the end of a wild-goose chase or the bottom of the rainbow, or the other side of Ireland altogether?
If you were looking for a house, didn’t you usually start with a map?
Flynn left the Royal George’s bar and went back out into the town.
Well no, said the assistant in the largest stationers that Galway boasted, no, you could not precisely buy Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland as you could for England – he knew exactly what the gentleman meant – but certainly there was an equivalent. Was it any particular part of Galway?
‘That’s the devil,’ said Flynn. ‘All I know is that the house I’m trying to find is somewhere near the Moher cliffs.’
This, it appeared, did not necessarily present a difficulty. There were some very good large-scale maps of the west coast, and there were several concentrating on that part. What scale would be needed? Most people had the one-inch-to-the-mile kind, which were ideal for touring, said the assistant; would they suit the purpose?
‘They sound exactly what I want,’ said Flynn.
After tumbling out and unfolding half a dozen different maps, during which time the helpful assistant several times became shrouded like Laocoon in the sea-serpent’s embrace, Flynn bought three of the inch-to-the-mile maps, and carried them back to his room at the hotel. Probably this would be the wild-goose chase after all, but it was worth a try because properties on that coastline were so sparse that a great many of them had to be identified by their name. Flynn spread the map out on the floor, and frowned over it.
And there it was, as clear as a lighthouse beam in the darkness. Maise. Maise. The house that could only belong to one person, because that person had many years ago written a piece of music for a children’s play at the Harlequin – a light, inconsequential piece of froth and frivolity that he had called Maise, which he told Flynn was a derivation of an old Gaelic word for happiness.
Surely only Professor James Roscius would have called his house Maise.
I believe I’ve got him! thought Flynn, and sat down to calculate the distance between Galway and the house called Maise which stood on the very westernmost tip of the cliff road.