25

They reached the point of the two cottages.

From the outside, both looked as lifeless as last time, like carcasses rotting beneath that greyest of skies. Ben and Chloe took one each for a quick inspection. They couldn’t afford to squander any time so late in the day.

Ben’s cottage had its half-door open. He took care not to lean his face in too close. The glow of the hearth inhabited the dark without disturbing it. Flames had long fallen, and embers were few. He rapped on the door and caught that familiar scent of cabbage, overboiled and sulphuric, probably the same batch from Wednesday now reduced to a stale broth.

Chloe was across from him – a hood of fur hiding her head – knocking on the other cottage. Its shutter and door were both locked, their wood streaked with a green mould.

Nobody was home.

‘Let’s keep going,’ she said. ‘We’re nearly there.’

Ben’s jeans had tightened and shrunk, shortening his stride. That discomforting, wet sensation had given way to a prosthetic numbness. He was aware of each step – he could hear his socks plunging in his boots – but there was no feeling below the waist. The burning and the throbbing were reserved for his fingers, his ears, his nose, and anything else exposed.

He had saved Chloe another plunge by carrying her over the flood. Ben was aware of how the cold affected her, how it turned her skin a limpid blue. She had looped her arms around his neck like Aoife used to. Somehow they seemed to weigh the same.

‘What if they don’t talk to us?’ he asked. ‘I mean, they weren’t especially chatty the last time we were here.’

‘Once they know that we know, they’ll talk,’ she replied.

‘How are we for time?’

‘Don’t think about that,’ Chloe said, looking ahead. ‘We’ll be fine.’

We’ll be fine? Ben imagined Alec Sparling ensconced in front of his fireplace, tumbler in hand, sheltered and warm as his housekeeper prepared him his next hot meal. He was fine. Their situation was deviating towards the dire.

They were nearing the turn into the village, where the path widened. Whatever awaited them was hidden behind a mass of brambles; seized and conquered by black, bloodless veins of ivy. Ben had expected to hear voices up ahead but there was nothing, only the squelch of their boots and the cheerless creak of trees in the wind.

What a stage for Ben’s final act – Tír fucking Mallacht, the closest thing to hell this side of life. But if anyone knew some way to ward off the creeper’s coming, it was the villagers; the same superstitious fools that Ben had pitied for all the wrong reasons.

They both stopped when they reached the corner.

There was no dishevelled horde waiting to meet them. The village looked deserted.

A few unlocked hatches knocked in the breeze as though trying to warn them away in broken Morse code. Tools rested against walls, slathered in mud. Weak streams of smoke snaked through some of the chimneys. Jugs had been filled. Footprints in the clay were flush with rainwater, deepest outside each cottage and on the worn trail adjoining them. All that was missing were the people.

It reminded Ben of the paintings that adorned the walls of Sparling’s study. Life and the colours of its making were absent. It didn’t make sense. Had the villagers finally surrendered to the curse? Ben imagined them with their hands held in solidarity, staring at the moon like a stranger in the sky.

‘Hello?’ Chloe shouted, standing in the centre of the common. ‘Tír Mallachts?’

And then they heard it – a groan; plangent and drawn out as though gouged from some wounded beast. A cry for help so agonising that Ben recognised it immediately. How could he ever have forgotten it? Before the interviews, as they introduced themselves, he had heard it. Pained and pitiable, and almost childlike.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Chloe called over in a shrill whisper.

Ben was already approaching the cottage where the old woman had stood, its door now unguarded and open. Daylight quit at its threshold, and the darkness gathered there like a wall of fog.

Chloe crept up behind him as he removed the torch from his pocket.

‘Remember,’ he said, ‘I told you I heard something.’

‘Something?’ she gasped, her hands gripping onto his shoulders. ‘For fuck’s sake, Ben. You didn’t say you’d heard that!’

He twisted on his torch. Its light revealed not a home, but something else.

A bucket on the floor brimmed with scarlet water. Congealed globs of blood could be seen splattered across the walls, constellating around the man atop the table in the room’s centre.

Cold wood and naked skin. His head had been rolled in bandages, tightened so many times as to make his skull appear misshapen and deformed in the torchlight. A perforation over his mouth kept him from suffocating. Eyes and ears – sight and sound – were lost to the cloth. Two holes had been carved in the timber board that was his bed, and through this had been looped some wire. It ran over his neck, pinning him in place, garrotting with the slightest press. The lightest film of skin clung to his bones, with every rib and hard part of him protruding. A blanket had been strewn over his legs, guarding his modesty, but offering nothing in the way of warmth. All his fingers looked freshly broken. Lengths of rope trailed on the floor from his wrists where the injuries hadn’t been allowed to scab over; lacerations repeated until they graced the bone within.

Ben turned his torchlight over the floor, where the instruments of the man’s torture had been thrown like children’s toys. Not tidied away but left out so that they may be returned to again. There were stone hammers of different sizes. Some lay flat, whilst the largest one stood erect, its head big as a brick. There were secateurs, too, and a handsaw with brown, blunted teeth. A tangled nest of fishing line had been cast under the table. Beside it, a needle was stabbed into the floor. These tools all had one trait in common – blood.

‘My God.’ Ben gagged, backing into Chloe.

It was uncertain whether the man was aware of their presence. The only sense not denied to him was that of touch. And judging by his wounds he feared that above all others.

Chloe was by his side immediately, trying to slide her fingers under the wire binding him in place. But even this contact – however well intended – drew from the man a violent hysteria. He forced his neck upward, choking himself, trenching the wire into the cartilage. Bloody spittle oozed from his mouth, clinging sticky to the cloth. His moans were deafening, amplified all the more by the cottage’s stone shell.

‘It’s okay,’ Chloe said to him, ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’

Ben was hesitant to help. The tortured couldn’t stand. And they were in no position to carry him to safety. They couldn’t even save themselves.

It was possible that the poor man was another of Sparling’s recruits. But what if he wasn’t? For all they knew, the bound was deranged. A vile product of a vile bloodline. Kindness would guide their hands to free him and that kindness could be met with malice. Was it for their own safety that the Tír Mallachts had disabled the man?

They were a weak-minded, reticent people, but they had isolated themselves for the sake of others. Could they possibly be capable of this?

Chloe dropped to her knees and searched under the table. The man was still frantically writhing above her. His arms, however, remained inert. It was then Ben noticed the iron hoops fixed into the walls and realised their function. It was a torture rack. The ropes attached to his limbs had been fed through the fixtures and pulled hard, stretching and popping bones apart.

‘We have to cut this wire,’ Chloe shouted over the man’s bawling.

The bound couldn’t lift a hand to hurt them. His body was broken. Ben passed her the secateurs and trained his light under the table as Chloe went about freeing him. She cut the wire and pulled it through the aperture. The man screamed as it drew across his neck, slicing red through greyed skin.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ Ben said to him. ‘I’m sorry that they did this to you. But it’s going to be okay. We’re going to get you out of here.’

Never had a lie sounded less convincing. Ben felt ashamed to offer the man something so cheap and impractical as it’s going to be okay.

With his body now released, he tried to raise his shoulders but all strength had forsaken him. The man’s frustration was growing and his moaning seemed somehow more desperate than before. He was rocking from side to side, labouring to throw himself from the table, aching to be anywhere else but the scene of his ruin.

‘He’s going to hurt himself,’ Chloe said. ‘Help me hold him down.’

Ben did as he was told. The man’s bones felt hollow to the touch, with skin so dry as to flake off in their hands as they pinned his shoulders back in place. He weighed nothing. It didn’t make sense that he was still alive.

‘Check around for some blankets or something,’ Ben said, still holding the man down with the slightest pressure. ‘He’s going to freeze to death.’

If only he’d taken action that day when he’d heard the man’s cries. It was easier to ignore him. It’s always been easier to do nothing. They could have learned just how fucked up the Tír Mallachts really were. They could have turned and run, taking this poor wreck of a human being with them.

‘This is all I could find,’ Chloe said, draping over the man’s body what looked like one of the women’s shawls, only more tattered.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Ben sighed. ‘What do we do? He’d going to die if he’s left here like this.’

‘At least his eyes are covered,’ Chloe whispered, as though she didn’t want the man to hear. ‘He couldn’t have seen the creeper.’

Was their situation really more dire than the tortured? What if that were Ben on the table? Was there any balm for the man’s wounds that words could offer?

‘Listen to me,’ Ben said, loud enough so that the wounded man might hear him. ‘Everything that you’ve gone through, it’s over, okay? You don’t need to be afraid anymore. We’re here to help you.’

He looked to Chloe. She nodded her head as if to say keep going.

‘We’ll be leaving soon,’ he continued, ‘and we’re going to take you with us, no matter what.’

With that said, the man’s screams returned. He was too loud. Ben couldn’t bear it.

He staggered outside, seeking anywhere but the horror of that room and the tortured man’s shrieking. He could feel the noise like an electrical storm in his skull, tickling the back of his eyeballs.

Sounds travelled far across open land. He imagined every Tír Mallacht – young and old – running stealthily towards them, funnelling through the narrow paths like rats, some carrying reams of rope, others dragging sledgehammers behind them, leaving long gutters in their wake. They must have heard the commotion, wherever they were.

Fortunately, whatever Chloe was doing inside was working. The man’s cries had steadily softened to a sad, soulful whimper, like an abused animal that knew only the malignance of mankind, thriving to be quiet so as not to be seen.

They were on the lighter side of twilight now. Ben looked towards where the bleak sky was brightest, where his last sunset had been denied to him. He thought of all those he had ever witnessed and failed to recall a single one. His memories were all borrowed from movies or photographs. So much had been taken for granted.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

The shock of the child’s voice whipped Ben forward.

Her presence could only mean one thing – the Tír Mallachts had returned.

His nerves surged with an angst that fizzled down to his fingers. He turned to see that same girl standing behind him. She had manifested as she always did, without a sound and seemingly from nowhere. Ben cast an uneasy glance around the village.

She was alone.

The child was unchanged. Same dress, same shock of curly hair. She stood oblique, with her head bowed, staring at Ben like a security guard who’d found a trespasser during a routine walkabout. He’d never known a kid to emanate such a hostile energy. One that burned strongest around those eyes that he had yet to see blink.

This was the girl responsible for everything. She had known the consequences when she found them that evening, out of earshot of the adults. Knocking off outsiders must have been a hobby of hers.

‘Trust me,’ Ben said, keeping his anger contained, ‘this is the last place I want to be. Chloe,’ he called inside, ‘can you come out here, please.’

‘What’s going…’ She froze in the doorway.

‘Our friend is back.’

The child looked to Chloe with the same lifeless expression and then brushed right past her. She skipped through the dark and hoisted herself onto the table, sitting beside the man as though he were a sick relation. Sick didn’t begin to cover his condition. Her face screwed into a frown when she saw that the wire had been removed from his neck.

‘He’s not ready,’ she said angrily. ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

‘What do you mean, he’s not ready?’ Chloe asked. ‘He’s good as dead, you little psycho!’

The child shook her head in annoyance but said nothing. She stroked the man’s bandages like he was an injured pet. The weight of their cloth was an anchor to one so weak, and though he moaned from her touch, he struggled to lift his head an inch from the wood. She shifted in closer to his naked bones. His breathing calmed.

‘Where is everyone?’ Ben asked her, leaning in beside Chloe.

The child ignored him. She hummed some low dirge as she caressed the man’s head.

They didn’t have time for this.

‘Fuck you, kid,’ Ben said and turned on his heel.

His legs carried him to the centre of the village, where he rubbed his face in frustration. Ben looked up to the sky like a sailor lost at sea, searching for a star to guide him home. Not long now.

Everywhere he looked the clouds were dull as granite. Everywhere that is, except to the east. In the distance, something bled into the sky, gilding its hem with light, weak and wavering. In the east there was fire.

The hatches should have been locked by now, and the villagers’ food and water divvied out. Conversations would have already ebbed like the sun to whispers of departure. Something wasn’t right. Ben ran back to find Chloe resting against the cottage’s sill, drained, as one who had spent her last drop.

‘There’s something burning on the other side of the village.’

‘What do you mean something burning?’ she asked, cracking her neck from side to side.

‘I don’t know. You can see it in the sky, over towards the church.’

Chloe lowered her head. She stared at her boots sunken into the grey sludge, digging the toes in deeper.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘What’s wrong?’ she echoed. ‘Look at the sky, Ben. It’ll be night soon. We knew when we came here that it was a long shot.’

‘Chloe,’ he said sternly, waiting until her head lifted to look at him. ‘Look around you.’

She glanced at the emptiness on either side and shrugged her shoulders.

‘The villagers should be locking this place down by now,’ Ben explained. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but maybe it’s over.’ Here he reached out to take her hand. ‘We can’t stop now. We’ve come too far. Besides, while there’s still light, there’s still hope. Let’s go see what these bastards are up to.’

The kid watched them from the doorway, hands over her mouth so as to hide her smile.