They walked, the three of them. They had no sense of time. They were headed west, they knew, following a carnival they knew, and of all carnivals on the small island there was one that was of particular interest to them. The one parked in the field behind the abandoned petrol station servicing the matchmaking festival of Lisdoonvarna. Andy, after the bloody burial and the chaotic exit of Eileen, had tapped on the computer with his thumbless hand and tracked it down.
So they walked, past the Five Lamps in the early dawn, towards what Burleigh had once known as Kingsbridge Station, now Heuston. They were early for the trains heading west but they didn’t mind waiting.
Something about train tracks endeared them to the Captain. Or was it to the corpse he now inhabited, the hapless Jim, who seemed amazed by every new step he took, as if performing tasks that in his own, recently terminated lifetime would have seemed impossible? This incarnation of Jim didn’t mind jostling; in fact, he liked pavements to himself, thrust passers-by violently to one side or the other without consideration of age or sex. He had yet to learn the art of the blend, an art carnies had mastered aeons before. So when he crossed Burgh Quay, straight into the path of one of those new green rubbish trucks, he stopped it with an outstretched hand that brought a spider’s web of cracks to the windscreen as the truck shuddered to a halt and left the driver wondering if he had hit the brakes rather than the accelerator. But when the Captain reached the grimy Victorian façade of Heuston Station, a veneer of calm descended. The tracks that threaded their way along the Liffey seemed to promise a route to something new and old, something west and quite outside of time. And the empty train, when they boarded it, seemed to have its own peculiar geometry. The sun poured through the right-hand windows and made strange rectangles of the light and shade. And the rectangular swathes of light that hit the floor were themselves moving with a shimmering cloud that looked like dust, but that, to the observant eye, would have revealed itself to be a host of tiny winged creatures, almost smaller than dust themselves.
The train gradually filled, and filled more with every station it passed. Teenagers in ripped jeans and T-shirts with collapsible tents and backpacks, families with buckets and spades at the ready, the odd lost farmer in a pinstriped suit, shiny with age, looking like an implant from another era. Which is how the three of them must have seemed, to anyone who took care to look and examine them closely. But Burleigh saw that none of them did. The Dewman stared at the tracks whirring by, as if they had a hypnotic power all of their own. His ersatz son reached out a hand every now and then as if to catch that ungraspable dust. When he opened his thumbless palm, Burleigh noted it to be covered in tiny wings, the fluttering of which was barely perceptible. It could have been chaff, it could have been harvest dust, from some strange, unearthly harvest reaping. Burleigh reached his own hand out and clutched a handful of what seemed to be air, and opened his palm to view the same fluttering harvest. But he knew, and he had to contain his excitement here, that it was just a harbinger of the reaping to come.
The train took them so far, then a bus took them further, and when the bus turned on its turnaround they had the option of hitch-hiking or Shanks’s mare. The possibility that the kindness of strangers would extend to their unlikely and probably visually off-putting trio seemed remote so they walked. There was no discussion about this choice; they just tramped on. The Dewman could have taken to the air had the body he had adopted been more adaptable, but Jim’s ample girth, with a body mass index of 32.5, on the cusp of obesity, made that highly unlikely.
Over tarmacadam roads first; then, when the roads departed from their sense of how the crow flies, over small drystone walls on to what were once called boreens and when the boreens curved away beneath the imaginary crow’s path, they blundered through hedges on to the limestone fields that stretched towards a landscape of low, stone-capped moon-like hills.
Time was no problem, in the beginning. The Captain, the Dewman, an fear drúcht collapsed it, stretched it, condensed it at will. Thus it came to pass that the early-morning train deposited them in the western hinterland when it was still early morning and the bus, renowned for its lack of punctuality, arrived late and departed long before its advertised departure. Once they left the road, the boreen, the drystone walls, time became a problem, compounded. For the Dewman whorled it with him as he walked. So he dragged the ancient landscape – or moonscape, Burleigh would have called it – into a strange kind of motion and caused ancient things to wake with each footfall.
These ancient things were without shape, unlike him. They had found no host as yet. But they were all need, these remnants of old forgotten whispers, and latched on to whatever crossed their paths. A hare found itself transfixed in a sudden mid-dash rigour, jumped on its hind legs, twisted horribly in an airy freeze-frame and came to ground possessed. Its eyes streamed red, its fur bristled with sudden grey and it spun itself around them, Burleigh, Andy, the Dewman, searching for whom it might terrify, if not consume. And the Captain whispered, in a language the hare understood, ‘Fan beagan,’ wait a little.
And so as they crossed the limestone floor a host of reawakened repossessed things slithered with them. Stoats, voles, mice, freshwater eels and crabs, and all of the barely visible winged things.
‘Wings,’ Burleigh rhapsodised, ‘miraculous constructions, from the swooping crane to the tiniest midge, they did what no invention could, kept their constituent bodies airborne.’
Could he have done as well? No, he thought, some deity or some demiurge with powers of thought and mechanical construction way beyond his paltry capabilities. So they hummed, they buzzed, they slithered their way forward behind the three lumbering bipeds like a cloud and a carpet all at once.