We walk. Although Maeve faces forward in the barrow, I know that if I put the barrow down to look, I’ll see her twitch and chew. Sooner or later, she’ll come for me again.
We move. I hardly sleep. We come across no one, neither sight nor sound. Maybe Maeve was right, and there’s only ghouls and ghosts left in this land.
Her feet and hands are bound, and when we stop to rest now, I tether her to something solid. To the north, a ruin, a castle, swallowed nearly completely now back into the earth, vines of creeper wood reaching up through the grass like grasping fingers.
I’ve no time for beauty now.
Maeve drinks however much water I give her. Sometimes her eyes are glazed and sometimes she stares at me closely, suspiciously. I ask her again about Phoenix City; she doesn’t answer me. Sometimes she says a word, but the word is not hers. She calls me “darling,” and I feel that she’s already gone.
Because I am so frightened, because I cannot sleep, we make good progress. I come off the main road before the rains to find shelter, but the town we’re nearest to has nothing for us but the long-ago remains of four large corpses and one small one, tied to trees. All we can make out now is clothes and bones. I try not to look close, but the sun catches off a piece of metal, a necklace that still rests around a neck, and before my stupid mind can catch up with itself I’m thinking about who’d have put it there. Danger sniffs them, and I don’t have the energy to get him to stop.
I am limping.
We move. I check my map, and we pass signs for Portlaoise and to Kildare. I check the towns small and big for the words “Phoenix City,” but it’s not there, never mind what Maeve says. We’re past the halfway mark between east and west, well past it, and we keep going.
I have spent so long now bent over my burden that my back might never straighten again. Still and all, we keep going.
I’m singing to myself under my breath in a sort of half daze of an afternoon when I realize there is something singing with me.
The wheelbarrow is squeaking. I’m not sure how long it makes the noise before I hear it, and how long then till I understand what a danger it is. Any noise will mean skrake might hear us, and then our becoming skrake. Which is no good, so it’s not.
“That’s no good,” I whisper to Maeve.
The dog eyes me warily and gives a low whine.
I stop and crouch, the muscles along my back stretching and groaning as I kneel and try to wrestle my brain into thinking. I blink hard, feeling dazzled by the sun. It’s the coupling for the wheel; a washer is gone rusty and stiff. I did not think to bring tools or parts or even oil with me. I sit in the middle of the road and put my face in my hands, and when I’ve finished doing that, I get up again. The rain isn’t far off, so I backtrack to the exit only half a klick behind us, and we strike out for a town.
I’d glimpsed the roofs of houses far off from the road whenever there were gaps in the trees, and now I see them up close. I push slowly, feeling as if I’m being watched from every broken window. The whole fucking country is haunted, I’m learning, not just our little island.
With every second step the wheel squeaks, and we’re so exposed, I’m wondering should I have stayed on the road, stupid skrake-attracting shitter of a barrow and all.
“Maeve. Should we’ve stayed going?” I wipe a grimy hand through my hair. “Maeve?”
Maeve says nothing.
Up ahead, though, I can see the road widening, and there are buildings against the road with yawning broken squares at their fronts. The squeak is only getting louder, and I try to lean to the right and then to the left to see can I get it to whisht, racking my brains for what I could use as a lubricant that’d last me another day.
“Cunt of a yoke,” I hiss to the barrow.
The squeaking is so loud in my ears, half of Ireland must be able to hear it, if there’s anyone left.
There’re more signs at the side of the road, big ones for Dublin and other places. They’ve writing on them, and though I can recognize the letters, I can’t read the words, and the bits I can read make no sense to me, except for the ones you see everywhere, the ones saying “She Has Come” and “Run,” and then circles and triangles and arrows and the like. One, a big metal sheet that had been painted blue once, has half fallen from its place, and I’m able to wheel the barrow round the back of it so it’s mostly hidden. I tell Maeve to hang on tight, and then Danger gets up from his panting in the shadows to come with me.
“Mind her,” I tell him. “Danger? Sit.”
He sits down again, looking grateful.
I check my knives and go on alone toward the town. The quiet is unearthly now I don’t have that squeaking in my ears. My breath is loud in the silence. The slap of my feet against cracked road and root and plant could be the rhythm of the whole world.
There’s plastic, broken glass, empty and squashed tin cans, and I pick my way carefully along, looking over my shoulder for skrake, toward where I hid Maeve, every few moments. It takes my eyes a long time to adjust to the gloom of the inside of the first shop I reach, and I don’t go inside but rest for a minute, my eyes closed, my hand against the empty window frame. I am light-headed. I do not know when last I ate.
Oil.
I’m not going to find oil, not in this shop, maybe not anywhere. I wriggle my toes and wonder how long a little blood might keep the barrow wheel slick.
I’m getting dizzily to my feet when it goes past me, a distance away.
A shape, dark and large and fast.
It’s gone before I’ve time to register what it is, but I can hear it, moving north past the lines of shops, and it disappears into the shrubs just as I clamber back out onto the street. A skrake? I don’t have the fear I’d have if I’d seen a skrake. It was bigger, running straighter, making more noise. My knife is in my hand, and I follow, unthinking, head spinning, belly rumbling. My feet bounce off the road; the branches and glass and scattered rubbish can’t hurt me. I am hungry is all. That’s why it’s hard to get up, and my head is swimming.
I push quietly through the growth northward after whatever animal I glimpsed. I won’t go far, I think. I’ll only take a minute. The greenery is so much thicker here. What little is left of the road is a different color entirely from the bluish-purple of the road to the city. Like it’s been swallowed up and spat back out and is barely a path, a rough line, like a finger drawn across dry dirt. It smells wetter down here off the main road, and the trees have a lushness, a freshness and coolness to them, and I feel the fog and heat in my head start to ease off me.
I breathe deep, in and out, and press on farther.
The land beneath my feet swells upward and to the left, and there’s a feeling about heading westward that seems such a relief—as if I have been moving against a strong current for these last days, and now I’ve turned and let it take me toward home.
I go on a ways, knowing I should turn back. I haven’t seen or heard the animal I saw, even if I did see something, and Maeve is alone. I think of turning round and picking up the barrow again and I can’t, so just for a while longer I keep climbing. Breathing deeply, moving fast, feeling the air in my lungs good and fresh and new. There’s a ridge ahead of me, off the track to the left, and I think I’ll go and climb that and have a short little rest and I’ll be on my way. Maybe I’ll even see something from the top, see the place I’m looking for or a road to it, leading east.
I hear it before I see it. Something moving through the trees. Fast, large, coming nearer—along the path. I realize it’s animals that have kept it a path all these years, through this forest once the old road crumbled away. Animals or skrake or maybe both. I feel calm; I look about me as the noises get louder and up at the tree above me, and I jump to grab on to a branch, and I pull myself up. I climb and then stop to listen.
It bursts out of the undergrowth to my right, and I’m safe enough up out of it, but still and all, I jump half out of my skin. It’s a monster, four-legged and massive, with antlers wide as its body and nearly as long, and bloody with flesh living and dead hanging off them. My hand goes to my knife belt, but the animal is so big, it’d be like trying to bring down a skrake with a needle. A deer, nearly, but massive.
It shakes itself out into the clearing and then stops, and I stay still and hold my breath and will it not to see me.
The incongruity of it. What a ridiculous thing to be alive, to be bleeding but maybe not dying. The animal is breathing hard, smelling the air, listening the same way I am listening. It gives a shake of its great head, and I can see steam rising in the heat from its muscles and flesh and hair. It is so alive. Even in my fear, watching this deer-beast fills me with such intense joy that I’ve tears in my eyes. It walks a little farther away, elegant and easy despite its size, away from me and into the clearing, head lowering toward the ground.
More movement, coming from the woods behind us. Maybe there are more of them. But the beast, whatever it is, knows what’s coming even before I do and is gone.
Skrake.
They shuffle and ooze out of the trees to my left, but the beast is disappearing already, tearing off through the grass, and within a few strides it is enveloped in the tree line at the other side of the clearing. The first skrake follows without a pause, but I can hear more now, coming from the trees all around me, and I wonder how ever there were so many that I didn’t bring them down on top of me. How long have they been following for?
All I can do is cling to my tree and watch as they—four, then eight, then eleven, more—race out after it, stinking and twitching and moving I swear with something that looks like glee. Maybe it’s the blood they’re smelling, or they can hear it, or maybe they’re just following each other, giving each other a direction. I barely breathe and do not move but can see the fabric on my chest vibrate a little every time my heart beats.
The skrake are nearly away, nearly through the trees at the other side of the clearing. Once the last is just out of sight, I breathe out and try to unstick my hands from the trunk of the tree, and I let myself down as quietly as possible from my branches back onto the ground.
I feel nearly good. If I’d seen something like that just a few days ago, I’d have wet myself for sure.
Then I see there’s another, a last skrake making after that mad beast behind its friends, and I’m so surprised at the sight of it that I do wet myself a little.