Chapter One #2
Most of Aoife’s friends were more work colleagues than friends, coders and AI engineers who got drinks after work on occasion.
Eimear was a theatre geek who lived insufficient paycheque to insufficient paycheque as a barista while taking jobs on the side doing costumes and props for indie films and plays.
Eimear was a perfect example of why Aoife hadn’t done a degree in the arts.
As Mum said: “why study something that will leave you broke and broken-hearted?” Eimear was broke all right, but if Aoife was being honest …
she didn’t seem particularly broken-hearted.
One more drink.
Two more drinks.
Three more drinks.
“Come on,” Eimear bounced on the couch from her seated position, spilling yet more pink margarita, “let’s get our Dutch on!”
“You’re completely mad.” Aoife polished off her fourth gin and poured a fifth, at which point the G&T was starting to taste halfway decent.
“All the great ones are. Go on, get us a red candle.”
Aoife stumbled to her everything drawer in the kitchen, her thoughts sloshing in her brain the same way the alcohol was sloshing in her glass.
She tracked down a red tea light she’d bought for Valentine’s Day last year.
Back when she’d been hopeful there was going to be someone around for Valentine’s Day.
She fell back onto the couch, the candle sitting in the palm of her hand. “Are we really trying to summon magical gates from the netherworld?”
“They’re the Gates of Desire, not gates from the never … nester … nennerworld.”
“That sounds much more promising.”
“Told you!” Eimear reviewed the incantation aloud on her phone. “Got it?”
Aoife nodded. She did not in fact have it, but she’d need to be sober for that, and if she had been sober she wouldn’t have been summoning magical gates from the netherworld.
“Desire, my desire,” Eimear began in a voice that mimicked an opera singer.
Aoife’s words followed a split second after in a much less opera-like fashion.
“Come to me and light the fire. I offer my past, my present, my future. The wound of a passionless life, come suture. I summon thee, oh Gates of … wait. I missed something.” Eimear squinted at her phone as Aoife downed more gin.
“The future, etc, etc, suture …” Eimear traced the lines on her phone with her finger.
“Oh! Here. Find me the love I most need, driven by selfless passion, not selfish greed. Let my body succumb to lust most grand, that I may know the other half of my soul even in a far away land.” Eimear glanced at the ceiling with a cheeky smile.
“Now that sounds hot … wait, don’t repeat that last bit.
” Eimear cleared her throat, readying herself for the finale.
“I summon thee, oh Gates of Desire. Come to me now and the light the fire.”
Aoife held her breath, staring at the candle in her hand. Eimear’s body went rigid, the apartment as silent as an unshared hope.
One minute passed.
Two minutes.
Five minutes.
Liam in number twenty-three banged on Aoife’s front door as he stumbled to his apartment, screaming to the night about his woes. His money was gone.
And as Aoife looked around, she realised the magic was, too.
~*~
Aoife set her bag on her bed at eight in the evening, placing her phone on her bedside locker.
Next to it was the unlit red tea light from the summoning two days before.
The candle being there was silly. The so-called ritual had failed, but Aoife couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.
Couldn’t bring herself to deny this tiny flicker of optimism.
She’d even kept her GP appointment that afternoon to re-up her birth control injection, because she wasn’t ready to truly admit she was destined for loneliness, celibacy, and a house swarming with stray cats.
Hope was a hard creature to kill.
Conor hadn’t even apologised when she’d texted him back, tearing him a new one for asking for nudes. In fact, he’d read the message, and then blocked her. She’d thought she’d had a few more irons in the Tinder fire, but they’d all stopped talking to her, too.
Why was love so difficult?
As the candle blurred in Aoife’s vision, lines from Eimear’s drunken summoning played through her mind.
Find me the love I most need, driven by selfless passion, not selfish greed.
Desire, my desire. Come to me and light the fire.
Let my body succumb to lust most grand, that I may know the other half of my soul even in a far away land.
Soulmates. Passion. Desire. Aoife’s fingers tingled at the thought, at the idea of what that would be like.
Wouldn’t that be something? For the story she told her grandkids to be about breathless glances from across the room, about love that conquered all, about passion that nothing, that no one, could stop.
But those were the wrong things to believe in. The sort of things a woman like Eimear believed in. Aoife wasn’t like Eimear.
Still. If a romance like that were real, if it could last … wouldn’t that be beautiful?
A lash of orange sputtered into Aoife’s vision. She blinked, clearing away the blur in her sight from staring for too long.
The candle.
There was a flame in the candle.
Aoife whirled around, expecting to see someone holding a match. There was no one. She turned back to the candle, watching it flicker, the flame snapping bigger and then shrinking. Bigger and smaller. Bigger and smaller.
Had Aoife lit the candle and forgotten about it? Had it been lit when she’d come into her room and she hadn’t realised?
The scent of sulphur and fresh rain swirled around her, thickening the air. Aoife’s body tensed. Even if she had forgotten about lighting the candle, she certainly wouldn’t have forgotten about bringing sulphur into her room.
What the …
A chill ran through Aoife’s bones, tugging at fears and hopes that had long lain dormant.
She turned slowly, carefully, sensing someone behind her.
Her breath hitched, her stomach tightened.
It was not someone. It was something. It filtered into the space in front of Aoife like a ghost trying to put on flesh.
The ghost of a gate, older than ancient, from no identifiable culture or time period.
Aoife stumbled back, away from the materialising gates.
No. There were no gates in her room, that wasn’t possible. She had been drugged. Or she’d had a mental breakdown and was hallucinating. Was she too old to become schizophrenic? Was there an age-limit on that sort of thing?
The see-through bars of the Gates solidified in soft strokes, chips in two of the vertical bars growing noticeable.
Perhaps a side effect of time, perhaps something else.
As the bars became more substantial, they grew deeper and brighter in colour until they shimmered.
They seemed to be made of multicoloured glass, as if carved from a stained glass window.
With a hiss and a ripple of smoke flooding from the bottom, the Gates became real, their corporeal form as tall as the ceiling and as substantial as the gates that had guarded Aoife’s secondary school.
Aoife stared. Speechless.
The Gates opened, creaking on their hinges, a cool breeze touching Aoife’s cheek as they moved. The inky blackness within called to her in far-off whispers, the melodic voice promising everything. Or rather, it promised love.
Which to the Gates, seemed to be everything.
On shaky legs, Aoife stood before the great Gates, her mind stuttering like a scratched CD.
These were not Eimear’s Gates of Desire.
That would be impossible. Aoife was losing her mind.
Obviously. Although Aoife wasn’t certain which was more frightening: the idea that these Gates were real, or that they weren’t.
Pull yourself together. Aoife needed to think this through scientifically.
That was the way of the O’Donoghues. When in doubt, do the practical thing.
The practical thing was to run away and seek medical attention.
Or … was the practical thing to walk through the Gates and prove they weren’t real?
Aoife’s instincts were to run. How badly she wanted to run.
Or did she? Which path was she supposed to take?
Stop it, they aren’t real.
What if they are real?
Don’t be daft.
Of course, they weren’t really there. And yet, the breeze, the smell, the look of them seemed to very much suggest they were there. Aoife took one step closer. Then another. Then another. She reached out a trembling hand and touched the cold, smooth edge of the Gates.
They felt real.
Aoife touched the Gates again. They still felt smooth, still felt solid. The inky blackness within whispered to her once more, the voice stronger, more urgent. It was do or die, they seemed to imply.
Take it or leave it, now or never.
Aoife stepped back. She stepped forward.
She couldn’t simply walk through the Gates, could she?
That would be absurd. Or would it? Aoife’s mother had taught her to test theories, to seek answers for the inexplicable.
In Aoife’s work life, she did that every time her code stopped working for no apparent reason.
Maybe the right choice was to walk through the Gates. Maybe the scientific solution was to test whether or not the Gates were real. If they weren’t real, nothing would happen. If they were real …
Aoife looked back. Looked forward. Took a deep breath.
If they are real …
She stepped through the Gates.