Chapter Fourteen #3
The pause holds too long; the chant breaks apart and falls away. Men stop moving and listen, heads turning. The siren whines on, still distant but coming closer.
Mart’s voice—pitched to carry, but with no urgency and no fear—calls, “Time to go, lads.”
For a long minute no one moves. Then they melt away, without hurry, over the walls and out the gate. In seconds the white expanse of the garden is empty. As Cal turns at the gate to look back, he thinks he sees a curtain lift, in an upstairs window.
Lena’s alertness to the townland has stopped being a pleasure.
In Ardnakelty’s winter silence, the scatter of remaining sounds travel farther, and have a sharp edge of warning.
Ciaran Maloney’s oldest practices the flute, a faint broken thread of notes like the soundtrack to a stealthy approach.
The smells that drift on the cold air—tractor exhaust, cooking meat—feel like deliberate intrusions, reminders that her territory is anything but impregnable.
She’s sitting on the kitchen floor, running Nellie’s soft ears between her fingers, when she hears the sound.
At first it’s only a faint jag in the silence, so far off and ragged that it could be a car stereo pumping, or teenagers having a party.
Then it coalesces and takes shape: voices, going on and on, for too long.
Lena goes to the front door with the dogs close at her heels.
Her yard is dark and empty. In the cold air the sound reaches her more clearly: men’s voices, a crowd of them, raised in a hard savage chant.
They’re too distant for her to make out the words, but the anger charges the air like coming thunder.
It hits her with a primal flare at the back of her neck: they could be coming for her.
Scraps of half-forgotten granny stories rise in her mind, long-ago bad women driven from the townland for sins that were only hinted at, running bruised and wild-eyed for the river or the mountain, one slip of a foot and gone.
For a moment of pure animal terror she almost follows them: grab the car keys, grab the dogs, drive.
Then she sees the patch of white light in the sky, off beyond the village, cold and ghostly on the cloud. Her mind is still flying for the hills and for a spinning second she thinks of Bobby Feeney’s aliens, before she realizes what it is: security lights, triggered by motion.
Lena stands in the doorway, palming back the uneasy dogs and forcing her mind to lay hold of sense. Only one house around here has security lights on that scale. This mob isn’t out for her blood; she’s nothing to them. They’re after Tommy.
When she understands what Cal’s done, it reaches her like something she knew all along. He took everything she found and brought it to Mart Lavin.
She tried to warn him, but even after everything he’d seen, he took this place too lightly.
This isn’t some big deal, I’m not gonna let Mart get me into anything.
Now he’s out there amid the roaring men and the white light, subsumed into them, unreachable.
This place has eaten him, the same way it’s eating Trey.
Somewhere far away, a siren starts up its banshee wail. The chant is still going, a throb in the night air, so faint that it feels like it’s inside Lena’s skull. Tommy is going to come after her.
She could still grab the dogs and drive, but she has nowhere to drive to. She’s left it thirty years too late.
The dark of the road is like blindness, after the white light.
It’s full of movement, quick deft rustles and crunches.
Small sounds scatter out across the fields, men moving along tracks they know by heart towards wherever they’re supposed to be tonight.
Cal feels something like dizzy; it takes him a minute to get his bearings and turn for home. His ears are still ringing.
He and Mart and Senan and P.J. find each other along the way.
Mart has rolled his balaclava back into a beanie; in the bleary moonlight, his hair sticks out like dandelion fluff around the edges.
“There’s yourself,” he says to Cal. “I was worried the big bad Moynihans had got you and they were holding you for ransom. I can’t afford you. ”
“Nope,” Cal says. He pulls off his balaclava and hands it back to Mart. His throat is raspy from shouting. His heart is still going hard, to the rhythm of Out out out out.
“Well,” Mart says, clapping his gloved hands together as he sets off up the road again. “That’s a job well done, lads. I’m not saying we got the result we were looking for, but that woulda been too much to ask. We done the job we went out to do. Tommy heard us, loud and clear.”
He reminds Cal bizarrely of a coach giving a post-match pep talk. Somewhere behind them, the siren is still coming closer, endless and mindless.
“I never thought he’d call the Guards,” P.J. says. He’s clomping along at his usual pace, shovel-feet slapping down steadily, but to Cal he seems subtly changed. All of them do.
“You already knew he was a fuckin’ traitor, sure,” Mart points out reasonably. “That’s old news.”
“He’s a fuckin’ coward as well,” Senan says.
His voice is hoarse too; he sounds like a stranger.
“Any man with a pair of balls on him woulda come out to us. Even just to tell us all to get fucked. If I’da had any respect for him before, it’d be gone now.
Hiding behind the curtains with his missus and his child—”
“Calling the fuckin’ Guards,” P.J. says, with bottomless disgust.
“We shoulda done the house,” Senan says. He’s still keyed up, whipping his beanie back and forth in his hand like a weapon.
“No,” Mart says. “We gave the man a chance. That’s good strategy, is what that is. If he doesn’t take it, he’s got no one but himself to blame, and no one can say the poor cratur got no warning.”
“He didn’t take it. I toldja: that fella doesn’t need a chance. What he needs is a root up the fuckin’ hole.”
“If Tommy’s wise,” Mart says, “he’ll send someone to talk to me tomorrow. What he oughta do is come to me his own self, but he won’t stoop that low. He’ll send someone.”
“Or else he won’t,” Senan says grimly. Before anyone can answer, he turns in at P.J.’s gate, where his battered car is listing to one side in the drive. P.J. follows him, still shaking his head over Tommy’s iniquity.
At his own gate, Cal lingers for a minute.
He feels like he should be saying something, or asking Mart something, but he can’t figure out what.
The whole evening feels like it broke away from reality, somewhere in there, and he’s having trouble finding his way back.
The cold has hit him again; he’s shivering, from deep down inside.
Mart cocks an eyebrow at him and smiles. “What I’d prescribe for you, Jean-Claude,” he advises, “is a nice drop of hot whiskey to get the cold outa your bones. And then a good night’s sleep.”
“Right,” Cal says. “Yeah.”
“And remember: yourself and myself and Senan were over in P.J.’s house all night long. Why we chose P.J.’s I don’t know, with his place in tatters and your lovely hacienda just waiting to host a gathering, but sure, we can’t deny him his turn just ’cause his housekeeping’s not up to par.”
He touches his beanie in a salute and heads off up the road. Beyond the village, Tommy’s security lights are still blazing, a small unearthly patch of white against the cloud.
Trey hears Cal’s steps on the driveway and is at the door to meet him, electric with impatience. “You give them the slaps?” she demands.
“Nope,” Cal says.
“Why?”
“It wasn’t that kinda night,” Cal says. He drops onto the sofa and starts unlacing his boots. His fingers won’t work right.
“Then what fuckin’ kinda night was it?”
“Kid,” Cal says. He can’t begin to describe tonight to her. He’s glad she wasn’t there. “I wouldn’t want to be Tommy Moynihan right now.”
Trey scans his face intently for a minute. Whatever she sees there apparently satisfies her. “OK,” she says, and she goes to the kitchen and switches on the kettle to make him a cup of tea.