Chapter 39
ALEX
The first thing was to scrub Maeve’s hands and arms clean, and then bundle her up in the car with Patricia, Nick holding her close until the very last minute, almost bent double, half in the car, promising over and over that he’d come down to the village and see her as soon as he could.
Alex stood by awkwardly, trying to keep from breaking down into a sobbing mess herself. She wanted to. She wasn’t sure how she was holding anything together.
She had seen Theo. Without him, she might not even be standing here. He had saved her, Maeve and Sally. She wouldn’t have had the strength without him.
And then what would have happened?
She remembered that place, the creeping darkness sucking at her soul. She remembered her dad…
‘Run, Alex! You have to run! NOW!’
How did she remember that now? And why did the darkness that had reared up around her in the undercroft still feel like it was pressing in on the back of her mind?
‘Alex?’ Nick called her back to the here and now with a start. His voice sounded as shaky as she felt. ‘Maeve would like to talk to you.’
Alex leaned into the car only to be engulfed in a huge hug. ‘Thank you,’ the little girl said into her shoulder, her voice muffled but unmistakable. ‘And you have to be careful now. He’s angry. He saw you, and he remembers you. He wants you.’
‘Who?’ She couldn’t mean Nick. He just looked terrified.
‘The dark man. Here—’ Maeve pulled back and then scrabbled around in the pocket on the seat in front of her, before pulling out a plait made of dried grass and withered daisies.
Another one. How many did the child have?
She knotted it around Alex’s wrist before Alex could stop her.
‘The other one is gone with the man from the forest, but this will protect you. I promise. Like you promised my mummy you’d protect me and Daddy. I’ll look after you too, Alex.’
‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ Alex replied. ‘And… maybe stay with your gran now until we know it’s safe here, okay? No more adventures until you’re bigger.’
Maeve grinned at her. ‘And when I’m bigger, I’m going to hunt down ghosts like you. And help them. Like you helped Mummy.’
Patricia couldn’t wait to get into the car and drive away. Alex didn’t blame her.
She and Nick watched them go until they vanished beyond the gates. He had his arms wrapped around his chest, like he was still hugging his daughter. Alex fiddled with the new grass bracelet and wished she had the child’s powers of belief. Especially self-belief.
Dark clouds were gathering over the valley beyond the trees, that kind of roiling darkness that presaged a storm.
Nick drew in a shuddering breath before turning to her.
‘What happened down there?’ But before Alex could answer he stalked towards the house as if he had taken a personal grudge against it.
‘Every bloody door in the house shut up fast, like they were bolted from inside. This one and the kitchen. The keys wouldn’t work, nothing.
I had to smash a window in the boot room round the back to get in.
And then I heard you in the cellar, but I couldn’t find the two of you. ’
‘Maeve said she came through the cellar. There was a hole in the wall down there.’
‘Yeah, I found it but I couldn’t get through. She must have wriggled in like a rabbit. How did you find that door? I never knew it was there. It looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades.’
He yanked the front door to the house open so hard that Alex feared, old and heavy as it was, it might come right off the hinges. Nick wasn’t just scared. He was angry too. And that made for a bad combination.
‘Nick…’ She didn’t know how to tell him any of this. She’d seen his wife. Theo had come to get her, called her love… How did she even begin? She was just going to make everything worse.
When she touched his shoulder, the muscles were knotted and tense. He shuddered at her touch and then froze.
‘Is this my fault?’ he asked tentatively.
His fault? How could this be his fault?
‘I don’t think so. I think… I think it’s the temple in the notebook. Chambers’ temple. To that thing.’
He hesitated again, as if reluctant to ask any more. But in the end, he clearly couldn’t help himself. ‘Maeve said you saved Sally.’
‘I think she tried to sacrifice herself to save us first. And then… Theo came…’
Nick hung his head and said nothing for a moment. Alex waited. She had to. Part of her wished she hadn’t said anything at all. She was an idiot.
‘He would,’ he whispered at last, his voice cracking. ‘Of course he would… Thank you. Both of you.’
‘Nick?’
But he looked up again and Alex found herself trapped by those eyes, the mix of green deep in the brown, the flecks of gold.
The lights from inside the house caught the glow in them.
Her hand came to rest on his chest. She couldn’t help it.
Nick’s closed over it, so much bigger, stronger, like something she wanted to cling to.
His lips parted and, the next thing Alex knew, he kissed her.
It wasn’t like before. Not like in the study, when she’d felt out of control and desperate.
Or in the drawing room, when the wild had engulfed them both.
This was deep and gentle, a careful invitation.
She couldn’t help but respond. But even as she let herself be swept up in it, in the closeness of him, the warmth, that heady scent, in the soft groan that came rumbling up from his chest, he broke the kiss.
His hand trailed down the side of her face and he frowned. There was heartbreak in those eyes now.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said abruptly and pulled away. ‘I shouldn’t. I—’
He pushed the door open and went inside. Alex closed it carefully behind her and then followed him into the kitchen, ignoring the study for now. The cellar door still stood open and Nick stopped at the top of the stairs as if steeling himself for another confrontation.
‘Take a moment,’ she told him. ‘Please. It’s been a lot. And it’s getting dark outside.’
The wind was rising. She could hear it rattling around the house. The storm was coming in fast.
‘Maybe you’re right. But we do need to sort that window in the boot room first with the weather turning. Hang on here. I’ll get my tools.’
He left by the back door and returned in minutes, trailing the wind and rain behind him.
He had some pieces of wood and Alex helped him measure and cut them.
She swept up sawdust while he hammered them into place over the narrow window at the side of the door.
For good measure she cleaned up the broken glass as well.
He must have smashed the small window pane and then reached through to open the door.
He was lucky he hadn’t sliced open his arm in the process.
With the rising storm firmly outside the house, he seemed to unwind a little.
‘Tea,’ said Alex.
He gave a wavering smile and sat down at the table, their positions oddly reversed all of a sudden.
His broad frame looked out of place as she slid past him but no more so than when he was handing her freshly baked goods or dishing up his wonderful meals.
It was more that this time she was the one fetching mugs and milk, and setting the teapot down between them.
They both stared at it in silence. Both unwilling to broach the subject.
And then Alex remembered her phone, and Gabe, and the aborted call. Oh God, he’d be frantic by now.
‘Shit, hang on,’ she gasped and sprinted to the study.
The door to the undercroft still hung open like a gaping wound. She closed it firmly and dragged one of the armchairs against it for good measure. Just in case, she told herself. In case of what, she wasn’t sure.
She scooped up her dead phone, plugged it in and turned it back on.
There were a dozen messages, missed video calls and various other attempts at contact.
Alex, what’s happening?
Tell me you’re ok. PLEASE.
What’s going on???
She typed quickly, straight into the group chat.
We’re ok. All good. She paused, wondering what on earth she could say to explain any of it. I think we have a bigger problem than I thought. Arnold, what do you know about something called Crom? Or the god of the hungry grass?
The response she got was not comforting.
Crom? Not the one in Conan the Barbarian? Gabe. Of course it was.
The phone rang. Arnold already had an answer, of course. Because he was that good.
‘Alex? Sorry. It’s easier than trying to type all this. I’ll put it all in a group email in a minute. Just glad you’re okay…’ He paused, concern bleeding through his words. ‘You are okay, babe, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, aware of how hollow her voice sounded.
He didn’t sound convinced but took her word for it.
‘Okay so, this is for real, not fantasy. And there’s a lot.
I looked it up earlier because it was mentioned in your grandfather’s notes and I thought it was weird, you know?
There was a god called Crom in Ireland, very old, pre-Christian, pre pretty much everything.
Howard nicked the name for his Conan books, that’s all, and mangled the hell out of it.
There were a few Croms in Irish lore – Crom Cruach, Crom Dubh, Crom Cenn, maybe more.
Could all be the same thing, or aspects of an old god, could be brothers.
At least metaphorically. Like the Titans.
Mostly it’s just scraps of stories though, all written by monks so there’s an obvious bias.
Sometimes they’re lumped in with demons and the stories are nasty enough for that. ’
She could hear him clicking his keyboard, bringing up more information.
‘Crom means bent or crooked. Cruach is a heap or a pile, as in bodies. Dubh means black and Cenn head, like severed heads, but most of the accounts are from the Greeks and the Romans who loved talking about the barbaric Celts headhunting, bloodletting and sacrificing whoever they could. So again, not reliable. One story goes that there was a golden idol, set up in a ring of standing stones, and they’d pour blood over it, pile up the bodies of the slain in front of it and have orgies, that their hunger was never sated.
But like I said – remember the sources. I don’t know about the god of the hungry grass. That could be a local thing.’
‘All right,’ she told him, fighting down her rising sense of dread.
A golden idol in a ring of stones. There was a ring of stones in the woods.
And in the undercroft… the thing Maeve had pulled out of the ground, the hunched figure with the grinning face which had rolled off into the corner…
that could have been a golden idol, couldn’t it?
But she didn’t want to say that out loud.
‘Speaking of local references… There are folktales about the wise women of Kilfayne. They could turn into hares and stuff and they were charged with keeping the land. Ask your Sasquatch about them. I bet he knows.’ He gave a soft laugh which petered out when she didn’t join in.
‘They’re mentioned in your grandfather’s notes too.
They were said to have defeated an evil being which sounds a lot like a Crom.
Such things can’t be killed, he says, so instead they trapped it using the magic of rock and water and the earth itself.
They built a great cairn over the thing to imprison it and grew a vast forest around it, a living barrier, imbuing the trees with enough power to contain Crom, and to destroy those who would release it.
There was some kind of ritual role, a guardian, called the walker in the woods. ’
The words rang like the whine of tinnitus in her ears.
The wise women of Kilfayne had created a guardian, the walker in the woods.
Just like they’d told her in the village.
They’d joked about it being Nick because of his surname.
But now she wasn’t so sure it was a joke.
Fionnuala had shut them down right away.
And Nick was always escaping to the woods. He guarded them. They gave him strength. And peace. They were his refuge. He had called himself her guardian and she had said this was her land.
She looked up at a sound to see Nick there in the study with her, listening, watching. So quiet.
God, they’d brought this on themselves, the two of them.
Arnold was still talking. ‘The walker is dedicated to guarding the prison, but it isn’t clear if that was a hereditary role, an elected one or a sacrifice maybe?
Whatever it was, the guardian is called to serve the trees, it says, and they’re part of the spell binding Crom.
And that great enchantment worked for generations. ’
Until the de Wildes came along, and ruined everything. She didn’t need to say that.
‘I think that’s where your house comes in.
From what the notebook says, the curse transferred itself to the building.
That entity lingered on in the stones and in the earth, sleeping deep, but the woods couldn’t protect the people inside the house anymore.
Those who live there risk falling prey to it.
That’s what Blaise Chambers found, and raised, and worshipped. ’
Of course it was.
That was why the de Wildes had the reputation they had around here, why they did nothing to help their tenants during the Great Famine, why they exploited the whole area, why they raped and murdered their way to power. Why the women died young if they stayed here, and why the men were bastards.
Why Chambers was still so powerful even though he’d been dead for two hundred years. Because it wasn’t just him. He wasn’t just a ghost but was tied into something else. Crom. The thing he had worshipped in life and served in death. The thing he wanted to feed Alex to.
She didn’t know how, but she had recognised it as soon as she laid eyes on it. Like something inside her had always contained that knowledge. That little bit of Kilfayne, the part of her Gran had nurtured, the part she had always suppressed. The part that had saved her and damned her father…
She had to face the fact that there might be what Gabe would classify as a demonic entity living underneath her house. How did you say that with a straight face?