A Cage of Roots (5 page)

Fr Shanlon had known the halls of his school – every tile and panel, buttress and pillar, sill and skirting – for so long that he had quite forgotten everywhere else. He knew he had been to a great many places at one time or another, but now even his dreams took place in the dusty carcass of St Augustin’s. His rooms, in the lowest part of the Priests’ House, were mostly quite spartan. An armchair and tall lamp were in a corner beside a table shouldering a stack
of large, thick books; one wall was lined with more of these and on the opposite side two dark doors, to a small bathroom and bedroom, stood either side of a modest fire grate. Beside the chair, facing the entrance, was another door, permanently locked. This was the only room that held anything of great interest, but no one had ever seen its contents. Fr Shanlon himself had nearly forgotten what it looked like, if not what it held. The key never left its hiding place.

He had been sitting in the chair, quite awake and reading, when a dream had crept up and taken him. Where once he saw words on a page, now he was faced with a thick wall of mud. The room became hot and small, the air dense and sour. He could not move. From the solid dirt in front of him, tendrils appeared – finger-like tentacles of wood pushed through and sought his face. They were black, and they reached him quickly, cold to the touch. They wove around his face, creeping down his throat and up his nose, and then more came, but these ones were blood red and dripping, grasping for his eyes. They found them! Burrowing beneath the lids … but, in a millisecond, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the vision disintegrated.

He was in his chair, the book on the floor by his feet, the hand that had let it fall trembling. But Fr Shanlon did not gasp for breath or break a sweat. Aside from his quivering hand, he sat still and poised. He sucked on his teeth,
glanced at his hand – the shaking stopped immediately – and let out a long breath.

A light passed through the room from the small window, scanning the walls and coming to rest on the locked door. The beams flicked off just before the noise of a puttering engine cut out and car doors opened and shut. The tall priest rose from his chair and arched his head back, then reached in to the roof of his mouth with his fingers. Three sharp tugs pulled the key from its hiding place.

The uncles had driven to the school in silence, but as they stepped out of the car into the icy evening, Taig was the first to speak.

‘How are we meant to find him?’ he asked.

‘He’ll know we’re here,’ Lann replied. ‘Look, lads. It’s been a long time since we spoke to him, so remember yourselves in there. Show respect. Show respect but …’

‘But never fear,’ said Fergus. ‘I remember.’

‘Sure your wit and eloquence never fail to charm anyone, Fergus,’ Taig added wryly. ‘He’ll be supping from your cupped hands before we leave.’

‘Yes, and your rugged manliness might put the fear into him, Taig, as it does every housewife in Limerick. He’ll be cowering before your blond locks and songbird voice
within minutes!’ Fergus retorted.

‘A fine time for talk,’ said a voice. It wasn’t Lann’s. He was looking just as surprised as the other two. It was close, like there was a fourth among them, but they could only see each other. Fergus blushed, immediately wondering how he could have joked when all this was happening.

‘And a perfect way to alert the whole school. How do we explain three giant oafs driving around after school hours?’ the voice continued.

‘Who
is
that?’ asked Fergus, spinning on his heels trying to catch the speaker. Lann stopped him with a hand on the shoulder and pointed to where Taig was looking. Across the gravel car park, a good forty or fifty metres away, they could make out the lofty outline of a very lanky man, hunched in a doorway and in shadow from the light behind him. His voice met their ears as if he whispered directly into them.

‘This way please. Quietly.’

Fr Shanlon led them through a small corridor lit only by a reddening sun. It smelled of ancient varnish and industrial cleaner, musty and tangy. The walls were lined with photographs behind foggy glass, team photos from years gone by with rows of boys all in the same striped jerseys, hurleys on laps or held like rifles. Some smirked, others were deadpan and the rest grinned like maniacs. Every few feet there was a glass case housing teeth-baring ferrets, shark-eyed
squirrels and velvet-feathered pheasants. One large case, containing a family of stuffed stoats, only survived Fergus’s stumbling by Taig’s light-speed reaction, who leapt and caught it moments before it would have exploded on the floor. Lann glared over his shoulder viciously, and spat ‘Fergus!’ between his teeth. The giant held his hands up bashfully and apologised. Fr Shanlon never turned or broke his stride.

They had passed through seemingly endless corridors, through door after door, until at last they arrived at a stairwell and descended to a level where there were no picture frames or stuffed animals. These halls were dark and unsettling; turn after turn, they tunnelled deeper into cobweb and dust. At last they stopped in front of a simple door. Fr Shanlon pushed it open and beckoned them through.

The three brothers stood awkwardly in the priest’s humble room, glancing around and sizing it up. At least they could stand up straight, as the ceiling was high. No one spoke, as the lofty priest sized them up through his thick glasses, sucking his teeth and emitting a slow, quiet grumble. Fergus and Taig avoided his dark-green eyes, but Lann gazed back, chin raised defiantly.

‘It has happened. She is gone, Cathbad,’ he said.

‘Yes, I know, Lann of the Long Look. You have lost her. You have failed,’ Fr Shanlon replied, without a flicker.

Lann bristled, but said nothing at first. After another
long silence, he finally broke the tension: ‘We have to go and get her. We need your council.’

‘Yes, I imagine you do. We’d better get on with it then.’

The priest crossed the room to the locked door, produced a key from his pocket and placed it into the keyhole. The door moaned, resisting on rusted hinges. A breeze of dank air brushed their faces, and made their hair stand up. It smelled of dirty, wet stone.

The door opened not to another room, but to a cavern. There were no walls but sheets of smooth rock. Limbs of it rose from the floor or dropped from the ceiling, ending in sharp points. The ground was uneven, and scored with thin streams and rivulets. There was some light, cast down through a small gap in the vaulted roof. It draped a blue ethereal blanket on every surface, and made the brothers look like ghosts.

In the middle, hulking around a clear pool where all the streams met, were four tall stone plinths. They were straight-edged obelisks, their edges marked with groups of cuts and chinks, some angled, others straight. The pillars rose at least nine metres to the cavern ceiling, and the marks ran up every corner to their peaks.

‘These are Ogham Stones,’ said Fr Shanlon. ‘I shall read from them, things will happen, and I warn you now, sons of Cormac: you will be
afraid
.’

He approached the first pillar, ran a finger down the
nearest edge and began to read aloud. His voice slipped deeper as he read, and seemed to gather weight; pulling it to a tone so low it made the uncles’ ribs rattle. The whole cavern hummed with it, sucking and swooping the chanting into the wet air. Pebbles danced and slipped from their perches; the water surface began to vibrate, droplets bouncing in time to a bass thrum that gathered rhythm as the incantation grew louder.

Fergus and Taig glanced at each other nervously, and they began to feel woozy. Lann tried to brace himself against it, but even he stumbled. Their heads felt compressed, like huge hands were squeezing them, tighter and tighter. It grew dark, just before the first phantom face, bearded and dead-eyed, appeared over a granite column.

Chapter 4

An Audience with Ancients

B
envy Caddock leapt from her perch on the wall, the whoop of her war-holler spooking a flurry of black crows into the sky. Her opponent was completely unaware of her presence; stupidly, naively thinking the area was clear of threat, he had passed along the wall, whistling, until the crushing moment he heard the shriek and turned to see her outline blocking the sun – impending doom in full flight.

With air flung from his lungs and stars dancing in his eyes, Sean tried to push his assailant off him, but had no strength. Leaning her elbow painfully onto his chest, Benvy smiled before plunging down on him again, squirting whatever breath was in him out into the cold air with a gasp and groan of pain.

‘I’m bored, Sheridan,’ the large girl, with rough, sandy hair tied back in thick waves, announced. ‘I’m bored out of my brain. What’ll we do?’

Sean had been planning on taking his book to his favourite spot on the edge of the woods, but he couldn’t say anything now: only wince and pray for some air to come back into his lungs. His glasses had fogged up and his cheeks had turned apple red. Benvy rolled off at last and sat up, hoisting his thick book onto her lap.

‘
Elon and Xanadu: The Six Swords,
’ she read the title aloud. It was written in elaborate, shiny type over an illustration of six swords in a circle, with lightning bursting out from the centre. ‘Oh, my God, you are such a nerdlinger, Sean Sheridan.’

The boy hoisted himself to a sitting position. He took his glasses off and searched for a piece of shirt under his thick padded coat to clean the glass. Without them his eyes looked tiny and dark.

‘I know,’ he replied, still clutching at breaths, ‘but we’ll inherit the Earth. And you’re a giant bully, by the way. You could have killed me! Book, please.’

Benvy considered flinging the book over the wall, but knew that would be taking the joke too far and just be a mean thing to do. She might enjoy terrorising Sean physically, but he was still her best friend, and had been all her life. She often waited for him here, on the outskirts of their estate, knowing that he would be slinking off for some quiet time with one of his ridiculous books. Sometimes,
especially when she was bored, she hated the thought that he was quite happy to do something without her. She threw the book to him, and grinned.

‘Let’s text Finny and see what they’re up to!’ she said, flipping the leather flap back on her phone.

‘No need,’ Sean replied, pointing towards the estate entrance. Finny had just walked through, and was heading towards the Sheridans’ house. Benvy got his number from favourites and dialled. They could see him stop and pull his phone out to answer.

‘Hello? I’m just at Knockbally. You guys in?’

‘We’re at the back wall, bonehead, watching you shuffle through the gates like a hobo.’

He looked up in their direction and immediately started running.

‘What’s the panic?’ Benvy asked, but Finny had hung up. When he reached them, he was breathless, suffering the effects of skipped training sessions.

‘The state of ya, Finny! You–’ Benvy began to jibe.

‘Shut up for a second, will you?’ Finny gasped between breaths.

Benvy and Sean glanced at each other. ‘What’s wrong?’ Sean asked.

‘It’s Ayla. I think she might be missing.’ Now he was looking straight into their eyes. He was not joking. ‘I texted her earlier, but no answer. So I went to the house,
and no one was in. At least, no one was answering the door. I know she might have been asleep, maybe her phone battery had died. But I knocked on the door hard. I was annoyed, thinking she was cross at me for something. I fecked a few stones at her window too: nothing. So I called Lann.’

Sean and Benvy said nothing, waiting to hear more, but they knew calling Lann was a brave move, and a last resort.

‘At first he seemed to think that she was just having a kip and the phone was off. But before I could say anything more he hung up on me. Why would he do that? I’m a bit worried about her, lads.’

His two friends said nothing for a long minute, sorting the information, coming to terms with it.

‘First things first,’ said Sean. ‘We go and check all the usual spots. We’ll check in Coleman’s Woods and head into town to Daly’s. She could be anywhere. She’s probably skipping through the woods, blissfully unaware anything’s wrong.’

He tried to smile, but it was awkward. The other two nodded in agreement.

‘Coleman’s first,’ said Benvy, hoisting herself over the wall, and marched towards the trees.

Deep under St Augustin’s, three more phantoms had appeared, shimmering over the remaining Ogham stones: spectral heads of two men and two women, all corrugated and ridged with age. The uncles recognised them instantly: they were the ‘Old Ones’ – an ancient council of druids, feared without limit by ordinary people. It was they who long ago had set the task before Lann, Fergus and Taig. It was they who had given them the power to live without death. The Old Ones had been flesh when the brothers had seen them last, on the dark day the charge was made; Caer and Macha were the women, Aed and Midir the men. They were the true power in their time and even kings kneeled before them.

Now, they hovered above each point with blue light spilling in tendrils of heavy smoke from their eyes and mouth. Each was turned towards the centre of the stones, looking down to the pool where Fr Shanlon stood ankle-deep in water. His palms were outstretched, his face lifted to the ghostly figures; his own eyes and mouth infused with the same blue glow. The three brothers had stepped back into the shadows, stunned.

‘
Cathbad, Earth-Brother, speak.
’

The voice, one of the women, Caer, was a winter wave sweeping through the uncles. It shocked every bone. They couldn’t speak or move, held still and tight by the air around them.

Fr Shanlon answered, his voice still ocean-deep, ‘Sisters: Caer, Macha. Brothers: Aed, Midir. The child has been taken.’

The cavern grew even colder, the ghost-heads, brightening but unmoving, fixed on the priest. One of the men spoke: ‘
Grave, unwanted news. If she is lost, all is lost. Her protectors? Killed?
’

‘They live, Midir. They are here.’ This was not a summoning – no one turned to look at the brothers. They still could not move, but fear was slinking into them, slithering and writhing behind their gaping eyes. There were no battles here in this stone limbo, no enemies to swing at, and no victory to relish: only fear. Taig seemed in more discomfort even than the others. He began to make choking sounds.

‘
Then they die,
’ uttered the second woman, Macha.

Taig’s gagging intensified, gasping as the air was wrung from him. Fergus and Lann could do nothing, held fast. Their brother’s body shook, a bead of blood slipped from the corner of his eye. His life was being crushed out. Still neither the priest nor his council turned to the uncles.

‘
But first: they find. They know what must happen. They know they must search in the old places. They know they must go to the roots of the Earth. You will show them the gates.
’

‘I will, Aed. She will be found. They will atone.’

Taig’s quivering stopped.

‘
We will open the gates
,’ Macha spoke again. ‘
But know that they will only open for a short time. The first, as the sun is highest; the second as the sun is on the wane; the third as the sun has sunk to slumber.
’

The faces disappeared and the cave slipped into darkness; the brothers dropped to the ground, senseless.

Finny, Sean and Benvy strode along a worn path through Coleman’s Woods. Evening sunlight fell in taut strings, rippling from leaves that sighed in time to the autumn wind. The undergrowth glistened with wet, and the gust showered them periodically with the water caught in higher branches. Occasionally the light disappeared as a herd of clouds covered the sun and soaked the trees with fresh rain. When this happened their view into the trees fell into gloom and the vivid green dulled almost to grey.

They had entered through a gap in the dense treeline on the Knockbally side and met one of the main tracks that cut through the centre of the woodland. The forest stretched from Dundearg to the eastern edge of town, passing both Ayla’s estate and Benvy and Sean’s. They spent a lot of time in there, and so each of them knew the network of trails in the sprawling forest well enough to alter their course without getting disorientated, and had
covered most of the main walking routes with no sight of their friend. They were all tired now, but determined.

‘Do you think it’s time to head to town?’ Sean asked. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Hang on for a minute, lads, there’s still a few spots off the main paths,’ Finny replied. ‘And she’s hardly spent the whole day eating sweets in Daly’s.’

‘Maybe we should split up? Each of us take one of the back lanes; we have our phones, if one of us finds her,’ suggested Benvy.

Sean shifted on his feet. He didn’t like the thought of being alone in the woods when it was getting dark – his imagination could easily feed fears of creatures in the ferns – but he didn’t want to lose face either.