BlackWind (16 page)

“How did he find that out?”

O'Shea sighed. “I'll get to that. Right now, let's just concern ourselves with the discovery of the Reaper.”

“Okay. Do they know how long it was in the bog?”

“When they did the carbon dating, they decided the creature had been in the bog at least five thousand years.”

Sean whistled. “Considering what a find that was, why hasn't the world been told about the creature?”

“When I'm finished with the tale, you'll know,” O'Shea admonished. “Stunned but excited at having found something so alien, Dunne loaded the creature's body into the boot of their car and took it back to the farmhouse. Once there, Dunne swore them all to secrecy. No one was to learn of the creature's existence until after it had been studied at length. I would imagine Dunne had visions of making a name for himself with the discovery of this ape-like man. He was a learned scientist and no doubt had read tales of the Yeti in the high Himalayas and similar creatures such as the North American Sasquatch. I am sure he thought he had found just such an animal in West Ireland.

“They began taking pictures of the body from every conceivable angle. When they turned the creature onto its belly to take pictures of its backside, another astonishing fact greeted them.”

“What?” Sean whispered.

“Something was moving around under the skin.”

Sean's mouth fell open. “No way.”

O'Shea smiled. “Aye, something was very much alive inside it.”

“A rat or something like that?”

“It wasn't anything that had crawled inside the corpse. It was something else. Something that had been inside the body when it went into the bog.”

Sean sat up straighter. “Something else? You mean like an offspring?”

“No, it was very much a male. The genitalia on that thing would make any porn star envious!”

“How could something live that long inside the body?”

“Will you let me tell the tale, lad?”

Sean clamped his lips shut.

“Dunne and his team discussed it for a long time, all the while watching whatever was under the leathery skin squirming around. I've read Lutz's notes, and she said the sound it made as it moved was like a field mouse scurrying under a dry cornhusk. Finally, Dunne made the decision to do an autopsy.”

“Wouldn't that have been against the antiquity laws?” Sean injected.

“What did Dunne care if it was? He had a discovery unlike any other. Knowing him as I do, I'm sure all he saw was the glory, the law be damned!”

“So they cut it open,” Sean said, disgusted.

“Aye, and discovered something even more bizarre. The creature's blood was as black as tar. And, although the body was perfectly preserved on the outside, the inside was something else again. All the internal organs were shriveled and dried up.”

“How could they know the blood was black, then?”

“Lad,” O'Shea said with exasperation, “stop interrupting and let me finish! Just take my word for it that the blood was black as a moonless night and let it go at that, will ya?”

Sean bit his tongue. Though he had hundreds of questions, he realized he had to bide his time. He nodded his agreement and forced himself to sit back and relax.

“Good lad,” O'Shea mumbled. “So they did the Y incision, but when they folded back the skin on the creature's chest, Dunne and Bryan nearly went through the roof. What they found was an eel-like abomination with green flesh covered in hard scales. It was about a foot in length, and the tip of its tail was forked and covered with sharp spines. The thing had red eyes, elliptical in shape like a viper's, and fangs that dripped a noxious, highly acidic fluid, which burned a hole through the wooden examination table. They could not believe anything like that could exist inside another living creature without destroying it.” O'Shea watched his son's face. “All right—ask.”

“How did it get inside the creature?”

“Well, now, that's the question they've been trying to answer since that day. No one knows how it got there. They know it's a form of parasite that feeds off the blood in the kidneys of the host body. They also know it can go into an extended state of hibernation.” O'Shea shuddered and looked at his hands. “And that it wasn't alone in the creature's body.”

Sean drew in a harsh breath. “There were more?”

“The thing they pulled out of the creature was the ‘queen’ of a whole nest, or what Dunne called ‘a hive,’ for there were dozens of the worm-like things in a honeycombed sac attached to one of the creature's kidneys. Most of them were no larger than your little fingernail.”

“W...were they dead?”

O'Shea looked him in the eye. “Five of those malevolent little beasties were still squirming. Dunne harvested them and put them in a jar with a piece of the creature's kidney. The trouble was, it wasn't the meat the parasites needed.”

“The organs were dried up,” Sean said with a frown. “That means they were feeding on what—the queen?”

“As I said—a very intuitive young man,” O'Shea stated, obviously pleased. “Two of the worms died before Dunne realized what you just did. Once he did, he sliced his finger, dropped some of his blood into the containers, and the parasites perked right up like a Fleet Street hooker with a new tattoo on her tit.” He chuckled. “You understand my meaning.”

Sean grinned at the analogy. “I do.”

O'Shea's face turned somber. He shifted in his chair to get more comfortable. “Dunne and his assistants began experimenting with the parasites. They put a laboratory mouse into a beaker with one of the things, but the mouse wouldn't go near it, and it wouldn't go near the mouse. Next they sacrificed one of the parasites, shoving it down a mouse's throat. Nothing happened, so they realized the mouse's stomach acid did the thing in. Next, they killed one of the mice, gutted it, and put it in a beaker. This time, the thing swarmed over the mouse and began to feed on the rodent's blood.”

“Where was the mother creature, the queen?”

“Placed in a beaker of its own. Dunne drew blood from each of his team members and began feeding it. When new workers are hired on at Fuilghaoth, it is the next thing they want to see after the creature itself. If seeing the Reaper ain't enough to put the fear of God in you, seeing that creature coiled up in the vat, glaring back at you, sure as hell is!”

“It's still alive?” Sean gasped.

“As alive as you and me, lad.”

Sean ran a hand through his thick hair. “Did he name those things inside the Reaper?” he asked, his voice raspy.

“Aye. He learned the thing inside is called a ‘revenant worm’ and that it had a physic bond to its host.”

“A symbiotic relationship?”

“Precisely. You are a bright boy, you are.”

“So they needed to know what effect these things had on the creature. They began to experiment.”

“That they did, but it wasn't until Bryan had the idea to surgically implant the parasite into one of the mice that they learned what the relationship between hose and parasite was.”

“What happened to the mouse?”

“It changed,” O'Shea said, holding Sean's avid gaze.

“Into what?”

“Into a creature twice the size of the one it had been before the surgical intrusion. Twice the size, with four times the speed, and a hundred times the strength. It was able to knock over its container and scamper away before they could catch it. And not only was it faster, stronger, and bigger, it was also smarter. Sometime during the night, it managed to release the other lab mice. The next morning, they were nowhere to be seen.”

“Oh, my God...”

“Dunne knew he'd happened on something more important than just the discovery of that beast. And he wondered what putting one of those parasites inside a human would do. At that moment, hell opened on Earth—Fuilghaoth was born.”

“He experimented on humans?”

O'Shea shrugged. “Not at first, mind you. For a year or two, he and a team of like-minded scientists he'd gathered from all over the world experimented with animals. By then, Dunne had bought land and built the compound near Derry Bryne. You won't find that town on any map of Ireland, I'll tell you right now, but it's there and right smack in the middle is the Fuilghaoth compound.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do you know what that means in Gaelic, lad? Fuilghaoth?”

Sean shook his head.

“It is Gaelic for ‘blood wind.'” He looked at his watch and frowned. “That's enough for one sitting. I've given you more than enough to think about.” He stood. “I'll come back tomorrow and we'll talk more. There's a whole lot you need to know.”

Sean stood also. Although he wanted to plead with the man to stay, to go on with the tale, he instinctively knew it would do no good. Brian O'Shea would tell his tale in his own time and in his own manner. “Thank you for coming to see me,” he said, putting out his hand. “What you've told me is incredible.”

“Lad,” O'Shea sighed, taking Sean's hand, “you've only been shown the tip of an iceberg deadlier than the one what sunk the Titanic. When you hear the whole of it, you may curse the day you met me.”

She had seen him now for three nights in a row.

Like a will-'o-the-wisp, he had suddenly appeared just after moonrise on Sunday, on the brow of the hill where the cromlechs stood sentinel to the Goddess Aine. His arms akimbo, his legs apart, he stared at her. With his face blurred by distance and the milky mist floating in from the bogs, she wished—not for the first time—that she had a telescope. In her heart, she gave him a name, though her brain told her he could not be the one she so longed to see.

This man's build was not the same as her lover's. This sentinel, as she thought of him, was taller, heavier in stature, with long dark hair that cascaded over his shoulders and fell to the middle of his back. He seemed powerful, even dangerous, and he moved with a stride that seemed to shake the earth.

She lifted her hand to the window, pressing her palm to the glass and—as he had done on the two nights previously—he lifted his hand, too. She could almost feel the warmth of his hand against hers.

“Who are you?” She smiled sadly when he cocked his head to one side as though he were trying to understand her words.

A sound in the hallway made her turn to look at the door. When she glanced back around, he was no longer on the hill, seeming to have vanished in the fog.

Bronwyn sighed deeply and rested her forehead on the cool glass. Her fingers arched against the glass in a hopeless gesture. Her breath caught on a wretched sob. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she sank to the floor, her cheek scraping along the rough stonewall.

“Sean,” she whimpered, wrapping her arms around her. “Oh, Sean, I miss you so!”

From the distance, the howl came, reverberating through the fieldstone walls. It was a lonely sound, a pitiful cry, and it brought her head up. She looked out the window, not surprised to see him on the hill once more. He seemed to be reaching out to her and she drew in a shocked breath.

“Sean?” she asked, coming to her feet. She slapped at the locked window. “Sean!”

He threw back his head and bellowed. A shiver of surprise and expectation ran through her. She grabbed the handle, knowing she could not open the portal, but trying anyway. She pulled on the offending metal, straining to break it, to pull it free of its housing.

“Sean!” she cried and watched as the sentinel started down the hill.

Her heart raced faster with every foot of ground he covered in his mad dash to her. She pounded at the tempered glass with her fist. He was only a hundred feet away, loping pell-mell toward her with his arms pumping like pistons, his feet digging into the earth. She saw his eyes—silver-hued in the moonlight.

“Sean?” she questioned, knowing,now, it was not her beloved she had conjured.

One moment he was a few yards away, the next he sprung from the ground in an aerial leap no human could have made. He cleared the fourteen-foot high walls of Galrath Convent and sprinted toward the tower in which the good sisters had imprisoned her.

Terrified, Bronwyn ran, shrieking as she lurched for the door. Behind her, something hit the wall. The entire room shook. She spun around and saw him clinging to the outside wall, three stories high, his face pressed against the glass. She screamed—a blood-curdling sound that outwardly startled the sentinel.

Afraid to turn her back lest he break through the glass and come after her, she stared at him. He cocked his head to one side, while his silver eyes became wet with cinereous tears. The heartbreaking sound of his low groan was so pitiful, so grievously wounding, she put her hands over her ears.

“Go away! Leave me alone!”

The sentinel whimpered. He clawed gently at the window, long talons dragging down the glass.

Then she heard her name on his thick black lips—"Bronnie.”

With a gasp, she sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, eyes wide, as she snapped her head toward the window.

A dream. Nothing more than a dream!

Throwing back the cover, she rushed to the window. She flung back the curtains and stared out from her tower room into the murky mist that crept in from the sea and spiraled over the crest of the hill. There was no cromlech to Aine. No sentinel standing watch. Only the low banners of fog dancing over the ground and the moonlight pulsing through the cloud cover.

For a long while she stood, staring, trying to conjure the shape of a man on the brow of Sleivemartin, a foothill of the Mourne Mountains. She waited—hoping, longing, needing, but receiving nothing save the ache that destroyed another small part of her lonely heart.

She went back to bed and curled into a fetal position, her hands thrust between her thighs. She shivered with the cold seeping in through the old fieldstone walls, but made no move to lift the coverlet over her.

It was, she thought, the wild tales other girls told after supper that had caused the dream. The girl from London had brought up the legend of the Bugul Noz.

“He is so hideously ugly, so repulsive, that even animals fear his appearance,” Sheila had said in a wide-eyed stage whisper. “He lives in the Brittany woodlands, deep underground, and only comes out when the fog is so thick no one can see his loathsome face. He hates the way he looks and is said to be the last of his race. But...” She lowered her voice. “Because he is so lonely, so desperately in need of human companionship, he will offer you anything, do whatever you ask of him, in exchange for your company and compassion.”