The New Policeman (9 page)

J.J. sat down on a stool. Jimmy could wait. Anne’s words were creating an urgent tide in his blood. This mattered.

“Why? Where is it going?”

Anne seemed to be speaking as much to herself as to him. “A determined and talented young man. Perhaps that’s what we need.”

“I meant what I said, you know,” said J.J. “I don’t care what it takes. If I can buy time for my mum, I’ll do it.”

“I can see that you’re determined,” said Anne. “But I wonder if you’re brave enough?”

“Brave enough? Why? What will I have to do?”

“You’ll have to find out what the inside of a
souterrain looks like, for a start,” said Anne. “If you have what it takes to go through, the rest of it might not be too bad.”

“Go through where?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” said Anne. “If you’re really sure you want to do this, I’ll take you there. But after that you’re on your own.”

THE LAD THAT CAN DO IT

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The souterrain was a much greater test of J.J.’s courage than he had expected. The only way into it was to drop down into a hole in the ground, then lie down on your stomach and wriggle through a short tunnel. But once that was behind him J.J. didn’t find it too bad. They had emerged into a long, narrow room with a muddy floor and an arched stone ceiling.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Anne Korff, holding her candle up high so that J.J. could get a good look at the place.

“Yes,” he said, and meant it.

“There used to be thousands of these all over Ireland,” said Anne. “Very few are left now.”

“What happened to them?”

“I suppose most of them are still there, somewhere. But people blocked them up.”

“Why?”

“Well, I suppose they could have been dangerous. Maybe cattle fell into them, or children. Or perhaps there were people who didn’t want anyone going in or out to the other side.”

“You can get out the other side?” said J.J.

“That’s what I’m going to show you,” said Anne.

She led the way along the chamber and ducked through a second crawl hole in the wall at the end. J.J. followed the wavering light of her candle and found himself in a second room, slightly smaller than the first.

“Some of them have more chambers,” said Anne. “This one has only two. Some parts of the world have amazingly complicated versions of this: pyramids, catacombs, henges, and suchlike. The Irish have always had a knack for keeping things simple.”

J.J. could see no way out of the room. He began to get an inkling that “the other side” might not mean what he had assumed that it did. Anne led him into the farthest corner of the room. She indicated the angle where the two walls met.

“This is the way through,” she said.

J.J. could see nothing but solid stone walls. “Where?”

“You really believe anything is possible?” said Anne.

“I do,” said J.J. with conviction.

Anne Korff, carrying the only candle, walked through the wall and disappeared.

Suddenly alone, in impenetrable darkness, J.J. experienced a moment of gut-wrenching terror. But before he could yield to panic, Anne Korff came back, stepping out of the wall just as she had stepped into it.

“I’m going through now,” she said. “And this time I’m not coming back. Do you want to come or stay?”

“Wait!” said J.J., too alarmed and confused to decide anything. “Don’t leave me here in the dark again!”

“Come on, then,” said Anne. “Don’t think. Just walk…”

She caught hold of his sleeve. The prospect of being left alone in the darkness again was a lot more frightening than walking into a wall. As Anne stepped forward again, J.J. followed.

He had never imagined that it was possible to walk out of a place and arrive into it at the same time. But that appeared to be exactly what had happened. The room was exactly the same in every respect. The only
difference that J.J. could perceive lay not in his surroundings but in himself. The sense of urgency that had pervaded his every waking minute for as long as he could remember was suddenly gone. He had grown so accustomed to it, in fact, that he had stopped being aware of it. Its sudden absence was astounding. He felt weightless.

Anne had turned back toward the wall. “It’s a sort of membrane,” she said, stretching out a hand. It disappeared into the stones. There was no gap. Nothing opened. The stones fitted snugly around her arm. They looked solid, but they must have been as fluid as water. “It’s a perfect seal,” she went on. “We don’t break it when we come through. It molds itself around us and closes again behind us, just like water does when you get into it.”

“Through where?” said J.J. He was still trying to get to grips with the concept of walking out of one room and arriving in it. As far as he could make out, they hadn’t gone anywhere.

“Come and see.”

Anne led the way through the two chambers; to J.J. it appeared to be the same way that they had come in. But when they emerged into the daylight, the world was not the way it had been when they left it. The sky
that had been gray was blue. The fields and trees were no longer wearing their early autumn colors but were lush and green.

“I don’t understand,” said J.J.

“Welcome to Tír na n’Óg,” said Anne Korff. “The land of eternal youth.”

FAREWELL TO IRELAND

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J.J. sat on the warm, grassy bank of the ring fort, gazing up toward the sun-drenched mountains. “If it’s as easy as that to get here,” he said to Anne Korff, “why doesn’t everybody do it?”

“Not so many people go into the souterrains anymore,” said Anne. “And even when they do, it doesn’t seem to occur to them to walk through the walls.”

J.J. laughed. “I wonder why?” he said.

“People fall through occasionally,” said Anne. “That’s what happened to me. I was snooping around as usual. I dropped my flashlight and broke it. I tried to feel my way along the walls and the next thing I knew, I was here.”

“Did you tell anyone about it then?”

Anne shook her head. “It was a long time before it
was clear to me what had happened. It’s not easy to remember what happens during the time that you’re here. When you go back it can be very confusing. Don’t forget that, J.J. If you find yourself in a souterrain or anywhere else feeling very confused, don’t be afraid. The mind goes into shock, that’s all. Some of the memories usually come back later on. But by then…well, I don’t know. I never felt like telling anyone I’d been to Tír na n’Óg. The chances are they wouldn’t believe me. And what would happen if they did?”

She handed J.J. the candle and a box of matches. “You’ll need these on your way back.” She patted her jacket pocket. “I have more.”

“Aren’t you going to stay?”

“I would love to,” said Anne, “but I have far too many things to do. Be sure and call in on me when you get home.”

She walked back to the mouth of the souterrain, then turned back.

“J.J.?”

“Mmm?”

“Don’t stay too long. Don’t forget what happened to Oisín.”

J.J. knew three people called Oisín. He couldn’t see what relevance any of them had to his current situation.

“Oisín who?” he called. But Anne was already gone.

J.J. lay back in the grass. His watch said five thirty, but it was later than that here, judging by the position of the sun in the sky; closer to seven, he guessed. He would be late for dinner if he hung around too long, but for some reason he didn’t feel remotely worried about it. He was on a mission, after all. Buying time was much more important in the long run. But he found that, hard as he tried, he couldn’t work up any sense of urgency about that, either. In a nearby blackthorn bush a linnet was singing its heart out. J.J. couldn’t understand how he had ever been so tyrannized by time. What had it all been about, all that racing around and getting nowhere? Even the thought of it made him feel exhausted. He yawned, sedated by the rasping of the crickets and the whistling of the birds. The sounds swelled to fill his head, then gradually faded out.

THE BIRD IN THE BUSH

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J.J. woke with a start. It felt to him as though he had slept for hours, but when he looked at his watch barely five minutes had passed. He’d only had forty winks.

He stretched out luxuriantly, a thing he hadn’t done for years, and turned over onto his side to have another little snooze. He didn’t need it, though. He was rested enough, and he was ready to get on with the business in hand. The sky was still blindingly bright, and he was looking forward to having a stroll around. There was never weather like this at home. Or perhaps there was, but everyone was too stressed out to enjoy it. A bit of sunshine; another commodity to be exploited—to make hay, or to get the house painted or to grab a quick swim on the way back from the supermarket.

He took off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and began to walk toward the village. Now that he was on the move, he discovered that this world was not nearly as similar to his own as he had first thought. There were fewer houses here, for one thing, and those there were didn’t really look like houses at all. They had an irregular, organic appearance, as though they had been hewn out of chunks of rock, or been pushed up from beneath the ground by some gentle movement of the earth’s crust. No people anywhere, not yet, though all the houses he passed had open doors and one had a small ginger cat sitting on its doorstep. There were, however, some rather strange bits of evidence that people did exist.

Socks.

When he passed the first one hanging from the hedgerow, J.J. paid it no attention. He’d often seen bits of clothing tangled up in hedges at home; it wasn’t that unusual. But when he walked around a bend and found three more lying in the deep grass of the verge, and yet another one dangling from a branch a few meters farther on, he began to wonder about it.

There were more trees and bushes here, and more birds in them. There were fields, but their boundaries were ragged; their walls fallen down and their hedges
full of gaps. The few cattle and horses he saw were fat and sleek, and wandered, as far as he could tell, wherever they pleased. Apart from them there was no sign of any kind of agriculture. There were no tractors, no black bales, no people out managing the land.

Where was everybody? And what kind of people lived in Tír na n’Óg anyway? Fairies? Leprechauns? Gods? He experienced a little shiver of apprehension, but it didn’t swell into fear. The sun was too warm and bright, and besides, there were the socks. He was coming across them every hundred meters or so. One here, two or three there. There were tiny baby socks with cartoon characters or teddy bears on them; there were children’s socks and adult socks, argyle socks and tartan socks and spotted socks, woollen socks and cotton socks and nylon socks. There were socks of every color and texture under the sun, and not a pair among them. Whoever they belonged to, J.J. decided, could not be too frightening.