The Changeling (5 page)

‘Come with me.’ The freezing fingers tightened. ‘You have to come with me.’

Aoife opened her eyes. The ghost child was kneeling over her, staring down at her. Aoife screamed, but no noise came. She tried to free herself, but couldn’t move.

‘Come with me,’ said the little girl.

With a desperate effort, Aoife heaved herself sideways, frantically trying to shake herself free. The child came scrambling with her across the bed, beseeching: ‘Come with me! Come with me!’

She got her hand to the bedside light; the moment it flashed on, the child sprang from the bed, raced across the floor and scrambled out of the window into the starless night. Aoife lay in a tangle of sheets, sweating, shivering, her heart hammering.

A terrifying dream.

The window had come loose from its catch and was creaking in the night breeze. As soon as she had her courage back, she got out of bed. Rain was blowing in, wetting the curtains. When she reached out into the dark to pull the window shut, cold fingers caught at hers.

She pushed them away with a cry. Wet leaves swept around in the rainy wind. The ash tree outside her window sighed and the rain rattled heavily on the slates above her. No moon, nor stars. The black garden stretched to the black wall. Beyond were invisible fields. The sudden downpour had released the sweet scent of hawthorn from all around, and the smell of it made her feel dizzy, like she’d been spinning in circles and suddenly stopped.

CHAPTER THREE

Aoife studied her father out of the corner of her eye, from under her lashes. He didn’t often come with her and her mother to Sunday Mass, but today he had seemed to feel the need for God. He was even listening to the sermon, his dark brown eyes fixed on the priest.

When she’d found her father’s picture in the locket, it was the first time she’d ever seen him with black hair – as far back as she could remember, his hair had been a thick silvery grey. Nor had she ever seen him cry – until yesterday, in the kitchen, with her mother’s arms around him. By this morning, he seemed to have recovered from whatever dark upsetting memory the locket had brought back to him. As the priest droned on, he caught Aoife’s eye and smiled. She smiled back.

Father Leahy blew his nose, and turned a page. ‘There is no other,’ he carried on in his flat, snuffly voice. ‘There is no God but Me.’

A subversive lyric drifted into Aoife’s head:

Your God says he’s the holy one,

But you know he’s not the only one . . .

Yes, she liked that. She needed to remember that and put it in a song.

I think he’s just the lonely one . . .

The words were still running through her head when she went up to take communion, and as Father Leahy placed the wafer on her tongue, she found herself raising her eyes to his gaze.
Maybe he’s the phoney one
 . . . The priest’s eyes widened; he snatched his fingers away as if he thought she was about to bite, and quickly sketched the sign of a cross.

Instead of returning to her pew for the rest of the Mass, Aoife carried on past it up the aisle and straight out of the church into the fresh air. She felt shaken – had Father Leahy really flinched from her, as if she had bared her teeth at him like a dog?
You know he’s not the only one
 . . . The persistent lyric was beginning to annoy her; it had set itself to a chirpy tune.

To block it out, she turned on her phone, and texted Carla:

U dead yet?

Carla had woken up that morning with a cold, presumably from getting soaked in the hawthorn pool the day before. But she must have gone back to sleep, because she failed to text Aoife back.

Restless and still troubled by the priest’s reaction, Aoife wandered the gravelled paths between the graves. The sun was warm on her head, and there was a scent of mown grass. An old man in a black jacket was tidying away dead flowers – John McCarthy, whose nephew owned the small supermarket. The old man was a heavy drinker and steadily losing his mind; he had taken to telling everyone that his nephew’s wife was a witch, although that didn’t stop him going there for his Sunday dinner. Aoife read the gravestones as she walked. Familiar Kilduff names: Heffernans and Burkes, Fergusons and Dohertys. A rake of O’Connors – her father’s family, the remains of which were spread thin around the world in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong. She realized suddenly that she was reading the stones because she was looking for the grave of a little girl, one who might have drowned out on the bog. She stopped looking. Then carried on.

Instead of a little girl, she found:

HERE LIES MOIRA FOLEY,
BELOVED WIFE OF EAMONN FOLEY,
BELOVED MOTHER OF JOHN JOE AND SEAMUS FOLEY.

Shay’s mother, laid to rest eleven years before, around the time Aoife’s family had moved home to Kilduff. Under his name, another inscription:

HERE LIES EAMONN FOLEY,
BELOVED FATHER OF JOHN JOE AND SEAMUS FOLEY.

Poor Shay, losing his mother and then his father in the same year.

‘That’s not Moira Foley in there.’

Aoife nearly jumped out of her skin.

John McCarthy was reading the gravestone over her shoulder, arms folded and elbows sharp in his old black jacket. ‘People say she was after jumping off that cliff, but they’re wrong.’

She got her breath back under control. ‘She killed herself? But that’s so sad!’ No wonder Shay was so quiet at school, never talking to anyone, keeping his own company.

‘Do you not listen? I said, that’s what they
say
. But she never did. If she had, the sea would have given her body up in the end.’

Surprised, she looked back at the gravestone. ‘But it says she’s buried here.’

‘Fool’s talk. ’Tis a log of driftwood. They fairies do love to play tricks on human fools with logs of wood.’

‘Oh, I see.’ People were trickling out of the church. ‘I think my parents are coming now . . .’

John McCarthy caught the sleeve of her hoodie in thin urgent fingers. ‘A fairy, that’s what she was. A lenanshee. A fairy lover. Eamonn knew it about her, God rest his tormented soul. He told everyone who would listen, even as he was painting and painting her portrait over and over again. “My wife’s a lenanshee,” he would say. “I’m not long for this world, and as for her, she was never of it.”’

His hand seemed so thin and brittle, Aoife didn’t like to shake it off. ‘I didn’t know Shay’s father was an artist . . .?’

‘But he wasn’t. A farmer was what God meant him to be – it was she who made an artist out of him, and it killed him. Your lenanshee is one dangerous fairy. She steals your heart and burns you up. Beware of the
leannán sídhe
, Aoife O’Connor. Stay away from the lover from the otherworld.’ He tightened his fragile grip on her arm. ‘Do you know what it is to have a
grá
?’

Aoife said faintly, ‘To want something really badly?’

‘Badly. Yes. Very badly. A
grá
is no ordinary, comfortable, fireside sort of a love. It is a mad love, a wild love, a hunger, a longing, a terrible insatiable desire that cannot be turned aside. If a lenanshee ever takes a
grá
for you, Aoife O’Connor, your life will be as short as a candle in the wind. My own nephew is married to a lenanshee, and look at the state of him – he can’t work in the shop, he’ll barely eat or drink, he’s an old man at thirty, and all he does is write poetry.
Poetry
.’ John McCarthy made a noise of disgust, whistling through his yellow teeth. ‘What good is poetry to a man? It feeds no one. It burns you up. You know what a lenanshee even is?’

‘Don’t they cry outside people’s houses when someone is about to die?’

‘You don’t know much, do ye?’ His eyes were bulging blue marbles in his lined brown face. ‘That one’s not a
leannán sídhe
, them’s a
bean sídhe
. A banshee. A woman of the fairy hills. She steals human babies to sell to the devil, and leaves fairy babies in their place. You can always tell a fairy baby. Bright red hair and evil in its heart. No souls, see, which is why they’re no good to the devil. My grandchildren – every one of them is from the otherworld.’

‘There’s my mam and dad now – I have to go.’ Relieved to have an excuse to get away, Aoife ran to join them. Sinead’s mother was talking to Maeve; Sinead shot Aoife a most un-Christian glare. Aoife changed direction sharply, and went to her father’s green Citroën.

When her parents got into the front of the car, Maeve said rather stiffly over her shoulder, ‘Mary says you made everyone late for the film by saying you saw a little figure running across the bog, but no one else saw anything and it turned out to be nothing.’

Aoife winced. ‘I was going to tell you about that. Sorry.’

‘Mm. It would have been handy to know in advance. I felt a bit ambushed.’

‘Sorry again.’

James kept glancing at Aoife in the rear-view mirror as he pulled out of the square. ‘So what was it you saw, do you think?’

Aoife sighed and leaned her head against the window. ‘Nothing. A lamb, maybe. Can we stop talking about it? People kept making stupid jokes about leprechauns. It was awful embarrassing.’

Early afternoon, Carla began bombarding her with texts about being so bored she could die. Apparently Killian had texted Carla twice
but her mam wouldn’t let her have visitors
.

Aoife texted back:

Be there in 20 mins

Halfway up the long narrow lane, she realized that it was happening again. She was going ridiculously fast – dangerously fast; if she met a car coming in the opposite direction, something horrible was going to happen, she was going to end up smeared across someone’s windscreen . . . Yet while her mind was having these alarming thoughts, her physical body was being flooded by utter joy –
Don’t worry about death, this is how it feels to alive!
Bending over the handlebars, torn between fear and ecstasy, she flew recklessly on. She made the skidding ninety-degree turn towards Kilduff without even looking to see if anything was coming the other way. The white lines down the centre of the road strobed past . . . The garage, the unfinished estate . . . A terrible squealing filled the air, ringing in her ears – the sound of metal screeching along the tarmac. She came to her senses, coasted the bike to a halt and got off to have a look. Disaster. Both tyres destroyed.

Panting, Aoife carried the bike across to the estate side of the road and laid it on its side on the grass verge, crouching down to get a better look. The thick rubber had worn right through and the inner tubes were shredded. What on earth had happened? She’d bought new tyres from the garage shop only a year ago, and they’d cost her thirty euros. Had she really ridden fast enough to wear them out? She checked the timer on her phone. Just over a minute since she’d left the house. No. One minute, to bicycle nearly two and a half kilometres? No. Impossible.
Insane.
She was imagining things, just like she’d imagined the child in the bog. Early Alzheimer’s? Paranoid delusions? The last of the energy drained out of her, and she suddenly felt a bit ill. She sat down on the grass. Then lay down, flat on her back.

Seconds later, her phone vibrated, and she worked it out of her trackies pocket and held it up, shielding her eyes from the sun.

U left? mam says not even you
thinks I have foot and mouth