The Devil I Know (21 page)

The man – if he was a man – was fastened to my side, his limp now a thing of the past. The faster I ran, the faster he ran with me, the two of us belting neck and neck, a race to the bottom, until I realised that I wasn’t running at all, that I was being carried, swept along, coupled to his locomotive, our limbs pistoning in sync. I screamed in the wind, screamed my head off. But he screamed louder:

‘
Deh
-not-
doh
,
deh
-not-
doh
,
deh
-not-
doh.
’

The chant accelerated as we gathered velocity. We swerved around the sharp bend in the avenue, our shoulders skimming the row of tree trunks that Father had slathered in white paint as a preventative measure against traffic collisions, and this detail struck me as unspeakably piteous. White paint, God above. We were so hopelessly ill equipped, so tragically unprepared, for the calamity that lay in store for us. Then the lights of the castle appeared through the trees. I flung out both arms to steer myself towards their safety, a drowning man flailing for the shore, but to no avail. It wasn’t up to me any more. I was just a passenger. We were going to shoot right past it. Larney was taking me down to the gate lodge, down to his lair.

But no. He clapped on the anchors when the avenue of whitewashed trees opened out into the courtyard. The staccato
deh-
not
-doh
expanded into a sentence, a life sentence, you might call it: ‘It’s not
doh
-ville, you duh head,’ he said in scorn before jettisoning his load, sending me vaulting headlong across the pebbles. ‘It’s not
doh
-ville, you duh head, it’s
deh
-ville.’

What?

I just thought the question. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe.

‘It’s not
doh
-ville,’ he repeated wearily to his feeble-minded ward. He now stood directly in front of me for he could spring from one coordinate to the next like a flea. ‘It’s
deh
-ville.
Deh-
ville, not
doh
-ville, yes?’ He sighed in exasperation at my benightedness when I failed to respond. ‘Do I really need to spell it out to you?’

And then he did. He really spelled it out to me.

‘Dee. Eee. Vee. Eye. El.’

The castle was droning, the lights were shining, the heavens were spinning, and the hells. I shook my head.
The Devil is my sponsor?
Again, I did not succeed in saying this. My participation in the diabolical lesson was wholly silent.

Larney clapped his black hands together. ‘The penny drops.’

I crawled away across the gravel, down on all fours by then. He alighted in front of me once more. Hooves. I scrambled in the other direction. Hooves. No matter which way I turned: hooves. I looked at the hooves, and then up at his glowing eyes. He now towered sixty feet high.

You said your name was Deauville
.

‘Don’t give me that. You heard what you wanted to hear. And look at the state of you now.’

He executed a courtly bow and I bolted past him up the terrace steps. Mrs Reid and her rosary beads were inside. When I made it to the threshold, in disbelief that this had been permitted, that I was being allowed to go home, M. Deauville – now half the size of a man – trotted forward and performed a goatish dance.
Tocka tocka, tocka tocka
. ‘And you know what time it is now, young master?’ he asked when the dance was complete. ‘It is time to give the Devil his due.’

‘Mr St Lawrence, during this period, would you describe your mental state as delusional?’

Oh absolutely, Fergus. No doubt about it. Show me an Irishman who wasn’t delusional during the boom. And by that same token, show me an Irishman who still is.

Priests must have been smaller in the sixteenth century. That is all that I can say. They seem so portly and plodding now, lumbering from one familiar haunt to the next in search of a little human contact, the battle having been lost and won, but they must have been smaller in the bad old days when holy war still raged. I took myself under the castle, along the winding subterranean passages to the priest hole. The last place anyone would look for a priest was in the bowels of a Protestant fortress.

The first time I had been down there – the only time I had been down there – was as a boy of nine or ten accidentally coming upon it; beneath a dresser, through a trapdoor, down some steps, then down some more steps, along a passage, around a corner, up a spur that split from the main passage, and behind a wooden panel. A boy of nine or ten could slip into the priest hole, but it barely accommodated a fully grown man. I could not stand up – the ceiling was no more than five feet high. So I sat. I slid the wooden panel shut and sat in the crumbling matter that had accumulated over the centuries on the cold stone floor. Desiccated mouse droppings and insect legs; woodlouse shells and the bristles of rats. That was my best guess, anyway. That’s how I pictured my den. I had no idea what I was sitting in – I couldn’t see a thing and it had no smell, not any more, other than the smell of damp stone. I clasped my knees and buried my face and I hid, Fergus, I hid.

I hid actively. It demanded intense concentration to sit tight. I actively willed myself into invisibility, erecting a force field with my mind, because the moment I stopped effacing my particles was the moment I would be found. By him. Deauville. He was on the prowl. Priests in the sixteenth century were small hunted men doing the job of a Hercules. No wonder the other team won.

There was no lighting since the sub-cellar level of the castle – including the dungeon that Hickey had so desperately wanted to see, the dungeon that all the kids had so desperately wanted to see – is not wired for power. There was no running water either unless you counted the dripping wall. The priest hole was excavated into the bedrock. What would happen, I caught myself idly wondering at one point, in the event of torrential rain? I slammed the door shut on that prospect and resumed my active hiding again. And no mobile-phone signal, it goes without saying, not through all that stone, but although I switched the phone off, it kept fizzling away. So I removed the battery. No joy. Eventually I smashed the device into smithereens and scattered the shards amongst the rest of the detritus on the floor of the hole, which was not a hole, strictly speaking. It just felt like one.

The phone contrived to somehow continue sizzling, and it quite possibly sizzles still, and may sizzle for all eternity. Frankly, that wouldn’t surprise me, but frankly, nothing could. The fraud squad swept its remnants into a bag as evidence in the ongoing effort to trace M. Deauville. Best of luck with that, lads. For the record: I do not want the phone returned when your investigation comes to an end, which I believe won’t be long off now.

I lasted, they tell me, three days in the priest hole. This I find hard to believe. Harder to believe than the literally unbelievable things which I know to be true. As far as I was concerned, I was banged up in there a fortnight, licking the dripping wall for sustenance. I heard Deauville’s footsteps from time to time.
Tocka tocka
,
tocka tocka
. I can tell you a thing or two about mortal fear. My blood pounded so thickly it felt like muscle, a mass of muscle lodged in my neck pumping like a heart.
Doom, doom
, it went. I didn’t move an inch. There wasn’t an inch in which to move. The priest hole had no back door, no escape hatch. It was a very good place to do away with a priest. Maybe the crumbling matter on the floor was priest – another thought to slam the door on. I huddled there with my jaw locked open in panic, waiting for a
knock knock knock
on the wooden panel.

Who is the corpse in the coffin, young master?

Sweet Jesus, it’s me.

For an extended portion of my confinement – and each portion was an extended one, and each one was confined – I grew convinced that Deauville was in that cell with me, as indeed he possibly was. When I moved, he moved fluidly around me to ensure we never collided. Sometimes I swiped the air to catch him out, but there is no catching the Devil out. And for one dire passage of time, one truly diabolical interlude, I became convinced that I was not under the castle hiding from Deauville, but already in Hell, and that this was it for eternity. Imagine. A stone cell too dark to see in, too small to stand in, too cold to sleep in, and not another soul to speak to ever again. The fear almost paralysed me. The recollection of it still does.
Doom, doom
. Hell.

This is where the crucifix came in. There was a crucifix nailed to the wall. It seemed when my hands first discovered it that the sheer force of my terror had caused it to materialise. I channelled many feverish thoughts into this crucifix during that period, thoughts I would never have suspected a rational mind like mine capable of producing. I have since seen the cross in the cold light of day. I requested it from my hospital bed, but when the garda took it out of the bag, I told him that he had brought the wrong one.

It was made of wood all right, a grainy greyish oak, but the face of Jesus didn’t hold a candle to the one I had seen in the dark. That face had even fleetingly alchemised into that of my mother and we were together again. The face on the cross that the garda produced was rudimentary, and yet when I closed my eyes and ran my fingertips over the notches, the sweet countenance appeared once more. It just goes to show. What precisely it goes to show – what precisely the whole sorry mess goes to show – I cannot yet say, none of us can yet say, other than that it demonstrates the power of two interrelated and potentially disastrous variables regarding the impossibility of certitude on the one hand and the infinite pliability of the human imagination on the other. One can never truly know where one stands, and yet one can be adamant about that position.

I put the crucifix into the drawer of the nightstand and pushed it shut. The garda looked disappointed. I should perhaps have given the relic its day in the sun after centuries spent nailed to an underground wall, but I was done with all that Higher Power stuff. A piece of wood wasn’t going to save me.

I woke one . . . I was going to say one morning, but there was no telling whether it was day or night in the priest hole. I thought my eyes would acclimatise, but there was nothing to acclimatise to. I couldn’t see my own hand. It is terrifying to wake in true darkness. I woke because something had crashed to the ground out in the passage. This was followed by a curse, a big mucker curse – Ah fer Jaysus’ sake – and then a second object clattered to the stones, betraying a level of incompetence and general clumsiness uncharacteristic of M. Deauville. Evil incarnate did not accidentally knock things over. Evil incarnate was deft.

I jumped to my feet and got a hammer blow to the crown of my head from the low ceiling. I managed to slide the wooden panel across before slumping through it and passing out.

I came around to a blaze of light. The garda flicked the torch beam at the mouth of the priest hole to establish that it was empty before speaking into his lapel. ‘Lads,’ he began in a high-pitched voice, then cleared his throat and started again, an octave lower: ‘Lads, I think I have him.’

The torch returned to my face. ‘How are you getting on there, sir?’

All authoritative now, doing his best to sound professional because he was just a big schoolboy underneath the uniform, jubilant at being the one to have found the fugitive. They’re all big children, essentially, the Gardaí, and although that may sound like a criticism, I intend it as praise of the highest order. It is the greatest compliment I can pay my fellow man. The ones who were never childlike are the ones you have to watch out for. The ones who have mastered their emotional impulses. The ones who are cold.
Strip the place of valuables while you still have a chance
. The garda’s face lit up at having found me and it was a heartening thing to see, and then it was a disheartening thing, because I realised that my own life was to be empty of such innocent triumphs, empty of clear-cut achievements, empty in general. No
I found him!
moments for me, because I never found things, I only lost them. Anyway. Back to the question.

‘How are you getting on there, sir?’

Stunned, was the answer. Too stunned to recognise that I was stunned. I was lying on my side unable to raise my head from the stone floor. Grand, Garda, I tried to respond, but nothing came out, so I blinked up in friendship at him, wagging my tail like one of the setters to say, Boy am I glad to see you! Or at least I lay there thinking that I was wagging my tail because I was seriously confused by the wallop to the skull. But that is by the by. Now that this whole protracted palaver is coming to an end, I find that I can’t keep from blurting random incidental stuff, like the bore at the cocktail party who, sensing that he is losing you, takes a firm hold of your sleeve and keeps talking, only faster.

‘Are you Tristram St Lawrence?’ the garda enquired for the record.

I wagged up an affirmative.

‘Aidan,’ he said into his lapel, ‘we’re going to need an ambulance.’

He helped sit me up against the wall – ‘Jesus, your hands are freezing’ – and unbuttoned his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. It is the moments of kindness that stand out. Perhaps because there have been so few of them. I am not asking for sympathy. I am not asking for anything. I am just saying that it is the moments of kindness that stand out.

The garda shone his torch into the priest hole. We both watched in fascination as the beam of light excavated its dimensions. So that’s what it looked like. A coal bunker.

‘Were you on your own down here the whole time, sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and then, ‘no.’ I lowered my head in embarrassment. ‘Actually, I’m not entirely certain.’ Tears sprang from my eyes, forming pale channels in the centuries-old grime that coated my face, as I was to discover some hours later when I met my reflection over a metal hospital sink, although it wasn’t the grime that made me recoil. The grime could be washed off.

The guard patted my shoulder. ‘Not to worry. We’ll have you out of here in no time.’ I suppose he thought I had lost my mind. And I suppose I had.

The sound of other voices reached our ears. I managed to master my tears, which was a relief to us both. The intimacy had been awkward. I have no talent for it. Neither did the guard. ‘Help is on its way,’ he repeated more than once, reassuring himself as much as me. Help was blundering down the passage, bumping into the objects the guard had already knocked to the floor, sending them scudding across the flagstones until they came to rest, whereupon Help tripped over them again. The garda winced. ‘We’re up ahead, lads,’ he bawled. ‘And would ye in the name of God take it handy! Those are priceless antiques.’

Back to me. ‘Do you think you could get to your feet?’

I nodded.

The garda hooked my arm over his shoulder and raised me up, but the legs were dead under me so he lowered me back down. It’s frightening how quickly muscles wither. It’s frightening how quickly everything withers; your mind, your world, your life. ‘Just relax there, Mr St Lawrence. They’ll be here any second.’

‘Tristram,’ I offered, a name which inevitably sounds more formal to an Irish ear than
mister
. Castler, I should have told him. Me name is Castler, how’s the form? A saucepan lid or shield or some such thing hit the floor spinning, a shimmering metallic crescendo at which the garda apologetically shook his head. We looked into the darkness in anticipation. I was expecting a whole SWAT team to come bursting around the corner, the amount of noise they made, securing the exits, flinging me to the ground, barking at me to keep my hands where they could see them, but in the end it was just a straggle of rank-and-file officers, cobwebs snagged on the peaks of their caps.

I think you probably have the rest of the details on record from here, Fergus – the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the twists and turns. There is not much more I can add. Carted out on a stretcher, squirming at the sun, bruised, ragged and shivering, smeared in grime. I’ve been found in worse states. It used to be the order of the day. And then M. Deauville rescued me and I owed him my life. The ambulance was waiting in the courtyard. So was Mrs Reid. I heard her before I saw her. All I could see was the sky.

‘Is he alive, Guard? Oh God, tell me he’s alive!’

Her face projected above me as if peering into my pram. Her eyes shot to the top of my head and she covered her mouth with her hand. The rosary beads were still threaded through her fingers. ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus,’ she whispered.

‘What?’ I touched my head but found nothing amiss – no dent, no blood, no crack. ‘What is it, Mrs Reid? What’s wrong with my head?’

Mrs Reid lowered her eyes to look into mine. ‘Nothing, pet,’ she reassured me, and squeezed my freezing hand for emphasis. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your head. There is not a thing in the world wrong with your head, do you hear me?’ Then she started to cry.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Reid.’

‘I thought you were dead, love.’

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

She looked up at the garda through her tears. ‘He’s not a bad boy,’ she petitioned him, still clutching my hand. ‘He’s not a bad boy. He’s just . . . well, look at him, Guard. Sure you can see yourself. He’s very troubled.’

Some hours later, I met my reflection in a mirror over a metal hospital sink. It wasn’t the sight of my chimney-sweep face that made me recoil. It was my hair. It had turned white, and not a gleaming helmet of silver like Father’s, but chalky white. Just like that, in a matter of days. Look at me. I’m an old man. All washed up. Barely forty.