The New Policeman (18 page)

J.J. sighed. His nerves were finally beginning to settle. “So you didn’t find anything around here?” he said.

“No,” said Aengus. “Not a thing.” J.J. looked around. The woods still frightened him. He was looking forward to getting out of there, but Aengus had closed his eyes and seemed to be having a doze.

“Lesson number five,” said J.J. “Have great difficulty in sleeping.”

“I’m not sleeping,” said Aengus. “We don’t do that here.”

“You don’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“We usedn’t to have a ‘never,’” said Aengus. “Or an ‘ever.’ No night, either.” He sat up and looked at the sky. “But I’ve an awful feeling there’s one on the way. What does your watch say?”

J.J. looked at it. “Twenty to seven.”

“And what did it say when you arrived?”

“About five thirty.”

“Damn,” said Aengus, standing up again. “It’s getting faster, J.J. It’s really getting a grip now.”

He picked up the fiddle and began to make his way through the woods, not in the direction of the road, but the other way, toward the top end of the Liddy farmland. J.J. followed him. “How can you tell it’s getting faster?” he asked him.

Aengus spoke over his shoulder. “When it first started, we barely noticed it. We had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, but it was so slow there was no way of observing it. Then people began to say that the sun had moved. No one believed them, of course. It couldn’t happen. But it was happening. We began to notice shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows. Just tiny ones at first, little slivers at the sides of the streets, but they got wider and wider until no one could deny that it was happening anymore. Since then it’s been speeding up.”

“It’s pretty slow compared to my world,” said J.J.

“It’s still way too fast, though. One of the problems is that we don’t know exactly when it started because it was so slow to begin with. If we knew when
it all began, in terms of your years, I mean, that might give us a clue as to what’s causing it.”

“How come?” said J.J.

The moss-covered rocks were slippery underfoot, and the undergrowth was getting thicker. Aengus was struggling to push through hazel and brambles and ash saplings.

“You know the kind of thing,” he said. “Earthquakes, hurricanes, nuclear explosions. Always a possibility that something like that could damage the time skin. We’ve checked out all the obvious ones, but there might have been something we missed.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with global warming? We’ve had big changes in the weather lately,” said J.J.

“We’re not talking about lately, though,” said Aengus. “This started long before your time.”

“What?”

“The best estimate we can make is somewhere between fifty and a hundred years.”

J.J. was having to struggle to keep up with Aengus who, judging by the speed and urgency of his progress through the dense wood, had finally grasped the essentials of worrying.

“Are you telling me that in the time it has taken your sun to move from there”—he pointed—“to
there, a hundred years has passed in my world?”

“No,” said Aengus. “It might have only been fifty.”

The information disturbed J.J. The uneasy feeling that had been nudging at him since he arrived was expanding into something like fear. He still couldn’t put his finger on it, though. He knew that some vital piece of knowledge was lodged in his memory, but, like “Dowd’s Number Nine,” it just wouldn’t come to him.

“Where are we going now?” he asked.

They were, finally, coming to the edge of the woods. Aengus pointed to his left, up the steep escarpment at the end of Eagle’s Rock. “Up there. I’ve been trying to put it off, but it has to be done. We’re going to pay a visit to my father.”

THE PÚKA

Kate Thompson

PART FOUR

1

To Sergeant Early’s annoyance, Garda O’Dwyer didn’t turn up for work at all the following week. He phoned the house where he boarded, but the landlady said she hadn’t seen him.

“He never spends much time here anyway,” she said. “I don’t know where he goes.”

Sergeant Early put the phone down. “Well, I flaming well know where he goes,” he said to Garda Treacy. “He’s off playing that blasted fiddle somewhere.”

He flung the phone book down on the desk and fixed Treacy with a manic gaze. “They’re all the same, you know. Fiddle players. They think they’re gods, but they’re not. It’s the devil’s instrument, the fiddle. My father drank himself to death for the love of it, so I should know. It’s the devil’s instrument.”

Ciaran overheard Helen talking on the phone.

“Hi, Phil? It’s Helen…. Fine, thanks, and you?”

Ciaran knew that she wasn’t fine. None of them were. All the talking they had done and all the resignation they had expressed had done nothing to alleviate the gnawing pain of J.J.’s continued absence. It had been more than two weeks now, and it wasn’t getting any better. They all detested the much-vaunted concept of “closure,” but they were all coming to accept the need for it. Anything would be better than the limbo in which the whole family was existing.

“Have you anything planned for Saturday week?”

Ciaran stood in front of Helen and mimed bewilderment. She had said nothing to him about Saturday week. The days since J.J.’s disappearance had flashed by so fast that there had barely been time for anything beyond the searching of their surroundings. And their minds. And their souls. Ciaran wasn’t even sure he knew what day it was.

“We’re having a céilí,” said Helen, looking at Ciaran, speaking to Phil. “The usual one. Second Saturday.”

“What?” said Ciaran.

“Can you and Carol put the word out?” Helen was saying. “Save us the hassle?”

“Helen!” Ciaran hissed.

“J.J. would have wanted it,” she said to both of them. “Whatever has happened to him, he’s still a Liddy.”

SERGEANT EARLY’S JIG

Trad

2

J.J. stood at the edge of the woods and looked down over the plain. Beneath the clear sky he could make out every detail that lay between the mountainside and the distant sea.

“Can I go down and take a look at my house?” he said to Aengus.

“Later,” said Aengus.

“I bet you usedn’t to have a ‘later,’” said J.J.

He was still looking down the hillside. Where the Liddy house would have been was a stand of tall trees. Their leaves were red, an unexpected fiery blaze on the gray-and-green slopes.

“What kind of trees are those?” J.J. went on, but Aengus had gone. For one of the ever-living ones he was in an unnatural hurry. He was striding across the
rough ground toward a series of jagged rock faces, a colossal set of limestone steps that J.J. always avoided climbing if he could. They were easier to scale than the sheer face of Eagle’s Rock, but not much.

Bran was lying at his feet. Her loyalty to him was touching, and he wondered where it had sprung from. He was sympathetic to her, but so was Aengus. He was the one who helped her out when the going got too tough for her, not J.J.

“We better follow him, I suppose,” he said to her.

But as she heaved herself to her feet, he could see that she was getting weaker. The journey she had already made on three legs was heroic. He couldn’t see her getting as far as the top of the mountain.

“Aengus!”

Aengus stopped and waited until they caught up.

“Does your father live up there?” J.J. asked him.

“His house is in the village,” said Aengus. “You probably saw it, opposite the pumps.”

“You mean the church?” said J.J.

“That’s right. But he doesn’t live there.” Aengus indicated the steep climb ahead of them. “He stays up there.”

“Why?” said J.J.

“Because he’s contrary,” said Aengus. He handed
J.J. the fiddle case and hefted Bran into his arms. Her damaged leg dangled beneath her from its scrap of skin and flesh, swinging with every step that Aengus took. It gave J.J. an idea.

“Aengus?”

Aengus stopped. Despite the weight of the dog and the hard climb, he was hardly out of breath at all.

“Why don’t we cut her leg off?” J.J. wasn’t squeamish. He couldn’t afford to be, because both Helen and Ciaran were. Animals had accidents all the time around the farm. Usually the vet dealt with them, but there were occasions when it wasn’t practical or possible. One of their goats had fallen down a rock face once and damaged a horn so badly that it had been, like Bran’s leg, hanging on by a thread. J.J. had cut it off with his penknife.

“There’s no saving it,” J.J. went on. “She’d do better if she didn’t have to drag it along behind her. I’ve seen dogs before with three legs and they do fine.”

“How would we cut if off?” said Aengus.

“I have a knife. I’ll do it if you can hold her still.”

Aengus looked into the wolfhound’s golden eyes. “I don’t think she’d like us to do that,” he said. “She might misunderstand our intentions.”

“It would be over before she knew it,” said J.J.

“At your end it might,” said Aengus. “I’m not so sure about my end, though. Have you seen her teeth?”

He continued on up the mountainside, and J.J. climbed behind him. He could see the point about the teeth. Bran was a hunting dog and by far the most powerful one he had ever seen. But another idea occurred to him.

“I’ll take her with me,” he said. “I’ll bring her to the vet in the village, give her a bit of time to recover, and then bring her back.”

Aengus didn’t stop or even turn round, but his words left no room for doubt in J.J.’s mind.

“That, my young ploddy friend, is one thing that you can’t do.”

THE GREEN MOUNTAIN

Trad

3

At the head of the huge steps, Aengus put Bran down, and she followed him and J.J. across the coarse grass of the mountaintop. In three directions they could see the gray Burren hills reaching into the distance, and on the fourth the green plain with the sea beyond. Before long, a huge hill of stones came into sight. In his own world, J.J. had visited it many times. There were two of them on adjacent summits, both so tall that they could be seen from the ocean. They had never been excavated, but it was held that they were burial mounds covering the bones of some ancient royal personage or other.

As they drew closer, J.J. noticed the figure of a man standing on the seaward side of the massive cairn.

“Mind your tongue with this fellow, now,” said
Aengus. “He’s the Dagda, and he really does think he’s a god.”

“The what?” said J.J.

“The Dagda,” Aengus whispered. “That’s his name.”

“What does it mean?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” said Aengus.

J.J., naturally enough, had expected Aengus’s father to be a good deal older than his son, but as they drew closer he was put in mind of the fairy method of rearing their children. The Dagda looked very different; he was bearded, for one thing, and he wore a heavy woollen cloak with a huge gold pin, but he appeared to be only a few years older than his son. He watched them as they approached, but his face showed no emotion.