The Pig Comes to Dinner (6 page)

She was staring at Kieran, quietly expectant, if he interpreted correctly the slight parting of her lips and the merest widening of her eyes. He thought he recognized her as one of the wedding guests. She had worn the same clothing. Now she would tell him why she had come. But she said nothing. She simply continued to look at him, her expression unchanging, her slim body upright, her head tilted slightly to the side, her right foot forward of her left.

He waited another moment, then said, “You're probably looking for my wife.” The girl took a strand of her hair that had fallen across the left side of her face, put it behind her ear, then resumed her near-stately stance, her mildly expectant look. “Or is there something I can do for you?”

He looked more closely at the girl. Around her neck was what had seemed a rough woven collar, but when he looked harder, he saw that it was not cloth, but flesh. Obviously she'd worn something of so coarse a weave that it had rubbed raw the skin. It could also have been a burn. Perhaps that was why the girl was unable to speak. Kieran would ask her. But before he could decide on which words might be appropriate, the girl moved her right foot backward, even with her left, paused a moment, then disappeared. She didn't dissolve; she didn't fade away; she simply ceased to be where she had been.

Had he blinked? Had he been talking to the shadows in the far corner of the hall? Had she left when he'd been— unknown to himself—looking elsewhere? He went out into the courtyard. No one. Nothing. He peered back into the hall. No one. He stepped back inside. Most of the cows were lying down, their heads angled away from the wall in front of them. The pig had moved, and the cow was resting its chin on the pig's belly.

Kieran peered along the walls, into the corners. He walked the row between the cows. He made a quick turn, trying to surprise anyone who might be behind him. Only a few shadows. He stood at the end of the hall, facing the animals, shifting his eyes from one side to the other. In a voice of practiced command he said, “I don't appreciate foolish games. So let this be the last time you try this. Understand?”

Before any answer could be given, he had gone back out into the courtyard. Determined not to look behind him, he went toward the scullery, where he knew he could be alone. It was while crossing the yard that he added to the list of possibilities of what might have caused the girl's disfigurement, the wound around her neck. It could have been made by a thick rope of coarse fiber. He was unable to prevent himself from continuing on to the next surmise: she could have been hanged.

He knew now who she was. Her name was one he'd heard since he was a boy. Her name was Brid.

But it couldn't have been Brid. Brid was dead—dead for more than two centuries. This girl seemed very much alive.

4

K
itty was at her computer, in her study on the first landing of the winding stair that led to the turret battlements two flights up. Frustrated by her work, stifled by her imagination's refusal to respond to her proddings, desperate to expand her skull so it could accommodate a brain enlarged enough to comprehend what she needed to know, what she needed to see and to hear, she had decided to go— as she often had before—to the top of the tower and present her pleas to the open air.

When she made the turn leading to the landing above, she stopped. She knew she'd see the loom, unthreaded, bare, the worm-eaten wood worn and gone gray, the treadle smoothed by the touch of uncounted feet. She knew she'd see the small unstrung harp, the kind you held against yourself with one hand and plucked the strings with the other. The pegs for the strings were still there, twisted each in a different direction like snaggled teeth. She had often wondered if some alignment could be achieved if ever the harp could be strung again. The instrument rested on a crudely fashioned stool, its wood never having known the touch of paint or sealing of any kind. Worm holes, like those on the frame of the loom, suggested a passage of years beyond knowing.

When first she'd seen the harp and the loom, Kitty's impulse had been to pick up the harp, to try the loom, to see if the treadle would move at the touch of her foot. Her next impulse was to touch nothing. These had not been left behind by the squatters; ancient they were and sacred to this room. And since that time, passing through to the ramparts above, she respected their dust and continued on, as did Kieran when he climbed to the turret.

On this day of particular frustration with her writing, Kitty made the final turning of the stair and stepped onto the landing. Unresponsive to her presence, Brid was working the loom, her muddied bare feet on the treadle, moving it up and down, the rhythm measured and easy, the cloth beam and the warp beam turning, the treadle allowing the girl to move the boat-shaped shuttle between the warp threads—except there were no threads.

No cloth was being woven, but this didn't seem to bother the girl. While over and through the unseen threads the shuttle went, Brid remained calm and unperturbed. Taddy held the harp against his left side, braced under his chin, the bottom frame resting on his thigh. Slowly he brought his right hand toward his body, the fingers twitching ever so lightly, the entire movement all the more graceful since no strings were being plucked, only the unstirring air brushed by the touch of his fingertips.

Kitty saw him in profile, his face immobile, his eyes downcast. He was listening. As was Brid. Whether the song was sad or happy she would never know, but she could tell from the distant look on Taddy's face and Brid's that memories had been awakened.

Kitty knew she must turn around and go back down as silently as possible. She must return to her computer. She must deny what she had seen, what she was seeing. Or she must review the workings of her psyche and determine whether she was sane or insane. In self-protection, to reach for some accounting of what was happening, she tried to tell herself it was not all that unusual. All her life—with the exception of her time spent in America—things would disappear and reappear in and out of the mists: a tree a few feet away, the islands in the bay, the high ridge of the hills and every sheep and cow in sight, all seen, then unseen, with the sky the least reliable presence of all. Her own house would vanish after she'd taken but three steps from the door. Long had she been prepared for this present phenomenon. And her acceptance of it was not as reticent as it might have been had she been born anywhere but at this farthest reach of the Western world, where the eternal mists offered hints of the proximity of the seen and the unseen. To see ghosts could be a gift given by her Kerry birth. Refusal of the gift was impossible. The sole act of choice was what she would do about it, about these visitations. That had yet to be decided—especially since she had not the least idea why she had been singled out but, it would seem, no one else, not the squatters or anyone in the countryside around. If someone had, it would have been not only mentioned but proclaimed. Most significant, not even her husband had reported any “sightings.”

Her next thought was that she could no longer dismiss these appearances as aberrations peculiar to County Kerry and its ever-shifting shadows, to the rise and fall of the mists that could, without warning, nullify the distinctions between the real and the unreal. This was Brid; this was Taddy, as named by the local Hag. There on their necks were the marks of the rasping rope. On their faces showed the loss to which they seemed reconciled, a grief whose source had been taken into their hearts, cherished and protected, until a rite could be found that would reunite them to themselves and give them peace or, perhaps, a respite from the wanderings to which they now seemed consigned.

Kitty decided to continue on her way to the upper air. With land and sea in view she could test her mind; she could think it through, this assault on her lifelong insistence—mist or no mist—that there were no such beings as ghosts, just as there were no Little People, no leprechauns, no netherworld of kingdoms and castles, of stolen children and predators ready to pounce and to snatch, to abduct and to imprison. She would see how Brid and Taddy, if there was a Brid and Taddy, would react to her passage through their private domain. Would they vanish, as seemed their habit? Would they ignore her? Would they, perhaps, seize her, take her to the parapet above, and fling her down for having invaded this world of their betrayal? There was only one way to find out.

Reverting to the pace of her approach—and fueled by her exasperation with Maggie Tulliver and the misguided Mary Ann Evans—Kitty passed through the room as though nothing out of the ordinary was taking place. Brid, and Taddy too went about their business. At the second step, just before the turn that led to the top of the turret, Kitty stole a quick backward glance to see if they were still there. They were, Brid at her loom, Taddy with his harp, each unmindful of her presence.

The trapdoor at the top of the narrow stair was stuck, as usual. Kitty stepped high enough so that her bent head was pressing against the door, the palms of her hands flush against the wood. With a strength summoned by her need to escape she pushed upward, head and hands, spine and legs all commandeered for the task. The trapdoor had no choice but to spring open.

Kitty ascended to the parapet. It was the sea off to the southwest she chose to watch during her ruminations. But Maggie Tulliver and Mary Ann had been superceded by Brid and Taddy. By what she'd just seen. Not only a fleeting glimpse, a quick, almost teasing, appearance, but a prolonged and uninterrupted display, assured and without the least apprehension on their part. Their existence was their own.

And Kitty their only witness. The Hag hadn't seen them, even though she'd known who they were from Kitty's descriptions. They were the young hostages chosen at random for hanging when the gunpowder plot was revealed. That there might have been no plot was accepted by some and dismissed by others. A search, somewhere between compulsive and rabid, had continued for months. Although the castle was practically dismantled, fields and pastures uprooted, border walls demolished and rock boulders overturned, no gunpowder had been discovered. By the time the ruthlessness had come to an end, the hangings had already taken place, the need for evidence having been dispensed with so that justice could be served without impediment. And so some portion of their spirits had been told—or allowed—to stay. But to what purpose? To haunt, to frighten, to turn white the hair and to addle the mind? As far as Kitty could tell, they wreaked no vengeance. Nothing had been destroyed. They were highly selective, to say the least, about when to make their presence known. Kitty McCloud seemed to have exclusive claim to the honor—or to the curse.

The curse. Did it consist only of these bewildered spirits? If so, let the entire land, the whole wide world, be cursed, so fair were they, so fine their presence. More a blessing, surely, than a scourge. But what had they to do with Kitty, and what had Kitty to do with them? That she had been chosen she already knew. But why? She had no powers. She wasn't all that certain she believed in what her eyes had seen. And yet, she
had
seen.

Off in the distance the sea was wild. Again and again the crested waves flung themselves at the shore. Kitty was indifferent to the whole shebang. She had troubles enough without taking on the idiosyncrasies of the deep. And, she realized, she would have to simply accept what she could not understand. Mystery, by its nature, was not subject to explication.

Of course, as a writer, it was her impulse to search for understanding, to expose a motive, to tame the chaos of the human adventure. She was a skilled manipulator, devoted by her calling to trace the movements of the unseen hand, to reassure her readers that events fulfilled themselves and, in the process, revealed truths otherwise unrealized. She was supposed to solve mysteries. To accept them was inimical to her calling. To admit the limits of her gift would be to admit defeat.

But she had no choice. A refusal to live with the reality of these unrealities would make a demand she was not yet prepared to make: to leave the castle. To abandon the curse. To dismiss these bewildered youths and forget their fate, a fate beyond their hangings, a destiny still to be fulfilled. How could she do that? How could she forsake those who had been forsaken by all the world?

Kitty stood at the parapet and watched the waves bash themselves against the headlands. She had been wrong to consider herself threatened by this presence of mystery. She had been brought beyond the common boundaries. Either she possessed or had been given a special grace. She had been honored, and to refuse it or rebel against it by going mad or abandoning the castle was inconsistent with her nature. She would go back to the landing below, to the loom and the harp; she would, if possible, communicate to Brid and Taddy that she accepted their invitation into their mystery. She would neither ignore nor deny their presence. They were welcome in her castle. She would make no attempt to exorcise them from her home or forbid them what comforts they might find at her hearth. And if there were any particular demands they had come to make, she would do what she could to fulfill them.

Down the stone stair she went, leaving the sea to insanities of its own. When she made the turn onto the landing, she stopped. Brid, who had been busy with her loom, also stopped, as did Taddy with his harp. No one moved. But when the moment had passed, Brid took up her task again, and Taddy—as if there had been only a marked pause in the score of the music he was playing—resumed his silent strumming.

Rather than continue through to the steps on the other side of the room, Kitty waited and watched. Brid continued to be caught up in the rhythms of her weaving, Taddy intent on rhythms of his own, the work-worn fingers delicate in their plucking and strumming. Even the sea seemed to have become silent. For Kitty there was only the throb of her own blood to reassure her that she too had not been taken into the realm of the dead. She wondered if she could—or if she should—speak to them. After pondering this for no more than three seconds, she crossed the landing, looking at neither of them, and continued on down the narrow winding stair to the no-less-mystifying world awaiting at her computer. Before she could confront Maggie Tulliver, however, she would confront her husband.