The Crow of Connemara (12 page)

Máire started to walk away again, perhaps to explore the farther recesses of the room, but the same impulse that had led me here kept me rooted to the spot. I crouched down, and under the altar, I saw something. “Máire,” I called out. “Bring the light here.”

She returned, and together we crouched down at the altar stone. Underneath, on the flags of the room, lay a crystalline stone. The color was difficult to discern in the torchlight, but I thought it, even then, to be a vivid green like an emerald, like Máire's eyes. The stone wasn't large—one could easily hide it in the palm of a hand—and it was polished and smooth. Máire reached for it; as she took it up, she gasped as if in alarm and dropped the torch on the flags, where it hissed and fumed.

“What's the matter?” I asked. Her eyes were open, but she was staring at something past me, transfixed. I turned to see, looking over my shoulder, but there was nothing there. I turned back to Máire and called her name. There was no response; I called again, and she seemed to rouse herself as if from a trance, still clutching the stone in her hand.

“Yeh di'nah see?” she asked. “The light? The place beyond?”

I shook my head. Máire released a long, shuddering breath. “I saw it,” she said. “'Tis a place beyond here, but yet right beside us. I could hear voices in the cloch, the voices of those who have held this stone before me, calling to me, beckoning . . .” She shook her head. “'Tis gone now. But I saw it. I heard it.” She looked directly at me then, and I could see the wonder and relief in her face. “This stone—'tis the key, and yeh were the one I needed t'find it.” She picked up the torch from where it was sputtering against the floor. “We can go now,” she said. “This is what I came for.”

I wonder now why I agreed with her so quickly. I wonder what other treasures or artifacts we might have found in the place, which I knew I could never find again on my own. Still, I asked no questions of her then, but followed her back out, and through the passages until we were back in our comfortable cave again—what I thought of now as “home.”

There, Máire sat down on our bed, holding the stone and staring at it. I sat next to her; the stone looked to be a crystal and it was indeed a deep green, but when I reached for the stone to take it from her for a moment, her fingers closed around it. She must have seen the puzzled look I gave her then, for she sighed and opened her fingers again so that I could see the stone: the deep and rich color of it, with veins of lighter blue writhing deep inside. I also noticed that she kept the stone away from me, where I couldn't easily have snatched it from her; I kept my hands at my sides, even though part of me wanted to insist, to say “I found it; why won't you let me touch it?”

“This is the key,” she said again. “I don't know how it came to be here, or who put it here, but this is the connection, the bridge we need.”

“We?”

“Yeh and me,” she said, but there was a hesitation and I knew she meant something more than that. “You're a walker of the land; with this, we could walk between
two
worlds. I just have to understand how the spell works, and how to place the power in the cloch.”

“Spell? Power?” I could hardly keep the skeptical laughter from my voice.

She didn't seem to hear me. “Do yeh sing, Rory? Do yeh know the old tunes? Tell me yeh sing.”

“I can sing a bit, I suppose . . .” but she only nodded, her attention still caught by the stone, the cloch.

“There are things that yeh might not believe in, but that doesn't mean they don't exist,” she told me. “All that I've told yeh before is the truth, and yeh must open yer mind to that if yeh love me as yeh say.”

September ?, 1947

Máire has spent all her time with the emerald cloch. I don't know how long it's been—many hours, certainly, or perhaps a day or more. She sits with it clutched in her left hand and her eyes closed, as if she's listening to voices only she can hear, and sometimes I hear her conversing with them. She rouses herself to eat, and she sleeps. Little more. We've made love only once since then, and even then she seemed distracted and uninvolved.

While she explores her own mind, I've begun to explore Oweynagat on my own—carefully, counting the turns and drawing a crude map here in my journal as I go. It was easy enough to puzzle out the way back to the entrance, as Máire's “home” is not that far into the complex—I did that first, because I'm starting to feel that is something I may need to know. But going the other way, back into the deep labyrinthian maze where we found the cloch . . .

For that, it's as if Máire somehow walked an entirely different path than those I'm able to discover, which are without exception narrow and low limestone tunnels that all end abruptly a short distance in. None of the passages seem to be the deep and winding passages we walked together, all of them with branching corridors in which one could easily get lost. Yet I've taken every exit from our “home” cavern that I can find by the light of my torch and our fire.

There aren't any other ways farther in. There can't be.

But that makes no sense. Or rather, it makes no sense unless I believe that Máire somehow has the ability to find pathways that simply aren't visible to me. It makes no sense unless I believe in magic and spells and the existence of the old gods and fey creatures. It makes no sense unless I believe that Máire is something more than what she appears to be.

Sometimes, I think I hear voices laughing at me as I stumble about, and I think I see people moving just outside the light of my torch.

But what else can I do while Máire is snared by her voices in the cloch except to continue to search?

So I'll explore more, and see if I can't find a more rational explanation for all of this.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen. I'm lost in a world that doesn't actually exist, and even though I stopped going to church a few years past, I find that I'm praying that I eventually will find the way back to my own reality.

September 24, 1947

It's been a long time since I set anything down here, and so much has happened since that I despair of ever adequately transforming it to mere words . . .

I'm currently aboard the
Mauretania
, en route from Liverpool to New York City. Where Máire might be, I no longer know, but I feel the loss of her still. I wonder if I've made the right decision, or if this is something I'll now regret for the rest of my life.

I don't know when it was or on what day that Máire finally stirred, as if awakening from a trance. “We have'ta go outside,” she said, already moving even as she said the words, grabbing a torch and walking swiftly toward the passage that led to the entrance. “We must go now.”

I followed her, barely able to keep up.

It was night outside, the air crisp as a winter apple, the sky lit up by the cratered face of the moon looming over the horizon while the stars shimmered, jewels on velvet between the blue-white sailing ships of clouds. Máire was standing not far from the entrance, twirling in place with her face raised to the sky as if searching for something, the cloch we'd found still in her hand.

She stopped. She lifted the stone to the sky as if it were an offering . . .

...and the sky answered. I witnessed a tendril of silvery green light twisting down from the zenith, like a phantom's rope attached to the clouds. The light was faint, but it brightened when it reached her, and I saw its cold fire wrap around her hand and forearm like a living thing. Máire gasped with the touch—not a sound of alarm but more like the cries I'd heard her make when we were together. The light from the sky brightened slightly, and a few curtains fled away above us, like fleeting sheets of aurora light touched with blue-and-red streaks. Faint marks appeared on Máire's arms, not unlike the swirling patterns carved on the entrance stones at Newgrange or on the walls of the room where we'd found the stone.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the aurora faded and vanished again, and Máire let her hand drop as if exhausted by the effort of holding the stone aloft, but I could see emerald light between her fingers. The cloch itself was alight: a beacon.

Then it happened . . . I was standing near the entrance to the cave, and a rush of cold air from within stirred the legs of my pants and fluttered the collar of my jacket. I felt the touch of hands on my face, plucking at my clothing, and I heard voices calling: some high and fair, others low and ominous, dozens of them calling in Gaelic and in languages that sounded older than any I'd ever heard. A dark fog seemed to surround us; in the mist, the forms of people moved. I heard the blowing of horns, the sound of hooves, the bellow of what might have been a bull. They passed by me and gathered around Máire until she was lost in the midst of them. “Máire!” I called out to her, frightened both for her and for me.

“Yeh needn't worry,” I heard her answer, though I still could not see her. “'Tis only me people, awake again for a time.” The black cloud continued flowing from the mouth of the cave and past us, moving westward over the fields, with the sheep running startled from the apparition and the sounds of its passage fading, until only Máire and I were left. The light from the cloch was now extinguished and Máire sagged, cradling her left arm. She let the cloch drop to the ground, as if she could no longer bear to hold it.

I went to her and held her. She leaned against me, letting me support her weight as if she'd been stricken nearly lifeless. “There's a door we can open,” she told me, her voice but a husk. “The power's gone now, but the cloch and the voices of those who held it before me . . . they told me there's a gateway we can use. Yeh are part of it, too. Yeh are to be the bard,” she said.

“Me, a bard? An' a gateway to what?” I asked her. With one hand, I picked up the cloch, the emerald stone. She didn't seem to notice, and I placed it in the pocket of my jacket.

She spread her hands, as if confused. “To another world, or perhaps it's only to another version of this one. But 'tis a
better
place. 'Tis where some of the Old Ones have already gone, where I should have gone long ago, had I been wiser.” She looked up at me, her face illuminated by moonglow, and hers was no longer the face of a comely young lass, but that of an old woman, her skin dry and cracked, her eyes rheumy and contained in a nest of wrinkled flesh. With the vision, I felt as if a spell had cracked and broken within me. She smiled, toothless, and I laid her on the grass, standing and stepping away from her, horrified. “I need you, m'love,” she told me, her voice quavering like a hag's.

A cloud passed over the moon, hiding her face from me, and as the clouds slid away again, her face had transformed again, no longer that of the hag but the young Máire again.

I continued to step back from her. “What's wrong, m'dear?” she asked, and I thought I could hear the hag's voice overlaid with the sweet tones of the Máire I knew. She looked westward, to where the black fog filled with voices had gone. “We have to follow them. 'Twill be in the west, the portal we must open. We have'ta find it.”

She stopped as I stood there, shaking my head. “I ca'nah,” I told her.

“No, yeh must!” Moonshadow slid over her face: Hag/Máire/Hag/Máire. Máire's face was not only her own, but the hag's . . . It stared at me with violence and fury, a madwoman's eyes. She stared at me as if I were a thing to be devoured.

Máire lifted her arms toward me, like she wanted to clasp me to her again, but now fear clutched me harder than any love I had, chasing away the infatuation and the lust. I didn't know what I was afraid of; I only knew that she'd become someone—or perhaps something—that I no longer understood, and for all the wanderlust in me that wanted to always see new things, I could not make myself step back into her embrace. I continued walking away, and her hands dropped. “Rory!” she called after me, but I turned my back on her. “I ca'nah do this without yeh,” I heard her say, her voice pleading.