Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (59 page)

DUN SIOG, OR THE FAIRIES FORT, was a crumbled ruin that lay at the southernmost end of Strangford Lough. Originally an earthen stronghold built—local lore had it—by the people who’d come before the Druids, it now held the remains of an old Norman castle constructed by a warlord for the Knights Templar. To reach it one had to wind one’s way along a cart trail that hadn’t been used with any frequency since people had ridden about on horses.

Shrubs and wild vines had long ago covered most of the ruins, though the topmost tower of the blackened hulk still loomed up spectrally out of the surrounding wild.

Thrawny, eyeing the chill landscape, where the mist seemed to ooze out of the ground, shivered uncontrollably.

“I’ll wait here,” he said, not even bothering to control the chattering of his teeth. “Keep an eye out like, in case anyone should come along.”

“If someone comes along,” Jamie said, coolly tucking the pistol into the waistband at his back, “you’ll be a sitting duck out here and it’ll be too late for the both of us. Come on, man, buck up, the stories about this place aren’t true.” He grinned, a flash of impudent white. “At least not entirely.”

The moon was a gibbous sickle, hanging low along the eastern horizon, casting an odd surreal mist through the skeleton of the castle. Thrawny could feel the damp of it in his bones.

“Do ye not remember the night we ran away an’ stayed here when we was lads?”

“I remember,” Jamie said shortly, putting a flask of something into his right-hand pocket. “Just at present, though, I’ve not the inclination to reminisce.”

“We swore we’d never come here again, Jamie,” Thrawny said, trying to shrink his bulk into the crack between seat and door.

“I believe we were about twelve years old at the time. I’m much older now and so are you. I don’t believe in evil fairies.”

“Lower yer voice, man,” Thrawny whispered through gritted teeth.

“There’s a man in there that desperately needs our help, Alexander. I’m not about to let him die because we hallucinated a few ghosts once upon a time. Now get out of the van, before I drag you out.”

“How the hell do you expect to get in there undetected?” Thrawny asked when they were standing in the long grass that obscured the old pathway.

“There’s a secondary route into the burial mound. I’m hoping the bastard doesn’t know about it, it’s the only thing we’ve got on our side right now.”

To the right a chimney rose a good fifty feet into the air, slanted at an alarming angle into the tumbledown stones of the exterior wall.

From underfoot rose the scents of crushed plants and dank earth.

There were legends about this place, and none of them were pleasant. Some land was never meant to belong to people; some land had been claimed before people were even a twinkle in the creator’s eye.

Thrawny cast one last look over his shoulder. Behind them the lough was glassily calm, its myriad drumlins rising like hunchbacked hobgoblins under the still silver light. Bladderwrack beckoned across the water’s skin like boneless fingers, glowing an odd milky green. He shivered and hurried to catch up to Jamie’s swiftly disappearing form.

Jamie’s memory had served him well. There was another entrance, overgrown with rank weeds and partially obscured by fallen stone, but once these were cleared out of the way the ancient doorway stood high enough that Jamie barely had to duck to clear the huge beam that supported the enormous weight of earth above.

Thrawny stepped inside. The darkness was profound and suffocating. He heard the click of a torch and suddenly Jamie was there in front of him, face lit from below, cat eyes sparked with an unearthly glow. Bastard probably saw better in the dark anyway, most demons did, Thrawny thought, feeling distinctly annoyed at the turn his life had taken tonight.

The flickering torchlight did little to ease his fears. It gave him, in random glimpses, the sight of things he felt sure no man was meant to see. He was certain he could feel evil faces leering out of the dark at him. The great damp earthen walls seemed to be breathing in and out, emitting an eerie blue ooze. The smell was literally that of the grave. Thrawny could feel a clutch of panic in his chest, squeezing his lungs tight and hard, as though they were turning to stone.

Above he could sense the very weight of the earth, the great heaviness like a pregnant body ready to separate itself from its burden. He swallowed and fought to catch his breath, succeeding only in making himself lightheaded. There was no light, not even a pencil thin wedge of it. He’d suffocate in here, his lungs—seizing—seemed to know the truth of it, even if his brain was not yet willing to acknowledge defeat.

Ahead of him, Jamie’s golden head winked out of sight. He had the distinct impression he was following Hades directly into the Underworld. He took one last glance at the upper world and shivered. The mist was getting thicker, obscuring both water and land, as though it were dissolving and would cease to exist as soon as he looked away.

Given the choice of turning back—well—he took a deep breath and put his feet to the path Jamie had gone down. Better the devil you knew than the one you did not.

THE BURIAL MOUND was a huge passage tomb, more than five thousand years old. Jamie felt his way down, torch casting flitting shadows amongst the long roots and dripping earth. The tunnel would end—provided there were no blockages—in the central chamber, which is where he felt certain Casey must be. Along with the men who had taken him off the lorry.

There was no way to know how many of them there might be, but Jamie suspected and hoped that their number would be few. He couldn’t count on Casey for help, as he wasn’t likely to be in any shape to do battle.

“Just let him be alive,” he mumbled grimly to himself. The sound echoed off the spongy walls and Thrawny uttered a nervous yelp behind him.

“Quiet,” Jamie hissed. “I’m going to have to turn the torch off, so grab hold of my shirt and just follow.”

The entry to the tomb yawned in front of them through a high, narrow door with a flat lintel stone crowning it. On the lintel stone a stubby candle flickered, under-lighting a hideous face. Jamie felt a thin shiver, like a spasm of quicksilver, pass down his spine. The stone face was ancient, that of a
sheela-na-gig
, this one with prominent ribs, horizontal scars across the flat cheekbones and the protruding genitals that made many associate these figures with fertility. She was the crone in the Celtic Trinity of maiden-mother-crone, and as such was an invitation to young heroes to enter back into her womb in death. The original womb, that of the Earth herself. Here the symbolism of the squat stone figure seemed all too hideously apt.

He stepped under the lintel and into the inner chamber of the tomb. A sense of yawning space engulfed him after the claustrophobia of the tunnel. Light soaked into the walls, reflecting back the dimmest of glows. Above, the ceiling soared several feet above their heads, spiralling up in steps of huge stone.

Candles, stuck into cavities in the walls, hissed uncertainly in the fetid air, casting faint pools of light that only served to intensify the darkness that lay between them. In one of these murky pools were three men—two with their backs to him and the other with his head being held firmly in what looked like an ancient cistern. Casey.

At this point, both caution and the element of surprise seemed like superfluous luxuries. Jamie simply cleared his throat.

The two men spun about, and Casey slid boneless to the floor, water trickling from his mouth.

The man to Jamie’s right brought a pistol up, cocked. In the half-second between heartbeat and thought, Jamie knew he didn’t have time to aim and at this range was looking his death square in the barrel. A solid
crack
rent the air, and the man dropped to the floor.

The other man launched himself at Jamie, in a flurry of curses and wet corduroy. Jamie, though, had read the intention in his eyes before the movement, and halted the ill-guided missile by the simple expedient of shooting him in the foot.

He dropped to the mucky ground howling, the ruckus causing a shower of dirt pellets to rain down from the roots above.

“Watch him,” he said shortly to Thrawny, who still hovered in the doorway to the chamber.

Jamie knelt on one knee at Casey’s side, assessing him for damage. Casey’s eyes were flickering now. In the murk of candlelight, he was a trout-blue, with the darker notation of a knot swelling on his forehead. Jamie felt for a pulse and heaved a heartfelt, “Thank Christ,” when he found it. It was thready, but it was there.

He ran his hands along Casey’s ribs; if anything was broken he didn’t want to risk puncturing a lung. Satisfied that it was safe to proceed, he compressed the chest. A plume of water spouted up from Casey’s mouth, but the man himself was still unconscious.

Jamie compressed the chest twice more and then bent to clear the airway and to breathe into Casey’s mouth. Compression, breathing, compression, breathing. Jamie began to lose count, as a trickle of dirt rained on the back of his head.

Finally Casey sputtered violently, the force of it dragging him up from his prone position and causing him to vomit a stream of brackish water out.

He cracked an eye open and peered at Jamie.

“You,” he said, and fell back to the ground again.

“No time for chat,” Jamie said rather wildly, having felt a vague tremor beneath his feet that he found more than mildly worrisome. “Come on man, we need to get the hell out of here before this place collapses.” Jamie pulled the gasping Casey to his feet and half dragged, half pushed him towards the tunnel opening.

“Run!” he shouted at Thrawny, who still stood over the thug with the bloody foot.

Thrawny snatched up the torch, nodding curtly at Jamie. “You an’ him first, I’ll bring up the rear. GO!”

Casey stumbled, dragging heavily on Jamie’s shoulder, but at last found his footing well enough to keep up. Root branches whipped their faces as they ran, the steady shower of dirt that poured down on them swiftly becoming a storm. Behind them there was an ominous rumble—that of angry earth rushing and heaving.

“
It’s goin’!
” Thrawny yelled.

Clots of dirt were falling now, big as a man’s fists, striking their heads and shoulders. Thrawny had taken up a steady stream of cursing, and Jamie was finding it harder and harder to guess how much farther they had to go before the tunnel entryway.

“
Please dear God, let it be close
,” he said under his breath. The earth above their heads was roaring like a mighty beast, ready to gorge itself on their all too tender carcasses.

A waft of air swept past his face at the same time that the roaring abruptly ceased, and Jamie felt a moment of complete panic. The silence, he knew, was tonnes of earth letting go entirely.

It went with a great lung-collapsing
whoosh,
just as Jamie shoved Casey face first with all his might out into the night. A huge chunk of earth knocked Jamie to the ground, flattening the air out of his lungs with a suffocating weight.

He tried to scrabble forward, hands dug deep in the ground beneath him, but he could not get purchase, the weight on his back was far too great.

And then redemption came in the form of two big hands grabbing his shoulders and yanking him with tremendous force clear of the killing earth. He gasped, mouth filled with grainy soil and bits of grass and rock. Casey reached past him and dragged Thrawny out with a great heave.

Covered in muck and sucking in great lungfuls of the misty night air, all three men collapsed in the tall grass, chests heaving, the euphoria of having survived sweeping through them.

The mound, now a shattered heap, was distinctly quiet. As if it had lain thus in ruin for the last thousand years.

Beneath Jamie the world was thrumming and he thought he could feel the rotation of the planet itself as it spun endlessly in space. He drew a shaky breath and lifted his head, once he could manage, looking over to where Thrawny lay hummock-like.

“What did you throw at the man?”

“I grabbed the wee witch off the lintel, likely cracked the bastard’s skull, though that’s of small worry to him now,” Thrawny replied.

“Thanks. That was quick thinking on your part.”

“Well I figured after all was said an’ done tonight, if anyone was goin’ to have the pleasure of killin’ ye, it was goin’ to be me.”

Jamie gave him a wry look. “Thanks anyway.”

“Aye, yer welcome.”

Thrawny heaved himself to his feet, small balls of dirt showering off him as he stood. “I’m goin’ to the van to find a blanket for the laddie,” he nodded toward Casey. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“Come on,” Jamie said, “let’s get out of the open. There’s cover over there.” He nodded toward a small stand of trees, looming inkily through the mist.

It was a narrow hollow ringed in rowan trees, the ground thick with decayed leaves and the debris of many years. The trunks of the trees were furred with moss and thick with tangled ivy.

Casey managed the short walk on his own power, though Jamie noticed that it wasn’t with his usual long strides.

“Are you injured?” he asked, casting an assessing eye over the man as he sat down on the heavy carpet of leaves, shivering.