The Mysteries (25 page)

22. Polly

It was like returning to full life after a long period of drowsy hibernation.

I wasn't surprised that Laura had been unable to accept my story, and I didn't blame myself for not having been careful or convincing enough in the way I'd told it. For whatever reason, she was totally wedded to a rational, materialist view of the universe, which made her more blinkered than any honest skeptic. This was a woman who had seen her own daughter disappear before her very eyes, an event that did not fit into her perceptions of how things are. Rather than changing her attitude, she'd blocked the memory. There was nothing anyone could do to change her mind.

But that was OK. I didn't need her.

Although I will admit to disappointment that what had seemed like a promising new friendship (with the added
frisson
of sexual attraction) had died such a death, I didn't waste time or energy brooding on it. I had a job to do. As soon as I'd put lunch on my credit card (I would figure out how to pay
that
bill later), I shot over to nearby Cecil Court, where there was a bookshop specializing in theosophy and esoteric books. I picked up a few that were new to me and looked as if they might be useful, and further burdened my credit card before heading home. I planned to spend the next few days in research and reading, soaking myself in the old mysteries once again.

But first, I tried to call Hugh.

Selfishly, I would have preferred to find Peri and bring her back all by myself, but I knew that might not be possible. It never pays to ignore the old stories, no matter how illogical and downright contradictory they can be. Sometimes, a particular hero is designated, and no one else can do the job. It was hard to imagine Etain going back for anyone but her human husband.

I couldn't get through to Hugh that afternoon. All three of his phone numbers led me, through call diverts, to the same electronic voice mailbox. I left my name and number, and said it was urgent. There was no more I could do.

Turning on my own answering machine to field calls from the fitted-kitchen, package holiday, book club, and double-glazing salesmen that so often punctuate my day, I made up a pot of coffee from the last of the fresh-ground roast and dug out the map box.

During my first year or so in Britain, when I'd traveled far and wide, searching for other spots as liminal as Doon Hill, I'd acquired a complete set of the Ordnance Survey “Pathfinder” series of maps. Each one covered a small section of the country in minute detail, on a scale of two and a half inches to the mile (or, as we're supposed to reckon it now, 4 cm to 1 km), with every hillock and spit of land given its local name, and every church, fort, well, and ancient ruin plainly marked.

To anyone who has grown up in America, Britain can appear almost ridiculously small. A tourist can confidently expect to “do” it in a week, or to visit all major sites of interest in a month. I suppose you could even manage to drive from John o'Groats to Land's End in a single day. Yet although it is small in physical dimension, it is complex, nearly infinite in detail. Every field and hill has a name and a story behind it, and although most may have been forgotten in this age of mass media, and the once-intelligible, straightforward Norse or Gaelic or Old English place names long since corrupted into nonsense sounds, with time and patience and a bit of imaginative research it was possible to restore the original meanings and once again catch a glimpse of the magic lurking beneath.

Along with the maps I'd stored my notebooks and travel diaries from those days, jottings that described my impressions of psychic and emotional atmospheres as well as physical descriptions of the spots I visited. I hadn't looked through them in years—frankly, I'd almost forgotten about them—and as I got them out I felt a tingle of the old excitement and felt absurdly pleased with myself for having kept this careful record. This would really cut down on the time needed for research; I'd be able to read my impressions of the area where Peri had last been seen, probably pinpoint the very hill or stone circle that was the local entrance to the Otherworld in a matter of minutes.

My smug pride quickly evaporated as I realized I was wrong. Although I thought I'd been “everywhere,” there were spots I'd missed on my leisurely grand tour, and the twenty- or thirty-mile radius around the public phone box where Peri had briefly materialized was one of them.

For its size, Scotland still has relatively few roads, and much of the west coast consists of long, skinny tendrils of land projecting out to sea, served by a single, narrow road that connects to nothing. At first, I was determined to drive down every obscure byway, but as the months wore on—and particularly in the short cold days of lashing rain—I gave that goal up as impractical. Even though there was a ruined castle that might have tempted me down to the end of the winding road where Peri had last been seen, something else—probably snow or hail—had countered that temptation. I'd decided that particular side track didn't fit in with my schedule, was too far out of the way, didn't offer enough of interest.

I cursed my younger self, although it had probably been a sensible decision at the time. The more closely I'd explored this country, the more it expanded, like some magical box, bigger inside than out. A whole lifetime would not be enough to investigate every nook and cranny of this island.

At least, although I hadn't seen much of North Knapdale, I had the Ordnance Survey map, and a copy of that useful little pamphlet,
Place names on maps of Scotland and Wales,
to help me make sense of it. I needed it, because almost nothing in that part of Scotland—apart from “caravan site” and a few cottages owned by in-comers from the south—was labeled in English.

The first name to catch my attention as I pored over the map was
Cnoc na Faire,
but a quick check told me that “faire” had nothing to do with fairies. It meant “watching,” and in connection with “Cnoc” (“a round hill”) translated as something like “Look-Out Hill.” I couldn't see anything with
sidh, sidhean,
or
sith
in the name to indicate the traditional connection with the Good Neighbors, but there were several ancient sites within walking distance of the caravan park—three duns, a ruined chapel, and several cairns, as well as an indication that there were caves along the rocky shoreline. People had lived along this coast for many centuries, and I was sure there must be places they'd told stories about, woodland with a reputation for being uncanny, heaps of stones once sacred to a now-forgotten god, a magic well, a cave where someone had been seen to go in but never to emerge again . . .

I spent hours, long into the evening, moving from a close study of the map to the dustiest books in my library, searching out old collections of folklore as well as more contemporary surveys with titles like
Mysterious Britain
and
Haunted Scotland.
Few gave any mention to Knapdale—which didn't feature much in the more ordinary guidebooks, either—and when they did, the reference was always to something located on another shore, or across the loch, twenty or thirty miles or more from where Peri had been seen.

Finally, in a book about the remains of prehistoric Scotland, I found a description of
Dun a'Chaisteal
, the Iron Age “Fortress of the Castle” and precursor to Castle Sween (which overlooked the contemporary caravan park). It was described as “associated, traditionally, with the mythical Celtic heroine, Deirdre of the Sorrows, who fled from Ireland to this part of Scotland with her lover, Naoise McUisneach.”

Deirdre and Naoise were both humans, entirely mortal, unlike Etain and Mider, yet the reference to this ancient love story gave me hope, for it seemed possible that a story about one pair of lovers might well be hidden or disguised by another.

Then I found this:

Dun a'Bhuilg, or Dunvulaig, The Fortress of the Quiver (or, perhaps, the Fortress of the Bag), the crumbling remains of another Iron Age Fort, was at one time avoided by locals, who believed it a dwelling place of the Daoine Sidhe, fairies, who could be seen on moonlit summer nights silently plying their delicate, eggshell boats with translucent green sails, in Kilmory Bay below.

With a deep sigh of satisfaction I carefully marked the book and laid it to one side with the map and my notes. All of a sudden, I was ravenously hungry. The pot of coffee was long gone, and that skinny little steak at lunch might have been consumed in another lifetime.

I went down the road to get a hamburger. I name no names, but one of the major American franchises had an outlet on the corner opposite the underground station, and although I'd been known to fulminate against globalization and the evils of standardized, mass-produced fast foods, not to mention the litter problem, there were times when all I wanted was the opportunity for quick, anonymous, no-hassle refueling.

I went out into the light, balmy evening. The air smelled, not unpleasantly, of garbage and traffic and humanity, that summer-in-the-city smell. There were lots of people around, strolling along by themselves, or hanging around in clusters outside the closed shops, or queuing for take-aways at the kebab shop, the pizza place, the Chinese. Although it was late, it still wasn't completely dark. For no reason at all except the season, my mood was suddenly one of ridiculous optimism. Except for those years in Texas, where it was already far too hot in June, and you knew it would only get worse, midsummer has always been my favorite time of the year. Maybe it's because it was when I was born, but it has always felt special; a time out of normal time, without regimented schedules, when day and night blend together seamlessly, and anything is possible.

Halloween was a dark and dangerous night, when spirits of the dead roamed the earth, but midsummer's eve was the haunt of a different type of spirit; it was for lovers. All at once I felt convinced that we were going to find Peri and that Hugh was the one to bring her back.

With the warm and comforting weight of food in my belly, the taste still in my mouth, I hurried home, impatient to talk to Hugh and convince him he could win back his long-lost love.

As soon as I got in I saw, as if in response to my thoughts, the winking light on my answering machine. One call, in the brief half hour I'd been out. But when I pressed the replay button there was only the faint hissing sound of the tape winding on before the buzz of the dial tone when the caller hung up. Hugh didn't seem like someone who'd do that, but I was reluctant to give up my belief that it was he, so I called him straight back.

Once again, I got his voice mail and left my details: “I really need to talk to you. Call me as soon as you get this.
Any
time, on my mobile.”

I added that, because I only had one landline, and if I had to keep that free for his call, I wouldn't be able to use the Internet. It was long past time that I upgraded, I knew. At the very least, I could have a separate business line. I'd considered it before, but somehow I never seemed to be in a position to expand and take on more expenses, even the most minor ones. Over the past few years, everything had gone up except my income. And now that Laura had fired me, my search for Peri had become something else to put down under personal expenses rather than possible income. Even worse, as long as I was looking for her, I wasn't going to be able to do anything else that might bring in some money.

Oh well, it looked like I was going to be running up a little more debt on my credit card. A straightforward loan would be cheaper, but what would I put down as the purpose of the loan? “A trip to Fairyland.” Yeah, right.

As I checked my e-mail again—that nervous tic of modern life—my attention was caught by the earlier message from Laura, with Polly Fruell's address. On a whim, I entered Polly's details into a search engine.

Seconds later, I was staring at her obituary, from the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
of March 2, 1995.

The next hit was on an article from the
Dallas Morning News,
from a couple of days earlier, describing the horrific freeway pileup in which three people—among them, Polly Jean Fruell, forty-three, of Jacksboro—had lost their lives, and seven others were seriously injured.

I bounced around to check out the other hits, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was Laura's Polly, and that she'd been dead for years.

Was it possible that Laura had been taken in by an ordinary imposter pretending to be her long-lost friend? Somebody who was in reality an associate of the man who called himself Mider, both of them criminals involved in Peri's kidnapping . . .

I could imagine Laura's mind running along such lines, but it made no sense. People invented complex scams in the hope of a large reward. There was no way anyone was benefiting from this—not in the ordinary way.

Polly was dead. She'd been dead three years ago when she turned up on Laura's doorstep on Christmas Eve.

The connection between death and the Otherworld appeared again and again in the old stories. Although it wasn't a straightforward equation, fairies were sometimes confused with spirits of the dead. The tumuli that were supposed to be entrances to their underground homes were in actual fact ancient graves, chambered tombs, and many first-person accounts from people who claimed to have visited Fairyland mentioned seeing people they had known but believed to be dead. In addition, some of the people stolen by fairies appeared first to die, like Robert Kirk or Mary Campbell Nelson, although that death was explained away as an illusion if they were later rescued.