Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

The woods were thick, and the light that filtered through the leaves felt cool and indistinct. It struck him how quickly rampant vegetation could take over any place abandoned or neglected by humankind. The sounds of the wider world were muffled here, soaked up by moss and loamy soil, the carpet of ivy and the green canopy above. What a riot of shapes and textures existed in this monochromatic world. Cormac thought of Una and Fintan playing here as children, of the treasure Aoife McGann had brought home, and understood the attraction a place like this would hold for any child with a vivid imagination. It was the very sort of place that would make you believe in ancestor spirits. How often at the site of some primitive settlement had he tried to conjure up an image of Ireland before it was cultivated—a wild green expanse of forest, lake, and bog, when the people dressed in the skins of animals and plaited their hair and worshipped the sun and the spirits of trees and water?

There was no apparent footpath here, and the thin, thorny branches that stuck out from the confusion of undergrowth caught at his clothing. He pressed on, and eventually found a narrow trail, or, rather, a place where the ferns did not grow quite as thick. He stepped over a fallen tree, its bark and fleshy wood being slowly subsumed by a radiantly pale green moss, and as he did so, he heard the distinct snap of a branch. Cormac whirled to see who might be following, but the wood seemed to have closed up behind him. Perhaps it was just paranoia. He turned back toward the tower, listening carefully for any movement besides his own footsteps. The path began to wind this way and that, and Cormac began to understand the reason: he nearly lost his balance when his foot struck a jagged stone embedded in the earth. He knelt and parted the underbrush in several places, finding a handful of similar rocky points within arm’s reach. It might be part of a chevaux-de-frise, an ancient defensive tactic used around ringforts to prevent easy assault by enemies on horseback. There was the tower, dead ahead, the dark gray stone of its base-batter blooming with lichen and moss. He picked his way carefully through the ankle-breaking stones, then climbed across an overgrown earthwork ditch that might be the remains of a medieval motte. The tower was about four stories tall; the only windows were arrow loops several feet long but only a few inches across. How dismal it must have been to live in such a place; how like a prison it must have seemed. Above him jutted a square garderobe that flanked a corner, and above that he could see stone corbels made to support some wooden structure long since destroyed. No sign of crows today. Cormac skirted the base of the tower, looking for the entrance doorway, which he discovered on the far side from his approach. The doorway was a simple pointed Gothic arch, above it a carved stone that might have been a family escutcheon, but it was too damaged to make out. The fact that there was a wooden door at all was curious, because the tower looked to be long abandoned. More curious still was the stout, shiny new padlock that hung from a latch firmly anchored to the wall. He lifted the lock and examined the keyhole at its base. Newly made scratches shone where someone had tried to insert the key and missed the mark. Once the door was locked, there was no way into or out of this tower short of scaling the walls.

Why would Osborne want to keep this building locked? The place was in ruins. Probably something to do with liability, preventing local hooligans larking about and getting themselves killed. But why would someone be out here in the middle of the night? If it were some sort of trysting place, that would explain the secrecy. But a trysting place for whom? Maybe he was wrong about Hugh Osborne and Una McGann. If they were involved, they certainly had reason not to be seen together in public. He couldn’t imagine Lucy Osborne in a place like this, but what about Jeremy? It could also be someone completely unconnected to this house, some local lothario who could have claimed this abandoned fortress as a meeting place. If that were the case, however, the whole village would know about it. Dolly Pilkington would certainly know who had purchased such a whacking great padlock, and might even have divined its purpose. Here he was again, acting the policeman.

As he stood at the door, Cormac heard the croaking call of a crow. He turned and saw nothing but leafy greenness all around, heard nothing but the distant shout of a corncrake. Was someone out there, watching him? The teeming silence of the wood gave no answer.

Nora overslept the morning after the mysterious phone call. She was hurriedly repacking her case for the return trip to Bracklyn when she remembered to check her mobile phone for messages. There was only one, from Cormac, wondering if she would mind picking up a few items for him while she was in Dublin. Robbie McSweeney had a key to the house, and was going to gather up the stuff; she could just collect the bag from him. She erased the message and punched in Robbie’s office number. They arranged to meet at Cormac’s house.

Coming from the city center, Nora crossed over the Grand Canal at Charlemont Street and found herself immediately in the heart of Ranelagh. If the daylight seemed a bit harsh this morning, it was probably because the leaves on the trees were still small, still a fresh shade of pale green against the sky. Cormac’s street, Highfield Crescent, turned out to be one of those gracefully curved and chestnut-lined Dublin avenues that seemed miles from the cacophonous bottlenecks of the main roads. Robbie hadn’t arrived yet, but he was coming all the way from the Belfield campus. Nora studied the face of Number 43, a tidily terraced red-brick row house, with an arched entrance trimmed in leaded glass, one of the thousands of nearly identical Victorian doorways in Dublin. Why did it seem curious to her that Cormac’s door was painted a bright, sunny yellow? The fenced front garden was a sharply edged patch of green turf so small that he might easily keep it trimmed year-round with a pair of embroidery scissors. Though she hadn’t yet seen the inside, she knew it would be a space very different from her airy, modern flat across the canal. She felt a twinge of uneasiness. It was strange coming here without Cormac’s knowledge. Should she have arranged to meet Robbie at his office? She hadn’t time to answer her own question when Robbie tapped at the driver’s-side window.

“You can wait out here if you like,” he said as she rolled down the window, “but I was hoping you might come in for just half a minute. I’m dyin’ for a mug of tea. And your reward would be the small bit of news I have for you.”

Nora found herself following reluctantly as Robbie pushed open the front door, careful not to knock down the old-fashioned black bicycle that stood in the narrow front hall. “I’ll round up the things he’s asked for, shall I, and you can get started on the tea.” After pointing her in the direction of the kitchen, at the back of the house, Robbie disappeared up the stairs, half lilting, half humming a faintly familiar tune. Nora entered the clean black-and-white-tiled kitchen; a table and two chairs stood in the small conservatory that jutted off the back of the house into the walled garden, giving the room a bright aspect, even on this slightly overcast day. She filled the electric kettle, found tea in a tin beside the stove, and prepared two mugs, then checked the fridge for milk. Plenty for tea; she held the bottle to her nose to make sure it hadn’t turned. The kettle boiled quickly, and while the tea was steeping, she ventured into the dining room, or what would normally have been used as a dining room, for this place was set up as a study: bookshelves lined the walls and a large table in front of the window was piled high with books and manila folders that almost obscured the view of the garden. Through an open set of double doors was a sitting room, with a deep leather sofa in front of a fireplace, and a couple of chairs upholstered in Turkish-looking geometric tapestry. The walls of both rooms were painted a ruddy ochre, and at the front of the house was a broad window seat flanked by two bookcases that reached to the ceiling. The atmosphere was orderly, unfussy, much like the man himself, and yet there were a couple of pieces that didn’t seem to fit, like the pillow-covered chaise in the corner at the far side of the fireplace. She tried to imagine Cormac at home here. The stereo cabinet in the near corner was piled high with homemade tapes. Nora scanned them, recognizing the names of some older traditional musicians. She approached the bookcases in the living room. The archaeology titles were no surprise, but Cormac also had quite a collection of books on art history, world religions, architecture, and language. There was a whole section of books on Irish place-names. What was it he’d said to Hugh Osborne? “Interested, but not very knowledgeable.” Right. She moved to the other set of bookcases, running her fingers along the spines of old editions in Irish, antique collections of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen, newer translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, a pile of Graham Greene novels, books of poetry by Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh. Had Cormac read them all? She was suddenly seized with homesickness, remembering her own precious books, save for the few volumes she couldn’t possibly live without, packed up in storage at home in Saint Paul. Seeing this wonderful collection only served as a reminder that nothing in her life was the same as it had been before. She sank down slowly on the window seat and closed her eyes, overcome by a terrible and familiar craving. And what if her need to scrabble through the evidence to find something, anything—what if it never satisfied her emptiness? Nora opened her eyes. She could still hear Robbie’s absentminded lilting from upstairs.