Declan Hughes: The Color of Blood

“Now, go,” I said.

Emily hung from the window and dropped to the ground below. Jerry Dalton held back, waiting for Sandra to get to safety; she was huddled near the empty grate of the fireplace.

“Sandra, come on, we don’t have much time,” I cried. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

I took her by the wrist, and she grabbed my arm hard and looked into my eyes and shook her head.

“I don’t want any more time, Ed,” she said. “I can never leave this house.”

I released her at once, by reflex, as you might recoil from the dead.

She smiled then, and clasped the bloodstone around her neck tight in her hand and turned and vanished into the flames. I never saw her again.

I went to the window and helped Jerry Dalton down. When I turned back to the room, it was an inferno. Whatever stuffing was in the furniture and cushions was highly inflammable; there was a circus of flame across the center of the room. Shane had his back to me; he looked like he was trying to find a way through the blaze. I clapped him on the back.

“Where’s Sandra?” Shane said.

“She was by the fireplace,” I said.

Shane tried to head that way, but the flames were impassable; his trouser leg caught fire, and I dragged him back and beat the flames off.

“I can’t go without her,” he shouted.

“Maybe she got out the door.”

“I have to go back for her.”

“Shane,” I yelled. “Think of Emily. We can double around and try to get in some other way. But if we stay here, we’re dead men.”

Shane looked me briefly in the face, his great scowl blackened with smoke. He shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“I think I do understand,” I said. “I know you killed Jessica. I don’t know why. But you would have known there would be little blood when she was stabbed through the heart. So when you rang and told me she was dead and asked where all the blood was, you were feigning some kind of shock you didn’t really feel. Your wife was dead because you had killed her yourself, hours earlier.”

Shane looked at me and, for the last time, the planes of his great face shifted into a grotesque smile.

“I just couldn’t take any more,” he said. “When I saw the photographs of Emily, I blamed myself, but I blamed Jessica more. A whore breeds nothing but whores.”

The fumes were choking me now, like acid in my throat; my eyes felt like they were bleeding; the foulness of Shane Howard’s words clung to the smoke like a chemical taint.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, my words a death rattle against the flames. Shane’s smile seemed garish but disembodied, as if it were the only part of him left alive.

“A father who killed her mother?” he said. “I’m no use to Emily now. I’m better off with my sister. I always was.”

I reached out to grab him, but he pushed me toward the window and plunged back into the flames. As I let myself down onto the path, the remaining portraits of John Howard were melting off the walls.

I clambered up onto the lawn. When I turned back, Rowan House was burning like a tinderbox; there were flames spouting from the roof and smoke billowed from windows above and below. On the main lawn through the smoke, I thought I saw a murder of crows assembled, thought I could hear the beating of wings; when I got closer, I saw that it was a bunch of uniformed Guards spilling over the grass. Marked and unmarked Garda cars rolled up the drive. Martha O’Connor stood by the granite-edged pool with a digital camera on her shoulder. I found out later that Emily had summoned her. Fiona Reed and Martha were in close conversation. They seemed to have a lot to talk about. DS Forde grabbed my arm and tried to have me arrested. Dave Donnelly intervened, and if he didn’t quite tell Forde to go fuck himself, he got him off my back. I told Dave I thought Jonathan O’Connor was still in the house, and I told him about Shane Howard’s confession. He directed Forde to lead a squad around to see if the front entrance was still accessible.

And then I saw Emily Howard pounding across the lawn, with Jerry Dalton following. They were coughing, faces blackened by smoke, red eyes streaming; I guess I looked like that too. Emily was carrying the dollhouse that had been in her bedroom, the one with the roof that didn’t open. Except it was open now, the edge frayed and splintered from where it had been forced. She looked around, saw Martha O’Connor, and beckoned to her, pointing at the camera. She put the dollhouse into Jerry’s arms, and then she opened the roof. There were no dolls fucking this time, no I should be ashamed of myself , just a folded sheet of notepaper tied in red and green ribbon. The paper was covered with a girlish scrawl that Emily read aloud in an unsteady voice:

Cold. When she slept, she slept for a thousand years, and nobody thought or spoke or breathed, so who was in charge of her kingdom then? Not her pathetic father and mother, the king and queen of nothing. Cold as ice, cold as the spell that froze the world. Because they want to give him away. But they will not be permitted. She can see what was wrong now: everything. The wrong people, chiefly Father who is a coward and a wriggling sticky worm when she told her mother what Father did Mother couldn’t make up her mind who she was angrier at maybe herself the shriveled-up old bag no one comes to visit me or talk to me as if it is All My Fault and I will be sent away to some school in fucking Galway where everyone is a fucking nun even the girls are nuns or want to be well the sky will burn the world down before that happens even if I should be ashamed of myself I am going to take the little man down to where no one can find us where we can disappear and they can wait a thousand years and even then if some prince comes and kisses her she’ll slit his lips and let them run bloodred all over scatter the rowan fruit in a ring that will keep the evil away that will keep them all away she has her little prince now and she and he will be invisible dark and wet and cold and safe for a thousand years

Below the writing there was a circle drawn in ink; in the top left-hand corner, someone had drawn a red and green cross. Emily pointed to the model of the pond, with its perimeter wall of pebbles glued together; she reached finger and thumb down into the top left-hand corner, dislodged a loose pebble and extracted a small length of red and green tartan cloth, rolled in a small tube. She held it up, and then placed it on the surface of the model pool.

Then she kicked off her motorcycle boots and jumped into the actual pool. Martha followed her with the camera as she waded toward the spot marked on the map. Then she vanished beneath the water. Dave Donnelly looked at me, and I nodded, as if to say, it’s okay. I didn’t know whether it was okay or not. The flames from the blazing house burned dark gold and blood orange; the dawn washed the sky a darker, deeper pink. Emily came up for air, and nodded to me, and almost smiled, and went beneath the dark water again.

“What’s she looking for, Ed?” Dave said.

“A child,” I said. “A dead child. A son.”

The metal cross atop the round tower stood black and indifferent against the inferno. Jonathan had told his family to go to hell, but that’s where they had been living all along. He had just lit the flames. I thought of Sandra, and I felt shame at how I had used her to get to the truth, and sorrow for what might have been, and anger that she didn’t trust me sooner, or at all. But it was too late for her, had been too late from the day her father touched her. I wondered in the long years she lived in Rowan House if she had sometimes envied her sister’s death. I thought of Mary Howard, with her message to her granddaughter from beyond the grave. I thought of Marian Howard’s child, and the dead children left in barns and church doorways and buried in fields and in gardens all across Ireland, all for the same reason, for shame, for shame. And I thought of the message last night from my ex-wife, the mother of my dead child, telling me she had given birth to a son.