Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘oh Jesus.’

‘ Deh ,’ said Larney, ‘not doh .’

That cultured tone. He was speaking in M. Deauville’s voice.

‘ Deh ,’ he said again, ‘not doh .’

‘What?’

‘ Deh ,’ he repeated, ‘not doh .’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘ Deh not doh, deh not doh, deh not doh.’

At that, I turned and made a run for it. No spine. He followed in close pursuit. We lashed down the hill together, going at it hell for leather, an Armageddon of noise on the dark still avenue. Deh -not- doh, deh -not- doh, deh -not- doh — his infernal chant was charged with the rhythm and momentum of a runaway train. Something big had come down the line, something huge.

The man — if he was a man — was fastened to my side, his limp now a thing of the past. The faster I ran, the faster he ran with me, the two of us belting neck and neck, a race to the bottom, until I realised that I wasn’t running at all, that I was being carried, swept along, coupled to his locomotive, our limbs pistoning in sync. I screamed in the wind, screamed my head off. But he screamed louder:

‘ Deh -not- doh, deh -not- doh, deh -not- doh. ’

The chant accelerated as we gathered velocity. We swerved around the sharp bend in the avenue, our shoulders skimming the row of tree trunks that Father had slathered in white paint as a preventative measure against traffic collisions, and this detail struck me as unspeakably piteous. White paint, God above. We were so hopelessly ill equipped, so tragically unprepared, for the calamity that lay in store for us. Then the lights of the castle appeared through the trees. I flung out both arms to steer myself towards their safety, a drowning man flailing for the shore, but to no avail. It wasn’t up to me any more. I was just a passenger. We were going to shoot right past it. Larney was taking me down to the gate lodge, down to his lair.

But no. He clapped on the anchors when the avenue of whitewashed trees opened out into the courtyard. The staccato deh- not -doh expanded into a sentence, a life sentence, you might call it: ‘It’s not doh -ville, you duh head,’ he said in scorn before jettisoning his load, sending me vaulting headlong across the pebbles. ‘It’s not doh -ville, you duh head, it’s deh -ville.’

What?

I just thought the question. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe.

‘It’s not doh -ville,’ he repeated wearily to his feeble-minded ward. He now stood directly in front of me for he could spring from one coordinate to the next like a flea. ‘It’s deh -ville. Deh- ville, not doh -ville, yes?’ He sighed in exasperation at my benightedness when I failed to respond. ‘Do I really need to spell it out to you?’

And then he did. He really spelled it out to me.

‘Dee. Eee. Vee. Eye. El.’

The castle was droning, the lights were shining, the heavens were spinning, and the hells. I shook my head. The Devil is my sponsor? Again, I did not succeed in saying this. My participation in the diabolical lesson was wholly silent.

Larney clapped his black hands together. ‘The penny drops.’

I crawled away across the gravel, down on all fours by then. He alighted in front of me once more. Hooves. I scrambled in the other direction. Hooves. No matter which way I turned: hooves. I looked at the hooves, and then up at his glowing eyes. He now towered sixty feet high.

You said your name was Deauville .

‘Don’t give me that. You heard what you wanted to hear. And look at the state of you now.’

He executed a courtly bow and I bolted past him up the terrace steps. Mrs Reid and her rosary beads were inside. When I made it to the threshold, in disbelief that this had been permitted, that I was being allowed to go home, M. Deauville — now half the size of a man — trotted forward and performed a goatish dance. Tocka tocka, tocka tocka . ‘And you know what time it is now, young master?’ he asked when the dance was complete. ‘It is time to give the Devil his due.’

‘Mr St Lawrence, during this period, would you describe your mental state as delusional?’

Oh absolutely, Fergus. No doubt about it. Show me an Irishman who wasn’t delusional during the boom. And by that same token, show me an Irishman who still is.

Priests must have been smaller in the sixteenth century. That is all that I can say. They seem so portly and plodding now, lumbering from one familiar haunt to the next in search of a little human contact, the battle having been lost and won, but they must have been smaller in the bad old days when holy war still raged. I took myself under the castle, along the winding subterranean passages to the priest hole. The last place anyone would look for a priest was in the bowels of a Protestant fortress.

The first time I had been down there — the only time I had been down there — was as a boy of nine or ten accidentally coming upon it; beneath a dresser, through a trapdoor, down some steps, then down some more steps, along a passage, around a corner, up a spur that split from the main passage, and behind a wooden panel. A boy of nine or ten could slip into the priest hole, but it barely accommodated a fully grown man. I could not stand up — the ceiling was no more than five feet high. So I sat. I slid the wooden panel shut and sat in the crumbling matter that had accumulated over the centuries on the cold stone floor. Desiccated mouse droppings and insect legs; woodlouse shells and the bristles of rats. That was my best guess, anyway. That’s how I pictured my den. I had no idea what I was sitting in — I couldn’t see a thing and it had no smell, not any more, other than the smell of damp stone. I clasped my knees and buried my face and I hid, Fergus, I hid.

I hid actively. It demanded intense concentration to sit tight. I actively willed myself into invisibility, erecting a force field with my mind, because the moment I stopped effacing my particles was the moment I would be found. By him. Deauville. He was on the prowl. Priests in the sixteenth century were small hunted men doing the job of a Hercules. No wonder the other team won.

There was no lighting since the sub-cellar level of the castle — including the dungeon that Hickey had so desperately wanted to see, the dungeon that all the kids had so desperately wanted to see — is not wired for power. There was no running water either unless you counted the dripping wall. The priest hole was excavated into the bedrock. What would happen, I caught myself idly wondering at one point, in the event of torrential rain? I slammed the door shut on that prospect and resumed my active hiding again. And no mobile-phone signal, it goes without saying, not through all that stone, but although I switched the phone off, it kept fizzling away. So I removed the battery. No joy. Eventually I smashed the device into smithereens and scattered the shards amongst the rest of the detritus on the floor of the hole, which was not a hole, strictly speaking. It just felt like one.

The phone contrived to somehow continue sizzling, and it quite possibly sizzles still, and may sizzle for all eternity. Frankly, that wouldn’t surprise me, but frankly, nothing could. The fraud squad swept its remnants into a bag as evidence in the ongoing effort to trace M. Deauville. Best of luck with that, lads. For the record: I do not want the phone returned when your investigation comes to an end, which I believe won’t be long off now.