Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (41 page)

After breakfast, they cut across country, through Ballymena, outskirting some towns, past Omagh, through Enniskillen, veering upcountry along Lough Erne, through Ballyshannon, down the high streets of tiny, depressed towns with poetic names forgotten moments later. She fell asleep in the early afternoon and was only awakened by the car coming to a soft halt some time later.

“Where are we?” she asked groggily, peering through blurred eyes at what appeared to be miles of sand and endless ocean.

“Donegal Bay,” Casey said, smiling softly as he smoothed her hair away from her face. “Come on,” he said and slid easily out of the car, tilting his face into the wind as he stood.

“Daddy used to bring us here occasionally, to blow the city stink off he said.”

“I’m sorry he’s gone,” she said, sliding naturally under the shelter of his arm, warming herself against his side. “I would have liked to have known him.”

Casey didn’t answer at once but kissed the top of her head and rubbed his cheek in her hair. “He would have liked to have known ye as well, Jewel. He’d likely have warned ye off me as quick as he met ye.”

“I wouldn’t have listened, not even to him.”

Casey sighed, wrapping both arms around her, “Christ ye scare me when ye talk like that. I’m so afraid of hurtin’ ye an’ yet I’d rather die than do so.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you,” she said, laying her ear against his chest and listening to the rhythmic thumping.

“I’d be lying if I said ye hadn’t, when ye went away in the summer I thought it likely ye’d never come back or if ye did it would be with himself. An’ the worst bit was I couldn’t have blamed ye a bit. The scales were weighted heavily in his favor.”

“He was just a childhood dream, this light that got me through a lot of dark days. But I never factored in that he was a man, not some prince in a fairytale who was going to rescue me. This here, you and me, it’s real and it’s what I want.”

“I can’t help but feel that I stole you away. It’s as if I stepped into a story where I had no part an’ grabbed the princess before the prince had time to make up his mind.”

“You didn’t steal me I came of my own accord.”

He looked down to where their hands were clasped, raised one of hers to his mouth and kissed it gently. “I cannot offer ye much, an’ ye know there are many reasons why ye should leave an’ not so many to stay.”

“You are more than enough, Casey,” she said and kissed the hand that held her own. “Now who is this mysterious person you’ve brought me to meet?”

“It’s my godfather but I’ll not be sure of his whereabouts until later this evening. He’s a man of some mystery but there are things about him that can be counted on with dead certainty.”

“Such as?”

“He’ll be tippin’ his elbow at Davy O’Brien’s pub by seven o’clock, if it were summer the time’d be somewhat more flexible but as it’s not he’ll be there on the dot of seven.”

“Your godfather? I’m not certain I’m prepared for that after meeting your uncle.”

“Devlin an’ Dezzy are worlds apart, ye’ve naught to worry about.” He squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “In the meantime there’s something I want to show ye.”

“Is there indeed?” she said raising her eyebrows and smiling.

“Ye’ve a dirty mind,” he grinned, “don’t ever lose it. However much the idea appeals though we’re on a public strand an’ there’s many windows overlookin’ it. I’ve no desire to have my hind-end on display for half the town.”

“Pity,” she sighed, “it’s such a nice hind end.”

“Come on with ye woman before ye have us both in the clink for indecency.”

They headed north along the strand, whippets of foam rushing at their heels. Clambered up black rock, slick and rank with seaweed to emerge on a barren headland buffeted by autumn winds off the Atlantic.

“This way,” Casey said and led her along a dirt road that ran parallel to the cliff’s edge. It ran for a goodly length and then abruptly petered out into a barbed wire fence. Several black-faced sheep peered curiously through the wire at them.

“That’s a new addition,” Casey stopped and stared at the fence. “There used to be a path down to the second strand through here,” he shrugged, “I suppose we’ll have to take the shortcut.”

“The shortcut?” Pamela eyed the narrow footpath that hugged precipitously close to the edge of the cliff with some trepidation.

“Aye, wind’s strong enough to keep us upright,” Casey said and set off along the path, with an apparent lack of worry.

The cliff edge was positively battered, with the wind whipping in at an increasingly alarming rate, Pamela could hardly see for hair blowing across her face and into her eyes. She followed nevertheless in Casey’s sure footsteps. Until they came to a deep gouge in the cliff head, a round hole whose maw ended some one hundred feet below in a throat of churning, freezing water.

“What now?” she said not relishing the thought of the walk back nor the walk forward.

“Fairy well,” he said mystifyingly.

“Fairy well?”

“Aye it’s what these holes are called, as a person could drop through them straight into another world.”

“Yes, it’s called the grave,” she retorted, “only the Irish would call a suicidal opening in the earth a fairy well. We’ll have to turn back, there’s no way to skirt it.”

“No need to skirt it,” he said and without so much as a running start, he leaped it in one easy, fluid jump. On the other side he held out his hands, nodding reassuringly to her.

“Are you insane?” she yelled straining to be heard over the wind.

“Completely,” he yelled back, “now jump.”

She eyed the hole, measured it at around four feet across and knew there was no way on earth she could clear it.

She met Casey’s encouraging look across the abyss and shook her head. “I can’t,” she said gripped suddenly by a paralyzing fear.

“Ye can, Jewel, just trust me, I’d never let ye fall.”

It seemed suddenly, standing here in freezing cold wind, a deathly whirlpool swirling beneath her feet, that the leap he was asking her to make was one of faith and that to walk from the brink now would be to irreparably damage the fragile fabric of what they were weaving together.

She uttered a silent, terse prayer that consisted mostly of the words ‘please’ and ‘God’ and jumped. Beneath her, a horrible yawn of nothingness opened and the sense of falling a horrible distance to that child’s nightmare place of no bottom and then, as promised, he caught her.

She balled his shirt front into her fists, sinking her face gratefully into his scent, letting go of a pent up exhalation.

“There’s nothing to fear,” he said, “I said I wouldn’t let ye fall an’ I never will.”

She nodded, wondering if the tears prickling her eyes and nose were those of relief or worry.

“I don’t understand you,” she said shakily, “you hate horses, avoid the ocean and yet you think nothing of leaping out into space with nothing to catch you.” And then, quite unexpectedly she burst into noisy sobs, muffled by the wind and Casey’s proximity.

“Shh, darlin’ it’s alright, yer safe.”

“But are you, Casey?” she asked, hands still crushing the cloth of his shirt.

“As safe as any man who leaves his bed every mornin’ and ventures out into this world. There are no guarantees in this life for any of us; we can only live the days as they come, moment by moment.”

She tilted her head back, tears drying as the wind flew against them.

Casey cradled one large hand against her cheek, sheltering her face.

“I feel safe when I hold ye, I’m safe in the night when ye take me inside an’ the world just goes away, that’s as safe as I’ve ever known life to be. I can’t imagine askin’ God to do any better than that.”

“I don’t see that God has much to do with what happens in our bed.”

“Oh darlin’,” Casey smiled, “God has everything to do with that.”

He kissed the last of the tears from her face, the salt absorbing into his own skin, the liquid evaporating to the elements and mutual warmth.

“Come on,” he pulled her up and away from the fairy well, her legs still shaking with fear, “it’s goin’ to rain somethin’ fearful or I miss my guess. We’d best find shelter quick-like.”

The wind had picked up considerably, the grass blowing horizontal to the ground and a great black mass of cloud scudding ominously in from the western sky. Below on the wide arcing beach with its coral- colored sand she saw the splintered remains of an old boat, washed up without passengers, half-drowned and tossed on lichen covered rocks, waiting for the next tide to regain some vestige of its former buoyancy. Caught between worlds, a thing of neither water nor land. She felt a pang of sympathy for it as she always had for things neither alive nor dead but only caught, defenseless, upon the edge of two separately spinning planes.

“This way,” Casey said some moments later. At first it appeared that they hung over yet another of the deadly holes that seemed to fester the cliff head. But leaning down as the first large drops of rain hit them, she saw that though the ground did indeed give way to the sea, there was a set of stairs, carved by some fickle whim of nature into the rock. Steep, and at present slick with spray, nevertheless they looked navigable. Casey’s black curls had already disappeared beneath the grass and skeletal remains of sea pinks that hung round about the rim’s opening.

It was a treacherous climb, Pamela had to stop several times to take a breath and assure herself of her footing. Casey stayed only a few feet below her, guiding her by a light touch on her ankles to the next foothold. By the time they made bottom her feet ached as did the back of her calves and thighs. They were both sunk into sand over their feet and even now the ocean was rushing towards them, breaking hard against the shoreline rocks and flurrying onwards.

“This way,” Casey pointed behind her and she turned to find an opening in the cliff. He had to turn sideways to slide through and even she had to hunch over, tilting her shoulders at an awkward angle.

She felt his hand touch her arm to guide her into a darkness so complete that it felt like veiling encasing her skin.

“Another few feet,” she heard him mutter to himself as if he wasn’t quite certain about the distance. Her entire body was prickling with the lack of light, small catpaws of panic dancing down her spine. In the heavy atmosphere, she could feel Casey disappear from in front of her as though he’d dropped soundlessly into a fissure in the earth. But just as quickly his hands reached back to guide her into the opening.

She stumbled onto her feet, it was still impossible to see but there was a sense of a vast space around them. The air was dry and surprisingly warm. She felt the tension begin to leak out of her spine.

“Stay there,” she heard Casey say from somewhere to her left and then there was the sense only of noiseless steps and an echo of breath on stone.

“What are you doing?” she asked, the impact of the whole darkness sitting in the notes of her voice, making it small and tinny and echoing it back a hundred reedy ways.

“Findin’ light,” he said, two words that splintered and divided again and again, against stone, so that it seemed he surrounded her on all sides.

She didn’t ask what he meant by this as the sound of her own voice, endlessly refracted, spooked her. A moment later there was a soft hiss, followed by the eruption of a halo of light in the darkness. It moved through the still and became, one by one, several pinpoints of light, tiny warm stars in the night of the cave.

“How—” she began halting as the word came back to her in twenty ghostly syllables.

“Candles,” Casey said, “seems as if no one has discovered this place since I last was here.”

“How long has it been?”

“Not so very long,” he hunkered down to the floor, seeming in the half-light to be searching for something, “but it might as well be lifetimes. I’ve never brought anyone here before, even Pat an’ Daddy didn’t know about it.”

“Thank you,” she whispered and the whisper rippled in, lapped upon itself in concentric circles until it disappeared with a misty sigh in the middle of the cave.

“Ah, there—come here, Jewel,” he said, beckoning with one hand the other having found what it sought. She knelt down beside him, the stone completely smooth beneath her legs. “Give me yer hand,” he commanded and she did as bid. He guided her fingers into several small grooves in the stone, rippled with irregularities, not at all like the unblemished surface above. She shivered, an indescribable chill emanating up her arm from the grooved rock.

“What is it?”

“Footprint,” Casey said and lowered the candle he held until her hand gleamed against the black rock.

Eight fissures divided the rock, eight precise tears that mimicked the shape of her own hand, though shorter by a good two inches in each case and with an additional three digits beyond her thumb.

“It looks like a hand,” she said part of her wanting to snatch her own fingers away and part of her wanting to absorb all the time that resided in the rock.

“That’s exactly what it became, though there was a long time between what you see there and your own hand.” He swung the candle back, opening the darkness a swatch at a time. “See.”

Behind her stretched a trail of footprints, the same eight fingered foot, four tracks to a set as though the creature had walked in a very measured step, indicating it would seem a body too heavy for its appendages.

“It would have been one of the first walkers, maybe even as old as the Devonian age, when the world was populated by hordes of fish an’ not so much else. It could have left these tracks because the ground was swampy, still half-submerged in water. But this creature, whatever it was, was making the first tentative steps toward land. Maybe for food, maybe for shelter, or maybe like me he wasn’t so overfond of water.”

“How long ago?”

“Three hundred an’ fifty, maybe four hundred million years, give or take hundreds of thousands either way. I’m no scientist, but I read about an eight fingered fish they found in Greenland back in the twenties an’ this seems to fit with that.”

“You never told anyone?”

He shook his head, face half-sheltered by the dark, the other side flickering in the uncertain candlelight. “No, y’know what would have come of that, masses of scientists, newspaper an’ magazine people, an’ then bunches of tourists coming to stare at these impressions in rock. They’d have had to tear the cliff apart to make it more accessible an’ so on an’ so forth. I couldn’t be responsible for that, couldn’t do that to Harry.”