The Snowmelt River Page 3

  The man gazed down at Mo, focusing the intense blue eyes on her cowering shape. ‘It was crystals then you were drawing in your notebook?’

  Mo nodded glumly.

  ‘Well then, go and fetch it. Show me your drawings.’

  Mo ran to fetch both her backpack and the notebook. She handed the book up to the stranger.

  The man plucked some iron-rimmed glasses out of the breast pocket of his shirt. His gnarled hands thumbed through the tiny pages and the blue searchlights passed over the drawings and words. His frown turned to curiosity. ‘Strange and potent images, for all that they are in miniature! And these words that go by them, if words they might be at all, are in no language that I recognise.’

  ‘Mo writes in a language of her own.’

  The old man shook his head. ‘Why would a child go to such extremes?’

  ‘So nobody else can read it.’

  The blue eyes were softer now as they confronted Mark’s own. The obvious question lay in the air between them. But the old man was prudent enough to leave it unasked. Instead he turned back to the notebook and carried on browsing. Suddenly he stopped, his finger tracing one of the images. Whatever the old man had seen, it was enough to turn him from the book to Mo, studying her with the same intensity of scrutiny he had previously focused on the book.

  ‘Perhaps your presence here is not without purpose?’

  Mark was curious as to what the old man had seen in Mo’s notebook. He was still eyeing Mo, with intense interest. ‘Sure you’re as elegant as the famous boy pharaoh.’

  Mo lifted up her hazel eyes to confront his blue. ‘Cuh-cuh-cuh-can I have muh-muh-my notebook back, please?’

  ‘On a condition! Will you be so good as to show me what it was you were so busy sketching by the white rock?’

  He held the notebook low enough for her to point out her most recent drawings and secret writings, which covered two pages. Then he studied the pages again through the iron-rims, glancing from her drawings to the white rock and back again. He whistled. ‘Well now – aren’t you the most remarkable creature. Here I recognise quartz and pyrites, here purple amethyst and ultramarine turquenite. You have the geometry of their structures – that’s a fact. But you’ve captured something deeper than any ordinary eye might see.’

  Mo flushed.

  ‘And did you plan to take away some crystals in your satchel?’

  It took Mo a second or two to recognise he meant her backpack. She shook her head vigorously. ‘That wuh-would be suh-suh-suh-stealing.’

  ‘Not if I were to give you permission. An artist of your skill demands that much respect. So take what you will of them. Explore my woods wherever you will, or must.’ He returned the notebook to Mo.

  Mo nodded her thanks, although her whole body was trembling.

  ‘A final question. How long have you been here, in Clonmel?’

  Mark answered, ‘A little over a week.’

  ‘Yet still time enough for one gifted with such vision. Tell me, Mo Grimstone, have you been surprised by what you’ve observed here?’

  Mark said, protectively, ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘Let your sister answer for herself, if she has a mind to.’

  Mo gazed back up at him again. ‘Whu-whu—?’

  The tall man leaned closer to Mo, so he could see the true expression in her eyes. ‘Take your time to find the words. I’m interested to know what might have captured your attention.’

  ‘In nuh-nuh-nature?’

  ‘In nature maybe – or in the nature of things?’

  ‘Nuh-nuh-nature is buh-buh-buh …’ Mo shook her head, frustrated in her attempts to express the word.

  Mark hissed, ‘I’ve had enough of this. Just leave her alone.’

  A huge hand descended over Mark’s left shoulder. ‘Patience just a moment longer. Leave her room to speak her mind.’

  ‘. . . buh-buh-blooming.’

  ‘Nature is blooming?’

  Mo nodded.

  The tall man held his face close to that of the girl a moment longer before he straightened up and gazed about himself at the ring of trees.

  ‘These woods are a confusion of trails and half-trails. Will you be able to find your way back the way you came?’

  ‘Of course we will.’ Mark turned on his heel as if to walk away, but Mo put her hand on his sunburnt arm.

  ‘Your sister is not so sure?’

  Mark sighed. ‘Okay. So why don’t you show us the way out?’

  The old man looked down at their anxious faces and abruptly turned on his heel, his long paces already creating such a lead they had to run after him. He called back over his shoulder without breaking stride. ‘Oh, I think I’ll do better than that. I’ll escort the pair of you to meet a matching pair of scallywags. You might find you have mischief in common.’

  Kate’s notion of fate had come to interest Alan a lot more over the days that followed that first meeting by the river. The loss of Mom and Dad had certainly made him wonder about fate. But he wasn’t sure he believed in it. At least not the superstitious notion of it that Kate and his grandfather had in mind. Over the ten days since then he had enjoyed getting together with her at the sawmill. They had agreed to a daily ramble, planning a route the night before. So far they hadn’t saved any threatened plants from extinction, but they had found a fleabane that was heading towards vulnerable and a cudweed that, if it wasn’t threatened, was still kind of interesting, at least to Kate. Enough to plant two more beds in the garden of the Doctor’s House.

  Then, sometime in the middle of all this, Kate had clapped her hands and exclaimed, ‘We need to get better organised!’

  ‘What do you mean – like some kind of place of our own?’

  She clapped her hands. ‘A den!’

  He had talked to his grandfather about it, and only yesterday Padraig had finally agreed that they could use the former dairy, a detached red-brick outhouse in the shade of a dilapidated old pear tree that was peripheral to the main house and the sawmill complex of buildings. And today, after Kate had arrived, they went to have a good look at the place, finding it filthy, with outdated wiring and old lead plumbing, and chock-full of rubbish.

  Alan pulled a face. ‘Boy – what a mess! It looks like it’s been abandoned for half a century.’

  But Kate was more enthusiastic. ‘We’ll just have to put off rambling for a few days and get it sorted out.’

  They had only just begun the clearout when Padraig came striding in off the slopes with two strangers in tow: a slim flaxen-haired boy with a bad case of sunburn, and a girl with strikingly bronze skin and shoulder-length dark brown hair. The boy looked fifteen or sixteen, maybe the same age as Alan and Kate, but the girl looked more like twelve or thirteen.

  ‘Company for you!’ Padraig tossed the comment into the air and was gone.

  Kate was as surprised as Alan with the appearance of the two strangers, who were peering curiously at the cluster of buildings that stood back from the road, including Padraig’s plain two-storey Victorian house, built of the same liver-coloured bricks as the dairy, and the labyrinth of corrugated iron sheds, surrounded by piles of logs. Padraig’s return to work was announced by the high-pitched scream of an industrial wood saw.

  ‘Hi!’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m Kate.’

  The youth blinked at her, looking embarrassed. ‘Hi!’ he said. ‘I’m Mark and this is my sister, Mo.’

  ‘And that’s Alan.’ She waved to where her newfound American friend was lounging against the trunk of the pear tree.

  Alan lifted an arm in greeting.

  ‘You’re English – over here on holiday?’ Kate enquired.

  ‘We wandered into the woods and got lost. The old man found us and brought us back here.’

  Alan shoved himself off the tree and came to stand next to Kate. ‘He’s my grandfather, Padraig.’

  ‘You don’t sound local, either. You’re American.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m American. Padraig is an O’Br
ien, my mother’s father. Or I should say was – my folks are dead.’

  ‘Mine too,’ Kate added. ‘We’re both orphans.’

  Mark looked as if he didn’t quite know what to say to that. He exchanged glances with Mo, whose eyes widened. Kate thought she had amazingly beautiful eyes, a pearly hazel in colour, and nothing like the blue eyes of her brother. They appeared lambent against the bronze tones of her skin.

  ‘Whu-whu-whu-what you suh-said about being orphans?’

  Kate blinked, taken aback by Mo’s stammer. ‘It’s true. We’re both orphans. But, well, you know, it was a lot more recent for Alan – only months ago.’

  Mo’s eyes shifted fleetingly to Mark, but they returned to look directly at Kate. Her face was tense, her look questioning as she added, ‘Muh-Muh-Mark and I, wuh-wuh-we’re … adopted.’

  Alan exclaimed, ‘What? Like you’re not really brother and sister?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t believe this,’ Kate implored. ‘Don’t tell me – you’re not saying that you’re orphans too?’

  Mark shrugged. ‘We think we are. But we don’t really know if we’re orphans or not.’

  ‘You don’t even know – sure that’s awful,’ muttered Kate’

  ‘We’re used to it.’

  Alan groaned, ‘I can’t believe this. It’s all getting like too much of a coincidence!’

  For several moments an uncomfortable silence pervaded the company. Then it was Mo who was the first to break the tension, shoving past Mark, to peer into the outhouse. Her gaze took in a jumble of old furniture and pieces of outdated woodcutting equipment. The place stank, as if generations of cats had used it for a toilet. ‘So whuh-whuh-whuh-what are you planning?’

  Alan shoved a clump of brown hair off his brow. ‘We’re going to make the dairy into a den.’

  Mark and Mo couldn’t fail to notice that, under his fringe, Alan had a red triangular birthmark in the centre of his forehead.

  Kate added, ‘And we could do with some help.’

  Mark seemed to be the last of them to shrug off the tension. Judging from the look on his face, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to spend the rest of the day shifting rubbish.

  Mo appeared to read her brother’s mind. She said, ‘Cuh-cuh-can’t we help them, Mark? Oh, cuh-cuh-cuh … c’mon.’

  Alan nodded up to the ceiling where there was an antiquated electric light fitting. ‘Looks like we’ve got juice. And there’s an old porcelain sink over there. So we’ve got water too, if maybe just a cold faucet and lead-piped, so definitely not drinkable. This place used to be a real dairy, back whenever. You’ve got to watch the floor because it slopes away to the corner where you see the sink. But hey! We get the junk shifted and we’ve got space for stuff, like maybe a table and chairs and even a phone line.’

  Mark sniffed at the green-stained sink. ‘You really think you could rig up a connection?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. There are two separate lines going into the house and the sawmill. All we’ve got to do is to hook up to one of them.’

  ‘We could set up a computer station?’ Mark’s spirits were beginning to lift. He and Mo only had another week, but even a week could become interesting.

  ‘Don’t see why not.’

  ‘We could download stuff – music?’

  ‘Sure! We could party!’

  Kate cut through the exchanges. ‘Partying wasn’t what I had in mind.’

  ‘Kate here is saving Ireland’s plants from extinction. I’ve been recruited to help her. The den will be our headquarters.’

  ‘Wow!’ Mark pretended to be impressed.

  Mo muttered, ‘Shu-shu-shut up, Mark!’

  The two youths grinned, struggling to control themselves.

  Mark lifted his eyebrows at Kate. ‘Maybe we can work out a compromise?’

  Kate shook her fist at him. ‘The only compromise I’ll give you is a meeting between this fist and your scalded English face!’

  The two boys fell into uncontrollable laughter.

  Mo raked her fingernail along Mark’s spine as Kate blushed a furious red. For a moment the two girls looked at each other. Then Mo’s lips pouted and she waved Kate to join her. ‘Cuh-cuh-cuh … Oh, come on, Kate!’

  There was no getting out of the chore after that. Mark, still laughing at times, threw himself into it as hard as the others. Clearing the dairy of junk took several hot and sweaty hours. All four of them ended up covered in dirt and spider webs. Alan tugged and hammered at the single cold tap until he got it working, and they washed their hands and faces over the white porcelain sink. They filled up some empty bottles so they could sprinkle water over the concrete floor, getting ready to broom it clean. A careless sprinkle and they ended up throwing the water over each other amid hoots of laughter. An hour later, with the sun heading west, they found an old wooden table and an assortment of chairs, so they could settle down and rest in a little more comfort, feasting on Irish ham sandwiches and ice-cold orange juice from Padraig’s kitchen.

  A sweat-streaked Kate rested her face on her interlaced knuckles and looked across the table at the fair-haired English boy. His short-sleeved shirt was muddied and streaked. Could it really be that all four of them were orphans? And if so, was Alan right – was this too much to put down to coincidence? The thought caused an anxious fluttering of her heart. She noticed Mark lifting a battered looking harmonica from his shirt pocket and she watched how he toyed with it on the scratched bare wood of the table.

  ‘Are you going to give us a tune?’

  His face flushed an even deeper red with embarrassment and he stuffed the harmonica back into the shirt pocket. But from time to time, as they munched and got to know one another, Kate noticed that he would glance her way, as if mentally assessing this bossy Irish girl with her green eyes and a temper to match the colour of her hair.

  The Sigil

  Mark and Mo were late in getting back to the rented house, formerly a Church of Ireland parsonage, where their adoptive mother, Bethal, was impatiently waiting. Bethal was tall, grey-eyed and bony, with long mousy hair plaited like a show horse’s tail and long unshapely hands that always looked raw. Now, in the gloom of the oak-panelled entrance hall, she shrank from the grimy appearance of their clothes.

  ‘Filthy toads!’ Her lips were inadequate to cover her gravestones of teeth. ‘Filthy! Filthy in body and soul!’

  With her ribs thrust out, she blocked entry to the tunnel-like corridor that led to the ground-floor washroom.

  ‘Get up there! Let Sir see for himself the state you’re in! He’ll know what to do about it!’

  So saying, she harried them upstairs with raps of her knuckles against the backs of their skulls, on through the tiers of chairs in the Meeting Hall and the tabletop makeshift altar, and through the heavy door into the office-cum-sacristy at the back. Here she abandoned them with a slam of the door. Late as they were, evening worship had not long ended and the pungent odour of sweat still permeated the Hall and chased them into the inner sanctum. Sweat, lots of it, was an integral part of Grimstone’s services, which had little to say about the gentle Lord Jesus. The Lord he venerated skulked away from the light in deeper and darker places, devoid of anything a normal priest or vicar would have recognised as Christian caring and kindness.

  On entering the sacristy, they saw that his soiled dog collar had been flung onto the desk surface. They also saw, with a slender hope, that he had little or no interest in their lateness, or, for that matter, the dirtied state of their clothes. Ignoring the clatter of their arrival, Grimstone leaned against the sill, while staring out into the fading evening through the wide round-topped window. As usual when he was coming down from the high of a service, the black silk shirt was stuck to him with sweat, sculpting his heavily muscled body.

  They waited in silence for more than a minute, listening to the deep methodical rasp of his breathing.

  ‘You’ve been wondering why I brought you here? I know you have, so don’t bother to deny it.’ His voice was
quiet, a sonorous growl, but they knew him well enough to sense danger.

  ‘Well, much as it surprises me too, this town is of growing interest.’ He inhaled a deep draught of the cool air of evening. ‘There is the reek of old power here. Not that you would catch the whiff of it. It is almost buried and forgotten, yet lingering, the way heavy stinks do. Maybe you girl, with your whore-witch heritage, can actually smell it? I’ve seen you scribbling into that book. So tell me what you’ve discovered.’

  ‘The nuh-nuh-nuh … the name is Cuh-Cuh-Celtic.’

  ‘Cuh-Cuh-Celtic! Of course it’s Celtic. Clonmel in their degenerate tongue means the Vale of Honey. But this stink is older … far older still. Pah! Why do I waste my breath on the likes of you! What can you tell me that I don’t know already?’

  ‘I’m nuh-nuh-nuh … nuh-not sure, Suh-Sir.’

  ‘You’re nuh-nuh-nuh-not sure? Well, let me explain then what is to be done. We face a more formidable challenge than I realised when I came here to proselytise this backwater. Why, then, I hear your small minds wondering, does he bother to share the good news with us? Why? Because it is my Lord himself, my sacred Master, who senses the threat. The threat is to Him. Oh, yes, indeed. He senses a threat to Him, here in this town, in the old power that still lingers here.’

  Mark muttered, ‘A threat, Sir?’

  Grimstone’s head was nodding slowly, his hair glistening with an opalescent sheen of sweat. ‘I had anticipated every sewer of Papist heresy, with its confessionals and slothful delusions. But this is far worse. What’s at the bottom of it? A lingering relic of the old paganism? I wouldn’t be surprised.’ His voice rose, throaty and rasping. ‘Old power! Old power, and a threat to My Lord, that by His blessed will, I will expose and crush.’

  Only now, as he spun round to face them, did they see that the black metal cross, the symbol of the church Grimstone had personally founded, was clasped in his right hand. He lifted it lovingly against his brow, pressed its embossed sigil against the scars of many such impressions, a new branding. Although the cross did not look hot, the smell of his burning flesh pervaded the room. Then he intoned the mantra: