The Snowmelt River Read online

  Nobody, not even Mark, understood this new twist. And if Padraig had an inkling he kept it to himself.

  All of a sudden, it was the last day of July and it felt as if the whole month had been simply too gorgeous to hold onto. Mo was squinting skywards, as if in a final appeal to the sun, where it was peeping in and out of cotton-wool clouds that seemed in no hurry to move along. How she wished this last month could have gone on forever, days so full of sunshine and laughter you wanted to slow them right down. But they just melted away anyway, one day merging into another, so that in the end the whole month of July had gone hurtling by in what felt like no time at all. A time spent building sandcastles on sunny beaches. But the trouble with sandcastles is they stand only until the waves come in and sweep them away. And, today, on this exceptionally sultry day, that wave was coming. Mo had sensed it build up, little by little, not out there in the Atlantic Ocean off the beach at Clonea, but within the bodies and spirits of her friends, and the terrible thing was that even though she knew what was happening she was utterly powerless to prevent it. It was there, already, in Alan’s angry expression as he put down the paperback he had been reading, pushing Mark and his mobile-phone-cum-camera away with his foot.

  ‘Knock it off, will you, Mark? Don’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, look out!’ Mark muttered as the phone fell from his grasp into the sand. ‘It’s hardly a crime,’ he remarked while spitting on a tissue and attempting to clean it.

  ‘Hey – it’s not very nice to take pictures of Kate when she doesn’t want it.’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest, Alan!’

  ‘Grow up – both of you!’ Kate mumbled at the squabbling boys, wiping sand off her arm where it had become embedded in her suntan protection.

  Mo stared, her gut squeezed in a spasm of worry about Mark. For weeks her brother had been developing a crush on Kate. Was Mark so stupid he couldn’t see that Kate had eyes for nobody other than Alan?

  Today’s trip to Dungarvan had just been another of the bike trips that were originally supposed to be about hunting down threatened plants. Mo had been keen enough on the idea because, while Kate scoured the hedgerows and wild spaces for threatened plants, she intended to carry out her own searches for crystals. Alan and Kate already had their own mountain bikes and it had proved to be no problem borrowing two more. Being the smallest, Mo had lowered the saddle as far as it would go to fit her short legs, and so, all too predictably, short-leg jokes became the fashion for the first few trips. She had just shrugged off their banter and surprised them all with her toughness and endurance, pedalling hard to keep pace with the others. But, given the glorious weather, they soon abandoned all pretence at plant or crystal collecting and headed for the beaches south of the Comeragh Mountains along the Waterford coastline. Dungarvan, with its numerous beaches, and Clonea beach in particular, with its two-mile crescent of beautiful golden sand, had become their favourite.

  And so it was here, at Clonea, on this serene afternoon, Mo sensed the change in her friends, as obvious to her inner senses as an unexpected gust of icy wind, or a cloud moving across the sun, might be to her physical senses. She remembered what Alan had said about fate: that the four of them coming together was too much to be explained away by coincidence. She also realised, with a certainty that none of her friends appeared to share, that the blooming had something to do with it. And more than anything she was sure that the same fate, whatever it implied, was closer – that all the time it had been creeping up on them.

  ‘I’m warning you, Mark!’ Alan insisted. ‘I mean it. I’ve had it with that phone following us around all the time.’

  Kate and Mo exchanged looks. It was an argument that had been brewing for weeks.

  She talked urgently to Mark, after Alan and Kate had gone in for a dip.

  ‘Yuh-yuh-yuh-you should stop whuh-what you’re doing.’

  ‘Tell me – what am I doing?’

  ‘You’re muh-muh-muh-making eyes at Kuh-Kate.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Yes yuh-yuh-you are. And know very well that Kate has no fuh-fuh-fuh … feelings like that for you.’

  ‘Oh, Mo – you’re just being silly.’

  ‘Why are yuh-yuh-yuh-you being so stupid?’

  ‘I’m not making eyes at her.’

  ‘Yuh-yuh-yuh-you know Kate and Alan are ah-ah-ah … an item.’

  ‘So what if they are? Girls can change their minds.’

  ‘Duh-don’t even thuh-think it.’

  ‘Oh, come on – you know I’m just pulling your leg.’

  ‘No.’ Mo shook her head. ‘No, no – no!’

  ‘Do you think I’m deluding myself into believing that Kate will fall for me if I just play some kind of long-term strategy?’

  ‘Yuh-yuh-yes!’

  Their eyes met – hers aglitter, his shifty. ‘Okay! I can see you’re getting all wound up and it’s making your stammer worse.’

  His words just wound her up even tighter. ‘Yuh-yuh-yuh-you’re absolutely buh-buh-besotted with Kate.’

  ‘I just want her to like me.’

  ‘Luh-luh-liar.’

  ‘All right – okay! Let’s you and me not fall out about it.’

  ‘Fuh-Fuh-Forget it, Mark.’

  ‘Mo – for goodness sake!’

  ‘You’re muh-mad.’ She put out her finger and tapped, like a cautioning whisper, against the mobile phone.

  He sighed. He understood the caution perfectly. Grimstone would kill him if ever he found out!

  ‘Okay, so I’m being stupid, Mo. I’m dreaming of Conan the Barbarian warrior sagas, in which I end up saving Kate’s life.’

  Mo turned away with a snort. She just couldn’t bear his looking at her with that flushed puppy-dog look on his face.

  ‘I know I can’t compete with Alan. That’s the maddening thing. He doesn’t even have to try. They have all that recent orphan stuff in common.’

  It was pathetic to watch how he mocked himself. He made a game out of the fact that his attentions only succeeded in making Kate laugh at him. But it was a dangerous game because he was so utterly lost in it, like the one thing he couldn’t bear even to think about was for the game itself to end. Mark was dipping his bare toes into the sand and flicking it in little frustrated gestures in the direction of Alan and Kate. ‘Oh, Mo – don’t you so hate the fact we have to spy on people? I can’t stand taking the pictures back to Grimstone.’

  She could see how, in betraying their friends, he was turning so much of the hate on himself.

  ‘I don’t even know why he wants me to do it. It’s not as if he even listens to what I have to tell him. It’s just our stuff, the little things that are personal to us. That just makes it all the more awful. I want it to stop. But I’d go on doing it forever if I could go on playing games with Kate and at the same time keep Grimstone off my back.’

  While Mark headed into the sea to join Alan and Kate, Mo stayed on the shore and watched him, fearful and tense, observing that he had been stupid enough to take the phone with him.

  She heard Kate’s voice raised in outrage. ‘How many times have I told you not to take pictures of me in my bikini!’

  Mo heard Alan and Mark’s voices raised in argument. Alan was defending Kate, and Mark, as usual, was trying to make a joke out of it. She heard the idiot tell Kate that he had been having Conan the Barbarian dreams about her. The arguing got worse. Mark was laughing, full of self-mockery, ‘How could I compete with a fellow whose name is an anagram of dual naval?’ Then Mark was splashing out towards the shore with Alan chasing him. They faced each other off at the edge of the surf.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Mark shouted. ‘You telling me, Alan, you haven’t been having Conan dreams about Kate?’

  ‘You’re asking for a punch on the nose!’

  They locked in a wrestle and fell over in the middle of a breaking wave. Mark was struggling to escape, trying to save his precious phone. But Alan didn’t give a damn about the phone. He grabbed Mark again and t
hey rolled over and over in the surf. Alan got an arm free and he punched Mark on the nose. They separated, Alan jumping to his feet while Mark sat in the tide with his phone held against his face, blood trickling through his fingers.

  ‘Enough!’ cried Kate. ‘Stop it this instant!’

  Alan suddenly looked sheepish. He extended his hand to Mark, to help him up. ‘Hey, I’m sorry – right? It just got out of hand.’

  Mark took his hand but he followed with his head, butting Alan in the centre of the face, so it was Alan’s turn to end up sitting in the surf with a bloody nose.

  Alan pushed away Kate’s consoling hand. ‘Okay – if that’s how he wants it. He’s nothing but a goddam idiot. I’ve had it with him.’

  Mo burst into tears. There was such a look of mortification on her face that Kate ran to her and hugged her. ‘Take no notice of those eejits. It’ll be all right. Honestly, it will. I know that Alan doesn’t really mean it.’

  Alan stormed off down the beach while Mark sat down in the sand, drying off the mobile phone with a towel and making sure it still worked.

  Kate muttered to Mo, ‘What’s his problem with that stupid phone?’

  Mo’s trembling turned into a fit of uncontrollable shaking. Her teeth chattered.

  ‘Ah, sure, come on now, Mo. It was just a few stupid photographs.’

  Then Mo said something strange. Her voice was a guttural croak, each individual syllable forced out, as if she were struggling to speak through a throat that was shackled with iron.

  ‘Guh-guh-Guh … Guh-Grimstone – wuh-wuh-wuh … !’

  ‘Grimstone will what?’ Kate helped her down, so they were sitting together on the soft wet sand by the water’s edge. Kate called to Mark, who was about ten feet away, ‘Mo’s really upset. Will you please tell me what’s going on, Mark?’

  But Mark wasn’t listening. His blue eyes were staring out to sea.

  Old Power

  Mark hardly slept that night, too shocked at how close he had come to being found out. And Grimstone added to it, as if he sensed that something was wrong, becoming more sarcastic than usual when he made them stand in front of him in the sacristy and provide the daily summary. He warned them both that their days of tomfoolery were close to an end. Then, when they arrived at the den the next morning, the situation got a whole lot worse. Padraig was waiting with Kate and Alan, all three sitting on the hummock of grass under the old pear tree in the warming light.

  The old man’s eyes seemed to blaze clearer and bluer than ever as he fixed them with his wide-open gaze. ‘Now then, young Mark and Mo! We know that something is not altogether right in this situation. I’ve been hearing one or two disturbing things. But I want to hear it from you in person. Will you tell me what ails you?’

  Mark felt his throat tighten, and he couldn’t hide his panic. ‘Nothing, Sir! There’s nothing wrong.’

  ‘Ah, now – Sir, is it?’

  Mark tried to bluff it out but there was no escaping those eyes.

  ‘Your father would do something if you stopped coming here? Meaning it was Grimstone himself that put you up to it?’

  ‘Muh-muh-muh … !’

  Mark put a restraining hand on Mo’s shoulder, to try to shut her up. ‘Mr O’Brien—!’

  But Mo shook his hand off. ‘If yuh-yuh-you won’t tell him, I wuh-wuh-wuh-will.’

  Mark shook his head violently at Mo, his eyes pleading for her to stop.

  Alan confronted Mark eye-to-eye, clearly still rattled from yesterday, in spite of the handshake. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. But one thing I know for sure is we’ve got to be honest with each other.’

  Mark didn’t care what Alan thought. He wasn’t going to explain just to please Alan. He tried to steer Mo away. But Mo wriggled free. Stutteringly and painfully, she began to explain. She told them the truth about the so-called Reverend Grimstone, and they listened to her in a shocked silence.

  Kate got up off the grass and put her arm round Mo’s shoulders. ‘Oh for goodness sake – I simply can’t believe it. Is this true, Mark?’

  Mark shrugged. ‘Mo and I, we grew up to be told that our biological fathers were drunkards and druggies.’

  ‘He cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh-calls us wicked nuh-nuh-nuh … nuh-nuh-names.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Mo is half aboriginal. Grimstone says that she only has to look in the mirror to see the face of her savage whore mother.’

  Kate gave Mo a huge hug. ‘You’re mother was nothing of the sort. If you look anything like your mother, she must have been gorgeous.’

  Mo’s face fell, her fingers writhing in a heap. ‘Muh-Muh-Muh-Mark and I … we – we wuh-wuh-wuh—!

  ‘What she’s trying to say,’ Mark added quietly, ‘is we were abandoned. Tossed away like pieces of rubbish on Sir’s doorstep – me at about eighteen months old and Mo less than a year old.’

  ‘Sure and that’s awful.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it! You really want to know what he would say to Mo when he felt like hurting her?’ Mark smiled, but there was no humour in his smile. ‘He’d say, “Now why do you think your mother couldn’t stand the sight of you the very moment you were born?” He’d tell Mo that everybody hated her, even when she was a baby, because she didn’t look like a Christian child. “Anyone can see that at a glance,” he’d say, pinching her cheek so hard his nails would leave a mark. “Go to the mirror,” he’d say. “Go take a good long look at your gipsy whore face.”’

  Kate just hugged Mo tighter.

  Alan was outraged. ‘Who the hell is this guy?’

  ‘The Reverend R. Silas – familiarly known as Arseless – Grimstone. Our adoptive father!’

  ‘Your mother … your adoptive mother … couldn’t she stop it?’

  ‘What? Dear sweet Bethal – the werewolf?’

  Padraig shook his head. ‘That blackguard sounds worse than a Puritan.’

  ‘What he really is … there’s a better name for it,’ Mark hissed between his clenched teeth. ‘But Reverend isn’t the word I’d use.’

  Kate said quietly, ‘He must be mad.’

  Mo’s face fell. ‘Cuh-cuh-clever – clever and wuh-wuh-wuh-wicked more than muh-muh-mad!’

  Mark added, ‘Recently he’s been getting worse. It’s something to do with the reason he came to Clonmel. But we don’t really know why he came here.’

  Kate held Mo at arm’s length. ‘Why he came here? Here to Clonmel?’

  ‘To spy on you.’

  Padraig barked a laugh. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘He thinks that you, Mr O’Brien, are some kind of druid.’

  ‘And what does he mean by that?’

  ‘A pagan … or something like that!’

  ‘Well now, isn’t that quite an accusation? What then is a pagan? Is a pagan someone who believes in ghosts? Or a child who discovers the meaning of magic? The druids were more than priests. These days they would be regarded as great thinkers … like a mixture of priest and philosopher.’

  ‘So you’re not a pagan?’

  ‘What were the auld religions but an attempt at understanding … maybe at understanding things that might better have been left alone.’

  ‘Grimstone talked about power. Old power.’

  ‘What old power?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I know how weird it all sounds. But it’s the way his mind works. He appears to be an old-type preacher but he doesn’t really mention Jesus, only the old hellfire and brimstone stuff. All he seems to care about is controlling people. He sets up some new branch of his church somewhere, converting gullible people. He goes looking for scapegoats. Somebody to attack. It brings him publicity and frightens still more into joining him.’

  ‘And that monster, he’s here and up to something like that?’

  Mark’s head dropped.

  Padraig stiffened. ‘Didn’t I sense there was something about you both, but I never imagined such nonsense in my wildest dreams.’ He was silent for several seconds. ‘But th
en, maybe we can turn the tables on him. Mo, will you show me your book again? Sit yourself down here on the grass while I take another look at some of your beautiful pictures.’

  *

  The four friends sat on the hummock while Padraig leafed through the pages in Mo’s green-covered notebook. Mo watched the old man’s face, his features half-hidden in the shadows and the long hawk-like nose almost touching the paper. She jumped when he pounced on one drawing. He dropped to one knee to point it out to her.

  ‘There!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is what caught my eye when I first looked through it.’

  Mo glanced fearfully at the drawing. Fear made her stammer worse. ‘It’s thuh-thuh-thuh – it’s the suh-suh-suh. . .’

  Mark spoke for her. ‘It’s the sigil. On Grimstone’s black cross.’

  ‘Sigil? D’you mean some kind of symbol?’

  ‘It’s part of the cross. Where the figure of Jesus would be, but this is definitely not Jesus. It’s silvery in colour instead of black, like the rest of it.’

  ‘Like suh-suh-suh-something very … vuh-vuh-very old.’

  ‘That’s right. The cross is made out of a black, twisted kind of metal. Like iron, but I’m not sure it’s really iron.’

  ‘Will you tell me everything you recall of it, Mark?’

  ‘It’s … well, it’s kind of gnarly, just like Mo has drawn it, only a lot bigger … and heavier.’ Mark held out his hands, to give an idea of the dimensions.

  ‘Cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh-creepy!’

  ‘The worst thing, the most repulsive thing about it, is the sigil in the middle.’

  ‘It guh-guh-guh-glows!’

  Mark nodded. ‘Honestly – it’s true. The sigil really glows, so you can see it shining in the dark. When Grimstone is talking to it.’

  Alan interrupted, ‘This guy talks to it?’

  ‘He calls it his Lord – his Master.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Muh-Muh-Muh-Mark and I … wuh-wuh-wuh-we think … we think he kuh-kuh … kuh-kuh-killed …’