A Cage of Roots (4 page)

Chapter 3

A Stifling Cell

A
yla jolted awake and gasped in thick, muddy air. She had that sensation of falling you sometimes get, except this one had lasted ages, like the fall was into something bottomless. It had not been a restful sleep, more like continuous fainting, and she had dreamt vividly about being back in the house, being smothered by her bedclothes.

It had now been an age since she had first discovered herself trapped in the clay cell. It felt like such a long time that Ayla felt utterly lost – mind, body and soul all adrift in the blackness. She had learned every curve of the walls, running her fingers along them, looking for the chink that must be there somewhere, feverishly scratching at the hard earth when she thought she felt it, and then pounding the walls with her fists and shrieking with rage when no gap
was found. Each time she had given up the search and lost herself in sobbing. Then she just lay there, staring into the black. The ritual always ended with a bout of determination – a fresh calm to help Ayla look at the situation analytically and maybe find a way out. But at the end of this thread was always the creature, and all practical thought disintegrated with the memory of that twisted maw and hot coal-fire mouth. The vision of those eyes, like cold full moons on a bitter night, sent her scrabbling for chinks in the wall again, and the process was reset.

Once, Ayla had tried to eat the slop the creature had left after its visit. Her stomach still ached from retching. She had been so, so hungry, but it had taken her a long time to realise that the bowl of slimy rot was meant to feed her. At first she had pushed it with her feet as far from her as she could, assuming it was some form of torture, or intended to knock her out. But, as the hours gnawed at her, she became curious and reached out for it. Pulling it towards her, she had gagged.

Ayla was well used to pungent smells – a life in the country, living with three grown men, had seen to that – but this wasn’t like the sweet silage that filled the air around Kilnabracka. It snagged where the back of her nose joined with the roof of her mouth and clung there, stinging. It drew tears and made her stomach heave almost instantly, but starvation made her curiosity strong, and she had sunk her fingers
into the hot slime and brought a handful slowly to her mouth. It was thick, viscous and slippery. Semi-solid chunks slipped easily from her cupped hand and plopped back into the bowl. Ayla thought about her first time trying oysters, with Taig and Fergus shouting encouragement. How disgusting those little sea snots had seemed to her then. But if eating oysters had become like diving into the Atlantic in summer – this would be like diving into slurry!

She waited for a gap between surges in her convulsing stomach, and brought the entire bowl to her lips and drank. The slop slid down her throat as one mass, coating her insides with a slippery paste. It made her tongue spasm with its bitterness, and though she instantly spat out as much as she could, the putrid mulch clung to her teeth and mouth, leaving deposits of grit that would remain crunching between her jaws for hours. She had never in her life imagined anything so revolting.
I’ll just have to starve
.

Without realising it, Ayla must have slept again. She woke with a cramping stomach and the lingering tartness of the slime in her mouth. It was even hotter and stuffier in her cell than before. As she shuffled for a more comfortable position it dawned on her that, despite everything, she would probably have to attempt the gruel again – it was that or die: black or white. In fact, she was going to have to be more cut-and-dry about everything from now on in order to survive.
Eat or starve, live or die, cry or think
– no more messing or feeling all defeated. You may be Irish now, but you were a New Yorker first, and that’s a tough combination. I’ll try and try until the bitter end to find a way out and I will do it by making clear choices. Little girl,
she thought,
grow up,
and she reached for the bowl. At her feet, light appeared.

Long black fingers gripped the edges of the widening gap and pulled the sides apart. Light flooded the cell and gripped the backs of Ayla’s eyes like a vice, squeezing. She hauled herself to a corner and brought her arm up to shield herself from its piercing beam. Slowly, the ache in her skull faded and her eyes grew used to the brightness, but still she was afraid to lower her arm.

From the source of the light, cackling flitted through the gap and the light dipped once, twice and three times as her jailer was joined, to her shock, by two more just like it. One of them snatched up the empty bowl and hurled it across the cell, to explode in shards just above her head. Ayla leapt in fright, slamming painfully into the muck roof.

The three creatures spat laughter and moved further into the cell. They were small and deepest pitch-tar black – all apart from their two white disc eyes. Their bodies were crooked, with gnarled, sharp fingers and toes, unnaturally long. They had legs, arms and a head, but there was nothing else human about them, hunched as they were with cruelty and malice, and when one began to speak its
burning mouth spat sparks. The other two again erupted in malevolent hooting. One carried a stick with a small, meek flame, which it waved at her goadingly.

Then the speaker turned to Ayla and let out a long, slow, hot hiss. Ayla couldn’t yet summon the courage to speak, though she badly wanted to show some defiance. Finally it spoke: ‘
Little girl, far from home!
’ The gaping furnace of its mouth sputtered, twisted into some sort of smile. The voice, guttural and rasping, bit at her ears. ‘
Little mongrel! Mewling little rat curled up in a hole so far from home she has no idea!
’

The other two cackled along and moved closer to Ayla, the one on the right, smallest of the three, bringing its face inches from hers. The heat from the vile creature singed her hair, but the smell was the most unbearable: when it spoke, fumes of pure rot filled the air in front of her: ‘
Yes, squealing runt! Whimpering ferret! Never see home again!
’

The third, who stood in the middle, joined in: ‘
Blubbering little slug, lost in a pit and half-dead in the dark.’
It laughed.
‘But not to die yet!
’

The first creature spoke again: ‘
No, not to die yet, little rat! Not eating? Our feed not good enough for the little lady mongrel?
’

‘
Pff! Lady Piss!
’ seethed the middle one, and they all laughed.

‘
No talk in you! Did you eat your own tongue then?
’ continued the first.

‘
Ungrateful weeping little stoat!
’ shrieked the small goblin, with sparks from its mouth settling on Ayla’s hair. She could smell the burning.

This was too much. From a swell in the pit of her stomach, Ayla found a surge of bravery and shouted back: ‘I’d rather eat my own tongue than that wet dung slop! And I’d rather eat it twice than talk to you horrible evil monsters! Let me out of here or my uncles are going to rip you apart!’

She instantly regretted her outburst. She tried to backtrack, but her apology was stifled with a choke as the small goblin’s knurled fingers gripped her neck. All three were close now, the fire in their mouths scorching Ayla’s lashes and eyebrows, needling her eyes and evaporating her tears instantly. She held an arm up to shield herself and used the other to try and prize the sharp fingers from her throat. She could not break its grip. This close, the creatures’ own eyes were a turbulent milky swirl, full of harsh light, cold and ghostly.

The first one, evidently the leader, spoke again: ‘
Your three fat oaf uncles are lost to you now, never to be seen again, little runt. They’ll be dead from searching before they even come close. You’re for the king and no one else. So eat, choking weepy piglet, or we will make you.
’

They left through the gap, taking the light with them, and leaving another large bowl of steaming slop. When
Ayla got her breath back, she winced in pain. The burns on her arm were already blistered and the pain in her neck still lingered.

None of the three uncles had spoken in the hours since they had raced to find Ayla missing from her room. Taig and Fergus sat in unblinking stillness at the kitchen table, neither looking at the other: just staring ahead into nothing. Lann was upstairs; he hadn’t left the room and it was now heading towards evening. Fergus stirred and looked to Taig.

‘We have to speak with Lann. We should have got going hours ago. She …’

‘She’ll be nearly lost to us already, Fergus,’ interrupted Taig.

Fergus looked incredulously at his brother, disbelief teetering dangerously close to anger.

‘How could you say that, Taig? How can you talk like that?!’ His voice rose as he spoke. ‘Talking like we can’t do anything. You know we have to find her!’

‘I know, Fergus!’ Taig shouted back. ‘But how long has she been gone? Now that it’s happened, where do we even start? It shouldn’t have happened in the first place!’ The last words scratched at his voice.

Fergus looked at his hands, clenched his giant fists and brought them down on the table. The fruit bowl leapt a foot into the air, the table cracked through the middle. He pushed back his chair and stood and looked up at the ceiling. ‘We have to talk to Lann,’ he said, making for the stairs.

Taig sighed, leaving the spilled apples to roll across the floor, and followed his brother to Ayla’s room.

He found Fergus pleading with a stone-silent Lann, who sat on the floor leaning against the cold bed with eyes fixed at his feet. They were lost under his deep frown, and the only movement was the shiver in his jaw as teeth clenched and unclenched.

‘Lann, this is doing nobody any good. We’ve wasted time now. It’s time to move!’ Fergus implored, frustration no longer creeping into his voice but coursing through it. He shouted the last part: ‘WE WILL LOSE HER!’

Taig placed a hand on Fergus’s shoulder. ‘Lann, he’s right. We know where she is. There is no sense in wallowing. We failed our first, most important job. We can’t fail the second – we have to go and get her.’ He spoke softly, ever the mediator.

Just as Fergus stiffened to shout again, Lann stirred and looked at them both. ‘We have to talk to Cathbad the Druid,’ he said, and stood.

The three buildings that made up St Augustin’s were held together by concrete stitches, patches of mortar prone to crumbling and in need of repair. The dense cloak of dark ivy did more of a job holding it all together: in some places its vines even pushed through the walls, curling around ancient, clicking radiators and forcing wooden tiles out of place where it plunged down into the corner of a classroom.

Being so old, the structures had a sort of life about them. Dusty air wheezed through vaulted corridors; wooden panels on the walls ached and stretched and grumbled; hot water hissed through lost networks of piping, making them snap and shudder. Some corridors went so dark and deep that even the oldest priests claimed not to have been down them. Being out of sight to all, the stories of ghosts flourished, sightings became legendary and the bowels of St Augustin’s were left unexplored by even the bravest pupils. To Fr Donnacha Shanlon, they were home.