The Changeling (16 page)

Nothing to do now but wait and trust that Shay would come. She strained her ears, listening hopefully to the silence. Water was still running somewhere nearby, gurgling faintly over stones, but there was no other sound.

Had he even tried to follow her at all? Aoife had been so certain that he would – but then, why would he? He had said they’d be drowned if they came this way, caught like rats in a trap, and she had ignored him. Maybe he had done the sensible thing, and let her go on alone.

After what seemed like hours, even the water stopped trickling, and then there was nothing.

Then there was something. A single bright pinpoint in the darkness. A random neuron firing in her brain? But the light stayed, until after a few minutes she was almost convinced it was getting closer. Even if it wasn’t, at least it wasn’t moving away – that would have been an unspeakable, horrible disaster. As she lay paralysed in the dark, this tiny pinprick, this eye of light, had already become the focus of all her hopes and dreams.

Come closer. Come closer.

She
wasn’t
imagining it. It
was
getting closer. She loved the little light. It was her friend.

And suddenly – an unbelievable gift – there was sound. Not the sea water running again, but a low agitated whispering. And the whisperer was saying:

‘
Jesus and Mary, Holy Mother of God . . . JAYSUS!
’

The light disappeared as Shay crashed violently into the rock beside her.

‘Shay, are you all right?’

‘Aoife, thank God . . .’

‘Can you move?’

‘Let me check. Yup, nothing broken. You?’

‘I’m kind of stuck.’

‘Hang on a minute. Where is it . . .? You have to keep pressing this thing or— Ah!’ The eye of light suddenly reappeared, probing towards her.

Aoife’s heart swelled with joy. ‘That’s so beautiful, the light . . .’

‘It’s the torch I was telling you about – handy little key-ring yoke. Penknife on it too. Thought I’d lost it but I had it after all.’ Shay was running the narrow beam over her face and body as he spoke. He said softly, ‘
Wahu.
Fancy meeting you here.’ Aoife couldn’t see his face behind the halo of the little torch, but she could hear the smile in his voice.

Smiling herself, she said, ‘Yeah, well, you took long enough.’

‘I know it. I got jammed in that tunnel a couple of times – thought I’d never make it through. Looks like you got a bit of a bump on the forehead yourself.’

‘Can we cut the chat and get me out of here?’

He laughed. ‘You’re not really in a position to give orders, you know. Still, here goes . . .’ He clenched the torch between his teeth and eased his hands in around her head. ‘You really have got yourself stuck, haven’t you?’

‘
Aargh!
’

‘I seriously wouldn’t scream like that—’

‘Of course I’m going to scream. You nearly ripped my ear off!’

‘Sorry, I’m sorry, but don’t scream. There’s been no high-pitched girly screaming down here for billions of years. Supposing the vibrations set off some movement in the rock? It settles by a millimetre, your brains are toothpaste.’

‘Thanks for the picture.’ But Aoife tried to do no more than whimper softly as Shay eased first her head, then her shoulders from the crack, after which she got her own hands free and prised herself out with an effort that rucked her hoodie and T-shirt up over her stomach.

Shay switched the thin beam of light away from her, illuminating the narrow wet gutter in which they had ended up. There was a lot of wet sand, and small stones and shells, presumably washed down by the ocean. He cast the light upwards. The roof bellied tent-like just above them, an odd greenish colour, as if covered with moss. The long steep slope down which they had slithered had ended in a shallow drop of about two metres. The black rock was glittering wet but no longer running with water – the high tide must already have sunk below the narrow opening far above.

Shay said, ‘We can probably climb back up. It’s going to be difficult because it’s so slippery, but it’s the only way.’ He turned the light towards her and cried in alarm, ‘What are you doing?
Stop!
’

There were loose stones piled up at the back of the small crevice in which Aoife had been wedged and she was kneeling, pulling them out, jerking and tugging at the ones that wouldn’t easily come free. They were egg-shaped and mottled green. ‘Help me! There’s a way through here!’

‘No, stop! Do you want to kill us altogether? They might be holding something up . . . Aoife,
stop
!’

She stopped. But her heart was trembling with excitement.
Down
 . . .

Shay groaned, ‘Oh Jesus . . .’

Dust and tiny glittering rock particles had begun showering around them like dry rain. Startled, Aoife looked up. The greenish rock above their heads was rippling faintly, like water. A single stone fell from it, and rolled around in the gutter. Another stone hit her on the shoulder. She said anxiously, turning towards him, ‘Shay?’

He was staring upwards with wide eyes as the dust sparkled down onto his face. A deafening bang jerked Aoife’s gaze back to the roof. A zigzag crack like a bolt of black lightning had just ripped across it.

‘Take my hand!’ Shay fell on his knees, pulling her beside her. With his free hand, he crossed himself, gazing upwards. ‘Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . .’ The zigzag crack was spreading wider and wider, and now more stones were hailing down. ‘Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . .’

A terrible roar, a peal of mighty thunder building, building . . .

He pushed her to the floor and crouched over her, trying to shelter her with his body. ‘Pray, Aoife. This is it . . . Pray!’

She gazed up into his eyes. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God . . .’

He touched her cheek and murmured, ‘Pray for us sinners . . .’ For the first time Aoife noticed that he had her gold heart clipped around his wrist.

The stone shower was growing heavier. The rocks were hitting every part of her that he was unable to protect – hands, feet . . . His body kept jerking as the unbearable shower rained down on his back. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners Seamus Michael Foley and Aoife O’Connor now and at the hour of our death . . .’

The stones were rising faster around them, burying them. He sank down on top of her.

‘I love you, Aoife O’Connor . . .’

The little key-ring light blinked out.

END OF BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ONE

Blackness. Silence.

Death.

Yet how could she be dead? She could feel his body, warm and heavy, lying over hers. The hard pressure of his jaw against her cheek. The softness of his lashes against her temple. His arms still tightly locked around her, protecting her from the falling rocks. The beat of his heart . . .

‘Shay? Are you there?’ Aoife’s voice echoed loud in the enclosed space.

Blackness. Silence.

Or was it only her own heart, beating alone in the darkness?

She whispered, ‘Shay?’

He did not stir. His body lay so heavily upon her.

He had to be alive – she could feel the warmth of him.

In the tiny amount of wriggle-room he had created for her by throwing himself across her, she twisted her head; her mouth slid across his cheek. Was his skin already turning cool? No, no, he couldn’t be dead . . . She laid her lips to his velvety eyelashes. Deep beneath the earth, she breathed in the grassy farm-boy smell of him, overlaid by the saltiness of the sea water in which his hair was still coldly soaked. She tried to move her trapped arms, and finally, centimetre by centimetre, found a way to slide them up around him and hold him tight against her. ‘Shay, wake up. Please, please wake up.’

Blackness. Silence.

Aoife tightened her arms around him. Her heart welled with grief and shame. ‘I’m sorry, Shay. I’m so, so sorry.’ He’d wanted them to crawl back along the ledge, to find another way; she’d insisted on squeezing through that tiny gap into the black bowels of the cliff. She hadn’t
ordered
him to follow her . . . But she’d known full well that he would, and still she’d gone – driven downwards by that terrible compulsion, an emotional gravity impossible to resist, the same incomprehensible force that had driven her to leap from the cliff into empty air . . . Could a dropped stone resist falling to the earth? Yet she should have been stronger, fought against it, for his sake.

I love you, Aoife O’Connor.

If only she had answered him at that very split second:
I love you too.
But everything had been happening so fast, the deafening roar of the cliff sinking down on them. Then, by the time it had faded away into a last small trickle of stones, it was too late. Shay had taken the whole weight of the cliff upon his back, to save her.

At least she could say his own words back to him now. Now, she had all the time in the world. She whispered, her lips moving against his ear, ‘I love you too.’

And listened as the echo of her whisper died away.

Infinitely soft: ‘
Wahu
 . . .’

Aoife’s heart bounded. ‘
Shay?
’

Blackness. Silence.

Her imagination.

Her muscles were stiffening, and her throat was sandpaper dry. How long would it take to die of thirst and starvation? A week? A month? Would it be very painful?

She shouldn’t be hoping for him to be still alive, she should be praying for him to be dead. Wishing, for his sake, that he had gone first, without her, switched out for ever like the light of his tiny torch. That way he wouldn’t have to wait with her in this dreadful dark for a long slow death.

It felt impossible to hope that he was dead.

‘Shay? Shay? Can you hear me?’

No answer.

Blackness. Silence.

Deep, deep beneath the surface of the earth they lay together in their tomb of solid stone, locked in each other’s arms, awaiting the end of time.

CHAPTER TWO

She came alert to a clatter of stones and braced herself, waiting for a second avalanche of rocks to finish the job, crushing the two of them to human paste.

Yet the weight on her was not increasing, but lessening . . .

A cool wisp of air drifted across her skin, and then, unbelievably, a young man’s voice said in a Mayo accent: ‘What the divil is this lad doing here?’

And a child’s voice exclaimed: ‘There’s a girl with him!’

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .’

Had the coastguard found them? Had they actually managed to follow them down under the cliffs? Amazing! Unbelievable! Aoife tried to open her eyes, but they seemed glued together. Now someone was trying to ease Shay’s body from her grasp, but her arms were too rigid to release him.

‘She’s as stiff as a board – is she dead?’

‘Maybe. Careful, don’t break her arms . . .’

Someone forced her hands apart, and Shay was gone. She tried to ask if he was alive, but her lips were so dry she couldn’t peel them apart.

Now she was being lifted from her grave, in someone’s arms, and then set down again on a flat surface. A hand was holding her wrist; she could feel a finger pressing against her vein. The deeper voice said, ‘I think I can feel a pulse.’

The child’s voice said, ‘Will I give her some of my potion?’

The other laughed. ‘Christ, no – you don’t want to be poisoning her.’

‘Just a dropeen. It’s magic.’

‘Donal, stop fooling yerself, ye’ve got no powers—’

‘It’s
magic
.’ A thin metallic edge was being forced between Aoife’s lips, clinking against her teeth; sticky liquid trickled across her tongue and down the back of her throat. An icy purple tide swept through her skull. Seconds later, she could open her eyes and her tongue came unstuck from the roof of her mouth.

She whispered hoarsely. ‘Shay . . .’

‘Hey, Ultan, she’s after waking up!’ The young boy kneeling over her was only about ten or eleven years old, snub-nosed and freckled with bright red hair, wearing a collarless shirt, a red necktie and short woollen trousers like something you might see in an old photograph from the fifties.

‘What were you after doing trying to get through the tunnel, missus? That way is blocked.’ The child not only looked old-fashioned, he talked like an old farmer from back the bog. ‘Only for that we were out here looking for our cat and heard the crash . . . Where d’ye spring from anyway? I’ve been down here as long as anyone and I never seen you afore this. Here . . .’ And from a leather pouch with a bronze ring at the neck he tipped a little more of the liquid into her mouth.

Another wave of ice swept across Aoife’s brain and everything went bright purple, but then her vision cleared again and expanded. She could turn her head. She was still in the cave . . . No, a
different
cave; smaller with white, pink-veined walls and a moss-carpeted floor. Soft daylight was leaking in through the ferns and flowering brambles that curtained the arched entrance. Blue-and-green dragonflies darted in and out, and pencil-thin waterfalls bubbled down the walls. From the hidden world beyond came the sound of birds singing.
Please God let this not be a dream
 . . .

The boy tipped yet another drop of liquid into her mouth. She sat up unsteadily.

The boy laughed, and tossed the pouch to someone behind her. ‘See. Who says I’m too young to have got my powers?’

Aoife turned in time to see a plump youth of about seventeen catch the pouch; he too was wearing odd clothes – in his case an electric-blue eighties-style shell suit. Her first thought was that she’d seen this boy before, wearing those very clothes. But then she saw Shay, and forgot everything else.

He was lying on his back, white-faced and completely still, his eyes closed. She scrambled towards him on her hands and knees. ‘Shay!’ She stroked his black hair. His hands were folded on his chest, her gold locket still clasped around his wrist. ‘Shay, wake up!’

The youth tipped a few drops from the flask between Shay’s slightly parted lips, saying, ‘I guess it can’t make him any the worse than he is now.’ The juice ran out of the corner of Shay’s mouth, as red as blood.