She scooped up her dead phone, plugged it in and turned it back on.
There were a dozen messages, missed video calls and various other attempts at contact.
Alex, what’s happening?
Tell me you’re ok. PLEASE.
What’s going on???
She typed quickly, straight into the group chat.
We’re ok. All good.She paused, wondering what on earth she could say to explain any of it.I think we have a bigger problem than I thought. Arnold, what do you know about something called Crom? Or the god of the hungry grass?
The response she got was not comforting.
Crom? Not the one in Conan the Barbarian?Gabe. Of course it was.
The phone rang. Arnold already had an answer, of course. Because he was that good.
‘Alex? Sorry. It’s easier than trying to type all this. I’ll put it all in a group email in a minute. Just glad you’re okay…’ He paused, concern bleeding through his words. ‘Youareokay, babe, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, aware of how hollow her voice sounded.
He didn’t sound convinced but took her word for it. ‘Okay so, this is for real, not fantasy. And there’s a lot. I looked it up earlier because it was mentioned in your grandfather’s notes and I thought it was weird, you know? There was a god called Crom in Ireland, very old, pre-Christian, pre pretty much everything. Howard nicked the name for his Conan books, that’s all, and mangled the hell out of it. There were a few Croms in Irish lore – Crom Cruach, Crom Dubh, Crom Cenn, maybe more. Could all be the same thing, or aspects of an old god, could be brothers. At least metaphorically. Like the Titans. Mostly it’s just scraps of stories though, all written by monks so there’s an obvious bias. Sometimes they’re lumped in with demons and the stories are nasty enough for that.’
She could hear him clicking his keyboard, bringing up more information.
‘Crom means bent or crooked. Cruach is a heap or a pile, as in bodies. Dubh means black and Cenn head, likeseveredheads, but most of the accounts are from the Greeks and the Romans who loved talking about the barbaric Celts headhunting, bloodletting and sacrificing whoever they could. So again, not reliable. One story goes that there was a golden idol, set up in a ring of standing stones, and they’d pour blood over it, pile up the bodies of the slain in front of it and have orgies, that their hunger was never sated. But like I said – remember the sources. I don’t know about the god of the hungry grass. That could be a local thing.’
‘All right,’ she told him, fighting down her rising sense of dread. A golden idol in a ring of stones. There was a ring of stones in the woods. And in the undercroft…the thing Maeve had pulled out of the ground, the hunched figure with the grinning face which had rolled off into the corner…that could have been a golden idol, couldn’t it? But she didn’t want to say that out loud.
‘Speaking of local references… There are folktales about the wise women of Kilfayne. They could turn into hares and stuff and they were charged with keeping the land. Ask your Sasquatch about them. I bet he knows.’ He gave a soft laugh which petered out when she didn’t join in. ‘They’re mentioned in your grandfather’s notes too. They were said to have defeated an evil being which sounds a lot like a Crom. Such things can’t be killed, he says, so instead they trapped it using the magic of rock and water and the earth itself. They built a great cairn over the thing to imprison it and grew a vast forest around it, a living barrier, imbuing the trees with enough power to contain Crom, and to destroy those who would release it. There was some kind of ritual role, a guardian, called the walker in the woods.’
The words rang like the whine of tinnitus in her ears. The wise women of Kilfayne had created a guardian, the walker inthe woods. Just like they’d told her in the village. They’d joked about it being Nick because of his surname. But now she wasn’t so sure it was a joke. Fionnuala had shut them down right away.
And Nick was always escaping to the woods. He guarded them. They gave him strength. And peace. They were his refuge. He had called himself her guardian and she had said this was her land.
She looked up at a sound to see Nick there in the study with her, listening, watching. So quiet.
God, they’d brought this on themselves, the two of them.
Arnold was still talking. ‘The walker is dedicated to guarding the prison, but it isn’t clear if that was a hereditary role, an elected one or a sacrifice maybe? Whatever it was, the guardian is called to serve the trees, it says, and they’re part of the spell binding Crom. And that great enchantment worked for generations.’
Until the de Wildes came along, and ruined everything. She didn’t need to say that.
‘I think that’s where your house comes in. From what the notebook says, the curse transferred itself to the building. That entity lingered on in the stones and in the earth, sleeping deep, but the woods couldn’t protect the people inside the house anymore. Those who live there risk falling prey to it. That’s what Blaise Chambers found, and raised, and worshipped.’
Of course it was.
That was why the de Wildes had the reputation they had around here, why they did nothing to help their tenants during the Great Famine, why they exploited the whole area, why they raped and murdered their way to power. Why the women died young if they stayed here, and why the men were bastards.
Why Chambers was still so powerful even though he’d been dead for two hundred years. Because it wasn’t just him. He wasn’t just a ghost but was tied into something else. Crom. Thething he had worshipped in life and served in death. The thing he wanted to feed Alex to.
She didn’t know how, but she had recognised it as soon as she laid eyes on it. Like something inside her had always contained that knowledge. That little bit of Kilfayne, the part of her Gran had nurtured, the part she had always suppressed. The part that had saved her and damned her father…
She had to face the fact that there might be what Gabe would classify as a demonic entity living underneath her house. How did you say that with a straight face?
CHAPTER 40
