It wasn’t until they’d left Dublin behind that Sam began to understand how deeply the English had set their mark upon it: theGeorgiantownhouses andVictorianwrought iron fences andEnglishgardens. In Lusk, Sam began to see a different Ireland altogether?—an older Ireland, from the looks of it.
Whitewashed clay cottages with thatch roofs blended into the landscape, clustered together as if gossiping. Barefoot children threaded past a dog snuffling and rooting in the wide dirt road, where a patch of stubborn grass crabbed up around an old pump. Scraggly trees rose up behind the cottages?—and on one occasion,insidea cottage, which had apparently misplaced its top. “Taxes,” Hel had murmured ominously. And silhouetted against the rising moon: the jagged crenellations of an ancient round tower. Castle Lusk?—a Gothic citadel built on the ruins of a monastery.
Van Helsing’s spurs jingled as he strode down the dirt road. Hel followed, managing to look as if she were going her own way, in her black-lensed spectacles, with Heathcliff perched on her shoulder. Sam trailed them both, thinking of how heroic they looked with the wind sweeping their long coats behind them. Clutching the Viscount’s box camera and stepping gingerly in her heels through the mud, Sam felt as if she’d walked out of another story entirely.
They were fortunate the curfew extended only to Dublin. They were less fortunate that the bodies had been found at sea. The ocean had a way of obscuring the trauma a body had endured?—decomposing them all too swiftly, or preserving them overlong, depending on the temperature and tides. And yet it was strange: Their bodies, according to Detective Lynch, had been untouched by predation.
For a moment, Sam could have sworn she saw lines of rot veining beneath the skin of the earth and up through the clay of the pub, the whitewashed walls splitting and seeping like open sores. It was so like flesh that acid washed the back of her throat. It wasn’t real, she told herself, squeezing her St. Brigid’s medal in her hand until it hurt. It couldn’t be real.
In the next breath, it was gone, as if it had never been. Sam released the medal. It was sticky with frost, the imprint of the saint pressed into her palm. The dark circles of Hel’s spectacles slid in her direction.All right?
Sam nodded tightly.
A vision.Despite her gloves, and despite her best attempts not to channel. The visions were getting stronger.
“Would you stop humming?” Van Helsing said irritably.
“Sorry,” Sam managed, her own voice muffled beneath the racing of her heart. The song. She’d been singing it without even knowing it. With a chill, Sam realized she had gotten so used to it, she scarcely heard it anymore.
A raven perched on the moss-eaten thatch roof of the pub, tilting its head to watch them with canny black eyes. Hel reached for her revolver, but Sam shook her head. To her surprise, Hel let it go.
Van Helsing called to a man in muddy corduroy leaning against the door to the pub, trying and failing to light a soggy-looking cigarette with chapped and swollen hands. “You, there!”
“Ah, if it isn’t yourself!” The man squinted up at Van Helsing. “Who are you again?”
“Jakob Van Helsing. Tell me”?—Van Helsing wrinkled his nose as the eye-searing scent of alcohol hit them, and whatever he had been about to say changed halfway off his tongue?—“are youdrunk?”
The man gave up on the rumpled cigarette and tucked it behind his ear. “Not nearly drunk enough to deal with the likes of you.”
“Ireland sober is Ireland free, Jonny,” an old woman called from across the street, her bulky frame wrapped in a heavy grey shawl against the damp in the air.
“Oh, fuck right off with that, Eileen,” he said. “I’ll get sober when England gets off our collective asses.”
“Only in Ireland,” Van Helsing said, exasperated.
“You came to a pub,” Hel said sharply. “What did you expect? It’s the same in London.” It was only that when the Irish did it, people took it to mean something. Whereas when a Londoner did it, it was just a bit of fun.
Hel stalked past him, pushing open the door to the pub.
“Hey, you can’t go in there!” Jonny said, but he didn’t move to stop her. Van Helsing bulled past, nearly knocking Jonny aside when he didn’t scramble out of the way fast enough, Sam hurrying on his heels, making apologetic noises. “Oh, so now everyone’s going into the pub except me, are they? Well, why not?”
Inside, the black brick floor conspired with the ceiling’s dark wood to give the pub the feeling of being hidden in the heart of one of Ireland’s hills. To Sam’s right, bottles of all sizes glimmered like gems on the wall behind a bar of uneven stone. Implausibly, a tree grew in the middle of everything, stripped of bark but miraculously unrotted. Dozens of St. Brigid’s crosses hung from its arching branches, rattling eerily as the wind swept in through the gaping door. Sam had heard of trees that could not be disturbed for fear the Folk would be angered, and wondered if this was one of them.
Heathcliff sniffed the air, reminding Sam of stories that animals might sense spirits where humans could not. Following his gaze, Hel stiffened, her eyes tracking something Sam could not see.
Ghosts,Sam thought. They were on the right track.
Four bodies were laid out on the tables as if for a feast, coins placed on their eyes. Three of them were clearly corpses?—waterlogged and bloated. Still clothed, thankfully. But the fourth?—the fourth wasalive, though Sam could see why there had been confusion.
His skin was pale and clammy, and his clothes were sodden. His eyes stared sightlessly, black holes in a slack face.
“That’s Mr. Pearse,” Sam whispered. The onetime proprietor of a textile factory, a man who had once loved motorsports. Sam now suspected the discontented set of his mouth had more to do with his dentistry than any emotion he might be experiencing. Indeed, he didn’t look as if he felt anything at all.A witness.
“...something wrong with him,” a man was saying. The publican, Sam assumed, from the proprietary way he rapped his knuckles on the table. He was dressed in a thread-worn sack suit and a top hat that did little to tame his thistledown hair and equally wild chinstrap beard. His watery blue eyes were intent on a brown-skinned woman holding a black medical bag in both hands. “It’s not natural, the way he is.”
“I’m telling you that, medically, he’s sound,” said the woman, a nurse by the looks of it. She wore a black wool coat with buttons all down the front and a flat cap that pulled her greying hair back from a narrow, care-lined face. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“What’s wrong with him, exactly?” Van Helsing demanded.
