Lake of Sorrows ng-2 Page 8

  After that encounter, the notion of the bees had kept at him. He was plagued with curiosity about what went on inside the hive, and he wondered how people ever managed to extract honey if the bees were such ferocious defenders. On his third visit, he’d found a musty old book about beekeeping in the ruined house; he brought it home to read, making sure it was well hidden beneath his stash of maps and school papers. The book, with its descriptions of queens, workers, drones, nurse bees, and undertakers, of their orderly existence and mysterious chemical communications, only whetted his appetite for more. He haunted the libraries in Birr and Tullamore, returning from each visit with another beekeeping book secreted under his jacket, hands clammy with excitement over the new knowledge it might impart.

  Once he had read every book he could lay his hands on, he’d sent away for a white beekeeping suit and veil. When he’d finally assembled the equipment he needed to set about putting the apiary to rights, his work had started in earnest. It could have occurred to him that his presence might be ruining his mother’s place of solitude, but he was too caught up, and reasoned that she could simply go there when he was at school. He’d begun very gradually, using a scythe to clear away the tall weeds, setting up the tumbledown hives and repairing the holes in their sides. In doing so, he’d found one or two boards bearing the unmistakable impression of a sledgehammer. In the dozen years he’d been working at it, he’d turned the apiary into a haven. He hoped his mother still went there. If she did, she never acknowledged this thing they shared, not even when he brought her the first jar of honey from the hives.

  He’d used the ruined house as his supply shed, just as the previous beekeeper had done. One day last autumn he’d found a small leather-bound book just inside the shed door, as though it had been left there for him. It was a beekeeper’s journal, unsigned, anonymous. There was nothing about the keeper’s own life; he wrote only about the bees. The pages contained a dutiful record of his daily work, the season’s cascade of flowering plants, the weather, and the honey that was the distillation of it all. Tucked inside the book he’d found a whole handful of sketches by someone trained in technical drawing, as he himself had been. They were precise, detailed drawings of swords and daggers, mostly, but there were also strange Y-shaped objects, like old-fashioned hardware. Looking at them pleased him, and he had tacked them up in neat rows on the walls of his beekeeping shed. It was still a mystery where they had come from, and not one he was likely to solve.

  This place was his sanctuary, away from the demands of the farm and the job, a place where he didn’t have to measure time. He was nearing the apiary, wading through tall grass and wildflowers, aware of their scent and of the faint buzz in the air. Bees had moods, the same as people; the temperature and the weather and the light all affected them in different ways. He had spent time studying the ways they moved, from a swarm’s quivering mass to the delicate, individual dances that spelled out the location of a clover patch somewhere close by. He’d studied the bees’ tiny bodies, marveling at the detail, the perfection of their transparent wings and striped raiment.

  The feeling came over him again, the anticipation of a third strange event yet to happen today. There was something unfinished about two of anything. He wouldn’t feel right until it was settled. He could hear the bees’ steady, collective hum as he approached, the reassuring, almost lazy vibration of more than a hundred thousand insects, their legs laden with the gold dust of pollen to be transformed into their precious hoard of sweetness. Bees were not good fliers; sometimes, especially in cold weather, he could sense the effort it took for them to become airborne.

  Charlie pushed through the tangle of thistles and blackberry brambles and tall grass that was beginning to invade his small apiary meadow from the edges. He trailed his hands over the fragrant bearded grasses and sweet globes of clover. The bees would be getting their fill. He loved this protected place above the lake, nestled below the hill’s crest, cut off from strong wind and heavy weather. He’d set his hives exactly where the old ones had stood, in an arc around the center of a small depression ringed by whitethorn bushes and apple trees. When the light was right, a person could mistake it for a stone circle, a holy place.

  At times he was seized with a feeling that he really ought to keep this area in better trim, but the feeling vanished when he was here, amid all this profusion. The grass did not live in order to be cut down, but in spite of cutting. Its nature was to grow and go to seed and grow again. He felt the rebellion in his own soul swell sympathetically whenever he stood on this small patch of earth. The world was meant to be wild, unbridled. The place where he worked, Loughnabrone, was humankind’s attempt to put its own shape on nature, but humankind never really won that fight. Drains filled in, grasses and bog plants encroached; they would soon take over again, once the humans were all gone.

  He looked down to find a single worker bee attached to his wrist, apparently attracted to a small smear of honey on his shirt cuff. He watched the insect circle the spot, intoxicated by the scent of it. He watched her tongue looping outward onto the cloth, feeling as small as she was, the air around him buzzing, vibrating with life, the very atmosphere thick with the smell of nectar and flowers, the sheer overwhelming abundance of the universe. This sudden awareness passed quickly, and he was once more in his own apiary, studying the single bee as she worked to get the nectar from his sleeve. When she was satisfied she lifted off, flying unsteadily, he thought, drunk on the taste of her own honey.

  There was someone in the apiary. Charlie stopped to peer through the dense and crooked whitethorn branches, half expecting to see his mother. Instead he saw a pale, slight figure in the center of his hive circle, a young woman about his own age. She wore a kind of shift—he knew no other word for the garment—a simple dress in some sheer material that caught the sun, which made her seem illuminated around the edges. A makeshift crown woven of twigs, clover, poppies, and other common roadside weeds adorned her dark head. He stood transfixed, watching as she lifted her arms and stretched luxuriously, like an animal. A single bee alighted on her outstretched hand, and she brought it down to have a closer look. It didn’t sting her, as he had thought it might; she studied its trail across the back of her hand. Far from being frightened, she seemed curious.

  She raised her thin arms level with her shoulders and turned slowly, raising her face to the sky. She seemed unaware of his presence; her eyes were closed, and he saw a cloud of bees gathering around her head, perhaps attracted to the flowers. He suppressed the urge to cry out, afraid he would startle the bees into doing her injury. But it was as if she anticipated, even invited the insects’ attention. He remained still as a statue, barely breathing as they landed on her in dozens. Her neck and shoulders were awash in a vibrating mass of busy, winged bee bodies. He imagined their strange strawlike tongues against her skin, perhaps tasting her for the queen substance, the chemical reassurance they needed to carry on. This was swarming behavior, he realized, the main thing all his efforts as a beekeeper went toward preventing, and yet he could not disturb such a wondrous apparition. She was some deity, a force of nature incarnate, and who was he to disturb her communion with her subjects? For it was as if she commanded them, and they sought her out, the irreplaceable touch and taste of her. And she, for her part, seemed transported, rapturous.

  He had no idea how long they stood there. It might have been two minutes, it might have been ten; his sense of time was distorted by this unexpected vision. It was almost as if their beating wings were about to lift her from the ground. He felt his center go with them, the girl and the bees, borne upward on a wish. He could have sworn there was a space beneath her feet, a miraculous millimeter, thinner than a bee’s gossamer wing.

  When the bees had taken their fill of her, it seemed, they departed as gradually as they’d come. She stood for a moment longer with her eyes shut, as if to retain the feeling of microscopic feet by the thousands upon her flesh. She shivered, clasped herself tightly, and heaved a sigh, th
e kind of wordless exhalation he imagined might escape from a woman whose lover has just left her. Then she dropped her arms to her sides and opened her eyes. Charlie was taken aback when he recognized the face, returned to earth from wherever she had been. It belonged to Brona Scully, the daughter of their nearest neighbor. Someone had cut off her long hair—that might have been the reason he hadn’t recognized her earlier. Brona was perhaps the only person in the locality who enjoyed more pity than he did. People said she wasn’t right in the head—but they said the same thing about him, he knew. Charlie wanted to be near her, to understand what she had just experienced. And with a kind of gentle, settling sadness, he knew he never would. He knew it in the same way he knew that this was the third strange occurrence, the thing he’d been waiting for all along.

  8

  The red wine swirled in her glass, and Ursula Downes studied the sediment as the eddying liquid slowed and came to rest. The bathwater was getting cold, and she was reaching the bottom of the bottle. She reached down and poured another splash; only a couple of inches remained. Her unsteady movement made the wine slosh in the glass, and several drops escaped and fell into the water. She watched as the inky red sank in ever-decreasing rings until it disappeared altogether. Her head felt heavy from the wine. She leaned back, letting the glass rest between her soapy breasts.

  She remembered the look in Owen Cadogan’s eyes this afternoon. She probably shouldn’t have laughed, but he was so pathetic. He couldn’t fathom why she wouldn’t just pick up where they’d left off last summer, and resume those desperate bouts of coupling he’d no doubt begun to think of as their “affair.” She had to admit that she had enjoyed watching his expression whenever she’d proposed anything slightly more adventurous than he was used to. But what right had he to assume that she would just take up with him again? Their relationship—if you could even call it that—had been based on physical need, nothing more. It wasn’t as if they even really enjoyed each other’s company. In fact, after what she’d seen today, she’d have sworn he actually despised her, so what was he on about? Owen didn’t know what had changed for her. She had other prospects now, not just another permanently married man who liked having it off once in a while with someone younger and more imaginative than his wife.

  And Owen wasn’t her only problem. Plenty of strange things had happened today, almost as strange as a second body with a leather cord around his neck. The crew were not settling into their work. Maybe it was just her imagination, but the pool of qualified archaeologists seemed to include a larger percentage of head cases every year. Rachel Briscoe was getting moodier and more unpredictable with each passing day. And what exactly had Charlie Brazil been up to, scrabbling through her site maps in the office this afternoon? She’d walked in and caught him out, and though he’d pretended to be curious about the excavation, there was more to it than that. He’d always been far too interested in their business. She’d seen him often enough, climbing the small hill behind her house, or out on the smaller bogs around Illaunafulla. Did he sleep out there, or was it some other attraction? Everyone around here thought him soft in the head, and Charlie Brazil was anything but. She’d find out what he was looking for.

  Actually, meeting Nora Gavin had been quite interesting. Ursula had to admit that she’d experienced the tiniest buzz shaking the woman’s hand, remembering her brief encounter with Cormac Maguire the night before. She’d always found it impossible to resist needling people like Cormac. She wondered if he was ever sorry about the way he’d left things between them. She’d long ago given up being sorry for anything. There was no future in regret.

  She set her wineglass on the floor, and began scrubbing at her nails with a brush, but gave up after a few seconds. It was no use; her nails would remain black until she left this place. She sometimes felt as though the peat was entering her very pores, filtering in through the microscopic cracks in her skin, filling her up with darkness. She was sick to death of bogs, weary of the people and the bleak rented house. Who would have believed it: two consecutive summers back in the same dreary squat from all those years ago? Somehow she thought her life would add up to something more by now. At least she’d insisted upon her own place—and why not, if Bord na Mona was paying? The crew’s communal way of life, the shared kitchen and toilet, depressed her unutterably, perhaps because she’d lived that way every summer for long enough. Maybe this time next year she’d be someplace where it didn’t rain ten months of the year. She relented for once and let herself imagine sun and heat, white sand, azure water. She knew she ought not to think about it too much. Bad luck.

  She wetted her sponge and applied a few drops of body wash, working it into a frothy lather, then slid the rough sponge around the back of her neck and over her chest and shoulders. The image of that second dead body in the bog came back to her, the stillness of it, the spark long extinguished. And with the picture came the knowledge that staying here much longer meant extinguishing her own spark, letting it gutter out in perpetual rain. She wanted to see it burn brightly for as long as possible. She felt nothing but pity and contempt for those who would stifle their own vital energy, from fear of what might happen—or even worse, from some false sense of morality. She knew she was an amoral person, by any definition of the word. The idea of morality held very little meaning for her. If the universe itself was amoral, why should the creatures governed by the rules of that universe be any different? There was no morality in gravity, for instance; it just was. Nor was there any sense or judgment in the way atoms formed into elements. Who was to say that one collection of particles had any more intrinsic value than another mass of particles with one electron more or less? The very coldness of it excited her, the hard, physical substance of the world. The rest was sentimentality masquerading as morality.

  She lathered the sponge again, and went back to washing, feeling suddenly aroused by its roughness on her soapy skin. Then the sponge passed over the top of a scar that stretched the length of her back. Various lovers had asked about it, a question that usually meant they felt entitled to intimate knowledge of her. Whenever that happened, she made sure not to see the person again. It was her only rule. She couldn’t bear inquisitiveness in a sexual partner; it seemed a singularly undesirable trait. Only one living person besides herself knew why she avoided dry cleaning shops and couldn’t abide the smell of perchloroethylene.

  Long ago, when she was still a child, she’d sought out confession, trying to get rid of that dirty feeling she couldn’t seem to scrub away. The priest had instructed her to tell him everything. She had complied, choking when she had to describe what her stepfather had done. She had remained kneeling, innocently hoping for absolution, even as she heard the breathing on the other side of the curtain grow more labored. It had only dawned on her very gradually that the old priest was getting stirred up listening to her, imagining what was forbidden, taking twisted pleasure in her fear and shame. “My child,” he’d called her. The bastard. The sick fucking wanker. She’d walked out in the middle of her confession. She didn’t believe in goodness or morality anymore. It simply didn’t exist, and people who did believe in it were deluded. She wiped away the single tear that slid down her face, and with it wiped the scene from her memory.

  Ursula took another swallow of wine and watched, fascinated at how the liquid clung to the side of the glass. It was true what she’d told Cormac—that she didn’t really give a damn about what vintage she was drinking, but maybe that would change. Desmond Quill said he would teach her about wine, and maybe she’d let him. She had to admit that Quill wasn’t at all her usual type. For one thing, he’d pursued her. When they had first met at that museum reception in the spring, she’d been struck by the hard glint in his eyes, the strength of his handshake. He’d kept staring at her through the crowd, and when they bumped into each other at the bar, he’d slipped one hand around her waist and steered her right out the door and into a waiting taxi. She hadn’t even asked where he was taking her, and when the taxi pul
led up in front of a Georgian house, she had followed him inside and straight up the staircase to his bedroom. They had not spoken a word. The memory of that first encounter still excited her. She and Quill were very much two of a kind. He was probably at least thirty years older than she was, and he never seemed to have the desperate, guilty quality of the partners she usually chose. She felt transparent to him, in a way that she’d never felt with any other human being—as if he could see right through her, into her bones, into the darkest thoughts that occupied her existence. He had never asked about her scar, but he’d often traced the outline of the damaged skin as though it were the map of her soul.

  Ursula’s reverie was suddenly punctured by a loud crash, then another, and another. Jagged fear sang through her veins. It sounded like someone breaking down the door. She leapt from the bath, leaving the water lapping and sloshing in her wake. Her fingers felt clumsy as she quickly turned the key in the lock. Then she covered her ears and sank down to the floor, trying to imagine what she would do if someone started to batter down the bathroom door. But no one came. The house had gone dead quiet.

  Ursula had no idea how long she waited—ten minutes, perhaps fifteen. She heard no movement, no sounds of life from the other side of the door. She knew it might be a ploy to draw her out, but she couldn’t stay in there forever, and her mobile phone was out in the kitchen. She found a small pair of scissors to use as a weapon, then pulled on her bathrobe and silently turned the key. No figure loomed out of the shadows at her, no hand reached out to grasp her by the hair. The house was still. She almost thought she had imagined it all, until she turned the corner into the kitchen and saw the word scrawled on the glass in red paint: SLAG. Ursula looked down at the small scissors in her hand and felt as though she was going to be sick.