Book of Kells Read online

  And now here he was, living in dirt and teaching the odd course or two. No social life to speak of, except when she took him places. Derval bullied him mercilessly. She herself knew it. She did so because he was so spineless, and because…because he was who he was, with the unstudied, unteachable gift of design he had, and did nothing but dawdle and doodle along. If Derval had that flaming talent, she told herself. Instead of merely a flaming temper. With her own decent intelligence and hard work she had made a name for herself, and enough money to keep herself and Tinker in comfort. John…he ate moldy bread, unnoticing. She blinked miserably at the head of limp pale hair. Born to be a frigging bachelor, every inch of him.

  Maybe what bothered her most about John was this. What he was doing now. Doodling and mumbling as though he were in another world, when someone (Ailesh? Herself? Derval wasn’t sure) needed him here.

  Gone away, gone away… Derval could hear the hunt horn blow the signal in her head. Fine rider though she was, she could never follow where Johnnie went, when he went away from her.

  The sad air on the stereo echoed her mood. She stepped into the bathroom, to make sure her eyes had not deceived her. No. The window was sealed shut with layers of carelessly applied, dirty paint. Ailesh, like the ghost of Banquo in her white sheet, wandered in with her and then back through the front room, her small face wrinkled with puzzlement. Derval sighed and followed. She leaned against the wall. Perhaps she should take the girl to the Home for Battered Women. Not on horseback, of course, but in the Mini Minor. John was no one to help….

  The air ended. John put down his pencil but his eyes were fixed on his work. The bathroom door faded behind a roseate, electric cross of light. On its surface, as if picked out in neon tubing, the thousand spirals danced like living things. Ailesh lifted her hand toward it and cried out, “Dia Linn!” Derval gasped and put her hands to her face.

  In ten seconds it had faded and gone.

  “What was that?” asked John mildly, still sitting on his stool by the front door. “I saw pink again. Like with the girl.”

  Derval nodded, openmouthed. “So there was. A cross of red light. And space on the other side, Johnnie. With hills like those just above Greystones Harbor, and slopes like those that run between there and here.”

  Derval turned to him again and fixed him with a glance. And in the middle of his wonderment he had time to wish his abilities were different or differently trained, that he could paint that vibrant dark face, with one brow down and one brow flying and mouth both mocking and warm. He remembered why he had followed her like a puppy from Newfoundland. “But it was… I saw a hill of oak trees, love. Black with oak trees, and the slope was black as well. There was no grass to be seen.” John’s vague face went peaked with confusion. “A mirage?”

  Derval restrained a cutting retort. “It wasn’t a mirage.”

  At that moment they heard the sound of iron ripped from concrete. The ornate black balustrade went clanking down the sidewalk, accompanied by dancing hoofbeats.

  “Here. Put this in your head,” said John, shoving the tumbler of milk over the enamel-topped table. Then he rested his chin on his fist and regarded Ailesh’s efforts to use a fork on the length of cold sausage. He had a suspicion she’d do better with a knife. He was afraid to give her a knife, so he merely watched.

  His resentment of Derval had grown until it was a pall that covered him and weighed him down. That was why he had to support his head in such a manner. When he had invited (invited? No. Merely not resisted strongly enough) Derval’s involvement in this puzzle, he had been only undecided. Now he felt wholly stuck. He had promised—or as good as promised—the woman he’d not call the gardai, but she’d offered no other solution. Did she expect him to adopt this crazy girl?

  John was afraid of crazy people. Always had been, even of old Otto who was safe enough that Dad took him out on the fishing boat. Crazy people caused John’s stomach to butterfly and the hair on the back of his neck to rise. Maybe because he knew he was a bit weird himself.

  Ailesh had grabbed the handle of the fork in the palm of her hand. The long sausage dangled down on either side and she was maneuvering one end of it into her mouth, spaghetti-style. She had given up trying to talk to John Thornburn.

  Odd. John’s stomach was free of butterflies at the moment. His hair, too, lay with its normal limp disinterest. He guessed he had simply filled up with being nervous about the girl. Or perhaps he was simply too pissed at Derval, who had flung herself out the door in pursuit of Tinker.

  How like her.

  In the beginning John had been terribly impressed with the Irishwoman with the Ph.D., who had never seemed to know a moment’s indecision. For months her presence had served to quell the constant floating uncertainty that was John’s mode of thought. It was her idea he should come to teach design at the Trinity Extension, and only through her influence had the school invited him.

  She swept all before her.

  The Valium should have given him some clue that she wasn’t as solid as she seemed, John now reflected. But he was more than willing to have decisions made for him, and terribly flattered to be wanted so much by anyone, let alone a lovely young professor. But since he had landed in Ireland, there seemed to be less and less to be said between them. John couldn’t with the best will in the world pretend to her interest in Celtic history, politics, or language. Art was his field and his fate, and it might as well be Zimbabwean as Irish for all he cared.

  Among the males who clustered around Derval—a generally hairy-chested lot cut from the heroic mold—he was a poodle amid the wolfhounds. He saw Dr. O’Keane less and less, to the point where he was not sure whether she’d yet taken another lover. (It was not like John to ask.)

  John had a suspicion—just a suspicion, for no one had been so cruel as to tell him—that he wasn’t very good in bed.

  Ailesh had finished the sausage. Her rosebud mouth was glistening with grease, as though she were wearing lipstick. The sunlight reflected from her lips and bounced through the ell of the front room to the kitchen window. It shone so in John’s eyes he wondered if he were getting a migraine. That would be the crowning shame: to get a migraine and become nauseated and aphasiac just when he had to make some decision about this intruder.

  He would not get a headache! He clenched his fists in his lap and hardened his jaw, letting a cleansing rage fill him. He would not let Derval return (was she going to return?) and find him helpless in a dark room.

  Little Ailesh looked at his motionless stern face with some trepidation.

  The rage felt rather good, really. John felt he now had the power to do something about Ailesh, even before Derval’s return. He could get her on a bus to Dublin, perhaps, and let the conductor worry from thereon. Or better, he could take her on a long walk and then hop a bus home himself, abandoning her.

  He could call the gardai.

  He glanced fiercely over at the object of these strategies to see the small female for whom his sweatshirt was far too big (how unusual) sitting receptively across the table, her hands folded and a look of worry, almost of fear of him, in her eyes.

  John winced. He would do none of these unfortunate things to Ailesh, of course. Poor crazy girl. But it was something for him to have felt in himself that he could. He patted her hand. She looked up and smiled gratefully. Her skin was soft to the touch, soft and full of feminine power. The reassurance was brotherly and mutual. Embarrassed, John removed his hand.

  She was very small. “You’re the scud of the lot, eh?” he said (meaning the runt of the litter). “Well, no matter. So’m I.” It was easy to say such things to a girl who couldn’t understand a word of it.

  John felt much better. He didn’t think he was getting a migraine after all.

  Chapter Three

  There is no human situation so miserable that it cannot be made worse by the presence of a policeman.

  —Brendan Behan

  Derval’s brain had been working so fast she felt it w
asn’t connected to her. In the time it had taken to trot Tinker back to the stable, finagle someone into cooling him down for her, cancel her student conferences on McCaffrey’s phone, and tootle the Morris Mini back to John’s house, she had both understood what had happened that afternoon and realized the implications to herself, the visitor, and the entire world. “I am the instrument of God,” she whispered to the rearview mirror. “Or is ‘Goddess’ more politically correct? Or ‘Gods’ in their plurality?” She liked the sound of that last phrase, “‘Gods’ in their plurality.” It seemed less serious, somehow, and Derval was not sure she believed in any sort of God. Since the mirror had slipped out of adjustment, she was made aware once more that excitement made her nose look longer. She grimaced at her image.

  She found John seated with Ailesh at the kitchen table. He looked oddly pleased with himself. Derval took a deep breath. “Johnnie,” she announced, making an all-inclusive gesture with her key ring. “This thing is more dangerous than the MX missile!”

  John Thornburn blinked vapidly at her. “The Morris, eh? It is tiny, but then so are most of the cars around here. If you get hit by a Volvo, though—”

  “You know what I mean,” snapped the dark woman, and she skidded a third chair over to the table. “The dimensional warp.”

  John furrowed not just his brow but his entire face. “Dimensional…you mean the pink mirage? I’d forgotten about that.”

  Derval sagged. “You…you forgot? A woman comes screaming into your house from another world and you just…”

  “I certainly haven’t forgotten the screaming woman. I’ve been feeding her, you see, and teaching her to use a paper napkin. But the pink mirage-thing—”

  “It was not a mirage. It was real!”

  “Mirages are real,” John continued reasonably. “They’re just from somewhere else. A trick of light.”

  Derval rose to her full height. He had something there. It might even be relevant, but she was in no mood to give him credit for it. “That girl,” she stated, pointing at mystified Ailesh, “is not a trick of light. And she came through the phenomenon out of somewhere to here.”

  “Don’t be silly,” John said with some asperity. “She came through the bathroom window.”

  “The bathroom window is painted shut!” shrieked Derval. “Painted, mildewed, molded, and cobwebbed shut!” In an excess of passion she dragged John’s chair across the kitchen and the dining ell to the hall before the bathroom door. She tipped the outraged householder over the threshold and closed the door on him.

  Ailesh watched the scene with friendly interest, for all the activities of these semidivine beings were probably deeply significant. As soon as the effort-flushed Derval returned to the table, she asked her all about it.

  John came back five minutes later in a brown study. “The bathroom window can’t be opened,” he said, and he sat down on the edge of the table. “I tried with all my strength.”

  “So what are we to do?” asked Derval triumphantly. As it was she who uttered the question, it must have been rhetorical, for Derval always knew what she was to do. John gave her a wary glance, wondering what improbable, impractical, and completely unshakable resolve she had hit upon.

  “I don’t think that’s up to us at all,” he murmured, continuing, “If this thing is as big as you say it is…” The trite fatuity of his phrase hit him, silencing him as no scorn of Derval’s might have done. “I mean, if the girl honestly came here through time—”

  “If she…!” Derval rose from her seat and her blue eyes were the centers of a face flushed to the color of a lit match. Her hands went to her breast and then extended outward. “Johnnie boy, I am perishing—absolutely perishing—for another, alternate conclusion. If you can give me one, you will have my undying gratitude and I can go back to my tedious graduate students a sane woman.” Derval caught the response murmured under John’s breath but decided to ignore it.

  “A hoax,” he answered her aloud. “Not the hoax you first thought of, with me pulling it off, but a hoax just the same. Someone at the college, or in one of my own classes, with…with lasers and…and hypnosis, possibly.”

  He stared at the dusty floorboards as he spoke, so he wouldn’t have to look at Derval when she answered—as he knew she would. “Someone willing to bite a young woman all over her privates in an effort to make the crack good? Not to mention somebody willing to get bit. Do you think they used a local anesthetic before ripping her up, or would that numb the mouth too much for subsequent bites?”

  John didn’t fight the ruination of his idea. He couldn’t raise his head. His vision swam with motes of dust gone brilliant, and he blinked and swallowed with difficulty. He felt floaty. That was a very bad sign. All the suspicious symptoms of the past hour returned to visit him again. “Whatever, Derval,” he whispered, and was glad to find that he still had control of his voice. “Either hoax or dimen…dementedal…time warp, our response must be the same.”

  “And that’s?”

  “Call the gardai.” Now, having said what he had to, John relaxed into a miserable passivity, watching the dust motes increase, spread, and occlude the left half of his vision. It was all very predictable.

  Derval gave a half-strangled wail. “For Christ’s sake, man, why not call the Pentagon directly?”

  John opened his mouth. No sound came out. Derval continued, “Don’t you know that’s the first thing our beloved taiseach will do? Give the benefit of the discovery away to the Yanks, like the faithful dog he is. Not quite for free, of course. He’ll expect benefits. Bigger immigration quotas probably.”

  This statement was bizarre enough to rouse John from his impinging private catastrophe. “What in hell do the Yanks want with all this?” he asked, and although he was reassured to find his words still echoed his thoughts, the effort of making sense leaked tears from his eyes.

  “What do the…? Ah, Johnnie, you’re a blessed innocent!

  “And not only the secret of the dimensional warp will disappear in Washington, to be pulled, hewed, and twisted into military usefulness—are you listening, Johnnie? But you yourself, having been the one to discover it, will be whisked away without a trace.”

  “M’not an American,” he grunted, squeezing his now useless eyes shut. He tried to rise.

  “Will that matter?” barked Derval. “Will Ottawa object to her big bully neighbor squeezing one small, very poor expatriate Canadian, without living family? Will Ottawa even know?”

  Derval’s sincerity shook through every word as she continued, “And myself as well. I’d vanish like a woman of Chile! Do you know what I’m going to do if you insist on giving this child over?” Derval was not a cruel person, but only an emotional one, and so did not understand why John only shook his head dumbly, like a horse scattering flies. “I could kill you, I suppose, and run off with Ailesh. But I might flub the job. Probably I would, being so fond of you and all.

  “What I will do is go underground. Today. Turn the provos to some good for once. Lose my job, and my name, what friends I have. Then maybe I’ll join a band of gun patriots striking out of Portadown.” She laughed at this idea, disparagingly, but half-fondly. “The last place anyone would think to find me!

  “Or maybe I’ll go to Brittany, or…London…or hell…Chicago. I’m told there are more Irish in Chicago than…” She paused, her breath coming hard.

  John was standing by now. His left hand had struck the table, a blow he scarcely felt. He rubbed his numb left cheek with fingers like wood. He heard Ailesh’s slushy, musical voice.

  “She says I’m being hard on you,” Derval drawled ironically. “She says you seem to be sick.”

  “I am,” admitted John hopelessly. “Migraine.” His slow, pachydermatous turn knocked his chair over. “Please, please, someone help me to the bathroom. I can’t see.”

  He wouldn’t take his medication until he knew he was finished throwing up, over an hour later. Derval sat beside him in the bathroom. “Just break a plate over my head
when I act like that, Johnnie,” she whispered. “It’s my own blindness, you know. I get carried away.”

  John did not answer. Could not. But Derval looked closely at his hunched shoulder blades for signs of forgiveness. She petted his cold, sweating, rigid back and tried to explain to the girl out of time how John had these…attacks. She tried in her incomplete, text-learned vocabulary of Medieval Irish to emphasize that the problem didn’t make John any less of a man. Ailesh squatted on her very limber ankles at the bathroom door and agreed so easily that Derval believed she must not have communicated the matter correctly.

  When he said he could keep his codeine down, Derval made John a slurry out of tea, honey, the narcotic, and (secretly) her last, cherished Valium pill.

  It was dark. John stared into the kind murkiness of the dining ell. His female companions were shadows. He felt as disinterested as the dead.

  Derval’s throat caught at the way his infantile blond hair reflected the distant streetlamp. His white undershirt made him more pitiable, and the weary way his head rested against the hard chair back was even more affecting. But his eyes had the look of a harbor after storms.

  “So it was the Danes, eh? How unfortunate. I don’t think that I, in her position, would be able to draw distinctions between Vikings and—er—Dublin Danes. What year would that make it, Derval?”

  She whispered into darkness. “Ailesh says the year is nine eight-five. Irish rekoning has not always agreed with the one we use now, but even with slippage, that’s quite a while after the Norse settlement of Dublin.”

  Derval yawned. “Right about then the Vikings were very bothersome. In fact, I remember that there was a second wave of raiding activity all around the Irish Sea.”

  She sighed and knuckled her eyes. “It’s likely our Ailesh doesn’t know much of what’s happening outside her immediate area. People rarely do, even today. I’m not sure we can really establish her time at this remove—”