The Wilding, page 19
Anthony passed a mess tin to Lisa. Saoirse had collected Erin’s tin and brought it with her own to the range.
‘What’s that you were talking?’ she asked Dom.
‘Latin,’ Dom Purvis said. ‘I’ve been studying it.’
‘So what did you say?’
Dom Purvis scooped two large spoonfuls of his hash into the tins.
‘Supper’s ready,’ Artem said.
Lisa took her tin and sat down on her dry, folded sleeping bag. The stone flags were solid and true after the roots and holes and missteps and treacheries of the bog. She wiggled her toes.
Anthony pulled up a low three-legged stool beside her.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Work away.’
‘It’s not bad this.’ Anthony lifted a spoon of Castlepurvis hash.
‘It’s hot. I’m warm. I’m drying. I’m happy enough.’
‘About what happened there.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘All the same, it was a dickish thing to say.’
‘You are not a dick, Anthony.’
‘Thank you. This … it’s hard not to just drop back on to what you know. Like holding on to something.’
‘It’s all right.’ She watched Dom Purvis lift up a hotplate and throw more turf into the burning guts of the range. He looked over to them and nodded. Saoirse and Erin had pushed their chairs together; Ryan and Artem sat cross-legged on blankets and sleeping bags. The little arcs and flickers of tension discharging were over but Lisa sensed that the alliances and grievances that generated them had set in place. ‘How did you end up here?’
‘You went back for the meds. We were following Ryan’s line. And it was there, right there. Not there, then there.’
‘Saoirse said. What did you see, Anthony?’
‘Big. No: tall. Drawn up and out. Everything stretched. Hollow. I don’t know how to describe it but that was what I felt. Hollow and drawn out. I didn’t get a good look.’
‘Saoirse said it was nothing we’d seen before.’
‘No, it was something else.’
‘Did it make a noise?’
‘No noise at all. Why?’
Lisa described the heavy, whistling thing that had passed them in the wood, the soul-shredding cries she’d heard from deep in Breen.
‘It might be the same thing, it mightn’t, I wouldn’t know,’ Anthony said. ‘I shouted to Ryan and Artem to stay with us but it was between them and us. It could have reached out and touched us. They just ran. We just ran. It was the only sane thing to do. It was reaching out to touch us. I don’t know how I know that but I felt it. I heard Ryan shout “Castlepurvis”. We headed back to find you and Eoin. Eoin must have run into it.’
‘Eoin ran into something,’ Lisa asked. ‘Why didn’t I hear any of this? Big … thing … people running, shouting. I should have heard something.’
‘It plays with distance and time,’ Anthony said. ‘Sound is distance and time. If you went back there now, maybe you’d hear us.’
They both stared a time into the red turf glow behind the vents of the big iron range. Crescents of amber light had appeared along the places where the walls and vaults met: early evening low sun.
‘Saoirse tripped,’ Lisa said.
‘I told Saoirse to go and find you. Is she all right?’
‘Just a twist,’ Lisa said. ‘She walked ten kay on that ankle. And those feet. Not a word.’
‘She’s like that,’ Anthony said. ‘She’ll bitch on and on about some tiny thing but when it comes down to it, she’s hard as nails.’
He paused.
‘All the time I was thinking, was it following us?’ Anthony said. ‘Would it appear like it appeared back there: big, fast? There. Would it be the long, empty thing or would it be something else? Something I couldn’t imagine.’ He looked at Lisa. ‘I can’t bear this. I teach English and Drama. Poetry and prancing around on a stage. Don’t ever let on I said that.’
‘Poetry.’
Anthony smiled.
‘Maybe check on William Butler?’
Lisa got up and went to the range. The covers were dry, bubbled and warped, the pages still thick and coarse and browned with bog water. She riffled it again and set it back to dry. As long as the spine held, as long as the glue bound, the book would survive.
‘This book got me into uni,’ Lisa said.
‘Your gateway drug.’
‘What was yours?’
‘Marvel.’
‘The comics?’
‘X-men. They were always the outsiders. There’s a lot of good writing in comics.’
‘Whatever gets you there. Do you teach them Yeats?’
‘Some. Not as much as I’d like. He’s not relevant any more.’
‘To the waters and the wild,’ Lisa said.
‘You can have too much of that,’ Anthony said. ‘And it never was a great poem either.’
Lisa laughed aloud and at the incongruous sound Anthony’s pupils and Dom Purvis looked over.
‘We’re talking about poetry,’ Anthony said.
‘He tried to teach us that,’ Saoirse said. ‘Never rated it. I liked the drama.’
‘He cast Saoirse as Velma Kelly in Chicago,’ Erin said.
‘Anthony said I’m a natural murderer.’ Saoirse spread jazz hands and sang the chorus of ‘All that Jazz’.
Everyone laughed and Dom Purvis applauded and Saoirse drank it all up and Lisa knew it for the moment. And she knew also that she had to take the spirit of that moment.
‘Dom, we’re all dry enough and we’ve got some heat in us and enough food. So can you get us back to the real world now?’
‘Ah,’ Dom Purvis. ‘That’s not quite so simple.’
34
‘I am Dom Purvis. This is my home. My castle. A Purvis’s home is his castle. I don’t own it – none of us have since the 1930s. But we used to own this house and the park and the bog as far as you can see. That’s where we made our money, out in the bog. We were one of the first to run a bog as an industry. Miles and miles of cuttings and stacks and bog railway, and Castlepurvis, at the centre of it all, like a spider.
‘My grandfather was the last Purvis to be born in the bog of Carrow. He was ten when the IRA came to tell great-grandfather John Mór to get out. Six big men in big coats and boots and shotguns. John Mór was not a bold man, but his wife, great-grandmother Margaret, was a Hamilton of Baron’s Court up in Tyrone. She had northern grit and directness. Everyone knew that it was she who ran the business. She took her son John Óg under her arm and the two of them marched up to the men at the door. She looked each one in the eye and said, “I know you Robert Bourke, and I saw your wife at Portumna market last week James O’Dowd, and how are your mother’s lungs, Hugh Tully? You’ve come to turn us out and burn this house to the turf and we can’t stop you if that’s your intent, but if you do, the business will fail and you will sink into hunger and poverty and your roofs will fall and your children will emigrate and the bog will rise up and take everything back.”
‘They stood there and issued their threats and warnings and shot John Óg’s wee Shetland pony back in the stable yard there to show who had the power but they never came back to the door of Castlepurvis. But the poison was under the skin; the power had shifted and business was never the same after the Civil War. The economic war with Britain hit us hard and John Mór and Margaret Hamilton-Purvis were all too happy to take the Turf Development Board’s money and turn their backs on the bog and move out to Galway. But everyone knows this is Purvis land.
‘I always knew this place existed; we kept the old photographs, read the histories and the household records. I knew where we came from. My dad used to bring me and my sister here. Other kids went to the beach or the water-park, we came to the bog. Even then it wasn’t much more than walls; gone wild long before rewilding became the thing. The downstairs was always intact – Dad used to bring us down with head-torches and we’d explore. Kids from Derrybrien used to use it for the usual things. We’d find condoms, empty White Lightning bottles, my sister once got cut on a broken syringe. Not long after that we found paintings of goat’s heads on the wall, pentagrams, runes, Latin written backwards, circles. That scared the locals off. I reckon Dad went out one night and did them all himself.
‘And I loved it. The peace, the flatness, the lack of any edge or boundary, the sense that here was a place that didn’t need us. That had never needed us. That resented us. Even when Bord na Móna were stripping the Carrow down to the bedrock, I knew there was a deep heart of wildness they could never touch.
‘I went to UCG to study bog-ology. That’s what I told everyone. Bogland ecology. Mum was disappointed – she wanted me to do something worthy of the Purvis name, but my dad was secretly proud. There was no Purvis name without the bog beneath it. Then Bord na Móna started de-industrialisation and bogland restoration and I worked up at Lough Boora but in my mind I was always in the Carrow, at Castlepurvis. Because I knew that was where the rewilding was growing from. Here. The house.
‘I knew I would come back. I moved slowly. Like the rewilding. I got to know some of the Wild Ireland board at conferences. I heard about the people moving back into Gortnamona. I got to know them through the Facebook pages and the group chats. I visited them. I went to their festivals. I listened to their theories and beliefs. Oh, they have theories. That there is something out there, in the heart of it. Something coming up out of the bog.
‘I went out with Moya on the autumn equinox – she said it was strongest around the turn of the season. She took me out across Moneen and Brackagh into Breen. We set up a hide. Two days we sat there. Two days in a tiny tent, eating energy bars and taking turns to nip out the back to piss and setting watches in the night so as not to miss the moment. Moya said it would only be a moment. It was all she’d ever seen, just a moment.
‘We were forty hours in. It was my watch. You have to refocus your eyes every so often, shift to something close in, then far away. It can hypnotise you, out there. First you see nothing, then you see everything; every moving leaf and bird and twig, then you see nothing again. I heard it first. No, I didn’t hear it first. You get so used to the wood sounds that you only notice it if they stop. And everything stopped. Between one breath and the next. Like time had stopped. I knew what it was, by its silence. I shook up Moya.
‘It moved as slow as bones. The silence held. That silence became bigger than any noise. And then we saw it, something enormous off among the trees. Like a building, like a tower walking. Dark as shadow, but light gleamed from it. I thought I saw antlers, horns, branches.
‘I almost forgot I’d brought a camera. Moya put her hand on my arm and stopped me. She was right. It would have broken the promise. Promise? Yes, because the thing moved again and I sensed it had sensed us, smelt us, heard our heartbeats. It was looking at us. I couldn’t see it entire, only in parts and hints and suggestions, but I felt its gaze on me and it tore everything out of me and scattered it among the branches like hanging guts. I was seen, through and through again, everything, down to the marrow in my backbone. I was nothing and this was nothing I could comprehend. Afraid? I pissed myself. But also, not afraid. Awed. Comforted. I knew what I was, what my place was. I knew that I would never know peace again until I felt it look upon me again.
‘The pandemic made it easy. The only difficult thing was avoiding the gardaí. That no-crossing-county-lines thing. Over a couple of weeks I moved everything in on foot. I was camping out in my own kitchen. The structure was sound and I got the ranges working so I had heat and cooking.
‘Every week I walk out to Coyle Lough car park. Moya meets me; I fill up a backpack with supplies, I give her my reports and observations and diary entries. So, to answer your question: it’s not so simple. It’s about eight kay as the crow flies, but you can’t go the same way twice. Sometimes it takes all day. And you can’t do it at night. Never. Ever. It’s strongest at night, but over the past few months it’s become more active at day. The great one, I mean. You’d not get to Coyle before dark. Spend the night here. You’ll be safe enough, though they’ve been coming closer in the last couple of weeks.
‘It’s changing. It’s growing. I say it because, though it takes many shapes and entities, I believe it’s one thing. Maybe we see what we think we can see because what it is, we can’t conceive. What I saw in the hide, I haven’t seen that again. I don’t think I can see it again. It’s something else now. But I get the feeling things are building to something. There’s a pressure, in my head, in every creature and plant out there, in every living cell. I’m going to see something soon, I think. I’m going to see what it really is. And that’s going to change everything.
‘You Lough Carrow people, you don’t know what you did. You called up the wild.’
35
‘He’s insane,’ Lisa whispered. She had nodded Anthony out into the corridor again. They stood furtively in an alcove behind one of the buttresses.
‘Howling,’ Anthony said. ‘But all we have is our pick of insanities.’
‘You want to try making it to Lough Coyle in the dark?’
‘We’ve only his word about that.’
‘And what we saw back in Breen.’ And what Lisa had seen, moving slow and stately through the abandoned street of Carrowbrook, woven together by the seething heart of dread. And high and glamorous and perilous at Kiltyclogher car park.
‘That’s true.’
Again, Saoirse arrived, uninvited.
‘What don’t you want us to hear this time?’
‘We’re wondering if we should make a run for the Lough Coyle car park tonight,’ Lisa said.
‘Are you insane?’ Saoirse said. ‘Dom’s batshit but I don’t think he tells lies. Not many.’
‘We’d reached the same conclusion,’ Anthony said.
‘Okay, but we sit watches,’ Saoirse said. ‘Now let’s get back. He knows you’re talking about him.’
Dom was making coffee in a big Victorian copper pot. He looked at Lisa, Anthony and Saoirse as they came back into the kitchen but said nothing and set the pot on the range. The light through the high windows had moved up the wall and across the ceiling to fade into gloaming. Dom had set gas lanterns and candles around the kitchen. Ryan moved from one to the next, lighting them with a wax taper.
Dom poured an enamelled mug of coffee and offered it to Lisa.
‘It’ll help you on the watches.’
‘What we were saying, you have to understand, it’s only natural …’
‘Yet you wouldn’t say it to my face.’
‘How could I?’ Lisa said.
Dom found another mug, two clean tins and a small jar.
‘Anyone not want?’
Erin raised her left hand.
Dom poured himself a coffee in the glass jar, cooled down with a slug of cold water. He set his jar on the table and brought a couple of SuperValu notebooks from the shelves. He opened a notebook flat on the table.
‘This?’
Lisa went to look. The double page was filled with sketches. A long clawed forearm like a withered tree branch. A head like knotted ivy, a beak of peeling bark. Heavy hunched shoulders, triple-crooked hind legs of mossy bone. Parts, details, glimpses. Each drawing was dated; May 19th, September 22nd, October 5th, and annotated: north-west Breen, Legacurry north, Muinemor.
‘I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell. Anthony?’
With him came Saoirse and Erin, Ryan and Artem. More eyes, more impressions.
‘No,’ Saoirse said. Anthony and the others agreed.
‘It’s an old manifestation,’ Dom said. He flipped to a page of eyes; some wide and liquid like a fawn’s, some hooded, narrow, some with the dumb-bell irises of goats, or narrow ovals, or many irises, or many eyes, or some jewelled and faceted like the eyes of carrion-feeding flies.
‘It’s so fast,’ Saoirse said. Ryan and Artem mumbled their agreement. The dates ranged from late 2019 to four days ago. Dom turned the page.
‘That,’ Erin said.
The sunken eyes; the tusks; the ridged, bristled back; the sharp hooves: Lisa stitched the details sketched on the page into a memory of the encounter – for a moment, for a wild moment – on the path through Moneyveagh Wood. A razorback, Ciara had called it. A hybrid. It had been enormous. The creature in the drawings was leaner, smaller, squatter and more furtive.
‘An torc mór,’ Dom said. ‘It’s one of the first that emerged out of Breen.’
‘It was a lot bigger,’ Ryan said.
‘I drew these back before the pandemic,’ Dom said. ‘It was part of the reason I had to move in here. It’s clearly evolving. Where did you see it?’
‘Moneyveagh,’ Lisa said.
‘That far east,’ Dom said. He pencilled a note in the margin and dated it. He turned the pages of his sketchbook. Roots, tendrils, skeletal legs, ribs and eyeless skulls. Lisa touched a finger to a full-page drawing of antlers as high and branched as a forest. Spike upon spike upon spike, skinned with green mould and hung with moss.
‘Adharcach amháin,’ Dom said.
‘Only …’ Lisa said.
‘Bigger,’ Dom said.
‘At the car park,’ Saoirse said.
‘Kiltyclogher,’ Lisa said.
‘Right on the edge of Wilding,’ Dom said. ‘I’d never seen it outside Breen. This is exciting.’
‘It was terrifying,’ Anthony said. ‘Fucking terrifying.’
‘More,’ Lisa said quietly. ‘Sublime.’
Dom Purvis looked long at her.
‘It saw us,’ Erin said. ‘It looked right at us and then it turned away. It was like it didn’t want to hurt us.’
‘I can’t understand that,’ Dom said. ‘So far from the heart zone.’ He grabbed a pink highlighter and dashed to the wall map. The others followed to watch. Dom found Kiltyclogher car park and made a large pink asterisk. He sucked in his lower lip in concentration as he noted the date and comments in black Sharpie on a pink Post-it. Lisa scanned the map for other pink asterisks. They clustered densely in the green shaded area of the map, which Lisa reckoned must be Breen, but moved out in a tight spiral. Kiltyclogher was an outlier. She noticed two other sets of highlighter asterisks, green and blue.
