The Sin Eater(6)
‘If you listen to them in Fintan’s bar of an evening, they’ll tell you it was nothing to do with a woman,’ said Colm. ‘They say Nick Sheehan met the devil one morning on the cliff tops and traded his soul, and that’s the real reason he was excommunicated.’
‘People don’t trade their souls, except in books. And what would the devil be doing in Kilglenn anyway?’
‘I don’t know, but they say he challenged Nick Sheehan to play chess and Nick Sheehan won, and the devil had to give him the chess set. But he locked it away in the watchtower because it’s so evil it’d frizzle your soul if you so much as looked at it. That’s why he lives up there – keeping guard over it.’
‘I don’t believe any of that,’ said Declan firmly.
‘I don’t either, not really, but I’d like to meet Nick Sheehan and make up my own mind,’ said Colm thoughtfully. ‘And it’s a grand story, isn’t it? I bet it’s told in every house in Kilglenn round the fire every Christmas.’
‘If we stay here long enough, we’ll be telling it as well, in about a hundred years’ time.’
‘Not us,’ said Colm. ‘We’re not staying in Kilglenn for a hundred years. We’ll be off to London long before that.’
London, late 1990s
Benedict could still hear the grown-ups talking downstairs, and somebody was calling to know whether there was any more coffee, but the sounds seemed a long way off. What was much nearer and much more real was the small Irish village where two boys had grown up, and where an ancient watchtower looked out over the ocean.
He wanted to ask Declan what he and the other boy – Colm – had really found in the watchtower, but he was starting to feel very frightened, and one of the things that was frightening him most was the way Declan was standing with half of his face turned away. But his father would want him to be brave, so Benedict got down from the window ledge and went towards the mirror, to get a better look at Declan and the fire-lit room. At once, the image seemed to flinch; Declan did not step back exactly, but he turned his face away like a man suddenly faced with a too-bright light.
Why had he done that? Benedict was trying to decide if he dared say Alice’s Let’s Pretend spell after all and see if the mirror let him step through it, when the fire-lit room with the dark figure shivered, then splintered, and all he could see was the reflection of this room with its dusty walls.
It’s all right, thought Benedict. He’s gone. I don’t know what that was, but I don’t think those two boys and that village and that stuff about the devil’s chess set was real. I’ll go downstairs, and I won’t ever tell anybody about this. It won’t ever happen again. I’m safe.
But he never did feel safe, not through all the years he was growing up in Aunt Lyn’s house. He had the feeling that Declan was waiting for him, somewhere just beyond vision and just outside of hearing, waiting for his chance to talk to Benedict again.
Once, when he was eleven, travelling back from staying with relatives of his mother, half asleep because it was late and the journey was a long one, he thought Declan looked at him from beyond the darkened window of the train. He sat bolt upright in the seat, peering through the window in panic. But the outline dissolved and Benedict tried to think that ghost images often did look back at you from a train window in the dark. They usually turned out to be the guard coming to check tickets, or somebody walking along the aisle.
By the time he was twelve, the pain of losing his parents was not as severe, and on his thirteenth birthday he realized he had to concentrate to recall their faces. He felt so guilty about this, he looked out several photographs and asked Aunt Lyn if they could be framed and put on his dressing table. He knew he would never forget how he had felt when they died, but Aunt Lyn was kind and loving and made no difference between Benedict and Nina, and Nina appeared to regard him as a younger brother she could organize.
But if his parents’ ghosts receded, the memory of what he had seen in his great-grandfather’s house did not. I’ll outgrow you, he said to Declan’s memory. I’ll go away – to university if I can – and leave you behind.
By the time he got to Reading University at eighteen, he thought he had succeeded. He found law absorbing – and he thought he might even try for a PhD in criminology. He made friends – in his second year he shared a rambling old house with three other students – and there were one or two girlfriends. Life was interesting and full.
And then, a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday, he received the solicitor’s letter, saying that under the terms of his parents’ will, the ownership of Holly Lodge would shortly pass to him, and that unless he wanted to live in it himself, which they thought he did not, they recommended he sell it. If he decided to do so they could arrange a house clearance, but Benedict must, of course, first go through the house’s contents to see what he wanted to keep.
I’ll have to go back, thought Benedict, the remembered dread stealing over him. It’s been eleven years, but whether I sell it or keep it, I’ll have to go back to Declan’s house.
THREE
Nell West had been pleased when Nina Doyle asked her to value the contents of a family house near Highbury. It had belonged to an elderly relative, said Nina, showering information on Nell in her customary pelting way, and it had been rented for about ten years, but there were most likely some quite nice things stored away. It was her cousin Benedict’s grandfather who had originally owned it; he had died in a car crash along with Benedict’s parents years ago. It had all been frightfully tragic, said Nina, because Benedict had only been eight at the time.