The Sin Eater(93)

It was locked, but the lock was a flimsy one and it snapped fairly easily. Feeling like a housebreaker, Declan went swiftly through the papers inside it. There were letters, bills, odd receipts from various local merchants. He opened the small drawers at the back of the desk.

The Deeds were there. Several pages of thick, expensive-looking paper, tied with narrow green tape, bearing the legend: Holly Lodge, freehold messuage and lands in the district of Highbury, County of London.

Declan thrust the papers into the inside of his jacket and almost ran from the house.





The present


‘So that’s how you did it,’ said Benedict softly, in the ruins of Colm’s cottage, with the ocean-scented air blowing all round him.

We did. And it took a long and weary time to get back up to Liverpool.

‘But you came back here?’

We did. And for a time we thought we were safe. We thought we could hide out, and I’d take the chess figure back to the watchtower.

‘To be with the embers of the others,’ said Benedict, softly.

Yes. I wish I could explain to you about its force – about how it poured itself into me and made me feel such hatred and such malevolence.

‘I understand a little,’ said Benedict, remembering parts of Fergal McMahon’s memoirs.

Do you? But you can’t begin to imagine how weary these years have been. The poets write about beckoning ghosts in moonlight shades, and they wax lyrical about wizard oaks and Homer’s thin airy shoals of visionary ghosts. Oh yes, Benedict, I have the learning and I have the classics at my beck and I can quote the great minds with the best, for the monks wouldn’t have sent their pupils out into the world deformed and unfinished before their time . . . But the moonlight shades are lonely and desolate and as for wizard oaks, I wouldn’t have them as a gift, even if I knew what they were.

Benedict said, ‘Why did you kill my parents? And my grandfather, who was Declan’s son after all.’


But isn’t every man somebody’s son? And I didn’t mean to kill them. They were hell-bent on destroying the chess figure. They had a few shreds of its story, handed down by Declan; they knew it was something to be feared. But I knew that if it was destroyed I’d lose my only chance of reaching one of Declan’s descendants, and ridding myself of the sins. It had to be one of Declan’s family, because—

‘Because he was the one who set the ritual working,’ said Benedict, softly.

So you understand that, do you? When I realized your father intended to destroy the figure I tried to stop him. They were taking it to the old St Stephen’s cemetery to bury it or burn it – he and your grandfather had pieced together some of the links to the past, mostly from half-memories Declan had left them. They hadn’t got it quite right, but they knew enough to realize it was the source of the house’s strangeness – that it was connected to the person they sometimes saw looking out of the mirrors. I had to prevent them destroying it, but I didn’t intend them to die. And then afterwards there was only you, Benedict.

‘The figure in the mirror,’ said Benedict, half to himself. ‘So my father did see you.’

Oh yes. But all those years ago when your great-grandfather got me out of Newgate Gaol, I wanted to destroy the chess piece – I knew it had made me a murderer. Declan didn’t want to come back here – he said we’d be seen and recognized. But I persuaded him. I could always persuade him to do what I wanted. I said even if we were seen, we’d be the prodigal sons returning.

But once we reached this cottage, it all went dreadfully wrong and the nightmare began . . .





Kilglenn, 1890s


For the first few hours of their return, Declan and Colm stayed in the shack, waiting for nightfall.

‘Then we’ll go up to the watchtower, and we’ll cast this devil-inspired figure into the rubble,’ said Colm. ‘It can reunite itself with the others, and for all I care they can spend the next thousand years raising Satan’s armies to invade the world.’

‘I hate being here and not seeing my family,’ said Declan.

‘When we make our fortunes in America we’ll come back and bestow largesse everywhere. What is largesse, by the way?’

‘No idea, but we’ll bestow it anyway.’

Darkness had not completely fallen when they set off for the watchtower. A faint glimmer came from the ocean, and the moon was rising, casting a cool silvery light.

There was a dreamlike quality to the cliff path as they climbed it, and they both remembered again the old tales of the Sidhe who could lure men to their deaths with their chill fatal singing.

The watchtower reared up above them as they came round the last curve of the path, stark and bleak against the night sky, and they both stopped and stared up at it.

‘Just think,’ said Declan softly, ‘how we used to make up stories about it – how it was a giant’s castle with a captive princess inside, or how it had been built from the magic-soaked stones of the ancient Irish Court of Tara.’

‘And now,’ said Colm softly, ‘it’s a burned-out wreck, with the bones of a renegade priest in the rubble.’ He began to walk up the last few yards, then stopped. ‘Can you hear that?’

‘I hear nothing. And if you’re starting to think this place is haunted, or the Sidhe are calling . . .’ Then Declan heard it as well, and the sounds were not ghosts and they were certainly not the Sidhe.