The silence around the listeners seems to deepen.
‘Niall’s sister tells her friend to knock on the door. The friend says Niall’s sister should do it. Niall’s sister dares her, so the friend knocks. No one answers. The music keeps playing –’
‘What sort of music?’ Geoff asks.
‘Beautiful music. Like with harps and stuff.’
‘Just like in the Irish story,’ Geoff says huskily.
‘Anyway, they knock and then they call out, “Hello, is anybody in there?” No reply. Niall’s sister reaches out and turns the handle. It’s locked, of course. But Niall’s sister’s friend has keys. The janitor gave her a set so she could lock up the spare room when they’d finished rehearsing. She doesn’t want to try them, though. She’s afraid, she wants to go and tell one of the nuns. But Niall’s sister knows there’s no way the nuns will let them hang around to see what’s inside the room. This is their one chance. So they start trying the keys in the lock. There are forty keys on the ring. Not one of them fits. They try the last one and then just stare at the door, totally flummoxed. They can still hear the lovely music, in fact it seems to have got louder. Then Niall’s sister, without knowing why, reaches out her hand and turns the handle again. And this time the door opens.’
Geoff, Mario and Skippy stare at Dennis moon-eyed, like three raccoons caught in headlights. From a distance, Ruprecht fondles his asthma inhaler impassively.
‘The friend says, “Okay, we should definitely go and get someone.” But Niall’s sister has already pushed the door open. Afterwards she said it was like the music had put her in a trance. There’s a big cre-e-e-eak. The two of them huddle together and step inside. And guess what they find there?’
‘What?’ whispers Geoff.
‘Nothing,’ Dennis says.
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. The room is totally empty.’
‘But…’ Mario utters in a strangulated voice. ‘What about the music?’
‘They can still hear the music, clear as a bell. And there’s also a lovely smell, like a field full of flowers, though it’s almost winter, and the room has no windows and is covered in dust and cobwebs. But almost immediately the smell and the music just… fade away. And they’re standing in an empty room.’ Dennis pauses summatively, and then, ‘Ever since, Niall’s sister’s friend’s been saying that the music must have come from somewhere else. Like maybe one of the boarders was playing it in her room, and it was carried through an air vent, or down the pipes? But the boarders’ dorms are way over on the other side of the school. Niall’s sister is certain that somehow the music was coming from that room.’
‘Whoa,’ Geoff says.
‘But how is it possible?’ Mario says.
‘Well, they must have built the room on top of the ancient burial mound,’ Geoff replies. ‘It’s the only logical explanation.’
Ruprecht gets up and paces about the room, gnawing his knuckles.
‘We know that St Brigid’s was a convent before they opened it as a school.’ Dennis is all seriousness now. ‘But what was it before that? This Druid guy says in days of Yore everyone worshipped this goddess called the White Goddess, and these mounds and things belonged to her. But when the Church came and spread Christianity across the country, it took over all the magical places for itself. Changed the names, converted the old legends into stories about, you know, God and stuff. Or else covered them over completely. It makes sense. You’re a bunch of nuns or monks or whatever, you want everybody in the neighbourhood following orders and doing what you tell them. If there’s some mystical fairy fort in the neighbourhood where weird shit keeps happening, you wouldn’t want people to know about it. You’d build your convent right on top of it and lock it up so no one could get anywhere near it.’
Ruprecht halts his peregrinations and rounds rather fiercely on Dennis. ‘Well, even if it is the long-lost Seabrook fairy fort, even if Niall’s sister did hear music – so what? What does any of it have to do with my experiment?’
Geoff fields this one: ‘Gee, Ruprecht, you said there might have been some hidden factor influencing the outcome last night…’
Ruprecht opens his mouth to reply, but breaks off and turns his back on them, muttering unintelligibly and throwing his hands about like a derelict in an underpass. ‘Ley lines, fairies – that isn’t science. Who ever heard of an experiment using fairies?’
‘It does sound pretty unorthodox,’ Dennis admits. ‘But didn’t you say yourself that a scientist has to open himself up to every possibility, no matter how weird?’
‘You did say that, Ruprecht,’ Geoff confirms.
‘And didn’t you say M-theory is weirder than any other theory in the history of science?’ Dennis perseveres. ‘And hasn’t your Professor Tamashi always said that probably the only way we’ll master hyperspace in time to save Earth is if a superior civilization comes along and gives us the technology? Well, what if the technology’s already here? What if the aliens have been and gone three thousand years ago, but they’ve left their gateway behind? What if, all this time, the solution to M-theory has been literally right under your nose?’
‘Mound does begin with M,’ Mario observes thoughtfully.
‘Holy smoke, Ruprecht – so does music!’
‘All right!’ Ruprecht, as his resistance crumbles, flinches in self-disgust. ‘Say it is possible. Why would this mound – why would it suddenly stop influencing the experiment?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe…’ Dennis taps at his temple like he’s starting an old watch ‘… maybe its influence fluctuates. Maybe there was a surge at the exact moment of the first experiment, but normally it doesn’t reach any further than that little room.’
‘So if there were some way to gain access to that room…’
For the first time since Optimus Prime disappeared, the pregnant sense of last night, the nearness of something overwhelming, pervades the basement again, filling the corners and slowly building…
That’s when Skippy’s phone beeps with a new message; and each of them realizes, before he even looks at Skippy’s dumb-struck face, that he knows who it’s from.
The night of the break-up Halley slept on the sofa. She wouldn’t take the bed, no matter how he pleaded with her; it was plain she would have preferred to go, if she’d only been able to summon the energy. Howard was surprised at the way she’d capitulated. He had expected screaming, punches, excoriation. Instead, she simply sank onto the couch as if he’d sapped her across the back of the head; she cried longer and harder than all the other times he’d seen her cry put together. And he could not comfort her; he was transformed into some monstrous creature whose touch brings only pain.
The next morning she left. He has not seen her since. He guesses she is staying with one or other of the motley straggle of friends she has assembled in her time here – people from work, Americans she’d met on expat forums, other émigrés and cast-aways who’d found themselves stranded on the margins of Dublin life. She calls to the house when he’s not there to collect her belongings; every time he comes home from work some new small thing is gone, as if he’s being burgled in instalments.
The house feels different without her. Though she still has clothes in the wardrobe, though her hairdryer still sits atop the dresser, her razor on the shelf in the shower, the rooms seem bare, denuded; her absence dominates the house – becomes, oxymoronically, a kind of physical presence, shaped and palpable, as though she moved out and this emptiness moved in to take up the space she left. There is a new kind of silence that the stereo turned up all the way can only fill one side of; the air that meets him when he unlocks the door now is clean and clear, smokeless, odourless, breathable.