An old black Audi A6 came booting up from the rear and overshot us on a blind bend, its registration plates mud-caked to illegibility. Three clipped male heads juddered about in the back seat and one of them turned to eye us. Whatever he said made the others turn to look too and then they were gone. ‘Fucken Eastern Europeans,’ Hickey muttered. The Audi was a left-hand drive. Plus the Irish no longer drove cars as old as that.
The road narrowed into a lane and the lane narrowed into a cart-track with a mohawk of grass running down the centre. A very bad feeling was brewing inside me. ‘This can’t be right, Dessie,’ I said, but what I meant was: Dessie, this is wrong.
Finally, a rusty green gate. For Sale by Public Tender read the sign erected on stilts like a prison watchtower, Sale Agreed nailed across it. Hickey killed the ignition and jumped out to empty his bladder into the ditch before wrenching the gate out of the long grass and shouldering it back into the field like the turning arm of a mill. I sat peering out at Dublin’s new urban quarter — fields of scutch grass and clumps of gorse. The sky was a dusky wash of blue and the first of the evening’s stars had appeared. The heavens, I remember thinking as I gazed up at them. And down here, the hell.
Hickey was delighted to get an opportunity to see what the truck could do, so we reared over hillocks and plunged into troughs, the white scuts of rabbits bounding out of the headlamp beams as he gunned the throttle. Then we hit something. He slammed on the brakes and whipped around in his seat to peer out the back window. ‘What the fuck was that?’
I hadn’t seen anything either. The impact had been loud but dull. We had collided with something soft and heavy. ‘Don’t get out,’ I warned Hickey because the bad feeling was even stronger in the field, but he jumped out to inspect the front of the truck, running his palm along the bull bars. ‘Doesn’t seem to be any damage.’
I lowered my window. ‘It sounded like an animal. Maybe it was a badger?’
He shook his head. ‘This is a raised chassis. It has a clearance of over three feet. A badger would’ve fitted underneath. It was something bigger than that. I don’t understand how we didn’t see it in the lights.’ He spat into the grass. ‘It’s dead now in anyways.’
Then we heard the animal howl.
‘We can’t leave it like that,’ I said. ‘We should go back and find it. Have you got a torch?’
‘It’s a hammer we need. I left me tools in the old truck so that’s the end a that.’ He was hauling himself back up into the driver’s seat when the thing wailed again, a blood-curdling sound. ‘Ah fuck it. I suppose we’d better put it out of its misery.’
So we both got out and went combing through the long grass in the violet twilight. I came upon a snowdrift of feathers where a killing had taken place. The strong brown wing feathers yielded to the downy white ones as layers of the bird were stripped away. When the feathers ran out, I encountered what looked like a fox’s brush. I got down on my hunkers to illuminate it with the screen of my phone. It was indeed a severed fox’s brush. The nub of the tailbone was the leathery black of a gorilla’s palm. No blood — this wasn’t a fresh wound. The blue light attracted Hickey’s eye. ‘Have you found it?’
‘No.’
We moved on.
Hickey disturbed a pheasant then. It exploded out of the grass, a clatter of whip-cracking wings, and he flinched backwards with a whuuh! ‘The size a tha!’ he grinned over at me, keen to laugh it off because it did not sit well on him, having his fright witnessed by another man, even if it was only a man like me. Then we heard a whimper. It was coming from a mound of gorse. Hickey picked up a rock and we approached.
It was woody old gorse, left to grow unchecked for so long that you could walk between the trunks propping up its prickly canopy. The closer we got, the higher the mound loomed, and then we saw the glowing eyes. And the glowing eyes saw us. They had been watching us all along.
Neither of us said a word, just about-turned and legged it straight back to the truck. When we were both in, Hickey hit the central locking button and the accelerator pedal. He didn’t stop to shut the rusty gate when we finally found our way out. ‘But what if it escapes?’ I said and immediately regretted voicing the question, because in referring to it I had confirmed that there was an It. Hickey didn’t answer.
‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked me some miles down the road. Night had fallen by then. Real dark, country dark.
‘No.’
‘Do you believe in the Devil?’
‘Don’t be absurd.’ The quality of his silence made me turn to him. ‘Why, do you?’
His face was lit electronic blue by the screen of the GPS, which indicated that we were still stranded in a void. ‘Yes.’
‘You believe there’s an actual man called the Devil who walks amongst us?’
‘I do,’ Hickey asserted with vehemence, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘I seen him. Down at the Steak one night. The lot of us were standing around a bonfire outside the cave when suddenly there was this face on the other side a the flames, standing right across from me an looking at me mate Shane. Staring at him, like. Boring holes into his head. He was black. An I don’t mean African black. He was a white man but his skin was black, an shiny an greasy, so I elbowed Shane an says, ‘Who’s your man? Who brought him? Fucker seems to know you.’ But Shane couldn’t see him. ‘Where?’ he says, an I nodded across the bonfire but your man had already went. But I seen the prick. I seen him there that night. A few hours later, Shane was dead. Drowned. Fisherman’s son. Never learned to swim. You remember Shane.’
‘I’m sorry, Dessie, I don’t.’
‘You do. He was in the little school with us. Did you know he was dead?’
‘No, I hadn’t heard. I must have been away.’
‘They said you were dead too.’
‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’
‘That’s right. Another Tristram St Lawrence. Common name.’
I lowered my head. ‘Yes, it is a remarkable coincidence.’
We journeyed for another mile or so without speaking. Hickey turned the heat on full. ‘Perishing in here,’ he complained, though it wasn’t. Moths blundered into the beams of the headlamps, and a frog made a break for the other side of the road, getting its timing spectacularly wrong. The amount of vehicles that passed that way — maybe one or two each night, and maybe none at all — why did it have to wait until then?
‘Have you ever seen the Devil?’
‘No, Dessie, I haven’t.’
‘I think you have seen him. I think you just didn’t know it was the Devil. Or that you just didn’t admit it was the Devil. That’s what I think.’
‘Is it?’
‘It is. Do you think he’d talk with an English accent?’
‘Please, Dessie.’
‘Or would he be one a them mad fuckers from Kerry? You know where they hold the Puck Fair? The Puck is another word for the Devil, isn’t it? Isn’t that right, Tristram? Isn’t the Puck another name for the Devil?’
‘I don’t know, Dessie.’ So don’t keep asking me. We were going around in circles again but there was no sun to orientate us this time. No moon either, that I could see. And no St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. The dashboard of the new truck was bare.
‘I’d say he’d be English. Like you.’
‘I’m not English, Dessie.’
‘You know what I mean. I’d say he’d talk posh like you.’ Hickey pondered the Devil’s accent as we raced along the country lanes. The blackness of the surrounding fields facilitated this strain of thought. There could have been anything out there. ‘Yeah,’ Hickey concluded, ‘the fucker at the bonfire with the coal-black skin didn’t look like a Kerryman to me. He didn’t look human. I’d say he was English. A posh English toff.’