Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

The creature’s head shot up as it spun round and stood, to stare at us. For the first time since we’d caught it, it spoke. A rapid torrent of words pouring out of its mouth as it eyed us questioningly. What was that? Gaelic? Seeing my incomprehension, it stopped again suddenly, falling silent with a frustrated, sulky expression on its face. Its hand reached up to feel at its bare neck before dropping listlessly again.

“Dayna Shee.” I repeated the sounds I’d heard the Companion say, but all it did was bite something off under its breath, crouch down, and start humming and turning again, stepping unthinkingly over the chain as it did so to avoid tangling its ankles.

“Shut it up. That sound is irritating.” Happily! The sound cut off again as I caught it in the back with the taser and it collapsed into a twitching heap. “I think we need to look at that torc it had in its pocket.” I went upstairs to fetch the neck ring and took it back down with me. “Feel it, all over, does it have any moving parts?”

My fingers found some little bumps in the metal that gave a little when I pushed at them but they didn’t seem to do anything. The knobs at the ends didn’t turn or come off either.

“I think it might be a translation device of some kind,” my Companion told me.

“An enchanted one? Sidhe magic?”

It just laughed at that.

“All advanced technology seems like magic to primitive people. The very concept of ‘magic’ is pure, superstitious nonsense. The laws of physics cannot be circumvented.”

“So they were advanced? Were they aliens, then? Like you or like the hostiles?”

“Neither. They were unknown to us all, before we discovered this planet. They claimed it was theirs. Whether they ever belonged here is another question. They seemed to come and go as they pleased but they did not travel through space to do so. Our scholars proposed that they belonged in a different universe, or at least a different dimension, and had found a way to slip between the two. They were not pleased by the new arrivals. Eventually, they stopped coming back.”

I thought about that for a while.

“I suppose that might explain the time lapses in all the old stories. People would vanish and turn up again only to find that years had passed in what, to them, was only a day or two.” I hefted the torc thoughtfully. “Shall we put it on him? See what happens?”

“Not now, no. We will wait until it is sensible again. Tonight perhaps.” My Companion sounded pleased though. Our little experiment had told us something that might be useful. I didn’t fancy sitting here jolting it every few minutes to shut it up until then. I’d come back down in a few hours. It was already trying to get up again as I went out.

Twenty-Nine

I’d have said that my cousin was lucky he was somewhere I couldn’t get my hands on him if I hadn’t known who could. Christ! I should have known!

He was good, though. When Shay put his mind to it, he could still hide things from me, especially when I was asleep on my feet. A direct question like, ‘Do you know where Brady O’Hara is yet?’ would have been enough to prevent him from going through with this fifty/fifty chance insanity. We never tried to tell each other direct lies because doing so would be futile.

I hadn’t even stuck my head into his room to check on him before I left home that morning. I didn’t want to risk waking him up. It had sounded to me, last night, like he meant to stay up for at least a few more hours. For once, I hadn’t found any reason to call him during the morning either. No, the first I knew of what he’d done was when it was already hours too late to prevent it.

The message he’d prepared for me popped up on my screen at noon on Wednesday.

His option one predicted that Jimmy Stewart would almost certainly die. Option two dropped that to a fifty per cent chance but would almost certainly kill my cousin too if it failed. Of course, he’d gone for option two. The fact that I understood all the reasons why he’d kept it from me, didn’t help matters at all. After I’d read that message through, I felt ill enough to throw up and furious enough to strangle him. The fact that he hadn’t come back to cancel this message, Shay said, meant that he’d at least succeeded in getting in.

If he didn’t get in touch, we were to go in on Friday afternoon, as soon as we had the promised address. Four o’clock on Friday was almost fifty-two hours away. How long had Brady O’Hara spent in Jackie Gibson’s house? Two hours? Three? Was my cousin already dead, right now? Was he being tortured? Or was his planned deception working as well as his ‘best-case scenario’ predicted it would?

Brady had kept both Dominic Chuol and Chris Arnold for over a week without his alter ego taking over and prematurely damaging either of them too much. Jackie Gibson’s death had been a rage induced response to our actions. I could trust Shay not to poke that bear.

At least the suggestion that we make sure the entry team had both Ground Penetrating Radar and a magnetometer with us was a good one. Once we had a clear picture of the composition of any secure structures the house may contain, both above and below ground, we’d know where to focus our attention to start creating entry points. His suggested equipment list was comprehensive. If we worked efficiently, he figured, Brady would only have twenty minutes, at most, to take his rage out on his captives before we got to him. Any hole we could get him in sight through we could