Brotherhood of the Tomb by Daniel Easterman Read Free Book Online Page B

hold perhaps a hundred gallons or thereabouts.’
    He closed his eyes. The memory of the temple and what had been found there was sharp in his mind now.
    ‘The ... the children were lying in a circle round the basin. Their throats had been cut and the basin filled with the blood. The basin wasn’t full, but the blood in it was deep. Their teacher was there as well. He had been drowned in the basin. The children had been stripped and tied with thongs. And someone had marked their foreheads with a circle, a circle containing a candlestick topped by a cross. That was when I had to get out, when they saw the cross.’ He paused. ‘I heard later that there was very nearly a massacre at the village where I’d been staying. They left just in time, before their neighbours got there. They’ve never gone back.’
    Ruth stopped him.
    ‘I don’t understand what this has got to do with you and Eamonn De Faoite.’
    ‘I think they’re here,’ he said. ‘The people who killed those children. They’re here in Ireland. And I think they mean trouble. I’ve got to get to Eamonn. Now, tonight.’
    ‘How do you know they’re here? What happened?’
    ‘I saw one of them. I chased him.’
    ‘An Egyptian?’
    Patrick shook his head.
    ‘No. That’s the strange thing. I don’t think he was an Egyptian. I think ... I’m sure he was Irish.’
    What happened to him?’
    He told her.
    ‘And you think they could be watching De Faoite?’
    He shrugged. He had dressed now and was eager to be off.
    ‘It’s possible. Listen, Ruth, I’ve got to go.’
    ‘I’m coming with you.’
    ‘No, I’d rather you stayed here to watch the house. There may be another watcher.’
    She stepped away from him. Behind her, the bed had grown cold.
    ‘That isn’t the reason is it?’
    He had already turned towards the door.
    ‘I don’t want you involved, Ruth. I’m treating this as personal business: it has nothing to do with the Agency.’
    ‘You think so?’ She was growing angry again.
    ‘Okay, yes, I think so.’ But he was lying, desperate to avoid the thought that the past was drawing him in again, that no one ever truly escapes from that delicately fabricated world. ‘Don’t get involved, Ruth. Don’t get the Agency involved. I’ll be back when I’ve seen De Faoite.’
    ‘Suit yourself. But don’t expect me to be here when you return.’
    It was still raining when he left.
    SEVEN
    He drove distracted through a world of lights and shadows, like a ghost passing through someone else’s dream. The final stages of his journey took him through a landscape of broken fanlights, rusted railings, and dark tenement walls on which someone had written ‘FUCK’ in foot-high letters, time and time again. It was an invocation of sorts. But who was listening?
    The Liberties were the oldest part of the city, and not even the dark could cover the squalor and neglect on every side. As Patrick walked down Francis Street towards St Malachy’s, he could smell yeast from the nearby Guinness brewery, mixed with a rotting odour that came up from the quays. A thin, freezing mist had started to move in off the sea and was working its way slowly along the streets.
    Above him, in a tenement, a curtain was twitched aside. Unseen eyes watched him pass, then the curtain fell back into place. A dog barked angrily on his left. Open doorways, stained and rotten, graffiti on the walls, a smell of urine from the hallways, broken windows, broken lights, broken lives.
    Eamonn De Faoite had been parish priest of St Malachy’s as far back as anyone could remember. Every morning for almost sixty years he had left his scholarship upstairs and come down onto the streets to face his little world. The Liberties were his Calvary, he had told Patrick once: they had broken him and scourged him and nailed him to themselves, year in, year out, an eternal Easter. He had tended generations of the poor and the almost-poor: baptized them, married them, said Mass for them and their