No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,109

who was the tallest thing Caitríona had ever laid eyes on, and sure and if by the end of the maddest three days any mortal had ever known, if Caitríona didn’t know then that her aunt had been the Irish Mage, and that she, Caitríona O’Reilly, the oldest niece of the MacNamarra clan, was meant to take up that mantle now.

NOW.

Perfect, Caitríona O’Reilly thought, and because Joanne was on her mind, she then heard the word echoed as Joanne would have heard it: pair-fect. And what, Joanne would have wanted to know, was a Pair Fect? Maybe it was two people who were fecked, as if fect might be the past tense of fecked, which was already the past tense of feck, the Irish way of saying a word that puritanical American television always bleeped out. Unless it was an Irishman saying it, because feck slipped by their censors when the more Anglicized version of the word wouldn’t.

Americans and Irish. Separated by a common language. Caitríona put her fingertips against the glass case encompassing the Clonycavan Man, one of the most perfectly conserved bog men to be found in Ireland. His fragile thin skin, sagging over shriveled muscles, his bones, his teeth, they were all stained rich mahogany brown from the ancient peat they’d nested in. Pickled, they were: bog acid pickled the creatures caught in it, and she’d read about each and every circumstance that improved the chances of a body being preserved instead of disintegrating. They were many, and in Ireland, they were easy to come by. Nearly sixty bog men had been found over the years, and that, Caitríona reckoned, was just the ones they’d found. Whole civilizations might be buried in the peat, if only they dug deep enough.

So it wasn’t only herbs Auntie Sheila had been digging for in the bogs. What could be worse than being murdered and thrown into the bogs but to lie in rest for centuries before being dug up by a rumbling peat harvester with teeth so vicious that no one could be sure if the poor mummy had been cut in half before death, or if his lower half had been severed and chewed up by the peat cutter. And the Clonycavan Man, he was one of the lucky ones. He’d only been murdered, his head smashed in and so well-preserved there were still bits of brain inside his perfectly preserved skull, and they knew what his last meals had been as well. And he’d been a bit of a dandy as well, with imported hair gel in the straggly hair that remained on his head. Caitríona hoped he’d died before being chopped in half, but she could feel the poor creature’s spirit still trapped within his body, the agony of his death never leaving him.

Auntie Sheila had searched out lost people like these in the bogs, and laid their spirits to rest. But these ones, the bog men brought to the museum on Kildare Street, they had been separated from their place of death before Sheila had found them, and their spirits cried and clawed at their glass coffins, a torture the anthropologists could never study. It was the memory of bog-tromping, and the thought of these glass-encased bog-men, that had brought Caitríona to Dublin at all.

Joanne, Caitríona thought, would know what to do. She’d dealt with ghosts before, though she said she couldn’t see them herself. Nor could Caitríona, but she felt the captured spirit within the glass regardless, as she’d never felt it before in all the times she’d visited the museum. The bog men had been spectacles then, a breathtaking glimpse at the horror of perfectly preserved death. Now she could hardly understand how she’d missed their cries.

Joanne would start with a power circle, that, at least, Cat knew, and so that was where she was to begin as well. The bog men display was strangely suited for it, with each mummy encapsulated down a winding ramp within a border of taller walkways. She couldn’t quite make a complete circle, at least not in one go, but then, there was more than one lost spirit to attend to, too.

Cat murmured, “Sorry, sorry,” as she stepped around visitors. Most moved easily, more fascinated by the mummies than a living girl, but a few glanced her way in surprise. The spear, she supposed, for there was nothing extraordinary about the rest of her, except perhaps the fire-engine-red hair straight from a bottle. Still, it would be the