Simeon's Bride Read Free Page B

course.’
    Jack said, ‘You’re not supposed to smoke near the computers, sir.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘It says so on that notice on the wall.’
    ‘I know that, Jack. Why not?’
    ‘I dunno … I suppose the smoke buggers up the works or something.’
    McKenna stood up. ‘Well, we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?’
    Expecting one of the mercurial changes of temper which characterized McKenna’s personality and made those around him feel they blundered with shrouded eyes through a minefield, Jack forebore to ask why McKenna preferred to work on a precious weekend off. Some things, he told himself, were best unsaid, for such questions might draw a response no one could ignore.
     
    Demons of folklore and wraiths of legend danced the twisting narrow lanes of Salem village, padded on silent feet in the wake of the living, and weaved threads of dark magic through the woods. Its dwellings built within sight of the squat-towered church and graveyard, the village inhabited the dark shadow of Castle Woods: acres of impenetrable growth along the foreshore of Menai Straits and beyond the bluff of land on which Snidey Castle stood.
    Fashioned by local skills, local labour, more than a century before for an Englishman gorged on the slave trade, fat with riches and cruelty, the castle swallowed the ruins of an ancient manor. The Englishman named his grotesque folly Castell Eborgofiant – the Castle of Oblivion – and the slate quarry gouging a huge wound in the distant mountain, where Welsh slavery further bloated his riches, he named for his wife Dorabella.
    Castell Eborgofiant became Snidey Castle almost as soon as the last stone was bedded into place, a small revenge for a huge injustice: Snidey because it hid itself within the shroud of trees, only the top of a battlemented keep in view; Snidey because it was bogus, a fake castle, embellished beyond all reason or sense. Every time he glimpsed those grey battlements, Dewi Prys wished upon that long-dead Englishman and his Dorabella all the torments of imagination, prayed for the ghosts of all the souls, black and Welsh, from which greed had stripped dignity in life, to lie entwined with them in death in their ornate and vulgar tomb in the village graveyard.
    His colleagues interviewing people at the castle and in the houses near the main road, Dewi wandered around the easterly side of the village, past the old schoolhouse, the vicarage, and the little row of single-storey dwellings next to the primary school, before making his way down the path beside the graveyard, under dripping trees and branches dragging low and heavy. The path debouched eventually at a small gateway in high stone walls marking the estate’s southern boundary, beyond which a little drinking fountain still trickled with brackish water pooling stagnant and spotted with slime.
    Smells of rotting leaf mould curled in the air, reminding Dewi of the riverbank and the deep woods and the poor ravaged body dangling from its rope. ‘There’ll be some story behind that,’ his nain had observed. The old ones on the council estate, safe from whatever horrors languished less than a mile up the road, relished long into the early hours of Sunday morning, on ghosts and tragedy and those secret things, just out of sight of this world, lying in ambush for the unwary.
    Lame Beti, out on her wanderings, her perambulations around the countryside, yawed from side to side up the path towards Dewi. She was never still, as if her crippled frame could not rest with its deformity, or bear to contemplate its ugliness. She grinned, showing teeth more crooked than the gravestones in the churchyard next to where they stood. ‘Hiya, del . No need to ask what you’re doing here.’
    Her voice, mangled by a cleft palate, grated on the ear. No one could look Beti in the eye: one bulbous muddy eye, to quote Nain’s picturesque description, looked towards Bethesda, the other to Caernarfon: east and west. She was the most