Free Even the Dead by Benjamin Black

into a tree and caught fire. That’s what they said on the news.”
    “And this happened just last night?”
    “Early this morning. I’d been with him. I ran away.”
    Lisa was gazing at the table again, as if mesmerized. She’s in shock, Phoebe thought. “What do you mean, you ran away?”
    “I can’t say any more. I shouldn’t even have told you this much.”
    Phoebe remembered that there used to be a bottle of brandy somewhere in the house. She rose from the table and searched through the cupboards, then went out to the living room and searched there. At last she found the bottle, on a shelf behind the wireless set that no longer worked. There was only a drop of brandy left. She went back to the kitchen and got down a wine glass and emptied the bottle into it and set it in front of Lisa. “Drink that,” she said.
    Lisa frowned. Fear had filled her with helpless bewilderment; she was like a sleepwalker who had been wakened too suddenly. “What is it?” she asked.
    “It’s brandy. It’s only a little—look. Drink it, now.”
    Phoebe went to the sink and filled a glass of water from the tap. Ballytubber water was the best and sweetest in the county, everyone said so. There used to be a holy well outside the town, on the road to Enniscorthy; sick people and cripples had come to it from all over, in the old days, and maybe they still did. Also in the town there had been a famous bonesetter; people came to him, too, women especially, not just from round here but from Dublin, and even London. There was a world—there were worlds!—beyond the one she knew, the world of the city, where life was supposed to be so broad and sophisticated but in fact was narrower, in its way, than the life of this little town. There were old, secret ways here, stretching back to times before history began. It was a place of ritual, of sacrifice and slaughter.
    She tried to picture it in her head, the park in darkness and at the center of the darkness a pool of fire, under a tree, the flames shooting up into the leaves and scorching them, and behind the windscreen a figure slumped over the steering wheel. What was that line in the Bible, about the burning fiery furnace? She couldn’t remember. She felt an edge of fear herself, now. Had she been mad to listen to this desperate young woman? What if Lisa had made up all this, what if she was delusional? She could be anything—she could be an escapee from an asylum. Darkness was pressing against the windows, like something that was trying to get in.
    Lisa hadn’t touched the brandy. She was crying, tears running down her cheeks, though her expression was still blank.
    “I’m so frightened,” she said, in a strange, crooning tone. “And I’m going to have a baby.”

 
    6
    Latterly, dinner at the Griffins’ had turned into a solemn procedure, less a meal than a sort of ceremonial, hallowed and ponderous. It wasn’t clear how it had come to be that way, and no one seemed to know what to do about it. Rose believed it was all the fault of the house, which she had begun to refer to, out of Mal’s hearing, as “the barn,” or even “the tomb.” It was an enormous place, a mansion, with gilded reception rooms and grand, sweeping staircases that might have been designed by M. C. Escher, leading up to silent landings and gaunt, brocaded chambers meant not for sleeping in, it seemed, but for some other kinds of repose, such as lyings in state, enchanted comas, vampiric dozings.
    “I do hate the place,” Rose would sigh, “and yet I get a real kick out of it, too. I’m perverse, I know.”
    Rose’s American origins were obscure. Her southern drawl suggested levees, and black servants in frock coats and powdered wigs, and acre upon acre of cotton fields, but she had once admitted to Quirke that at some stage in her past life she had worked in a dry cleaner’s.
    Quirke too enjoyed the house’s awfulness, in a masochistic way. Somehow it suited the state he was in, neither sick