Chapter 2: Pt. 1, Ch. 2: Through the Mist

Part 1

Chapter 2: Through the Mist

The sky was brushed pink and purple, the sun hidden behind the tall city buildings, the first stars of night not yet visible to light their path as the group of four crept down a narrow alley on 38th Street somewhere between 8th and 9th Avenue. It was an alley unlike any Honora had ever seen since moving to New York. The buildings in the city were not only taller than those she had known in Ireland, but were also spaced much farther apart if they were separated at all. Even Cortlandt Alley was wide enough for a carriage, or even a car, to pass through. 

Where they walked now was scarcely big enough for two people to walk side by side, as she was forced to do now, the short dark girl still roughly holding her by the arm. The path ahead was deserted. But for the lack of balconies or windows along the high brick walls, the narrow passage was identical to one of the winding passages she would find on her trips to Dublin, right down to the rough stone that echoed as they walked. She might not have noticed these oddities at all if not for the way they happened on the alley. 

“She was in here alright,” grumbled a bartender, barely giving Rocco a glance as he cleaned a glass with a dirty rag. “The guy she came in with had to help me drag her out of here. Wouldn’t hear a damn word against her. She was drunk already by the time she got here, and she was fun enough for a bit, but then she started rubbing customers the wrong way.” He scowled at the memory. When asked if he had seen where the girl went off to once he threw her out, he jerked his head toward the door. “The two of them ran into the alley across the street, laughing their damn heads off.”

“What alley across the street?” asked the dark girl.

“Between the gambling house and that old brothel that just shut down.”

That answer was apparently unsatisfying. “There is no alley between the gambling house and the brothel.”

But the bartender was telling it true. The street was filling up with parade goers on their way home, all walking right past the alley without paying it a second look. Narrow and dark as it was, they needed a torch to see. The loud echo of their footsteps quickly replaced the sounds of the crowds of people and cars of the busy city streets. 

“What do you even mean to find here?” asked Honora, hoping her anger would mask any fear her voice might betray. The dark girl ignored her, shining her torch along the ground. 

“She’s bound to have gone into one of the clubs on 39th,” said Terrell, though no one had been talking to him. None of that mattered, anyway. The girl had been missing since June. Why the jew thought he still had a chance in hell of finding his sister was anyone’s guess. It was a wonder the barman remembered her at all.  

“That’s if we ever come out the other side of course,” Terrell continued. “Seems like we been walking a lot longer than just one block.” 

“He’s right.” The dark girl stopped, nearly yanking Honora off her feet. The two boys knocked right into them, unable to see in the dark. “We should turn back,” she said, but, as she shone her torch along the walls and ground ahead, she made no move to turn around. “Terrell,” she let the torch fall to her side and turned to the negro, “take Honora and Rocco—”

The Italian boy cried out and threw himself to the ground at the dark girl’s feet. There was a glint of gold under the light of her torch. The normally quiet boy chattered away excitedly, holding up a pocket watch for them all to see before running off into the shadows.

Honora was nearly yanked off her feet again as the dark girl cried out and ran after him, dragging Honora along the cobblestone. If 39th Street indeed lay ahead, they surely would have run straight into traffic, running at full speed as they were. But the alley only grew darker, narrower, and more winding.

“Wait a minute.” Honora dug her heels into the stone as she felt a cool mist on her skin. At first she was ignored, as usual, but when the mist was gone, Terrell hollered for them to stop. Apparently he was worth listening to. “Didn’t any of you lot feel that?” Honora asked just as the negro said, “Do y’all hear that?”

Running water.

Not just water from a leaking drain pipe, or a few drops of rain. It was coming down in torrents along each of the high brick walls, sending mist up all around them, just like when Honora was a girl running through Tourmakeady Wood with her sister, only this time, the rushes of water did not pour into a deep pool, but ran down the narrow path ahead.   

The dark girl’s grip had loosened, and her torchlight had gone out, but Honora was too curious about what might lie ahead to make a run for it now. She allowed herself to be led through the passage, toward a crack of faint blue light until she found herself looking through a wide cavern full of rushes of clear blue water on all sides, crashing into deep, luminescent pools. After months upon months of being trapped and suffocated by concrete and smog, she nearly laughed aloud at the sight of it all. 

“Rocco,” the dark girl called, her voice reverberating off of the stone walls and high ceilings. The three of them walked along the edge of the pool. The negro walked behind Honora, likely to keep her from running off again, not realizing escape was no longer her top priority. 

She thought she had seen every street, alley, and rooftop in Manhattan, at least the ones where she would not get shooed away by cops. She was wrong. There was a whole world in the middle of the city she had known nothing about. They passed along more waterfalls, some even bigger than those they had passed in the alley, some no more than trickles through jagged rock, punctuated by little fairy pools of light all the way down into the deep dark water below. At some points the ledge they walked along ceded entirely, and they had to make do with skipping across rocks until they found solid ground again. The faces of her companions reflected her own wonder as they turned this way and that, looking up at the high ceiling of the cavern, stalactites bearing down from above. 

The new terrain must have slowed Rocco down. They found him slowly stepping across the rocks, his pant legs soaked from falling into the water. The dark girl reprimanded him in Italian, and he defended himself, showing her the watch. 

“The watch is his sister’s,” she explained. “She wouldn’t have left it behind willingly. It’s likely she was carried from here.”

“We ought to hurry, then,” said the negro. 

“Why?” asked Honora. “We’re already two months too late. The girl’s dead.” She scoffed at the looks the other two gave her. “The boy doesn’t even speak English. What does it matter what I say?”

Rocco glanced at them but made no protest as he continued walking along the rocks. 

“She’s got a point,” said Terrell as they followed. “You really think the girl’s still alive?”

“I didn’t,” the dark girl admitted. “Nor did I expect to find a vast cavern in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen. I’d entertain any number of possibilities now. Wait.” She threw out her arm to stop them from going any farther. “What’s that ahead?” 

All Honora saw was more of what they had left behind them: a steady stream that lit their way through the dark tunnel. Then she saw it too. Fire. No, not a fire, exactly. Just a lone flame falling, falling, until it disappeared. Then another fell after it and did the same. 

“We must be near the end of the tunnel,” said Terrell. “It looks like someone’s got a fire lit out there, but—”

“Why’s it moving like that?” asked Honora. “Like it’s…” 

“Raining fire,” The dark girl whispered. For a while, she did not speak or move at all, leaving the rest of them to look around at one another stupidly. At length, she led them onward. “Let’s go. Carefully.”

As they drew closer to the falling flames, Honora saw that they were not truly falling. Not all of them anyway. Some were being pulled one way or another, some even flew straight up. After a while, they would each blink out altogether. Honora looked up and saw the dark sky above before she realized they had left the cave. Stone walls and stalactites gave way to trees and rolling green hills, mountains on the horizon. And still flames danced above and around them, disappearing when they reached the landscape. 

“They’re like lightning bugs,” said the negro. “They’re way too big to be lightning bugs,” he added quickly. “I meant the way the flames move.”

The dark girl listened to the jew’s chatter for a moment. “Rocco seems to agree,” she said, walking towards one of the tall oaks where a flame had just vanished. 

“Watch out,” said the negro as a flame fell from one of the branches. 

But the flame drifted away without even touching her, until it landed in the grass a few feet away, where it extinguished. They all inched closer to where the ember had been. 

“It’s a bird,” exclaimed Honora. The blackbird ignited at the sound of her voice and soared up into the trees. 

“So it is.” The dark girl gazed up at the branches above. “A fire bird.” She looked back at each of them in turn. “I think we can assume we’re not in the city anymore.”

“We were walking through that alley for a while,” said Terrell. “Could we’ve somehow ended up underground?”

“We walked on a slight incline, but nowhere near steep enough to bring us underground,” she replied. “At least not before we hit 39th Street.”

“Not to mention there’s not any mountains like that anywhere near the city,” said Honora, nodding at the horizon. 

“There don’t seem to be anyone in sight,” said the negro, scanning the horizon. “I suppose we got a while to go before we run into anybody.” He looked back at the dark girl. “Seeing as we ain’t going our separate ways any time soon, can we get your name?”

“Davcina” she replied without paying him a glance. She looked back at Rocco as he talked excitedly, gesturing at the sky. “Rocco’s right,” she said as she stopped and gestured toward the heavens. “The stars are gone.”

“It’s cloudy. So what?” Honora looked up at the sky, and saw what all the fuss was about. The sky was as clear as she had ever seen it, but still, not a single star. “What’s that mean?” Honora looked at Davcina. “Where are the stars?”

“I suppose we could still be underground,” answered the negro, though no one had spoken to him. 

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“Maybe.” Davcina looked doubtful. Without another word, she pressed on toward a path through the open field and hills ahead, and Honora and the others followed. 

The tall, jade green grass spread far and wide, surrounded on all sides by trees of different colors. There was the green of summer, from fern trees to pine, but there were also the yellow, orange, and red leaves of autumn, and even the white and pink blossoms of spring. The embers flew across the night sky, lighting their way. The creek that led them out of the cave had trickled into nothing, but here and there they found more pools of glimmering blue water. Too blue, actually. It seems to glow from somewhere within its depths, just like the pools had in the cave. There was no time to stop and have a look. Every member of their party seemed intent on finding the girl Honora had all but forgotten about.

Back home, her real home, there were places a body just did not go. Not by herself, not with a lover, not even with a whole lot of people. Even if it would make the way home shorter by over half an hour, she and her sister Caoimhe never ventured off the path after dark, because people who did so never came back. Not in the stories they were told anyway. 

No one told those stories in New York. They told stories, of course, but not of the sort you would hear from your grandmother rocking by the fire, or in the inn while the men had a pint after a day’s work. The kids who lived on the streets would talk of disappearances, but always with some mundane explanation, or worse, a childish ghost story. 

But this place they had stumbled on through the mist made the hair on the back of her neck stand up and her stomach churn in a way that screamed of that grove of trees in the Tourmakeady Wood Caoimhe warned her never to cross. The landscape had been wondrous to behold at first sight, but now something about it seemed wrong. Like how the stars were gone. If the others saw it too, they kept it to themselves. Caoimhe would have told her to turn back. 

But Caoimhe was not there. She slept in the little room in the household where she spent all her days cleaning, only coming to the window in the early morning to give Honora a handful of coins to get some food in her belly, turning a deaf ear to all of Honora’s protests that she could take care of herself. The sister she had known was as lost to her as her home, as dead to her as her mother and father. Had she known how much of a change she would see in her sister, she would have said a proper goodbye to her as they stepped off the ship at Ellis Island, just as they had said goodbye to their mother halfway across the Atlantic. 

Every sunset of their journey, Caoimhe would drag Honora up onto deck to watch as the sun dipped to touch the water, and together they would pray that their ship would find itself in the path of golden light, a path that could lead them to another world. A world where they might find a cure for what ailed their mother. A flower, or some healing water, or music that could stop the spread of sickness. 

But even when their ship stayed the course of the path of honey, the sun quickly disappeared over the horizon before they were even bathed in light three hours. Caoimhe thought if they had an enchanted ship that could move as quick as the setting sun, they could sail three days in its light, and reach the island of Tír na nÓg. Honora would of course point out that the sun would reach America before a day passed, but Caoimhe would only roll her eyes, because Mag Mell would never take them to America, but over an enchanted sea, where it was always sunrise or sunset, and the waves gently rocked the boat forward, but the storms never came to tip it over. 

At the center of the isle, they would find a tall tree with far reaching branches, and the souls of the departed would sing their welcome as they plunged a drinking horn in the well it kept in its shade. With one drink, their mother would be well again. They would dance and sing for three days before taking the ship back home to Ireland in the golden path of the sunrise. 

But they were not in an enchanted boat. Their mother took her last breath below deck eight days into the journey. When the passengers gathered on the ship’s railings to set eyes on the Statue of Liberty for the first time, Honora and Caoimhe stood alone with only scant recollections of their mother’s plans for their new life to guide them.

Now Honora was truly in an enchanted world, not by sailing along a path of golden light, but by being dragged through a dark mist in a narrow alleyway. Outside of the cave, Honora was all but forgotten by her companions. As they walked, the trees slowly closed in. Those to her right were only ten, twenty feet away at most. The hilly terrain would block her from view if she fell some paces behind the rest of the group. If she could just get to the tree line unseen…

She slowed her pace, falling behind the others. No one took note, occupied as they were with their new surroundings. She veered off to the right. If she was caught, she could always claim she was distracted by the fire birds, or one of the little pools of luminescent water, or the swaying tree branches, or the music…

It echoed through the rustling leaves. Not a dancing song, but something soothing that brings sleep to a weary mind. Fingers glided smoothly across harp strings. Someone called her name, but they were far behind, unimportant. The song grew louder, faster. She was getting closer. The trees were so near…

“Have you completely lost your mind?” Someone grabbed her arm and whipped her around, pulling her away from the trees and her reverie. 

“What the bloody hell are you doing?” snarled Honora as Davcina dragged her back to where the others stood. 

“Keeping you from getting yourself killed.” Davcina rounded on her, still holding tightly to her arm. “We’re already looking for one missing girl. What would possess you to go off into the trees by yourself?”

“I thought…” Honora looked back to the trees, now still and silent. “I heard…” No one sang to her now. Had she imagined it all?

“What did you hear?” asked Davcina sharply. 

“Nothing.”

Davcina’s eyes narrowed. She looked at Honora for a long moment before raising her gaze to the trees behind her. “Fine.” She turned away, but kept hold of Honora’s arm. “We should keep as far from the trees as possible. Whoever lured Rosa off could be in there.” 

“Davcina,” the negro called. Beside him, Rocco was gesturing wildly at the ground between them.

Where there had only been grass before, there were now two pairs of black footprints. 

“See how it crumbles?” he continued, kneeling down, pressing the grass with his hand. “I think it’s ash.” He held out a handful as Davcina came closer to study it. 

She pinched the cinders between her fingers, smelled it. “So it is.” She walked past him and observed the path they had been traveling, then walked back to the nearby trees. 

“I thought we weren’t allowed near those,” Honora called irritably.

“I don’t know how I didn’t notice before,” said Davcina, feeling the bark of one of the trees. “I knew something was off, but…” She picked a flower off the brach of a nearby dogwood and handed it to Terrell. He felt its petals, but it crumbled between his fingers and turned to ash, just as the grass had. “The path looks like soil and stones,” Davcina went on, gesturing at the ground between them, “but it’s all more ash and coals.” She felt the trunk of one of the trees again. “This isn’t even bark. I think it’s basalt.” 

She continued studying the tree trunks along the wood’s edge, seeming to forget Honora and the others entirely. A reproach from Rocco brought her attention back to them.

“The good news is the path we’ve been walking along must be leading us to Rosa. Any foot traffic at all would have left a set of prints. A beaten path suggests frequent comings and goings. We should keep following it.” She muttered something to the negro before walking briskly back to Rocco, who had already set off again.

Terrell hung back, and Honora guessed he had been charged with escorting her back to the path. If that was the case, he could wait as long as he liked. 

“Looks like you’ve made yourself some friends.” 

“Friends?” Honora said with as much contempt as she could muster. He could not possibly be talking about her present company. 

He laughed, motioning towards her feet, where nearly a score of blackbirds had settled. Up close, they were not black all over, but had red and orange stripes on their wings. They hopped around in a loose circle, disturbing the grass until Honora stood in a ring of ash, and still more flames fell around her. She shrieked as one fell lightly on her arm. The red and orange overtook its whole wing span as it spread its wings and ignited, shooting back into the night air. 

“It’s alright, they won’t hurt you.” 

Honora stepped back as Terrell made to place a hand on her shoulder, and kept backing up until she was outside the fairy ring.

The negro dropped his hand, a touch of annoyance showing on his face. “Well, seeing as you’re alright, we ought to be getting back to the path.”

“I don’t need you looking after me.”

“We ought to be looking out for each other. This place ain’t right, and none of us know what might be hiding in that forest. Davcina thinks it’s best we stay in pairs, and I agree with her. One girl’s gone missing already.”

“If it’s all so dangerous, why won’t she let me leave? I’m not trying to get myself killed in here. I just want to go home.”

“But you wasn’t heading home. You was walking that way.” He jerked his head towards the footprints she and Davcina had left. “Not towards the caves at all. It looks like you had it in your mind to go back at first,” he pointed out where her footprints had abruptly changed course, “but your curiosity started getting the better of you around here.” 

She stared at the footsteps. Her train of thought had derailed when the music started and just now she could not recover it. “I… I thought I heard something. That’s all. I got distracted.”

“You heard something that scared you?”

“No,” snapped Honora. 

“I only asked ‘cause you was crying.”

“I was not.” But when she brought her hand to her face, she found tears still on her cheek. Why had she been crying? “It doesn’t matter anyway. I imagined whatever it was.” 

She headed back towards the path, where Davcina and Rocco were already a ways ahead. The blackbirds startled and took flight, leaving their ring of ash behind.

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