Therefore to the rebel city I went, obtained a room for the night in a rather overgrand (and, to my subsequent regret, overpriced) hotel on Patrick Street and started on my inquiries. They have long memories in Cork. Once I had established the impeccability of my nationalist credentials, the people I met in the hotel bar were only too keen (a zealous light would come into their eyes) to recount the events of that night.

From Jessica's descriptions and the local testimonies, I narrowed the possible locations down to Merchant's Quay on the north side of the Lee, in the shadow of Shandon Steeple. Next morning, fortified on a true detective's breakfast of bacon, tripe, and a local blood pudding called drisheen, I crossed the river on foot to further my investigations.

Merchant's Quay was another of those periodic reminders one comes across with too great a frequency of the grim days from which our nation is only slowly emerging. Elegant town houses built to the refined tastes of the mercantile class of seventeenth-century Cork had been reduced to blackened facades shored up against the final collapse into the waters of the Lee by batteries of timbers and props. In any other city they would have been long ago demolished as an affront to civic pride; in rebel Cork, always on the wrong side of any uprising, they were maintained as a memorial to the Black and Tan's barbarity. In the entire row only one house had survived. There is always one that obdurately holds out when the fire passes, when the people move out, when the developers move in. This doughty survivor was a Mrs. MacCurtain, ninety-two, and bent treble with arthritis. She took it upon herself to invite me in for tea and fruit brack while she recollected that November night.

"There were only two deaths, though I don't know whether to be thankful that there were so few, or angry that they were any at all. From number eight, they were. The Mannions. Both of them died in the fire. They got cut off-the fourth floor, do you see? When the Fire Brigade came the Tans slashed their hoses, would you believe? They stretched out blankets, so, for them to jump, and everyone was out in the street, shouting jump, jump, for Christ's sake, jump! Never mind that their own homes were going up in flames before their very eyes, they were beyond saving, but there still might be hope for the man and the woman and the baby. Did I say they had a little girl? They did, so, no age at all, God love her, for such a terrible thing to be happening to her. The father, he was about to throw the little girl out, and his wife next, but suddenly there was a great whoosh of flame and the roof came down and, well, there was nothing we could do for them. But the little girl was still alive. The window bay had protected her, you see? We all shouted for her to jump, but she was afraid, she was so high up, and she no more than four.

"Then out of the crowd walked these two tinkermen. We didn't know who they were, where they came from, what they were doing there, but before anyone could say a word, they walked into the house; into the fire, would you believe? Straight in. Now, I was there, I will tell you what I saw, with my own eyes, and that was that the one who went in first, a small, swarthy man, like an Eyetalian, he was scattering what looked like dust from a bag over his shoulder, and when the dust fell, the flames died down. The next we saw of them, they were up in the window beside the girl. We all shouted, 'Throw her down, Throw her down!' but the other one, the tall, thin one, he picked her up in his arms and turned away, as if he meant to come back through the fire. They hadn't gone two steps when all of a sudden there was a tremendous boom! Must have been a gas main going up, or something, and this ball of fire blew the rest of the windows out. I tell you, the flames shot up one hundred feet, so they did, and it was a fireman himself told me that, so. Well, we all thought, there's another two poor brave idiots gone to their Maker, and the little girl with them, poor thing. Why hadn't they listened and done like we'd said and thrown her out? But then what did I see, but the flames in the hallway snuffed out like a candle and the two of them come walking out with the little girl like they were on a Sunday afternoon walk on Crosshaven Promenade. They set the little girl down and in all the rush and haste they had disappeared through the crowd before anyone thought to talk to them. Hadn't even stopped to be thanked, and we never knew who they were or where they had come from. They came and went without a single word. But for them there's not one would have survived in number eight. And I know what I saw with my own eyes, and other folk will tell you what they saw with theirs, and what happened is a miracle, a real Hand of God miracle.

"I tell you this one last thing: after the fire, the brigade checked their blankets and tarpaulins we'd wanted them to jump into, and they said they were so old and worn that anyone who jumped in would have gone straight through. Straight through. So that tall, thin one, he must have known, though don't ask me how, because we'll never know, none of us."

I asked what had happened to the little girl. Mrs. MacCurtain replied that she had been taken by a sister who lived in Dublin, and had later married a Protestant. It was not a mixed marriage; the woman in question had been confirmed into the Church of Ireland, a thing she regarded as an outrage to nature.

Satisfied, I was preparing to leave when Mrs. MacCurtain piped up like a little bird with a final reminiscence.

"Oh, yes, I quite forgot to tell you, Mr. Rooke. This was a strange thing. When the little girl was adopted by Mrs. Mannion's sister, it was the child's second adoption in almost as many years. You see, she had already once been adopted, so, by the Mannions. Poor old Mrs. Mannion was told by the doctors she could never have any children of her own, a dreadful curse to visit upon a woman," (she crossed herself devoutly) "so she adopted a little girl from the Sisters of Divine Visitation."

I was surprised to find that the nuns of Visitation Convent were not a foundling order. Presented with an orphan, I had automatically placed her in an orphanage. The Sisters of Divine Visitation were a brisk and bustling missionary order engaged in good works of supererogation across four continents. Their convent on the Mallow Road out of Cork was bright, clean, modern, and clearly very well-funded. The current Mother Superior was a fresh-faced, dynamic, almost aggressive woman in her early forties. Sister Agnes, her predecessor, had retired from supervision of the sisters five years before at the venerable age of seventy-four. A skipping teenage novice (too worldly by far ever to make a success of life in orders) took me to the cloister garden where Sister Agnes liked to spend clement afternoons in the sunlit recollection of the past. Sister Agnes was a tiny bone of a woman. Seeing her wheelchair among the buddleias and fuchsias, I made the error of mistaking serenity for senility: her recall was instant and total.

"Such a dear little thing-like a daughter to us all, a ray of sunshine in our close community. Women in close community can be such terrible old bitches. Sisters in Christ no exception. But little Bernadette-Mary brought out the good in us-all these maternal feelings that a vow of celibacy is supposed to dissolve away like smoke, which, of course, it doesn't. She was very tiny when she came to us, a mere babe in arms. I suppose we should have given her over to one of the foundling orders, but, one sight of her, well, could you? We had her baptised at once and hired a wet nurse from Grangegorman, a poor woman who'd just lost her fifth, and she looked after Bernadette-Mary until she was weaned. After that she stayed with us here in the convent, and she would probably still be here if the bishop hadn't heard about the child. There was a terrible to-do, we just managed to keep it out of the papers. The thought had never occurred to us, you see, but everyone would have thought the child was one of ours, and that would have been a terrible scandal, indeed. The bishop insisted we have the child adopted at once. We approached the woman who'd wet-nursed her, but she had her hands full with her second attempt at a fifth, so, after much searching-I was very particular about who would look after our Bernadette-Mary-she was put with a couple called Mannion. Nice people, they were. We were all very sad to see her go. Something went out of the convent the day she left to go to her new parents. She was almost three."

I asked if she recalled where the child had come from. It might have been yesterday to Sister Agnes.

"From my brother, in County Sligo." Seeing that despite myself, I had permitted a look of surprise to cross my face, she said genially, "Yes, even nuns have brothers. And mothers, too, and fathers. And families. A proud family it is that has a daughter a one-time Mother Superior of a convent; doubly proud if it has a daughter a nun and a son a priest."

"Your brother is a priest?"

"Was a priest. Called to the higher service of Our Lord these twelve years past. Not many of us left. A brother in America, of course, and a sister married to an Australian. My brother was the priest of a small parish just to the north of Sligo."

A sound like a slowly tolling, ponderous gong sounded in my head. The perfume of Sister Agnes's cloister garden was suddenly dizzying.

"Was the family name by any chance Halloran?"

"It was most certainly. Did you know my brother?"

"I knew some of his parishioners. Drumcliffe Parish, was it not?"

"Drumcliffe it was, under the shadow of Ben Bulben."

The extortionist who claimed to be a receptionist at my hotel in Cork charged me two shillings and threepence for a ten-minute long-distance telephone call to the Links Hotel at Rosses Point in Sligo to reserve a room for the following night.

Late spring was maturing along the hedgerows in sprays of blackthorn blossom and crisp dog parsley as I motored up from Sligo through Limerick, Galway, and Ballina. My spirits matched the season. After too long in Dublin, one feels one is turning to something of the consistency of waterlogged newspaper. I enthusiastically serenaded the locals with songs and snatches from Gilbert and Sullivan. After an excellent dinner in the Links Hotel's renowned restaurant and a couple of whiskeys in the bar with its even more renowned view over the Atlantic, I felt ready for my visit to Father MacAlvennin, Father Halloran's successor. In Ireland, all detective work starts, and ends, with the parish priest.

Father MacAlvennin was a round-faced, cheery chap, doubtless destined for a premature coronary. From the number of detective novels hidden on his bookshelves between works of a more publicly pious stance, I judged he would be only too willing to assist me in my inquiries, as the police euphemistically put it. I sat in the amber buttoned-leather tranquility of his drawing room while he fetched the relevant parish records. He was very proud of his record keeping. His primary vocation was administrative. His ambition was to serve in the Vatican Civil Service. Eyes gleamed behind circles of glass at the thought of two thousand years of genealogies, histories, indexes, codices. He located the appropriate record in a shoe box of National Sweeps tickets and golfing scorecards-Father Halloran's gifts had lain in a different direction entirely.

"There you have it-Sisters of Divine Visitation, in Cork. The Mother was the sister of the Father." Only in Ireland can a sentence like the above have any logical meaning. "The child was a foundling, abandoned in a rush basket at the back door of a Mrs. Maire O'Carolan, widow of the parish. She worked for some time as a housekeeper at Craigdarragh House-the place achieved some notoriety, or perhaps fame, on account of it being the family home of the celebrated local eccentric, Dr. Edward Garret Desmond. You may recall that, in the early part of the century, he had a fanciful notion of communicating with creatures from another world by means of a giant illuminated telegraph in Sligo Bay, which consequently brought shame and ruin upon the whole family. If I remember rightly, was there not a scandal surrounding the daughter-a rape case, wasn't it? Now, what was her name?"

I declined to proffer a nomination. Craigdarragh. The Desmonds. How often in a lifetime do we follow a certain road so far, across changing and challenging terrain, to find that it leads to its own beginning? A sense of currents moving beneath a still surface, of unseen connections and associations, crossed over me like the shadow of a cloud.

"Emily, that was her name," the Father said, pleased at the efficacy of his memory. "There's a strange tale told about her in the parish-that she was taken away in a cloud of red mist into Faeryland; that her child was half faery and was therefore cast out and left as a changeling on Mrs. O'Carolan's doorstep. Idle nonsense, of course-you know how tongues wag in the country-and not the sort of thing that I would encourage in my parish, but there are many, too many, of my flock who believe the story."

In the morning I was given a little lesson in local history over brandies by the barman at the hotel, a veritable cornucopia of local knowledge. The incredible story of the lost girl and the cloud of red fog was well known to him-he even furnished me with a list of credible witnesses to the event. I declined to follow them up. I learned from him also that Craigdarragh had been sold to a Major Ronald Costelloe, ex-North West Rifles, ex-Pukkah Sahib, who, after becoming something of a local celebrity on account of his Indian housemaid and polo ponies, finally passed into popular history under a cloud of infamy for having aided and abetted the Black and Tans in the War for Independence. Such treachery had earned him an IRA bullet in the subsequent siege and gun battle in which Craigdarragh had been reduced to a charred shell. Equipped with a pair of bird-watching binoculars and a Swiss mountain-walking stick, I motored out to the house. I parked the car in the old gateway, slipped between the rusted gates, and walked up the drive. Even on as exhilarating a late spring morning as this, the melancholy was intense. The grounds had reverted to their natural state. Rhododendrons and shrubberies were riotous, the lawn a veritable jungle. The overwhelming sensation was of the encroaching woods reclaiming an old possession. The IRA had done an uncharacteristically thorough job on the house: it was roofless and windowless; plaster was peeling away in sheets from the scorched, blackened walls; chimney stacks made stark silhouettes against the sky; there were ashes, ruin, brambles, decay. Of the lives and circumstances that had moved within those walls, in those elegant gardens, there was not a trace-not so much as a scorched piece of trim from a silk parasol. It seemed to me a sad parable of the Ireland we have created.

From the sad remains of a great house, I crossed the stile at the end of the rhododendron walk into Bridestone Wood. Twenty years can span the life and death of even as great a house as Craigdarragh, but in the life of a wood they are as an evening gone, as the hymn says. There were a few halfhearted attempts at husbandry along the edge woods, a few sawn logs, damp cones of sawdust, an unruly stab at coppicing, but for the most part I walked in a woodland that had clearly never felt the hand of man. As with all wild, untouched places, a colossal, primitive sentience seemed to reside in every twig, every leaf, every uncoiling fern and spring flower. But there was a further uncanny sensation quite peculiar to Bridestone Wood: that of being watched. I could well believe the warnings of the barman at the Links Hotel when he had learned of my intentions for the afternoon. "Folks say it's haunted. Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that myself, but I do know there's a mighty odd feel to the place." Indeed. Not quite haunted, but not quite not.

My general trend was upward, my chief goal the Bridestone. After a few hundred yards in what I felt was that general direction I found myself headed downslope. Reorienting myself, I followed a small stream upslope, made a small detour around a thick clump of brambles, and found myself once again disoriented. The stream which I had kept to my left sounded from my right. Presuming I had turned around inadvertently, I rectified the mistake, walked on, and found myself once again beside the dead oak I had used as my initial landmark.

By now thoroughly unnerved, I consulted the small compass built into the head of my walking stick. I followed the needle and kept my eyes on my feet. After a hundred or so paces I began to experience a mounting sense of dislocation-up, down, left, and right shifted alarmingly. I persevered, and as I pushed on I became aware of a growing sense of resistance, a kind of muscular inertia, as if the air had thickened against me. It took me twenty minutes to cover as many yards. Without warning, the pressure ceased. I almost fell over in my exertion. By my estimates, I was less than a quarter of a mile from where I had parked the car; I felt like I had run ten miles. As I puffed and panted like an old man of seventy, the most baffling of the disorientations overcame me. I was still pressing uphill, but the slope of the ground seemed to increase until I felt as if I were climbing an almost vertical wall of vegetation. The evidence of my eyes had the wood sloping gently up to the foot of Ben Bulben; the evidence of my body had me on the face of a veritable Matterhorn!

Clinging there for dear life to every available hand- and toehold, I became aware of the birds-starlings, magpies, crows, ravens, eponymous rooks, all birds of ill omen. The trees were black with them. I clung to my rootholds and watched them come flocking in. As if by command, they rose as one and came at me.

I can remember very little-thudding wings, flashing yellow beaks, scaly legs, and clawed feet. I do remember hanging from my perch with one hand and lashing out with my Swiss mountain stick in the other, smashing hollow bones, snapping beating wings; the shrieks and cries and the whirring, flapping wings all around me. Beaks lunged for my hands, my eyes, my cheeks. I was engulfed in a storm of black feathers. I lunged and parried with my stick-too far! The grass tore in my fingers and I tumbled downslope. Trees, rocks, stumps, briars, loomed before me. Miraculously, I escaped being smashed and broken upon them. I came to an eventual rest in a clump of furze not ten feet from the dead oak, bruised, scratched, mud-smeared and covered with leaf mould; otherwise, considerably more intact than I should have been after a vertical fall of a quarter of a mile.

Bridestone Wood, or the spirit that controlled it, would not permit penetration by such as I. Trembling with delayed shock, I followed the rabbit path through the edge of the woods to the Drumcliffe Road.

A brace of Napoleon brandies in the hotel bar helped the recuperation process. From my table by the window, I could see the birds still circling above Bridestone Wood across the bay.

10.

A FELICITOUS SUCCESSION OF lifts and stowings-away brought them to the Boyne Valley, and the tombs, by early evening. Six millennia of legend and story had woven around the megalithic cemeteries of Knowth, Dowth, and Newgrange a nexus of mythlines too powerful to block at the source. Five years before, Tiresias and Gonzaga had fought for a season weaving a complex double spiral of gyruses about the minor nodes and octave points, isolating the tombs' Mygmus energy from the countryside mythline pattern. The Boyne Valley remained a key strategic site. If the Adversary were to regain control of the phagus-generating energies focused there by six thousand years of human imagination, the entire process of containment could be threatened. Proto-phagus forms were abroad, boiling out of the earth like heat haze; every hedge and thicket seemed to harbour a leering Firbolg or Jack-in-the-Green. The sense of flow along the mythlines toward the focus at the tombs was so overpowering that Tiresias was forced to dispense with his spectacles. Gonzaga was not so blessed; he could not turn off his senses so easily. He walked as if bothered by a bad conscience, pausing every so often to twitch and shake the voices out of his head.

The dark was drawing down by the time they reached the first gyrus. It had been sited on a minor chordal node on a wooded knoll known as Townley Wood by the riverward entrance to an old country seat abandoned in the War of Independence. They groped in the twilight through the debris left by early season picnickers. Gonzaga stuck his finger into a partly decomposed condom.

"It has, since long, been this one's understanding, that Mother Ireland eschewed the use of these," he complained.

They found the gyrus by the last glow of the sun between the trees. Utter destruction. The buried elements had been sniffed out and grubbed from the earth, as if by tusks, then stamped into nothingness. As a final act of destruction, the centre of the small clearing had been scorched. Gonzaga sniffed the air. "Pookah."

In its contemporary form, the pookah had been demythologised by the centuries into another member of the pantheon of faeries major and minor-a rural Puck figure, generally good-natured, if prone to occasional acts of minor domestic mischief. In its ancient manifestations, the pookah had been terrible and dangerous, the spirit of the forest itself, with its roots in the racial memory of the woolly mammoth of the periglacial fringelands, haunting with tusk and claw and sinew the nights of the Mesolithic settlers.

"Good comrade, please, one moment's perfect hush: This one suspects a presence in this place Not of ourselves. This one must hear and sense."

Townley Wood was in complete darkness. Tiresias had spent too many years following the mythlines to fear the dark, yet as Gonzaga turned slowly, as elegantly as a dancer, in the fire-blackened clearing, he felt cold hands touch his spine.

Gonzaga let out a wordless cry and pointed. Tiresias had his glasses on his nose in an instant. Townley Wood was transformed into a place of pale mists and rivers of pastel light. He looked where Gonzaga was indicating. A tangled worm of luminescence was unravelling and dissolving in a shallow dell a handful of yards distant. He glimpsed faces: the horse-headed homunculus, the sea cat, the satyr, the werewolf, the wild boar ... and then they were gone, absorbed back into the Mygmus.

They spent the night by the desecrated gyrus, watching, listening, waiting. Gonzaga cut two hazel branches and stripped them into long staves. While Tiresias muttered and fretted across the borderlands of the Dreamplace, he emptied his sack onto the charred ground. His fingers, like small, bright-eyed animals, moved over the strewn items, touching, weighing, selecting, rejecting. Dried flowers, shards of broken crockery, Boy's Club badges, bones, bird feathers, scraps of cloth, holy medals, broken jewellery, coins, bottle caps; those that passed his test he attached to the staves with short lengths of twine and button thread. Motorists and other users of the Dublin Road were so surprised by the sight of two tramps waving what looked like portable maypoles at them that, needless to say, they did not even slow down, let alone offer them a lift.

11.

DESPITE CLAMOROUS REVIEWS AND long lines to book tickets, Damian had not been impressed by the film. Jessica had been annoyed with him because he had not enjoyed something she had anticipated so long. She had been excruciatingly embarrassed when he had laughed out loud at cutlass-wielding Errol Flynn springing from concealed trampolines in a tropical Panama (emphasis on the last syllable) that looked more like the Palm House in the Botanical Gardens than the Spanish Main-the only one in the entire audience who had laughed.

"Look at them," he said when the final credits had rolled and the audience was cramming the exits before the National Anthem froze them in their seats. "Is this the country our fathers fought for? Is this the Caitlin Ni Houlihan Pearce and Conolly and MacDonagh died for-a cinema full of Irishmen watching an American film of an English pirate played by a Tasmanian queer?"

Jessica sprang, as nimbly as Captain Blood himself, to the idol's defence, but Damian in this mood was inaccessible to her, walking alone through the pure landscape of the Gael-the blood-washed mountainsides where everyone wore kilts and spoke grammatically perfect Irish and played hurling and lived by the grim sea in a grim cottage with two grim wolfhounds; a land where no one had ever heard of the BBC Light Service, or F. W. Woolworth's, or Alexander's Ragtime Band, or the rise of Fascism in Italy, or Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. "We finally throw off eight hundred years of British cultural imperialism and stand alone, the last Gaelic nation, and what do we do? Spend half our bloody lives in the dark watching Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Bloody Flynn. Jaysus!"

The sultry evenings had made St. Stephen's Green a natural magnet for strolling couples. That night there was the added attraction of a band concert.

"Can we go and listen to them?" Jessica sometimes felt isolated in Damian's company-she loved his uniqueness, that he was not just another Hoover salesman or conductor on the Howth electric tram-but she also loved the company of other people. Damian listened to the brassy notes softened by the warm, amber air. "Jaysus. The British Grenadiers. I despair for this country. Why the hell am I bothering trying to save you all?" Jessica stared at him in open hatred as he walked away. She caught up with him at the Leeson Street gate. He stood with his hands in his pockets watching a street entertainer grinding the handle of an old hurdy-gurdy. At his feet a monkey skipped and grimaced to the droning slip-jig and held out a sequin-stubbed bag for alms.

"Paddy-on-a-bloody-string," Damian said. He dropped a penny into the monkey's bag. It doffed its cap but its eyes were turned inward to purely animal concerns.

"Thank you kindly, sir." The hurdy-gurdy man tugged a cap peak. Jessica gasped. He had no eyes. Blank skin covered the sockets where eyes should have been.

The monkey screamed and chattered and threw itself at Jessica, straining at the extent of its tether. Pointed teeth snapped and clashed. Swearing at the monkey while apologising to Jessica, the hurdy-gurdy man brought the thrashing animal under control. Jessica was shaken. For one moment it had not seemed a monkey at all, but a very small, very old, very wizened, naked woman.

The hurdy-gurdy man was on his pitch by the Leeson Street gate, grinding out his doleful tunes when she passed on Monday evening after work. His archaic instrument gave a peculiar, almost lamenting air to even the most familiar of tunes; there was a spirit in those drones and strings that drew Jessica, while at the same time repelling her. The hurdy-gurdy man remained on St. Stephen's Green until Wednesday, when she saw him on a new stand by the canal locks. As she passed in the tram, the blind hurdy-gurdy man looked up and, with some sense other than sight, fixed his empty sockets on her. Thursday he had moved on to a new location in front of the big church on the Lower Rathmines Road. From her seat in the third row on the top deck, Jessica's eyes met his eyelessness. The monkey thing skipped and gibbered. She remembered what it was about it that made her shudder when she had seen it outside St. Stephen's Green: for a moment, she had thought it was the tiny woman in Gaiety Green who had tried to give her the golden torque. The next day she took a different tram home, by a different route. A creeping sentience of being followed, through the streets and avenues, over the bridges and tram lines, to the brass welcome of number twenty, haunted her. She could not rid herself of the sensation that the hurdy-gurdy man's blindness in this world was vision in the other; that, in the alien perspectives of that shadow-Dublin, she shone in his sight as bright as an angel.

Friday the hurdy-gurdy man and his homunculus had crawled their blind way to residence in Belgrave Square, the next street down from Belgrave Road. She could hear his melancholy drone on the warm, yellow air as she sat at her mirror and made herself glamorous for Damian Gorman.

A scratch at the door was The Shite, leering malevolently.

"What do want, you little frigger?"

The Shite's leer deepened.

"I know where you're going, and what you're going to do, and who you're going to do it with."

"Oh, do you, now? And how the hell would you know?"

"The man told me."

Jessica seized The Shite by the lace collar of her sundress and dragged her into eye-intimidation range.

"What man?"

"The man in the park. He's ever so nice. It's such a pity he's blind, the poor man. He says he's a friend of yours, he knows all about you. He told me all about your boyfriend-Damian, isn't he? He told me he was in the IRA. He says he has something very important he has to give you. You can call down with him any time. He's got a nice monkey-he let me play with it."

"You stay away from him, you hear me? You go near him or his monkey again and I swear to God I'll break every one of your fingers in the door."

"You touch me and I'll tell about Damian, the IRA murderer, and what you do with him in the alley behind Hannah's Sweet Shop."

"You little frigger."

They glared at each other in mutual impasse, The Shite not the least intimidated.

"Get out," Jessica ordered. "You're a spying little bitch. Get out."

"God's very angry with you for being a Protestant associating with someone who's a rebel against His Law. God's going to punish you; God's going to make you have a baby."

"Up your bum till it comes right out your mouth, Shite."

12.

"YES! OH, YES! THERE, look, don't you see it? So far away you'd almost think there was nothing there at all... there, I've glimpsed it again-something bright, like a silver needle, shining in the heart of the storm. I'm getting closer. I can see it more clearly now. It's not a needle at all, it's a tower, a tower of glass, so clear it's as if it isn't there at all, but at the same time shining with a light of its own. It seemed tiny because it was so far away, but now, as I fly closer, I can see that it's miles and miles and miles tall, it goes up forever and ever, straight and sheer and smooth, pure and perfect crystal. Closer still, and I can see there are no doors, no windows. Silly! What would a glass tower need windows for? It's all solid glass-pure, perfect shining crystal, rising out of the sea. The sea is so black it's like ink, and the clouds are black, too. It's hard to tell where the clouds end and the sea begins; it's hard to be certain of anything. Everything is so fluid and changeable, except the glass tower."

Despite the heat in the room, I felt icicles along my spine.

"Oh! The clouds have parted. I can see the top of the tower. It's opening up like a flower in bloom, like a rose with hundreds of petals and each petal is a different land with hills and forests and rivers and seas. All different, so different, some with red skies and purple clouds; some where mountains float in the air; some where there is no grass, only many-coloured waving tentacles woven into patterns like a Persian carpet; some where everything is crystal, bright, brilliant sharp, diamonds and rubies and emeralds; and others that are made out of poems and music and time and hate. Here is a place where everything is made from dreams so that nothing is the same from one moment to the next, and here a place of wheels, all running around and around the outsides and insides of each other. All of them are different, lying folded next to each other like the petals of a rosebud unfolding to the light."

We had arrived; the place of Jessica's primal memories, the nonquantifiable domain from which all human symbology and mythic power is derived, a place where our notions of discrete time and space are without meaning, our Lost Edens, our Gardens of Earthly Delight. I shivered. A sudden, inexplicable chill had entered the study. Outside the window Merrion Square shimmered under the heat haze. Within, my breath hung in steaming clouds. My fingers were so cold I could barely scribble down my pencil notes.

"I can feel myself being drawn down, toward the petals of many lands. Like a sycamore seed I am spiralling down. I am being pulled toward one of the world petals. Why I am attracted to this one I don't know. It's strange-not like any of the others. Its hills and valleys and plains look as if they are made of skin. I'm settling toward it, into a little valley-not so much a valley, more like a pit, with steep, wrinkled sides. It's soft and warm, though, and I can feel deep underground the sound of throbbing. But I can't keep a hold. It's too smooth-I'm slipping, I can't hold myself, I'm sliding down into the pit, down, down. It's dark down here, and the sound of the throbbing is growing louder. What's happening, where am I going?"

The cold, it must be her doing. Is she drawing on the latent heat of the atmosphere, channelling it through her preconscious self? But to what end?

Manifestation?

"I'm inside now. This is strange. It's a bit like being in a cathedral-all pillars and arches and vaults-except, when you look closely, you see that the pillars and arches and vaults are made up of twisted ropes, and everything's red. It's more like hell than a church, but why do I feel so safe here? Why do I feel that this place welcomes me, that I'm returning home after a long time away? I can't understand this, that everything is so strange, and yet I feel so safe, so welcomed, so protected. Everything swells and contracts in time to the booming, beating noise. It shakes me to my very centre, but even that is comforting. Do you understand? How can something so overpowering and terrible be so comforting?"

The cold had grown so intense that every breath crackled like needles in my lungs. Delicate filigrees of ice coated the windows. The water vapour in the study was condensing out into a band of mist at dado-rail height. Knots and whirlpools in the mist layer fleetingly called to mind human faces.

"I'm walking through the cavern. I've been walking for what seems like miles but there's still no sight of an end to it. I can see things now I couldn't before-things pulsing behind thin translucent walls; things that look like bunches of grapes, except each one is the size of my head; tubes and pipes that throb and pump in time to the beat. I can hear something: a voice. I can hear it even over the pounding heartbeat; a woman's voice. She's saying she doesn't know what to do. She sounds very upset. She says part of her wants to keep the child here with her for always, but another part of her knows it must leave and enter the world. It sounds like the kind of talk you talk when you are talking to yourself-the kind of talk people aren't meant to hear. Wait, I can see something! I can see something."

Those phantom faces in the eddying mist, they were not the product of imagination.

"It's a woman. She's kneeling. She looks as if she's crying. She's naked. I come closer but she doesn't hear me. She just keeps talking to herself."

No mist now, but a circling choir of faces: fools, kings, priestesses, pretenders. Thick lobes of ice covered the windows and spilled onto the radiators. Ice; cold, ghostly faces. To Jessica it might have been an afternoon in a summer meadow.

"I'm beside her now. I'm bending down to touch her. What's the matter? Why are you crying? Can I help? She looks up at me. I see her..."

And her expression was no longer one of supernatural serenity. Her face was an inhumanly blank porcelain mask.

"It's her. She's here. She's come for me again."