Chapter One: Na Rudaí a Théir Ar Strae
(The Things That Go Missing)
The September fair at Cill Mór had not changed since 1933, which was precisely the problem. Same striped tents staked into the same damp field. Same donkeys standing with the same expression of profound disappointment. Same smell of frying onions and wet wool and something faintly sulphureous from the bog that bordered the eastern edge.
Eimear Ní Bhroin stood at the edge of it all, her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, watching a child she did not know run past with a stick of pink candy. The child was eight, maybe nine. The child was not her brother. The child was not lost.
She had stopped expecting to find him. That was not why she came.
She came because the fair was the last place Dónal had been seen alive, and something about the geometry of the place—the way the light fell across the cattle pens, the particular angle of the hurling pitch beyond the hedge—still pressed against her ribs like a hand. Twenty years, and the hand had not let go.
“Miss Ní Bhroin? Miss?”
A young garda, no older than twenty-five, with the red-faced earnestness of a man who had never lost anything more significant than his bicycle pump. He was flustered. She had seen the type before. They always thought she might be the one to break the pattern.
“The child,” he said. “The one who went missing this morning. You said you might—”
“I said I would look,” Eimear said. “I didn’t say I would find.”
She followed him anyway.
The missing child was a boy named Kevin O’Mara, aged seven, last seen near the fortune-teller’s tent. The fortune-teller was a woman from Ennis who called herself Madame Sosostris and had, according to local gossip, lost her own husband to a woman from Limerick in 1949. Eimear had no opinion on the accuracy of her predictions, but she noted that the woman’s tent was positioned directly beside the old ring fort—the rath—that had been there since before the English came.
The same rath she had warned Dónal to stay away from, twenty years ago.
The same rath she had not watched him near because she had been looking at a boy named Tomás Ó Briain and thinking about the way his hair fell across his forehead.
“Kevin was playing near the ditch,” the garda said. “His mother looked away for a moment. Just a moment.”
Just a moment.
Eimear felt the words land somewhere below her sternum. She did not flinch. She had learned, in Liverpool, how to not flinch. English landladies and their sharp little observations had taught her that.
“Which direction was he facing?”
“South, they think. Toward the bog.”
“Show me.”
The bog did not look like a place designed to lose children. It looked like a place designed to keep them, if you did not know better. The light was soft there, and the grass grew in tufts that looked like seats, and the air smelled of moss and something sweetly decaying. A child could sit down in that grass and disappear without meaning to.
Eimear walked the perimeter slowly. She did not call out. Kevin O’Mara was not Dónal. She did not know his voice, and he would not know hers, and shouting into a bog was the sort of theatrical grief she had left behind in Liverpool along with her accent.
Instead, she looked down.
The rath was not a circle so much as a suggestion—a low earthen bank grown over with brambles, the entrance marked by two stones that leaned toward each other like old men sharing a secret. The cattle avoided it. The fair’s organizers had strung a loose rope around it, more gesture than barrier, with a handwritten sign that said “Please Keep Out” in faded ink.
Someone had knocked over the left-hand stone.
Eimear crouched. The grass around the stone was flattened, but not by cattle. The pattern was too deliberate. A small body, moving fast, sliding on the damp ground. She touched the dirt. Cold. Recent.
She stood, intending to call for the garda, when her hand closed around something caught in the brambles.
It was a rosary.
Not Kevin’s—Kevin’s mother had said he was not wearing one. This was older. The beads were blackthorn, darkened with age and skin-oil, the crucifix small and worn smooth in the centre where a thumb had rested. The metal was tarnished, but she could still make out the figure of Christ, his head bowed, his ribs visible beneath the casting.
She knew this rosary.
She had threaded it through Dónal’s fingers herself, the morning of the fair, because he was nervous about the donkeys and she had told him to say a decade for courage. He had laughed at her. He had been eight. He had thought courage was for farmers and soldiers, not for small boys who wanted to ride a donkey.
“Say it anyway,” she had said. “It can’t hurt.”
The rosary had vanished with him.
Now it rested in her palm, cold and solid and impossible. The blackthorn beads clicked against one another as she turned them over. The knot at the base of the crucifix was still loose—Dónal had always worried it, picking at the thread with his fingernail when he was bored.
She pressed her thumb to the knot.
It gave slightly. The same loose thread. Twenty years, and the thread had not tightened.
“Miss Ní Bhroin?” The garda was behind her now, breathless. “Have you found something?”
Eimear closed her fist around the rosary. The crucifix bit into her palm.
“No,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
Kevin O’Mara was found two hours later, asleep behind a stack of hay bales near the cattle sheds. He had climbed into a gap between the bales and the wall, wedged himself in, and fallen asleep with his thumb in his mouth. He was not lost. He was simply hidden.
His mother cried. The garda looked relieved. The fortune-teller emerged from her tent long enough to say “I told you so” to no one in particular.
Eimear walked home alone.
Her house was small, at the edge of the village, the whitewash peeling in strips that looked like maps of countries that no longer existed. Her mother, Bríd, was inside. She would be sitting by the range, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on the fire. She would not ask where Eimear had been. She had stopped asking, years ago.
Eimear went to her room instead.
She sat on the edge of her bed, the rosary in her hands, and she turned it over and over. The blackthorn beads were smooth. The crucifix was warm, as if someone had been holding it recently.
Impossible, she thought.
She was a woman who had lived in Liverpool for twelve years. She had seen electricity. She had seen motorcars. She had seen a man fly an aeroplane over the Mersey in 1945, so low that she could see his goggles. She did not believe in impossible things.
And yet.
The knot was still loose. The thread was still pale where Dónal’s thumbnail had worried it. And when she held the rosary to her nose, she caught the faintest trace of something she had not smelled since 1933.
Turf smoke.
Bread.
Someone’s hands.
She did not sleep that night. She sat with the rosary in her fists, and she thought about a boy named Kevin O’Mara who had not been lost, only hidden, and about a boy named Dónal who had been gone for twenty years and whose rosary had just returned.
Nothing is ever lost, someone had said. She could not remember who.
She thought it might have been herself, a long time ago, before she knew better.
“I know everything that’s lost in Clare.” He stepped back, pushing the blue door wider with his bare foot. “Come in. Your tea will be cold, but that’s not my fault. I forgot to boil the water.”
The inside of the bothán was larger than the outside.
Eimear noticed this, registered it as impossible, and then decided to stop noticing. There was a limit to how many impossible things she could accommodate before breakfast.
The room was cluttered—not dirty, but full. Shelves lined every wall, and the shelves were crowded with objects. A child’s shoe. A wedding ring on a length of string. A single riding glove. A jar of pickled eggs that looked disturbingly like the ones from the fair’s lost-and-found tent. A prosthetic leg that had been polished to a high shine and displayed on a velvet cushion.
And clocks.
Seventeen of them, arranged on the mantelpiece, the windowsills, the floor. Each one had stopped at a different time. A grandfather clock in the corner showed half-past three. A carriage clock on the shelf showed eleven minutes to nine. A tiny brass clock that might have come from a ship showed a time Eimear could not read because the hands had been replaced with what looked like fish bones.
“Time,” Séamus said, following her gaze, “is the thing people lose most often. They don’t notice until it’s gone.”
He was at the range now, pouring water from a kettle into a teapot. The kettle had not been on the range a moment ago. Eimear decided not to ask.
“Your brother’s rosary,” he said, without turning around. “You want to know how I found it.”
“I want to know how it found me.”
He turned. He was holding the teapot in one hand and two cups in the other, and his bare feet made no sound on the flagstone floor.
“The Áit Eile,” he said, “has a way of pushing things back when they’re needed. Your brother’s rosary has been in the system for twenty years. It decided you needed it now.”
“The system.”
“The Áit Eile. The Other Place. Where lost things go.” He set the cups down on a table that had not been there a moment ago. “I am the Keeper. I keep things. I do not steal them, I do not hide them, and I am not responsible for the prosthetic leg. It arrived in 1944 and has refused to leave. I have tried reasoning with it.”
Eimear sat down. She was not sure when her legs had decided to do that.
“You’re telling me,” she said carefully, “that there is a place—a place—where lost things go.”
“I am telling you that there is a place where lost things are kept until they are found or forgotten. There is a difference.”
“And my brother is there.”
Séamus poured the tea. It was the colour of bog water and smelled faintly of turf. He did not confirm or deny. He simply pushed a cup toward her and said, “The tea is cold. I told you I forgot to boil the water.”
She drank it anyway.
It was not cold.
It was the hottest thing she had ever tasted, and it tasted like the memory of something she had lost before she knew she had it.
They sat in silence for a long moment. The seventeen clocks did not tick, but Eimear could hear them anyway—a kind of almost-sound, like the memory of time passing.
“How do you know about Dónal?” she asked.
“I know.”
“I want to bring him home.”
Séamus set down his cup. For the first time, his expression lost its vague, distracted quality. He looked at her directly, and his eyes were not the eyes of a man in his forties. They were older. Much older. They had seen things that she would never see, and they had kept them anyway.
“Finding,” he said, “is not the same as retrieving. And retrieving is not the same as keeping. The Áit Eile does not give things back for free. There is always an exchange.”
“What kind of exchange?”
He did not answer. Instead, he reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew a small leather-bound notebook. He flipped through it, found a page, and turned it toward her.
The handwriting was cramped and ancient. The entry read:
“1933 – Dónal Mac Broin, aged 8. Lost near rath, Cill Mór. Status: Held. Reason: Voluntary displacement (sióg). Retrieval cost: Not assessed.”
Eimear stared at the words. Voluntary displacement.
“He followed something,” she said. “That’s what you’re saying. He wasn’t taken. He went.”
Séamus closed the notebook.
“Your brother made a choice. He was eight years old. He was following a fairy who was having a bad century. The choice was not informed. But it was a choice.”
“A bad century.”
“Her name is Peig. She is an idiot.” He said this without malice, as if stating a fact about the weather. “She did not mean to keep him. She simply… forgot to bring him back. And now your brother is no longer entirely human. He is not gone. He is not dead. But he is not the boy you remember.”
Eimear’s hand went to the rosary in her pocket. The beads were warm.
“Then what is he?”
Séamus stood. He walked to the window, where one of the stopped clocks showed a time that might have been dawn or might have been dusk. He touched the glass.
“He is a lost thing that does not want to be found,” he said. “Or he does. Or he doesn’t know the difference anymore. The Áit Eile changes things. It changes people. Your brother has been there for twenty years. He has grown. He has forgotten things. He has remembered things that never happened.”
“What things?”
“When you find him—if you find him—you will have to decide whether the thing you are bringing back is your brother or a stranger wearing his face.”
Eimear stood.
“I’ll decide that when I see him.”
Séamus turned. His face was unreadable, but something in his posture softened. He picked up her cup—she had not finished the tea—and set it on the range.
“Come back tomorrow,” he said. “I will take you to the Áit Eile. But I warn you, Eimear Ní Bhroin: once you step into the Other Place, you will leave something behind. Something you did not know you were carrying.”
“What?”
He opened the blue door. The Burren stretched out beyond, grey and endless, and the morning light fell across the flagstones like a question.
“Hope,” he said. “You will leave hope behind. Hope is heavy. The Áit Eile does not allow heavy things.”
Eimear walked out into the light.
She did not look back.
But she felt the rosary in her pocket, and she felt the weight of her own hope, and she wondered if she could afford to lose it.
Chapter Three: An Chartlann Faoin gCuimhne
(The Archive Beneath Memory)
The county library in Ennis smelled of dust and silence and the particular mustiness of books that had not been opened since before the war. Eimear had been here once before, in 1950, to request a book on Liverpool’s dockyards. The librarian had looked at her as if she had asked for a map to the moon.
That librarian was Máire Ní Riain.
She had not changed. Same grey hair pulled back so tightly that her eyebrows looked perpetually surprised. Same spectacles on a chain. Same expression of mild, professional disgust, as if the world had failed to meet her cataloguing standards and she had not yet decided whether to forgive it.
“You’re Eimear Ní Bhroin,” Máire said. It was not a question.
“I am.”
“Séamus sent you.”
“He did.”
Máire made a sound that might have been a sigh or might have been her soul escaping her body. She stood, removed her spectacles, and polished them on the hem of her cardigan.
“The Áit Eile is not a tourist attraction,” she said. “It is not a place for sentimental journeys. It is an archive. A poorly managed archive, thanks to him and his… his filing system—” She said this as if filing system were a curse word. “—but an archive nonetheless. Things are kept there. They are not displayed. They are not borrowed. They are certainly not retrieved for the sake of a woman who cannot let go of the past.”
Eimear said nothing. She had learned, in Liverpool, that silence was often more effective than argument.
Máire held the silence for a long moment. Then she deflated, just slightly.
“Follow me.”
The door was behind the Irish History section, under a sign that said STAFF ONLY – AND ALSO GHOSTS. The sign was handwritten, the ink faded, and someone had added a postscript in smaller letters: “No, really. Please knock.”
Máire produced a key from somewhere in her cardigan—Eimear did not see where—and unlocked the door. The lock turned with a sound like a bone cracking.
“Stay close to me,” Máire said. “Do not touch anything. Do not speak to anything that speaks to you. Do not accept anything that is offered. And if you see a child with no name, do not—”
“What?”
Máire pushed the door open. The darkness beyond was absolute.
“Just don’t.”
The stairs went down much further than the library’s foundations should have allowed.
Eimear counted. Thirty steps. Forty. Fifty. The air grew colder with each step, and the smell changed—from dust and paper to damp and earth to something else entirely, something she could not name. Turf smoke. Holy water. Iodine, sharp and clean, like the smell of a hospital where someone had just died.
And then, without transition, the stairs ended and the Áit Eile began.
It was not a place, exactly.
It was a collection of places, stitched together like a quilt made by someone who had not quite understood the concept of seams. Eimear stood in what looked like a school corridor from the 1930s—the linoleum was cracked, the walls were painted a shade of green that had been illegal since 1945—but the corridor led to a field, and the field contained a kitchen table, and the kitchen table was floating in a space that might have been a church or might have been a barn.
“Overwhelming at first,” Máire said, without sympathy. “You’ll adjust. Or you won’t. Either way, it’s not my problem.”
Eimear looked down. The floor beneath her feet was solid, but it shifted between flagstone, linoleum, and what appeared to be the surface of a frozen lake. She chose not to look too closely at the shapes beneath the ice.
“The archive is this way,” Máire said, setting off at a brisk pace that seemed entirely unconcerned by the shifting geography.
They walked through a room full of chairs. The chairs were all empty, but some of them were warm, as if someone had been sitting in them moments before. They passed a corridor lined with mirrors, but the mirrors did not reflect Eimear. They reflected other things. A woman in a different coat. A child holding a red balloon. A dog with no eyes.
“Do not look into the mirrors for more than three seconds,” Máire said, without turning around. “They get ideas.”
They passed a shelf of lost buttons—thousands of them, arranged by colour, by size, by what appeared to be emotional significance—and a corner where prosthetic limbs stood at attention like soldiers awaiting orders. The prosthetic leg from Séamus’s bothán was here, Eimear noticed. It was standing next to an arm and what looked like half a foot.
“And here,” Máire said, stopping so abruptly that Eimear nearly walked into her, “is the Card Catalogue. Do not touch it.”
The Card Catalogue was not a catalogue. It was a wall of drawers, each one labelled with a year. The years went back further than Eimear could see—further than 1900, further than 1800, further than seemed possible. The earliest drawer she could read was labelled “1014 – Battle of Clontarf (lost swords, lost lives, lost kings)”.
“Everything that has ever been lost in Ireland is in these drawers,” Máire said. “Every sock. Every memory. Every child who wandered into a fairy ring and never came out.”
Eimear’s hand moved toward a drawer labelled 1933.
“I said do not touch.”
Eimear touched.
The drawer opened. Inside was a single index card, handwritten in the same cramped script she had seen in Séamus’s notebook.
“Mac Broin, Dónal – Cill Mór – 1933 – STATUS: HELD – LOCATION: SECTOR 7 – NOTE: Accompanied. Do not retrieve without Keeper approval.”
Beneath the note, in a different hand—lighter, shakier, as if written by a child—were three words:
“I am not cold.”
Eimear’s breath caught.
“That’s his,” she said. “That’s Dónal’s handwriting.”
Máire closed the drawer. Her face was unreadable, but her hands were shaking.
“The lost can sometimes write their own cards,” she said. “It is not a good sign. It means they are aware of their lostness. It means they are waiting.”
“For what?”
“For someone to find them. Or for someone to stop trying.”
They walked deeper into the Áit Eile.
The geography became more confused. A staircase led to a ceiling. A door opened onto a wall. A window showed a view of the Atlantic Ocean in 1948—Eimear knew the year because she saw a ship she recognized from Liverpool, the Royal Iris, and she had last seen that ship in 1948.
“The past is not fixed here,” Máire said, noticing her gaze. “It leaks.”
They passed a room that contained nothing but a single bed. The bed was rumpled, the sheets still warm, and on the pillow was a child’s drawing of a dog.
“Dónal’s bed,” Máire said. “From 1933. He slept here the night before the fair.”
Eimear reached for the drawing. Her fingers were inches from the paper when a voice spoke behind her.
“He doesn’t sleep there anymore.”
She turned.
The boy was maybe ten years old. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and no shoes. He was wearing trousers that were too short for him and a jumper that had been mended so many times that it looked more mending than jumper. In his hands, he held a small collection of buttons—red, blue, green—which he was arranging into a pattern on the floor.
“Who are you?” Eimear asked.
The boy looked up. His eyes were not the eyes of a ten-year-old. They were older. Much older. And they were empty in a way that had nothing to do with youth.
“I don’t have a name,” he said. “I was never found.”
Máire made a sound like a trapped animal.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk to him. He’s—”
“Extra,” the boy said. “That’s what I am. Extra. Like a button that doesn’t match any coat.”
He held up a blue button. It caught the light—there was light here, though Eimear could not find its source—and for a moment, the button seemed to glow.
“Your brother is in Sector 7,” the boy said. “He’s been waiting for you. But he’s different now. He’s taller. And he’s not sure he wants to leave.”
