Chapter 45
Mullins went to the door of the tavern and looked outside.
“It’s coming down like horse’s piss out there.” He laughed. “Have you got a cloak I can borrow?”
“There’s a large ladies’ one someone left here, but that’s all,” the barman offered, also laughing.
“It’ll have to do,” Mullins said, and he took it, threw it over his shoulders, and pulled up the hood. “Must have been a fine-sized woman who owned this.” He laughed when he was able to pull the hood up and close the cloak a little at the neck.
“Never saw her,” the barman said. “Thank God!” And they both burst out laughing.
“Thanks,” Mullins said as he stepped outside.
“Look after yourself.”
When he was out in the rain, it didn’t seem so bad. The cloak was actually quite thick, and he could get a faint smell of perfume inside its hood. He wondered what type of woman who smelled so good would be in a tavern and leave a cloak like it behind.
Something crashed to the ground not far away and took his attention. It had been a woman emptying a bucket out the window. She was on the second floor, and he gave her a theatrical bow as she closed the window. He looked back at the streets around him he saw the street sign for Braithwaite Street, and it triggered a memory. He was on Pimlico Road, and just beyond him was the entrance to Greater Elbow Lane, which in turn housed Lesser Elbow Lane, the place where Thomas Olocher’s eaten body was found.
With the courage and curiosity of drink in him, he walked resolutely to this site. He stood looking at the thin lane and trying to imagine what the soldiers had seen when they found him. There was another noise behind him, but he didn’t turn this time, thinking it the woman emptying buckets again on Pimlico.
He grew tired of standing here, and he made his way towards Meath Street. It was quiet as he walked down that echoing street, and the rain was down to a light shower. He passed Cale Alley and Engine Alley and then Earl Street onto Meath’s Row. He thought he heard something like a dog growling, but he couldn’t see any dog around.
As he passed the narrow entrance to Hanbury Lane, something black and full of gleaming teeth launched at him from the darkness. It was powerful, and in his inebriated state Mullins lost his balance and fell to the ground. The creature came up on top of him, but Mullins had his strength still; he grabbed hold of it and pulled it towards him to stop any slashing motion of those wild teeth, to take away the opportunity for motion. As he held the struggling animal, it felt strange, the muscles not reflecting the size of the frame. He lashed out a few times at it and felt that it was trying to get out of his grip, returning blows with hooves that seemed to be on its chin and upper lip. The blows came as though from punches from a man, and this didn’t make sense at all in Mullins’s frenzied mind. He lashed out with his knee at where he thought the groin might be, and the creature doubled up and lashed somehow with the centre of his back at Mullins’s face; he felt his nose break, and his eyes watered as he let go of the monster.
It scrambled up from him and Mullins, though not seeing, swung his legs and tripped the animal as it tried to get away. It crashed down, and Mullins grappled on the ground with it as his sight came back a little. He pounded blows into the abdomen of the creature, and its skin and fur seemed to shift and soften his blows, as though the creature was hollow in places. The teeth came at him, and it was then that Mullins knew he had seen this motion before. He had seen it when Lord Muc fought with the tusks at the Poddle. This was a man he was fighting, a man inside a costume with his arms inside a serrated gauntlet, and the part of the back that had struck out at him was in fact the head, covered by the fake animal skin.
With this new theory in mind, Mullins began to rain down blows through the “jaws” and into the hard lump between them. His blows got harder and harder, and he threw his head in there for good measure, the blades of the teeth catching him from time to time as he did, and slowly the creature began to lose strength and finally lay moaning the moan of a wounded man.
Mullins sat back against the wall, exhausted, and called out loudly: “I have the Dolocher!”
He could hear doors opening and running feet slapping against the ground and people asking one another where the call had come from.
It wasn’t long before a crowd had gathered in the rain to see the spectacle of the blacksmith and the Dolocher both lying wounded on the ground, the creature moaning like a man, and blood spreading over both.
Mullins pulled himself up against the wall of the building behind him and got into a sitting position. As he did, he saw that the man in front of him was trying to get to his knees to crawl away. Panic spread in the people gathered.
“It’s getting up!” someone shouted.
“Relax, people, he’s not going anywhere.” Mullins swung his large fist down on the back of the creature, where he estimated the man’s head to be, and it slumped again to the sodden ground. “It’s a man in costume,” Mullins said as he tried to catch his breath, his eyes still streaming and his nose bloody and painful. The people huddled a little closer, and soon they were jabbering in agreement:
“It is a man!”
“Looks like boar skins all sewn together.”
“Let’s see who it is,” a soldier who had arrived said.
“Leave him until Alderman James gets here,” Mullins said. “Has he been sent for?” The soldier stopped and looked at him and then stood, thinking for a second before issuing an order for the alderman to be sent for.
As he lay there, bleeding, Mullins grew weak and sleepy. He could still hear the people all around as they chatted excitedly about the end of the Dolocher. Their numbers had swelled dramatically by now, and every window and door frame held as many faces as it could. He was entering that strange consciousness of near sleep when he heard Kate saying something to him, but when he opened his eyes, she was not there. He closed them again, and she was thanking him, and she was wearing something cream that he had never seen her in before. He knew she was safe now, and he nodded at her thanks. He was warm now, and everything he heard sounded strange and echoed in his head.
Finally, he felt a pair of hands on his shoulders, shaking him. He thought it was the Dolocher having awoken again, but when he tried to raise his arms in defence, he found they only went halfway up before he felt a terrible pain, and he had to put them down again. He opened his eyes, and he saw the smiling eyes of Alderman James.
“You did it!” he was saying over and over.
Mullins sat forward again and began to get a clearer picture as to what was going on around him.
“Who is he?” he asked the alderman.
“Let’s find out,” he replied with a smile, and he nodded to the soldier who was there already.
They both watched with great interest as the soldier took his knife. Finding a hollow space, he sliced into the front of the costume and then pulled it apart. As the hide skin ripped and separated Mullins looked on with interest. He figured—hoped—he was going to see Lord Muc or else Edwards and but as the top of the head was revealed, he saw that it was not going to be either of them. This man was quite bald on top, a thin sheen that almost reminded him, with his hat off of course, of…
He saw the bloodied face, and it was him! Without his cap on. Mullins pushed back against the wall in horror and shock, and he looked to the alderman, who glanced back at him in wonderment. There in front of Mullins, being disrobed as the Dolocher, was none other than Cleaves! The friend he had thought was so savagely killed that nothing was left of his face and not much of his body, the man who was so beloved by the children of the Liberties and who told ghost stories and was always ready for a laugh, whom Mullins had sworn an oath to avenge! He was the Dolocher! He was alive! He was the one who tried to kill Mary Sommers and his beloved Kate and now tonight had even tried to kill him—a man he had called many times over their lives his best and only true friend.
“Cleaves!” he finally managed to say.
He saw the head bobble on the body of the half-costumed Dolocher and saw those placid, peaceful, and beautiful eyes gaze upon him—there was such sadness in them.
“I didn’t know it was you, Tim,” he croaked.
All Mullins could say at that moment was, “I know.”
“And she wasn’t your lady friend at the time, either.”
“I know.” Mullins was still in a daze, his nose aching and his mind unsure as to what was happening.
“Who is this man?” the alderman asked, looking at Mullins.
“This is Cleaves, who everyone thought had been one of the victims of the Dolocher.”
“Cleaves! Then who is the man who was killed?” the alderman shouted at Cleaves.
“He was a man from the country who was unlucky enough to have the same build as me and be out on the streets with nowhere to stay that night,” Cleaves said after he rubbed blood from his mouth.
“Why, Cleaves?” Mullins asked, still in a state of disbelief. He wanted to hear that he’d had no choice somehow, that there was some coercion behind it he could not fight against, but he knew in his heart that this would not be what he was told.
“For Dublin,” was all Cleaves said in reply to this.
“What the hell does that mean?” the alderman shouted at him, but Cleaves didn’t answer, and his sorrowful eyes were again on Mullins, as though he were willing him to understand what he was saying.
And Mullins did understand—but not then and not for a long time afterwards, when Cleaves was hanged, when the rebellion of 1798 failed, and the Parliament was dissolved, and Dublin was ruled directly from London. In his own twisted way, Cleaves believed that a city, a people even, lived on only through the stories that were left behind when they were gone. Cleaves could see the writing on the wall for Ireland and knew that it was only a matter of time before it was no more than a province of England, and he wanted true Dublin to survive this.
He donned the mask of the Dolocher, his arms covered with serrated steel shards that many thought were the teeth and jaws of the beast, and he killed and terrorised in the middle of the night in the name of history, the preservation of history. He wanted to invoke a Dublin that could never be forgotten by those who would live there for ever to come, a Dublin that was of Dublin and not of London. For that reason, he made as sure as he could that it was never an English person he killed, and he never attacked anyone from the army; he didn’t want the Dolocher to ever be associated with freedom fighting or nationalism. It had to be a myth that grew and grew and changed as the years went by into something intrinsic to the city, something that could never be separated from its narrative.
And that stands to this day. The Dolocher is still known in Dublin over two hundred years later, but if you ask anyone today who Cleaves was, they will look at you with a blank expression and tell you that they do not know.
A city lives and dies by its myths.
The End
Thanks for reading. I hope that you enjoyed this book. Please leave a review where you got this book, or you can contact me at www.europeanpdouglas.com with any comments you might like to make.
About the Author
European P. Douglas was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1978 where he spent his first six weeks of life in an incubator. This is where he developed his independent streak and ability to entertain himself- the qualities needed to enjoy a solitary pursuit like writing. At the age of 14, he developed a liking for travel and did this as much as possible, taking in most of Europe, as well as visits to the US, Japan, and Australia. The recession pummelled him in 2009, and his job no longer existed While unemployed he decided to use this time to become more serious about writing, which had been a lifelong hobby. With this in mind, he completed a Creative Writing Diploma from Kilroy's College (While also less glamorously becoming a certified payroll technician)
When both his writing tutor, Eileen Casey, and Novelist and Guardian Book Reviewer, Helen Falconer, encouraged his work he decided it was time to try to be a writer. He found his greatest success to date with the release of the novel 'The Dolocher' in October 2014. At the time of writing (February 2016) this book has close to 8,000 downloads from Amazon.
A young adult novella titled 'Rattleyard' will be released on March 1st, and a follow-up to 'The Dolocher' titled 'Shadow of The Dolocher' will be released later in 2016.
European P. Douglas lives with his wife, Aisling, and sons Harrison and Franklin, in Lucan, Co. Dublin. There is also a cat called Paris in the house.
Check out my web page and say hello at www.europeanpdouglas.com or hire me to Ghost Write for you at www.ghostcreativeservices.com
If you would like to contact me for any reason please email
[email protected] This novel was edited by Kelly Cozy, and she you can hire her services at https://booksidemanner.com/
The Dolocher is the first in a four part series of Alderman James Mysteries. The second book ‘Shadow of the Dolocher’ is out in 2016. Please check my website for the release date.
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