By The Head
Her heart is racing...you can't keep up
The night is bleeding like a cut
Between the horses of love and lust
We are trampled underfoot
By the head of the Liffey, in County Wicklow, placid pool and gaping cavern mouth: Phoulaphooka; the Pool of the Phooka.
"My grandfather told me the tale of a huntsman's pack--the best hounds in all of Kildare--gone down to Wicklow for the hunt. In pursuit of a fox, they made their way down a gulley to Phoulaphooka, and next, over the cliff of the waterfall there, to their deaths. Every last hound, broken on the rocks, and the wily old fox, he just turned to look back at a job well done. The hounds' owner could do naught but stand there, looking down upon the whimpering, howling mass of broken houndflesh and cry. I know that place. I knew that fox...."
"You knew the fox?" She asked, her fingers tracing down my chest, her eyes smiling into mine as the water cascaded behind us into the Wicklow night.
"I know that place because it is my place, as it was my grandfather's before me, and his grandfather's before him. And I knew the fox because he was my grandfather. We've lived here long, generation after generation, even as the mortal world has grown and become a modern behemoth, crashing over the ancient and attempting to make it new. Some things can't be reborn: they simply are, and are as they have always been. This place, Phoulaphooka, is such a place."
Her eyes were gemstones in the gathering dark, full of doubt and delight. She wanted to believe, but didn't dare. Still, it was the best line she'd ever been given by any boy, after any time spent in the dark, so she listened, and she smiled.
"There have been some who have mistaken my kin for the Tinkers by the roadside, peddling baubles and tin, and there have been some who have mistaken us for devil highwaymen, stopped in for a quick game of cards. Still others have called us stray horses or goats, but few indeed--especially in this world that grows more mundane by the moment--have recognized us for what we truly are."
"What you truly are?" She was humouring me...
"A Phooka," I answered simply, returning to my diatribe:
"Not surprising, then, that these folk of today--not so much of the country as of the city--should be so unsuspecting."
"A Phooka?" She asked, neither believing nor understanding. Her hair fell into her face, and my heart skipped.
"Faery shapeshifters," I said, thinking that surely she wasn't so newly fallen off the cart as to never have heard a single tale of my kind. Surely, even in modern Dublin, somebody still talked of the fair folk...
"Yeah, right!" She rolled her eyes, and in a flash, I felt myself slip backward in time to an hour prior, when her eyes had again rolled skyward, only that time as I had kissed her.
"I would show you, but you might be frightened," I answered, realizing my foolhardiness in having told her anything at all. I should've kept my mouth shut, as I had with all the others over the years and the centuries, but this one was different; this one I loved. I loved my Rose....
The deeper I spin
The hunter will sin...for your ivory skin...
Took a drive in the dirty rain
To a place where the wind calls your name
Over th trees the river laughing
At you and me...
Hallelujah, heavens white rose
The doors you open
I just can't close
Don't turn around. Hard to stop thinking that, watching them there. Her skin, so white, like the moon burning on a Samhain night; her hair painted black by the moonlight like a river of blood.
Don't turn around. Don't see me standing here in the shadows. Don't make me strike you blind--would be a sin to pick those bright eyes from your head with the tip of my whip as I've done so many others.
Don't turn around. Don't know me. Don't let me call your name in ecstasy.
Don't turn around.
Easy enough for a phooka to love his mistress in the dark. Easy enough for him to bring her here, to this place, whether she believed him for what he was or not, but far harder, when you carried your head in your hands, rather than your heart.
He'd known her since she was a little thing--watched her grow and bloom, so unlike the dead thing that he was. He'd known her since he carried her grandfather's soul into the darkness. She had seen him then, and she had screamed, and he, he had been too soft to flick his spiny whip at her then, just as he would be now, no doubt, if she did turn around, and see him standing there, watching their kissing, and listening to their soft words to each other.
Don't turn around...
You left my heart
Empty as a vacant lot
For any spirit to haunt...
"Prove it," She said. "Prove it. Change into something."
I shook my head. Don't make me do it, I begged in my mind. Please, just trust; just believe. And then, I saw it, in the shadows behind the trees: a peeping phosphorescence that could only be one thing, and my heart sank into my toes, as I recognized the Dullahan.
Had he been there the whole time? Had he watched our kissing? Listened to her whispering with me? Had he clenched his head harder under his arm as she murmured into the night her I love you's?
"Prove it," she was saying again, and she was smiling like a schoolgirl, and I couldn't resist her. In an instant, I wanted a thousand things: to be back kissing her where all was perfect in the world, where nothing could harm us, where both were safe and warm; to change my shape, and whisk her away on galloping hooves away from this place, away from the headless horseman who watched us from the bushes like a perverted vagrant.
"Prove it."
"Two things: when you get on my back, and I tear away from here, don't turn around, and whatever you do, don't look back."
And I thought of Lot's wife, in the Bible, and of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I knew the very words would make the tragedy happen, but they were already freed from my lips, and there wasn't a thing I could do but take to all fours, and reach my head moonward, as my body sprouted fur, and my feet and hands became hooves, and the shock of black in my long mane fell over one mad red eye.
I was more shocked than thankful when she hoisted herself onto my back, her hands insistent on my withers, her laughter soft in my ear. But mine were not the only hooves that echoed through the night as we tore away from Liffey Head and up the hill towards the starlight....
Don't turn around
Don't turn around
Don't turn around
Your gypsy heart
Don't turn around
Don't turn around again
Don'turn around
And don't look back...
I'm only hanging on
To watch you go down....my love....
Wild rides have always been the currency of my folk, and as she laughed against my neck, I hurtled through the trees, lashing her with their branches, as I'd lashed her with my fingers and with my tongue. Behind us, hard hoofbeats, and that ever-steady glow, and I begged her in my soul not to turn her head; not to look back over my rump at what was coming at us through the dark. But I knew that it would happen, as surely as I knew she could not keep this secret...
Over Liffey Head, to the top of the falls at Poulaphooka, and I remember my grandfather's tales of the hounds, and how he had laughed at what he had done to the huntmaster (who he said had earned it, though he never said how), but in my mind it was not hounds that lay bleeding at the base of the chasm, but instead my beloved Rose, torn to pieces on the rocks.
We rode harder.
And in the darkness, only one set of hoofbeats, and I knew the worst was coming. I stopped for but a moment, to let her catch her breath, and was then I heard it, the low and plaintive moan of the Dullahan:
"ROSE! ROSE!"
I wanted to tell her to cover her ears, but could not, for I could not speak her language as a horse. As it was, I could do nothing more than stamp my foot and snort loudly, and pray that my whinnies would drown out the sound. But they did not. The glow was closer now, and I could smell him on the air: all cold and mouldy dampness, like a deathshroud.
And in my mind, a thousand screams of "Don't turn around! Don't look back!" But I could feel her body turning on my back, the release of pressure from one thigh and the tightening of the opposite side, as she spun her body slowly round and looked into the eyes of the headless one behind us.
And then her heels were in my sides, and I was turning to face him, and his own horse reared at our fast approach, throwing him off-balance. For a moment, the entire world was off-balance....
Just as I thought we surely would run headlong into the Dullahan and his horse, she yanked me to a halt. Right in front of him. My Rose: for a woman, she had bollocks of brass! And much to my surprise, she showed not a moment's fear, as she let down her hair, from where she had twisted it up with a long, antique gold pin.
All was silence, save the Dullahan's horse's laboured breathing and my own, and, there in that silence, she let that pin drop to the ground, then reached right out and grabbed his head from his hands and hurled it away, down the cliff-face of the falls, into the dark.
As morning came to us, we lay together once more in the mist of the falls, and my Rose, still laughing...
"I don't understand. You'd never heard of a phooka, yet you knew precisely how to deal with a Dullahan?" On some level, my pride was wrecked by this.
"I saw it once before, when I was a girl. I never saw a phooka before tonight," She explained, as if this was supposed to make this blow to my ego fade completely away.
"So your parents--or whoever--told you what to do, so you wouldn't be afraid?" I asked, still pouting somewhat.
"Yes. My father always told me: If you live right, you'll grab life by the bollocks, but to live longest, you grab death by the head...."
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Copyright 2002: Arch-Druid CiHela
Song lyrics excerpted from Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses and So Cruel
Copyright 1993, U2
Lyrics by Bono
No copyright infringement is intended or implied.
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