When they reached a wall of greenery where the vines from the meadow above the cave spilled down over into the field, she increased the area and parabola of her casting, widening the path. The vines drew back like curtains, and Torkel saw the entrance to a largish cave.
“Better use lights,” Clodagh said, though she imperturbably stepped into the dimness, Marmion behind her.
“Oh!” Marmion said. “What ever has happened here?”
“Somebody tried to kill this place,” Clodagh said. “But Petaybee fights back.” She indicated the streamers of vines and roots extending from the ceiling.
She proceeded until, farther inside the cave, she stepped cautiously around what looked like a green hillock.
“Ah! Here. Captain,” she said to Torkel, sprinkling the hillock so that the vines gradually shrank away to show the body they had encased. “Is this yer man here that you were looking for?”
The popped eyes, protruding tongue, and cyanosed face were nevertheless identifiable as those of the former shanachie. The bloodied grooves tightly scored about his neck gave ample proof of the agency that had killed him.
“He said he had a sure fire mining method,” Torkel said. “Something to do with Petraseal.”
Faber knocked on a piece of the roof that had remained vineless thus far. “This is Petraseal all right, but this on the cracks” He ran his fingers over it and shone his flashlight beam on the result and on what had covered the ends of the withered vines. “Look. It’s not even white. It’s pale lime green and it’s not Petraseal, Captain Fiske. This is exterior wall paint, and not a real high quality at that.”
Shepherd Howling, visibly shaking, suddenly sprang at Matthew Luzon as if attacking him. “Get me out of here! I must escape the Great Monster before it devours us all as it devoured that man.”
“Uh, Dr. Luzon,” one of the assistants called nervously. “Can you come back here?” He had followed Clodagh, who was continuing to sprinkle, undeterred by her grisly discovery, farther into the cave. “We’ve got three more corpses.”
“I demand that this woman be held for questioning and that the bottle containing her weed-killing solution be seized and analyzed,” Matthew Luzon said.
Marmion Algemeine, still unhappily abstracted by the grotesque deaths of the four men, regarded Matthew with stupefaction.
“Held for questioning? Whatever for?” she demanded.
“Clodagh helped ! Without her we’d never have found those poor men.”
Matthew didn’t exactly say “aha!” but a malicious light did glitter in his eye as he said, in a quiet voice, “And how exactly did she know that these particular vines would need her particular remedy? And how did she just happen to have it available?”
“And I,” Torkel said sternly, “only requested materials and manpower to reach the cave.”
Marmion was not to be confounded. “Why, I would suppose that plants as aggressive as these might be a fairly common nuisance. Is that how you knew, Clodagh?”
Clodagh shrugged but didn’t defend herself.
A woman from Savoy spoke up quickly. “And how wouldn’t she know that? Sure, coo-berries has never been this bad before. It’s that hard to root them out wherever they grow, but they never strangled anybody before this. Still, it’s been an uncommon early spring, and everything is growin’ the like of which I’ve never seen before in all my life.”
“So you would say, would you, madam,” Matthew said “that the weather was unusual and the plants are unusual? Tell me, if what Ms. Senungatuk used on the coo-berries was an ordinary remedy for their sting, why didn’t the rest of you use them?”
“Sure, why should we?” she asked. “Coo-berries wasn’t botherin’ us any, were they? And only ‘cos you come, did we know they was up at the cave. And another thing,” she went on, winding up to unburden all her complaints, “back before Shanachie Reilly arrived, people used to come here for latchkays and have a chat with the planet, like. Only then Reilly gave us to understand that a lot of our problems, the floods, the avalanche, the quakes, were on accounta we were too pig-ignorant to understand properly what it was the planet was sayin’ to us. After the time lightnin’ struck the meeting hall and burned up all them people, just before Reilly came to us, we let him do the talkin’ and I would say things have been pretty peaceful since.” She paused and said, “But for all that many folk thought Reilly knew best, he never did learn the remedies like Kilcoole’s Clodagh. Our old healer died two winters back and we’ve been wanting to get someone new trained up, ‘cos I’ve known about her since we was both younglings. Village even had a promising girl child ready to go ‘prentice’ herself to Clodagh, iffen Clodagh Senungatuk’d have her, but Reilly wouldn’t allow it.”