Chapel: Chapter 1

"Wake up, Kate: wake up, it's alright, I'm here"

She opened her eyes; Phil continued to wipe her brow dry, and sat patiently with a glass of fresh water, which she accepted gratefully.

"Thought you'd need that: same dream again?"

Kate nodded. Her throat was too dry; she dared not trust her voice until she had emptied the glass.

"Any more details?"

"I pushed the chapel door open this time, Phil: why does it seem so familiar? It's as if I've visited the place, but at the same time .... not." she ended, lamely. She sat up and shook her hair from her face, frustrated at not being able to explain herself more clearly.

Phil nodded: they'd been over this ground a number of times already. Taking the empty glass, he used the distraction (and the slight noise) of replacing the glass on the bedside table to mask the discreet click of activating a tape recorder. Kate hated being taped, but he sensed it was important to record the details of her dream as accurately as possible.

"How about ... outside the chapel? Still the same?"

"I come along a ... a path through a woods, or a forest: it's not a paved road, or anything. No, the Chapel is definitely somewhere out in a .... nature setting, like a forest. There's some sort of an old, crumbly ruin behind it, but the Chapel .... it's almost as if it's untouched, somehow, even untouchable ... am I making sense?"

"Like, Time has no effect on it, you mean?"

Kate nodded. Phil's sensitivity whenever she tried to describe her recurring dream, and any extra details she managed to remember, was something she had come to accept. Also, he had the knack of putting into words things which she sometimes finds difficult to describe.

"It's almost as if - as if the Chapel is the one ‘real' thing, a photograph glued onto a sketch or a painted background - like a sort of a collage, you know?"

Phil knew exactly what she meant: it was a technique he often used in setting up displays of his freelance photography.

"Care to try and sketch it for me?"

Kate reached for a pencil and began with a few firm strokes. Phil watched in fascination as the picture grew and took shape. He could never be jealous of Kate's artistic talents, which in many ways complemented his own musical skills: but there were times when he wished he could come even close to producing her lifelike sketches.

"Did you get any impression of how the Chapel looks inside?"

They had discussed the dream many times; the way in which details seemed to become clear, like the gradual apparition of a photograph in a tray of developer, and with each repetition they had both become more certain that the building and its location were real. They were also certain that neither of them had ever seen the Chapel itself, or anything remotely resembling it.

After a brief pause to sort her impressions, Kate shook her head.

"Not really: but there didn't seem to be any ... what's the word, not benches .... ?"
"Pews."

"Right, pews. I got the impression that the inside of the Chapel was more or less empty: no pews, no altar, no furniture ... "

"As if someone's stripped it, you mean?"

"No. At least, not if you mean do I think it's been sacked, or vandalised. No, it sort of felt as if it was still a place of worship, but at the same time it felt ... private: like a family chapel on an estate, or something like that. The sort of place where you might not need lots of pews and statues and such."

Kate's pencil hesitated, seemingly of its own accord. With an abrupt movement, she laid it on the table.

"Another brushstroke would spoil it" she said, decisively. Phil nodded agreement: in matters artistic, he trusted her judgement every time.    

The chapel had definitive, solid, three-dimensional lines and contours: there was nothing vague or ill-defined about it. It had the feel of a ‘still life' sketch, rather than something created from an artist's imagination.

For several moments they both stared. The more they drank in, the more it took on a three-dimensional, photographic quality.

"Know what?" said Phil "That place is real: it must be possible to Google something to help us stick a pin in the map ..... "

********   

It took three days of constant sifting through possible leads in every major search engine Phil could think of, but he found it at last. Kate came home to find him sat in front of the PC, gazing vacantly at an endlessly bouncing screensaver.

"Found it: and you're not going to believe what else I've found out!" were his first words.

"So try me." In all their years together, Kate had never seen the normally effervescent Phil in such a curious, reserved mood. Even when shattered after a long night getting something ready for an impossible deadline he still had a smile or a joke on his lips.

His response, however, was totally unexpected.

"Fancy a holiday?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He shook the computer mouse, and a picture filled the screen.

Click. A computer-drawn image of Kate's sketch appeared in the top right corner of the picture. Even allowing for the difference in size, the correlation between the two buildings was unmistakeable.

"What's that?" he asked.

It was unmistakeable. The detail plucked from the photograph was identical in every respect with what had appeared at first glance to be free doodles and repeated motifs all over Kate's sketch. Kate glanced from the one to the other, thunderstruck.

"What ..... ?"

It's called a triskele design" explained Phil

"No, that's not what I meant ..."

"Sorry, Kate. I'm not trying to take the Pee: I dredged a name for the design off the 'Net, I thought you as an artist might already know it ..... "

"Yes, you're right, I've heard the term before, but I'm at a loss to figure out why I've doodled it time and again all over the sketch. And look! It's even scribbled over the door, just about the same place you found it in the photo!"

Phil nodded.

"That's what I thought, but I needed your confirmation to be certain. Want to know where it is?"

Without waiting for an answer, he clicked the mouse again. The picture dissolved to a middle-distance shot of the same building, viewed from the same angle. Unmistakeable ruins of a bigger, fortified castle or similar building surrounded by forest could be made out. Another click changed the perspective once more: the castle ruins were on an island. The picture appeared to have been taken from an aeroplane, and formed an impressive upper right quadrant to ..... was it really an Estate Agent's brochure? Apparently it was: Kate crouched closer to read for herself. She sat back a few seconds later, shaking her head.

"Nice try, Phil, but I don't buy it! No way, José!"

"Honest, Kate, I didn't believe it either - but it checks out! Look, I've got a fistful of URLs: the Estate Agent's genuine."

She gave him one of her Looks, but he held his ground. Still unconvinced, she sat back at the screen and read once more.

"Loch Cé , Co. Roscommon ..... island known as The Rock, Macdermot's Isle .... is the ancestral home of .... Phil, if you're winding me up .... !"

"Honest, sweetheart, it's so way out nobody would dare make it up!"

"And the crunch is - the island's for sale? Do people actually buy islands?"

"Apparently they do - if they've a cool three-quarters of a mill to spare, and they want a bit of privacy in Ireland! This Estate Agent must have an exclusive list of mega-rich clients, he seems to deal in nothing other than private islands and suchlike."

"Now tell me your Great-Aunt Fanny's left you megabucks to pour into this hole in the ground ......!"

"No, but thanks for the idea! I must check if I've any rich relatives I could knock off and inherit from .... much simpler, love! You know I've been thinking of researching my family tree for a while now. Why don't we just  ... take off, do the Irish tourist bit, and head for that part of the world? You know you need a break, and we're not strapped for cash this month ...."

*******

Before the day was over, flights had been found and booked.

"Thank God for budget airlines, and standby tickets prices!" grinned Phil, who hated parting with his hard-earned cash for any reason whatsoever.

Surfing to find quotes for car hire in Ireland (on the assumption that, since he had managed to get cut-price air tickets, this would work out cheaper than hiring a car and then paying for a ferry ticket) he stumbled on a local agent for a firm offering holiday packages in Ireland using horse-drawn "gypsy-style" caravans. The idea appealed to both of them, and as there was a stable in a town called Boyle, close to where they wished to go, he decided on a sudden impulse to book one for a fortnight. Kate had at least done some riding, and had some idea how to handle a horse, but as Phil said:

"How hard can it be? I'll bet they're trained to stop every time they come to a pub .... !"

Packing never presented any terrors for Phil, who was used to being called out on short notice to photo shoots. With at least one laptop, a plethora of cameras and plenty of film, he was as likely to go off with little more than the clothes he stood in, and his "flexible friend" to buy himself out of any problem he might encounter due to needing food, a room for the night, a change of clothes or any one of a dozen other practical matters. Kate, the practical one, took charge of this aspect of their holiday.

"Do you realise" she said at one point, as she snapped a case closed "We haven't actually been away - I mean, completely away: not photo calls and business trips - for yonks!"
"Jeez, it must be ‘yonks' since last time I heard anyone use that word!" responded Phil, ducking automatically to avoid the cushion he knew would be tossed in his direction for the remark. Predictably, he ducked just in time and the cushion missed its mark.

"But listen!" he said, wisely changing the subject "Did Slattery's say anything about whether we get a map of any sort? Because if not, perhaps I'd better be finding a decent OS map before we leave. It doesn't look more than about fifteen, maybe twenty miles from Boyle to the lake, but we'll need a large scale map of the area once we get there!"

A brief phone call to the agent's office was enough to ensure that a detailed OS map would be waiting for them when they collected the caravan.

Phil remained dubious as to how they would ever manage to wear the clothes packed into two full suitcases in a fortnight but decided to hold his peace. Far more important, as far as he was concerned, were the two laptops and the selection of photographic and recording equipment he had selected as indispensable for his mission to trace what he privately thought of as The Chapel of Her Dreams.