Gae Assail

by johnnedwill

It had taken me a week to track Doctor Corrigan to a terraced house in Belfast, and then another week to persuade her to agree to the interview. The house was about fifteen minutes' walk from Botanic railway station, in one of the numerous side streets that crisscrossed that part of the city. Identical houses in long rows. It would have been all too easy to become confused and lost.

The house was over a century old; its brickwork scarred and pocked by the years. A pair of chimney pots had been placed either side of the door, converted into planters. I hammered on the door and waited for an answer. "Doctor Corrigan? I'm - ."

"I know who you are." The woman who answered the door was in her late forties. A pair of plastic-rimmed glasses were perched on her nose, and she peered over the top of the lenses at me. "Come on in."

Inside, the house was neat and tidy. I followed Doctor Corrigan down the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the building. A single window looked out over a paved yard. The windows of the house behind were just visible over the yard wall. "I'm here to ask some questions about the Downpatrick giant."

The woman snorted at me. "It ruined my life."

I looked around me. "You're not doing too bad if you can afford a place like this."

"I inherited it from my grandmother. Otherwise, I couldn't afford to live here. Not on an assistant lecturer's salary. Sit down. Would you be wanting a cup of tea?"

"Please." Here, in the university quarter of Belfast, tea was the essential social lubricant. Even more so than alcohol. A refusal would have been rude. Doctor Corrigan went to the gas stove and put a kettle full of water on to boil. "So - the giant. What can you tell me about it?"

Doctor Corrigan waited for the water to boil, then made a pot of tea and set it on the table between us to brew. Only then did she sit down. I took out my phone and placed it in front of me, set to record. The doctor looked suspiciously at it. "You're not going to mention my name? I don't want to lose this post."

"No. I won't. Don't worry. So, how did you get involved with the giant?"

She poured out a cup of tea for herself and gestured for me to help myself. "It was five years ago. I was asked to come to an archaeological dig in South Down. Professor Murray - he was quite high up in the faculty at the time - needed my help."

I interrupted the doctor. "Where was the dig?"

"A place called Lugh's Grave. According to local legend it was where Lugh had given Celtchar mac Uthecar his spear, the Gae Assail. You can find the barrow in the drumlin swarms to the west of Downpatrick."

I took a mouthful of tea. "So, what did you find?"

Doctor Corrigan stared at me. "You don't know?"

"i do, but I want to hear it in your own words."

Doctor Corrigan fiddled with her cup, staring into it as if trying to discern something in its depths. "Professor Murray's team had uncovered the skeleton. When I got there it was still partially buried in the soil of the barrow, but it was obvious there was something different about it. My first impression was that whoever it was had a number of congenital defects. Acromegaly and oligodactyly."

I looked blankly at the doctor and hoped she would enlighten me. She did.

"The skeleton - or what I could see of it - was deformed. The limbs were out of proportion to the rest of the body, and the skull was misshapen. Also, there were only three digits on each of the hands and feet. Professor Murray wanted me to investigate the body. He thought it could provide some important information on why it had been put in the barrow in the first place. So, I got him to finish uncovering the body and pack it off to my laboratory."

"So, what did you do with the body?"

Doctor Corrigan looked straight into my eyes. "If you want to know," she said quietly, "then my report is available online. Somebody leaked it to the internet, convinced that I was hiding something. Of course, the university authorities didn't believe I wasn't responsible for that - !"

Her bitterness was obvious from the one of her voice. "I'm here to get your story," I reminded her. "Remember?"

Corrigan glared at me for a moment, then went on. "Fine. The first thing I did was reassemble the skeleton. Bones often are displaced when they've been buried for any period of time. I hoped that I would be able to correct some of the more obvious defects. But I couldn't. I asked Professor Murray if I had all the bones, and he confirmed that I had everything that had been in the barrow.

"Now that I had the body in the laboratory, it was obvious that something was wrong with it. It was as if it wasn't human. I decided that I needed to do some tests on it. I had the bones x-rayed. I took scrapings and sent them off for dating and DNA analysis. It took about a month to get the results back."

"And?"

"For a start, the x-rays showed that the structure of the bones was wrong. They were too porous. It was as if the minerals had been leached from them - like the osteoporosis that astronauts suffer from on long-duration space missions. Also, the radioisotope analysis was all wrong. The dates the laboratory came back with didn't make sense. According to the data, the bones were much younger than they should have been. But I don't think Professor Murray would have allowed his students to make such an elementary mistake in the archaeology. The clincher as far as I was concerned was the result of the DNA analysis."

"What was that?"

"Whoever had been buried in the barrow, they had triploidy."

Again, I gave Doctor Corrigan a blank look.

"Triploidy," she said. "Humans are diploid. They have forty-six chromosomes. Somebody with triploidy - ."

"Has forty-nine chromosomes?" I asked.

Corrigan nodded. "Exactly. Triploid children rarely survive more than a few years into infancy. The giant was more than two metres tall - obviously mature."

"You said 'rarely'. Doesn't that mean it would have been possible for a triploid child to survive into adulthood?"

"Not with the other deformities I mentioned."

"This is when you put forward the theory that this - whatever it was - was some kind of alien?"

For a moment I thought that Doctor Corrigan was going to throw her mug at me in a fit of rage. Then she calmed down. "No," she said. "I never put that forward as a theory. I have - sorry - had a reputation. What I said was that there were certain anomalies."

"But what about the other - ?"

Doctor Corrigan glared at me. "I was being scrupulously honest. I mentioned everything in my report. I did not draw any conclusions. Those were for Professor Murray to make. The fact that somebody leaked that report, and the results of my tests are nothing to do with me! I did not say that the giant was an alien or a fairy or - or - or -!" She banged her mug on the table, and a wave of coffee slopped out and formed a puddle on the formica. "Now look at what you made me do." Corrigan got up and grabbed a handful of paper towels from a roll by the sink.

I waited for a moment before "But the university still blamed you?"

"And I almost lost my job for it." Doctor Corrigan scrubbed away at the pool of coffee, stopping its spread. "'Bringing my employer into disrepute.' That was their excuse. The university board decided to reduce my funding. That was just as bad. If you don't have any funding, you can't do any research. And if you can't do any research, then you can't write any papers. And in academia, it's publish or perish. I'm lucky I still have a post. Nobody else would want to employ a scientist who claimed that the Irish god Lugh was an alien who gave away a magic spear, are they?"

I had to agree with her. "So, what happened to the skeleton?"

Doctor Corrigan shrugged. "I don't know, and I don't care. It's probably in some drawer somewhere. Out of the way, so nobody can ask awkward questions and get even more awkward answers."

My coffee, hardly touched during the interview, had grown cold. It was time to leave.