by Lila Dubois
As she stared down the hall, she saw two people at the entrance to the nursery room. She flipped from flustered to concerned—she didn’t want morbid tourists messing up the scene.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?”
“We are not done talking!” Tristan said as he followed her.
“Dr. Heavey.” As she got closer, Melissa realized that the female was Sorcha. “This is Séan Donnovan. We were able to go through some old records, and we think we know who the children are.”
“You do?” Melissa brushed by them, checking to be sure they hadn’t moved anything and deposited her box of samples on top of a tarp. “That may help answer some questions about who murdered them.”
“Murder?” Sorcha said in a thin voice.
“All of them were murdered? Even the children?” Séan asked. He had a thick Irish accent.
“Yes.” Melissa pulled out her laptop, which she’d brought up to the nursery so she wouldn’t have to keep running downstairs. “The adult female’s leg was broken shortly before death. Ribs and most of her phalanges were also broken, indicating some sort of aggressive physical altercation. The children both had fractures to the upper vertebrae. If they were older their hyoid bones would be broken.” Melissa paused, reluctant to say the words. It was so much easier to discuss bone trauma than it was to explain what that trauma meant in terms of human suffering. “They were strangled. Strangled with enough force that their necks broke.”
Sorcha whispered, “But, but he was only a baby.”
Melissa didn’t want to tell them how severe the marks were—it was enough they knew it was murder. The fact that the strangulation had been brutal wasn’t necessary for them to know. “Yes, it is a rather grim—”
“Stop,” Tristan said.
*
Tristan couldn’t bring himself to enter the room. His heart was pounding in his chest, his blood full of fire. Even in the hall he could feel the cold that emanated from the room. The sun had disappeared and raindrops splattered against the windows of the nursery. It was the first time he’d seen this hidden room, and it was worse than he could have imagined. Not just the real physical space, with its sad, broken pieces, but the cold, hate and sadness that saturated the air.
“Don’t. Move,” he told Séan, Sorcha and Melissa.
Séan grabbed Sorcha, holding her still. He didn’t question Tristan’s order.
“I told you already.” Melissa got to her feet. “I’m sorry about your kitchen.”
“Melissa, stop.”
She stopped talking, both eyebrows going up. She looked around, then focused on Tristan.
“She can’t see them,” Jacques said.
“What is it?” Séan asked quietly.
“There are ghosts all around you,” Tristan answered.
“This is preposterous.” Melissa bent to her boxes. “You all need to leave, not because there are ghosts but because you’re destroying my context clues.”
“You don’t believe, but that doesn’t make the ghosts any less real,” Tristan told her. He was focusing on the people who were alive, trying not to see the ghosts that filled the room like dancers on a stage.
“Can’t you feel it?” Sorcha asked Melissa. “Look how dark it is, how cold.”
“That’s a good point.” Melissa looked around, then grabbed two work lights from the corner of the room. She fiddled with them, but they wouldn’t turn on. “The battery must have run down.”
“Tristan, what do you see?” Séan asked.
Now that he’d been asked directly, he had no choice but to look, to interpret. These weren’t just still, transparent figures. It was as if he were watching video clips on endless repeat. The room was full of moving figures, but they weren’t distinct people, rather the same few in different places, doing different things. The most common one was a redheaded woman in a green dress.
“There’s a man and a woman. They’re fighting,” he told the others. He watched as the male figure slapped the woman to the ground, then kicked her viciously.
“This is ridiculous,” Melissa said.
The beating continued, and though Tristan knew the events had happened long ago he winced. “He’s killing her. She cannot survive.”
“I…I saw it too,” Sorcha said, voice shaking. “When I touched the blood on the floor.”
Tristan looked at her. “You see it now?”
*
“You mean to tell me that you both think that you’re seeing into the past, to the moment when this woman was killed by whoever assaulted her?” Melissa’s voice was calm, curious.
She watched with interest as the rest of them succumbed to a shared delusion.
“Séan,” Sorcha asked the bearded man who was holding her, “do you see anything, over there behind Melissa?”
Melissa looked over her shoulder. There was absolutely nothing there.
It was dark in the room now that it was seriously raining. The lights from the hall provided some illumination, but the shadows were long and eerie, so she could excuse the rest of them for imagining things. She did find it interesting that they were all “seeing” the same thing. It wasn’t far different from people who went to psychics and then convinced themselves of psychic power by reading in to every strange word the “psychic” said.
Séan and Sorcha ran for the door, knocking over a broken chair. Melissa gritted her teeth—there was no reason for them to be in here, making a mess.
Tristan stopped them at the door. “You cannot come out here,” he said to Séan. “He’s waiting.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but he’s waiting for you, reaching for you. He’s tried to enter the room, but he can’t. He’s waiting for you to come out.”
“It must be the man who possessed you before,” Sorcha said. “The brother.”
Melissa made her way over, not wanting to miss a word of this strange drama. “Whose brother?” she asked.
“There are old parish records at Séan’s house, because it used to be the parochial house.” Sorcha’s face, already pale, seemed nearly translucent. She was genuinely scared.
“We went through them,” Séan said, his voice low and lilting. “We found three boys who had no last names. In the parish records their births were there, but not their baptisms, and there was no father listed.”
Melissa frowned. “That’s unusual. I presume that the parish isn’t large, so it would be odd that the priest didn’t know the children’s origins.”
“They were the bastard children of the Lord of Glenncailty,” Séan said.
Melissa looked over her shoulder, then nodded. “That would make sense if they went to the local school, though usually the children of a landed and titled man, even if they were bastards, would have been taught by a private tutor. In this case, a tutor from England, since no Englishman would allow his children to be taught by an Irish person.”
“Glenncailty isn’t easy to get to, even today,” Sorcha said.
Melissa considered what they said, ignoring the way they were all twitching and staring suspiciously at the shadows. “So the records indicate that there were children who may have been the children of the English landlord. They were enrolled in the parochial school, though they were not baptized in that church. That supports the theory since the Lord of Glenncailty would have wanted them baptized in the Anglican church.”
“We found three names. There are only two children’s bodies,” Séan said.
“The infant is too young to be in the parochial record.”
“But that means there are two children unaccounted for,” Sorcha whispered.
“We’re missing bodies.” Melissa looked around, tensed. There was nothing worse than missing bodies. Though she didn’t put any sentimental value on them, she did believe that death deserved notice. Most of the time death could only be confirmed with a body. “We’ll need to do a full excavation of this room and—”
A strong gust knocked a branch into one of the windows. It shatte
red, and wet wind whipped around the room. The plastic box containing the infant fell to the floor, the little bones rolling out.
Sorcha, who until then had seemed relatively sane, ran toward the remains, knocking Melissa out of her way.
“I’m here, my sweet baby,” she said.
“Oh dear,” Melissa sighed. Some people were overcome when faced with death and sadness—it seemed that Sorcha was one of them.
“Your bastard father killed your brothers,” Sorcha mumbled. “I thought that I could protect my family—after all, he wouldn’t dare hurt them, not when I’d been so good to him, not when he loved me.” Sorcha’s accent had gotten so thick Melissa could barely understand her.
“Sorcha!” Séan picked her up, and she struggled, laughing maniacally. Melissa had some chloroform in her kit—if Sorcha didn’t calm down soon, she would use it.
Séan carried Sorcha toward the door. At the threshold, Tristan stopped him.
“No, don’t come out here. He’s waiting for you. Give her to me.”
Melissa was more than a little alarmed—it seemed Tristan was as wrapped up in the delusion as poor Sorcha was. There was no one in the hall, no reason Séan couldn’t leave.
Sorcha screamed, thrashing so much that she fell from Séan’s arms. She was ranting in Irish, the words coming so fast that though Melissa spoke a few words of the language, she couldn’t make out anything. Melissa ran to her, putting one hand on her head. “Hold still.” It was chloroform time.
“He can see them,” Sorcha said dreamily.
For a minute Melissa shivered—the atmosphere was getting to her. The wind howled through the broken window, the shadows wavered as the lights in the hall flickered. Sorcha, with her pale skin, waves of red hair and eerily distant stare, looked like the kind of woman you would expect to see whispering about ghosts while standing in the rain. The only thing she was missing was a billowing white dress.
“Tristan can see the ghosts.” Sorcha blinked and seemed to come back into herself. “God protect us.”
Tristan’s face was grim, deep furrows bracketing his mouth. “You see them?” he asked Sorcha.
“I did. I think I was inside her, the mother, or she was inside me.”
“We know.” Séan touched her arm. “You were…talking.”
“Did you understand her?” Melissa asked Séan. “I didn’t get it all.” Though she didn’t believe the other woman had been possessed, which is what Sorcha was implying, it was interesting.
“What did I say?” Sorcha asked.
It was Séan who answered. “You said…that you had to kill them, your children, to hurt him.”
Tears filled Sorcha’s eyes, and she nodded. “The father, the Lord of Glenncailty, killed the oldest boy because he looked and acted Irish. She was angry, so angry.” Sorcha rubbed her arms.
“He kills one child, she kills two, and then he kills her.” Tristan shook his head. “That pain, that rage… They are not ghosts.”
“I saw them, I felt them. What can they be if not ghosts?” Sorcha asked desperately.
The mother of all collective hallucinations. Melissa kept that theory to herself.
“Memories.” Tristan’s gaze scanned the room, and for a moment Melissa believed that he could see something. “They are memories so strong that they left a mark. Ghosts are souls, left wandering because they cannot leave. These are not true ghosts, they are moments of history that even time cannot erase.”
“We can’t…we can’t make them go away?” Sorcha asked.
“No.”
“We need to leave, run.”
“I…can’t.” Tristan said, his voice filled with both horror and resignation.
Melissa had had enough. She wouldn’t let this go on any longer. Since Sorcha now seemed relatively normal, she went to Tristan. Taking his wrist in her right hand, she took his pulse—it was racing. Whatever he thought was going on, it was having a true physical effect on him. “All right, I believe you believe there’s something going on here.”
Tristan laughed, but it was a sad sound. “You don’t trust what you can’t see?”
“I’ve seen more dead bodies, graves and horrifying things than most people,” Melissa told him quietly. “Trust me, if there were ghosts, I’d know about it.”
It was time to end this. Leaving Tristan in the doorway, she went to her kit and pulled out a few things she always carried with her. “Ghosts, or memories, or whatever you want to call them, don’t exist, but people’s reactions are very real. That I can help with.” She took two road flares and an emergency horn out of the bottom of the kit.
“Most major religions have exorcism rituals,” she said. She’d found that explaining often helped people snap out of it. “They are called a variety of things. I’m not a cultural anthropologist, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the exact commonalities and differences are, but I know there are similar elements used in most. The first is fire.”
She popped the caps from the flares. There was a hiss and then red flame sputtered to life. She turned in a circle, moving slowly and solemnly. There was no mocking in what she did—her belief in the supernatural was non-existent. Her belief in the human mind and the need for ritual was ironclad.
“The second common element is sound.” Holding up the emergency beacon, she braced herself and pressed the button. The siren was so loud it was nearly physically painful. Sorcha and Séan both bolted from the room, hands clapped over their ears.
Melissa released the button. The sound stopped, the silence almost as deafening as the siren. She focused on Tristan.
“They’re gone,” he said. “That worked. The memories are gone.”
* * * *
They were avoiding her.
Melissa couldn’t blame them, but it still hurt. It had been two days, and she was almost done with the bones. Ever since they’d suffered from a collective delusion, Tristan and Sorcha had given her a wide berth. They were friendly when she saw them—Sorcha in the lobby and Tristan in the parking lot when he was on his way out to the car and she was on her way in again after a trip to Dublin for supplies.
She’d left a message with the front desk, asking Sorcha if she’d supply Melissa with the documents she and Séan had found. The papers had been waiting for her at the door to her room a few hours later. She had a meeting in the morning with Seamus O’Muircheartaigh, the owner of Glenncailty, and Elizabeth Jefferies, the general manager.
She’d give them a verbal report on what she knew, provide them with a written report, a CD of the 3D rendering she’d made, as well as all the photos she’d taken. The bones were neatly boxed up. Jurisdiction over them was up to Detective Sargent Oren, whom she’d called. He couldn’t be there for the meeting in the morning, but she’d agreed to forward him all of her findings.
Her back hurt from being bent over her computer, and her left forearm was aching from typing. The sun was just starting to set. Changing from slippers to socks and boots, she grabbed her jacket and headed out for a walk.
She took the exit at the end of the hall, following the path that led away from the castle deep into the gardens. They were expansive and a beautiful mix of manicured perfection and wild vegetation. Her purposeful walk slowed until she was simply wandering, occasionally touching the flowers she passed. The garden was banded on three sides by high stone walls, the fourth being the castle itself. Beyond the back wall of the castle there were several buildings, one of which she guessed was a church. When she ran across a gate in the wall, her curiosity got the better of her and she slipped through it. A pretty little church, its yard overgrown, was surrounded by tall grass. Beside it was a stone cottage with a low ironwork fence, the yard inside it neatly kept. There was a light on in the windows of the cottage.
Respecting the privacy of whoever lived there, she headed for the church. The wooden door was half-rotted, half-petrified. She poked her head in, looking at the cross that still hung on the wall. The wind picked up, cutting through the fabric of her
pants. Melissa shivered and backed up, planning to return to the castle.
The ground beside the church caught her eye. Unlike the castle gardens, or even the area around the stone cottage, the land here was lumpy, the tall grass not enough to hide the tightly grouped mounds.
Melissa blew out a breath. Stepping carefully, she walked the area, drawing a topographical map in her mind. It was too uneven to be natural, especially in the floor of a valley. There was something under here.
One of her best friends and travel buddies was an archaeologist. She could scan a landscape and point out places where there was something under the soil—what to Melissa would look like a little hill or natural valley would, to her friend, scream out “dig me up!”
Melissa could do the same thing—with graveyards.
She picked the highest mound and started ripping up grass. It took her half an hour, and the light was nearly gone before she hit stone. Using her phone as a torch, Melissa looked at the small area she’d excavated. There was stone six inches under the soil—probably a gravestone that had been knocked over.
A forgotten graveyard wasn’t unheard of. The church beside it clearly wasn’t functioning anymore, meaning there was no one to care for or maintain the cemetery. Melissa touched the stone, running her fingers over it—part of it was smooth, the other part of it strangely rough. She brought her phone closer. There was a date, but it was so badly damaged she had trouble making it out. It looked like 1632, but she might be wrong. The space above that, where there should have been a name, had been hacked away.
“This isn’t forgotten,” she whispered into the wind. “It was desecrated.”
Shivering not with the cold but with horror at the realization, she stood. Beyond the wall the main and east wings of the castle were bright with light. A hidden room with bodies, a graveyard that had been desecrated and forgotten.