Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  “Get the staff!” ordered Elizabeth, turning to face the academics. Magdalena, also somewhat dazed, scrambled to her feet and made her way toward the staff. Victoria moved as if to rush to the side of her friend but Elizabeth lunged at her, prepared to strike. Victoria stopped abruptly where she was, everyone’s attention on the stand-off. Magdalena reached the staff and bent to pick it up.

  “Magdalena! Wait!” Victoria called out to her friend. “Don’t do it! Leave the staff there! Don’t trust her!”

  Magdalena stood, holding the staff upright. “Why not?” she demanded to know. “She has come to help clear Fen’ka’s name and set the poor persecuted woman at rest!”

  “She is the Dearg-due!” cried several voices at once.

  “I know!” Magdalena exclaimed. “She was mistreated and abused in life, killed unfairly by men who had no right! That is why she is here to clear Fen’ka’s name—they are both women, killed unjustly, and Elizabeth is here to help! Why can’t you understand that, Victoria?”

  “No!” cried Victoria. “That is not why she is here! She—” Before she could finish the sentence, Elizabeth jumped forward, wrapping her fingers around Victoria’s throat. In that same instant, Sophia threw herself at Elizabeth and hit her over the head with the chalice, spilling the salt across Elizabeth’s face.

  Elizabeth roared in fury, rearing her face to the sky and shaking her head wildly, attempting to cast the salt away from her skin. Smoke and steam hissed and fizzed as her flesh sizzled and popped, the purifying salt stripping away the false mask from the Dearg-due. Her contemporary street clothes also melted away at the touch of the salt, revealing the billowing tatters of the Dearg-due’s red shroud. The creature’s screams resounded in the night, echoing across the otherwise empty Old Town Square. She released Victoria’s throat and seized the chalice from Sophia, throwing it down the same street where the staff had fallen. The chalice hit the cobblestones and clattered toward Magdalena’s feet. Magdalena hastily picked up the chalice and held it with the staff.

  The Dearg-due turned back to face the academics, her screams coming now in bursts and gasps. Like everyone else on the square, Magdalena could see the truth of her appearance now, even without the Infant of Prague medals. While the Dearg-due paused in horror, Theo, acting on the effect the salt had on the undead woman, threw the cardboard canister of salt at the creature’s face. The flimsy cardboard exploded on impact with the Dearg-due, knocking her back several steps and spewing a cascade of salt into her shroud.

  The true-Elizabeth cringed and screamed, doubling over and clawing at her face where the canister had struck and spilled down the ragged folds of her shroud and her deeply folded skin along her throat. The salt burned and hissed, apparently working its way deeper into her withered flesh. The shroud billowed and rippled around her. Magdalena wanted to rush to her side but hesitated, unsure how to best help the suffering Irishwoman.

  As suddenly as they had appeared, the crows completed a wild circle in the sky and took flight across the river. The cloud of birds twisted itself into two flocks. One flew towards the city of Waterford, wheeling and dipping just beyond the river’s other bank. The second, smaller flock rose and dipped toward the river and then set out to follow the waterway that flowed to the nearby sea.

  Seamus and Mary Claire hesitated before standing again. “Have they gone?” she asked, tentatively, seemingly afraid that making any sound would draw the attention of the birds again.

  “I think they have,” Seamus answered, glancing at the sky and across the river. They stood and hurriedly made their way to Oisin.

  “Now, was that another stunt you arranged just special for the city girl?” Mary Claire asked Oisin when they reached him.

  The student-turned-farmer shook his head. “Never seen crows like that,” he admitted. “Not at night. Not in those numbers. Amazin’ sight, that!” He gazed into the sky in the direction they had gone.

  “Never seen the like o’ it before,” Seamus agreed. He swept his bright light on the ground around them. “Are we here yet, Oisin?”

  Oisin turned his attention back to the earth and swept his flashlight around as well. “Aye, Seamus. This would’ve been the cemetery for the estate-owning family in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Strongbow’s Oak stood back over there, near the castle, but these burials could easily have been described as ‘in its shadow.’ The mansion back that way, where the family would have lived, was built in the 1780s or 90s. After the time of the Dearg-due. Before that, we don’t know if there was another house on the site or if the family lived in the castle.” He gestured back across the fields with his light and then again at the nearby ground. “These plots here were far enough from the house and the castle not to be upsetting to the family but close enough to be visited.”

  Mary Claire looked at the ground. “I don’t see any graves, Oisin.”

  “No, the grass has grown over most of them by now. No one is keeping them up any more, more’s the pity. But they’re here, all right.” He kicked at a clump of grass and weeds near him and was answered by the thud of the stone hidden by it.

  He swung his flashlight to one side. “We’ve had some repair and construction work done lately on the farm. I took the liberty of bringing these down here before you arrived.” They could see a small tractor with a short, four-wheeled wagon filled with bricks.

  “Those’ll be jus’ grand!” Seamus exclaimed. “Great cairn-building materials you got stockpiled here, Oisin!”

  Mary Claire shook her head. “A whole wagon-hold full of bricks? How big a feckin’ cairn are you planning to build?”

  “Oh, each cairn probably doesn’t need to be more than five or six bricks to be safe,” Seamus answered. “It’s just that we don’t know for sure which grave here is the Dearg-due’s, so we have to build a cairn on each of them.”

  Mary Claire stared at Seamus in shock, her mouth falling open. She turned to Oisin for support but he only grinned sheepishly and nodded in agreement with Seamus.

  “This can’t be happening!” She stamped her foot and marched in a circle, trying to organize her thoughts. “You both have got to be kidding me, right? How can you seriously plan to build a cairn of five or six bricks on all the graves here, just to be sure that you build the cairn on the right grave? Do you seriously believe this old story? What is the point of building these cairns in the middle of the night?” she demanded, pausing to catch her breath. “Besides, what if the right grave isn’t even marked any more? What good will all this cairn building have done, then?”

  “Look, I should have said something to you before now, but I was afraid you wouldn’t want to come then,” Seamus apologized. “I know it sounds daft. I know that. But there’s some truth to those old stories.”

  “You cannot be serious!” Mary Claire exclaimed. “What do you expect me to say? How do you expect me, a scientist and a chemist, to have a boyfriend who seriously believes in centuries’ old stories about girls who become vampires and then goes running around on other people’s farms in the middle of the night to build cairns on graves to keep her pinned under the earth?” She thought again and repeated her question: “What was it exactly that Professor Sean asked you to do for him?”

  Seamus stared at his feet as he answered. “He e-mailed me from Prague and said that a lot of very strange things have been going on there, things he couldn’t take the time to describe in detail, but that he was convinced one of the women at the conference was—is, rather—the Dearg-due. One man he knows has already disappeared and he is afraid she may have designs on several others. He wrote that there are three likely burial places of the Dearg-due, two in the city and this one here. He said that he e-mailed his nephews and asked them to send him digital photos of the grave sites in town with cairns on them. He pretended that he needs the photos for a presentation. But he knew that he would never be able to get his nephews into Castle Annaghs. So he asked me.”

  “He expects you to believe this crazy story?” Mary Clair
e wasn’t sure which of three men—Seamus, Oisin, Professor Sean—was the most insane.

  “Yes, he does.” Seamus looked at her. “He expects me to believe it because he knows I will. He knows that I believe there is more truth to the old folktales than most people are willing to admit and that was part of the reason I decided to go into folklore studies.”

  Oisin finally spoke up. “Even if there is no Dearg-due the way the story describes her, Professor Sean clearly thinks there is some danger in Prague. Why not take the precaution of building a cairn of stones on a few graves here in Ireland if that can help?” He arched an eyebrow. “You know that some of the most amazing science is built on a hypothesis that no one took seriously when it was first proposed. These stories don’t come out of nowhere. They have to come out of someone’s experience, just like a scientific hypothesis.”

  “That’s totally different!” Mary Claire shook her head. “A hypothesis can be tested, verified, and the results can be replicated. How does any of that apply to building cairns? Yes, you’re right, those stories don’t come out of nowhere. But they come out of the experience of abused women, of Irish nationalism and religious self-identity. All those things we were talking about back there!” She pointed angrily back to the road. “Those things give birth to stories like the Dearg-due, not the experience of men who are really attacked by it! Can’t you see that?”

  “Ah, but have you ever seen any of the molecules you do experiments with?” Oisin continued as he went to get bricks from the wagon. “You do tests and experiments and then devise a theory that best fits the results. But the thing that you are trying to explain is nothing you ever see, right? Growing up out here in the countryside, you see things. Things that just cannot be explained except by them old stories that no one hardly tells any more.” He inserted his flashlight into the crook of his elbow and picked up four bricks, balancing them in his hands and against his chest. “So maybe no one has ever seen the Dearg-due, but her story fits the results. Building a cairn on her grave has stopped the attacks in the past. Why would it be any less effective now?”

  He knelt and, with a scraping noise, set the bricks on a gravestone hidden in the grass. Seamus walked to the wagon and brought more bricks to Oisin. Seamus stood with his light, pointing its beam so that Oisin could see to arrange the bricks in a cairn formation on the grave.

  “Where are the other graves?” Seamus asked Oisin, who stood after having completed the cairn.

  Oisin pointed to several places on the ground. “There’ll be graves all around this area. Just kick at the ground to find them. But be careful. As the wooden coffins disintegrate, the ground shifts and sometimes falls in on the grave, resultin’ in dips in the ground or holes in the surface that can trip you up and break your leg. Sometimes, if there is no headstone, the depression in the earth is the only sign that there is a grave there needin’ a cairn built on top it. The last time I was here, which was when I first discovered the graveyard, I counted about twenty or so graves. There should be more than enough bricks for a cairn on each of them.”

  Seamus noticed that Mary Claire was still furious.

  For a while, she watched the two men go about their task, kicking the ground to find a gravestone and then carrying bricks over to it and erecting them in a small pile. Then her anger seemed to fade. “Oh, what the hell,” she announced. “If you two insist on being crazy, at least I can help with a few bricks and get the whole business done that much faster. The sooner you’re done here, the sooner we can go home!”

  “Now, that’s the God’s honest truth,” Seamus said. He met Mary Claire and kissed her lightly.

  “Why was it so important to you that I come along?” she asked him. “Why not just meet Oisin?”

  “Well, what fun would that be?” he asked. “Besides, I’ve avoided telling you this for all this time but it couldn’t go on forever, now could it? The truth would’ve come out sooner or later. Right?”

  “I suppose so,” Mary Claire agreed. “Where better to admit that you believe in vampires than in an old, overgrown graveyard at midnight?” They both laughed and she continued, “But if either you or Oisin ever tell any of my labmates that I came out to build a cairn of stones on a vampire grave in the middle of the night, I’ll kill you both!” They both laughed again and Oisin relaxed. He was humming a drinking song as he brought bricks to another grave.

  Seamus recognized the tune and began to sing along quietly, then Mary Claire joined in. She made her way to the wagon of bricks and carried a few to Seamus, who met her halfway and then took the bricks to another gravestone. Seamus caught Mary Claire stepping as carefully as she could, probably wanting to avoid either tripping on a grave or skidding on another cow pie. They fell into a rhythm. Singing, carrying bricks, building cairns. A dog barked in the distance.

  The men built a series of cairns on gravesites ranging from their starting point to the edge of the trees and cattails as well as towards a hawthorn hedge towards the fields, planted no doubt to keep the farm animals from wandering into the cemetery. The number of bricks in the wagon was slowly diminishing and, in the light from the flashlights, the tops of each cairn peeked out of the grasses overgrowing each grave.

  “It looks like a little forest of cairns,” she said to Seamus as she handed him another few bricks. As she took a few steps back to get another load, she tripped and collapsed with a surprised cry. Seamus and Oisin both immediately stopped what they were doing and shouted, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I just tripped on a root,” she replied. “I’m fine.” Seamus watched to be sure she had no problem standing. She started to push herself up from the ground and then halted, moving her hands around first, then getting onto her knees.

  “I found another grave here!” she called.

  “Hey there! I say, how dare you attack my colleagues?!” a male voice demanded of Elizabeth, who was doubled over in pain. She looked up to see Wilcox running up from behind the startled Magdalena. He continued forward recklessly, hardly breaking his stride as he seized the staff from Magdalena as he passed her, causing her to drop the chalice. He swung the staff in wide arcs. The air shivered and rippled as the energy of the staff awoke to his fear and his anger, both directed at the doubled-over Dearg-due. He cracked the staff across Elizabeth’s huddled shoulders.

  The Dearg-due howled again in rage and rose up to face her new attacker, flinging her arms open. Wilcox began to swing the staff at her again, but with one claw, she wrenched the staff from his grasp and threw it back down the street towards Magdalena, who hurried to collect it and the chalice once more.

  “In the name of all that’s holy!” thundered Wilcox. The other academics froze in surprise, and Elizabeth sensed that they had not expected this courage. Wilcox, now weaponless, lunged at the Dearg-due’s knees, perhaps aiming to topple her onto the salt scattered on the ground.

  But she was quicker. As he bent over and threw himself at her, she grabbed his shoulder with one claw and his throat with the other. As he whirled about with his own momentum, she lifted his feet from the ground and hoisted him high into the air, tossing him toward the entrance to a narrow alley across from the clock. His body crashed into the cobblestones. A dark pool began to spread on the ground from where his skull had shattered on impact with the stones.

  “Go!” the Dearg-due ordered Magdalena. “Go back and take the tools with you! Hurry! I can finish with these troublemakers!” Magdalena hesitated. “Go!” snarled the Dearg-due again, turning to face the academics, spreading wide her arms.

  Magdalena turned and hurried down the street behind her, heading toward the bridge.

  “Which of you dares to follow her?” the Dearg-due taunted the academics, leering and snapping her face forward toward one and then another in rapid succession. They all took an involuntary step or two back, stumbling. Elizabeth’s laughter filled the night air.

  “Will none of you brave professors run to follow her? Do none of you realize you are powerless without the
magical tools of Prague? Do none of you realize what we can accomplish with them?” She laughed again, glancing toward the bleeding corpse to her right. Delight and hunger overcame the Dearg-due, and in an instant she was astride Wilcox’s corpse, straddling his torso.

  For the second time that evening, she hastily lapped blood from a professor’s wounds. Pausing in her gruesome meal, she lifted her face high and laughed in glee and triumph. Continuing to lap up the precious blood, she began to hover in the air. The shroud flowed around her as if buoyed on waves of an unseen current. Rejuvenated and refreshed by her second meal of the evening, the Dearg-due’s wounds began to heal.

  The academics stood in horror and disgust, unable to move. Sophia buried her face in her husband’s shoulder, unable to watch. The Dearg-due barely noticed. The night was silent except for her frantic slurping. Her shroud continued to rise and billow, lifting her higher above her prey. Only her tongue and lips connected her to the earth, anchoring her to her sustenance. She held the shoulders of Wilcox’s corpse to better position herself above the blood dribbling away between the cobblestones. The corpse shuddered and soon after, the blood flow gradually slowed.

  The Dearg-due lifted her face from her feast, standing upright in the air, her shroud trailing on the ground below her. Her chin felt sticky and darker red spots stained her red shroud where Wilcox’s blood had spurted and stained the linen. She no longer felt the blister on her forehead from the Infant of Prague medal nor the wounds from the salt.

  “It has been ages since I have been able to feed so well,” the Dearg-due mocked the still-shocked academics. “Twice. In one night. Shall I attempt to feed once more?” She leered and quietly laughed, confident in their inability to stop her now. Feeding twice in such a short time made her feel strong, invincible. Stronger than she could remember feeling since… when? She wasn’t sure.