by Otto Penzler
“The farmer buried the lamb the next morning. At midnight that night the door came open again and the lamb entered. Its back was scalded as before. It lay down and died. The farmer buried it again. When this happened a third time, the farmer sent for me. I was then a young priest but I knew what had happened immediately and laid the dead spirit to rest by the solemnity of exorcism. The black lamb appeared no more.”
I was hastily scribbling notes. I had to put down one of my notebooks on a side table as I bent to my task.
“Absolutely great, Father. That will make a nice tale. First class.”
He gazed at me sourly.
“It is no game we are talking about. The dead have equal powers to the living and you should be warned not to mock them, young man.”
I smiled indulgently.
“Don’t worry, Father. I’ll not mock them. I just want to get this programme together . . .”
Father Doheny winced as if in pain but I prattled on obliviously.
“Are there such things as zombies in Ireland?”
He sniffed. It suddenly reminded me of the old woman and the answer she had given me.
“You mean a corpse reanimated by sorcery?”
“Yes. Don’t we have any stories about the walking dead in Ireland? I mean, what do you call it, a marbh bheo?”
His pale eyes seemed to gaze right through me.
“Of course the dead walk. There is only the faintest veil between this land of the living and the land of the dead. At the right time and with the right stimulus the dead can enter into our world with the same ease as we can enter into their world.”
I could not help smirking.
“That’s hardly the official Church line from Rome.”
His thin lips compressed in annoyance.
“The ancients knew these things long before the coming of Christianity. It would be better not to take them lightly.”
Father Nessan Doheny was a delight. I was scribbling away as fast as I could, imagining a whole series of programmes devoted to the ageing priest sitting recounting his bizarre tales.
“Go on, Father,” I prompted. “How easy is it to cross through this veil, you speak of, into the land of the dead?”
“Easy enough, boy. Over at Caherbarnagh, when I was a young priest, there was living a woman. One day she was returning to her cottage when she stopped to drink by a small stream. As she rose to her feet she suddenly heard the sound of low music. A group of people were coming down the path, singing a strange, soothing song. It puzzled her and she felt a shiver of apprehension. Then she realised that close by her a tall, young man was standing watching her, his face strange and pale, the eyes wide and blank.
“She demanded to know who he was. He shook his head and warned her that she was in great danger and unless she fled with him, evil would befall her. She began to trot off with him and the people coming down the path with their music cried out: ‘Come back!’ Yet fear lent her wings and she ran and ran with the young man until they reached the edge of a small wood. The young man halted and pronounced them safe. Then he asked her to look upon his face.
“When she did so, she recognised him as her elder brother who had been drowned the year before. He was drowned while swimming in the dark waters of Loch Dalua and his body had never been recovered. What was she to do? She felt evil near and ran home to send for me, the local priest, confessing all. There was fear and trembling on her when she told me her tale and after she had made that final confession, she died.”
“That’s a terrific tale,” I said, entering it enthusiastically in my notebook.
“There are tales of the dead in every corner of the land,” nodded the old priest.
I became aware of an old clock chiming in the corner. I could not believe it. It was ten o’clock already. I sighed. Well, I was getting so much good material that it was a shame to break off now to make sure I was back in Cork at a reasonable hour.
“But what about this marbh bheo, Father,” I asked. “These stories you have told me are more of ghosts than the walking dead. Are there stories of reanimated corpses?”
The priest’s expression did not change.
“Ghosts, walking dead, the dead are dead in whatever form they come.”
“But reanimated corpses?” I pressed. “What of them?”
“If I must speak, then I must,” the old priest said almost half to himself, half as if speaking to some third party. “Must I speak?”
Naturally, I thought the question was addressed to me and answered in the affirmative.
“I will speak then. I will tell you a tale; a tale of a great English lord who used to own these mountains in the days before Ireland won her independence from England.”
I glanced at the clock and said: “Is it a tale about the walking dead, the marbh bheo?”
The priest ignored me.
“The lord was called the Earl of Musheramore, Baron of Lyre and Lisnaraha. He had a great castle and estate which covered most of the Boggeragh Mountains. He and his family before him since the days of the English conquests and the flight of our noble families to Europe. The estate was a prosperous one and the Earl of Musheramore was rich and powerful.”
His voice assumed a droning tone, hypnotic and soporific.
The real point of his story had taken place in the days of the “Great Hunger.” During the mid nineteenth century, the potato crops failed. Because the peasants of Ireland had been so reduced in poverty by the absentee English landlords, the potato had become the staple diet, mixed with a little poaching on the estate, game from the land and fish from the rivers and lochs. The lords of the land severely punished any people caught taking the game or the fish. One young man who had dared to poach a couple of rabbits from Lord Musheramore, to help feed his large family, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in Australia for seven years. That was the type of fate that awaited any peasant who poached on their lord’s land. The law was vigorously imposed by landlords’ agents, usually impoverished former officers of the British army, who were employed to run things in the absence of the owners.
So, of course, when the potato crop failed, the people began to starve. In a space of three years the population of the country had been reduced by two and a half million. Yet the landlords and their agents still demanded the rent on the tiny peasant hovels, evicted people into the winter snows and frosts; men, women, children and babes in arms, if they could not pay, were evicted, their cabins torn down to prevent reoccupation. Under such straits they perished from exposure, malnutrition and other attendant diseases. Cholera struck everywhere.
Yet the landlords prospered. Great shiploads of the landlords’ produce—grain, wheat, flax, cattle, sheep, poultry—were being loaded aboard the ships in Irish harbours and sent to England for sale. For every charity relief ship, raised by the Irish communities abroad, sailing into an Irish port, six ships loaded with grain and livestock were sailing out of the ports to England.
A great bitterness spread over the land. An attempt to rise up against the rulers was severely crushed by the military.
On the estate of Lord Musheramore, the peasants gathered in a body, kneeling on the well-kept green lawns outside Musheramore Castle, holding up their hands in supplication to his lordship, pleading for his help to keep them alive for the forthcoming winter, a winter that many were already doomed not to see, so wracked by malnutrition had they become.
Lord Musheramore was a vain young man. He was about thirty years old, with a dark, aquiline face and sneering mouth. Since his inheritance he had only visited his estate once. He preferred to live in a house in London where he could visit the playhouses, taverns, and the gaming houses where he loved to win or lose moderate fortunes on the throw of the dice or the fall of cards. But he had come to visit during that summer to ensure that the produce of his estate was not being squandered on any “famine relief.”
He was somewhat alarmed at the concourse of people that gathered on the castle lawns. There were hundreds of peo
ple from the cottages and the villages which his estate encompassed. He sent his overseer straightaway to the military at Mallow and three companies of English hussars soon arrived and surrounded the castle to protect it from attack. The captain in charge, acting on Lord Musheramore’s orders, told the people to disperse. When they hesitated, he charged his troops into them. The hussars went berserk, swinging their sabres and shouting like banshees. The result was that many died, including the local priest who had come to add his authority to the pleas of the peasants.
Now among the people gathered that day was an old woman named Bríd Cappeen. She had been shunned by the people in better days for she had the reputation of being something of a witch. She was, indeed, a wise woman. She had escaped the soldiers with no more than a sabre’s cut across her thin, angular face. But the scar on her heart was deeper than that. Old Bríd Cappeen knew the ways of the ancients, the old ways that were practised from time immemorial, whose origins were forgotten even by the time of the coming of Christianity. She could search the entrails of a dead chicken and find the answer to the future in its bloodied remains.
Bríd Cappeen had fled to the gorse covered mountainside when the soldiers attacked and had hidden all day there. That night she crept down the mountain to the lawn where the corpses of the peasants had been laid out ready for disposal. She searched the pile of corpses, wild and demented, until she found the one she wanted. The body of a man whose wounds had not caused any limbs to be severed. Then with the strength derived from God alone knows where, or maybe from the Devil, Bríd Cappeen hauled that corpse away into the night. She hauled it up to her lonely cave in the mountain.
There, in the cave, she practised the old rituals, conjuring words that no scholar of the ancient Gaelic tongue would recognize. She sought and found herbs and threw them into a steam kettle on a small fire and bathed the body of the man and, finally, as the moon reached the point in the night sky which signified the hour of midnight, the limbs of the man began to tremble, to pulsate and the eyes came open.
Old Bríd Cappeen let out a growl of satisfaction.
She had created the marbh bheo; she had conjured the “living corpse” to her bidding.
In the ancient times it was told that vengeance could be visited on a wrongdoer by a druid or druidess who could reanimate the body of a person wrongly slain. Old Bríd Cappeen began to enact that vengeance.
She sent out the reanimated body of the corpse on its dreadful quest. Lord Musheramore, Baron of Lyre and Lisnaraha, was about to board the ship for England in Cork harbour one evening when he was attacked and literally torn apart by a man whom no one could identify. The police and soldiers swore that they opened fire and hit the attacker several times. The local magistrate took this with cynical humour, for the attacker escaped clean away and there was no blood on the cobbles of the quay except the aristocratic blood of Lord Musheramore.
The captain of the hussars was attacked next in his own quarters, safe in the barracks at Mallow. He, too, was torn apart. The attacker was evidently a man of amazing strength and iron purpose for he had broken through the stone and iron walls of the barracks to get into the captain’s quarters. When they found what was left of the captain, many soldiers, veterans who had served in campaigns in India and Africa, were sick and broke down in terror.
Then, Major Farran, the overseer of Lord Musheramore’s estate, was set on one evening while out with his two great hounds. Farran was a stocky man, afraid of nothing in this world nor the next, or so he boasted. He carried two hand pistols and the hounds that bounded at his side were not just for company. They had been known to tear a person to pieces at his command. Major Farran was hated amongst Musheramore’s peasants. He knew it and, curious man that he was, thrived on it. He liked the aura of fear that he was able to spread around him. But he was wise enough to take precautions against any attack those who hated him might make.
But pistols and hounds did not protect him that evening.
It was three full days before all his remains were found along the bloodstrewn pathway. And the doctor confessed that he had no way of knowing the flesh of Major Farran from the flesh of the mutilated hounds.
And all the while Bríd Cappeen crooned away in her cave on the slopes of the mountain.
She was not satisfied with immediate vengeance on those who had wronged the people of Musheramore’s estate. She became determined to make all who were connected with the Musheramore family pay for the deaths of her relatives and fellow villagers. Vengeance became her creed, her passion, her overwhelming desire. And the marbh bheo was the instrument of her vengeance.
For years, thereafter, there were reports of the demented Bríd Cappeen scouring the night shrouded country of the Boggeragh Mountains in search of vengeance with her living corpse at her side.
Father Doheny stopped talking abruptly, leaving me forward, open mouthed, on the edge of the seat.
“That’s a fantastic tale, Father,” I stammered at last, realising that he had come to an end of it. “Was there really such a person as Lord Musheramore?”
He made no reply, sitting gazing down at the smouldering turf.
I shivered slightly for the turf was not sending out any warmth into the tiny cottage room.
“Would you be prepared to come to our studios in Cork and talk on the programme about the marbh bheo? We could pay you something, of course.”
I suddenly felt a draught on the back of my neck.
I turned and saw the cottage door had opened. To my surprise, because of the lateness of the hour, I saw the old woman I had met in the occult bookstore. Her black shrouded figure was framed in the gloom of its opening. Her Victorian dress seemed to be flapping around her in the wind that had risen across the mountains; flapping like the wings of a dark raven.
“Your business here is finished,” she said imperiously, in a voice that cracked with age.
“I am here to see Father Doheny.” I smarted at her lack of manners and turned to the old priest seeking support. “At your suggestion, too,” I added, perhaps defensively.
The old man seemed to have nodded off in his high-backed wooden chair, for his jaw was lowered to his chest and his eyes were closed.
“Well, you have seen him. He has spoken to you. Begone now!”
I stared incredulously at the effrontery of the old woman.
“I rather think that it is none of your business to instruct me in another’s house, madam,” I said sternly.
Behind the blackness of her veil, she opened her mouth and an hysterical cackle caused the hairs on the nape of my neck to prickle with apprehension.
“I am in charge here,” she wheezed, once she had recovered from her mirth, if that horrific sound was mirth.
“You mean, you are Father Doheny’s housekeeper?” I could hardly keep the astonishment from my voice for the old woman looked incapable of carrying a teapot from the hearth to the table, let alone performing any of the chores expected of a housekeeper.
She cackled again.
“It is late, boy,” she finally replied. “I would be about your business. There is an evil across this mountain at night. I would have a care of it.”
She threw out a gnarled claw in a dismissive gesture.
I glanced again at Father Doheny but he showed no sign of stirring and so I gathered my notes, rose and put on my coat with all the dignity I could muster.
She ignored me as I bade her a “goodnight” but simply stood aside from the door.
Outside the cottage the moon was up in a sky across which fretful clouds moved hurriedly as the wind blew and wailed over the crevices of rocks. A frost lay forming its white veins over the ground. The temperature must have dropped considerably since I had arrived. In the distance I could hear the howling of dogs. The sound seemed ethereal and unreal in the night air.
I went to my motorcycle and, trusting that I was not disturbing the old priest’s slumber, I kicked the starter. It took a while to get the Triumph’s engine warmed and ready enoug
h for me to begin to wind my way down the mountain track.
I had not gone more than a mile when I realised that I had left one of my notebooks on the small table in Father Doheny’s cottage. With a sigh I halted and turned the Triumph gently on the muddy track and pushed back towards “Teach Droch-Chlú.”
I halted my bike and made my way along the track to the dark outline of the cottage.
Something caused me not to knock but to halt outside.
A shrill chanting came to my ears.
It was the voice of the old woman. It was some time before I could actually make out the sound of the words and then they meant little to me for they were in an ancient form of Irish.
Something prompted me to peer in through the small panes of the window.
I could make out the old priest, now standing still in the middle of the room. The old woman was before him, huddled with bent shoulders, crooning away. I was surprised to see that in her hands she held one of those old fashioned cavalry sabres, with a curved blade. There was something peculiarly disturbing about the way she was carrying on, chanting and crooning in that shrill voice.
Abruptly she stopped.
“Remember, Doheny,” she commanded.
The old priest stood stiff and upright, his colourless eyes staring straight above her.
“You must remember. This is what they did.”
Before I could cry out a warning, the old woman had raised the sabre and, with the full force of her seemingly frail frame, she thrust the point of the weapon through the old priest just about the level of his heart. I saw the end of the blade emerge through the back of his jacket. Yet he had not even staggered under the impact of the blow.
My jaw hung open. There are no words to express the shock and terror that scene gave me.