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 landlord's 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 people 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 Brid 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 Brid 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.
Brid 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, Brid 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 Brid 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 Brid 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 Brid 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 Brid 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 an
d 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 enough 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-Chlu".
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.
Worse was to come.
The old woman let go of the sabre and stepped away from him.
"Remember, Doheny!"
The old priest's claw-like hands came to the handle of the sabre and then, with a mighty tug, he pulled the great blade out of his body with a slow, deliberate motion. It was bright and shining and without a speck of blood upon its blade.
I stood at the small window transfixed with terror.
I could not believe what I had seen. It was impossible. She had thrust a sharp sword through a frail old priest and the priest had not batted an eye. He had merely withdrawn it. And it had made no wound!
"Remember, Doheny!"
I suppressed a cry of fear, turned and ran back to my bike. Panic seemed to impede my every move. I tried to start the motor but everything I did seemed wrong. I heard a cry from the old woman, became aware of a shadow on the path. I could feel fetid breath on my neck. Then the bike started with a roar and I was speeding away.
The track was twisting, the mud on the road slowed the machine. I felt as if I was in some cross-country bike race, swerving, twisting, leaping down the mountain pathway in the direction of the nearest village which was Ballynagree. I had never ridden so hard in all my life, ridden as if a thousand devils from hell were at my heels.
Just as I was beginning to relax, I saw a small hump-back bridge over a winding mountain torrent. I knew it to be an old granite stone bridge which was scarcely the width of three people walking. I eased back the throttle on my machine to negotiate it in safety and then…
Then, by the light of my front lamp, I saw the pale figure of the priest standing in the centre of the bridge; standing waiting for me.
In fright, I tugged at the handlebars of my machine, wrenching them, as I made a silly and futile attempt to ride through the gushing stream rather than run over the bridge.
My front wheel hit a stone and the next thing I knew was that I was cart wheeling over and over in the air before smashing down on a soft muddy surface of the bank. The impact still drove the breath out of my body and I lost consciousness.
It was only a momentary loss. I remember coming to with a swimming, nauseous sensation. I blinked.
A foot away from my face was the pale, parchment features of the priest. The colourless eyes seemed to be staring through me. His breath was stale, fetid and there was a terrible stench of death on him. I felt his hands at my throat. Large, powerful claws, squeezing.
"Stop, Doheny!"
It was the old woman's shrill tones. Beyond the priest's shoulder I caught a glimpse of her, the veil thrown back, while the skull-like face was staring in triumph with a livid weal of a scar showing diagonally from forehead to cheek.
The pressure eased a little.
"He is not one of them, Doheny. Leave him be. He is to be witness to what we have done. Leave him be. What we have done will live in him and he will pass it on so that it will be known. Leave him be."
The old priest, with incredible strength, shook me as if I were no more than a rag doll.
"Leave him be," commanded the old woman again.
And then I must have fainted.
When I came to, there was no one about. I pressed my hand against my throbbing temples and rose unsteadily to my feet. For a moment or two I could not remember how I had wound up in the mud of the mountain stream. Then I did remember. I gave a startled glance about me but could see no sign of the old priest and woman. The mountainside was in darkness. The only movement was that of the trees whispering, swaying and rustling in the winds that moaned softly over the mountai
n.
I stood a moment or two attempting to get my bearings. Then I saw the black heap of my Triumph motorbike lying in the shallows of the stream. I tried to move it out of the water but saw immediately, by the buckled wheel and splintered spokes, that even if I could start the machine it would be useless. Nevertheless, I attempted to start it. The starter gave a weak "phutt" and remained lifeless. It was obviously waterlogged.
I manoeuvred it to the bank of the stream and then waded up to the humpback bridge. There was nothing for it but to start walking down the mountain to Ballynagree. My head was throbbing and my mind was a whirl of conflicting thoughts. Was someone playing some terrible joke, a joke which was in bad taste? But no one would go to that extreme? Surely?
It took three hours of trekking down the muddy pathway before I saw the first signs of habitation.
I finally saw the dark outline of the garage where I had stopped for petrol. I stumbled towards it numb and frozen and hammered on the door. It was a while before I heard a window go up in the room above the garage front. A light shone down and a voice cried: "Who's there?"
"My motorbike has broken down and I'm stranded," I yelled. "Can I get a taxi from here or stay the rest of the night?"
"Man, do you realize that it is three o'clock in the morning?" came the stern reply.
"I was stranded on the mountain, on Musheramore Mountain," I replied.
A woman's voice came softly to my ears although I could not hear what was said.
The window came down with an abrupt bang. I waited hopefully. A light eventually shone in the downstairs window. Then the door was opened.
"Come away in," said the male voice.
I entered, feeling ice cold and drained from my experience.
As the light fell on me, the garage man recognized me.
"You're the young man who asked me the way to 'Teach Droch-Chlu' earlier this evening, aren't you?"
I nodded. It was the man whose overalls had proclaimed his name to be "Manus".
"That's right. My motorbike has broken down. I need a cab."
The Mammoth Book of Zombies Page 47