Haunted Ground ng-1

by Erin Hart

  Computerized Tomography: Extensive computerized tomographic images were made of the individual’s skull. No fractures are visible in the skull vault. The brain is not greatly shrunken and does not appear to be surrounded by air. The differentiation of gray and white matter can be identified within the dense brain stem extending into the spinal cord. As in the radiographs, there is a well-defined opacity of indeterminate origin, suggesting some sort of foreign body lodged in the individual’s mouth.

  Report on the endoscopy performed by Dr. J. S. Mitchell, Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity College, Dublin:

  The interior of the mouth was very well preserved. The tissues were moist and much less stained than external tissues. They were brownish in color, and the membranes were not particularly fragile. The object appearing in previous radiographs and scans was present here also, but from its position against soft tissue, it was difficult to discern what exactly this object might be, or any details about its composition.

  There was nothing in these reports that Nora didn’t already know. She closed the file and slowly circled the table, focusing on the awkwardly wrapped package and imagining the cold horror that waited there. Who are you? she asked silently. What happened to you? She reached out a hand and rested it on the twisted black polythene. Tell me. As soon as the thought flashed through her mind, Nora felt a sudden impulse to withdraw her hand, but couldn’t. She felt a pang of heartsickness as strong as any she had ever experienced, and stood with eyes closed, fixed to the spot until the sensation slowly dissipated. She opened her eyes and took her hand away.

  Though she had been there dozens of times, the lab’s bright light and bare, polished surfaces seemed somehow foreign and strange. The others will be here any minute, she told herself. Get a grip. She took the X rays from a brown folder beneath the reports, put them up on the viewer, and switched on the light, studying the location of the “opacity” that they would try to extricate today.

  Ray Flynn, the conservation technician, interrupted her thoughts, pushing through the door with his camera in hand. He was screwing on the flash attachment and checking to see that it was in working order. “Anxious to have at it, eh, Dr. Gavin?”

  “Guilty.”

  “You’re as bad as my kids at Christmastime.” Flynn pushed back through the door, nearly bumping into Niall Dawson. As assistant keeper of antiquities at the National Museum, Dawson was actually the person in charge of the operation today.

  “Hello, Nora,” Dawson said, smiling. “We’ll be getting started any moment now, as soon as Fitzpatrick makes an entrance.”

  “What do you think of the execution idea?” Nora asked.

  “It’s a definite possibility. The electron microscopy shows damage to the vertebra consistent with use of a blade of some sort. Our problem is that we can’t tell definitively whether decapitation took place preor postmortem. We may have to be satisfied with what we have.”

  “I know we can find out who she was,” Nora said. As soon as she spoke the words she felt foolish, as though she’d blurted out some secret. “I know it’s completely daft, but I do.”

  “You’re wishing for something that may not happen. Promise you won’t be downhearted when it turns out to be nothing.”

  “I’ll promise no such thing.”

  Thirty minutes later, Barry Fitzpatrick, the plumpish, gray-haired dental lecturer from Trinity, was in the midst of his preliminary naked-eye assessment, speaking with the deliberate, measured tones of a teacher used to dictation: “The mandible appears to be only slightly dislocated due to postmortem events.” Grasping the crown of the red-haired girl’s head with one hand, he tried shifting the jawbone, first slightly from side to side, then up and down, with the other. “The jaw remains quite flexible. Because of the remarkable preservation of facial skin and muscle tissue, it will be necessary to open the mandible in order to gain access to the teeth. Mr. Flynn, if I could ask you to be ready with the camera as we open the mouth? Thank you.”

  Fitzpatrick pulled gingerly at the lower jaw, eventually loosening the red-haired girl’s teeth from where they had bitten through her lower lip. He opened her mouth as wide as he could, peered inside, then reached in with a latex-gloved finger to check for missing teeth and molars.

  “There appears to be full dentition present, the third molars being fully erupted. The teeth are brown in color, and there appears to be a complete absence of tooth enamel. Assessment of the individual’s age at death is difficult in this case, since enamel provides the most accurate indication of tooth wear. The first molars show slight to moderate wear of the dentine, while the third molars—if you could move the light just a little closer, please, Mr. Flynn—show little or no wear. Probable age at death was approximately twenty to twenty-five years. Now, Dr. Gavin,” said Fitzpatrick, looking up from his work and wrinkling his nose in an effort to keep his glasses from sliding down any more, “if you could give me an indication of where we should begin searching for this famous foreign body…”

  “It appears to be fairly far back in the throat,” Nora said, pointing to the spot on the X-ray film, “and closer to the left side than the right.” Fitzpatrick glanced at the negative image, then bent to his task again, using his dental mirror as a tongue depressor.

  “I want to avoid damaging the surrounding tissue if I can,” he said, “but it’ll be difficult not to push whatever it is even farther back, unless—Mr. Flynn, do you have a very large tweezers of some sort? That will do nicely, thank you.”

  It was all Nora could do to keep from pressing next to Fitzpatrick so that she could see what he saw through the magnifying viewer.

  “Come on,” he said, coaxing the thing forward, “this way out. Here it is.” Fitzpatrick lifted the object aloft, and four pairs of eyes beheld a band of finely worked gold, centered with a dark red stone. “I’d say it was a man’s ring, wouldn’t you, Dawson?” said Fitzpatrick, clearly delighted with his discovery. They all drew around to examine it more closely.

  “Appears to be,” Dawson said. “And look inside. There’s some sort of inscription.” He struggled to make out the letters through the magnifying lens: “COF, then the number sixteen, letters IHS, another number, fifty-two. Then more letters, AOF.”

  That’s it, Nora thought, the message she’d known was there. Had this girl tried to swallow the ring, or simply to hide it? What other explanation could there be? What thoughts must have raced through her mind in the last few seconds before she died? Nora looked back to the top of the table where the girl’s mouth was still propped open at an awkward angle under the glaring light. She felt suddenly ashamed. “Gentlemen,” she said, “if we’re finished, hadn’t we better cover her up again?”

  14

  The loom’s rhythmic sound usually had a calming effect on Una McGann’s mind, but tonight she felt slightly on edge. Brendan refused to have a television in the house, so each of them was engaged in some customary evening occupation: Fintan worked at the table, cutting new reeds for his pipes, making an occasional squawk as he blew through each thin piece of bamboo to test its sound. Aoife knelt on the floor beside him, enacting some story with an unlikely foursome that included a spotted salamander, a winged fairy, an elephant, and a giraffe. Brendan sat apart from them, on a stool near the fire, meticulously grinding a keen edge on one of his half-dozen sickles. Brendan kept a vast collection of old tools in the shed; some had belonged to their father and grandfather, while others came from neighbors who knew that he was interested and offered him their old implements when they ceased cutting turf or making hay by hand, as nearly everyone in the locality had done. His collection included spades and pitchforks, billhooks for cutting ditches, punch forks and hand rakes for thatching, foot sleans and breast sleans. Brendan kept each one shining, never letting the damp turn to rust on their blades.

  Fintan waited for Una’s eyes to meet his, and his eyebrows raised in a question. He’d asked her advice earlier this afternoon; he was dying to break the news to Brendan about his
plans to leave Dunbeg. She’d tried to put him off, saying that now wasn’t the time; as long as he wasn’t planning to leave until the autumn, there was no point in telling Brendan so soon. He’d only stew about it all summer, she warned. Fintan had disagreed. He still wanted to tell Brendan tonight. She could feel the anticipation in every gesture he made. He’d planned to go to America for years, he’d told her, but only recently had saved enough money to make it possible. He had enough to live on for a few months, anyway, even if he didn’t find work right away. And a friend in New York had promised to set up some gigs for him. Fintan was only two years younger than she was, but tonight Una felt decades older than her brother, seeing him practically bursting with the news.

  What would this house be like without Fintan? Una wasn’t sure that she and Aoife could remain if he left, but leaving Brendan completely on his own was a thought she had tried to avoid.

  She watched her elder brother as he held the sickle against his left knee, tracing the silvery half-moon shape of it over and over again with the pink round of a sharpening stone. Every few strokes, he’d pause to feel its edge against the thick skin of his thumb. It must soothe him somehow, to sit and smoke the pipe and work at these things. How sad that she couldn’t really talk to Brendan, and tell him what was in her heart, as she could do so easily with Fintan. But Brendan had always been so serious, trying to act like a grown man by the time he was fourteen years of age. He’d never seemed to have time to play when she was a girl, but then he was six years older than she was, already busy with farmwork when she and Fintan were still small.

  Had Brendan ever given any thought to marrying? He’d certainly shown no interest in anyone she knew about. And there weren’t many opportunities for a social life in Dunbeg. Brendan was never one for dances or the other usual functions where people could meet. He went to Mass, of course, and he might go into the pub, but he’d always have his pint standing at the bar, nodding wordlessly to the half-dozen other regulars who drained their glasses beside him.

  Brendan looked up from the sickle, not at her, but at Fintan, who held a reed up to the light to check its thickness. Brendan looked as if he were about to utter some expression of annoyance over his brother’s foolish waste of time, but instead he paused, evidently thought better of it, and returned to his work.

  How much had she given up to come back here? She missed the laughing faces of her Dublin neighbors, Celia and Jane. Despite Dublin’s gray concrete walls, the graffiti-covered dustbins, the noise and grime of the city, Una had felt warmly accepted, enveloped, even, when she was with them. Celia worked in a bookshop; Jane was a writer. They were as poor as she was, but in a joyful, bohemian way that she always admired but could never quite achieve. Their flat was filled with books, with conversation and cigarette smoke. Perhaps what buoyed her friends was the love they shared, a tenderness forbidden where they came from, but tolerated, or at least ignored in the city, far from the prying eyes and clucking tongues of the villages where they’d grown up. Una had no such close friends in Dunbeg. What a relief it had been to be with Celia and Jane, to feel as if she could let go and say what she really thought. But another part of her spirit had never felt at home in the city. She had missed the smells, the sounds, even the very quietness of Dunbeg, the breathing space one could experience even in a room with several other souls. That silence, that solitude in company existed for her nowhere but here.

  Una looked at her daughter’s bright head bent over her tiny tea set, as the child whispered an entire conversation in the various voices of her odd menagerie. Una understood Brendan’s desire to keep things as they had been forever. Weren’t there times—like this very moment, in fact—that she wished she could spare Aoife all the pain and disappointment of growing up? But she knew that sheltering her daughter from pain would also take away the profoundest joy, like the feeling she’d known when Aoife was born, seeing the damp crown of her daughter’s head covered in pale down. The nurses didn’t like it, but Una had sometimes unwrapped her completely, to drink in every detail of her compact and perfect naked body. You must keep the child covered up, they’d clucked, she’ll catch her death. As if death itself were contagious. Una had made up her mind to raise Aoife without shame, if she could, and took the greatest satisfaction in seeing her little girl growing up as blissfully alive in her physical self as Una had felt painfully repressed. Her parents had not been entirely to blame for that, she knew. It was the place, the time, and the stifling Catholic morality in the atmosphere they all breathed.

  She was glad Fintan knew what he wanted. He had started at the tin whistle, and saved enough money for a set of practice pipes by the time he was thirteen. Brendan considered him lazy, she knew, but Fintan’s thoughts were always on the music, to the point of distraction at times. You can’t live on music, Brendan had often told him, but Una could see in Fintan’s eyes the fiercest desire to prove their brother wrong. For years, he’d worked all winter long weaving simple Brigid’s crosses to sell to tourist shops in Scarriff and Mountshannon, and he’d saved every penny he ever earned playing music for hire. Hardly laziness. Una also understood Fintan’s desire to explore the world beyond a place like Dunbeg, where the future was mapped out for you almost from birth, depending on who your father was, and how much tillable land you owned, and what the people in your family had done for generations upon generations. Tradition could be a prison sentence, as much as a point of pride.

  The hidden things in Brendan’s room pressed on her heart more each day. There must be some plausible explanation. Surely. So why was she afraid? He’d always been a moody man, but the darkness seemed to have grown worse recently, and she’d started remembering things he’d said or done that troubled her. This morning, rounding the corner of the house, she’d remembered something that had taken place on that very spot nearly twenty years earlier: Brendan, about twelve years old, with a hen whose head he was about to strike off. He held the bird’s struggling body between his knees, stretching her neck with his left hand, and chopped the head off with one stroke of the bread knife. He looked up and saw Una but didn’t move or utter a word as the hen’s body quivered, and then went still. He studied her for a moment, then rose from his crouch, and held out the dripping carcass to her by its scrawny legs. Here, he said, take this to Mam. She thought he was trying to frighten her, but when she looked up at Brendan’s face, there was nothing in his eyes; his expression had been completely blank.

  Disturbed by the memory, Una pulled the bar on the loom firmly back, then slid off her bench. “Come on, Aoife, love, time for slumber.”

  “But, Mammy, it’s not even dark.”

  “No, and it’s not going to be, either, until past your bedtime. Don’t you want to see where our book takes us tonight?” They’d been reading since the winter, one chapter each evening. Aoife’s face brightened, then clouded over again as she considered which prospect appealed to her most at the moment. Una loved to study the landscape of her daughter’s face, which was tempered by moods as changeable as Irish weather.

  “Come on, upstairs with you now,” she said in a mock-threatening tone. “Give the lads a kiss.” She stood and waited as Aoife planted her lips firmly on Brendan’s whiskery cheek, then on Fintan’s. He looked at Una again, and there was mischief in his eyes.

  Not now, she mouthed in reply, but Una could see that he didn’t plan to heed her advice.

  Upstairs in their room, she tore through the bedtime story, prompting Aoife to say, “Mammy, you’re going too fast.”

  “Sorry, love,” Una said, slowing her pace, but, as she did, straining to hear what might be passing between her brothers downstairs. The fact that she could hear nothing made her even more tense.

  “That’s all for tonight,” she said, closing the book at the end of the chapter and giving Aoife a quick kiss. “Sleep well, a chroi.”

  Una knew the moment she opened the door that the silence below did not bode well. Brendan’s voice was quiet, but there was fury in it.

/>   “America, is it? I might have known. Can’t wait to get away from us, can you? And not just down the road, you have to go halfway round the world, and it’s still not far enough. And how are you going to get enough money to go live in America?”

  “I’ve saved a good bit. And I thought I’d sell off my share of the farm.” Brendan didn’t respond, so Fintan continued: “I went to the solicitor. He told me that Una and I have equal shares in the farm, same as yourself. How long did you think you could keep that from us, Brendan? But don’t worry, I’ll give you a fair price.”

  Brendan stood, trembling, with the handle of the sickle gripped tightly in his right hand.

  “You fucking whelp,” he said, on the last word bringing the blade of the sickle down on the table, where it stuck fast. Fintan scrambled backward, upending his chair, his face openmouthed in shock at what his words had unleashed. Brendan’s rage dissolved into bewilderment, then further into remorse. He sagged to his knees, and rested his head against the edge of the table.

  “Fintan, you’d better leave,” Una said. “Just for a while.”

  “I’m not leaving you here—”

  “Fintan,” she said again, sharply. “Will you get out? We’ll be all right.”

  Fintan climbed to his feet, and left hurriedly by the front door. Una stood where she was for a moment, then walked deliberately to the table, where she wrested the sickle from its place. She felt its dead weight in her hand as she opened the back door, walked to the shed, and hung it up among the other tools neatly arranged on hooks above her head.

  When she returned to the kitchen, Una saw the door to the front hall closing, and heard Brendan’s footsteps treading the length of the hallway to his room. Perhaps it was the relief of not having to speak to him at this moment; she put her hands to her face and drew in a long, gasping sob.