The Dead House

by Billy O'Callaghan

  She looked at me, and I could see her fear but also a kind of electric delight, an excitement that the candle’s yellow glow stretched and sharpened towards something manic.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, raising her voice and lifting her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘You may enter. Welcome, Master.’

  For almost a minute, there was no sound. And then we became aware of a noise coming from across the room, in one of the corners. Small at first, barely noticeable, but growing steadily more hectic. A rustling sound, like that of a small rodent scrabbling through fallen leaves. Of the three candles on the table, one, alongside Maggie, guttered and went out. A squeal jerked loose from her, followed by a gasp of embarrassed laughter. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, which for no reason I could explain, made me smile, too.

  ‘Did you live in this house?’ Liz asked, ignoring us and the noise, keeping her focus, and beneath our fingertips the glass drifted towards the board’s upper left corner, hit ‘Yes’ and fell back a few inches.

  ‘Did you die here?’

  Again, it moved to ‘Yes’ before drawing back.

  ‘How did you die?’

  Now, instead of moving forward, the glass began to rock, quickening to violence.

  ‘Stop,’ Alison pleaded. ‘We’re making him angry. We have to stop.’

  ‘How did you die?’ Liz repeated.

  The glass was alive now beneath our combined touch. It rattled madly on the board, then all at once stopped dead. We each held our breath, until the stillness was torn open by a loud thump on the ceiling directly above us, like the landing of something heavy from a height, and the glass began to crawl again, a long sweep across to T, back to E, to A, to D. We looked at Liz, but she could only shrug. Her eyes were wide and yellow in the candlelight, and her lips moved in silence to the word, the letters first and then the whole. Seconds passed. Then, again, the glass moved, T, E, A, D. T, E, A, D. T, E, A, D. Slowly, then quickening, over and over until our gazes anticipated a kind of pattern. T, E, A, D.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Maggie said, her voice a husk. ‘Ask him what tead means.’

  The glass stopped in mid-repetition. And so slowly that each letter seemed underlined, it started to trace a new direction. R, O, P, E.

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘Rope. You committed suicide?’

  Again the glass slid towards ‘Yes’.

  ‘Why?’

  Gan aon bhia. Lack of food. Ocras. Hunger. Even with the night’s cloying heat, I felt numb. I watched the glass, trying to comprehend what exactly I was seeing. Logic suggested that someone could easily have been manipulating the situation, but I didn’t suspect Maggie and it certainly wasn’t Alison. Liz seemed the most obvious candidate, if someone had to be. History, as we had come to realise, captivated her, and she’d already made passing reference to her interest in the occult, a fascination bordering perhaps on the obsessive but which she seemed to consider quite natural, since poetry was, she said, in its purest sense little more than a channelling anyway, an alchemy that helped solidify the ephemeral. Yeats knew it. So did Blake, and Shelley, and Donne, and Ted Hughes. I’d have liked to believe that this was all part of a game for her, but one look at her determined flame-yellowed face convinced me otherwise.

  For the next few minutes, she persisted with her questions. The responses came slowly, often in broken sentences but at least now in English, though there were still instances of occasional relapse, missteps confined mainly to single words. She scratched down each message and attempted to decipher its meaning from the few clustered letters, but even when delivered in a language we could all understand the full sense of these words was mostly lost to us. Teach them. Pray. A name, Crom, which, according to Liz, referred to an early pagan deity.

  Then Maggie began to speak. Her voice seemed full of air and had a low, considered hush that made the sound of rain on glass, and was recognisably hers but also, in some peculiar way, not. She sat on my right side but had turned partially from the table and become fixated on a point of distance somewhere behind and beyond Liz, though the darkness in that direction was absolute. The flames of the two remaining candles bounced and jogged, their glow tormenting her semi-profile, pulling at the stripes of shadow, elongating the clean planes of her skin.

  ‘He lived here,’ she said. ‘This was his home. And he hanged himself in this room. From these rafters. For ten days he’d eaten nothing but grass. Up until then the people around here had survived on rats, insects, any birds that they could catch. Other things, too.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘The blight had come and then come back, and the first year was terrible but only the beginning. The shellfish were lost when the ocean brought a red tide, and the second year the herring stayed north, out of reach of the boats. So there was nothing. And it was bad for everyone. A mile over, towards Allihies, a fisherman’s wife was lost in birthing. One of the women saved the child through butchery, but it was born small and seven weeks early and died that first night. The fisherman sent the woman out, then blocked the door and set fire to the thatch. The house took almost an hour to go. There were three more children in the house and those who had come down to see said they never woke, that they were already dead from smoke before the flames reached them. And the fisherman stood at the half-door, staunch as a tree, gazing out into the darkness, until the roof came down around him. In the days after, the neighbours raked through the embers, collecting what could be salvaged.’

  ‘Maggie?’ Liz asked, trying to remain calm. ‘What are you saying? How do you know all this?’

  Maggie’s stare never left the distance. When she was not speaking we could all hear the papery rustle of her breathing. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘It’s just here, in my head. Pictures, words. I can see it. It’s difficult to explain. I feel as if it’s being whispered to me. I don’t hear a voice, not exactly, but I feel it. I know what’s being said.’

  We were all still touching the upturned glass. For now, it had stopped moving, but nothing was finished.

  ‘He kept school down in one of the back acres, sometimes down on the beach. The children came from as far away as Cahirkeen in the north and Knockroe to the south. Men and women, too, as things began to deteriorate. He taught them to read and add up, but mostly he instructed them in older ways of worship. The priests had come, of course, generations of them, and they’d thrived during the better times when prayers never had to be more than easy words. They were tolerated but couldn’t quite belong, and they never penetrated the fabric because the stories they told had no grounding here. This land had its own gods, ancient when the likes of Christ were young. These gods controlled the sun and the tide and the seasons, and they were cruel and vengeful to disobedience but generous to loyalty, protecting those who knew how to properly ask. And the people needed instruction, especially once the potatoes turned putrid in the fields and everything stopped growing. They needed to make amends for what had been abandoned.’

  ‘How bad was it?’

  ‘Bad. People began dying on the roadside, in ditches. On a still day, or if the wind was coming from the wrong direction, you could hear the keening for miles. Early in the second year, he killed a girl. A child, sixteen, seventeen years old. He’d taken her away from the group and led her down onto the beach. She wore a torn smock and hadn’t eaten in more than three days. They held hands on the path and across the sand towards the rocks, where no one could see them, and when he made her naked and bent her over the first low outcropping her ribs and backbone stood against her pale skin like the ridges in a ploughed field. She cried out when he entered her, a small, deep, destroyed moan, and he felt her break in a warm gout, and through what followed she gripped the rock with one hand for balance and held her head in the other, gagging with pain and imploring of him to stop. But he didn’t stop, couldn’t. He kept on until his own control snapped, and then he slumped against her, breathing deep, shuddering breaths, and her body held beneath him, a delicately carved thing but
cold and still as something already dead except for the enduring hum of her crying. He kissed the filthy sweep of her neck, the skin coated with sweat and dirt and pocked raw by the stabbing of ticks, then ran his fingers into and against the spill of her tangled hair, jerked her head up twenty inches and before she could resist or even breathe to scream smashed her face five or six times back down into the reefs. She died almost instantly but he didn’t stop until she was ruined, and then he smeared clots of her blood into the skin of his own face, chest and groin, cradled the body in his arms and waded out into the ocean. It was a sacrifice, part of the ritual, the sowing of a seed, the reaping of a life, and an attempt to sate Manannán, almighty of the sea, and the Cailleach, and Crom Cruach, the thunder-crack, the god of day, of the sun.’

  I wanted to be sick. I wanted to get up from the table and just run, in any direction as long as it would take me away from here, and from this. But I didn’t. I couldn’t move. And neither could anyone else. We sat there, listening, numb with growing horror, while the words came like rain and the story built and gushed.

  They all knew. Everyone knew, even the family of the girl, the father and sister she’d left behind. What he had done, and why. And that he had done it for them. Worse, they’d all colluded. They helped select her, and, by turning away, by sitting in the acre in a silent huddle, studying the sky or the dirt but never one another, they’d granted him permission to do what he claimed and assured them was necessary. But a month passed, and then a second, and nothing changed. The anger of the gods didn’t abate, and no prayers were heard. Maybe their faith had been allowed lie too long fallow. By October, he himself had taken ill. He’d started eating grass, as many did, just to feel his mouth full again, and spent desperate days hunched in pain, his shrunken stomach knotted with cramp. There was talk, just a whisper but with a ring of truth about it, that further north, in parts of Mayo and Galway, areas where the blight had wreaked even greater havoc and where even the grass had ceased to grow, some had taken to eating their dead. The ones who spoke of this, and those who heard, shook their heads and tried to force the thought away, but the natural abhorrence for such acts had softened, dictated by a deeper ache.

  On the fifth day after falling ill, he saw his wife at the window. Áine. She had passed several years earlier, during their second year of marriage, taken by yellow fever. Back then, he’d spent most of his days out on the water, waiting for the return of spring, and he should have been with her because he’d known she was bad, though not how bad, not that her condition would prove so quickly fatal. She died alone, sweating her heart to stillness in a bed that he later had to haul outside and burn, and for a long time after, months at least, perhaps even as long as a year, he continued to see her everywhere. Then, gradually, she seemed to fade from his life, and in those final days, until she again started appearing to him, he could hardly even recall her face. He was on the floor, slumped in a corner of the empty room, and lifted his head to find her at the window, looking in, watching. He felt only a sense of calm at the sight of her, maybe even relief. And what struck him was not the paleness of her complexion but the familiar brittleness of her shape, her slender shoulders, the narrow hips. She was not smiling but there seemed no sadness about her, either. She was simply waiting, as she had waited so often in life, gazing out over the ocean for the first hint of his return. And following this visit, she came back often, standing in the doorway as he lay down on the floor to sleep, accompanying him in the mornings and during the last of the light when he trawled the beach in search of a bite to eat, even the least morsel – a crab, a mussel, dead carrion, a snarl of kelp, anything. She never spoke, because they had no need for words. Her expression was placid, unchanging, a mask of infinite patience. Waiting, he’d come to know, for realisation to take full hold.

  As the days built and passed, he grew increasingly weak, until eventually even standing presented too great a challenge. That final morning, he stumbled outside into the rain, fell to his knees in a corner of the field nearest the house and ate what grass he could force into his mouth. His teeth had begun to fall out, the gums receding in a way that turned everything loose, and he lay for hours on that patch of ground, through into the afternoon, on his side, helpless, with the juice running green from his nose and broken lips. Waves of cramp kept tearing him from the stupor of a punch-drunk sleep, the violent purge of his stomach convulsing, giving up its yellow acids and, in ropes of blood, its lining. Sometimes, when he could force open his eyes, he saw the disc of sun like the hole of a musket shot at half-height in the sky, muted to opalescence by a skin of cloud. But more often the cloud banked itself in layers so dense that there was nothing at all but the unbroken greyness, and the threat of further rain. And then, on towards evening, he saw her again, standing just out of reach, and as she moved before him he moved too, struggling first to his knees and then his feet, and following her inside, surrendering at last to what he had to do.

  ‘He’d prepared for this. He had already hung the rope and tied the noose. All that remained now was its execution.’

  Maggie’s words guided us, but I found that I could also picture it, as clearly as if it were playing out in real time before me. I could see him climb, with the little strength left to him, up onto the chair and then the table, bring himself to its edge, put his head through the loop, and draw away the few inches of slack, twisting it so that the rope’s fibres bit into the flesh of his throat and the big knuckle of knot settled heavily just behind and below his left ear. So that the end would be quick. So that even if the neck failed to give, the jugular almost certainly would. He’d seen men hang before, and knew the way. He closed his eyes to spare himself the sight of the window that lay ahead, the blanched filter of the light spilling through the narrow, unshuttered gape with its boast of the world beyond and the small, good things that world still possessed. But the new pitch blackness put up an instant, nauseous challenge to his balance and when he opened his eyes again, Áine was standing there, just inside the window, her shape diffusing the light but not stemming it. And as he leaned forward from the table’s edge towards her, she reached out her arms and for the first time in half a lifetime revealed the teeth inside her smile.

  The candles guttered again. Beside me, Alison was weeping hard. She gripped my hand tightly and from the darkness asked in a tiny, fractured voice that we please stop now. Across from us, Liz nodded and tipped the glass onto its side. Her eyes were yellow fire in the light of the remaining candles, and I could see that she was crying, too. I got up and switched on the light, and brought the fresh bottle back to the table. We started in on it without talking, none of us knowing, I suppose, quite what to say.

  There was something blocked about that whiskey-fuelled aftermath. What had occurred lay around us like the taint of pepper in the air, a slow poison that once tasted cannot be easily forgotten. Alison gripped my hand and announced that under no circumstances would she sleep alone, that she’d make do with a blanket and an armchair, propriety be damned. She kept seeing it, she said. Over and over. Her mind was scarred with it. And she couldn’t understand why it was so vivid. Maggie was the one who’d spoken the words, but why had we all been able to see? And on my right, Maggie nodded, but seemed vague, as if she had not yet all the way returned from wherever it was that she’d been taken. She held her glass in both hands but only now and then remembered to drink, and her eyes retained a particular kind of stare, the look of having glimpsed too much, and of having been invaded.

  *

  An hour or so later, the house had fallen silent. I’d surrendered the sofa, which seemed like the chivalrous thing to do, and helped Alison arrange her bed, announcing that I was happy enough to settle for the armchair. And, in truth, I didn’t at all mind sitting up, and was not yet done with the whiskey. After a while, Liz led Maggie away to the bedroom, and for several minutes the soft mumble of their voices came through the wall and insinuated the air of the living room with a vague second frequency. I listened onl
y because the sound was there, but the words themselves were shapeless, indecipherable.

  Alison slipped out of her dress and hurried beneath her quilt in just her underwear. I kept my eyes averted without needing to be asked yet still somehow caught a fleeting glimpse, a flash of body. She noticed, I think, but said nothing. And from the sofa, snug to her chin beneath the duvet, she watched me openly as I stood and set about unbuttoning my shirt.

  ‘It’s so warm tonight. Do you think it’d be all right to leave the window open?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But let me get the light first. Otherwise the place will swarm with flies.’

  I folded my shirt, laid it across the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and slipped on a T-shirt before stepping out of my jeans. But when I switched off the light we again felt plunged into something worse than darkness. She gasped, a tiny helpless sound, against the immensity of it, and then a silence opened up beyond that, and held for what seemed like a long time. I settled in the armchair, sipped at the last of my whiskey, and had finally started contemplating the idea of sleep when she cleared her throat and asked, in a whisper unbearably small with upset, if I’d sit with her for a while, if I’d hold her. I put down my glass and came to her, groping my way in the dark, and when I opened my embrace for her to slip inside she pressed against me so hard that I could feel the banging of her heart, the hot vibrato of her breath against the underside of my chin, the burn of her cheeks still feverish with earlier tears. We held that position for as long as we could, until it began to feel awkward, and then we lay down together, not anticipating anything except comfort and reassurance.

  Dawn’s breaking surprised me. I felt the shift of the light and opened my eyes. It was still early, maybe five o’clock, and everything was still. Alison lay asleep against my chest. My usual habit on waking is to rise immediately, without thought as to the time, but this morning I resisted the urge. Caged within the darkness, the events of the night before had lost their definition. Something had certainly happened, we’d gone too far with the game, but already the edges were beginning to fray. Night holds its own reality, one that boasts ample room for monsters. By contrast, the stillness of this grey-breaking dawn was perfect.