by Peter Spokes
She continued to hold up the lamp and appeared to examine my face closely for several moments before leaning closer, not only causing me to squint, but in my subsequent recoil, I backed hard into the now closed door.
I had nowhere to run – and quite possibly – nowhere to hide.
Then, to add to my panic, she finally whispered: “You should stay in your rooms. It is safer for you, for there are ungodly creatures from the dark side that creep and crawl.” She spoke with surprising menace.
Although ‘flippancy’ is not generally part of my nature, I could not help but deliver, “Would you know if there is anything ‘creeping and crawling’ in the kitchen right now? I would really like a coffee.” I said it carefully worrying that she may find some evil portent to my question.
“There may still be some downstairs by the bar,” she said somewhat ambiguously, as I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the coffee or ‘creatures that creep and crawl’ but either way she proffered it with all the menace of one speaking of something that should not be spoken of while darkness reigned.
“Okay, thank you,” I said edging past her. I was about to proceed down the stairs when on a sudden, unstoppable impulse, I turned back to her. “Do you mind telling me your name?” I asked.
After several seconds, she answered, “My name is Sinéad but for some reason people know me as ‘Gale’.”
I nodded realising that the good people of Kilronan were more familiar with the movies than I had given them credit for.
The coffee was cold and the only possibly ungodly creatures that looked like they had any potential to creep and crawl were still occupying the tables; their hair and beards resting in spilt beer – they had clearly determined to spend the night here at the inn.
As one not to be influenced by the surrounding nonsense, I proceeded with my plan to take in some night air. Maybe a pleasant moonlit walk will tire me enough to sleep, I thought.
I left the inn and walked along Main Street; it was humid and I could hear peals of thunder in the distance and wondered on the sensibleness of my leaving my coat. The silence was eerily solid, like experienced when one has one’s head underwater.
Scene 3: Rain
I simply ‘followed my nose’ as my mother used to say, and proceeded along Main Street, whistling to myself.
The silence was almost palpable and I felt as if I were walking through a picture. Nothing stirred and yet I experienced a perception of expectancy; a slight pre-indication or portent for something… changeable.
I was so engrossed in my auspicious meanderings that I suddenly found myself looking up at the gates to the churchyard.
Again, there appeared to be a swirling mist before the road and around me which seemed – irrationally to my tired brain – to part like gossamer veils as I walked across the road and through the gates.
I wasn’t sure why I had headed there but, oddly, it seemed the right place to be.
After a period of time that I felt I was not completely sentient to, I stopped and looked around and found myself – with something close to horror – standing before Rosie’s grave.
I looked down at the words on the cold stone; A beautiful daughter and sister taken before her time. I had never seen those words before and looked closer to see if because of her brother was appended on the end.
As I turned, I noticed the stone to its right was the one against which the doll had been leaning the other night – the stone that had the same name on it as the young child Siobhan. It seemed a bit scary that I had so closely come to seeing Rosie’s grave earlier.
I turned and hurried towards the gates more than a little curious as to how I had found the grave as I had never visited it, didn’t know where in the graveyard it was, or even desired to find it.
I was still pondering on this when, as I crossed Main Street and reached the kerb, I almost walked into Siobhan.
I was about to ask her what she was doing out at such a late – or early – hour – again – when she spoke.
“Exciting, isn’t it?” she said.
I looked around at the motionless and silent vista around me and the dark graveyard beyond and wondered if she owned a dry sense of humour far advanced for her years, or perhaps she too could feel something in the air.
“What are you doing here, Siobhan?”
“Waiting to play again, with my sister,” she said simply.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She’s in the graveyard but can’t find a way out.”
I looked across the road at the wall and the dark gravestones. “What’s she doing there?”
“That’s where she lives… now… and so does your…”
Suddenly her voice was drowned out by a thunderclap; an explosion of such magnitude that I had never experienced before. I say it in – I feel – almost blasé terms, but I almost leapt out of my skin; it was without any doubt the loudest sound that my ears had ever had the misfortune to experience, although, remarkably, despite the vehement anger of the skies, Siobhan remained quite calm.
And then the heavens – finally – opened.
Everything beyond twenty feet was suddenly obscured by the deluge and I lowered my head down into my shoulders not unlike a tortoise retracting into its shell.
The nearest shelter was a large beech tree beside the churchyard gate so without thought I quickly grabbed Siobhan’s hand and raced the thirty feet or so across the road.
It was as we neared the opposite kerb that something I cannot explain occurred.
All of a sudden – despite my secure grip – Siobhan’s hand ‘faded’ from mine. An odd choice of word you will agree, but chosen with some precision and not a little thought, for her hand did not slip or wriggle free, but seemed to suddenly ‘diminish’.
I stopped and looked back to see Siobhan still standing on the kurb where I had seen her earlier. Peculiar, but again, why entertain unlikely solutions when it was probably nothing more than the games of sleep deprivation.
I ran back and looked down at her as I shook myself and unsuccessfully searched my pockets for a handkerchief to wipe my brow. I was expecting to observe a bedraggled urchin with her hair plastered to her face – but strangely not. Despite the fact that my shirt now clung – drenched – to my skin, it appeared that not a drop of rain touched her face, nor the merest bead of water marked her dress.
This time, no rational reasoning came to me.
I’ve heard of localised showers but this was crazy…
But as the wheels in my head ground on, I was distracted by the look of the upmost bewilderment on Siobhan’s face. She looked up at me with such a look of astonishment as if she were seeing a ghost.
“Are you okay?” I said, and then a little louder over the thunder and with some concern, “Siobhan! are you all right?”
She said something I couldn’t hear and then louder, “You held my hand!” she shouted over the roar of the rain and stared between me and the aforementioned extremity.
“Ah yes, I’m sorry, but I thought we should get out of the rain – and quickly,” I shouted, wondering if I had run a little too fast for her. Maybe her hand had simply slipped from mine after all.
“We still do need to find some shelter,” I said, as the wet discomfort between my shoulder blades progressed to my lower back and beyond to a far more discomforting place.
“You’re not like the others!” she shouted over the thunder.
“Ah, you too,” I said vaguely, wondering where I had heard a similar statement before. I was shouting over the roar of the torrent, and looking longingly at the tree beside the gate. I felt I must resemble the proverbial ‘drowned rat’.
Despite the discomfort, it was oddly reassuring to watch the rain thrashing down. It reminded me of times I have snuggled in an armchair before a raging fire whilst the winds have howled and the rain crashed against my
windowpane. But this was strangely the antithesis as the air was hot and even breathing seemed quite difficult, but the rain was welcomed like an army liberating a land from a fiercely oppressive regime.
The armies of desiccation and aridity were finally being driven back.
I stood in the rain watching the puddles enlarging on the walkways and along Main Street where they swelled to form a shallow and then fast-moving stream.
Oddly, the mist remained though I knew not how that could be, such was the driving rain, but in fact, the mist seemed to grow more intense and increase in its coalescence until I could almost swear that I myself saw forms moving within it. I thought again about the Rorschach ink-blot tests although I thought it odd that as a dismissive of the whole ghost business, it was certainly strange that my mind was making humanoid forms from nothing more than swirling eddies within the fog, but maybe there was still a residual wanting or desire to see my sister again.
But then, I had not slept for many hours and so my mind was perhaps more susceptible to wayward visions.
I looked down at Siobhan staring out at the rain and wondered if I had actually grasped her hand at all.
Scene 4: Rosie
We stood together in the rain.
Siobhan was smiling. “I will be able to see my sister very soon now, and I can go home again,” she said very excitedly.
“How so?” I asked puzzled.
“The rain is washing away the boundary; it’s almost gone,” she said.
I looked across the road at the wall. “It would take more than heavy rain to remove that,” I said eying the old slate construction.
Siobhan smiled. “You are silly,” and then as if she were relaying something to a simpleton, “not all walls are visible,” she said.
“Where is it you live, Siobhan?” I said, changing the subject as I was beginning to feel that some judicious coherency was seemingly leaking from this conversation.
Siobhan paused looking down for several long moments and I wondered why, considering the simplicity of the question. But then she looked up and in that anomalous, grown-up manner, fixed my eyes with her own and gestured towards the graveyard. “I live here… in the cemetery… with Rosie,” she said simply.
My smile faltered and when I opened my mouth nothing came out; I swallowed hard several times before, “… What… what are you talking about?”
“Rose is my friend and we play together… well… used to… before the boundary went up.” She paused before, “You know, she says that it wasn’t your fault that she is gone and you need to stop feeling bad about it.”
“Siobhan… don’t… don’t talk about this… you don’t know what you’re talking about,” I stammered.
She simply shrugged her shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated quietly.
I took a deep breath but felt the tears well up anyway. “You cannot know of this. You don’t – didn’t – even know Rosie… she lived a long time ago… before you were born!”
“Her heart was weak,” Siobhan continued as if I had not spoken.
I looked down and after what seemed an endless time, “I caused it to happen you know,” I said, now weeping openly but strangely surprised by how good I felt, as if something that I had kept caged inside for too long was finally seeing freedom and running wild.
I let it run.
The dam had burst.
“We always liked to run,” I whispered. “She was fast but I was faster; she knew that but would still try to beat me. When we got home she said her chest hurt so my mother called the doctor.
She was dead before he arrived.
If I hadn’t raced her home that afternoon, she would still be here today.”
“No!” Siobhan said with surprising conviction for a six-year-old. “She would have died, maybe days, maybe weeks or months later, but she was destined to die early; she had a weak heart; it was not your fault.”
“How do you know these things? You cannot know my sister; she died thirty-six years ago, and you… you are a child.” My voice was rising as much from the incomprehensibility of the moment as of Rosie’s mention.
Siobhan was unperturbed by my raised voice. As I continued my denunciation, she smiled sadly, straightened up and stared at me directly in a way no six-year-old should look at an adult – and I closed my mouth.
“I know that others called her Rosemary but you referred to her as Rose – unless you were alone, in which case you called her Rosie.
She prefers to call you by your middle name, ‘James’, as she has always thought that ‘Monty’ was such a funny name… and she says she used to stand at your bedpost listening to you for hours in the late evenings and early hours, when you were in your bed… after she died.”
Again, I wondered how Siobhan knew these things that had been so personal to me. I knew I would suffer a relapse if I thought I could speak to Rosie again.
“No! No! That is impossible; ghosts do not exist!” I shouted, and felt good as I was bringing the conversation back to rational normality. “And stop speaking of her in the present tense; she is gone!” I said.
Siobhan looked away. “Paradox and contradiction,” she said and continued, “Rose is gone… and yet she is here… and I am a child… but I’ve been around for such a very long time.”
She turned to look up at me. “As for ghosts; when you took my hand and crossed the road… did that seem normal to you?”
Chapter 6: Acceptance
Scene 1: No Understanding
That evening I thought about Siobhan’s words but try as I might, could not put any rationality to it and what conclusions I came to were quite preposterous.
My mother had told me that Rosie had suffered a heart attack due to a weak or underdeveloped heart; something that had never been disclosed to anyone else; but I had dismissed that, feeling certain that it was said to make me feel absolved of the responsibility and blame of her death.
But how could Siobhan know?
Naturally, I could not entertain the ‘ghost’ thing but even if it were so, and in some way Siobhan was a ghost, I could see her, and I touched her hand, momentarily, when I tried to pull her out of the rain, though I still had no understanding of the disappearing hand thing.
So, she could not possibly be a ghost – unless I were one too, but now we were heading towards the ludicrous.
Also for Siobhan to know these things, she must have been colluding with Rosie, which again, highlighted the absurdity of my analysis.
I had read several Sherlock Holmes books, and Holmes suggested that once all plausible reasonings had been discounted, then whatever reasonings you were left with, no matter how implausible or improbable they seemed, were likely to be the answer. But I still could make neither head nor tail of it.
When first I met Siobhan, she had mentioned how funny my name was; just as Rosie had often said to me; maybe that was all it was, a funny name and a coincidence, and I was looking into it far deeper than it warranted but those coincidences were starting to trip over themselves. I was very much aware of my diagnosed mild paranoia since Rosie’s death. But this wasn’t simply implausible; it was downright impossible.
But when does in-depth self-analytical analysis end and paranoia begin?
I recalled a doctor telling me many years ago, that I was very vulnerable to desires and influences of the heart and prescribed some medication that he said might well be lifelong but would help me in separating what is – and can be, from what is not – and can never be.
With the rather common misconception that things would make more sense in the morning, I gave up and took to my bed.
Scene 2: Siobhan and Mairead
In the morning, the sunlight poured through my window and I dressed and left the inn – almost walking into Breahna.
“You just don’t look where you’re going, do you, Mr Rhodes?”
>
“Ah, hello, Breahna; isn’t it a lovely day?”
Breahna looked around; “Blessed be; indeed it is,” she said, her eyes alight and her face upturned to the sky. “I really believe that last night’s ritual has cleansed the village of the insidious pall.”
“We certainly had a lot of rain,” I said trying to remain focussed in the onslaught of Breahna’s fine cheekbones and eye-watering gaze.
I walked on and while passing the churchyard, I looked over and stopped as I noticed the father presiding over a burial.
I waited and then walked over to him. “Hello, Father.”
“Hello, Monty, looks like my sermon worked; I have asked around but no one has seen any ghosts or shadows and the mist has lifted.”
I felt it was clear that the father was crediting himself with far more than was warranted, but was it really any different to Breahna’s claim? I felt good; the sun was sitting in a cloudless sky. The mist was gone and it felt like the little village had found itself free from a dark and claustrophobic miasma.
The whole idea of ghosts now seemed a world away and was easily dismissible in my current feel-good frame of mind. I was feeling so good, in fact, that I had felt it was time to stop the medication. I was now thinking in a ‘down to earth’ and ‘level-headed’ fashion and I was no longer hankering after things that did not – and could not – exist, except in the picture houses, of course.
No; I no longer needed the medication and I really felt the paranoia was now gone.
As I was passing the church I recognised Siobhan. She was playing with two friends in the graveyard. They sat cross-legged and appeared to be laughing and chattering incessantly at one another. The one with her back to me had auburn hair and sat a little taller, so I guessed was probably a little older than the other two; while the other girl was so like Siobhan as to quite possibly be her twin or sister, for her hair was of a similar blonde and, like her, wore it in plaits over one shoulder.