by A. L. Knorr
"No, thanks," I said.
She put the bun on a napkin and pushed it toward me with her tongs.
As I tore into the pastry like a starving person, a very loud off-key refrain of “Happy Birthday” startled me. Bingo. I craned my neck and spotted a crowd of gray-haired people, mostly women, at the very back of the cafe. A shiny red banner had been fixed in the corner - Happy 100th Birthday! A young woman holding a cake with a single sparkler on it lowered the concoction onto a table in the middle of a crowd of seniors.
Aileen was turning one hundred years old.
I chewed my way through my cinnamon bun and drank my tea. Both things tasted like ashes. I stole frequent glances toward the back of the cafe. Every few minutes, someone attending the party would leave. Sometimes they were a couple of old ladies, arms twined at the elbow, helping each other walk. Sometimes it was a single person, shuffling their way through the cafe and out the door. Felt hats, comfortable loafers, hose and skirts or wool slacks dominated the fashion choices. All of them looked old enough to be my grandparents, maybe even my great grandparents. The geriatric crowd was getting thinner and thinner.
When there was almost no partiers left I screwed up the courage and made my way to the back of the café .
When I saw her, I knew it was Aileen. She was by far the eldest of any of the people I'd seen here today. She sat in an advanced looking electric wheelchair. A much younger woman hovered nearby, the one who'd held the cake. Nurse? Daughter? Granddaughter? The last two partiers were pulling on cardigans with shaking hands, and finding their way to their feet.
"Excuse me," I said to the younger woman. She walked away from the table and approached me. I smiled warmly, even though every nerve was twanging. I gestured to Aileen. "Is that the lady turning a century old today?"
She smiled. "She is. Unbelievable, isn't it? I can't believe we let her out, but when a woman turns a hundred, you do whatever you can to grant her birthday wishes. She's still as spry as anyone, if you can believe it."
"Let her out?" I echoed, picturing a cell.
She laughed. "That sounds terrible, doesn't it? I just mean from the home. She wanted to come here to celebrate her birthday because she opened this cafe about sixty-five years ago. Course, it was a restaurant in those days."
"Really? That's amazing. I was wondering if I could sit and chat with her. Wish her happy birthday? Would you mind? It's not every day I meet someone who’s lived one hundred years."
"Be my guest. She loves young people." She stepped aside and made room for me to sit down next to Aileen. "I'm just going to run to the loo, I'll be right back," she half-whispered.
As I sat, Aileen's head inclined in my direction. "Who's there?" she said in a dry, weak voice. Her eyes were filmy with white, her white hair a thin fluff around the crown of her head. Her nose was still straight and perfect, the only part of her face that looked untouched by the fingers of age.
"My name is Georjayna Sutherland," I said. "Happy birthday, Aileen."
A smile tugged at one corner of her withered lips. "Thank you. You sound funny. Where are you from?"
"I'm Canadian."
"Ah," she said, turning her head even more in my direction, her unseeing eyes unmoving in their sockets. One eyelid drooped. "I have family who moved to Canada after the war, but I never made it there myself." Her accent was strong, and I had to work to understand. "Even if you live for a century, it seems there is never time enough."
"I was wondering," I said, licking my lips, "if I might ask you something of a personal nature?"
"I’d welcome it," she said. "No one asks me anything about myself these days. One time, a journalist came to talk to me on my ninety-fifth birthday. But since then, I haven't had much excitement. Ask away."
I cleared my throat. "Are you married to a man named Cormac O'Brien?"
She didn't respond. Not even a blink. I couldn't read any expression in her blind eyes. She'd turned into a wax figure. My heart began to pound. "Ma'am? Aileen?"
"How do you know that name?" Her frail voice had gone so quiet, I had to lean in.
"I...well, I stumbled across it in the diary of a relative. And I stumbled across the name Aileen, too. I thought the reference might be to you."
"Which relative? Who are you related to?" Her voice wavered, but she didn't seem fearful.
"Mailís Stiobhard-Sheehan," I said, fumbling over the pronunciation, my eyes glued to her face.
"Oh," she said, and raised one shaking hand to her lips. "Stiobhard." She pronounced it Steward. "I have not heard that name in...I don't know how long. That poor, poor woman."
"Did you know her?"
Aileen’s chaperone returned from the washroom. "I should be getting Aileen home, she tires easily," she said.
"Oh." I couldn't bring myself to stand. I was trying to think of how to ask for more time when Aileen spoke.
"Wait, Sarah," she said. "Just a few more minutes. I'm fine. Would you mind giving us a bit of privacy?"
Sarah looked surprised and shot me a wary look. "If you wish. I'll be over by the counter, then."
"Thanks," I said, relieved. I turned all of my attention to Aileen.
"I didn't know her very well," Aileen said. "But when I was a girl, everyone knew about Mailís. She went missing. I'm sure you know."
"Yes," I said. Did Aileen know why? Surely she couldn't be ignorant of what had thrown Mailís into an emotional hell-hole.
"She took her own life, poor soul."
"That's what they say." I didn't want to ask her outright. Was it fair of me to stir up the past for this elderly woman? But I didn't have to.
"She was meant to marry Cormac," came the frail voice.
"Your husband," I supplied.
"No. Cormac and I never married, although we intended to. Cormac died before we could. It's a long time ago, now. There was a time when I couldn't talk about any of this. But now it seems almost like it happened to someone else, it’s so long ago. It was unacceptable at the time for a girl to get pregnant out of wedlock. Now, things are much different. But then, when I found out I was pregnant, and Eoin was killed in a political skirmish, I was completely lost. I couldn't tell my parents. I couldn't tell anyone, except Cormac."
"Eoin?" I said, sitting up with a start.
"Yes, my fiancé at the time. Cormac's brother."
Wait. What? "It wasn't Cormac's baby?"
She coughed out a laugh, "Goodness, no. I had no interest in Cormac that way. And he had none in me. We were friends. He was the only other person besides Eoin who knew about the baby. So when Eoin was killed..."
"Cormac stepped in to marry you..." I finished, my entire body was covered in gooseflesh. "Did Cormac love Mailís?" I asked, scanning the wrinkled face, the sightless eyes.
"Oh yes," she said. "Very much. He would have died for her. But in those days, duty to family was more important than love. After Eoin died, Cormac broke his engagement with her to marry me. He wanted his brother's child to have a father, and he wanted to protect me from the shame of it."
"What happened to him?"
"Do you see a black purse sitting nearby?" she asked, raising a hand.
I looked at the bench behind her. "Yes, here."
"Inside, you'll find a wallet. I don't mind if you open it."
I felt weird, rifling through the bag of an old blind lady. I pulled out a matching black wallet. "What am I looking for?"
"In the middle. Be careful, it’s fragile."
In the very center of the wallet was a pocket. A soft yellowed paper had been folded up and slipped inside a plastic sleeve.
"I have carried this article around with me for over sixty years," she said. "In memory of Cormac. How such a good man could have gone in such a way, shakes me to my very soul. He should never have bought that property."
Property. Another piece of the puzzle slipped into place, and it was like an icy finger slipping down my spine. Cormac O'Brien. The O'Brien Property. Brendan - Jasher's father. He'd bought th
e O'Brien property, he was the current owner. He also seemed to have inherited some pretty terrifying bats. I kept my horror and shock inside as I gingerly unfolded the article.
Another newspaper clipping. My life had become a laundry line of frail newspaper articles. The black and white photograph at the top made my breath stop in my throat. A mummified body lay face down on the ground, one arm stretched out over its head. The wasted limb was no thicker than bone, the reaching hand and fingers nothing but a curled claw. A row of dead plants cradled one side of the body, like it had been unearthed from a neglected garden. The headline read: Garda Baffled by Desiccated Body in Back Yard.
"This is Cormac?" I whispered. I cleared my throat. "I don't understand how this is even possible in Ireland? I mean, he... " I stopped myself from saying that he looked like a mummy that had been unearthed from an Egyptian tomb.
"He's all dried out," said Aileen. "I lost my eyesight, but I can still see the image in my mind. It's impossible in a wet place such as Ireland. And even more impossible to have happened in one day. I'm telling you, it’s that land." In a whisper, she added, "Cursed."
"One day?" I blinked. "What do you mean one day?" I looked down at the article and scanned for a date. "6 March, 1935."
"The day before that photo was taken, Cormac was seen by no less than a dozen people, alive and well. You see why it is the greatest mystery of Anacullough? Maybe even all of Ireland."
"This happened on his land? This is his garden?"
She nodded.
"The O'Brien place," I said. The image of bat-like creatures made of smoke flying out of Brendan's body rumbled noisily into my mind like a truck carrying a load of rocks. My hands trembled. Bad energy, Faith had said. I looked down at the mummified body, the dried lips laying the teeth bare. My heart thudded. This was a lot worse than bad energy.
"Do you mind if I take a photo of this article?" I asked Aileen.
"I don't mind," she said. "Many people have. Mostly journalists, over the years."
"Thank you." I took out my phone and laid the article out flat. I hovered over it, focusing, and captured it. I folded it up and put it back into her wallet.
"Thanks for talking with me, Aileen. I'll let you go home and rest now."
She nodded. "It was nice talking to you, Georjayna."
"Happy birthday, Aileen." I laid a hand on her skinny shoulder and she patted the back of my hand with a dry palm. I caught Sarah's eye and she left her chair by the counter and returned. Her face was loaded with curiosity.
"Thank you, I appreciate the time you gave me with her," I said.
Sarah opened her mouth, but I just gave her arm a squeeze and kept walking. My heart was pounding, and my throat felt dry and hot as the image of Cormac's skeletal hand, clutching at air, burned behind my eyes.
Chapter 29
When I left the cafe, the rain had stopped once again. The air had a fresh, humid quality and smelled extra green. I was so distracted by the strange conversation with Aileen that I don't remember the long walk back to the bike rack.
I took the handlebars, lifted the front tire from the rack, and pointed it toward home. A heavy exhaustion had settled in. I felt like I'd been running all over the county like a madwoman. Just as I was about to throw my leg over the bike, I noticed a woman with her back to me on the sidewalk, standing by a lamppost as though frozen.
Movement beyond her caught my eye and I looked past her. I gasped. Jasher's father stood in the square by the fountain, swaying on his feet. A swarm of the smoky bats flew around and through him. My hand flew to my mouth and my eyes stretched wide, I felt like they might pop out of my face. There were so many more demon bats than there had been before. He flailed an arm as though to knock a bat away, but his movement was aimless. It was obvious that he couldn't see them, only sense them. Brendan wore a gray trench coat in spite of the warmth of the day, and it hung on his shoulders the way it would a scarecrow. He was wasting away.
"O'Brien," I whispered. Brendan had lost at least thirty pounds since I'd seen him outside the library, maybe more. How did a man lose that much weight in a matter of days? A chill crept across the backs of my hands.
A metallic crash made me jump and snapped me out of my theorizing. The woman turned to look at me. "Alright there, miss?" she said, her Irish lilt warm and friendly.
I picked the bike up and jammed it back into the bike rack just to give myself a second to catch my breath. My eyes were drawn back to Brendan like he was magnetized. "Yes, sorry."
The woman turned her back to me. I walked to stand beside her and realized she was staring at Brendan, too. Could she see the smoky black shapes? Highly unlikely, but they were so clear to me that it was hard to believe no one else could see them.
"Do you know him?" I asked.
"Aye, I did," she said, not taking her eyes from Brendan.
A beat.
"What do you see?" I asked, hesitantly.
She didn't seem surprised by the question. "I see a very sad story," she answered. "Very sad. He was once a pillar in our community. Now look at him."
I was looking. Brendan flailed an arm at a darting black shape that flew a circle around his head and then disappeared into his neck in a puff of black powder, like a fungus exploding and sending spores everywhere. I shuddered. A few guttural and angry words came across the square from him, words that make no sense to me. Gaelic?
"You see what heartbreak can do to you if you let it? He could have kept that precious boy. He could have accepted that bad things sometimes happen and it’s no one's fault. He could have survived. Thrived even."
I tore my eyes from Brendan to look at her pale face, her blue eyes sad. "This all started after he bought Cormac O’Brien’s place?"
She nodded and glanced at me. "You’re a foreigner, how do you know?"
"Jasher is my adopted cousin," I said.
Her face lit. "Ah, so you're Faith's niece. Come from Canada are you?"
"Yes, just for the summer." My eyes went back to Brendan. "What's wrong with him?"
She gazed at him, not seeing what I was seeing, but it didn't matter. It was obvious something was very wrong with him. She shook her head. "No one can help him now. You watch. He'll end up just like that O’Brien man. Swallowed up in the dead earth of that place. It's a grim business, that." She gave a sad nod and shuffled away.
I was nailed to the cobblestone by her words. Swallowed up in the dead earth of that place. The dried out corpse of Cormac wavered before my eyes, a transparent image overlaying the man now staggering across the square, the smoky bats swooping after, around, and through him. I left the bike and followed him, staying well back. He walked like a drunken man, muttering to himself, occasionally swinging an arm out at a pest he couldn't see.
People who saw Brendan coming crossed the street to get away from him. He had deteriorated fast. I could hardly reconcile this lost soul with the man I'd seen at the beginning of the summer outside the grocery store.
Brendan turned a corner I jogged so I wouldn’t lose sight of him. As I followed, my mind was a crashing sea of questions. What did the woman mean by dead earth? Could the earth have taken vengeance on Cormac because of Mailís? She was a Wise, a being gifted by the ancient fae. Had the fae taken deadly steps to avenge her broken heart? Somehow, I couldn’t see the fae being so malicious, they were life-givers, not life-takers.
Brendan walked slowly and I stayed back as I followed him through a residential area. The houses soon thinned, each successive yard larger than the last. The energy of the earth hummed beneath the soles of my shoes, vibrating and alive. We were leaving Anacullough.
Brendan meandered down a long, tree-lined road. Most of the small, gnarly trees in the ditch were covered in crab apples. I stayed back and kept to the moist shoulder to muffle my footsteps. I wondered if he knew where he was going or if he'd decided he just wanted a walk. He seemed to amble aimlessly at points, and every so often an arm would flash out at a bat. The road wound through pastureland. T
here were very few farmhouses now, mostly fences, stone cairns, and sheep.
I knew we'd arrived not because Brendan opened a wooden gate on squeaky hinges and entered a yard, but because of how that yard looked. The house must have been beautiful once; it had been a stone bungalow with wooden trim. Now, it was crumbling, with one corner of the foundation half sunk into the ground.
I now understood what the woman had meant by dead earth. Nothing grew on the property. Nothing. Not a weed, not a tree, not a mushroom. Nothing. The earth around the house looked as gray as ash and dry as desert sand. Vibrant green surrounded the plot of land on all sides, the dead land stretched out in a circle with an abrupt edge - thick green grass outside the circle, poisoned looking earth inside.
I could sense at the very edges of my being that there was no life in the earth under this house, or around it. I watched Brendan stagger up a path he'd packed down by his daily comings and goings. With each step, a cloud of black dust drifted up around his boot, like fine powder. The black dust clung to his clothing like mold. He took a wild swing at a demon-bat in the air and spun in a circle with a loud cry. My hand flew to my throat and tears pricked my eyes. The hand that flashed through the air was bony and gnarled. The demon-bat disappeared into his gut and he reacted like he'd been socked hard by an imaginary fist. Doubled over, Brendan staggered up the half-collapsed steps and fell through the door, slamming it behind him.
I squeezed my eyes shut and a hot tear escaped. I thought of Jasher and my heart ached for him. Who could help his father now?
Chapter 30
I looked down at the ashy dirt not far from my feet. From far away, the edge of the dry place formed an oblong shape, like how the circle of a flashlight bulb stretches into a long oval when the light hits at an angle. The patch of dead earth surrounded the house, swallowed up one side of the yard, and reached under the fence and out toward the dirt road. I stepped up to the edge, my flip flops only a few inches away from the depleted soil.
I squatted down to inspect the ground more closely. I sniffed. A faint smell of mold and putrefaction wrinkled my nose. I reached out, hesitated, then dipped a finger into what used to be earth but now seemed beyond definition. The gray substance clung to my finger. I rubbed my thumb against it and it smeared like ash, staining my skin. A wisp of smoke drifted up from my fingertips.