by Seamus Deane
She wrote home to her father for the first few months and all seemed to be well. But then the letters stopped altogether. It was only after it was over that people found out what had happened.
The children were beautiful, especially the girl. She was dark, the boy was fair. They spoke Irish only. Brigid taught them all she knew, every morning for two hours, every afternoon for one hour. But they had this habit, they told Brigid, that they had promised each other never to break. Every day they would go to the field behind the house, where their parents were buried, and put flowers on the grave and sit there for a long time. They always asked her to leave them alone to do this; she could watch them, they said, from an upstairs window. So Brigid did that. And all was well. But, after some time had passed, and summer had waned, Brigid tried to discourage them more strongly, for it was often wet and beginning to get cold. Still, the children insisted. On one particularly bad day in the autumn, when the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind was howling, she stopped them going. She wouldn’t give in. And they, in turn, insisted. Finally, she put them in their rooms and told them that was the end of it. They could visit their parents’ grave in decent weather, but she wasn’t going to have them falling ill by doing so in such conditions, no more than their parents would want her to, or want them to insist on doing. After a big quarrel, the first they ever had, the children went to their rooms and, after a bit, when it was dark, Brigid went to bed. Now, would you believe this? It’s the God’s truth. The next morning, when she went to their rooms, what did she find? She found the boy was now dark-haired, as his sister had been, and the girl was fair-haired, as her brother had been. And they didn’t seem to notice! They told her they had always been like this, that she was imagining things. You can imagine! Poor Brigid! She thought she was going out of her mind. She examined them all over; she questioned them; she threatened not to give them any meals until they told her the truth. But they just sat there, telling her she was the one who had got everything wrong. Right, says Brigid, we’ll see who’s imagining things. We’ll go into the village. We’ll go to the priest. We’ll go to anyone we meet and we’ll put the question to them. The children agreed, and off they went to the parochial house and found the priest in and waited in the drawing room to meet him. Brigid sat down and then got up and sat down again while the children, polite and well-mannered as they usually were, sat before her on straight-backed chairs, quiet and as assured as any two grown-ups would have been. When the priest came in, Brigid went straight to him and said, ‘Father, Father, for the love of God, look at these two children, Francis and Frances, and tell me what has happened, for I don’t know if they’re in the hands of the devil or what.’ And the priest, very surprised and shocked, looked at her, looked at them, caught her by the wrist and sat her down, shaking his head and asking her what did she mean; to take it slowly, tell him again. But the children, she cried at him, look at the children, they’ve changed, they’ve switched colours. Look! She pointed at them and there they were, looking at her and the priest, and they were the colour and complexion they had always been, the girl dark, and the boy fair. We told her, they said to the priest, we have always been like this but she says we changed colour and she frightened us. Both of them began to cry, and Brigid began to wail and the priest ran between them like a scalded cat for a while before he could calm things down.
Poor Brigid! She knew the priest thought she was going strange, the children were so loud in their protests and so genuinely upset that she began to wonder herself. Especially as the children kept their complexions just as they had been for days and days after, and during those days, no matter what the weather, Brigid let them visit their parents’ grave and watched them from the upstairs window and saw nothing wrong. But she couldn’t sleep at night, for she knew, she knew, she knew that she had not been mistaken. She could clearly remember examining them – running her hands up the back of their hair, seeing the boy’s skin that shade darker, the girl’s skin that white and pink that had been the boy’s. She knew she had not imagined this, and yet there it was! She lay in the bed clutching her rosary beads and saying her prayers and every so often shaking with a fit of the weeps, for she knew either she was mad, or there was something very strange in that house and very frightening about those children. With all this sleeplessness, she took to walking about her room and now and again she would pull back the curtain to look outside. Over to the left was the field where the grave lay. It was no more than a week after she had gone to the priest that she looked out one night and saw to her terror that there was a kind of greenish light shimmering above the grave, and in that light she could see the children standing there, hand-in-hand, staring down at the ground where the light seemed to be welling up. She was so terrified that when she tried to cry out she could not; when she wanted to move, she was paralysed; when she wanted to cry, her eyes were dry-dead in her head. She didn’t know how long she stood like that but eventually she moved and forced herself out the door and as she did she began to wail their names – Francis, Frances, Frances, Francis – over and over as she rushed along the corridor. With that, she heard them, in their bedrooms, crying out and went to find them wakened and terrified, still warm and dry, both of them, still with sleep in their eyes. She brought them to her room and put them in her bed, shook holy water over them, told them to pray, told them not to be frightened, made herself go to the window again and look and all was dark – no greenish light, no figures of children at the grave. The night passed somehow The children slept. She lay in the bed alongside them and held them as close as she dared without waking them. But when they woke and asked her for breakfast and what had happened, she went cold all over. For now their voices were changed. The boy had the girl’s voice, and the girl had the boy’s voice. She put her hands over her ears. She shut her eyes. Then she said she became calm for a moment. She knew she had to see. So she asked the children to come with her to the bathroom to wash before they ate. She helped them undress, even though they usually undressed themselves. And sure enough, their sex had changed too. The boy was a girl, and the girl was a boy. And they paid no notice! They washed themselves and said nothing. She made them breakfast, she gave them lessons, she let them out to play under the apple trees in the front garden. She knew, she said, that if she brought them to the priest or the doctor, the same thing would happen: they would change back and leave her looking like a lunatic. She knew, too, that if she left the house – even if she could find a way of doing so, for there was little or no transport to be had and certainly none to take them as far north as Derry – and there was nowhere else she could think of – something terrible would happen. She knew now she was being challenged by evil, and the children were being stolen from her by whatever was in that grave out the back. Oh, she knew without knowing how she knew it. There was no question.
Katie paused for a long time. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. Eilis was bending down in her chair, her hair falling over her face. I wanted to peep in the shaving mirror on the wall to make sure my hair was still dark. Katie went on brooding. A coal in the fire cracked and little blue flames began to hiss. There was no sound from upstairs. Some families, Katie told us, are devil-haunted. You see that young girl, Brigid McLaughlin? She was the same family as poor Larry up yonder on the street corner, him that never talks now, since he saw the devil on the day before his marriage. You remember that story? Eilis did. She nodded her head. I didn’t. But I wanted Katie to go on with this story, so I nodded too. She went on. It’s a curse a family can never shake off. Maybe it’s something terrible in the family history, some terrible deed that was done in the past, and it just spreads and it spreads down the generations like a shout down that tunnel, the secret passage, in the walls of Grianan, that echoes and echoes and never really stops. It’s held in those walls forever.
An instinct woke in me at the mention of Grianan. I wanted her to stop, not knowing why, but she went on. I wished my mother would come awake, or that someone would come in and i
nterrupt Katie. But everyone seemed to have gone. In an hour, the factory girls would be coming out, the place would be alive with people, Katie would rush to get the dinner ready, I would scrub down the deal table, Eilis would start clattering the knives and forks. Deirdre, Liam, Gerard and Eamon would all come in, my father would arrive, my mother would appear, people would be chattering about this and that, the radio would be turned on for the news.
Anyway, anyway, Katie continued, passing her hand over her broad, kind face in a circular, washing movement, there the poor girl was, locked in with something terrible and the two strange children changing over from one to another before her very eyes. She wrote down in a notebook all the changes there were: changes from boy to girl, changes back to what they had been when she first came. Some of the changes were smaller than others. One day, it would be the colour of their eyes. The girl’s would be blue, although she was still dark-haired and olivy-skinned; the boy’s would be brown. Another day, it would be their height. The girl was a little taller, normally, but one day she was the boy’s height, and he hers. One day, she swore, it was their teeth changed. She had his smile, and he had hers. Another day, it was their ears. Another day, their hands. On and on, for thirty-two days she watched these changes. The children continued to sleep in her room, and on seven of the nights throughout those days she saw the greenish light on the grave and the figures of the children standing there, hand-in-hand, even while they were lying asleep in her bed with her. By now, it was deep into November. She was living as if she might explode at any minute but she kept her panic down. When anyone came to visit – the priest, the doctor, a tradesman – the children were always as they should be. No matter how she watched, she never saw the moment of change from one condition to the next. Then, suddenly, everything got worse.
She was brushing Frances’s hair in front of a long free-standing mirror that you could adjust to whatever angle you liked. It had a wooden frame, a mix, she said, of two woods: one was called bird’s-eye maple and the other rosewood. She wouldn’t have known this, but the children told her. They knew every detail of every article of furniture, every piece of china, every item of cutlery, every floor-covering and wall hanging, every picture and clock, in the house. They knew the names of the local people to whom the farmland had been rented out for pasture; they knew the conditions of the rental; they knew the grazing in the different fields – everything! Brigid had just finished brushing the girl’s hair and was giving it a final stroke or two when she looked and saw herself in the mirror, standing there with the brush in one hand and the other cupped in mid-air, as though holding something. But the girl wasn’t there, wasn’t in the mirror, although Brigid was touching her, holding the strands of the child’s hair in her hand. She stood there, stock-still, wanting to fall to the ground, keeping herself upright by dint of her will. The boy was in the room at the time and he came over, asking her to hurry up and finish brushing for he wanted to go downstairs and play. He moved into the frame of the mirror and he too disappeared. She asked them to look and they did, and she asked them if they could see themselves, and they said yes, of course they could, and they laughed, but uneasily. And they could see her too, they said. The grandfather clock in the bedroom corridor struck at that moment, struck ten strokes. She remembered that. She counted them. It was ten o’clock in the morning of the twenty-first of November. And that clock never moved a solitary inch thereafter. It stopped and it never started again.
Now she didn’t know that then, but that was the very hour and day the parents of those children had died, five years before. They both died at the same time. But she only learned that later. And it was then that the children stopped going out to the grave every day. It was then they stopped the changes. It was then, she said, that she knew the two people in the grave outside had finally come into the house. She went to the priest and asked him to come and bless the house. He did. He walked all through it, bearing the host with him, saying the Latin prayers, throwing the dashes of holy water on all the doors, all the exits and entrances. When he had done, he asked Brigid why she had covered up all the mirrors in the house. She told him. He commanded her then to bring the children to him in front of the big mirror in the bedroom and he took off the velveteen cloth she had draped over it and stood them in front of him before the mirror. And there they were, just as normal. He would have to do something about this, he said; he would write to the uncle and see what could be done. The doctor would call and see her, and his housekeeper would come in now and then to help her. At least January wasn’t far off and then she could go back home for the uncle would have returned by then. So, all this was done. But when Brigid was left alone, as she had to be, she felt the presence of the dead parents all over again; the house was colder, and, every so often, she would see the greenish light under the door of one of the rooms that had been closed up or fading away at the end of the upstairs corridor or thinning out to a mossy line in the frame of a window as she entered a room.
Then one night, she said, they came for the children. Francis and Frances were in her bed as usual. They lay there awake, unable to sleep, and the little girl began to sing a song Brigid had never heard before in a language that was not Irish or Latin or English, and the little boy joined in. Brigid stood before them, a crucifix in her hand, praying, praying, with the flesh prickling all over her. Those children lay there, she said, their voices in unison, singing this sad, slow air, and all the changes she had seen before passing over them, one by one, faster and faster, until she didn’t know which was the boy, which the girl. The whole house was booming, as with the sound of heavy feet on the wooden stair. The greenish light came into the room in mid-air and spread all over it, and with that came this whispering of voices, a man’s and a woman’s, whispering, whispering, furious, almost as if they were spitting in anger, except that the voices were dry, whipped up like swirlings of dust in a wind. The children stopped their singing and sat up in their bed, their eyes standing in their heads, their mouths open but without sound, their arms outstretched to Brigid. She opened her arms to them, dropping the crucifix on the bed, and she says she felt them, their hands and their arms, felt her own hands touching their shoulders, and, with that, the greenish light disappeared, the whispering stopped, and the children were gone. All that was left was the warmth of the bed, the dents in the pillows, the wind whistling outside.
She got the priest out of his bed in the middle of that night, and he came with her, hurrying down the road, buttoning his long coat, telling her she should not have left the children, that this was the last straw, she’d have to go home. But when they got to the empty house and searched it and found no children, he began to accuse her of having made off with them and was going to get the doctor, who had a pony and trap, to go to the next town for the police. Oh, Father, she said, do that. Do what you must. But before you do, come out the back with me. She led him to the grave, and there they saw, the both of them, the greenish light wavering over the mound of earth and heard, clear as a lark song, the voices of the two children, coming from the heart of the light, singing, singing their strange air. The priest blessed himself and fell on his knees, as did Brigid with him, and they stayed there in the wind and the rain until morning when the greenish light faded and the voices of the children with it.
The children were never seen again.
All the mirrors in the house had been shattered, all the clocks were stopped at the hour of ten, only the children’s clothes were left to show that they had once been there. God knows what the uncle thought when he came back. Brigid was taken home, the uncle came to see her, she talked to him, she talked to everyone who would listen for maybe six months after her return, she went completely strange in the head and people used to bless themselves when she appeared and hurry away. Then Brigid stopped talking. Until the day she died she never spoke again, would never leave her room, would never have a mirror near her. Only every year, on the twenty-first of November, you could hear her up in her room, singing thi
s song, in words none could understand, a song no one had ever heard, that must have been the song the children sang that night long ago, in south Donegal, only five years after the Famine. And the blight’s on that family to this very day.
At last, my mother moved upstairs, the bells of the cathedral began to ring, and the noises of the world outside came dappling in as Katie blessed herself, laughed and shook her head at something, and told me to get the scrubbing-brush and warm water for the table. Eilis sat there, her hair falling fair over her obscured face.
PART TWO
CHAPTER THREE
RATS
November 1950