All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  The trees of the orchard rustled, listening in. Long silver hairs glinted in the light of our candles, tangled around old stone. Far away, again, came a sound like a scream.

  Cale and Ida jumped. Finn took me by the elbow, his grip kind but firm. “Let’s just head back to the town,” he said. “Get a room for the night. Call our goddamn families. We can take a bus to Donegal in the morning.”

  Behind me, the cottage glowed.

  “What if the morning is too late?”

  “Deena,” Finn said, his hands pressing. “Mandy isn’t there.”

  The heat of the ground started to rise up through the soles of my feet, a strange knowledge, a deep need.

  “We have to follow,” I said. “We keep hearing the screams.”

  Ida was giving me a long and considering look when I turned toward her, tears drying on her cheeks. “I think Finn’s right,” she said finally. “I think a night’s sleep will do us all good. We can keep going in the morning.”

  “Cale,” I said, imploring. She had felt the same thing as me, back there in the orchard. The same presence taking over. She had brought her candles, her stones in their velvet pouch, had talked so much about family ghosts. She had to believe.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “But Finn’s right about the journey.” She showed her phone, the glow of the map too bright in the darkness. “It’s a full day’s walk and there won’t be any buses now. We have no choice but to wait for morning.”

  Finn gave a perceptible sigh of relief and led us away from Mary Ellen and Ann’s cottage, back through the briars and brambles, back toward the road.

  My phone dipped in and out of signal, but every time I checked it I had several new messages. All Rachel calling, texting. She may not yet have known where I was, but she knew something wasn’t right.

  Rachel had trouble sleeping—she always had. Some nights were two a.m. showers or four a.m. baking, the clattering of pots and pans finding their way into my dreams. She’d play the radio low so as not to wake me, but sometimes when I got up to go to the bathroom in the night I’d hear it, quiet notes of classical music on Lyric FM and often, just underneath the music, the sound of crying. The next morning there would be fresh bread for breakfast, raisin-filled scones packed in my schoolbag for lunch. After Mandy’s funeral, there were so many cakes we couldn’t eat them all. The house smelled like yeast and hot butter and cooked apples, all salted with my sister’s tears.

  It occurred to me that, at this moment, Rachel was probably cooking, lights blazing in the kitchen, curtains closed to the streetlamps outside, eyes on her phone as she chopped apples and rhubarb, waiting for me to call.

  We stumbled in the darkness, our fingers stuck in cobwebs that looked like they were made of shining silver hairs. We were breathless, tired, rushing toward the road. I tripped over a tangle of gray hairs and couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t keep the panic from rising in my chest.

  I signaled to the others to stop, fumbled in my bag and pulled out my inhaler, took two long puffs.

  “Sorry,” said Finn. “We can slow down a little.”

  Ida shifted her bag on her shoulders. “Let’s give it a minute. It’s okay.”

  I breathed deep, lungs fighting against the feeling I was drowning.

  “There are places,” Cale said, as if to distract me, hand pressed against the trunk of an ancient tree gnarled over the road. “Places where you kind of almost remember how it used to be. Before us, I mean. When there were no roads or people or telephone poles.”

  We shone our phones around the scraggly field, the grassy wilderness, the tumbledown wall. Piles of rocks in a weedy grave.

  Ida said, “It’s because, in places like this, nothing’s really changed.” She shifted her weight, her shoes crunching brittle twigs underfoot, laces shining in the moonlight.

  “We’ve changed,” I said, watching her.

  Maybe Cale was right. In some places, it was easier to remember that you were standing on ground your ancestors once walked. There were places where you could touch the past. Press your fingertip into the bullet hole on an angel’s breast, brush up against a tree that was only a sapling when your road was built, walk paths that ancient armies once traveled on horseback. There were places where, if you listened closely, you could still hear the rhythm of long-ago hoofbeats.

  When we reached the road, I knelt in the middle of it as if I was about to pray and pressed my ear to the potholed tarmac. Faintly, from far away, I was sure I could hear wheels turning, wooden carts creaking, the clump of horseshoes denting the ground.

  “Deena?” Ida said, panic creeping into her voice.

  Finn touched her arm gently. “She’s okay.”

  Cale stepped out onto the tarmac and joined me, listening.

  The others clustered around us. Ida crouched and touched the surface of the road. “Maybe that’s why Mandy wanted us to follow the map,” she said. “Maybe she wanted us to feel the past, smell it, taste it. Not just read a list of dead names off our family tree.”

  I raised my head to meet my niece’s gaze, said in wonder, “That’s exactly what I was just thinking.”

  The cartwheel rumbling beneath the road became a vibration that set small stones skidding. Before I could properly form the sudden fear that the past was about to run us over on this tiny country road, a car appeared from around the bend and stopped suddenly in front of us.

  I stood. The car was an alien thing: old, large, once red, now dotted with rust and fallen petals from last spring that had never been washed off. For hours, we had felt so far from civilization that the car looked wrong, like it had come from another time. Or perhaps we had.

  Behind the wheel was a broad, lined woman in her sixties, maybe older, with coarse gray hair escaping from a bun, wearing a shirt rolled up at the sleeves. She stared at us, unsmiling, and stuck her head out of the window like a dog. A real dog—large and black, the kind of Labrador that might have been crossed with a bear—bounded up from the back into the passenger seat and stared at us, tongue lolling.

  “It’s late,” said the woman. Her voice was harsh, loud. “What are ye four doing out here?”

  “We were out walking,” Finn said quickly. “Lost track of time.”

  “We weren’t drinking or anything,” said Ida, immediately making it sound like we had been.

  “We’re just heading home,” said Cale.

  “We were looking for a lift,” I said.

  The others gaped at me in disbelief.

  “Were you now,” the woman said in a way that was more a statement than a question. “I’m driving up to Donegal—be there in forty-five minutes. There’s room in the car if that’s where you’re headed.”

  “No thank you,” said Ida, as I said, “Yes please.” I added, “That’s exactly where we’re going, actually,” for good measure.

  Ida’s eyes widened. She shook her head.

  “We could be at the next place in less than an hour,” I whispered. My phone vibrated in my pocket again. Whatever the others thought, I knew we were running out of time. I knew that the faster we got to Donegal, the sooner we’d find Mandy. If we went back to Sligo, Rachel would be onto me by morning.

  “This is crazy,” Ida hissed back. “We can’t just get in a car with a stranger.”

  “People hitchhike all the time.”

  Finn puffed out his cheeks. I could almost see the point at which he accepted the perfect serendipity of the moment, the point at which he convinced himself that this was just a story, a treasure hunt, an adventure, a way for me and Ida to grieve. “What the hell,” he said. “Let’s just go.”

  “Back, Lucky!” the woman barked at the dog, who loped over the back seat to settle in the trunk. Finn got in the front and I sat at the window behind him, Cale in the middle and Ida behind the old woman, who grabbed the gearstick
like it was the neck of a chicken she was killing, wrestled the car back into gear, and sped on.

  * * *

  —

  Less than an hour later, the woman stopped unceremoniously just off the main road and told us we’d arrived. We tumbled out of the car and she gave a brisk nod, then shot out of sight.

  “Well,” said Ida, when the roar of the car had faded into the distance, “that was weird.”

  “That was weird,” I agreed. “And this is not what I expected either.”

  This was our destination: a big gray building that looked like it might have once been a factory, and a dilapidated red-brick section next to it that looked somewhat more like an old boarding school. It was surrounded by a tall iron fence, the gates unlocked. The windows were high, only holes in the stone, the ones at ground level boarded up with thick sheets of metal. But the front door was open: a great black mouth.

  The streetlamps on the road opposite shone eerily. It was past midnight. The roads were deserted. Only the wind whistling through the empty windows, small rustlings in the grass and weeds of a garden that seemed too scared to grow inside the old factory. Or maybe they’d been burned away. It looked like there were building works going on during the daytime. As if they planned to tear the place down or build it up, start anew.

  “Okay. This is it.” I creaked open the heavy gates and walked toward the derelict building in the darkness.

  “That sister of yours sure liked her creepy, abandoned places,” Finn remarked.

  “Yeah.” Ida twisted her mouth around. “What’s with that?”

  But I just walked across the garden. I didn’t hear the others follow me. When I finally turned around, Cale was biting her lip and Finn was frowning. Ida hung back.

  “It’s just a building,” Cale said as if to reassure herself. “There’s nobody here but us.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” said Finn. “I mean, this place really reeks of ghosts. And not the quiet family kind.”

  Cale and I exchanged a look. She took a box of sea salt out of the front pocket of her bag and shook it. “We just pour a ring of it around us and make sure it doesn’t break.”

  “Fuck,” Ida muttered. “Don’t let the salt circle break. Fuck fuckidy fuck.”

  * * *

  —

  There was no sign that my sister had been there. The place was empty, dust-carpeted, with high ceilings and thick walls. We walked through two huge rooms, our footfalls echoing so that it sounded like there were more than four of us. Forty shoes maybe, tapping on stone.

  There was a hallway at the end of the second wide room, the remains of heavy wooden doors propped open. Darkness spilled out. Between the two rooms was a crumbling staircase, leading up.

  “She isn’t here,” Ida said with certainty and a strain in her voice. My skin crawled.

  “No,” I said. “She isn’t.” My resolve faded; whatever force had driven me to reach this place tonight was gone. In its absence was a kind of fear. I knew what I had felt in Ann and Mary Ellen’s cottage. I knew now the power of old ghosts. I did not want that to happen here.

  Unanimously, we decided to wait until morning to look for Mandy’s letter. Exploring this place in the dark seemed unwise. Without really discussing it, we settled ourselves in the first room, close to the doorway that led outside. Around the walls were the rusted carcasses of empty bedframes, as though they had been pushed aside to make room to move things through the middle. Other objects were stacked around them: boxes and bags, wire hangers, rickety metal shelves. We stayed away from the shadows they cast, from the way the beds seemed to creak in the corners, as though invisible bodies were sinking down upon them, watching us.

  Cale drew a circle of salt around us. I thought of Mandy, of the bull skull she put into a salt circle with me, of the bull I saw, of the bull who spoke to Julia, tried to get her to stay, tried to protect her like he’d promised Mary Ellen he would. I fell asleep with the ghost of a feeling of rough hide on the palms of my hands.

  * * *

  —

  Something woke me with a start. A subtle switch in temperature, a different sound from the night air whispering in through the empty building. Almost empty. I opened my eyes, expecting to see sunlight. But inside the room everything was gray.

  We’d settled ourselves a few feet from the doorway, hoping that the ghosts, if there were any, were hiding farthest from the door. From time to time, a car had driven by, its headlights splashing like paint on the walls behind us, half waking us before the darkness lulled us under again.

  I hadn’t expected to sleep at all that night, in that place. It was like we were under a spell.

  We’d slept in a pile like puppies, Cale and Ida, Finn and me. We’d stacked our bags and things around us as protection, reinforcing the thick circle of salt. Finn hadn’t let us light Cale’s candles again. “This is creepy enough as it is,” he’d said, and he’d hidden her matches in his pocket. We trained our phone-flashlight beams on the high ceiling.

  It felt awfully real, that circle of salt in the darkness. Like it was the only thing keeping the true darkness out.

  Cale mumbled something in her sleep. Ida shifted closer to her. Finn threw one arm up over his head, cushioned by his backpack, our hoodies and jackets blanketing us all. I slid my hand carefully into his trouser pocket and took out Cale’s matches.

  My phone had gone dark and Ida was using my portable charger. I flicked a match alight and touched it to one of Cale’s candles. When I stood up, I took the box of salt with me.

  The others awoke when I stepped over the circle.

  “Where are you going?” Ida asked, at the same time as Finn said, “What the fuck are you doing, Deena?”

  I whispered, even though we were all awake. “I didn’t want to take the phone for light,” I said. “But I really need to pee. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Goddamn.” Finn shuffled himself up. “Give me that.” He unplugged Ida’s phone and exchanged it for my candle. “It’s only slightly less creepy if we’re the ones with the candle. It’ll just blow out on you out there.”

  I kissed my best friend’s cheek as thanks and hurried out into the garden.

  I peed in the bushes behind the front wall, not wanting to go any farther into the overgrown garden, and when I came back inside I walked quickly, staring straight ahead.

  But I could feel it. Something. I knew that if I took my eyes off the flickering candlelight lapping around the shapes of my friends I’d see it. I’d see her. A girl with a shawl and a candle at the bottom of the staircase, beckoning me on.

  I think I whispered, “No.” I think I said, “I can’t come with you.” I think I moved toward her anyway.

  “Deena!” came Finn’s voice. “What are you doing?”

  This had to be a dream. That’s why I was carefully placing one foot in front of the other, walking through the second room, toward the stairs instead of back to my friends, protected by their circle of salt.

  A sound from the stairs like fifty footsteps. A sound like children’s laughter and screams.

  “DEENA!” Finn bellowed, but it was Ida who ran out of the circle of salt, scuffing it with the toe of her shoe.

  “I have to follow,” I said, and I climbed the stairs.

  “Stop, stop, stop!” my friends shouted from behind me.

  The shawl-girl’s light rounded the corner of the landing. I could hear Finn’s and Ida’s footsteps on the stairs, see the dance of their candles in the shadows, but I was at the top, already turning into a room, a long room like the one downstairs, with a big open space in the wall where the window used to be.

  That’s where the girl was. Her candle blew out in the night breeze. Mine was the only flame in the room. The girl stood up on the ledge of the window as if she was about to jump and, right when Finn, Cale, and Ida came clattering into the room, she
disappeared.

  Ida gave a small, low cry. I could hear Finn’s teeth clacking as he shivered.

  Cale said, “Did you see—did you—see—”

  There was a letter on the windowsill. A letter addressed to me. It was weighted down by the girl’s brass candleholder.

  My own candle’s flame flickered. But I wasn’t carrying a candle, was I? Wasn’t I just holding a phone?

  “This is . . .” Ida was pale, eyes bright and wide. “This is some mass hallucination or something. This is some mass hysteria. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. We’re all just imagining together.”

  Cale had her eyes closed. She was muttering, “I can’t see you, I can’t see you, I can’t see you,” over and over again. Finn’s hands were clenched and he was shaking.

  I stood in the middle of the room and spoke in a clear, loud voice that even my own ears didn’t recognize. “We see you. We hear you. We feel you. What do you want?”

  Follow, came the whisper. Follow us.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  There are tears in the landscape. Pinpricks in the map. Pain stays on in places like this.

  “What do you want us to do?”

  You won’t see us in the photographs. The history books. But the landscape remembers.

  By then I was crying. Huge tears blinding. “What do you want me to do?”

  The only thing you can do.

  Tears ran like rivers down my cheeks, dripping onto the dry floor, salting the earth. “I can’t find my sister. I can’t break the curse. I can’t do anything. I can’t help you. I’m just a bad fucking apple. Just like her.”

  So were we. Don’t let us be. Tell the story.

  The tears were choking me, stealing my voice. “What story?”

  Break the curse, Deena.

  “Shit.” My voice broke first.

  I sank down to the dusty floor and wept.

  Dear Deena,

  None of this is easy. This isn’t a simple story to tell. True stories often aren’t, especially those that have been hidden for so long. This is where you come from. The history of this country is tied to the roots of our family tree. I need you to know this. She needs you to know this. They all do.