Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

“What gives you the impression she’s out to snare Hugh Osborne?”

“Sure, didn’t I see them often enough when I’d be coming and going on me bicycle, her getting a lift off him, or chatting to him through the window of his car? This was going on all the time, mind you, even after he was married. But she’ll never get him, not for all her tears and her sweet smiles.”

As he took his leave and filled his lungs with the fresh air outside Mrs. Hernan’s house, Devaney had a claustrophobic vision of her sitting in that room day after day, drinking tea and chain-smoking, boiling bacon and cabbage for her dinner, marking the hours until Coronation Street came on the telly, and winding the clock at bedtime so that it would continue slowly ticking away the remaining minutes of her life.

“Have you got a torch?” Cormac asked. Nora patted the pocket of her jacket. It was Monday evening; they had put in almost a full day at the excavation, and were now on their way to the tower, before Hugh Osborne returned from Galway. The late afternoon was as the day had been, overcast but temperate, with a faint taste of the lake in the air. But for the occasional birdcall, it was quiet as they made their way along the demesne wall toward the woods. Nora led, with Cormac following close behind.

“Watch where you step as we get closer,” he said. “You could break an ankle if you aren’t careful.” He’d been solicitous since yesterday morning, and hadn’t wanted her to stay alone in her room last night. She’d finally persuaded him that she’d be fine on her own, but decided that she didn’t mind his consideration. They had traveled about a hundred and fifty yards when she stopped. Through the thick cover of leaves and branches, she could just make out the tower’s outline. Cormac was pointing out some of the tower’s features when he suddenly fell silent.

“What is it?” she asked.

Cormac raised a finger to his lips, then pointed wordlessly to the door of the tower. The hasp was open, as was the padlock, which dangled from the staple.

“What should we do?” she whispered. He gestured to her to keep back against the wall, then indicated that he would approach the door. Cormac looked behind him, and picked up a stout tree branch that lay near the cleared area, turning it to find the surest grip, and using the cudgel to push against the stout wooden door. To her surprise, it swung open easily, as if the hinges had recently been oiled. There was no response from inside, no sound or movement, so they exchanged a glance, and began to walk slowly through the doorway. It was dark and damp inside. The narrow slits in the thick walls didn’t let in much air or light. Cormac’s torch beam revealed a stone stairway that wrapped around the room and disappeared up into the heavy, cross-timbered ceiling. Nora reached in her pocket and switched on her own torch, whose light fell on a stack of large books and a pile of woolen blankets that lay on the dirt floor to one side of the room. She nudged the blankets with her foot, and saw that one was not a blanket at all, but a large shawl or something similar, shot through with gold threads. The floor looked as if it had been swept. Beside the blankets stood a crate covered with what appeared to be puddles of melted wax and burned candle ends. In fact, there seemed to be half-burned candles everywhere they could see: a few tapers and pillars, but mostly tiny votive lights. A jumbled pile of brand-new candles lay on the crate nearest the makeshift bed. As Cormac turned, his torch flickered over a stack of crates against the far wall, and he trained the beam more carefully to see what was there.

“Nora, look at this.” She added the light of her torch to his, illuminating what appeared to be an orderly collection of small animal bones: among them she recognized long-toothed skulls of rabbits and sturdy-snouted badgers, the delicate skeletal remains of stoats and birds. The next crate held the road-flattened carcass of a fox, with its bushy tail intact, and the severed wing of a crow, with its jet-black feathers fanned outward.

“What do you make of all this?” Cormac asked.

“I don’t know. Hey, what are those?” Nora shone her light on several large sheets of paper that lay on the floor beside Cormac’s feet. He crouched to examine them.

“Sketches,” he said.

Nora knelt beside him, and they each took a handful of curled and water-stained sheets to sort through. She could make out the recognizable shapes of animal skulls and bones, done in thick lead pencil, but the lines were wildly expressive, as though the artist had tried to memorize the contours of each object, and had put pencil to paper with closed eyes. There were dozens of sketches, compulsive repetitions of the same objects. Nora picked up and studied one of many distorted outlines of the crow’s wing. “Who could have done these?”

“Just what I was—wait a minute, look.” Cormac shone his torch slowly up the wall. Nora added her light as well, and each of them turned slowly in place, until their torch beams revealed that most of the wall space had been covered with huge abstract images of bones and eyeless skulls, on a background of twisted organic shapes—jagged lines, curving contours, and spirals of dark purple and dusky blue, interlaced with wide, wriggling swaths of metallic gold. Seeping moisture had caused some of the paint to come away in places, and from its thickness, they could see that the walls had been obsessively layered with paint over time. At the foot of the stairs lay a jumbled pile of empty cans, rags, and petrified brushes. A few spray cans and tins of paint, obviously used, stood on one of the crates nearby. Of all the things they had imagined when the door remained locked, the tower house as some kind of makeshift studio was not even among the considerations. And yet here it was before them.

“God, Cormac, this is so weird. But it’s kind of wonderful as well.” Nora began perusing the volumes that lay by the makeshift sleeping area. “Bird books, lots of art history,” she reported, then pushed the stout wooden door shut. The back of it had been painted in the same fashion as the walls, but in the midst of the paint was a large color plate of an icon depicting a Black Madonna and Child.

“Cormac, have a look at this.” There was no answer but a startled cry and a flapping, scuffling noise, and Nora swung her torch around just in time to perceive that she was under attack. She threw both arms up to protect her head, and felt a sharp scrabbling and a gust of wing beats against her face and hands as she flailed the torch in an effort to shake free. Cormac grabbed hold of her sweater and pulled her to the ground.

“Keep down!” he whispered fiercely as the random flapping continued above their heads.

“What the hell is that?”

“Just a bird. I’m afraid I dropped my torch. Which way is the door?”

“Behind me here,” Nora said. They scrambled out into the fresh air and light, and sat for a moment with their backs pressed against the tower’s sloping base, gasping for air.

“I should have warned you,” Cormac said. “This place seems to be a sort of rookery, I suppose you’d call it. There’s a whole flock of crows nesting in the top of the tower and the trees above.”

Nora rubbed her pecked fingers, then reached up and felt the scratch on her forehead. “Here, let me see that,” Cormac said. He knelt beside her and tipped her head back to examine the wound. “It’s not too deep. You’ll mend.” He sat back on his heels and crossed his arms. “Well—we’ve seen inside, and we don’t know anything more than we did before. But I’m willing to call Devaney if you think we ought to.”

“Let’s think about this for a minute. Somebody uses this place to make pictures. That may be a bit strange—I’d even go so far as to say creepy—but it’s not illegal. And if it is Hugh—”