Over the Gate & Other Stories

By Aonghus Fallon

Ten Irish tales of the supernatural, the otherworldly, and the uncanny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aonghus Fallon
• Release date: Jan 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370956548

Book preview

OVER THE GATE

& OTHER STORIES

Aonghus Fallon

Cover by the author.

UK spelling and grammar used throughout.

Smashwords edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS.

Over the Gate

Conquerors

A Bright Lady, Surpassingly Fair

Mr Henry

A Curious Episode in the Life of Jennifer O’Malley

Froggy

A Bottle Darkly

Tadhg & the Cluricauns

Hunger

Lost & Found.

OVER THE GATE

‘Listening to that carry-on in the pub last night, you must think we’re all bloodthirsty Fenian bastards, but you’ve got to understand the history of the area. My great-great grandmother was left to die on the side of the road and she wasn’t the only one, either.’

‘Yeah? I’m guessing some Anglo-Irish dickhead was to blame.’

The sarcasm in Frank’s voice was hard to ignore, but Conor seemed oblivious. ‘No. The man who owned most of the land around here at the time was a well-to-do Catholic, a fellah called McCreary – this was after the penal laws had been abolished. He spent most of his time in London. The man who evicted me gran was his agent, an ex-army captain from Suffolk called Captain Tisdell, a short, thick-set gentleman who looked taller than he was because of how he carried himself. Tisdell always wore the same stovepipe hat and the same black clothes. He had the palest eyes, seemingly – wolf’s eyes, somebody called them – a pair of big, bushy black sideburns, and a vicious streak. Nowadays people would probably say he was suffering from PTSD – he’d fought in the Boer War. Tisdell was the one in charge. He made the rules and he enforced them. You gave him any lip, he kicked you out. He didn’t care if you’d paid your rent or not.’

‘Well I suppose he had a job to do, like everyone else.’

Frank and I had gone to the party on the spur of the moment. We’d been bored of our usual haunts and reckoned some shindig out in the sticks might be a bit of craic.

We were sorry now. Not just because we had roaring hangovers, but because we still had to get home. We’d come down in a car with three other people who’d vanished off early that morning. There was a coach to Dublin leaving the village twice a day but we’d missed it on both occasions.

We were stuck here until tomorrow. Meanwhile we had to put up with our host, who – when he’d learnt we were going for a walk to clear our heads – had insisted on coming along too.

Right away I could see how this might lead to trouble. Frank was a Blackrock boy: a big, heavy-set guy with a head of short ginger curls and a face like a slab of raw beef. He was barely twenty-five, a repeat student, but already looked like what he was: a good prop forward, gone to seed.

Frank didn’t have much time for culchies and Conor, a skinny, intense character with longish black hair, was confirming all his worst prejudices. I suspect Conor had an equally low opinion of us. He was perfectly civil, but we were just a pair of cosseted Dubs to him: lads who didn’t have a clue what their country was really about, anymore than they might know anything about the wars fought on their behalf.

In fact, my background was a tad more ambivalent than Frank’s: I was from the wrong side of the Liffey, the first in my family to go to UCD, and my parents had been from the west originally (I’d spent my summers in Cong). I had a foot in both camps, so to speak – which was why I’d already decided my role was to defuse any rows between the two.

‘I suppose he did,’ Conor agreed, a glint of humour in his green eyes. ‘A job is a job, right? No matter if you’re a soldier in Auschwitz or an overseer in a cotton plantation in the deep south. Ye do the best ye can!’

Frank smiled: a smile filled with malice. ‘At least the camps and the plantations made a few bob for the people who ran them.’

Some of the good humour faded from Conor’s eyes. ‘Oh, McCreary’s tenants put plenty of money in his pockets! My great-great grandmother farmed some lazy beds not two miles from here. A patch of bog on a hillside, that’s all it was. She still had to pay McCreary ten shillings a month.’

I was sorry we’d let Conor choose our route, now. He’d parked his car by the forestry, then brought us a short distance along a country road – a road still busy with passing traffic – before leaving it for a shady lane that wound up the hillside between low-hanging hawthorns. The sound of cars, tractors and lorries had grown more and more muted, eventually stopping altogether, while the lane itself had deteriorated into little more than a dirt track.

It was so quiet. I’d enjoyed the silence at first. Now I found it oppressive. Also, I was disorientated. We were talking about the bad old days, and on the evidence of my own eyes it might as well have been the bad old days. All I’d seen so far through the odd break in the hedgerows on either side of us had been unkempt fields. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen a telephone pole. And in that eerie hush, everything we said seemed loaded, the fractious exchange between Frank and Conor reverberating through the still air with all the mysterious, horrible significance of an incantation.

I had to spancel Conor: the more annoyed he got, the more likely Frank was to needle him.

‘She could have walked,’ I pointed out. ‘She was a free agent. Which is more than you can say for those poor divils in Auschwitz or in the deep south.’

Conor wheeled round to face me. ‘And go where, Aidan? Every estate back in those days was the same. As was every landlord. And each of them had a man like Tisdell doing his dirty work for him.’

I was getting irritated despite myself. ‘Well you said yourself McCreary was a Catholic. Isn’t that the whole thing about history? That it’s not as straightforward as we’d like? That it’s not all about good guys and bad guys? It’s not as if our own lot treated us any better, once we got independence.’

‘Those landlords were all bastards, Catholic and Protestant alike,’ Conor spat. ‘And they were all helped by men like Tisdell: men willing and eager to burn a house down around somebody’s ears. Englishmen, each and every one of them.’

Frank shook his head wearily. ‘Here we go. The bloody famine again.’

I shivered. Was it my imagination? Or did the air suddenly seem sour with ancient grievances and thoughts of vengeance? And if so, was our little row summoning up all those old ghosts? Or being fed by them?

Conor’s eyes were blazing now. ‘Desperate times, hah? Tisdell didn’t have the excuse of desperate times when he horse-whipped my great-grandmother and turfed her out onto the road! Forty years after the famine, that was!’

I watched his chest rise and fall through his thin white T-shirt, filled with a creeping dismay, while Frank smiled condescendingly. I could tell right away Frank hadn’t noticed anything unusual – Frank was about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. ‘That was over a hundred years ago, dude.’

We’d been walking very slowly along that lane while we argued. A dull summer evening had given way to a listless dusk, made all the darker by the hawthorns crowding in on either side of us. Now Conor stopped, stuffing his hands into his pockets and looking away from us. He didn’t want us to see the anger burning so brightly in his eyes, I think.

‘Maybe – but do you know something?’ His voice was very low. ‘If Tisdell was standing in front of me now, I’d strangle the bastard.’

‘You reckon?’ Frank smirked.

Conor shot him a quick, fierce glance. Frank’s response was an exaggerated shrug. ‘This guy Tisdell was ex-army, right?’

‘So?’

‘So he knew how to take care of himself. My guess is he’d make mincemeat of you.’

That was it. Next minute the two of them were squaring up to one another, while I hovered anxiously between them, the same, sinking sensation in my stomach.

‘Whose side are you on?’ Conor demanded.

Frank was wearing a pair of borrowed track-suit bottoms that contrasted oddly with his tweed jacket (he’d vomited all over his slacks the night before and washed them in the kitchen sink that morning: they were drying on a radiator back in the house) but he oozed all his usual self-assurance. Having four inches and four stone on Conor helped. Also, you don’t end up on your college’s senior team without learning a trick or two.

‘I’ve never been much of a Celtic fan, to be honest –’ he said, with the same elaborate casualness.

‘You patronising cunt!’ Conor lunged for him, even as Frank held up his big butcher’s hands to deflect him.

At which point I separated them. Frank would have just pushed Conor into the ditch otherwise. And laughed it off afterwards.

‘Maybe it’s time we were heading home, lads.’

They stood back, Frank smiling but flushed, Conor glowering away like a madman. I was just trying to stop things spiralling out of control, but I was right. We really did need to go home. We left it any later, we’d end up walking back to the car in the dark. But neither of them moved. Finally Conor opened his mouth to make some retort.

Then something caught his eye and he frowned.

That was when I noticed the battered old gate. We must have walked right by it. Not surprising, given how it was almost hidden by foliage. Conor was staring beyond it with a look of open fascination on his face.

All three of us drew closer to it without even being aware of doing so, even I, despite my dread.

A field crowded with thistles and ragwort sloped down into some unknown valley. The hill opposite was striated with narrow, grassy furrows – lazy beds, I realised. But that wasn’t all. Like I said, it was a dull evening, grey clouds gathered thickly above, so the light was poor, but even I could see a woman was digging away at one furrow, a woman in a red shawl, while a man on horseback had paused on the hilltop above, little more than a silhouette.

A man wearing what looked very like a black, stove-pipe hat.

He sat absolutely motionless. He and his mount might have been carved from stone but for how the horse twitched its tail. I had the eeriest impression he was watching us.

There was something off-kilter about that whole scene, apart from its incongruity. The colours seemed so muted and ugly. And even as I studied that figure – that grim, intent form, radiating its own unique malevolence – it wavered for a second.

Conor was staring at the distant rider like somebody hypnotised, arms down by his sides, hands clenched.

Frank cleared his throat. ‘Must be a film shoot.’

There was no crew, no army of vans and gennies, just those two figures, the woman stooped over her spuds and the man gazing across the valley. This wasn’t a shoot, and even Frank must have known as much, a puzzled frown creasing his broad features despite what he’d just said.

‘Rubbish,’ Conor muttered.

Frank’s face regained a bit of its old cockiness. He glanced slyly down at Conor. Something was wrong, but he still couldn’t resist winding the poor sod up. That was Frank all over.

‘What? You reckon it’s him? Tisdell? Why don’t you go over there and give him a piece of your mind then?’

Conor grabbed the top of the gate with both hands. It creaked protestingly. ‘Maybe I will and all!’

‘Frank –’

Frank heard the alarm in my voice. He was standing closest to Conor, and he was a lot bigger and stronger than me: he could have reached out and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. Instead he just cocked one ironic eyebrow.

By the time I tried, it was too late. Conor already had one leg over the gate. He shrugged my hand away angrily.

A second later he was gone: gone down through the long grass, running towards the man who was waiting for him on the far side of that valley.

Maybe love can draw lovers together no matter what stands between them, whether it’s miles or years. Ever since that day I’ve always reckoned hate is every bit as powerful.

I should have gone after him. No matter what the consequences. Frank was right. Conor didn’t have a hope. Not against a man like that. As it was, I stood by the gate and hesitated. That hesitation enveloped me, held me rooted to that spot, while around me the world stopped what it was doing and waited – waited for me to do something. Anything.

And waited in vain.

Next thing I knew, I was stumbling along in pitch darkness, still on some country road but not the same one, trees forming a canopy above my head, a carpet of leaves beneath my feet. I felt as if I’d been lurching along in the