Hallowed Ground



  HALLOWED GROUND

  HALLOWED GROUND

  Greg Meyer

 

  Cthulhu Wept

  2015

 

  Copyright © 2015 by Greg Meyer

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Printing: 2015

  ISBN: 978-1311780669

  Contact: [email protected]

  Please don't pirate this. It's pay-what-you-want. If you want it free, you can get it free. Thank you.

  To my family and friends.

  Thank you for making life worth living.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Heat Death of the Universe

  Why So Serious

  Loak's Annunciation

  Consume

  The Tragedy of Crows

  Ireland Belongs to the Dead

  The Fairy-Road of Eiscir Riada

  Hallowed Ground

  Judas Kiss

  Conqueror

  The Worms Crawl In

  Winter in Pine County

  Graffiti in a Massachusetts Asylum Cell

  The Second Coming of Dagon

  Astrology

  The Room is Blue Because It Is

  Recommended Reading

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe thanks to a lot of people. My parents, for countless trips to libraries and bookstores when I was a kid. My first boss, Jerry Groebner, for trusting me to do my job. My teachers, including Ray Schmidt, the first to take a red pen to my writing; Deborah Downs-Miers, who showed me I still had much to learn; Baker Lawley, Matt Rasmussen, and Phil Bryant, who provided invaluable criticism; the faculty of the English Department at Gustavus Adolphus College, for their support. My grand-uncle Clair, whose reward for reading my early stories was seeing his literary stand-in brutally murdered. My friends, both online and in-person, who have encouraged and critiqued my writing.

  Thank you all so much.

  Greg Meyer

  May, 2015

  PREFACE

  “You must have written this at a very dark time in your life.” The 4-H judge was reading a sword-and-sorcery story I had written about a cowardly soldier bleeding to death. As far as science fiction and fantasy goes, it was tame. Also awful, but that’s beside the point. I had written the piece in a good mood, on a good day, and I didn’t see darkness in it at all. It was a standard fantasy story. No matter how many times I declared I was happy, she wouldn’t believe me, and kept insisting I was some sort of self-harming depressive type. I wonder what that judge would think of this collection. She’d probably call SWAT on me as a pre-emptive measure.

  It’s funny. I’ve always been a coward—I was afraid of the dark into my early teens, I didn’t like horror movies, I didn’t care for scary stories. Overall, I was the kid everyone makes fun of for being a wimp. And then somewhere along the line, I’d say when I was in my junior or senior year of high school, I read a story. Not a very good story. It was a “creepypasta,” one of those manufactured urban legends that float around online, like Bloody Mary or Hook-Hand back in the pre-internet era. The story was called “Ben Drowned,” and it scared me for days. A little found-fiction piece about a haunted video game cartridge. I know. I laugh now, too. But soon after “Ben Drowned” I read Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and began to lurk on a poorly-designed web forum dedicated to more stories set in the zombie apocalypse. Some were excellent, most were terrible. But that one mediocre story about a dead kid named Ben set me off on a spiral into all kinds of horror and pseudo-horror media. I watched Alien and Event Horizon late at night on the tiny screen of an iPod, I read pirated copies of Brian McNaughton’s Throne of Bones, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series… None of it was especially scary (well, Event Horizon, Alien, and Throne of Bones are all terrifying), but it sparked an interest that hadn’t been there before. In particular, Lovecraft stuck with me. His mythos did, more accurately. I loved Cthulhu and Hastur and Elder Races and colors out of space.

  So off and on into college, I dabbled around in horror. Occasionally I’d pick up a horror novel or watch a scary movie, but for the most part, my reading and writing stayed firmly centered in science fiction and fantasy. That isn’t to say I didn’t experiment with elements of horror, but the tone and focus remained very much on heroism and humanity, not ghouls and psychos and mental trauma.

  Then I went to Ireland for a month during my junior year of college. It was one of the best decisions of my life, for many reasons mostly unrelated to horror, writing, or really anything that would interest you. In Ireland, things shifted. I read Yeats for the first time, heard Irish ghost and fairy stories from a master folklorist, walked where Irish rebels were imprisoned and executed. I wrote an essay at the end of the trip. It’s in this collection. That essay marks a shift in my writing. That essay was dark. Not scary, but dark. And I realized I could write dark things, mature things, even spooky things, and it didn’t come off as a little kid with a flashlight under his chin whispering, “And then she gave him cooties!” I mean, my writing still seems like that sometimes, but I usually hit my thematic mark. (Or somewhere in the same zip code).

  Ireland got me interested in writing darker material, and I mucked around, trying out bits of grim and gory. It was still dabbling, but a slightly more expert sort of dabbling. The dabbling of a hobbyist rather than someone who wasn’t even sure whether ghosts said “boo” or “release me from my suffering, oh mortal child, and I shall reward thee with treasure.” (It’s actually “Oooooooooooohhhhhh.”) So that was how I muddled along for a while longer. I wrote my first Walking Fella story in that period—you’ll see him in this collection, too, the poor maggot-infested sod—and it was fun. I enjoyed writing him and his unfortunate situations.

  That brings us to last semester, and a class about Romanticism and Gothic literature. I read spooky stories, studied them in-depth, and learned about the societal pressures that made Gothic writing so wildly popular at the time. That’s where things really kicked off. I sat down determined to create intentionally unsettling stories and poems. In the seven months since then, I wrote almost every piece in this collection. Only a few are more than a year old. They still have fresh ink on them.

  Through these essays, stories, and poems, I’ve taken a look at, among other things, what makes a hallowed space and how minds change based on inner and outer stimuli: Societal shifts, eldritch horrors, and personal upheaval. There are questions I’ve asked myself, questions I’ve asked others, and, hopefully, questions you’ll ask. (Along with glimpses at things which should not be.) I hope that, if nothing more, you are entertained. If you derive some intellectual value as well, all the better.

  In the end, though, this book’s for you, nameless 4-H judge. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Never stop telling kids their work stems from a dark spirit. Or, maybe, do, because that’s not very nice. The work is not the author. The work is not their belief. The author is dead. Long live the author.

  P.S.: If you can find all the geek and English-nerd references in this collection, you get a prize! (The prize is you paid more attention to my writing. You lucky duck).

  HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE

  In the future, the stars will burn out.

  But before that, we’ll spread like ants

  Across space, ravaging planets in a bout

  Between clans and ideologies, scrabbling

  Like the apes we are, led by a lout,

  O
r a monomaniac, or the Anti-Christ,

  And each and every human lusting for clout

  Claws and bites, reverted to beasts.

  There’ll be no peace until the stars burn out.

  WHY SO SERIOUS

  Life’s a joke,

  A nasty, brutish

  Buildup to a cosmic punchline:

  Us.

  LOAK’S ANNUNCIATION

  I am the one who comes unannounced. My names are many.

  I am the everchanging. My form and humour are as shifting as your

  affections.

  I am the laugher. I see the joke in your existence.

  I am the coyote-walking-on-two-legs. For a century of centuries I have

  poked my long snout into your lives.

  I am the carrion-eater. The dead who don’t pay me tribute, I devour.

  I am the rearguard of war. The looter is my disciple.

  I am the one who waits at the threshold. When you die, you pass

  through my domain.

  I am the bookburner. The destruction of knowledge is my delight.

  I am the deceiver, the Judas-sire. My tongue is forked like a serpent’s.

  My paws are the paws of a dhole,

  My fangs the fangs of a wolf,

  My laugh the laugh of a hyena,

  My eyes the eyes of a jackal,

  And I am none of these things.

  I scratch at doors in the darkness. Those who answer, I slay.

  I unearth the root of human suffering and find it insufficient.

  I bare my teeth in a wolf-grin at bloodshed and widow’s grief.

  I cannot be captured or called-up. The bones of those who have tried

  litter my fane.

  I breathe and shrivel souls. My inhalation summons the dead.

  I watch at every window. The treebranch which scrapes the glass is my

  paw.

  I defile the gates of the underworld. Offal I leave at the gates.

  I rob the cradles of rich men. Like a dingo I eat their young.

  I wander the hills and bayous. Among the cities I stalk unseen.

  I walk besides pastors. I guide them to rob their blind flocks.

  I devour the asp and the eagle. The bear and the wolf give me wide

  berth.

  My eyes are rubies. They glow in the flames of your homes.

  My jaws are steel-traps. They lie in your path at night.

  My howl is the howl of a ghost-child which has forgotten a mother’s

  arms.

  My heart is the heart of a lover whose passion has bitterly turned.

  My breath is the breath of the graveworm, fostered and fed on the

  corpse.

  And I am none of these things.

  None who have lived know my true name.

  Even the wise see only my masks.

  I am Loak the skinwalking spirit,

  And I know the truth in the world:

  Though you think you are formed in our image,

  We are formed in thine.

  CONSUME

  Seventh July

  As a child, I was sickly. A frail constitution, inherited from my father, plagued me into my early teens. I spent many weeks confined to my bed by racking coughs or fever or any number of other ailments. No doubt my parents worried about me a great deal.

  But early on I discovered the secret of dreaming, of stepping into worlds created by the unconscious mind and taking control. The fashion now is to refer to such a practice as lucid dreaming, but at the time I encountered the idea in a popular weird fiction magazine, it was merely known as Dreaming. The capital stood for the control one influenced over the imagined worlds. Dreaming was my escape from countless pokes and concoctions from doctors and faith healers. Indeed, I spent so much time in the lands of sleep that I constructed a city therein, a glimmering city of gold and precious jewels, inhabited by all the heroes of my reading. Conan the Barbarian resided there, and Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes, all the idols of a sickly boy, alongside my sometime friends and playmates and, later, girls whom I admired from afar.

  At the center of this bejeweled city was my palace, an inverted, cathedral-like building of crystal. It sparkled and scintillated with an interior luminescence, lighting the city even at night, brighter than the moon but softer than the sun. There I ruled as a child-king, directing my subjects in their quests and great feats.

  I grew older. The city faded as my body grew healthier. By the time I graduated college, I had almost forgotten the dreamcity, though it periodically appeared in my subconscious dreams. Studies and romance and friendships had drowned out childhood fancy. By middle age, nothing remained of that shining city. Mundane toil, a wife and child, the demands of daily life, had erased the thing completely. Still, some nights I would wake, and for an instant remember a glimpse of that inverted palace, glowing in the night.

  Then one day, as I toiled at my desk, a brief glorious vision struck me. My city, as it was in the old days, shining as a diamond and bursting with light and laughter. All my middle-aged lassitude slipped away and I desired to dwell within that city once again.

  And now, I go in search of my past.

  Twenty-Second Luong

  Seeking that childhood dreamcity, I stepped out from the eighty-first gate of the City of Countless Doors into the Void-Between-Voids, and there I saw much which has been forgotten throughout history, and still more which was never learnt.

  Cadaver-titans wallow there, cosmic beings lost to memory before our civilizations were conceived. In the lee of such fallen titans, massless hordes ebb and flow, their cities anthills upon an elephant’s corpse. Eons flow past and yet these long-abandoned corpses linger on, ravaged but enduring. Many memories and nightmares stalk such charnel cities, last remnants of souls haunting those who inhabit their remains. Consuming the flesh of a titan, even a dead one, is a perilous act, and to huddle in the aura of unimaginable power brings awareness of secrets vaster than living minds may safely comprehend.

  For an unguessable age I wandered amongst the whiteness of the void, searching for the dreamcity of my youth. My footfalls echoed in temples built before the first human left the cradle of Africa, pleasure-palaces of beings even the most ancient of races knew not, cities which were to Olympus as Xanadu is to London, vistas of such exquisite beauty that even my memories of mother and wife and child greyed in comparison. But still my dreamcity called to me, and I wandered on.

  Seventy-Fourth Luong

  At last the labyrinth streets of Akhule Otimnhir swallowed me up with a sigh, and I walked its alleys and thoroughfares as a Buddhist walks a mandala. In contemplation I sought to regain those long-dormant childhood dreamlands whence my radiant dreamcity had come. All that lingered from those carefree days was a memory of an inverted crystalline palace, balanced on its central spire. So much I could see clearly. But remembrance is not the same as experience, and I greatly desired to dwell in that dreamcity once again.

  As any Dreamer knows, all forgotten dreamworlds drift slowly into the Void-Between-Voids and rest there for eternity and a day. A dedicated explorer might step among the dusty creations of young Einstein, or wander the twisted hallways and unnatural geometry which Hitler once imagined. I had no such lofty goals. All my desire was bound up in that diamantine palace, to stand at its peak once again and look over my lands.

  At times I stood in Akhule Otimnhir’s five-cornered squares watching crowds swirl by, charting patterns of infinite complexity. Exported Victorians haggled with the city’s native deiphagists, ethereal beings glided past crinoid things, all interacting in a grim pavotte orchestrated by the pipe of dreams. For even the Void-Between-Voids, the absence of all existence, is subject to the whims of the blind idiot piper. Though in many worlds Azathoth remains unknown, in the Void-Between-Voids some offer sacrifice to deepen his slumber while others seek realms outside all thought in hopes they will be beyond his reach. It is in the shops
and libraries of such escapists I hoped to find a trace of my childhood dreamcity.

  Nineteenth Faroe

  A voice accosted me as I wandered blindly near the abattoir mines wherein the city finds its sustenance. Ducking through a beaded curtain of knucklebones, I found myself facing the first female deiphagist I had ever met. The males of the deiphagists are fish-belly pale, their faces misshapen and lopsided, and their arms stretch almost to the knee. This female, and all others I subsequently encountered, was corpse-grey, and though their facial structure is often distorted, it is not to the extent of the male deiphagists. This creature’s husband, it appeared, was one of the flesh-miners toiling not far distant. She informed me that often these miners uncovered dim chunks of some crystalline but malleable material. As the chunks were not the flesh on which they dined nor the bone with which they built, the miners ignored their discovery at first. But one enterprising worker brought out a fist-sized lump and displayed it at market, where a traveler recognized pure memory of a titan. For titans are unlike the beings which serve them. Their memories and their deeds become intrinsically part of their physical form, just as they are sustained and grow ever stronger from the offerings of their slaves.

  Soon, other miners brought forth fragments of the titan’s past, competing to find the valuable lumps or even stealing them. For explorers of the mind’s vast reaches quickly realized that titan-memories allowed dreaming states which no poppy or charm could recreate.

  Swayed by the deiphagist’s urgings, I purchased one slim mass of titan-self and departed furtively back to my lodgings. At every junction I glanced around, expecting vengeance from the long-dead titan’s long-dead acolytes. Though I had abandoned any trappings of religion years ago, and though I dwelled beneath the undecayed corpse of a titan, an indescribable sense of transgression now gripped me.

  Alone in my dim room, I studied the crystalline thing. It sat upon my mussed bed, slowly changing hues under the inconstant candlelight. Observed carefully, the titan-self seemed to pulsate with a steady rhythm. As my vision narrowed and focused upon that transcendent stone, my own heartbeat slowed to match the awful throb of a corpse-pulse

  At length, growing bold, I produced my pocketknife and sawed off a thin piece of gelatinous crystal. With a hesitating reverence, I placed the thin slice under my tongue. A bitter copper taste engulfed me. I struggled not to vomit. Immense quiet dropped over the city, yet I heard every breath of every living creature. And then time juddered. Snatches of conversation in tongues forgotten when Egypt was young. Sensations of ecstasy and abhorrence. First one sense, then another, battered by memories of a being ten trillion times my superior, every nerve-ending more acute and alive than the synapses of my brain. A dreadful sense of power consumed me.

  I strode amongst great cities and palaces, labyrinthine mazes haunted by unquiet ghosts and far worse fiends, forests and gardens fruitful with plants I did not know but recognized all the same, battlefields filled with inhuman screams and ghastly forms. But nowhere was my dreamcity to be found.

  Some time later I found myself kneeling on the rough floor of my garret room. My body convulsed with the aftershocks of a phenomenal cosmic power. Sweat ran in rivulets to pool on the bone floor. I stood in the center of a city built from the skeleton of what I had inhabited mere moments ago.

  As the last vestiges of titan memory left me, I wept. The damp air of the deiphage city wrapped around me like the arms of a drowned lover.

  I felt hollow, as I had never felt before. To know titanhood for even an instant, only to return to this bleak existence… A weaker man might have gone mad. Not I. Nor did I wait to ingest another wafer of the dead titan. Perhaps this flash of memory and glory would show me my childhood dreamcity.

  Sixty-Eighth Faroe

  Again and again I delve into the soul of a dead titan, searching for that elusive dreamcity I once called home. Days and nights crawl by, swifter than any bird yet never-ending as infinity. The chunk of titan-self grows small. I dread lest some other seeker find my dreamcity first and profane it with their presence. More titan-self is needed.

  Seventy-Fourth Faroe

  Every journey to that deiphagist woman’s shop fills me with revulsion. In each passerby’s visage I see malignant marks of dissolution. These base creatures dine on the great luminous being whose memories I have lived. Unknowing, unheeding, they desecrate a being more glorious than the sun. Knaves. After I find my dreamcity, I will preserve the life of this titan. I will write down each event, each miracle, each great feat. It will be a new epic. A new Gilgamesh, a new Iliad.

  Twelfth Dognacht

  Days pass, then weeks. I cloister myself in the garret lodging, emerging only to eat or replenish the supply of titan-self. Though magnificent vistas and glorious sights reveal themselves unto me, none are my own dreamcity of youth.

  But as time slips past, I no longer care whether I rediscover my childhood haunt. Rather, it seems paramount that the dead titan’s memory be recorded. I delve deeper into the titan-self, purchasing not just from the first deiphagist woman, but from many vendors in back alleys and side streets. The power of a titan sears my mind day and night. And yet. And yet, when I put pen to paper in order that the titan might be revered, all words fail. The experience cannot be translated into mere mortal language.

  Forty-Seventh Totemphatht

  My money runs low. Already I forgo meals for more titan-self. Try as I might, no words flow. At the same time, the memory of my dreamcity has faded until only the vaguest impression of that crystalline inverted palace remain.

  Ninetieth Totemphatht

  This titan knew much, and its power consumes me. But for all its power and knowledge, the lingering titan-self cannot satisfy my desire. Instead I have been filled with an aching void which demands substance I cannot provide. Is this how the deiphagists feel in the end?

  First Unkemsprecht

  Today I glimpsed a mirror. I did not recognize myself. My skin was pale, and my face was not my own. What have I become?

  Fifty-Sixth Unkemsprecht

  I was searching for something. Something important. Can’t seem to remember what it was. Once, though, I was a titan.

  Seventieth Unkemsprecht

  I don’t remember my name…

  First Luong

  My name is Akhule Otimnhir. Eons ago I ruled a thousand stars. Now, I am reborn.

  THE TRAGEDY OF CROWS

  I: Sæmundr on Crows

  Odin has two ravens: Wisest of bird-kind.

  But crows in their murder, jealous

  As swart and grasping elves,

  Plotted to steal one sip of crystal

  Water from that Mimir-guarded

  Well. Stones they bore aloft,

  To splash in that silent deep whence

  Knowledge and wisdom trickle

  Into the earth. Pebble by pebble,

  The water crept higher; but an eagle,

  Keen-eyed, warned

  Old Mimir laxly drowsing.

  Thus crows quarrel with eagles.

  II: Hugin and Munin

  Rotting leaves. The ground is littered

  With winter’s damp refuse.

  Two lean, half-molted crows squabble

  With a bread-fat pigeon;

  On the asphalt bike path

  A couple shears apart.

  The old myths have faded

  Out of memory and thought,

  Like dead leaves turning to dirt.

  III: Wings Full of Gaps

  An intricate skein of lace,

  Time slips away softly,

  Falling out of step;

  A south-bound goose

  Straggles behind its flock.

  Human memory fades sooner

  Than ocean breakers crashing

  Against the Moher cliffs.

  But eagles remember

  Old ways, bloody gods,

  And the treachery of crows.

  IV: No Place Within the World

 
Before cave-dweller first stood upright,

  Crows flew.

  Sharp-beaked, they devoured corpse-heaps

  In great charnel cities

  Now lost to oceans and jungles.

  Eagles circled

  And observed the doom

  Which came to proud Sarnath.

  IRELAND BELONGS TO THE DEAD

  I’ve always been ashamed when Shane McGowan asks, “Have you ever walked the lonesome hills, or heard the curlews cry, or seen the raven black as night upon the wind-swept sky?” For years, my answer was no. And I was ashamed. And now my answer is yes, I have done these things, Shane, and I wish it weren’t so. The curlew’s shrill keening holds only loneliness. A black-winged raven wheeling in widening blue-grey gyres brings only sorrow. Ireland belongs to the dead.

  All my life, I’ve been proud of my Irish blood—what drops grace my mongrel pedigree—and heritage: St. Patrick, Catholicism, “Danny Boy,” Guinness. Oh, sure. I could tell you about the horrors Ireland survived. The Potato Famine. Oliver Cromwell. The Easter Rising. The Black and Tans. But they were just names and facts to me, snug in my home reading sanitized stories of Cuchullain or Red Hugh O’Donnell. All the same, I was proud.

  Here, in the looming shadow of the Burren’s rocky hills, all my pride is gone. It’s hard to care about Ireland’s past glories when you’re dripping wet and struggling to light a stack of peat bricks to help the toiling radiator. Sure, you’re soaked from your own stupidity in being caught out in a rainstorm, and the peat blocks won’t catch because you’re incompetent at starting fires, but it still takes your mind from Roddy McCorley or Kevin Barry. And walking the lonesome hills leaves little time for thinking about Fenian rebels. The scrubby brush and long wicked vines with their tearing thorns are more than enough to keep your attention. Losing your footing up on the Burren’s hills can result in a long slide down, and the rocks are slick with winter rain. I wonder now why anyone would find Ireland worth dying for. Frank McCourt’s father made his boys swear to die for this country. This land of rock and rain and memories. It’s cold here. And wet. Why did Cromwell want Ireland? Why did anyone want Ireland? Having climbed the hills surrounding Ballyvaughan village, I don’t understand what sort of maniac would keep climbing a slope littered with slick sharp rocks and treacherous spongy moss and tripwire thorny vines, crest ridge after ridge while never reaching the summit, and decide, “By all the gods, I like it here!” I’m not such a person, though I’d like to pretend otherwise.

  But for millennia, settlers and raiders have visited Ireland. Ring forts—earthen doughnuts glazed with brilliant emerald grass and sprinkled liberally by whitethorn and scrub brush—mar the Irish landscape like gargantuan acne scars. More than forty thousand such excavations litter Ireland. Each one belonged to men and women who had been dead fifteen hundred years when St. Patrick first stepped onto Irish soil. And they cannot be removed. Whether fearing fairies or European Union penalties, no farmer will touch the forts. And so these reminders of the old ways remain, sheltering nothing but cows and scrub where sheep and their owners would have huddled in the cold damp of ages ago. What kind of men and women were these dead people? Did they carry a foolish pride in their clans? Were they happy? Or was life nothing but a hardscrabble drudge of rain and filth and death?

  Death certainly was a constant for these ancient Celts. Their wedge tombs and cairns and dolmens dot the Burren. Thousands of ancient graves, some older than the Egyptian Pyramids, too many to even begin excavating. In each of the few crypts archaeologists have examined, dozens of skeletons lay jumbled. None of these early settlers survived beyond thirty years of age.

  Small surprise, then, that even as far back as Roman times there’s anecdotes that the “Hibernians” partook of the poitin a bit too much. When your landlord demands rent and you’ve nothing but your house and a couple scrawny cows, you might as well have a drink. And if you’re having a drink, might as well go down to the pub for it. It’s warm there, after all, and your neighbors will be there, too. So you have a pint, and another one, it’s toasty from a roaring fire, and you’ve another pint still and play a hand of cards, and Big Malachy McCabe and Sean Moloney are playing fiddle and accordion lively-like, and Jimmy Lanigan buys a round, and you forget your sorrows—Ah, there’s a lot of ‘em—and you tell some stories. About the Good Folk, maybe, or heroes like Cuchullain, long dead now, and there’s the dead again, coming back to haunt you. No escape from those unquiet ghosts, even in the warmth and the music and the fine company.

  The rich folks thought they could run from Ireland’s dead. The British landlords were fools. Ghosts don’t lie quiet here. For all the gentry’s money and influence, they couldn’t get away. Sure, sure, they paid and cajoled to get Galway’s gallows moved outside the walls, away from their fine homes. Those fools. There’s bones piled six feet deep below Galway’s streets. When the rich strolled down cobbled Galway roads or picnicked in Eyre Square, they strolled and picnicked atop ancient graves. What about ceili dancing? Ceili dancing’s no escape either. What kind of freedom is there in stepping and spinning to “The Siege of Ennis” or “The Battle of Aughrim?” All the sets and fancy patterns ever danced won’t make those battles less bloody or return their slain to the living world. Death’s grip can’t be escaped. These aren’t tales of the Daoine Sidhe where you can waltz off free through trickery or courage.

  Not that old tales will survive much longer. Take Eddie Lenihan, say. A grasshopper of a man, all agitated movement and Gandalf beard, Lenihan doesn’t tell stories—he becomes them, bouncing around, clutching his throat, waving his arms frantically. Listening to Lenihan pontificate on fairy forts or the inherent danger of cutting a whitethorn bush (if he doesn’t believe in the Good Folk, he hides it well), you begin to wonder if maybe, just maybe, there is Another Crowd out there, behind the veil. The remnants of a defeated race, still haunting their former land. Lenihan hops around, gesticulating, as he describes a fairy hurling match, and you’d think him a sugar-laden child on Christmas morning. Then you see his hands shake a bit as he sips from a glass of water, notice all the sources of his stories are old or dead, wince when he admits he can’t drive anymore due to his health. Slowly, it sinks in—Eddie Lenihan is one of the last seanchai, one of the few remaining storytellers. How many legends will go with him to his grave in three decades, two decades, one? Too many. Dead tales for a dead land.

  The old tongue is fading, too. Irish Gaelic may be a mandatory subject in school but that doesn’t mean a tourist is likely to hear it spoken. In Galway, a city with high percentages of Irish-speakers (a grand 10% of the population), you might be lucky enough to catch some phrases tossed about by greying men over their pints, or witness a teenager, prodded by his father, keen out a few sean-nós verses at night’s end. Irish Gaelic is obsolete now. Stores display it out of legal obligation, but business is conducted in English.

  What business there is. Ireland suffers through its second recession in ninety years. Limerick’s side-streets and apartment-fronts are littered with garbage. Every third store is shuttered, imprisoned behind metal bars. Dog waste spots the sidewalks like canine-produced landmines. Ballyvaughan—picturesque Ballyvaughan with its little stone church with the one stained-glass window and its cozy pubs full of warmth and delicious curry smell, all surrounded by the Burren’s hostile majesty—is three-quarters closed. Most of the stores are shuttered for the winter, the tourist off-season. Rumors around town claim some shops won’t survive another year. I wish I’d more money to spend, fiscal life-support.

  One of my housemates survives on potatoes. Just potatoes, lots of them, with butter and salt. There’s an irony there. A sick sort of humor which must be necessary to survive here. When the weather and landscape conspire against you and you’ve sold your last cow to make rent, that ability to visit the pub and laugh about life over a pint must be evolution at its peak. Whatever that genome is, I lack it. While I can recognize the dark hilarity, I cannot laugh at it. I’m n
ot Irish enough to live here. And I’m glad of it.

  Ireland belongs to the dead. Every blade of emerald grass, every slab of Burren limestone, every turf of peat—all of it remembers. The countryside is dotted with property lines and old homes both ruined and intact. Each stone wall dividing Ireland into forty shades of green is the work of some long-dead farmer or herder laboring countless hours to lift heavy chunks of stone into place. Despite layers of jackets and sweaters, the cold and damp leach into your bones like the Morrigan’s unwavering glare. Crow-headed they called her. Are those ravens or the Morrigan’s favored bird circling above at grey dusk? According to some versions of Cuchullain’s death, the enemy army didn’t dare approach his dying form until they saw a bird perch on his shoulder and sip the blood from his battle-wounds. What no version mentions is: Was it a crow, or was it a raven? A carrion-bird, or the death-goddess herself? Does it even matter? The land remembers its dead. Bernie McGill’s words don’t apply here: “Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.” Ireland’s phantoms aren’t quiet. They scratch at the windowpanes and howl around the chimney. They remember. The land remembers. And it will not let you forget: Ireland belongs to the dead.

  Ireland is beautiful. The Burren’s karst landscape, all jagged grey rock ripping up through scraggly grass like a steak knife through deer hide, could bring tears to your eyes. (Or maybe it’s the pain of twisting your ankle when that clump of moss doesn’t have a rock supporting it after all.) It wouldn’t be hard to just sit in a pub like Lough’s in Ballyvaughan or Taffe’s in Galway and never leave, living off Bulmers and chips until that’s all your blood and flesh were. But I don’t belong. I wasn’t raised here in this dualistic land of the dead and the sublime. Trodding on graves is bad enough done occasionally: I couldn’t live my life where sidewalk hides skeletons. Ireland’s harsh splendor and unquiet dead are not for me. And I can accept that. I’ve seen what my life could be, surrounded by old glory and old ways gradually being subsumed into modernity. And that glimpse of ferocious beauty will sustain me for a lifetime in the valleys of the easy mundane.

  Still, I miss Ireland; I miss it with a hollow ache I’ve never felt for family nor girlfriend nor cherished memory. I brought back a bit of the Old Country, clinging to my soul, and my longing isn’t a tenth or a hundredth of how the emigrants once hurt. Ireland belongs to the dead, but Ireland haunts the living.

  THE FAIRY-ROAD OF EISCIR RIADA

  It’s a long, winding road from Galway to Cloonfush

  Through wasteland filled with wails and rasping teeth.

  If you stop your market cattle and bid them hush,

  You can hear a fairy-woman laughing on the heath.

  Years ago a drover camped in the early dark

  And ate his bread; his herd munched road-brush.

  He fueled the fire and hummed “The Red Lark;”

  Thirteen horses flew by in a headlong rush.

  As the riders thundered by, a woman shrilly laughed—

  The kind of laugh that wives and parsons fear,

  Which drives a steady sane man daft.

  The night wore on but her voice lingered in his ear.

  Down off the high road the hapless fairy-mad

  Gibbered, and ground their rotting teeth;

  The lowing cattle began to freely gad,

  And the fairy-woman still laughed wildly over the heath.

  Out in the dark echoed the glassy trill

  Of the unseelie woman’s ghastly glee:

  He shook with a fearful, sinful thrill

  And joined the dead in the high road’s shadowed lee.

  It’s a long, winding road from Galway to Cloonfush

  Through wasteland filled with wails and rasping teeth.

  If you stop your market cattle and bid them hush,

  You can hear that drover screaming on the heath.

  HALLOWED GROUND

  Seamus Rafferty, oldest fisher in Ballyvaughan, lay alone before the altar. No family knelt near his flimsy pine coffin. In fact, the church of Mary Stella Maris sat empty save for Seamus in his coffin and young Father Brendan in his vestments.

  As he stumbled through the Requiem Mass, Father Brendan was almost glad for the absence of mourners. A botched funeral could damage his standing in the isolated village even further. Already he felt the parishioners barely tolerated him. His youth, his unfamiliarity with their customs and dialect, his books of canon law. Ballyvaughan wanted Father Duncan back, but Father Duncan had been recalled for his near-heretical writings. So Father Brendan arrived and sent Father Duncan away.

  But even the village’s polite dislike of Father Brendan did not explain why no mourners were present at Seamus Rafferty’s funeral. The old fisher had a large and loving family, and a reputation for generosity and kindness towards all. Why, just last night at the man’s wake—Father Brendan was present to pronounce a few edifying words—hadn’t three separate friends lamented the world was worse off with Seamus Rafferty gone?

  Father Brendan puzzled over this mystery until he intoned the last “Requiescat in Pace, Amen” over Seamus’ body, whereupon Michael the sacristan peeked in to announce that six strong men were here to carry the coffin.

  Michael was older than Seamus by far, but lacked the honorary of “Old Michael.” Instead, locals called him Sacristan Michael to distinguish him from various other Michaels roundabouts. Though a bit crook-legged, Michael remained spry and spent his free time, when not tending the church, documenting local ruins and history. Father Brendan found Michael an invaluable guide to area customs: The second Angelus at evening, the strange fishers’ prayers in neither Latin nor Gaelic nor English, the taboo against naming the drowned dead, the red doors to “ward the Gentry away.”

  After removing his vestments, Father Brendan followed Seamus’ coffin and the six strong men into the mid-morning drizzle. They walked out from the village and hiked up into the low surrounding hills, where a square of grass and dirt nestled within a dip in the stone as if cupped in a giant’s hand. Up above on a higher ridge stood a great dolmen of roofed standing stones. The empty void between the stones lay thickly shadowed even for this overcast day.

  On an early ramble through the country round, Father Brendan had noted that great portaled tomb. Inquiring with Michael, the priest learned ancient inhabitants of the Burren had chipped long low passages out of the stone, vast burial chambers that stretched back as far as anyone cared to explore in flickering torchlight.

  The six strong men lowered Seamus Rafferty to the ground. The old fisher’s coffin flexed precariously and the scrap wood creaked. One of the wooden pegs seemed ready to pop loose. A shallow grave awaited, scarcely deep enough to hold the coffin, water already pooling in the bottom. Good ground was scarce in Burren country.

  While the coffin-bearers caught their breath, Father Brendan glanced around this lonely cemetery. No headstones marked fellow resters-in-Christ. Perhaps each family kept their own graves.

  A slight sensation of weakness caused him to feel for his heartbeat. The pulse was irregular and very faint at times. The doctors in Dublin said his heart was faulty. It had not barred him from seminary and priesthood, however.

  Turning back from his reverie, Father Brendan found the pallbearers lowering Seamus into his grave. Hurriedly, he began final prayers for the deceased. But he had scarcely intoned the first “Dona eis requiem” when one of the men—stocky Rod McCorley—stopped him with an exclamation. “Nae, Father. Your work is done here. Best you be off now.”

  Gawping in befuddlement, Father Brendan failed to chastise the man, simply stumbling back to Ballyvaughan. His ears roared with blood and the world swam about. What sort of madness was this? To hold wake and funeral for the dead, but deny their last prayers? This could not be explained as some local custom.

  When he emerged from his stunned state, he found himself in church. Kneeling before the altar, Father Brendan prayed for guidance. In seminary, he had learned many things, many nu
ances of the faith. Everything appeared so simple then, so easy. Now he wandered in the shadow of despair. “Good Lord, guide my words and actions.”

  Michael interrupted the young priest’s prayer. “Ah, Father. I’ve just touched-up that pitcher of Our Lord o’er there…”

  Standing up, Father Duncan loomed over the sacristan. “Michael, I demand an explanation. Why did Rod McCorley send me away before I could pray over old Seamus’ grave?”

  “Yeh prayed o’er t’grave?” Michael paled.

  “I did not. Though I should have insisted. I failed in my duty as pastor.” Father Brendan clamped onto Michael’s gaunt shoulders. “Why did they send me away, Michael? Such behavior is not in line with doctrine.”

  A sigh of relief from Michael, then a yelp as Father Brendan tightened his grip. “It’s how we’ve always done. Ever since the old days before even this church stood here, before the stone fortress this church used t’be, all the way back to before the first priests came. The dead, we bury them in the hollows, an’ no one prays o’er them. Then after a year or so their bones go into the dolmen above. It’s always been that way… Tis a path of the Gentry up nigh that place, and they dinnae care for hallowed ground. Father Duncan saw no harm in’t.”

  The last words were delivered in a wheedling tone which made Father Brendan’s gorge rise. Father Duncan. Father Duncan. Could he never escape that old heretic’s shadow?

  “Father Duncan was a schismatic and recalled to face punishment.”

  “Maybe, but he understood. Unhallowed ground and no prayers o’er the grave. The way it must be. Best yeh just leave such things alone. Best not to meddle in the old ways. The Gentry don’t care for nosy pikers.”

  Unhallowed ground and unsanctified burial. Father Brendan reeled. Anger threaded through him. His pulse quickened and he shook. He must calm down. The doctors said his heart could fail. He must calm down—All the world went white.