Black Harvest (10 page)

“Yes. At the bar. It was the only place open, but there’s a man there who drives a taxi in his spare time. He’s coming. He was still in bed so I started walking back. I thought he’d have caught up with me on the road. Anyway, she says Sligo’s the nearest place with a hospital, she said go there.”

“But why isn’t he here, Colin? Why won’t anybody help us?” She sounded peevish, like a spoiled little girl. Colin opened his mouth irritably, then shut it again. She must be much more worried than any of them had realized. It had been far worse for her than anyone else, all those hours alone with Alison. He said quietly, “I’m sure he’ll be here soon, Mum. He had to get petrol. Don’t worry.”

He left her at the front door, staring stonily up the track, and went into the kitchen. Oliver was sitting at the table looking into Eileen O’Malley’s basket. His face was colourless. He said in a whisper, “Colin, I just don’t believe this.”

“What’s up, Oll? You look like a sheet.” But he knew, even as he said it. There was that mustiness in the atmosphere again, and a sharp, bitter smell he’d met once before.

“I can’t believe it,” Oliver stammered again. “Honestly, I can’t. But look, and she only made these this morning. They were going to take them to Galway or something.”

The two brown loaves were spongy and soft, and a green furriness was spreading over them, like hair. In angry panic Colin plunged his arm into the basket and brought the cake out. It was a crumbling, sodden mess, sticky in his hands, and gave off the smell of sickly, over-fermented beer. The milk was in two bottles, but the green foil tops were swollen and cracked across, as if the contents had turned to grey ice.

Now Oliver knew, and was part of it with them. Now he too had heard the baby crying in the night and felt the unnatural heat. Here in his hands was decay itself. His busy brain ached as he tried to find comforting explanations for all that had happened. But he found none.

Colin thought he heard someone coming down the hall. He grabbed the basket. “It’s Prill. The taxi’s here. Look, I’ll do the explaining, Oll. Don’t let’s frighten her. I’ll get rid of this lot right now.”

He took everything outside and Oliver heard glass smashing inside a dustbin. He stayed at the kitchen table staring down at a brown pool of foul-smelling liquid that had oozed out between the mesh of the basket.

“Y
OUNG DANNY
” was fifty if he was a day, little, fat, bald, and cheerful like his mother. Colin felt comforted as he helped Mum and Alison into the car. The baby was actually asleep but the minute she woke up she would probably start yelling, and Mrs Blakeman would need someone to talk to on the journey. It was a long way to Sligo and the ancient car couldn’t have a top speed of more than fifty. Under all the rust it was probably held together with Sellotape.

Mrs Blakeman promised to try and phone them. Failing that, she would leave a message at Danny’s Bar, and she said she would ring Dad, too. Colin was in charge, and they were not to worry. She was sorry to leave them on their own but they couldn’t all go to Sligo. Anyway, she could well be back by tomorrow night.

All this was delivered in a flat monotone. She wasn’t really
interested in them any more, she just wanted to get away. Prill hugged her fiercely but she almost pushed her out of the way as she shut the car door. It was like touching someone asleep, or dead.

Prill ran up the track after the car and watched it turn right towards Ballimagliesh. The two children, in their peculiar tasselled shawls, were standing right in the middle of the road with arms outstretched. Their fingers spiked the sky like winter branches.

Young Danny couldn’t have seen the children because he changed gear, revved hard, and drove straight at them. It was a good road from here to the hill above the village and he may as well pick up a bit of speed.

Prill screamed wildly, “Mum! Mr Malone! Let them get out of the way! You’ll run them down! Please, stop! What are you
doing
?” As the car rolled forwards over them she shut her eyes, waiting for the screech of brakes and tyres, for glass shattering, the cries, the bloody mess in the road. But the taxi simply chugged off steadily towards Ballimagliesh, and the quiet of the countryside dropped over her again. When she opened her eyes she could see the two small figures a little farther off, still standing motionless in the middle of the road, their hands stretched out towards her.

She turned her face from them and tore back along the track, stumbling over stones, tripping up in the dusty potholes. She just wanted to sleep, to lie in the darkness till this nightmare world had lost its hold upon them. She couldn’t fight it any more.

When she got back the two boys were poking about in the hole. She slipped quietly into the kitchen. Jessie was now stretched out full length in the middle of the floor, unnaturally still. She looked dead. In sudden panic Prill dropped to her knees and flung her arms round the big dog’s neck, rubbing her cheek against its face. Jessie had been a member of the family for a long time now. How many times had Prill turned to this loyal, utterly accepting creature, when everything was going wrong? How many times had the dog’s simple affection given her comfort?

But now she gave a sharp warning growl, and as soon as Prill slackened her arms she stood up and dragged herself away to the other end of the kitchen, as if she was in pain and wanted to be on her own till it had passed.

Prill noticed that she’d only eaten one half of one biscuit. The mess under the table suggested she’d simply played with the rest and spewed them out half eaten. Her bowl of meat was untouched, and it was warm in the kitchen. The stuff was alive with maggots.

Prill’s throat tightened. She closed her eyes and turned away. When she opened them again she was looking up at a shelf. There was Dr Donovan’s pink juice, untouched, almost offering itself to her. The label prescribed two teaspoonfuls for babies under one. Prill was nearly twelve. She found a soup spoon and swallowed four doses. It might just give her a few hours’ sleep, at worst it would make her feel sick, and that would be nothing new.

She crept into her bedroom, closed the window, and
pulled the curtains across. It was hot again, but she was past caring. She took off all her clothes and lay sweating under a single sheet, praying that sleep would come.

Outside, Oliver and Colin were arguing about something. Prill closed her eyes. She felt pleasantly drunk and quite sleepy. She would definitely drift off now. She hoped she would never wake up.

Colin was soon pedalling along the road on Kevin O’Malley’s bicycle. It was one of two he’d found in the farmer’s tin garage. On his back was a small rucksack with Dr Moynihan’s flashlight in it, and some food he’d bought in the village.

He was going back to the Yellow Tunnel, but this time he wanted to explore it from the top end. A framed map of Ballimagliesh and district that hung in the hall of the bungalow showed a footpath running from behind Ballimagliesh Church across the fields to the old chapel. He might have another look round the ruins before going down the tunnel again.

Oliver was an obstinate pig. His precious hole was quite big enough now and he was making a mess with the soil, but he still wanted to carry on digging. Perhaps he thought he was really a rabbit. He was crazy.

Colin hadn’t managed to persuade him to leave off. He’d obviously stopped bothering about what was “allowed”, anyway. Prill had gone off to bed and stuck a notice on her door that said “Do not disturb”, so perhaps it was as well that someone had stayed behind. At least she wouldn’t wake up
and find nobody around; and she quite liked Oliver now. They’d be all right together till he got back.

He sat by the little pool in the chapel ruin munching an apple and swigging milk. The food tasted great in the open air, miles away from that bungalow, and he ate nearly all the biscuits before stuffing the packet back into the rucksack. They should all have come really, it was better out here.

There was one thing to do before going down the tunnel. As well as a penknife he’d brought some pan scourers from the kitchen. It was some minutes before he found what he was looking for, the mouldering, mossy headstones all looked much alike, but at last he located it, knelt down, and set to work.

He rubbed away for a good half hour and by the end his fingers were bleeding and his hands raw. The tombstone must be three quarters buried, what he could see was only the top. It was rounded and the design was clearly visible now, a smiling skull with bones crossed underneath and angel heads flanking it at each side. In large Roman capitals was the single word “MORRISSEY” and a date, 1751.

Colin was puzzled. Mrs O’Malley had told them that Donal Morrissey was from County Donegal. He had come to Ballimagliesh as a young man and been taken on as a labourer on her father’s farm. She could still remember the stories he used to tell her about his grandmother Bridget who’d been widowed young and brought up eleven children in Kilmacrenan.

Colin stood back and looked at the stone from a distance.
Now the daylight fell sideways on the lettering, making it sharper. MORRISSEY. There was absolutely no doubt. He tried to think what had happened in history in the year 1751 but couldn’t think of anything. Yet it was nearly a hundred years before the Famine. And there was something else odd, too. In those days only the rich people could have afforded gravestones. The poor had planks of wood or were simply buried under mounds of earth.

Bridget Morrissey must have been very poor, left single-handed on a tiny farm with all those children, and anyway, that was much farther north, in Donegal. Donal Morrissey was ending his days in a tumbledown caravan, living on charity from the O’Malleys. He could never have been a rich man either, so it couldn’t be the same family.

Ten minutes later Colin was down in the tunnel. The part that had intrigued him was at the top end where it widened out, and where the rocky ceiling had developed a split. Looking up you could see grass waving and a piece of sky.

The storm had turned everything underfoot into mud. He squelched about shining his light over the rocky walls. The place smelt foul and was choked with litter. This was where the village kids congregated in the summer. They had carved initials all over the soft yellow rock.

Just above his head there was a long ledge. He scrambled up on to it, the soles of his sneakers adding grey, rubbery skid-marks to the dozens already there. It seemed there was nothing new to discover; he just found sweet papers and more initials, “Sean loves Mo. True. Very True.”, “Daniel L. =
Pauline B.” and “Kenny Boyce Rules OK.” What a let-down.

The ledge was quite wide, at a pinch you could sleep on it. Colin lay down. He couldn’t see the sky any more because the rock jutted forward and blotted out the light. He closed his eyes. For the first time in days he was cool, the dampness of the walls was seeping into his clothes and a mouldy smell filled his nostrils. He might be a corpse, lying there.

Over his head, through layers of earth and stones, he could hear thunder muttering again. What if a great storm blew up and filled the crack with mud, so he couldn’t get out? He could die here and nobody would know. He opened his eyes and grinned. He was getting like Prill.

He shone the flashlight directly over his head. Even here someone had been busy with a red felt-tip pen. “I love Rosanna O’Shea,” he read, but the letters were very wobbly. It wasn’t easy to write with your hand bent back at a horrible angle. Whoever loved Rosanna must be very determined.

Then he saw something else, bits of thin, spidery writing scratched into the rock. It was shaky copperplate script, the old-fashioned kind they’d been made to copy in First Year Juniors. “They shut the way through the woods,” he remembered writing laboriously, and “The Lord is my Shepherd”.

Some of it consisted of sets of initials. “C.H.M.” he made out and “T.M.’48”. Next to them, in a bigger hand, was the name “Rachel”. Under this the scratching was much fainter. “Lord Have Mercy” was written quite small but with the capital “L” elaborated with wavy lines, and next to it, “Pray for us now and in the hour of our death”. All round the bits of writing, in a kind of frame, someone had scratched the word “Salvation”, over and over again.

W
HILE
P
RILL SLEPT
and Colin was flat on his back in the Yellow Tunnel, Oliver was digging steadily and feeling a bit uncomfortable about what he’d told Colin. He didn’t really want to make the den any bigger, there were other, more important reasons for going on now.

The soil in the middle of the den, in the “hole within a hole”, was quite easy to move because it was finer than the rest. There were no hard clods, it was more like sand. It was here he’d found the silver thing and the shreds of silk, and a lot more pottery too, since then. He’d cleaned it all carefully and put it in a polythene bag. This was the place to dig.

The black plastic rubbish sack was getting quite heavy and he’d dragged it out from the bushes to have it near him. The bones and pieces of wood inside weighed quite a lot, and it saved him the bother of climbing in and out all the time.

The sky had been thickly overcast all morning and now Oliver felt a slight breeze on his face. It was getting quite dark and he could hear thunder in the distance. As he looked down into his den a large raindrop plopped on to his neck, followed by several more. Soon it was raining quite heavily, turning the freshly dug earth into thick mud.

Oliver threw his spade aside, scrunched the mouth of the black sack together, and weighted it down with a brick. That was the end of digging for today. But before going in he glanced back. The pelting rain was washing away at his careful excavations quite rapidly. The simple force of water was much more effective than anything he could do.

The rough hole was rapidly turning into a pit of mud. Puddles had formed in the bottom and the water splashed into them. As Oliver stared down something was happening, something that made him forget all about the cold water streaming down his neck, and the filth sloshing over his sneakers.

Shapes were edging up out of the mud. At first they looked like the remains of trees, a mess of lopped branches flung down the hole in a heap. Some had rough knobs on the end and one was oddly patterned, a main stem with pieces curving out from it, like the teeth of a huge comb. As the rain lashed harder the branches turned pale brown, then yellowish, and something on its own was gleaming perfectly white, like an overturned saucer.

Oliver opened his mouth and tried to breathe deeply. He couldn’t, neither could he swallow. It was as if a great lump of
gristle had stuck halfway down his throat. Fear rose and washed over him. First he was hot and tingling, then he was icy cold. His mouth felt dry, like paper.

He slithered down into the hole and tried to get his hands under the saucer thing, but it wouldn’t move, so he dug his fingers right down, trying to work out how deeply it was buried. It was hard, solid and quite narrow. Then one finger went into a hole. Oliver plunged the other hand up to the wrist in mud and got hold of the thing from underneath. Then he pulled hard.

It resisted for a moment, then shifted. He tightened his grip and pulled again, leaning back on his heels so that he could use all his weight to free the thing. It came quite easily then. The mud made a soft plopping noise and closed up again.

Oliver was no sitting in his hole plastered with mud. Aunt Phyllis’s scrubbed, combed little boy was totally un-recognizable. Every inch of flesh that showed looked as if someone had painted it with grey emulsion.

He was staring at the thing in his hands. It was only small, about the size of a small melon, but the child couldn’t have been so very young, it had all its adult teeth; he noticed that they were quite perfect. He ran his hands over the skull and turned it over. At the back, just at the base of it, his fingers felt shreds of hair.

Then something inside him snapped suddenly. He felt as if a giant boot had kicked him hard in the stomach and a spasm of pain jerked him to his feet. He flung his arms out,
still holding on to what he’d found, and was violently sick in the mud.

“When in doubt, have a bath.” Auntie Jeannie was always saying that; it was one reason he liked her. She wasn’t rigid about when you did things, not like his mother. At home it was
bath
– seven o’clock sharp;
wash hair
– Fridays;
cut toenails
– Mondays. On and on and on.

He needed a bath now to get the mud off, calm himself down, and warm up. He was feeling cold for the first time since coming to Ballimagliesh and as he climbed into the bath his teeth were chattering. He didn’t stay in it very long, the water was lukewarm and made him feel shivery. Then he remembered the electricity supply was off. This might be the last hot water for a long time. The house was getting colder.

He tried to wake Prill but she was fast asleep. He had peeped round the door and heard very deep breathing and the occasional snore. He’d given her a shake. “Prill,
Prill.
There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” he’d whispered. But she just wouldn’t wake up.

There was an awful smell in the kitchen. Vomit. Oliver almost stepped into the yellow pool as he went across the floor to open a window. The dog had been sick again.

She’d obviously tried to eat her dinner then sicked it up almost at once. She was back under the table, her nose buried in her great paws, but her eyes were open and staring at him lifelessly. He felt sorry for her. His mother wouldn’t let him have a pet because of the old people, and this dog had frightened him at first, she was so noisy and wild. But his two cousins adored her, especially Prill. Perhaps he could find that vet in Ballimagliesh and get him to come.

He found a mop and bucket in the utility room and sloshed soapy water over the kitchen tiles. He’d watched his mother clear messes up, nurses were used to it. She was always very businesslike and so was Oliver. If you worked quickly you could just about stop yourself throwing up.

When the floor was clean he threw Jessie’s food away and filled the bowl up with fresh water. He even patted her gently and she turned pleading eyes on him. Her dumb helplessness made Oliver want to cry. He must find that vet.

Before going out he left a note on the kitchen table. “Gone to Ballimagliesh. Will bring some food back. Oliver.” Nothing about what he had found in the muddy pit. Outside he pulled Kevin O’Malley’s piece of corrugated iron down into the hole, covering everything up. Prill wasn’t likely to go poking about in this weather, but he wanted to be there if she spotted anything.

He had planned to borrow Kevin’s racer, he could go fast on that. But it wasn’t there. Colin had obviously beaten him to it. He looked in dismay at the machine that was left, an ancient lady’s bicycle with a wicker basket fixed in front. It must weigh a ton. Still, the basket was useful. He placed the small package for Father Hagan in the bottom of it and pushed the old bike to the end of the track.