A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  The man seeking a wife coughed outside. He looked though the doorway and came in. The pound note was in his hand. ‘I hope I’m not after giving you a start, Miss Nally,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought the pound back.’

  She looked at him and it. ‘Well, I guess, Mr Carney, that’s good money.’

  ‘The best,’ he said deferentially. ‘But it’s what my brother does take but nine coppers, or nine pieces of silver, or nine pieces of gold.’

  ‘Is that so? I suppose it’s coppers he mostly gets.’

  ‘I won’t be denying it. There’s not been anyone but one Yank who could show him nine pieces of gold. And as many come back from the States with the name of a fortune they haven’t got, it’s small wonder.’

  ‘Then I guess, Mr Carney, I’m to give you nine coppers, and you give me back the pound. I’m real pleased at the charm being so cheap.’

  She took the note his fingers seemed reluctant to release, and his eyes lingered on her. ‘Have ye the grass safe?’ he asked.

  The answer had jerked from her lips, ‘I threw it away,’ when the Experimenter came down the stairs. His voice went before him; he was calling on his household. Everyone was to come up to the laboratory again. He pattered into the kitchen, threw one glance at the stranger, and swept him into the party.

  The little girl was not of it; she had wandered off into the mushroom field, and, eyes earthward, was moving among the red cows.

  Mary Nally was the first to speak. Her lower lip drooped, the white edge of a tooth showed as she bent over the mouth-piece. She dealt with the weather. The two men followed; and as each spoke, the Experimenter examined the plates, coils, and instruments, setting something in motion that interrupted by timed intervals the light of the sunbeam on the mirror. He appeared pleased, straightened himself, tapped the table with a finger, and addressed the three as he would have done a row of students. The sounds, he told them, had acted as he had anticipated. The magnetic field, mysteriously created, was no longer present. They had spoken their thoughts under natural conditions. There was no compulsion to follow a set formula of words.

  The molecules of the body loosened, as it were, by that unknown magnetic current had produced a hypnotic effect. They had been magnetised in the first experiment by induction – that was magnetised by another body which had been strongly magnetised. A magnetic field was created that held up and deflected the energies and activities of his instruments; and why it had done so (for it had not acted in such a way as the current might be expected to act), and where it had come from, was still a matter of conjecture to him.

  The human beings addressed bore varying expressions on their faces. The wife-seeker’s was full of the gravity that a fellow scientist might give. Words stood on his lips. His voice shot into the pause when the Experimenter ceased.

  ‘There’s not a man in Ireland, north, south, east, or west, that can do a better charm than my brother William,’ he said, and swelled with pride.

  The Experimenter’s eyes wandered out of the imaginary classroom, and he had an exact vision of the three. His mind reached for the words that had stopped at his ears. ‘Ah, indeed. What charms?’ he said.

  ‘I seen him take a bitteen of grass,’ said the wife-seeker, ‘and put it in a bowl of water and say the prayer of the saint of the muscles over it. That would be one charm. Many do be corning to him for it.’

  Mary Nally had reached the door. It opened and closed behind her with the speed of a gust of wind. Some minutes later Anthony appeared in the kitchen. He had not put any harm on what he had said, he told her; he had not let on that she had been to William.

  She thrust the one pound into his hand as if she were a wild thing about to claw him, and said some words, and he went away. In the field he met the little girl, and he stayed and talked to her. ‘She can’t do you a ha’penny worth of harm,’ he concluded, and walked on.

  The child came back to the house with the mushrooms in her blue apron. As her hands rattled the tea-cups in the basin of water, she watched Mary from the corner of her eyes. She watched her, as, dressed for visiting, she crossed the yard. When she was out of sight the child ran swiftly to the bedroom door and as swiftly ran back. Three times she pattered across the flags, and three times returned. And on each excursion to the door she carried a face of resolve, and each time she ran back, the resolution was broken and there was alarm in its place. On the fourth adventure the door fell open before her, and darting into the bedroom, she swooped upon the trunk.

  The Experimenter went out the next morning. About eleven, he reached the boreen that led to the slated house. He followed the boreen and saw a man going before him driving a donkey with creels of turf. The man limped. He and the donkey stopped before a half-built rick. The sods were thudding to the ground as the Experimenter reached them. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Are you William Carney?’

  The stooping figure straightened up and looked round at the voice. ‘Good morning. That’s my name.’

  ‘You have a charm, I hear; a magnet. You charge a piece of grass. How do you do it?’

  The sods thudded again. The man’s coat spread out like the brown wings of a hen as he stooped over them.

  ‘I am a scientist, and interested in your magnet. I wish to learn your method.’

  The answer was the sound of falling sods.

  The Experimenter raised his voice. ‘I ask you to show me how to magnetise a blade of grass so that it will create a wide magnetic field. I will pay you for your secret.’

  The hen-like wings swung up. William turned and studied the Experimenter’s face. ‘Do you want it done over yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, if that is the only way you can demonstrate.’

  ‘Are your muscles knotted?’

  ‘I am not rheumatic.’

  ‘What’s wrong with ye then?’

  ‘Nothing. I wish to investigate. I wish to learn if your charm is a real activity, or whether you are a humbug. I see you are lame. Why do you not cure yourself?’

  The sods fell again. That was a rhythm in the sway of the man’s arms; in the answering thud. Some minutes passed.

  Then he stood up, and his closed lips parted. He drew a deep breath, looked towards the fairy tree, and wiped the brown dust of his hands on has coat. ‘Come back to the house and I’ll make a cure,’ he said.

  He led the way, limping. The Experimenter followed with a sprightly step. He watched the rites closely. He took the bowl with the three blades of grass, and went after the man three times round the hawthorn tree. But the circle was made not sun-wise, from left to right, but left-hand wise. The water in the bowl was stirred, and the Experimenter told to take the grass that floated nearest to him.

  ‘Now carry it in your left hand and the bowl in your right, and walk back to the house.’

  The Experimenter did as directed. Suddenly he found that something had happened to his right foot; he was limping.

  It was early that morning that Mary Nally began to think of Anthony. She had thought of him before, but that was in a dream at the time that Bridgie met Anthony as he went by with a bullock to the fair. She remembered she had said some insulting things to him. She wondered how she could have thought of marrying a young fellow like John Naughton, instead of a sober, settled prudent man of years. About eleven she went to shake out the folds of her various suits, and take a glance at her bank-receipt. Before she reached the lower layers of her garments she knew that the charm had gone. Dramatically, slowly, she removed everything; then slowly, automatically, refilled the trunk. She sat for a space with tightened lips and eyes of steel. Who was the thief?

  The Experimenter! He had seen the grass!

  Then she went up the stair, putting her feet down heavily as a woman might who called on all to see her wrong. The laboratory door was locked. She shook it; beat on it, and turned angrily away. Prudence came and sat by her side as she waited in the hall, and laid calming hands upon her. Another thought stole in. She put on her silk suit, her rose-garlanded ha
t, her eight-carat bracelets, and left the house.

  It was noon, and the sun was breaking through the long-drawn white-grey clouds as she reached the boreen. A man was coming along the road. It was Anthony with the price of the bullock in his pocket. He was sober – that is, he had only had enough to show that he had been to a fair, a degree of sobriety that is not classed with ‘a drop taken’ – and the elegant figure by the boreen caught his eye. It was the rich ‘Yank’, the woman with whom he must match.

  And to her – Anthony in his good black suit, the green felt hat on his head, with his broad, red, matured face, his eyes just pleasantly brilliant – the man she had pictured in her matrimonial attains. His loud hearty greeting rang before him; they drew together. He swung her hand up and down for a minute. ‘Here’s the pound I borrowed off you!’ he said, ‘and another with it for interest!’

  William heard their voices and steps as they came down the boreen some minutes later. He stopped building the rick, and studied them for a few minutes. ‘Is the match made between ye?’ he called.

  The wife-seeker shouted it was, the pride of success on his face. The Experimenter sitting on the bank looked at Mary Nally. Her flinty eyes were upon him.

  He got off the bank, and standing by it, offered his congratulations. He spoke of happy married lives, of true love, of his pleasure in the happiness of a woman who had every quality to make the man she had chosen blessed. The wedding gift that he wished to give her should be one that she herself should name. It should be beautiful, it should be useful. And the woman with her man won, the new slated house before her, was pacified.

  He had a question to ask her, he said; was he lame? He asked it as a scientist. He had another thing to ask – a favour. Would she stand before him, and look straight into his eyes, and say, five times in a loud commanding voice, that he was not lame; that he was to walk without a limp down the lane. He was not joking. It was an experiment.

  She laughed gaily; stood before him, and did what he asked. Five times she spoke. He put one step forward, hesitated, moved again, gave one limp, and then walked with a firm and equal step down the boreen.

  William’s eyes followed him, wide gaping. He threw the sod in his hand on the ground, and went after the Experimenter. Anthony pulled the woman’s arm. ‘Lookit, lookit!’ he exclaimed, ‘the limp’s gone from William!’

  The Experimenter heard the steps and looked back. He walked on with strong strides till the man’s voice called twice. Then he stopped. Bare-headed, his black locks ruffled over his high forehead, William came towards him.

  There was deep respect in his tone. ‘Will you wait a minute, sir, I would ask you a question.’

  The Experimenter waited.

  ‘You made her spake five times. It’s nine or seven I’ve seen used. What would be the reason of the five?’

  ‘What is the secret in the blades of grass? And why have you never cured yourself till now?’

  ‘I swear by the Gospels that I know no more than that the charm is by the power of the saint of the muscles of the body. And I didn’t cure myself because I’d have to give my lameness to someone.’

  ‘You didn’t mind giving it to me!’

  ‘I heard you had gifts yourself, and ye vexed me with the questions ye were putting. I’ll be greatly thankful to you, sir, if you will say why you used the five.’

  ‘Five had no merit in it. Any other number would have done as well. But I was nervous. I used the power of suggestion. Good day!’

  A Story Without an End (For N.C.)

  DOROTHY MACARDLE

  (Mountjoy Gaol, December 1922)

  The War of Independence (or Anglo-

  Irish War) brought bloodshed and

  atrocity to nearly every corner of the

  island of Ireland between 1919 and

  1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended

  it partitioned the island into Northern

  Ireland and the Irish Free State, leading

  to a Civil War between Pro-Treaty and

  Anti-Treaty forces a few months later

  (1922–1923). Against that traumatic

  backdrop, this subtly weird story by

  Dorothy Macardle, written while she was

  imprisoned for her Anti-Treaty activities,

  might make us wonder what a ‘vision’

  really is – a precognitive dream, or a

  warning sent backwards through time?

  IT WAS SOON AFTER the truce began that Nesta McAllister came to Philadelphia. A little shyly she came among us and a little critically she was received; many of us had worked with Roger McAllister and delighted in him as the wittiest, believed in him as the most creative and inspiring of Ireland’s men, and we wondered, when we heard of his marriage, whether he had been lucky and wise.

  We liked Nesta; very young, very dark, she was, very serious at times, without the defiant gaiety that is the only armour for such a war as she had to wage.

  She contributed little to the talk and storytelling of those evenings, but loved to listen, and one felt in her a sensitive response to one’s precise meaning, one’s more discriminate thought, which made the talk grow subtler when she was there. Una, who knew her best, said of her: ‘She has lost herself in Roger’s life and mind.’ Frank said: ‘She is a little woman who’ll get hurt.’

  It was on one evening when we had been recalling old prophecies and forebodings and telling of omens and dreams that she told us her troubling story; she told it, I think, chiefly to hear us assure her that the dream could never come true.

  It had happened in January when she and Roger were living in hiding in the mountains of County Cork, he waging with his pen a campaign so dangerous to the enemy and so infuriating that we dreaded capture for him more than death. No man in Ireland was more remorselessly hunted then.

  ‘It was in the middle of the worst time of all,’ she said, ‘when martial law had been proclaimed and men were being tried by drum-head Court-Martial and shot on any pretext at all. You could be shot for “harbouring rebels”, you know. We didn’t harbour rebels, of course, because Roger’s work had all to be done “underground”; we lived without even a servant in a little four-roomed cottage in the hills. When it was necessary for Roger to meet the staff, he used to go off alone on his bicycle at night and come back just when there came a chance. Those, of course, were my worst times.

  ‘It was on a night when he was away that I had the dream. You know,’ she said, hesitating a little, ‘that I have had dreams sometimes that came true. I dreamed of my father’s stroke, though he was quite well, just before it came – I saw his face change – and my sister’s baby – before it was born. I saw it under the sea – and afterwards, in the Leinster, they were both drowned. It is terrible to dream like that.2

  ‘As a rule, when Roger was away I couldn’t sleep, but that night I was very tired and fell asleep before twelve o’clock. In the dream we were sitting, he and I, in a room lighted only by candles – the living-room of the cottage it was – I saw the makeshift couch by the fire and the door that opened straight on to the road. It was night; the door and shutters were bolted and there was no sound. I think I was looking into the fire – I was looking at something, anyhow, that shaped itself into a face – a thin, long face with hollow eyes. I hated it, I tried to drive it away. Then we were in the room, just as before, Roger writing by the candlelight, with no sound – I was waiting for a sound. Then it came – footsteps on the gravel outside, and a long, low, hissing call, then a knock, someone knocking with his knuckles on the door. Roger stood up and crossed the room quickly and opened the door and four men carrying a stretcher came in; they came walking slowly like figures in a play; there was a man lying on the stretcher – a dead man, with that long, thin face and those deep eyes; there was a blood-stained bandage round his head – I hated him – I was afraid – such terror gripped me that I woke. I woke cold and shuddering, but I didn’t wake properly. I fell asleep again and then – then came the other dream.�
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  Her face had gone white and her eyes wide and dark. ‘Better not be telling it,’ Frank said. But she crushed her hands together and said, ‘No, no – I’ll get rid of it – ’tis better for me to tell.’

  ‘In this dream I was not present myself – I knew in a way that I was asleep – there was a mad feeling that if only I could wake – if only I could cry out – but I had no power.

  ‘There were high stone walls and a dark yard; everything was cold; it was dawn. The yard was full of stones; it was narrow and long; there was a dark hole dug in the earth. There was a man standing near it, against the wall; his hands were behind his back and his eyes were bandaged; there was a bright red mark over his heart. It was Roger; he was going to be killed. Soldiers formed up with rifles and stood covering him. There were nine; I counted them; it was all quite clear. Then a tall man stood behind them, an officer, with a revolver, covering them. I looked at him and tried to scream – I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t, I had no power. He was the dead man – he had a great scar on his brow and hollow eyes, and that long, cadaverous face. I heard him shout “Fire!” and heard the volley, and saw Roger fall, and saw that man go over to him with his revolver and shoot – Oh, it was horrible. I can’t.’

  She broke off. For a while none of us could think of anything to say, then Liam Daly said laughingly, ‘One of the uncounted terrors of martial law! I suppose our misfortunate wives and mothers were dreaming our executions every night! God pity them,’ he added soberly, ‘the time they had.’

  Nesta looked up gratefully. ‘Yes, it was very natural,’ she said, ‘and there was one thing that showed how it was – just a crazy combination of hopes and fears. The uniforms of the soldiers were green! That comforted me, of course, but – the first part of the dream came true.’