I took in the peeling front door, the darkened and dusty front windows, the sagging net curtains in one of the upstairs rooms. I guessed that I could sell it straight away; but then it might be worth smartening it up a little. A coat of paint and a new bathroom suite from Hickey’s could make all the difference between £85,000 and £125,000.
I climbed out of the car, tugging up my collar against the rain. A small brindled dog barked at me for invading its territory without asking. I shaded my eyes and looked in through the front window. It was too grimy to see much, but I could just make out a black fireplace and a tipped-over chair. The living-room was very small, but that didn’t matter. I might redecorate Number 15, but I certainly wouldn’t be living in it. Not here in Ballyhooly, which was little more than a crossroads ten miles north of Cork, with two pubs and a shop and a continuous supply of rain.
Mr Fearon made a fuss of finding the right key and unlocked the front door. He had to kick the weatherboard to open it; and it gave a convulsive shudder, like a donkey, when it’s kicked. The doormat was heaped with letters and free newspapers and circulars. Inside the hallway, there was a strong smell of damp, and the brown wallpaper was peppered with black specks of mold.
“It’ll need some airing-out, of course, but the roof’s quite sound, and that’s your main thing.”
I stepped over the letters and looked around. Next to the front door stood a Victorian coat and umbrella-stand, with a blotchy, yellowed mirror, in which Mr Fearon and I looked as if we had both contracted leprosy. On the opposite wall hung a damp-faded print of a dark back street in some unidentifiable European city, with a cathedral in the background, and hooded figures concealed in its Gothic doorways. The green-and-brown diamond-patterned linoleum on the floor must have dated from the 1930s.
The sitting-room was empty of furniture except for that single overturned wheelback chair. A broken glass lampshade hung in the center of the room.
“No water penetration,” Mr Fearon remarked, pointing to the ceiling. But in one corner, there were six or seven deep scratchmarks close to the coving.
“What do you think caused those?” I asked him.
He stared at them for a long time and then shrugged.
We went through to the kitchen, which was cold as a mortuary. Which felt like a mortuary. Under the window there was a thick, old-fashioned sink, with rusty streaks in it. A gas cooker stood against the opposite wall. All of the glass in the cream-painted kitchen cabinets had been broken, and some of the frames had dark brown drips running down them, as if somebody had smashed the glass on purpose, in a rage, and cut their hands open.
Outside, I could see a small yard crowded with old sacks of cement and bricks and half a bicycle, and thistles that grew almost chest-high. And the rain, gushing from the clogged-up guttering, so that the wall below it was stained with green.
“I still can’t imagine why your woman wanted to give me this place,” I said, as we climbed the precipitous staircase. Halfway up, there was a stained-glass window, in amber, with a small picture in the center of a winding river, and a dark castle, with rooks flying around its turrets.
“You’ll be watching for the stair-carpet,” Mr Fearon warned me. “It’s ripped at the top.”
Upstairs, there were two bedrooms, one of them overlooking the street and a smaller bedroom at the back. In the smaller bedroom, against the wall, stood a single bed with a plain oak bedhead. It was covered with a yellowing sheet. Above it hung a damp-rippled picture of the Cork hurling team, 1976. I went to the window and looked down into the yard. For some reason I didn’t like this room. There was a sour, unpleasant smell in it, boiled vegetables and Dettol. It reminded me of nursing-homes, and old, pale people seen through rainy windows. It was the smell of hopelessness.
“Mrs Devlin wasn’t a woman to explain herself,” said Mr Fearon. “Her estate didn’t amount to much, and she left most of it to her husband. But she insisted that this house should come to you. She said she was frightened of what would happen to her if it didn’t.”
I turned away from the window. “But she wouldn’t explain why?”
Mr Fearon shook his head. “If I had any inkling, I’d tell you.”
I still found it difficult to believe. Up until yesterday morning, when Mr Fearon had first called me, I had never heard of Mrs Margaret Devlin. Now I found myself to be one of the beneficiaries of her will, and the owner of a shabby terraced property in the rear end nowhere in particular.
Not that I was looking a gift horse in the mouth. My Italian-style café in Academy Street in Cork hadn’t been doing too well lately. Only three weeks ago I had lost my best chef Carlo, and I had always been badly under-financed. I had tried to recoup some of my losses by buying a £1,000 share in a promising-looking yearling called Satan’s Pleasure, but it had fallen last weekend at Galway and broken its leg. No wonder Satan was pleased. He was probably laughing all the way back to hell.
We left the house. Mr Fearon slammed the front door shut behind us – twice – and handed me the keys. “Well, I wish you joy of it,” he said.
As I opened the car door, a white-haired priest came hurrying across the road in the rain. “Good morning to you!” he called out. He came up and offered me his hand. “Father Murphy, from St Bernadette’s.” He was a stocky man, with a large head, and glasses that enormously magnified his eyes.
“You must be Jerry Flynn,” he said. “You’re very welcome to Ballyhooly, Jerry.”
I shook his hand. “Difficult place to keep a secret, Ballyhooly?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. We have plenty of secrets here, believe me. But everybody knew who Margaret Devlin was going to give her house to.”
“Everybody except me, apparently.”
Father Murphy gave me an evasive smile. “Do you know what she said? She said it was destiny. I have to bequeath my house to Jerry Flynn. The wheel turning the full circle, so to speak.”
“And what do you think she meant by that?”
“I believe that she was making her peace before God. The world is a strange place, Jerry. Doors may open, but they don’t always lead us where we think they’re going to.”
“And this door?” I asked, nodding toward Number 15.
“Well, who knows? But when you’re back, don’t forget to drop in to see me. My housekeeper makes the best barmbrack in Munster. And we can talk. We really ought to talk.”
I hadn’t planned on going back to Ballyhooly for at least ten days. I was interviewing new chefs and I was also trying to borrow some more money from the bank so that I could keep the café afloat. I had already re-mortgaged my flat in Wellington Road, and even when I told my bank manager about my unexpected bequest he shook his head from side to side like a swimmer trying to dislodge water out of his ears.
But only two nights later the phone rang at half-past two in the morning. I sat up. The bedroom was completely dark, except for a diagonal line of sodium street-light crossing the ceiling. I scrabbled around my nightstand and knocked my glass of water on to the floor, the whole lot. The phone kept on ringing until I managed to pick it up. I don’t like calls in the middle of the night: they’re always bad news. Your father’s dead. Your son’s been killed in a car crash.
“Who is it?” I asked.
There was nothing on the other end of the line except for a thin, persistent crackling.
“Who is it? Is anybody there?”
The crackling went on for a almost half a minute and then the caller hung up. Click. Silence.
I tried to get back to sleep, but I was wide awake now. I switched on the bedside light and climbed out of bed. My cat Charlie stared at me through slitted eyes as if I were mad. I went to the bathroom and refilled my glass of water. In the mirror over the washbasin I thought I looked strangely pale, as if a vampire had visited me when I was asleep. Even my lips were white.
The phone rang again. I went back into the bedroom and picked it up. I didn’t say anything, just listened. At first I heard nothing but t
hat crackling noise again, but then a woman’s voice said, “Is that Mr Jerry Flynn?”
“Who wants him?”
“Is that Mr Jerry Flynn who has the house in Ballyhooly?”
“Who wants him? Do you know what time it is?”
“You have to go to your house, Jerry. You have to do what needs to be done.”
“What are you talking about? What needs to be done?”
“It can’t go on, Jerry. It has to be done.”
“Look, who is this? It’s two-thirty in the morning and I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Go to your house, Jerry. Number 15. It’s the only way.”
The woman hung up again. I stared at the receiver for a while, as if I expected it to say something else, and then I hung up, too.
For a change, it wasn’t raining the next morning when I drove back to Ballyhooly, but the hills were covered with low gray clouds. The road took me over the Nagle mountains and across the stone bridge that spans the Blackwater river. I drove for almost twenty minutes and saw nobody, except for a farmhand driving a tractor heaped with sugar-beet. For some reason, they reminded me of rotting human heads.
When I reached Ballyhooly, I parked outside Number 15 and climbed out of my car. I hesitated for a few moments before I opened the front door, pretending to be searching for my keys. Then I turned around quickly to see if I could catch anybody curtain-twitching. But the street was empty, except for two young boys with runny noses and a dog that was trotting off on some self-appointed errand.
I pushed open the shuddering front door. The house was damp and silent. No new mail, only a circular advertising Dunne’s Stores Irish bacon promotion. I walked through to the kitchen. It was so cold in there that my breath smoked. I opened one or two drawers. All I found was a rusty can-opener, a ball of twine and a half-empty packet of birthday-cake candles.
I went through to the living-room. Out on the street, an old man in a brown raincoat was standing on the opposite corner, watching the house and smoking. I picked up the fallen chair and set it straight.
The silence was uncanny. A truck drove past, then a motorcycle, but I couldn’t hear them at all. I felt as if I had gone completely deaf.
I returned to the hallway and inspected myself in the blotchy Victorian mirror. I certainly didn’t look well, although I couldn’t think why. I felt tired, but that was only natural after an interrupted night. More than that, though, I felt unsettled, as if something were going to happen that I wasn’t going to be able to control. Something unpleasant.
It was then that I glanced up the stairs. I said, “Jesus!” out loud, and my whole body tingled with fright.
Standing on the landing was a white-faced boy, staring at me intently. He looked about eight or nine, with short brown hair that looked as if it had been cut with the kitchen scissors, and protruberant ears. He wore a gray sweater with darned elbows and long gray-flannel shorts. And he stared at me, in utter silence, without even blinking.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “You almost gave me a heart-attack.”
He didn’t say anything, but continued to stare at me, almost as if he were trying to stare me into non-existence.
“Come on,” I said. “You can’t stay here. This house belongs to me now. What have you been doing, playing? I used to do that, when I was your age. Play in this old derelict house. Ghosthunters.”
Still the boy didn’t speak. His fists were tightly clenched, and he breathed through his mouth, quite laboriously, as if he were suffering from asthma.
“Listen,” I told him. “I’m supposed to be back in Cork by eleven. I don’t know how you got in here, but you really have to leave.”
The boy continued to stare at me in silence. I started to climb up the steep, narrow staircase toward him. As soon as I did so, he turned around and walked quite quickly across the landing, and disappeared into the smaller bedroom at the back of the house.
“Come on, son,” I called him. I was beginning to lose my patience. I climbed up the rest of the stairs and followed him through the bedroom door. “Breaking into other people’s houses, that’s trespass.”
The bedroom was empty. There was nobody there. Only the bed with the yellowed sheet and the dull view down to the yard, with its weeds and its cement sacks.
I knelt down and looked under the bed. The boy wasn’t there. I felt around the walls to see if there was a secret door, but all I felt was damp wallpaper. The sash window was jammed up with years of green paint; and the floor was covered in thin brown underlay, so the boy couldn’t have lifted up any of the floorboards. I even looked up the chimney, but that was ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous even when I was doing it. The flue was so narrow that even a hamster couldn’t have climbed up it.
My irritation began to rearrange itself into a deeply disturbing sense of creepiness. If the boy hadn’t hidden under the bed, and he hadn’t climbed up the chimney, and he certainly hadn’t escaped through the window, then where had he gone?
He couldn’t have been a ghost. I refused to believe in ghosts. Besides, he had looked far too solid to be a ghost. Too normal, too real. What ghost has falling-down socks and darns in its sweater?
But he wasn’t here. I had seen him standing at the top of the stairs. I had heard him breathing. But he wasn’t here.
I went from room to room, searching them all. I didn’t go up in the attic because I didn’t have a ladder, but then the boy hadn’t had a ladder, either, and there was a cobweb in the corner of the attic door which he would have had to have broken, even if he had found some miraculous way of getting up there. The house was empty. No boy, anywhere. I even opened up the gas oven.
I left the house much later than I had meant to, almost half an hour later. As I came out, and slammed the door shut, a woman approached me. She probably wasn’t much older than thirty-five, but she looked forty at least. Her brown hair was tightly permed and she had the pinched face of a heavy smoker. She wore a cheap purple coat and a long black skirt with a fraying hem.
“Well, Jerry,” she said, without any introduction, “you’ve seen what you have to do.”
“Was it you who phoned me last night?”
“It doesn’t matter who phoned you. You’ve seen what you have to do.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what I have to do.”
“You should be here at night then. When the screaming starts.”
“Screaming? What screaming? What are you talking about?”
The woman took out a pack of Carroll’s and lit one, and sucked it so hard that her cheeks were all drawn in. “We’ve been living next door to that for twenty-five years and what are we supposed to do? That house is all we’ve got. But my daughter’s a nervous wreck and my husband tried to take his own life. And who can we tell? We’d never sell the property if everybody knew about it. Number 17, they’re the same. Nobody can stand it any more.”
It started to rain again, but neither of us made any attempt to find shelter. “What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Maureen,” she said, blowing smoke.
“Well, tell me about this screaming, Maureen.”
“It doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes we can go for weeks and we don’t hear anything. But it’s November now, and that’s the anniversary, and then we hear it more and more, and sometimes it’s unbearable, the screaming. You never heard such screaming in your whole life.”
“The anniversary?” I asked her. “The anniversary of what?”
“The day the boy killed his whole family and then himself. In that house. Nobody found them till two days later. The gardaí thought the house was painted red, until they realized it was blood. I saw them carry the mother and the daughters out myself. I saw it myself. And you never saw such a frightful thing. He used his father’s razor, and he almost took their heads off.”
I looked away, down Ballyhooly’s main road. I could see Father Murphy, not far away, white-haired, leaning against the rain, ta
lking to a woman in a blue coat.
“Can’t the priest help you?”
“Him? He’s tried. But this is nothing to do with God, believe me.”
“I don’t see what I can do. I was bequeathed this house, by somebody I never even knew, and that’s it. I run a café. I’m not an exorcist.”
“You’ve seen the boy, though?”
I didn’t say anything, but the woman tilted her head sideways and looked at me closely. “You’ve seen the boy. I can tell.”
“I’ve seen – I don’t know what I’ve seen.”
“You’ve seen him. You’ve seen the boy. You can’t deny it.” She sucked at her cigarette again, more triumphantly this time.
“All right, yes. Is he a local boy?”
“He’s the very same boy. The boy who killed his family, and then himself.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was beginning to suspect that Maureen had been drinking. But she kept on smoking and nodding as if she had proved her point beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that I was just being perverse to question the feasibility of a dead schoolboy walking around my newly acquired house.
“I have to get back to Cork now,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ve seen him and you’re just going to leave? You don’t think that you were given this house by accident? That your name was picked out with a pin?”
“Quite frankly I don’t know why it was given to me.”
“You were chosen, that’s why. That’s what Margaret always used to say to me – Mrs Devlin. She was chosen and there was nothing she could do about it, except to pass it on.”
I unlocked my car. Maureen started to become agitated, tossing her cigarette away and wiping her hands on the front of her coat, over and over, as if she couldn’t get them clean.
“You mustn’t go. Please.”
“I’m sorry. I have a business to run.”
But it was then that I saw one of the grubby upstairs curtains being drawn aside. Standing in the bedroom window, staring at me, was the white-faced boy. Somehow he must have hidden from me when I was searching the house, and here he was, mocking me.
Feelings of Fear Page 19
