Feelings of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  I kicked open the front door and ran upstairs. I hurtled into the front bedroom but the boy was gone. He wasn’t in the back bedroom, either. There was a tiny linen cupboard between the two rooms, but it was empty except for two folded sheets and a 60-watt lightbulb. I slapped the walls in both bedrooms, to see if they were hollow. I lifted up the mattress in the smaller bedroom, in case it was hollowed-out, and the boy had been concealing himself in there. It was stained, and damp, but it hadn’t been tampered with.

  Underneath it, however, lying on the bedsprings, I discovered a book. It was thin, like an exercise book, with a faded maroon cover, and it was disturbingly familiar. I picked it up and angled it toward the window, so that I could see what was printed on the front.

  Bishop O’Rourke Memorial School, Winter 1976. The same junior school that I had attended, in Cork. I opened it up and leafed through it. I could even remember this particular yearbook. The sports reports. The opening of the new classroom extension. The visit from the Taoiseach. And right at the back, the list of names of everybody in the school. Familiar names, all of them, but I couldn’t remember many of their faces. And there was my name, too. Class III, Gerald Flynn, between Margaret Flaherty and Kevin Foley.

  But what was it doing here, this book, hidden under the mattress in this run-down little house in Ballyhooly?

  I looked around one more time. I still couldn’t work out how the boy had managed to elude me, but I would make sure that he never got in here again. Tomorrow morning I would change the locks, front and back, and check that none of the windows could be opened from the outside.

  As I left the house, Father Murphy came over.

  “Everything in order?” he asked me, with that same evasive smile. A real priest’s smile, always waiting for you to commit yourself.

  “You said we ought to talk.”

  “We should,” he said. “Come across and have a glass with me.”

  We crossed the street and went into a small pub called The Roundy House. Inside, there was a small bar, and a sitting-room with armchairs and a television, just like somebody’s private home. Two young men sat at the bar, smoking, and they acknowledged Father Murphy with a nod of their heads.

  We sat in the corner by the window. The afternoon light strained through the net curtains the color of cold tea. Father Murphy clinked my half of Guinness, and then he said, “Maureen hasn’t been upsetting you?”

  “She told me that she could hear screaming.”

  “Well, yes. She’s right. I’ve heard it myself.”

  “I’ve seen a boy, too. I saw him in the house, twice. I don’t know he got in there.”

  “He got in there because he’s always in there.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, that he’s a ghost?”

  Father Murphy shook his head. “I don’t believe in ghosts and I don’t suppose that you do, either. But he’s not alive in the way that you and I are alive. You can see him because he will occupy that house until he gets justice for what happened to him. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  “You really think it’s the same boy who killed his family? That’s not possible, is it? I mean, how can that be possible? He killed himself, too, and even if he hadn’t, he’d be my age by now.”

  Father Murphy wiped foam from his upper lip. “What’s been happening in that house isn’t recognized by the teachings of the Church, Jerry. I’ve tried twice to exorcize it. The second time I brought down Father Griffin from Dublin. He said afterwards that no amount of prayer or holy water could cleanse that property, because it isn’t possessed of any devil.

  “It’s possessed instead by the rage of a nine-year-old boy who was driven to utter despair. A child of God, not of Satan. His father was a drunk who regularly beat him. His mother neglected him and fed him on nothing but chips, if she fed him at all. His older sister had Down’s Syndrome and he was expected to do everything for her, change her sheets when she wet the bed, everything. He lived in hell, that boy, and he had nobody to help him.

  “My predecessor here did whatever he could, but it isn’t easy when the parents are so aggressive. And he wasn’t alone, this boy. He was only one of thousands of children all over the country whose parents abuse them, and who don’t have anywhere to turn.

  “Whatever it is in your house, Jerry – whatever kind of force it is – it’s the force of revenge. A sense of rage and injustice so strong that it has taken on a physical shape.”

  “Even if that’s true, father – what can I do about it?”

  “You were chosen. I don’t know why. Margaret Devlin said that she was chosen, too, when she inherited Number 15. And before her, Martin Donnolly. I never knew what became of him.”

  “So what happened to Margaret Devlin? How did she die?”

  “Well, it was a tragedy. She took her own life. I believe she was separated from her husband or something of the kind. She took an overdose of paracetamol. Lay dead in the house for over a week.”

  On the drive back to Cork, under a late-afternoon sky as black as a crow’s wing, I kept thinking what Father Murphy had told me. A sense of rage and injustice so strong that it has taken on a physical shape. It didn’t really make any scientific sense, or any theological sense, either, but in a way I could understand what he meant. We all get angry and frustrated from time to time, and when we do, we can all feel the uncontrollable beast that rises up inside us.

  Katharine was waiting for me when I got back to my flat. She was a neat, pretty girl with a pale pre-Raphaelite face and long black hair. She helped me in the café from time to time, but her real job was making silver jewelry. We nearly had an affair once, after a friend’s party and too many bottles of Chilean sauvignon, but she was such a good friend that I was always glad that we had managed to resist each other. Mainly by falling asleep.

  She wanted to know if I wanted to come to an Irish folk evening in McCurtain Street. She was dressed for it: with a blue silk scarf around her head and a long flowing dress with patterns of peacock feathers on it, and dozens of jangly silver bracelets. But I didn’t feel in the mood for “Whiskey in the Jar” and “Goodbye Mrs Durkin”. I poured us a glass of wine and sat down on my big leather sofa, tossing Bishop O’Rourke’s Memorial Junior School yearbook on to the coffee table.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Katharine. “The bank didn’t turn you down, did they?”

  “As a matter of fact they did, but that’s not it.”

  She sat close beside me, and she had some perfume like a pomander, cinnamon and cloves and orange-peel. “You’ve got something on your mind. I can tell.”

  I told her about Number 15 and the boy that I had seen on the landing. I told her about Maureen, too, and the screaming; and what Father Murphy had said about revenge.

  “You don’t believe any of it, do you? It sounds like a prime case of mass hysteria.”

  “I wasn’t hysterical, but I saw the boy as clear as I can see you now. And I couldn’t find how the hell he managed to get in and out of the house. There just wasn’t any way.”

  She picked up the yearbook. “This is spooky, though, isn’t it – finding your old junior school yearbook under the mattress?”

  She read through the list of names in Class III. “Linda Ahern, remember her?”

  “Fat. Freckles. The reddest hair you’ve ever seen. But when she turned fourteen, she was a cracker.”

  “Donal Coakley?”

  “Thin. Weedy. We all used to chase him round the playground and pinch his biscuits.”

  “What a mean lot you were.”

  “Oh, you know what schoolkids are like.”

  “Ellen Collins?”

  “Don’t remember her.”

  “Martin Donnolly?”

  I frowned at her. “Who did you say?”

  “Martin Donnolly.”

  “I don’t remember him, but that was the name of the man who owned Number 15 before Margaret Devlin.”

  “It’s a common enough name, for goodness’ sake.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, but who comes next? Margaret Flaherty. I wonder if she could have changed her name to Devlin when she married.”

  “Isn’t there somebody you could ask?”

  I called my old friend Tony O’Connell – the only former classmate from Bishop O’Rourke’s who I still saw from time to time. He ran an auto repair business on the Patrick Mills Estate out at Douglas.

  “Tony, you remember Margaret Flaherty?”

  “How could I ever forget her? I was in love with her. I picked her a bunch of dandelions once and she threw them away and called me an idiot.”

  “Do you know if she married?”

  “Oh, yes. She married some fellow much older than herself. A real waste of space. Estate agent, I think he was. Frank Devlin.”

  “And Martin Donnolly? Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Martin? He moved to Fermoy or somewhere near there. They found him drowned in the Blackwater.”

  I put down the phone. “I may be making a wild assumption here,” I told Katharine, “but it looks as if Number 15 is being passed from one old pupil of Bishop O’Rourke’s to the next, alphabetically, down the class list. And everybody who owns it ends up dead.”

  “You’d better check some more,” Katharine suggested. “See if you can find out what happened to Linda Ahern and Donal Coakley.”

  It took another hour. Outside, it started to grow dark, that strange foggy disappearance of light that happens over Cork some evenings, because the River Lee brings in cold seawater from the Atlantic, the same reaches where the Lusitania was sunk, and the city turns chilly and quiet, as if it remembers the dead.

  I found Ita Twomey, who was Linda Ahern’s best friend when they were at school, by calling her mother. Ita was Mrs Desmond now, and lived in Bishopstown. “Linda was a single mother. But she inherited a house, I believe. But she was killed in a car accident on the N20 … both herself and her kiddie. They burned to death. The gardaí said that she drove her car deliberately into a bridge.”

  And Donal Coakley? I managed at last to find Vincent O’Brien, our class teacher at Bishop O’Rourke’s. “You’ll have to forgive me for sounding so hoarse. I was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx only two months ago. I’ll be having a laryngectomy by Christmas, God willing.”

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to a classmate of mine called Donal Coakley.”

  “Donal? I remember Donal. Poor miserable kid. I don’t know what happened to him. He was always very unhappy at school. All of the other kids used to bully him, every day. I don’t suppose you did, Jerry, but you know how cruel children can be to each other, without even realising what they’re doing. He was always playing truant, young Donal, because he didn’t want to stay at home and he didn’t want to go to school. Poor miserable kid. They were always stealing his lunch money and taking his sweeties and hitting him around. You never know why, do you? Just because his parents were poor and he always smelled a bit and had holes in his socks.”

  “But do you know what happened to him, after he left school?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. He never finished Bishop O’Rourke’s. He left at mid-term. He couldn’t take the bullying any longer. I think his parents moved. There was some trouble with the social services. I never heard where they went.”

  My mouth was as dry as if I had woken up from drinking red wine all night. “Donal was bullied that badly?”

  “It happens in every school, doesn’t it? It’s kids, they have a sort of pack instinct. Anybody who doesn’t fit in, they go for, and they never let up. Donal had second-hand shoes and jumpers with holes in them and of course that made him a prime target. I’m not talking about you, Jerry. I know you were very protective of the weaker kids. But it was a fact.”

  Protective? I thought of the time that I had snatched the Brennan’s bread-wrapper in which Donal’s mother had packed his jam sandwiches for him, and stamped on it. I thought of the time that five of us had cornered him by the boys’ toilets and punched him and beaten him with sticks and rulers until he knelt down on the tarmac with his grubby hands held over his head to protect himself, not even crying, not even begging for mercy, though we kept on shouting and screaming at him.

  Donal Coakley. My God. The shame of it made my cheeks burn, even after all these years. The day it was raining and we found out that he had lined his shoes with newspaper because they had holes in the soles. Wet pages from the Evening Echo folded beneath his socks.

  “Is that all you wanted to know?” asked Vincent O’Brien.

  I could hardly speak to him. “I’d forgotten Donal. I’d forgotten him. I don’t think I wanted to remember.”

  I put down the phone and Katharine was staring at me in the strangest way. Or perhaps she wasn’t. Perhaps I had suddenly realized what I had done, and everything was different.

  “I – ah, I have to go back to Ballyhooly,” I told her.

  “You’re not crying, are you?”

  “Crying? What are you talking about? I have to go back to Ballyhooly, that’s all.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight. Now.”

  “Let me come with you. Something’s happened, hasn’t it? You’d be better off with somebody with you.”

  “Katharine – this is something I have to deal with on my own.”

  She took hold of my hands between hers. She stroked my fingers, trying to calm me down. “But you must tell me,” she said. “It’s something to do with Donal Coakley, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak. She was right, damn it. She was right. I was crying. The boy on the landing was Donal Coakley. I had bullied him and tortured him and stolen his money and trodden on his lunch, and what had he ever had to go home to, except a drunken father who punched him and a mother who expected him to lay the fire and take care of his handicapped sister; and that damp bedroom in Ballyhooly.

  I could have befriended him. I could have taken care of him. But I was worse than any of the others. No wonder his father’s razor had seemed like the only way out.

  You don’t know how dark it is in the Cork countryside at night, unless you’ve been there. Only a speckle of distant flickering lights as we drove over the Nagle mountains. It was cold but at least it was dry. We arrived in the middle of Ballyhooly at eleven thirty-seven and the Roundy House was emptying out, three or four locals laughing and swearing and a small brown-and-white dog barking at them disapprovingly.

  “I don’t know what you expect to find here,” said Katharine.

  “I don’t know, either.”

  I helped her out of the car, but all the time I couldn’t take my eyes off Number 15. Its windows looked blacker than ever; and in the orange light of Ballyhooly’s main street, its paintwork looked even more scabrous and diseased.

  “Is this it?” Katherine asked. “It looks derelict.”

  “It is.” I unlocked the front door and kicked the weatherboard to open it. I switched on the light and, miraculously, it worked, even though it was only a single bare bulb. I had called the ESB only yesterday afternoon to have Number 15 reconnected. The damp smell seemed even stronger than ever, and I was sure that I could hear a dripping noise.

  “This is a seriously creepy house,” said Katharine, looking around. “How many people died here?”

  “That night? All four of them. Donal’s father and mother, Donal’s sister, and Donal himself. And Margaret Flaherty died here, too.”

  “It smells like death.”

  “It smells more like dry rot to me,” I said. But then I took two or three cautious steps into the hallway and sniffed again. “Dry rot, and something dead. Probably a bird, stuck down the chimney.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Katharine.

  “I don’t know. But I have to do something.”

  We took a look in the living-room. The broken ceiling-light cast a diagonal shadow, which made the whole room appear to be sloping sideways, and distorted its perspective. The wind blew a soft lament down the chimney.

 
; “What are those scratches?” asked Katharine, pointing up at the coving. “It looks like a lion’s been loose.”

  “I asked the estate agent.”

  “And?”

  “Either he didn’t know or he didn’t want to tell me.”

  I took Katharine into the kitchen. It was deadly cold, as always. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. Just some sign of what was really happening here. Just some indication of what I could do to break the cycle of Donal Coakley’s revenge.

  If it was Donal Coakley, and not some madman playing games with us.

  “Nothing here,” said Katharine, opening the larder door and peering inside. Only an old bottle of Chef sauce, with a rusty, encrusted cap.

  We went upstairs together. I hadn’t realized how much the stairs creaked until now. Every one of them complained as if their nails were slowly being drawn out of them, like teeth. The landing was empty. The front bedroom was empty. The back bedroom was empty, too. The chill was intense: that damp, penetrating chill that characterizes bedrooms in old Irish houses.

  “I think you should sell,” said Katharine. “Get rid of the place as soon as you can. And make sure that you don’t sell it to the next person on your class register.”

  “You may be right. And there was me, thinking this was going to solve all of my problems.”

  Katharine took a last look around the bedroom. “Come on,” she said. “There’s no point in staying here. There’s nothing you can do.”

  But at that moment, we heard an appalling scream from downstairs. It was a woman’s scream, but it was so shrill that it was almost like an animal’s. Then it was joined by another scream – a man’s. He sounded as if he were being fatally hurt, and he knew it.

  “Oh my God,” Katharine gasped. “Oh my God what is it?”

  “Stay here,” I told her.

  “I’m coming with you. I just want to get out of here.”

  “Stay here! We don’t know what the hell could be down there.”

  “Oh, God,” she repeated; but her voice was drowned out by another agonized scream, and then another, and then another.