In These Dark Places

by Stephen Duffy

  January 2nd 1976 dawned bright and cold. It had been raining ceaselessly since before I arrived home. But that morning the sky was a blessed blue with not a trace of a cloud to be seen. The fields were white with a frost which crunched gorgeous under foot as I walked the banks of The Fola. It was merely a bluff by nature, a little sidestep. There wasn’t a hint of the storm which at that very moment was gathering its fury five hundred miles out over the Atlantic. I knew where Jessop would be that evening and when he would be there. January the second, the ninth day of Christmas and the feast of The Holy Name of Jesus. Jessop would be offering the benediction at church at six o’clock. The rectory would be empty. I’d have to smash a window. So be it. What I hoped to find would put pittance to the trifling matter of a broken pane of glass. I had nothing to do but kill time. I spent it out at Ellie’s grave.

  By a quarter to six the sky had darkened considerably, the sun had set and the stars were soon obscured by a bank of dark and surly clouds tumbling in from the west. Parishioners filed through the gates of the church. Headlights spilled down the lane as I crouched in the shadows by the rectory wall. When everyone was inside the church I stole across the lawn and rounded to the back of the Rectory. I didn’t need to break a window, the coal shaft door was unlocked. I made my way down into the cellar and emerged inside Jessop’s home. I was inside his territory now but I didn’t care. I made my way to his study, safe in the knowledge that I had at least half an hour to get the job done. I knew Jessop carried the key to the safe on him, I’d seen as much that day years before. But I had the strong inkling that there had to be a spare somewhere in the house. I’d start in his desk and then work my way around the room. The spare had to be in his study, it just had to be. Perhaps Jessop had recalled that I had seen those envelopes that long ago day. Perhaps a strong fear and paranoia that I might come after him on finding out what he had done to my father had put him on his guard. Perhaps that fear drove him to protect the one chink in his armour, that safe and what it contained. It might have been putting all his eggs in the one basket, but the man, shrewd and calculating as ever, had been bang on the money.

  Not once did I expect to find Joe Brandon waiting in the study for me. I caught the brass glint of the cross in the corner of my eye and then I swam down into the murky black of unconsciousness.

  I came to in darkness, the low rumble of an engine filling my ears. I jostled and bounced in the blackness and I knew where I was. They had me. I was in the boot of Joe Brandon’s car. I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious but from the howl of the wind and the patter of rain on the steel above my head I knew that it had been quite some time. A storm had blown in, a big one.

  The car came to a halt with a jerk. I heard the doors slam shut, muffled conversation drowned by the wind and the rain. I tried to ready myself to jump out at them when the boot was opened but I had no room to manoeuvre in the cramped space. Brandon dragged me from the car by my hair, the pain rippling down through my skull and watering my eyes. He slammed me onto the wet tarmac. The storm was in full fury. Rain bounced off the road before my face, the wind howled like a banshee and cobalt blue flashes of lightening ripped the sky asunder. We were out on the Strand Road just above the Barrow Pier.

  They dragged me up from the ground, pushing me ahead of them as I stumbled down the hill towards the Barrow Pier. The world was spinning, kaleidoscope confusion. I was drenched to the skin, my head pounded, my jaw was throbbing. Reality flickered before me, illuminated by flashes of lightening as they punched bolt bright through the darkness lending a sense of surreal to perception. The granite slabs, wet underfoot, shone with a steel grey glow. I slipped more than not and each time I went to ground Brandon laid his boot into my ribs, cheered on by Jessop, ecstatic in his perverse enthusiasm.

  That we were down on The Barrow Pier told me only one thing. They meant to kill me. Why else would they have brought me to where it was believed Ellie had gone into the water. I wanted to resist, to retaliate, but there was no fight left in me, none at all. As Brandon dragged me feet first out onto the pier after I had fallen for the fifth or sixth time, I surrendered myself to my fate. They could do to me as they wished. I was done. My only hope was that it would be fast, that it would end quickly.

  ‘What now?’ Brandon asked Jessop, as he threw me against the granite pillar at the end of the pier, knocking the wind out of me and breaking another of my ribs for sure. He had to shout through cupped hands so as to be heard over the wails of the wind.

  ‘An eye for an eye,’ Jessop hollered in reply.

  ‘Let’s be done with it then,’ Brandon roared as he scooped me up into his arms and jostled me towards the edge of the pier.

  ‘No! Not yet! This boyo’s yet to confess to his sins, he’s not yet paid his penance. There’s an act of contrition needed yet from this fella.’

  Brandon tossed me onto the cold stone and as I struggled to regain my wind he pressed his knee hard onto the nape of my neck, the coarse grain of the granite grating the flesh on my cheek.

  The gale, ferocious in its intensity now as the storm gathered above us, whipped the dark sea white, caps of glistening foam hurling themselves against the harbour walls, bursting into spectral fountains and raining down on us. Brandon’s boot was heavy on my neck.

  ‘Here, hold him out there!’ Jessop screamed. ‘Stretch him out!’

  Through the spray and the rain I could see Jessop standing before me, a thick switch of bramble clasped in his fist. I was dragged to my feet.

  ‘Strip him down,’ he roared, his voice whipped away by the screeching wind.

  Brandon spun me around and tore my jumper off of me from the collar down.

  ‘The t-shirt too!’

  The wind bit at my skin, the rain lashed against my bare chest.

  ‘Now, put him there, hold him tight!’

  Brandon pushed me down once more, pressing my chest against the side of the granite pillar. He held me there tight against the soaking granite, my legs splayed out behind me, my spine bent into an unnatural curve. Grabbing hold of my wrists Brandon sat down on the ground and pulled me tight against the pillar while he pressed hard onto the other side with his feet so as to pin me as tight as possible.

  ‘Good,’ Jessop shrieked as he rounded me. ‘Keep him there, hold him steady now!’

  I didn’t feel the first one. It never registered, my skin numbed by the bite of wind and rain as it was. The second strike bit hard, the thorns of the bramble switch biting deep into my skin and tearing flesh from bone as Jessop ripped it away. My screams were lost in the fury of the storm, carried to oblivion, smothered by nature’s wrath. Again and again Jessop bore down with his thorny whip, ferocious in his intent, his glee finding expression in his high pitched squeals. I can’t count, couldn’t count how many times those jagged thorns plunged into me only to be ripped away again at a jaunted angle ensuring that the damage visited reached its full potential.

  ‘Pay your penance!’ Jessop roared. I tried to speak, I couldn’t. The pain was too much to surmount, I couldn’t string a coherent thought together.

  ‘Pay your penance! Confess before the almighty!’

  Another blow, and then another. One after another they fell, tearing into me. The salty spume from the breakers seeped into my wounds, an agony anew.

  Semi-conscious, almost delirious in my pain, I could see Brandon’s enthusiasm for retribution wane. His grip on my wrists weakened. There was a shadow of doubt in his eyes. Had he signed up for this? I didn’t think so. Tossing a man into the jaws of the storm, he had been okay with that. But this, this vile act, this barbarism, it had shocked even him. How many times those thorns bit into my flesh I don’ t know, I do know that it was enough to make the pier run red, I remember that. Brandon shifted, his grip on me loosening further still. He moved up onto his haunches as my blood and the spume of the storm ebbed toward him. A little looser on my wrists.

  Jessop was maniacal. Whooping and hollering as he quoted scripture, each pas
sage accompanied by another lash of the bramble switch.

  ‘For God will bring every deed into judgement! Every secret thing, good or evil! For it is time for judgement to begin at the household of God! And if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? Peter – Four – Seventeen!,

  Brandon had had enough. His appetite for retribution evaporating as blood red salt water washed around the soles of his shoes.

  ‘Let’s just do it, Father! Let’s just toss him in!’

  ‘Not yet!’ Jessop bellowed, his voice thundering above even the tumult of the storm. ‘Contrition must be observed!’

  Jessop stooped over me, his face contorted with rage.

  ‘Feeling penitent yet?’

  In a flickering instant of clarity I was able to bring my mind together to string at least once sentence together.

  ‘Ellie’s blood is not on my hands, but Peter’s is on yours… paedophile!’

  My words were met with a sustained and vigorous assault. The bramble switch tore skin from my face, my neck. Jessop pounded me with a new found viciousness.

  Beaten down, weary, wrecked and wretched as I was, I saw it. From the corner of my eye, a mountain not once chartered by man. A mountain never gauged, measured nor mapped, it rose up from the inky black of the sea, its summit capped white by foam as it hurtled towards us, unseen by either of my assailants. I could barely utter the words. My mouth full of blood and broken teeth, my throat dry, my lungs screaming for air. Brandon’s grip loosening even more. The words were a pain to me. My voice clipped and stymied by my swollen tongue, blood, thick and ferric in my mouth.

  ‘And what of Pharaoh’s men, Father?’

  Brandon released me from his grasp and I hugged the granite pillar. I held onto it with the last of my strength. Life. Death. Eternal struggle. Jessop had no time to answer me. A wall of water broke over the Barrow Pier, a leviathan not even Melville could have conjured. They were gone.

  Jessop went first. Whatever he had in reply to my question cut off as he drew breath to respond. Swell, storm, sea. Each conspired against him. As lightening cleaved the thunderheads I saw him. White face, alabaster fear, he was swept from the mouth of the harbour out into the full fury of the storm.

  Lost, and gone forever.

  A half breath later, long and laboured, Brandon was gone too. He tumbled off the pier into the fury of the swell. Slowly, deliberately, I dragged myself to my feet, defying the agony of my wounds through gritted teeth. I watched him. Time slowed down, ticking by, frame by frame, flickering in the strobing pulses of lightening. The terror on his face comical, delicious. My wounds weeping, aching, agony, I watched him. A pale face, a white point, a dying star in the velvet black of eternity. The swell tossed him back and forth around the harbour as he tried to fight against it. This brute of a man reduced to nothing more than flotsam on the whim of the tide. He was dying and I was glad to be witness to it.

  I thought of Ellie. I remembered the night she died. I thought of Chrissy Brandon, that sweet woman who had taken me in as one of her own. That darling woman who had already lost a child. I remembered the night up in The Dell when Ellie had come to me after our fight. She had known I would be there, she had come to apologise, to talk. That no one had seen her all the miles she had walked to get there was my one saving grace. She was wrestling with her conscience. She told me that she would never find it in her heart to reconcile killing a man with her faith. We had talked for a while, I tried desperately to convince her that what she had done had been the right thing to do at the time. We argued. Back and forth, over and over. The same old ground, again and again.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said.

  ‘Of course I do!’ I snapped.

  ‘No, no you don’t. It doesn’t even seem to bother you, at all! I have to get it off of my chest, I have to tell Father Jessop and get an absolution.’

  ‘Ellie if you tell him, he’ll come after me with it. Seal of confession or not, he’ll come after me and when he does that means you’ll go down for it too. So not only will you face the judgement of God, you’ll have to spend the rest of your life in prison waiting to face that judgement!’

  She was standing by the edge of the Dell, at the spot over the Fola from where Peter had cast himself down into the water so many summers ago.

  ‘You’re right. Oh my God, you’re right.’

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘See, you’re being sensible now.’

  ‘No,’ she said as she turned and stood with her back to the drop over the river. ‘You’re right, judgment in fifty years or judgment now. It doesn’t matter, it will still come. There’s no escaping it. Is there? That’s it then… it’s finished.’

  ‘Ellie, no!’ I screamed as I rushed toward her.

  In the blink of an eye, my sweetheart was gone, down into the murky depths of the river. I watched her go, helpless to stop it, powerless to save her. She went under the water and never came up. I had hoped that she would. For two long days afterwards I had hoped that she had come to her senses and managed to pull herself out. She never did. The river took her out to sea, and the sea tossed her up onto the Barrow Strand two days later.

  I knew how it would look. From the instant it happened I had known that I would be accused of her murder. I was willing to accept that. I was willing to spend the rest of my days behind bars if it meant that Chrissy Brandon could bury her youngest child in holy ground and not have to live out the rest of her days with the stigma of her daughter’s suicide. The fates however, had decided otherwise. A chance meeting with John Traynor out on the Darkin Road had put me miles from where they believed she had gone into the water. That simple twist of fate had saved me from a life in prison.

  Joe Brandon was dying before my eyes. The swell tossed him against the granite wall of the pier again and again. He went under, came back up. Down again. Soon he would go under and that would be the end of him. Another of Chrissy Brandon’s children lost to the water, lost to the sea. I watched him. I thought of her, I thought of Ellie.

  His hand was cold in mine.

  Author’s Note

  This story is a work of fiction. My intent was not to cast aspersions on any institution; religious, community, social or otherwise. Their use herein is merely as a plot device and seeks not to misrepresent, impugn or otherwise denigrate their work in any way, shape or form. Real locales, people and events mentioned in the story are used fictitiously as temporal markers in the flow of the story. All other characters and events portrayed are the products of my imagination and any resemblance to any persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Stephen Duffy

  Dublin, 2017

  By The Same Author

  Steaks and Stout

  Boned and Rolled

  Done and Dusted

  Available at

  www.stephenduffyauthor.com

  www.amazon.com

  www.barnesandnoble.com