by A. A. Glynn
He lurched towards the figures, waving his arms as if to shoo away a flock of geese. But he could not reach them. They were always paces away from him. And the voices chanted the name of D’Albert continually as he blundered on through the field, not even aware of the ground under his bare feet. Then, around the figures, a ghostly landscape was evolving. He saw a backdrop of forests, then the ragged stumps of trees, thousands of them, felt warm tropical air, saw a panorama of tumbled primitive homes and felt the poverty and degradation. He stumbled on into the night, hoping that, somehow, he could physically grapple with this nightmare and strangle it.
The sibilant voices enticed him and, abruptly, the panorama changed. He was now in the field that slanted away down to the road into the village, the field with the mysterious grassy mounds.
There were more figures and a new, grotesque landscape taking shape around him.
Ghostly at fist, then more solidly, there appeared a sorry array of humanity: children, women, and men. They were gaunt, barefoot, clad in wretched rags, and all with heads reduced to mere skulls in which there again burned huge, accusing eyes. He was in the midst of them, trying to dismiss them with frantically waving arms.
“Go away!” he screeched in a cracked and hysterical voice. “Go away! Leave me alone!”
But they multiplied. More and more of them surrounded him, a wretched horde of famished phantoms, who were there and yet not there when he tried to strike out at them. Once more, he saw shawled, skeletal women with tiny scraps of humanity in their arms; children with stick-like limbs and bellies extended by want of nourishment; ragged old men and women whose bent and frail bodies quivered with ague. And there were ghostly buildings: the low, deep-thatched cabins of the peasant Irish of long ago, but bereft of any cosy, rural charm. Some of them were tumbled, and the thatches of others had been forcibly dragged off, while others had burning thatches that sent up a reek of smoke to fog the horrifying tableau surrounding Criswell-D’Albert.
Then his bare foot struck one of the mounds in the ground and he stumbled to sprawl full-length over the grassy hump. Immediately, the agony hit him—a pain in the pit of his stomach like no pain he had ever known. It was a wrenching, agonizing knife, slicing into his innards. He gave a strangled, gasping cry and tried to rise but fell forward, writhing as the pain hit again, this time even more burningly intense. He sprawled on the small hump in the land and rolled in growing agony, with his legs drawn up to his chest. He was dimly aware that the starving phantoms were crowding around him, watching him with haunted eyes that bore no pity. They were all there: a horde of living near-corpses from far impoverished tropical villages and from a stricken Ireland of the past.
And the agony increased as he writhed and rolled with his face contorted into a mask of pain. He tried to gasp out a cry for help but all coherence choked in his throat as the agony gripped every inch of his being. It surged through him but, in particular, it gnawed unceasingly into his stomach. Open-mouthed, gasping, he rolled on the harsh grass.…
* * * *
Young Garda Larry Donovan drove the police car through a bright spring morning. Beside him, Sergeant Ned Byrne leaned easily with an elbow on the edge of the open passenger window, luxuriating in the warm promise of the day.
The car was cruising along the road out of Ballygrill and approaching the point where the old D’Albert lands met the road. Following an annual duty laid on the officers of Garda Siochana in rural postings, the two were touring the district to remind holders of the scattered houses that it was the time when certain thistles sprouted, and they must clear their gardens or neighboring roadside verges of the weeds whose blown seeds were a menace to the cultivated fields of their farming neighbors. Normally, one officer could undertake the task but, on this pleasant morning, the middle-aged sergeant could not resist an opportunity of abandoning the paperwork on his desk for a spell.
He was enjoying a pleasant reverie when he was abruptly fully awakened to his surroundings by the sight of a figure running along the otherwise empty road, approaching the car with wildly waving arms.
“Who’s this and what ails him?” he asked, straining forward in his seat.
“It’s old Tommy Lynch, looking as if the devil is after him,” said the younger officer.
Close to the low fieldstone wall, the car halted and Tommy Lynch stumbled to the open window on the sergeant’s side, gasping and waving towards the field so carefully shunned by himself and his fellow villagers.
“Come over to the field!” he mouthed. “Come quick and see what’s in it!”
The policemen left the vehicle and hastened with him to look over the wall. Tommy Lynch jabbed a finger towards something lying on one of the overgrown humps that straggled over a portion of the field. “Look at that! It’s a body for sure! I was walking past here when I spotted it. A body in a pair of pyjamas by the look of it.”
“Did you get a close look at it?” asked the sergeant.
“I did not!” stated Lynch with strong emphasis. “Not for all the tea in China would I set foot in that field!”
“Stay here!” ordered the sergeant. “We’ll talk to you later. C’mon, Larry, let’s see what we have here.”
The officers climbed the wall and Sergeant Byrne said: “Listen, lad, whatever you do, don’t walk on any of those lumps in the ground. D’you hear me, now? Keep well off them!”
They approached the crumpled object of their attention, sprawled full across one of the grassed mounds. Sure enough, it appeared to be a man clad in pyjamas. They stood over it, bewilderedly, then the sergeant breathed a shocked: “My God! This can only be the fir gorta!”
Larry Donovan felt a quiver of fear course through him, for the man inside the pyjamas could hardly be called a man at all, merely the shriveled husk of one, a bundle of skeletal bones.
“Do you know what this corner of this field is?” asked Sergeant Byrne in an awed tone. “Do you realize what these humps in the ground are?”
“I don’t,” said the younger man. “I only know there’s some kind of superstition about the field, and old Mary Crowe says she was attacked by something in it long ago.”
“Graves,” intoned the sergeant weightily. “Graves are what these bumps are. This bit of the field is a Famine graveyard. About the only humane act of old Lord Hugh D’Albert in the Great Famine was to allow it to be used for the burial of his starved tenants. There’s an old, old story clinging to such places. If you walk on a Famine grave, you’ll become a victim of the fir gota. Some say it’s a stark warning that the Great Famine must never be forgotten, and those of a religious complexion will say it’s a reminder of the gospels’ instruction to feed the hungry.”
Larry Donovan was bending, looking more closely at the grotesque corpse, almost lost in the folds of the night clothing. The head was little more than a skull, but he recognized its anguished, twisted features as those of The Yank, the once hearty, well-fed visitor to the village.
“It’s Mr. Criswell, who’s taken to calling himself Criswell-D’Albert,” he breathed. “What in the name of God brought him to this?”
“Name might be the operative word—the name he brought back into these parts,” pronounced his superior. “Speaking from a non-police point of view, I’d say we’re looking at the workings of the old local curse. He somehow got lost among the graves and somehow stumbled over them. So he was caught by the fir gorta, poor fellow.” He turned to Donovan, looked at him quizzically and asked: “I suppose, Dublin jackeen and smart city man though you are, you know what fir gorta means?”
“I do, of course, Sergeant, would I be on the force if my Irish wasn’t as good as anybody’s?” responded Donovan.
And, together, they pronounced the translation: “Fir gorta—The Starving Man.”
EMBRACE OF EVIL
I half expected my twin brother Roger to meet me at Bicester rail station with his car but, when I arrived, there was no sign of him. I shrugged it off as an indication that he was running true to form. P
robably, he was so absorbed in his painting or in his ongoing study of art history that he had totally forgotten the time of my train’s arrival from London.
My pocket map showed me that the village of Cotstones was only a short distance away, and my bag was not heavy so I decided against a taxi thinking that, after my long sojourn in western Canada, it would be good to walk through Oxfordshire lanes on a bright spring day.
A roadside signpost put me on the right path and I was soon strolling between high hedgerows on lanes almost wholly untroubled by traffic. As I progressed, I began to share Roger’s enthusiasm for this quiet corner of England where he had rented the old manor house for a time. In several letters written just after his arrival, he praised this rich, green countryside but I was slightly puzzled as to why his letters dropped off after a time. It was typical of a man who lived only for his work that Roger had holed up off the beaten track in an old house without a telephone. It was typical of him, too, that he had no truck with innovations such as e-mail, which he saw as just another nuisance to eat into his precious time. In the last few weeks, our correspondence was limited to a mere couple of letters in which we discussed my plan to visit him when I arrived in England. Strangely, although Roger normally wrote chatty letters, his last ones were unusually terse, as if written by a man who was considerably preoccupied. They carried an almost tangible suggestion of a change in my twin’s character, and I hoped that he was not overdoing things and was unwell.
Again, among the scented hedgerows and spring birdsong, this was something I could shrug off. Probably, Roger was just deeply involved in both his painting career, now paying dividends after his early struggles, and his studies of English Victorian art, a field in which he had already produced a couple of well-received books. Indeed, I often felt that, when not engrossed before his own easel, my brother lived in the nineteenth-century world of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler, and Sickert. On the whole, it was a mode of life to which he was totally suited, being a bachelor with a happy-go-lucky attitude, caring little for material possessions.
I mounted a slight rise in the road and spotted a cluster of houses some distance beyond it, obviously the village of Cotstones. At that moment, too, I made my first human contact since leaving Bicester: an elderly man in rough working clothes, walking towards me.
“Am I on the right road for Cotstones Manor?” I called.
He came a little closer and eyed me narrowly from under bushy brows before answering almost suspiciously: “The Manor House? Aye, just a bit the other side of the village. You can see the roof from a little way down the road. I’ll come back with you and show you.”
He walked beside me toward the village; a friendly gesture, I thought, but I soon found it was mingled with a countryman’s curiosity concerning strangers. “You might well be a brother to the artist chap living at the Manor,” he commented candidly. “You look just like him—except for the beard and him being thinner than you.”
Beard? Then I recalled that in one of his chattier letters, Roger had said that, since he was now conquering London’s Cork Street galleries, he might as well conform to the popular notion of a painter and grow a beard. Thinner? Roger and I normally shared a fairly solid build as well as healthy appetites. If he was now thinner, I hoped it was not because he was neglecting himself.
I satisfied the man’s curiosity. “Yes, I am his brother—his twin, in fact.”
“Ah, I thought as much. You a painter, too?”
“No, nothing so glamorous. I lecture at a university in Canada, and I’m home for a few weeks for the first time in three years. What’s this about my brother looking thin? Have you heard that he’s been ill?”
“No, I don’t see a lot of him, but then none of us does. Keeps himself to himself, but the wife’s sister has the little shop here in the village and he goes there for his various needs. She’s mentioned a time or two that he seems to be looking more peaked. And—and, well—he was as friendly a man as you could meet when he first came here, but now he’s much more standoffish and silent, as if he doesn’t want to have much to do with anyone. I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it. Don’t think I’m passing judgment on him.”
“No, not at all. It doesn’t sound like the brother I know so well. Maybe he isn’t so well after all.”
“I wouldn’t know, but I shouldn’t be surprised but what some ailment might come upon a man living in that place.”
“Why—is there something wrong with Cotstones Manor?”
The old man gave a low and mysterious chuckle. “Well, let’s just say there’s stories about it.”
“Stories?”
“Aye, the kind of stories you get in the country. My grandfather told me a lot when I was a boy. He lived to be over ninety, and he had dozens of the old yarns from hereabouts, most of which are now long forgotten. But the one about the Manor still lingers.”
“What’s the story?” I asked, but he pointedly ignored me and stopped me in mid-stride, pointing to a pair of high chimneys visible through a gap in the trees beyond the last houses of the village street.
“That’s the Manor,” he said. “I must leave you now. I hope you find your brother well.”
There was something profoundly disturbing in the way he turned hastily and retraced his steps along the street, even as I was in the act of thanking him for his help.
I walked onward, half-heartedly noting the surroundings: a small shop; a timbered pub with the sign: The Plough; a straggle of cottages, some with new-looking extensions and equally new concrete driveways bearing substantial cars, indicating how the rural folk were being replaced by the prosperous crew from the cities; and a square-towered Norman church with a sign giving the latest standing of the roof preservation fund. All the time, I thought of Roger and the unpleasant reputation the Cotstones Manor hinted at by my acquaintance from the village.
I found the Manor to be an early Georgian structure, almost lost amid ill-kept trees and shielded from the lane by a high, forbidding wall in a poor state of repair. It was reached by a long pathway, robbed of sunlight by an archway of tall trees. My field is anthropology and at least once before I had encountered the feel of real evil. It was during a field-trip to Mexico, on the site of a place of Aztec sacrifice where the hearts had been torn out of living human victims. The mingled cruelty, violence, terror, and pain from centuries before hung in the air like an almost tangible fog. Walking along that path to the forbidding, crumbling old house, I knew something of the same breathtaking revulsion I had experienced on that occasion.
Why on earth had Roger rented this ghastly place?
I climbed a set of broad, cracked steps to a great oaken door, which swung open even as I approached. Roger was framed in the portal, a Roger greatly changed since our last meeting. He was certainly much thinner, with an unkempt beard, and there was an unusual light in his eyes. He was dressed untidily in a stained check shirt, paint-stained trousers, and scuffed sandals.
“Oh, it’s you, Vic,” he said in a colorless voice, as if I were someone who called a couple of times a day rather than the brother whom he had not seen for three years.
“Hello, Roger. Did you get my letter?”
“Yes, come in. Sorry I couldn’t meet you at Bicester. Got some trouble with the car.” There was that same flatness to his voice, which seemed to indicate that he couldn’t care less whether I turned up or not. “Come in. I’ll organize some tea.”
We passed into a wide hallway holding an almost overpowering mustiness. A broad stairway swept down to its center but, where it must once have boasted elegant banister rails, it now had more modern ones of wood, incongruous and rickety-looking. The whole place was grimy and uninviting with oddments of old furniture scattered about. Whoever rented out this unprepossessing place had a nerve making it available, and Roger must have been out of his mind to take it.
“Come upstairs,” said Roger. “My studio’s up there and I sleep there too—but I’ve fixed up a camp bed for you in the next room.”
This room proved to be as untidy and cluttered as the rest of the house, with a number of canvases propped against the wall and facing inward. I threw my bag on the camp bed and, while Roger went off to fill the kettle, I turned one of the canvases towards me.
I beheld a painting of the head and shoulders of a girl, obviously by my brother, but a vast improvement over all his earlier work. The subject was a stunning beauty, dressed in the fashion of about 1850. Roger had caught a gently molded, full-lipped face with huge eyes, holding a deep sadness and yet, incongruously, a distinct hardness. I considered the portrait for fully five minutes, realizing that my brother must surely have reached the zenith of his talent.
From another canvas, the same girl looked out at me with the same superbly rendered melancholy. And she was depicted in another, another, and yet another. Every canvas showed the same beautiful girl, whose wide eyes held that same melancholy mingled with the jarring quality I began to find menacing.
It looked as if Roger had recently painted nothing but this intriguing and tragic girl over and over again. Whoever she is, I thought, he is obviously haunted by her.
Engrossed in the portraits, I almost forgot Roger until I saw him in the doorway, holding a tray bearing cups of tea. A frown crossed his face for a moment as if he was annoyed by my taking the liberty of looking at his work, but he asked: “Like them?”
“They’re terrific,” I told him. “They’re far better than anything you’ve ever done. Is the model a local girl?”
Roger gave a wry smile. “Yes, you could say that, Vic—a local girl.”
He sank into silence, obviously not inclined to tell me anything further about the girl who had modeled for the paintings, which must have occupied a great part of his recent time. His stolid silence as we drank tea, together with his gaunt physical appearance and his general air of neglect was now worrying me deeply. This was not the vigorous and carefree Roger with whom I had grown up. Moreover, this welcome, which was hardly any welcome at all, was not what I had expected. In the old days, Roger would almost immediately have whisked me off to the village pub for a meal and drinks and eager conversation. Now, I had the distinct impression that he was only just tolerating me.
