The Dead House extract: Where the past is as thick as tar
‘So, tell us, Michael. Would you say you’re in the habit of seeing ghosts?’
Maggie was on her knees in the centre of the room, lighting candles. Every time she struck a fresh match her face bloomed momentarily yellow into view, but when the match went out, usually to a puff of breath, she seemed engulfed by the night, sucked back down into its abyss. The candles remained lit, but in few enough numbers yet to properly penetrate the dark, and only a suggestion of her features lingered until the next match flared, the lines of her face holding largely as a memory.
Her tone was old ground, a stilted, good-natured mocking that played to her audience yet knew better than to fully abandon its own doubt. I sat back in the armchair and pretended to consider the question. We were all tired and happy after a long day, and she’d already cracked the seal on the first of two bottles of Jameson bought earlier from the off-licence in Castletownbere, half-filling four water glasses despite our dutiful protestations.
I didn’t really mind being teased.
‘I wouldn’t say in the habit, no. But being around artists so much, I’m certainly no stranger to the unusual. Or, let’s face it, the downright weird. So, I’ve seen some things. I don’t think I’d call them ghostly, though. And I’m not sure I’d call this ghostly, either.’
‘Describe it.’
I studied the glow of the candles. The elongated yellow stillness of the flames added atmosphere and encouraged an almost prayerful calm but at the same time seemed to lend the dark a greater density, emphasising the blind corners. Beside me, barely an arm’s reach away, Alison sat curled up on the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her, most of the weight of her body leaning leftwards onto one elbow, and the armrest, watching me. I didn’t have to turn to feel her gaze or to sense the hint of a smile that had gained such a new and comfortable permanence on her mouth.
‘I’m not sure I can,’ I said. ‘This morning I really did think it was a person, a girl or a young woman. Because it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to find someone on the rocks. But looking back, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel quite real. It’s as if I have all the pieces but they won’t fit together. And then, tonight, all I got was a glimpse, a white movement gone before I could properly even focus. I’m sure the dusk didn’t help, or maybe that was the reason I saw anything at all.’ I shrugged. ‘Like Alison said, it was probably just a gull. Or my mind playing tricks.’
From outside, the approaching sound of footsteps interrupted our chat. We knew it was only Liz, but a certain disquiet layered our silence, which most likely had to do with how heavy the night felt. After a few seconds, she came through the door, carrying a white plastic bag shaped to the large flat squareness of a board game or an old LP record.
Maggie was still on her knees on the floor, the flesh of her upturned face shining now like honey in the glow of the small surrounding flames.
‘Where’d you go? I poured you a drink.’
‘Oh, thanks. I just needed something out of the car.’
‘You shouldn’t have gone up alone, Liz. Jesus, it’s so dark. And that path still needs surfacing. You could easily have fallen or turned an ankle.’
Liz raised the plastic bag. ‘I remembered that I’d brought this from home, to help us while away the hours. And of course I knew there’d be alcohol involved. But I must say, the candles are the perfect touch.’
‘What is it?’ Maggie asked, reaching for the bag. ‘Snakes and Ladders?’
I leaned forward in my chair and watched her uncover a stiff white sheet of cardboard. The neat black block-capital letters of the alphabet had been laid out by hand across the centre of the sheet in two slightly arcing lines, giving the effect of a stretched and colourless rainbow, and directly beneath, following the same sweep, a row of numbers running from one to nine and finishing with a zero. In the top left corner, Liz had drawn a circle of sun with spider-leg rays alongside the word ‘Yes’, and in the top right a crescent moon and the word ‘No’.
‘It’s a Ouija board,’ I said. ‘I’ve only seen these in films. You made this?’
‘A few nights ago. I thought we could have some fun with it. Old houses are stuffed to splitting with memories, and it’d be a shame to waste the opportunity.’
I drained my whiskey. I can’t say why I felt so uneasy. I’m not sure, even at that point, that I’d have described myself as a complete non-believer, but neither would I have come anywhere near fitting even the most relaxed definition of religious. Life, from what I’d seen of it, was complicated enough without adding superstition to the stew. But every time I closed my eyes I was back on the beach, alone this time, in the first of the morning light, a grim and colourless dawn caught between seasons. And I was walking towards the rocks.
‘I’ve heard of them,’ Alison said, ‘but I’ve always been wary of using one.’
She rose from the couch and began to clear the table. I watched her, trying to read her thoughts, but couldn’t decide whether what I was seeing was anxiety or excitement. It was one of those airless nights and the room felt warm. I undid a button on my shirt, and when that did not suffice I got up and went to stand for a moment in the doorway. Outside, apart from the spray of light from an unseen moon ribbing what had to be the ocean, blackness dominated. I stood there, breathing deeply of the dark, tasting its salt and chlorophyll sweetness, and didn’t turn until Maggie called out to me. The others were already seated on three sides of the table, the board laid out flat between them. I went after the open bottle before joining them, facing Liz, with Alison on my left and Maggie to my right.
‘So, what do we do?’
Liz had the board facing her. A small spiral notepad, a pen and one of the shimmering candles lay beside her right hand. She placed a shot glass upturned on the centre of the board.
‘There’s nothing to it. We each just put a finger on the glass, like this, and I’ll ask the questions. Hopefully we’ll get a response.’
‘Hopefully?’ Alison gave up a cough of laughter, a jarring sound that hit, then fell just as suddenly away.
‘Well, there are no guarantees, of course. But if this sort of thing works at all then it’ll surely work here. The west coast is full of places like this, homes left to ruin after the Famine hit and the population either fled or just died out. A lot of the bodies weren’t even properly buried. They simply lay where they fell until time and the ground swallowed them up. The past must be thick as tar in these parts.’
My heartbeat had quickened. I sucked down whiskey from my glass and held the final dregs on my tongue. The flavours of the land filtered up through the heat, a mineral sting of dirt and turf and clean water. A weight settled in my throat and the high part of my chest. I smiled to myself, but only for the benefit of the others, in case any of them happened to be watching. Then I poured myself another shot.
Across the table, Liz closed her eyes and asked, in a whisper, that we do the same. We each reached out, placed an index finger on the base of the upturned glass, and shut our eyes. Something about that deep and sudden closed-off darkness, perhaps in combination with the alcohol I’d consumed, did something unpleasant to me, brought on a vertigo state that set me in some inner way off-kilter. I held my breath, which seemed to help, but not quite enough, and after a minute or so I gave up.
The candlelight seemed stronger now. The others kept the stillness of standing stones, dutiful, at least on a surface level, in their compliance, ready and open to some trance state. But their clenched mouths were braced, their nerves wired against the least touch or sound. I came within half a second of slapping the table. But I held back. Their anxiety was real. Instead, I focused on the glass in the dead centre of the table, and waited. I think, looking back, that I knew something would happen.
‘Are there any spirits present?’ Liz asked at last, pitching the words a clear tone at least above what was usual for her. Beside me, the hint of a smile, most likely shaped by fear, creased the corners of Alison’s lips. ‘If there is anyone here, please give us a sign. Make a tapping sound, speak through one of us, help us to move this glass. Please give us a sign that you can hear us.’
‘Do you feel that?’ Maggie whispered. She opened her eyes and stared at the glass, then raised her gaze, with pleading, to Liz.
‘That’s Mike.’
‘It’s not.’ To prove my innocence I raised my hand.
‘I still feel it. Like a vibration.’
I touched the glass again. She was right. A tremor, barely perceptible, as if it were catching the hum of an almost-tuned radio signal.
‘What is that?’
‘There’s something here,’ Liz said, her voice thick with the pure thrilled air of dread. ‘I think it’s drawing energy from us. Just wait.’
The vibration deepened. We all felt it. The glass was cold to the touch but its resonance crept slowly up my arm, a little bit like the pins and needles sensation of blood rushing back to a limb after a period of prolonged numbness. Then, by degrees, the glass set to quivering, and I watched, transfixed, we all did, until that alone became the measure of time and everything else ceased to matter. Beside me, very softly, Alison began to cry. She made no sound apart from a slight disruption to her breathing. The tracks of her tears gleamed in the candlelight. I reached for her and took her free hand, not caring what the others thought, and she wove her fingers between mine in a way that linked our arms inside the elbow. The skin of her palm was cool and dry, familiar still from our morning on the beach, and for just an instant, for me, the glass lessened in importance. Gradually, though, its trembling intensified. Within a minute it had started, quite visibly, to rock.
‘Christ. It’s actually moving.’
‘Just take it easy, everyone.’
‘Is this real?’ asked Maggie. ‘We should be filming this.’
Liz raised her free hand, demanding silence, and again lifted her voice to its peculiar new pitch.
‘Who is here with us? Please try to identify yourself.’ She looked around, as if expecting to see something. ‘Use our energy to spell out your name.’
Everything stopped. We held our breath and glanced at one another. Maggie began to laugh.
‘Funny, Mike. You’re a real hoot.’
‘I told you,’ I said, with more force than I’d intended. I felt angry, for no good reason. And I knew it, but couldn’t seem to help myself. ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Fine. Liz then.’
‘Wait.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s moving again,’ Alison whispered. ‘Oh Christ, I think I’m going to be sick.’
Steadily then, the glass began to slide across the cardboard, slipping in apparently random fashion among the letters. My view of the board was inverted, which made it difficult to follow the pattern with any real accuracy, but Alison, beside me, who had a slightly better view, tightened her grip on my hand. I could hear the wet tear of her breath and then a constricting gasp when the glass again came to rest. Across the table, Liz, mumbling to herself, scribbled down the letters on her notepad. Then she raised the pad, tilted it so that it caught the sheen of candlelight, and considered for a moment what she’d written.
‘It must be in Irish,’ she said, and let out a long, unsteady sigh. ‘I think it says, An Máistir. The Master.’
Alison’s crying intensified. ‘Oh, Jesus. I told you. This is dangerous. We need to stop before something goes wrong.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Liz said, trying for the sort of reassurance that I could see, even in the darkness, she did not quite feel. ‘I’ve done this before. We’re fine. Really. Nothing can go wrong. We’re free to stop at any time.’
‘Then I’d like to stop now.’
‘Ali, please,’ said Maggie. ‘Let’s just give it a few more minutes. Then we’ll stop if you still want to. But it’s just a bit of fun.’
‘It’s not my idea of fun,’ Alison said, but she reached out and returned the tip of her left index finger to the glass. After a moment of hesitation, the rest of us did the same. Immediately, the glass began to vibrate, rocking slightly from side to side, then again set to drifting across the board, the movement slow, casual, hitting letters in flurries and stopping for seconds at a time. Twice or three times I was certain that it had finished, but then it would stir once more and continue on its crawl.
‘Well? What did he say?’
Liz studied her notepad. ‘It’s difficult to tell where one word begins and another ends. I thought it’d make more sense than this. When I’ve done it before it’s always been much easier to follow. But this is in Irish, and even at school mine was never much better than terrible. As far as I can make out, it says, ‘An bhfuil cead agam teacht isteach?’ which I think means, ‘Can I come in?’ Or words to that effect. Well, that’s what it does mean, but something like that would be a literal translation. I think he’s asking for permission to join us.’
She looked at me, and I could see her fear but also a kind of electric delight, an excitement that the candle’s yellow glow stretched and sharpened towards something manic.
‘Yes,’ she said, raising her voice and lifting her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘You may enter. Welcome, Master.’
For almost a minute, there was no sound. And then we became aware of a noise coming from across the room, in one of the corners. Small at first, barely noticeable, but growing steadily more hectic. A rustling sound, like that of a small rodent scrabbling through fallen leaves. Of the three candles on the table, one, alongside Maggie, guttered and went out. A squeal jerked loose from her, followed by a gasp of embarrassed laughter. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, which for no reason I could explain, made me smile, too.
‘Did you live in this house?’ Liz asked, ignoring us and the noise, keeping her focus, and beneath our fingertips the glass drifted towards the board’s upper left corner, hit ‘Yes’ and fell back a few inches.
‘Did you die here?’
Again, it moved to ‘Yes’ before drawing back.
‘How did you die?’
Now, instead of moving forward, the glass began to rock, quickening to violence.
‘Stop,’ Alison pleaded. ‘We’re making him angry. We have to stop.’
‘How did you die?’ Liz repeated.
The glass was alive now beneath our combined touch. It rattled madly on the board, then all at once stopped dead. We each held our breath, until the stillness was torn open by a loud thump on the ceiling directly above us, like the landing of something heavy from a height, and the glass began to crawl again, a long sweep across to T, back to E, to A, to D. We looked at Liz, but she could only shrug. Her eyes were wide and yellow in the candlelight, and her lips moved in silence to the word, the letters first and then the whole. Seconds passed. Then, again, the glass moved, T, E, A, D. T, E, A, D. T, E, A, D. Slowly, then quickening, over and over until our gazes anticipated a kind of pattern. T, E, A, D.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Maggie said, her voice a husk. ‘Ask him what tead means.’
The glass stopped in mid-repetition. And so slowly that each letter seemed underlined, it started to trace a new direction. R, O, P, E.
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘Rope. You committed suicide?’
Again the glass slid towards ‘Yes’.
‘Why?’
Gan aon bhia. Lack of food. Ocras. Hunger. Even with the night’s cloying heat, I felt numb. I watched the glass, trying to comprehend what exactly I was seeing. Logic suggested that someone could easily have been manipulating the situation, but I didn’t suspect Maggie and it certainly wasn’t Alison. Liz seemed the most obvious candidate, if someone had to be. History, as we had come to realise, captivated her, and she’d already made passing reference to her interest in the occult, a fascination bordering perhaps on the obsessive but which she seemed to consider quite natural, since poetry was, she said, in its purest sense little more than a channelling anyway, an alchemy that helped solidify the ephemeral. Yeats knew it. So did Blake, and Shelley, and Donne, and Ted Hughes. I’d have liked to believe that this was all part of a game for her, but one look at her determined flame-yellowed face convinced me otherwise.
For the next few minutes, she persisted with her questions. The responses came slowly, often in broken sentences but at least now in English, though there were still instances of occasional relapse, missteps confined mainly to single words. She scratched down each message and attempted to decipher its meaning from the few clustered letters, but even when delivered in a language we could all understand the full sense of these words was mostly lost to us. Teach them. Pray. A name, Crom, which, according to Liz, referred to an early pagan deity.
Then Maggie began to speak. Her voice seemed full of air and had a low, considered hush that made the sound of rain on glass, and was recognisably hers but also, in some peculiar way, not. She sat on my right side but had turned partially from the table and become fixated on a point of distance somewhere behind and beyond Liz, though the darkness in that direction was absolute. The flames of the two remaining candles bounced and jogged, their glow tormenting her semi-profile, pulling at the stripes of shadow, elongating the clean planes of her skin. ‘He lived here,’ she said. ‘This was his home. And he hanged himself in this room.’
Billy O’Callaghan
Billy O’Callaghan will be reading from The Dead House, alongside novelist Lisa McInerney, at Waterstones, Patrick St, Cork, on May 4 at 7pm. There will also be a Q&A with both authors. Admission is free.
He will also read on Wednesday, July 19, at 1pm at Bantry Library as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, which takes place from July 14 to July 21. Full details of the f estival are on www.westcorkliteraryfestival. ie or LoCall 1850 788 789.
