Author: pj

Cheating a little bit this week as I’ve got a lot going on. Apologies. 

Instead of a brand new short fiction, I’ve dug out something from 2013 which hopefully you’ll enjoy. 

—-

Some people may think it morbid to take pleasure in a visit to a  graveyard. I was once however, not only one who enjoyed such visits, but  who actively sought them out. As a taphophile the diverse ornamentation  of tombs and stones fascinated me and became a hobby of mine. My  interest took me all around this island and, eventually to a small  ex-mining town in the North.

The pit which had once been the lifeblood of the place had collapsed  disastrously some three decades earlier and the community had never  recovered. The once-bustling town was now a morass of blind-eyed broken  windows and slack-jawed black doorways with only a huddle of the more  ancient buildings still occupied.

There was no priest in this place; its church bearing the same aspect  of dereliction as so much of the surroundings and my examination of the  burial-ground was completed more quickly than anticipated, most of the  more ancient monuments having toppled or crumbled from neglect. Even the  stark, lone, large slab inscribed with the names of those who had lost  their lives in the mining tragedy was, I am ashamed to say, something of  a disappointment.

My return journey not being scheduled until the following morning, I  found myself faced with an evening spent in the under-occupied pub, or  else alone in my dingy room above, and neither scenario appealed. My  hobby had furnished me, almost accidentally, with knowledge of the  folklore surrounding burial places, and I found it interesting to note  that this was the eve of the feast of Saint Mark. I decided it might be  amusing to pass my time observing that old custom which Keats so  famously wrote upon – namely that if one watched over a graveyard on  that night, the spectres of those yet to pass in the coming year would  show themselves.

Seated on the mossy church step as midnight approached, the sight of a  figure walking among the crumbling monuments brought me sharply to my  senses. In the bright, clear moonlight I soon recognised the face of the  pub landlord and fear turned to embarrassment. I began to stammer an  apology but the publican only shook his head slowly and sorrowfully.

“They are coming”, the words spoken softly yet somehow left ringing in my ears as he trudged back into the shadows.

And come they did.

Customs have their purposes, forgotten to many though they may be,  and I am witness to what may happen if such rituals are neglected or  ignored. I had seen the next year’s ghost already. The landlord (as you  have guessed) passed away peacefully enough within the allotted course  and was buried in the old churchyard, but no Saint Marks Eve vigil had  been kept in that ruined parish for many years. Those who came shambling  after the publican – who should have come long, long before – could not  be mistaken for the living; their bodies having been crushed and  mangled in that awful cave-in of thirty years previous.

The beach was loud. Not with music blaring from phone speakers, people having picnics, children squealing with laughter, or any of that kind of thing. It wasn’t that sort of beach. Not today. Today the sky was grey, and so was the sea. The waves were loud, and the wind, and the seagulls.   

Will staggered along the grey sand, half blown by the wind at his back, half dragged by the dog at the other end of the lead he held in his hand. Bobby was a shaggy, toffee-coloured mongrel, who stood almost as tall as him when she reared up on her back legs to lick his face. Will was under strict instructions from Gran not to let Bobby off her lead or else the dog would be straight into the sea and stinking up their caravan when they got back. Bobby strained, but it was only in eagerness to snuffle at the next pile of whatever had been stranded when the sea last retreated. 

A shadow of a great black cloud raced along the beach, turning the grey day instantly to twilight.  A sudden furious gust shoved Will to his knees. The waves seemed to roar now, screaming gulls dragged sideways through the air. Sand stung Will’s eyes as the raging wind changed direction. He threw up his arm to cover his face. Bobby’s lead slipped from his hand. 

A high whistling tone rang painfully in Will’s ears. The wind was gone.  Uncovering his face, he saw Bobby standing still as a statue just ahead of him. Her ears pricked, listening intently. The leads handle was only a few feet away. Will reached for it. The whistling stopped. The lead was dragged from reach as Bobby took off at a gallop. Not towards the sea as Will had feared, but towards the sand-dunes which lay between the beach and the caravan park. 

The dunes were hard to climb. There were a few well-trodden sandy paths through their valleys but, if you wanted to get up higher, there were spiky grasses and brambles to contend with, not to mention the gnarled, half-buried fences which were supposed to stop people straying from the path. For every step Will took he seemed to slide backwards half a stride. Eventually, sweat running down his neck, he reached the summit of the highest dune he could manage. 

The air felt strange now that the wind was gone. It made Will think of the way things felt and sounded in an empty school hall. He shouted for Bobby, but his voice didn’t seem to carry as far as it should. He called again, and again. There was no sign of the dog, but something else caught his attention. Something which shone ever so brightly in the dull afternoon. 

The twisted tree grew deep down in a perfectly circular bowl of sand, surrounded by high dunes. It must have been there for centuries, Will thought. The strange wind which had come and gone so suddenly must have somehow reached this long-sheltered spot because the tree had been wrenched violently to one side. Sand trickled down its newly exposed roots and over the mouth of the hollow which had opened up beneath. Something golden shone within. Treasure. 

Without any thought as to how to get back up, Will was about to begin his slide towards the treasure when something made him hesitate. A low, menacing growl. Will turned and Bobby stood behind him, her teeth bared in a snarl which he’d never seen before. The dog wasn’t looking at him though, she was glaring past him at the opposite dune. A second later Bobby’s growl was answered with a sound which Will felt in the pit of his stomach. A low, bass rumble like an approaching underground train. 

The thing which made that sound was as black as a shadow.  Later, Gran would try to convince him it had been a shadow. A trick of the light, caused by the weird weather. Bobby was a big dog. A shaggy dog. So, naturally, her shadow would look even bigger and shaggier. Yes, even as big as a horse. 

Will didn’t tell Gran that the black dog had spoken. Still, he did as it told him. Will never went looking for the tree again, and he never told a soul about the treasure. 

In 1990 work on the Limerick to Galway motorway halted. A lone tree stood in its way. The Hawthorne, according to tradition, belonged to the Sidhe (Ireland’s Fairies). Disturbing such sites is forbidden. A curve was added. The road snaking around the Thorn Tree. 

—–

“This lore is not dead. People think it’s dead […] and the reason they think it’s dead because it’s not being talked about any more. Why is it not being talked about any more? Because people are ashamed to talk about it. If you talk about the fairies today […] you get nudge nudge, wink wink, ha-ha-ha, but the old people used to call them the fairies. The old people used to call them many sideways names.” [1]

These are the words of Eddie Lenihan “Ireland’s greatest living storyteller”, a folklorist, historian, and expert of traditional Irish fairy lore.

In 1999, Eddie made headlines across the world. The following is an excerpt from an article dated June 15th of that year, which appeared in the New York Times:

LATOON, Ireland — Eddie Lenihan, a smallish man with a dark unkempt beard, a wild head of hair and an intense look in his eyes, pointed to the high white-blossomed hawthorn bush standing alone in a large field in this village in western Ireland and issued, not for the first or last time, a warning to local officials:

“If they bulldoze the bush to make way for a planned highway bypass, the fairies will come. To curse the road and all who use it, to make brakes fail and cars crash, to wreak the kind of mischief fairies are famous for when they are angry, which is often.” [2]

The fairy-thorn (sceach in Gaelic) at Latoon was, according to Eddie, an important marker on an ancient fairy path. Specifically, it was believed to serve as the meeting place for the fairies of Munster whenever they prepared to ride against the fairies of Connacht. Lenihan was informed by a local farmer that he had seen white fairy blood at the spot, proving that the hawthorn was still in use by the fair folk. 

Eddie weaponised his storytelling skills as a form of non-violent protest and activism. Repeating the old tales as loudly and widely as he could, he drew the interest of first the national, and then the international press. And it worked. The route of much-delayed motorway, originally was begun in 1990, was ever-so-slightly altered, to skirt around the sacred tree. 

In a letter published in the Irish Times shortly after work was completed, Clare county engineer Tom Carey, who oversaw the project, claimed that there was no influence of the fair folk, however. It was simply easier to go around the tree. That had always been the plan, he insisted. Nothing to do with fairies at all. [3] Still, there are those who were, and who remain, rather sceptical of this official back-pedalling. We all know that people are often ashamed to admit that they believe in fairies these days, but that doesn’t mean they don’t fear the consequences of upsetting them. 

REFERENCES

1. https://eddielenihan.weebly.com
2. https://eddielenihan.weebly.com/in-the-news.html
3. https://www.soundsofsirius.com/the-fairy-tree-that-moved-a-motorway/

Gav Cross.  Storyteller, Theatre Maker, and Teacher. 

• Twitter twitter.com/gavcross 
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• Facebook Facebook.com/gavcrossstoryteller 
• YouTube YouTube.com/user/gavcross

Jen didn’t like the owls. She didn’t like the noise they made. That Jurassic World screech. It was a horrible, greedy sound. A wicked sound. 

“Get some exercise“, meant that Jen should go and wear herself out for an hour while mum had one of her Zoom meetings at her kitchen table office. One hour was ten laps around the block. Fifteen if she really went for it. Cycling around the block had been boring from the start, but after three months it had become really boring.

After a while, Jen realised it didn’t really matter where she went, so long as she was back in sixty minutes. She set herself a challenge to see how much of the local area she could cover. Every road, every side-street, alleyway, and track in the neighbourhood, an hour at a time. Then one day, tyres bumping over gnarled roots on an overgrown track known locally as The Fairy Path, Jen heard the owls. 

Eerie screeches mingled with the squeal of brake-pads as she skidded her bike to a stop. The strange sounds Jen thought she’d heard came again, echoing along the narrow, muddy track. Terrified, she looked all around, searching for the source. Something so white it seemed to glow in the dimness of the tree-lined passage drifted silently over her head. 

The barn owls had made their nest high in the hollow trunk of an ancient elm. Jen stood and watched as the adults took turns flying out, only to return carrying tiny wriggling things with brightly coloured wings. Maybe they were butterflies or dragonflies, maybe they were tiny birds. 

The piercing calls of the owlets, hidden somewhere within the elm never seemed to stop, even as meal after meal arrived. Jen really didn’t like that sound. Not just because it had given her such a shock, but because she felt like there was something wrong about it. Something more than hunger, more than greed. Something wicked, she thought.

She couldn’t remember where she’d read it, but Jen knew that owls coughed up the bones, fur, and feathers of their prey. Pellets, they called them. Searching around the base of the elm, she found them. Half a dozen or so dark, damp looking sausage-shaped things. Jen picked them up in an empty crisp packet, pulling the bag inside out like a dog-walker cleaning up after their pet. 

That evening, mum was chatting on the phone to aunty Anne. Aunty Anne’s husband, uncle Dave, delivered parcels. It turned out that uncle Dave had seen Jen pushing aside brambles round the back of the old boarded-up church, making her way onto the Fairy Path. He’d called out to her from his van, but she hadn’t heard him. Jen was in trouble. Mum was furious. No more rides around the block on her own. She couldn’t be trusted. 

Jen knew she’d done wrong. Knew mum wouldn’t be happy if she found out she’d been going further than she was supposed to. Even so, she was surprised just how upset mum was. It was Jen’s ride along the Fairy Path which seemed to upset her the most. 

Days passed. A week.  Jen’s bike leant untouched against the garden shed. 

Mum was in a meeting in the kitchen, but no hour’s exercise for Jen. She had to occupy herself quietly in the house. That was when she remembered the owl pellets. 

Jen found the old magazine where she’d first read about them. To find out what owls had been eating you needed to soak their pellets in water, then carefully tease them apart. The article included pictures of some of the bones you might find. Tiny delicate jawbones, ribs, and vertebrae of rodents and birds.

What Jen found didn’t match anything in the magazine. Each was no larger than the tip of her finger. The bone – if it was bone – so paper-thin that no sooner had she uncovered one it collapsed in on itself, seeming to melt under the glare of the bathroom light. Skulls. 

Tiny skulls with disproportionately huge sockets, where Jen felt certain great big insect-eyes once sat. She remembered the bright, twitching things she’d seen the owls carrying in their beaks. The insatiable screeching of the hungry owlets. That horrible, wicked sound. 

Jen thought of her ride along the forbidden path.

Then she remembered its name. 

 Many old stories tell of sailors landing on mysterious islands, out in the open sea. There they make their camp, and light their fires. Then the island sinks down fast. The drowned become its food. The island is not an island at all. It is the Zaratan – a monstrous sea turtle.

—

Look, there is Fastitocalon!

An island good to land upon,

Although ’tis rather bare.

Come, leave the sea! And let us run,

Or dance, or lie down in the sun!

See, gulls are sitting there!

Beware!

Gulls do not sink.

There they may sit, or strut and prink:

Their part is to tip the wink,

If anyone should dare

Upon that isle to settle,

Or only for a while to get

Relief from sickness or the wet,

Or maybe boil a kettle. — from the poem “Fastitocalon” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, by J. R. R. Tolkien (1962)

In Tolkien’s poem — set in the history of his Middle Earth, and well known to the Hobbits of the Shire — the gigantic Fastitocalon is the last of the mighty turtle-fish. The beast’s huge size causes sailors out at sea to believe that that it’s shell-back is actually an island. Landing there, they set a fire on the back of the Fastitocalon, but the monster dives beneath the waves and drowns them all. Tolkien based poem is based on much more ancient sources, however. 

The Physiologus is a didactic Christian text written (or compiled) in Greek by an unknown author around the 2nd century CE. The following passage is contained within it:

There is a monster in the sea which in Greek is called aspidochelone, in Latin “asp-turtle”; it is a great whale, that has what appear to be beaches on its hide, like those from the sea-shore. This creature raises its back above the waves of the sea, so that sailors believe that it is just an island, so that when they see it, it appears to them to be a sandy beach such as is common along the sea-shore. Believing it to be an island, they beach their ship alongside it, and disembarking, they plant stakes and tie up the ships. Then, in order to cook a meal after this work, they make fires on the sand as if on land. But when the monster feels the heat of these fires, it immediately submerges into the water, and pulls the ship into the depths of the sea.

Though the aspidochelone appears to be more of a gigantic fish, or whale than a turtle in some tales, the name zaratan has become more clearly identified with the concept of a giant, island-backed turtle in recent years. This may be something of a mistake, however. 

The Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (كتاب الحيوان; “Book of Animals”) is a mediaeval text in which a vast creature with a hard shell-back, covered with fauna so as to resemble an island out at sea, entices sailors to land upon it before diving to drown them. The text identifies this creature as the saratan; the Arabic word for crab.