There was I, this Friday the 4th of May morning around about 10.36 and thinking about what I can do today, you see like our webmaster Steve Evans I'm a self-employed Painter and Decorator, which sounds great, but it's not, when there's loads of work coming in you get some good cash coming your way even after the VATman had his/her dip into your dosh, but when there's no work coming in surviving from week to week is sometimes bloody hard.
Well, this week is one of my bad weeks, a customer has been trying to find a suitable wallpaper for me to paper her hall, stairs and top landing, so if work comes in to backup all the quotes and enquires I've had then after this week I'll be busy for a few months to come, which will be great because it'll allow me to buy a new Blizzard 040 accelerator card, a new Blizzard SCSI-2 kit board and hopefully 32Mb or better still 64Mb of Fastmem.
My old Blizzard 030 MkIV packed up on me a week or so ago after about 6-7 years of great service, so a better and faster one is a "MUST", so, trying to think of what to do to-day in order to pass the time away a bit better for me I decided to go up to our local library for some books (naturally).
Some time ago on the earlier diskmag versions of The Crypt, I used to write the odd ghost story, well, when I say that I used to write the ghost stories that's not actually true, the stories were already written in the various books I simply retyped then out into my word processor called Protext and saved the stories as ASCII file and sent them off to Ray.
For whatever reasons, I stopped typing out the stories, I think I got a bit pi**ed of with doing them, I used to sit at my computer for hours typing out the various stories, anyway, with my recent visit to our newly-built library today (Monday) I found another ghost-story book with several shortish stories in them, so if I don't get bored with all the typing I'll be sending in a newly typed-in story off to either Ray or The Ferret ever so often, and hopefully you'll be able to read a new story ever new issue of The Crypt, ok, this first story is called "The Revenants" and it's by Bryan MacMahon and like all the future 15 or-so stories, I've copied then from one book called "Irish Ghost Stories" edited by David Marcus Happy reading.... (Dr. Jekyll)
(Latest News)....Thanks kindly to Ray (DM), and his words of wisdom and sound advice I have recently bought a brand spanking new Apollo 1230 Pro MkIII accelerator with 16Mb on board from Eyetech, now, I was about to buy a new Blizzard 040 because being a user of a Blizzard 030 for about 7 years I found the 030 to be a brilliant card, well, as 030's go.
As soon as my Blizzard packed up I was in part-turmoil about which card to get, at first I thought about getting the Blizzard 040, but after reading the specs about it in one of the Amiga Format mags (Nov 99-Page 50), and it seemed by the 040's specs that unlike it's excellent 030 predecessor the 040 isn't all that good a card especially when the asking price is a tad short of �150, but apparently the Blizzard 060 is a brilliant card.
I was very wary about getting the Apollo 1230, even if Ray has got one and reckoned that for the low price of �59.95 for the two SIMM version. It was a very good inexpensive card, and since having and using it I will go so far as to recommend it for any miggy user wishing to upgrade to an 030 especially if they're on a very tight budget.
Anyway, on with the story......
It could be argued that in an age of silicone chips, microwave ovens and genetic engineering witches do not exist. However, they do. Without a witch or two it would be a lack lustre world. If a society for the preservation of witches is to be established, it will not be before time.
For all the world it happened to be the Feast of the Dear Departed. Just before midnight Old Maag was trudging her way home from a cottage on the edge of the town where there had been a turkey-gamble which was a rural diversion in which the winner of a series of card games of Forty-five receives a scrawny turkey as first prize. Old Maag was in a foul humour for she had won only a single game in a long evening of gambling.
Those playing with Maag never made bold on the old beldame, for she had the reputation of enquiring by improper means after things lost, lost or hidden to come. Rumour also credited her with having spilled the hot blood of a cockerel on the ace of hearts and of having held up the card at the Consecration of the Mass so as to procure luck of the wrong kind.
Maag never praised the living, she invariably praised the dead. At times she scolded or upbraided the dear departed or spoke to them with amiable irritation, just as she would address a kettle reluctant to boil or a door that would insist on blowing open without apparent cause.
Conflicting thoughts contending in her brainpan, Old Maag staggered alone in the darkness. There was a fitful wind but an erratic moon. Of a sudden she stopped at the graveyard gate on the edge of the Town. She glanced sidelong at the ranked crosses faintly showing in the meagre light. Black Harry, her Lord and Master, pricked her. She stood irresolute for a while, then pushing her head between the bars of the gate she began to atone:
As the words left her lips, a coconut rosary beads hanging from a spike of the gate began to melt into dripping chocolate. There was an echo of hypocrisy to the complaint. The cry of a widow at the edge of her husband's grave as her eyes secretly sieved the mourners in search of a new man. A husband bemoaning a dead wife while inwardly cheering for conjugal liberty. There was a further echo in the hag's chanting - one tinged with malice and a desire to upset the normal condition of affairs.
The Good Provider also heard the incantation as He hears the chirp of every sparrow in the ivied eaves of creation, the rusty whinge of every peacock in the garden of the Eastern World, the minor modal song of each black-backed whale under each island cliff in the Northern Hemisphere and that unbelievable medley of minor sounds with which the air is replete, though largely unheard by pure humans.
The Provider left off His whimsical painting of new varieties of butterflies and parrots. As He listened to the reiterated call of the Old Lady, a smile framed his pearly teeth in the recesses of his curling beard. To Himself He said softly, "I'm a little tired of cant. I'm tempted to teach someone or other a lesson."
'Just the very night to do so,' He added.
Maag tried to withdraw her head from between the bars of the gate. Her head was a prisoner. So was the rest of her old body. At first she refused to panic. She told herself that she was among her own. Above her was a heaven of scudding moon light.
As midnight chimed rustily from the steeple of an old church in the town, the clay on the surface of a grave a short distance from the gate began to heave, crack and part. It did so utterly without sound. Faintly at first, but gradually growing clearer by the second, there hung and whirled a little mist of ectoplasm, that viscous substance, if substance if can be named, which exudes, seeps, or emanates from a body of a spiritualist medium during trance and which now through the whim of the Provider was percolating through the cracks of the grave. Gradually, as Maag watched it with intensity, the spinning shape became edged with prismatic hues, the whole writhing and wriggling as if balanced on a tail not unlike that of a huge tadpole or a play-top of a giant child.
This primal shape became still larger: it then almost imperceptibly divided into three parts which wove back and forth, in and out, up and down, until, not unlike a pupa or chrysalis, they changed into rather human shapes. These shapes assumed the forms of an elderly man with an aureole of silver hair, a buxom woman in her late prime and a girl who had obviously just emerged from puberty into young womanhood.
Maag watched this, the whites of her ancient eyes showing at intervals faint blue in the fitful light of the sky.
There was nothing even vaguely eerie about the three personages now standing on the pathway. They could have been late family mourners come to pay respects to a common grave. Their clothing, if clothing it could be called, seemed to be a kind of institutional grey. The elderly man was seen to be carrying a black walking cane on which silver mountings glinted at intervals.
The trio drifted towards the gateway where the eyes of the imprisoned Maag recognised Old Malcolm Dunn whose nickname was Sagacity, his daughter Lizzie Grigg, nee' Dunn and his grand- niece, Mary Jesephine Lavelle. The girl, a first year university student of biology, had drowned in the quarry pool having fallen in while picking whitethorn blossoms in early May, an undertaking which everybody in the country-side knew was most unlucky.
At the squeeze-belly stile, although the gesture was completely superfluous, the elderly sage stood aside to allow the two females to precede him. Lizzie Grigg, who went first, paused to offer Old Maag a hostile stare as if to indicate the measure of her resentment at the disturbance of their eternal rest. The old witch closed her eyes and turned her head away.
The revenants then drifted off towards the town leaving behind them the seared crosses and headstones, the squat spotted tombs, the sprinkling of marble angels with bird droppings on their heads; presently they reached the poor radiance of the first of the street lamps and later still moved along the pavement of the main street of the country town.
There was no one abroad: from the recessed doorway of the town bank a cigarette tip glowed and faded, at the same time a button or two on a young Garda's tunic took and lost the gleam. The Garda poked out his head, swivelled it to glance up and down the street - it was obvious that he was less concerned about seeing than being seen. To the Garda the fluent passage of the triform on the opposite pavement could have been a drift of fog or turf smoke. The younger woman kept looking about her. Dreamily, as if sleepwalking, she tagged a little behind her companions.
A brindled cat scurried out of an archway; stopping short before the shapes it made a horseshoe of its back and spat- hissed upwards in their direction. An old stray sheepdog sleeping on a bakery grating on the pavement roused himself with a deep growl and made a semi-circle on the roadway to allow them passage. An inevitable owl from the ivied castle tower rustled its wings above them as it crossed in the upper air of the street.
The revenants turned off the Main Street and entered a narrow row of tall houses of faded red brickwork, their fronts flush with the line of the street. Outside one of these houses Sagacity, who was leading the way, stopped and turned to his companions.
"Things have changed," he said in a deep minatory voice. His daughter Lizzie Grigg nodded grimly. Mary Josephine looked up at the house with an anticipatory smile.
'Discretion is called for,' Old Maag said severely, 'Also tact and control. Daughter,' he added, addressing Lizzie, 'Bear in mind that you are merely wife of the First Part.'
Lizzie pursed her already tightened mouth. As her father raised his hand to lift the heavy knocker, he paused to look up at a first-storey window over which dark blinds were drawn. Turning again; 'A Wife of the Second Part now shares what was once your conjugal couch, 'he said. With a glance at Mary Josephine he added, "There is also the new wife's nephew named Andrew Soople. A young man of twenty-three. An electrician.
Mary Josephines's lips came apart. 'I danced with Andrew once,' she breathed.
Sagacity knocked on the door.
All three waited. There was no response.
'Louder!' Said Lizzie Grigg.
'Please,' from the grand-niece.
Old Malcolm knocked a little more loudly than before.
In the first-storey bedroom above their heads, Judy Grigg nee' Soople, second wife of Billy Grigg, her pneumatic form squashed against her husband's back, raised her head from the pillow. As the knocking again re-echoed through the house her fingernails clutched her husband's breast.
'That our door?' She gasped.
'Dineen's,' Billy growled through half sleep.
The knocking came again. It sounded like thunder. 'Some-one is dead,' Judy gasped. 'Go down Billy Grigg and see who it is.'
Billy cursed under his breath. He swung slowly out on to the floor. Too sleepy to recall that the window was paint- bound he tried in vain for a moment to raise the sash.
Dragging on a long brown cardigan and cursing still more vehemently he shuffled downstairs in old carpet slippers. Reaching the front door he bent his head.
'Who's out?' He muttered.
'Open, you fool;' Lizzie shouted from outside.
Billy's reaction was to growl, 'Where's your bloody key, woman?'
On the sudden realisation of the true state of affairs he drew back from the door and made the sign of the cross on himself. Cautiously indeed, the while reassuring himself that he was still asleep, he drew back the bolt, twisted the knob of the lock and opening the door on its safety chain, peeped out, 'Whas-sit?' He asked.
Like three cold draughts of air the shapes brushed past him in the little space allowed. Then as they stood in the hallway, Billy Grigg managed to gasp as if in confirmation of his wildest conjecture. 'Holy Christ, it's Lizzie, Old Sagacity and Mary Josephine herself out of the Quarry Hole.' Again he blessed himself feverishly.
Lizzie drifted into the kitchen followed by her father and the young woman. As wife of the First Part she groped on the dark wall just inside the kitchen door. 'Where's the light switch?' She asked peremptorily. It's to the right of the door now,' her former husband answered, a bullfrog of bewilderment in his throat.
Lizzie switched on the dim light. Looked around her imperiously and proprietorially. Peered at the Consecration Certificate above its now quenched votive lamp. A new certificate indicated that the house had been re-dedicated to the Sacred Heart in the framed oleograph above. No mention now of herself or her two fine sons in Wyndmoor, Philadelphia. Lizzie, folding her arms across her breasts as if in preparation for a battle, took a seat adjacent to the fireplace. Mary Josephine was already seated.
Billy stood framed in the doorway. His face was chalk white; after an appropriate silence, 'What brought ye?' He asked hoarsely.
'Wanting at home', sniffed Sagacity.
'Remains to be seen,' Lizzie commented.
The girl made a pleasant humming, purring sound in her nose.
'We buried you decent,' Billy was addressing his first wife.
'You could hardly leave me overground,' the woman countered.
'What way are you, Malcolm?' Billy asked his ex-father-in- law.
'Perpendicular,' the old man said.
Mary Josephine continued to smile vaguely. Her head was held a little to one side. She appeared to be listening to sounds coming from upstairs.
'Herself will get a shock,' Billy ventured.
'That she might for fear she mightn't!' Lizzie sneered.
'Is there someone upstairs besides Judy?' from Mary Josephine.
'Andy Soople, Billy's nephew. An electrician.
'A Cuckoo,' Lizzie sniffed.
'I danced with him in ballbay,' the young woman said.
'Judy gave up her widow's pension when she married me,' Billy said.
'Or was it her Old Age Pension?' From Lizzie.
What age is Andy now?' Mary Josephine asked meekly.
Twenty-three,' from Billy.
'Married?'
'No!'
I was twenty when I tumbled in,' the girl said, not without pride. 'I'm still that age.'
Billy became alert to footsteps on the stairs. He hurried out into the hallway. Feverish whispering was heard outside, Cuff-huffing and a sense of consternation. Voices. 'Dead?' 'Alive.'
'Come in and see.'
Peering and peeping. Advancing and retreating. Urgency and mystification. Then, 'Are you out of your mind?' and for god's sake call Andy.'
The faces that peered were coloured red from the red bulb above them in the hallway. And from natural or supernatural agitation. After considerable tugging, Billy led in his wife Judy. She resembled nothing more than a nanny-goat on a halter. She groped just inside the kitchen-door, gripped a chair and sat on its edge. She wore an out-at-elbows cerise dressing- gown. She spread her fingers across her mouth and gawked.
She made no attempt to greet the visitants. 'You, Divine Lord,' she kept repeating as she blubbered. The dribbled spittle leaked through her fingers and ran the back of her hand. 'Mine,' Lizzie said, addressing her father and indicating the cerise dressing-gown. She looked up at the mantelpiece. 'Where's my blue vase? She demanded.
The cat,' Billy gulped.
'A cat with butter-fingers maybe,' Lizzie said. She looked up at the walls of the kitchen. 'Such a daub,' she added with a grimace. Her stare settled on a paler rectangle on the wall.
'In the attic,' Billy put in.
The First Wife glowered at the range.
'My Rayburn is gone too,' she commented.
'This one heats four radiators,' Billy said.
Judy had come to some kind of terms with herself. With a superhuman effort she asked with all the sweetness she could muster, 'Will I wet a pot of ?'
Are you able?' Lizzie said.
'That's enough,' her father chimed in.
She can't keep it bottled up,' Mary Josephine ventured.
'Strong or weak?' asked the wife of the Second Part.
'Strong,' said Sagacity crisply.
Billy grabbed the chance to escape. 'I'll plug in the kettle,' he said. In the scullery he filled the kettle and looked at himself in a mirror hanging over the sink.
'What dimension am I in now?' He asked his reflection.
'What did I have for supper?. With God's help, it's only a nightmare. If it's for real, I'll roll with the punch. I'm not to blame. All I did was marry a widow when my prime wife had gone over. Now she's back, the prime wife that is. I mean to say, I mean to say, I mean to say this doesn't make me an extra-marital canoodler does if? I mean to say, am I bigamist or eejit? Eh?. It's twenty past one o'clock in the morning in a small sane Irish town and here are three come-backers looking for tay.
One of them died of a superfluity of wisdom, another died of enmity and another died of romancity - the last girl who tumbled down through the blackthorns and choked on green scum and frogspawn. I mean to say, a man's brain should not be subjected to such enormities. My moral stance was sound,' he assured his reflection.
The kettle had begun to sing. Billy clattered ware onto a large tray, 'Imagine,' he continued in a mumble, 'after where she has been and seen, what bothers her now is the colour of the kitchen wall. Is it Nile Green or Woodland Verdure? Eh? They're bloody well not going to sleep here tonight. I mean to say, if this got out, look how it would affect my standing in this town. If Judy doesn't scoot 'em, I'll find some way of doing so. If only people kept hens in their back gardens nowadays like they did long ago, the cockcrow might call 'em home. By golly, but that gives me a bloody good idea. Hurry up kettle and boil!'
Click went the control of the electric kettle. Billy continued to sing in a low voice at the point where the kettle left off.
Still muttering to himself Billy, bearing the tray laden with tea things, returned to the kitchen, 'I should have put a stronger bulb in the kitchen - the light might put the skids under 'em. "Wanting at home" my royal Irish arse. Have I everything, tea, milk, sugar, biscuits? Myself is the crackers. Maag had a hand in this I swear. That's what I get for refusing to buy her pishoguey home butter. Get up Tom Coffsey and drink your tay.'
The three revenants looked down morosely at the tea tray. Billy began to fill the cups. 'Shamrock tay,' Lizzie said. 'Three leaves only.' As Judy made a bridle up, Andy Soople appeared in the doorway! All fell silent. He wore a vivid silk dressing-gown.
Mary Josephine put up a ghostly hand and parted her ghostly hair. Lizzie looked from the girl to Andy. Billy flashed a look at Judy. Sagacity closed what was formerly the aperture of his mouth.
All the other saw that Mary Josephine had eyes only for Andy. Andy had electric eyes only for Mary Josephine. Billy made some unheard mumbles of introduction. No one offered to shake hands.
The group was frozen to tableau for an appreciable period of silence.
'Can you bake meal bread?' Lizzie stabbed at Judy.
'With caraway seeds, yes.'
'Not if you soak them first.'
'My scones were famous.'
'Someone told me they were like birdlime.'
'Once you have a good oven you can bake anything.'
'Can't beat oven and radiators together.'
Sagacity made a sound like the warning cough of a mortal.
Billy gestured to the untouched fare on the tray. 'I daresay you'll have to go back before long,' he said.
'We were thinking,' Sagacity said solemnly, 'of staying around for a few nights.'
'I'd love that.' Said Mary Josephine, her eyes on the flowered dressing-gown.
'And where would you stay?' Billy asked.
'After all the ullagoning you had,' said Lizzie with severity - she was addressing Billy, 'the least you might do is put us up for a few nights.'
'Can't stay here,' from Judy, 'All the rooms are taken up.'
'Might stay with real old friends, then.'
'As you please.'
Sagacity turned to Billy, 'Do you still keep pigs?' He asked in an effort to raise the conversation to a more placid plane.
'There's a by-law now against keeping pigs. At a pinch we might put up Mary Josephine,' he added.
'All or nothing,' from Lizzie.
'Three musketeers,' the sage said.
'My coffin wasn't up to the mark,' Lizzie said, glaring at Billy, 'And I always told you I detested a brown habit.'
'We searched the house for you Child O' Mary cloak and veil,' Billy countered. 'Couldn't find it.'
'Pawned perhaps,' from Judy.
'Water under the bridge,' Sagacity said dismissively.
'Would any of you like to go to the toilet,' Judy was addressing the revenants.
'Toilet?' all three said together. Lizzie put their common scorn into words, 'Do we look like people who go to a toilet?'
Since it all seemed that no one was interested in having tea, Billy took up the tray. He went out to the scullery and stole open the door leading to the small back garden. Nothing there but shadows, high stars and stillness. A small upper window of the living-room was open so he could hear the conversation in progress inside.
'I got Andy to install a new bathroom suite in pale rose,' Judy was saying.
'Chamberpot to match?' From Lizzie.
The Master room is en suite,' Judy countered.
'I built up this place,' Lizzie said, Indicating Billy, 'When he comes across he'll be buried beside me,'
'No guarantee,' from Judy.
Out in the meagre garden Billy plucked a blade of grass. He licked the insides of his thumbs and closed them about the grass blade. Placing his lips against the slit he blew a cock- a-doodle-doo. Malcolm alone seemed to heed the bugle call of eternity implicit in the mock cockcrow. The others took little notice. The wives were at it hot and heavy. Mary Josephine's eyes dreamed on. The lights flickered in the eyes of the young electrician. Billy crowed again. The call now seemed to be making some impression.
Malcolm indicated the it was time to return to their proper home. Mary Josephine drew close to Andy. 'Do you ride a motorcycle?' She breathed. 'A little,' he murmured.
Lizzie played her final card. Outfacing Judy she said, 'You've a small claim to a man if you haven't a child by him; without a child all you have are words and paper. My sons in Philadelphia won't see me wronged.'
The cock crew the third time, 'We'll be off now,' Sagacity said. His two fellow revenants indicated assent. The older man cleared his throat with a measure of finality. All prepared to listen. Billy stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
'Our visit here has been a wound of eternal law, a lesion of time and space,' Malcolm began - 'the result of a whim rarely indulged in by the Provider. Why He chose us as exemplars I cannot explain except perhaps that we are ordinary folk and thus are typical. If I hold aloft the flames of a ha'penny dip I cannot illuminate the summit of Mount Fuller. The common head louse, Pediculas capitis, cannot be expected to solve a quadrant equation nor a rhinoceros to do a crochet.
The Provider, the Prime Instigator, obviously has a keen sense of humour, how else could He endow humans with the ability to appreciate and reconcile the more bizarre elements of human life consequent upon which recognition the zygomatic muscle of the upper lips responds in a series of nervous spasms - a minor epileptic fit in fact - a phenomenon which mortals, limited in the matter of precise terminology, call laughter.
Superficial observers marvel at man's exploration of space but express little wonder at the fact that common elver, equipped with only natural radar no bigger than a pinhead, can crawl 5,000 mile of slime on the ocean floor to finds its way to a pool in the stream below the town.'
'You never lost it,' Billy said in admiration.
'Hitachi and Mitsubishi make powerful machines,' the girl whispered in the young man's ear. 'There's also the Moto Guzzi.'
The young electrician had closed his eyes, tightened his fists on imaginary handlebar grips, and was shuddering in imaginary speed.
Sagacity glared at the whispering girl and the shuddering electrician. '"Wanting at home" is a misnomer,' Sagacity went on. 'We are intruders,' he said including the other revenants in the declaration. 'Once the game of a person's life is over a new hand of cards is dealt. In the game we have no further part. If the greatest loss to family or nation or mankind were to return in response to the plaint of a hag or the love ache of an adolescent, the revenant would cause an upset. I go further,' he said with severity. 'We are dirt! Insamuch as dirt has been defined as displaced matter, a piano in a cornfield is dirt and a cowpat in a drawing-room equally so. A whore in a convent, a virgin in a brothel! But if the piano and cowpat, whore and virgin exchanged places, 'pari passu' as it were, the result is harmony. Let us be on our way.'
The trio of revenants drifted towards the door. Mary Josephine moved last; as she passed the young man she whispered in his ear, 'Faster, my love. Myself on the pillion behind you. Like Oisin and Niamh riding to the land of Ever Young.'
When the revenants reached the churchyard gate they found the old gossip still enstocked between the bars. Her face was white and drawn; her eyes shone like those of a snared hare. Her rump stuck out behind her as if somehow she had managed to achieve a position of repose.
Sagacity poked at the old woman's buttocks with his walking cane. Although the ferruled end passed through her flesh without causing pain, the old woman winced, squealed and twisted. As with an odd laugh, Old Malcolm poked again, the crone turned her neck so awkwardly and indeed so fortunately as to release her head from the bars of the gate. The old woman totted backwards, dragged by her trailing shawl over her shoulder and staggered away through the mid-road darkness.
Sagacity led the way through the stile. Mary Josephine lingered; 'Safety last,' she whispered with a final look back- ward at the dim cut-out of the town skyline. Following the others, she extended her arms and then drew them close to her breast's as if hugging them about a young man's waist. She shuddered as if in response to the shuddering of a machine.
Reaching the grave the three forms stopped. A cloud covered the moonface. 'Ready, steady, go,' the Sage intoned. Three swirls of paint colour gathered momentum, grew larger, then tapered to the shape of large spinning tadpoles. Then all three forms merged into a single unit and slowly screwed down into the grave. The final glint, indicating that they had been there at all, could have come from a silver mounting of a walking cane or ray of moonlight tweaking a gleam from the broken glass of a wreath on an adjoining grave............
The End.