Welcome to this St. Patrick’s Day edition of Nuzo’s Nightmare Pit. Our story this month is straight out of Ireland and is one that embodies all the quirkiness of Irish lore, together with some horrible chills to spice up your day’s celebrations.
The author is Ted Dunphy, a brilliant Irish writer and a dear friend whose works I admire tremendously. So, without much ado, let’s dig into this short story, titled, The End of Life. Happy St Patrick’s Day to you all, and may the fairies gift you luck.
THE END OF LIFE
You can’t do anything.
I control you now.
So, be still.
I’ll do the talking.
I know it is puzzling not to be able to talk. Dying does that to you. It is difficult to speak when you are lying face down in a bog hole full of dirty brown water that stinks, as you now know. Here, let me pull you out of the water a little and turn you over.
You can’t do anything by yourself after the accident you had. Human bodies don’t cope with being pounded against a road at high speed. Then hitting the stone wall put an end to any hope your people could make you work again.
That was some crash.
My, my, you mangled that leg. Mmm, the other one came clean off, your right arm was ripped off too. Putting it simply, you wrecked your body when you crashed that machine you were racing along the bog road.
The left side of your rib cage is in good shape. Not a bone out of place. Your right side took the brunt judging by the devastation caused. Thankfully, I’m not interested in bones.
The searchers looked for you in the wrong places. The foxes did better. At least they found your leg. That noise is them fighting the crows that want a share of their meal.
The search was called off a while ago. Now it is just you and me and I can do my work without being disturbed.
Most people in your situation wonder how long they have before they go. In my experience, and I have a lot of experience, over two hundred years in your time, some die more slowly than others.
I give you about three minutes and you will be completely dead, you know, brain not signalling, heartbeat stopped, organs packed up, lungs switched off. Mind you, with all that bog water in your lungs, they were well gone a while ago.
I am waiting for your body to realise it is over and stop so I can get at your brain.
I like this waiting part of my work, a time of calm reflection, not to be rushed. I hold back until all our body bits are turned off completely. Then I lift out the energy, or the life force your people call it, that vital spark that makes you who you are.
Ah, a complete shutdown, quicker than I expected. That’s better, for me anyway. Now I don’t have to bat away all those questions running through your brain. You are still vaguely aware. You can receive messages and sensations but you can’t communicate. That will come when the roots penetrate your body and you learn the language of the earth and the trees. They can’t wait to dig deep into you and start communicating with you.
+++
Just before your brain stopped signalling you were wondering who I was and why you could not see me. I can look like anything you want me to look like. How about if I were like a flickering light fading and glowing, or a hovering tongue of flame, or a flutter of gossamer wings? I like that image, poetic almost. If it helps, imagine me as one of those fairies your people talk about. One chap I waited on to bleed out insisted I should have a name. Fergus was the best he could do. With his last whistling breath, he named me Fergus the Leprechaun.
A hopeless name, but I wasn’t bothered.
Me and my kind have always been part of Irish storytelling with rainbows and pots of gold, or leading weary travellers into bogs to drown them. You make up stories of us playing fiddles in the moonlight, or we pop up in the middle of battles and slay whole armies when your own chaps are whacked and on their knees. You wonder if we exist but secretly you like us around. It’s a typical Irish thing. You shape your life around make-believe but deny we exist when asked.
Think of me as a worker in the garden of Ireland. I sow, water, protect and harvest all that grows here. A fertile land doesn’t do it by itself. There you have it, I am one of earth’s Irish gardeners, making Ireland a green and pleasant land, as you are so keen to sing about when you have a couple of pints of Guinness inside you. I manage all this bogland and the surrounding flat land down as far as and along the Waterford coast almost as far as Cork. Everything this side of the river Suir and up to the Comeragh mountains is in my care. My flat bog land is not as fancy as the jagged mountains and the green forests, and they say that Kerry and the coast of Clare are as beautiful as you would get anywhere.
I prefer the bogland.
I love this bog. There is so much energy here. I could sit all day and watch those reeds over there. That is graceful living at its best. No rush by the rushes, if you will pardon the pun. They stand tall and sway gracefully, waiting for the world to turn and breath so that they are filled with the juice of life from earth and sky. When it is their turn to keel over, they gracefully give back to earth all that power that sustained them during their short life.
Do you see that black bog pool over there? A very large and fierce pike lives in it. Do you like fish? I’m not bothered one way or the other. They look beautiful when they swim in a languid manner, you know circling gracefully and with such ease. I love that about them. But there is nothing languid about that pike. He sits under that bank and darts out when a victim enters his pool. He calls it his pool, arrogant little brute, as if he owned it. Fish are like that, a bit slow to grasp the wider picture of things. He acts like his pool is the whole world.
Did you know people like that, you know, self-centred and thinking the whole world revolved around them? He wonders why he is lonely and nobody visits him. That tells you how lacking in self-awareness he is. He used to pillage in the next pool also but the opening is too narrow and shallow now that he is fully grown, so he is trapped. He is in a prison but he doesn’t see that. Even the frogs stopped visiting his pool once he began eating them.
Frogs are something else. I can sit and watch them all day. They are hilarious when they get together. They would liven up any meeting. Always jumping around, shagging each other, telling yarns, all croaking at the same time so that they don’t know who is talking or what is being said. Not that they are bothered by that. What would they do with an idea if they even recognised one? They are more like you humans than that pike is.
Once the rats have had a turn at eating you a good deal of your weight will have disappeared which will be helpful, but they can be rowdy eaters. They never take turns. They will swarm over you shoving and fighting each other when there is plenty of you to go around. I have to be firm with them to keep them in line. I stand over them to stop them eating you in the wrong order, making my task more onerous.
The older rats know me well. They know all about keeping to procedures. But some of those younger ones have had no decent upbringing. I give them a good whack of my stick and put order on them. Just look there at how good that older one is eating the end of your remaining leg. He has been at this feeding on dead people a few years now and knows how to behave. He is not rushing. He sits quietly getting on with eating you. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.
Watch out for the birds. Sorry, I forgot you can’t see at this stage. They will be after your eyes, lazy brutes that they are. Pecking out your eyes is as easy as plucking berries off a holly bush in winter. They sit and peck, peck, peck away. No digging in dirty mud for worms or scuttling around branches looking for grubs and insects, no cracking nuts or anything that demands a bit of work. I wouldn’t mind them having your eyes if they did it in an orderly way. Earth doesn’t need your eyes but those birds land on your head and push and shove each other, tilting your head to the side so that the roots in the bog get confused on the way into your brain. That is why I shoo them away. I could drive a spike through your head and impale you to the ground. That would keep your head still and facing the way it needs it to be. I don’t think there is any call for that, at the moment.
You won’t need your eyes so if I were you I wouldn’t be too bothered when rats or birds take them. You don’t need eyes because seeing gives such a false impression of reality.
Let me lift your arm a little and tuck it in by your side. There. That’s better. It is easier to slide you deep into the pool later if your remaining arm and leg are all pointing the same way. It’s me I am thinking about because I have to do the heavy lifting.
The last parts of my schedule are tiresome if things are not done well. I always say perfection is built on the groundwork you put in beforehand. Being consumed and taken back into earth is the most natural thing that could happen, as long as it is done properly.
Life turning to death is all about maintaining a state of symmetry at the various stages of your return. Earth is irritated by any lack of order. That is the reason for decomposing you in an orderly way so that all that energy is the last thing to leave you.
Your energy is like the warmth a bird leaves behind in the nest when it flies away. It is as delicate and fragile as a sigh. It requires loving care and sensitive handling. You can see why I am fussy.
When you were given it at your start of life it was like you were a drop of water splashing into the air. Each drop is unique and self-contained, sparkling and changing shape as it twists and sparkles in the air, separate and distinct for a brief moment, reflecting the light. Then it falls back and is part of the river again, its brief spurt of individuality over. You are at that stage where you are about to drop back into the river, or into earth to be more accurate.
You don’t have to do anything now. I do it all for you.
The sucking feeling in your body is the connected fibres and roots of the bog plants digging into you. You will eventually become one with those roots, part of a web of feelers, tendrils, call them whatever you want. I am not particular about labels. The reality is that you become part of a vast web of life and roots living in the soil and water of the bog. You will learn to communicate with the other roots. They will tell you all you need to know – where danger is, where food and water are to be found, what is threatening your existence, where to reach out to the materials that will sustain your life. In time you too will learn to feed off the flesh of people and animals and suck your food from the earth like the rest of the bog.
Your people don’t know if they should believe I exist. They make me out to be a will-o-the-wisp on the Dunmore cliffs, or the old women walking the Tramore road who disappears when you speak to her. To some, I am the evil spirit that crawls into cots and eats babies eyes and sucks dry their brains, or the breath of foul air that turns milk sour and makes goats go dry. They tell stories about the Banshee wailing, announcing the death of someone close. That’s me howling when I can’t have the dead body because the family will guard it until they burn it or put in the wrong type of ground. Your cemeteries have no life in them and are of little use to the life of earth.
Think of me as…
The light in the distance on a stormy night, tempting you to take a different way home;
The hair rising on the back of your neck, telling you that you are on a treacherous path;
The sense that you are not alone;
The feeling that someone is behind you or breathing over your shoulder;
The certainty that you have been here before but can’t remember when;
The tingle when you hear voices, see a light and feel the urge to take a different turn in the road that you suspect leads to danger;
That road leads to me, waiting to cull your spirit and give it back to earth from which you came.
End
Q & A
Q. So Ted, would you mind sharing what inspired this story?
A. I was inspired by reading African horror stories and wondered why the Irish don’t have similar stories. Tell an Irish person a horror story and they will start laughing. On the other hand, talk about death and they take it seriously, especially they wonder about what is it like for the last few minutes before they go. Plus I am interested in the way the energy or spirit of a person goes back to the energy of the universe and becomes part of the ongoing flow of energy in the universe. So I put the whole thing together with the folklore of fairies, "little men”, and a very pragmatic approach to death.
Q. How would you describe your works?
A. My written work is a mix of down-to-earth, pragmatic, unadulterated reflection of reality, with a smidgen of dark humour and a search for the light at the end of a tunnel - any tunnel. I tend to write about individuals faced with insurmountable odds who have to find the resources in themselves, and the resilience they did not know they had, to fight back. Most of the time the individual wins but not always. They win only when they discover the knack of working with others. In all my work - reflecting my view of life - there is always an optimism that comes from being blessed to have met so many decent and good people in my life - like you, Queen of African Horror, who has the brightest and most infectious laugh of anyone I know.
Q. Are you working on any stories and when can your readers expect to see another published Ted Dunphy Irish thriller?
A. I wish you had asked before I drank a glass of wine!! (Several) Anyway, I have to hand a story based on the life of my grandmother who was a feminist, IRA activist, widowed at the age of 25, remarried and mother of five sons and two daughters, who lived through the 1916 Rising in Ireland and the civil war, and in later life could cook potatoes and dumplings like no one else could.
I am partway through writing a trilogy of a dystopian account of what happens forty years from now when the world has been devastated by a virus that destroys all the world's oil, cutting off the use of machinery, travel and commerce between countries. Every country and island lock themselves down against others to protect their food supplies and ruthlessly destroy any opposition within their boundaries. What happens when a stable authority like the Catholic Church is the only system left that can control Ireland so that the Catholic Church emerges as the leader of life in Ireland? What does it take to corrupt the leaders of the Church so that they exercise a draconian style of government on the people that is set up to serve their requirements and wants? And how do the people react, especially women who bear the brunt of most of the repressive regulations? Will the secret of success lie in returning to the ancient Celtic religions and Celtic way of life lived in harmony with nature as the way to a good life? St Patrick once squashed that Celtic religion and attitude. Will the New Catholic Church of Ireland survive if it follows his example?
Note:
Ted Dunphy’s books are available on Amazon.
Follow him on Twitter: @DunphyTed