Bull Running For Girlsl (14 page)

The night was warm but an eerie green mist hung low to the ground, weaving its way around the rocks, searching with dead man’s fingers into each slight crevice and swirling around the boulders. The pathway around the point and up the hill was rocky and a little unnerving in the darkness. The children had been told by so many adults never to let lantern light drift out to sea, so as cautious as ever, they kept the light shining inland. The path undulated and as they went over the next rise they were surprised to see the flames of a large bonfire on the beach. As they drew closer they could see quite clearly the figures of four men sitting by the fire, staring out to sea.

“What fools—light from this point would guide anyone into the shallows,” said George. “The sailors will read everything wrong. The lights from here and the other two islands will confuse them,” said George. He shouted at the men. “Hey, put that fire out!”

The figures turned slowly around to look at the children but did not call back. Their clothes seemed odd but the children were used to the foreign fashions of sailors so took no heed. The evening began to change around them and it grew suddenly cold, heralding the wind, which changed direction as if winter had fallen. The sea became rougher and the rain began to fall, cold with a bitter sting to it.

George made as if to go down the rough track that left the main pathway down towards the beach. Alex grabbed his arm.

“Don’t, George—I don’t like the look of them.”

“The fire, they can’t light a fire.”

“I think that they know that, George. I really think that they do. The rain will put the fire out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pirates. They’re the pirate wreckers, George.”

George stepped back and turned to Geraldine.

“Where’s the light from the metal man, the warning light should have been lit by now?”

And then the wreckers moved. Slowly at first they lumbered towards the children through the softer sand of the lower banking. By the light of the fire Alex could see their hollow, cadaverous faces and the limp way that they held their arms. She screamed and turned to run. The other two ran in front of her, scrambling up the banking towards Elsinore, away from the creatures that the incantation had brought forward. Once there, they banged on the front door and screamed for help.

Candles were lit and there came a crashing from within the house as master and servants stumbled into one another in the near darkness. Alex’s father shouted and wanted to know just who was at the door.

“Let us in, let us in!” cried Alex. “Father—let us in!”

Through the darkness the children could see the fearful wreckers coming closer with muffled voices. Even in the darkness they could see their milky, filmed eyes. And yet still the large oak door would not yield.

Alex started to scream once more as she pounded on the door until her hands began to ache. All three of them were attacking the door now, kicking and crying out for refuge.

“Father! Father!” Alex put her back to the door and started to sob into her hands, knowing that the foul wreckers were almost on top of them.

Suddenly the door gave way. The children were hauled inside and the great door bolted behind them.

Alex hid behind her father, begged him to get the guns and to keep well away from the door.

It was Alex that jolted George out of the desperate state he was in.

“Say the names! Say the names again!” she screamed.

George was breathing heavily but started to mutter the incantation again. He said the names twice and then a third time.

“Rove Maloney, Pen Willy, Craven Blackstock and Gin McCarthy—be gone.”

The dreadful wreckers turned away from the solid oak door and made their way clumsily back down to the shoreline to the tiny cave where the skull was lying half buried in the sand.

There was no sleep that night in Elsinore and there was a great commotion back at Holland Park after hearing the news about what the children had been up to. Anne Halifax had no qualms about sending the children to boarding school in England. Alex was left to live with her father in Elsinore, forever dreading a pounding at the door, her nightmares terrifying. In these nightmares she could smell rotting flesh and would wake in a fearful state.

All had thought that George had banished the wreckers but on wild stormy nights in winter, when the ships came too close to shore, they fell afoul of the dreadful creatures. The wreckers stood their ground and fed upon the poor sailors as they were washed ashore.

But the dead left the children alone—except in those nightmares.

Pirate wreckers—wreckers that George had brought back, in some foul form from beyond the grave.

Geraldine never went back to Sligo. She finished school, and before the decade was out, she was quickly married off to a master silk weaver in London. However, George did come back and whenever he was allowed to see Alex, at a wedding or other such family occasion, she was carefully chaperoned and was never far from her father’s admonition.

Sometimes, there were a few years between sightings of the wreckers and then there would be reports from sailors, that strange, mysterious lights had almost led them aground on Rosses Point and, those that had not perished on the rocks as a result of them, told of how they had nearly come to grief. Burnt out fires were occasionally found on the beach at Rosses Point and no one ever found the culprits who made them. Fathers, sons and brothers were lost to the sea and local people, who at one time deep within their family history might have spawned a wrecker or two, knew that none of them were the cause of the calamities.

When Alex’s father died and was buried at Drumcliffe there was no wake, and on returning home Alex shuttered Elsinore House and would not let anyone come close to her, except for Tilda Florence and Dewy, who had come across from Holland Park some years before. They had fallen out of favour with Anne Halifax on account of the fact that they had not kept an eye on the children when she was recovering from childbirth, on that awful night so many years ago. The only other person that Alex would see was George and they could often be found deep in conversation with furrowed brows and earnest exchanges.

George was the company agent for Donovan’s shipping in Sligo. On the last day of October he was on his way home from business in Glasgow aboard the ship
The Iris
. A day or two later Alex and George planned to announce their engagement.

Alex stood at the drawing room window, watching the sun go down and the sky turn blue-black. The sky looked bruised that evening and as the cold, winter sun backed down Alex thought she could see streaks of blood on the shoreline, and began to think back to that terrible night all those years before. The sun disappeared and she was left apprehensive and in brooding spirits.

The wind started to howl around Elsinore and she sought out some comfort in the kitchen. There had always been little formality between them and Tilda called Alex by her Christian name, although Alex was now mistress of the house. Tilda wouldn’t dream of calling her anything else and Alex liked it that way. Tilda was baking and Alex was moving things about that didn’t need to be moved and generally getting in the way.

“Alex! Wouldn’t you rather be in the drawing room with yer books? He won’t be seen until morning. The ship has to get into Sligo, and then he has to make sure the cargo is safely attended. Then he’ll come to you.”

“I know, Tilda. I know, but you know how I feel about him being out there tonight.”

“Yes, I know accidents have happened, but they will not happen to George—they simply won’t.”

“Accidents?”

“Yes, accidents, nothing more—now be still.”

“But Tilda you’ve heard the stories and you know what happened to me—to us!”

“I know that the night all those things happened to you, you had been drinking that awful rum and that you believed the stories told by Old Griff.”

“And what about the skull?”

“What about it?”

Alex shrugged her shoulders. “Griff said that if the skull was buried in the graveyard—”

Tilda didn’t let her finish. “The skull probably isn’t there now anyway and what if it is? Do you really think that it will make any difference?”

Alex leaned across the table and would not leave it alone. “And can you say that you have never thought of those stories on a night such as this, when the remains of the sailing boats and bodies have been broken and washed up on the shore? The men and boys so pummelled by the rocks that they are beyond recognition?”

Tilda didn’t say anything. She was speechless and had never seen Alex in such a state, not even on the day of her father’s funeral—not ever.

Alex went back to the drawing room but could not be still. The wind howled even louder and she could feel its chill throughout the house in spite of the fire. She picked up half a dozen books or more but could not settle on any. She sat in the armchair next to the window and fancied that she could see a glow from a fire that had been stacked on the beach. In her frustration she could not sit down any longer and paced the room from hearth to window, from window to hearth. With each step, as she drew closer to the window, she thought she could see a fire on the shore.

“No, it can’t be. Please, God, let this ship pass safely.”

Then she could stand it no more. She reached for her cloak, pulled on some stout walking shoes and unbolted the front door. A shovel lay next to the door. She had planned to do this many times but in her fear she had never had the courage to do it. She was determined to find the skull. If she found it, after all these years, she would bury it in Drumcliffe graveyard. Perhaps if it lay on sacred ground the curse would be gone.

She needed no lantern to go down the pathway from Elsinore. She had travelled this way a hundred times before, in her nightmare, down to the wreckers on the beach. Alex descended with difficulty against the icy wind, which flailed a thousand sword-sharp points against her, but still she went on towards the bonfire that she could now see on the shoreline.

There were no wreckers on the beach, just the crashing of the waves against rocks and the stinging sand that had been whipped up by the wind. Alex thought that she could see the green mist shapes of the wreckers appearing. There was no light on the metal man, no lantern to guide any captain. There was no safe passage that night for ships, only the light from Rosses Point to bring the vessels to the rocks and the cannibal pirates.

Head bent against the fierce wind and clutching the shovel in one hand, she made her way down past the sand dunes, where lay the bones of the men from the Spanish Armada, wrecked in a tempest in 1588. Their bones turned to dust and whirling like dervishes also looking for a sacred place to rest.

The fire was too big for her to put out alone so she took a piece of burning wood from the outlying embers and headed to the small cave she had spent the last ten years trying to avoid.

Utterly terrified (but with George in mind), Alex made her way through the narrow gap into the cave. She thrust the torch before her and squeezed through the narrow entrance.

Alex frantically shone the torch this way and that, looking for any trace of the skull or remnants of the old green shawl. She found nothing but a memory of that awful night when George told his story, and the shadows on the wall heralded the forms that were becoming substance on the beach. She sunk to her knees in desperation as the storm heightened and the wind threatened to shatter stone.

“God help us from the wreckers!” she cried. “Forgive us for what we have done; we had no right, no right at all!”

The storm fell silent and then she could hear the sound of metal grinding against metal, as if something was moving that had not moved for many years. She could hear cries and the wailing from outside the cave, and the deep thud of something pounding the sand. Alex dropped the torch and placed her hands over her ears, so dreadful were the screams. At last they stopped.

She picked up the torch and left the small cave. On leaving she tripped and fell over something, finding herself a breath away from the face of a creature not entirely human—or alive—but which had not been entirely dead. She could smell the evil of it. Alex screamed and made a grab for the torch. As she stood up it became apparent that the wreckers had either been pulled limb from putrid limb, or had been pummelled against the rocks by something with great strength. A wrecker’s head had been squashed to a pulp and was surrounded by giant footprints, which led off—back to the water’s edge. The bonfire was no more than a column of smoke that vanished within seconds. Alex felt the bile rise in her throat and she was sick against the rock that she clutched to steady herself. She muttered another prayer and raised her head.

She looked up and out to sea. It was calm now and a vessel was making its way to Sligo harbour. The torch had been lit at the base of the metal man and he stood there defiantly, pointing at the safe passageway between the island and the point. It was then that she knew George would reach a safe harbour.

Author’s Note: “Elsinore House now stands empty and is falling into ruin. It was once the home of the smuggler John Black. William Butler Yeats and his brother Jack, as boys, spent their summers there, in the home of their cousin Henry Middleton.”

In November 1996 a group of divers looking for wrecks in Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, U.S.A. came across an anchor and cannons. The wreckage is believed to belong to the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the flag ship of Blackbeard. The ship was lost in the vicinity in 1718. Recovery of the wreckage is ongoing today.

The white house on Taylor’s Creek had been converted into The Sly Boy Bar and Eatery. It had been open for just one year and was the fastest food place in town. It looked out onto the Atlantic at Beaufort, North Carolina, and was set amongst water oak and cedars. Tangled vine twisted around the columns like snakes trying to gain entry. Built around seventeen hundred, the property had a double front porch made out of Scottish-heart pine, pegged together by builders that were more accustomed to making ships; and the whole place shook badly when the wind howled in from the Atlantic. Two tall chimneys stood the assault of winter every year, threatening to shatter and hurl their bricks into the angry sea.