Authors: Kevin Holohan
Behind him he heard a gentle tapping from the refectory. He moved toward it, drawn by some irresistible need to bear witness. From the doorway he stared at the high center window and listened to its labored creaking. There was a sudden snap as the sash ropes gave way inside the casement. The top half of the window slammed down under its own weight and splattered the floor with shards of stained glass.
Brother Boland stared at the mess. What had once been a carefully executed resurrection scene now covered the floor in a chaos of colored splinters.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he exclaimed, and ran off to find Brother Loughlin.
M
r. Laverty, we’re here to check the tally sticks,” announced Mr. Pollock as he strode into the class just after lunch. Behind him followed a flushed and sweaty Brother Moody, who had his sleeves rolled and his leather warmed up and at the ready. Clearly they couldn’t wait until the end of the day.
Laverty sighed and sat on the windowsill staring down into the yard while Pollock walked through the class inspecting the sticks.
“Outside.”
“But sir, there’s no mark,” whined Smalley Mullen.
“Outside, sor! I know a counterfeit tally stick when I see one! You’re in right trouble now, me bucko!” Mr. Pollock grabbed the boy by the shirt collar and pulled him out of his chair.
“Don’t drag your feet like that, you little gurrier!” snapped Brother Moody as Smalley shuffled out the door.
“Where’s your stick, boy?”
“It must’ve fallen off,” answered Bradshaw as he searched frantically on the floor under his desk.
“Outside!”
“Mr. Scully, outside!”
“But sir, there’s no mark. It’s the real stick.”
“Mr. Scully, you are a guttersnipe, a bowsie, and an incorrigible miscreant, and I am sure you deserve a beating. Outside! Now! And that goes for your cohorts too: McDonagh, Lynch, Sullivan! Outside!”
Finbar could not believe his ears. “But sir …”
“At least one of you sinned at lunchtime and the others were there so you are all guilty of collusion. Guilty one, guilty all! Outside, the lot of ye!”
Finbar followed McDonagh out the door and smelt Brother Moody’s acrid sweat as he passed him.
“Thank you, Mr. Laverty. You may continue with your lesson,” said Mr. Pollock, and swept out of the classroom with the eager Brother Moody in tow.
Mr. Laverty looked at the dozen or so who were left out of the thirty.
“Youse can do yizer homework or go to sleep. I don’t care,” he said tiredly over the sounds of beating and chastisement from the corridor outside.
“Ring that bell properly, damn you! They’ll never hear that!” scolded Brother Loughlin.
He stood behind Brother Boland and waited. Boland turned around and stared emptily. He bit his lip and trembled but otherwise refused to move.
“That’s what broke the window in the refectory,” he protested.
“Don’t talk rot! That was woodworm. Give me that!” snapped Brother Loughlin, and grabbed the bellrope from Boland’s hands. He gave it a sharp tug, and to his satisfaction the bell above wheeled round and pealed the start of the last class.
“What in the name of God is wrong with you now?” shouted Loughlin above the noise of the bell.
Boland was cowering and had his hands clamped over his ears again. “It’s wrong! All wrong! There is a moldering!” He fled up the stairs to his cell.
Dam-Age, Dam-Age, Dam-Age
, the bell tolled in his head.
“Don’t come back down! You are confined to your cell. I’ll find someone responsible and willing to undertake bell duty! Do you hear?” yelled Loughlin. He harrumphed dismissively and gave the bellrope another pull for good measure before striding off to check on McDermott’s progress on the oratory repairs. Now he needed him to fix the refectory window too.
The monastery bell announced the end of the last class. Brother Boland got up from his cot and paced nervously around the narrow confines of his cell. He went to the window and stared down. He breathed in and out rapidly through his nose, the nasal hairs fluttering about like kite tails. In the distance he heard the dull murmur of the boys in the school corridors, and through it, cutting into his mind like a scream, came the sound of the monastery bell once again. It was being rung by a harsh, uncaring hand, a hand with no sense of echoes or resonances. It was being rung by that damned blow-in Moody! He could feel it! Boland moved to the window and gripped the sill to steady his trembling hands.
He shrank from the bell’s internal discord. Behind its peal he could hear the swelling hum of protest. The inaudible grace notes of wrongness nested in his chest and squirmed inside him. He stood up from his cot, sat down again, stood up again, and went again to his small window.
He watched the boys below pour out of the school and across the yard. The gray tide flowed slowly out into the world beyond. He looked through the grimy glass at the school building across the yard. He peered at its outline and held his breath. Was there an answer to the bell’s wrongness in there? He pressed his floppy ear against the glass and listened, its quiet coldness for a moment calming him.
He saw Dermot McDermott lock the gate behind the last stragglers and walk back toward the monastery. Boland leaned his forehead against the glass and closed his eyes. The wind gusted and the window sashes above his head rattled within the frame. He breathed deeply through his nose. Patiently he waited for the light to fade. He soon opened his eyes again and watched the cross on the spire of Saint Werburgh’s away to his left. Slowly it faded into the growing darkness. Somehow he figured the darkness would make it easier to sense the inner tremors of the school.
He went to his cell door and listened to the late-afternoon silence. He opened it a crack, half expecting to find Brother Tobin or Brother Walsh outside on sentry duty. Evidently Brother Loughlin had forgotten to post anyone. He slid out through the door and closed it silently behind him. He stood still and the sparse fuzz of what was left of his hair tensed and flickered. He looked like a very worried peach.
The wrongness was all around him now. It was sourceless, omnidirectional. He had no idea where to look for it. He had to go to the bell tower to get a better sense of it or he would never find it in time.
Suddenly, a wave of the wrongness made manifest boomed and whooshed through Boland’s understanding. Barely able to stay upright, he scuttled along the corridor toward the stairs to confront the unease howling down from the attic.
“Be careful not to splatter that all over the place.”
Dermot McDermott looked down at the floor beside his bucket and saw Brother Loughlin’s boots peeking out from under the hem of his cassock. As if the shit work wasn’t enough, he had to put up with orders from this fat fuck.
“Yes, Brother,” he replied tonelessly.
“So, how’s the work coming along?” shouted Loughlin up at McDermott’s legs and arse at the top of the ladder. The rest of him was out of sight inside the hole in the oratory ceiling.
“Fine,” answered McDermott’s muffled voice. Some of the joists were quite rotten but he was certainly not mentioning that.
Before Loughlin could make any more comments he was silenced by a dull thump and resultant explosion of dust that blew out from the hole in the ceiling. McDermott almost fell off the ladder and clambered down spluttering and coughing and covered in sooty black filth.
“Holy Mother of …”
This time the rumble was louder and longer and the oratory was completely filled with soot and dust that billowed out from the hole in the ceiling.
“Merciful hour, what on earth is going on now?” cried Loughlin fearfully as he felt the floor shudder and jerk under his feet.
“Go on in there and ask your father if he would have a match for a weary traveler,” the stranger had said. Brother Comiskey had gone inside to get his father. When his father saw Michael Collins at the gate he had erupted with laughter. Brother Comiskey remembered how Michael Collins had patted him on the head and gave him a penny still warm from his pocket. He could still hear the two men’s voices talking low into the small hours of the morning.
Brother Comiskey was so lost in himself that he failed to notice the bare bulb over his head start to swing in a tiny arc unnatural to light fixtures on dry land. His wizened hands picked and pulled nervously at his white hair.
Brother Talbot closed his eyes and mused on his calling to the Brotherhood. “Be good, son, and make us proud. This is all for the best. You’ll get a proper education this way. The Holy Ghost will help you.” Talbot could see his mother standing at the gate of their small farm, his eight younger brothers and sisters clustered in the doorway of the small cottage. His father must have been somewhere inside. Byrne, the carter, had cleared his throat impatiently and spat onto the ground. He’d muttered darkly about missing the train to Thurles. Brother Talbot had stood up on the cart and waved to his mother until she and the gate and the farm disappeared out of sight behind the brow of Mish Hill. He was thirteen. He did not see his mother again until she was laid out for her wake.
“Ah, Christ! Where did I leave those damned glasses? I can’t find me slippers without them!” Brother McGovern patted the blanket on his cot searching for the glasses that sat atop his bald head. Without their aid he stood no chance of apprehending the unusual bulging of the ceiling above his door.
Moira Brady was the only girl Brother Garvey had ever loved. When she ran away with that British Army officer he never recovered. He still remembered the day he’d made the driver stop that bus in Longford and had run down the street thinking he’d seen her. He had been nearly forty then and was still not sure what had possessed him to join the Brothers.
He sat on his straight-backed chair and sighed heavily. A tear ran from his one good eye and trickled down his unshaven cheek. He was completely unaware that the only thing holding up the ceiling was the closed door in the overburdened load-bearing wall between his cell and the corridor.
“Our Lady of Indefinite Duration, pray for us sinners who have recourse unto thee,” mumbled Brother O’Toole softly as he lit another candle at the tiny makeshift altar beside his bed. Unable to kneel, he braced himself in veneration on his walking sticks and stooped nearer the floor than usual. A pious man, being confined to his cell with only Father Flynn’s communion visits for spiritual sustenance had left him hungering for more. He had therefore fashioned himself a little straw statue of Our Lady of Indefinite Duration and surrounded it with homemade earwax candles. His whispered prayers were just loud enough to obscure the ominous creaking of joists above his head.
That little pup Sheridan. Oh yes, he had seen through Sheridan all right. Spotted him as a wrong one from the start. And wasn’t he right? Didn’t the pup grow up to move to London and land in jail for killing a girl with a hammer? Wasn’t he right when he said Sheridan was a wrong one? Oh yes, you couldn’t pull the wool over Brother Galvin’s eyes in those days.
Galvin felt his cot rattle and gaped in horror as his tiny floor-level dormer window buckled at the sides, shattered, and popped out into the yard far below. His bath chair rolled across the room and crashed into the door.
It happened so quickly that there was no time for any last-minute thoughts of dying. The ancient relics were drooling and mulling over what was left of their past lives and suddenly there was noise, darkness, and then silence: terrible, irreversible silence. Simultaneously the two end walls of the attic folded inward and the roof collapsed and buried the ancient Brothers under an avalanche of masonry, wood, and slates.
Brother Loughlin took the stairs two at a time. Dermot McDermott tried to keep his eyes anywhere but on the heaving bulk of Loughlin’s arse that preceded him up the stairs.
At the top they found a frantic confusion of Brothers.
“The roof fell in! I tried to warn them! It told me it was coming!” shouted Brother Boland. He was covered in dust and stood shivering with shock.
Loughlin elbowed Boland out of the way and ran straight into the pile of rubble that blocked the final flight of stairs to the attic. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“Is it another miracle?” asked Brother Tobin excitedly.
“What are we to do?” asked Brother Boland fearfully. Loughlin ran his intelligence twice round the narrow limits of his mind and snapped his fingers decisively. “Mr. McDermott, you will stay here and make sure no one touches anything. The rest of you, back downstairs. It could be dangerous here.”
“Aren’t we going to rescue the elder Brothers?” asked Brother Tobin nervously.
“Is it those little bastards again?” called Brother Moody as he ran up the stairs to join them.
“I’ll take care of it! Brother Moody, please take Brother Boland back to his cell and make sure he stays there,” snapped Loughlin, and clumped back down the stairs with all haste.
Moody took Boland roughly by the arm and led him down.
“I think you should all go back downstairs now,” said McDermott.
The Brothers reluctantly headed down, a multilimbed knot of fear.
“Yes, Brother Loughlin here. I need to speak to Father Mulvey immediately … No, madam, I will not phone back later. Tell him this is an emergency.”
Brought Loughlin waited.
“Father Mulvey … Yes, I know, but I think you should get over here as soon as you can. We have a spot of bother … I’d rather not say. I think you should come over right away. You might want to bring that Father Sheehan with you … Yes, I am serious … Yes, I do … Right then.”
Loughlin hung up the phone and sat back in his chair. He picked up the brass figure of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly that presided over his desk. He weighed it in his hand and smiled with satisfaction at the little catch he had heard in Father Mulvey’s voice. Not quite fear but something other than total composure, and it had pleased him to no end. Briefly it clouded the fact that he had not the slightest idea what to do about this new development. Before he could fully relish this sweet moment to its fullness, his door burst open and McRae stumbled in.