First published in Terra! Tara! Terror!
“Bless me, Father, for … I might’ve sinned.” Hugh O’Neill spoke hesitantly into the confessional’s claustrophobic dimness. “Though -- to be honest, in the eyes of God, I’ve half an idea I might not’ve.”
Beyond the grille, the indistinct form of old Father Brian Flynn set chin to palm and huffed a sigh. The ritual of the confessional was all but pointless, a small rite they acted out. Flynn had known Hugh as the curate of St. Joseph’s, in Stradarvan, for all fifteen years of his service. Hugh was due to replace the venerable Matthew Walsh as parish priest, just as Flynn’s own curate would assume his shoes, when retirement beckoned.
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Flynn said acerbically. “You’d best regale me. What did you do -- or not do?”
For painful moments Hugh waffled. “It’s a long story.”
“We’ve plenty of time. How far back d’you want to begin?”
“Twenty years,” Hugh admitted gloomily.
“You’ve left a sin unconfessed for twenty years?” Flynn was appalled.
Hugh bridled. “It wasn’t a sin, twenty years back!”
“What wasn’t?” Flynn asked, shrewd now.
“The whiskey.” It was Hugh’s turn to sigh. “Truth is, I got a taste for it.”
“Well, a drop of malt never hurt,” Flynn began.
“I did me liver in, Brian,” Hugh corrected. Flynn fell silent. “Saw a doctor here, and he sent me to hospital in Waterford -- they said I’d six months left. Liver like a lace curtain, apparently.”
Flynn tutted. “And you, just forty years old!”
“Aye, Brian. I know,” Hugh said dolefully.
“And it’s drinking yourself into an early grave you want absolution for, I suppose!”
Hugh gave a start of surprise. “Uh, not quite. I’m cured.”
Flynn drew a deep, calming breath. “You just said you’d six months to live.”
“Aye, but that was before.”
“Before what?”
Now the curate of St. Joseph’s chose his words with care. Only the right ones would do, to describe a scene he fancied lay well beyond his old friend’s imagination.
It began with an empty, hollow feeling as he rode the train home from Waterford, a death sentence hanging around his neck as surely as a noose. As a priest, he might have anticipated with pleasure, if not joy, the end of this life, his passage into Eternity --
But as Flynn said, he was just forty. Half his life should still be ahead of him, years in which he’d imagined himself priest of his own parish, watching children grow up, whom he’d christened; watching their children grow. Time to enjoy simple things: pipe smoke in the evening, thoroughbreds training in the morning mist -- perhaps a winning sweepstakes’ ticket that built his orphanage, repaired the convent roof. These were life’s good things, which made any man, and a priest more than most, feel comfortable with his soul.
The diagnosis burned everything to ash, blew it away on the breeze. Hugh felt only emptiness as he walked the narrow, twilight streets back to St. Joseph’s. Lamplighters were abroad; children shrieked with fun on their way home; a dozen fiddlers competed in as many pubs as the sea wind brought in a dank fog.
He prayed as only a priest knew how. Prayed night and day for a month -- felt the rot growing inside until his next hospital appointment. Hope bloomed in the face of common sense and was dashed again, replaced by the familiar void as he boarded the westbound train.
Emptiness had a way of gnawing at a man’s mind and spirit, just as rats gnaw on bones. The mile walk from station to church was a marathon for a sick man. Before he covered half of it, Hugh’s decision became easy.
He left the main road, took a path winding back into the woods. A few carts rattled toward town, horseshoes rang on cobbles, but dense trees soon blanketed any sound of civilization. Early May had grown mild. A few tatters of late blossom persisted, but most trees wore full leaf. A carriage-lamp moon hung in the east, riding the low hills.
He knew where she lived.
At least once a week, parishioners crept to confession with whispers about coming here, needing -- a cure for me rheumatics. A daughter for a change, after four sons. Bring me husband home safe, he’s a week overdue at sea. Get me da off the drink before --
Hugh shut out the raucous cacophony of his thoughts. Before courage failed him, he rapped on the door.
She went by the name of Mother Lil, and he’d always wondered if this were short for Lily -- a symbol of purity -- or Lilith, which he recalled from his studies was Hebrew for serpent. Either way, his options had expired.
The door cracked and a middle-aged face peered out suspiciously. Just a woman: middle-height, middle-weight, middling attractive, in a dark blue dress and pale blue shawl, thick silver hair brushed extravagantly over both shoulders. Not quite what one expected of a lady in this one’s line of work.
Mother Lil rolled her green eyes to the heavens. “You’re here to exorcise me, are you? Where’s your bell, book and candle?”
He plucked off his cap, fingered it awkwardly. “Actually, I came to beg a favor.”
She studied him rudely before letting him in. He pulled a chair to the table, took a cup of tea, and the story spilled out. Whiskey, diagnosis, imminent departure --
“I’ve no wish to depart just yet,” he finished lamely.
“Even if God’s laid judgment on you?” she demanded.
“I laid judgment on meself,” he said wretchedly. “He didn’t make me drink a bottle a day for twenty years!”
“No, but his lordship let you. And now you want a cure.” She shook her head over him. “Shame on you -- and you, a priest!”
“It doesn’t work for priests?” Hugh gulped.
But Lil only shrugged. “’Tis not for me to say … Father.”
Heat colored his cheeks. “Call me Hugh. Best forget the priest part, at least while I’m here.” He wound his scarf tighter, to hide the dog collar. “Look, can you help or not? People confess how they come here for cures. Rheumatics, a bad tooth, whooping cough --”
“And livers rotted with drink,” Lil added disapprovingly.
She opened a cupboard, fetched a lamp. Kerosene prickled his nostrils as the wick caught alight with a taper from the hearth. She chose a stout walking stick and cape from the rack by the door, and waved him out.
“You’ve come at a good time, at least. A day short of the full moon -- of May, though February would’ve been best, especially if the moon were waxing on the first of the month. Not that you’d care to know any of this.”
The door slammed but she didn’t bother to lock up. She made a left-hand gesture; a black cat sidled from the shadows, flopped across the step between potted rosemary and sage. Hugh wisely kept his lips sealed as she led him into the woods.
She didn’t need a lamp -- he saw at once, the path was so well trodden, he could have found his own way, if he’d known where to begin. It wound between brambles, hazel and wild cherry, seeming to run in spirals, long enough for him to grow winded, cut by the familiar pain that brought him here in the first place.
At last Lil stopped by a tumble of masonry. Her lamp clattered down on a weather-worn brick. Hugh made out a rough circle, deeply pitted in the center, everything overgrown by moss. A well? Heart quickening, he took a step back. Lil angled an odd glance at him, face a mass of weird shadows.
“You bade me bring you. What, second thoughts?”
“Yes -- no. I …” He swallowed. “What is this place?”
“A holy well, belonging to -- shall we call her Saint Bridget?” She snaked two fingers into her handbag, plucked out a coin, a polished stone, a feather, the stub of a candle, a little silver cup with a broken handle.
She filled the cup from the well, lit the candle from her lamp. The feather fluttered in the night air and the moonstone glimmered with a light of its own. Water, fire, air, earth. A smell of moss and mushrooms, fallen leaves and fog, rose from the well. Lil tossed in the coin, waited a moment, then clapped her hands, three times three: a summoning sound, sharp on the clammy air.
She knew the old old language, beyond anything Hugh knew of Gaelic or Erse. She spoke it fluently, and though he listened hard he picked out only a few words.
Leigheas. Impigh. Duraman. Fuisce. Sagart. Slanu. And Brigid -- cure, beg, idiot, whiskey, priest, healing … Brigid.
He shivered. Shall we call her Saint --
Brigid, the exalted one, Dagda’s daughter, wife of Bres, mother of Ruadan.
Falling silent, the woman turned back. Moonlight whitened her features. “Will you greet the spirit who heals? Or will you be faithful, return to hospital, lie in their bed and let God -- and the whiskey -- take you? D’you want forty more years to do good work, make amends before your proper time comes?”
His chest squeezed. “Must I make a deal with the devil?”
She assumed a pained look. “Who would that be, Mister O’Neill? Don’t you know, there’s no such thing in the Craft? If there were, we’d have no truck with it! Here’s a spirit who heals. But you must believe, and you don’t, do you? Because you can’t see it.” She sneered. “You can’t see angels, cherubs, demons -- or God! -- either, but you believe in ’em!”
“Well, yes, but …” He stopped, aware of the rents in his argument. Just then, plausible patches eluded him.
Lil came closer, peering in the moonlight. “I like you, Mister O’Neill, so I’ll do you a favor. Only cuz I like you, mind.” She snapped her fingers before his eyes, muttered something guttural. The sound seemed to reach inside his skull, spin his brain between his ears.
He blinked and looked again. The moonlight was easily thrice as bright, the woodland less tangled, shadows not at all sinister. And creatures blinked back at him, some tiny enough to be voles, others the size of shire horses. Sprites cavorted, three sylphs sprawled along a bough with a blazing salamander. Two undines lazed around the well. A dozen pixies paused in a game of tag with a pair of hobs -- more entities than Hugh recognized, and all astonished to realize he saw them.
Snap. Lil’s fingers darted before his eyes once more, and they vanished. “The world invisible. Isn’t it grand? Now, Mister O’Neill, I’ll ask once more. Will you greet a healing spirit? ’Tis your book, not mine, that says God created everything in heaven and earth -- and the important word there is everything. All the things you can see … and all the things you can’t.”
He gulped air into parched lungs. “Tell me what to do.”
Memory shattered to glass-shard fragments as Father Flynn’s voice intruded on the vast silence which had settled over his confessional. “Did you go back to that hospital?”
“Aye, Brian.” Hugh studied his friend through the mesh, thinking again how odd it was, to feign being strangers in the booth, when every priest knew every parishioner by their voices.
“You’re cured,” Flynn observed.
“They call it a miracle, on account of me being a priest -- the power of prayer.”
“Who’s to say it isn’t?” Flynn hazarded shrewdly.
“You didn’t see the things I saw.” Hugh had only to close his eyes now, and he saw them all again. “The world invisible is bigger than you think.”
“Is it, now?” Flynn mused, deliberately inscrutable. “Well, the woman told you some truths. If God created everything, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, he created the faer folk too. Shocked, Hugh? Tush … you’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard the banshee.”
Hugh didn’t know what he’d expected, but this was not it. “And you’ll be telling me next, God created the Sidhe, and women like Lil are …”
“Are what?” Flynn snorted. “What is it you want absolution for? You defied your own good sense and rotted your liver, then thumbed your nose at God and asked a witch for a cure, when medicine knows no such thing. Did you sin? A matter of perspective, isn’t it?” He rose to his feet. “Are you cured?”
“Clean bill of health,” Hugh affirmed.
“Then …” Brian Flynn paused. “Go’n pray awhile, you’ll feel the better for it. Send the woman a big bunch of flowers -- on the quiet, mind. Spend your future doing good work, it’s the best absolution I know.” He swung open the door. “Oh, and one more thing.”
“Yes, Father?”
“Stay the hell away from the whiskey!” Flynn banged the door and marched away in search of tea, which as always served at four o’clock.
“Bless me, Father, for … I might’ve sinned.” Hugh O’Neill spoke hesitantly into the confessional’s claustrophobic dimness. “Though -- to be honest, in the eyes of God, I’ve half an idea I might not’ve.”
Beyond the grille, the indistinct form of old Father Brian Flynn set chin to palm and huffed a sigh. The ritual of the confessional was all but pointless, a small rite they acted out. Flynn had known Hugh as the curate of St. Joseph’s, in Stradarvan, for all fifteen years of his service. Hugh was due to replace the venerable Matthew Walsh as parish priest, just as Flynn’s own curate would assume his shoes, when retirement beckoned.
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Flynn said acerbically. “You’d best regale me. What did you do -- or not do?”
For painful moments Hugh waffled. “It’s a long story.”
“We’ve plenty of time. How far back d’you want to begin?”
“Twenty years,” Hugh admitted gloomily.
“You’ve left a sin unconfessed for twenty years?” Flynn was appalled.
Hugh bridled. “It wasn’t a sin, twenty years back!”
“What wasn’t?” Flynn asked, shrewd now.
“The whiskey.” It was Hugh’s turn to sigh. “Truth is, I got a taste for it.”
“Well, a drop of malt never hurt,” Flynn began.
“I did me liver in, Brian,” Hugh corrected. Flynn fell silent. “Saw a doctor here, and he sent me to hospital in Waterford -- they said I’d six months left. Liver like a lace curtain, apparently.”
Flynn tutted. “And you, just forty years old!”
“Aye, Brian. I know,” Hugh said dolefully.
“And it’s drinking yourself into an early grave you want absolution for, I suppose!”
Hugh gave a start of surprise. “Uh, not quite. I’m cured.”
Flynn drew a deep, calming breath. “You just said you’d six months to live.”
“Aye, but that was before.”
“Before what?”
Now the curate of St. Joseph’s chose his words with care. Only the right ones would do, to describe a scene he fancied lay well beyond his old friend’s imagination.
It began with an empty, hollow feeling as he rode the train home from Waterford, a death sentence hanging around his neck as surely as a noose. As a priest, he might have anticipated with pleasure, if not joy, the end of this life, his passage into Eternity --
But as Flynn said, he was just forty. Half his life should still be ahead of him, years in which he’d imagined himself priest of his own parish, watching children grow up, whom he’d christened; watching their children grow. Time to enjoy simple things: pipe smoke in the evening, thoroughbreds training in the morning mist -- perhaps a winning sweepstakes’ ticket that built his orphanage, repaired the convent roof. These were life’s good things, which made any man, and a priest more than most, feel comfortable with his soul.
The diagnosis burned everything to ash, blew it away on the breeze. Hugh felt only emptiness as he walked the narrow, twilight streets back to St. Joseph’s. Lamplighters were abroad; children shrieked with fun on their way home; a dozen fiddlers competed in as many pubs as the sea wind brought in a dank fog.
He prayed as only a priest knew how. Prayed night and day for a month -- felt the rot growing inside until his next hospital appointment. Hope bloomed in the face of common sense and was dashed again, replaced by the familiar void as he boarded the westbound train.
Emptiness had a way of gnawing at a man’s mind and spirit, just as rats gnaw on bones. The mile walk from station to church was a marathon for a sick man. Before he covered half of it, Hugh’s decision became easy.
He left the main road, took a path winding back into the woods. A few carts rattled toward town, horseshoes rang on cobbles, but dense trees soon blanketed any sound of civilization. Early May had grown mild. A few tatters of late blossom persisted, but most trees wore full leaf. A carriage-lamp moon hung in the east, riding the low hills.
He knew where she lived.
At least once a week, parishioners crept to confession with whispers about coming here, needing -- a cure for me rheumatics. A daughter for a change, after four sons. Bring me husband home safe, he’s a week overdue at sea. Get me da off the drink before --
Hugh shut out the raucous cacophony of his thoughts. Before courage failed him, he rapped on the door.
She went by the name of Mother Lil, and he’d always wondered if this were short for Lily -- a symbol of purity -- or Lilith, which he recalled from his studies was Hebrew for serpent. Either way, his options had expired.
The door cracked and a middle-aged face peered out suspiciously. Just a woman: middle-height, middle-weight, middling attractive, in a dark blue dress and pale blue shawl, thick silver hair brushed extravagantly over both shoulders. Not quite what one expected of a lady in this one’s line of work.
Mother Lil rolled her green eyes to the heavens. “You’re here to exorcise me, are you? Where’s your bell, book and candle?”
He plucked off his cap, fingered it awkwardly. “Actually, I came to beg a favor.”
She studied him rudely before letting him in. He pulled a chair to the table, took a cup of tea, and the story spilled out. Whiskey, diagnosis, imminent departure --
“I’ve no wish to depart just yet,” he finished lamely.
“Even if God’s laid judgment on you?” she demanded.
“I laid judgment on meself,” he said wretchedly. “He didn’t make me drink a bottle a day for twenty years!”
“No, but his lordship let you. And now you want a cure.” She shook her head over him. “Shame on you -- and you, a priest!”
“It doesn’t work for priests?” Hugh gulped.
But Lil only shrugged. “’Tis not for me to say … Father.”
Heat colored his cheeks. “Call me Hugh. Best forget the priest part, at least while I’m here.” He wound his scarf tighter, to hide the dog collar. “Look, can you help or not? People confess how they come here for cures. Rheumatics, a bad tooth, whooping cough --”
“And livers rotted with drink,” Lil added disapprovingly.
She opened a cupboard, fetched a lamp. Kerosene prickled his nostrils as the wick caught alight with a taper from the hearth. She chose a stout walking stick and cape from the rack by the door, and waved him out.
“You’ve come at a good time, at least. A day short of the full moon -- of May, though February would’ve been best, especially if the moon were waxing on the first of the month. Not that you’d care to know any of this.”
The door slammed but she didn’t bother to lock up. She made a left-hand gesture; a black cat sidled from the shadows, flopped across the step between potted rosemary and sage. Hugh wisely kept his lips sealed as she led him into the woods.
She didn’t need a lamp -- he saw at once, the path was so well trodden, he could have found his own way, if he’d known where to begin. It wound between brambles, hazel and wild cherry, seeming to run in spirals, long enough for him to grow winded, cut by the familiar pain that brought him here in the first place.
At last Lil stopped by a tumble of masonry. Her lamp clattered down on a weather-worn brick. Hugh made out a rough circle, deeply pitted in the center, everything overgrown by moss. A well? Heart quickening, he took a step back. Lil angled an odd glance at him, face a mass of weird shadows.
“You bade me bring you. What, second thoughts?”
“Yes -- no. I …” He swallowed. “What is this place?”
“A holy well, belonging to -- shall we call her Saint Bridget?” She snaked two fingers into her handbag, plucked out a coin, a polished stone, a feather, the stub of a candle, a little silver cup with a broken handle.
She filled the cup from the well, lit the candle from her lamp. The feather fluttered in the night air and the moonstone glimmered with a light of its own. Water, fire, air, earth. A smell of moss and mushrooms, fallen leaves and fog, rose from the well. Lil tossed in the coin, waited a moment, then clapped her hands, three times three: a summoning sound, sharp on the clammy air.
She knew the old old language, beyond anything Hugh knew of Gaelic or Erse. She spoke it fluently, and though he listened hard he picked out only a few words.
Leigheas. Impigh. Duraman. Fuisce. Sagart. Slanu. And Brigid -- cure, beg, idiot, whiskey, priest, healing … Brigid.
He shivered. Shall we call her Saint --
Brigid, the exalted one, Dagda’s daughter, wife of Bres, mother of Ruadan.
Falling silent, the woman turned back. Moonlight whitened her features. “Will you greet the spirit who heals? Or will you be faithful, return to hospital, lie in their bed and let God -- and the whiskey -- take you? D’you want forty more years to do good work, make amends before your proper time comes?”
His chest squeezed. “Must I make a deal with the devil?”
She assumed a pained look. “Who would that be, Mister O’Neill? Don’t you know, there’s no such thing in the Craft? If there were, we’d have no truck with it! Here’s a spirit who heals. But you must believe, and you don’t, do you? Because you can’t see it.” She sneered. “You can’t see angels, cherubs, demons -- or God! -- either, but you believe in ’em!”
“Well, yes, but …” He stopped, aware of the rents in his argument. Just then, plausible patches eluded him.
Lil came closer, peering in the moonlight. “I like you, Mister O’Neill, so I’ll do you a favor. Only cuz I like you, mind.” She snapped her fingers before his eyes, muttered something guttural. The sound seemed to reach inside his skull, spin his brain between his ears.
He blinked and looked again. The moonlight was easily thrice as bright, the woodland less tangled, shadows not at all sinister. And creatures blinked back at him, some tiny enough to be voles, others the size of shire horses. Sprites cavorted, three sylphs sprawled along a bough with a blazing salamander. Two undines lazed around the well. A dozen pixies paused in a game of tag with a pair of hobs -- more entities than Hugh recognized, and all astonished to realize he saw them.
Snap. Lil’s fingers darted before his eyes once more, and they vanished. “The world invisible. Isn’t it grand? Now, Mister O’Neill, I’ll ask once more. Will you greet a healing spirit? ’Tis your book, not mine, that says God created everything in heaven and earth -- and the important word there is everything. All the things you can see … and all the things you can’t.”
He gulped air into parched lungs. “Tell me what to do.”
Memory shattered to glass-shard fragments as Father Flynn’s voice intruded on the vast silence which had settled over his confessional. “Did you go back to that hospital?”
“Aye, Brian.” Hugh studied his friend through the mesh, thinking again how odd it was, to feign being strangers in the booth, when every priest knew every parishioner by their voices.
“You’re cured,” Flynn observed.
“They call it a miracle, on account of me being a priest -- the power of prayer.”
“Who’s to say it isn’t?” Flynn hazarded shrewdly.
“You didn’t see the things I saw.” Hugh had only to close his eyes now, and he saw them all again. “The world invisible is bigger than you think.”
“Is it, now?” Flynn mused, deliberately inscrutable. “Well, the woman told you some truths. If God created everything, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, he created the faer folk too. Shocked, Hugh? Tush … you’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard the banshee.”
Hugh didn’t know what he’d expected, but this was not it. “And you’ll be telling me next, God created the Sidhe, and women like Lil are …”
“Are what?” Flynn snorted. “What is it you want absolution for? You defied your own good sense and rotted your liver, then thumbed your nose at God and asked a witch for a cure, when medicine knows no such thing. Did you sin? A matter of perspective, isn’t it?” He rose to his feet. “Are you cured?”
“Clean bill of health,” Hugh affirmed.
“Then …” Brian Flynn paused. “Go’n pray awhile, you’ll feel the better for it. Send the woman a big bunch of flowers -- on the quiet, mind. Spend your future doing good work, it’s the best absolution I know.” He swung open the door. “Oh, and one more thing.”
“Yes, Father?”
“Stay the hell away from the whiskey!” Flynn banged the door and marched away in search of tea, which as always served at four o’clock.
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