Sleeping deep beneath the ground like we did that night afforded us perhaps the only passable night of rest we had enjoyed in some weeks. We arose early, however, to celebrate mass with the congregants of Ruthin for the last Sunday of Advent. Attendance was strong and the entire mass peaceful. I felt a pressing need to shout out at the entire congregation and question how it was that they could pretend that everything in Ruthin was proceeding normally. However, I restrained myself as I sat in the first row of pews with my sons and Sir Lucas.
Far in the rear sat Doctor Yeoman and Mayor Cooper, both of whom did not rise for songs. It seemed that they had both resolved to adhere to as few of the obligations of attending mass as was possible. I noticed that the notary, Cael Powys, was not in attendance. I would inquire about that shortly after the mass and discover that apparently he never attended. I had questions about how it was possible that a man could be in supposed service to the Crown and yet not show loyalty to the Church.
The sermon for that day was a missed opportunity for Father James. I would have preferred that he use it as an opportunity to solicit assistance from those members of the populace willing or able to do so. As it was, he kept it thematically appropriate with the season, using Christ’s birth as an invocation for the renewal of our commitments to one another and of course to renew our faith in Christ.
Following mass, we returned to the inn to close out our accounts and move our belongings, such as they were, to the church’s cellar. I was not surprised in the least that documents I had brought with me had been examined and moved about by others in our absence. I can’t blame those who did so. We were, after all, alien presences and had taken no time to soothe the town’s fears about our intentions. Despite the disturbance of my documents, however, all of those papers appeared to be present and generally unharmed.
“Father, my room!” Robert shouted. I ran around the hallway to see that indeed his possessions had fared worse than mine.
His numerous books had been torn to pieces and scattered across the floor, his bed cut open, and his clothes taken out of the cabinet and carelessly discarded in random spots. Fortuitously, however, his clothes had not been destroyed as his books had been.
“Who could have done this?” he whimpered.
“We can ask the innkeeper if he saw anything, but I doubt that will be a productive line of inquiry,” I said, putting my hand on Robert’s shoulder to console him. “We best be moving along now, Robert.”
Once we had moved our principal lodgings to the church’s cellar, dank and musty place that it was, I reasoned that our next most useful course of action would be to visit Mr. Jones again on the northeast side of the town. He, after all, had provided the only information thus far that had led to any firm sign of our foe’s plans. Though it had cost us dearly, obtaining that chest granted us something on which we could proceed.
Jones was still drunk from the previous night when we found him, or perhaps he was newly drunk from that morning. In either case, he was slouched, clutching his head, and groaning repeatedly about how he’d been slapped by a woman named Cynthia Burnell, apparently a cousin to the erstwhile constable. I took from many of his meandering statements that he had attempted to console Cynthia in her grief by offering, perhaps too brazenly, his companionship. There were other details of the encounter that I do not care to put to writing because they were intensely vulgar.
“Mr. Jones,” I sighed as I stood over him, “we came to speak to you about what we found in Ruthin Castle.”
“Oh. That,” he groaned, finally removing his hand from his head. “An’ was it worth ol’ Baen bitin’ the dust?”
“Maybe,” I said. “It was a chest made of the bones of at least three different men, etched in Welsh incantations. It seemed to be new.”
“Ah. That explains where Jack went,” Jones chuckled painfully. “He deserved better than that.”
“You think Mr. Walker’s bones were part of that chest, yes?” Sir Lucas asked.
“Aye. I’d been thinkin’ ‘bout that for a while. The other two, I can’t ‘member their names just now, but there were two others Jack ‘ad been workin’ with,” Jones’ voice strained as though he was dragging the thoughts out of his skull by force. “You’d probably ‘ave to go talk to Cael. He wrote down that they were missin’.”
“This is the first I’ve heard that there were others,” I said.
“Oh yeah. Jack was, I think it’s fair to say ‘was’ now, always one for his lil’ schemes. I still can’t believe he got others ta go ‘long with this one. All he had was what those crazy people were sayin’. That damn chanting and what not,” he grumbled. “Anyone who’d be taken in by all that shit deserved to die.”
“Horrible thing to say,” Sir Lucas bemoaned.
“Yeah? Well, I said it.”
“Mr. Jones,” I interjected, realizing that we had to make some effort to keep our efforts moving productively, “can you provide us with some manner of evidence as to where to look for these other people?”
“Think it’s pretty clear that they’re dead and got made into that box ya found,” Jones scoffed.
“I meant evidence as to who they are and where they lived.”
At that he rose, walked over to his cabinet and tried to pour himself another tall glass of gin. Discovering that his existing bottle had run empty, he tossed it to the ground, causing it to shatter into dozens of pieces. He then grabbed a fresh one, filled to the top, and proceeded to pour fully half of it straight into his glass. Confoundingly, he sweetened it with the finest pinch of sugar.
“Takes the edge off just enough to make it tolerable,” Jones laughed as he sat back down in his chair. “When ya drink as much as I do, can’t afford the good stuff.”
I simply stared at him in irritated silence.
“One of ‘em was seeing Noah ta treat some boils or some damn thing. God, what was his name?” he squeaked and then paused, hoping that he could recall something. “Don’t remember. Anyways, talk to Noah. He’d know who it was.”
“He didn’t mention any such thing when we spoke to him,” I said.
“Ya probably didn’t ask him about this. He doesn’t keep a finger on such things anymore, ya know? Now, you should probably be gettin’ out of here,” he said, motioning toward us with his hands as though he was literally shooing us out of his house.
“Why? You are afraid of something, yes?” Sir Lucas asked.
“Damn right I am,” Jones coughed in a wheezing laugh. “All of ya saw that fire there on the hill, on Moel Famau?”
I nodded, fearing what more he might add to what we already knew.
“Well, ya might wanna keep yer heads low for a while here. Whoever did that summonin’, they have somethin’ nasty enough to make short work of anyone. Even that Dullahan is nothin’ compared to that thing,” he said gloomily. “Honestly, ya should think about goin’ back ta London or bringin’ in some more help, ‘cause ya ain’t doin’ it with what ya’ve got.”
As we walked back across town to Doctor Yeoman’s office, most of us said virtually nothing about what Jones had said to us. One might find that a strange thing given the gravity of the warning. I, however, decided to focus my mind purely on the task before me. We needed more information and we needed it badly. I had otherwise resolved that we should camp atop Moel Famau until such time as our foe showed itself in full. Whether we would die or utterly vanquish our foe was irrelevant to me at that moment. All I desired was that we should face it.
Doctor Yeoman simply sat at his desk, fingers pressed into the bridge of his nose. He didn’t say anything for a while, even as we attempted greetings. When he had greeted us at his door, he only offered the flimsiest of acknowledgements.
“So, what’s troubling you now? I didn’t scare you off before,” he said amusedly. “With what I heard about Baen, I’m shocked you haven’t scampered off yet.”
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“It wasn’t that damn story about him falling in the lake. I’ll tell you that much,” he said, snickering.
“I believe that we are on the same side here, Doctor Yeoman,” I continued, even though I expected to get nowhere with the jaded and cantankerous doctor.
“Side? You have a strange vocabulary, Doctor Willis,” he sighed. “This isn’t about sides.”
“What is it about, then?” Sir Lucas asked.
Doctor Yeoman looked at us with vacant eyes.
“Damned if I know. I thought I knew at one point,” he said wistfully. “You know, this was once a good practice I had here in Ruthin. I made over twelve-hundred pounds a year. Twelve-hundred. I never thought I’d see that sort of income. But now, I can’t say I understand what’s happening. It’s a terrible fog. People and things of ill meaning stalking us. Worse yet, there are more of them every few weeks, it seems.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
This sort of banter went on for some time until I resolved to ask him directly about the two nameless individuals, specifically the one he had treated as per what Mr. Jones had said to us.
“Doctor, it is our understanding that there was a man who sought treatment from you for persistent boils, or something of that nature,” I began. I paused to judge his reaction. He raised his head slightly and furrowed his brow. “We have reason to believe that this person may have been a close associate of Mr. Walker.”
Doctor Yeoman rolled his eyes so far into the back of his head that I was worried that they might not come back around.
“You’re talking about Sean. Sean O’Connell. Irish lad, came here to Ruthin about, oh, a year ago, I should think,” Yeoman said. “Never could quite figure him out. He came to me because of his boils. Simple enough thing, really. I must have lanced ten thousand boils in my time as a physician, probably more. His were more than a little odd, though. They oozed this reddish liquid, not red like blood. Red like the colour of a soldier’s uniform. No matter how many times I lanced them, they kept coming back.”
I began to feel my stomach turn, both from imagining this loathsome boils he described and because I started to realize what might have been happening to him. There was once a rumour I had heard about a “Blood Banshee”, though it was unclear where this creature lived. Rumour was that she could suck out all of your blood in a single pass, leaving you a desiccated corpse upon the ground. Apparently her mark upon you was that you would bleed exceptionally bright red blood, red like the dye in clothes or some foods. Yeoman’s description sounded eerily similar to that rumour, to which I had previously paid no mind at all.
“And where in town did Sean live? Or does he live?” I asked.
“On the second question, I have a firm idea. It’s not actually in town, but if you head almost due west you’ll come across an ugly brown farmhouse with a dark red roof,” Yeoman said, straining his mind to come up with the answer.
“Due west,” Sir Lucas muttered aloud.
“Yes, it really is hard to miss,” Yeoman returned to simply brooding.
“Should we be concerned about any contagions and the like from whatever his malady was?” I asked.
“No. The primary thing ailing that man wasn’t his boils or whatever those were. He was probably the craziest man I’ve ever met, or at least he was until some of the more pernicious bouts of madness started setting in here in Clwyd,” Yeoman scoffed. “He had these tendencies to rant endlessly in Welsh and I could scarcely understand most of what he said when he would get like that. Sometimes he would scream the words at me, as though I cared to hear them.”
That piqued my curiosity immediately. Other than His Majesty and his strange Welsh ramblings, we had yet to encounter one of these others about which we had heard so much Thus, any opportunity to expand our knowledge of the afflicted was inherently desirable.
“Do you recall any of what he said?” I inquired.
Doctor Yeoman shook his head disdainfully.
“I’d sooner light myself on fire than worry about the rantings of a madman. I just dutifully nod and let them run their course. A perfunctory courtesy, but one I try to give my lunatics,” he said with a pained grimace. “I don’t know about your success with this, Doctor Willis, but I find that being kind-hearted sometimes is enough to cure lunatics.”
“That isn’t my experience,” I gasped, staggered that he would even try to suggest that he had met with success. “I treat all of my patients with dignity, regardless of the extent of their affliction, but there are so many cases where encouraging them to just babble on incessantly does far more damage than sternly correcting them.”
“If you say so,” he shrugged. “In any case, that’s all I have for you.”
After our meeting with Doctor Yeoman, we trudged west through town, encountering yet another stiff snowstorm that resulted in large drifts piling up all around town against buildings and the central clocktower. We came across a clustering of four townsfolk who walked in the same strange rhythmic way through the storm. They walked right past us, all chanting the same Welsh words over and over again, though I could not ascertain what they were. I instructed John and Robert to follow them, John for his brawn and Robert for his ability to translate whatever nonsense it was that they were saying.
When we arrived at the O’Connell farm, we found it predictably deserted. Anything else would have been a great surprise to us. The farmhouse was indeed an ugly rundown brown building with a red shingle roof. A similarly poorly maintained barn sat next to it, replete with holes in its siding and roof. Its lands were modest at perhaps ten acres and seemed to primarily be oriented toward the raising of sheep, based on the herd that resided in the barn. There may have been some small areas under cultivation for wheat as well.
Inside the farmhouse, affairs were adequately tidy though with how dark it was inside it was hard to assess dust, dirt, and the like. A small room was separated from much of the rest of the house, containing a double bed. Based on the clothes there, I surmised that Mr. O’Connell was married, a fact that had not been mentioned by any of those with whom we had spoken. Similarly, there were two small beds in the main living area, just to the right of the dining table. Clothes stored in a heavy dresser nearby indicated they were for a young boy and young girl.
“Two children,” Thomas commented. “Seems light for the Irish.”
“Thomas, not now,” I grumbled, thumbing through papers lying on a nearby desk.
Most of the correspondence I saw was quite ordinary, albeit the man’s penmanship was dreadful and I could scarcely make out more than half the words. The remainder could be gleaned by context. The great bulk of the letters and other papers simply pertained to orders for wool from customers and then his own records for purchases of grain to feed his sheep. Whatever else one might say of Mr. O’Connell, his records were fairly extensive and meticulous, if a touch shoddily stored.
Then I happened across a very strange thing indeed. There was a bound series of documents in a marginally locked drawer that we were able to simply force open due to the weakness of the lock. This seemed to be something of a diary, but only spanning the prior nine months or so. It began with his writings in March of that year, pertaining to the expected birth of a child in April. Come April, this descended into devastation when the child, whom he named Patrick, passed away only three days after being born. I paused to pray for Patrick’s soul before continuing.
The tenor of Mr. O’Connell’s writings took on an exceedingly disturbing bent. His lamentations ventured from being simply sad to frightening. “I will rip off the flesh of any happy child I see! It is unfair that they should live while Patrick is dead in the ground.” Such sentiments are common among lunatics I have treated who have encountered great trauma. Envy is considered one of the deadly sins for a reason and Mr. O’Connell’s writings aptly demonstrated that point.
Around July, he started writing a series of Welsh phrases over and over across his pages. “Tri am y gwaed. Tri am y fflamau. Tri am yr esgyrn. Naw i ni i gyd.”
Sir Lucas offered a translation for me, which he delivered in a lyrical voice, as though he were reading Shakespeare.
“Three for the blood, three for the flames, three for the bones. Nine for us all,” he sang.
Thomas and I looked at him with terrified expressions. His own face had turned grey and then he began an almost maniacal chuckle that turned quickly to tears.
“His family had three others. His wife and his two children,” he cried. “They would have been one of those groups of three, yes. I’m sure of it.”
I said nothing and returned to the diary. With each passing week, his writing became larger with more extraneous lines and embellishments that defied any manner of convention. He periodically reverted to English, including in one entry where he wrote, “This is not a world for them. Any of them. Their lives will craft a new world.” That entry was in mid-September. “This miserable kingdom will come crashing down. It deserves only the worst.”
“Sir Lucas, when did His Majesty take ill? Precisely, if you can,” I mumbled.
“I believe it was the first week of October, though if Greville were here he might tell you that His Majesty started to have unusual complaints several days before that,” he said. “Does that matter?”
“Possibly,” I answered.
His next entry, September 21st, was “I gave them over. All of them. She promised a curse on the crown, a continuing curse that will bring the whole island low.” Then a repeated phrase in massive lettering, “MEDDWL PWDR, PEN WEDI PYDRU, CORFF WEDI PYDRU, YN FUAN I GYD WEDI MARW.” Sir Lucas translated it as “A ROTTED MIND, A ROTTED HEAD, A ROTTED BODY, SOON ALL DEAD.”
“This was somehow related to a curse put on the King,” I said grimly. “And he sacrificed his entire family to do it. Men in despair will do shocking things, but this is something else altogether.”
Sir Lucas closed his tearing eyes and wiped repeatedly with a handkerchief. Thomas, standing behind me, gasped and whimpered.
“Well, at least they rhymed it this time,” Thomas laughed uncomfortably.
“A complete coincidence,” Sir Lucas said. “There is no reason Welsh words would necessarily translate in such a way. No, no. It is hard enough for us to determine what is happening here without seeing meaning where there is none. If--”
“Quiet,” I commanded. My nerves were already in such a state that I could not abide any more pointless bantering.
Mr. O’Connell’s entries became so disorganized with fragments of thoughts ending abruptly and changing topics frequently. Words trailed off, drooping down the parchment on each page as though there were some force pulling them down, stretching and twisting them. My spine tingled as I continued. I have seen many a deranged man’s writings in my lifetime, but this was something quite unique.
Oddly, around the second week of October, some clarity reemerged to Mr. O’Connell’s words. “I miss them all terribly,” he wrote. “Now I am alone on my farm and I wonder if it was truly worth it all. My dear family, I thought it would do anything for them. Instead, I asked everything of them. No, I forced them to give everything. How they cried. I shall never forget that.”
At that point, I wanted to stop reading as I had building rage toward this man. There are those who might view Mr. O’Connell as being merely pathetic rather than loathsome. I confess that I do not allow for such distinctions. Not in this case.
Finally, I came across mentions, though sloppy and demented, of his approach of Jack Walker regarding a potential treasure in Ruthin Castle. He referred time and again to the belongings of “a powerful man” who was “the greatest warrior in Wales.” Apparently, Mr. Walker interpreted this to mean that there would be treasures fit for a king. The Welsh chanting of the townsfolk doubtlessly aided this perception. I recalled the references to “a crown” in what Mr. Jones had told us, but it is possible that this was a metaphorical statement as opposed to a literal one.
Jack Walker appeared to trust Mr. O’Connell, for reasons that elude me, and the two obtained permission from the current owner of Ruthin Castle’s lands to prod around. The owner is absentee and lives actually near Liverpool well off to the northeast of Clwyd. O’Connell described Walker as “A fool’s fool, and even that might be too kind.” The last entry I came across was another Welsh incantation, but the penmanship was quite poor. Sir Lucas managed to make sense of it, however.
“Heddiw, byddaf yn cwympo. Yfory byddaf yn codi. Mae marwolaeth yn reidio eto. Mae marwolaeth yn reidio bob amser,” Sir Lucas said, his voice trailing off. He paused before giving us the translation. “Today I will fall. Tomorrow I will rise. Death rides again. Death rides always.”
“The Dullahan,” I said. “O’Connell, Walker, and someone else were sacrificed to bring about the Dullahan.”
“That would be my understanding. Yes, yes,” Sir Lucas limply concurred.
“And what was his family sacrificed for?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t know,” I conceded.
“I wonder if they were responsible for the coming of the banshee, or cyhyraeth, we encountered near Kew,” Sir Lucas said.
“Burnell made it sound as though that creature was a ‘sister’ of sorts to this red banshee or blood banshee or whatever one chooses to call it. I had interpreted that to mean that they had been around for some time,” I recalled. “Although, he never did specify how long it had been.”
“And, if I may suggest, it seems as though these rituals are to resurrect things that once were. Yes, yes. It is entirely possible that he spoke of legends that have persisted here for some time,” Sir Lucas said. “One of these things may have been slain and was brought back.”
“In any case, we know more than we did earlier. We should get back to my boys in town and consult Father James on his thoughts,” I declared. “After all, night falls shortly.”