Western Coast of Ireland
1930
When Yeats O’Malley was thirty-seven years old, he bought a crumbling old manor house by a small inlet of the Carrowbeg River on the western coast of Ireland. It was a crowning glory moment for him, an achievement he’d spent a decade working toward. The house had a long and storied but unverifiable history, as parts of the foundation’s stone walls and the dungeon, including the terrifying oubliette, dated back to the sixteenth century and the pirate days of the queen of the seas, Granuaile – Grace O’Malley. It was supposedly built on the site where her castle was originally situated. The woman who would not bow to the queen of England.
He shared the pirate’s surname, though he wasn’t related to her bloodline. It mattered not; what he shared with Granuaile was the mythical call of more… that something waited for him, something bigger than himself. The house was only the beginning.
They called it Edge House, because it sat on the edge of the inlet, perched above the water so close that a spring king tide would make the river rise high enough to kiss the first-floor windows.
Its most recent owner before Yeats was a famed mystery writer with one hundred books to her name who, rather inconveniently, had gone missing on Christmas Eve eleven years earlier, never to be seen again. There were rumors, of course, that she faked her own death because the pressure of her illustrious career was getting to her, or that her lover was a cheat and a liar and killed her outright, or that she’d drowned in the river that swept the shores of the manor’s gardens after a late-night ramble.
Yeats didn’t particularly care about the truth of her disappearance, only that the manor was at last available, and in disrepair, which hurt his soul. It needed millions to renovate: the roof was gone in certain spots; the walls were turning black with mold. He had just enough cash to buy the place and strip the walls back to the original stone before his accounts ran dry.
So he held a party. A Christmas Eve fundraiser. He invited everyone he knew, and the local press, and charged a thousand punt a head.
Fifteen people came.
The great ballroom was decked out and empty. He had a month’s worth of food he was forced to donate to the tent people camped on the manor’s grounds, those starving wastrels he hated to look upon, he with the largesse they had not, and egg on his very handsome face.
Insult to injury, fifteen thousand was only enough to patch one corner of the roof.
He knew if he could make the manor a destination, he could raise the remaining five million to renovate the old gal properly. So two weeks and seven bottles of fine Irish whiskey later, Yeats got creative. People might not be willing to give him money to renovate his dream home, but they would certainly come to see where the infamous Agnes Sweet was last seen.
With permission from her family, to whom he promised a substantial cut (but never delivered, the last of them having passed away before he finished, and who needs money when you’re dead?), he turned the house into a shrine. He wrote an emotional script that described the history of the house, the circumstances of Agnes’s disappearance, and a few suppositions of her death, and hired a couple of local boys to conduct tours, making sure they ended in the dungeons. It was a salacious tale: a century earlier, a small door had been carved into the wall to access a cat that had fallen through the angstloch and become trapped inside the oubliette, and all manner of horrors had been found. The local archaeology team had excavated skeleton after skeleton. Lord knows how many had perished after being shoved through the angstloch. Though now covered with a small wooden trapdoor that was always kept locked, it gave him the chills. He had to pass the short hallway that housed the fear hole, as it was sometimes called, on his way to the wine cave, and every time he felt as if the eyes of the dead were upon him.
It was cold and damp down there, perfectly spooky, and struck just the right note for an afternoon learning about a missing mystery writer. The patrons would stick their heads in, feel that ominous chill, and back away, happy to return to the surface.
Bolstered by the warm reception to his newfound profit scheme, he opened a bookshop off the grand dining room and stocked all of Agnes’s titles, as well as several avant-garde biographies done on her life and career. He hired a local watercolorist to paint the house and grounds (imagining them lush and green, of course), and hung the art all over the house with discreet gold price tags dangling from the frames. The art sold as well as the books; the artist became famous and moved to Dublin. Yeats held weekly movie nights, a rare treat, showing the adaptations of Agnes’s most famous novels. He commissioned a bespoke brand of tea, Irish breakfast with a hint of whiskey on the finish, which was a huge hit. He forced out the tent people and opened a section of the grounds to proper caravaners, stocked the pond with trout, and started a flora and fauna tour for the outdoorsy types.
The first year, he was able to repair the rest of the roof and plaster the walls. The second, he restored the oak and ebony parquet floors and the soaring Sicilian marble staircase. And the third, he opened the second-floor bedrooms to private groups, usually writers who wanted to soak up the glory of their hero’s creative space, or the ghoulish, who came convinced the place was haunted.
It was, of course – it was too old not to be – but Yeats himself had never seen a spirit. The lore, though, grew and grew. There was a five-foot marble statue in the stairwell of an angelic woman, and some said if you stood at the base of the stairs at midnight during a full moon, she would glow red with the spirit of Agnes Sweet herself. That sort of nonsense made everyone want to visit. He’d only noticed something odd about the statue once, and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. Yeats wasn’t a superstitious man, either.
Year five, he threw the Christmas Eve party again. They capped the attendees at one thousand; the waiting list was three times that.
Yes, Yeats O’Malley had struck gold.
But all veins run dry eventually.
Bunting wrapped the stairwells, and pine scented the air. Six blue spruce trees lined the foyer, so covered in tinsel and green, gold, and red baubles delivered straight from the factory that the smoky teal needles were barely visible.
They’d shot twenty turkeys, fifteen grouse, and three geese. The plum pudding was spiked with brandy, and silver trays of champagne flutes and sidecars passed through the room, glasses finding their way into nearly every hand. Tomato soup and brandy butter lined the tables. Potatoes of every ilk rode in silver chafing dishes; there were one hundred specially made Christmas cakes designed so everyone could have a slice for good luck. The pitch and tenor of the house had turned up, the happy hum of bees in an indulgent hive. Father John’s nose was already red; Yeats needed to keep an eye on him to make sure he could still do the Christmas Eve service at midnight. They’d planned to do it here in the manor instead of St Mary’s. The house would be full of incense from the censer, but that was all right. Yeats didn’t mind the smell.
It was a merry scene. Everything he’d always dreamed of. One of his friends even showed up with a lovely gift, a recording of his favorite hymn sung by the famed German soprano Elisabeth Schumann. The whole evening was perfect. Until his butler Dónal pulled him aside, long nose pinched.
“There is a woman in your office, sir.”
Normally, this would be an intriguing, even welcome, bit of news. But tonight, with so many people wandering the house, he’d closed off a few rooms for safety, including his precious space.
“Then get her out,” he whispered, jovially waving at the owner of a new sporting store in town.
“An American woman.” The hushed horror in his voice cut through Yeats’s tippling buzz.
“Who? I don’t recall an American on the guest list.”
“I don’t know, but I heard her earlier, ordering champagne from the bar man. And I’m afraid there’s no convenient way to remove her. You’ll need to…”
Dónal was gripping his hands together fretfully, something rare and unexpected. He was a commanding presence. For him to be in a twist, something was truly wrong.
“All right,” Yeats relented. “Lead on.”
He marched with purpose so he wouldn’t be waylaid, bumping into the town mayor with his hand up the dress of a local starlet made good on the London stage, but not seeing anyone else of note.
He’d set up his office in the northeast corner of the house, built it as both workspace and library. The shelves were bursting with books on a variety of topics. There was a blue velvet sofa and two leather chairs by the marble-clad fireplace, a fire chuckling merrily in the grate. His wide oak desk with a black leather blotter on top held nothing but a Montblanc fountain pen with a golden snake wrapped round its cap, supposed to have belonged to the doyenne Agnes Sweet herself, and a stack of notecards, the paper thick and creamy. The party was a dull roar here, loud enough that he knew people were in the house but removed enough for a proper conversation to be had.
This was his sacred space.
And it was defiled.
The American was draped over his desk chair, back arched and breasts exposed, a ruby necklace of wetness dripping through her blonde hair onto his precious Agra kilim dragon-themed rug. It was a one-of-a-kind piece – inherited from Sweet too, like the pen – and it was rapidly being ruined by the gentle plish plats of the stranger’s blood hitting the soft hand-knotted silk.
That was when he noticed his prized fountain pen sticking out of the American’s neck. Yeats said an exceptionally rude word in Gaelic, and Dónal, startled but unflappable, cleared his throat.
“As you can see, sir, we need a moment alone.”
“Yes, quite. Who did it?”
“I don’t know. No one has been allowed in this part of the house.”
“Yet an American woman was able to get back here and get herself murdered. Oh, my carpet!”
He shook himself. Right. This was a disaster, but he could make it work. Now he remembered her coming in, standing in the keep staring at the gloriously decorated trees, wide-eyed as a fawn. And, if he remembered correctly, alone. If she hadn’t yet been missed…
“Is there anything else that might tell us what happened here tonight?”
Dónal gestured to the fireplace. Yeats’s eyes followed the butler’s pointer finger to see the round heel of a boot print, rimmed in red. “She wasn’t alone.”
“That’s not yours?”
Dónal shook his head.
A terrible idea formed in Yeats’s mind, and he dismissed it immediately with a heavy sigh. This was not an Agnes Sweet novel. This was real life, and there were real consequences that must be dealt with.
“I’ll call the police. Just make sure no one gets back here until they come. And keep it quiet, Dónal. I will make sure the guests are safe, and escort the constabulary here when they arrive.”
Dónal went a peculiar shade of alabaster akin to the sculpture in the stairwell. “Sir, there is another option. Your party wouldn’t be ruined and you could deal with—” he waved a hand toward the dead woman “—this, tomorrow.”
“But there’s a murderer in the house, Dónal. No, we must do what’s right.”
“As you wish, sir. But whoever killed her is certainly gone by now. Who would stay to risk being caught? Were she to be found tomorrow, in the oubliette…”
The logic of that statement was unassailable. Or maybe Yeats was just drunk and desperate. He couldn’t envision another way out that protected both his party and his reputation.
“You’re certain no one has seen?” he asked.
“I can’t be completely, sir, but I feel sure the alarm would have been raised if someone had.”
Now that it was Dónal who’d made the suggestion – stiff, straight-laced Dónal – Yeats was on board. He would much prefer not to let things be ruined by this interloper who’d had the audacity to be murdered during his party.
Yeats O’Malley, you’re going to hell for this. “All right. To the oubliette. And get my pen out of her neck. It’s an antique.”
Dónal cleverly managed to knot a tea towel round the woman’s neck so she wouldn’t drip on the way, and they rolled her in the rug. There really was no other way, Dónal argued, and Yeats relented. Walking shoulder to shoulder like two mice with a stolen baguette, they snuck through the back hall to the small door leading to the cellar. Straining under the dead weight, they made it down the stone steps and wormed their way toward the wine cave, stopping at the short hall that housed the angstloch. When opened, the vast darkness below released a scent of moss and must and wet things. With a “heave… ho,” down the oubliette she went, landing with a thunk that made Dónal turn and retch into a silver crested champagne chilling bucket. It was a rare show of emotion for the lad. Then the door in the floor was closed, and Yeats was rubbing Dónal’s back. “There, there. Better out than in. Now go get yourself a whiskey and take a seat by the fire in my office. You can send someone to deal with this… mess—” he gestured toward the bucket “—later. They’ll just assume it was a tippler from the party who got lost below. Oh, and clean up that boot print.”
With a grateful nod, Dónal departed.
Yeats took a deep breath, blew it out hard through his nose, checked himself for any untoward smudges of blood or other incriminating matter, then headed back toward the incandescent joy that was this party. He stopped by Our Lady of Perpetual Cold Palm, as he blasphemously called the marble statue, and shook her hand for luck.
Grabbing a sidecar from a passing tray, he squared his shoulders and made the rounds, again the jovial host, dropping a joke here, a well-timed comment there, watching, ever watching, for who might have committed the heinous deed. He’d done two full loops and it was nearing time for Father John to start the service, and nothing untoward was evident.
The guests gathered in the front hall and received their benediction, heard the story of Christ’s birth, revelled in the familiar scent of incense from the censer and ignored the slight slurring in Father John’s voice during the homily.
Yeats was five measures into ‘O Holy Night,’ his robust baritone ringing through the room, joining with the beatific smiles of his guests enjoying this special service, when he thought he heard knocking. He had a moment’s panic – someone had come for the American, or the police were here, knowing what he’d done – but he didn’t hear it again and no one else seemed perturbed. He made it through the rest of the service without another sound. Made it through seeing his guests to their various cars and bicycles, many setting off on foot for the short walk back to town, a few even sailing off, the tide having come in and allowed their keels room to go upright and slip out onto the bay. In each face, each eye, he looked for signs of terror. Of malice. The soul of a murderer, lurking in their depths. But none seemed at all perturbed or disturbed, only merry and bright, happy to be a part of this remarkable evening.
He was saved in many ways; not a soul asked after the American woman. She must have come alone.
It was a relief. He really could deal with her tomorrow. He was rather proud of himself, actually, for the discretion and fortitude with which he’d handled the situation. Tomorrow, he’d call the police to the house, show them the dungeon, explain he was missing a rug and had gone searching, and look what horror he’d found.
Someone had killed the girl; it wasn’t too far-fetched to assume they’d try to hide the body. Surely, the killer had heard Dónal approaching and panicked, leaving the girl behind. No sane murderer would leave a body out in plain sight during the middle of a party. No, no, the culprit had been interrupted. Yeats was sure of it. He’d simply finished the perpetrator’s devious work.
When he was finally alone, he returned to the office. Dónal was not there, though an empty whiskey glass sat on the table by the fire. It was late; he must have found his own bed. Strange, though. He acted as valet as well as butler; for him to abandon his duties was unusual.
Yeats shot back a tot of whiskey himself, enjoying the smooth burn and how it warmed him from within, and, saying a prayer of gratitude to the good man upstairs for keeping the American hidden long enough to allow him to find a plan for dealing with her, he locked the door, checked to see that the fires were banked (they were), and wearily mounted the Sicilian marble staircase. Light came from under the door in his room; he paused, curling his right hand into a fist in case someone was inside. He pushed open the door, but there was no one.
He face-planted into his bed without bothering to undress and dreamed terrible dreams all night.
Yeats was startled awake by quiet singing in his ear. It was a whisper, really, so quiet that once he bolted upright, he could barely hear the words. “O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining…”
There was an odd noise that accompanied the words, one reminiscent of a spade hitting dirt.
He opened his eyes, and memories of the evening’s evil deeds paraded in. He was assailed by the cheery calls of the early morning birds and the lapping of water against the banks, and the homely, comforting ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. You dreamed it, he thought, rolling from his bed. His head was splitting and he stopped for a moment to rest his skull in his hands before forcing himself to his feet. The sun had not yet risen; the sky’s edge was the color of new milk.
He heard the carol again, so faint as to not be real. Grabbing his robe, he rushed down the staircase, tripping in his haste, missing the last few stairs. He knocked his temple against the banister and landed in a heap at the base, jarring his whole body. It took a second for his breath to return, and when it did, he thought he heard the lines from the hymn again.
“Fall on your knees. O hear, the angel voices…”
He looked up at the statue, shocked to see her limned in crimson.
“He knows our need. To our weakness, no stranger!”
He could have sworn he heard knocking, echoing through the keep, growing louder and louder, shaking his body, and under it, the note he could just about make out, a spade hitting the dirt.
The massive, cased grandfather clock struck five, and the noise was unholy in his head.
Yeats curled into a ball on the floor and moaned. His head, his head was going to burst.
“Dónal,” he screamed, but it was relentless, the chorus of voices and whispers and blades hitting dirt and the knocking on the walls of his soul, his heart, his heart was pounding, shaking his body in time with the reverberations. The drumbeat of the ticking clock grew to a violent crescendo inside of him, and to escape it, he rose and stumbled forward. He moved down the stairs to the cellar slowly, afraid, hitting the switch at the base to illuminate the space. Every step echoed. He inched closer and closer to the hallway where the angstloch to the oubliette waited. He heard the spade biting into the loamy earth, again and again and again, and finally reached the door. The cacophony grew to unbearable levels, and just as he stepped into the darkened hall… stopped.
His gramophone was set up by the angstloch, the wooden door cover standing open. The record on it had finished, and the needle bumped and scratched in time. He drew closer and saw the record itself was the special gift he’d received earlier, the rich notes of the famed soprano singing his favorite hymn.
Who in the dickens would put this down here? The odd bangs and knocking had clearly come from the record, echoing in the small space. But why—
A dark shape emerged from the gloom, and before he could move out of the way, he tumbled head first down the dark, dank hole.
Alone. In the pitch-black, the ancient soil seemed the same color as the night sky, making it almost impossible to tell the difference between ground and air, the oubliette hole letting in a meager light from above. He dripped sweat and the spade bit into the earth, and though his eyes were acclimated to the dark, he could sense a shine, a flickering, like a candle in the dark, illuminating a small circle to his right.
It was a bleak place, he thought, taking a break. He wiped a dirty hand across his brow, smelling the scent of death. The hole was certainly deep enough to hide the woman, was it not?
The shaft of light brightened the space, and Yeats’s eyes opened, relieved. His heart was doing double time. He took a deep breath. Was the nightmare truly over?
It took him a moment to gain his bearings, and panic set in as he realized he really was in the dungeon, lying on something soft, a terrible pain in his head. His hands scrabbled and he felt the rug from his office. A moment of sanity, and memories of the night before returned. The party. The dead woman. The disposal of her body. The singing from the record. And then, the fall. He remembered nothing more. What in the hell was he doing down here?
Moving slowly, head pounding, he unwrapped the woman’s body. She’d been a beauty. He hadn’t killed her, had he? The night had been such a blur: Too many drinks, too many cheers. A triumph, or so he’d thought. He was painfully sober now, however, and perhaps it hadn’t been such a success after all. But no, he’d certainly recall participating in such a terrible deed. Slicing into flesh with the sharp tip of the fountain pen? It was a visceral thing, killing a person with your hands. He’d remember.
Could it have been Dónal? Surely not. Mild-mannered, quiet, Dónal Barlow was the least entropic fellow one could imagine. But how well did Yeats know him, after all? They were of an age, and the man was strapping; he could have managed the physicality needed to murder the girl. But what a thought! No, Dónal was a good man. He’d come when the house was bought, with recommendations from a local family; had served loyally.
It’s a bit late to be worrying about the who, he chided himself. Whoever did it was long gone anyway, right? Who would murder a woman and stick around?
His heart, the rhythm already accelerated from the discovery of his predicament, thudded loudly. Stop thinking. Get yourself out.
He went to the small door, and found it blocked. He shouted and pounded on it with his fists, but the only answer was the lonely ticking of the grandfather clock, the pendulum echoing down the house vents. He’d always found it comforting when alone in the great manse, that tick-tick-ticking like the beat of a mother’s heart.
He ran his hands along the walls of his prison, only to find the very spade he’d dreamed about leaning against the wall. As if someone had come down here in the night to bury the woman’s body, but abandoned the plan. When Yeats had investigated the noise and found the gramophone, perhaps he’d chased off the killer.
Or perhaps you were drawn here to die, old boy. If you share her fate, the killer is safe.
He fought down the panic. Surely Dónal would come for him.
He’d dreamed of the spade biting into the earth, though. He took it in hand, and moved toward the woman’s body. Was he meant to bury her, and then he’d be let out?
Fine. He’d play along. He’d call the police the moment he got out of here, and tell them everything. They wouldn’t hold him accountable. He was an upstanding member of society, a leader in this town. He’d done nothing wrong.
He attacked the soil with vigor, and almost immediately the spade caught on something. The clang reverberated through the small space, echoing in time with his heart.
He fell to his knees and edged closer, reaching a hand into the dirt. They said the house – well, this dungeon, at least, before the castle keep crumbled around it – had belonged to the pirate queen. Was there treasure buried here, in this place of pain and horror, where no one would dare enter to look?
His fingers grasped something and he pulled. The object came free easily, and he hurried over to the beam of light from the oubliette hole: a pearl bracelet. Three strands, with a thick gold and diamond clasp. It took his mind a moment to register the bracelet resided around a long, dirty white bone, which was still attached by a few shreds of ligament to the palm of a hand.
Agnes.
He screamed and scrambled backward, then found his feet and ran to the door. He pounded his fists against the rough wood and cried out, “Dónal! Dónal! Let me out of here!”
There was nothing. No one. Terror overwhelmed him and he sobbed for release. Finally, he gathered himself.
Stop. Stop and think. You’re a smart fellow. You can get out of here if only you think.
He tried to ignore the fact that he was alone with the dead American and the skeletal remains of a woman who must be Agnes Sweet herself, and now he, too, was locked in this dreadful place. He needed to get out. The door was barred and there was only one other entrance, and that was through the angstloch. But without ladder or rope, there was no way to reach the hole itself. It was such an effective prison. He was done for.
Finally, curiosity outweighed his anguish, and he dug up the rest of the skeleton. It was small, disarticulated, and with the tell-tale bracelet and the large hole in the skull, he knew he’d solved part of the mystery of Agnes Sweet’s disappearance. Someone had bashed her on the head and shoved her down the fear hole, then come back and buried her. Was his fate to be the same?
He sat on the moist ground and listened to his heart beating. Again. And again. And again. The grandfather clock tick-tick-ticked in time, and eventually, Yeats fell asleep. In his dreams, the heartbeat was joined by others, some soft, some loud. Some skittered and chirped and some thumped languorously. Many had died after being shoved down the hole. So many hearts, beating so many times, over so many centuries. They grew louder and louder, and Yeats lay down in the dirt and let his join the chorus.
Three nights passed, and the clock in the hall ceased to run. The silence in the dungeon was overwhelming. To hear only his own heart beating was too much. He could feel himself slipping, the madness taking him deep in its bosom. The creatures in the dungeon seemed to come to life, and he didn’t feel quite as alone. Yeats knew it wasn’t real, that he was hallucinating from the bump on the head or the lack of food and water, but he welcomed the imagined company. The silence was unbearable.
Soon enough, the American began to smell, and she was embarrassed. They had conversations about her life, her childhood, and he realized he would have enjoyed knowing her, had she lived. She claimed to have come for a visit, gotten in the family way, and was in hiding at her aunt’s for her confinement. She was a fallen woman, but Yeats didn’t mind. She was good company.
Agnes the skeleton mocked him angrily from the corner, annoyed at his blatant tarnishing of her legacy by using her talent and fame for his own gains.
Neither could tell him who’d murdered them. Worse, no one came to look for him.
He had no voice left. His fists were raw and bloodied. He’d prayed and screamed and begged. There was no water except the moisture from the rocks, and he licked them as often as he could manage. He was growing too weak to care. Death would take him soon enough. And through it all, his heart beat, and beat, and beat.
The fourth night, there was a new noise, an eerie clomping above. He thought he heard his name, a whisper in the darkness. His mother? Come to call him home? Warmth suffused his chest, and the beating of his heart grew more frenzied.
Yeats. Yeats.
“I’m ready to see you again,” he whispered back. “I’ve missed you. I’m sorry I was such a terrible son.”
Yeats. Yeats!
The word grew louder, then louder still, and the voice closer, and closer still. He could see the body of the American in the dim light, and the form of Agnes Sweet, the horrible grin of the skull. “Farewell,” he told them.
“Yeats O’Malley!”
The voice was close, and real! And he recognized it. It was not Dónal, but belonged to Father John.
There were others too, and his heart leaped for joy.
“I’m here! I’m here in the dungeon! Save me!”
“Yeats?” a voice called from above. “Is that you in there?”
“It is! Oh, you’ve no idea. I’ve been locked in for days! Please, please help.”
“Dear God, what’s that smell?”
“It’s a woman, or I should say, two women. I didn’t kill them but they’re here with me. One was buried, one I was going to bury, but I didn’t kill her, I swear I didn’t. I found her, in my office. She was already dead, you see, and I panicked. If you’ll just lower a rope, or open the door, I’ll explain everything. I will!”
It took them an hour to figure out how to release him from the dungeon, and he babbled to them the whole time, detailing all the reasons why it was clear he had not killed the girl in there with him. Whoever had locked him in had clearly done it, couldn’t they see? And that person had blocked the door thoroughly, so they hauled him up through the oubliette with a rope around his arms, for he was too weak to climb the ladder they put down.
As he left the dank room, he promised both women that he would solve the mystery of their deaths. He would unmask their murderers, once and for all. And after the police investigated and found no wrongdoing on his part, he tried to keep that pledge, to no avail. There was simply nothing to go on.
While Yeats eventually saw them safely buried in a proper graveyard, with Father John officiating and the whole town surrounding the site, laying them to rest was the end for him. There was no clue what had happened, and Yeats, never quite right after the incident, withdrew to his home.
Of Dónal, there was no word. He had disappeared into the fabric of the universe. Once they cleared Yeats, the police (and the townsfolk, oh, the rumors they shared!) speculated that Dónal had lured the young American to the party, killed her, and locked Yeats in the dungeon to take the fall for his crime, but there was no way to know for sure. A few strange bits and bobs were found in the butler’s things: a diamond hair clasp, a pipe, three playing cards, a long piece of brown velvet ribbon. The police wondered if they could belong to more victims, wondered if Dónal was some sort of Jack the Ripper imitator.
They never would know for certain. But part of the mystery of the elusive butler was solved when what was left of Dónal Barlow was found in the spring thaw, face down in the mud of the riverbank. Escaping the house? Or searching for a way in to help his master? There was no way of telling.
Yeats closed the house to the public. He puttered. He fretted. He refused all callers, having groceries and liquor delivered. He would not allow a soul to pass through the doors. He sat next to the grandfather clock, winding it every hour so it would never again run out and go silent. Silence was no longer his friend.
The week after Dónal was found, the first clock arrived.
And then another. And another.
Grand ones. Small ones. Pocket watches and grandfather clocks. Pendulums and cuckoos, water clocks, and hourglasses that chimed when the hour was up. Even an atomic clock that whirred constantly, marking the seconds as well as the minutes and hours.
Yeats chipped away at his vast fortune, searching the world for the finest timepieces money could buy, but ignored the one thing he could save, the beautiful container that housed his madness.
He spent his days making sure every one of his clocks was in lockstep time, so four times an hour, the heartbeats from the dungeon rang throughout the house to keep him company.
The roof began to leak, and the plaster peeled from the walls. Water intruded on the foundation, and the northwest corner, disappointed in the lack of maintenance, finally sank three feet into the marshy bank, cracking the walls apart. The grand home became unlivable again.
Time passed.
Yeats passed.
They found him sitting in the darkest corner of the dungeon, surrounded by pocket watches that had stopped ticking long ago.
Christmas Eve
Now
“Edge House,” the tour guide intoned in a disappointingly light brogue, “has over three hundred and twenty clocks, many of unknown vintage, but several that are truly invaluable, including one with provenance dating back to the early thirteenth century, claimed to be one of the first known mechanical clocks to exist. When the previous owner passed, the house went into probate and was eventually nominated to be a cultural heritage site. That nomination failed, but the house was too important to the community to let it drift into the sea. It was partially restored in the eighties, the worst of the foundation damage repaired, and has been maintained by the grace of the city since. It’s taken a good deal of money, and now, the home has a private benefactor who will oversee a full renovation. The only request of the previous owner was for the clocks to be maintained, and as you can see, we’ve done just that. Prepare yourselves. It is nearly midnight.”
This was the part of the ghost tour Julia Exeter had been looking forward to most. A famed mystery writer, she already knew the history of the place. And, she was privy to the house’s deepest secrets. She was certain she knew who murdered the women who had died here. And she thought she knew why. She was going to prove her theories, then make sure everyone else knew, too. The book she was writing would expose them all. The rise and downfall of Yeats O’Malley, procurer of the clocks and finder of bodies, was a full section. But there was so much more to the story. Julia was focused on the bigger picture.
She tuned out the guide and slipped into the dining room off the central keep. She stood at the window and looked out at the water. Imagined the night her great-grandmother had done the same, almost one hundred years earlier. From what Julia had pieced together, she’d come across the sea to stay with her only living relatives when tragedy befell her own parents, and she was having an affair with someone in the great house.
What excitement it must have been for a young American visiting family nearby to be invited to the famed Edge House Christmas party by a secret lover. She couldn’t have known what would happen; that this was the last place she’d be seen alive. That the distant relatives she was living with would never say a word when she didn’t come home. That they would ship the baby she’d secretly had while with them off to the orphanage on the other side of town and wash their hands of the situation.
A secret baby who grew up to be Julia’s handsome, rakish grandfather. This spitting image of the daguerreotype of the man called Dónal Barlow she’d found in the church archives.
Julia had discovered part of the truth in the diary of that horrible distant aunt. Or what she could make of it. It was in the last lines of the diary that she found the core of the mystery.
Elizabeth Exeter lost to the excesses and sins of Edge House, just as darling Agnes was. Someone in that house murdered them both.
The gaily decorated rooms of that Edge House no longer existed, replaced with the festooned false charm of the historical holiday, replete with wall hangings explaining the significance of the portraits and the house’s history, and many stag heads mounted, glassy and staring, from the walls. Julia was going to change all of that. The sale would go through in the morning, and then she’d own her history, and the house’s, forever. She would write its story and bring it back to life.
The clocks began to chime, and gong, and clong, and chirp, and whistle, and as they counted down the midnight hours, over and over, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, they literally shook the walls. The tour group was appropriately awed, laughing and hooting in excitement.
When the last beat finished echoing, the guide deepened his brogue.
“The house has seen many sorrows, from its beginnings as the castle keep of Granuaile to its later purchase by the famous mystery writer, Agnes Sweet, whose body was found fifteen years after going missing in the very dungeon you will visit today. Many deaths have occurred here, and it is now one of the most haunted homes in Western Ireland. If you’ll follow me, we’ll go down the stairs to the dungeon now.”
Julia smiled and got in line.