Everything started to change the day the south of the village began its inexorable tilt. Being no stranger to subsidence, it came as no great surprise to Cornelius. That the pond, having come and gone with the seasons for so many years had in the last winter failed to materialize, had led him to suspect that something was about to happen; though if there was a surprise, it was that it happened so fast and to almost everyone on the south-side of the village to boot. Nonetheless, it filled him with dread.
Nobody in the village noticed for a time. Too caught up in their own personal affairs, they failed to notice the signs of distress emerging from the doctors’ surgeries, as the number of elderly people with alignment problems exploded. Indeed, questions were only raised when otherwise healthy middle-aged people began falling, tripping on raised paths and crooked curbs, but for the most part it failed to register amidst the complaints arising from the heat of May and the associated stink of sulphur from McLoughlin’s swamp.
As it should happen, it was as he entered the village that a tile came clattering free and struck the path just before him, driving the population into a rage for the realization of the damage wrought to their town. Having been out walking all day, he was struggling with his knees. Like many elderly people, he suffered with alignment problems and the arthritic stiffness so aggravated by damp weather. Struggling, he shuffled along, his groaning incantations for mercy so quiet that only God would have heard. But the revelation that struck the village was not divine, but of the serious condition that besieged its structures. Weary and sore as he was, he could see the façade of shop fronts and homes being scrutinized by a perplexed population that one-by-one emerged from their buildings to witness the subtle but growing fissures that lined the streets and scaled the walls. Anger took up residence.
If the spread of subsidence proved perplexing, it showed that had little to do with the thirst of elms for water. Quite frankly, there just weren’t that many trees. Yet there was a rational explanation, and with so many villagers seeking the root of the problem, it couldn’t remain hidden for long. As it would turn out, the truth, when it surfaced, brought answers to a great many riddles, for in recognizing the imperative of survival, the Tullys came forward detailing seven generations of burrowing beneath the soils of Poulnabrone. In fact, their network was so extensive that people, for a while at least, ceased calling them worms, instead associating them with the Vietcong, for they were worthy of anything yet discovered during that great imperial atrocity. What had caused them such great trouble was the town’s rugged geology, the elevation of its granite base altering dramatically along a line that followed the centre of the main street, and along which ragweed now sprouted. The soil lay shallow to the south, and though but part responsible for the Blairs’ long suffering, it quite easily explained the collapse of the road at the point of the infamous hole.
“Didn’t I tell you those tunnels would bring trouble to this town? Didn’t I tell you?” Cornelius said to Lily when he finally settled by the fire in the kitchen. He grimaced as he sat.
She poured him a cup of tea. “Are your joints at you?”
“Ah, they’re not too bad. I’m active, you know.” He seemed proud of the fact, she noted.
“Well, of course you are, gallivanting about the country with Cassandra Clony.” She’d been washing potatoes prior to his arrival. She began peeling them, cutting just beneath the skin. She kept one eye trained on him, paying no attention to the flickering lights.
“You’ve noticed?” He stared sheepishly into his cup, strangely reticent.
“Everybody’s noticed, Dad. It’s the gossip of the town. ‘Con the loon Conlon and mad Cassandra Clony.’ They only say nothing out of respect for your age...” She paused for a minute, as though considering her words. “And because they know how Kevin Clony will react. He’s dangerous.”
“Ah, come on,” he blurted, feigning both insult and shock. “I’ve fought in two wars, remember.”
“How can I forget? I swear you live in a trench, a great big pile of mud that’s gunged up your mind.”
“Be nice, now,” he cautioned. She’d hit a sore spot. The ghosts of Gallipoli had returned since his foray in the tunnels. Nightmares stole sound sleep and his longing for the battles of war disturbed his days. The stench and bile of the wounded and dying had always remained, but now exhilaration, an enormous sense of freedom he’d never before encountered encroached on his memories. His eyes glazed over as he lapsed into remembrance.
“Bullets and mortars tend to make you ponder death,” he said to her, his voice distant, as though speaking from another realm, “but lately… I don’t know… I have this sense of spontaneous action and I don’t know if that’s a memory or something I've imagined or just read. I mean, thinking in days was a luxury… let alone weeks or months. It may be difficult for you to understand, but despite the madness, the chaos, the terror…” he paused in tormented reverie, “…I sometimes wish I was back in the trenches, and that disturbs me.”
“I understand,” she lied, the only answer she could give. She swore he would die in a trench, the one that cursed his heart. She gouged the knife into a potato to remove some rot.
Without warning he snapped to, becoming animated. “But how can they think I’m having an affair? Christ, I’m almost seventy.” His bluster belied his foreboding, a feeling that had only grown with the explosion of subsidence throughout the town.
“Da, that man is dangerous.” She slammed the knife down in frustration, her tone raised in admonishment. “He’s weird possessive of his wife, and she’s half cracked. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.” She stared at him for a moment, but he remained oblivious. She resumed her peeling.
“Well I can’t say that thought hasn’t crossed my mind. But I’m the only friend Cassandra has. And sure, don’t they say I’m crazy?”
“You are! Running about like a teenager.” She shook her head in disbelief. “‘No fool like an old fool,’ they say. And I’m beginning to think they’re right.”
“Well, I haven’t seen her in over a month. Lily, I’m worried about her.” He really was bothered. It was as though he had a paternal responsibility to protect her. She was so vulnerable.
Lily looked hard at him. “Well so you should be, because who knows how he’ll react if he’s heard even half of what’s passed my ears. Seriously, you’ve gained quite a reputation.”
“More than the one I already had?” He winked at her.
She shrieked in exasperation. Next thing he’d be telling her he was in love.
°
It was love that Cassandra Clony pondered as she watched her husband eat. “I wonder does he know what love is?” she asked herself. He disgusted her, increasingly so of late. The dirt under his nails, his shabby suit, the slack jaw and open mouth, all conspired to revolt her.
“Do I even know what love is anymore?” she wondered, her thoughts turning to Cornelius. Her heart was drawn, as though a celestial force spun her about through night and day. The night lasted too long. A childlike yearning tugged at her.
Kevin Clony seemed to be aware there was a dialogue taking place. He looked up, making no effort to hide his belligerence. “What?” Mashed by molars, spaghetti and marinated mince filled his open mouth. He stared at her.
Nauseous, she looked away. “I didn’t say anything,” she fired in quick defence. He was too prone to aggression those days, too aware that something passed before his eyes. She didn’t dare to think how much he knew.
Like Cornelius, she had an equal sense of foreboding, although hers bore no relation to the dilemma of the town. She was frantic. Unable to leave the house in almost a month, she’d watched forlorn as Cornelius shuffled past, waving her arms from the upstairs window to let him know she couldn’t pass the door. Her husband appeared almost omnipresent, arriving home just when the thought of venturing out would settle. His silence terrified her. He watched her movements, popping in and out in a frequent but irregular fashion, setting her on edge.
It was on the day she succumbed to her despair that she finally ran, hobbling from her home in a mad-dash stumble for freedom, the swellings on her face still too fresh to show colour, her hair knotted with the blood from the gash on her forehead. But whereas she’d always cowered after the assault, withdrawing into obsequious denial, this time was different. She staggered through the streets, heading straight for the town’s centre, her hysterical need overcoming her desire to avoid attention. She whimpered as she walked. Riven by panic, she lurched into each step. As though she were caught in a tunnel, she walked oblivious to what lay at the periphery of her sight. Villagers approached, but she cringed and shrieked in fright. She knew only one thing: she must keep moving.
°
Having just finished peeling the potatoes, Lily filled the pot with water before banging it on the stove, her efforts briefly masking the thumping on the door. Urgency and panic hammered against the wooden frame.
“Dear Lord, who’s that banging?” she asked, startled. She ran to answer. Swinging the door open revealed a barely recognizable Cassandra Clony, a congealing mass of blood-knotted hair hiding most of her face. Her swelling eyes bespoke terror. Her rent lips trembled and split wide as she attempted to smile. Lacerations marked her arms and face. Serrated teeth cut through Lily’s senses. Rooted in shock, she stood captured for a moment. Cassandra whimpered, shivered, swayed, sagged, and fell forward into her reluctant arms.
°
Kevin Clony arrived home to a bloody mess on his doorstep. He’d had a long day and was exhausted by his recent efforts at looking after his wife. He groaned. The door swung wide, the pane at its side, shattered at head-height. Hair protruded from a cracked sliver of glass. Shards crunched underfoot. “Lord, what has she done this time?” he cursed.
He knew what she’d done. He could see it: the violent strikes of her head on the glass; the manic fury that allowed no sense of pain; the grazing of the soft flesh below her elbow. He could picture her hurling herself against the hall table that lay with one leg broken. “Good Christ, not again,” he cried. It was so long since the last time she’d been so violent that the memory had almost lapsed. It returned now, vivid, clear of the dull frost of distance. He knew where she’d gone, to her cultivated protector. Just like the last time, when she was young and had left him with their child, accused. Even his family hadn’t believed him until her mother had spoken. They’d had to move then. It was why they lived in Poulnabrone, in her home town.
He sat nervously, smoking, drinking whiskey, pondering his fate. Temptation dangled before him. His kids were grown, their fate their own. Did he have to go chase her, and damn the consequence?
His feet ultimately decided for him, carrying his lethargic frame to his car. He drove to the Clony’s, aware of the stares that followed. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” yelled Debra Blair, as he stepped from his car. He ignored her. “Leave them be, would ye,” roared out Frank Dunne, equally appalled by his neighbour’s harrowing experience.
“It’s not what you think,” he tried to say, but the words came out mangled. Not inclined to embarrassment, he growled his dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, he rang the doorbell, politely, and waited. He felt weary. His eyes glazed over as he slipped into a patient void.
“What do you want?” barked a belligerent Cornelius from the sitting room window, startling him.
He decided on the most direct approach. “Only to talk.”
That appeared good enough for Cornelius, for moments later he stepped from the house, his creaking frame stiffer than usual. In grim silence, they walked to a bench by the front of the church.
“She’s sick,” Kevin Clony opened.
“Pot and kettle,” Cornelius snapped back. He could smell the whiskey, putting him on guard.
“No, you don’t understand.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Do you think I did that to her?”
“Are you saying you didn’t?”
“I’m saying that she’s sick. She hurts herself. Not very often, but when she does...” He shook his head in melancholy.
Cornelius felt something shift in him. He’d never thought that she might have done that to herself, but now that it was said, he knew it was true. He looked intently at her husband, his desperation obvious. The unkempt suit and growing stubble no longer seemed the rough look of a cold man, but of one worn ragged. Dark shadows on baggy eyes confirmed his exhaustion. He felt an unexpected sympathy for the man, who just moments before he’d despised. Everything about him suggested a resignation to misfortune.
Tattooed arms supported Kevin Clony’s crunched up posture. His elbows rested on his knees as he stared forward, his face squeezed by the palm of his hands, his thumbs placed under his chin. “We used to be normal,” he continued. “But that was a long time ago. Something inside her just snapped. It’s why we’ve kept to ourselves for so long. I thought that if I supported her, helped her, I could somehow prevent her from... Christ, I even tried to get her help. But she wouldn’t go. Kept saying I wanted to commit her. And I couldn’t do that against her will. I’ve loved her too long.” He fell silent for a moment, staring into the depths, pondering his admission, his evocation of love.
“Do you know what it’s like to love someone so much you just want to wrap your arms around her and hold her and not let her go? You know you’re suffocating her, but there’s this fear clawing at you, promising all the horrors that your imagination can muster. And you think that if you can just keep her inside these walls, she’ll be safe.” He formed a square with his hands and looked through it. “That if you can just hold her close, contain her urges, then no harm will pass. But your fears become her prison, and what you thought was a defence was but a dam, storing trouble in reserve. You can’t keep out trouble, when it’s already inside.”
Cornelius watched him, but remained silent. He didn’t know quite what to make of what he’d heard. The man spoke sense, but… he just didn’t know.
“I’ve never been violent to her, old man. No matter what she says, that’s the truth.” All of a sudden, as though arriving at a resolution, he bounced up and started swinging his arms to get his blood flowing. “I’ve just got to deal with this.”
Cornelius remained seated. He didn’t trust the man, and the words of Cassandra had long weighed heavy. Relieved that he didn’t have to deal with the violent tempest so long promised, he was nonetheless wary. “I can’t be the judge of this,” he finally said. He stood up slowly, his hands pressed hard on his creaking knees. He felt weary. “I’m going to call the Guards. Let them figure this out.”
Kevin Clony sighed in resignation. “If that’s what you’ve got to do, old man. But thanks for hearing me out anyway. I’ll go back to the house and… wait, I suppose.”
°
He never had a chance to ring the Guards. Upon arriving back, he found Lily awaiting him. She was frantic. “She’s gone,” she gushed. “She left just a few minutes ago. I couldn’t stop her. She took a torch, Dad.”
All traces of the pain in his joints vanished as the importance of her words sank in. She’d gone into the tunnels. “Christ, she’ll get lost down there,” he almost shouted. Scouring about for a spare torch, his alarm grew with each passing moment. “Come on, Lily. Help me find a light.”
Minutes later, she returned with a lamp. It was an old Tilley from when he’d gone fishing at night in his earlier days. The wick was still good. He added some kerosene. It sprang to life. “Be careful, Da,” she cautioned. “She’s not right.”
He touched her tenderly. “I know, love. I know. Call the Guards and tell them where I’ve gone.”
°
It didn’t take him long to find her. She was manic, hunkered on the floor, scraping at the base of a beam. Her torch was extinguished. He didn’t know if she’d turned it off or the battery had faded. It was impossible to tell. He approached her slowly, with his hand extended.
Stopping only for a moment to look at him, she hissed. Recoiling momentarily, he stared at her as though seeing her for the first time. Her eyes bore tragedy, her face a proscenium where tales were acted for the world to bear witness. Love, loss and loneliness conspired. She returned to the post. “What are you doing, Cassandra?” he asked, still unaware of the threat she posed at that moment. She was clawing at something.
“What are you doing there?” he repeated, slowly gaining ground. He knew where they were. The tunnel really wasn’t safe at this point. “Cassandra,” he called, his tone gentle. She looked at him for just a moment, and then gave a tug. Something shifted. Loose stone and dust fell from the ceiling. He grew alarmed.
Realizing he couldn’t keep treading softly, he sought to grab her. Though old, he was still a large man, and one with considerable strength, but her mania was too much for him. She moved with speed, pushing him back against the wall. The Tilley clattered free, dousing its flame. The smell of kerosene filled his nostrils. He felt his clothes; they were soaked from where he’d struck the wall.
He could hear her in the dark, her efforts multiplied since he’d attempted to grab her. Knowing roughly where she was, he used the sound to guide him. “We’re cursed, we’re cursed,” she groaned as she yanked. He stumbled without balance through the dark, his terror of her intentions consuming his fear of the suffocating blackness. As though afloat on giant waves, he swayed about, the rough earth knocking against his tiny steps, his outstretched hands further eroding his balance. Seeking air, he gagged. He held himself upright and breathed deep, attempting to regain his poise. Falling dust made him cough. A stone struck his forehead. She was succeeding. He knew it, could feel it in each grunt and crack of timber from where her hand gained purchase. She would pull the whole thing down.
Staggering forward, he tripped and fell into the opposing wall. “God damn it, where are you?” he groaned. Warm salty blood trickled to his lip from where he’d banged his head. Grit caught in his teeth. He couldn’t find her. “You’re going to kill us,” he shouted.
“We’re cursed, we’re cursed,” came the answer, floating through the darkness from some indeterminate space, so disoriented had he become.
“You’re going to kill us,” he roared, his reverberating voice echoing throughout the tunnel. It was no use. Putting his hand to the wall, he turned towards the entrance – or where he considered it to be – desperate now to make some distance. He knew more or less where they were. The water table sat high at that point. The old pond lay just to the south. He closed his eyes and remembered: the discipline of the march. If only he could trust his legs.
°
It was as Debra Blair contemplated the weather that a crater formed in her garden. Until that moment, her dilemma had been whether to hang out the clothes or wait for the clouds to pass. Feeling the ground tremble, she thought it was an earthquake. Her knees quivered and legs turned to jelly. Having no experience with such phenomena, she stood stranded in shock. Dropping her basket, she reached for the doorframe at hand.
Despite choosing the ideal place to survive an earthquake, she soon discovered that it was no such event. Instead, as she stumbled into her garden, she found to her amazement a depression, formed almost eight feet deep and equally wide, running horizontal across her lawn. Aghast, she was soon joined by neighbours, all staring at the slump of the earth that had ripped through properties along a considerable stretch. “What on earth?” she muttered, utterly bewildered by the sight of her sunken lawn and the water that rose in its stead.
Lily Conlon’s scream barely pierced the silence of her confusion. “He’s down there. He’s down there. HELP!” The voice seemed surreal, the words distant, as though one and the same as the vicarious alarm of the thrushes chirping. Suddenly she was awake, and everything vivid: the colour of the sky, the sound of the birds, the wail of panic from her neighbour’s garden, the bubbles rising in the pond. The blood drained from her face.
°
It was at this time that the consequences of the house’s tilt became acute. With an adventurous spirit that refused acknowledgement of danger, Malachy had set about exploring the attic. Unaware of the precariousness of his footing, he’d passed along the wooden beams. They were loose. As the ground shook from the collapsing tunnel, the beams bucked and loosened from their moorings. He slipped. The plaster of the ceiling below gave way. And in a sequence of events that he would never understand, his body, twisting sideways, caught a wire, which wrapped itself around his neck and caught him by the throat.
It was Toddy that discovered him as he entered the house, hanging limp but for his twitching legs. He yelled in disbelief and began desperately attempting to hoist his son, whilst using the nearby brush to break the ceiling’s plaster. Alerted by his roars, Debra ran into the house and froze at the foot of the stair. Locked in place, she stared wide-eyed at her son who was hanging by his neck with only his lower body showing. A scream that never emerged from her throat turned inwards, its resonance interrupting her heart. Toddy yanked hard, and though it seemed an eternity, the cable came free. Malachy fell into his arms, unconscious, a red line circling his neck, his face mottled, his eyes bulging, his trousers soiled. Debra thumped the floor, falling hard.
°
It was as the extent of the damage was revealed that they found Cornelius. Other than a sunken shed and the accelerated inclination of precarious dwellings, little to no destruction could be observed. Instead the pond, that had failed to materialize over winter, surfaced, along with an arc of water that rose like a lagoon along its northern flank. It was amidst the slow mechanical excavation of that uncertain land that he was discovered, only partially encased, his waist and legs held stiff, whilst his torso sat imprinted in the newly formed embankment, hand rising from the sodden earth as though reaching towards salvation. It was a miracle he survived.
No remains of Cassandra were discovered, nor would they ever be, although in years to come some would see a ghost, a lingering of some apparition, a declaration of unheeded mourning. Having come too close to losing her father, Lily felt no sympathy. She cursed her name. “What is it about you and trenches?” she asked her father between sobs, as he was taken to the ambulance. He’d winced as he’d laughed, but the buddleia swaying in the breeze made him sombre. It was beginning to bloom. A butterfly fluttered close and settled and then fluttered again and rose. He watched it vanish, the terrible beauty of its symmetry, the curse of its rhyme. A tear rolled down his cheek.
°
For the next three days Debra stayed in the hospital with her son. Her body caught in shock lay frozen in insomnia whilst the events of the day seared her mind. They returned home subdued, her only joy that her son survived without damage to his brain or heart, such was his luck. Staring later that evening at the ceiling, a tear escaped and rolled down her cheek and followed the lines that had formed as her house subsided. Standing in front of the mirror as she cleaned the bruise on her forehead, she traced a split down the wall of the bathroom and saw how it joined with the lines in her face, and she cursed the trees and the land that was so uneven that her house, as it sank, sank but in part, so that the only symmetry found was in the cracks and splits that ran through its walls and leapt through the void onto her skin. And as she lay down on her bed in a profound melancholy, her son held in her arms, she heard the squeals of excitement of the neighbours’ children, for the circus had arrived and was outside in the field by the church. Posters were appearing throughout the village promising fire eating, sword swallowing and tight-rope walking, so that as Debra slept she dreamt that her son walked the tight rope, falling right into the stomach of the man who could swallow swords, for that was how he caught him. And she saw herself screaming, and as she screamed, the earth opened and the great tent fell sideways, and her screaming body fractured like an image in a broken mirror, and the man vomited and threw up her son, and her son was also fractured so that no part of him fit.