The Parasite: Chapter One

 

I: Land-Eater

 

Cruit Moorland, Donegal, Ireland. September 1845.

 

“I have seen what I have seen Mick, and I’ll not sit here and have you convince me otherwise”, John was unwavering in his words.

Old Mick's eyes were sullen and distant. To John, his older brother looked not like a man but some wax or wooden sculpture of a man. 

John’s lips and throat burned and he held an empty whiskey bottle. People thought it strange, carrying an empty bottle around like some whacko, and he’d flip it in his hand and make a pop in the rim with his finger every so often. Since the rot set in, he couldn’t afford to abandon his village folk in the fields to make the trip to Inishowen for more. Anyhow, he hadn’t two shillings to rub together. But my God, did he want a chug of cold whiskey. He wanted to feel himself floating somewhere neither here nor there, somewhere warm and fuzzy that bobbed up and down. He rubbed his lips roughly with his hand.

Thunderheads boiled and writhed overhead, and John wanted to be back in the village sooner rather than later. 

“I can't play no part in it,'' Mick said and shook his head. “I’m done with all of that, and I thought you were too.”

John pointed yonder up the beach along the black-rock cliffs that rose and fell along the Donegal coast. A big tree perched outward from a spot on the cliffs’ summit, a half-mile or so from where they stood. “That’s where I saw it. Clear as day, I saw it. You reckon I’m lying, then?”

“Naw”.

“You think I’m doting, then? Away with the fairies, is that what you think?”

“Naw, John, fucksake.”

“Then I don’t get it. The crops are failing and our people are shedding pounds and the potatoes are black as your boot. The devil is at work here. And I saw em’ with my own two eyes”, he pointed up the beach again, “up there by the cliffs.”

 Mick followed his brother’s finger again, and watched dreamily as the waves swelled and crashed and ebbed. “Can’t play no part in it. After what happened in Dungloe, I’m done with it all.”

John spat out a laugh in disgust and turned back towards the village, leaving Mick alone facing the sea.

“Before you go, John”, Mick said, “tell me. Have you cleaned the mess you’ve made with the bailiff?”

“I have my boy on it.”

“Well. You know me, and you know I don’t fumble my words and dance around the point, you know that?”

“I know it well.”

“Well you’ve put us all in a terrible position here. They’re going to come a-lookin', if not this week then surely the next.”

John’s hands trembled by his sides. He swallowed what felt like a lump of hot coal in his throat. He let the empty bottle drop from his hand, and it hit the sand silently, landing upright on its base. He needed a drink.

*

 

Cillian had been on the short trek a few times in previous weeks, but now he fell and tripped forward countless times along the way. It’s not that he didn’t know the narrow track, he knew it like the back of his hand. It was the front of his hands that were the problem.

They were stained black with blood. They smelt of dirty coins and no matter how hard he wiped and dusted, the western gales seemed to dry the blood deeper into his skin. He couldn’t take his eyes from them, and he fell forward twice while looking at them and how the blood seeped around his fingers. Sometimes they didn’t look like his hands and he glided his fingers through the high grass just to see if he could feel them. 

 

(They’re yours. Make no mistake, lad. They’re yours)

 

The field was already scarcely dotted with farmers and their shovels and sickles, pulling clumps of rot from the ground and tossing them away with a curse. Farther to his left was a sea of rolling green hills, some with trees and some without, some with barns and outbuildings. The view seemed to stretch on further and further; the farms and trees became specks, and the horizon met the grey sky eventually. 

It was undeniable, the aura of decay that filled the air. Some of the older folks in the hamlet tutted and dismissed the worries before, but once the farmers began dragging spoiled stock from the ground they could tut no longer. The crops they had planted lay in puddles of murky water and when hauled from the ground resembled torched foetuses. Even the racing winds that were driven eastwards by the Atlantic couldn’t carry away the stench of death.

 

The beaten track wound along the edge of the sea cliffs and downwards towards the inlet, where it snaked its way along the reeds and dunes and onto the beach. There was a grassy clearing above the beach, just behind the dunes, and that’s where the village lay. A dozen cottages whitewashed with paint and gull-shit that seemed to sprout from the land itself. It was a picture of isolation. Of decay.

(Of entrapment you’re trapped here and now the land is rotting and there’s blood on your hands)

 

Cillian galloped forward along the inclining path and looked down along the coast at the cobbled one-story huts he called home and how they leaned awkwardly inland from years of powerful seaborne gusts and how their thatched roofs danced wildly in the wind like the manes of some feral herd of horses.

There was a cottage propped on the edge of the cliff on the descent, and luckily when he’d passed it last Miss Kyteller had been indoors. 

“She’d chat the ear offa’ ya’” was the general consensus when asked about Kyteller. Truth be told Cillian thought she was fine and there was no harm in her, but he found peace in avoiding her sometimes, with her hour-long conversations and whatnot. He thought now would be as good a time as any to avoid her with his hands flaky with another man’s blood.

 

(Your hands. Can’t you feel the breeze on them? You could have said no but you didn’t)    

 

The trail wound past the side of her house where an oak tree stooped overhead drunkenly in a mess of intertwining boughs. It was late September and already the leaves were shrivelling into lifeless scarlet shavings. Almost, if not identical, he thought, to the shade of blood that dribbled from the men’s mouths he had just buried with the shovel.

The shovel. 

The fucking shovel.

 He turned around and started back when Kyteller’s voice came from the front of the house.

“Go bhfuil tú, Cormac?”

He turned back towards her and clenched his hands behind him.

“Aye, Alice, how are you?”

There was a picket fence between them and her shirt sleeves were rolled to her elbows.

“Conas tá tú?”

“I’m alright, you know”, Cormac looked around at the fields adjacent to the cliffs. More farmers had come out now, man and woman alike, and they were all on their knees digging for anything salvageable. In some sick and haunting way, Cillian figured they looked like tombstones scattered across a graveyard. “All things considered.”

“Tabhair chugam é”, she said and leaned on the fence with one arm. She was a young woman, two years older than Cillian, and he thought her to be a fair-looking lady. Usually, he shied away from eye contact, even his own mother’s, but Alice’s eyes — her left one green and her right one a kind of bluish-grey — made for curious viewing.

 

(Keep your fucking hands out of sight)

 

“Say again, Alice.”

“I say we’ve been through worse. It’ll pass as quickly as it has come.” 

“Well, we can only hope. Where’s the little one? Haven’t seen her out in ages.”

“Oh, Eireann”, she nodded back to the house and shouted, “Eireann!” 

Cormac smiled awkwardly and could feel beads of sweat forming on his hairline now. He was burning and freezing in the morning wind. “Best be on my way, Alice…”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, though?” She looked at the sky and the swollen grey clouds that ambled overhead.

“Eh?” Cillian asked.

“Makes you wonder why it’s happening. What would God benefit from bringing our food to rot, and we all good folk.” All good folk, Cillian thought, and squeezed his hands tighter into balls. “I couldn’t say, to be honest.”

“Too many of us, I reckon. We’re overrunning the place.” Her prismatic eyes were glassy now as she looked over and past Cillian at the herds of farmers on the field. 

“Too much shagging”, she added abruptly and laughed, turning around in case her young girl had emerged and overheard her. She could do without those curious questions for a few years yet, Cillian figured. Shaggin, Mammy? What’s that mean?

Cillian forced a laugh and turned in the direction he’d come, because if someone found the shovel it’d all be blamed on him, and it wasn’t his fault.

 

(But you agreed to it, did you not? You could’ve said no but you didn’t)

 

“I’ll be seeing you around, Miss Kyteller.”

 “One more thing Cillian, c’mere.” He turned back and walked over to her. “I know what’s going on.” She stared unwaveringly at him with a soft smile. His eyes searched her face. “And I’m not talking about the bailiff’s blood on your hands or their corpses laying up the road or the fact you just have to get the shovel.”

A chilled finger pressed into the base of Cillian’s spine. 

“I need you to bring him to me.”

Cillian’s face had drained of colour. “I…bring? Who?”

She lifted her arm from the fence and retreated back towards her cottage on the edge of the cliff, the very cottage Cillian figured would eventually fall into the icy Atlantic blackness, if not in his lifetime then the next.

“You know who.”