Himself

by Jess Kidd

A thick silence grew as the forest surveyed his dark work. The trees stopped whispering and the crows flew away, speechless with horror. But the child watched everything, as quiet as a stone, with his eyes big and unblinking.

Today Mulderrig is just a benign little speck of a place, uncoiled and sprawling, stretched out in the sun. Pretending to be harmless.

For the dead are always close by in a life like Mahony’s. The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you’d only let them get a foot in the door.

Tadhg

Pronounced like "tie-guh"

“Ah, you’re lucky then. What’s your name?” Mahony forces himself to look at the dead girl, to smile at her. She stops walking and stands perfectly still, staring hard at her faint hands. “How the feck should I know?” she says, and turns and skips through a tree trunk.

a thick damp prowls into his nose and mouth, settles on the back of his tongue, and starts to paw his throat closed. It is the smell of a million mold-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.

She gives Mahony an unsettling smile, revealing a set of teeth like a row of bombed houses.

They wring their hands apologetically. They wait for his eyes to open so that they can be seen. They only want to be seen.

“At the time people believed, maybe still believe, that your mother was unnatural, evil even. A few years earlier and they would have burnt her as a witch outside the Post Office.”

“They didn’t take you there to get rid of you, Mahony; they took you there to save you.”

A good pint has magical powers. It can solve the simplest of problems, heal surface wounds, and cement minor friendships, all in one evening.

“We play to our strengths, isn’t that how the best detectives work? With my mind and your unnatural talents we’ll have this case cracked in no time.”

The books want to tell you something. They want to help.” And then Mahony feels it.

“Are you the kind of cowboy to run from trouble?”

“We ask you to forgive the weak among us who have erroneously turned to dark traditions. Banish from us all spells, witchcraft, maledictions, evil eyes, diabolic infestations, possessions, and ghostly curses.”

It is a truth universally unacknowledged that when the dead are trying to remember something, the living are trying harder to forget it.

And when he looks at this trim housewife in her respectable dress, with her hair neat and gleaming, he’ll know that he’s loved every last inch of her and that his kisses burn her skin still.

The manager was glad that the next five residents all died on Annie’s shift, for she dealt with things so marvelously.

Ahh, a nurse of death. Reminds me *very* much of that season of Fargo with serial killer nurse

Neither of them is surprised that in a moment of crisis a man is nowhere to be found.

Mrs. Cauley smiles through her butterfly of gauze and tells him that, on the contrary, books save lives.

Her hand squeezes his. “I plan to die like a warrior: fiercely and upright.” Tears run unannounced onto Mahony’s pillow, for love is just as heartbreaking as pity.

But the dog was wise and she knew that the man had darkness in his mind, more darkness than she’d ever seen before, despite their long years together.

Of course, ask Bridget Doosey and she would tell you that milk products are particularly vulnerable to malevolent supernatural forces. Keep the dead away from the dairy, she’d advise.