Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

of their inks, mixed by hand from local and distant flowers, well water and crushed beetles. And here’s the moments anonymous peoples, children and adult, took just for themselves in doodles and flourishes. Centuries-old, still here is something that keeps going. I could take it and put it in a safe context.

But when you get up into a free view, ah sometimes all you can do is realise. Be forced to. Here’s this frail cage of your body against meaningless winds. And here come the questions of cosmology and of God, hammering over the sky like doom. And you realise, with only one person inside of you, you are so easily cracked open and dispersed. Hands up if you feel the same. Hands up, swishing your arms through the thin layer of particles which surrounds us all times. Our living in this fragile element contributes to it a net loss, a tiny degradation. And the world’s getting worse over time. And this so fucking predictable, like I’d been programmed to think just so, in these places – somebody’s kind of a joke. When she gets up high it really gives her … perspective. I took a deep breath in. I reached into the nearest gorse bush and pinched off a yellow bloom and smelled it and threw it away. I know I looked happy; Daniel smiled at me. Happy just to be breathing, I guess.

On a Bench Overlooking the Edge

We sat with our hands in our pockets. Shit, I thought. My hair whipped out and around my head. If I was going to be this fucking morose, I’d have liked it to have been because I was hungover from a good time. I felt Daniel shift in the seat a little; his knee fell against mine.

‘Do you think Tom is still sitting at the kitchen table?’ I said.

‘It’s bright today.’ He raised a hand to his eyes. ‘I think he probably is. That’s my mum’s house, down there. No, there.’

‘Nice,’ I said. The winds from the cosmos blew over us, hissing in the golden-red trees off to one side sending bits of them flying, and in the redoubtable gorse which made not much of a noise at all. The tilted axis of the earth made the seasons, and this was autumn. How can we believe in hauntings now? We are so little and always being obliterated, and as a species on the way to securing that completely. Belief in ghosts, in possession. However much I’d like not to believe, I can fully grasp why I do, or why I am able to fool myself: oh to be grand and full of diverse modes of being, to know extension of the self, to know God and demons and angels and the drawling, drifting spirits of enduring souls in such an epoch as this. It’s the very end of everything, I thought. Though it was autumn, so, in that too, of course I thought so. But Tom was, anyway, he was haunted. Or bedevilled. I’d take for myself the strange, exciting fear in that, if I could haul myself out of this strange mood. Daniel leaned against me, or I leaned against him.

‘What could it be in the book that’s getting to him?’ I said.

‘You don’t think we’re overthinking it?’

‘I want to look at the book again. I want to understand it.’

‘Why?’ said Daniel, ‘You think it contains some mystery that has wrapped him in its claws? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t seem himself, then last night, and this morning, and you said yourself a while ago, before I even noticed, that something was enchanting him.’

‘I said you were enchanting him.’

‘I never took you for a sceptic,’

‘Sceptic. I believe in the beauty of this world and all that’s gone before. But I think what’s gone stays gone,’ he said, ‘this is all there is, Órla. It’s enough. It’s very beautiful, right now.’

‘Aesthete. I just think he might be, you know. Something.’

‘Fine. But seriously, you think he’s – I thought you were so solid and – sharp. I didn’t expect this,’ Daniel said.

‘Expect what?’

‘You really believe he’s got some kind of devil in him. Some kind of ghost. Or he has become a portal to the unseen world. On what evidence, there can be none—’

‘All right, stop. You don’t know me. You don’t know—’

‘The things I’ve seen?’

I said nothing. Daniel got up and walked a little way off to the edge, overlooking the city. We’d missed each other somewhere and spun off. I couldn’t do this alone, I thought. I searched my head for what I knew of Daniel, in those weeks of our friendship. He was warm, twitchy, gentle, had a light comic touch, seemed to understand me on some innate level, seemed to understand everything by the map of his feelings and his mind, charmed by Tom – I’d seen it by then – keen fondness for me, responsive, clever. Yet now, when I needed his softness and feelishness, this coldness, judgement. Laughter came from behind us – a child, running with a brown Labrador. I watched them canter over the small field at the top of the hill. I wanted to be a little girl again. But I believed in ghost stories then too.

‘Tell me a ghost story, then,’ he said, ‘one from your real life. Tell me what you’ve seen.’

The Cold Bitch

Once when I was a girl, about six or so, I said, my parents ran away. It was wintertime. We had just moved temporarily into this lonely house on the coast. My da was working there on a contract, restoring the house around us for some rich guy. We’d be back home by the spring, mam told me. The house was rangy, from the sixteenth century, hauled up from the cliffs it stood on – I looked it up years later to scratch the itch it had left me with but there was not much information to be had beyond the property value –