GILLIAN O’Doherty adjusted her name badge pinned to what could only have been the dress of an Irish colleen had said Irish colleen lived in Hollywood and looked anxiously over her shoulder at the sun over Benmornan. Her long, flaming hair helped the costume, but made her feel no less ridiculous. There was less than an hour before it sank over the mountain, she reckoned, and there was still no sign of the last tourist party of the season.

Mentally she began to re-adjust the spiel, making it as lean as possible while still giving some semblance of value for money. The last thing she wanted was to be caught here after dark. Yes, the townies might laugh, and the big city folk scorn, but she remembered the stories her grandmother would tell about Rathkelly, and there was no way that she was acting.

Tomorrow she would concentrate on the final chapter of her thesis. Once that was over she could start that new job at the hospital.

Or at least that was once the plan. There wasn’t going to be much in the way of a profession for the foreseeable future. She smiled as she remembered the events of that morning. She couldn’t wait to tell Gerry.

She stood at the front of the village, where the road passed. Turn right and it would take you a mile and you’d be in Fermanagh, at the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Turn left and there was nothing but bleak bog for 20 miles of road, until you saw the lights of Donegal town. Calling it a road was pushing it, thought Gillian, as she gazed at the grass pushing its way up through the middle of the road. Something in the corner of her eye in the trees made her start. Two glowing red lights. She turned and smiled. It was the tour bus, inching its way carefully down from the North.

It trundled to the surprisingly large tarmacked car park across the road, before turning and coming to a stop as if ready to take off again at any minute. Which is what the driver, Francy McNamee, was planning to do at the first sign of trouble.

Gillian looked both ways, caught herself on and walked across the road, while Frank opened the side storage trunk, as the tourists started to disembark.

“Frank what kept youse?” she muttered under her breath in her sing-song Donegal lilt.

He pulled out a wheelchair, making Gillian roll her eyes. “Mrs Goldstein demanded the genealogist at Florencecourt explain to her why she couldn’t have had any ancestors in Fermanagh, as she thought the entire house was exquisite.”

Gillian’s heart sank. “Yanks? A wheelchair?”

“Two, actually.”

“Oh Frank, that’ll add 10 minutes to the tour.”

Frank stopped putting the chairs together. “Cut down on the story of every house in Rathkelly. Just tell the main gist of life in the Famine years. You don’t have to tell how the entire Gallagher family ended up in Van Diemen’s Land for stealing bread. That’s not a bad one, mind.”

“But look at the sun.”

They both squinted up to look at Benmornan. Standing in front of him, Gillian didn’t see the worried look flit across his face.

“Ach Gillian, you don’t believe that oul’ shite, do ye?”

“Well have YOU ever been on the road after sundown?”

He smiled at her. “That sounds like a country record.”

The passengers were beginning to disembark, a hum of chatter rising from them, slacks and shirts so loud they almost disturbed the peace. Not for the first time, Gillian was renided that it wasn’t particularly hard to do, as no birds sang near Rathkelly.

Two old dears were placed in the wheelchair.  Gillian took a deep breath. Showtime…

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Rathkelly Village Museum in Ireland. My name is Gillian and over the course of the next half-hour –”

“We were told it was gonna be an hour lady.”

Gillian blinked rapidly and pursed her lips slightly. It was going to be one of those days. There was no point in telling them why their lateness was causing the tour to be curtailed.

“Well, as you know, 1845-47 was a dreadful time in Ireland. The staple diet was the potato, and when blight attacked the crop in 1845 there was little or nothing food to fall back on.”

She walked them across the road. Rathkelly seemed little more than one pathetic street, with wretched stone cottages on either side, with one or two stronger looking buildings, leading up a small hill to the ruined church at the top.

Gillian noticed the shadows lengthening. “Life revolved around the fields for the residents. They grew crops, raised animals, but throughout Ireland, they had nothing to fall back. An estimated two million perished of hunger and disease. There are stories of corpses by the wayside, teeth stained green with grass.”

She always got emotional whenever she reached this point of the history. Her grandmother had told her stories of people she had met as a child, how had lived through the Famine. Recently these stories of children had hit her even more.

A voice piped up from the wheelchair. “Tell us the story.” A murmour of agreement went up from the rest of them gathered. “Yeah, go on.”

“Okay,” she replied, sighing again at her disappointment. The real story had all of the drama and tragedy that you could ever want, but they still wanted the legend. Bloody tourist guides.

She walked to the centre of the village, at right angles to the old shop-cum-police barracks.

“Rathkelly was unlike the other villages of Ireland. It seemed to escape the worst ravages of the famine for the first two years. As best we know, death rates were no worse than they had been before the Famine. The villagers, one account goes, tried their best to keep things that way.

“They threw a ring of steel, as it were, around the village. The wretched poor who came looking for help were turned around and left to die. The story goes that in the worst year, Black ’47 they called it, a widow woman with two children came crying one night, begging for help. The men of the village grabbed her, stripped her and violated her, leaving her out in the street in the middle of the night.

“Her wailing, according to one account, grew weaker during the night, and with her last breaths, she screamed that the villagers would lose their immortal souls. There is no record of what happened to her children.”

There was complete silence among the group. Even Frank had stopped, hanging on her every word.

“Within days, scarlet fever hit the village. All the children died some 24 of them. The food stores were hit with disease, and the food rotted away in the pits. The potatoes they had stored turned black and soggy, and putrid.”

A shiver ran through the tourists.

Gillian continued, her stomach becoming knotted with the story. “One night, two gentlemen in well-dressed Victorian garb arrived in the village, where they were by now starving. They had a wagon they said was full of food. Sure enough, there were cooked meats, pies and flagons of wine ­– and potatoes. Clean, disease-free potatoes.”

Gillian felt a little proud. She had them in the palm of her hand.

“The local priest said there was something wrong about this whole deal, but they broke into the church, which was the only place they could set up the feast, and set it up.”

She was so lost in her reverie that she didn’t even realise that the shadows had got longer.

She walked backwards up the small hill to the church, with the group of following on her every word.

“Well, there was drinking and eating that night to beat the band. The villagers felt that they deserved it after all that they’d been through. The priest refused to have anything to do with it, which everyone remarked upon. Nobody seemed to notice that their benefactors did not enter the church.”

She paused, turned around and up at the ruined church, still blackened. In the corner of her eye she saw the sun just above Benmornan mountain, and paled.

“The clock struck midnight, and the villagers looked down. The meat had changed.” She paused. “Into the limbs of children.”

A frisson went through the group. It always did at this point, and she was faintly gratified to see it.

“Sweet Jesus,” said one man.

She looked around. ~Drunk, terrified, driven out of their minds, the candles overturned, setting the drapes on fire. The flames licked up towards the thatched roof. It caved in, and the villagers perished.”

She paused.

“Or so it was thought. Father Eunan, the local priest, came out of his house. The two ‘gentlemen’ stood outside. One of them gestured. The door to the church opened, and the villagers’ corpses walked out, some still aflame.”

Some of the women had tears in their eyes.

“The gentlemen walked them around the back of the church, and to this day, nobody ever saw where they went.”

There was silence. Then: “Horseshit.”

Gillian started. “I beg your pardon?”

“Sam Goldstein, ma’am. If all the villagers died, how do we know this? It sounds like a cheap horror story.”

She smiled, in spite of herself. This usually got asked. “Father Eunan went back into the parochial house, wrote down everything that he had seen.  His last testament is in the Vatican. A copy is in the Donegal Museum, and, I understand, the Black Museum in Scotland Yard.”

The tour guide looked up, and saw Frank looking directly into the sun. “After writing up what he had seen, Father Eunan is believed to have walked to this tree beside the church, threw a rope over the branch and was found hanging there the following day when locals came to investigate what happened.”

Silence. She always liked to break it with: “No birds are ever heard here.”

The tour group parted as Gillian started to walk back down the hill. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is supposed to have happened here. Nobody comes here after dark. We don’t really need to lock up.”

There was nervous laughter. “There have been stories of people disappearing over the last few years in this stretch of road. The parish ran from the border with Fermanagh a mile to your left as we look down, and three miles east towards Donegal Town. Either way, nobody likes to be here after the sun goes down over Benmornan there just behind the church.”

Gillian clapped her hands together. “So, people, I would suggest that you return to your bus and get back to your hotel tonight. I can assure you that the meat is ethically sourced, guaranteed delicious and not from the graves of the eternally doomed.”

There was nervous laughter as the trip moved down towards the bus. “Thank you for coming to see Rathkelly Famine Village. Enjoy the rest of your time in Ireland.”

There was a smattering of applause. Frank walked up to Gillian. “That was one of your best yet, cuddy,” he said in his thick Tyrone brogue. “I’ll miss you here next year.”

Gillian started. “W-what?”

He smiled at her. “Gillian I’m a father of six and grandfather of eight. I know when someone is expecting.”

She couldn’t help from smile. “I can’t believe that you knew that.”

“Ah now. Best of luck to you and that peeler husband of yours.” The sun was sinking beneath Benmornan.

“Now get your ass up that road.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck Frank.”

“Yeah, that’s a good name for a child.” He winked.

He turned to the crowd. Right ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll climb aboard, I’ll take y’all back to your hotel.” Both wheelchair users were back on the bus. Without them seeing he just horsed the chairs straight into the storage compartment of the bus. He looked at the sun. it was more than half set behind the mountain.

He closed the compartment, smiling grimly at the thought that he was scared of an old wives’ tale.

Frank got into the driver’s seat. He watched as Gillian gunned up her Ford Fiesta and went to drive off. He switched on his engine, looking up at Benmornan. The sun’s top rim was all that was showing. His hands were sweaty as he swung the bus sharply left.

He gunned the engine as fast as he dared on the small, bendy glorified track, certain that he would not meet any vehicle coming down the road.

“Hey buddy, you in the Indy 500?” came a shout from the back of the bus. Frank ignored him. He’d just about another 300 yards through the trees before the road became properly tarmacked, marking the border between the Republic nad Northern Ireland.

In the Fiesta, Gillian reached for her mobile, and put it into the slot, pumping in a number.

“Hello garda O’Doherty, it’s Mrs O’Doherty here. I have a little surprise for you when you get in tonight.” She smiled and patted her tummy. “See ya soon, babe.”

In his rear view mirror, Frank’s imagination was either playing up on him or night was falling in the forest in the rear view mirror. He thought of what would happen if he lost a busload of Yanks in the 21st century. He’d never hear the end of it.

Gillian glanced down as she hung up. Looking up, there was a figure picked out by her headlights. Instinctively she jammed the wheel to the right.

Frank’s bus burst through the trees and on to the road. The rear view mirror seemed immediately brighter. He suddenly realized he was doing 70mph, and brought the bus to a controlled stop. He sat back, breathing heavily.

BANG! BANG!

He startled, opening the door.

“Playing dodgems today are we?”

Frank sighed. “Good evening officer.”

In her deep blue Fiesta, Gillian O’Doherty glanced down to turn the phone off and the radio on. She took off her seat belt to reach over for the dials. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the figure and wondered what someone would be doing on the road at this time of the day.

She swung the wheel and saw the figure disappeared. Too late Gillian saw the tree stump.

Mrs O’Doherty went through the windscreen. She woke up with her head at an unusual angle to her body. She could see the two tall figures, their Victorian coats giving them the look of an old movie she saw once.

She knew her neck was broken. She heard the shuffling but never saw the creatures coming for her.

She tried to breathe. She tried to protect her baby, never knowing that it was already dead.

The blouse of her uniform was ripped open. She knew that something was biting huge lumps out of her body.

She could hear the tearing.

She could see blood spurting in all directions.

She could feel something pushing at her tummy.  Despite her grotesque angle of her neck, she could feel her womb being ripped open.

“NO! NO! NOT MY BABY!” she screamed.

And then she felt the pain as her voice box was grabbed and ripped from her neck.

She breathed.

She breathed again.

She breathed, shorter.

She breathed her last.

Gillian O’Doherty lay dead by the side of The Cursed Road. 

Or she would have, but her body jerked. Her eyes opened. Drenched in blood, her corpse stood up, jerkily moving, still trying to hold her steaming organs inside her.

She felt her head being turned back to the more usual position.

With the fast disappearing remembrance of her life, she saw what remained of the denizens of Rathkelly. Burnt, twisted, some sightless, yet controlled by the pure evil in the forest.

She saw some who still had lower jaws, biting on her even-now putrefying flesh, others trying to stay away from her, as if they were ashamed at what she had done.

Gillian O’Doherty realised before a mist came down that she had now joined the ranks of the undead and tried to let out a primal scream of grief and rage and anger for her unborn son as the last of her blood gushed out of her neck through her voice box.

Her baby opened its eyes, staring glassily.

 She walked with the others to the famine graveyard at the back of the church and laid down with them in the cursed earth.

THE rabbit was out foraging for food. Suddenly he could hear the noise of the weird animals. It looked all around, but being at the side of the road, it could see nothing but the strange pinpricks of light that it didn’t know were stars, and the bright light that it didn’t know was the moon in the dark velvet it didn’t know was the sky.

If it was being honest, and if it could speak – concepts that were alien to the rabbit, as it could be and do neither – it would tell you that it occasionally wondered what the noises were, and it always seemed to be attached to the weird animals that would occasionally appear on one side of the big black line and run at speed up it as far as the rabbit could see. Sometimes the noise would appear with bright lights, and it could see the weird animals’ shapes in the bright lights.

The rabbit usually knew to run off the black line at this point, but it was on a bit where the black line had dipped. Therefore, while it heard the noise it associated with the weird animals running up and down the long black line, it didn’t see them. The angle was too sharp for it too see the lights, until suddenly the sky was filled with them. The weird animal gave the rabbit the shock of its life as, going faster and sounding noisier than any weird animal had ever done before, this one seemed to take off and fly through the air.

The rabbit was seriously worried now; if the weird animals had mutated into weird birds, then very likely it could dive bomb from the sky and pick up the rabbit. He had seen it happen. He had even seen it happen with big birds and sheep.

Yet this weird animal that might be a weird bird didn’t seem interested in taking the rabbit for food. The rabbit watched as it landed on the black line, lights turning from white to red as it traveled on down the black line to the forest that even the rabbit dared not go. It couldn’t say why of course, but it knew better than to even enter the forest.

What the rabbit didn’t know was that the weird animal was carrying six people within it. It soon ignored the weird animal and went about its business, which was mainly to get to the other side of the road and to the burrow. There hadn’t been much foraging worth the name, but maybe next night might be better.

Preoccupied with the gnawing hunger, the rabbit was suddenly surrounded by the noise and the lights. This time the weird animal didn’t take off, and it had blue lights on its head.  The rabbit raised its head at just the wrong time.

The front bumper hit it square on the head, snapping it back. The skin split along the side of the rabbit’s neck, splintering bone, gristle and sinew, blood poured from its neck. The spinal cord was already snapped.