An Unsnarling of Thread

The Stairwell:

Someone, or something, watched from the room with the wired-glass pane. May didn’t look; she knew the geometry of the asylum’s landing was wrong, that it folded and unfolded like a paper trick when no one was watching. On some nights, faces bloomed pale in that wired-glass window, patients who weren’t on the books anymore, their mouths writhing furiously as if they were eating pain.

They brought May down the narrow stairwell where dirty beige paint peeled like old scabs and each step coughed a hollow note. At the bottom, the air was colder, and the basement corridor smelt of carbolic, singed dust and something faintly sweet, like pears gone to rot. A bare bulb swung gently on its chain and the orderlies’ shadows danced on the walls like devils at play.

In the treatment room, they strapped May to the trolley with broad leather straps. Her bare feet made two small crescents of dirt against the greying sheet. She carried nothing but the brass plaque she kept hidden beneath her gown, pressed flat against the curve of her hip: ‘May’s Marked Future’. She did not know where it came from, only that the weight of it felt like a memory that wouldn’t speak. Dr Brendan O’Rourke waited, shirtsleeves rolled, tie loosened like a man halfway between propriety and apology. He had the tired look of someone who stayed late to argue with his own conscience. His pen trembled once between his fingers before he stilled it.

"May," he said gently. "It’s Dr Brendan. I promised your father I’d look after you."

His voice had Galway softness layered over Wexford iron.

"Your father, May," he said, more to the nurses than to May, as if telling the story would stiffen his courage. "Castle Street. The week of the Easter Rising. He saw the glint of the rifle before I did. Pulled me over a wall and took the bullet in his shoulder. He told me it was nothing. ‘Better me than a bookworm like you,’ he said. He laughed as if to make light of it."

May watched his mouth shape the words. This did not sound like her father, he of the scowl, the harsh word, and the belt.

"Let’s get you settled, May," he said. "And then you can tell me about the bad dreams."

Session I:

"What do you dream, May?" Dr O’Rourke asked, keeping his voice very even. He touched his collarbone, almost absently, and let his hand fall.

She tried to focus past the throb in her scalp. "There’s a… a fold in Castle Street," she said. "Between the butchers and the solicitors. It shouldn’t be there, but I see it if I’m not trying. It opens into a courtyard. A shop that grew out of stone; not built. Ice cream in colours that hurt. A gentleman, no; not a gentleman, but something wearing a gentleman, who smiles with too many teeth. He told me the flavours could taste secrets. He said..."

"He said I’d pay a debt I didn’t owe," she whispered. "He pressed here."

She twitched her chin towards the cold star beneath her breastbone only she could feel, that icy second heart that tapped tap-tapped when she thought of the dream.

"And there’s a library," she said, the words scraping loose as if they had been held too long in her throat.

"Only at night. The shelves move when you turn your back. The librarian stamps the inside of your skull and the ink runs down into your sleep. The labels on the books are names I’ve forgotten, and the stories read you."

Dr O’Rourke nodded slowly, pen scratching. He glanced at the nurses, then back to May. "And do you see anyone from this hospital in your dreams?"

"The grey lady," May said. "She stands on the landing that isn’t there by day and she looks like a bruise turning old. Sometimes she holds out her hand. And sometimes there are patients in the locked room peering through the glass."

"Good," he said softly. "That’s enough for now."

They fixed the rubber gag between her teeth, the taste like a boiled bicycle tyre; smeared conducting jelly cool as a dead fish along her temples; pressed the conductors there, twin moons of hard metal. The machine hummed: a prim little sound, more offended than ominous. He hesitated, then nodded at Sister Keegan. She twisted the dial. The hum deepened into a steady, eager purr. The smell of ozone bloomed, thin and bright like a struck match. A trolley squeaked in some other corridor; a radiator ticked, then fell silent.

"May," he said, leaning close. "I’m here. I’m doing everything I can."

She wanted to tell him that there was a bell somewhere no one else could hear, that it rang when she closed her eyes. She wanted to say that if he put his hand on her chest, he would feel the cold brand like a frozen talisman. She wanted to say "Don’t," but the rubber soaked up the word and the current took her.

White fire stitched its neat, cruel embroidery along the inside of her skull. The light in the room fled to the corners. Sound left the world like a tide.

For a moment she saw the gentleman’s bark-grained face peel back and the bog-water eyes gleam. His hand pressed to her heart. A bell rang somewhere a long way down.

And then there was only the rattle, the foaming spittle, the bruising welt of the straps biting, and the nurses’ hands like small anchors, keeping her from flailing off the world.

When it was over, the conductors were removed and the jelly cooled to tack. Her temples smarted and she smelt singed hair, sour sweat and, faintly, her own seared skin.

Nights Between:

They had drugged her before the treatment. Paraldehyde left a sweet rot in the air and a soreness at the injection site. She woke with the taste of metal; sure she’d bitten through the rubber as her sense of ‘now’ dribbled back. Not normal metal she thought, more the taste of ice cream mixed with regret and sour iron.

The ward spoke in its sleep. The radiators ticked and the pipes gurgled, and when the wind came in off the Slaney it carried laughter that wasn’t laughter and footsteps that began in the ceiling and ended just behind her bed.

On the haunted stairwell, a gentle crying, soft as a sigh, drifted through the landing; the grey lady drifted back and forth wringing her wispy hands. "It’s only draughts," the night nurse would say, clutching her rosary tight. "It could just be the wind."

May learned to stare through the terrors as if they were pictures on a wall. The more she was frightened, the more the world seemed to take it as permission. Eventually, terror burned itself out. She watched and waited as if she were sitting at a window, letting weather pass.

Each morning, she felt for the plaque. Its letters had polished bright under her restless thumb, as if the brass enjoyed being remembered.

They had told her the Garda found her, barefoot on Castle Street, screaming and puddled in her own urine as if she had been tipped out of herself. She could not remember that or the first two months at all. Nightmares came to her walking on long legs wearing a coat of moss.

Session II:

A month later, the burns had paled to pink crescents. They wheeled her down again. The bulb swung again. The locked room watched her pass.

"Tell me about the man in the shop," Dr O’Rourke said, and she thought he looked thinner, as if some private appetite had been gnawing him. His pen hovered and trembled slightly before it met the page.

"He wasn’t a man," May said. The rubber was not in yet; her voice sounded like a stranger’s. "He grew. His coat went to moss. His teeth turned to needles. He laughed like a barren field in November. He said my aunt, Helen, broke a promise and he took her life in halves. He said debts run in the blood. He put his hand here and made a mark you can’t wash off."

"And he has a name?" Dr O’Rourke’s pen hesitated.

She frowned. Names were slippery in the library. They wriggled out of your mouth. "I don’t know," she said finally. "Only that when I close my eyes, I can see his shadow between the shelves."

"All right," he said, as he put the rubber plug in her mouth. "Breathe. Think of the river. Think of the sun on your face at the Quay. I’ll count to three."

She drew in the carbolic air tainted with sour rubber as if it would fill her and make her float. He nodded at Sister Keegan. One. Two...

The current found her bones with relief, as if it had been searching for her and was glad she had come back. The seizure flung her upwards. Inside the white fugue, the shop-bell chimed a single bright, polite note. The gentleman leaned through the ringing and whispered:

"When your time comes, what is owed will be collected by who it is owed to."

When she woke, she was crying without sound. The doctor’s thumb pressed the pulse at her wrist.

"Easy, May," he said. "You’re all right. You’re all right, we know we have to be careful, for your heart’s sake."

The words were a little prayer he didn’t quite believe in. She watched his mouth form them and thought of her father laughing as he bled, the way men laugh when they’re too proud to be afraid.

One Month After:

She did not scream any more. She had forgotten how.

The night breathed around her bed, steady as a sleeping stranger. Moonlight angled through the shutters in narrow bars like the damp pages of a book held almost closed.

Something stood at the foot of her bed.

She had seen the grey lady enough times to recognise the density of her, the way she bent the air as if carrying weather inside her filthy embroidered dress. Tonight, the grey lady’s face was a smudge, her hands folded like a prayer that had forgotten the words. May gazed at her as if she were a picture in a magazine left out in the rain.

"Go on, then," May said without voice, the words forming in her head like breath on cold glass.

The grey lady did not move. The air changed. The bars of moonlight seemed to lift and tilt. Where the grey lady had been, something taller unfolded, seven feet, the ceiling seeming to bend around his head. Bark-grained skin; eyes the colour of bog-water at dusk; dank moss shadows moving where a coat might be.

He stood at the foot of her bed and old air came with him: peat and rain and a hint of brass polished by someone who was not human.

"Who's there?" May asked, not in fear but as if asking a name at a bus stop.

He tilted his head. His smile showed too much thin enamel, but there was weariness in it too, as if he had forgotten how to be cruel without effort. From the corridor, a distant trolley rattled; the stairwell breathed; the radiator sighed.

"Findarra," he said as introduction. "Not the one who marked you, no. That was my brother, Dinfarra. He is not... careful."

He stepped closer. A finger like a knot in a tree reached out and traced, feather-light, the pale scabs at May’s temples from the ECT machine. She didn’t flinch even though his touch was as cold as a winter morning’s milk.

"You’ve taken your burns like medals," he said. "Your kind always do. Shock and burn and call it cure."

"Are you here to collect?" May asked, surprised to hear how flat her voice sounded. Somewhere far away, she was still a girl who had been afraid. Somewhere nearer, she was a woman too tired to be anything at all.

Findarra sighed. The curtains trembled.

"No. I’m here to put a clock back on a mantel where it belongs," he said. "We came to your island as refugees when our sky burnt. Ours was a war not made for mortal minds to hold. We threw our circles across the raging foam of probability between worlds and fled through the projected standing stones into your rain. Then the circles died behind us like windows blown in, their magic all used up. We think our realm is a cinder now, baked hard by rage-spells and prideful arrogance. There are not many of us left who remember the old fields, the ancient woods, the old kings and the artificed spells that tore our reality apart."

He glanced at the shadowed stair beyond the door, where the grey lady stood. "We make do. We make bargains. We take our tithes when we’re owed. But Dinfarra… he took more. He marked you out of turn. He pinched the thread too soon. It soured the pattern. Now a Sídhe of great power, a witch or a queen, it makes no odds to you, has threatened to vanish our bloodline for the insult. The families take sides. Knives come out in the hedgerows. The air itself might burn with long-forgotten rage-spells dragged from ancient texts."

He smiled without kindness. "We are refugees, yes, but very old refugees; our wars ruptured the very weft of our reality before your kind walked this land."

Somewhere in the building, a clock coughed its tired tick. The radiator clicked again. The corridor settled back into its hush.

"What do you want of me?" she asked.

"To pay a different debt," Findarra said. "To set the time right. You were meant to go with your sisters to England, to the mills and rooms that smell of soap and steam. You were meant to meet a handsome man who laughs with his eyes, and you were meant to have a child whose foot drumbeats against your skin like rain on a window. That is the thread we were meant to leave intact. Instead, you are here, strapped and shocked and drugged, and the thread snarls. Dinfarra’s mark on you spoilt it. I’ve come to unpick his stitch and lay the cord straight, to avoid a war that would split hedgerows and sky alike."

He looked down at her, waiting for permission. Her terror had burned itself to ash that floated in the lamplight. She nodded.

"If I do this," he said softly, "it will not be tidy. You will think you had a dream you cannot keep hold of. There will be a bell where it should not be and a taste you cannot name. But you will not be here. The price is half your life. But there will be a love, a love strong and true."

At the last, he touched the brass plate beneath her gown through the sheet, the one she had kept hidden without understanding. The metal became cold enough to burn. A light rose, green and graveyard-soft, spilling over the bed, softening the edges of everything until the room looked as if it had been painted with moss water. The air waited like a page about to be turned.

May tried to speak, and what came out was not words but the visceral shaking of a world.

The thread unsnarled:

The bed tipped. Or the world did. The straps were gone and her legs were free and the smell of pears and carbolic was replaced by lilac and something warm and human.

The green light thinned to a filament at the corner of her eye. May rolled onto her side and into an embrace that felt like love condensed into flesh. A man’s shoulder under her cheek; the give of him at once unfamiliar and already known. A laugh she recognised with her bone and her blood.

"I had the strangest dreams last night," she murmured into the cotton, her voice heavy and amused with sleep. "But I cannot remember them for the life of me. I think maybe baby is giving me these dreams. It’s kicking so much and I feel so tired all the time. I know it’s time to rest at the hospital, to get strong for our baby, but I don’t want to go."

He stroked her hair. His hand was warm. The room around them was small and full of other people’s furniture, England’s particular shade of daylight leaking at the curtain’s edges.

Somewhere out in the street, a little bell rang. It was too late in the year for ice cream and too far from Castle Street, Enniscorthy, for such a familiar sound. She felt the smallest smile rise and fall, unmoored from reason.

"It’s only the window," her husband mumbled into her hair.

"It could just be the wind," May murmured and closed her eyes.

The green thread in the corner of her vision thinned and thinned until it was only the space between two thoughts. In that space, in the seam where dream and waking meet and make their weather, the courtyard that shouldn’t exist opened and closed like a sigh. A hand made of bark and patience let go of a debt. A quarrel older than stone guttered out before it learned to burn the sky.

At St. Senan’s, asylum the grey lady turned on the stair and went on with her endless, gentle haunting.

In a room that could not be found twice in a row, a gentleman with moss on his lapel tasted the air, and for once, could not tell if the sweetness was victory or just ‘losing well’.

Later that morning, May packed her bag and with gentle tears let her husband take her to the hospital. Baby was due in the next three weeks and with her heart weak as it was, her doctor had insisted.