An Enniscorthy Christmas Carol

Laughter hit the street first. It burst out of the “Soldiers of Fortune” Pub like warm air from a kitchen door; fiddles chasing it, boots knocking rhythm out of a stubborn floor, glasses striking wood with the relief of people who'd earned the right to be noisy. It ran a few yards into the cold, met the wind, and dared it to try anything.

Beyond the doorway's punch of heat, the town wore its year the way old fighters wear their scars. Shopfronts were patched with plywood and optimism. Scorch marks traced black commas up the stone where robotaxis had explained "efficiency" to granite and lost. Scaffolding and fresh mortar made quiet promises. Whole streets had their power back; others sat dark and stubborn. From Vinegar Hill, you could make out the ribs of buildings waiting for their skin. Over by the dead AI hub, a graveyard of machines glittered: robotaxi shells crumpled like bad ideas; police-bot and bipedal worker-bots stacked like a warning no one needed twice. All reminders of yet another Irish rebellion that would mark its day with marches, Guinness and tall stories.

Inside the pub, noise did what noise does best. If you were listening properly, you could hear three separate jokes being told at once and one very old argument putting on a fresh coat of Guinness, all backed by the frantic rhythm of Irish music at full tilt.

Ruaidhrí-Tadhg Colfer (Tag to his friends, "Captain" to anyone who had watched him organise chaos into victory) stood with his back pressed to the bar as if the oak had personally applied for the job. In front of him, Brendan Molloy, Chairman by title and habit, attempted to square his shoulders into a shape that contained authority. It almost worked, from a distance, with the lights low.

"You," Tag announced at a volume that made the mirrors consider unionising, "are a two-faced, blancmange-spined gombeen. I've eaten custard with more backbone. You'd be better off manning the drive-through at McDonald's than pretending to lead our town.”

Molloy's collar appealed to a higher power. "Now then, Tag, you're the worst for drink," he said, throttling his voice down to "press conference". "I have the good name of Enniscorthy to think of and I won't be brawling like a common gobshite." His right hand mindlessly rummaged amongst the discarded wrappers in his pocket, failing to find any emotional support biscuits.

Garda Sáirsint Evonne Kehoe (niece to Big Mick, sister to Sean "Sneaky" Kehoe, and the town's last blue line between nonsense and paperwork) placed her hand on Tag’s shoulder.

"If you brain him," she told Tag, "I'm off duty."

Big Mick Kehoe slid between Tag and Molloy with the grace of a man who has stopped more fights than he has started. "There's a better way," he said (words you only hear right before a bad idea gets its coat). He nodded at the opening door, where laughter was trying to warm cracked stone. "Make him earn his chestnuts. A Christmas test."

Tag's eyes did that thing they do when a plan lands fully formed. "Three rooms in the old asylum. Ghosts of an Enniscorthy Christmas: Past, Present, and Future. Christmas Eve. He does the lot, and I'll leave him be."

The pub, silent to a man, leaned in the way audiences lean when they sense a reputation is about to be stapled to an outcome. Molloy read the room, looked at Tag, at the part of himself that knew he couldn't refuse a public dare and spin the story to his benefit.

Sensing this was beyond debating, "I accept," he announced, and took half a step back, as the body is a loyal servant to common sense even when the mouth has gone freelance.

The Briefing:

Two nights later, in the back room of the “Soldiers”, Tag briefed his prank team like a man issuing a safety lecture to a box of unstable fireworks.

Corporal Sean "Sneaky" Kehoe (toolkit, grin, unfortunate talent for appearing next to unlocked windows) ticked boxes. Specialist James "Nails" Rafferty (cyber-hermit, FOI enthusiast, human paper trail) didn't look up from his laptop. Private Paul "Eejit" Murphy (whose call-sign had been awarded with compassion and frequency) sat up as straight as a good idea.

"Room One: Past. Room Two: Present. Room Three: Future," Tag said. "We scare him, we don't break him. This is about points, not a court date. Remember, frightened, not dead"

"Sheets, signage, bucket, no expired weaselly politician", Sneaky said, clicking his pen like a troubled metronome.

Tag turned to Eejit and slowed down to a speed appropriate for bridges and promises. "Do not drop, spill, tangle, or generally feck anything up. If you feel a feeling, sit down until it passes; same thing with any thoughts that might accidentally find their way into your head."

Eejit nodded as if gravity itself had just deputised him.

From the doorway, Evonne's voice arrived without footsteps. "Garda car organised," she said. “He bolts; I stop him without any inconvenient Christmas overtime paperwork. Ho-ho-ho."

Christmas Eve:

Christmas Eve found St. Senan's Asylum waiting with the patient rudeness of an old building that has outlived several bad ideas. The walk from town held the year's marks if you paid attention: a listing streetlamp patched with tape, a row of boarded windows wearing spray-painted jokes that had the decency to be funny, a melted smart-kiosk burnt to framework. From the hill, the wind came with a hard edge; the kind of cold that used to live in unheated church porches.

The main doors gave way because doors do, long after people don't. Inside, air collected itself into the particular chill that gets into a person's sentences. Paint peeled in lazy strips; cracked tiles remembered boots they didn't want back.

They’d rigged it with gusto. FACE YOUR DOOME had been misspelt in pig’s blood on the wall,

Room 1: "XMAS PAST" painted on the door in more pig's blood, which looked authentically grim in torchlight and slightly unhinged in a quiet corridor. Sneaky draped a sheet over his head and became a ghost whose boots were definitely regulation issue.

Room 2: "XMAS PRESENT" in a fresher, wetter streak. Nails taped his laptop to an upturned crate, laid the voice modulator on his chest like a confession, and opened a folder called MOLLOY.

Room 3: The bucket rig. Eejit stood on a chair beneath a doorway, ten litres of pig's blood balanced above him like festive doom. "All you have to do is nothing," Sneaky had told him. "You were born for this." Eejit nodded so carefully you could almost hear him not moving.

Ghost of Christmas Past:

Molloy came alone, walking like a man who believed cameras made you brave even when they weren't there. The corridor's cracked glaze reflected him in broken pieces. He opened Room 1 as if it were a ribbon under a small crowd's eyes. The sheet ghost stirred; the projector obliged.

The film didn't start with the lockers. It started with the boys, an AI masterpiece with Molloy's younger face lifted from his Facebook page, seamlessly mapped to the chubby boy filling the screen.

The bus, mornings: Brendan climbing the steps to "Fatty Molloy," called out with the cheerful efficiency of lads who work in bulk. Laughter sharp as cutlery.

A biro moustache added to his class photo on the noticeboard with CUSTARD BOY written underneath because twelve-year-olds are expert dieticians.

The projector didn't linger. It showed enough, then cut to the Chase. Boy Molloy stealing the caretaker's master key and took what he needed from jackets and drawers. Then, hiding the stolen evidence. Wallet and watch into Locker A, phone and coins into B, the fountain pen into C. He created the discovery: a typed note on the secretary's Olivetti placed in the headmaster's in-tray. "Certain lockers. Suspicious items. Concerned pupil." He added a single spelling error for sincerity, then signed his name at the end.

The headmaster's thanks bloomed into "Hero" like mould on bread. Parents were summoned. The boys were suspended. One lost a scholarship he'd bragged about. The teacher retrieved his pen without looking at faces and signed something with it that day because people prefer ink to be stronger than guilt.

In the present, Molloy looked down at the gap between sheet and ground. Boots. "Authentic haunting footwear, is it?" The ghost sneezed into the modulator and sounded briefly like a kettle boiling in hell. Molloy didn't clap. He left with his chin up a half-degree past earned.

The First Biscuit:

Outside in the corridor, the cold pressed down like a tax demand. Molloy's hand went to his coat pocket and found what it always found: Twelve individually gold foil-wrapped pieces of butter shortbread, twenty-five euros each imported from London. He peeled one free with the care surgeons reserve for organs and bit down.

He chewed slowly, the way you chew when you're buying time from feelings.

Ghost of Christmas Present:

Room 2 had the same red greeting. Inside, a clean sheet and the slow confidence of a man with slides.

Exhibit A: "Purchase Order: Artisan Confectionery (Urgent). Delivery Method: Helicopter." The amount had more commas than decency and the poise of a number that thought it was doing you a favour.

Exhibit B: A neat chart titled “Corruption”. Showing numbers that would make NASA blush.

Exhibit C: "Draft to Legal: Clarify liability regarding assistant-level financial irregularities; reputational risk; suggest termination." The sentence wore gloves; the meaning didn't.

The last slide just had four bold words, one under the other like nails at a crucifixion.

Wholesale

Corruption

Molloy

Guilty

"You've no evidence," Molloy said, because some sentences own you outright. "AI forgeries. Also, nice boots." Molloy sniffed, ranked the scare "slightly more alarming than yoghurt", and marched back into the corridor.

Between Rooms: The Second Round of Biscuits:

The corridor stretched longer than geometry suggested. Molloy's hand went back to the box before his brain gave permission. Two biscuits this time. He ate them like a man taking medicine: quickly and without pleasure.

The butter coated his tongue and told his nervous system that everything was fine. He swallowed, straightened his tie, and turned the corner

.

The Door That Wasn't His but Was:

Molloy should have reached a rigged doorway and a pig’s blood surprise. Instead, he reached a door that hadn't been painted, hadn't been prepped, hadn't been placed there by any man with a toolkit and a pension plan.

He tried the handle. It turned the way truth does when it's done waiting.

The room beyond collected wrongness like stamps. The Grey Lady stood where angles go to think; embroidered dress worn down to intention, bare feet not making much, if any, contact with the floor. Her eyes held the stillness of a ledger that was all truth.

The other room's occupant, Findarra, waited at the far corner: seven feet of nightmare. Top hat patched by men who debate needle sizes like politics. Coat of moss sliding through greens the way anger slides through families. Fingers like gnarled branches politely declining a handshake.

"Molloy," he said, revealing a smile that held far too many glistening bone white needles of teeth.

"I don't know how you did this," Molloy told the air. "Projectors. Smoke. Clever though."

"Clever," Findarra agreed, like a nightmare discovering a new word. "Watch this for clever."

The pictures arrived without drama and, therefore, with more authority.

From Vinegar Hill, Enniscorthy showed itself as a map of losses: blackened gouges like handwriting gone hard, the dead AI hub now a water-filled crater rimmed with twisted rebar. Terraces stared with empty eyes with windows blown and roofs discarded, the castle heaped in piles like broken teeth. The “Soldiers of Fortune” stood ruined and burnt out. On streets, thin pale men burnt pallets in oil drums and called it heating. The Slaney flows languidly, carrying doors, plastic debris and other things that certainly weren’t shop mannikins. In doorways and under cracked lintels, people huddled, sad, dirty, cold, with hands cupped to faces, and cheeks pressed together for borrowed warmth.

Findarra's coat went two shades darker. He did not raise his voice. "This is your future, Molloy. The town's and yours. A ruined, broken Enniscorthy stained with your beliefs that made it someone else's fault."

A cheap headstone in a corner of the cemetery. No statue. No plaque. Someone had spray-painted a rude word with beautiful penmanship.

Findarra crossed to him without crossing and raised one finger, bark-hard and certain. He pressed it to Molloy's chest, where a mark would live, if there was a place for it.

"I would mark ye," he said. "But you’ve no heart to hold a mark. Your soul is black with greed and vain pride. Marking you would soil me. You are already cursed, what would be the point?"

The Grey Lady never blinked. When ledgers blink, something is usually missing.

Molloy ran, leaving a small puddle where the last drops of bravery had leaked out of him. There is dignity in retreat when you choose it; there is only speed and the spreading wetness of shame when you don't.

The Lights and the Road:

Night slapped him clean. He made the car in a straight line that wasn't. Gravel objected, tyres argued back, and the yard lent him its echo. As he tore past the edge of town, the damage read itself backwards in the headlights: a swan-necked lamp patched with tape; a melted kiosk caught mid-scold; a row of shuttered windows with jokes you could only see at three in the morning. You don't know a place until you've driven through what hurt it.

On the road out toward home, a Garda car lit blue. Evonne stepped into the beam with the serenity of a woman who had stopped larger men than cars with a look. He braked because training sits deep in bones that panic can't reach.

"Window," she said, twirling her finger, and he obeyed.

Up close, you can read what fear writes. The salt tracks. The tight mouth. The smell of something damp and bitter. Evonne took it in, measured it against what she knew of fear, and called it enough.

"Drive slow," she said, and stepped away.

Tag came to the window like curiosity in a warm coat. "How many rooms, Brendan?"

"The first two were easy," Molloy said, shaking. "Just your idiot army mates. I could see their boots." His voice found its politician again by reflex. "I don't know how you found what you think you know, but I deny it all."

"The third?" Tag asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Molloy said. The voice cracked like a bright idea. "You went too far. I don't... I don't know how you did it."

Tag looked down at the drying dark stain of shame on Molloy’s trousers. Tag let the quiet run a little. "The bet's satisfied," he said. "We don't have to like each other. I'll stay out of your way if you stay out of mine."

Molloy nodded, swallowed, and left as if leaving was a skill he’d perfected.

The Call:

The blues went dark. Evonne left to return her borrowed car. Tag stood a while in the cold, collecting his thoughts. His phone buzzed. Sneaky didn't bother with hello. "He never did. Room Three. We waited. He went somewhere else. Then we heard a scream and his car leaving. That was that."

"The bucket?" Tag asked, not quite smiling.

"Eejit went to see why there wasn't screaming coming from the room," Sneaky said. You could hear the grin. "Took the full load. From eyebrows to insoles. Says he's traumatised. Wants hazard pay."

"He's well named," Tag said, and meant it with love. "Use the towel Mick gave you. Burn the rest."

Nails' voice drifted in from somewhere with poor heating. "Exhibit B landed. He knows what we know. He'll call it a lie, but he knows."

"Good, see you at the Soldiers when you get eejit presentable", Tag said, and ended the call.

He stood long enough for the cold to remember him. He replayed the conversations. Molloy had said the third room was the worst of it. Sneaky said Molloy had never been through the door to room three.

The thought arrived without knocking. He did not say it out loud. The night does not need encouragement: Where did he go, and what (exactly) met him there?

After The Fun Was Over:

Later that night, in the back room of the “Soldiers of Fortune”, Evonne and Tag lifted a pint because some victories are better sipped. Big Mick took Sneaky's towel from him with tongs and a look that demanded the name of the saint in charge of laundry. Eejit was learning the hard way that pig's blood leaves hair eventually, but humiliation takes much longer.

In one corridor of St Senan’s, a smear of festive "red" dried to the colour of busted budgets. In a room that wasn't there, a woman in grey placed an invisible ledger back where it belonged. Findarra turned his coat one shade darker and smiled, his teeth too many and needle sharp, glistened without cheer at a joke he chose not to share. A moment later, the room and its guests were no longer there.

Christmas Day, Molloy stress ironed a suit. He would not repeat Findarra's words even to himself. He would, however, remember the feeling of a finger finding nothing to mark. Like all things not serving him, he filed it under “forget”.

Enniscorthy kept its own counsel, as it always has. If, in the weeks that followed, anyone passing St. Senan's after dark thought they heard the town doing its sums where corridors shouldn’t be, they did what the people of the town have always done with ancient bookkeeping and inconvenient truths: they went home, put the kettle on, and let the night finish its work in silence.