The Madness of Tiernan

Others Stories | Jan 23, 2012 | 22 min read
24 Votes, average: 4 out of 5
Others Stories

The Madness of Tiernan

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Quietness. Darkness. He was asleep. He was dreaming.


It was raining, and the water dripped off the trees onto their helmets: men not from around here, with spears and skirts and big, rectangular red shields patterned with lightning strikes. That was appropriate: the night was split, every so often, by lightning. They were advancing, pointing their spears into the dripping foliage, the dripping leaves, pushing them aside. They were wide-eyed: a sign of fear.


But fear was appropriate, in this ancient land of Hibernia.


They wished for the safety of their fort, at Drumanagh, where at least some impression of Roman civilisation impinged on this barbarian island. But the centurion was shouting: they were looking for... what?


Seán Morrison woke up with a start, his heart pounding for no discernible reason.


He rubbed his eyes and turned around, sitting on the side of his bed; his feet landed on the cold wooden planks of the floor. Light filtered in through the window, but through a sheet of snow. It looked like there was no escape from the Quilnagyre Gaeltacht for the while.


"Seán? Seán a chara?" a voice called from outside the door, a deep voice with a cultured Dublin accent: his friend, Hugony Ó Murchú, a professor of Irish, who had invited Seán to Quilnagyre.


"Seán? A' bhfuil tú istigh ansin? Are you in there?"


"Cá h-áit eile a mbeinn? Where else would I be?"


"Cheap mé díreach go mbeadh rud éigin triálaithe agat... I ndiaidh aréir, a' bhfios duit. I thought you might have tried something... after last night."


"Táim fós anseo. I'm still here."


Ó Murchú opened the door. Seán pulled a shirt over his head, rubbed his eyes tiredly, and wandered out into the inn – for an inn it was; gracing it with the word 'hotel' would be ridiculous.


"How's our guest?" the barman asked heartily – because the guest rooms opened almost right onto the bar. If many more people lived in Quilnagyre, this would have been a problem. "Last night a bit much for you, eh?"


"Truth be told, I don't remember the half of it. Was there drink?"


"You could say that."


"That'll be it, then. Oh, God, my head..."


"Seán? A' bhfuil tú all right?" Hugony asked, through his moustache. He rubbed a bit of cigarette ash off his tweeds, absent-mindedly. "Last night - "


"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, stop going on about it, all right? I'll be grand. What're we doing today, anyhow?"


"We'll visit the small little town of Ballycrook, a bit to the west."


"Ballycrook? Not a place I ever have heard of."


"People don't go there much."


Thinking back, Seán supposed there was a hint there; but at the time, he considered it merely difficult to access – not unreasonable, in the snowy Wicklow Mountains. He rubbed his eyes again and followed Hugony out to his car.


"We'll be a while." Hugony said back to Seán, in the back seat. "Try and get some rest."


Seán fell asleep.



* * *



They'd found it. The men with the skirts and the spears and the effeminate marks of decadent civilisation, stood in a circle, while the centurion looked at it.


Standing stones. A circle of them, and a mound in the centre.


They had these in Gaul, to the south, but the men of Gaul had forgotten what lay beneath their earth, preferring to throwing themselves headlong into the fattening embrace of civilisation, wearing togas and drinking dark red wine as if somehow they could forget who they once were and what they once had known. Some Britons, around Eboracum and Deva, and those north of the wall, they knew how to use the stones, but none knew so well as the Scoti: the Irish, with their unique language and their ancient land and their unsullied customs, uncontacted, barbarian, vital. They were not trapped into cities or constrained by culture: they were who they were, and who they were was a savage, ancient race.


The wild-eyed Irish.


Suddenly the Romans were warned: a crashing in the trees, the rumble of a horn, rustling in the foliage. Dark shapes moved among the trees, betrayed by the odd glint of light from a long, burnished sword. They burst out, birth-naked and inscribed with swirling spell-lines of blue woad, swinging their long Celtic swords. The Romans locked shields, gasping breath in the damp, and trusted in their civilisation, their discipline, to save them.


Chariots – chariots – Jupiter Optimus Maximus, they had chariots! The Romans fell back under a hail of flint-tipped arrows, towards the stone circle. The arrows whizzed about the centurion; he didn't notice, he looked at the stone circle, rubbing his stubbled chin.


Then he raised his arms and began to speak.


This was one Gaul who hadn't forgotten his gods.


The Irish stopped. The Romans stopped too: where before had been the clamour of battle was now only silence. Slowly, with the creak of leather and mail, they all turned around, peering worriedly, crazedly even, as the centurion spoke a language that was neither Latin nor Gaelic nor Greek, nor any tongue known to mankind, but something older, something deeper, that had been made up by the folk who had owned Ireland before the Irish.


"Craiceáltacht Thighearnáin – craiceáltacht Thighearnáin!"


The Irish ran.


The Romans followed.


Only the centurion stayed, amid the dripping trees, arms cast high, his incanting voice bouncing off the stout boles and off the mountain peaks, shouting louder and louder and louder and louder in his weird cant, his helmet-brush shaking with fervour, until -


The Madness of Tiernan.



* * *



Seán Morrison jerked awake.


"Seán? We're at Ballycrook."


"Jesus – Hugony, I had the strangest dream?"


"Would you like to talk about it?"


"I would not – save for one thing. What's the Madness of Tiernan?"


"'Tis a legend, and not one I'd be inquiring into, were I you. Come on, we're here."


Ballycrook was at the very western edge of the Quilnagyre Gaeltacht – not because English-speakers lived beyond it, but because nobody lived beyond, because beyond it was the black bulk of Carrig Crook, the highest mountain in the Gaeltacht, and nobody in their right minds lived on Carrig Crook. It was a small place – a handful of houses, and in the centre of the town a hill on which somebody had taken it upon themselves to build a church. Hugony had stopped the car near the hill-church, affording Seán a good chance to examine it. It predated the Normans, that much was certain; mind you, Seán was fairly certain some of the older inhabitants of Quilnagyre predated the Normans, but that was another story altogether. It was built in the Celtic Romanesque architecture native to Ireland, though it had extraordinarily detailed carvings, featuring stars and horrible beings in profusion.


"What're the carvings of?" Seán asked Hugony.


"That's another question you'd be better off not knowing the answer to. Come on, Seán, you're as slow today."


Tigín Chruach was the name of the local pub, and it was there Hugony left Seán to fend for himself while he wandered off to attend to some business or other. Seán was beginning to doubt that this holiday had been a good idea, but he owed it to Hugony. Nevertheless, Ballycrook was a taxing enough place to visit. The locals were a completely different bunch to the Quilnagyre folk. They all had a grey cast to their skin for a start, and sunken, wrinkled faces, as if they were all made of melting wax. They all walked stiffly, as if their joints were clogged up with rust. Nor were they friendly; though Seán wouldn't be, if he was grey, ugly and rusty.


"C'nas atá?" the barman greeted him in the Tigín, giving him a long-jowled stare.


"Go maith ar fad. I'll have a pint of Guinness. Oh, and by the way, have you any idea at all what the Madness of Tiernan might be?" Seán asked, all in Irish.


"Why would you be wanting to know that?"


"I've merely a curiousity on me."


"You up from Quilnagyre?"


"A bit further afield, I'm afraid."


"I may as well say... I don't think they'll mind. In the old days, when the Irish people were Irish and not English who pretended otherwise - " Seán let this remark about the English-speaking population pass without comment, not without a considerable deal of effort - " there was a great king, Tiernan by name: 'Kingly' it means, and kingly he was, the man who invented tartan. He united the whole island under his leadership, and the Irish were a strong people.


"When he had done that, he brought his own faith to the people: that of Crom Cruach, the Bloody Crescent. Mad, he was, to do such a thing, in my own opinion, for Crom Cruach is a fierce and terrible god; but he did it anyway, and that's why the Madness is named after him. A fair few of the druids followed him into it, and they began to get into orgies."


"Of wine and sex and stuff?"


"More along the lines of blood and killing and death, but enough of that. Anyway, one night, Tiernan and his followers went for the greatest festival of them all, that of Samhain – Hallowe'en, the foreigners call it – and had a mighty time of it. 'Cept when sun rose on the new year, not a one of them was to be found.


"The god stayed though, though his loyal followers went underground. They paid him bloody homage, and in time his cult began to spread."


"Perhaps... to Roman Gaul?" Seán asked, dreadingly.


"Yes. In fact, some of the Roman folk did used to come here to worship - "


"Here to Ireland?"


"Here to Ballycrook. Tiernan's last orgy took place on this site."


"Seán!" Seán jumped and whirled around.


"There you are." It was only Hugony, puffing red from the cold, all the locals staring at him. "I hope the barman hasn't been filling your head with fairy stories."


"They're not fairy stories, and you know well - "


"Shut up, you," Hugony snapped, "before you get someone else caught in your web." The barman held his hands up in a gesture of placation: the locals returned to their drinks. "Come on Seán, let's go." Hugony beckoned him outside.


"Hold on. The man was saying to me - "


"Ah you don't want to be paying any heed at all to that bull! Now into the car and let's go back to Quilnagyre."


Reluctantly – for his curiousity had been aroused – Seán followed Hugony back to the car, but decided not to go asleep this time. Hugony started the engine, swearing at the cold weather, and drove off towards Quilnagyre.


After three hours of wandering aimlessly about the meandering country roads, Hugony was – with inordinate reluctance, it seemed to Seán – forced to return to Ballycrook. Hugony seemed unduly worried by this – he muttered things like 'tomb-herd' and 'planar warping', which sounded like things a professor of quantum physics, and not Ancient and Medieval Irish, should have a kenning of. Seán looked out at the town again, and saw, this time, what a dilapidated little pit Ballycrook was. The dusk unsuited it particularly well; the houses, low and thatched, quaint anywhere else, huddled together as if scared of the night, their windows glowing the yellow colour of rancid butter. The roads were bumpy and cobbled, as if covered in warts, or smallpox scars, at least two hundred years old and poorly maintained since then. Occasionaly one of the bent, grey, droop-faced locals in their Aran jumpers and country caps would pass: they'd look up at the car as it approached, follow it with their gaze, and turn to look at it as it went down the road. Shadows clumped between the houses, as if all the shadows of the past thousand years were still there, as if Ballycrook were the Florida of shadows.


"We'll have to stay in the hotel here." Hugony said, looking out the window, seemingly nervously. "One room... don't go out in the night, Seán. Not for anything. Not here. Not in Ballycrook."


"What is it – drug dealers? Gangland criminals? The 'RA?" Hugony barked a short, sharp laugh in which there was not even the faintest hint of humour.


"No, Seán, not the 'RA."


They pulled up in the main square – an enclosure immeasurably dignified by the name 'square', let alone 'main' – just as darkness fell, the sun dipping behind the nethermost reaches of Carrig Crook. There was one building – Seán had been too busy chatting to the barman to notice it – which had three stories, an incongruous tower dropped into the middle of the cowering village, rivalled only by the moth-eaten church steeple. It was for this building that Hugony made, at a fair clip which Seán, for all his being younger, was hard-pressed to match.


"Hugony – what the hell is going on?"


"Hell."


"What?"


"I'll tell you more in the hotel room. I tell you anything now, you'll think I'm mad, you'll wander off, and you'll get yourself killed. Or worse."


"What's worse than – oh, I'm fed up asking you questions."


Hugony pushed aside the doors of the hotel – the three-storey building. One of the grey-faced natives looked up from behind a counter.


"C'nas atá? I assume you'd like two rooms."


"Just the one. Room 33."


"I'm sorry, sir, Room 33 is ta-"


Hugony slammed his fist on the counter. Seán jumped.


"I bloody well know it's not," he snarled, "because no-one comes to visit this dump. You open up Room 33 for me now or I'll have you seeing stars!"


"Stars! Why, sir, there's no need to be so violent! Pardon my old head, sir, it seems there's no-one in 33 after all – I'll take you up there right away..." The hotelier led Seán and Hugony up two increasingly rickety, worm-eaten flights of stairs – Hugony was right about the lack of visitors, anyway – and to a room with a surprisingly solid door on which was the brass numeral '33'.


"The key." Hugony snapped. The hotelier hesitated, and Hugony reached for something around his neck.


"The key – the key, yes, sir! Here it is, I'll not bother you any further."


"See that you don't. Come in, Seán, and lock the door behind you."


The hotel room was dusty, and not much bigger than fifteen by twenty. Two dusty single beds had probably once been illuminated by dusty bedside lamps, but were now lighted by dusty candles which burned dustily in the dusty recesses of the dusty room. Hugony blew some dust off his bed, looked at it longingly, and said to Seán:


"Get some sleep, Seán. Maybe you'll wake up thinking I'm mad."


"Surely that's a bad thing."


"Not whenever you consider the alternatives." Seán rolled onto his bed – without even undressing – and stared at the ceiling. It took him some time to get to sleep – he was disturbed by the sound of Hugony drawing on the plank floor – but sleep he did.



* * *



The centurion was alone now, and the wild light of the Gaulish tribesmen shone from his eyes, the light the Romans had almost extinguished, and that he was going to avenge tonight. He grinned, manically, chanting at the mound.


"Iä Crom!"


All the Irish and Romans were gone. Neither wanted to see what lived in the mound.


"Iä Crom!"


The Madness of Tiernan had taken him, ripped his mind from his body and taken that fleshy vessel for itself. His will was no longer his own, but part of something greater.


"Iä Crom!"


The mound quivered. The stones began to glow.


"Iä Crom!"


The stones shone with a black light, if such a thing was possible, which it wasn't, but the rites occurring tonight took no heed whatsoever of the limits of the possible and impossible. Both were as one to it; there was nothing it could not do.


"Iä Crom!"


The whole side of the mound caved in, and something stirred.


"Iä Cro - "


Thud.


The centurion stopped, mid-chant, thick black blood running from his mouth into his stubble. His eyes went wide, lit with the light of the dying Gaul that the Greeks were so impressed with.


From his back protruded a javelin, the one that had killed him: not an Irish piece of work, but a Roman pilum.


Common human decency is a trait shared by all people, Romans too, and no decent human would allow the rites going on that night to finish. The centurion fell forward, dead as one can be, and the mound... quieted. All returned to silence, in the moon-cast shadow of Carrig Crook.


Sometime later, some fool decided that this mound would be a good site for a church, and so was founded the cursed town of Ballycrook.



* * *



Seán leaped out of bed with a garbled cry, rubbing frantically at his eyes.


"God – my dream - "


"Seán – Seán!" Hugony whispered, urgently. "Seán, wake up! They're coming for us!" He pressed a piece of chalk into Seán's sleep-fogged hand as if it was the most important thing in the world.


"Hugony you're mad."


"I wish I was. Seán, you take the window – I don't think they'll come in by there, but you can't be too careful."


"What - "


"Stars, Seán, pentacles! Draw them!"


Seán did, wondering whether Hugony or the dreams would drive him mad first.


Hugony talked as he worked.


"Seán, last night was no ordinary party. It was also a magic rite."


"Magic! First off I don't believe in it, and secondly you had no right to without my consent."


"Ah shut up Seán, it was for your own good and you'll be glad of it tonight. It was white magic – I'll tell you the details another time – and it was to protect you in case just this happened. I didn't want to visit Ballycrook but I had to... anyway. Seán, this town is cursed. The barman told you about the Madness of Tiernan?" Hugony asked, scribbling ogham lines around the edge of the door.


"He did indeed." said Seán, in the process of drawing a big star around the window. It looked quite pretty, he thought.


"Well, Seán, it's gotten into everyone in Ballycrook. They're all part of it. The State should burn the place but... regardless, here is where the Madness is strongest because – God, how do I explain this in the time we have? - it's not a madness."


"Go on." Seán was only half-listening, having somehow convinced himself that there was a rational explanation for all that had happened, including Hugony's inability to drive down a perfectly straight road out of Ballycrook.


"It's the will of a... being."


"Being?"


"Alien being, which landed in Ireland from... beyond space... in the time of King Tiernan. He worshipped it, the fool, and it got a taste for worship – and worshippers! A group of the sane druids, after it took Tiernan, they locked it away beneath this very landscape. But its mind, it can still reach out with that, and it grabs hold of men's minds and drives them to do things they would never normally do."


"Such as a... Roman centurion..." Seán's chalk line dribbled to a halt.


"Keep drawing! You've heard that legend?"


"I dreamed it."


"Damn!" Hugony swore. His chalk broke. "Then the madness has gotten into you too. I can only hope my magic kept it off last night. Listen, this thing, this alien thing... Crom Cruach is the name of it. That roughly translates into English as the Bloody Crescent."


"The Bloody... Crescent?" Seán's doubts were considerably reduced from a minute before.


"Oh that's only the vaguest description of it – one can't really describe a being that exists in five dimensions simultaneously with normal words – but it suffices. It's one of the blackest evils in the whole of Ireland, if not the wide world, and it's taken a fancy to us."


"Oh dear God."


"He won't save you now."


"Shut up Hugony."


"You!" The door shook, and a bass voice roared. "Out of there, now!"


"Don't go near the door, Seán! Don't touch the star-signs, they're all that keeps us safe. Here – you onto the bed, I'll finish the window..."


"Out, now! We need our sacrifices!"


"Come and get us!" Hugony roared. Seán had never seen the tweedy little professor quite so angry.


"Hatchet... give me the hatchet..." Something slammed against the other side of the door, something sharp – and there was a cry of pain.


"Damn! They've star-signed it! Ah Crom, it burns!"


"We're safe, Seán, for now. They can't get us." Hugony allowed himself the faintest ghost of a smile.


Then the chanting began.


"Iä Crom.


"Iä Crom.


"Iä Crom..."


"Seán." Hugony said, slowly and deliberately. A beam of moonlight lit up his face. "Close the window and shutter it."


Seán did as he was told.


"Iä Crom!"


Seán looked at the window, through the lathes of the shutter. He could see the church.


"Iä Crom!"


Was it – could it be...?


"Iä Crom!"


The church shook. Seán's stomach heaved.


"Iä Crom!"


The steeple swayed and rocked precariously, as if the mound it was built on had suddenly... disintegrated.


"Iä Crom!"


Suddenly, the steeple collapsed. It showered inwards upon itself in a spray of rubble. The crucifix from the top smashed into the rubble and broke in two.


"Iä Crom!"


A sound that no animal, human or otherwise, could ever have made echoed off the black heights of Carrig Crook: a high-pitched roar.


"It's here." Hugony whispered.


A bloating darkness rose up from where the church had been, a greasy blackness that Seán's gaze slid off of. Through the lathes he saw the crowds of Ballycrook people surrounding the darkness, worshipping it, adoring it. He wondered, idly, why they were so grey and bent, whether it had something to do with the Madness.


"Seán, close your eyes and get into the centre of the room." Seán did. He squatted there, listening only to the sounds: the scrape of Hugony's chalk, the roaring of what must be Cromm Cruach, the chanting of the Ballycrook people.


"Mighty Crom! Thy sacrifices await!"


Something brushed against the window with a rubbing, squeaking sound. Seán squeezed his eyes shut even tighter.


Hugony's chalk stopped, and he felt the professor's presence step into the great star he had made the two of them.


The window burst inward in a shower of glass, and something brushed against the shutters, something soft and sticky. The shutters rattled.


Seán put his head between his knees and prayed.


The wind which had flooded into the room stopped, and a cloying scent filled the room, a scent replete with the imprisonment of ages beneath the fertile Irish turf, and before that aeons in a meteor, hurtling through the wilds of outer space, and before that, an inexplicable alienness that could not be described, so bizarre was it, a scent aeons-old and filled with only one recognisable emotion: pure, blind, hatred.


Seán whimpered like a kicked pup.


Something began to search the room, knocking softly against the bedside lamp, brushing dustily against the dusty floor. Something crashed to the ground in a spray of tinkling glass.


And then that thing touched Seán's bare leg.


He snatched it back inside the star, but nothing will ever make him forget the sensation: a snaily, vile stickiness, a tentacular oozing, that of a being utterly opposed to all Seán stood for and that had been since the beginning of time, an evil, monstrous, godly-powerful, palaeologaean being with all the hatred of a thousand thousand dictators, the murderous intent of a million serial killers and the intelligence of the whole of the human race taken together, redoubled, redoubled again, and then made greater still. This creature was, to all intents and purposes, a god. Nothing could stop it.


It touched the edge of the star and drew back. Seán thought he heard a hiss. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut even tighter.


Nothing.


Crom Cruach was gone.


Seán waited for hours for another hint of that vile presence, but when he fell asleep, he didn't dream. A ray of pure, brilliant sunlight arced in through the window, illuminating Seán and Hugony, both huddled in the star. Outside the window, the church was in ruins, the mound was collapsed in on itself, but of Crom or the folk of Ballycrook, there was no sign.


Seán looked at the professor.


"We survived." he said. "Ha."


"Haha."


And they both collapsed laughing. They were on their own, surrounded by enemies, with no way of getting out, but they had survived Crom, and that was something to laugh about.

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Reviews

Chanchal Jan 31, 2012

a very long story......

Triss Jan 27, 2012

It was a pretty good story. good job. :)

Preeti Jan 27, 2012

very well written..

Diana Jan 24, 2012

Go han-mhaith i scr?bhinn. Bhain m? taitneamh as s? go m?r. Is teanga ?lainn Ghaelach agus bh? s? deas a fheice?il san ?ireamh ? i do sc?al. Mar a bheadh ??mo seanmh?thair r?, caithfidh t? a meas d?ibh si?d ar f?idir leo labhairt teanga marbh.

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