Concrete.
Stay at home. Stay far away from this island, smothered under the weight of its own mysterious, shadowed antiquity. I know you’ve seen the brochures, the jewel-like photographs of craggy coasts and rolling hills, the images of grim-looking sheep wandering the picturesque lanes of my home country. Of course you know the reputation of openness, of hospitality, but you have not visited the inlet-cradled, drowsy villages I have, with their windows that stare like heavy-lidded, bleary eyes out over periwinkle and seaweed choked bays. Where the locals are odd-looking, furtive and surly. I urge you, with the greatest vehemence to ignore such facades and remain in places where civilisation is more than a thin veneer. Do not simply stick to the beaten path, but avoid the tourist trap altogether and remain in whatever paradise of steel, glass and concrete you call home.
The people of Ireland, for the most part, have grown prosaic and materialistic, the romance and mystery of the Celtic past are extinct to them. People prefer now to dwell in sleek apartments, and even those who live beyond the cosmopolitan bubbles of our cities tend to see the ominous wilderness of dark trees and desolate stones as merely a scenic aside to their modern homes. For this, though it may sound odd, I am profoundly thankful.
There was, indeed, a time when this attitude, this pursuit of mundane capitalism and continental chic, had been a great disappointment to me. Despite the trend for progress, and the steady march of wholesome concrete over the wild places, the strain of the dreamer, famous in our history, occasionally breeds true in the Irish. Some few men and women still seek out the lonely places, where mendicant clergy once atoned for imagined sins, and where poets sat for long hours in the watery sun seeking insights and visions. There are always some among us who cannot ignore the pull of those gloomy stones, the moss-draped tombs and circles of monoliths older even than the Pyramids.
Though none would think it of me now, in my well-known agoraphobia and obsession with the urban, I was once one of these flighty youths. Having some talent for illustration, I studied and collected art, struggling to compose landscapes that would embody my peculiar, dreamy visions of the desolate Hibernian countryside. I looked always to the bizarre, from Goya to Giger, for inspiration. I sought out the strangeness in our heritage with gusto, poring over archaeological records and delving into the stranger tales of our famous literary giants. From the earliest age, to the chagrin of my parents, I had been given to odd wanderings, always away from the group, toward some frog-infested brook in the woods or rocky, thorn-crowned outcropping in a distant field.
It was this spirit of wandering which led me to my current position, a hatred and revulsion of that landscape that once thrilled me with its hints of ancestral memory. Any of my past acquaintances can vouch for my penchant, sometimes bordering on mania, for lone camping trips to ghost-storied or superstition-shrouded locales. Equipped with only the best camping gear and laden down with sketch-books and photographic apparatus of various kinds, I would set off whenever the weather looked even remotely promising. I went to capture some trick of the light or some arrangement of scenery, which would elucidate to others that gauzy layer of the eerie which seemed to overlay the Irish wilderness in my own perceptions. I soon exhausted the usual trails and began to rely more on the veiled warnings of elderly rustics, who dimly remembered the old superstitions, to guide me to interesting locations. The tales of the dreaded ‘little people’ of ancient folklore still held some sway among the oldest farmers and country people. Their fear of unhealthy profusions of blackthorn trees and the babblings of deserted well-springs invariably led me to some area of the foreboding aspect I craved for my images.
I don’t care anymore that people call me crazy, that people shun me in the halls of this chrome and glass cage where I choose to imprison myself. If the mere suggestion of my dislike for trackless wilderness should rub off on even one person, then I have done them a service. If my work for the urban development authority and the planning office leads to more and more gleaming white concrete-built havens from ‘nature’ then I am proud. Proud that some I have had some part in the destruction and burial of that foul soil, those dark trees and those accursed stones, beneath substances of modernity, substances and shapes designed by men. The tourists and the conservationists be damned, for I know I am, damned to years of sleepless nights and nerve-medication, and sceptical doctors by what I have seen.
At first it was only the artistic urge that moved me, but as time went on, I grew to half believe the old fairy stories I gleaned from the more whisky-laden old-timers.I started to wonder if I might not come upon some conclave of the leprechauns or siogs in a haunted glen far from two-storied houses. And so I moved often by night, with torch in hand, exploring copses and seashores where odd tales lingered. God, how I wish now I had stuck to my simple paintings, or better yet, that I had been born blind and never seen the dark woods and lonely beaches of Ireland.
I was abroad on the sea-shore one windy and drizzle-shrouded night, swathed in waterproof gear, quite a way from my camp. The wind howls in the west of Ireland, sometimes gaining strange pitch as it weaves between rock and branch. In spite of this I fancied I heard other sounds upon the wind that night, strange chitterings and pipings and occasionally something like speech. I wondered who else would be out in this weather, on such a dismal stretch of coast, and what purpose they could be about. Perhaps, I thought, it was some seekers after the bizarre such as myself, having gleaned similar tales of the supernatural from the drunkards in nearby towns. Perhaps it was merely a group of disaffected rural youths seeking distraction with illicit cider and cigarettes.
I saw, silhouetted against the cloud-dulled haze of the moon, a thicket of gnarled blackthorn on the headland which marked the southern curve of the beach where I stood. By all the lore this must be the most haunted location for miles around, and, though I would scarcely admit it at the time, it also seemed to be the source of the half-sounds caught and dragged by the wind. I resolved to visit this hill top ring of thorns, reasoning that should I be met by a group of disagreeable teenagers, the sturdy knife at my belt and stout aluminium body of my torch would deter them from making sport of a lonely traveller. As I mounted the gradual rise of the headland, I noticed shapes in the water below, great silvery reflections of the moon. I was greatly disturbed by this for a moment, but a remembrance of the porpoises I had seen earlier that day quieted this odd sensation.
Forging onward, I was again distressed, this time by the way in which the trees ahead whipped in ways oddly contrary to the winds direction. At this point I was sure that I could hear some intelligent sound, some form of vocalisation, from within the thicket. I ventured closer, unsure whether to extinguish my torch and creep onwards or to announce my presence and proceed openly. I decided on the latter course, and called out thinly ‘Who’s there?’ The only response, if response it was, came as a kind of low level murmuring gurgle, like old plumbing sometimes makes in bad weather. I pushed on, feeling slight scratches from the thorny branches now surrounding me, and hefting the reassuring weight of my torch. I scanned the beam narrowly ahead of me trying to glimpse some clue as to whether it was drunken yobs ahead or merely some kind of mating wildlife, or if indeed I might have stumbled upon some revel of a supernatural kind.
When my torch-beam did in fact illuminate its first clue, I should have fled. I certainly retched, bringing up little, but heaving and spluttering in that dark tangle of branches. It was a goat’s head. A severed, mutilated goat’s head, impaled upon an overhanging branch, like a good-luck charm on a door lintel. The head of a young, white goat hung there, oozing half congealed blood, it’s eyes removed and replaced with the tiny carapaces of crabs, no doubt from the beach below. Strange symbols had been incised into the flesh too in the area of the forehead. Some were geometric, like odd mathematical diagrams, while others were serpentine like a grotesque imitation of Sanskrit characters. Why this was not enough horror to content me that night, I will never know. I was morbidly fascinated by this ritualistic crime, and appalled that rural teenagers could stoop to such an act in an effort to combat their ennui. I pushed my way into the central clearing of the thicket, readying admonitions, pious rebukes and threats of police involvement, but meaning only to scare and shame the sacrilegious youngsters.
Concrete. Concrete by the thousands of tonnes, pollution, bulldozers, asphalt and cars, steel, architecture, industry. That is the only medication I can frame to the disease which I encountered in that nighted hell of thorns and blood and gauzy moonlight. Whether or not the things I saw there were hallucination, I don’t care. A landscape that could inspire such a vision should be paved over just as surely as if it did indeed harbour the inconceivable horrors of which I alone am convinced. Drown every living cell, and every gloomy stone of that horrid terrain beneath placid grey cement. Tell the tourists to stay where trees are managed and at the mercy of men.
The teenagers I had thought to admonish, were indeed in that blasphemous clearing. These were not however, the misguided dabblers in the occult I had surmised. There were three of them, two males and one female, completely naked and in an obvious state of sexual arousal, smeared head to toe in blood, most suggestively and grotesquely around their mouths. Some awful tarry stains surrounded their nipples and genitals, and the air bore a stench that seemed to mingle musk, decaying fruit, mold, acid corrosion and other unnameable elements.They were clustered around the bole of a madly deformed tree, and at their feet was the dismembered and partially devoured remains of the headless goat. When I say it was a tree they surrounded, I mean I thought it was a tree, until it lurched and rippled, and it was only then that I noticed it’s blackly gelatinous aspect, gleaming eye-like spheres along its writhing branchy tentacles and strange hoof-like appendages where roots should have been. I stood transfixed, in a kind of catatonic shock, gazing at this insanity. Serrated blowholes pulsated here and there upon this ridged nightmare, like the pneumostomes of a slug, and it’s whole being ran with a tarrily iridescent slime.
As I stood, unable to move, or vomit, or collapse, the blood-slicked monsters regarded me with a kind of sly malice. Suddenly they moved, with freakish speed, grasping my arms in impossibly strong fingers. The gibbered and drooled pinkish spittle on me, and began to chant in some horrific language which seemed oddly and nauseatingly close to our native Gaelic, but with the most alien and upsetting of accents. ‘Ga-neagza ii’ screamed the female, her blood stained breasts heaving. ‘Igg-sogg le-ak ii’ responded the males in cadence. Panic gripped me now and I screamed over and over, but the wind still howled, and I knew I was miles from any aid. ‘Shee-laab Na Giiii’ my captors screamed in unison, pushing me towards the tree-like horror. My consciousness failed me then, or my memory fails me now, either way I am glad.
I awoke, in an indescribable agony, every inch of my body screaming in searing pain. I lay for many hours, bruised and naked, upon the sandy shore. My body was covered in foul-smelling shiny liquid like the trail of a great black snail. Circular lacerations ringed my genitals and nipples, and the little finger of my right hand was amputated at the second knuckle, cauterised as if by great heat. Aeons later, or so it seemed, I made it to my camp. I was exhausted, but knew that nothing, not even a body on the brink of collapse, would cause me to spend another night in the wilderness. As darkness fell, I made it eventually to a town, where I disturbed the drowsing Garda, the police representative, with wild tales of devil worship by the old strand. He looked at me with an expression a little too knowing, and I fled from his decrepit office to the nearby pub, where I took a room and several bottles of whiskey.
I spent the night in vigil at the window, bottle in hand, and took the first bus toward Dublin that morning.
I have never been in the open country-side since that day, and I rarely leave my sanctuary of concrete, my apartment. I work via the internet, bending my efforts to help cover all the green spaces that remain on this accursed isle. I travel occasionally to the hospital, for treatment of the odd sores on my chest and pelvis, which sometimes weep a tarry substance or extrude inexplicable fibres. Though I have read of Morgellon’s disease, and it’s associated delusions, and though sympathetic doctors try to placate me with this diagnosis, I know better, and no-one has been able to explain the rubbery black scab where the tip of the little finger on my right hand should be. The only thing that gives me solace now is to see great heavy cement trucks roll by on the roads outside my window, bringing the blessing of concrete to the wild and lonely corners of history choked Ireland.
End.
If you actually read that, thanks for your time.
