Of An Outhouse In Autumn (2)

PART ONE: https://www.abctales.com/story/sean-mcnulty/outhouse-autumn-1

 

 

There was a small yardspace out the back.  An old rake rested against the wall of the house, and underneath it a garden shovel and a bucket, each of them infrequently used as the long grass in the adjoining garden could attest.  It looked like the rest of nature had taken umbrage with Mrs. Weymouth’s back garden, as though all of the autumn had been sucked right out.  Looking down to the end, over the pronged grass tops, hazel and willow trees stood tall but sickly----and they held onto their dead leaves for dear life, strangely, as though defying the seasonal turn.

‘I wonder if I’ll ever get that grass cut again,’ Mrs. Weymouth said.

The outhouse was not attached to the main house but it was merely a stone’s throw away and I could see why Mrs. Weymouth might be concerned about rats migrating from it to her home.  It was an unsound-looking building alright, but solid, constructed out of concrete---badly though, seeing as one wall seemed to be built higher than the other making the top of it tilt. 

The garden as a whole was the most topsy-turvy I had ever seen.    

I went to the door of the outhouse and raised the latch which had valiantly attempted to contain its mysteries for months.  Mrs. Weymouth began to cautiously lean in beside me as the door creaked slowly open.  We were greeted by a place that was predictably squalid, but only through disuse and not ostensibly the presence of supernatural entities.  Slime and moss hung boldly from the walls like they were a troll’s Christmas decorations.  The saucer of death was still on the floor where Mrs. Weymouth had left it, long emptied, covered in hard green carbuncles of unknown origin. There were no rat bodies to be seen, or mouse bodies, not even spider bodies, though the effects of their webbing were all around; the toilet chain was robed in a ghostly suit, a dress of cobweb.  I took a cloth from my pocket and dusted off all the cob.  The cistern appeared to be drained of water and the toilet bowl also was dry and full of scum.  But when I tugged on the chain, there initiated some activity below, a choking sound, then a reddish vapour began to rise out of the loo, emitting a nasty, fetid smell.

‘Step back,’ I said to Mrs. Weymouth.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.  ‘Nobody’s used that bog in years.  And Brucie never smelled that way.  I remember his odours well.’

It was an outhouse after all, one not attended to in a long while.  It should not have been queer to find all manner of stench and stink lurking inside.  But the vapour that came from the lavatory and the odour attached was not the kind I feel public sanitation departments were accustomed to.  There was something scorched and putrescent about it.  Not knowing another way to describe it, I would settle with calling it a smell like that of burned flesh.  It was frankly unexplainable.

‘I don’t think it’s your usual toilet smell,’ I said to Mrs. Weymouth.  ‘It has a quality of death about it.’

‘You think the rats might have crawled in there to die, do you?’

There was nothing I could say in response to her.  Maybe they did.  Maybe they didn’t.  But there was no sign of a single dead rat---that was for sure.  No twig of bone neither.

‘I often thought to bring a cross in here,’ continued Mrs. Weymouth.  ‘But all my best ones are being used at the moment.  I wouldn’t want to waste them in here, you know.’

Then there was a sound.  It was a frail chafing sound and it came from within the walls – slow and soft at first, then rapid like how someone would scratch after suddenly discovering an especially itchy spot.     

‘Do you hear that?’ wailed Mrs. Weymouth.  ‘It’s them.  They’re coming.’ 

With that, she ran back into the house leaving me to ponder the uncanny scrapes alone, and I can say from the sound that a possibility existed it was the result of small rodents and I thought it must just be some of them jockeying under the stone.  I put my ear to the inner wall of the outhouse to listen more closely.  There was a substantial increase in the scratching when I did this and a chill went through me that was unassociated with the one my ear was suffering from against the freezing concrete.  A cold sense of unease wound its way around my body.  Yet I kept listening.  And when abruptly the scratching ceased, my already pained ear was stabbed further by a loud piercing shriek from within the wall, long and sustained and like nothing I had ever heard before.  I pulled back, stepped out of the outhouse, and slammed the door shut.  The sound I had heard was too sonorous and forceful to have come from a single rat, or even many of them, and a horribly unsettled mood came over me.  If a supernatural presence was at work, what kind of supernatural presence?  I couldn’t imagine this outhouse being of any significance to a human ghost, or of any significance to anything really, yet here it was, giving off hellish sounds and additionally hellish effluvia. 

I went back inside the house and informed Mrs. Weymouth that her outhouse indeed deserved further inspection, that I would stay over and listen for what might come in the night, and then in the morning, return to Maynooth and broach the matter with like-minded researchers who might aid in the pursuit of a more detailed investigation.  My intention was to contact a more experienced parapsychologist than myself, one equipped to deal with matters relating to animal spirits and, dare I say it, demonology.  It is an area I have no interest in.  Maybe this is because I have little to no experience with phenomena you would classify as malevolent.  And even so, if I did encounter such an element, some apparition with a vicious streak in it, I would assuredly put it down to the casual incoherence of humanity.  I have no dealings with devils.  I am not a spiritualist.  Although I believe there can be rewards in the work of mediums, and in practising the séance (as it is possible for them to lift some people out of distress), through hard research and basic powers of reason, it has been proven to me that the greater majority of individuals working in this field are outright frauds.  By the same token, I place very little faith in the concept of non-human spirits.  Animals – I can entertain those.  But demons.  That is another story.  Sure, it might make it easier to reckon with certain convulsions of nature by believing in such things, but I just find it all very implausible and unhelpful.  Still, we all have our limitations, and there is no shame in deferring to independent authorities.

‘Thank you so very much, Miss. Fitzgerald,’ said Mrs. Weymouth.  ‘It gives me strength to know you will be here, even for just one night.  It is so difficult being alone and with not another soul around to go to for help.  I can’t count on a single one of those people out there, those neighbours...’  Mrs. Weymouth stopped mid-sentence, gathered her thoughts and said:  ‘Miss?  Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’ve been calling you Miss. Fitzgerald all this while not even having asked if you are married, my dear.  I do apologise.  You look so young.’

‘That’s quite alright.  I don’t care about the titles.  Dr. would be the more apt one, but I’m not likely to take offence if you don’t address me that way.’

‘Doctor?  Oh my...’

‘And if you must know, I am a Mrs. actually.  Mr. Fitzgerald is also a researcher, though his field is marginally more orthodox than my own, something which tends to be a source of friction between the two of us.’

‘What could be more orthodox than chasing after the dead, Dr. Fitzgerald?  Sure aren’t we all at it, every day of our lives?  Well, it is good to know you are not alone in this world.  Loneliness is not a good thing to be sitting around in too long.’ 

For supper, Mrs. Weymouth prepared a soup of ham and potato with barley – which was delicious by the way – and we talked more of bad neighbours and mean children and cruelty and loneliness and of good books to keep bedside for curling up to: she recommended I read the works of Molly Keane, when I rather embarrassingly admitted I had not.  She told me about a young man who once rented out their spare room when Brucie was still alive, a student of history at Trinity:

‘He’d be in that room half the time cutting and peeling his hazel wand, if you know what I mean.’

We both chuckled.  Then we talked about Yeats and Lady Gregory, celtic twilights and secret societies.

Not once did we mention the outhouse.         

That night, as I lay awake in Mrs. Weymouth’s spare bedroom, I listened to the wind as it howled wildly outside.  I could hear the bucket being tossed about on the hard ground, rolling and tossing again and again.  I left the curtains open and watched the walls for shadows throwing.  One threw its long arm across the wall and touched the ceiling and it stayed in that position but this was only because it was reflecting the brass floor lamp which sat by the window in the faint moonlight.  I did not witness a large looming shape as the one Mrs. Weymouth described.  Nevertheless, in my hypnagogic moments before falling into sleep, I was aware of a ghostly scutter under the bed like the running back and forth of little feet.  It could well have been an auditory hallucination considering my near-sleeping state, brought on by notions impressed upon me by the day’s events, but I chose to believe, in my advancing somnolence, that these were Mrs. Weymouth’s tiny victims come to say hello and scamper.  I didn’t look under the bed.  I was too sleepy.  You would be justified in your anxiety and chagrin if suddenly lumbered with a commotion of little running feet as you were trying to doze off, but I suffered none of that.  The patter had a hypnotic flow and only additionally thickened my state of repose.

I would very much like to tell you now of a most startling dream I had in that curious house on that evening, but I am sorry to say that I retained nothing.  I can’t even recall if I even dreamed at all.

 The next day, I got up, said good-bye to Mrs. Weymouth and drove back to Maynooth.   I spent the following weeks trying to contact a number of eminent parapsychologists and demonologists, wrote many letters and made many calls, in the hope that someone would show an interest in Mrs. Weymouth’s case and accompany me to the house to extend the investigation, but responses did not come swiftly and in this waiting period, before I could return to Mrs. Weymouth’s home, an event occurred which was so horrible it made the national newspapers.  Sometime in the middle of October, a young boy from the street, perhaps one of those kicking a ball around in the road the day I first arrived to visit, was found dead.  The boy had been missing for a whole day and was discovered hidden in the long grass of Mrs. Weymouth’s garden as police were conducting an area-wide search.   The boy was pronounced dead of asphyxia, brought on possibly by exposure to or ingestion of a large quantity of strychnine.  The body was also found covered in bitemarks that were attributed to those of a large rodent – or many large rodents.  Detective Sergeant Halpin told reporters that the boy had been lying there unnoticed for such a long time that the rats had evidently gotten to him and chewed him up. 

Mrs. Weymouth was arrested and charged with murdering the child by way of poison and no objection came from her as she was taken away by police.  A photograph of her in the paper showed a handcuffed elderly woman with an unparalleled look of despair on her face.

My heart sank.  

I knew that Mrs. Weymouth was predisposed to using poison so I could not disregard that she had in fact poisoned the child.  Accidentally, perhaps.  I would not say deliberately, even considering her antagonistic relationship with the neighbours.  It could be reasonably concluded that the boy had been messing in her garden and had in some way come into contact with the poison she had left out.  Had there been more instances of her leaving out poison than she had led me to believe?  Had there been so much more going on with her than she had led me to believe?  I could not say.  Yet I had heard with my own ears those tiny feet scuttering under the bed and that unholy screech in the walls, smelled with my own nose that awful odour like burned flesh.  

 

*

By good chance, I was able to visit Mrs. Weymouth’s home in November, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Halpin, who had taken charge of the case.  It was saddening to step inside that sitting room again and pass the photos of the smiling Mr. and Mrs. Weymouth in their heydays.  When we made it to the back garden, I was amazed to see that an enormous change had occurred.  That long grass had been cut and the trees were now functioning as normal healthy autumn trees, their leaves now down and gold, brown and crimson on the ground.

‘Someone cut the grass?’ I asked the Sergeant.

He looked out at the garden and squinted ambivalently.

‘Yes,’ he then said.  ‘I’m not quite sure.  Somebody must have come along and given it a good trim.’

 As I stepped onto the new autumn lawn, a sudden shockwave came over me.  In marvelling at the change that had swept over Mrs. Weymouth’s garden since last being there, I hadn’t noticed upon entering that the notorious outhouse, which had been the basis of my entire relationship with this place, was gone.  It had simply disappeared. 

‘Where is the outhouse?’ I asked Sergeant Halpin.

‘What outhouse?’

‘There was an outhouse right there.  That was the reason Mrs. Weymouth contacted me.  It was there that she had her rat problem.’

‘I can’t recall an outhouse ever being there,’ Sergeant Halpin said.  ‘Sure, isn’t there an upstairs toilet?’

I walked over to where the outhouse had been and checked for signs of its removal.  There was nothing.  It was as though it had vanished into thin air. 

Above us, a white-winged blackbird flittered about awkwardly before landing on the grass and skipping across the garden, searching for something to eat.  It stopped somewhere in the middle, flicked its little head around in a panicked sort of way, and then shot up into the sky and away over the houses.  I would never come to know what frightened that blackbird, or where the outhouse went, or why the boy died, or why autumn came so late here, but I would certainly go on knowing that cruelty takes cover in the most unexpected places, and that poison could be hiding around every corner, and behind every home.  Maybe it has a way of getting to us all eventually.      

Even though it gave me no pleasure to add this frightful case to these journals, I am glad to have finally done it at last.

I can tell you that these events convinced me not to return to North Dublin for some time.