Extracted from The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu, published by Appletree Press
The House by the Churchyard
by Sheridan Le Fanu
Prologue - part 4
The House by the Churchyard
When your humble servant, Charles de Cresseron, the compiler of this narrative, was a boy some fourteen years old—how long ago precisely that was, is nothing to the purpose, 'tis enough to say he remembers what he then saw and heard a good deal better than what happened a week ago—it came to pass that he was spending a pleasant week of his holidays with his benign uncle and godfather, the curate of Chapelizod. On the second day of his, or rather my sojourn (I take leave to return to the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady. Her name was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable, being made in a hearse, by easy stages, from her house of Lisnabane, in the county of Sligo, to the church-yard of Chapelizod. There was a great flat stone over that small parcel of the rector's freehold, which the family held by a tenure, not of lives, but of deaths, renewable for ever. So that my uncle, who was a man of an anxious temperament, had little trouble in satisfying himself of the meerings and identity of this narrow tenement, to which Lemuel Mattocks, the sexton, led him as straight and confidently as he could have done to the communion-table.
My uncle, therefore, fiated the sexton's presentment, and the work commenced forthwith. I don't know whether all boys have the same liking for horrors which I am conscious of having possessed—I only know that I liked the churchyard, and deciphering tombstones, and watching the labours of the sexton, and hearing the old world village talk that often got lip over the relics.
When this particular grave was pretty nearly finished—it lay from east to west—a lot of earth fell out at the northern side, where an old coffin had lain, and good store of brown dust and grimy bones, and the yellow skull itself came tumbling about the sexton's feet. These fossils after his wont he lifted decently with the point of his shovel, and pitched into a little nook beside the great mound of mould at top.
"Be the powers o' war! here's a batthered head-piece for yez," said young Tim Moran, who had picked up the cranium, and was eyeing it curiously, turning it round the while.
"Show it here, Tim;" "let me look," cried two or three neighbours, getting round as quickly as they could.
"Oh! murdher;" said one.
"Oh! be the powers o' Moll Kelly!" cried another. "Oh! bloody wars!" exclaimed a third.
"That poor fellow got no chance for his life at all, at all!" said Tim. "That was a bullet," said one of them, putting his finger into a clean circular aperture as large as a half-penny.
"An' look at them two cracks. Och, murther!"
"There's only one. Oh, I see you're right, two, begorra!"
"Aich o' them a wipe iv a poker."
Mattocks had climbed nimbly to the upper level, and taking the skull in his fist, turned it about this way and that, curiously. But though he was no chicken, his memory did not go far enough back to throw any light upon the matter.
"Could it be the Mattross that was shot in the year '90 as I often heerd sthrikin' his captain?" suggested a by-stander.
What is the true identity of the Yorick-like murder victim, untimely disinterred? 'The House by the Churchyard' continues
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