Desperate Remedies
By
David O’Mahony
Somebody had beaten Margo to it.
“Dammit,” she said, wiping the cold drizzle from her forehead.
The door to the mausoleum was open, a sliver of dense black gaping beneath an inscription saying “Power”, her family name.
The rusted iron lock lay on the ground before it.
Margo tucked the leather pouch holding her lockpicks back into the canvas satchel she wore cross-body and took a breath, listening with every fibre of herself.
The cemetery, a vast, ancient thing set into the hills overlooking Waterford city, was perfectly still apart from the shuffling of two hedgehogs to the north, a fox to the west, and the steady pecking of rain on the ground and long grass.
Most of the headstones near the mausoleum were pummelled to the point of illegibility, tilting forward and back as if they’d been pushed up from beneath.
Still, there were no chitterings or throbbings in the earth that she could tell.
“Okay, that’s not so bad,” she said, glad that the dead were still lying dormant in their resting places. It was always unnerving to hear a corpse shuffling or tapping out the rhythm of some song from their youth, but there was nothing except still silence.
Maybe the lock had just broken from age.
Her father and his brother had been in a long dispute over looking after the place, and both received letters from the local council over its lack of upkeep,.
It could have been neglected for years and rusted its way to oblivion.
Had that been why her father Reggie had come all this way, travelled a hundred miles without warning to go to a graveyard – just to fix a padlock?
Was that why he was now fighting for his life, eaten away with some curse she didn’t understand?
She sighed with relief at the silence, then held her breath again at the sick feeling in her stomach while she dug out the squat and scuffed right-angle torch her father had used in the army.
Crouching to turn the pieces of the lock over in leather-gloved fingers, she swore.
It hadn’t just cracked and broken. It had been crushed and torn apart.
And what were those scratches – teeth marks? Seriously?
Christ, Dad. What have you gotten me into?
Scratching idly at her ear she dug her phone out from one of the pockets of the stone-coloured belted trench coat she always wore, then called her cousin Liam. Right now, Liam was the only thing between her father and death.
The phone rang three times before a weary voice answered. “Did you get it?” Liam asked.
“Not yet.”
“Hurry up, okay? “
“There’s been a … complication.”
She heard Liam sigh. Liam Kincaid, a distant cousin she saw more like a work acquaintance, was renowned for his skill with the dead and the occult.
He was in demand for banishing ghosts or clearing up the scenes after rituals both good and dark.
While Margo had plenty of skill, she was a novice compared to him.
So when her father had fallen ill with something smelling unnatural, there was no point trying to fix it herself.
Swallowing her pride, she’d phoned Liam.
And he doesn’t even send me Christmas cards, she thought. “How’s the old man?” she asked.
Liam sighed again, a sort of bone weariness. “He doesn’t have a lot of time, Margo. I can hold him where he is for a while yet, a couple of days maybe, but whatever’s inside him is fighting.”
Margo leaned over, resting her head against the slick stone of the mausoleum while she struggled for words. She’d known Reggie was dying when she left, but hearing it out loud was another thing.
She thought for a second about the black mass sitting just beneath the skin of her father’s stomach and the purple tendrils rippling throughout his flesh.
He’d dealt in odd artifacts for years and had picked up all sorts of ailments, everything from boring flus to a sort of shrill wasting mania that made him think he was his own father, but he’d always bounced back.
That a bite would do him in – whatever dark force it brought with it – seemed insulting.
“Something’s latched on to him,” Liam had said a day earlier, when he arrived to help.
He examined the mass in Reggie’s stomach, waving a hand around bruising reminiscent of a bite mark, though Margo hadn’t noticed it earlier.
“Maybe it piggybacked in on something he bought, but it feels recent. Has he been anywhere weird? Maybe it thought it had found a weak spot but, whatever it is, it’s going to turn him if we don’t get it out. ”
“He was at the family mausoleum in Waterford. Wait, did you say turn him? As in undead? You can’t be serious.”
She could have lived with a spectre, maybe. But not the living dead.
Liam rolled his shoulders and shrugged the same way Reggie would.
“Look, I’ve seen a lot of weird things over the years.
You have too, I know it.” Liam had spent an hour looking over the old man, casting weaves and daubing him with ointments to try and figure out a way to counter whatever had taken root.
“If it’s what I think it is,” he’d said eventually.
“I have an idea. But you’re not going to like it. ”
“I’m desperate,” Margo had said.
“Good,” Liam had answered. “Because to get rid of a grave curse I need one of his ancestral bones. A skull is best but really, I can make anything work. Older the better, though. Oldest is best.”
“Can’t you go get it?” she’d asked. “I don’t want to leave Dad.”
Liam, a gaunt man a little over average height with closely cropped hair dusted with silver, shook his head sadly and pulled a small leatherbound book from a pocket.
She recognised it as Dennehy’s Rituals of Holding, though she had never seen a copy in real life.
Liam flicked through the orange-tipped pages until he found the ones he needed.
The left was in hieroglyphs, with the right in English translation but annotated from some previous owner.
“Look, it says it here,” Liam had said, pointing: “‘Bone of the ancestor raised from the grave by the hands of the descendant’. You’re the only one who can do it.
“But Margo, be careful. And try to find whatever bit him. The more I know, the more precise the counterspell. It’s the only way I can stop his soul from getting trapped.”
A furtive drive in the dark had brought her from Dublin to Waterford on Ireland’s south coast, an old city that had been home to generations of Margo’s family, though they had all since scattered.
A short trudge through mud and rough pathways brought her to the crumbling mausoleum, a gunmetal grey monolith set into a low hillside and crowned with weeping figures reminding Margo more of valkyries than angels.
In a graveyard talking to my cousin on the phone, looking for bones and biting things.
What else would I want to be doing on a Saturday night?
Turning over the pieces of the lock, she said: “Promise me you’ll keep Dad alive until I get back, okay? Please?”
“I’ll do my best, but it’s very, very hard. Curses are tricky bastards at the best of times, and this is a bastard of a bastard.”
Margo chuckled in spite of herself and she heard Liam do the same. “Listen, you said ‘complication’, what did you mean?”
“The lock’s broken.”
“Ah. Well, not necessarily the end of the world. I mean, your dad probably had to do it to get in. And anyway, old graves get broken into all the time, it’s probably just somebody looking for a place to crash–”
“The lock was crushed. I think it was bitten off.”
“Ah. Well. Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“You brought silver with you, didn’t you?”
She tapped a pocket, checking that the antique hammer was still there. It was heavy with a broad head engraved in Nordic runes and had belonged to a mason, once, before her father had acquired it. “Yeah. I have something.”
“Okay, well, keep it handy. Lots of things can live in old graves, vampires, graveworms, you might even come across a–”
A rasping snarl on the other end of the call almost deafened her. It barked in words she recognised as a mangled form of Irish, though archaic. “I have to go,” said Liam. “It’s getting stronger as your dad gets weaker. Hurry, okay? Hurry.”
The line went dead, leaving Margo rising to her feet in front of the tomb. Her nose twitched. Something saccharine with a sharp bite at the back of her throat. From the dark came the grating of stone on stone and a damp slithering moan.
Clipping her torch to her coat and pushing the door open, shadows rippled in the stark white light, leering at her with jaws as wide as chasms. To the left a handful of earthenware urns sat in roughhewn ledges in the wall, their name plaques tarnished and shrouded in dust and time.
Ahead, beyond old wooden coffins on iron biers, shadowed stairs crept down into the dark, framed by smooth limestone blocks wedged into the ragged stone of a cliff face.
It must have been a natural cave before they dug it out hundreds of years ago.
They’d always been a large family, even if most seldom spoke to each other. Guess they needed the room.
Shaking her head and tucking errant hair behind her ear, she pushed the thought to the base of her mind and looked around.
Shit. To her left, a coffin had been cracked into, the cheap boards pried apart.
The torchlight landed on a filthy grey sleeve enshrouding what was left of a skeletal arm.
The fingers lay strewn in the dust with the broken wood, slick with sticky spittle.
Even from a few feet away she could sense the lukewarm remnants of recent life radiating from it.
The hair on the back of her neck rose and a tingle ran along her scalp. It wasn’t human.
Jesus Christ, Margo, what have you gotten yourself into?