Chapter 21 #3
According to Katie, a teenage fount of gossip, Colleen had married a lad they’d grown up with not long after Mal abandoned her in Dublin.
Their home was a hovel caked in misery. Starving, hollow-eyed children with swollen bellies laid around the bare yard, covered in flies that had already begun to feast. Dirty rags billowed in the dirty breeze. Above the door hung a crooked crucifix.
Mal knocked, further upsetting the crucifix. The child who answered could have been his, Mal thought, had things gone differently. He peered through the door of what had almost been his life, feeling guilty for his relief.
“I’m looking for Colleen. I’m… an old friend, here to help.”
Colleen appeared, wiping her hands on a threadbare apron that bloomed with stains. The apples of her cheeks had sunken, and her creamy skin was curdled and heavily lined. Colleen had lived in squalor so long that she had become a part of it, indistinguishable from the quiet anguish surrounding her.
She froze, as if she had seen a ghost. Horrified recognition dawned on her dirt-smeared face.
All of his excuses died on his lips. With her bitter eyes staring holes through him, he couldn’t lie to this woman, the hardened shell of the lass he had almost wed.
“Mal? Is that really you?”
Understandably, Colleen was upset that the man who had abandoned her was now darkening her doorway in a tailored suit.
She took his charity and looked at him, really looked at him.
Before she slammed the door in his face, she imparted a killing blow: “You’re a monster for what you’ve done, Malachy Bane.
Mean and cruel, beating on those too weak to fight back. You’re no better than your Da.”
Those words echoed in his mind long after she and everyone he cared about died.
The silver watch sat heavy in his pocket. If Mal gave it to Janus and collected his fee, there’d be only scraps left for Colleen’s family after dividing the money amongst his siblings. Neither Colleen nor his family would survive long on scraps.
Mal had condemned Colleen to this fate, but he had the power to help her escape its clutches. How much more could he get by selling the watch himself?
He made a decision then, standing before the closed door in the gutted shell of his old village. A decision he would regret for the rest of his life.
Finding a discrete buyer through his black-market channels took no time at all. Mal sold the demonic pocket watch for a higher price than he’d expected. He doled out the small fortune to his family and set aside a considerable sum for the woman he had forgotten.
He’d have to avoid Dublin and lie low until the dust from his double-crossing settled. It meant more time away from his beleaguered family, but he could rest assured that with this money they’d be more likely to survive to see him again when he returned.
Selling that watch became his bitterest regret.
Mal returned the next morning to say his goodbyes. He let himself into the Dublin house where his sister Sarah lived with her brood and the younger Bane siblings. Instead of the usual chaos of a home filled with children, he was met with silence.
The silence grew more oppressive as he wandered the hallways, calling their names to no reply. The kitchen was quiet, dark. No breakfast simmered on the stove. No steaming pot of tea waited on the table. No toddlers ran underfoot. The first inklings of fear sank their claws into Mal.
Something dripped on his head. His fingers reached towards it and came back wet and red.
Blood.
Panic shot through him in a cold fire. Heart pounding, Mal dashed upstairs, dread mounting with each step, and rounded the corner into a hallway lined with closed doors. Silence greeted him. His hand hesitated on the first door handle.
The door creaked open. He stepped into little Mary’s nursery and stopped short. His heart seized and shattered.
Blood. Blood everywhere.
And there, in the crib, were the remains of his youngest niece. Mary’s tiny, fragile body had been ripped limb from limb. All that remained of the infant, with her soft curls and infectious laugh, was a gory pulp.
Mal fell to his knees and vomited. Bile burned his throat and tears stung his eyes as a molten cleaver of grief tore him down the middle, as baby Mary had been torn apart.
Behind his eyelids, squeezed tight against the onslaught of panic, the horror of her mangled corpse was projected in vivid, mortifying detail.
The fearful knowledge of what awaited him behind the other closed doors had him scrambling to his feet.
He ran, crying and shaking, down the hallway and flung open the doors, one by one, and saw the atrocities within.
Ripped apart at the seams, his family’s insides were splattered across the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Sarah and her husband had been mutilated in their bed.
Their blood dripped through the floorboards and into the kitchen.
His sister, brother-in-law, nieces and nephews—gone. Tearing at his hair and howling like a wounded animal, Mal collapsed into a puddle of gore that had once been his family and wept, wracked by a grief he could not yet comprehend.
Jesus, what of the rest of his family?
He sprinted to the front door, seized in a tight fist of terror. A spot of white in the red clouding his vision caught his eye. An ivory card trimmed in gold rested beside the door. Written in bloodred Thieves Ink was: “Betrayal has consequences.”
Grief and fury warred within him as the words disappeared. At the rotting heart of it all was his own guilt. The pocket watch. Janus. Blood. His family had all but been slain by his own hand, victims of the consequences of his action.
Panicked, Mal traversed across Dublin to Trinity College. Strewn across the dormitory were pieces of Seamus. Mal took in the horror of his younger brother’s dismembered corpse. Blood still steamed on the narrow bed where he had been torn apart.
Tears and snot and blood streamed down Mal’s face as he cradled the pieces of Seamus, rocking and crying and blubbering useless apologies the lad would never hear.
The first and last Bane to attend university.
Seamus would never live to graduate. An old soul, the aunties in their village had called him.
Now Seamus was a broken soul who would never live to be old.
The money that should have saved them had killed them. And it was Mal’s fault, all his fault.
As the sun spilled over the horizon, Mal traversed back to their village in County Cork where savagery greeted him.
Liam had not lived to see his first child born.
His younger brother and pregnant sister-in-law had been impaled on the church spire, run through like meat on a skewer.
Their blood dripped down the spire and anointed the crucifix nailed above the church door.
Blood-soaked hanks of hair tangled in Mal’s fingers as he lowered the wife to the earth beside her slain husband.
The child inside had died along with her, pierced through the heart before it took its first breath.
Katie had not lived to celebrate her fifteenth birthday.
The pink ribbon she always wore in her copper hair was soaked with blood from where her decapitated head had rolled away from her body, minced into bloody mush by dozens of stab wounds.
She fell apart in his arms as Mal rocked her, weeping and repeating her name like a broken prayer.
One by one, Mal traversed to his siblings’ homes. One by one, he found them slain, slaughtered, massacred. One by one, his heart shattered into too many pieces to ever be whole again.
Gone. His entire family, gone.
Colleen had not been spared, either. She had not lived to see the end of this famine. Mal’s charity had been her death sentence.
His mind overflowed with poisonous thoughts.
All his life, he had striven to take care of them.
He had sold his soul, piece by piece, to see them fed, clothed, safeguarded from the horrors he had not been able to protect them from at their father’s hands.
Now, he had as good as killed them himself.
The blood on his hands would never wash clean.
Mal wept useless tears, uttered useless prayers to a god that had never listened, as he gathered the remains of his family. His life ended with theirs.
You’re no better than your Da.
Colleen’s parting words echoed as he buried her in the Dublin graveyard where he had laid his siblings and their families to rest. Among the ivy-covered headstones, slowly swallowed by earth and time, were fresh graves crowned with clean marble that marked the tragedy wrought by his own hand.
The Bane headstones were carved with the same death date of August 6, 1850.
He had set fire to his family tree and now he was all that remained. He was worse than his father. Da had beaten them, and Mal had ended them.
He buried a piece of his black heart along with each body.
How careless he had been. How steep the price they had paid.
Sarah would never watch baby Mary take her first steps.
Liam would never be a father. Seamus would never graduate from university.
Katie would never turn fifteen. Mal had buried her birthday gift along with her.
In one fell swoop, he was left with the fractured pieces of a life that had gone from full to empty before the sun rose to illuminate the full devastation.
All the love he had for his family had nowhere to go, and so it festered within him.
He held each of their deaths inside of him, letting the grief and corrosive guilt eat away at him.
He knelt at their graves and wept, wishing the earth would swallow him so he could lie in darkness with his brothers and sisters.
When hands manacled his biceps and hauled him to his feet, he did not resist. He didn’t struggle when they shackled him in handcuffs that pricked like the bite of a thousand mosquitoes, his magic leaking out drop by drop.