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“Bad day?” Mike murmured, pulling back to
see her face. She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “It’s just…there’s so much
misery out there, Mike.”

“I know. But think of the good you’re
doing.”

“That’s just it. I don’t think I am. They
don’t trust me.”

“It’s only how they are with outsiders.”

“They don’t act that way with Fiona.”

“Aye, but she’s Irish. They’ll get used to
you. Or they won’t.” Mike kissed her and went into the kitchen.

They had one of two working refrigerators in
the compound. The other was in what they called the processing
plant, a small wooden structure between the gypsies’ camp and the
last row of cottages. This was where the main storage of the
harvest was kept along with any meat caught. Mike poured two
glasses of water from a pitcher on the table and brought one to
her.

“Did you know they’re calling us New
Dublin?” Sarah said as she took the glass from him.

“Beats Daoineville,” he
said.

Daoineville was the name
given to the compound eighteen months earlier by a man who had
taken it by force and who had since left the area in shame and
humiliation.

Plus, he’d tried to hang
Mike and Fiona’s husband Declan.

“I just think we need to
resolve how we work with the people on the outside,” she
said.

“I think what we’re doing
works fine,” Mike said in his best
and-we’ll-hear-no-more-on-the-subject tone. Sarah nearly laughed.
Surely he knew her better than that by now?

“They’re like children,”
she said. Going to the window, she thought she heard John’s voice
and now watched him approach with Gavin. The two boys—both so
different from each other—were as close as if they’d been born
brothers. Just seeing John, laughing and unaware he was being
watched, made Sarah’s heart fill with love and worry.

There wasn’t a day that
went by that she didn’t wonder if she’d done the right thing by
allowing him to join her back in Ireland.

“What makes you say that?”
Mike said.

Sarah turned to him and
frowned, trying to remember what she’d said. Her face cleared and
she set the glass down on a table.

“Fiona said she heard in
the village that people are starting to talk about trees that can
walk and fairies roaming about.”

Mike’s face darkened.
“That’s barking. I don’t believe it.”

“You can ask her at dinner
tonight,” Sarah said, patting his shoulder on her way to the
kitchen. The front door opened and John and Gavin burst
in.

“We’re starving!” John
called. “Hey, Da, Tommy said you were looking for us?”

Sarah stood facing them
from the door of the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Mike said,
dropping his voice. “I need you to check out the area on the outer
wall of the—”

“Tommy showed us the
tape,” Gavin said. “We already checked it out.”

“What tape?” Sarah
asked.

“
And?” Mike asked
patiently.

“Bunch of broken branches
and trampled bushes,” Gavin said.

“Any idea of
what
trampled ‘em?” Mike
asked as Sarah came into the room to hear better.

“Cor, Da,” Gavin laughed.
“You think we got a herd of wild water buffalo on the
loose?”

“Water buffalo are by
definition wild,” John said to Gavin.

“Blimey, you’re right, you
little bugger!” Gavin grabbed John and began wrestling with him
standing up.

“Gavin,” Mike said
tightly.

“There weren’t any
footprints,” John said, catching his breath but still in the grip
of Gavin’s arm around his throat. “Not animal, not
human.”

“Mike, what’s going on?”
Sarah said, her hands on her hips. “What bushes? Where?”

“It’s nothing, Sarah,”
Mike said, but he frowned in concentration.

“It doesn’t sound like
nothing,” she said.

“Just something we’re
checking on,” Mike said. “Nothing to worry about, I promise.” He
gave her a quick kiss and herded the boys out of the house. “Come
on, lads, your Aunt Fiona will be here presently with the bairn.
You’ve got time to check on the horses before dinner.”

He turned and gave Sarah a
wink and left the cottage. For a brief moment as Sarah watched them
go, she felt a chill emanate from the very walls of the cottage and
settle gently around her shoulders.

CHAPTER TWO

Sarah loved the bonfire nights the best. They
didn’t do it that often, but when they did they gathered the whole
compound together around the center cookfire to tell stories—even
the gypsies. It helped remind her that this was her family
now—these forty odd Irish people, old and young. She grinned at
Fiona who sat across the campfire with her husband Declan. While
gatherings like this usually involved music, especially when the
gypsies were in attendance, storytelling bonfires were quieter
affairs. The sleeping toddler in Fiona’s arms, wee Ciara, would be
able to enjoy the cradle of her mother’s arms and Fiona could relax
knowing the child couldn’t be safer.

Siobhan Murray sat next to her old childhood
friend, Margaret Keenan, and the two old ladies giggled and
whispered like teenagers. Unlike Siobhan, Margaret had never been a
great beauty as a girl. In fact, the stark angular planes of her
face matched her sharp tongue. To nobody’s great surprise, Margaret
had never married.

Mike sat next to Sarah. As the leader of the
compound, he often spoke at these gatherings, even if he didn’t
usually tell stories. There were others who did that better. Sarah
caught a glimpse of John sitting with Tommy Donaghue. Maybe the
bonfire nights didn’t totally take the place of Netflix binging as
far as John was concerned, she thought with a smile, but Sarah
thanked God her boy had them instead.

John had been disappointed to realize that
it wasn’t Halloween they’d be observing tonight, but its precursor
Samhain. Mike had explained that Samhain was a high druid holy day
observed by the ancient Celts.

All John heard was there would be no candy
or reason to wear scary costumes.

Gavin sat a few families away from Fiona,
his arm around the girl Regan. You couldn’t live in a community as
small as this one and not realize the two had taken to each other
but they seemed to have accelerated their attraction in the last
couple of days. Sarah glanced at Mike but he was looking at the
elderly man standing in front of the fire, who was the first
storyteller. Nothing escaped Mike’s notice and Sarah knew he’d
observed his son with Regan. She also knew he didn’t approve.

Mickey Quinn held out his hands to prompt
silence before he began. The Irish, as master storytellers, had all
the confidence in the world that they would get the stage
conditions they desired. Old Mickey had been speaking and telling
stories for too many years not to know he’d have everyone’s rapt
attention before long. He could wait for it.

One by one, everyone around the flickering
bonfire became silent. Mickey waited until only the sounds of the
horses nickering in their stalls could be heard before he
began.

“I’ll be telling you the story of the Horned
Witches of Slievenamon,” he intoned, his voice deep and resonating.
Mickey had no family in the compound and because he shared little,
there was a lot of mystery surrounding why that was. But he was a
hard worker and one who would volunteer for the worst jobs—burying
the dead, or scraping maggots from carcasses.

Sarah looked at Mike, who
was watching Mickey with full concentration. She had to smile. The
only thing more serious to an Irishman than
telling
stories was listening to
them.

“One night,” Mickey said in his clear Irish
accent, “when her family and servants were asleep a very rich woman
sat combing wool when there came a knock at the door. Startled, the
woman answered, ‘Who is there?’ ‘I am the Witch of one Horn’ came
the answer. Thinking one of her neighbors needed help, the rich
woman opened the door, and a woman with a huge horn on her forehead
and her hands full of carded wool entered. She sat down by the fire
and began to card the wool.

“Then a second knock came to the door. The
mistress opened the door, and a second witch entered, with two
horns on her forehead, and a spinning wheel. She began to spin, and
the door continued to knock until twelve women sat round the fire.
Each had one more horn than the one before. The third witch had
three horns and the last one twelve.

“As they carded the thread and turned their
spinning-wheels, they sang an ancient rhyme. Soon the mistress
discovered she could not move nor utter a word, for a spell of the
witches was upon her.

“One of them called to her in Irish,
demanding that she rise up and make them a cake.”

Sarah’s attention in the story waned and she
looked around the audience as Mickey’s words carried clear and
strong in the night air. Somehow Gavin and Regan had disappeared.
Sarah wondered if Mike had noticed. She looked over Mickey’s head
and saw by a flash of lightning heavy rain clouds were moving over
the compound.

“…
and so the rich woman sat
down by the well and wept. Whereupon a voice came upon her and
said, ‘Go to the north angle of the house, cry aloud three times
and say,
The mountain of the Fenian women
and the sky over it is all on fire
.’

“When she did what the voice told her to do
the witches inside the house rushed out with shrieks and fled to
Slievenamon, cursing the Spirit of the Well.”

Sarah whispered to Mike under the applause
as Mickey took his bows and then his seat, “That is truly the worst
ghost story I ever heard.”

“All ghost stories come from Ireland. We
invented them.”

“That’s not true and thank God for it. It
made no sense.”

Mike laughed and pulled her close to him.
Fiona and Declan rose and after a nod to both Sarah and Mike
retired for the night.

“Did you notice Gavin and Regan left?”

“I did,” Mike said. “If I have to send out a
bleeding search party, I’ll be none too pleased. Are you cold?”

“No, I’m good.” But she shivered. It was a
chilly night but it wasn’t the temperature that made her tremble.
Something felt wrong. She couldn’t put her finger on what.

John walked over and sat down next to Mike
and stretched out his legs in front of him. He was growing. It was
hard to believe he was already fourteen years old. Since the bomb,
he’d had to do so many things well beyond his years.

“No offense,” he said to Mike. “But that was
one crappy ghost story.”

Sarah laughed. “I already told him.”

“What did them having horns have to do with
anything?”

“It’s likely that the old stories don’t fit
so well in modern times, ”Mike said, picking up his pipe and
lighting it. “I think that’s the value of them.”

Many of the other families were leaving with
their little ones and the few who were left, moved closer to where
Mike sat and pulled out pipes and jugs of poteen and homemade
beer.

“What do you mean?” John asked. A movement
caught his eye and everyone turned to see Gavin and Regan, hand in
hand, coming back to the fire. They sat down to listen.

“Well, the stories stay true for hundreds,
nay, thousands of years,” Mike said. Sarah noticed his brogue
became stronger the more whiskey he’d enjoyed.

“How’s that even possible?” John said. “Five
hundred years ago did they even write stuff down?”

“Oh, aye,” Mike said, warming to his tale.
“In any village, they’d all recite the stories and if someone had a
different version, they’d vote to either go with the new version or
stay with the old. That way there was always the one story told the
same way.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” John said. “But in
the States, we dress up as vampires and witches and go from house
to house in the dark. It’s really cool.”

“Sure, we do that here, too,” Mike said.
“Or, we used to. I imagine they still do back home, eh?”

America had been only
marginally affected by the bomb—a bomb
they
had triggered by their behavior
in the Middle East. There was no doubt the average American was
still trick-or-treating back home. And everything else. As if
nothing had happened.

“You’re too old for that sort of thing
anyway,” Sarah said to John with a smile.

“I know.”

“But tonight isn’t about giving away candy
and wearing super hero costumes,” Mike said. “Halloween came from
Samhain which is a very real, very…scary druid holy day.”

“Tell ‘im, Da,” Gavin said. Sarah could tell
he’d been drinking so she knew Mike could tell too.

Mike went on as if he hadn’t noticed.

“Tonight is about fairies and magic,” he
said. “The druids believed the very trees and bushes would come to
life on Samhain, and the rabbits and the fox would sit in judgment.
Have you heard of the Wicker Man, lad?” he said to John.

“Blimey!” Gavin said. “I forgot about him.”
He pulled Regan closer to him, his arm draped over her shoulder.
Her eyes were glassy as she looked into the fire, as if she’d been
drinking too.

“Well, the Wicker Man is a ghoul more than
fifteen feet high who rises up from the verra earth to taste the
flesh of the living.”

John gulped and glanced at Sarah. She smiled
at him.

“But Samhain,” Mike said, reaching for
Sarah’s hand, “is also a way to honor the Earth. I think, in the
old days, when you got your food from the land, whether that was in
crops or the animals that roamed it, you had a stronger sense of
gratitude to nature.”