All good tales in this part of the world start with
“Listen up, for this is no word of a lie. Pull up a chair and I will tell you a tale” In this instance about Dooley’s Cairn and the Dullahan that lives there and appears every Halloween.
They say the veil between worlds thins on Oíche Shamhna, when the living and the dead walk the same roads, and strange hooves are heard on the stones of Northern Ireland. Most pay it no mind: a candle in the window and some honey and milk left for the Good Folk on a west-facing windowsill to make certain the night passes without harm.
But Michael O’Brien was not most.
He was a solicitor by trade and a miser by nature, one of those individuals who can find fault with the way the sun rises. People in his hometown said he had been born without either wit or warmth, and he did little to prove them wrong.
That Halloween night, while the children went guising, knocking at doors with laughter and masks, Michael sat by his fire with the curtains drawn tight. Every so often the bell rang, and he’d heave himself to the window to shout:
“You know what you’re doing is begging? A pack of dirty beggars, the lot of you! Clear off before I call the Police!”
And away they’d go, laughing all the louder for it, leaving him to his precious silence. It was a rite of passage to ring Auld Man O’Brien’s doorbell and get shouted at on Halloween.
At near midnight he treated himself to a rare indulgence, a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and sipped it like a man enjoying the wages of virtue. The wind outside turned cold and thin, with the cries of ravens carrying on it, from Dooley’s Cairn, an ancient place where the earth’s memory was long.
It was from there the coach came.
Four horses, black as peat and thin as bone, pulled it across the bog. The wheels didn’t make a sound on the gravel track. A great shape sat on the driver’s seat, cloaked and headless, and beside it, leaning on the bench, was his own skull, grinning wide enough to show the back of its throat. The Dullahan had left his cairn.
When he reached the end of Michael O’Brien’s drive he pulled the reins once. The horses stopped, snorting steam.
Inside, Michael was brushing his teeth when he heard it-the faint rattle of harness, the soft tread of hooves. He frowned, peered through the window and saw the black coach waiting below.
“Ah, for God’s sake,” he muttered, “more of this nonsense.”
Down the stairs he went, grumbling about trespass, property lines, and criminal mischief. His gray dressing gown flapped behind him like some great demented stork. He threw open the door, and the night air was cold as iron on his face.
The coach door swung wide on its own.
“Who’s there?” he barked. “I’ll have you up in front of the court, see if I don’t!”
A voice like the turning of grave-soil came from within the dark.
“Michael O’Brien.
He froze.
“You took from the living and gave nothing to the dead.”
The Dullahan turned on his seat, lifting his skull high. Its eyes were pools of green fire.
“Your name is written. The road is waiting.”
Michael stumbled back, clutching his dressing gown. “You’ve the wrong man! I’ve broken no law!”
The jaw of the skull creaked open in something like laughter.
“No law of man”.
Then there was a noise, a whip-like cracking sound, and something invisible hit him right in the chest. The door slammed shut.
The milkman found the front door open and the house silent when he came by in the morning. A crowd of neighbours gathered. They found Michael sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space with an expression of terror carved into his face. His hair had turned white as frost. The mug of chocolate lay cold on the bedside table; the marshmallows melted to a grey crust. And on the windowsill beside his bed, outlined in ashes, was the mark of a horseshoe pointing downward. All of Michael’s luck had run out and escaped.