Even during those floods, the site of the public house never succumbed to the water, it was always just high enough to escape, becoming an island in the midst of a temporary lake at times in the past. There were pictures of the pub getting barrels of ale or porter delivered to it by boat during one particularly long period of rain, although who exactly was going to drink that beer was never explained, as any patrons would also need to be ferried to the pub, and back. But there it stood, a wooden, stone and brick building with an unusually high pitched slate roof and a tall, crooked chimney. There were windows on two sides made from ancient, wavy glass and timber that had hardened like iron by the passing of time and layers of paint. The front door was recessed in the angle of the windowed sides, creating a triangular porch that pointed back towards the town. It had a long L-shaped counter that faced the windows, with a snug on one end with sliding doors for access, and a hatch for getting served. There was a private living room with a tiny kitchen behind the bar, and some bedrooms upstairs. The very basic toilets were in a lean-too at the back of the building and had been added recently enough. Before that? Well, the river wasn’t far away and everything flowed down the hill anyway. Nobody knew exactly how long the structure had stood here and it was certainly a site more suited for a castle than a public house. An inn or some other resting place that offered accommodation for weary travellers would also have made more sense, but here it was, just a simple drinking house.
The myths and legends passed down verbally from year to year and ear to ear, before finally being committed to paper, spoke of a far older structure somewhere close by. A ring of stones. No sign of the stones remained, and perhaps it was just a story, told to scare children away from the ‘Fairy Ring’ and the treacherous river. The once boggy land that surrounded the hill had given its name to the establishment, Tigh Moneen – The Little Bog House. No trace remained of the bog after all these years, the name incongruous after centuries of new layers being added to the original ground level, but there it stood this odd vestige of older times, resistant to the development and major modernisation that happened around it; towered over by modern apartments and other high-rise buildings but oddly seeming higher, and perhaps loftier, than those structures?
And if you paid very close attention as you approached it on foot, this lost remnant of the town's history seemed to hum, vibrate and shimmer, not felt by ears or feet, nor seen by eyes exactly, but certainly experienced in your very core.
-o-
Big Isaac the barman was now pretty sure that he was in fact dead.
At first it had been one odd thing. He couldn’t get out from behind the counter itself as every time he went to lift the bar flap and enter the rest of the public house he found himself back behind the bar polishing glasses. And that was another thing? He could pick up a pint tumbler but it wasn’t really a proper glass. It felt vaguely like one in his hands but there was something wrong with its heft and how the light reflected from it. It gave off odd sparkles that seemed to drift up and away from the surface as he used his cloth to buff it, as if he was wearing away tiny particles of pure light with every movement. Another issue was his clothes. He couldn’t remember wearing any outfit other than what he currently had on, which was loose cotton shirt, grey with a stand-up collar. His trousers were thick grey corduroy and held up by braces. Over those he wore a waistcoat of lurid purple, buttons done up apart from the first and last. On his feet were heavy boots of scuffed black leather, well-worn but very comfortable. A sprung metal garter held up each sleeve and an old silver watch in the pocket of his waistcoat, the chain stretched across his large belly, completed the ensemble. Wearing this getup and standing six foot six he certainly was a sight to behold.
And that there was an issue too, he could never catch sight of himself in any of the mirrors hanging on the walls of the public house. Between the names of long-gone breweries and beer brands he couldn’t quite see himself. It was as if the mirrors were all just slightly angled to catch the reflection of a part of the bar counter he wasn’t behind. Even if he moved, it was as if the mirrors moved too. Unlike the Sacred Heart of Jesus picture that hung on the wall in the snug, its constant gaze boring into him from over the lit, flickering crucifix filament bulb in its glass cover that sat under the frame, whenever the sliding partition that gave those in the snug a little privacy from the servers behind the bar was opened. Big Isaac wasn’t a very religious man, or was he? He didn't know but he blessed himself whenever he faced the picture, just to be sure.
Something else odd was how he couldn’t remember being anywhere other than behind the bar of the public house. It was all quite strange? He knew that he worked in The Moneen but he couldn't remember anything else. Not family or friends, not a home, or any other building for that matter. He didn’t know how long this had gone on, but he felt strangely calm about it. He seemed to have a purpose although he couldn’t tell exactly what that purpose was right now.
He didn’t like the blackouts though.
He’d be behind the bar polishing those damn glasses (Come to think of it, that was the only real task he seemed to perform?) when his surroundings would flicker and dim, then there would be blinding flash followed by darkness. Slowly, a pinprick of light would grow and the public house would rematerialise in front of his eyes. Big Isaac didn’t know what a blackout really was but this seemed the best explanation for what occurred at these times.
Although it didn’t explain The Others.
They always appeared in the same positions when he came out of his ‘blackouts’. At first he had missed them as they moved like blurs of light and shadow with just a splash of colour catching his eye. He discovered it was easier to see them by not looking directly at them, a bit like staring at stars that appear brighter in your peripheral vision, as these entities seemed to exist just out of direct sight. Eventually by concentrating a little harder he had begun to recognise them more clearly. A lady with a short bobbed haircut and shorter dress, who showed too much of her legs in his opinion. Her bright, yellow headband flashing as she appeared to move her head, and body, at enormous speed while standing oddly at a table talking to no one, her mouth opening and closing way too quickly. There was also a gaunt, elegant gentleman who stood at the counter after another of his blackouts, and who moved, like the lady, in fast forward. His moustache and bowler hat shimmering more that the bright red bowtie that adorned his scrawny neck and his hand quivering around a glass of something clear and bright in a glass that splashed and sparkled as his body moved as if to fill in a certain void in space. Yet another figure who appeared was a longhaired young man who stood in the corner of the bar with a book and a pint of something dark on the shelf where he leaned. He too was all grey and full of jerks and tiny turns, with strange blue footwear blurring as he moved in the same odd fashion as the others. There were others too, like the spinning child with the green hat at the door, and the quivering older lady with the orange shopping bag, or the newspaper reader with his wine-coloured glasses, and the bearded man with turquoise polo shirt who just stood near, but not at, the bar, head nodding and his body shaking too, like all the others. Were there more? He thought so but couldn’t quite remember, as none of them ever appeared together. None of them seemed real to Big Isaac, and although he was pretty sure he didn't really believe in ghosts that seemed to be the only explanation. None of it made sense but then again he wasn’t really sure what sense was, or reality for that matter anymore.
It was at that point that he realised that perhaps something wasn’t quite right with his mind, or his surroundings – that something was off with his world.
But it was the angel in the snug that finally convinced him that he was dead. He was polishing a glass – again – when he glimpsed movement behind the hammered glass hatch of the serving screen on the bar that opened into the snug. He put down the glass, or perhaps it was buffed to nothingness, and walked to the end of the bar and slid across the glass panel. At first, all he could see was the morose Scared Heart picture staring at him, the crucifix in its little glass dome flickering and glowing as ever. He blessed himself and was about to slide back the partition when he glimpsed a flash of purple spinning quickly before the grey that coalesced around it began to form a shape in his peripheral vision.
Was it an angel? It certainly looked like one once he concentrated on the being's appearance. He could make out a tall creature with what looked like wings on its back and a purple-flamed sword held in front of its face, casting sickly highlights on the being’s angular features. The blade-like face with a sharp nose and pointed ears appeared to be quivering with rage as it vibrated and twisted in a tight space, just like The Others. Big Isaac took a step back and froze, shocked by the appearance of this grotesque, biblical angel in the confines of the pub. Why would it be here? Come to think of it, why were The Others here? Why was he here? He still couldn't remember.
It was while he stared at the angel that he decided that seeing it and the other ghost-like apparitions must surely meant he was dead too? Perhaps visible to The Others just as a faint figure ferociously polishing glass tumblers, his vibrant purple waistcoat the only thing to attract the eye. Maybe he too was a wraith? Destined to exist but not to live, to think but not remember anything outside the walls of the public house. He was one of The Others too perhaps, but slightly freer to roam?
Suddenly the angel-like creature turned his quivering face and looked straight at Isaac. With great effort it moved its hands and twisted its body and it was then that Isaac realised it wasn’t quite an angel. It was a being of some kind and the sword was certainly real, but what he had took to be wings now seemed to be a cloak hanging over sharp, protruding shoulder blades, exaggerated by the stooped, hunchbacked form of the creature and an unseen weight on those shoulders. The face seemed to take on a clearer appearance and Isaac realised that what he had taken as rage was maybe just sadness and fear. That face showed chronic aging too, not just the age that normal beings show with the passing of time. This face was ancient, the paper-thin skin stretched across now-grey, primeval bones. One of the hands that held the sword released its grip and with great effort and a sharp crack, it slowly moved towards Isaac. Now he felt only pity for the figure, it needed comfort and help. The image of the Sacred Heart looked down on Isaac as he reached out to meet the hand that came towards him, and as their fingers touched the world went purple and all that Isaac saw was the vanishing image of the red flickering cross before solid blackness.
-o-
Isaac stood on a small hill overlooking a river. In the millisecond when he touched the being he learned what it was and how it came to be trapped. A Warrior Fae, a Soldier of the Sidhe, one of the Fairy Hoard, a Chieftain of the Tuatha dé Danann, or whatever name it and its type had become to be known as over the years and centuries, and who had come to this land and ruled here for a while, as other had before and after them ...
But the landscape itself can’t be ruled, it was older than time and any beings, and eventually always won the war – if not the battles – with those who sought to tame it and subjugate the ordinary folk. It lured and trapped this ferocious Sidh inside a stone pushed up from the earth, and over time it trapped others if its kind too.
Isaac looked and saw a circle of stones that ran around the hill top, each held a glimmer of colour.
Now blackness again. Then suddenly he was back in The Moneen, but now he was in the snug under the watchful eyes and the red cross. The world tilted and he saw the man in the red bowtie. Again it shifted and now he saw the lady with the yellow headband. One after another all The Others appeared, flashing into existence so quickly and disappearing again only to appear a second later, faster and faster. Eventually he could see them all at the one time in a blur, along with more figures, as the very structure of the public house disappeared, and he now realised that they formed a circle, and always had, but now they were standing, and quivering and moving tightly here on a bare hill. Stones started to shove through the soil where each of The Others stood, trapped by time and space, until both stones and people coalesced and eventually formed a circle. Oscar tried to escape but he was locked in the confines of the shape of his own stone now, twisting and turning, polishing a blasted tumbler again. He was trapped in the mundane, as the last of the Sidhe roamed free and followed the rest of his kind that had found the way to escape the stones over the previous years, fleeing into the high hills and back out of the minds and memories of men.
Free at last.
-o-
Tigh Moneen was busy most nights, as people liked its quirkiness and quaintness, even if they did feel an uneasiness before the entered through the front door. This wasn’t helped by the rumours of those who had disappeared from this side of the town over the decades and centuries, never seen again and no bodies ever found. That was the issue with drinking one too many this close to the river of course, and the slippery concrete of the bridge combined with the precarious nature of the river bank and quays. One misadventure or slip and the river could be quite unforgiving in how it gobbled you up and left no trace behind.
But once through the door of the public house and in the warmth of the open fire on a winter’s evening, and with a glass of something mildly intoxicating in hand, that apprehension slipped away like the cold from your bones, and you felt safe and secure in this old drinking house. If you were lucky and well timed you could sit in the snug under the gaze of the Sacred Heart picture. And at times, by some trick of the light, a curious flash of lurid purple was reflected on the glass and frame, and from the dome that held the flickering red cross.
Image 2: Callanish Standing Stones VII (explored) - Flickr - B^lly Frank.jpg. Public Domain via Wiki Commons.
Converted to marker-style illustration using Android Gallery Editor, then edited in IrfanView to improve contrast, saturation and sharpness.