O Murder Night by J.T. Ellison
Chapter 1
Western Coast of Ireland
1935
When Yeats O’Malley was thirty-seven years old, he bought a crumbling old manor house by a small inlet of the Carrowbeg River on the western coast of Ireland. It was a crowning glory moment for him, an achievement he’d spent a decade working toward. The house had a long and storied but unverifiable history, as parts of the foundation’s stone walls and the dungeon, including the terrifying oubliette, dated back to the sixteenth century and the pirate days of the queen of the seas, Granuaile – Grace O’Malley. It was supposedly built on the site where her castle was originally situated. The woman who would not bow to the queen of England.
He shared the pirate’s surname, though he wasn’t related to her bloodline. It mattered not; what he shared with Granuaile was the mythical call of more… that something waited for him, something bigger than himself. The house was only the beginning.
They called it Edge House, because it sat on the edge of the inlet, perched above the water so close that a spring king tide would make the river rise high enough to kiss the first-floor windows.
Its most recent owner before Yeats was a famed mystery writer with one hundred books to her name who, rather inconveniently, had gone missing on Christmas Eve eleven years earlier, never to be seen again. There were rumors, of course, that she faked her own death because the pressure of her illustrious career was getting to her, or that her lover was a cheat and a liar and killed her outright, or that she’d drowned in the river that swept the shores of the manor’s gardens after a late-night ramble.
Yeats didn’t particularly care about the truth of her disappearance, only that the manor was at last available, and in disrepair, which hurt his soul. It needed millions to renovate: the roof was gone in certain spots; the walls were turning black with mold. He had just enough cash to buy the place and strip the walls back to the original stone before his accounts ran dry.
So he held a party. A Christmas Eve fundraiser. He invited everyone he knew, and the local press, and charged 1000 punt a head.
Fifteen people came.
The great ballroom was decked out and empty. He had a month’s worth of food he was forced to donate to the tent people camped on the manor’s grounds, those starving wastrels he hated to look upon, he with the largesse they had not, and egg on his very handsome face.
Insult to injury, 15,000 was only enough to patch one corner of the roof.
He knew if he could make the manor a destination, he could raise the remaining five million to renovate the old gal properly. So two weeks and seven bottles of fine Irish whiskey later, Yeats got creative. People might not be willing to give him money to renovate his dream home, but they would certainly come to see where the infamous Agnes Sweet was last seen.
With permission from her family, whom he promised a substantial cut (but never delivered, the last of them having passed away before he finished, and who needs money when you’re dead?) he turned the house into a shrine. He wrote an emotional script that described the history of the house, the circumstances of Agnes’ disappearance, and a few suppositions of her death, and hired a couple of local boys to conduct tours, making sure they ended in the dungeons. It was a salacious tale: A century earlier, a small door had been carved into the wall to access a cat that had fallen through the angstloch and become trapped inside the oubliette, and all manner of horrors had been found. The local archeology team had excavated skeleton after skeleton. Lord knows how many had perished after being shoved through the angstloch. Though now covered with a small wooden trapdoor that was always kept locked, it gave him the chills. He had to pass the short hallway that housed the fear hole, as it was sometimes called, on his way to the wine cave, and every time he felt as if the eyes of the dead were upon him.
It was cold and damp down there, perfectly spooky, and struck just the right note for an afternoon learning about a missing mystery writer. The patrons would stick their heads in, feel that ominous chill, and back away, happy to return to the surface.
Bolstered by the warm reception to his newfound profit scheme, he opened a bookshop off the grand dining room, stocked all of Agnes’ titles, as well as several avant-garde biographies done on her life and career. He hired a local watercolorist to paint the house and grounds (imagining them lush and green, of course), and hung the art all over the house with discreet gold price tags dangling from the frames. The art sold as well as the books; the artist became famous and moved to Dublin. Yeats held weekly movie nights, a rare treat, showing the adaptations of Agnes’ most famous novels. He commissioned a bespoke brand of tea, Irish breakfast with a hint of whiskey on the finish, which was a huge hit. He forced out the tent people and opened a section of the grounds to proper caravaners, stocked the pond with trout, and started a flora and fauna tour for the outdoorsy types.
The first year, he was able to repair the rest of the roof and plaster the walls. The second, he restored the oak and ebony parquet floors and the soaring Sicilian marble staircase. And the third, he opened the second-floor bedrooms to private groups, usually writers who wanted to soak up the glory of their hero’s creative space, or the ghoulish, who came convinced the place was haunted.
It was, of course – it was too old not to be – but Yeats himself had never seen a spirit. The lore, though, grew and grew. There was a five-foot marble statue in the stairwell of an angelic woman, and some said if you stood at the base of the stairs at midnight during a full moon, she would glow red with the spirit of Agnes Sweet herself. That sort of nonsense made everyone want to visit. He’d only noticed something odd about the statue once, and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. Yeats wasn’t a superstitious man, either.
Year five, he threw the Christmas Eve party again. They capped the attendees at one thousand; the waiting list was three times that.
Yes, Yeats O’Malley had struck gold.
But all veins run dry eventually.
