SHADOWS OF THE DAWN  (Extract)

 

 

 Chapter One

 

 

 

A long time ago, before the world turned old, there was a small dusty hamlet which nestled on the border of the County. It had been built - if that is the right word for such a collection of tumble-down cottages - by warriors, who had swept through hundreds of years before, leaving little settlements here and there to mark their path, and it had long since fallen asleep in the folds of the rolling green hills that surrounded it. The brown-stone church that sat on the sweep of the valley looked benignly  down on the cluster of thatched roofs which huddled below it, like a goose proudly watching its brood of goslings sleeping in the midday sun, and, in the lengthening shadows, seemed to smile its approval. A muddy track ran or rather wandered past the wooden doors like a drunken farm-hand on his way to collect water from the brook that meandered slowly through the yellow-green willow trees lying at the foot of the guardian hills. Life passed quietly here and, were it not for the trickles of smoke that punctuated the skyline, it would have been easy to imagine that the inhabitants had once upon a time vanished into the depths of the earth itself.

 

 

It was into this slowly vegetating world that Niall’s family had come some years previously, fleeing the haunted wastes of the flatlands that lay to the east. They had moved, without much ceremony, into the priest’s house that sat in the lee of the derelict churchyard and there they had tried to heal the wounds and forget the nightmares of the past. His father, the priest, had once been a scholar and an athlete but life had treated him unkindly. He had grown old before his time and , in many ways, was now a broken man who was doomed to preach a faith that, even for him, had become something of an illusion. His mother, an artist and a giddy socialite in her youth, had once dreamed too - only to see the dreams turn to dust in the cold and hostile faces of those they had sought to help. This was to be a fresh beginning, a time when time itself would mend and repair the damage to their souls - or so they hoped and thought.

 

 

Niall himself had only vague memories of the land from which they came and could only recall a world of endless horizon where the rain had fallen with grey monotony and people had muttered about the ghosts that were supposed to frequent the cold and marbled tomb of a house in which his family had lived. It had been a world devoid of warmth, of kindness, of hope, so he rejoiced now in the green and verdant hills and the flowing streams and the animals that grazed quietly in the undulating fields around him.             

 

 

He, together with his three sisters, settled quickly into the rambling warrens of the old rectory and were content to idle away the days exploring the dust-filled attics, the echoing barns and the mysterious, overgrown gardens that constituted and defined their new universe. It was a curious house: at one time, light and full of sunshine and, at others, dark and menacing. They learnt to keep away from their mother’s bedroom, which soon became, in their children’s minds, a cross between a Queen’s throne-room and the torture-chamber of an evil warlord, and the dank and forbidding cellar which lay beneath the house and was occasionally used as a threat to control them. Instead, they would spend their time in the playroom at the far end of the house, where their parents seldom ventured and they could, for a moment, escape the looming storm clouds in innocent and casually mischievous pursuits, or they would silently creep out into the gardens and run whooping across the grass to one or other of their bolt-holes where they could entertain the flights of fancy to which children retreat when surrounded by tensions they are too young to understand or counter.

 

 

They also discovered the other children who dwelt in the tiny hamlet and shyly learnt to allow them into their confidence and, in return, to be invited into the games these new friends would play in the farmyards and haybarns that sprawled around the ramshackle cottages down the hill. It was a time of learning and adventure, a time of childish imaginings but also a time when the darkness began to descend.

 

 

It is difficult to say when exactly it started. Maybe it had always been there and only gradually began to emerge into their consciousness as they grew older; maybe the continued weakening of their father paved the way and finally opened the door to the demons hidden in the depths of their mother’s mind. All Niall knew was that in the mornings the air would be thick with the tension of approaching thunder and his father would be quivering with fear and apprehension at the sounds emanating from the dark room at the top of the winding stairs.