The Good People, A Tonight's Terror Original

A young American family travels to the Irish village where the mother grew up. What begins as a long-overdue homecoming slowly becomes something else entirely, something older than any of them, and very much alive. 

No AI Writing. No AI Narration. 

Intro/Outro: D. Moore

Tonight's Terror. Original horror stories told in the dark. 

Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, like, and turn on notifications for future stories! Check out our website for every episode, merch, and more. 

http://www.tonightsterror.com

This audio is an original short horror story written and performed by Tonight’s Terror (C.S. Austin). It is not adapted from, based on, or affiliated with any existing novel, audiobook, film, or copyrighted intellectual property. All writing, narration, and production elements are original and owned by the creator unless otherwise credited.

Transcript

Cold Open

SPEAKER_01 0:02

There are places in this world that don't get many visitors. Places that want things from us. Tonight, we're going somewhere very old and very green and dark. So leave the light on.

Channel Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:20

You're listening to Tonight's Terror: Original Horror Stories to Hear in the Dark. Subscribe and share if you're a fan. And now, tonight's story.

Story Begins

SPEAKER_01 0:36

The hills unfurled one after another as we drove along the coast. Ireland was as green as I imagined. No, greener. The road was draped across the landscape, and our little black rental car hummed along at a snail's pace. I had worried endlessly about driving on the left. An hour in, I was so drawn out the window to the rolling swells of green, to the stone walls lining the road, that the only danger was my own inattention. A white road sign ahead was lettered in black. That's it, Mary said. No, Mary said. Our son Freddie giggled in the back seat. He held a rubber lizard in one hand. I can say it as well as Mommy can, I protested with a glance in the rearview mirror. No, Freddy called, his legs swinging happily over the lip of the car seat. I reached across and squeezed Mary's wrist. She was beaming. It had been nearly a decade since she first began talking about making a trip to her hometown. I'd never been to Ireland at all, a fact I carried with some guilt. Mary had lived in Ireland until college, when she relocated to the U.S. It was a huge part of her identity, and I'd only ever experienced the place through her. Never learning too much, never asking as much as I should have. She didn't force it. The ugly American. The road dipped into a wide valley. The roofs of low buildings appeared in a cluster ahead. From a distance, the village looked tiny. Something I could capture in a single photo. But as we wove through the circuitous streets, I felt immediately lost. After what seemed like a dozen turns at the giddy instruction of Mary, I asked if she knew where she was going. She just laughed. Our car drew looks from pedestrians and tired-looking old men slouching in the doorways of shops. Everyone knows everyone here, Mary offered. They're lovely people. I smiled and awaited her next instruction. The sun was setting when the car came to a rest on a patch of uneven cobbles beside Mary's childhood home. The house was whitewashed like most others in the village. The roof was dark slate, looking much newer than the body of the building. Mary had mentioned her father's saving to have it replaced the year before. I hadn't seen Mary's father since the wedding in New York. It had been seven years. Mary had come home once since then, but I'd had to work and didn't make the trip. The front door opened and he stepped out. Callum was a short, bald man with a white beard and soft, warm eyes. Welcome, welcome, welcome, he shouted as we closed the car doors. I waved and began unfastening Freddy's car seat straps. Behind me I heard Callum greeting Mary. At last, a lady for this drab house. Welcome home, my lovely. I looked back and saw Callum hugging Mary and lifting her gently off the ground. Mary's mother, Sheila, had died before Mary and I knew one another. Callum had lived on his own for a time. But when his brother's wife passed early that year, he'd moved his brother into the house. Early reports from Mary's phone calls with her father suggested that they kept one another company, got along well enough, and bullied each other to stay out of the pub, at least on weekdays. Freddie had freed himself from the car seat by the time I turned around. He stood on the cobbles, clutching his rubber lizard, regarding Callum with frank suspicion he reserved for strangers. Callum crouched down to his level. And who's this fierce creature? Freddy considered the question seriously. Freddie. Freddy, Callum repeated, as though tasting the word. Then what's your man's name? He nodded at the lizard. Another pause. Dave. Callum looked up at me with wide eyes, delighted. I shrugged. Dave, Callum said gravely. He reached out and shook the lizard's rubber foot. An honor. Freddy, apparently satisfied, held the lizard out for a full inspection. Callum took it in both hands with the solemnity of someone receiving a small trophy. He turned it over once, nodding, and then handed it back. Right then, Dave, you're very welcome in this house. Freddy giggled and pressed the lizard against his cheek. Callum straightened and clapped me on the shoulder. Come in, come in. Amon's got a fire going, and there's something on the stove that'll sort you out after that long drive. Inside, the house was low-ceiling and warm. It smelled of something cooked and something older beneath that. The walls of the entry were hung with framed photographs, most of them black and white. Faces I didn't recognize. A metal flute of some kind hung over the door. A narrow staircase rose steeply at the far end. The rooms felt compressed, built for a life that didn't require much space. A man rose from a chair near the window as we came through the door. He was taller than Callum, thinner, with the same bald head, but none of the softness. He wore a collared shirt buttoned to the throat, despite the warmth of the room. Amen, Mary said and embraced him. He patted her back twice, precisely, and released her. His eyes moved to me. You'll be the husband, he said. I will, I said, and shook his hand. His grip was dry and firm. Callum was already in the kitchen, calling back about the stove. Mary followed his voice, pulling her coat off as she went, already home in a way I wasn't and wouldn't be for some time. Freddy trailed after her, Dave dangling from one fist. Amon gestured toward the chairs by the fire in we sat. He poured from a bottle on the side table without asking, and handed me a glass. Whiskey, neat. I thanked him. Long drive from the airport? he asked. A few hours. Beautiful, though. I'd never seen it before. He nodded slowly as though this confirmed something. Most Americans haven't. Mary always described it well. She just undersold the green. Something close to a smile crossed his face and was gone. She left young. You remember what you remember. From the kitchen came the sound of Callum's laughter and Freddy's voice rising to meet it. Eamon glanced toward the sound, then back to the fire. He's a lively one, I offered. He is, Amon said. He turned his glass in his hand. How old? He turned three a few months ago. He nodded again. A log shifted in the fire, and he watched it settle. He'll want to stay close to the house while you're here, he said, without looking up. The wood comes right up to the edge of the village on the north side. Children go in and sometimes get lost for days. He said it in the way you'd say anything, seemingly unconcerned with the sinister tone of the remark. Then he took a sip from his glass and looked back at the fire. I winced with a sip of the whiskey he'd given me. Well, at his age we don't let him wander much at all, I said. Amon grunted in agreement and then spoke again. Your boy's a little sprite. Wild green eyes on him. I wasn't sure what sort of response that merited. I gave a little laugh I use when I haven't heard someone correctly, but don't want to ask them to repeat themselves. Eamon ignored it. The ruckus from Freddy and Callum in the next room crescendoed, and I almost stood to intervene. Then I heard Mary's voice and knew she was corralling Freddy before something fragile got broken. Our Mary knows this town well, Eamon said. She wandered to the wood when she was a little nipper. Not much bigger than your boy. Oh yeah? I said mildly. Privately I was hoping to hear some old stories of Mary as a wild youth while we were here. She was already a grown woman when we met after college. I never had any insight into her life before. When she spoke about this place, she said the sort of things that confirm someone did indeed have a childhood. But without knowing Ireland, it was really hard to understand her. As I waited, in vain, for Eamon to say more, Freddie burst through the threshold of the parlor. Daddy, granddad says I'm making dinner. I looked at Eamon and raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. He tilted his head back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes. Mary's childhood bedroom had been tidied for guests. Two single beds sat against opposite walls with a narrow lane of hardwood floor between them. I surveyed the room with theatrical disappointment. No posters, I said. Mary was unbraiding her hair. What? No posters! No evidence of teenage rebellion. I was promised embarrassing formative years. There were never any posters. Not even I cast around. Who's big in Ireland? Who would a teenage girl in old Dooling Town I gestured broadly at the window. Who would she have on her wall? Mary looked at me. Rod Stewart, I said. Rod Stewart. Big in Ireland? Rod Stewart is Scottish, Mike. Also, I was a teenager at the same time you were. The nineties? Enya, then. Oh, brilliant. Enya is huge. Enya is timeless. Where are the Enya posters? Go to bed, Mary said. I sat on the edge of the mattress. It creaked in a way that suggested it had been there since Mary was actually a teenager. She crossed the narrow gap between the beds and kissed me once, then smoothed the hair back from my forehead, the way she did when she thought I was worried about something. Two single beds, I said. Very romantic. It's my father's house. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. The house had gone quiet. Down the hall I could hear nothing from Freddy's room, which meant he was either asleep or climbing something in the dark. Can I ask you something? I said. Hmm? Amon. The thing he said about the woods. She looked at me in the mirror as she brushed her hair. What about it? Two things, actually. A warning. The children go in and get lost for days. And then something about you getting lost there as a kid. I wasn't lost, Mary said. I was never lost. I just played there sometimes. We all did. He made it sound like a hazard. He's old. Mary. She was quiet for a moment. It's superstition. Old Irish superstition. People here, older people especially, they have ideas about the woods. About what's in them. They tell stories to keep the kids from wandering off. Trolls, I said. You have the wrong country again. It would be fairies. The good people, Mary said. The good people? I asked, sarcasm creeping in. It's what you call them to stay on their good side, Mary explained. Does Tinkerbell have a bad side? I asked, smiling broadly. Mary shot me a look in the mirror and carried on brushing her hair. Okay. Not Tinkerbell. Not Tinkerbell, she said. That's not That's an American thing. Disney. The Irish fairy is different. Different how? She seemed to choose her words carefully. They're not benevolent isn't the right word. They're not good or bad exactly. They have their own interests. They can be kind. But they can be very unkind. Unkind how? I asked. I was smiling still, playing along. Mary climbed into her bed and gathered the quilt to her chin. Oh, you know, pranks and the like. She said it lightly, but she paused before she said it, and I noticed, but then let it go. She snapped off the lamp on her nightstand, and the house settled around us into silence. The bakery was at the edge of the village square, a low-fronted place with fogged windows and a handwritten sign. Collum pushed through the door like he owned it and immediately began a loud conversation with a woman behind the counter. Mary followed him in. I stayed just outside with Freddie, who was more interested in the cobblestones than the pastries. The square was quiet in the morning. A few people moved across it with purpose. A man with a dog, a woman with a canvas bag, and a couple of older men occupied a bench near the center, doing nothing in particular. The sky was the color of a clean sheet. Freddy crouched to examine something between the stones. I stood over him with my hands in my jacket pockets and watched the square. He'd barely touched his breakfast. He never ate much. He'd make up for it at his next growth spurt, Mary always said. Mary appeared in the bakery window and waved me in. I held up a finger and pointed at Freddy. I shook my head. She mouthed something and pointed at the pastry case. I turned to Freddie. But what do you want, a muffin or there was a woman crouched beside him. I hadn't seen her approach. She was old and small, dressed in dark layers. Her face was close to Freddy's as she spoke to him in a low voice I couldn't make out. Freddy was listening with that particular stillness he reserved for things that genuinely interested him. I closed the distance in two steps and put my hand on Freddy's shoulder. Hey, Bud, I said, and looked squarely at the woman. She looked back at me without alarm. Her eyes were sharp and entirely unbothered. I was just chatting to the little imp, she said pleasantly. He's a proper one. She straightened, unhurried. She gave Freddie one last look of what seemed like genuine approval and moved off across the square without waiting for a response from me. I watched her go. Freddie went back to the cobblestones. Mary appeared at my elbow. What was that? Some woman. She was right in his face, talking to him. I only looked away for a second. Mary watched the woman's retreating figure, and her expression shifted. Mike, her voice was quiet and even. That's Briid De Fuelin. She's a church lady. She's here every morning. She's completely harmless. Well, I didn't know that. I know you didn't, she said. She'd said it without heat, but it landed. This isn't New York. You don't need to run at every person who says hello to him. I didn't answer. Callum had come to stand in the doorway of the bakery with a small paper bag and he was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read. Not unkind, but not without judgment either. I looked down at Freddy, who had produced Dave from his coat pocket and was walking the lizard across the stones. Okay, I said. Yeah, you're right. Mary touched my arm once and went back inside. Callum held the door for her and followed without comment. I stayed outside another moment. The old woman had crossed the square and disappeared between two buildings. I took a slow breath of cold air. Briid Nefuelin, church lady, perfectly harmless. Three days passed, the way good days do, quietly and without incident. Callum had opinions about what we needed to see and the confidence to act on them. We drove the coast road twice, once in sun, and once in mist so thick the sea disappeared entirely. We walked the ruins of a church so old that Callum couldn't tell us with certainty who had built it or why they'd stopped using it. Freddy collected rocks and had to be limited to choosing five to keep. He took home ten. On the second afternoon, Mary ran into a woman outside the butcher's shop. Shabon, a friend from childhood. Back in dueling six months to look after her mother. They stood on the pavement catching up while I took Freddy to watch a sheepdog dozing in the back of a parked truck. When Mary rejoined us, she was quieter than she'd been, in the way you get after an unexpected reminder of the time that's passed. Meals at Callum's were generous and loud. He cooked the way he did everything, with total commitment and no apparent recipe. Freddy ate little of what was put in front of him, but received praise from Callum after every bite he did take. Amon was there each evening, pleasant enough, occupying his chair by the fire. He asked me reasonable questions about my work and nodded at the answers. He was good with Freddy in a hands-off way, acknowledging him, never ignoring him, but keeping a certain distance. I couldn't tell if that was temperament or simply the habit of a man who had never had children of his own. One night, Callum produced a bottle of something unlabeled and poured generously. We sat around the table long after the plates were cleared. At some point, Freddie fell asleep against Mary's arm, and neither of us moved to put him to bed. By the third night I had stopped bracing myself against the place. Late that night, I woke at some small hour to a sound I couldn't place. It was high and wavering, rising and falling at irregular intervals, not loud, but very present. A high, keening sound like a cry. I lay still and listened. Wind, I thought. The coast was half a mile away, and the village offered little by way of shelter. The walls of Callum's house were thick, but old, pocked and mortared and remortared over what had to be centuries. There were gaps and things like that, places where the air found its way in and out and made whatever sound it liked. I listened for a long time. At home I liked sleeping through storms. There's something comforting about hearing the wind press on the house or the rain tap on the roof. But I didn't like this. I peered into the darkness. Mary slept undisturbed in the other bed. Down the hall I heard nothing from Freddie. I lay still for another few minutes, and then gave up on the pretense of sleep. I pulled back the covers and crossed the hall to Freddy's room. He was asleep, on his back, with his arms thrown wide, the way he always slept, as though falling from a great height. Dave was on the pillow beside him. I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched his chest rise and fall, then step back into the hall. From downstairs a faint light flickered softly into the stairwell. And voices no, one voice. Low and rhythmic. I came down the stairs carefully, avoiding the third step which I had already learned to distrust. The parlor was lit by the fire, burning low. Amen sat in his chair. He was not asleep. He was looking at the fire and speaking quietly, almost to himself, in a cadence that took A moment to recognize his verse. I stopped in the doorway. He either heard me or sensed me and looked up without surprise, as though he'd been expecting company. Couldn't sleep, I said. No, he agreed. Not with her hackles up like this. He nodded to the window, the trees bending in the driving wind. I didn't ask who she was, choosing to think he meant Mother Nature, but scarcely believing it. I came in and sat in the chair across from him. The fire had gone to coals and the room was warm, but not hot. He reached for the unlabeled bottle on the side table and raised it in my direction. I nodded, and he poured. What were you reciting? I asked. He looked back at the fire. Something my mother taught me, something her mother taught her. A poem of a sort. He was quiet for a moment. Then without looking at me, he began again. They come when the green is deep and old, when the hawthorn stands alone on the hill. They take what shines, what laughs, what's bold, and leave behind what's cold and still. No lock will hold, no prayer we'll keep, no mother's arm, no father's eye. They move between the wake and sleep and mark the ones the green would keep. The fire shifted. Amon lifted his glass and drank. That's a cheerful one, I said. Something twitched at the corner of his mouth. They weren't cheerful people, the ones who made these things. His eyes remained on the fire. I finished my whiskey and set the glass down. Well, I said, and stopped, because I didn't have anywhere to go from there. Aaman nodded as though I had said something sensible. Get some sleep, he said. That boy will be up early. I climbed the stairs. In the bedroom Mary was breathing slowly, turned toward the wall. I got into bed and looked at the ceiling, listening to the house. I thought about waking her. I ran through how that conversation would go. The poem, the flatness of Eamon's voice as he recited it, the way and mark the ones the green would keep, had landed with a weight of a warning rather than a rhyme. I thought about her face when I told her and what it would do to her, sleeping in her father's house, bringing this to her in the dead of the night. I turned over and resolved to say nothing in the morning. The phone call ran long. It always did. I sat in the car with the phone pressed to my ear and watched the clock on the dashboard tick past twenty minutes while my colleague in New York walked me through a problem that could have been an email. Through the windshield I could see the edge of the market. Canvas stalls, a crowd moving slowly through them, the ordinary noise of a Saturday morning. I said what needed to be said and ended the call and got out of the car. As I walked the rise to the market, I thought to myself how easy life was here, and for a moment I mused on the idea of retiring here with Mary when the time came. Then I heard her. Mary. She was standing in the middle of the market, turning in a slow circle, and the sound she was making was not a word. It was an animal cry I'd never heard her make. A shock of panic rushed over my scalp, and my mouth went dry. Callum was beside her with both hands raised, saying something I couldn't hear. Amon stood a few feet back, scanning the crowd with a fixed, pale expression. I ran to them. What is it? No one spoke. I looked around them in a panic. Where's Freddy? Mary turned to me. Her face was a thing I had never seen before and hoped to never see again. It was contorted into a grimace, like a tragedy mask. Her breath came and choked, raking gasps. We can't find him, Callum said. He was just here. Just a moment. Just now. Who saw him last? I demanded. Who was watching him? No one answered. They looked at each other in the way that people look at each other when the answer is that everyone assumed someone else had it handled. Michael, Callum started. I didn't wait. I turned and started moving through the stalls, pushing through the crowd, calling his name. Freddie. Freddy. My voice came out strange. Alien, too high and cracking. People turned to gawk. I didn't care. I went into the first shop I came to, a narrow place selling wool products, and asked the woman behind the counter if she'd seen a small boy, three years old, dark hair, green eyes. She shook her head, and I was already back outside. I ran from shop to shop along the market's edge. A butcher, a bookshop, a place selling candles that smelled of something floral, but all I could smell was soot. I was shouting by the third shop, raving by the fifth. I looked at my watch. It had been thirteen minutes. The shopkeepers' faces, petrified, I'm sure, were blanks to me. I couldn't say who I'd seen or shouted at. Finally I stopped in the middle of the street and couldn't remember which shops I'd already tried and had to start again. I don't know why. I kept thinking about his hands. The way he held Dave against his chest when he was tired, the lizard tucked up under his chin like a little green secret. The way he reached for my hand in parking lots without looking, just knowing I'd be there. Nineteen minutes. And his laugh, the one that built and built until it tipped over into a helpless squeal. Every time I pushed open another shop door, I braced for it, certain for a half second that I'd find him on the other side, delighted with himself, having wandered somewhere new and wonderful. Every door I opened was wrong. At some point I was crying. I don't know when it started. At every turn I saw the trees. I couldn't stop my gaze from drifting back to the tree line. Twenty-five minutes. It was there at the edge of everything, past the last stall, past the village limit, where the road became a track and the track became nothing. The forest came right to the edge, the way Amen had said it would. Dark between the trunks, even in the full daylight. Still, in a way that the rest of the morning wasn't. I pulled my eyes away and kept moving. If I had to search the forest I would. Then I saw her. Briid Nefuelin, the church lady. Perfectly harmless, moving quickly along the far edge of the market with her head down. She was carrying something. A large bundle hoisted against her chest, rolled canvas or a rug, bulky enough that it bent her forward under the weight of it. I don't know what I thought. I wasn't thinking. I crossed the market at a run and got in front of her. She stopped and looked up at me with those sharp, unbothered eyes. I was already grabbing for the bundle, already shouting about my son, about Freddy, the words coming out in no particular order. I was possessed. She didn't resist. She released the bundle and I tore it open. It unrolled onto the cobblestones and was empty. A dirty old rug. She stood and watched me kneel over it. I ran my hands uselessly over the empty, woven fabric. She didn't say a word. A hand came down on my shoulder, heavy and sure. Eamon. He got an arm under mine and hauled me upright. I was still crying and couldn't stop. The market had gone quiet around us, a ring of faces I didn't know, watching. Breed Nefuelin gathered her rug from the ground with a calmness that would shame me later. Aaman steered me away from the crowd, around the back of a pub, to a bench that sat against the stone wall in the patch of pale sun. He sat me down and stood in front of me with his hands on his knees, looking at me steadily until my breathing slowed enough to approach something like a sentence. He won't have gone far, Aamon said. His voice was level. This is a small place. There are people looking. Callum has the constables on it. The woods, I said. Eamon said nothing. The woods are right there, I said. You told me, you said there are folks looking, Amon said again. He sat down beside me and put a hand briefly on my back. You need to be still for a moment. You're no use to the we lad like this. I put my face in my hands. Behind us the market was beginning to move again, voices low and purposeful. I could hear Mary somewhere still calling Freddie's name. Her voice had found words again, which was somehow worse, to hear her again, living this. I thought about her hand on my forehead the night before, the small, ordinary kindness of it. It felt like something that had happened on another continent. Freddie had been missing for thirty-eight minutes. I lifted my head and looked miserably at the tree line over the rooftops of the village. The station was a small building on the east side of the village. Two rooms and a corridor that smelled of old coffee and photocopier toner. They sat us at a table in the larger room and someone put mugs in front of us. We drank without tasting anything. A detective named Ronan She sat across from us. He was young for the job, or seemed it. He asked his questions carefully and we answered them, and then he asked them again, slightly different, and we answered them again. At some point I understood that this was procedure and stopped resenting it. Mary had stopped crying. That was almost harder to watch. She sat very straight, with both hands around her mug and stared at the middle distance and answered every question in a flat, precise voice. I kept my hand on her arm. She didn't acknowledge it, but she didn't move away. Twice I stood up to leave, and she he talked me back into my chair. There were people looking, he said. More people than I could be. I knew he was right and sat down and hated him for it. Where would he go? Mary said, for what felt like the dozenth time. Not to She, to herself, to me, to the room. He doesn't know this place. He wouldn't just walk somewhere. He wouldn't. He follows things, I said. A dog, a bird. He'd follow something without thinking. Mary nodded slowly. We had established this. We kept running to it as though it might eventually tell us something new. Callum had refused to come to the station. He and Aamon were somewhere out in the village with a group of men I'd never met, covering ground. I was glad someone was moving. I couldn't stand that it wasn't me. Mary looked up at some point and went still. Chapon came through a door at the far end of the corridor, escorted by a uniformed officer. No cuffs, no visible distress. She walked calmly, her coat still on. But she didn't look our way, which struck me as deliberate, and she was taken into one of the back offices, and the door was closed. Mary was on her feet. That's Chabon, she said. I see her, I said. Why is she here? She he looked at her, then at me. I introduced her to Freddy, Mary said. She was looking at Sheehe now with an intensity that made him shift in his seat. Three days ago, outside the butcher's. She hadn't seen him before that. She'd never met him. Mary, I want to know why she's here. Nobody comes back to this village. Nobody. She moved back to care for her mother, I said. She told us that herself. That's what she said. Mary. She sat back down. She picked up her mug and set it down without drinking. Her jaw was tight. She said something measured about standard procedure and people coming in voluntarily to share information, and Mary listened to it with the expression of someone who had stopped believing in ordinary explanations. I understood it. I didn't correct her again. The room was quiet for a long time. Someone typed somewhere. A radio crackled briefly and went silent. I wanted to be running. Nobody was running. Shehe's phone rang. He looked at the screen and stood, turning slightly away from us. He answered and listened. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, Thank you. And then we're coming. And he ended the call. He turned back to us. The careful professional expression had shifted into something more human. He blew out a long breath. We have him. They'd found Freddy at the edge of the wood. That was all we were told, and for the time being it was enough. He was unharmed, no explanation for how he'd gotten there. He'd been sitting in the grass at the tree line as though he'd stopped to rest, and one of Callum's friends had nearly walked past him. In the car, on the way back to the house, Freddie sat in his car seat and looked out the window and said nothing. Mary had him by the hand across the gap between the seats. I watched them both in the rearview mirror and felt something loosen in my chest that I thought might never loosen again. The constable had cautioned us not to press Freddy on the particulars of the time he was missing. He would share what he could. He'd been cleared medically and that's what mattered. The few questions Mary and I had asked him were met with laughter or Freddy bouncing them back to us in a silly voice. Callum had a fire going by the time we got back. He held Freddy for a long time in the doorway and didn't say anything, which was unlike him. Eamon stood back, looking at Freddy. His eyes narrowed. He nodded at me once and I nodded back. He's all right, Callum said finally. More to himself than to me. He is, I said. We resigned ourselves to silence, broken only by the occasional pop or hiss from the fireplace. Mary had taken Freddy up to bed herself. After thirty minutes or so I heard her softly pace from Freddy's room to ours. I stood at the foot of the stairs, trying to decide if I'd be able to sleep if I went up. And that's when I heard something. It came from the top of the stairs, small and clear, winding its way down through the dark of the hallway. Freddy's voice, and not Freddy's voice. The melody was one I didn't recognize, something old sounding, with a lyt that rose and fell in a way that felt considered and too precise for a three-year-old who mostly sang the wrong words to television themes. It was full, it was unhurried. It was, in some way I couldn't name, not a sound my child ever made. I stood still. The sound stopped. I went upstairs and looked in on him. He was in bed, eyes closed, Dave tucked under his arm. The room was quiet. His chest rose and fell. Tired, I thought. We were all shattered. Children did strange things after frightening days. They processed things in ways adults didn't understand. He'd heard something at Callum's, a song on the radio, something one of the search party had been humming. He was three. He repeated things. I pulled his door to and went to bed. We had two days left in dueling before we flew home. Freddy woke the next morning in good spirits, which was a relief. He came downstairs ahead of us, and Callum made a production of his entrance. I watched him move through the kitchen, steady, bright eyed, apparently unbothered by the previous day in every way that mattered. Children were resilient. Everyone said so. He ate Callum's breakfast with a focus that surprised me. Not the picking and negotiating I was used to. The half-eaten toast pushed to the edge of the plate. No, he cleaned everything in front of him and looked up for more. Callum, delighted, gave it. I told myself the ordeal had worked up an appetite, the fresh air, the drama of it. Mary set a plate in front of him and he went at it without ceremony, without the usual deliberation over what touched what. When I reached across to move his cup so he wouldn't knock it over, he turned and looked at me with an expression that stopped my hand. Not anger exactly, something faster than anger, something wild. His eyes on mine for just a moment, flat and assessing. And then it was gone, and he was eating again. I pulled my hand away and said nothing. Dave sat on the windowsill where Freddy had left him that morning. He stayed there all day. Freddy walked past him twice without a glance. It had been at least a year since I'd seen that lizard more than arm's reach from my son, for more than a few minutes at a stretch. I put Dave on the kitchen table at one point, within easy reach. Freddy ignored him. Jet lag, I thought. The disruption of routine? Trauma expressed itself in strange ways in small children, especially. I was fairly sure I'd read that somewhere. He'd be himself again once we were home, in his own room, with his own things around. But then I began to watch Mary watching him. She did it carefully, surreptitiously, small glances across the room while her hands were busy with something else. At dinner she sat at the corner of the table closest to him, which was her usual spot, but she didn't reach over to wipe his face the way she normally would. She kept her distance by an inch or two. I wasn't sure she knew she was doing it. That night, after Freddy was in bed, I came into the kitchen and found her standing in the doorway of the sitting room. She wasn't doing anything. She was looking at the chair where Freddie had been sitting an hour before, her arms crossed low against her stomach. I watched her for a moment. Mary? She turned. Whatever had been on her face before was gone before I could read it fully. She gave me a small, tired smile and said she was heading upstairs. We went back to the market the next morning. Something to do, maybe. Somewhere to be that wasn't Callum's house. Perhaps we wanted to take the curse off the place. I resolved to keep him within arm's reach and never take my eyes from him. Freddy moved ahead of us along the stalls, stopping to look at things without touching them, which was itself unusual. Normally he had to be physically redirected from handling merchandise. Mary and I walked a few paces behind him. I kept my eyes on him as Mary spoke. I need to tell you something, she said. She wasn't looking at me, she was watching Freddie. Okay. She was quiet for a moment. Freddie had stopped to peer at a display of snow globes. The way he's been, she said. Since they found him the eating, his lizard, the way he looked at you yesterday. He's had a terrible experience. We all have. I know that, she said. He needs time. We get home, we get back to routine. Mike. She said it quietly, but it stopped me. I think something happened to him in those woods. Something we might not have a name for. I looked at her. What does that mean? She kept her eyes on Freddy. There are stories, old ones, about children who go into the woods and come back changed, but not themselves. I understood what she was saying, and I wish I didn't. Mary a changeling, she said. Just like that, flat and plain. The way she'd answered Sheehe's questions at the station. I looked at Freddy, who had moved on to the next shelf, and was running his hand along a row of miniature Irish flags. My son, three years old, dark hair, green eyes. That's a fairy story, I said. I kept my voice low. That's something people told each other hundreds of years ago to explain things they didn't understand. Sick children. Children who had seizures or fevers or I know the history of it, Michael. Well then you know it's not real. She said nothing. Mary, I turned to face her. Listen to what you're saying. You're telling me our son is what exactly? That something took him and left something else? That's what you believe. I don't know what I believe. You've been through something traumatic. We both have. The local superstition is getting to your head. Amon's poem, the stuff about the woods, all of it. It's been in the air since we got here. And you grow up with these stories. Of course they're surfacing now, I paused. Are you even sleeping at night? She looked at me then. Something moved across her face. Don't do that. I'm just asking. You're dismissing me, she said. I'm worried about you. I turned back to Freddy. That's our son, I said. She turned back to him. He'd picked up one of the flags and was holding it up to the light, waving it slowly. Is it? she said quietly. I felt a flare of something I wasn't proud of. Not fear, not concern, but revulsion. That Mary could look at our child and think that, that she could stand here in the cold morning air and say that out loud about him. Like he was some alien creature. It was unloving in a way I hadn't thought her capable of. It was, if I'm being honest with myself, in the most private part of my mind, a kind of madness. I didn't say any of that. Freddy set the flag down gently and moved on to the next stall. We followed him in silence. At night, I found Aamon alone by the fire. I hadn't planned what I was going to say. I sat down across from him and he looked at me with those steady, unsurprised eyes and waited. Mary thinks there's something wrong with Freddy, I said. Not wrong, like not medical. Some other kind of wrong. Eamon said nothing. She used the word changeling, I said. I watched his face. I noticed that he was not at all shocked. I need you to tell me that it's grief talking. That it's the shock of what happened in the story she grew up with and being back here. I need you to tell me that. Amon looked at the fire for a long time. There's a woman, he said. Bried Nefuelin. You met her. I stared at him. The church lady. She knows these things better than I do, Ayman said. Better than anyone in this village. He turned his glass in his hand. If you want to understand what Mary's telling you, go see Bried. I accused that woman of taking my son. She knows that. And she'll still talk to me? She's not the type to hold a grudge. Go in the morning, before nine. Breid Nefuelin lived in a narrow house on the north side of the village, two streets from the market. I knocked at 8 30. She opened the door before I'd finished knocking, which suggested she'd been expecting me, which I decided to not think about. She brought me into a small sitting room and poured tea without asking. She sat across from me, with her hands folded. I told her what Mary had said. I told her about the eating and about Dave, and about the look Freddy had given me over the lunch plate. I told her about the singing I'd heard on the stairs. I kept my voice steady, and felt faintly ridiculous, but kept going anyway. She listened without interrupting. She showed no ill will, despite my theatrics on the street days before. When I finished she was quiet for a moment, and then she said, What do you know about the good people? What Mary's told me, what Amon recited, fairy stories. She looked at me the way she looked at me in the market square, sharp, unbothered, entirely without judgment. The changeling is not a story people invented for amusement, she said. It was an explanation for something they witnessed. A child who was one thing and then another, who looked the same but had lost whatever it was that made them themselves. She paused. The old people believed that what was taken was kept, that the good people don't destroy what they take, but they keep it. You're saying my son is still out there? I am saying that's what the old people believed. What do you believe? She picked up her tea. I believe there are things in this world that have been here longer than we have, and that don't wish us well. I believe the wood on the north side of the village is one of the places they are closest to us. She set her cup down. I believe your wife is not wrong to be frightened. They're patient things. Clever. The changeling will watch and listen and learn. In time it can become very convincing. And if it can do that, then what's the difference? I drove back to Callum's house in a state I couldn't name, not belief. I wasn't there, but the rational framework I'd been maintaining since the market, since Mary had said that word out loud, had developed a crack I couldn't talk myself out of. I wanted to get out of dueling. I watched him differently that afternoon. Freddy sat on the floor of the sitting room while I read in the chair nearby. He played quietly, moving objects from one place to another with a methodical patience that tugged at something. He'd always played with noise and chaos and abandon. This was something else. He looked up at me. Can I have the flute? he said. I lowered my book. What flute, bud? He held my gaze. The flute, he said again, as though clarifying were beneath him. I looked toward the kitchen, where the tin whistle hung on its nail above the door. Where it had hung, presumably for years. Freddy had been in this house less than a week, and I'd never seen him look at it twice. That's granddad's, I said. That's not a toy. He looked at me for a moment longer, then returned to his objects, apparently satisfied to let the matter drop. It was after midnight when I found his bed empty. I'd gotten up for water and looked in out of habit, and the bed was empty. Dave was on the pillow. The window was closed. I went through the house quickly and quietly, not wanting to wake Mary, not yet knowing what I would say if I did. Panic was crawling up my back and across my skull as I went. The back door was unlatched. Freddy was in the garden. The night was clear and cold, and he was standing in the center of a small rectangle of grass, shirtless, bathed in moonlight, the tin whistle at his lips. The sound that came from it was not the sound a child makes learning an instrument. It was not exploratory or accidental. It was a melody. The same melody I'd heard on the stairs the night we'd brought him home, that old, unplaceable thing rising and falling in the dark garden, with a certainty that stopped me in the doorway. I stood and listened. It was beautiful. That was the thing I wasn't prepared for. Not eerie, not jarring, it was beautiful in the way that very old music is, unhurried and arresting. Some part of me didn't want it to stop. Some part of me wanted to stand in that doorway in the cold and let him play. If it was him playing. But beneath my wonder, I knew that every second I stood there was a second something was happening to my son. Whatever this was, whatever was playing that whistle in the dark, it was doing it because I hadn't stopped it, because I was standing in a doorway listening like a foolish little man under a spell. I stepped outside. The grass was cold and wet under my feet. He was smaller than he'd ever looked indoors, standing there in the moonlight, his small, bare shoulders entirely still. He saw me right away. The music stopped. He lowered the whistle and looked at me. We stood there in the cold, and he didn't say anything. Somewhere down the street a dog barked. The ordinary world coming back. I crouched down. Freddie, where did you get that? He hummed to himself. Freddy, the whistle, where did you get it? He held it out to me. I took it. It was the one from above the door. What were you playing just now? He shook his head, with the serene confidence of someone who knows they will not be believed, but doesn't particularly care. I scooped him up and carried him inside. Upstairs I put him back to bed. Then I trudged downstairs as though I were dreaming. I replaced the whistle on its nail. At the foot of the stairs I turned back and looked at it. I couldn't be sure if I'd just hung it there or if I'd been dreaming. We said our goodbyes and drove to the airport and flew home. I don't remember much of it. I remember Freddy sleeping against Mary's arm on the plane, and Mary looking out the window at the dark over the Atlantic, and neither of us saying much. Home was a relief, in the way that ordinary things are a relief after extraordinary ones. Our street, our driveway, the particular smell of our house. The first thing Freddie did when we got through the door was find Dave. The lizard had been in his bag the whole trip home, packed by Mary before we left Collum's. Freddie hadn't asked for it once. Now he went straight to it, pulled it out, tucked it under his arm without ceremony. I watched it happen from the doorway and didn't say anything. I didn't look at Mary. Over the days that followed, he came back to himself in increments. The eating leveled off. Meals became negotiations again. Food was pushed around plates. Certain textures were objected to on principle. The chaos returned to his play. He sang the wrong words to things and laughed at himself for it. His laugh, the one that built and tipped and became the helpless squeal. The first time I heard it fully in our kitchen, I had to leave the room for a minute. The relief was almost crippling. Mary started to touch him again, small gestures, smoothing his hair, picking him up without thinking about it, the easy, unconscious, physical language of a mother with her child. I watched it return to her gradually. Like feeling coming back into a limb. One evening I came downstairs to find her on the sofa, with Freddie asleep across her lap, her hand resting on his back, and the expression on her face was one I recognized. It was just love, plain and uncomplicated. I told myself, it was over. Whatever that town had done to us, we were home now, and Freddie was Freddie, and Mary was Mary. The rational world had reasserted itself in the way the rational world generally did when you gave it enough time and distance. It was a Sunday morning, maybe three weeks after we'd come home. Freddie was at the kitchen table, with a dry cup of cereal and a collection of small plastic animals he'd arranged in a row. Dave was propped against the cereal box. Mary was at the counter with her coffee, and I was reading. Freddy picked up a plastic elephant and walked it across the table toward Dave. He stopped it in front of the lizard. Dave, he said seriously, this is Gerald. Mary laughed. I felt something release in my chest that I hadn't known was still held. I watched him introduce Gerald to each animal in the row, seriously, by name. It was perfectly him. The voice, the ceremony of it, the names. Gerald, Patricia, enormous Steve. I sat there and let myself savor it, let myself believe that the boy at my kitchen table was my son and had always been my son. That Ireland was a beautiful, green place we had gone and come back from, and that was all. Mary was saying something to me about a birthday gift from my sister, and I was nodding. I was looking past her at Freddy, who had gone quiet over his animals, moving them from place to place with a focused, methodical patience. And then I heard it. It was small and idle, the way children hum when they're not thinking about anything. His eyes were on the table. His hands moved the animals. The sound came out of him the way breathing comes out of a person, without thought or effort. It was the melody, the one from the garden. Mary was still talking, she hadn't heard it. I looked at her. She was smiling at Freddie now, her coffee cup at her lips. Her eyes were warm and content.

Channel Outro

SPEAKER_00 59:54

Thanks for listening to Tonight's Terror. If you enjoyed the story, follow, rate, and review on your favorite podcast platform. It helps new listeners find the show. Visit Tonight'sTerror.com for all our stories, merch, and more. Until next time, sleep well.