Teach Ceoil

A disused church on the edge of an Irish estuary is reopened as a music venue. The sessions are lively, the crowd is warm, and the tradition feels alive again. 

But something beneath the ground is stirring. 

And the musicians have learned that the music isn’t just for enjoyment, it’s keeping something vast, old, and awake from rising too close to the surface.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:36

All right, you're here. Will you sit in now? This isn't the kind of story that you'd want put in the papers. Not ones you'd want your name tied to anyway. What I'm gonna tell you now happened here, or hereabouts. You can call it the town by the grey water if you like. It's enough to say the estuary is wide here. The tides breed in and out like some great sleeping beast. And the streets tilt slightly toward the river. As if even the cobblestones under the thinning tarmac were leaning in to listen. Now, before you tell me you've heard it, you haven't heard it from someone who was there. I was there. Or near enough to it. And I'll tell you from the off, what's wrong up there in the old church isn't a ghost in any storybook sense. If you ask me, it's something older. Something that goes on happening long after the people who built the stones are dust. You know the place I mean. The little church never quite ruined at the edge of town. With the big trees bowing over the graves and the stream beyond. They'll tell you it was built by the merchant men. Dutch or Belgians, so it said. Them ones who owned the ships, and who another people's king sold this land. Grand folk, so they say. Hard men, it said as well. The kind that had pray aloud and pay slow. Ones that had jacked the rent on those who improved the land, they took off them, then rented back. They built that particular church on an older place, the way all churches have always been built. Wise enough says you, but something of the land remembers, and it certainly never forgets the wait. There was talk when I was a young lad that the graveyard wasn't right. The grass wouldn't take root over some of the plots. There was a soft patch near the wall that never dried out. You threw a stone into it. It'd swear you heard water echo back. And no bird ever settled on the roof. I never noticed that myself till it was said. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. A church without birds is like a sky without wind. Wrong in a way you feel low down in the gut. Or maybe lower. After the church closed it down years ago, it stood there empty, the door nailed, the windows black or smashed in, ivory savouring its slow swallowing of their belfry season by season. The bow wait. People felt it was cursed ground, though no one would say by what and the landlords, well, they were all gone, their fine houses burnt down in a fire, testified to be a freak accident. Then picked at by vultures, seeking stone or lead until the council put a good end to it in the 1980s. But their bones stayed. Big vaults with weird Dutch-Belgian names carved deep enough to outlast the rain. You'd see the letters glowing wet after a storm, and sometimes they looked fresh caught as if the dead were keeping their own stones in order when no one else would. You'd think that was enough, but the town is a way of turning old wrongs into business. When the council took over the ruins, they called it heritage and before long there was talk of funding. That's how it came to be. A Tiochiole, a music house, so they call it. The first time I heard it was open again, I went. Sure I did. Curiosity is a sin they don't warn you enough about. It was a fine night, calm, and the sky low over the estuary like a hand. The church was lit from the inside with those little strings of bulbs, the kind that make even a ruin look merry. You could see the headstones through the windows, the light catching on them like rotted teeth. Inside they'd set up chairs and tables, and the smell of smoke and beer softened the air. People were laughing, tuning fiddles, stamping feet to keep warm. It was grand. It was alive for a while. Then I felt it. Not the bitterness of cold exactly. It was heavier than that. A kind of attention. Like when a room goes quiet and you know someone's behind you, but you can't hear them move. I thought maybe I was imagining it until the tune started. A slow air it was, the kind that feels like remembering something you've never lived. The squeeze box player started first. Then a flute joined, and it lifted up like mist off the river. And then you'll think I'm gone cracked. I smelled it. It wasn't the smoke, couldn't have been the beer. A smell of wet stone, old deeper than deep water. Clay turning in graves. The air shifted, thick as breath. Someone at the next table stopped tapping in, whatever passed for time. The box faltered a note, and every head turned to the far end of the church. The lights dimmed, not out, just perceptibly lower, like something was leaning on them. There was a sound, faint as paper tearing, or maybe cloth. Then the smell deepened. Seaweed, candle grease, rotten fruit, all of it, all together. The old smells of human life packed too close for too long. And the air, how do I say it? It had dundid itself. Like heat, only cold. Shapes moved where there should have been none. The windows flickered, and in the dark between them you could swear you saw faces. Not clear, not solid, but enough. Well enough. There was a man-shaped thing. Wiry, gnarled, tall but stooped, wrong in the joints, him at the edge of the light, his coat too long, his head bending low, and I swear, on all that's still homely and sincere, the eyes of the landlord's portrait on the wall turn to look right at it. You'll say that's the light. But the light doesn't look back. No one screamed, no one ran. The squeeze box player just started up again, faster and livelier this time, a real, wilder and growing desperate, the kind that keeps time from freezing, then stops silent settling. The others followed, stumbling at first, then quick, the smell thinned, the air loosened, and by the time the tune ended, the lights were steady again. We laughed, of course. It's what people do when they don't understand something. Someone made a joke about ghosts liking jigs. Another round was called, the box player's hands were shaking, but he smiled, a smile so tense it must only be returned, and that was that. Until later. When the crowd was gone and the night cold again, I walked home by the river shore, shook a bit, I'll admit. You could see the church from the hill, its lights out now, just the graveyard sliver in the moon, and from there, faint but sure, I heard it knocking. Three knocks, a pause, then three again. Not on wood, on stone. And I didn't go back for a long time. Now they play there every week, summer and winter, and the music never stops entirely. Even between tunes someone will hum or tune or tap a heel. And have you ask why they'll laugh? They'll say it's a tradition. They'll say it's for the atmosphere. I've seen it in their eyes though. They know. The old thing under the ground listens. It listens and it waits. The music keeps it drowsy, maybe. Content, if such a thing can feel such a thing. It doesn't hate us. It doesn't love us either. It's not even cruel. It's just vast and near and awake. And that's why if you're ever there and the music stops too long and the air grows heavy, don't look at the windows. Don't breathe deep. And if you hear knocking, even just the once, don't you go answering. Because it's the land itself, remembering that we are the brief ones.