The Press: A Halloween Short Story

THE PRESS 

A Halloween Short Story 

Graham Masterton 

CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS 

Baltimore, MD 

2012
 

Copyright © 2012 by Graham Masterton
 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cemetery Dance Publications

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First Digital Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-383-2

Cover Artwork Copyright ©
2012 by iStockPhoto.com 

Digital Design by DH Digital Editions
 

Few people shed any tears when Padraic Rossa died at the age of 89, even his publishers, because he hadn’t produced a book that was either comprehensible or commercial since the mid-1970s, and he was probably the most cantankerous man that Irish letters had ever known. Even Brendan O’Neill, who was loved by authors everywhere for his emollient reviews in the
Cork Examiner
, had called Rossa “a foul temper on legs.”  

Rossa’s last work
All Hallows Eve
was published in 1997 and was little more than a splenetic rant about the way in which the Irish had allowed the rest of the world to turn a sacred Celtic ritual dating back to the 5th century into a “cash cow for the makers of plastic pumpkins and Hallmark Cards.” 

“It was one thing to turn our folk music into fiddle-de-dee for the tourist trade, and our magical beliefs into garden gnomes. But by allowing the commercialization of Halloween we have dragged the souls of our dead ancestors out of the eternal shadows and hung them up in the common light of the marketplace for every inquisitive passer-by to finger.” 

When it was published two weeks before Halloween, Rossa’s book was widely excoriated in the book pages of the
Irish Times
and several other newspapers and magazines for being “a saliva-spraying welter of Celtic superstition and Druidic mumbo-jumbo by a man who seems to believe that ‘fun’ is a notifiable disease.” 

You no doubt remember, though, that five of the reviewers who gave Rossa such critical notices disappeared on the night of All Hallows’ Eve, and no trace of them was ever found. There was a lengthy investigation by the Garda Síochána, during which Rossa was questioned several times, but he made no comment about their vanishing, except to say that they had probably got what they deserved. Nervous jokes were made in the press about “the curse of Padraic Rossa” and stories were told in Henchy’s Bar that he had summoned up Satan to drag his critics down to hell, their way lit by embers, in turnip lanterns, as Satan did to all unrepentant sinners, at Halloween. 

After he died, Rossa’s huge Victorian house on the steep hill overlooking the River Lee in Montenotte came up for auction almost immediately, since there were bills to be settled and Rossa’s books hadn’t made any decent money in decades. The coal bill alone hadn’t been paid for six-and-a-half years.  

I was called up by
Irish Property
to write a feature about the house and I went up there one slick wet Thursday morning with John McGrorty, who was to take the photographs. John was a very humorous fellow with a head of hair like a bunch of spring carrots and a taste for ginger tweed jackets. 

We parked in Lovers’ Walk and John took a selection of pictures of the outside. The house was a four-story building in the Gothic style, painted pale green, with dark green window-frames, as tall as a cliff. I think “forbidding” would be your word for it. It stood on the brow of the hill with the river far below, and from the steep back garden you could see all of Cork City and all the way beyond to the drizzly grey-green hills. 

We rang the doorbell at the glass front porch and a young woman from the auctioneers came to answer it. A large yellowish slug was clinging halfway up the window and John touched it with the tip of his cigarette so that it shriveled and dropped onto the flagstones. 

“You’re a sadist,” I told him. 

The young woman from the auctioneers was pretty enough, with a short brown bob and a pale heart-shaped face and sea-green eyes and rimless glasses. “My name’s Fionnula,” she said, holding out her hand.  

“I’m John,” said John, “and this is Michael. Do you know what ‘Fionnula’ means in Swahili?” 

Fionnula shook her head. 

“It means ‘bespectacled beauty from the auctioneers.’” 

“Oh, yes,” she said, “and do you know what ‘John’ means in Urdu? It means ‘red-headed chancer in a clashing orange coat.’” 

“Well, girl, you give as good as you get,” John told her. “Are you going to be conducting us on a tour of these delightfully gloomy premises, then?” 

The hallway was vast. Over a marble fireplace hung a dark oil portrait of Padraic Rossa himself, clutching his lapels as if he were trying to tear them off his jacket. He had a blocky-looking head, and he looked more like a bare-knuckle boxer than a writer. 

“He was a sour-tempered man and no mistake,” said Fionnula. “I met him only the once. I came up here to make a valuation but he wouldn’t let me into the house. He said that he wouldn’t be dealing with an empty-headed young girl who knew nothing of the Celtic tradition.” 

She showed us the drawing-room with its heavy velvet curtains and its strange paintings of pale men and women, peering out of the darkness with luminous eyes. Some of them had beaks like owls, while others had foxes’-claws instead of hands. 

“You could well believe that Rossa was a close friend of his Satanic Majesty, now couldn’t you?” said John. The flashes from his camera seemed to make the people in the paintings jump, as if for a split-second he had brought them to life. 

We toured the bedrooms. The ceilings were damp, and in some places the wallpaper was hanging down. In Rossa’s own bedroom, the mattress on the four-poster bed had a dark stain in the middle of it, and there was an overwhelming smell of urine and death. 

At last we came back downstairs to take a look at the dining-room. At the far end of the room stood a huge mahogany cupboard, with carved pillars and bunches of grapes, which must have been used for storing china. In Ireland we would call a cupboard like this a press. 

“That is a massive piece of joinery and no mistake,” said John, taking pictures of it. Its finial touched the ceiling, and it had a wide drawer underneath with handles in the shape of demons’ faces, with rings through their noses. 

Fionnula turned the key in the lock and opened up the press so that we could look inside. It was completely empty, but it was unexpectedly large inside, almost three times as deep as it looked from the outside. It had that sour vinegary smell of old cupboards that have been closed up for years. 

“You could almost live in this,” said John. “In fact I think it’s bigger than my flat. And look…what’s that written on the back?” 

The back of the press was covered in lettering, faded black, with some gilded capitals. It looked like Gaelic. 

“We’ll have a picture of this,” said John. “Here, bespectacled beauty from the auctioneers, do you think you could hold my light for me?” 

He helped Fionnula to climb up into the press, and then he climbed in after her. He handed her his electronic strobe light and started to take pictures of the lettering at the back. “Now I recognize some of the words here,” he said. “
Beó duine d’éis a
anma
…that means ‘a man may live after his death.’” 

He peered at the lettering even more closely. “This is some kind of Celtic incantation…a summoning-up of dead souls. It must be connected with Rossa’s book on All Hallows’ Eve.” 

As his fingers traced the words, however, I heard an extraordinary noise. A slow, mechanical ticking, like a very loud clock, but punctuated by the clicking of levers and tumblers, and the flat
donk
sound of expanding springs. 

“What the hell’s that?” asked John, turning around. But before any of us could do anything, the huge doors to the press swung silently shut, and locked themselves, trapping John and Fionnula inside. 

“Will you open the effing doors, Michael?” shouted John. “This isn’t a joke!” 

“For God’s sake, let us out!” said Fionnula. She sounded panicky already. “I can’t stand enclosed spaces!” 

I turned the key, but the doors wouldn’t budge. I went to the sideboard and pulled open the drawers. One of them was full of tarnished cutlery, so I took out a dinner-knife and tried to pry the doors open with that. They still refused to open. Both John and Fionnula were hammering and kicking on them, but they were so solid that they didn’t even shake. 

It was then that I heard two more sounds. A high-pitched squeaking, like a screw turning, and then a sliding noise. 

“John!” I shouted. “John, are you all right? I’m going into the garden, see if I can find a shovel or a pick or something!” 

But John yelled, “The ceiling! The ceiling’s coming down!” 

“What?” 

“The ceiling’s coming down! It’s going to crush us!” 

The squeaking went on and on. I ran into the rainy garden and came back with an iron fence-post, and I beat at those doors until the fence-post almost bent double. John and Fionnula were both screaming and then I heard something break, and John crying out in agony. “
Oh Mary Mother of God save us
!
Oh Mary Mother of God
forgive me
!” 

After that there was nothing but a slow complicated crunching. I stood outside the press with my eyes filled with tears, trembling with shock. Eventually the squeaking stopped, and then I heard ratchets and cogs, and the doors to the press slowly opened themselves. Inside, there was nothing at all. No John, no Fionnula. 

For a moment I couldn’t understand what had happened to them. But then I saw blood dripping from the edge of the drawer at the bottom of the press. I took hold of the demon’s-head handles and slowly pulled it open. 

If you have never seen human beings compressed until they are less than an inch thick, it is almost impossible to describe them to you. The most horrible thing is their faces, which look like pink rubber Halloween masks, with scarlet lips and empty, liquid eyes.  

But John and Fionnula’s bodies weren’t the only remains in the drawer. Underneath them were the crushed remains of several other people, their skin as papery and desiccated as wasps’ nests.  

I could only guess how Padraic Rossa had persuaded his critics to step into his cupboard. Perhaps he had pretended to be conciliatory, and invited them up to his house to explain the mysteries of Halloween to them. Then perhaps he had suggested that they examine the Celtic incantations at close quarters. Whatever had happened, he had made sure that they, too, had a very bad press. 

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