The Press: A Halloween Short Story by Graham Masterton

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