BOOK TWO
Prologue
The Nought County Examiner
August 1, 1981​​
Murder in Nothing?
The bizarre deaths of a large family in the quiet farming community of Nothing has police baffled.
The trouble started with a whistling sound, two short trills followed by a long one, that echoed from the woods behind the Morighan family farm. James, the second to eldest of the Morighan boys, was raking leaves from the back garden at the time.
He hardly noticed the sound at first. It was faint and faraway and he was focused on dragging piles of damp maple keys from under his prized raspberry bushes. The maple keys piled up every year, spinning from the farm’s dozens of trees like flitting fairies, building up on the grass and the soil. If James did not keep on top of them, the seeds would take root and more maples would sprout up, crowding out his bushes like hostile invaders.
When he finally did notice the sound, almost as an afterthought — a weird whistling from somewhere behind him — a chill rushed over his skin and he stopped what he was doing.
The Morighan farm stood on the outskirts of a small town, one so small it was called Nothing. The only sounds generally heard around the town of Nothing were that of tractors or farming equipment, the neighing of horses or moaning of cows. But this sound was different. This sound was new. It sounded a bit human but also a bit animal, like the piping of some exotic bird.
And yet James did not raise the alarm. He always felt safe on the farm and told himself, surely, there was some innocent explanation for that otherworldly whistle.
There wasn't. A burst of white clouded his vision. His chest slammed into the garden bed. And then, darkness.
The eight victims, 52-year-old Owen Morighan, his wife, 49-year-old Catherine, and their four sons, Dermot (26), James (22), William (21) and Casey (17), along with Owen's brother Patrick (50) and his wife Tess (45), were all found dead at the scene of unknown causes.
The kitchen at the back of the farmhouse was a whirl of activity. The Morighans were about to sit down for dinner. Catherine pulled a roast out of the oven while Tess chopped carrots and Will set the table. Patrick sat with a kerchief tucked into his collar while Owen paced, complaining loudly about the town and their stubbornly held superstitions.
“This family isn’t cursed,” Owen said, waving his arms. “There are no such things as curses! But try convincing the farmers union of that. This is the third time they’ve denied me entry. Cursed? I’ll show them cursed!”
The others nodded along with Owen, and piped in with their own complaints as pots and plates clanged and steam rose from baked potatoes. No one was aware of what was happening outside.
In the next room, the Morighan's youngest daughter Moira rocked her infant son Merritt in her arms. He had been fussy that day, crying in shrill spurts. Whenever the baby cried, Moira tried to keep him away from her father, who still hadn't accepted him.
“Do you know how long and hard I’ve worked to rebuild this family’s reputation?” he had said when he had discovered Moira was pregnant. “You have destroyed all of that in a single stroke! Now we’ll have to deal with the stares and the whispers all over again!”
He had been right, of course. Moira had been foolish. She had fallen in love with a man who would not, could not, love her back.
Moira rocked the baby faster. “Quiet, Merritt, quiet,” she muttered, glancing out the window.
Mist rose in the distance, drifting out of the forest that ran behind the Morighan farm. For a moment, Moira thought a row of people stood in the mist, dressed in strange clothing as grey as the sky and brown as dead leaves. But after a blink, they were gone.
At this time forensic experts are trying to determine exactly how the victims were killed. No external wounds were found on any of the bodies.
The backdoor to the farmhouse burst open and the Morighan’s eldest son Dermot rushed in. “Trespassers!” he shouted, and the kitchen fell silent.
Then they all heard it — the whistling.
“Everyone into the basement,” Owen said. “To be safe.”
The family needed no more convincing. The whistling was strange, eerie, cold. It pierced through them like the cry of some unknown bird of prey.
Casey called the police. Will locked the doors. Dermot loaded the shotgun the family kept in a lockbox under the stairs. All the while the whistling continued, growing louder, closer, more frequent. It sounded like communication, a secret code some military group might use to pass messages back and forth.
Owen was last into the basement. He bolted the door behind him. "What did the police say?"
Casey was shivering subtly. "I don't think they took me seriously."
"Of course they didn't," Will snapped. "They never do in this town.”
Dermot paced the floor. "I have a bad feeling."
"I don't understand," Patrick said. "What's happening? Who's on the farm?"
"Where's James?” Catherine said, her eyes going wide. “He was with his raspberry bushes!”
Dermot’s eyes welled. He gave his father a look and shook his head.
"What does that mean? Where's James?” Catherine repeated as Owen hugged her and begged her to calm down.
Then, that whistle.
Moira, the Morighan’s 24-year-old daughter and her infant son Merritt miraculously survived the attack by hiding in one of the property's sprawling cornfields.
Moira sat huddled in the corner of the basement, cradling the baby in her arms. Not far from her was an iron cage. The cage had been passed down in the Morighan family for generations, from an ancestor who was a blacksmith and made transport carriages for criminals. Or so she’d been told. Moira had always found the thing creepy and did not like to be so close to it. Though right now it was preferable to being anywhere else in the house, vulnerable to whoever, whatever was out there whistling.
“Quiet,” Owen said. “They’re in the house.”
Moira shut her eyes. The baby was crying. She rocked him and whispered, “Quiet Merritt, quiet Merritt.”
Everything else was silent. The floorboards upstairs didn’t even creak. A spider could creak those floorboards!
Then there came a knock — a gentle rapping, like from a visiting neighbour, on the basement door.
Owen raised the gun. “I’m armed!”
There was a pause and then again, a RAP - RAP - RAP against the door. Louder this time.
“We’ve called the police!” Owen shouted.
Then there came an eruption of knocking. Fists pounded against every door, every wall, every surface. It was like an earthquake. The house trembled with the impact of what sounded like hundreds of rapping fists. Tess and Catherine hugged each other, crying and screaming. The boys stood behind their father, looking this way and that. Dust rained from the ceiling as the pounding, rapping sounds reverberated from all directions.
And then it stopped.
“What is this? What’s happening?” Patrick hissed.
Another sound — sizzling, like meat on a skillet. Sparks flew from the door at the top of the stairs.
Moira hugged the baby tighter. “Quiet, quiet, quiet.”
At the top of the stairs the doorknob wriggled. Then it dropped and clunked step … after step … after step down into the basement where it rolled to a stop at Owen’s feet.
Someone or something pushed on the door from the other side. It rattled but stayed put, still bolted by the storm locks. A short whistle trilled, like a signal, and — THUD! Something solid slammed against the basement door. Whoever was out there was trying to break down the door!
Moira rocked the baby again. The words, Quiet Merritt, quiet, kept running through her head. But Merritt was quiet. He had stopped screaming. She looked down at him. He was smiling.
Moira Morighan’s description of the suspects has only added more mystery to this already bizarre case. As many as twenty suspects have been described as men and women in their late teens or early twenties dressed in dark clothing.
Moira followed the baby’s gaze to the small window above her head. There, staring between the cracks in the filthy screen, was an eye — the strangest hazel eye she had ever seen. The eye winked, fingers slid open the window and a face stuck itself into the basement.
The face belonged to a boy. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen. He had rusty hair, flushed cheeks and strange hazel eyes, like stained glass. He was beautiful. It was the only word she could think to describe him. So beautiful she thought for a moment she was dreaming. So beautiful she gasped.
The others had not notice him. Her brothers were manoeuvring a laundry table up the stairs to reinforce the door while Owen shouted instructions and then added his own weight to the barricade. Patrick hugged Catherine and Tess, who were both sobbing. The door was splitting.
The boy at the window held out a hand to Moira. He smiled and dimples flashed on his cheeks. There was something about his smile. It made Merritt giggle and filled Moira with a warm, fluttery feeling, like falling in love. She stood up and put her hand in his.
Police immediately sealed off the area and scoured the Morighan family farmland and surrounding forests but found no trace of the suspects.
The next thing Moira knew, she was out in the cornfield, rushing between the stalks at a pace that felt like flying. The boy had her by the hand. The wind whistled in her ears and her eyes watered as he whisked her forward, the cornstalks whipping past her in a green blur.
When they stopped, Moira gasped in ragged breaths and hugged the baby close. How fast had they been moving? How far had they come?
The boy stood between the cornstalks, perfectly still. He wasn’t out of breath, in fact, he hardly seemed to be breathing at all. His clothing was strange, simple, like a uniform the colour of dried blood, with subtle patterns on it that were only visible up close. Most striking was what appeared to be a single embroidered arrow stitched over his left breast with black thread.
He looked Moira up and down. His beauty disoriented her. She found it hard to think as his strange eyes roamed over her body, seeming to change colour as they did so, from hazel to green to deepest blue. There was only ever one person who had ever made her feel this way — mesmerized and terrified all at once. Him. Merritt’s father. The man she loved with all her heart, though she didn’t even know his real name.
“What about the others, the rest of my family?” she asked. “Aren’t you going to help them, too?”
The boy only stared. He was so beautiful. But there was something in his eyes, now a dark shade of brown, something hard and cold. A faint curl fluttered on his lips, like a sneer.
Detective Eustace Pipes who is heading the investigation said that aside from the bodies themselves almost no forensic evidence has been recovered at the scene.
Moira started back towards the farmhouse. He stopped her. His grip on her arm was hard and cold. It hurt so much she almost screamed. But the boy slapped a hand over her mouth and held up a finger for silence. His strange eyes held a threat.
The baby cooed. And the boy looked down at him. His finger still to his lips, he released Moira slowly. She stayed still and didn’t scream. He slipped his hands under hers, underneath the baby.
“No, what are you doing?” Moira said, pulling back.
In one swift movement, the boy took the baby and pushed Moira backwards. His strength was shocking. One moment Moira had been upright, the next she was on the ground. The cornstalks all around her were bent and broken, flattened as if hit by a cyclone. She was winded, her body ached. She heaved herself to her knees. The boy now stood metres away from her, hunched over. He was laying Merritt on a tuft of grass.
Investigators are appealing to anyone who might have information that could help police identify the attackers to contact Nought County police.
The boy looked Merritt over as a doctor might. He gazed into the baby’s eyes, one then the other, opened his little mouth and examined his tongue. Then he rubbed his hands over Merritt’s tiny fingers. There was a sparkling, powdery substance on the boy’s hands, like emerald dust.
Moira dragged herself along the ground towards the baby, but before she reached him, the boy frowned, stood up and stepped away as though disappointed.
“What did you do to him?” Moira asked, her voice coming out a hoarse whisper, but when she reached Merritt, he appeared happy and unharmed.
The boy looked down at Moira and the baby and for the first time, she did not feel disoriented by his beauty. The expression on his face had tainted it. It was unmistakably one of contempt.
A gunshot! It came from the direction of the farmhouse. The boy turned immediately toward the sound. Then after one final glance at Moira and the baby, he disappeared between the cornstalks.
The motive is at this time is unknown, but based on the eyewitness descriptions, police are not ruling out the possibility that the murders were the work of a gang or a religious cult.
Moira struggled to her feet, Merritt to her chest, and then raced as fast as she could back towards the farmhouse. It took infinitely longer than she had expected. The boy must have taken her to the very edge of the family property, which was almost 2000 acres, and perhaps even onto the neighboring land. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? It had seemed to take only seconds.
When she finally emerged from the cornstalks into the Morighan’s open backyard there was no sign of the attackers. The whine of sirens rose up out of the silence. The police were coming. They were actually coming! Maybe the siren sounds had frightened off the attackers. There was hope!
She ran up the porch steps and shouldered open the backdoor. It swung forward easily and bumped against its own doorknob, now rolling in a circle on the kitchen floor. She climbed past what was left of the basement door, which was now no more than a pile of splintered planks, and then down the stairs.
Autopsies on the eight bodies will be held to determine cause of death in each case.
Moira’s family was there in the basement — her mother and father, her four brothers and her aunt and uncle. They were there, lying peacefully on the concrete floor as if they were sleeping. But she knew they weren’t sleeping. It was too late. They were gone. They were all gone.
So were their killers.
So was the boy.