The priest arrives at the parish in late April,
his name still whispered in Dublin’s corridors.
The village has not changed—same cobbled streets,
same rusted gate at the edge of the bog. He is
given a small room above the chapel, where the
walls are damp and the window faces the old
graveyard. A boy from the local GAA club
delivers his belongings, muttering about the new
priest being “not welcome.”
By midweek, the priest notices the absence of
certain names on the church register. The land
feud, long buried, resurfaces when a farmer dies
under suspicious circumstances—his body found in
the same field where his grandfather once fought
a rival family over boundary lines. The priest
is summoned to the scene, where the earth has
split open, revealing a hidden well beneath the
soil.
He begins to question the records, finding a
ledger in the sacristy that lists debts and land
swaps from 1890. One entry stands out: a
transfer of property between two families,
signed by a man who died in the Rising. The
priest’s own father’s name appears in the margin,
crossed out with a single line. A rule bites: no
one may question the land records without
consequence. The priest ignores it.
In the pub, the locals speak in hushed tones. A
woman who once worked as the parish cook tells
him of a ritual performed before the war—
offering a piece of land to the fae in exchange
for protection. The priest dismisses it as
superstition, but the next night, he hears a
voice in the chapel, singing a lullaby his
mother once sang. The voice stops when he turns.
The next morning, the altar cloth is torn, and
the holy water is gone.
The feud escalates when a tenant farmer refuses
to leave a disputed plot. The priest tries to
mediate, but the farmer’s wife accuses him of
hiding the truth. She shows him a photograph of
her husband standing beside a man who died in
the Civil War. The priest recognizes the man as
a former parishioner, now buried in the same
graveyard. A second rule bites: no one may speak
of the dead without permission. The priest
speaks anyway.
On the eve of the harvest festival, the priest
is found in the chapel, unconscious. The
villagers gather, but no one dares to enter. The
next day, the priest wakes, claiming he saw the
dead walking the fields. He confesses nothing,
but writes a letter to the bishop, asking for
reassignment. The letter is never sent. The
priest is found dead in the same field where the
first farmer died, his hands dug into the soil,
his face frozen in a look of terror.
The land remains unsettled. The parish is
abandoned within a year. The well dries up. No
one dares to claim the disputed plot. The
priest’s name is erased from the register. The
only record of his time is a single page in the
ledger, written in his hand: “The land remembers.
”
