HauntingBeauty
Chapter Four
THE Book of Fennore, Danni learned via the seemingly endless web pages she’d read between customers, was an ancient text thought to predate the Book of Kells—the illuminated manuscript written sometime in the eighth century. The Book of Kells was famous for its ingenious illustrations and the breathtaking artwork interwoven into the text. It told the story of Christianity, combining gospels with portraits, ornate canon tables, and intricate symbols. But where that book was dedicated to Christianity and was a historical treasure of Ireland, the Book of Fennore dealt with a darker side of Irish culture—the part seeped in superstition and born of its pagan ancestors. Its claim to fame came in the form of sinister legend and damning lore.
And the Book of Kells was real and on display in Dublin. The Book of Fennore was only a myth.
Or so the numerous pages she’d read claimed.
Danni tried to take comfort in that consensus. The Book of Fennore didn’t exist. Like the boogeyman or the Loch Ness monster, it wasn’t real. But she could still smell it, still sense it in the air. Still see the blood seeping from the pages and feel that dark, malevolent vibration working its way through her body.
All that from seeing it in a vision. She couldn’t imagine what it might be like to really stand in its presence. She didn’t want to even think of it. But there was a reason her mother had shown her the Book of Fennore, and Danni was afraid it had been a warning of what was to come. Of what she might be forced to face.
She rubbed her eyes. If that didn’t make her sound like a raving lunatic, she didn’t know what would.
Fennore, she read, was from the Gaelic word meaning white ghost. She noted that Fionúir, as in Ballyfionúir, was listed as a derivative. The white ghost. Was she the woman who’d appeared to Danni? It certainly fit.
Some experts speculated that the white ghost had been a pagan priestess before the birth of Christ. The Book of Fennore, they claimed, was her guide to the underworld of dark magic. Others thought the Book was propaganda created by the last of the Druid priests to instill fear into their dwindling flock of believers.
It’s thought that our ancestors were ancient Druids, Sean’s voice whispered in her head.
It was all conjecture, of course, because there was no tangible evidence that the Book of Fennore was anything but a widely circulated legend. Still, the controversy over who authored the Book raged on. Danni couldn’t help but see the irony in an argument over who might have written the Book they all agreed didn’t exist.
The disparity narrowed when it came to the content and purpose of the Book. All parties concurred that the Book of Fennore was believed to be a fearsome tool capable of harnessing the power of the universe. What was meant by that remained unknown. Likewise, how all that power could be utilized was a mystery as well.
What seemed clear to everyone was that the Book of Fennore should not be trifled with. All that power didn’t come cheap. As with most religious myths, the gifts the Book of Fennore bestowed would inevitably bring tragedy and death—worse, anyone foolish enough to use it for personal gain could ultimately unleash on the world an evil of unimaginable dimensions. The Book of Fennore could not be trusted to obey any man’s law—worthy or not.
“Terrific,” Danni muttered. “So why’s my mom got all the evil in the universe hidden in an antique coffer?”
It would take a historian to make sense of everything she had read, and Danni was far from that. But it seemed for every expert refuting the Book and its powers, there was another coughing up proof that it had existed at one time even if it did no longer. In the infinite realm of belief, the Book of Fennore had a great following. There was even a picture of it, drawn in a journal by a monk who’d lived seven hundred years ago.
All the skin on Danni’s body seemed to pull tight as she stared at the sketch. He had the asymmetrical shape right, the pitted blackness of the leather, the entwined silver and gold, and the glitter of jewels. He’d floundered when it came to duplicating the knot that locked it tight, though. Not surprising, it had been intricate and strangely fluid.
But for something that wasn’t supposed to be real, she and the monk had both imagined it in the same way.
Danni shivered, wondering if the monk had felt that screeching hum that still seemed to rattle her bones . . . or seen the thick and viscous liquid leaking from its pages. Had someone shown the Book to the monk as her mother had shown it to Danni? If so, who? And why?
She covered her face with her hands. Her head hurt. Her mind ached. But she felt like she was circling something and if she just kept at it, she would figure out what it was.
Sighing, she scrolled to the next link her search had pulled. This one took her to an article from the Irish Times archives, titled “The Bloody Isle of Fennore.” The date on the article was October 1999. She read the first line twice, letting it sink in before she continued.
The tenth anniversary of the murders and suicide that rocked the tiny fishing village of Ballyfionúir passed with little ceremony and no closure.
Closure. There never seemed to be any of that in her world. It was something Danni had longed for and dreaded her entire life.
Although officials insist the investigation into the disappearance and likely murders of Fia MacGrath and her children will continue until they are found or their bodies recovered, they admit the likelihood of the young mother and her children being alive is slim to nonexistent. The triple murders of the MacGraths followed by the apparent suicide of their attacker was sensationalized when two additional bodies were later found in an unmarked grave, bringing the death toll to six. One of the victims was positively identified as the son of the alleged murderer, Niall Ballagh.
Stunned, Danni paused and read that again. Niall Ballagh was the alleged murderer? Niall Ballagh? Related to Sean Ballagh?
Rumors that the mythical Book of Fennore had been found on the island and was the catalyst to the violence that occurred that night have added to the mystery surrounding the grisly and brutal slayings, and fueled an international search for the victims, who have never been found. Cathán MacGrath, husband and father to three of the victims, is the only known survivor. MacGrath’s eyewitness account portrays Niall Ballagh as a twisted and jealous man on a killing spree, which left MacGrath’s wife and children dead and Cathán MacGrath seriously injured.
Using MacGrath’s account of the events that took place, investigators have tried without success to uncover the catalyst for Ballagh’s actions, but a head injury sustained in the attack has hindered much of MacGrath’s recall and made his memory unreliable. MacGrath has never been able to offer insight about the subsequent deaths of Ballagh’s son or the unidentified woman found buried with him.
When asked about the rumored Book of Fennore and its possible discovery on the island, Cathán MacGrath denied all speculations and accused the media of ridiculous sensationalism. Chief Inspector Byrne responded in like, “When so many innocent people are killed, the public seeks an explanation that will make sense of it. Unfortunately, some things will never be explained.”
Evidence uncovered by the Garda supports Cathán MacGrath’s accounting of what happened that night, but without the bodies of the alleged victims, much of it is inconclusive.
Danni frowned, staring at the words but seeing in her mind the vision from this morning. The boy she’d seen in the grave—was that Niall Ballagh’s son? Who else could it be? But if it was the same boy, then how—why—had the vision placed Danni in that grave with him? He’d died twenty years ago, when she was just a child. She frowned, trying to remember more clearly exactly what she’d seen. But like a dream, it had faded into blurry bits and pieces.
And what about the rumors that the Book of Fennore had been found? Was that why her mother had shown it to her? Danni scrolled down, hoping there would be more to the article, but instead of text she found pictures.
The first was a grainy black and white. The caption read, “Niall Ballagh, only suspect in the Fennore Murders.” She hesitated for a moment before meeting the eyes of the man accused of murdering everyone in her family except her father, putting off for just one more moment seeing the man thought to have committed Danni’s own murder. Slowly, she lifted her gaze and looked into his face, knowing that at least two of the victims had been alive at the time he’d killed himself.
She shouldn’t have been surprised to recognize him. He was the man she’d seen in the cavern with her mother. Niall Ballagh hadn’t been threatening when she’d seen him then. In fact, he’d been just the opposite. She remembered how he’d held his hands out, palms up, trying to soothe whoever was in the shadows. Danni thought about that. The article said her father’s injury had made his memory unreliable. What had he really seen that night? What had he imagined—or thought he’d seen? Danni didn’t even remember him being in the cavern at all. He had to have arrived later, then. Maybe the vision had ended just before Niall Ballagh went nuts.
Niall Ballagh’s eyes stared back from the sepialike picture, shadowed with despair. Like Sean, he was a tall, solid man with broad shoulders, thick arms, and big hands. He stood on the deck of a boat, dressed in a raincoat and rubber boots. She leaned closer to her screen, trying to discern his features from the many shades of ivory and gray. His gaze was direct and piercing, his jaw set. No smile or glimmer of humor in the light eyes.
As she stared at him, she was filled with a host of conflicting emotions. The part of her that had grown up in foster care, never knowing a home she could call her own—that part thought death by his own hands had been too kind for Niall Ballagh. But there was another part of her, a piece that remembered the ravaged anguish on his face as he’d stood beside his son’s body, and that part couldn’t help but feel compassion.
Had the murderer of Niall’s son sent him into the rage Danni’s father witnessed? Perhaps her family had stumbled into a show-down, had become innocent victims to violence not intended for them. She tried to piece the possible scenarios together in her mind. Niall Ballagh might have gone berserk and killed Danni’s brother and wounded her father—but Danni and her mother got away—not knowing, perhaps, that her father was still alive. And maybe her father’s grief and guilt over not protecting them had later filled in the pieces his memory could not.
But, if it had happened that way, why hadn’t Danni and her mother returned home after they learned Niall killed himself? Why had they run to America? And why had her mother abandoned her there?
Questions. Always questions without answers.
She rubbed goose bumps from her arms and moved to the next picture. This one was of her family. They were wearing the same clothes they’d worn in the snapshot Sean gave her, but the camera had caught them unaware, each of them lost in thoughts of their own. Without the fake smiles, they appeared somehow tragic.
Danni’s mother stood shoulders hunched, staring at something far off and unattainable. The breeze teased a strand of hair across her face and lifted the hem of her skirt. Beside her, Danni’s father was grim and distant, hands shoved deep in pockets, chin pointed to the thundering ocean. Sandwiched in the middle, Danni and her brother held hands, each of them stoic as they quietly waited. There was resignation in Danni’s expression—a mute and forlorn acceptance that made her wonder if she’d known what was to come next.
“Cathán MacGrath, pictured with wife, Fia, and their two children, victims in the Fennore Murders,” was all it said beneath the picture. But the photograph itself had already said so much more.
She stared at her father’s face for a little while longer, but it was the last photo, one that showed a teenaged boy leaning against a blackened boulder, that made a wall of ice come down hard around Danni’s gut. The pictured adolescent was both defiant and desperate, facing a gale that chapped his cheeks and gave his eyes a glittering sheen. He was tall, wiry, not yet grown into his big hands and feet. With his dark hair blown wild and his shoulders hunched forward, he seemed to straddle the lines between youth and maturity. Still, a shadow of the man he would become stared back at her.
Torn between bewilderment and rage, she looked into those insolent eyes. What game was Sean Ballagh playing with her? What lies had he told?
Slowly she moved to the caption, feeling as if she were falling into an endless pit as she read the words printed there.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head while comprehension and disbelief battled within her. What it said couldn’t be true.
And yet . . . Danni thought of this morning, how he’d appeared at her door without warning. She’d never seen a car or heard an engine, even when he left . . . and in his passport photo he’d looked so young—nearly as young as he did here. When she’d seen him standing on the other side of the window . . . the feeling that he’d been conjured from her thoughts . . . and the strange stares from the two women and their children when she’d been talking to him in the store. It wasn’t they who’d acted strangely, it was Danni, talking to herself . . . and when the lady who liked tea sets had said she had plans for dinner, she’d been answering Danni’s question to Sean, Will I see you later?
No, it was impossible, even for Danni, whose life had suddenly become so fantastic. It didn’t make sense. Except in a small dark corner of Danni’s heart it made perfect, horrible sense.
She read the caption under the photograph again, this time aloud, hoping the sound of her voice would bring new meaning to the words.
“Sean Michael Ballagh, picture taken days before his murder. His body and that of an unidentified woman were the only remains found.”
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