1
It began with a mistake. A glitch in the library’s database mismatched her name to an address from her past, an error that sent letter after letter falling through a door she’d rented years before. Sweetbriar Lane.
Opening that door had never been easy, since she always seemed to be tangling the key among other things, trying to steer a small scooter over the step while library books shifted and slid against her chest, or fumbling a bin bag and a football and the clammy fingers of a toddler. They only left Sweetbriar Lane because the landlord’s family needed it, although that was what landlords always said – some brother or cousin would suddenly return from Australia, desperate for somewhere to stay, but then, within weeks, the house would be seen advertised at a higher rent. She was too busy scrubbing the grime from their next set of rented rooms to mourn the loss of the sunlit kitchen where her babies had been little. She knew she couldn’t return, either to those years or that door – but then this glitch insisted on sending her name back there again and again and again. Every time she requested a library book, a confirmation slip landed on that mat, to be lifted with a stranger’s sigh and slammed onto a growing stack.
When the estate agent rang to request a forwarding address for all her letters, she blushed at the tiresomeness she’d caused and promised to have any future notices diverted to her home. Once she’d hung up, she tried to continue folding the laundry, but the sight of the agency’s name on her phone had brought a sign to mind, one that always turned her head as she made her way home.
FOR SALE
On a hill over the city, a derelict mental hospital had been partly converted into apartments, and now the hospital chapel was being advertised as a development opportunity too. She counted herself among the many who flinched as they passed that old institution. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she – whose distress had twice sent her clambering river railings seeking her ending – might have lived within those walls.
She called it a whim, the force that lifted the phone and made her thumb ask a favour: if the agent was arranging viewings of the chapel, might he allow her to pop in afterwards, just for a quick look? It all happened quite quickly then, the phone began to ring in her hand, and within fifteen minutes, she was watching him unlock the gate.
Among mounds of overgrown gravel, a bankrupt digger sat abandoned, its rust-ruptured bucket still holding a final load of dirt aloft, a garden of dandelions and ragwort thriving mid-air. Beyond, the chapel stood as it always had, waiting for her to find it. Once the old key entered, the old lock nodded. There you are.
Inside, darkness. Panels of plywood had been fixed to every wrecked window. She picked her way through dim scatterings of debris while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Thin partitions marked an early attempt to slice the space into smaller rooms, but the original brick walls remained bare, shivering with cobwebs, where someone had pasted a picture of a man, holy hands bracketing a redbrick heart. A plywood sheet had dropped a knot, admitting a finger of light so sharp that she grimaced, lifting a hand to shield her eye, but that beam gripped her chin and turned it.
Look, it insisted, pointing.
Look – there.
On a new wall, a blazing circle was floating, drawing a ring of light in which the clouds outside were swirling again, spun upside down or inside out – and oh, she breathed, fingers flying to her mouth. Oh.
It was only because of her grandfather’s fondness for this phenomenon that she recognised it, naming it to the man in giddy astonishment – camera obscura! – repeating what he used to say: all it takes is a tiny hole in a dark room – a pin pierced through a heavy drape or a blackout blind, say – to conjure the world beyond all over again. She pulled the phone from her pocket to photograph it in delight, but the man was already walking on, so she click-clicked and hurried after the song of his steps.
No candle, no statue, no altar, no pew – if not for the scale of the windows, those small new rooms wouldn’t feel like a church at all. The agent’s voice kept moving onwards, narrating a vision of the home it would become, and she tried to follow this fiction – yes, maybe a sofa would sit here in the amber spell cast by a reading lamp, and yes, maybe this dim nook really would whirr with suds – but her imagination kept stumbling. Neither home nor sacred space, to her the building felt stuck between states, stubbornly shaking its head.
The addition of a raw staircase led to a newly built floor, which let her approach the upper windows. Her hands felt for the absent glass, storm-blown or stone-smashed, probably tossed into builders’ skips and driven to landfill. Now those gaps were empty, glazed only by the view of leaf-greens and sky-blues. Turning, she wandered the warren of new rooms, emerging from a walk-in wardrobe to find the agent waiting – time was growing short, was there anything else she’d like to see?
The bell tower tricked her into thinking that she was looking not upwards, but directly ahead, down a long corridor. She blinked, dizzied. No bell? Stolen. She felt her brows tangle, imagining what it would take to effect such a theft. This lost bell, she guessed, had probably met with an ending of cash and melt, but she chose to imagine it clanging elsewhere instead, invisible waves rippling invisible calls to the dead: a summoning. She could nearly hear it herself.
Did he remember where the original altar had been located before the renovations? Glancing up from his phone, he nodded to where she’d seen the beam of light. The sky had clouded in the meantime, deleting the circle from the wall – she’d arrived just in time to witness it.
Outside, he had an urgent call to return, so she wandered the perimeter alone, craning her neck to peer up at the buckled windows. A bramble scratched her ankle, then held. Wincing, she unhooked its claw from her stocking, only to see something winking underneath. Pushing those briars aside revealed a single splinter of stained glass, bright as a ruby and warm as blood.
Under a pair of crumpled beer cans, she found more shards, golds and pinks and greens, some grime-crusted, some still connected by lead. Digging them from dirt, she felt the bite of their sides and thought teeth, thought mouth, thought song, then speech. The vapours that had risen from warm bodies in the pews would have carried syllables mixed with candle-soot, distilled as condensation on the chapel windows. Every one of these fallen fragments would have known the touch of such vapours, before being flung into this world of briar and rain and the fleshy slip of snails. There was something about these shards. She could feel it. They still held a holy light, glimmers of human longing embedded in them, like fossils in stone. She gathered as many as she could, as the man nodded in bemusement from his phone. Mine, she thought in delight.
Walking back uphill to her car, she was so absorbed in daydreaming a kaleidoscope that might twirl these shards to life that she didn’t notice the split pavement until she was already tripping over it, a cartoonish plunge that opened her fist in fright. One panel was falling, then smashing on the path, lead relinquishing its long grip on the glass.
Lifted from the pavement, that lead spelled a letter in her hand.
L
As soon as she read it, she knew it was a sign.
* * *
Gave no name. Some mild delusions:
messages, apparitions, signs. Collects rubbish
she says, ‘held a holy light’.
* * *
The city, she said, held an archive in which it stowed all its oldest maps and contracts, along with love letters, photos, and promises. When she learned that it also held records from the old hospital, she made an appointment.
Arriving, she found it locked. She could hear the bell lifting its echo within, but the door didn’t open. Had she confused the date? She waited a while, pressed again. Nothing.
Hands to the glass then, brow between them, to see the interior: a tiled floor, a coat stand, and a table, bare but for some pencils and a large bottle of hand gel. She tried a knock. Too gentle. A crumpled crisp bag flung itself past her ankles. She knocked a little louder, then let her gaze soar skywards in a clutch of pigeons, rollercoasting over the bookies and pubs and terraced rooftops, over the hairdresser and the tyre shop, before flapping back to the powerlines over the archive. Those birds, she knew, would show her what to do, so she counted them as they landed, all cluck and coo.
One. Two. Three – four. Five.
If a sixth … If a sixth, she would leave.
As if triggered by this thought, the door buzzed itself open, startling the pigeons from wire to wing, a grand scattering. She stepped in. When the door fell shut, locking her in, she felt the birds disappear.
* * *
She’d always liked the word archive, how nimbly it conjured visions of vellum scrolls and vaults where ancient secrets might be stored, but this archive wasn’t like that at all. It was more like the school she’d loathed as a teenager. A wall of metal lockers for belongings. A noticeboard of thumbtacked reminders and warnings. A list of rules: no pens allowed, no keys allowed, no bags allowed, no coats allowed. There was even an attendance book. At the counter, the archivist read questions aloud from the form she’d submitted, rewarding each correct response with a nod.
Name? Nod.
Contact number? Nod.
Address? Nod.
Institution with which you are affiliated? Shrugging, she tried to grin. No nod at this.
The tables in the reading room had been arranged in rows that all faced a glass partition, beyond which the archivist began examining a trolley stacked with boxes. She didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing, so she wandered to the only window, counting twenty-five bars between her and a long slice of outside. The view was bleak: all she could see was a high perimeter wall of greyish stone vined with ivy, but if she strained to the side, there was a little sky, low and dark now, spitting a thin drizzle. She chose a chair, folded her hands, tried to stay still. Fidgeted. Folded again.
The archivist returned with a parcel wrapped in thin blue card and ribboned like a gift, placing it on an aged pillow before her. Yes, she was permitted to touch. No, she wouldn’t need gloves.
The door fell shut.
Tugging that pale ribbon, she felt the knot give, revealing the oldest casebook in the archive’s collection. She found it extraordinarily beautiful, with its dishevelled bindings and delicate, ruined spine. As a fine sediment gloved her fingertips with the texture of a snuffed candlewick, she understood that no matter how gentle she made herself, her interruption in this book’s existence would have its consequences; particles were already lifting and leaving, fixing themselves under fingernails she might gnaw absently, waiting for lights to change.
Inside, she found a shock of marbled endpapers, deep islands of teal burbling through pale ovals and crimson veins, recalling the histology slides she’d placed under microscopes as a student, decades before. Vascular, she thought, and then, Vessel.
Turning the page, she caught an inscription trying to slant away in copperplate.
Female Case Book
Chronic Cases
Dr William T. A. Scanlan
Assistant Medical Officer
November 1895
The pages that followed were all a pale blue. Each individual section began with a handwritten name, followed by printed headings seeking facts – Address, Age, Occupation – and several lined pages to be filled with observations of their future histories. She recoiled, reading the doctors’ scrawl: ‘very dull and stupid’, ‘a feeble little woman’, ‘dirty and mischievous’, ‘very self-pitying and hypochondriacal’. Months might pass between entries, or sometimes decades, as their observations began to echo those that had come before, years and years of a person’s existence reduced to:
No change
No change
No change
and No, she thought, change. She knew she couldn’t make her will felt in this text; she couldn’t change anything, neither the difficult handwriting nor the doctors’ remarks, which from her distance felt so cold. She also knew that she could have closed the book in disgust and left. But she didn’t. She let the book lead her onwards through crowds of Ellens and Catherines and Marys and Kates, each with her own distinct troubles and desires, longings and distresses – she read and read, and as she read, those lives were spinning from the text into her mind, where they were alive.
One woman came shoving through the crowd to grip her by the elbow, fingers firm on her flesh, insisting on speaking in present tense – ‘says she has enemies here and that she would be out long ago only for them. Says people were kind to her in a way, but that is all past and gone now’. The Reader’s attention was snagged by a small repetition. One word, sharp as a fishhook. It pierced her finger, fixing it to the book. Says.
This word let her sidestep the doctor standing between them, turning her ear instead to a voice as clear and alive as the vines pulsing the cold wall outside. The doctor, meanwhile, was writing that since the patient ‘has now been very well for a year and a half, it seems a pity not to give her a chance out again. She is a good cook and says she can easily get a place.’ That woman’s voice soon left, but the pages kept turning, each says and said carrying new exclamations of disdain and rage and fear and grief. So many visions. So many dreams.
Says that fairies work on her nerves, and she hears the voices of the fairies talking to her at night.
Says the world makes her very happy, that there is joy going about.
Says she drank all the beer in Guinness’s Brewery.
Said she sees her father and mother in the dormitory every night and that we are all ghosts stealing about.
Said she has changed into many shapes since I last saw her.
Said that she will be burned soon, and that people are foretelling it.
To spill all those words into her notes made of her a vessel, a jug of living speech, lost in the familiar sensation of filling and pouring and filling again. Her clumsiness on the chapel path made her wary of dropping digits or sloshing words on the carpet, so she doubled back on herself, flipping her pencil to rub at her errors. No one could erase inked lines from the casebook pages though, just as no one could say, ‘On second thoughts’, or ‘Not anymore’, or ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’ Once someone said something in those blue pages, they said it forever, and now, in her own notes, they were being forced to say it again. What had been written about these women in one century (‘dull’, ‘sullen’, ‘stupid’), was being written again in another, the same cold portrayals appearing on a new page – but this time, she was to blame.
Such qualms troubled her thoughts, but not her hand, her pencil diligently copying a distant August afternoon where a woman was declaring herself ‘Lady Julia Jones, the grandest woman in London’. Nearby, a doctor was numbering another woman’s delusions about X-rays and distant planets. Her pencil followed, writing ‘(1) That there is an eye watching her’, though she knew this wasn’t really a delusion. It was true.
Possible delusions –
Eyes? Time?
Certain voices compelled her to record them, just as they must have once compelled the doctor. Both of their hands set to scribbling one patient’s assertion that ‘all her misfortunes began when she was born on New Year’s Eve, and that her mother said she was roaring coming into the world, and that it was a sign that she was to be unlucky in the world, so she supposes she had to be unlucky’. Wary of losing a word to the ravine between casebook and her notes, she was repeating those words in the silence of her mind as she transcribed. It was a sign, it was a sign, a sign … that she was to be, that she was to be … Her hand froze. With a shock, she realised that she’d been muttering aloud. In a place with so many rules, what would happen if she was caught talking to herself?
Risking a quick glance through the glass partition, she saw the archivist was still absorbed in the computer screen, and exhaled slowly, relieved that her whispering hadn’t been noticed after all. But she was wrong.
The city had heard every word. She felt its breath on the back of her neck, cold and close through the many-barred window, and she knew that it was remembering that long-ago voice and the long, loose braid that belonged with it, her asthmatic wheeze and bare heels pacing the dormitory past midnight. In hearing those long-ago words spoken again, the city felt itself mesmerised. So that made two of us, she said.
There were many pages left to read, but the archive clock never slowed its ticking, her allocated hours dwindling to minutes with brutal speed. The children would soon be emerging from school in raincoats and scuffed shoes, and her afternoon would fill with chores and homework and errands. Soon. But for a little longer, it could be just her and this book. She pressed onwards through the crowd, reading each person she met in the particularity of their sorrows, their enmities, their own cherished rage. If she recognised their distress, it was because she, too, had known the lure of the river’s dark silks and the horror of being dragged back from her ending, but even when she recognised wisps of herself in their lives, she understood that her pain was hers, and their pain was theirs.
Some wept while she listened. Some, wide-eyed, were experiencing visions. Some shrieked revenge. Some gawked from padded rooms, while she gawked in. Some were buckled into gloves. A few minutes after midday, one grew weak, lay down by her left hand, and died. Then came a shriek: ‘there are invisible devils talking to me and injuring my face, look at my face after them, they have me destroyed. You know very well what they are doing to me.’ This was true – she could see her suffering – but an apparition from the future could change nothing; she could observe, and she could record, but she couldn’t interrupt.
Another woman’s whisper drew her very close, turning her ear to a secret, confiding that ‘she sees her mother every day on the stairs and that she at times is mesmerised’. Her pencil fell to the desk. She could see it so clearly.
The laced shoe, pausing mid-step.
The hovering toe-tip.
The rail, gripped.
The face, turning blank, then rapt. A mother watching her daughter watching her.
(Who chooses the site of a vision, the witness or the apparition?)
The first metallic glint in her child’s hair must have been a shock to this mother-ghost – my baby – but soon, the length of her daughter’s braid shone silver-grey, her mouth slumped, and her knuckles swelled arthritic. Her mother-ghost tried to look after her, she never missed a visit, but she couldn’t stop the doctor’s pen from describing her daughter as ‘most doleful and melancholic in appearance’, sending her to live out her days in the Auxiliary Asylum by the sea.
Alone, far from their turret and the stairwell beneath, her daughter’s heart came apart; she died the following year. If only the doctor’s notes had mapped the location of this vision, the Reader could break in and open her arms, to see who’d fill them. But comforting the dead was not the purpose of these records.
What were they for? Who were they for? Other doctors, she supposed, who might skim a patient’s history before plotting treatments. Many entries were initialled W. S., matching the opening page: William Scanlan. Towards the end of November 1895, he was writing of a woman who said ‘that she can stop the Sun from dancing, that her husband sold her to the clergy because he did not want her to be looking so well as she had too much money … She heard a man speaking to her during the night, while in bed. He said, “We’ll meet again,” but she does not know who he is.’ Later entries only shrugged ‘No change since the last report’, ‘No change’. ‘No change’, ‘No change’. Years were lost to such repetition, while precious minutes were passing in the archive. Scanlan’s signature was replaced by new squiggles – LS or GH or LFG or JF – but no one ever clarified whether the man in the night made good on his promise: ‘We’ll meet again.’ Instead, one doctor observed that this patient ‘fancies she is in a grand place and is very happy. LS.’ Three years later, the same hand found her ‘elated and cheerful, fancies this is a lovely place and that she is wonderfully happy’. Even after a bout of influenza, she was ‘still cheerful, although she now tells everyone that she is dead’. To this doctor, the patient appeared neat, clean and healthy, if ‘very pale in complexion’, and when the patient spoke from that blue page to address her doctor, she ‘says my name is Miss Justice’.
The Reader was taken aback. Was she looking at another woman?
To attempt to answer this question, she had to read even faster, feeling two clocks in motion, one stealing her last minutes in the archive, the other blurring whole seasons past asylum windows. Blown blossom. Then snow. Inside those windows, Miss Justice was observing her patient through seasons of laundry steam and seasons of spoon-clatter in the dining hall; through seasons when she ‘says she is tired out from work’, and seasons when she ‘says the dry land is alive’; into seasons when her temperament shifted and she was judged ‘cross and on the defensive in conversation with everyone’.
She read on – ‘silly and weak-minded … fond of decorating herself with colourful ribbons … a splendid worker in the laundry’. Beyond the glass panel, pens were being loudly shuffled. ‘Decorates herself with gaudy scraps … shouts and scolds at everyone’, but the Reader felt she was choosing a life of beauty and defiance, despite her awful circumstances. She jumped. Someone was standing over her, rolling a cough like a fistful of marbles from lung to throat: ahum-grum-grum.
Remorseful, then, that her selfishness had robbed minutes from the archivist’s lunch hour, she apologised, and closed the book with tenderness, promising herself and promising the women within that she’d soon return to listen to all they were saying. But she didn’t.
* * *
She seems to recite
casebooks by heart.
How?
I do not ask.
Nor do I ask ‘Why?’
Not yet.
Instead, I ask how she found me –
it can’t have been easy.
She only lifts a hand,
eyes still closed, and says
that will become clear.
So (for now), I let her continue.
* * *
She didn’t keep her promise to return to the casebook. She couldn’t.
Within days, the government ordered all public buildings closed and told everyone to stay at home. A lethal illness was in the air. On the radio, voices pined after all that the pandemic had stolen from them: holidays, weddings, deathbeds, birthdays, shopping trips with friends. No one ever mentioned missing an archive, but whenever she thought of that sealed door, her breath caught in her chest. The casebooks were locked in with no one to visit them, no one to witness their visions, no one to listen. In the notes shoved under her bed, the November dark of 1895 stirred, where a deep voice was promising, ‘We’ll meet again.’
Her days were all the same: same mornings of homeschooling duties, same wrinkled laundry, same walk, same dinner, same pots to scrub of same stains, same scream building and building.
No change
No change
No change
No change
No change
No change
No change
She arranged the chapel shards in a pair of wineglasses on her bedroom sill, admiring their sharp bouquets of red and teal, gold and absinthe-green. There, they witnessed her hours of smiling or scowling at screens, squabbles with her husband and their midnight desires, the bleak wars of her family whose weaponry was silence, the relief of forgiveness, all the bedtime stories she read, all the tickles and laughter, all the lists ticked and the tasks neglected; those shards saw all her sorrows and shames and lusts, all her joys and fears, and nothing she felt was ever new to them. Through their glint and gloom, distant lights moved. Weak sun. Cold moon.
Copyright © 2026 by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
