William H. Hallahan - by The Monk Read Free Book Online Page B

the large kitchen,
people began to dance in their heavy shoes, while the women put out
food on a long wooden trestle table in the yard behind the house.
    And Jim Davitt looked down at his son in the cradle and put his
forefinger into the baby's small fist. He thought about facing death
at any instant. Why would a fiend kill an infant?
    "Ah, Brendan, what have we given
you--life or death? What's to become of you?"
----
CHAPTER 2
The Black Horseman
    There was a black-clad rider and he rode a black horse and he came
a great distance. Long before Brendan could see him, he heard the
horse's hooves: clippity clip, clippity clip .
    Brendan was four and he had a fever and that day he didn't go to
nursery school. And all day and into the evening he heard the horse's
hooves and he told no one. He pressed his hot forehead against the
cool windowpane of his bedroom and listened to the clippity clip .
At eight that evening there was talk of taking him to the hospital
because his fever was so high and because the teddy bear had an even
higher temperature and it was nice and cool in the hospital--and they
could put him in a bathtub packed with ice there. Lovely cool ice.
    Brendan fell into the deep sleep, and the hoofbeats grew, louder
and louder, and the earth shook from them. The rider arrived. He was
all in black with a black hood over his head and black lusterless
eyes looking at Brendan through the two holes in the hood. And the
horse had a mask over his eyes too, and a black plume standing on his
forehead. Clippity clip .
    And on the horse behind the rider was Grandfather Davitt in his
banker's suit and his angry glasses. He looked very severe. And when
Brendan woke, his fever had broken, and he and the teddy bear and bed
were all wet with his perspiration. And his mother hugged him and
cried and said he didn't have to go to the hospital.
    But his mother looked very anxious when he told her about
Grandfather Davitt on the black horse and she made him promise not to
tell anyone; it was a family secret. In the morning his mother told
him that Grandfather Davitt had died the evening before in his sleep.
    Somehow the story got out and the rest of the family looked
askance at Brendan. He had the second sight from his mother, the
family said.
    When he was nine, he was eating cornflakes at breakfast, he
remembered clearly, and he heard hoofbeats very far away. At
lunchtime he told his mother. At dinnertime she began to prepare his
memory for the black horseman. And gradually he remembered the fever
and the rider and his grandfather mounted on back and looking very
angry.
    At two o'clock in the morning he roused the family with his
shouts. The horseman was terrifying, mounted on an enormous stallion
with a black plume who made the earth shake with his stamping hooves,
and the horse pranced and kicked his legs in the air, then rode off
with Grandmother Davitt on his back behind the rider with the
terrifying, dead black eyes.
    Twice when he was thirteen the terrible rider visited him and
carried off Grandfather Davitt's twin sisters. They died within three
weeks of each other, and his mother inherited a houseful of Waterford
glassware, Belleek china and other household impedimenta.
    His mother then sat with him and carefully explained about his
second sight. He didn't like it; he didn't want it. The horseman
terrified him. She counseled acceptance: God had given him the gift
for a reason and he had to accept it without complaint. He talked
earnestly with her after that and sought her consolation and
reassurance. She told him she too had the second sight, only it
appeared much later in her life and it was not nearly as strong as
his. He confessed that he often could tell things about
people--secret things, just by touching something of theirs.
 
 
    The next time he heard the hoofbeats, Brendan was fifteen. He was
down at the Jersey shore for Labor Day week and he had just fallen in
love.
    Her name was Annie O'Casey. She was a cousin to his