An adaptation from the book Fairy Legends and Traditions by Thomas Crofton Croker, 1825.

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Cover art and all art by John Constable

Let this be a lesson to every young man… stay home, live decently, and don’t go wandering the world looking for trouble. Morty Ó Súilleabháin learned that the hard way.

At fourteen, he ran off to sea, leaving his parents to grieve him as good as dead. They never learned what became of him, only that he’d boarded a ship bound for America. Both died brokenhearted.

Thirty years later, a stranger showed up in Beerhaven asking after the old couple. It was Morty, come home too late. When he heard his parents were gone, something in him cracked open with grief, not that it did much good now. Repentance rarely arrives on time.

To make amends, Morty was told to walk the pilgrim’s road to St. Gobnait’s chapel out in Ballyvourney. He set off that same afternoon, eager to get it over with.

He hadn’t gone far when night fell, no moon, just a thick fog rolling up from the valleys. The mountain road was a maze of forks and unmarked paths, easy to lose in even by daylight. Worried he’d wandered off course, Morty spotted a light in the distance and headed toward it. But every time he closed in, the light slid further away, glowing faintly through the mist. He told himself it was St. Gobnait guiding him home.

He walked like that for miles, chasing a light that always stayed just out of reach. Eventually he got close enough to see it was a fire, and beside it, an old woman. That’s when his faith wavered. Because the fire and the woman had somehow kept pace with him for miles, over rough, uneven ground, without ever seeming to move at all.

“By Gobnait and her teacher Abban,” Morty muttered, “how does a fire outrun a man, and who’s the woman keeping it company?”

The words were barely out of his mouth when he found himself standing right beside the fire, no memory of covering that last stretch of ground. The old woman didn’t look up. She just kept eating, her jaw working, her eyes flicking toward him with each bite. And her eyes weren’t right. Not brown, not blue, not grey, a strange, feral red, like something that hunts at night.

Whatever courage Morty had brought with him started draining fast. She said nothing for a long while, just chewed. Then, without looking up… “What’s your name?”

Sulfur curled from her mouth as she spoke. Her eyes went from red to a sickly green.

“Morty Ó Súilleabháin,” he managed, “at your service” though he meant it only as a formality.

“We’ll see about that,” she said.

He wanted to run, to pray, to do anything but his legs wouldn’t obey him. Fear had nailed him to the spot.

“Take my hand,” the old woman said. “I’ve a horse that’ll get you to your journey’s end quick enough.”

She led him toward a black opening in the mountainside, the fire trailing along ahead of them like it had a will of its own. At the mouth of the cave she called out, and a jet-black horse burst from the darkness, hooves ringing off stone like something out of a nightmare.

“Get on,” she snapped, and shoved him onto its back with strength no old woman should have. Morty grabbed for the mane and caught nothing, his hands closed on air. But the horse carried him anyway, launching off cliffs, tearing through riverbeds, running like a storm through the mountains all night long.

Hikers found him the next morning at the bottom of a cliff, flat on his back, badly bruised, thrown there by the Púca. Morty had no remembrance how he got there, unsure of what was real and what were filtered whisky dreams.

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