The Hunger by Caitlin Devlin, cup of Irish breakfast tea, served black.

The first time I saw her, I was dressed as a giant mouse. She could have passed for any other member of the audience, except her face was withered and simian, her skin grey and thin around her bony frame. When my part was done, everyone clapped but her, and I scattered off like the mouse I was pretending to be.

    ‘How’s the diet going?’ Erin smirked as we waited in the wings. She had been cast as Clara and got to wear a pretty pink tutu instead of the stupid mouse costumes the rest of us were stuck in. Her ma let her take pills to keep her weight down. It was working; she was the skinniest girl I knew, and she had been given every leading role in every show that year. Whenever I asked Ma if I could take weight loss pills, she’d roll her eyes and tell me all the colleens in our family were plump.

    I grabbed my coat and kept my head down so Erin wouldn’t see the stupid tears welling up in my eyes. The woman from the audience was standing under a streetlamp outside the dance school, huddled up in a grey cloak. I hurried past her, not daring to look, as if she would disappear if I didn’t acknowledge her.

    The summer I turned sixteen, I saw the woman in the cloak in the front row as I auditioned for a part in Giselle. I’d never danced in the show before, but I was determined to be cast as one of the fairies that bring vengeance on dishonest men. I tried to channel the pathos the part demanded with every sissonne, but even as I danced, I could see the directress muttering to the casting agent behind her hand.

    ‘Sugarplum fairy,’ she said, and they both grinned.

    I understood straight away that it was their code word for when a girl was too fat. I cut down to eight hundred calories a day after that audition and started smoking cigarettes to keep the hunger pangs at bay.

    The next time I saw her, I was twenty. Dance school in London was going better than anyone had imagined I would, and critics were comparing me to Natalia Osipova. When I read that review, I sat in the passenger seat of my best frenemy’s car at lunchtime, and we smoked two packets of cigarettes and downed most of a bottle of gin. We didn’t eat lunch because lunch made you fat, but we liked clear spirits. I was thin enough to still shop in the children’s department in shops and they cast me as Odille in Swan Lake that Christmas. Life was good.

    There’s a scene where Odille has to do thirty-two fouetté turns. It’s a scene that the critics watch out for, that even casual ballet fans wait for expectantly. My knee had been playing up that week, but I ignored it. My collarbones were prominent and there was a little white spot on my forehead that always appeared when I was dieting as hard as I could.

    I was no longer a mouse, I was the black swan in her full glory, the ebony feathers on my tutu iridescent under the hot stage lights. I didn’t even feel my knee buckle beneath me until I was on the floor.

    Gasps flooded the stage, rising up from the audience. There was no way it could be played off as part of the performance. The stagehands closed the curtains, leaving me crouched on the stage in agony, cradling my leg like a broken ballerina doll.

    At first, they were hopeful: with physio I might be able to dance again. Would I be as good as I once was? Maybe, with enough practice. The next time: it will take a lot of hard work. Finally: maybe you were meant to do something else.

    It took a year of slowly giving up before I officially left dance school, and I took two jobs to stay in London. She followed me everywhere that year, the emaciated woman in the cloak and her shrieking infant. I toyed with the idea of seeing a counsellor about it, but I knew how crazy it sounded. Besides, she didn’t do anything but lurk in the corner of my eyes, hanging around like an unwanted smell. I limped around London with a cane that curved against my hand like a question mark.

    ‘You’re getting too thin,’ my flatmate Billy remarked one night. He meant it kindly; he knew it was the biggest compliment you could give me. We were getting ready to go out to spend the last of our savings.

    ‘I’m rocking concentration camp chic.’ I said, working Frizz Ease through my hair, which I had chopped off into a pixie cut a few weeks earlier. I wasn’t a gifted hairdresser.

    ‘Drochshaol.’

    ‘You what?’ I’d never paid much attention in Irish lessons at school.

    ‘I didn’t say anything.’

That Christmas, I busied myself helping with a children’s production of Sleeping Beauty. That’s how I met Alexis, who was bankrolling my caprice in children’s dance. His family weren’t quite oligarch rich, but they weren’t far off, either.

    By the time Alexis proposed, I was the manager of a small theatre in a commuter town. I didn’t need the cane every day by then, but my leg followed along behind me like a piece of wood. Sometimes the woman in the cloak would lurk outside the window when I skipped lunch or when I bawled up food in napkins, a habit from my childhood. Mostly I ignored her.

    It was Alexis who brought up moving back to Ireland. His parents were pressuring him to take over more of the family business and I think he wanted to get away. As much as I hated the idea of facing Erin and those other girls as a failed dancer, I knew Alexis needed a project, and he had decided his project would be to build us a house on some land he had bought, about an hour from where I had grown up.

    You know when you go back to school as an adult and realise how small everything was? It was like that, driving back through the little hamlets and villages that bordered my hometown. Grey mist followed us as we wound through the country lanes.

    The land we had bought was two fields and the skeleton of a thatched cottage that would have once housed tenant farmers. Only three walls were left standing, a notice pinned to one reminding them it would be dangerous to enter. Not that anyone would bother; I was too far from town for teenagers to use, too leaky and cold to shelter homeless people. In a century or so, left to its own devices, the cottage would have completely returned to the land with nothing left to hint it had ever been there at all.

    ‘You lot are bloody mad,’ Alexis complained one night, as we sat in the drafty old campervan with rain battering the roof. ‘You know the conveyancer had to check if we were in a fairy ring. What’s all that about?’

    ‘Well, you don’t want to piss off fairies.’ I told him the story of the motorway they wanted to build but couldn’t because it would get in the way of a tree rumoured to belong to them.

    ‘You know back where I’m from fairies are helpful. They don’t mind where you build.’

    ‘Maybe we’ve had such a hard time in this country our fairies have to be a bit feistier.’

    We stayed in a caravan while they did building work on the house and at night I shivered and lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering why we’d ever left England. Hail pounded on the metal roof and Alexis was moody and withdrawn, not used to slumming it and getting impatient with how slowly the construction work was going. My days were long and tedious, running into legal hoops with setting up my dance coaching business and picking out flooring with a builder who called me “little lady” and wanted to double check every decision with Alexis.

    The cloaked woman loomed. When I drove back from town I’d see her on the road, looking forlorn with a baby cradled in her arms, her eyes hollow and staring. She hung around on the field, standing on the peripheries, sometimes crouched by the crumbling walls of the cottage. More horrifyingly, she was bringing others with her now: a man who was no more than a skeleton with ashen skin stretched around his bones, a little girl more hair than person, her feet bare, bony arms sticking out of a ragged dress, an emaciated old woman covered in pox scars. I rubbed my eyes whenever I saw them, pretending I believed they were a trick of the light.

    Ligidh sinn isteach, nó ligidh sinn imeacht. Let us in or let us go.

    Alexis had to fly to Moscow for two weeks, leaving me on my own in the caravan, the most miserable I had been since my accident. There was some hold up with the building work and the builders were demanding more money, more time. Would we ever really live here? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. The ground was sodden and damp, the sky permanently grey.

    I was woken up by the sound of banging.

    ‘How much longer are you going to take?’ It was a little angry man in a baseball cap, his trousers belted up just below his nipples. Spittle dropped from his lower lip as he spoke, but I don’t think he noticed.

    ‘What’s it to you?’ We were in the middle of nowhere; the suggestion that we could be bothering anyone with noise was ridiculous.

    He seemed taken aback. ‘Oh. I didn’t expect you to speak English. I thought you were both them Eastern Europeans.’

    ‘Fuck off.’ I started to close the door on him, but he stuck his boot in the way, stopping me. I felt a stab of anger and reached for the cricket bat Alexis kept by the door, just out of sight, just in case a chancer bricklayer thought they could raid us for money or jewellery.

    ‘Move your fucking foot.’ I don’t know where it came from – like I said, I never paid much attention in Irish lessons at school, and barely scraped a pass – but my voice became a low growl as I said, ‘Imigh leat, a chiníoch.’

    ‘You and your husband are destroying a local historical site,’ the old man said, stepping back but clearly wishing I was a man so he could hit me. He chucked a manky paperback book at my feet: Nineteenth Century Thatched Cottages of South West Ireland.

    ‘Ah, sure you’re a right scholar.’ I slammed the front door of the caravan.

    I picked the book up and examined it, ready to throw it straight in the bin, but it slipped out of my hands. When I lifted it up again, the book was open about a hundred pages in. Pictures from the early days of photography, black and white and grainy, but unmistakable: the field I stood in was a little sparse-looking smallholding, the derelict building a small cottage complete with the traditional thatched roof and whitewashed walls – in front of it stood the woman in a black cloak, cradling a baby. She looked sturdier then, her cheeks almost plump, but it was unmistakably her. The location was printed underneath, along with the year 1845, the first year of the famine.

    Until then, the woman had just been a loose idea, easy to dismiss as a macabre figment of my imagination. Now she was real. A woman who had once lived here, who had stood where I stood. It made a grim kind of sense, why I always saw her when I was struggling with food, when she had lived here, starved here, on the land I would buy one day.

    ‘Your neighbour is being dramatic,’ the local historian reassured me a few weeks later; I’d commissioned them on the pretence that I was worried the racist man had a point about the cottage being a historical landmark, but really I just wanted to know more about the woman in the cloak. ‘Thatched cottages used to be common around the whole country, so I’d hardly say there’s any historical significance to your land… no offence.’

    We both chuckled awkwardly.

    ‘The family you asked me about, the O’Neils, were the ones in the photograph in that book he gave you. It all makes for very tragic listening, though.’

    ‘I’d like to hear their story.’

    She paused. ‘The wife was called Mary. She married Thomas in the late eighteen thirties. They were tenant farmers and, like almost everybody at the time in the southwest, they subsisted mostly on potato crops. Obviously, in ’forty-five that all went wrong, so Thomas took on a job in the public works, digging ditches. It was a plan by the British, you see, to try and relieve the problem by providing government work.’

    ‘Okay,’ I said, to feel part of the conversation.

    ‘The problem was, the work wasn’t local, so he’d have to walk five miles there and back, often on little to no food.’ She cleared her throat. ‘What I’m telling you next, it’s not verified. It’s only the stuff of local oral legends.’

    There was silence.

    ‘Go on.’

    ‘One night, Thomas was returning home, but five steps from his front door, he dropped dead from exhaustion. Without him as the main breadwinner, his family starved to death that winter.’

    ‘That’s tragic.’

    ‘Of course,’ she added quickly, ‘it’s more likely they died of typhoid or one of the other diseases caused by the famine, but that’s how the story goes.’

    ‘Thank you for researching it for us.’ I sat down on the bed and looked out of the campervan window onto the boggy grass. The woman in the cloak was, as she often did, staring forlornly into the horizon. ‘I was wondering… are there any ghost stories attached to the cottage, or the land?’

    ‘None that I heard.’ I could almost hear the historian rolling her eyes.

    ‘Well, that’s comforting, at least.’

    I watched as the builders worked on the house, feeling like a ghost myself. At night, I lay awake, the famine ghosts standing at the foot of my bed, daring me to do something to get rid of them. I decided they were nothing but nightmares.

    Alexis called me from the airport when he landed in Dublin. He sounded exhausted and frail. I emptied the half-finished bottle of gin I had been drinking and hid it under some ready meal containers in the bin, hoping he wouldn’t see it when he got back.

    As his taxi pulled up at the end of the drive, I felt like a dog awaiting the return of its owner. He had lost weight; his face had become lean and gaunt, his coat hanging off him. He dropped the suitcase halfway down the dirt track but carried on, like a toddler learning to walk. A few steps from the campervan, he lost his footing again, and I ran out to stop him falling.

    He grabbed my arm, pulling me down into the mud with him. There was terror in his eyes and I could see the reflection of the woman in the cloak behind me. The ragged man – Thomas – hovered behind Alexis like the negative of an old photograph.

    ‘There’s a woman behind you,’ he said, breathing laboured. ‘Ligidh sinn isteach, nó ligidh sinn imeacht.’

    He blinked, as if confused, and stopped moving. He was five steps from the front door. The woman in the black cloak stood beside him. She held out a bony hand.

    I took it.

Bio:

Caitlin Devlin is a folk horror writer, living in the UK. She is currently working on her third novel. You can follow her at @caitlindevlinhorrorwriter on Instagram and Threads.

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