Trespassers Read Online Free Page A

many weaknesses.
    ‘Be kind to her,’ he tells me. ‘She’s old and lonely. She needs you to like her.’
    This flatters me.
    *
    Meanwhile, our time in Wicklow is almost over. We are shuttling between Killough and a house so new it is not yet finished. It is being built for us, just outside a village called Killiney, by an architect called John O’Gorman, and has been being planned for most of my lifetime – which is not, of course, very long, although it seems immensely so to me.
    We have made countless trips in my parents’ black Ford car to watch its progress, and its modern conveniences astound both Aunt Kate and myself, who have been looking forward in a delirium of joy to moving into it for good. None of the four of us has ever lived in a house so new that nobody lived there before us, a house painted white on the outside and primrose within. A house without ghosts.
    Killiney, being in South County Dublin, is supplied with telephone lines, gas and electricity. This means that I shall no longer be left in the dark once my candle is blown out at night – an
enormous
relief which my parents pretend not to appreciate. They pretend not to because, while we’re still in the old house, they are afraid to leave me a lit candle or matches or even an oil lamp lest I knock it over and burn the house down. I don’t argue about this now. Why bother, since, once we finally move to the new house, there will be an electric switch in the wall next to my bed which, at the touch of a finger, will flood the room with light? The old, creaky, earwig-ridden room where I still sleep and where I cannot be quite sure that a family of witches doesn’t live too will then be no more than a memory. Alleluia! Electricity is like having your own sun. I could worship it.
    Kitty, who is not coming with us, is to take all the oil lamps when we leave, though not the candles. Eileen says we may need a store of those since sometimes electricity can break down. This shocks me. The sun doesn’t break down. Why should electricity?
    Until recently I was afraid to come out from under the bedclothes after dark, and have been known to wet the bed ratherthan grope under it in search of a chamber pot. I manage to forget such lapses and, though ashamed, am addicted to the terror which provokes them.
    Addicted! Eileen has told me this wonderful new word. Being addicted is like being under a spell so that bad things which happen aren’t my fault. They are hers because she has made me too fond of the frightening tales she likes to tell before I go to sleep. That is because she is addicted too. Worse, when she and I go trespassing in the deserted estates which are now overgrown and have been taken over by owls, weasels, ravens and the like, we play a game which Seán has forbidden, but to which she and I are irresistibly drawn. This is how it works. First, Eileen hides in the bushes, leaving me to work up anxiety, then, having taken off her coat and pulled it over her head, she will suddenly appear in the middle of a yew or a laurel walk whose top branches have knit together so that, even at midday, it is as dark as a railway tunnel. Pretending not to be herself, she makes weird noises and mimes our joint idea of a witch. I run away. She chases me and sometimes I trip and fall. When this happens she, her face half hidden by the coat which she has turned into a hood, looms above me, still half playing at being a witch, and reduces me to thrilled, gibbering terror. The glass eyes of the fox fur which she normally wears around her neck now look down from the top of her head. Its teeth grin. When she pulls it forward, its jaws snap.
    Don’t I know it is she? Well, yes and no. After all, she may have a second, dangerous self which sometimes takes over. Maybe a demon has entered her? There are stories like this. She performs a sort of dance. Sliding out from under the coat, her pale fingers mimic tentacles and I both do and don’t want to be more frightened