She was Irish.

Well, she had acquired an Irish name—Miss Horan. A lovely lilt leavened her language. And her eyes were the startling grey-blue sometimes seen in that race.

Trouble was, she putting it all on. Miss Horan was actually Romanian, or some such. Old Doc, who was relating the story to me whilst barbering my hair, was not certain from whence the woman actually came. Since we both knew the truth of it, it went unsaid that on our island, people hail from everywhere and mix like mad. So it’s simple enough to up sticks and move yourself to a new spot where you can pretend to be someone else if you feel the need of it. For a time, then, it suited the woman who called herself Miss Horan to be Irish.

Why did it suit? Well, because she overheard a conversation whilst stuck in a queue in some dismal shop, a conversation in which a local barmpot claimed that it was a ‘well-known fact’ that certain Irishfolk had the ability to kill rats by casting rhymed spells. Before I could call out such nonsense, Old Doc defended the truth of it (that it was something people claimed, not that the claim could be true). He stated that the notion was even posited in Shakespeare somewhere.

(I later looked for the reference, and was surprised to discover it actually did exist— in As You Like It, Act III, Scene ii. Rosalind, finding that someone has been anonymously posting poems praising her loveliness onto numerous trees throughout the forest of Arden, remarks that ‘I was never so be-rhymed since…I was an Irish rat.’)

Why should this nonsensical rodential palaver be of such interest to Miss Horan—whatever her actual name was then? Well, she was a grand-looking woman, right enough, but not—as the saying goes—the marrying kind. Getting along a bit in age, she sought therefore to procure a reliable means of income to support herself for the foreseeable future, build her nest-egg. (Her previous means of living is unknown, but much-speculated about. The consensus is that she was either a laicized nun or professional bit of totty.) In any case, Miss Horan possessed a fierce intellect and was wily enough to detect an opportunity in the overheard words. She determined to teach herself a passable Irish accent and learn some nonsense phrases in Gaelic so she could head off down the road. It was her plan to move from farm to farm throughout the island, promising credulous landowners—for a reasonable price—that she could rid their barns of rats. In other words, Miss Horan pledged she would kill vermin with poetry.

After an initial burst of inward self-congratulatory enthusiasm regarding her idea, Miss Horan began to realize there were obstacles to overcome before her scheme could be made to bear fruit. For one thing, she had to consider whether any of the island’s landowners would actually be daft enough to believe she could cause the decease of local Rodentia with the incantation of a few simple words. Well, yes, if they were men, Miss Horan decided they could indeed be made fool of—she hadn’t met one yet with a ha’p’orth of common sense. Whatever her previous role in life, whether conventual or bawdy, it did not leave her overburdened with an especially high opinion of the male sex—that’s fair to say. One gaze into the blue sky of her eyes and they were lost for good.

Still, it might well pay to allow herself a companion, a sizable male compatriot to intimidate, to ward off unwanted attention along those lines, at least whilst traveling. And she knew of just the man—a distant cousin of hers by the name of Bogdan. He was a lumpen, oafish sort of fella, a former gravedigger—currently living hand-to-mouth on the quiet—who was the subject of a far-and-wide search by the constabulary, having been accused repeatedly of separating soon-to-be-buried corpses from their valuables. Miss Horan never cared for Bogdan very much—he was a witless plonker—but he would do. She decided to rechristen him Colum, and since she knew him to be constitutionally incapable of the mental concentration needed to put on even a rudimentary Irish accent, Miss Horan felt it best to present him on the road as a mute, her poor voiceless assistant in performing the ancient and mysterious raticidal arts.

What to wear? Miss Horan knew ordinary, everyday working folk were mightily impressed by those who had cause (and the means) to dress up fine, so she accessed some of her nest-egg and procured a measure of rare sateen fabric in a celestial lilac shade. She adorned the garment, fashioned into a kind of flowing robe, with a galaxy of glittering, stitched-on gnostic symbols she designed herself. Miss Horan imagined farmwives exiting their hovels to stare in awe at her as she floated past on their rural roads, with rats reputedly dropping dead like flies in her wake.

(By the way, this all took place many years ago near what is now called New Town. The area around there then was mostly scattald, open public land, decorated here-and-there with the decrepit outbuildings of a few private holdings. Subsistence farmers, you know, eking out a meagre living, abiding in shanties. Best to start there, test out the act, before moving on to more prosperous areas.)

In a borrowed two-seat shay on their way to their first attempt at this bit of chicanery, the new-named Colum—who didn’t seem to mind being coerced into Miss Horan’s scheme—queried her about what was likely to happen when her phony incantations failed to actually bring forth any dying rats (he liked to picture them emerging with a pained squeak from their hidey-holes, clasping their little paws to their little chests).

‘Ah,’ she said, as if the idea’d just occurred to her, ‘I suppose we could use these as convincers.’ Miss Horan indicated a modest-sized grey canvas sack situated between them on the narrow seat of the shay. Colum untied the bit of string holding it closed, peered inside, and spied half a dozen dead brown rats.

‘What you’ll do is climb atop the structure in question beforehand and abide with these predeceased little fellas. When you hear me finish my incantation, you’ll drop them down one right after the other as if they’re new dead. All the buildings ‘round this way are rickety and half falling-down. I don’t doubt that there’ll plenty of holes in the roof for you to squeeze them through.’

They completed many miles of the trip with Colum alternately gawping at Miss Horan, amazed, or just shaking his head.

When they finally came up to a suitable farm, a likely little remote holding featuring a scalable, slightly atilt, two-storey barn tucked into a muddy hill at the corner of the property, Miss Horan sent Colum on his way to climb it with the ratbag. Then she steered the shay to the front of the holding, descended gracefully, and approached the tiny lamplit farmhouse, stepping around piled horseshit in the yard whilst her magnificent lilac robe whiffled behind her in the breeze. Try to imagine the expression on the farmer’s face when he encountered this transcendent vision postured on his mucky stoop, a gorgeous Irish goddess offering to rid his property of vermin, a nonetheless agreeable goddess who was willing to accept any small payment he might muster as tribute. Of course he said yes to the proposition (his wife, who might have been more sensible, was away with the kiddies in Old Town nursing her sister, who was down with the croup).

So Miss Horan and the farmer—whose name was Strzelecki or Strzeleczek, or something like that—proceeded out to the barn and stood close together for a long moment in the doorway. She then planted him there with a mild wave and went ahead on her own to stand, with magisterial bearing, at the geometric centre of the structure. Suddenly she raised her arms, as if in supplication.

‘Oh, yes, there are many vermin abiding here,’ Miss Horan said, turning her head this way and that.

‘I catch them, but there’s always more,’ the farmer said.

‘Oh, it should be mentioned,’ she said, ‘that most of my killing spell will have to be translated and cast into the English language, which unfortunately spoils the timeless poetic beauty of the Gaelic rhymes. But the sacrifice is necessary, since these are English rats.’

If the farmer read through the questionable logic of this assertion, his face did not betray it.

She lowered her chin in preparation for dropping her already lusciously low voice a further octave, then in a full-throated roar cried out:

‘Vermin! Vile thieves of grain! Engines of disease! Purveyors of filth! Harken!

Death and damnation is yours! The great Celtic Goddess Morrigan commands it!

Éirigh na francaigh, atá sa scioból seo, gach duine agaibh, agus tuit anuas!

Rats, which live in this barn arise, all of you, and fall down!’

This was  Colum’s cue. Watching the ritual through an imperfection in the greyed slats of the roof, he shifted his considerable weight whilst attempting to dump the dead rodents bunched tightly together in the ratbag through the narrow oblong hole he’d chosen. The much-weathered wood of the roof supporting him creaked menacingly, then gave way suddenly and completely. With a cry he fell through. On the way downward, Colum’s head struck with a vicious thwack on a crossbeam and his neck was broke. His wildly cartwheeling body reached the floor of the structure with a thunderous crash, followed by a shower of blood spatter, a number of predeceased rats, and some stabbing splinters of rotten wood. He was dead as a stone.

Now, what would you or I do in this situation, if we were somehow to find ourselves in Miss Horan’s shoes? We might be tempted to accede to an impulse to rush to our dead relative and grieve over him, even if we privately acknowledged that—ho-hum—we never cared for him all that much. Or, realizing the scam had altogether failed, we might do a runner, leg it for the shay to make good our escape.

But Miss Horan was not you or I.

She approached the grotesquely splayed body calmly and then with perfect timing turned to the astonished farmer now standing at her side. ‘I congratulate you, sir,’ she said. ‘You obviously knew a dangerous wanted criminal was hiding somewhere on your property, and you intuited that my spells work just as well on villains as they do on vermin. Brilliant.’

They split the reward.

‘So,’ Old Doc said, as he stepped around to the front of me in order to gauge the evenness of my side-whiskers, trim my eyebrows, and finish his story, ‘Miss Horan’s reputation became so formidable and so widely-known as a result of this dramatic incident that she soon began getting paid as a liaison with the constabulary. If they had a general idea where an escapee from gaol or some other poor fella the rozzers were seeking might be holed up, they’d send her in, arrayed in her magnificent mystical clobber, to approach possible hiding places one-by-one. Once a criminal spied her coming, more often than not he’d abandon his place of concealment and emerge, po-faced and disheveled, with his hands raised, preferring immediate capture to outright execution by Irish poetry.

Well, all right, then. One day, after a few years passed, in some out-of-the-way place she’d landed in her wide travels across the island as an Irish mystic, Miss Horan came across a man—a prosperous man, a tall and strong man, a genuine Irishman, who saw through the bold-as-brass phoniness of her façade immediately. He stood observing her approach with his arms crossed, highly amused and delighted. As she got close to this fella, Miss Horan was astonished to be met with a penetrating assessment from eyes as bright as her own. For the first time ever in her life, she felt herself back-footed in regards to a man.

Well, I certainly don’t need to tell you what happened after that.’ 

– James Morris

Author’s Note: In 2024, I wrote a story called ‘The Stone Lifter,’ and I enjoyed the experience so much that it inspired in me a sort of creative explosion of similar stories, all interlinked, featuring the same locale, and framed by the same narrator. ‘Miss Horan and the Killing Spell’ was written fourth in that series, but I felt it stood on its own sufficiently to warrant separate publication. I recall with fondness the day I realized what the ending was going to be—it’s the sort of satisfying moment that keeps a writer going.