The Mysterious Monument of Ballykillduff

(That No One Quite Remembers Building)

Chapter One — The Morning It Was Noticed

On Tuesday evening there was nothing in Pat O’Daly’s top field but sheep, thistles, and one sulking scarecrow with a hat like a collapsed cake. On Wednesday morning, there was also a monument.

It stood where the ground lifts slightly to look down at the village, a tall dark shape the colour of stormwater, too smooth for local stone and too clean for anything that had spent the night outdoors. When Pat first saw it, he thought it was a trick of fog and rubbed his eyes hard enough to make stars. The monument stayed.

By half-seven the lane was thick with neighbours and theories. Mrs O’Shaughnessy said it was “either a famine cross or an awful mistake.” Young Máirtín, who knew everything worth knowing at eleven years old, declared it an obelisk and then asked, privately, what an obelisk was. The priest said a blessing just in case; the postman took a photograph just in case; the cows chewed inscrutably, as they do in all cases.

When Pat laid his palm against the stone it was neither warm nor cold but something like both, a temperature your skin couldn’t name. He drew back with a tiny hiss of surprise and laughed, embarrassed. The monument seemed to drink the sound and give nothing back.

Chapter Two — The Arguments

By lunchtime the monument had already caused three rows, two reconciliations, and a vote. In Hartnett’s Bar, the Tidy Towns committee concluded—with onion-slicing seriousness—that flowers would improve it. Old Mr Keogh objected that you could not improve a thing until you knew what it was. “Would you frost a mystery cake?” he asked. Mrs O’Shaughnessy said yes, of course she would.

Down the snug, Tommy Furlong offered to tow it away with his tractor. “It’s not rooted,” he argued, “I can tell by the tilt of it.” Others insisted it was planted to the very heart of the earth. A schoolteacher suggested contacting the Department, which satisfied everyone because it meant nothing had to be done today.

Strangest of all, at the peak of each quarrel a forgetfulness slid over the room like steam on a mirror. Voices dropped, frowns softened. By the end of a pint the drinkers couldn’t quite recall what they’d been fierce about, only that it had been very important and probably Tommy’s fault.

Chapter Three — The Shifting Shape

The children began a game: draw the monument every day. Greta sketched a thin needle of stone. Her sister drew a cross shouldered like a wrestler. Máirtín’s page showed a spiralled spire cut with little windows that weren’t there an hour later.

A tourist took a dozen pictures from the same spot and, that night in her B&B, discovered her phone held twelve different monuments: a pillar, a steeple, a column banded with carvings that looked like a flock of starlings mid-turn. The landlady advised deleting them before bedtime. “It’s only asking for dreams,” she said, and made cocoa.

The mason from down the road swore the patterns on the stone were tool-marks from no tool he owned. The patterns changed when you watched them and, worse, when you didn’t. “Like nettle shadows,” he muttered, and kept his distance.

Chapter Four — The Sound at Midnight

The first to hear it was Mrs O’Shaughnessy, waking at twelve to the kind of silence that makes a house nervous. Through the open window came a hum—low at first, then gathering itself into something like bees or like a choir or like both at once. It seemed to drift from the field where the monument stood.

Others heard it later: the baker, rolling dough by moonlight; the fox, ears pricked mid-slink; the priest, who sat up in bed and said, “All right,” to no one in particular. For some the hum was music; for some it was wind; for one poor man, it was his name, called softly and sensibly, as though by a friend who wanted help moving a sofa.

At dawn the sound fell away, leaving the hedges crowded with dew and the listeners unsure whether to admit they had been listening at all.

Chapter Five — The Disappearing Bicycle

Mr Keogh leaned his bicycle against the monument the way a man leans a question against another, half-hoping it will answer. He stepped aside to tie a bootlace and, when he looked back, the bicycle was gone. In its place, the faintest damp ring on the stone, round as a halo.

Two weeks later a turf-cutter found the bike standing bolt upright in the bog, perfectly balanced, ferns shouldering through the spokes. The chain was freckled with rust; the bell worked better than ever. The turf-cutter wheeled it home and Mr Keogh swore off cycling and swore, too, that the bog had looked at him as if it knew a joke.

“Things wander,” Mrs O’Shaughnessy told him, sympathetic. “My kettle wandered into the pantry once. But yours has gone poetic with it.”

Chapter Six — The Children’s Dare

They dared each other, because that is the proper work of children. Touch it. Just with a fingertip. Count to three. Count to ten. Don’t blink.

Máirtín pressed his palm flat to the stone and felt a prickle race up his arm like cats’ footsteps. In that prickling there was a suggestion of words, not heard so much as leaned upon: Come back tomorrow. Come back when you’re taller. Come back when you’ve learned to keep secrets the way stones do.

He did not come back the next day, or the day after, because he discovered that when he turned toward the field his feet preferred to go towards goalposts or ice-cream vans. The monument had given him a homework he wasn’t ready to do.

Chapter Seven — The Rain That Wouldn’t Fall

A storm stacked itself over Ballykillduff, a cathedral of cloud. Rain crossed the valley in marching sheets. It soaked the road, baptized the cattle, and turned the schoolyard into a shallow sea where paper boats went to war.

Everywhere, rain—except the monument’s field, which stayed dry as a teacup turned upside down. The drops split and skated off, leaving the grass beaded and the stone shining like a seal’s back. Pat O’Daly stood at the gate with a face of thunder and the priest tried another blessing to be on the safe side.

Afterwards they found a dry circle in the wet, as neat as if a giant had drawn round a plate. On the circle’s edge daisies kept their heads, scandalously unruffled.

Chapter Eight — The Tidy Towns Meeting

This time they made it all the way to action. The Tidy Towns committee purchased a big brown bag of daffodil bulbs and printed a rota in biro. Saturday morning, nine o’clock, boots and gloves, flasks at the ready. “We’ll soften it,” said Mrs O’Shaughnessy. “That’s what flowers do to the world. They soften it.”

At nine there were boots and gloves and flasks—but no bulbs. The bag lay open beside the monument, splayed like a mouth that had told a secret. Not a single bulb remained. There were, however, little hollows thumbed into the soil all round the base, as if a careful gardener with earth-dark hands had been through in the night.

In spring, of course, nothing came up. Unless you counted three bright daffodils flowering in a ditch two fields away, where nobody had planted anything and where the water, it was said, sometimes ran uphill.

Chapter Nine — The Outsiders Arrive

Ballykillduff featured on a late-night programme about strange places, wedged between a haunted lighthouse and a statue that blinked. After that, the outsiders came: notebook people, camera people, drone people, a gentle professor who carried a measuring tape and the air of someone who apologised to chairs.

They took careful photographs; they filmed the way the light slid; they interviewed Mr Keogh, who told his bicycle story in three different endings. Back at their hotels the footage misbehaved. Files labelled “Monument Close-Up” displayed twenty seconds of black cat washing its paw. Data vanished as though exhaled. The gentle professor, affronted, tried to sketch from memory and produced a splendid drawing of a lighthouse he had never visited.

Two of them stayed an extra day and went home with local woollens and no professional pride left, which is sometimes the better souvenir.

Chapter Ten — The Vanishing Shadow

At evening the monument’s shadow should have stretched towards the village. On Tuesday it refused to stretch at all. On Wednesday there were two shadows: one lying the expected way; the other angled into the bog like an invitation nobody sane would accept.

A trio of lads—lanky, long-hearted, terrible at obedience—followed the second shadow between the sedges, laughter laid on thick like bravado. When they came back at last, boots sloshing, they were pale and courtly as princes. “We saw… birds,” one said. “Or maybe doors.” Another said nothing. The third stopped biting his nails and took up whistling, which alarmed his mother.

For a week after, the second shadow did not appear. When it returned, the lads stayed away and the bog seemed to smirk.

Chapter Eleven — The Ballykillduff Daleks Investigate

News travels fast to certain ears, and the Ballykillduff Daleks possess very certain ears. They arrived with a purposeful whirr, arranged themselves like officials, and declared the monument “A SUPERIOR STRUCTURE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN. POSSIBLE KIN.”

Chief Dalek McSpud attempted measurement with his plunger and found that every time he read the tape the numbers translated into recipes. Dalek Breda took notes and lost them immediately in the neat compartments of her own mind. Dalek Murphy suggested a small, polite EXTERMINATION to see what would happen; the beam fizzled like a spent match. The monument hummed—just a fraction louder than it did at midnight—and one of its changing patterns briefly resembled a Dalek in profile wearing a very foolish hat.

“CONCLUSION: COUSIN,” McSpud announced grandly. “ALTERNATIVE CONCLUSION: NUISANCE.” They circled twice, as if consulting a manual only they could see, then backed away with the rare humility of machines faced by the oldest kind of stubborn.

Chapter Twelve — The Final Forgetting

Time pressed its thumb on the season and turned the page. The monument stood. Children learned new games. The Tidy Towns committee judged window boxes. The priest stopped glancing at the field when he passed, and the baker, rolling dough by moonlight, forgot to listen for the midnight hum.

Visitors dwindled to the odd car that slowed and then didn’t stop. Pat O’Daly’s sheep grazed right up to the stone and sometimes, it must be said, farther than sheep are meant to graze. Even the Daleks, who never truly give up on anything except sense, turned their attention to other excitements.

And yet each morning, there it was: tall, dark, perfectly itself. If you asked in Ballykillduff where it had come from, people smiled with the softness you hear in old songs.

“Was it always there?” they would say, genuinely pleased by the question. “I can’t quite remember. But sure, it looks well, doesn’t it?”

The wind lifted, the grass answered, and the monument—as ever—kept its own counsel.