The Ballykillduff Incident
Ballykillduff was a quiet place. Nothing much ever happened there, unless you counted old Mrs. Dunne’s cow getting stuck in the bog every other Tuesday, or the time young Declan swore blind he saw a banshee combing her hair by the churchyard wall (it turned out to be his granny in a nightie, sleepwalking).
But that changed one moonless night, when the stars vanished.
Not behind clouds—no, they simply blinked out, one by one, like someone was snuffing candles in the sky.
Then came the humming. Low, deep, and wrong. It rattled windowpanes, stirred glasses off shelves, and made the dogs howl until their throats gave out. At precisely 2:06 AM, the power failed. Phones died. Radios hissed static. The whole village went dark—except for the bog.
A light rose from it. Not a flickering will-o’-the-wisp or the distant glow of a torch—this was blue-white, searing, pulsing like a heartbeat. People peered from windows, too scared to speak, as something… vast… emerged.
It wasn’t a ship like you’d see in films. No saucers or flashing lights. It looked like a cathedral made of bones and glass, covered in thorns that dripped black ichor. It hovered a few feet above the bog, and beneath it, the earth boiled.
Then they came.
Tall as lamp posts. Skin like rotting velvet. Faces like melted candles with too many eyes. They didn’t walk so much as glide, legs twitching like dying spiders. And worst of all, they smiled—wide, toothless grins that split their heads open like a zipper.
Father Malloy was the first to go. He stumbled out of the rectory, clutching his rosary and shouting prayers in Latin. One of the creatures tilted its head and whispered something that made his body turn inside out without spilling a drop of blood.
The creatures moved street to street, house to house, marking doors with something thick and red that steamed. Those marked were never seen again. Sometimes you’d hear a scream, cut off mid-breath. Sometimes just a long, wet chewing sound.
By morning, the light was gone. The ship too. And so were forty-seven people.
The rest of the village was untouched. Untouched, but changed. The survivors don’t speak of that night. They’ve boarded up their windows with iron crosses. They won’t leave their homes after dark. And no one goes near the bog anymore.
But if you’re foolish enough to visit Ballykillduff on a moonless night, you might hear the humming.
And if you hear the humming, it’s already too late.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 