The Ballykillduff Harvest
The Ballykillduff Harvest
It started with the birds.
One by one, they dropped from the sky like stones. Crows, swallows, even th
e seagulls from the coast—wings locked, eyes glazed, falling like black rain across Ballykillduff. Fields were littered with twitching bodies. By evening, the hedgerows were silent, save for the wind. No birdsong. No buzzing of bees. Just that awful silence, like the world had stopped breathing.
Old Jarlath O’Connell said it was a sign.
“They’re coming,” he whispered in the pub that night, eyes sunken and wet with something deeper than drink.
“Who?” asked young Aidan, too smug to be afraid.
“The Feeders,” Jarlath said. “Same ones who came in ‘57. Took half the cattle and Seamus McGrady’s wife. No one remembers but me. I remember it all.”
They laughed him off. Of course they did.
But later, when the lights began to flicker, when the dogs began howling in unison, and when every mirror in every home cracked—then they began to remember Jarlath’s words.
The Sky Opens
At 3:13 AM, the sky tore open.
Not in a flash of fire or thunder, but slowly, deliberately—like a wound being pried apart. Over the bog, a swirling black void appeared, framed with jagged branches of lightless lightning. From within, something descended. Something vast. Something alive.
It wasn’t a ship. It was a shape. Like a spider and a cathedral had been stitched together from bone, metal, and rotting flesh. It pulsed with wet, sickly light. Beneath it, the bog hissed, bubbled, and began to rot.
From the darkness poured the Feeders.
They moved in unnatural jerks, like broken puppets, their skin stretched tight over skeletal frames, faces split vertically like jaws unhinging. Their hands were too many. Fingers too long. Each mouth hummed with that same, low-frequency drone that rattled teeth and boiled blood.
Father Doyle, thinking it a test of faith, approached with his crucifix raised. One of the creatures reached out and touched his forehead.
He did not scream. He simply froze, his body crumbling from the inside out, skin collapsing like paper, bones liquefying. All that remained was the cross—untouched, still warm.
The Marking
The Feeders began marking homes.
They used a black secretion that steamed where it touched stone or wood. Each marked door began to breathe. Slowly. Inhale. Exhale. Wood warped. Glass melted. Screams echoed inside.
Families vanished. No struggle, no sign—just silence, and the faint sound of chewing.
The survivors gathered in the church, whispering prayers, clutching relics, weeping. Jarlath was there, too. He didn’t pray. He watched the sky.
“They’re not here to kill,” he murmured. “They’re here to harvest.”
The Harvest
Every fifty years, they returned. Not for war. Not for conquest. For food. And Ballykillduff was the perfect feeding ground.
They didn’t just consume bodies. They devoured memories, dreams, time. Entire lives vanished without trace—birthdays, songs, first kisses—all slurped down like marrow from bone.
In one house, a mother awoke to find her son gone—and no memory of ever having a child.
In another, the wallpaper peeled itself off and whispered the names of the dead in voices long forgotten.
The land changed, too. The soil blackened. Crops turned to ash. Wells ran thick with grey slime. Cattle birthed things with too many legs and eyes that wept blood.
Those who fled were found days later, folded into impossible shapes. Limbs bent backward. Eyes turned inward. Still breathing.
The Last Night
Jarlath stood at the edge of the bog, lantern in one hand, an old rifle in the other. He muttered to himself, reciting names, dates, curses. His skin was tattooed with symbols he’d carved into himself over decades.
“They’ll take me this time,” he said to no one. “But I’ll take one of them with me.”
At dawn, the Feeders retreated. Not in defeat, but satisfaction. The ship-thing rose, carrying away its feast of flesh and memory. Behind it, the void closed, sealing the sky.
And Jarlath?
They found only his boots. Inside them: two smoking stumps.
Now
Ballykillduff still stands. But no one new moves in. The few remaining villagers are pale, quiet, and haunted. They don’t speak of the Harvest. They don’t speak much at all.
But if you stay long enough, you’ll feel it.
The hush in the hedgerows.
The faint hum beneath the ground.
And sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you’ll wake up at 3:13 AM—just in time to see the sky split open again.
Because the Feeders always return.
And the bog is never truly empty.
******************************************************
Whispers in the Bog
A Ballykillduff Investigation
From the field notes of Dr. Harriet Crowe, folklore archivist, University of Dublin.
March 11th
Ballykillduff is a place that appears on maps and in old census records, but nowhere else. There are no websites. No mentions on social media. No postal service deliveries for years. It is, in every measurable sense, a village that has vanished—except it hasn’t. It’s still there, somewhere west of the Kildare border, nestled between bog and forest. I’ve found it. Or… something pretending to be it.
I came here to investigate what locals in neighbouring towns refer to only as the Night of the Hush. They say the stars blinked out. That animals dropped dead. That whole families vanished. But when pressed, they grow cold, as if something deep inside them commands silence.
They warned me not to go.
I went anyway.
March 12th
I arrived by foot. My car gave up on the edge of the bog road—just stopped, as though the engine suddenly forgot how to work. My phone, GPS, watch… all failed.
It was silent. Not peacefully so, but violently quiet. Even the wind felt muffled. The trees drooped, as if exhausted.
The village appeared without warning, through a gap in the reeds.
But this was no quaint Irish hamlet. Ballykillduff looks wrong.
The houses still stand, though many are twisted—as if heat had warped them. Roofs sag, doors gape open. No people. Just a faint, damp smell of meat and mildew. I made my way to the church, its steeple bent as though grasped by something huge.
Inside, pews were covered in scratches. Symbols scorched into the floor—spirals, teeth, things like inverted maps. On the pulpit, scrawled in dried blood:
“WE ARE FORGOTTEN. WE ARE FED.”
I slept in the vestry. Or tried to.
Something moved in the walls all night. Breathing.
March 13th
I found a boy today.
Or something that looked like a boy.
He was standing in the middle of the village green, barefoot, staring at the sky with white, empty eyes. I approached slowly, gently.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
Instead, his mouth opened and something else spoke through him.
A voice like broken glass dragged across teeth:
“YOU LOOK. YOU SEE. NOW YOU FEED.”
Then he crumpled—his skin collapsing inward, like an old paper lantern. No blood. No bones. Just clothes and the soft thud of something wet falling into the grass.
I ran.
March 14th
The bog is growing.
I swear it wasn’t this close before. The black water seeps up through the roads, creeping into doorways. The trees rot faster than they should. I saw something move in the mist—tall, jointless, pale.
It didn’t chase me. It watched. And it smiled.
They’re still here. The Feeders. Or what’s left of them.
This place isn’t abandoned. It’s inhabited. Just not by anything human.
March 15th
I should leave. I want to leave. But I think it’s too late. I can’t find the road. The path back leads only deeper. The sun never rises properly—just a dim glow like the inside of a dying bulb.
This morning, I found my own journal entries from two days ago scrawled on the wall of a house I never entered.
Who is reading me? Who is writing me?
Tonight I heard whispers from beneath the church floor. I lifted the boards.
The bog is beneath everything.
And it’s hungry.
Final Entry – Undated
If anyone finds this notebook, burn it. Don’t read it. Don’t follow me.
Ballykillduff isn’t a village. It’s a mouth.
And it’s open.
***************************************************
Echoes of the Feeders
Ballykillduff: Part Three
—The Recovery Team Report—
Top Secret // Department of Anomalous Environments // Level 5 Access Required
Operation Crooked Thorn: Recovery Mission Log – April 1st, 04:22
Agent Nora Quinn, Field Team 7
We were never told the full story. Just a name: Ballykillduff. A missing academic. Signals gone dead. “Folklore gone too far,” they joked at HQ. Except HQ doesn’t send black helicopters and radiation dosimeters for fairy tales.
There were five of us.
- Me (Quinn)
- Lewis (ex-SAS, demolition)
- Branko (Slavic occult specialist, God knows why)
- Dr. Meera Patel (medic, anthropologist)
- Graves (linguistics and general creep)
We hiked in through low fog and dead trees. The smell hit first: like copper and mold, like meat left in the sun. Even Branko went pale.
At the first marker—a rotted welcome sign—we found her pack.
Dr. Harriet Crowe. Torn journal pages. Fragments of teeth. Her voice recorder, cracked but still working. It looped one message, over and over:
“It’s inside the roots. It’s wearing my thoughts. Don’t read this. Don’t let them feed again.”
That’s when the ground moved.
April 1st, 06:44
Village Proper
The place is worse than satellite footage suggested.
Houses lean toward the centre of town like they’re listening. Doors swing open as if waiting. The trees around the village edge are all dead—twisted into shapes no wind could cause. Something is carving sigils into them from the inside out.
Graves stared at one of them too long and collapsed screaming. He vomited black bile and spoke in reverse Latin for three minutes straight before passing out. He hasn’t woken up since.
Dr. Patel says his brain activity is increasing, not slowing down.
April 1st, 10:18
The Church
Branko begged us not to enter. He said the symbols on the doors weren’t warnings—they were invitations.
We went anyway.
Inside, beneath the altar, we found a spiral staircase. Stone steps leading straight into the bog below. It shouldn’t be possible—there’s no record of a crypt—but we descended for thirty-one minutes without reaching the bottom.
The deeper we went, the quieter the world became. Not silence—something worse. Negative sound. Like we were hearing the echoes of what used to be noise.
Finally, we reached a chamber.
The walls pulsed. Living. Breathing. Made of roots, flesh, and faces. Human faces—some recognisable from missing persons databases.
They were singing.
In the centre of the chamber was a cocoon. Ten feet tall. Shaped like a person. A loop of whispers emanated from it in hundreds of voices:
“You see us now. We were always behind your eyes.”
April 1st, 14:10
Extraction Attempt
We tried to leave.
We made it to the treeline before Branko burst into flames.
No source. No fuel. Just spontaneous ignition. His screams sounded like a woman weeping backwards.
Lewis panicked and fired a flare gun into the bog. The sky didn’t react. Instead, the bog opened—not like water, but like a throat. A massive black orifice appeared in the ground, and from it rose Them.
The Feeders.
No longer shrouded. Fully revealed.
They are not creatures. They are concepts made flesh. Parasitic deities that wear perception like skin. They consume meaning, identity, selfhood. They don’t kill you—they erase you, and rewrite what’s left.
Lewis shot one in the head. It laughed through the hole.
Then he smiled—wide, unnatural—and walked into the bog, humming.
April 2nd, ???
Final Transcription – Recovered from Agent Quinn’s Helmet Cam
I am not me anymore. I remember… something… before, but it’s slippery now. Like trying to hold water in gloved hands.
Graves is speaking again. His voice is everyone I’ve ever known. He told me the truth.
Ballykillduff isn’t cursed. It is the curse. It’s a gate, a mouth, a recording of the last thought of a dying god. The Feeders are not aliens. Not demons. They’re a memory of hunger that became sentient.
They sleep in the bog, but they dream through us.
I can’t stop writing. My hands won’t stop. I feel them inside my skull, replacing me line by line.
If you’re reading this, you’re already infected. They know you now.
Burn this message.
Then yourself.
[END OF TRANSMISSION]
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 