The Ballykillduff Tetralogy

1. THE CROOKED THORN

Nobody remembered who planted the crooked thorn at the edge of Ballykillduff. It had always been there, bent like a claw against the wind, its bark the color of dried blood. The children avoided it. The old ones gave it wide berth. And the crows never perched on its limbs.

Then one day, the sky split open.

Not with lightning—but with a sound. A deep, humming tone that rang through every drainpipe, every marrow bone. The animals ran first. Then the power failed. Then the people vanished.

Only Mrs. Donoghue saw them land.

She was hanging her washing at dusk when the humming deepened into a song. She turned her head—and there they were. Tall things, impossibly thin, with limbs like reeds and faces like porcelain masks. They didn’t move so much as rearranged themselves from one place to another. And behind them floated a great black vessel, silent and watching.

Mrs. Donoghue dropped her clothesline and walked toward them, her eyes glassy. She spoke no words.

In the morning, there were no people left in Ballykillduff. Just the crooked thorn, now straight and blooming with pale, pulsing flowers that dripped something like ink.

A government van rolled in the next day. Men in suits walked the perimeter and said it was a gas leak. The papers called it an “environmental anomaly.”

But you could still hear the hum, if you stood quiet.

Especially at night.

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2. THE LAST POSTMAN

His name was Eamonn Kells, and he didn’t believe in aliens. He didn’t believe in much, really—except his morning tea and the sanctity of the Royal Mail route, which he’d been walking since 1978.

When Ballykillduff vanished, Eamonn didn’t get the memo.

His bag was heavy that day. He muttered at the hills and the sheep and trudged down the long, twisting lane lined with gorse and stone.

The first thing he noticed was the silence. No birds. No wind. No sheep bleating. Not even the sound of his own boots.

The second thing he noticed was the thorn tree. Straight now. Towering.

He should’ve turned back.

Instead, he reached the first house—Donoghue’s cottage. But it wasn’t a cottage anymore. The walls were melted into glass. The windows pulsed. A single glove lay on the step, still warm.

The rest of the houses were the same—warped, humming. Every door he opened revealed a dark space full of impossible shapes. Shadows moved like thoughts across the ceilings.

In the square, something stood waiting.

It wore a face he recognized. His own.

“You’ve brought the messages,” it said.

Eamonn dropped his bag. The letters spilled out—blank pages, all of them.

“You’re the last one,” it said.

He screamed, but no sound came.

Later, a shepherd saw him walking the hills, mouth open, eyes glowing faintly blue. He wore no shoes, carried no bag. Just a thorn in his hand, dripping with ink.

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3. AFTER THE FOG

In 1983, a university research team tried to study the “Ballykillduff Event.”

They sent a drone first. It returned with images scrambled like corrupted film reels. Then came a team of three: Dr. Aoife Mallon, physicist; Marcus Reed, folklorist; and Tomás O’Malley, technician.

They entered the mist just before dawn.

Inside, time collapsed.

Dr. Mallon’s log: “The trees have reversed their bark. Birds fly backward. Reed claims he saw his grandmother’s funeral—except he was in the coffin. My watch ticks like a heartbeat.”

Reed disappeared on Day 2.

O’Malley began speaking in numbers. Not equations—coordinates.

Mallon followed them. Deep beneath the schoolhouse ruins, she found it.

The heart.

A pulsing structure, suspended in nothingness, breathing in sound and exhaling memory. She realized too late: it wasn’t just a place. It was an organism.

Ballykillduff hadn’t been invaded. It had been eaten—digested by something from between the stars. And it was still hungry.

She tried to leave.

On Day 7, only static returned from her radio.

On Day 8, the sky above the site bloomed open. Satellite footage shows something enormous leaving the Earth.

The next morning, the thorn tree was gone.

But a single flower bloomed in its place.

It whispered:

“We remember. So do you.”

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4. THE THIRTEENTH SIGNAL

Declassified Intercept – Deep Bore Listening Station B-13, Donegal Hills
April 23rd, 03:06 GMT

Operator 1: “That’s… not a language.”
Operator 2: “Repeats every thirteen seconds. Four tones, then a whisper.”
Operator 1: “Play it again.”

[AUDIO: Four ascending tones. Whispered phrase.]

Whisper (enhanced): “We are almost through.”

The signal comes from the bog near Ballykillduff. The town no longer exists on any registry.

Station B-13 sends a drone.

04:14 – Drone enters perimeter. Soil samples levitate.
04:19 – Feed distorts. Biological sensors fail.
04:22 – Structures rise from the bog. Grown, not built. Spires like fungus.
04:25 – Signal changes.

VOICE: “One remembered. One forgot. One will wake the mouth.”

Survivor Log – S. O’Shaughnessy:

“I went inside. Not just the bog. The space between ideas. It thought me open.”

“They showed me the gate—the mouth. Ballykillduff was only a dream it had once. Now it dreams wider.”

“I am the signal. I wake others.”

New Protocol: Operation BLACK SHRIKE

• Seal 40km radius

• Suppress all folklore references

• No rescue attempts authorized

  EPILOGUE: THE ONE WHO REMEMBERS

  They called her Brigid, the old woman who lived just beyond the stone fence where the land curved inward like a mouth.

  No one knew how long she’d lived there. Some said she was the last born in Ballykillduff before the town vanished. Others whispered she’d never been born at all—that she’d simply remained after the forgetting.

  Children dared each other to visit her. She offered no sweets. Just stories. Told in the hush between kettle whistles and wind through peat. If you listened too long, you’d forget your own name before the tale was through.

  One night, when the fog rolled thicker than ever, a boy named Ciarán went to her cottage. He was fourteen. His mother had vanished two weeks earlier, walking her dog near the old road to Ballykillduff. They found the leash. Nothing else.

  He knocked.

  The door opened before his fist struck wood.

  Brigid sat at the fire, unmoving.

  “You’ve come for the end,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’ve come for my mum.”

  “Same thing,” she said.

  Then she told him the last tale:

  “There is a town that remembers you, even when the world forgets. A town that once was flesh, and now is thought. You can walk into it, if it calls your name—but you won’t leave with it. You’ll leave as it.”

  “They were not invaders. No. We called them. Through our grief, our stories, our need to believe the world was more than it was. Ballykillduff became the doorway. The offering.”

  “The crooked thorn was the first tooth.”

  “Now it waits to wake fully. In dream, in breath, in data, in language. The thirteenth signal is no longer a warning. It’s a heartbeat.”

  Ciarán tried to speak, but his tongue felt heavy.

  Brigid turned.

  Her eyes were voids, flickering like television static.

  “You are the last,” she said.

  “The final story is yours.”

  The next morning, the cottage was gone.

  All that remained was a stone fence, circling a perfect circle of ash.

  And a single, straight thorn tree in the center, blooming with black flowers that whispered when the wind passed through:

  “We are already here.”