A Girl, a Murder, and Twelve Dreadful Children

Chapter IV: Towns and Villages

Troubles may ofttimes be so dire that they cannot get better. But they are never so dire that they still cannot get worse. -- Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

People have always liked to give names to the places they live. It makes their villages and towns seem more like a community and less like a random collection of houses.

But giving names to things gives those things life. They cease to be inanimate objects or abstract concepts, and they become something comprehensible and almost tangible. Death is easier to fear when it has a definite form, instead of being a simple cessation of life. And so the Grim Reaper took shape in people's minds, and became an understandable symbol of something that could not be understood. A doll is just a collection of cloth and stuffing, but when a child gives it a name it becomes their friend and companion.

A group of houses is just a dot on a map. But give it a name, and it becomes a place. A village. A home.

Given enough time, it becomes a person.

Armagh and her brothers and sisters had become personifications when enough people had called them home for long enough. They had their own personalities and goals. But even when they rarely saw each other, they were all aware of each other's presence at the edges of their consciousness. None of them had ever completely disappeared.

Until sixty years ago.

To this day no one knew what had happened to Belfast. One day she had been there, and the next she'd disappeared. Everyone knew who was responsible. Ballymena and some of the others had set out to make some of the Irish invading their towns disappear in retaliation. But for years the towns had had to live without their queen.

The only thing more unsettling was her sudden return.

Belfast reappeared as suddenly and inexplicably as she had left. She said nothing about where she'd gone or why. She acted as if she'd last seen her siblings six days ago, not sixty years ago. But the malice and cruelty that always clung to her like a cloak had intensified. Instead of being like a cloak, it was now like a second skin. And she made her displeasure known.

All over Belfast -- the city -- people dropped dead. The official cause was a heart attack, even though none of the deceased had ever had heart trouble before. Buildings cracked and fell. Officially, it was because of structural instabilities. Streets suddenly ran into places they had never gone before. People woke up to find the view from their houses had changed. Workers found their places of employment had relocated without warning. There was no official explanation for any of this. It was much too strange.

The personifications knew what was causing this. Or rather, who.

Belfast, the personification, was angry. For some reason she was unable to bring her wrath down upon the people who had captured her. And so her rage had nowhere to go, and instead she vented it upon the people unfortunate enough to be nearby.

Armagh trembled to think what would happen unless someone did something soon. But how could they do anything when their queen refused to tell them what was wrong? Belfast would never answer another personification's questions.

There was only one solution.

They would have to find someone else to investigate this.

~~~~

Dani's first idea had proved useless. She hadn't tried it yet, but she suspected her second idea would be just as useless. The police were unlikely to let her investigate the murder scene herself, after all.

And how was she to go to Enniskillen without raising the children's suspicions? Not to mention the police's?

She puzzled over this as she placed a pot full of macaroni cheese on the stove. Then it hit her. Her mother's fiftieth birthday was coming up in a week. Dani had already sent a card. She hadn't visited on any of her parents' previous birthdays since she moved out. She had learnt that in the interest of staying sane, her parents were best kept at arm's length. But what could be more natural than taking the children to visit their sort-of grandmother on her birthday?