“That’s a splash of brains and blood. It’s there this hundhred years; and it will never leave it while the wall stands.”
An indelible stain on the wall that triggers the hunchback’s story within the story of a narrator travelling on business in the south of Ireland finding, among ‘noble trees’ and their reputed ‘sweetest nuts’, a rotting house, with evocative description of it and the landscape, and an indeterminately aged hunchback inside who narrates in some semi-dialect, and with dubiously inferred points of view, of the various bargains about his debts and swearin’ with a shifting human-shaped ‘divil’, once dressed like a French ‘sojer’.
With a needle-blood-letted elbow (“at the place where he drew the blood, and he closed the flesh over it.”) and a gluey Zenoism galore… “…they say if the divil gives you money overnight, you’ll find nothing but a bagful of pebbles, and chips, and nutshells, in the morning. If I thought he played fair, I’m in the humour to make a bargain with him to-night.”
“Down he goes, right for the wood of Murroa. It seemed to him every step he took was as long as three,… […] Sir Dominick made my grandfather sit at his elbow while he counted every guinea in the bag. […] …and felt himself, every bit, turning as cowld as a dead man, and you may be sure he did not feel much betther when he seen the same man steppin’ from behind the big tree that was touchin’ his elbow a’most. […] …and with that the Evil One handed him a needle, and bid him give him three drops of blood from his arm; and he took them in the cup of an acorn, and gave him a pen, and bid him write some words that he repeated, and that Sir Dominick did not understand, on two thin slips of parchment. He took one himself and the other he sunk in Sir Dominick’s arm at the place where he drew the blood, and he closed the flesh over it. And that’s as true as you’re sittin’ there!”
Truth is a ‘leap year’ of faith, it seems! Or a single day’s hop of “a short square fellow with a cloak on”? The hunchback storifier himself is the divil, I wondered, telling its own story? I don’t think even Le Fanu knew!
***
My other reviews of disconnected horrors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
My review of SQUIRE TOBY’S WILL by Sheridan Le Fanu: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/22/squire-tobys-will/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
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