During the whole of a dull, dark, soundless day in the April of that year, when clouds hung oppressively low in the Heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Ulster.
I know not how it was, but with the first glimpses of the building –known locally as “Stormont” – a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. It depressed me in a way I could scarcely explain. And yet I was now committed to spending weeks in its bleak shadow.
The reader will ask why I made this journey on horseback, or at all. The first question is easily answered. There was a war in the Caucasus then, and petrol prices had been badly affected. Also, alas, my newspaper’s budget for covering Northern elections was not what it had been in happier times.
Thus, I have in part answered the second half of the reader’s question. But in reporting on the elections, I was also responding to the importunities of an old friend, a resident of said house, Roderick Ulster.
A boon companion of my boyhood, Roderick had in recent years lapsed into a state of nervous agitation, evidence of which was plain in his letters. Earnestly he had entreated a visit, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. Hence had I wended my weary way through the Dark Hedges of the bleak Ulster countryside, and been dispirited anew by the dreariness of its steeples.
Yet nothing prepared me for the irredeemable gloom of the ancient house itself, with its decrepit walls, which as I now noticed had a barely perceptible but definite fissure extending almost exactly down the middle, in zig-zag formation, with a margin for error of 3 to 4 per cent.
As I was soon reminded, Roderick shared the vast house with his only sister, Madeline, whose nerves were similarly frayed. They were the last descendants of the ancient Ulster family and in some ways opposites, while in others identical. When I remarked on this latter point, Roderick confirmed – a little resentfully, I thought – that they were indeed twins.
But whereas Roderick’s nervous state arose from a disorder doctors called “nationalism,” Madeline’s reflected a similar affliction of opposed polarity: “unionism”. Her condition had dramatically worsened of late, baffling physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the diagnosis.
It was for this reason that when, shortly after my arrival, Madeline was declared dead (by an opinion poll in the Belfast Telegraph), Roderick took the precaution of temporarily entombing her for two weeks in the family crypt, prior to burial.
I personally aided him in this gloomy task and was troubled to notice, as we left, a faint rosiness invade the hitherto death-like pallor of her cheeks.
Perhaps it was my own state of dread that made me imagine I had also heard her whisper something, namely: “The only poll that matters is the one on May the 5th.” But we closed the crypt anyway and hoped her tortured spirit had found rest.
In the weeks that followed, Roderick’s own state of nervous exhaustion only worsened. Then, one storm-lashed night – May the 5th – he came to my chambers in near-demented frame of mind. He was cadaverously wan, as usual, but there was now something between mad hilarity and hysteria in his eyes.
I tried to calm him, although petrified myself. The whole house seemed to have been electrified by the storm. Curtains rippled with static. Casements rattled. And now a terrible shrieking was heard in the corridors, growing louder as it approached, until the door of the chamber crashed open.
There stood Madeline, with terrible vengeance in her eyes. And yet the life that had temporarily reanimated her was already all but exhausted. She was in her true death throes this time. With her last breath, she collapsed on top of Roderick, who expired simultaneously in fright.
From that chamber, and that mansion, I fled aghast, until I was a safe distance hence. There I looked back and saw that a blood-red moon now shone through the once barely-discernible fissure.
As I gazed, the fissure widened, dividing the house into two blocks of exactly fifty per cent. Then the mighty walls fell asunder and sank slowly into Belfast Lough. At which point, I was woken by the voice of a returning officer, announcing the results of the 14th count in Fermanagh-South Tyrone.