encounters with evil

 This happened in the year 2014.

I was sitting in the kitchen of the home of a character styled Marion Bruce.

She and two other women styling themselves Margaret Roche and Gwen Healy (no relation of mine) had engaged in a false befriending operation with me on behalf of third parties during a particularly vulnerable period of my life after the death of my mother.

For three years they had insinuated themselves into my world, engaging in the practice of pyschological undermining known to professional clinicians as gaslighting.

On at least one known occasion, one of them had administered a narcotic substance to me in a gift of food.

The three women were clustered in a sort of coven around a supposed Catholic priest called Ruairi O'Domhnaill who had self identified to me as a member of what he called a significant IRA family.

I have no proof that O'Domhnaill was aware of what the women were doing to me. But I do not endorse him as a Catholic priest.

Now here I was in Marion Bruce's kitchen, still little suspecting the extent of the false befriending operation that had been underway for three full years but about to find out a whole lot more about it..

Marion Bruce had just served me a cup of coffee.

Almost absent mindedly stirring the coffee, I said: "Tell me again why you pulled out of that pilgrimage to Medjugorje."

In late 2013 I had asked her to book me into a September pilgrimage to Medjugorje. I was supposed to be travelling in secret. She had told my brother who was in on the secret that she would go along to Medjugorje to keep an eye on me. At the airport just prior to departure, she had informed me she wasn't travelling after all as she had realised she didn't have enough annual leave and would need to take holidays later in the year.

Two thugs had also been booked on the pilgrimage, a boxer and a brain, that is to say a fellow to keep an eye on the boxer, with the intent of giving me a beating or worse at Medjugorje.

The beating hadn't quite worked out.

But in the months since my return, I had twice asked Marion Bruce to tell me again why she'd pulled out of the pilgrimage at the airport. Each time I'd rather enjoyed watching her squirm.

This time she didn't squirm.

Her face suddenly contorted with pure hate.

Her eyes flashed with spite.

The effect was quite interesting because she had spent three years never letting the sweet as pie routine drop for a moment.

At this moment she knew her three year infiltration of my life had failed and there was nothing she could do about it.

She knew I knew what she was.

There was nowhere to go.

And she wanted to hurt me.

All this I registered still stirring the coffee perched on a stool in her kitchen.

She answered my question with these precise words: "I bet your mother got fierce fah before she died. I bet she could barely walk."

That was a Kodak moment right there.

It was like the moment in the opprobrious television cartoon Southpark when a congenial young man is buying lemonade from the children and he says "ooh nice lemonade," then his voice changes to a tone of pure malevolence and he adds "You will never defeat us you know. Cthuhlu has arisen. The dark lord has come. All hail Cthuhlu."

Or it was like the regular sensation scenes in Battle Of The Planets when Zoltar would throw off his disguise and jeer the orphans with a cry of: "Nyah, ha. ha, Gee Force."

I don't know how he kept a straight face because the orphans beat him every week.

But I digress.

Now picture it bold readers.

I'm still stirring coffee in this woman's kitchen.

There's no one else there.

I'm sitting in her kitchen.

I've just heard the words: "I bet your mother got fierce fah before she died. I bet she was barely able to walk."

Fah is Dublinese for fat.

And this is what I'm thinking.

I'm wondering if I make a run for it, can I make it down the corridor to the front door if this woman tries to stop me. For a woman so pass remarkable about her betters whom she's never met and is unlikely to meet in the next life, she's a bit fah herself.

And what if she calls her husband.

What if Big Al is in the next room.

Waiting.

He's a bit fah too.

How would I manage the two of them.

And what if she grabs up a carving knife?

All this I was thinking while still desultorily stirring the by now most stirred coffee cup in the history of, well, in some history of something with a lot of pathos in it.

"Ah she wasn't that fat," I answered quietly. "She was alright really."

I stayed until I'd finished the coffee.

Can you believe that bold readers?

I think I even said a Hail Mary with her before I left.

Years later she came to me in a dream.

The instant I saw her I said: "Go to your devil."

She answered: "When I go to my devil, he will embrace me."

And I woke up.

Scary shite.