TW:- Strong gore and violence involving children; reader discretion is advised.

Slaughtaverty 1745

The small head rolling from the battered table in the centre of the cellar, landing on the floor with a fleshy thud, once belonged to Dáire, the boy six-year-old Uilliam Doyle often played with, in the fields behind the church.

His body shaking with violent fear, Uilliam watches the head roll over once, twice and stop with its milky eyes, no longer bright blue, staring sightlessly at him. The soft blond hair that always covered his friend's head like fluff is matted with blood, and Uilliam shivers in horror at the thin trickles of blood running from what used to be Dáire's nose, ears and lips.

The boy's mother always got so angry when he arrived home with his hair all dirty and his clothes a mess. Uilliam knows she would be very upset to see her son right now. Dáire's mother loved him, and Uilliam was always a little jealous of that love. Now his heart hurts thinking how much his friend's mother is going to cry if she knows that he is cut into pieces on a dirty table in a cellar that smells like shit.

He would scream, but his voice died days ago and is now only a hoarse whisper... besides, screaming might draw attention to him. He doesn't know how long he's been in the filthy room. There is no day or night, no windows, only cold stone floors with some dirty straw to sleep on and stone walls, slimy with dripping moss.

There are only three of them left now. Uilliam is not sure how many boys there were when he just got here because he can only count up to six, which is the number of years he's been alive, and he always gets confused around four.

He wants to cry for Dáire because they will never play together again and tell each other crazy stories about knights and dragons, but he is too scared to cry. His eyes are glued to the horror on the table near his cage, unwilling to believe that the pig farmer is chopping up his friend. Chop, chop, chop... not caring that pieces are falling to the ground.

The man never speaks. He comes in and pushes bowls of tasteless slop under the doors of their cages. When they've eaten, he unlocks one of the stone cages built into the walls, grabs the boy in it, cuts his arm and drains some blood into a bowl, which he gives to the scary girl chained in the corner. When he's done, he binds the boy's wound and forces him to drink a brew of strong herbs from a cup. Then he leaves.

Over and over.

Uilliam's arms have many cuts. They burn and ache and won't heal properly. After every cut, lifting his head or making sounds is harder for him to do. When he turns his head slightly, he can see Timmy Collins crouching in his cage, his arms wrapped around his shins, rocking back and forth and back and forth; his eyes don't seem to see anything anymore. In another cage, Sam O'Neill is sleeping... or dead. The man cut him the last time he was down here. He'll sleep for a while now, just like Uilliam has many times.

Timmy used to tease Uilliam's sister, Merry, about always being dirty and smelling like sheep, and because of that, Uilliam doesn't like Timmy much, but he still doesn't enjoy seeing him look like this. He might be older than Uilliam and stronger, but in here, they are all equally weak. He knows Timmy secretly likes Merry, even if she is much older.

Everybody likes Mairead Doyle.

She is kind and filled with love, and Uilliam knows she's looking for him. She would never just give up and let him go. Not just her; his brothers would be looking too. Merry always takes the swings of his father's belt in his place, shouting at Uilliam to run while he can. He doesn't want to run anymore, but unlike Séamus and Conor, he cannot fight back yet. Father never tries to beat them when Séamus is home; lately, he is a little afraid of Conor too.

Uilliam wonders if Taillte is worried about him. She used to care about him more before the baby got into her belly, and she started crying day after day. She now only comes home if Séamus is there to hide her from Father. Now that Taillte is Lorcan's mother, she is not who she used to be.

Uilliam misses Merry. She always takes care of him, gives him some of her food, and hides him from their father. She always takes the blame for anything he does wrong. He was in the field near their hut, sneaking around, looking for a weapon to use on their father after Merry saved him from another beating, shouting at him to run. That day, Uilliam decided that he would try to fight back for a change and save Merry from getting more scars.

He did not expect to be knocked over the head and wake up here in hell. He would rather be beaten by his father...

Earlier, just before the man came down to feed them their gruel and cut one of them, the scary girl again broke free from the chain attached to a ring around her neck and ripped off the door of Dáire's cage. Uilliam could see her teeth, sharp and dirty, in the light of the lamp the man always keeps burning down here. Dáire tried to get away from her, screaming for help, but she was strong enough to break her chain and rip the small, barred door right out of the wall. He didn't stand a chance.

She bit his neck, ripping a chunk of flesh from it and sucked on the wound, making strangled sounds until Dáire stopped moving and fell from her hands when she finally let him go. Uilliam could hear her purr as she crawled around on the floor, moving from cage to cage, sniffing the air. She wanted more.

That was when the man came crashing down the stairs, slashing his whip through the air. For some reason, the girl is afraid of that whip. Uilliam doesn't understand why she would fear something she could easily tear from the man's hand and break into pieces. When the pig farmer hits her with it, she hisses loudly in pain, but the marks fade almost immediately. The whip doesn't do much to her. She still shrinks away from it when the man waves it around the same way Uilliam's father swings his belt.

He thinks the girl was once Laoise, the pig farmer's daughter, but he is not sure. She is dirty, her long white hair and her shredded clothing streaked with blood. Her eyes are almost colourless, except when she's about to drink from the bowl the man puts on the ground close enough for her to get to; then they turn black, like holes in their white balls.

Ulliam can tell that she hates the man. She always hisses and growls when she sees him, and he is sure that if she got a chance, she would rip him to shreds like she'd done with Oisín, the boy who shared his cage when there were more boys. She bit every part she could get her teeth into, ripping deep gashes all over, and Uilliam curled up, covering his ears with his hands, sobbing as Oisín's screams went on and on and then suddenly stopped.

Uilliam's throat clogs with tears, and he turns his head again, scraping the side of his face over the dirty straw on the floor to look at the two other boys. He hopes Sam is not dead yet. When a boy doesn't wake up after being cut, he ends up on that table, and the chopping starts. Ulliam cannot stand the chopping.

When the current chopping finally stops, the pig farmer scoops the pieces of his friend into big buckets, grabs the head by its hair and drops it on top. He grunts as he carries the load up the steps to the door. When he opens it, the sound of excited pigs fills the room, along with the vomit smell of the pig pens. Despite living in his own filth this long, Uilliam still gags at the smell and is relieved when the door closes, even if it does cut off the light and leaves them in the suffocating darkness, barely broken by one flickering lamp.

Somewhere in the darkest corner of the cellar, the girl is growling. She is angry. She wants more blood. Drinking it while it pumped hotly from Dáire's living body worsened her hunger again. After she killed Oisín, the man had to cut more than one boy at a time for a while before she would settle down. Uilliam doesn't know how many more times he'll be able to bleed for her before he dies. Is the man going to steal more children?

He can hear the chain chime and scrape, chime and scrape on the stone floor, and he tries to follow the sound to guess where she is. His shivers become uncontrollable spasms of fear when he sees her emerging from the shadows, her pale eyes flicking around, searching, as she sniffs the air.

The man hadn't fixed her chain yet, or she had broken it again. Much quicker this time. It is dragging on the floor as she moves around like a drunk, scraping her nails against the walls and over the doors of the empty cages until she finds the one locking Uilliam out of her reach. He knows he is lying too close to the bars and tries to move away, out of her reach, but his body feels like it's loaded down with big rocks; he feels sluggish as if he is moving through thick syrup.

A hoarse scream burns his throat when her questing nails snag in a piece of his tattered clothing, and she drags him flush against the bars where she's kneeling, her face pressed against the iron near his, her eyes as black as nothing. She parts her lips, humming in anticipation and, whimpering, Uilliam shrinks away from the sharp teeth glinting in her wet mouth on either side of her smooth front teeth. He tries to kick out against the door and push himself away from her, but she digs her nails into his arm and pulls it through the bars, crushing his face and shoulder against the small door.

When her teeth slice into his wrist, searing pain tears through Uilliam's body worse than any of the cuts the man gave him and any beating he'd ever received from his father. It leaves him breathless, his sight blinded in bright white agony, and then the noisy sucking begins.

Tears flow from Uilliam's eyes - once the colour of the ocean, now black with terror - as he struggles to breathe through the pain and the fear. As he feels his life draining from his body, his biggest regret is that he'll never get to play with Lorcan again. He was Taillte's son's big brother and was going to teach him all the things Séamus and Conor taught him.

Through the buzzing pain, he is vaguely aware of the sound of splintering wood and the blurry sight of the pig farmer tumbling down the stone steps leading into hell. The girl screams in rage, and her hands fall away from his arm. She grows quiet when a man speaks to her in the language Uilliam has heard the Pavees use when they're speaking to each other.

Someone pulls him from the cage and drops him on the table, still slick with Dáire's blood. He wants to speak and tell the man that he is not dead yet. He wants to let him know that he can still be bled and doesn't have to be chopped up like all the other dead boys, but the man bending over him, touching his face, is not the pig farmer.

This man's eyes are an impossible colour, like grey glass and his hair, thick and black, spills over his shoulders in waves. He smells strange and clean in the putrid air of the cellar. Uilliam watches him weakly from between his heavy eyelids, unable to beg him to let him live. Blinking slowly, he sees the stranger lift his own wrist to his mouth, and Uilliam's eyes snap open wide when the man presses that wrist against his lips, and a strange liquid dribbles into his mouth.

It tastes a little like the blood from his cut lip when his father slapped him hard, but it also doesn't taste like blood at all. It awakens a yearning deep inside the boy, a craving for more, and he drinks it hungrily, feeling the pain in his body subside and the heaviness leaving his limbs.

Somewhere beyond his vision, he can hear the pig farmer beg for his life, the first words Uilliam has ever heard him say. He can also hear him scream in pain when someone kicks him. There are many angry people in the cellar, and Uilliam wonders if they're there to save or kill them. Turning his eyes to the side, he sees the girl lying limp and docile in the arms of another dark-haired man. Her eyes are no longer black; they're glaring up into her captor's face, cold and calculating, yet she seems afraid.

As Uilliam's body fills with the warmth of the blood trickling down his throat, his eyelids slide shut, his brain finally escaping from the horrors he'd experienced since the pig farmer stole his life.

~~~