The Negative Year
Percy and I grew up in the same boring town out in the middle of nowhere. He was a couple years older than me and we didn’t exactly run in the same social circles, but I knew who he was. Even way back then, he had a certain reputation.
The summer before my freshman year of high school, my parents went through a messy separation. I started acting out and skipping out on school seemed to be the greatest act of rebellion to bring my parents back together. Those first couple of weeks, I hardly spent any time at all in the classroom. I spent most of my time wandering around the Old North Wood, since it seemed to be the best place to hide out without a truancy officer stumbling across me. It would have been a fairly boring way to spend my weekdays if it hadn’t been for Percy.
After a couple of days, I started hearing someone else wandering through the woods around lunchtime but never saw anyone. I was a dumb, paranoid kid and assumed it was the police searching for me. That’s why I started climbing the trees and spending my days as high up as possible. From up there, you could see pretty much the entire town. It was also from up there that I finally saw my wannabe stalker. It was Percy, always walking the same path and always humming the same tune.
I should have left it alone, but curiosity got the best of me. After about a week of watching Percy go through this routine, I finally decided to slip down from my tree and follow him. It took a couple of days since I was being overly cautious and Percy kept giving me the slip around Giant’s Hill, but I finally managed to see what he was doing during his lunchbreaks.
There was an old coal mine about a mile north from my usual tree. The dirt road leading up to it looked like it hadn’t been used in decades and the entrance looked like it was a light breeze away from caving in. But that didn’t stop Percy. He strolled on through the entrance without a care in the world.
Again, my curiosity triumphed and I very stupidly went in after him.
It didn’t take long for me to get completely and hopelessly lost in those mines. The kind of lost that broke me down into tears and forced me to rethink every decision I’ve ever made. I’m not sure how long I was stuck down in those tunnels. It felt like hours. And just when I was about to completely give up and accept my fate as a subterranean goblin-dweller, that’s when Percy found me.
He took me by the arm and told me to run. From what, I didn’t know. But ran we did. We went this way and that with Percy dragging me along as though we were outrunning the Devil himself. Eventually, we were back outside and Percy was laughing.
What he told me next is the really insane part of this whole story.
He had been going into that coal mine for the last week trying to hunt something down. Something that he said was stalking all of our friends and neighbors so that it could feed on our nightmares and our misfortunes. He called it the Dullahan.
“It nearly had you,” he said to me. “If I hadn’t found you when I did, you would have been cursed with so much misfortune that you would have preferred to be dead.”
You would think that all of that sounded bad enough, but he claimed things were even worse. He said that the Dullahan cannot be stopped. No road can be blocked and all doors unlock when it approaches. He said that it could feel the misery I held over my parents’ separation and wanted to feed. But Percy got to me just in time and supposedly struck a deal with the Dullahan that saved my life.
Per the agreement Percy made, the Dullahan would give me thirteen years to enjoy life. But once those thirteen years were spent, it would come for me and inflict upon me a year of bad luck and darkness. Percy called it ‘the Negative Year’.
“I’m pretty sure the Dullahan will keep its word, but I’d keep some gold with you just to be safe,” I remember him telling me. “For some reason, they are absolutely terrified of the stuff. Even a tiny little pin should be enough to keep it away. Might even save you from the Negative Year when it comes rolling around.”
I definitely didn’t believe any of Percy’s nonsense about the Dullahan, but I was too grateful for being safely led out of the mines to say anything. He told me to held on home and leave him to finish driving the Dullahan out of town before it could feed on anyone else.
I’ll never know for sure what he did after I left him, but I was more than happy to be back at home. That was definitely the last day I ever skipped school. I actually even tried convincing my mom to let me go once or twice when I had the flu.
That was thirteen years ago today, which means tomorrow is meant to start the Negative Year. I’ve had a pretty amazing life since that day. My parents got back together, I went to college, got an amazing job at a prestigious investment firm, and fell in love with an amazing man. Tomorrow is actually my wedding day. I don’t believe for one second that Percy Maelock actually made a deal with an evil spirit, but on the extremely slim chance that he was telling the truth, I’ve made sure that my wedding band is made of gold.
~ Submitted by Sara Underhill
The Dullahan:
The Dullahan is a spirit from Irish mythology. It takes the form of a headless rider atop a black horse, holding its head beneath its arm. Its mouth is always stretched into a demonic smile, its eyes are always moving to see across the wide countryside in search of its next victim, and its flesh is fabled to have the consistency and color of moldy cheese. It carries a whip made from a human spine and wears a cloak made from a banshee’s veil.
According to Percy Maelock, many of these monstrous fiends came to North America in the late 19th Century after growing fat from the misery of Ireland’s Great Famine.
Percy Maelock Quote of the Day:
“Look out for the headless rider. It rides upon a black horse and feeds on the misery of others. If you see it slow its riding, turn and run as fast as you can. If it calls out your name, you will surely be doomed to die.”
