The Register — The Mournhowe Register

A Notice to Persons Newly Resident in the Parish

Published by order of the Registry, and fixed to the church door, that none may plead ignorance of the arrangement under which we all live.

In the year 1736, Parliament repealed the old Act against witchcraft. The law did not find that there were no witches. It found that there was no crime. The distinction is a lawyer’s, and you now live inside it.

The fires went out that year. And the old neighbours — the ones your grandmother would not name after dark, and she was right — came home, to a country that no longer had a court to try them. They were not changed by their absence. We were. The Act itself may be consulted at the office; it bears the signature of his lordship, ————, though the ink of the striking-out is not the clerk’s, and the clerk has declined to say whose it is.

They are registered. Every one of the uncommon sort residing in this parish is entered in the Register below, with a number, a lineage, and a licensed trade. The reader will search that book for his own name in vain. Persons are not registered. The law counts what it can be sure of counting.

They are licensed. The singer’s trade is grief, and it is a lawful trade. The rider’s trade is collection. The cat’s trade is her own affair, and the clerk has stopped asking. A licence is not a leash; it is a receipt. The parish knows what lives here. This is not the same as governing it.

They are recorded. What can be printed, the Mercury prints. What cannot, the Register keeps. Between the two very little is lost, and nothing is explained.

Advice, Offered Without Charge

Keep iron about your door. This is not superstition. It is maintenance.

Give your surname to any neighbour that asks it. Your Christian name is your own property, and the parish advises you to keep it so.

If you hear singing, and can find no singer, you are not obliged to listen. Those who have listened are agreed on this point, briefly.

The lights on the moor after dark are not the parish’s lamps. The parish lights nothing past the bridge. Do not follow them, and do not thank them.

The parish bids you welcome. The uncommon sort have signed nothing, promised nothing, and kept this arrangement, these fifty years and more, better than we have kept most treaties. Complaints may be lodged with the Clerk between the hours of nine and four. The parish takes no responsibility.

Fixed to the church door at Michaelmas, 1786, and renewed yearly. By order of the Registry — Parish Clerk

BAN-7 The Singer at the Howe & Hound Banshee, of the keening sort — Irish descent, lately of the northern moors

Woodcut: the singer at the tavern table, the house asleep around her — Cut taken from the life, by the Parish engraver: the Howe & Hound, near closing.

Name: She gives none. The register records her as “the Singer at the Howe & Hound.”
Descent: Of the old families of Ireland, who followed their households across the water in the hungry years. Where the family goes, she goes; when the family ends, she sings it out.
Present Trade: Keeps no fixed abode. Sings in taverns for coin, and settles debts of a kind no bailiff will touch. The dying she attends without invitation; the living hire her at their peril.
Note on her Gift: She does not foretell. She is no seer. She knows a death only when it is already at the door — and then she is merely the first to say so aloud. the parish of ———— learned the distinction too late.

Record of Incidents

On the night the North Road lost its head, she was heard at the Howe & Hound, and the room slept, and a sack left with her that did not leave with its owners. See the picture, “A Matched Set”.

Here unfolds the sworn deposition of Wilf Ackroyd, potman at the Howe & Hound, taken before the Clerk.

“I poured for the two gentlemen at the corner. Then she sang the one bar, and I woke with the morning and the cups still full. I have not poured a late hour since. A man should know when a house wants closing.”

Entered in the Register the 14th day of October, 17the last figure is eaten away. Examined & found true — Parish Clerk

DUL-1 The Night Rider of the North Road Headless rider, of the Irish sort — a collector, not a killer

The Mercury advertisement concerning the Night Rider's lost head — His own notice in the publick paper; see the Mercury, No. MCDLXXVIII.

Name: The Night Rider of the North Road. Older tongues say Dullahan.
Descent: Rode the old roads before there were roads to name. Carries his own head for a lantern; it sees further off the neck than on.
Present Trade: Rides the North Road between dusk and the third cockcrow. Speaks one name only — and whoever owns it is called. Gold turned in his path buys a night’s passage; the paper is here torn — there remains only “…and no false coin, for he weighs it by”.

Record of Incidents

Three nights absent from his round, the parish paper advertised his own head as lost property — a reward offered, the loser himself the advertiser. See the Mercury, No. MCDLXXVIII.
The matter was, in time, settled otherwise. See the picture, “A Matched Set”.

Here unfolds the sworn deposition of a carter, his name withheld, taken before the Clerk.

“I gave him the road and looked at my hands. You do not look at where the head should be. My father told me that, and his father told him, and none of us has ever been called.”

Entered in the Register the 3rd day of October, 1790. Examined & found true — Parish Clerk

CATS-9 Grimalkin Cat-sìth — the fairy cat of the Highlands; nine lives, one shown, eight kept back

Woodcut panels of the theft, the cat attending — From the Parish plates; the cat appears where she pleases.

Name: Grimalkin. She answers to it only when it suits her.
Descent: Came down from the Scottish hills the way all the old neighbours came: quietly, and to stay. Black, with one white spot on the breast, which the wise do not mention to her.
Present Trade: Keeps the mice from an honest cellar and the secrets of everyone in it. Sits at wakes uninvited. ———— ———— ———— ———— — the clerk thought better of recording her other trade.
Lives Remaining: a figure, wet — the clerk has crossed out and rewritten the figure more times than is comfortable.
Note: On the night of a wake, cover the mirrors and watch the cat, for a corpse unwatched is a corpse she may speak for. BAN-7 works the same road by a different door.

Record of Incidents

this record is not yet opened — “The Cat is Next,” the archive notes, and says no more

Entered in the Register the — day of —, 17—. Examined & found true — Parish Clerk

No. ——— “Jack — of the Lantern, of the Wisp, of whatever door will have him” application for registration · refused

Application Refused

In the Matter of an Application for Registration

The applicant presented himself as “Jack — of the Lantern, of the Wisp, of whatever door will have him,” and sought a licence and a number, as the law provides for the uncommon sort.

The application is REFUSED, on the following grounds, entered by the clerk:

— That the applicant cannot be assigned to any registered lineage, being, by his own account, turned away at both the gates below and the gate above, and thus of no established kind this office recognises;

— That the register requires, for every soul entered, a date on which it may reasonably be expected to die, and the applicant could supply none, having here the paper is burnt through, the edges charred;

— That a man who cannot be buried cannot be registered, for the two offices share a ledger.

The applicant, on being refused, is recorded to have thanked the clerk warmly, taken up his lantern, and remarked that he “would call again.” He has not been seen since — see the picture, “A Matched Set” — though a small light has been noted, more than once, at the edge of the moor on nights the office was working late.

Filed under matters unresolved. — Parish Clerk