The
Celtic Goddess Morrigan is one of my favorite deities to vilify. Maybe I need
to be careful, because if she exists she probably doesn't have a very good
opinion of me—and she's not a supernatural being you want to be on the bad side
of. She was the Celtic goddess of war and of discord. Like many deities, she is
an ambiguous figure. In the ancient Irish languages, if you accented her name as Mórrígan it meant "great
queen; if you did not accent it and called her Morrigan, it meant "phantom
queen." Her totem animal was the crow and she was sometimes said to feast
on the bodies of slain warriors through the form of the carrion crows who
always hung around battlefields to eat the corpses when the fighting was done.
All in all, she was a troublemaker and a goddess to be afraid of. She
appears as a malevolent force in my book The
Last Minstrel and my long story, "The Raven and the Forest Girl."
In the story "The Welcome Song of Morrigan," you do not see her but
she is an evil presence throughout the story.
I
was still shooting for dark horror at this time. As the title to my story
implies, it is about a song, and about a musician, Shane Evans. He plays and
researches Celtic music and is following up some leads on an Irish harper who
collected old tunes. After the man's death, his son moved to northern Michigan but
one day the son's new bride killed him and two of the servants who worked for the family. Sentenced to
life in prison, she killed two inmates, was put in solitary confinement, and
eventually hanged herself. The house, controlled by a trust, has given Shane
permission to go through the musical archives there. He is let into the house
by a teenage girl named Tina who says she plays guitar and likes Celtic music.
Her boyfriend, she says, plays in a rock band.
Shane
is lucky that day—or so he thinks. He finds three pieces of music he does not
recognize. One is written on velum, not paper, sealed, and titled "The
Welcome Song of Morrigan." Shane is elated. Tina looks at the music and
asks if she could perhaps have a transcription of it. Shane makes copies for
her and drives back to his home in Grand Rapids, quite a ways away, leaving his
discovery in his music studio. Wanting to celebrate, he goes to a coffee bar
where he knows friends will be, finds them, and shares his good news. At the
table is a young woman named Devona, quite beautiful, and interested in Shane's
discovery. As they are talking, police appear and want to question Shane. He finds
out Tina has killed her boyfriend, hacking him to death with an ax. When he
goes back in, Devona identifies herself as one of the elven people and tells
him what he has recovered is the Welcome Song of Morrigan—a song with a curse
on it that welcomes people to madness, violence, and death.
After
hearing about Tina and now meeting up with Devona, Shane wonders if all the
psychotic women in the world have come to Michigan. He goes outside, a car
screeches to halt, and Tina, looking demonic, attacks him. Devona validates her
claim of being a supernatural creature by magically deflecting the ax. The
police, who have remained (correctly thinking the girl might come there to kill
Shane) confront her. She attacks one of them, wounding him with the ax. They
shoot and kill her. Shane goes to the police station.
When he sees Devona again, she asks where the music is. She plans to recover it
and guard it, which is her task as a supernatural creature. They drive to his
home. When they arrive, Shane is horrified to see Leah Roush's car in the
driveway.
Leah
is a friend who plays in a local rock band. Shane has given
her a key to his studio so she can use his equipment. He and Devona rush inside
to find Leah's severed head on a table. Shane thinks she found the music,
played it, and someone, probably her boyfriend, heard it and killed her.
The
police eventually find Leah's boyfriend's body (he has killed himself) and a
note that says, "She killed her." They think he means Tina but Shane
knows he meant Morrigan. The music is there. Devona seals it and says she will
take it to the Temple in the lost land of the faerie folk where she is the
guardian of the document. The Queen of Faeries, she says, has granted her a boon—anything
she desires—as a reward if she finds the song and brings it back. She and Shane
make love. She confides that the Faerie Queen made her leave her husband and
children and become a guardian thousands of years ago (which is why she is so
eager to make it with Shane). He suggests she use her boon to ask that she be
freed from her task. She agrees and goes to present her petition to the Queen.
She will become mortal when her request is granted but is willing to pay that price
for freedom and for love.
Shane
goes to the police station. The police conclude that Tina killed Leah and her
boyfriend killed himself out of grief. Shane is exonerated and the Welcome Song
of Morrigan is safely sealed away in the Temple of the Fairy Queen. When Shane
returns to the 24/7 coffee house, he finds Devona waiting for him.
The
story appeared in Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror, 2011, which appears to be out of print now. Some of my Morrigan stories are accessible, though. You can read a lot about her in The Last Minstrel where she appears frequently and in all her nasty, malicious glory. The same is true in a my novella, "The Raven and the Forest Girl,"which appeared recently in Silver Blade. In this particular story, Morrigan does her evil but finds out there are deities floating around who are much more powerful than she. As I'm doing with many of my stories that have appeared in magazines no longer in publication, I'm going to find out about copyright issues and, if they are not an obstacle, resubmit and, hopefully, republish "The Welcome Song of Morrigan" to make it once more accessible to the reading public.
For more titles, look at my Writer's Page.
I would love to hear your comments!
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