It began with a mistake. A glitch in the library’s database mismatched her name to an address from her past, an error that sent letter after letter falling through a door she’d rented years before. Sweetbriar Lane.
Getting through that door had never been easy, since she always seemed to be tangle up the key with everything else, trying to steer a tiny scooter over the step while library books slid against her chest, or juggling a bin bag, a football, and the damp fingers of a toddler. They left Sweetbriar Lane only because the landlord’s family needed it, though that was the tale landlords always spun—some brother or cousin would pop back from Australia, desperate for a place to stay, yet within weeks the house would appear on the market again at a higher rent. She was too busy washing away the grime from the next cluster of rented rooms to mourn the sunlit kitchen where her babies had grown. She knew she could not return—not to those years or that door—but then this glitch kept dragging her back there again and again. Every time she asked for a library book, a confirmation slip landed on that mat, picked up with a stranger’s sigh and dropped onto a mounting stack.
When the estate agent rang to ask for a forwarding address for all her letters, she reddened at the annoyance she’d caused and promised to reroute future notices to her home. After she hung up, she tried to go on with the laundry, but the sight of the agency’s name on her screen carried a message that always pulled her attention back as she walked home.
FOR SALE
On a hill above the city, a derelict mental hospital had been partially converted into flats, and now the chapel there was pitched as a development opportunity as well. She counted herself among the many who flinched whenever they passed that old asylum. If she’d been born a different decade, she—whose turmoil had twice driven her toward the river’s edge in search of an end—might have lived inside those walls.
Neither home nor sacred space, to her the building felt stuck between states, stubbornly shaking its head.
She called it a whim, the impulse that pushed her to pick up the phone and ask a favor: if viewings of the chapel were being scheduled, could she slip in afterward for a quick look? It all happened so fast then—the phone began to ring in her hand, and within fifteen minutes she watched him unlock the gate.
Across mounds of unkempt gravel, a bankrupt digger lingered, its rusted bucket still hoisted with a last clump of dirt, while a wild garden of dandelions and ragwort thrived mid-air. Beyond it, the chapel remained as it always did, waiting for her to discover it. Once the old key turned, the old lock gave a nod. There you are.
Inside, darkness. Panels of plywood covered every ruined window. She threaded her way through the dim scatter of debris as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Slender partitions showed a first attempt to carve the space into smaller rooms, yet the original brick walls stayed bare, trembling with cobwebs, where someone had stuck up a picture of a man, holy hands framing a redbrick heart. A plywood seam sagged, admitting a blade of light so sharp that it made her squint, one hand raised to shield her eyes, yet that beam found her chin and tipped it upward.
See, it urged, directing her gaze.
See—over there.
On a fresh wall, a blazing circle hovered, tracing a ring of light in which the clouds outside swirled again, spinning upside down or inside out—and oh, she breathed, fingers flying to her lips. Ah.
Only because her grandfather’s fondness for this phenomenon had rubbed off on her did she recognize it, naming it to the smiling guide—camera obscura—repeating what he used to say: all it takes is a tiny hole in a dark room—a pin punched through a heavy curtain or a blackout blind, say—to conjure the world anew. She pulled the phone from her pocket to snap a photo in delight, but the guide had already moved on, so she click-clicked and hurried after the rhythm of his steps.
No candle, no statue, no altar, no pew—if not for the scale of the windows, those compact new rooms wouldn’t feel like a church at all. The agent’s voice kept pressing onward, painting a vision of the home it would become, and she attempted to follow this fiction—yes, perhaps a sofa would sit here in the amber glow cast by a reading lamp, and yes, perhaps this dim corner would truly hum with laundry—yet her mind kept faltering. Neither home nor sacred space, to her the building felt stuck between states, stubbornly shaking its head.
The addition of a bare staircase led to a newly constructed floor, which brought her closer to the upper panes. Her hands searched for missing glass, storm-swept or stone-battered, probably hauled away to landfill in builders’ skips. Now those gaps were empty, glazed only by the view of leaves and sky. Turning, she wandered the maze of fresh rooms, stepping out of a walk-in wardrobe to find the agent waiting—time was running short, was there anything else she’d like to see?
The bell tower tricked her into thinking she looked straight ahead, down a long corridor, not upward. She blinked, dizzy. No bell? Stolen. Her brows knitted as she imagined how such a theft might be done. The vanished bell, she guessed, had likely disappeared for money, melted away, but she chose to picture it ringing somewhere else instead, sending unseen waves that called to the dead: a summons. She could almost hear it herself.
Did he remember where the original altar had stood before the renovations? Lifting his gaze from his phone, he gestured toward the place where she’d seen the beam of light. The sky had clouded in the meantime, erasing the circle from the wall—she’d arrived just as it vanished.
Outside, he had to hurry back for an urgent call, so she wandered the perimeter alone, craning her neck to study the buckled windows overhead. A bramble scraped her ankle, then clung. Wincing, she freed it from her stocking, only to glimpse something winking beneath. Pushing aside the thorns, she uncovered a single shard of stained glass, bright as a ruby and warm as blood.
Under a pair of crushed beer cans, she found more fragments, golds and pinks and greens, some coated with grime, some still bound by lead. Cleaning them from the dirt, she sensed the bite of their edges and thought teeth, thought mouth, thought song, then speech. The vapors once rising from warm bodies in the pews would have carried syllables mingled with candle soot, distilled as condensation on the chapel’s windows. Each fallen shard would have known the touch of such vapors before being hurled into this world of briar and rain and the soft, fleshy slip of snails. There was something about these shards. She could feel it. They still carried a sacred light, traces of human longing embedded within, like fossils in stone. She gathered as many as she could, as the man looked on with bemusement from his phone. Mine, she thought with delight.
She pictured the bell ringing elsewhere instead, invisible waves rippling to summon the dead: a call. She could almost hear it herself.
As she walked back up the hill toward her car, so absorbed in envisioning a kaleidoscope that might coax these shards to life, she failed to notice the fractured pavement until she was already pitched forward, a cartoonish tumble that left her fist open in fright. One panel cracked, then shattered on the path, the lead loosening its grip on the glass.
Rising from the pavement, that lead formed a single letter in her hand.
L
As soon as she read it, she knew it was a sign.
*
Gave no name. Some mild delusions:
messages, apparitions, signs. Collects rubbish
she says, “held a holy light.”
*
The city, she claimed, holds an archive where it stores its oldest maps and contracts, along with love letters, photographs, and promises. When she learned that it also retained records from the old hospital, she scheduled an appointment.
Arriving, she discovered the door locked. She could hear the bell’s echo lifting from within, but the door refused to yield. Had she mixed up the date? She waited a moment, knocked again. Nothing.
Hands pressed to the glass, brow resting between them, she peered inside: a tiled floor, a coat rack, a table bare save for pencils and a large bottle of hand gel. She knocked. Too softly. A crumpled crisp bag skittered past her ankles. She knocked a bit louder, then let her gaze drift upward to a swirl of pigeons rollercoasting above the bookies and pubs and rowhouses, above the hairdresser and the tyre shop, before circling back to the power lines above the archive. Those birds, she knew, would point the way, so she counted them as they landed, all cluck and coo.
One. Two. Three—four. Five.
If a sixth… If a sixth came, she would go.
As if answering that thought, the door buzzed open of its own accord, startling the pigeons from wire to wing, a grand scattering. She stepped inside. When the door swung shut behind her, locking her in, she felt the birds vanish.
____________________________
Excerpted from Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. All rights reserved.
