The Tallyman’s Mark

The summer I turned fourteen, my family moved from the clamor of Dublin to a crumbling farmhouse in the Burren, where the limestone seemed to swallow sound. The house, named Cloch Mór by the old owners, sat alone at the end of a rutted lane, its windows like vacant eyes. My older brother, Declan, and I shared a love for late-night video games, and that first week, we played until the small hours, the glow of the screen our only companion against the pressing dark.

One night, after Declan had trudged up the stairs, I went to my room on the ground floor, a converted parlor with a high ceiling and a damp smell. I pulled back the quilt, and something cold and sharp clamped onto my right shoulder, digging into the muscle. A voice, low and growling, like stones grinding together, rasped, ‘Good night, Muirne.’ I spun around, heart hammering, but the room was empty. The door was shut. The only sound was my own ragged breath. The next morning, a bruise in the exact shape of a hand, with an extra finger on the thumb side, bloomed purple on my skin.

From that night, the world seemed to tilt. My grades, which had been steady, plummeted. I couldn’t focus. A gray fog settled over my mind, and I found myself crying without reason. My parents, worried, took me to doctors, but they found nothing. I was prescribed pills that made me feel like a zombie. But the worst part was the tally marks. I started seeing them scratched into the walls of my room, appearing overnight. One, two, three, four – each day a new one. I tried to scrub them off, but they’d resurface darker.

Declan thought I was losing it. He’d joke, ‘Muirne’s gone witchy,’ and laugh, but I saw fear in his eyes. Then, one night, I heard a scratching sound from the corner of my room. I flicked on the light and saw – not a mark – but something like a long, black fingernail carving a groove into the plaster. It traced the shape of a five, then stopped. I screamed, and Declan burst in, but the thing vanished. He saw the mark, and for the first time, he was silent.

I started sleepwalking. I’d wake up in the field behind the house, standing among the limestone slabs, my feet bare and cold. On one such night, I found a small, flat stone in my pocket, carved with a symbol like a spiral. The next morning, I showed it to Declan. He turned pale. ‘That’s a tally stone,’ he whispered. ‘Old farmers used them to count livestock. But this one… it’s counting something else.’

We researched in the local library, under the dusty gaze of the parish records. We found a legend about a ‘Tallyman,’ a creature that marked those it claimed, appearing in times of great sorrow or death. It was said to visit the dying, pressing its hand on their shoulder to take a piece of their soul. I had been marked, but I wasn’t dying. Or was I? My depression was a slow disease, eating away at me. The tally marks, I realized, were counting the days until it would take me.

Desperate, I decided to confront it. I stayed awake, armed with a can of hairspray and a lighter, a silly weapon but all I had. At 3 AM, the scratching began. I turned on the light. There, in the corner, was a tall, gaunt figure, its skin like gray bark, its fingers too long, with an extra joint. It had no face, just a smooth oval where eyes and mouth should be. But I felt it staring at me. ‘Good night, Muirne,’ it rasped, and it raised a hand, tracing the air. I saw a final tally mark appear on the wall – the sixth.

I screamed, ‘Why me?’ The figure tilted its head, and a voice like wind through a hole echoed in my mind: ‘You opened the door. You played with the dark. Now I keep the count.’ And I remembered – that first night, I had seen a flash of something in the window, and I had ignored it. I had left the curtains open, inviting the dark in.

I lunged with my improvised torch, but the flame did nothing. The thing laughed, a low, cracking sound. Then, it pointed a finger at my chest, and I felt a coldness spread. ‘One more night,’ it said, ‘and the count is complete.’ It faded, leaving only the smell of wet earth.

I ran upstairs, woke Declan. Desperate, I remembered the stone in my pocket. I held it out, and Declan’s eyes widened. ‘It’s a protective charm,’ he said. ‘Old folk used them to ward off the Tallyman. You have to break it.’ I ran to the back door and hurled the stone into the darkness. It shattered against a rock, sending a spark. Immediately, I felt a release, like a tight cord snapping.

That night, I slept better than I had in months. The next morning, the tally marks on my wall were gone, and the bruise on my shoulder had faded. My grades slowly returned, and the fog lifted. The farmhouse still creaks, and sometimes I think I see a tall figure in the corner of my eye, but it always vanishes. I don’t know if I truly escaped or if it’s merely biding its time, waiting for the count to resume. But I know one thing: I never leave a window uncovered, and I never, ever play games past midnight without saying ‘good night’ to the one who might be listening.