I'm trying to write this rationally. I'm trying to sound like a person who doesn't believe in weird things. But I need to tell you what happened because I genuinely don't know what else to do.
I was working late last Tuesday. Just admin stuff, emails, trying to respond to the absolute FLOOD of interview requests and festival inquiries. It was maybe 1 AM. The house was quiet. Rattlin' — the cat — was asleep on the sofa.
Then she wasn't.
She started meowing. Not her normal "feed me" meow. Urgent. Insistent. Like something was wrong. I got up to check on her and she walked straight to the back door, sat down, and stared at it.
I opened the door and she walked out into the lane.
Now, Rattlin' is usually terrified of the dark. She's an indoor cat mostly. She'll venture out in daylight but she's not adventurous. That night she walked straight down the lane like she knew exactly where she was going.
I followed her.
She crossed the road — I was nervous the whole time, looking for cars — and headed toward the fields. There's a gate about 200 meters down that leads into a field that borders the old bog road, the one that hasn't been properly maintained in decades.
She sat down at the gate. Just sat there. And stared into the field.
I stood behind her for maybe fifteen minutes, trying to understand what she wanted. The field was empty. Nothing moving. Just darkness and the sense of something very old and very patient waiting in it.
Then she turned around, walked back down the lane, came inside, and went to sleep on the sofa.
When I woke up the next morning, I wondered if I'd dreamed it. But Rattlin' has walked to that gate every night for the past four days. Every night at almost exactly 1 AM, she gets up, leads me down the lane, sits at the gate, stares into the field, and comes back.
She knows something. She's trying to tell me something.
And I'm going to have to go into that field to find out what.
I'm not ready for that. But I'm going anyway.
— Seamus