The story varied depending on the age of the teller and the shock-factor intended, but the basic plot was always the same.
It happened many years before, so many that those who could remember were long gone and only their great, great grandchildren remained. There lived a girl in the town. She was bubbly and pretty and outgoing, sometimes to an eyebrow-raising degree. Some called her feisty, headstrong; others called her a harlot. Perhaps it was due to the fact that her mother had died giving birth to her and she had never had that maternal figure to teach her the ways of ladies and coach her on decorum.
Whatever the reason, when a passing battalion stopped in the town, she became besotted with one of the soldiers and no laws of chastity could keep her from him. The whole town looked on with clucking tongues; nobody took the time to tell her.
And so the soldier passed on and the girl’s belly grew so that it could no longer be ignored. It was a disgrace; the talk of the town. Something had to be done before word spread to the neighboring villages.
She was hidden away, and for nine months that was how she stayed.
On Easter morning her child was born. All pink and wriggling it was taken away from her. She heard its first cries as the door closed on her lonely prison, her arms clasped over her empty chest. She never knew if she was mother to a son or daughter.
Nobody knows for sure what became of the child. The most PG rated stories told of it being sent off to an orphanage in a far away city. Other versions were not so kind to her progeny. There was a well in the center of town. For many years it had been closed up, cemented in, and water was drawn from a spring in a less convenient location on the outskirts. There is no documented reason why. The stench and toxicity of decomposing flesh after a time made for undesirable cooking water perchance? Maybe that was the ill-fated infant’s first cot, its newborn cries replaced by watery gurgles as it was held down with a stick like the unwanted litter from a stray cat, the dark and the cold closing in around it as its short life ended. I leave each to make their own conclusions on the matter, but the general rule of thumb is: the deeper buried the truth, the more heinous the crime behind it.
All that remained was the question of the girl. What to do about her? She was tainted, used, an embarrassment. No man would have her for a wife. And worst of all—she was the weak link in the town’s secret.
So she stayed locked up, and it soon became evident that she had her uses after all. There were men in the town who had needs that their wives could or would not satisfy. And of course there were those who had no wives—widowers, bachelors. You know, the upstanding citizens who could afford a penny or two for a ride of the corrupted daughter.
No one ever questioned why every nine months or so a fresh, moist squealing bundle of joy was brought from the house; there was the reputation of the town to think about. The whole town participated in her lifelong rape, whether they laid a hand on her or not, whether or not they were the ones who wielded the throbbing, twitching rods that plugged at her womb daily and nightly, sometimes mere days after she had given birth.
And then something happened.
Monday night was Bridge night in the local hall for the ladies, and hence, it was the busy night at the house. It didn’t run on an appointment system; the men just dropped by when they felt the stirrings. The women were away, the men were left unattended…and we all know whose hands the devil makes work for.
It became poker night at the house, mainly because the queues were getting longer by the week and the patrons needed a way to amuse themselves while they awaited their turn. On that particular night the parish pastor was downstairs with the girl. It was not in his habit to call to the house on Monday nights, usually coming instead at quieter, more clandestine times. But, when nature calls…
He was a respected and busy man, so naturally when he showed up he skipped to the head of the queue. He had been down there for some time when an inhuman roar rose from the bowels of the house, shaking the foundations of the town. In homes all along the street, people stopped what they were doing and shivered; the Devil had come to Murrins.
In a stumbling body, the men rushed downstairs, the loving father at the forefront, anxious to protect his business interest. He flung open the door and a wave of that awful howl buffeted them with its force.
On the floor by the bed was a man, naked and bloody. Where his penis should have stood, proud and erect, was a jagged stump, a geyser of blood spurting from the center, the flow already ebbing as his life did. The detached appendage was lying on the floor by the door like a giant fat slug; a slimy streak marked its track down the wall where it had been flung.
She was crouched over him, her thumbs dug deep into his eye sockets. Vitreous fluid leaked from around her fingers, getting sucked up his nostrils with each agonised breath he took. His leg twitched as her long nails shorted some circuit in his brain.
Her head snapped up and she glared at the string of shocked faces outside the door, faces she knew only too well, faces that would, at some point in the night, have been hovering over hers, sweating and contorting with exertion and unrequited ecstasy.
Her eyes flashed red and black, something very alive and very diabolical behind them. Her hair was a tangled black mass around her pale, sunken face. Her dry, abused lips cracked and split as they stretched in a deranged snarl, her teeth ringed with blood.
All the torment and torture, the pain and injustice had broken through that feminine shell and manifested itself into the demon that stood before them.
The growling sound was coming from deep within her throat. It grew and rolled up through the house, filling the foggy night air. People set down their forks or newspapers and listened in fear.
A blue flame licked the house, flicking out from under it, forked and pointed like a dragons tongue. Within minutes it had consumed the house and everyone in it.
That night, all through the town, every infant disappeared from under the watchful noses of their loving parents. Mass panic erupted the next morning when beds were found cold and empty. Terrified parents met at the ends of driveways, wringing their hands in despair, tears cleaving tracks of worry down their cheeks.
One by one they found them; their mangled bodies scattered across the woods and fields like discarded dolls. Some bobbed face down in the well, all bloated and sodden. The lifeless forms of others dangled from the trees as though dropped from a height, their necks twisted, limbs shorn. Others lay on the cold ground, broken and bloody, spines snapped like twigs. They all had one thing in common—there were none left alive. She had exacted revenge for each monster that had been planted in her belly, and for the only one that she had cared about.
And so, according to the legend, that was how it began.
On Easter morning she came, The Easter Bunny, stalking through the gardens of the town. In some she left her mucus-coated gifts to the inhabitants, others she passed right through.
When Christine was a kid she remembered warnings from her mother not to look out the window on that night before Easter, and never, under any circumstances, to go outside before her father said it was okay. She remembered vividly the burning rituals in the back yard.
Her mother told her once of a time when she herself was a child, when she dared to look out the window. She screamed so loud her ears rang and Christine’s grandmother had covered her eyes, comforting her and chastising her in equal measure.