Clíodhna Byrne

artistic interpretation of Clíodhna by Riley Logan (@genderbinaryisforlosers on tumblr)

## Details

### First Mentioned

Season 6, Episode #1: Monday 22 October 1973

## Voice

### First Heard

Season 6, Episode #1: Monday 22 October 1973

**Clíodhna** is the narrator of season 6 of Within the Wires. She keeps a medical journal/personal diary as she cares for Gráinne Lynch while she recovers from surgery, and chronicles the strange happenings of the old house in the middle of a decimated village.

> *"I’ve started taking notes. I’ve nearly filled up an entire pad with what look like the scribblings of a psychopath. If someone finds my body surrounded by a pile of notebooks and cassette tapes under a pile of shattered windows, atop which is a beautiful golden flower, they’ll just sigh and say, “what a tragedy, this girl clearly went quite mad."”* **-- Clíodhna in *Episode #8: Monday 29 October 1973***
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## Biography

In the childhood centre where Clíodhna grew up, one of her Instructors told the children dozens of old Irish folktales. She had never cared about them much when she was a child, not putting much stock in fairy stories.

Before she became a nurse, Clíodhna was a mechanic. She worked at an auto repair shop for some amount of time and as a result, knew a lot about car maintenance and repair. At some point, she decided that her talents were better suited elsewhere, particularly her ability to make people laugh and put them at ease.

At the Galway hospital Clíodhna trained in, there was a doctor who used to say "Pain only hides in housecats." Once, behind a record shop, Clíodhna and her partner Siobhán found a kitten, presumed stray, that Siobhán wanted to adopt. Clíodhna objected, largely on the grounds that she would be the one who ended up looking after it, because Siobhán didn't know how and wouldn't trouble to learn. Siobhán and Clíodhna would sometimes stay up until 2am drinking cheap California Chardonay and then curl up in bed together. Once, they were dancing together while drunk and Siobhán did an elaborate twirl that accidentally put a massive crack in her bedroom window. While Clíodhna scrambled for makeshift first aid supplies, Siobhán laughed, because they had to use masking tape to bind the wound closed.

In 1972, Clíodhna suggested she and Siobhán go camping, and she refused because of her phobia of snakes. Despite knowing that there were no snakes in Ireland, she would not agree to go, and Clíodhna later concluded that Siobhán simply hadn't wanted to go camping with her, and her mind fabricated an intense phobia of Irish snakes to justify that aversion.

### Home Care Nurse

After Clíodhna graduating from nursing school, she worked in hospitals and care homes for about a year. Gráinne was her first care-at-home patient. When she expressed a desire to take a job outside Galway, leaving for the first time in years, Siobhán laughed at her for choosing one so close. She suggested they meet up on a holiday somewhere further afield, but she said she had been in Galway too long and needed to get out. Clíodhna secretly wished that Siobhán would fight for her to stay, but she did not meet significant resistance.

#### Day 1

When Clíodhna drove to Ballinroche on Monday 22 October, she stopped for breakfast at a cafe, the Saucy Noggin. Driving on to Gráinne's house, it took much longer than expected, although she didn't think she had taken any wrong turns and ended up at the house eventually without doubling back. The half-hour drive took over two hours, and although Gráinne seemed unhappy with Clíodhna, she didn't seem surprised. Clíodhna got the impression that Gráinne generally distrusted or disdained medical professionals.

That night, Clíodhna had a dream that kept waking her up. In the dream there was a faceless woman, possibly Siobhán, calling her name. The dream appeared to involve a house, but it was suspended in the air, with clouds below it. When she woke up, she thought she heard someone talking softly just outside her door, saying her name.

#### Day 2

On Tuesday, Gráinne was marginally more communicative while Clíodhna took her through her physiotherapy exercises, because she understood that a failure to communicate might result in making her injury worse. Clíodhna also heard the voice again, while she was taking Gráinne's blood pressure, but Gráinne said she heard nothing. She asked about her family, but didn't get any answers, so spent the morning exploring the rooms and looking at all of the photographs, trying to identify Gráinne and get an impression of the Lynch family. She even looked in Gráinne's bedroom, although she promised herself not to do so again.

At dinner, Gráinne was more up for conversation, and asked Clíodhna about herself and why she had chosen the career she had. Afterwards, while she was recording her notes for the day, Clíodhna thought she saw a light on in a house that no longer existed (except for a single undemolished wall), about fifty yards from Gráinne's house.

That night, she dreamt that she was walking around a big, old house and trying to catch sight of someone watching the house from the windows, because she could feel herself being observed. Eventually she went up to the attic room and looked out over the darkened landscape, which towered into the night.

#### Day 3

On Wednesday, Clíodhna went into Ballinroche for groceries in the afternoon. The drive was a normal length and uneventful, and she spent some more time taking stock of the town and what was there. She also met Colm and quizzed him about Gráinne, but he claimed not to know anything of note despite having done grocery deliveries to her house every week for about fifteen years. When Clíodhna mentioned planning to get lunch at the Saucy Noggin, Colm advised her to get back on the road quickly before it got dark, but she laughed it off, saying she had plenty of time. However, the drive back to Gráinne's house again took hours. On the way, she saw the house from the previous night's dream off the side of the road, and kept hearing whispering from the back seat, which almost made her crash into a stone fence. Gráinne was not angry when she got home, although her tea was late, and Clíodhna got the impression she believed her, although she didn't say so.

#### Day 4

In the morning, Clíodhna was woken by the voice whispering her name, and then she thought she heard loud footsteps downstairs. After Gráinne's morning exercises, she also thought she heard a conversation happening on the other side of the wall of her room, despite the fact there was no room there because the houses on either side of the terrace were completely gone, and no one out the window when she looked. The voices were speaking in a language like Irish, but not Irish, because Clíodhna could not understand them. She also thought that the woman of the pair of voices sounded like Siobhán.

In the afternoon, Clíodhna went for a walk, trying to follow the odd diagonal line that cut through the foundations of the old village. She followed the line past the former buildings and into the fields, and then started following a beam of sunlight. She imagined animals, and then the absence of animals, and kept following this perceived path until she found a large mound with stones laid all around its base. She searched for an entrance into it, like a passage tomb would have, but couldn't find one. Later in the evening, Gráinne told Clíodhna about the area and the people who used to live there, and mentioned boys called Pádraig and Oisín. While recounting the day's events to her recorder, Clíodhna thought she heard footsteps in the house in amongst the rain.

#### Day 5

That night, there was a big storm and Clíodhna dreamt of a fast, flooding river. In the dream she saw two children with dark curls and green eyes playing by the river, and before she could warn them back, they both fell in. She jumped in after them and dragged them to a river island, and although she was soaking wet, both of the children were dry. Then she woke up, and could not get back to sleep because of the noise of the storm. She and Gráinne stayed awake together watching the rain until it turned to sunrise. When she heard whispering again, Clíodhna asked Gráinne if she heard it too, but she just smiled and teased her for being scared of the rain, like her little brother had been.

A window was broken during the storm, and Clíodhna couldn't phone into the village because the phone line had also been taken down. When she went into Ballinroche to see about getting the phone fixed, they were disbelieving of the storm, saying it hadn't rained in a fortnight. She eventually convinced them to send someone to have a look at the phone line after the weekend. She ran into Colm on the way out of the council offices, but he was evasive, and she considered buying him a pint sometime to get him to tell her what he'd seen strange.

While she was in town, Cliodhna also got her library card, and got a look at some old local newspaper clippings, pre-Reckoning maps of the area, and some photographs, with the help of Yesenia, the librarian, and Maria from the Saucy Noggin.

The drive home from Ballinroche felt to Clíodhna like it took five or ten minutes, much shorter than it should've been. After getting back, Clíodhna continued to snoop through the house, especially the photographs. Looking at Gráinne's family, she was sure that the children she had dreamed about were her siblings.

#### Day 6

That night, Clíodhna dreamt that she was attending a party in the house, although it kept shifting and changing the rooms around. There was a Victrola in the corner of the sitting room playing unfamiliar, eerie music. Dozens of people were dancing, and a slightly younger Gráinne was there, asking her if the party was fun. Clíodhna accidentally slept in, despite usually waking up at 6:30am without an alarm. After 9 o'clock, Gráinne wheeled herself to the foot of the stairs, having got herself up, and shouted up, "Clíodhna! Are you dead?" waking her up after melding slightly into the dream. She also thought her bedroom window had been smashed by a storm. Feeling nauseous and disoriented, Clíodhna then forgot to toast Gráinne's bread for her breakfast before pouring baked beans over it. Clíodhna ate the soggy bean bread after getting Gráinne a new breakfast, because she didn't like to waste food.

In the afternoon, Cliodhna went to fix her broken window, finding the shed (despite its shabby exterior, and Gráinne apparently not touching it for decades) neat and stocked with what she needed. She decided not to ask Gráinne who tidied it, because she didn't want to know the answer. However, when she went to fix her window, she found it was in perfect repair, and instead it was the landing window - which she had boarded up the previous day - that was letting a breeze in. It looked to her as if the boards she had used had rotted off the frame overnight. She felt as if someone was standing outside the window, but could see nothing there when she worked up the nerve to look.

That evening, Gráinne seemed to be in a talkative mood, and Clíodhna told her about her dream, even asking if Gráinne had had the same one. Gráinne told her she had dreamt of a different party, and they had not shared a dream because that was not how dreams worked. She told her she was strange, and then wheeled herself out of the room. It reminded Clíodhna of a folktale she had been told at her Childhood Centre, about an odd, kind girl who had Dé Danann in her ancestry. While she was recording her notes for the day, Clíodhna thought she heard something whisper her name again. She decided to write Siobhán a letter so that she didn't sound crazy over the phone.

#### Day 7

That night, she dreamt she could hear a crying child, but couldn't find them. She woke up still hearing the screaming, and then a voice whispering, "He's here. He never left." Clíodhna attempted to use the information she got from the library and Maria to learn more about Gráinne's village and who used to live there, hoping to identify the ghost(s) haunting her, working backwards from the most recent newspapers. She expected to find a "wrong death" but could only find pictures of two Lynch brothers enlisting to the army and a death from old age. She began to suspect that part of the wrongfulness of the death was a coverup.

While Gráinne napped in the afternoon, Clíodhna snooped round the house and found a pair of photo albums. Some of the pages' photographs had been removed, but many of the ones that remained included a little boy, sometimes with a border collie. In the photographs, he got no older than 7 years old, and when she asked Gráinne about him, she was quiet for a long time before telling Clíodhna to put the photo album back where she found it. To change the subject, she told Gráinne about a field she had passed nearly every day on her walks, filled with pumpkins that were one time gored by a small group of deer. Gráinne laughed and told her that there were no pumpkins growing there, maybe in all of Ireland, but Clíodhna insisted she knew what she saw.

Afterwards, Clíodhna remembered a photograph she had found and taken of Gráinne sitting with a young boy on her lap. She went upstairs to get it where she had left it in the box under her bed, but found it was gone.

#### Day 8

Clíodhna was kept awake during the night by the sound of a mouse scurrying along the skirting boards. She attempted to read, but couldn't focus, and then tried a breathing exercise she had been taught growing up, but the noise continued to bother her. At one point, she thought she heard it right next to her ear, and later became convinced that the sound was whispering, not mouse-scratching. She wanted to ask Gráinne if she could hear it too, and whether it was the ghost of the boy in the photograph, who she speculated was her son, raised as her brother.

Clíodhna attempted to turn on her lamp, but couldn't reach it. The whispers stopped as she tried to listen to them, but as she drifted to sleep, she heard them again, speaking in the same strange language as before. After a while, Clíodhna began to feel that she understood what they were saying, although she couldn't pick out or translate the words directly. She interpreted the whispers as a story about a heartbroken girl who brought gifts to a river and disappeared. Clíodhna tried asking the voices what the story meant and what they wanted from her, but got no answer.

At 3am, Clíodhna was woken by feeling her bed shaking, and turned on her lamp only to find that her room's walls had expanded out into infinity. Turning the lamp off and then on again, she then found the walls had closed in tightly. When she fell backwards onto her bed with a yell, everything seemed to return to normal. Gráinne also woke early, but did not seem troubled, and told Clíodhna that her breakfast could wait until a more reasonable time. Clíodhna mentioned the whispers, but not what they said, and Gráinne seemed to know what she was talking about, but didn't attempt to explain. Afterwards, Clíodhna went back to bed, but doubted she would sleep again.

Nobody came to repair the telephone in the afternoon. At around 11am, she saw a truck parked outside the house and thought someone had come, but found the truck seemingly abandoned when she went to look. The truck looked to be 30 years old, but brand new, and had vanished without a trace by 6:30pm. She also saw spring flowers, buttonweeds or tansies, blooming in the garden, despite the time of year. They were surrounded by damselflies, though she thought at first they were faeries, and there was no body of water nearby.

As the sun set, Clíodhna heard the phone ring, but couldn't find her way into the house, as the façade seemed to go on forever in a circle. When she finally did find the door and get inside, the phone stopped ringing just before she picked it up. There was no click or tone to indicate that it had ever been connected, and Gráinne laughed that she had known they wouldn't be able to fix it. Clíodhna snapped at her about the boy in the photograph, and Gráinne went quiet and "empty" before leaving. She heard the floorboards creak and imagined that there was a pit or a crypt underneath the house. While she recorded her notes for the day, she began to repeat, trance-like, "The boy is below."

#### Day 9

Clíodhna believed she did not sleep at all during the night, but had several strange and unexplainable experiences. She believed the landing window was smashed again, by someone's fist, but then that it was already broken and boarded up. In the morning, she begged Gráinne to let her call the Department of Societal Health and move them both to a different house, but she refused. Clíodhna became convinced she had something to do with the death of the boy in the photograph.

Clíodhna attempted to drive to the village to call DSH, but found that her car wouldn't start. She examined it closely, but could find no fault, and despaired at her failure to fix it. She decided to walk to the village instead, setting out around midday, but hadn't arrived by 5pm. She sat down on the side of the road and cried, and then decided to turn back, and the walk to the house only took 20 minutes. She ranted hysterically to Gráinne, but she calmly told Clíodhna that the phone was fixed. There was a dial tone, but Clíodhna couldn't get through to the village. She called Siobhán and told her she was probably going to come home, but Siobhan sounded unconcerned, and Clíodhna hung up. She tried to call back and didn't get an answer. Angry with Siobhán and terrified of the house, Clíodhna decided she had to do something.

#### Day 10

Clíodhna dreamt that she could hear someone singing out in the street, early in the morning, but couldn't reach the window to look. Something banged on her door as she approached it, making her fall backwards, and it opened to reveal the boy from the photograph, holding tansies with damselflies flying around his head. His eyes were completely grey, and when she touched her shoulder, she became sure that his name was Oisín. Clíodhna found herself in the unruined village, and a young Gráinne was standing just outside the front door of the house, smiling. She walked to meet someone, and Oisín (his eyes now a normal blue) called after her, asking to come along. She rejected him, and he seemed upset, but after a moment, he followed her anyway.

The scene changed, and Gráinne and her friend took off running away from Oisín, who begged them to wait for him. The scene changed again, and Oisín chased Grainne's laughter only to tumble down a hill and land in a creek. He stood up, and screamed as he tries to put weight on his foot. It began to rain. He was not found until dusk, feverish, and a doctor was called but he did not get better. Gráinne did not come to visit him. Clíodhna forced herself to wake up, drenched in sweat, and immediately recorded her dream, resolving to confront Gráinne when she went downstairs.

She sat Gráinne down at the kitchen table and laid out everything she had seen and experienced, demanding that they put Oisín to rest. Gráinne was quiet throughout, until she finally said that the boy in the photograph was her older brother Rónán, not Oisín or a son she didn't have. Rónán died when he was nine and Grainne was three. Gráinne said that the voices Clíodhna heard were nothing to do with wrongful deaths, just the world being full of things they couldn't understand or change. Later that day, Clíodhna phoned Siobhán and they talked until midnight. After she explained what had happened, Siobhán suggested that Clíodhna was having stress-induced paranoia and night terrors, and she needed to deal with her anxiety. She also suggested a gas leak, but Clíodhna couldn't tell if it was a joke. This made Clíodhna realise that Siobhán didn't want to be with her, and Clíodhna had run away from addressing it.

After hanging up with Siobhán, Clíodhna seemed unsure what she was going to do next, packing and unpacking her bags. She didn't know how long she would stay, where else she could go, or what time even really was. Finally, she expressed a need to be quiet. Her ultimate fate is unknown.

## Additional info

* The name "Clíodhna" appears in Irish mythology, and a tale about a goddess who fell in love with a mortal, Ciabhán, and left her kind's otherworld to be with him only to be swept out to sea. It also could come from "clídna" meaning "shapely".
	+ The folktale Clíodhna mentions on Saturday the 27th appears to be a variant of this myth; one of the Dé Danann falls in love with a mortal man, but in pursuing him is cast out from her family's land and driven mad by loneliness. In this version, the mythical Clíodhna also has a daughter who is left to be raised by Ciabhán.
* Clíodhna has never had a dog or a cat.
* There is some evidence to suggest that Clíodhna was being poisoned, not haunted. Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odorless gas that can build up in houses and symptoms may resemble a haunting from the victim's perspective; forgetfulness, confusion, exhaustion, nausea, personality and mood changes. Clíodhna mentions on Saturday that the fireplace was never lit, and the house was now heated by gas.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Season 6, Episode #1: Monday 22 October 1973
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Season 6, Episode #9: Tuesday 30 October 1973
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Season 6, Episode #2: Tuesday 23 October 1973
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Season 6, Episode #3: Wednesday 24 October 1973
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Season 6, Episode #6: Saturday 27 October 1973
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Season 6, Episode #10: Samhain
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Season 6, Episode #4: Thursday 25 October 1973
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Season 6, Episode #5: Friday 26 October 1973
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Season 6, Episode #7: Sunday 28 October 1973
10. ↑ Season 6, Episode #8: Monday 29 October, 1973