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Overview

The graveyard is a place of deep unrest. Bushes and trees that border it are overgrown and have tangled together into a single entity. Despite the warmth of a summer’s day the air causes one’s hair to stand and goose pimples to rise high on the skin. Many branches and thickets make it an ideal nesting place, but yet no birds come here. The absence of their song is a chilling reminder of what lies beneath the earth—waiting.Ireland has endured decades of misery under an unjust invader. Now, it’s the year 1845, a time of blight, when the crops fail and the potatoes, the mainstay in the people’s diet, lie rotting in the ground.Timmy, twelve-years-old and stable boy on the Maycroft estate, is unlike any other child. Though bound by laws that are beyond his understanding, he dreams of a better life for his family. Even the harsh treatment of a drunken father and regular beatings from the man he despises most, his superior, Black Jack Carey, does little to diminish his trust in God and the love he has for his mother and siblings. Elizabeth, once mistress of Maycroft, is left to the mercy of her cruel brother-in-law, her only crime, her inability to bear a male heir. When the new Lord proves himself to be what she suspects, a gambler and layabout and her position within the household precarious, she realises the full extent of the trouble she and her three daughters are in. The Lord of Maycroft is soon deep in debt and under the control of the man who is a danger to all of them. Black Jack Carey, a man who will stop at nothing to gain control of the land and power over the woman he desires most, Elizabeth. With the famine raging, she sells what little she owns and with just enough money for their passage, she sends her daughters to a cousin in America. Left alone to face a bleak future, beaten and raped by Carey, she takes refuge in the Workhouse. Here amid the stench of decay and surrounded by disease, she meets Timmy. A friendship that at other times would not have been allowed, blossoms and they find within one another the strength to face the daily hazards until they escape and return to Maycroft. Pursued by Black Jack, they move from place to place, collecting the abandoned children they find on the roads. Jack finally catches Elizabeth and his actions bring about her death. Timmy bereft by her passing, is left alone to nurse the sick and dying children. Slowly the Typhus kills all around him until he too succumbs to its folds. All are buried in an acre of designated land known as The Paupers’ Graveyard.Black Jack Carey, who atrocities to his own people have made him a figure of hate, is murdered and his body buried in the same field as the others. Even in death he refuses to rest. His evil moves through the soil, it flows over the bones of the dead, prodding them awake and it would have remained like this though out time, but for the actions of one man. Two hundred years later an ambitious builder bought the land to build twenty seven houses. Dream homes he called them and they would become such for the residents, but it would be the stuff of nightmares. Though he had lain in restless sleep, it was the disturbance of the earth that caused Black Jack to rise and with him Timmy, Elizabeth and the other children. Stronger in death, Jack starts a campaign of terror on the living as well as the dead. But the most deadly and inescapable is the disease he brings with him, Typhus. Carried by lice, it soon spreads to the living and once again the most susceptible; the children are the first to die. Timmy and Elizabeth are forced listen to the screams of the terrified residents as they echo in the still, night air. It is only when a specialist in disease control arrives from America to track the source of the sickness that they dare to hope. But Elizabeth’s sorrow increases when she recognises the locket that hangs around the young woman’s neck. In order to save this woman,

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