Six Black Candles by Des Dillon sampler

des dillon is an internationally acclaimed award-winning writer. He
was born in Coatbridge and studied English Literature at Strathclyde
University before becoming a teacher. He was Writer-in-Residence at
Castlemilk from 1998–2000. He is a poet, short story writer, novelist,
dramatist, broadcaster, screen writer, and scriptwriter for tv, stage and
radio. His books have been published in the usa, India, Russia, Sweden,
in Catalan, French and Spanish. His novel Me and Ma Gal was shortlisted
for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and won the
World Book Day ‘We Are What We Read’ poll for the novel that best
describes Scotland today. His poetry has been anthologised internationally.
His latest award was The Lion and Unicorn prize for the best of Irish and
British Literature in the Russian Language (2007). Des lives in Galloway
with his wife and two dogs. Six Black Candles won the International
Festival of Playwriting Award in 2001, and in 2004 played at the Royal
Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, winning the best Ensemble award at the
Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland.
[Six Black Candles] written like Dillon’s previous work in vivid demotic
style, is a celebration of women… his writing is always truthful, immediate
and powerful. It is also unadorned. Dillon has no time for adjectives
and adverbs… He writes the way he speaks, with punchy directness and
enormous brio.
scotland on sunday
[Of Dillon’s women folk] These are the Dillon sisters – wives, mothers,
loving daughters, and part-time witches. Forget pointy hats and
broomsticks, though. These women are thoroughly down-to-earth and
have everyday lives in their home town of Coatbridge that wouldn’t raise
a curious eyebrow. Unless someone crosses them, of course. ‘Then we’d
give Macbeth a run for his money,’ one of them jokes.
the herald

Also by Des Dillon:
Fiction
Me and Ma Gal (1995)
The Big Empty: A Collection of Short Stories (1996)
Duck (1998)
Itchycooblue (1999)
Return of the Busby Babes (2000)
The Blue Hen (2004)
The Glasgow Dragon (2004)
Singin I’m No a Billy He’s a Tim (2005)
They Scream When You Kill Them (2006)
Monks (2007)
My Epileptic Lurcher (2008)
Poetry
Picking Brambles (2003)

Six Black Candles
DES DILLON

First published in 2002 by Headline Review
First Luath edition 2004
This edition 2008
Reprinted 2011
Reprinted 2020
isbn (10): 1-906307-49-0
isbn (13): 978-1-906307-49-3
Des Dillon has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
The paper used in this book is recyclable.
It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy,
low emission manner from renewable forests.
Printed and bound by
Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow
Typeset in 9.5 point Frutiger
by Jennie Renton
© Des Dillon

Dedicated to my sisters
Caroline, Lina, Angie, Wendy, Geddy and Donna –
cos they are fuckin magic
For the general public –
none of this is true
it’s all made up:
Fiction
Thanks for the assistance of the Scottish Arts Council.
Without the 2001 writers’ bursary
this book might not have been written.

six black candles
Three Dead Men
I’ve got six sisters. They’re Witches. Real Witches. So far they claim
to have killed quite a few people. Here’s some examples. Brian
McGowan that called Wendy a lezzy. Peter Bannan that called
Donna The Ghoul one time too many. And John Cassidy, a plumber
with the burgh that never plumbed my Maw’s washing machine in
right. They’re all dead – Bannan, McGowan and Cassidy – and they
died after my six sisters done the Six Black Candles on them. That’s
their top spell. The one they use when it’s time to pull out all the
stops.
They know spells that come from Donegal way before the
tattie famine. My Granny, Oul Mary, says they come from way
before Christianity. Before St Patrick told the first snake to fuck
off out of Ireland. Her Maw passed them on to her and she
passed them on to our Maw, and our Maw passed them on to the
Girls. They’ve had good teachers, my six sisters. The best.
When I say Girls what I really mean is women. They’re all in their
thirties except for Caroline who’s just turned the big four oh.
That’s as far as I can go telling their ages. You know how you
don’t give away a woman’s age? Well, that rule applies even
more when the women involved can cause horrible deaths at
the flick of their black nail varnished fingers. Here they are from
oldest to youngest:
Caroline
Linda
Angie
Geddy
Wendy
Donna
So what about Bannan, McGowan and Cassidy? Brian

six black candles
McGowan was screaming up Kirshaws Road on his motor bike.
A Kawasaki. He’d been on the drink three days, and he was
going faster than his rubberised reactions could cope with. His
hand kept turning the throttle that little bit more without him
knowing. Like a sleeping bird on a perch. When he rounded
the bend at McKinnon’s Knitwear (Kilts and Tartans a Speciality)
he should’ve felt the centrifugal force pulling him towards the
kerb. But he didn’t. If he was sober he would have slowed down.
Definitely. But this day he was full of Buckfast, and coming out of
the bend he was hitting seventy.
Everybody knew there was a roundabout at the top of
Kirshaws Road. Everybody except Brian McGowan, that is. He
didn’t even brake when he came to it. Hit the white bubble in
the middle. And it’s quite an incline, that thing. Brian McGowan
flew into the air like a stunt drunk. The last thing he saw was
the surprised face of the ASDA lorry driver as he was embedded
in the windscreen. Witnesses said the back wheel of his bike
was still turning. Like it never even knew it had left the road.
McGowan’s face was scattered with little stars of windscreen glass
and the blood was running down like red comet tails. All points
North as the comets blazed a trail to Brian McGowan’s dead
forehead.
Poetic Justice, said Wendy, calling me a lezzy and ending up,
excuse my language here, fucked by a big lorry driver.
I remember the Girls cackling.
Number two was Peter Bannan. He died when a forklift truck
fell forty feet onto his head. The odds against getting killed
by a forklift truck are staggering. One falling onto your head?
Astronomical. I’ve scoured papers and the internet and nowhere
else have I come across a case where somebody’s demise has been
brung about by a forklift actually falling onto their head. Peter
worked in the Klondike and one of the furnaces was getting

six three black dead candles men
overhauled. He was down there in the black dust sweeping the
place out. He was a cloud of smoke with the head of the brush
coming out the front every now and again. That created another
front to the cloud and the whole thing moved forwards.
All up the inside and down the outside of the furnace this
intricate scaffolding had been installed by the Callaghans. And
they’re the best scaffolders in Coatbridge. The forklift was
going round the top with pallets of new firebricks. The top of
the furnaces, being the hottest, are always the ones that crack
and break and crumble. The forklift was laying them out for
the specialist bricklayers to come in the morning. Willie Gann
was driving the forklift and down below he could see Cloud
Peter moving about the belly of the furnace. Two men going
about their jobs. But they didn’t know at the exact same time
my six sisters were performing the Six Black Candles on Bannan.
Sometimes the spell takes weeks. Sometimes it happens right
away.
Bannan stopped for a fag. His cloud of black dust settled and
fell to the floor as another cloud of grey fag smoke rose. Like
he’d swapped one cloud for the other. Unbeknownst to Bannan,
up above the tubes had started bending. Gann felt the structure
lurch an inch or two into the furnace. He leapt out and jumped
onto the steel beam on the walls of the Klondike, holding on like
a lobster. There was a creak but there was that much work going
on about him that the noises echoed into the furnace and were
just a noise soup for Bannan. Then there was a snap but that was
just a bone in the soup. It wasn’t the noises that he should’ve
been scared of. It was the silence of the forklift truck falling in
holy stealth through the air. The only thing he noticed was its
accelerating shadow. They say he was leaning against his brush
with his fag in his mouth when it pancaked him. When my sisters
heard the news they rejoiced.

six black candles
That’s him a fucking ghoul now, said Donna. Baldy bastard.
She laughed and done her starey-eyes thing. She sometimes,
or quite a lot of times in fact, stares unfocused dead ahead and
doesn’t blink. It makes her look more mysterious. Number three
was Cassidy, the plumber with the burgh that never plumbed my
Maw’s washing machine in right. His fate was the worst by far
of these three. He came to Maw’s when it was only Maw that
was in. Forty quid she paid him to plumb in the new Zanussi. But
Cassidy was a skinflint. He thought he would save a few quid on
materials. Rip Maw off. Instead of running a hot and a cold pipe
to the machine he only connected it to the cold. He used a wee
splicer thing to make his job easier so that the one pipe fed into
the two holes in the back of the machine. He told Maw it was the
latest thing in washing-machine technology.
Vorsprung durch Technik, Alice, he said.
And he laughed at his own patter. But he was a liar. Usually
your machine fills with hot and cold to the right temperature and
then sets off doing the washing. If you just fill it with cold it’s got
to heat the water to the right temperature first.
That meant Maw’s machine took hours to do a wash. On
a number six it took eight hours at full load. Eventually Maw
phoned Cassidy back. She was nice enough but he gave her all
sorts of abuse over the phone. There was a family meeting about
it. The consensus was for everybody going over and kicking fuck
out Cassidy. Not a hospital case, just a few digs to the head and
plenty to the body. Maybe jump up and down a wee bit on his
legs. Leave him in good enough condition to come back and
fix the Zanussi. But we never got time to take it to a vote. Cos
had Cassidy not been to the pub all day? To cap that he was in
a right bad mood. And what had been going through his head
but this argument he had had with Maw on the phone. He came
staggering down the lane shouting, it sounded like Chinese, and

six three black dead candles men
papped a half brick through the scullery window. He couldn’t
have picked a worse time to do it. We were all there. Twelve
counting Maw and Da and Oul Mary.
I wanted to kill him. To get that halfer that he chucked and
break all his fingers with it. Crush them to dust. You’re always
more violent when your family’s there. But he was covered
with sisters when I got there and Oul Mary was trying to stove
his head in with one of Gallagher’s garden gnomes. Dopey, it
was. They had five of the Seven Dwarves. As I stood looking
for an opening for a boot or maybe a good dig, Cassidy, quite
sharpish for a podgy guy, struggled free and shot down the lane
screaming obscenities.
You might be ugly but you’re fat, shouted Oul Mary.
Then, by a telepathic gift that none of the boys were blessed
with, all the Girls, including Maw and Oul Mary said, Six Black
Candles at the same time. Two weeks later they done the spell.
Three weeks later Cassidy was dead.
He was in Jeannie Breen’s house. Her Zanussi wasn’t going
right. He was fixing it to make a few bob for the drink.
What seems to be the problem? said Cassidy. He was looking
in his bag for a stethoscope probably. Everybody always wanted
to be a doctor and he was no exception. The thing was, he would
soon be needing one. Or more accurately; an
undertaker.
Sometimes the tub turns when the door’s open, went Jeannie.
Of course Cassidy had a PhD in white goods. He sneered at
Jeannie Breen and let a little blast of air out the side of his mouth
through his teeth.
The tub!? You’d have a hell of a time if the tub turned, hen.
It’s not a tub it’s a drum.
That was her put in her place. But Cassidy wasn’t finished.
He wanted to crush her. He never done the City and Guilds in

six black candles
Electrical and Electronic Craft studies for nothing, you know.
For your information, he said, a drum can’t turn when the
door’s open. There’s an isolation switch on the door so that when
you do this (he opened and shut the door a couple of times) the
current that supplies the induction motor coils is cut off.
Well, Jeannie Breen knew nothing about induction coils.
She thought it might be something to do with pregnancy and
contraception. She was about to speak but he told her he worked
better with the women out the scullery. She seen the drum give
a wee kick behind Cassidy. It turned a half turn even though the
door was open. She was going to tell him but he’d said it was
impossible so she went into the living room and read Hello!.
Fantasized about celebrities. She was right into imagining a brief
encounter with some prince from the Transylvanian mountains
when she heard an unusual thumping noise coming from the
scullery.
It was only when she heard the scream that she shuffled in
at top fluffy slipper speed. There was the Zanussi on a full spin
and Cassidy’s big arse wobbling about to the reverberations of
his smashed-in head as it rattled up and down and to and fro
in the machine’s big round mouth. Oh, the machine was saying.
Oh! Jeannie ran over and switched it off. Cassidy’s head came to
a wobbling rest looking upwards and his neck was twisted like
a wrung-out blanket. It’s funny the things you think about in a
crisis. Jeannie Breen was going to let it go to ‘rinse’ to clear away
some of the blood.
He was dead anyway, she told the Girls, but then I thought I’d
switch it off and close the door. A rinse might have sprayed blood
all over the walls.
A practical woman, Jeannie Breen. Rumour has it when they
took Cassidy to the mortuary he had his boxers stuffed in his
pocket and a pair of Jeannie Breen’s pink frillies on. Nice woman

six three black dead candles men
though she is, Jeannie Breen, you wouldn’t want to wear her
knickers. Not with the problems she’s got with her waterworks.
That’s one philandering burgh plumber out the road, Angie
said.
And the rest of the Girls agreed. I felt a bit bad now about the
doing we gave him. If only he hadn’t lobbed that brick through
the window he might still be alive. It’s amazing the twists and
turns that fate can deal. Just when you thought life was one
thing it becomes something else entirely.
So that puts you in the picture about the Girls. I’ve not
mentioned the lists of people they’ve exacted their retribution
on in slighter ways, with less potent spells: limps, blindness and
infertility all being par for the course. One man who took the last
loaf in ASDA from under Angie’s fingers doesn’t know that it’s his
fault him and his wife can never have any wanes. He had three
wanes to his first wife. There’s trouble ahead for him.
Now, bearing in mind what I’ve told you already, try to
imagine the meeting the Girls had when Bobby, Caroline’s man,
turned forty and done a runner with Stacie Gracie. Never before
had they been offended at such a level. Even before they met we
all knew somebody was going to end up dead.
To understand this story fully you need to know something
about history. Not the history of Ireland and Scotland but the
history of the Girls. The history of the family. The history of the
immigrants in Coatbridge. Where it all comes from. My sisters
didn’t lick their talents off the grass. But this is no chronological
history. It’s the bits and bobs that I’ve picked up along the way.
Stories. That’s the main currency in my culture. Tale-telling. I
can only do two things. One: tell you the personal history of
the family through wee stories. Two: tell you the story of what
happened one night last year.
Here’s the thing that set it all off. The fuse. Bobby worked in

six black candles
ASDA on the fancy meat counter. Then this wee bird Stacie Gracie
started there. She was alright in a pre-historic kind of way. A body
that was perfect for sex but a face like a pterodactyl. She had
one eye going for the messages and the other one coming back
with the change. But there’s no telling the ways of Love. Bobby
fell for her like a bag of tatties off the top shelf. First time she
sliced a quarter of chicken and held it delicately on her hand it
was like she was weighing lace. Cupid done his thing. You always
see Cupid in fields or meadows or city parks. You never think that
he’s sat there at the meat counters of this world too. Waiting for
the sweetness and light of slices of corned beef on a pretty hand.
Or the pastel pink of Spam being wrapped in cellophane.
Stacie Gracie and Bobby moved in together. A flat over in
Greenend. That was the first Caroline knew about it. He went to
work in the morning and never came back. Stacie Gracie phoned
Caroline from the new flat and gloated. If she knew about
Bannan, McGowan and Cassidy she wouldn’t have went near
Bobby at all. She’s not daft, Caroline. Soon as she found out, she
looked at the clock and it was only half past four. She flung her
coat on and went straight up to Kennedy’s to file for divorce and
make sure she got the house. Her and Bobby bought their house
in Old Monkland. A top flat in Kellock Avenue. They bought it
just before the place started going downhill. Now all the other
houses are boarded up or should be. Some of the verandas
have been ripped off the walls so that flats have doors out into
nowhere. Most of the people in the flats are drunks and junkies.
The walking dead. People who are dead but still walking and
people who should be dead but we go on hoping. In a nutshell,
she was a nutcase for buying a flat in the roughest street in
Coatbridge.
The Girls asked if Caroline wanted the Six Black Candles
done on Stacie Gracie. But she didn’t. She preferred to deal

six three black dead candles men
with her own life problems without recourse to Witchcraft. She
never was one for joining in much in the spells anyway. Never
quite believed it. Donna, on the other hand, believed it fully.
Caroline was always the most sensible of all the sisters. If one
sister dissents then the Six Black Candles can’t go ahead. They can
shed a sister here and there for small spells but not the Six Black
Candles. Weeks passed and Caroline was up at Kennedy’s every
other day making sure things were going smooth. The weeks
turned into months. Caroline thought she was coping; being
busy can block out emotions for a while. In reality things were
going from bad to worse. She found out that Bobby hadn’t been
paying the mortgage. He’d been spending all his dough on Stacie
Gracie. Taking her everywhere. They went to the Meat Counter
Servers’ Convention in Blackpool and didn’t go to any meetings
or seminars. Spent a fortune the whole week on drink, drugs and
partying. Bobby started planking the arrears letters so that as far
as Caroline knew, things were ticking along nicely. The situation
was now that she needed ten grand to keep the house. Five to
pay the arrears and bills and another five to keep her going till
she could get a job.
Bobby was in love and it’s always best to wring people dry
when all they need is the air they breathe and the one they love.
Caroline was getting in there before the air turned sour and
Bobby started to fight for his rights. He agreed to give her ten
grand. But that was all he done; agreed. Every time she phoned
him he told her he’d get it next week. If she didn’t get it in the
next month the bank was going to repossess the house. Caroline
was in big trouble.

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