Hauntings Page 8

“I need to get home to Birchinlee,” was all she could think to reply. Mary saw a new sharpness in the old woman’s gaze.

  “What’s your name, lass?”

  “Mary Francis.”

  The old woman sucked air between her teeth and shook her head. “Too old to remember faces.” She turned to the cork board and tapped a finger against the newest pin. “Just like that she comes,” she said softly.

  When she turned back around, the old woman’s eyes were glistening. Mary swallowed and hugged herself against the cold that was to come.

  Her guide bundled a few items into a knapsack, among them a compass and a dark brown loaf fetched out of a mesh-fronted cupboard. She picked up the poker beside the stove. “Iron.” The old woman brandished the poker before packing it away. “Good for ghouls, both living and dead.” She tugged her fisherman’s hat down over her ears and picked up the lantern. Hobbling over to the door, she glanced back at Mary. “Let’s be having you, lass. This day isn’t getting any younger.”

  ~*~

  The bracken was ankle-deep, the exertion of the climb burning her throat and lungs, but the old woman pressed on. The girl was a silent presence at her back; it was all too easy to forget she was there. Every so often, the old woman paused for breath and looked back over a shoulder. It wasn’t her imagination. The girl continued to follow in her footsteps.

  Curiosity got the better of her. “The reservoir is high, hmm?” She pointed down to the expanse of water in the valley below. “Sometimes in the heat of summer you see the remains of the villages that were drowned. Derwent Church steeple used to poke right out of the water. Few things as queer as that sight, at least until the safety-conscious so and sos demolished it.”

  The girl hummed softly to herself. She didn’t seem perturbed by the presence of the reservoir or inclined to comment on it.

  “We meet the path here.” The old woman strode out from the heather and onto the snowy path. The girl followed after.

  ~*~

  “The Coach and Horses!” Mary felt a surge of joy as they approached the gritstone outcrops. She didn’t stop to question the strength of her reaction. Instead she forgot the cold, forgot her seventeen years of age too, and clambered about the circular stacks of rock. Mist closed in around them.

  “I saw these stones from the road when Pa brought us to live in Tin Town. Folk are right. From that distance, they look like a coach and horses.”

  The old woman clucked her tongue. “I know them better as the Wheel Stones. They turn time.” The rheumy eyes stared up at Mary. “Most folk have no idea the Shifting even exists.” She tapped the spot beneath her left eye. “Most folk are blind to it.”

  “Will we be home before dawn?” asked Mary, running a hand along the roughly textured stone. Below, the old woman prattled on.

  “England’s Bermuda Triangle – that’s what they call the White Peak and Dark Peak. I don’t suppose that means anything to you, lass. You haven’t lived with its peculiarities day and night – and by live, I mean really live. For year after year until your bones seize in their sockets and your mouth gets powder dry.” The old woman gestured ahead. “We should make it to the Salt Cellar with the remains of the day.”

  Reluctantly, Mary clambered down and trudged after the old woman. It had pleased her heart to see the great weathered rocks. Journeying south of Dovestone Tor, she was similarly taken by another of Dark Peak’s treasures – the gritstone pillar known as the Salt Cellar. Mist bled around its edges. Mary ran ahead and climbed the jutting crags. Cold lay heavy in her lungs but the exertion helped the blood flow.

  “Too dark for that!” called the old woman from the ground. “The Shifting will suck you up if you don’t stay grounded.”

  There was desperation in the old woman’s tone. Mary was irritated. “It’s wonderful up here!” she cried. The atmosphere left her face damp. Out there, past the edge of the gritstone shelf, the mist roiled like an ocean of milk. Anything could inhabit the valley below – an enchanted kingdom, Hell’s gate...

  Somewhere at the far reaches of her mind, she heard the old woman calling to her. Her focus stayed on the drop off a few short steps away. It was so very tempting to just step off and swim out into the winter wilds.

  The smell of paraffin reached her nose. She sniffed, a little confused about where the smell was coming from. The next moment she ducked instinctually as a tremendous roar assaulted her ears and a colossal shadow passed overhead. Vibrations filtered through the ancient stone, feeding up her body and making her skull ache. The huge machine clipped Derwent Tor, engines shrieking and spluttering. There was an instant of white noise followed by the cacophony of scorched bedrock and tearing metal as the aircraft impacted a few miles north.

  The violence of the crash left its bruise on the atmosphere. Tearful with fear, Mary slid back down to the ground. A glowing lantern swung in close to her face.

  “I said to stay close! The Shifting nearly had you then.” The old woman thumbed her nose. “I’m used to the stench of it. But you, well, you’d just let it drag you right on in.”

  Mary had no idea what the old woman was talking about. Was she insensible to the events taking place around them?”

  “The aeroplane…” Her voice trailed off into a sob.

  The old woman shook her head. “These hills are littered with crash sites. No end of speculation why. Some say we’re on a flight path for inexperienced pilots in the military. Add to that bad weather and these dark peaks… In both World Wars, bombers returning from Europe would overshoot their base and run out of fuel over these dark hills.” The rheumy eyes moved in close, lantern swinging from the old woman’s thumb. “The incident you just witnessed is from 1943. Pilot Officer Denis Kyne took off in an Oxford LX518 for his first solo night flight. Kyne set course for Condover. Nothing more was ever heard from him.” She sniffed, accepting of the fact. “Time to get going. Between here and Back Tor, we’ll hear them from all across the valley.”

  “Hear who?” Mary tucked her rain cape close.

  Thrusting the lantern out, the old woman nodded at the darkness. “The dead ‘uns,” she said.

  ~*~

  What could account for the Shifting, how it shuffled time and events and laid them out in a new order? Like sand, it trickled into and over itself. Or was the phenomenon more like tectonic plates, sliding into new positions that were out of place and out of the ordinary? The old woman was used to the figures in the mist, their flying jackets, leather caps and goggles to protect against a wind they could no longer feel. The girl was less jaded. Figures bubbled up from the mire either side of the path and Mary made a croaking sound, her throat contracting around a scream.

  “Do you see?” she cried, faltering on the path.

  “Aye, I see, and that’s all that matters. You on the other hand should nip your hood in close and concentrate on the way ahead. Leave the spectres to me.” The old woman waited until the girl did as instructed. Reaching into her knapsack, she pulled out the iron poker. It was no kind of weapon against the Shifting, but it would keep the spirits at bay. With the girl staying close, the old woman advanced slowly.

  Voices called out from the mist.

  “Mayday! Mayday!”

  “Ich möchte nicht sterben!”

  In-between the panic of those final moments came the banter, singing, and camaraderie of the men’s everyday existence. It was as if the Shifting restructured the airmen’s lives – and deaths – into its own discordant symphony.

  The old woman’s lantern lit the way past the leaning rock platelets known as the Cakes of Bread and onto the mossy incline leading to Back Tor. The path was lost beneath the snow, but the woman checked her compass occasionally and seemed to have a feel for the way of it. Figures reached for them from the shadows, graveworn and charred. The old woman slashed at them with the poker and they dissolved into the mist.

  “I just want to go home,” whimpered the girl.

  “Aye,” said the old woman.

  A few more
trudging steps and the Shifting released them, like pressure popping.

  “Those men seemed lost,” said the girl, wide-eyed and calm now. Apparently her understanding of events just seconds before had altered too. “Someone should show them the way home,” she murmured, staring back over a shoulder.

  ~*~

  The path meandered through the heathered moorland. A small owl glided towards them on still and silent wings, disappearing back into the mist as suddenly as it had appeared. The air had a taste of iron.

  Mary watched the old woman scoop up a handful of snow, pop it into her mouth and curse its chill. A few hunks from the loaf of bread were devoured as well. Mary might have joined in the meagre feast if she had felt the need.

  “Are you all right?” she asked when the old woman set out along the path again, her breathing laboured.

  The old woman snorted. “I’m ancient and tired. It’s not natural to have one’s days stretched out like this, but what to do about it? The Shifting swept me up when I was seventeen.”

  “My age,” exclaimed Mary, seemingly pleased by the fact.

  “Aye, you are. Lost too. Been lost a while.”

  “And you are guiding me home.”

  “I do hope so, Mary. I do hope so.”

  Their conversation petered out as they reached a large cairn of stones.

  “Lost Lad.” The old woman directed her lantern at the cairn. “He leaves me be now, but you may have to abide him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The boy was forced to shelter here when the weather turned cruel. He died, his dog too. The shepherd who found him scratched ‘Lost Lad’ onto a stone. Ever since, shepherds are said to add another stone to the cairn when they pass.” She put a hand against her chest, not through emotion Mary realised, but in an effort to calm her erratic breathing.

  “I know that folk tale,” Mary said quietly.

  “Excuse me, Miss.”

  The voice came from the mist. Mary clutched her rain cape closer, willing it to shield her as the shape of a snuffling animal appeared, followed closely by a figure.

  “Excuse me, Miss. I’m lost, and it’s bitter you see. Even Bobbit here feels it, don’t you boy?” The child bent to stroke the dog’s head. Unlike her faded memory of the airmen, these apparitions seemed less substantial, older perhaps. The body of the boy and the dog were strangely colourless, as if formed of the mist.

  “You see them?” A few paces in front, the old woman halted. Lantern held before her face, she looked ghoulish. “The Shifting has taken us into their time. He was a lad from Derwent village, long before it was flooded.”

  “My father is working on Derwent Dam. He says they’ll have to flood some villages to make the reservoir.” It made sense to Mary to keep on talking. If she kept focused on what was real, the apparitions of the boy and his dog might fade away.

  “Please, miss.” The spirit’s voice was more insistent now while the dog gave a soft whine. “I’m cold, awful cold. Save a lost lad, could you?”

  “Ignore them.” The old woman strode over, brandishing the iron poker at the shadows.

  “How is he talking to me?” exclaimed Mary.

  “Lost too, aren’t you. Fallen between the cracks of the Shifting.”

  “I just want to go home.” said Mary. Her head ached and the boy kept on talking.

  “Ah, the wind is biting, miss. Just help me find the path, please. Just help me find the path.”

  The boy held out his hand to Mary. She stared at the pitiful figure, and was gripped by the same seductive pull she had experienced standing on the ledge of the Salt Cellar. The mist crept closer.

  “Help me.” The boy’s hand reached, the arm extending unnaturally. Mary started to raise her hand, overwhelmed by the desire to sink into those depths. To stay cocooned in the shifting white.

  A shadow passed in front of her and the twang of reverberating metal broke her reverie. Mary blinked. The old woman had brought the poker cracking down onto the ground. The boy and his dog were gone. Even the mist had lifted slightly, dropping back from its prey.

  ~*~

  Oh, but hadn’t she been just seconds away from losing the girl to the Shifting and finding herself back in that bleak cowshed for the lord only knew how many more years! The old woman willed her nerves to settle as they crossed over the dam. Her heartbeat was frantic as a bird’s.

  The water stretched away in a sheet of inky black. Gothic towers, arranged at intermittent points along the brick path, loomed above their heads. They might have crossed a drawbridge to some ancient settlement. Over the years the Shifting had shown her villages where iron was mined and smelted. It had haunted her with the cries of harmed children from the northern moors. She had lived alongside the tourists who trudged in heavy boots, their souls made lighter by the glorious mystery of Dark Peak. She had glimpsed the future too, where war machines scattered the valley – and beyond to where the sun burnt with a savage heat and the land died beneath her feet. All of this, she had experienced while waiting to guide a lost girl home.

  Behind her, Mary was humming softly. Apparently the trauma of the Lost Lad’s apparition had faded from her thoughts. They were drawing closer to Tin Town, the girl with happy determination, the old woman with ragged breaths and pain behind her ribs.

  After crossing the dam, the path widened, allowing the two to walk alongside one another.

  “Do you remember what happened earlier?” said the old woman suddenly. “Before you knocked on my door and asked me to show you home?”

  Mary sighed. “Maybe I am ailing for something. Nothing stays fixed in my mind. There was a window. I was watching the mist outside. It was rolling like a beautiful ocean.” She glanced over, her wide eyes glistening. “And then there was the stony path and you at the end of it.”

  The old woman stopped walking. She would have put a hand to Mary’s shoulder but daren’t risk unsettling the balance between them.

  “Mary, when we get to Tin Town and I wave you in at your door, don’t forget one thing. When the Shifting flows by your window, close the curtains and forget it. Keep that part solid in your mind.”

  Whether the girl understood what she was saying, the old woman couldn’t tell. Certainly the girl appeared aware of her guide’s struggle to draw breath and keep upright. The iron poker served as walking stick now. The old woman pressed on.

  Mist tumbled across the water to one side of the path and billowed through the woodland to the other. Fairholmes, with its car park and visitors centre, shape shifted and was the farmland it once was. Ladybower Reservoir became a snowy valley.

  The first glimpse of the temporary town, Birchinlee – or Tin Town as the navies had come to call the place during its brief existence at the start of the nineteenth century – came into view. Mary beamed and chatted, encouraging the old woman to see her to the door.

  “I’m afraid of the dark,” she explained, letting her hood fall back.

  Over the years, the old woman had only seen remains among the trees – what was left of the waste incinerator, the cellar walls of Derwent Canteen and the raised terraces on which the huts once stood. Now she saw the village anew, if with clouding eyesight. The dwellings wove together from the mist – huts clad in corrugated iron, their tiny windows offering glimpses of light within, wallpapered walls, and homely furnishings. The paraffin street lamps brightened. There was the school and hospitals, the post office and cobbler, the hairdresser and tobacconist, the butchers – all four – and the public house. Voices could be heard from within, belonging to hard-bodied men who worked the dam site and had built a village to sustain their families. The snow lay over cobbles now and from every direction arose some familiar noise – the hum of the incinerator, the cries of a teething babe, the hollow moan of the wind through Tin Town.

  And then they arrived at the door to the seventeen year old Mary Francis’s home.

  Shrugging off her borrowed rain cape, removing her coat beneath and the raggedy jumper under, the
girl passed them over and asked, “Will you come in?”

  The old woman slumped against the hut wall for support. “No, lass. You go on now. I’ll just catch my breath.”

  Young Mary nodded. “Well, goodbye then, and thank you.” She opened the door, a rectangle of light spilling out across the cobbled street. The door closed to with a soft click.

  Mary Francis slid down to the icy ground. For 102 unnatural years, she had waited for the Shifting to reunite her ailing body with its child soul. So very very long she had waited, until finally the patterns of time realigned and allowed the two Marys to guide each other home.

  Cradled in the nook of Dark Peak, the aged ghost crumbled to dust and blew away on the wind. Tin Town was a sparse collection of ruins once more. A raggedy jumper and an abandoned rain cape lay discarded on the snowy ground.

  The Things I See

  By Theresa Derwin

  I don’t see a carousel. I see the souls of dead children. The lights on the carousel jump and flicker, fireflies trapped in a jam jar. A wooden horse painted shades of pinks and reds with flecks of gold, turns round and round in time to the music of the organ. Always last to finish the race; it’s going nowhere, carrying the souls on its broken, tarnished back. The horse was new a hundred years ago.

  He says I’m imagining things. I can’t see them. They’re not really there. But I know better.

  ~*~

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the young boy watching me. He’s watching me concoct a recipe for tonight’s party. I hope he likes it. Mike, that is, not the dead child. The dead child can’t eat, or taste for that matter. Although I have no doubt that in life the child might have liked Italian food. Maybe it’s the dark eyes, the sunken cheeks more olive than pale, or the way his doleful eyes reach out with hunger. Part of me wants to ask the boy, and part of me wants to ignore the impulse, pretend I can’t see him. I’m afraid he’ll answer if I speak.

  No, I can’t see him as I chuck a chunk of garlic into the sizzling wok, breathing in the pungent, heady aroma of the ingredients, bathing in a myriad of spices, rich and sweet. I imagine a stream of scented smoke wafting above me, the dead kid following the scent with his nose like the Bisto kid, and I have to stop myself from laughing. Laughing right now would be a very bad thing. I wouldn’t be able to finish prepping for the dinner party.