SCRAVIR – While Whitby Sleeps
CHAPTER 1
Miss D’s Bar of Mysteries, West London
‘Let me finish,’ Daniel says. ‘All that horror stuff – castles, howling wolves, vampires, buckets of blood, “give me a sign, master”, steampunk, clockwork goggles, top hats, eeevil. I don’t believe in any of it so why would I go to a Goth festival?’
‘Good music,’ Alex suggests, good-naturedly. ‘A weekend with your mates? Crimson corsets and amazing babes?’
Daniel’s eyes fail to light up.
‘OK. Whatever.’ Alex stands up and wobbles his empty pint jar. ‘Shall I get another round in?’
‘I’ll get my own,’ Daniel answers.
‘Suit yourself.’
Alex threads his way between the tables, dumps his glass on the bar and waves a tenner back and forth in front of his hipster beard in the hope of attracting attention.
Daniel runs a finger round the inside of his crisp packet on the off-chance he’ll find a few crumbs. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy Alex’s company, they have been friends as long as he can remember, but Daniel is skint. That is the issue. That and all the gothic stuff. He would rather spend what little splash he has on real things. The supernatural is for little kids.
He cannot know it yet but in a few sleeps manchild Daniel will either revise his view of what is and what is not real, or lose his life.
The bar is heaving. Tuesdays are the new Saturdays in Miss D’s Bar of Mysteries. Only a few weeks into term and -students’ pockets, like Alex’s, are still stuffed with loan money. Money that is -desperate to escape and see the world.
‘Hey, Daniel, check this out.’
Daniel turns round, straight into the face of a gargoyle nightmare in fluorescent green shorts and a purple hoodie.
‘This is Katie.’ Alex steps out from behind the nightmare.
‘Hi Danny,’ says Katie whose face is weirdly half-visible beneath a transparent plastic mask; zombie meets evil woman in a Miyazaki animation. ‘Looking forward to Whitby?’
‘Tell her I’m working.’ Daniel addresses Alex, ignoring Katie.
‘You’re right, he is a miserable git,’ Katie says. ‘This is the Daniel, right, the guy whose mum ran away with the milkman?’
‘Nothing to do with me.’ Alex throws up his hands, a -picture of innocence. ‘I swear, Dan.’
‘Right.’ Daniel turns to the gargoyle. ‘I’m not a miserable git, Katie-Watey. Some of us work for a living.’
‘Ow, you’re killing me,’ Katie gasps, clutching her heart. She turns to Alex. ‘I know!’ Her voice now gleams with enthusiasm. ‘He could go as Scrooge, stand on the pier, and shout at tourists.’ The energy ebbs as quickly as it flowed. ‘Second thoughts, with that face he’d scare the pelicans.’
‘Pelicans?’ Daniel scoffs. ‘In Yorkshire?’
Alex is laughing like a set of clockwork false teeth. Like Katie is the queen of stand-up. Daniel shakes his head sadly. With her mask, Katie makes Quasimodo look like Superman. Not that Daniel fancies Superman any more than he fancies Quasimodo. Or bloody Alex. Or rollercoaster emotions Katie ‘pelican’ crater-face.
‘But you are coming, right?’ Alex refuses to let it go. ‘Like when did you last have a holiday? We could …’
‘No.’
Alex’s smile slips.
Katie tugs Alex’s arm. ‘Forget him. Come and meet the other guys. They’ve got this great …’
‘In a minute.’ Alex is still looking at Daniel.
Katie saunters away to join a bunch of girls giggling at an iPhone screen at the long table in the bay window.
‘If it’s just the dosh,’ Alex says, ‘I can lend you …’
‘We’ll catch up next week. You can tell me how it went.’
Alex finally accepts reality. ‘OK. Catch you later, mate.’
Torn between relief and regret, Daniel watches Alex join Katie and the others. She is all over him, peeling up the lower half of her mask to give him a kiss. Black lipstick meets brown whiskers. Alex can’t have known her more than two weeks. It must be his blue and yellow jacket, flashy as a kingfisher. Some girls are such suckers for bright colours.
It is fifteen degrees colder outside the pub. Daniel doesn’t do waiting for buses. He walks and, twenty minutes later, has almost reached his bedsit when his phone rings.
‘Hi Dad,’ he says.
‘Where were you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sod sorry. I’ve been waiting an hour.’
‘What for?’
‘Clearing out your room so the lodger can move in. Remember?’
Daniel has completely forgotten the arrangement. Funny how you forget stuff you don’t want to do. Stuff like moving all your childhood posessions out of the family home.
‘I’ll be there in half an hour. I was working late.’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘What about my things?’
‘They’ll be in a cardboard box in the alley.’
‘They’ll get nicked.’
‘What would anyone want with your old crap?’
Daniel changes the subject. ‘Alex invited me to spend the weekend with him up north. In Whitby.’
‘So you weren’t at work. You were in a pub with your mates.’
‘Where was it Mum grew up?’
‘I don’t talk about that.’
‘Middleham, wasn’t it?’
‘Middlesbrough. She isn’t there son.’
‘Take Street she called it. “All they did was take take take.” She used to sing that while she was cooking breakfast.’
‘Don’t poke old scabs.’
‘Did you ever go there? To meet her family …’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘… or to see what the place was like?’
‘Listen, if it was Shangri-bloody-La up there why did she bugger off down here the day she turned sixteen?’
‘I’m just saying …’
‘I don’t have time. Your old stuff’ll be in the …’
‘Wait.’
‘It’s always all about you, Daniel. What about me? How d’you think I felt when she run off and dumped you on me?’
The well-trodden path to self-pity city; it happens every time Daniel tries to talk about mum. Which isn’t often.
‘I only wondered where she …’
‘Look, if you want to go then be my guest. They’re tribal up there. One big happy family. You’ll find her no time. OK?’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to go.’
‘We weren’t interesting enough son. End of. One day she wakes up and thinks sod this for a lark and she’s gone. Just like that. You were eight so you can’t remember but …’
Suddenly Daniel does remember. For the first time in over a decade he remembers. He sees himself in the front room, a snotty-nosed kid staring at her photo on the wall, tiny fists clenched, trying to understand what he has done to bore and disappoint his Mum and make her leave forever.
‘… and that was that,’ his Dad is saying. ‘So when you’re ready to grow up and accept reality …’
Daniel has heard enough. He cuts the call and presses Alex’s number into his mobile.
‘Hey. Dan, sorry about earlier, mate. I shouldn’t have …’
‘I’m coming.’
If she closed her eyes tightly to block out the harsh glare of the streetlights, the woosh of lorries speeding away from Rotterdam docks sounded like the sea.
The fever was getting worse, her shaking limbs causing the acrid smell to spill from the lining of the filthy sleeping bag she had retrieved from by the canal. She had not eaten for two days. Over the weeks she had lost a great deal of weight. Her hair was matted and dirty, but she had not forgotten her name. She was called Grace and she was determined to find a way of getting aboard a ship to England.
Like her grandmother back in Africa, Grace would never have believed that ice could exist outside the freezers of the expensive shops in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, but there it was hanging like carrots from the bridge above her head. She wished she could tell her parents, brothers and sister what she had found but Ebola had stolen them all.
The concrete wall at her back sucked what little heat remained in her skinny frame, in spite of the triple-layered cardboard chrysalis she had wrapped around herself. How many pupae emerged as butterflies and how many shrivelled and died alone and unmissed?
The ground beneath her was peppered with pigeon shit but here in the shadows she was at least dry and relatively safe. Vagrants, drunks, and other asylum seekers might turn up, driven by the same need for shelter, but while she remained hidden Grace was unlikely to attract the casual violence of local youths and angry old men.
Hearing footsteps, she opened her eyes and pushed the woollen hat up off her face. A tall stranger had left the path and was pushing through the bushes towards her. He looked well dressed. Not a vagrant or asylum seeker then. Grace shrank back, hoping he would see only a pile of rotten cardboard and turn away.
But he kept coming. Her flimsy shelter trembled as he knelt centimetres from her face. She held her breath and prayed. Suddenly the cardboard lifted, his face centimetres from her own and she was petrified. In her home country she had been taught to be fearful of his kind, they were often killed and their bones used to make powerful magic.
But this one placed a paper bag beside her.
‘Eat it quickly while it is hot,’ he urged her in English and in French.
She could smell the food. Nothing made sense. She was so hungry. Grace propped herself up, opened the bag, reached inside and grabbed the takeaway cup, smelling the soup and feeling its heat spreading into her hands. One eye on the stranger, one eye on the food, she wolfed down the sandwich, the fries, the soup, the croissant.
When he put his hand on her shoulder; she cursed herself for having been stupid enough to believe that he might be different to the others. At fourteen, she knew what he wanted. What they all wanted. Everything was a contract; I give you something, you give me something. Her body in exchange for a shelter or a biscuit.
Then she felt the surge, like the heat that had found her fingers through the sides of the soup cup, growing so quickly she thought she would burst into flames. She looked up at him, her brown eyes ablaze with fear and astonishment. His eyes were closed.
The heat rippled and grew. Gasping, Grace fell back, her limbs jerking out involuntarily, as stiff as if in a fit, throbbing with the rampaging heat. Staring blindly up at the underside of the bridge, her mind swam with fragmentary images of her journey, tumbling like coloured shards in a kaleidoscope. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.
For a moment he was standing above her then the branches of the bushes were creaking as he pushed through them and, without a word, he was gone.
And she felt better than she had in weeks.
CHAPTER 2
The Journey – Daniel Murray
Friday 4th November Ealing, London
I ran to Ealing Broadway station, rucksack on my back, hopped onto the Central Line and checked my messages. There was one from Alex:
“Brilliant! C U in the Middle Earth Tavern. 9.30”
Hobbits. Brilliant. Not. Beneath that was the previous evening’s message from Kerplunk Katey:
“Number 13, Three Kippers Cottage, Henrietta Street. Alex says you can sleep on the sofa. But no being boring, we’re there to paaarty! And you have to be in costume. A creature of the night. We’re really strict about that.”
I had sent a four word reply: “Really strict. Got it.”
No point telling her I had the self-respect to make other arrangements. I had searched Whitby Goth Weekend, places to stay certain that there would be something cheap and moderately cheerful in a small town on the edges of the Arctic Circle in November.
Wrong.
Every room in Whitby was booked, except the grand hotels at the top of the hill. £250 a night.
Then I spotted it. Right at the bottom of the list. From the map it meant a bit of a walk along a dark road but so what? A tenner a night. In the back of the net perfect.
It was touch and go but I made it to Kings Cross and hopped aboard the two o’clock train just as the doors were closing. I had half-expected everyone heading north to be in period costume but, except for a hysteria of Harry Potter fans dribbling in front of a wall in the middle of the station, everyone seemed normal: tired and keen to get home for the weekend.
The journey was boring but dull. Gas towers, Arsenal Football ground, a few miles of terraced streets then, leaving London behind us, the sun came out briefly, lighting empty fields and a couple of church steeples, stone tributes to a rural space programme that had never quite taken off.
One so-what sandwich and one hundred and sixteen minutes later we arrived in York. With sixteen minutes to burn, I stuck my head out of the station hoping to pack a glimpse of the famous Minster, the largest Gothic building in Europe. Turned out that you couldn’t glimpse the famous Minster because the famous city walls were in the way. (You should have the photos by now. Pretty rubbish I know, sorry.) I could have gone for a walk but I didn’t want to risk missing my connection.
Train number two. As the train pulled out of York I allowed myself to think about what lay ahead. Goth Weekend was only part of it, I was conducting research.
While all my mates, including Alex, had gone straight from school to university and were debt-surfing to destitution, I was living the dream, earning the minimum wage in a nine to five and somehow stashing pennies away to join the housing ladder. Not in London, where my savings would never buy more than an outside toilet in Mile End, but a proper house, in a city where young people could still buy a house. I had checked everything out online. Street after street of terraced houses, a new university campus with thousands of students. The perfect opportunity for Daniel Murray, aka me, to scramble up, like Jack on the beanstalk, to a new land of property and success. In eighteen months I would have a deposit, buy a house and rent it out to students and use the income to buy the next one. Ten years and I would be primping my plump property portfolio while Alex and Katie and the others were clutching useless media-studies degrees, adrift in a sea of loan repayments.
The train rolled northwards in the darkness and by the time we passed through a wasteland packed with graffiti covered cargo trains and overgrown bushes I had scribbled down the addresses of a dozen terraced properties, ten times cheaper than in London. A discarded shopping trolley loomed out of the darkness like a prehistoric shark scavenging on the sea floor, followed by huge billboards carrying smiling two-meter high faces where none of the components quite lined up. Finally the cop shop swung into view, brightly lit and gaudy as a box of Quality Street, and the train slowed and stopped.
Middlesbrough. As lovely and glamorous as Luton. I got off the train, ran to the exit and legged it out of the station. Forty-five minutes later I was back on the platform, out of breath and confused. I’ll tell you about it sometime.
I hate journeys, especially travelling alone. Which is how I travel. Only so much staring at my phone I can stand. Either I eat non-stop, stuffing myself with crap like a pedal bin on acid, or I’m trying to sleep with my face vibrating against the window while the person next to me is stuffing her face with pickled eggs.
London to York: two hundred miles in one hour fifty-six minutes. Middlesbrough to Whitby: thirty miles in one hour forty-nine minutes.
Sixteen bloody stations; I counted them. Never more than five houses, a cattle shed, and a few desiccated weeds trembling beside bored-looking stones.
Assuming there was meant to be heating … it had died. I played at making breath clouds in the cold air until someone caught my eye and gave me that pitying look that people give saddos who are wearing novelty antlers on a bus.
My fellow passengers were a jumble: flat-capped locals with dour buttoned-down faces and shapeless homemade clothes (camouflaged in greens and browns to avoid attracting the attention of predators when they stepped off the train), and a few outsiders going Goth. I was the only one with a rucksack; everyone else had cases. And hatboxes. I had brought a hat myself but it was a crushable special, stashed in my rucksack.
A group of students at the far end of the carriage were playing Open Drains; you drink as many bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale as you can in five minutes while singing “We are the Barnsley, the mighty mighty Barnsley” at the top of your voice. The other passengers all pretend nothing is happening, as people do in England until someone finally snaps, purple in the face, and starts screaming will you please shut up before apologising profusely and throwing themselves off the train or hiding in the toilets to avoid any further unpleasantness.
I almost said something, but who listens to me?
And so we trundled: Kildale, Commondale, Castleton Moor, Danby, Lealholm, Glaisdale, Egton, Grosmont, Sleights, Ruswarp, Timewarp … until eventually the countryside ran out of cowsheds and we slipped down the hill into Whitby.
It was half past seven as I grabbed a visitor’s map at the information desk and stepped out of the station into a gale gritty with horizontal rain. Parka zipped, I hurried along the harbour towards narrow streets and hot food.
The town was adequately catered for in terms of fish and chips. The sweet smell of frying fat billowed from every second door. I had expected streets heaving with Goths but the weather had driven most of them indoors. A hardy group of steampunks in platform shoes, top hats and velvet jackets spattered with brass buttons like green olives on a pizza were posing in front of the Dracula Experience. As I passed, one of the party produced a fob watch from his waistcoat pocket and declared ‘My word, is that the time, Sir?’ to raucous laughter from his friends. Already pissed. Easily amused.
The famous spiritualist and clairvoyant’s shack was just where they showed it on Google. How could someone with even ten percent of the talents advertised in capitals above the door be operating from a tatty shed beside a crabstick stall?
It was warm in the fish and chip shop.
‘How do I get to Hawkser?’ I asked the girl shovelling my chips into a cardboard box.
‘You mean Hawsker?’ she asked, her Yorkshire accent thick as treacle. ‘You in a car, love?’
I turned to show her the massive rucksack on my back. ‘I’m walking.’
‘What’s quickest way to Hawsker, Bob?’ the girl shouted over the fish fryer.
‘Lose your job and miss a rent payment,’ came the helpful reply from an individual of whom only the hat was visible. ‘There’s no way back so don’t try it.’
The girl’s purse-lipped smile and arched eyebrow suggested that stupid remarks were all you ever got from whomever was on the other side of the frying fish.
‘I’d take a taxi,’ she said.
‘Can’t I walk there?’
She made big blue eyes at me as she placed the battered fish on top of my chips. Wearing normal clothes instead of an ugly green nylon uniform she would be really pretty.
‘Are you training to reach North Pole?’
‘Less than five kilometres, according to Google,’ I told her.
‘How far’s five kilometres, Bob?’ she shouted to the hat on the other side of the fryer.
‘More than four but less than six.’
‘About three miles,’ I told her.
‘I know that. I were wondering if you have any idea. Where are you going?’
‘A campsite. Farview Farm.’
Her expression changed again. ‘Farview?’ she said incredulously. ‘Don’t you know about …’ her voice trailed off. She changed tack. ‘It’s November, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Everything else was booked.’
‘You’ll freeze to death. Or worse.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, I wouldn’t normally, but in our flat we’ve a futon. You could …’
‘I’ll be fine.’
She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Nowt as daft as folk. Especially Southerners. Cross the swing bridge and follow signs to abbey steps. At the top, the abbey’s on your right. Keep going and you’re onto Hawsker Lane.’ She leaned forwards and whispered, ‘I’m giving you a few extra chips,’ then straightened up. ‘You’ll need them. That’s six pounds ninety.’
‘What will he need?’ asked the voice behind the fryer.
‘Wellies and a canoe. He’s heading up abbey steps,’ the girl answered, winking at me.
I was halfway down the street and stuffing my face when she shouted ‘Here, take this.’ Shoes clattering, she ran up. ‘Bob’d kill me if he saw me give it you.’ She handed me a small pink plastic fish. ‘I bet you don’t have one.’
‘Yeah, right. Why would I?’ I was confused.
‘It’s a torch. Look, you push its eyeball. Like this.’
‘Is this a fish and chip thing or a Whitby thing?’
‘Just one of Bob’s stupid gadgets. We use it to go to the store at the back. It’s pitch black up on the headland.’
‘OK. Thanks. Does it need feeding? Are you going to the festival by the way? To watch the bands?’
‘We’re open while ten o’clock when it’s busy … Maybe.’
‘Might see you there then. Tomorrow night?’
Her smile was radiant but fleeting. She looked anxious again. ‘Here’s my phone number, in case you get into trouble.’ She scribbled on a slip of paper. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Daniel. Dan.’
‘I’m Tiffany. Take care, Daft Dan.’
The bridge over the river Esk, though it was not really a river at that point, was a cast iron swing job designed to let tall ships pass through to the back of the harbour. I wondered what it looked like open, with a stretch of road complete with double yellow lines hanging over the water, leading nowhere.
Narrow footstreets led through the old town. Sandgate, with its Goth shops, fishmongers and Victorian photographer’s parlour, led to Market Square. Past the squat sandstone clock tower onto Church Street crowded with shops selling old-fashioned sweets, hiking gear, rocks and fossils, rude postcards, buckets, paintings; all that junk that people have to buy when they see the sea. Spilling out from a couple of pubs were twenty or thirty people, all beer glasses and laughter. Top hats everywhere, long purple dresses, red bodices, face tattoos, earplugs the size of dinner plates, telescopes, and dogs in ruffs.
The Internet guide said that it was important to visit Argument Yard, an alley off Church Street. I disagreed.
I had finished my fish and chips and was still hungry and disappointed that “Justin’s famous fudge shop” was closed. A hundred different types of chocolate, fudge and toffee, according to the Guide. Given the walk ahead and the fact that my entire provisions consisted of a small bottle of lemonade, I was relying on the campsite shop being well stocked.
The steps up to Whitby Abbey were sick. The sign at the bottom said that there were one hundred and ninety-nine steps. I must have climbed at least five hundred by the time I reached the top and stopped to catch my breath.
The view was spectacular. Across the dark waters of the harbour, houses, shops and games arcades lit up the hill opposite like fairy lights on a Christmas tree and, in spite of the rain and the journey ahead, I felt a real buzz of adventure. It was going to be an exciting weekend.
Turning back into the rain, I faced a choice. To the left a path led through the graveyard towards a church squatting on its haunches, its eager flagpole shaking like a dog’s tail. To the right, the second path, thick with running water, led on towards the abbey. Desperate for a couple of minutes out of the elements, I headed briskly between the blank-faced wind-blasted tombstones towards the shelter of the church entrance.
I fished my phone out of my pocket to ring Alex; it was already obvious that I wouldn’t reach the campsite, pitch my tent and walk back into town to meet him at the Middle Earth Tavern by half past nine.
Voicemail.
My fingers were poised to type a text when my head was whipped back as my hood was yanked from behind. The phone flew out of my hand.
‘How dare you. How DARE you! On hallowed ground. You devil.’ shouted a woman’s voice trembling with rage.
I tried to wriggle free but the grip on my jacket intensified. Something sharp as a blade pressed against my Adam’s apple.
‘Urinating on the souls of the departed, smoking your drugs, desecrating the churchyard.’ the voice shrieked behind me, in a thick accent. ‘I abjure you and fight fire with fire!’
She was strong and moved quickly, cracking my elbow against a tombstone as she dragged me backward away from the steps and the church, away from the light. My shoes slipped in the sodden grass.
‘Cleanse him, oh Lord, that the evil be purged and sanctity restored to thy holy place.’
‘Stop,’ I tried to shout but the excruciating pressure against my throat reduced my voice to a pathetic gurgle.
The land sloped down. Was that the sound of the sea? I lurched to my right, twisting and dropping a shoulder. Instead of escaping the woman’s clutches, I lost my footing and crashed to the ground. I saw her briefly, silhouetted against rough rushing clouds, as she spun me round on my back. A mountain of a woman with calves as thick as telegraph posts.
‘Not far now.’ Her voice now calm, almost sing song.
She marched across the headland, down the slope, still hauling me by the neck. Suddenly I understood that the sharp metal cutting into my skin was not a knife but the zip slider on my parka. The church was disappearing from view as I flailed about, reaching out for something, anything, to stop our progress. Handfuls of wet grass. Struggling to breathe. I reached for the edges of my hood, desperate to prise it away from my windpipe but my fingers could not force their way between the fabric and my neck.
My tormentor meanwhile was humming cheerfully.
The breeze was chill on my face as rain clattered like nails being hammered into a coffin lid. My head was spinning and I began to seriously consider that this mad bitch might actually throw me over the edge of a cliff.
‘Alice. Alice! That’s enough,’ shouted a male voice.
A moment’s hesitation, then the dragging recommenced. Running footsteps now.
‘Enough! Let him go!’ said the male voice.
The dragging stopped.
‘Let him go!’
‘The Lord’s work,’ she mumbled.
The vice-like grip on my hood ceased and I lay in the slick wet grass gulping air like a drowning fish.
‘Back away, Alice. Sit down,’ ordered the male voice. ‘Hi, is that Charlie?’
Charlie? I rolled over onto my side and saw a tall thin man dressed as a vicar talking into his phone.
‘Yes, I’ve got her. In the churchyard … Three minutes. OK. That’s fine.’
The man leant towards me and stretched out a hand. ‘I’m so sorry. Reverend Allstairs. Let me help you.’
The man dressed as a vicar was a vicar and hauled me to my feet. His hand was warm and dry. Sitting three metres away was Alice in a black plastic mac, glowering at the ground, her demons evaporating into the night. Mid-fifties, grey hair hanging in girlish plaits, her mouth puckered in a pout.
‘I am afraid Alice gets agitated by the Goth festival and has a tendency to wander from the unit. She’s mostly harmless.’
‘Mostly?’ I spluttered.
‘On this occasion she has, I confess, somewhat exceeded her …’
‘How many people has she killed?’ I asked.
Alice lay back in the grass and let out a sigh like a deflating balloon.
‘No sleeping on hallowed ground, Alice,’ Allstairs said, then turned to me. ‘Unless you are enjoying the eternal sleep that comes to us all.’ His stern features softened into the faintest of smiles. ‘The social workers should be here any minute. Can I help you? You are staying in a hotel perhaps?’
I shook my head. ‘Is there somewhere I can dry off a bit?’
‘The church is closed, I’m afraid. But if you are looking for accommodation I recommend a local hostelry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I answered. ‘I’m sorted. I’m heading for Farview Farm, in Hawsker.’
The clergyman gave me a curious look. He studied my rucksack. ‘It is a long trek lad, and the roads are dark.’
‘I’ve got a torch. Of sorts.’
‘I am sorry I cannot be of more assistance,’ he said, looking genuinely distraught.
Alice had sat back up and was rocking back and forth, hugging her knees.
‘Will she be all right?’ I asked.
‘She’ll be fine,’ the vicar reassured me. ‘Well done you for asking.’
I shrugged.
A couple of men in raincoats were striding purposefully towards us. They stopped in front of Alice and pulled her to her feet. She offered no resistance and stood meekly between them, head bowed.
‘Bloody Fridays,’ said one of the men. ‘Someone rung earlier to say “I bet Mad Alice’ll be off” but nowt we could do. There’s no staff.’
‘We keep telling them,’ the other man agreed. ‘No-one bloody listens. How’s the lad?’
‘I’m OK,’ I said, assuming they meant me. ‘No worries. I’m on my way.’
No point wasting half an hour in an awkward conversation. I left them to it and strode off up the hill to the church. My phone was in the grass by the path close to where Mad Alice must have leapt out from behind a grave.
Bloody Gothic weekend. Still, I’d have something to talk about later.
My laryngeal prominence was hurting like hell. I knew it was called that because I had checked up about Adam’s apples; people at work kept banging on about the size of mine, telling me I looked like I had swallowed a coffee cup.
Turns out knowing the posh name for a body part makes sod all difference to the pain.
It was eight o’clock and I could smell the sea. The path ended at the abbey entrance, as Tiffany had said, alongside a large car park surrounded on three sides by high stone walls. A single road led away towards the south-east.
I admit I hesitated.
Should I go back into town instead of wandering off into the wilderness drenched to the skin? Who else was out there hiding in the dark? Then I remembered Katey-Watey. Begging her to let me kip on their sofa would be worse than being throttled. I’d never hear the end of it.
Anyway, there was no such thing as evil, just the occasional nasty bastard and a few lost souls like Mad Alice. Odds on bumping into more bad shit must be a million to one.
The footpath hugged the abbey’s perimeter wall, affording my person a welcome respite from the malevolent attentions of the elements. The place was so gothic I was talking to myself like the sad steampunks outside the Dracula Experience; those old late night horror movies had made more of an impression on me than I had realised. It felt fun so I rolled with it.
The carcass of the desecrated edifice festered beyond the wall, a tenebrous jagged presence against the pit of darkness and the solitude that had enveloped my flagging soul. I avowed to an extreme discomfiture that propelled me to hasten away from that haunt of malediction. Twice I fancied I heard the ugly animal rasp, a black cry in the grim gloom of those sepulchrous stones. Crow, wolf, or denizen of the night?
Or, put another way, the on-line guide said that, in the -horror story, Dracula had climbed the 199 steps and disappeared into the abbey.
The further I walked the bleaker and more exposed the landscape became; an infinite expanse of wind-swept grass cowering below a bruised and brooding sky. The wall came to an end, as all walls do, and I was again faced with a choice. I had saved a screenshot of this junction on my phone before leaving London. Just as well because there was no signal on this edge of emptiness. Green Lane, to my right, and Hawsker Lane, going straight ahead. I knew which road to take but the loss of a signal bothered me. I could not remember ever being disconnected from the rest of the world. Cut off from the Collective. It didn’t happen in London. No-one would know where to find me if I went missing. No GPS signal. Nothing. I might as well be at the North Pole though, on second thoughts, since that was called a pole it was probably bristling with mobile phone antennas.
The path had shrunk to a dotted line of irregular flagstones, thin as a trail of breadcrumbs in a forest. I followed it past a line of squat buildings with corrugated roofs, then the buildings were gone, leaving only the night sky, the wet road, and a tatty broken hedgerow through which the gale howled and moaned.
I abandoned the path for the road, better to walk in safety than risk tripping in the undergrowth. I had not seen a single vehicle since starting my climb to the church and I felt sure that even with my ears covered I would hear any approaching car, or at least see the beam cast by its headlights. I chose not to use the dead fish torch Tiffany had given me; in that vast darkness I’d be as exposed as a luminous prawn floating in the Marianna Trench.
After a few minutes I passed a turning on my left. The scribbled sign read caravans for sale. The jagged crest faintly silhouetted on the horizon might be a farm. For a moment I fancied that I might have reached my destination but the name on the gate said otherwise.
The monotony of the terrain was getting to me. I don’t scare easily but I did find myself spinning around more than once, having had the strangest sensation that I was being followed.
The road was empty.
I had to take the seventh turning on the left. In the lacklight, there being no moon, I stuck to the middle of the lane, keeeping both verges equidistant. I had gone some considerable distance beyond the second turning when I was startled by a blaring barrage of noise. Throwing myself into the hedge, I turned to find a double decker bus at my heels. One of those old Routemaster buses they used to have in London, with that half-cab at the front. There was no light to see the colour of the bus but I knew instinctively that it was black. The headlights were off and the sidelights scarcely brighter than a flickering match. The bus inched forward until the cab drew level then stopped. Protected from the rain by the overhang provided by the upper deck, the driver’s cab window slid open.
‘The night is chill,’ said a booming and resonant voice from within. ‘Allow us to carry you to your destination.’
‘Thanks for the offer but I’m almost there,’ I answered. ‘No worries.’
‘No-one should walk in this weather. Hop on the back and I can at least take you the next kilometre down the lane. There are blankets on board. Coffee and whisky. We are heading left presently but we cannot leave you drowning in the dark.’
I could not see into either the cab or the bus, there being curtains in the windows. The voice sounded friendly enough but the incident with Mad Alice had put me off strangers for the evening.
‘Honestly, I’m fine. I’m walking to the campsite, it can’t be more than a mile now.’
‘What a coincidence. Farview Farm?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘That is where we are heading. The offer still stands, my friend.’
The diesel engine was ticking over. I looked up and down the lane, trying to imagine how often a bus appeared here in the middle of nowhere. If I refused I might be walking for another thirty minutes, or more.
‘I’m soaking wet.’
‘That is why I stopped, my friend.’
‘OK. Thanks. Where do I get on?’
‘At the back. It’s a bus,’ the driver laughed.
I walked towards the back of the bus. It was not an open platform bus; there were doors at the back that folded open on my approach. As I stepped forward to climb aboard I saw the destination board above the doors.
17 Hounds of Hellbane
– world tour
On the doors were a succession of stickers marking music festivals in Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Slovakia, Bulgaria and so on. A tour bus belonging, presumably, to one of the bands playing at the Goth Weekend. I might, amazingly, be closer to the action than Alex, Katie and the others!
I stepped on board.
The bus had been adapted. A chain was hung across the stairs, along with a sign that read:
Strictly no admittance– on pain of death
A bit gothic. At the top of the stairwell was a mirror, designed to allow the bus conductor to see onto the upper deck from down below. It was so dark that I could not say with any certainty what I saw but, if pushed, I would venture the opinion that there were chairs and long tables and that on the tables, or boxes perhaps, were long sinuous forms writhing like a kelp forest in the sea pushed back and forth by shifting currents.
Downstairs seemed nice.
Part of the seating had been replaced with storage space. The space that remained had been converted into an open-plan kitchen and lounge area. Warm as toast.
Everything was black: curtains, cupboards, table, chairs, small sink and taps … everything. The only lighting came from three pencil thin slithers of light that shone from the ceiling down onto a jet black worktop on which stood a black cafetiere, from which drifted the delicious aroma of fresh coffee. Black coffee.
‘Please take a seat and we can be on our way,’ said the driver.
I could see the top of the driver’s back above his chair through a partially open window but nothing more. Removing my rucksack, I took a seat by the cafetiere and the bus set off. There were mugs in a cupboard under the worktop and in no time I was warming my hands round a steaming cup of coffee and feeling almost ready to smile at my good fortune.
‘Where are the band? Are they…’ I started.
‘Resting,” the driver cut me off. ‘We’ve had a long journey. There’s a bottle of slivovitz in the cupboard to your right, should you desire a pick-me-up.’
According to the label, slivovitz was the finest plum brandy in the world and made of damsons grown in the mountains of Moravia. I poured a small slug into my coffee and replaced the bottle in the cupboard.
Barely had I put the mug to my lips when the bus slowed right down and turned onto a potholed track that shook the suspension and rattled the mugs in the cupboard. Seeing the cafetiere sliding across the worktop, I wrapped it in a tea towel (also black), and placed it in the sink.
Parting the curtains I saw that the track had entered a farm. Thinking we had arrived, I stood up and pulled the bell cord, for the hell of it. I hadn’t been on an old Routemaster bus since I was ten years old and, back then, I had to stand on a seat to reach the cord. The bell went ting but the bus kept going, straight through the farm and out the other side. I sat down again.
Along the sides of the bus, just below the ceiling, where the advert posters would be on a London bus, there was a long line of cryptic signs and symbols, dark grey against the black of the overall décor. Some of these looked vaguely familiar, variations of astrological symbols, others resembled nothing I had ever seen. One in particular drew my eye. It showed what looked like the head of a bird of prey, the beak tugging on a loose bag on which were written a jumble of letters in a jagged script that resembled a collection of tiny bones. I was musing on this and drinking the last of my coffee when the bus slowed again then came to a stop.
The diesel engine ticked over for a few seconds then died. In the ensuing silence I fancied I heard the hollow tock of a grandfather clock. I waited for the driver to announce our arrival then, when nothing was said, I turned towards the cab. The driver had gone; I had been so absorbed in the image of the hawk that I had failed to hear him open his door and climb out.
Drawing back a curtain, I peered outside. It was deep sea trench black. I was tempted to stay on the bus and await the return of the driver, who must no doubt be discussing where to park with the owner. On the other hand, I did not wish to appear rude. Shouldering my rucksack I went to the back of the bus and pressed the luminous exit button. The doors folded back on themselves with a pneumatic hiss and I stepped out.
The rain had stopped, which was excellent news, and the rolling clouds had parted to reveal a whisker of moon, but that was as far as the good news went. I had been camping before, in Devon and in France, two star sites and no star sites. I was ready for rudimentary facilities but Farview was in a class of its own. The place was deserted; no reception block, no lighting, no signposts, nothing. Fortunately, I didn’t need much: a toilet block and a patch of ground that could take a dozen tent pegs. My tent was cosy and easy to erect. My sleeping bag had, according to the makers, saved lives on Everest and on Svalbard, so give me some grass free of cowpats and sheep shit and I was sorted.
The thin light of the moon outlined a large delapidated house with a jagged and possible broken roofline and chimneys all at different heights.
Behind me stood a huge barn with rusted corrugated iron sheeting for walls. Two doors, tall enough to allow a bus to pass beneath them, were slid back to reveal a gaping maw as black as the empty void of space. Flapping back and forth in the wind on the right hand door was a small, frayed and mud-spattered poster bearing three words in Comic Sans …
Welcome to Farview!
Copyright © 2021 Christian Vassie / Injini Press
