by Allyson Bird
“What about the risk to you?” my sister asked.
“Yes I know about the risk. But—what do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
For another moment there was silence between us.
“Just think about it. If there’s something we can do, we should do it—now. Ring me later, Sis.”
Sylvia was eighteen years older than me and since our mother died she had been more like a mother to me; I used to imagine that Sylvia had given birth to me and that my mother had lied to hide a family scandal. Although in her late fifties, my sister was still a beautiful woman. Well, she was to me, her little sister. Sylvia’s father was an American. I never knew anything about my father (except that I had blonde hair like him), because my mother never talked about our fathers. All I remember is that once, when I was playing cowboys and Indians with my brother’s friends, my mother said that Sylvia’s father looked like the boy who was shouting more than the others. I looked to find out who was shouting the most and he wasn’t a cowboy. Sylvia was of American Indian descent and appropriately enough her spirit guide was of her tribe too. Even as a child she saw spirits and it always scared me when she had conversations with people that I could not see.
The dark clouds followed me over the ridge and it began to pour just as I put my key in the door.
I used web and e-mail and that suited me and my clients just fine, as I preferred to work quietly and without much fuss. The parents, Elizabeth and Steven Patterson, did not want anyone except the police to know that I was involved. I had offered my services as a psychic detective to them before Sylvia had actually agreed. I had all the newspaper clippings with their bizarre guesses at what had happened.
The year was 1999 and Christ’s birthday was just round the corner. The Daily Recorder suggested that the boy had been taken for ransom, but no ransom demand had been made. Their son, Jake, had been safely tucked into bed in blue-check pyjamas and with his Snoopy dog. All the doors were locked and no one was staying in the B&B attached to the Victorian tea room. They lived in a small market town at the edge of the moors and the family did not have an enemy in the world—until now.
The wind and rain had not let up all day and it was well into the evening when it stopped, just as the phone rang.
“Hi, Abbie. You know I’ll do it, but I’m not happy about it. This isn’t just a case involving a lost will or a wife who has walked out on her husband. This is going to get dirty and I have to think about you.”
“Sylvia, I will keep my distance. Do you really want me to walk away from this one? The parents…think of what they are going through; think of me when I was little. Could you have lived with yourself, all those years ago, if you hadn’t helped?”
“That was different, you are my little sister. I don’t want you getting too close to this one. It feels bad, really bad.”
“Sylvia, Sylvia, come on now, think of the parents, this is the fifth child. Give me your best shot at it.”
There was a long pause; the wind picked up and then dropped again.
“…The boy is still alive but not for much longer. He is getting weaker…,” again, a pause, “…We’re in the countryside, I see for miles. It is very close to where you live, too close, Abbie. I’m not happy with this. All this is going on very near to you.”
“Don’t you see, Syl, that’s why I have to help.”
“…I see a few farmhouses but I’m coming to one that has a fence with moles nailed to it. I go down the track and past the old farmhouse door, past the barn and into the wood beyond. In this wood there is an old cottage, much older than the barn, and the cottage has boards on the windows…. That’s all that Sam is giving me. I’m sorry.”
“Is that were the boy is?”
“I think so—it isn’t at all clear. That’s all I get. Are you going to give this information to the police?”
“Yeah, and thanks, Syl. Bye.”
It was something at least. Did many farmers hang moles on fences?
The wind let up for a few hours but it was still a cold January day. I rang my contact in the local police force, John. He came round to my house, out of uniform, and I told him what my sister had said.
“Moles you say, not many farmers still nail moles to the fence. I think I know where that farm is.”
John telephoned it in and it did not take the police long to act upon it. They found the farm, the barn, and the moles. They took Jack Moffat, the farmer, in for questioning that night. I went down to the police station although I had promised Sylvia to keep my distance. I had to see him.
Moffat was a man in his mid-forties, dressed in tweed trousers, an old blue jumper, and heavy boots. He did not look like a murderer to me—but what does a murderer look like? Some serial killers look quite innocent, from their photos. Moffat was confused and uncertain, and I felt sure this was not the person who was responsible; they had not found the boy. Without evidence, they couldn’t keep him at the police station.
Sylvia rang me again the next day. I told her what I knew. “They’ve not charged the farmer, Syl. Nothing to hold him with. No evidence in the farmhouse, nor the barn, or anywhere on the property.”
“What I said is still right. They didn’t mention a cottage? I don’t understand it, but it is still right.”
It was crazy but I had to go and check it out myself. Sylvia would never forgive me, but I had to go. The farm was exactly as she described; five moles nailed to the fence, then the track, then the farmhouse. An old woman, whom I supposed to be Jack Moffat’s mother, let me in.
“You’d better sit down for all the good it will do yer; cos I won’t be able to tell yer police anything else.”
I kept quiet about who I was and looked around the farmhouse as she made tea. The farmhouse wasn’t dirty, but it wasn’t exactly clean either. On the mantelpiece there was an old, light brown teapot. Too old for holding tea and was, in fact, a model of a World War One tank, complete with the head of some ruddy-faced Tommy as the handle on top of the lid. On a large oak table set against the wall, sat a huge pottery Alsatian that guarded the doorway to the kitchen, where an assortment of real sheepdogs sat, each keeping a watchful eye on me. An old oil painting of a highland piper hung on one wall, and a selection of hunting traps and guns on another. The old leather sofa had seen better days and had a faded, red throw sprawled across it, reaching out to cover the holes. I wanted to leave but felt that I had to stay until at least after the cup of tea.
The old mother set down the tray, pulled her tatty brown cardigan tighter around herself and fastened a button before she sat down, exhausted from her labour. She gestured at me and the teapot and in the next second I was pouring tea for a supposed murderer’s mother. I shook from the fact that the kidnapped boy might still be hidden close by, somewhere out in the cold. I wondered why the police had been unable to find him—as my sister was never wrong.
“I noticed the moles on the fence,” I said, taking a sip from the willow pattern cup. My mother had loved the story of the willow pattern and had told me it years ago.
“The moles—there t’ keep a reckoning.”
For a fleeting moment I remembered that five children had disappeared—
“How do you catch the moles?”
“Jack does it now but his dad used t’ use a spring trap—pulled back and placed over a collapsed tunnel. When the mole builds the tunnel up again, the spring gets triggered and no more Mister Mole!—goodbye t’ the gentleman in velvet.” She laughed and the tea dribbled down her chin.
I looked at the gruesome traps that hung on the wall.
“He didn’t have any time for traps made with bent hazel and string as they was t’ soft for the little buggers, he said. We called him Mowly Jack, or mouldy Jack some days. Got a photo of him somewhere. He moved on then, t’ make quite a living at catching the moles with poison rather than traps cos it paid more for the moleskin yer see, t’ make waistcoats, and such like.”
The old mother pointed at the mantel. �
��Up there.”
Up there was an old photo album with pictures of old dames and young children in below-knee dresses and white pinafores. On one page there was a drab photo of a man with brisk sideburns in a black, wide brimmed hat and he wore a dark, hollow expression.
I showed it to the old mother.
“That’s him. Mowly Jack.”
“Quite a stern character wasn’t he?”
“Stern? He were an evil bastard. I could understand anyone suspecting him of murder but me Jack, never.”
“Just one more thing. Is there an old cottage close by?”
“…There used t’ be, but it were pulled down years ago.”
I thanked her for the tea and left the farm, shivering as I passed the five moles nailed to the fence.
The nightmares started that night. First, I dreamt that I was seriously ill in a hospital bed. I couldn’t move but was fully aware of the nurses, doctors, and everything else. It is all very well to say that one should die in their sleep, all peaceful. I don’t think anyone dies in their sleep peacefully. They might look like it, but that’s not the way it is. They go down fighting every inch of the way, terrified of the demons or of serpents coiled around their bodies and that strike each part of their mind again and again. There will be no peace for any one of us. We will see what others cannot see and our minds will twist them into terrifying monsters and there is nothing any of us can do about it.
Then I had a nightmare about Mowly Jack and his moles. He was walking down the lane to Moffat’s farm with a sack over his shoulder. When he got to the fence I thought he was going to nail some moles to it, but instead, from out of the bag he took a small child who trembled and cried. I woke up in a cold sweat and rang my sister, before it grew light.
“Moffat will be out of police custody today, they can’t keep him any longer and there is no sign of the boy.”
“The boy’s dead Abbie. Sam told me that he passed over a few hours ago.”
“But Moffat is still in police custody, unless the child died where he was imprisoned.” My hands trembled. I could hear Sylvia sighing on the other end of the phone.
“A child has disappeared on the spirit side too. Sam won’t help us anymore.”
“I don’t see how you giving me information can have anything to do with a spirit child’s disappearance.”
“Well it has. Don’t you see? There could be killings on both sides now. It has nothing to do with me anymore. Sam won’t help if it means losing more spirit children. I have to stop, Abbie—I can’t carry on.”
“You think that the disappearance is connected to what we are doing. Doesn’t the spirit world know who has the child?”
“Spirits can connect to those who want them in our world, and they know some of what we cannot see, but they are just like us in their own world. In their world they live as simply as we do and there is mystery there too.”
“Sylvia.”
“Yes?”
“How can a spirit child die?”
“I don’t know, but spirits can cease to be and that death is every bit as valid as a death in this world. This is the first spirit disappearance that I have come across and the mother is distraught.”
“I know Sylvia, I know.” I tried to calm my sister down.
A soul is a soul, whether it is here or on the other side. I remembered how I had escaped my own death, with my sister’s help. She used Sam, her spirit guide to help her. He had led her to an old, disused steelworks where he had seen the teddybears, six in all. One stood out from the rest, small and made of plastic, beige with a blue bib and a chewed ear. It was mine, but it has never been discovered though I was found.
The next night was the longest I had known in a long time, the weather turned colder, windy, and it began to snow. I usually loved snow, but right now I wished it away and prayed that there would be no more deaths. I lay in a troubled sleep in my bed and it was just after midnight when twigs on the withered oak rattled against the window and woke me. I had been meaning to cut back that branch all winter, but kept forgetting. I decided to get up and go and get some hot milk.
My cat, Orphy, was huddled next to the cooker far away from the kitchen windowsill where he usually slept. “Yes, Orphy, it’s very cold.”
The wind died and I thought I heard a light knocking on the door. Not wanting to answer the knock immediately I peeped out the window curtain and switched the porch light on. There, standing on the porch, was the man that the old mother had shown me in the photo. I could see his face clearly by the light. My hand shook as I held the curtain, and I remained rooted to the spot. His eyes were the eyes of a dead man, sunken in and fixed against a bone-white skin. His eyes tried to hold my stare but I could not help but lower mine to look at the small forms that stood on each side of him. I recognised one tiny face immediately—it was the murdered boy, Jake Patterson.
Mowly Jack stared at me in defiance and turned to go up the road in the direction of the Puritan graveyard, his wide-brimmed black hat stuck to his head for all eternity. I could not let him take those spirits. I grabbed my jacket and quickly put on my boots. I had no time to do anything except snatch my phone off the hall table and go after him. What was I thinking? The snow had only been falling for a few hours but it was enough to isolate this part of the world. Anyway, who could I tell…that a dead man had captured the ghosts of two dead children? I was desperate as I followed him up the lane, and I tried to ring Sylvia. Would there be a signal? I panicked. I was chilled to the bone but I needed to help.
Finally I got a signal.
“Sylvia, Sylvia. I see the man who has murdered them. He has them with him right now!”
“Keep calm—this is what you do, trust me. Ask the spirit world, ask them for help, they have to get the children away or they will never be free of him. Are you still there? Do you understand? This is something you cannot do alone—”
I heard the phone fall from her hands and understood immediately. I closed my eyes against the death-cold snow and begged for help. I begged for a chance to stop him.
Mowly Jack dragged the poor children through the blizzard, nearing the iron gates of the Puritan graveyard. I pleaded as I had never done in my life for some force to come to my aid. I could hear the cries of the small children.
Then—thank God—I saw the graveyard gate open. I saw the Puritans, and Sylvia, reach out and haul Mowly Jack through the gate. He had to let go of the children and they ran to my side for safety. The child spirits kept close to me as I crept towards the open gate and peered through to see what was happening. I had to know. The Puritan spirits dragged Mowly Jack over to an empty grave. He was kicking and screaming and several Puritan spirits pulled a tombstone over him as he tried to scramble out. Mowly Jack was sealed into the holy ground and would walk the earth no more.
I looked down at the children. From each tiny face tears were falling, but their eyes were full of gratitude too. My sister took them by the hand and led them away. She looked back and smiled once more at me, and I watched as they simply melted away in the swirling snow.
When I got home, exhausted and shocked, I saw something lying on the doorstep. It was my teddy bear, small and made of plastic, beige with a blue bib and a chewed ear. I held it close and cried.
The next morning the boy’s murder was all over the papers. The police had returned to the farm and investigated the old farmhouse a little more closely. Anyone could have missed the wall. The plaster looked dry. No one had heard the whimpering coming from behind it. It was too late. The poor child had been left to die with the rotting corpses of four others who had already passed over. He was there whilst I had been taking tea with the old mother and admiring the willow pattern on the tea cup.
Author Note: For my sister Sylvia, who passed away 1st March 2008.
The Silk Road
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, influenced the work of Shakespeare, Keats and Chaucer amongst others. A hundred novellas were written by Boccaccio between 1350—1353.
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All the final arrangements were in place and Frieda was to travel to China soon. She was looking forward to the trip and couldn’t wait to get away. She looked up from her writing, gazed out the window at the sodden ground and realised that summer was not going to materialise in England at all that year. Global warming had taken its toll and the only decent weather that anyone could enjoy was in May and the rest stayed somewhere around The Azores. It was mid-July, but might as well have been early spring or late autumn for all the sun she’d seen.
Frieda was going to China to do research for a book on the Cherchen mummies. The last book she had written was about how different cultures handled death and bereavement. Frankly, it had made her maudlin and depressed. She had the luxury of being able to write full time which had an effect on the normal, acceptable biorhythms of her life. Affected by insomnia, Frieda would often write until 3 a.m. before finally falling asleep until mid-day. Weeks of that and shopping for more Bolivian Roast at 5 a.m. in the 24-hour Tesco and any writer would get irritable, and depressed.
Depression. Each bout a nightmare, with long days of inactivity caused by disinterest and perhaps biopolarism. At least she experienced the highs on that. During the bad times Frieda would lay flat on her back in bed with quilt tucked tightly under her chin. A prisoner in her own body, her mind locked down with a great big bolt driven through her brain. Trapped. There was no escape, except into morbid thoughts and the feeling that nothing was worth her effort or of any value. Alongside the depression came claustrophobia. To Frieda, hell would be sleeping inside one of those small hostel compartments in Japan.
She couldn’t get beyond the trap that human existence was a wasted effort. She could write about life in stories, journals, and facts but why bother, when it was only second hand and others should experience it for themselves?
Frieda had no desire to take her own life. It wasn’t that kind of depression. It was the sinking feeling that she could stay so still that she would simply die within minutes: switch everything off in her head just like a light switch, one after the other until her mind was in darkness.