Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  The back of the house was the big problem. The yard and the huddle of outbuildings backed into the hillside. He was sure this was the way they had come in when they raided his property before. There were walls built against the hill, but they were bulging and slipping under the pressure and were no barrier to anyone determined enough.

  Dearden walked out into the yard and knew immediately that something was wrong. He saw that somebody had knocked over the dustbin. They had strewn rubbish all across his yard.

  ‘Mr Dearden?’

  Dearden jumped in alarm. How could he not have noticed the person standing near his side gate?

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘On my motorbike.’

  ‘What motorbike?’

  ‘It’s here, behind the wall.’

  The motorbike was invisible on the other side of the stone wall. Dearden realized he might be making a mistake by only keeping an eye out for cars on the road.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Dearden.

  ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Philip Granger.’

  ‘Yes. It was your brother who was killed. Alex knew him.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Dearden struggled for a moment over what to say. Then he looked at the young man’s motorcycle leathers and black hair.

  ‘You’re related to the Oxleys, aren’t you?’

  ‘Lucas is my uncle,’ said Philip.

  ‘I’ll give you two minutes to get off my property.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Dearden gestured at the tipped-over dustbin. ‘Do you know anything about this? Were you here last night with some of your cousins?’

  ‘No. I –’

  ‘I don’t want you here. Your family is nothing but trouble.’

  ‘All I wanted to say was –’

  ‘Now you’ve got one minute.’

  ‘OK, OK, I’m going.’

  With narrowed eyes, Dearden watched Philip Granger start up his bike and leave. Those people from Withens were getting even more brazen if they were wandering on to his property in broad daylight. Serious action would have to be taken.

  Derek Alton picked up the stick that Lucas Oxley had given him. He bounced it in his palm a few times, enjoying the feel of the wood. He liked its solidity, and the smoothness of its grain. It had a satisfying weight and balance, as if it were a natural extension of his arm. When he held the stick up to the light, he could see the bruises and scarring along the length of the wood. But it was good, thick blackthorn. Blackthorn was best. He was lucky to get it, because there wasn’t much of it growing around Withens.

  Then Alton frowned at the sight of a stain on the stick. It looked like a splash of red wine. Like communion wine, perhaps? But surely not at the altar of St Asaph’s.

  With a sudden burst of energy, he swung the stick through the air, as if striking at something around head height. He had to imagine the noise and the impact. But the physical action, the rush of air, and the movement of the muscles in his shoulders all made him feel good, even exhilarated. He wanted to do a little jig on the stone flags, to open his lungs and let out a shout of joy. But this wasn’t the place or the time.

  ‘Death and renewal. Winter and spring. The darkness and the light.’

  Though his voice was still quiet, it carried the entire length of the church. The sound bounced off the dusty stone lintels and the dark oak roof timbers. The word ‘light’ seemed to return to him in the cool air with a different note, sharper and more peremptory, as if it had been spoken by someone else. Alton swung the stick again, listening to the swish of its movement through the air. The sound was almost like music, a distant whisper of otherworldly voices, sighing for the coming moment, for the time to be right.

  ‘The beauty and the sorrow, death and renewal. The powers of light and new life.’

  Alton wasn’t even sure that the Church of England fitted naturally into the landscape in this part of the country. Perhaps Withens needed something more muscular and rugged, more in tune with the cycle of the seasons and the implacability of nature. Perhaps it ought to be able to call on something more in keeping with the preoccupations of those wretched men who had been the first to live and die in Withens – the men killed and maimed in their hundreds building the tunnels. The men no one had cared about.

  He had wondered about that when he first came to the place and had learned about its history. It had been the prosperous traders and landowners who had subscribed to build St Asaph’s, as an act of charity. But it was the blood of the ordinary working men that had consecrated the landscape.

  Now he was getting too absorbed in the past again. It always made him feel depressed. He swung his arm once more, trying to work out what it was about the acoustics that made his voice sound so unfamiliar.

  ‘The darkness and the light. The light.’

  Sometimes, it seemed to Alton that the entire area might be on the verge of reverting to paganism. Only the previous year, the May Day bank holiday festivities in the town of Glossop had culminated in the burning of a wicker man. Alton had thought this was the sort of thing that only happened in films, and when he had first read about it, he had an uneasy frisson. But he reassured himself that these things were most likely done for the benefit of the tourists these days. There couldn’t be any real belief involved in the rituals, could there? Yet local residents in Glossop had written their bad memories in envelopes and attached them to the wicker man, so they would be carried away by the flames. Superstition, that’s all.

  His feelings were even more confused by the fact that the ritual had taken place at the Glossop Labour Club. Not only that, but events leading up to the burning of the wicker man had included an opening ceremony conducted by the local member of parliament, along with a pie and pea supper, a coffee morning and craft fair. For the children, there had been a short-story competition, a summer pageant, and a bouncy castle. All these were things that in other areas were associated with church fêtes.

  There were times when he felt as though he was trying to fight back more than the encroaching nettles and bracken in his churchyard. Now and then, a dark shadow seemed to fall across his day-to-day reality, and he had a vision of himself battling against something just as insidious and persistent, and just as impossible to defeat.

  Alton held the stick up to his face and squinted towards the tip. The stain on the wood was dark and had soaked deep into the grain of the blackthorn. Its shape was rather like a map of Derbyshire – a long trickle running away to the north, where it pooled into a smear at the Yorkshire border. He nodded with satisfaction at the image. The village of Withens was somewhere in that smear that was border country, a lost and forgotten speck in miles of empty peat moor. And St Asaph’s sat on the edge of the village, gradually disappearing in a mass of encroaching undergrowth, like the burnt-out Ford Fiesta on the grass verge at the top of the road. In most Peak District villages, there would be a committee whose aim was to win the Best-Kept Village competition, and they wouldn’t have rested until they had got the abandoned car removed or the churchyard cleared. Not in Withens, though.

  All the members of his congregation were either old, or strange. Often both. Services were held at St Asaph’s only every alternate Sunday. Most of the elderly residents of the bungalows came, and a few people made the journey from Hey Bridge. But not many others. For the modern generation, attending church was a cause for suspicion. To admit to being a Christian was like confessing to a social problem.

  But then again, attending church didn’t make you a Christian, any more than standing in a garage made you a car.

  Sometimes Alton felt sorry for St Asaph. The saint had carried hot coals in his cloak to warm his master, without burning himself or his garments, which had proved his holiness, or so it was said. But carrying hot coals wasn’t much to be remembered for, was it? Some people would suggest it was a foolhardy thing to do.

  But if anyone who wasn’t holy enough tried to carry those hot coals, they would certainly be burned
.

  Ben Cooper looked up the road past Waterloo Terrace. He had been planning to call at the church in Withens to see if the Reverend Alton was around. He wanted to ask him about the Border Rats, and maybe to get a look at Craig Oxley’s grave, if he really was buried at St Asaph’s. Cooper had started to feel that everything he was told by someone in Withens had to be double-checked.

  But he had noticed there were cars outside the Quiet Shepherd, and people around the doors of the stone garage where he had seen the clay-covered wooden boards. What was going on at the pub now? Well, the only way to find out was to go and see.

  It was only when he saw the baskets of flowers being brought from the cars and the petals being pressed into place in the clay that it dawned on Cooper what he had been looking at on his previous visit. Like many local people, it was something he had taken for granted for years, and had never bothered to wonder about the details of how they came about.

  He recognized Marion Oxley, who glowered at him, but carried on with her work filling in blocks of colour with blue hydrangea petals in outlines that seemed to have been created with rows of black coffee beans.

  ‘You’re making a well dressing,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s right.’

  An outline drawing had been made in the surface of the clay with a sharp instrument – probably one of the knitting needles lying around on a side table. The pattern had been emphasized by pressing in holly, rowan berries and alder cones, with mosses, bark, and lichens. The flower petals were going on last, the picture being created from the bottom upwards so that the petals overlapped and the rainwater would drain off.

  If Diane Fry had been here, she would have said it was just another quaint rural custom. But this one was unique to Derbyshire, and attracted many thousands of visitors to the Peak District every year to see the displays. The pictures in the well dressings always told a story, too – often a religious theme, but sometimes subjects with more local significance.

  ‘What’s that background made of?’ asked Cooper, pointing at the pale grey material backing the picture.

  ‘It’s fluorspar. We just call it spar.’

  ‘Of course.’ Fluorspar was local, too – the product of a number of quarries in the mineral-rich White Peak.

  The women were fussing around him, and Cooper started to feel that he was in the way. He couldn’t see yet what the picture was going to be. Only the background had been filled in. But soon a picture would appear in living colour for the display. And it would be living too – or almost, since all the materials were natural. Some of the hundreds of well dressings that appeared through the county from April through to September were astonishingly detailed and inventive, and it was no wonder they were such an attraction for visitors. Withens just seemed such an unlikely place to find one.

  ‘This is quite an early well dressing, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘We’re the earliest at this end of the county. It means we have to rely on what’s in flower.’

  ‘Is the display this weekend?’

  ‘Of course. There wouldn’t be much point petalling now, otherwise. It’ll only last a few days.’

  And the well dressings had started as a way of thanking the water goddess who provided a village’s clean water supply. Some villagers had believed that it had been their pure water that had protected them from the Black Death that had ravaged the rest of England in the fourteenth century.

  Derek Alton’s hands were stained green and smelt of leaking sap from the dock plants. Their leaves were large and healthy-looking. But when he grasped them in his bare hands, he could feel both sides at once, the cold and the warmth. Another eternal duality lurking in the undergrowth to surprise him. The cold of death and the warmth of life. The darkness and the light.

  Alton pulled his hand away, thinking of the slugs and snails that might be clinging to the undersides of the leaves. He wiped his palms on his trousers, and decided he should have worn his gloves. He hardly dared to pull at the leaves too hard, because they were surprisingly fragile and ripped easily in his fingers. Yet their stems were as tough as any weed he had come across, and their roots were firmly fixed, so that they clung tenaciously to the ground even when he threw all his weight into heaving on them. He ended up with pieces of shredded leaf and tiny bits of their flesh pressed into the creases of his hands, his fingers slippery and stained green by their juice. Their broken stems smelled faintly acid.

  It must have presented a major engineering exercise to get the massive flat gritstone slabs into place over the graves. It was almost as if the families who had paid for them had been making absolutely sure that their dead relatives were never going to push their way up out of their graves and come back again. No person could lift one of those slabs on his own. But nature could do it. Nature was pushing them up, sliding them aside, pulling them down into the ground and tilting them at jaunty angles, making a joke of the whole thing.

  Saddest of all were the stones at the western end of the graveyard. They were tiny by comparison to the gritstone slabs. In fact, they reminded Alton of the little milestones that could still occasionally be seen on the roadside in the Peak District, relics of a forgotten period when travel was slow enough to see them.

  At this time of the year, the tiny stones were just managing to peep above the bracken litter, but they were destined to disappear again within a week or two. Alton had no idea why the people who were remembered by the stones had not even earned their full names on their memorials. They bore only initials and a year. Here were G.S. and M.W., and over there C.S. All of them seemed to have died in 1849.

  Was it just lack of money that had restricted the poorer families to a tiny stone with no space on it for a proper inscription in tribute to the dead? Or had it been yet another peculiar local custom?

  But when he looked at the huge gritstone slabs nearer the church, with their ornately carved lettering, their biblical texts and complete family histories, Alton knew the answer. The people in Withens had not been divided by belief and tradition, but by wealth and position. So many churchyards in so many thousands of towns and villages were testament to that fact. The rich had been able to buy their way closer to Heaven.

  But Christian burial was based on the belief that the dead would rise again one day. Like a seed, the body was planted in the earth to await rebirth.

  The worst pest of all in the churchyard was the bracken that had spread down the hillside. Grazing sheep normally kept it down, but in the churchyard it was out of reach of the sheep because of the stone walls. Each year, the bracken grew from the debris of its own dead growth of the previous autumn. Recently, a frost had caught some of the new bracken fronds as they unfurled. They were already brown and dead and brittle, crumbling under his fingers. Even as the rest of the plant grew green and vibrant around it.

  In one corner of the churchyard, a sycamore and some young hollies had claimed several graves as their own. Elsewhere, rosebay willowherb was beginning its spring offensive and the rhododendrons were threatening, the chestnuts were unfurling their leaves, the brambles, docks and thistles were spreading unhindered, and underfoot were the small, black, bullet-like heads of the plantains.

  Alton knew there were a couple of dozen graves that hadn’t seen the light of day for years, and probably never would now. Their inscriptions took on an air of ironic neglect: ‘Sacred to the memory … here lieth the body … departed this life … Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.’

  The sycamores had spread through the churchyard like a plague, their whirling seed pods uncontrollable in the wind. When he had first arrived, Alton had persuaded the diocese to pay for the rampant sycamores to be cut back down to their roots, on the grounds that they were damaging the graves, pushing up the horizontal memorial stones. But already the remaining bases of the trees were shooting again – their amputated boles protruded from the edges of the gravestones like fingers trying to lift the stone slabs. Their fingernails were green – the new shoots of spring emerg
ing from the grave.

  There was something that no one ever mentioned, but which Alton couldn’t help thinking about whenever he saw the virulent green of the plant life burgeoning in his churchyard. Part of the problem was that in the older areas of the churchyard, the vegetation had too many nutrients to feed on. The sides of the ancient burial caskets would have been breached many years ago, allowing the peaty soil to trickle through the cracks in the wood and mingle with the bones and the mouldering clothes of the dead. And with the soil would go the insects and all the things that lived underground in the dark. And behind them, the roots of the plants colonizing the surface – pale, thin tendrils twining into the crevices and attaching themselves to wood and bones and desiccated flesh. Earth to earth, indeed. And then from earth back into the light, in an unstoppable burst of energy as nutrients surged up the stems of the plants into a green eruption every spring. It was almost as if the dead were always able to come back and overwhelm the living.

  Because energy never died – it simply dispersed into the rest of the world and re-formed itself. In the churchyard of St Asaph’s, it seemed to re-form itself into brambles and thistles, docks and dandelions, everything that was green and damp and grew faster than he was able to control.

  The vicar sighed at such thoughts. They had never entered his head until he had arrived in Withens and Hey Bridge. But he couldn’t be blamed. Even the bishop didn’t blame him. People still died in Withens. But there had not been a single wedding in his time in the village, nor a christening. It was as if the people had no objection to wearing funereal black to enter the church, but they drew the line at the frivolity of a white wedding gown or a christening robe, at bridesmaids in satiny pastels and bright buttonholes.