The Lychgate
Page 26
The second week of November saw a mixed bag of weather. Robert Mason left Lincolnshire early one morning, driving north. He’d woken Ndola’s family on more than one occasion in the last seven days, screaming from a nightmare. While they’d been most understanding, Bob was glad to no longer be a burden. With some limited funds from equity in his former marital home still available, the historian tracked down a two-room crofter’s hut on the Isle of Skye. It was a dump and in need of serious work. Yet, the few Internet photos made it appear luxurious in comparison to the life he’d led over the last year. Plus, it was available for immediate occupation. He broke his journey at a motel outside Glasgow, then set off next morning along the A82 with Loch Lomond glittering to his right. The bleak but beautiful expanse of Rannoch Moor gave way to snow-capped peaks through Glencoe. At Fort William he took the Glenfinnan road to Mallaig, and a ferry from there to Armadale on the island.
Sometime later, the Land Rover’s tyres crunched along an unmade track on a hill overlooking Loch Eynort. There stood a drab, white-washed shack with a corrugated metal roof. The building seemed sad and forlorn like an abandoned dog. It would need proper roof tiles when Bob could find the time and money. Still it was a bargain for someone on a budget, used to roughing it. Dusty and dirty; cobwebs and not much else appeared to hold the broken-down hovel together. There was a strange sense of instant connection and camaraderie between the building and its new owner. Shabby on the outside, hollow within. The old place suggested some metaphorical resonance with the troubled historian. Bob couldn’t go back to life in the modern world per se, even if he wanted to. That week at Ndola’s showed him the always-on, ever-connected insanity of twenty-first century life no longer worked for him. He needed isolation to get his head together. The manner of that dreadful departure from Deeping Drove also troubled him. All those lives lost without testimony or witness. When he found the courage, Bob knew he must somehow become their biographer, even if nobody ever read his account.
* * *
“There you go, Bob. Enjoy.” A plump, red-haired woman set down a steaming plate of haggis, neeps and tatties in front of the weathered historian.
Bob’s face had adopted a ruddy hue in the six months of harsh weather since his arrival on Skye. Yet he felt healthier for it, even though nights of undisturbed rest were nothing more than a fleeting hope. He always woke with a start, soaked in sweat during the early watches. His unconscious mind still grappled to assimilate incarnated myth into some reasonable concept of rationality. How would it ever do so, when the logical brain told him those tragic events in Lincolnshire couldn’t be real? Yet real they were. “Thanks, Moira.” He smiled at the rosy-cheeked landlady of his local pub. It was a forty-minute hike down from his tiny croft, but Bob enjoyed the exercise. Plus a dram or two gave him an extra hour's rest before the nightmares came again. Hot meals were reasonable here; not that he was getting too bad at fixing stews and other one-pot fare at what he now called ‘home.’ His existence was frugal and simple, with humanity kept at a controllable distance. For extra cash, he took occasional jobs supply teaching history in schools on the island. That was all he needed to top up the bank account from time to time.
“Old Alasdair’s going to tell one of his ghost stories again.” Moira indicated a crimson-faced, white-whiskered man in a threadbare navy sweater sipping whisky by the pub’s common room open fire.
Bob was familiar with Alasdair MacKinnon’s penchant for spinning ripping yarns about spectral highlanders and the restless spirits of deceased women in unrequited love. The retired fisherman’s stories were bigger whoppers than tales of his record catches at sea. “I’m sure he is.” The historian scooped up some meat to sample it. “Mmm. Fine as ever, Moira. Thank you.”
The woman beamed. “You’re welcome, love. Hey, you know, one of these days it might be nice if you told us a story from down south.”
“You mean a ghost story?”
She pressed the tray on which she’d carried his food from the kitchen against an ample bosom. “It would make a nice change from Alasdair’s usual collection. If I hear ‘The Spirit Maid of Glen Brittle’ one more time…”
Bob dropped his knife and fork with a clatter. He clasped shaking fingers beneath the stout wooden table to conceal them.
“Is everything okay?” Moira asked.
The historian cleared his throat. “A sudden chill, that’s all. I’m fine, thank you.”
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No, that’s okay. This will be splendid.” He watched the landlady turn to go, as old Alasdair began his performance in a spooky, overdone voice.
* * *
Water cascaded over the Fairy Pools in Glen Brittle. Rich blues and greens thundered as the torrent sang like a mystic choir, suggesting the site had been well named. Robert Mason perched atop a rocky outcrop, his hands resting against a patch of dry heather. Beneath, an azure basin of water glimmered with such an intense hue it produced a deeper saturation of colour than the sky far above. Drifting clouds cast bands of sweeping shadow across the surrounding mountains. On his many circular hikes from the croft, this spot ever proved his favourite. Something about the other-worldly nature of its appearance offered comfort and solidarity. Here the man could step across that boundary between fantasy and reality in his mind. It was an illusion, and he understood that, but no less a tonic for his tortured soul.
The last rays of late September sun disappeared over the horizon as Bob got back and lit a fire in the tiny grate of his shack. He warmed some soup in a cast-iron pot and sat down at his small, square table with a hunk of homemade rustic bread and a bowl of the repast. A month to go and it would be a year since the events of Halloween 2019. Life on his quiet hilltop overlooking Loch Eynort had settled into a familiar rhythm. But there were ghosts inside he still couldn’t lay to rest. Ones he would never lay to rest until he set down the tale in writing.
Supper over, he cleared the table except for a lamp providing meagre light; enough to scribble by. Bob retrieved a ruled pad from the bag he always took with him on supply teaching jobs. He rubbed his eyes, clicked open the retractable nib of a pen and began to write:
THE TRUTH OF DEEPING DROVE - A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT BY ITS ONLY SURVIVOR.
Much may be written about what occurred at the off-grid, Lincolnshire down-shifters site of Deeping Drove during the end of October 2019. Wild speculations abound, as they always do when such a tragedy is discovered in aftermath without an eyewitness to report. Yet there is a witness. I’ve heard in a recent letter from an old colleague, that it’s believed what started as a secular settlement morphed into some necromantic cult. A deviant, controlling structure that ended (as such things often do) in suicide and murder. To leave that as an unchallenged epitaph for my friends and neighbours, is to do them a disservice. What follows is the only eyewitness account from the community’s only surviving member. I will leave it in trust with my solicitor, to be opened, read and circulated after my death. Were I to release it in life, my existence would become plagued with unwanted attention at best, and subject to unfounded criminal proceedings at worst. In death, people may claim these are the ravings of a deranged madman. A crazed hermit who dropped out of society to conjure fantasies from his disturbed psyche. Would that it were so!
Let me begin with a roll call of site inhabitants, at the time the troubles began.
The first founder was a woman called Constance Creek. She lived on the spot with another group as a child, for reasons which shall become clear later. Connie was a driven woman and skilled potter with a paranormal secret. One we all discovered far too late, and which we would never have believed before.
Martin Bradbury was a traditional thatcher and a skilled waterman. He was one of the first settlers along with Peter and Margaret Leonard - farmers bankrupted by the modern system, who moved to the fens with their son, Timothy.
The remaining members drifted in over several months:
Joseph and Naomi Hargreaves - a builder and
his wife.
Daniel Charter - smith and woodworker.
Dean and Michaela Claridge - a butcher and his schoolteacher spouse, joined by their teenage daughter, Sarah.
Jason Saint (a.k.a ‘Decaf’) - a building labourer, who it later transpired was part of a robbery gang lying low.
Darren Clements (a.k.a ‘Dinger’) - also a building labourer and Jason’s accomplice.
Marie Craven (a.k.a ‘Angel’) - a pretty, headstrong girl whose real name turned out to be Marie Saint – Jason’s sister. A hairdresser and beautician by profession. She was the robbers’ getaway driver.
Stephen Colefax - a retired Anglican vicar, to whom the world owes a debt of gratitude it will never understand. It breaks my heart that I am the only one alive to offer thanks for his life and faithfulness. And to record it for posterity.
Abigail Walters - herbalist, psychic, textile and basketry maker. My onetime, casual intimate partner. A woman for whom I held deeper feelings than I ever thought possible, in retrospect.
And last of all, myself. In my academic career, I was a university lecturer of history. Now I am attempting to piece my life back together on the Isle of Skye, after watching myth and legend become fact and reality in the most brutal manner imaginable, all those miles away.
What you are about to read will make you question my sanity. It's a question I have asked myself daily, ever since that Halloween night. The above named people were the inhabitants of Deeping Drove, when a lich walked out of the pages of fantasy and into our lives. Irreconcilable hatred and a desire for vengeance, travelled beyond the grave to conspire with powers of darkness confounding all human comprehension. My name is Robert Mason. This is our story…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Devon De’Ath was born in the county of Kent, ‘The Garden of England.’ Raised a Roman Catholic in a small, ancient country market community famously documented as ‘the most haunted TOWN in England,’ he grew up in an atmosphere replete with spiritual, psychic, and supernatural energy. Hauntings were commonplace and you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting three spectres, to the extent that he never needed question the validity of such manifestations. As to the explanations behind them?
At the age of twenty, his earnest search for spiritual truth led the young man to leave Catholicism and become heavily involved in Charismatic Evangelicalism. After serving as a part-time youth pastor while working in the corporate world, he eventually took voluntary redundancy to study at a Bible College in the USA. Missions in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa followed, but a growing dissatisfaction with aspects of the theology and ministerial abuse by church leadership eventually caused him to break with organised religion and pursue a Post-Evangelical existence. One open to all manner of spiritual and human experiences his ‘holy’ life would never have allowed.
After church life, De’Ath served fifteen years with the police, lectured at colleges and universities, and acted as a consultant to public safety agencies both foreign and domestic.
A writer since he first learned the alphabet, Devon De’Ath has authored works in many genres under various names, from Children’s literature to self-help books, through screenplays for video production and all manner of articles.