Skendleby

by Nick Brown

  He could hear laughter and music from behind the tall hedge. Every window in the house was brightly lit and the standing lamps flanking the long driveway illuminated the gardens. The front door was open and he entered unnoticed into the bustle and noise. In the hall he was met by Janice, Derek’s wife, all blonde curls and spangly dress, carrying a champagne bottle, talking to a man with a polished shaved head and a diamond attached to his right ear dressed in a suit that Jim thought would cost more than he earned in a month.

  “Jim, this is Si Carver, he’s the new owner of Skendleby Hall.”

  “Yeah, and you won’t recognise the place after I’ve got to work on it.”

  Jim pointed out that they’d already met.

  “Yeah, of course, Williams, no, Gibson, isn’t it? You edit the local rag. I hope you’ve thought seriously about how you’re going to support my development by the Hall, maybe a petition or something.”

  Jim said that he was still thinking about it.

  “Yeah, well you need to think quicker if you want to send someone to cover my strictly-invite-only Christmas Eve party. Real A list event that’ll be, come yourself if you want, everyone who matters will be there: I’ve asked Rio, Wazza, the lot.”

  Then he saw someone more interesting and moved off leaving Janice to escort Jim through to the large kitchen where the drinks were laid out. He noticed that since his last visit all the carpets had been removed and replaced by an expensive wooden floor and that new ash blonde wooden furniture and shiny leather sofas were scattered about the house. The lighting, as always, seemed too bright coming from crystal chandeliers in the centre of all the downstairs rooms except the kitchen. Acres of bright space and expensive furniture gleaming with minimalism but a brittle and impersonal feel, like a show home suffering compulsive makeovers.

  In the kitchen Jim recognised a few lost souls he saw here every year and whose names he never remembered. He helped himself to a glass of wine and stood by the kitchen sink, leaning against a work surface taking stock of his fellow guests. Some slinky young women and sharply dressed young men but a fair smattering of men dressed like him for the golf course, expensive V-necked sweaters in pastel shades and logos worn with red trousers or unnatural looking ironed jeans. Oddly, there was no sign of Derek, whose presence was normally unmistakable and whose voice tended to dominate proceedings.

  He took his wine into a conservatory of barn-like proportions where, on a huge table, was a vast array of dishes ranging from lobster salad through cassoulet to Roquefort and crusty bread. He helped himself to a large plateful as much to stop feeling like a spare part as out of hunger and began the usual excruciating process of trying to eat standing up. Whilst doing this he fell into conversation with a couple of other misfits adopting similar strategies. The music from the front room became louder and the noise level began to make conversation in the conservatory difficult. This was unusual at Derek’s well regulated and formulaic gatherings. He was on the point of suggesting to his companions that they get another drink when he was accosted by Derek, who took him by the arm and led him out of earshot to the far corner of the room. Derek was not operating in his normal manner of assured bonhomie; he seemed rattled and strangely vulnerable.

  “Listen, Jim, I warned you about those archaeologists: I don’t know what happened to Lisa on that jaunt of yours today but you’d better put that food down and go and speak to her.”

  He was red faced and talking very quickly.

  “When she came back she was lively, animated, and, as you’ll soon see, different. At first it was all right, in fact a nice change from her usual morose self, but now she’s making an exhibition of herself. I tried to speak to her but she bit my head off and turned very nasty, now she’s like a mad thing.”

  He then steered Jim to the front room and the music. In the centre a group was dancing while everyone else watched. Lisa was the focus of attention although Jim only recognised that it was Lisa after he looked a second time.

  Her hair was down and she was dancing with her arms above her head and laughing at two men dancing with her. She was dressed in a tight glittering gold top, a very short skirt and thigh length boots. His first reaction was one of pure admiration, she looked provocative and very sexy, with much longer legs than he’d previously noticed. She also looked out of control. This took thoughts of attraction out of his mind and he felt embarrassed and alarmed.

  “Get her out of here and take her home.”

  Derek’s voice was urgent as he pushed him through the periphery of the throng towards the dancers. Any uncertainty about how he would approach Lisa was unnecessary.

  She danced clear of her two partners and swayed towards him, her arms tracing snaky patterns above her head watched by everyone in the room with interest and amazement. This type of floor show was not expected at Derek’s.

  Her eyes were sparking in a way he’d never seen. She placed both arms round his neck, lifted her right leg and entwined it around the back of Jim’s and, clinging to him, continued to sway suggestively to the rhythm of the music. She was encouraged in this by the applause of her entourage. Breathing into his ear she ground herself against him and slipped a hand down to his groin.

  He didn’t feel embarrassed or aroused as his objectivity told him he should, he felt very afraid. He was being humiliated: it was deliberate, threatening and spiteful.

  He tried to pull away but she positioned his right leg between her thighs and was sliding up and down it like a pole dancer. Shouts from the crowd urged him on and it was clear that there were some in the room who envied him as they clapped along with the beat. A fit looking young man in a sharp suit with a huge lump of gold on his wrist, standing next to Si Carver, shouted,

  “Go on, granddad, fucking give her one.”

  The spectators cheered but the scantily dressed sexy young woman whom they saw was very different to the spiteful presence that he felt smothering him like poison ivy.

  “Lisa, stop being stupid, let me go, your dad wants me to take you home.”

  Lisa removed her hand from his groin and placed both hands on the sides of his head holding his face close to hers, looking into his eyes, her mouth open and her tongue flicking across his lips. Suddenly she seemed bored and released her grip.

  “Fine, Jimbo, I’m ready to go, this is so boring, take me home. But you’ve missed your chance now, you won’t get another.”

  She disentangled herself and without a backward glance walked straight through the crowd to the front door, ignoring her father. Jim turned to make eye contact with Derek, who merely gestured to the door and turned back towards the kitchen, obviously relieved the social embarrassment was over.

  On the road a clergyman locking his car stared at them. Lisa laughed and pulled up her skirt, flashing at him. In the car she didn’t speak and it seemed to Jim her performance had been an act which she’d now dropped. He felt both unable and disinclined to open conversation, worried about what direction it might take. So they drove in silence through the dark countryside with the headlights playing on gaunt trees and open frosty spaces. Jim would normally have played some music but remembering his recent brush with music thought it wisest not to, so the only soundtrack to the journey was the hum of the engine punctuated occasionally by soft giggles from the passenger seat.

  When they arrived at Lisa’s apartment she opened the passenger door and then turned towards him. He saw that the already short skirt had ridden right up and just before he turned to avert his gaze she slid across the seat towards him.

  “Now’s your chance to find out if I’m wearing knickers, Jimbo.”

  He was conscious of a hand behind his neck and warm breath on his face. Her lips brushed his and he felt her tongue flick across his lips and up his cheek to the lobe of his left ear. Then a sharp, piercing stab of pain which made him shriek. Lisa wriggled out of her seat.

  “Think yourself lucky, that’s just a token. You got off lightly ’cos you’re harmless.”

  Then she s
lammed the door and walked off, laughing, towards her flat.

  Jim sat in a state of shock and then, desperate to be away, turned the car round and drove quickly off. He’d crossed the old pack horse bridge and turned onto the Silk Road before he managed to regain a normal breathing pattern. There was a tearing pain in his left ear lobe and when he touched it his hand felt the unmistakably warm stickiness of blood.

  She’d drawn blood. Why? What was about? He felt so upset and humiliated that he almost missed his turning down the lane that skirted the Skendleby estate and led towards the safety of home. He turned sharply causing the car to slide on the icy surface, which he corrected with some difficulty. This immediate problem caused by driving helped him to recover his senses and an element of his old pragmatism returned. He was wondering what to tell Alice when he got back. He’d have to explain being home so early with his ear bitten through and the collar of his shirt soaked in blood.

  The car was still slipping about on the road surface even though he was driving with extreme care and he noticed a strong wind had sprung up. The boughs of the trees on either side of the road were swaying and twisting wildly in the full beam of his headlights. He slowed at the sharp bend by the estate’s gate house where the road began to slope down to the woods. This stretch of road had started life as a track through a wild and vast forest but as the woods had diminished, replaced by farm land, the track had become a metalled road. Alice always said the wildness of this area had never been completely subdued and the spirit of the old primeval forest still survived.

  Then he saw something remarkable: the trees on either side of the narrow road were being shaken violently by the wind and yet, picked out clearly in the headlights and seeming to hang motionless in still air, were some crumpled beech leaves. These were moving slowly to a far different rhythm from that of the rest of the wood. He watched fascinated as the leaves circled each other caught in a state of unnatural, suspended animation. They held a hypnotic quality and Jim was aware of nothing else apart from these dead fragments of the old wood and their strange courtly dance. Then they suddenly froze and hung motionless in the night air in front of the windscreen, clearly picked out against the dark of the night. For a moment time seemed to stand still; then he was through them as if he’d passed through a bead curtain hanging in a doorway. The car slewed across to the side of the road and come to rest in a passing space by the bridge.

  He turned off the ignition, engaged the handbrake and sat in the still darkness listening to the thudding of his heart, hoping he’d not had some type of stroke or epileptic seizure.

  Someone was watching; a figure standing at the fringe of the woods, picked out at the furthest reach of his headlights. The dark trunks of the trees merged with the torso but a white face caught in the uncertain light was staring at him. Then it was gone, leaving Jim reminded of the surly waiter who’d gestured to him in the restaurant.

  Too shaken to continue his drive and needing fresh air, he opened the car door and got out. Outside the warm and comforting interior of the 4x4 the night was cold and, despite the shelter of the trees, an icy wind viciously whipped across his face.

  Through the trees towards the excavation he had an impression of light and in his state of bemusement he walked towards it. Within the wood it was less windy but darker. The light from the headlamps didn’t penetrate beyond the first two or three metres. This thin spur of woodland, fringing the road, looked idyllic in daylight. But at night it was unnerving and uncertain underfoot. He stumbled towards the edge of the tree line where the fields that flanked the dig began. The scrunching of twigs on his progress through piles of dead leaves disturbed the silence as he lurched between the rough and ancient trunks of the oaks. He could hear the stream nearby rushing over its stony bed sounding like a torrent further distorting his perspective. By the time he reached the stone wall of the estate he could feel sweat trickling down his back and his heart pounding.

  Across the fields the dig lay abandoned for the night, and there, strangely illuminated at its edge, was the tomb. An insubstantial dark figure was perambulating across the fields towards it moving with a type of gait that seemed to defy any natural laws of movement. A peculiar process was propelling the figure without it taking anything recognisable as a step. Watching it filled Jim with a sense of terror he’d never experienced in his life, not even in his worst nightmares.

  Then, as he feared it would, the figure stopped and slowly, deliberately, turned its head; Jim stood rooted to the ground, time stalled. An awful white face fixed its gaze upon him and Jim comprehended it knew him. The face was hideously distorted but the expression of gleeful malevolence was stark and Jim felt it like a blow. Then, in a curiously disarticulated gesture, it slowly raised one of its arms and pointed an unnaturally long white finger at him.

  He was cursed, marked for death or damnation. It hit him like a blow, short circuiting his nervous system. It was this spasm of horror that released him from the spot and sent him stumbling and gasping through the woods towards the lights of his car. He drove away: tonight he’d been served a warning and he was going to heed it.

  CHAPTER 13

  ANCIENT ECHOES

  “It’s been a macabre exercise this one.”

  The flat nasal accent belonged to Tim Thompson leaning back in his tilting chair beneath the ‘This is a smoke free area’ sign lighting his pipe. He looked like, and played up to, the stereotype of a dusty academic: untidy hair, beard, glasses and even a brown cord jacket with elbow patches which he must have had specially made. So he blended in perfectly with the dishevelled and untidy surroundings of the Unit’s main research room. The site review was being conducted without any great enthusiasm from anyone except Thompson.

  The conference was taking place later in the day than scheduled because Steve and Giles had turned in late. Steve had sat up drinking rum with Jan, not gone to bed until four and then overslept, whilst Giles had slept very soundly but woken late in strange surroundings feeling like he’d been drugged. It was, therefore, not until two in the afternoon that the review had been able to commence. Neither of them felt at the height of their academic powers and both were irritated by the pungent odours of Tim Thompson’s pipe smoke suspecting he smoked it out of sheer affectation. But they were morbidly eager to hear his report of the site documentation as what they’d just encountered had left them confused and uncertain.

  “What’s most interesting,” Thompson continued once satisfied that the pipe was fully alight, “is that since the village site was abandoned there’s not a single shred of evidence of any subsequent settlement despite it being in an excellent situation. So we have evidence of a well established village being suddenly deserted not later than about three hundred BC, which, by the way makes it contemporary with the sacrifices at Lindow Moss. After that, nothing. Strange don’t you think?”

  He paused for effect and to relight the pipe, which had ceased smoking.

  “However, the unoccupied site continues to have a recorded history and a frightening one at that. There’s a passage in volume 24 of the Folklore of North Cheshire published 1832 that records a generations-old children’s rhyme about a soul-stealing devil peculiar to Skendleby. Then there’s the journal of Montague Heatly Smythe, Vicar of Skendleby between 1771 and 1776. An Oriel man with time on his hands he was a friend of Gilbert White, you know, the one who wrote The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. This journal looks like his attempt at the same thing. He published some of it privately and it is now archived in the library of his old college and very dull reading it makes.

  “However, the last section deals with local legend. One of the legends deals with a series of lights that appear by Devil’s Mound, and bring disaster to anyone who sees them. Up to this point the journal is written as a series of eloquently discursive, if pedantic, letters to a friend or colleague, probably White. The letters are reasoned, rational and slightly sceptical but become increasingly morbid in tone.

  “Then they just f
inish: the last one is dated 16th November 1776 when he suddenly disappears from the parish, rather like your Iron Age villagers. He returns to his college, where he is considered distinctly odd, spreading wild tales of haunting and the Devil. There’s a note in a friend’s journal expressing concern and then Heatly Smythe disappears from the records. The circumstances of his death are unknown but suicide is likely.

  “I believe some later instalments of the journal are missing and I’m trying to locate them. In fact there’ve been problems with a number of vicars in this parish, including the present one, who has a strange past. Anyway, I digress.”

  During this speech Thompson’s pipe was again extinguished but he was sufficiently engaged with his subject to ignore it. Giles and Steve were also engaged with this in a way they wouldn’t have been before the excavation. Their normal approach to Tim was to make fun of him and his evidence. The game was to pretend to take what he said seriously and then extend it to ridiculous levels until he realised and lost his temper. They were experts in this game of ‘Wind up Thompson’ and derived a childish pleasure from it, but there was no pleasure now.

  “In fact,” Tim continued, basking in their undivided attention, “for an uninhabited spot it seems to attract a surprising amount of human misery. Amongst the medieval records I came upon a Calendar of Inquisition post mortem from the Chester Archive dated 26 September 1283 which recorded the following:

  ‘John de Balnea of Adlington hanged himself on St Mary Magdalene’s day. He took off his clothes and fled to the park of Skendleby close by Devil’s Mound and there as one frenzied, hanged himself by a cord from a hazel. No one else is guilty.’