Guilt Trip

by Maggy Farrell

  As I peered at it, I felt a sudden shiver down my spine and that old expression leaped into my head: like someone just walked over your grave. At the very same moment, the shop bell jangled violently as the door flew open on a gust of wind. Crying out in shock at the sudden noise and commotion, I spun round, only to find a new customer, an older woman, the one in the chiffon scarf, battling with the breeze, struggling to shut the door behind her.

  I groaned inwardly as the other customers chuckled at me. Why was I so easily spooked these days? Three counts of déjà vu, a dark shape in my dream and a voice on the wind and I was behaving like a complete idiot, crying out at the slightest thing. I mean, what had I expected to come through the door? The ghost of the Devil’s Lair?

  As the woman joined the queue, I turned back to my postcard, trying to ignore the amused looks I was still getting. But just as it appeared that everyone had finally lost interest in me, going back to their, no doubt, inane gossiping, I was suddenly startled by a sharp intake of breath very close to my ear.

  Glancing round, I found that the newcomer had now moved uncomfortably close to me, apparently unaware of the concept of personal space, peering rudely over my shoulder at the postcard in my hand. Then she looked at me, her brows knitted with anxiety.

  “Do be careful!” she hissed.

  I turned to the others for some kind of assistance. This was obviously the local madwoman. But they weren’t paying me any attention at all now.

  Not knowing what to do, I looked back at the postcard. Was she afraid that I would damage it somehow? Hurriedly, I stuffed it back in the rack. Anything to shut the old bat up.

  But she continued.

  “You must take care,” she whispered urgently to the back of my head. “Take care!”

  As the queue moved up, I was aware of her eyes boring into me, but I didn’t look round: no need to give her any encouragement. I just hoped that, getting no response from me, she’d give up. And it seemed to work.

  When it came to my turn at the counter, I made my purchases quickly, stuffing them all into my bag, leaving the shop with my head down so as not to make eye contact with her again.

  Outside, I could see Dad further down the street, parked by the side of the road as arranged. I hurried over and climbed in while he started the engine.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Just met the village nutter, that’s all,” I said, flinging my rucksack onto the back seat and grabbing for my seatbelt.

  “A bit of local colour, eh?” Dad laughed, indicating and pulling out. “What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing really. She was just worried I might break something,” I said. After all, that’s all it had been, really.

  But as we drove by the shop, the woman was just leaving. Spotting me, she stopped and stared, lifting her hand up slightly as if about to beckon to me, a worried frown on her face.

  “Oh God, there she is,” I said.

  “Don’t look at her!” I added loudly as Dad peered over curiously. “She’s probably a descendant of the witch of the Changing Well who’ll turn you to stone.”

  I laughed nervously. I knew I was being stupid, spooked by nothing - again. But as we passed her, I turned away, leaning over to switch on the radio, deliberately blocking her out.

  8

  The beginning of our route that morning led us back along the same road as the day before, between hills scarred by horizontal beds of limestone and topped by jagged grey crags. And then we took a different direction, and up onto even more rugged, mountainous terrain.

  Angry and raw, the wind was raging up here, hurling grey clouds across the sky, their dark shadows blotting the landscape, constantly changing its hue through various shades of dark green to purple black. Chill and cutting, it blasted at the windscreen as we drove higher, spattering it with the occasional fistful of rain.

  But, surprisingly, these harsh conditions didn’t take away from the beauty of the place. Actually they intensified it. It was as if nature was putting on a display of strength. Of power.

  And maybe Dad was feeling the call of the wild too. Switching from the radio to one of his CDs, he cranked up the volume unusually loud, filling the car with the raw emotional turmoil that is dad rock. And so we sang together, as loud as we could - like wolves howling at the moon.

  <><><>

  But soon enough we’d descended into the more gentle landscape of the dales, the road now lined with hedgerows and moss-covered dry-stone walls, with signposts pointing the way to tiny villages and homesteads - and the Changing Well.

  Parking, Dad bought two tickets at a small kiosk and we went through the gate and followed the trail into the woods. Above us, the wind roared as it buffeted the tops of the trees, but down on the forest floor we were relatively sheltered. The path meandered through the tangled green woodland, the smell of wild garlic and damp earth filling the air.

  Eventually we came to a flight of steps cut into the side of a cliff, at the bottom of which we reached our destination: the Changing Well. Not your usual type of well, water pooling up from under the ground with some kind of pulley and a bucket to collect it; this was more a huge hollow basin of rock in which water collected as it came from above, from a natural spring rushing out of the hillside next to the steps. But though the water came down from the cliff top, it didn’t fall in a crashing cascade. Rather, it spread out in a thin sheet over a strangely smooth, bulbous, undulating surface, as if over glass or polished metal, before dripping as hundreds of tiny drops into the pool.

  I looked at Dad for an explanation.

  “Think of it as a giant stalactite,” he said, getting out his camera. “The water originates in an underground lake which passes through rock on its journey to the surface, picking up mineral salts - like calcium carbonate - on the way. Then when the water eventually flows over the cliff, the minerals get deposited as flowstone, building up into this smooth, stone-like overhang. Just look at that vertical rippling. It almost looks corrugated. Beautiful!”

  And he was right: it was sort of beautiful. But it was eerie too.

  Just below the overhang, about seven meters up, a wire had been strung all the way across, like a washing line, though it was placed exactly where it would get dripped on most. And on this washing line was pegged a row of random items which appeared to have been carved out of stone: a top hat, a kettle, a tennis racket… They looked to me like a weird display of voodoo offerings - a sacrifice to the witch of the well.

  “They’re not really stone,” Dad said. “They’re just objects covered in deposits which, over time, build up and make them look like stone.”

  He started fiddling with his camera but then swore irritably as a big group of people appeared at the top of the steps. He’d wanted the place to himself so that he could get the best shots without interruption. I left him to it, opening a bag of crisps and wandering off to look at the information board nearby.

  And there I found a drawing and information about the witch, supposed to have lived there centuries ago, turning her enemies to stone, and leaving a trace of her magic in the waters when she left. It was the usual kind of tale you would expect to hear in a mysterious place like this. Our ancestors trying to understand the world around them; finding supernatural explanations for nature’s bizarre ways.

  I wondered how they’d have explained my recent bouts of déjà vu…

  By now, the other visitors had reached the well and were milling about, getting in Dad’s way, even attempting to chat to him, until he gave up, disappearing up the steps to try to get a better shot of the overhang from up there, in relative peace.

  I sat down on a bench and watched the crowd. They seemed to be some kind of old folks’ club on a day out. All bobble hats and hiking boots and passing round of boiled sweets. Then a rather self-important man, a ridiculous red bow tie sticking out above his cagoule, stood up on a rock, and raised his clipboard in the air, directing the others to assemble round him.

  They did
as they were told, and he began to lecture them in pompous, dramatic tones, like an old-fashioned actor. He began by explaining about the petrifying effect of the water, and how people were sometimes given permission to leave objects on the line to be ‘turned to stone’. Then he gave the old explanation for this ‘magic’- that the well had once been associated with a witch, giving a few dates and details which weren’t on the noticeboard.

  But then he went further, offering a second story.

  “Some sources suggest that originally the well was not called the Changing Well at all,” he said, emphasising the name by making inverted commas in the air with his fingers, “but the Changeling Well, involving not a witch, but a changeling.”

  I sat up a bit straighter, listening to him.

  “A changeling was of course believed to be an imperfect and thus unwanted faery baby who had been left to be raised by unsuspecting humans in exchange for the theft of their own perfect son or daughter. A secret, underhand swap by the faery world.

  “There have been many examples of such stories through history, used by communities to explain the presence of a child with a disability or a mental disorder. In other words, if a child did not fit in in some way, if he was ‘different’, then perhaps he was literally a reject from another world. A changeling.”

  There was a lot of muttering and discussion in the crowd at this. I was shocked too. People in the past seemed so ignorant, so cruel, so ready to label others as outsiders.

  And then a wave of heat engulfed my cheeks as I remembered how I’d treated the woman in the shop that morning: I’d labelled her a ‘nutter’ and joked that she was descended from a witch.

  So maybe being hideously judgemental about anyone even slightly different from ‘the norm’ wasn’t just a historical thing. Maybe it was just part of our nature. A nasty part; but a part. Human nature. Instinct.

  It was an uncomfortable thought. But it only got worse when the man finally shushed the crowd and continued: “According to these sources, this place got its name when a young girl, described as ‘slow of wit’, was drowned in the well by her family. But even though the act was deliberate, the culprits were never brought to justice as they swore that they had believed her to be not a human being, but a changeling. And thus this became the Changeling Well.”

  I sat there on the bench, horrified. A child drowned by her own family? My mind filled with disturbing images which I struggled hard to suppress. But had they really thought that she was a changeling? Really? Or had they just used that as an excuse to get rid of her? Was she, as ‘slow of wit’, a burden to them? An extra mouth to feed? And so they’d simply murdered her and used an old superstition to get away with the crime.

  And then a sudden memory hit me of a poem we’d studied at school about a boy on a farm watching some unwanted kittens being drowned in a bucket of water. And in the poem he’d finally accepted that this was the way it had to be.

  The class had been in an uproar at that, finding it all disgusting. But then the teacher had basically told us to get real, giving us various examples of animals themselves who killed their unwanted young, for example in rejecting the runt of the litter - the small, weak, or injured one - the mother refusing to feed it, just letting it starve to death. Like it or not, as the poem said, it was just a hard fact of life. Nature could be cruel.

  I looked back at the well. The voodoo-like items hanging there seemed even more disturbing now. Especially those with a vaguely human shape like dolls and puppets. And other, less-obviously-recognisable objects seemed to me now like a frightening array of body parts: small bones, shrunken heads, broken carcases. A line of unwanted children.

  As the pensioners moved off, I took a big swig of Coke, letting the liquid swill around my mouth to wash away the bitter taste which had risen up from my throat.

  What was wrong with me? I was being ridiculous. It was just an old story. And probably only a myth anyway.

  But now the wind picked up, crashing through the trees above and sending odd gusts to the well below, making the washing line jiggle, the stone-like objects swinging and swaying in a strange, ritual dance.

  I looked away, screwing the lid onto my bottle. I had to get a grip on myself. But as I was shoving the bottle into my rucksack, I heard it again. A sound on the wind. A distant cry. A voice calling out as it had done at the Falls.

  I looked up, but no one was there. I was alone.

  I busied myself again, fastening the buckle on my bag, zipping up my jacket, trying to tell myself not to be so stupid. There had been no cry. Of course not. How could there have been?

  And yet I had heard it.

  “Help me…!”

  I shivered. It was the story of the changeling that had done this. It must have been. The gushing of the well and the talk of the girl’s drowning had brought my mother’s death back to me. The memories rushing in, unbidden - like the cold, black water.

  And I heard it again, a high-pitched cry on the wind as it wailed above me, reaching down to pluck at the line so that the objects rattled and danced. I stood up, moving closer to the well, my eyes drawn back again to the performance. Pulled there, as if by some kind of hypnotic force. Unable to look away, they swept over the line now, scanning the objects in turn. A lobster, a boot, a handbag, a spade-

  And then something stopped them in their tracks.

  A teddy bear.

  And I knew it.

  I knew what it looked like beneath the thick layer of stony deposits. I knew it was pink. I was sure of it. Candy pink. The inside of its ears white. A tiny strawberry on one paw.

  And its place up on the wire had been an act of rebellion. Of liberation. I felt it within me, as surely as if I had been there myself, experiencing it. In my mind’s eye, I saw the teddy bear being hoisted up on a long pole, and the thin metal hook being looped over the wire.

  And I felt within me an overpowering surge of triumph, of victory, to see it hanging there, being marred by the dripping water.

  But these hugely powerful feelings were, like lightning, extinguished in an instant. And then my whole body began to tremble as my mind was plunged into a much deeper, darker emotion: terror.

  “Melissa?” Dad’s arms were suddenly round me, supporting me. “Are you okay? Your teeth are chattering!”

  I burrowed my face into the folds of his coat, my eyes screwed shut, trying to force the dark feeling from me by sheer willpower, until eventually it released its hold on me, and the spell was broken.

  “Melissa?” Dad looked at me, his expression serious, concerned.

  But how could I tell him what had happened? How could I worry him like that? It would only remind him of Mum.

  So, again, with a huge effort, I slapped on a smile. Pretended it was nothing.

  “Just a bit cold, that’s all,” I said.

  But Dad wasn’t fooled. “No - it’s more than that.” He looked at me, frowning.

  “Then it’s just this place,” I said, sighing, as if he’d forced the information out of me. “All this voodoo stuff. It’s a bit creepy.”

  I had said the right thing this time. His face cleared instantly, the clouds vanishing, and he started to laugh, patting me on the head in a deliberately patronising manner. “Is my sweet, little baby scared of the wicked witch of the well, then?” he said in a stupid voice as if I were two years old.

  I hit out at him, and he began chasing me around, pretending to be some kind of ridiculous pantomime hag coming to get me, while I screamed and laughed, my worries momentarily shelved.

  But all too soon he became grown up and sensible again, eager to get on with his photos. He suggested I go off and explore, but I offered to stand right next to him, holding the equipment. I didn’t want to be alone.

  But being next to Dad didn’t stop me worrying. As soon as we got back to the pub, I’d try one of Dr Henderson’s new tablets. See if that helped. See if it blotted out the insanity once and for all.

  But what if it didn’t? What if this madness co
ntinued? I couldn’t deceive Dad forever. And then he’d march me straight off to Dr Henderson, demanding more help. Something different. Because, if stronger medication on top of almost a year’s worth of weekly sessions with the psychiatrist didn’t work, then perhaps we needed something more extreme.

  And the only thing I could think of was that they’d put me away. They’d have to, wouldn’t they? In some kind of hospital. An institution.

  Dad would think it was all for the best. Of course he would. He’d do it with the best intentions. But the result would be the same, wouldn’t it. He’d send me away from him. Another parent getting rid of a child who wasn’t ‘normal’. Like the changeling.

  And I couldn’t bear that.

  9

  That evening back at the Fox and Hound, I took a long, hot shower. My body was aching: the cold wind seemed to have seeped into my bones, chilling me to the very marrow. I let the steaming water pummel my shoulders, warming and relaxing me. I’d secretly taken one of Dr Henderson’s stronger tablets, and could feel it getting to work already, making me pleasantly lightheaded.

  I still didn’t really understand what was going on. Not fully. I mean, I was used to the dreams - though why they’d changed was a mystery - and I could understand hearing Mum’s voice calling out to me for help. But the teddy bear and the extreme feelings it brought? And the déjà vu? What was that all about? Dr Henderson had once said that extreme trauma could bring on hallucinations. But of teddy bears and hands? It seemed an odd way for my mind to work through its issues.

  As I smoothed shower gel over my skin, my mind wandered to Dad, wondering how he was taking it all. Almost a year without her. His best friend. The love of his life. Mum. But then, he’d thrown himself into his work, hadn’t he. His career was really starting to take off. And obviously, he had me.