by Adam Slater
Most of the time.
The conversation came to an awkward halt.
‘I know!’ said Melissa suddenly. ‘The time when you were born must be on your birth certificate.’
‘Maybe,’ admitted Callum. ‘But I’ve no idea where it is. Besides, we don’t need a piece of paper to say I’m a chime child. I think you’ve already proved that. And I don’t think Gran would be convinced anyway. She doesn’t believe in magic or anything like that.’
‘All the kids at school say she’s a witch!’ Melissa blurted suddenly, her big eyes very wide again.
‘Well, they say that about you too,’ Callum retorted. It was true, and Melissa must have known it. ‘And they say she’s a gypsy, which is rubbish, and they say Mr Gower has an artificial leg, which I bet is also rubbish.’
‘You can sort of see why people might think your gran’s a witch,’ argued Melissa. ‘I mean, living out here in the middle of nowhere with only you and the cat.’
‘Having a cat doesn’t make her a witch, any more than wearing crystals makes you one!’ Callum snapped. ‘She doesn’t know a thing about the supernatural – after I saw the Grim I asked her if there were any local legends about Marlock and she told me to look at a book of old photos of Stockport!’
‘Sounds like she’s in denial,’ said Melissa. ‘A bit like you. Or else she’s hiding something.’
Callum squirmed uncomfortably. He hadn’t forgotten how strangely interested Gran had been when he told her about being followed by the Church Grim, even though she’d tried to explain it away. And then there was the crumbling black and silver book hidden on the ledge above the window . . .
‘Don’t go in for a career in MI6,’ Melissa said. ‘Because your poker face is rubbish. What are you thinking about?’
‘Books,’ admitted Callum, tracing his fingertips over the Dictionary of the Supernatural.
Melissa looked around the room. ‘You said your gran was only into gardening books and novels. Does she have other books here?’
‘I’ve only seen one,’ Callum admitted. ‘But yes. She was looking at it last night. She keeps it hidden. I saw her taking it down to have a look at it.’
‘Were you asking her about the Grim last night? Maybe that’s what she was looking up!’
Callum jumped to his feet and dragged a straight-backed chair over to the window.
‘She won’t be home for another hour,’ he explained. ‘The book’s up here. She hides it behind this front row of newer stuff. Come and help – we’ve got to keep track of what we move, because she’s bound to notice if they’re not put back in the same way. You wouldn’t believe how organised she is.’
Melissa scrambled to her feet as well and studied one of the lower shelves for a moment.
‘You’re right. She’s got all these novels arranged in alphabetical order by author. Did she used to be a librarian?’
Callum didn’t answer. He was already standing on the chair and pulling books off the high shelf.
‘Here, take these,’ he said. ‘Stack them on the floor by the door. In the exact order I pass them to you.’ Much as he was growing to like Melissa, he didn’t quite trust her not to make as much of a mess with the books as she’d made with the hot chocolate. ‘OK, now I’ve got another load . . .’
Bit by bit, Callum emptied the shelf. Just as he had thought, the top shelf was double depth, the books at the front concealing the extra space behind. But it was too dark to see what was there.
‘Can you turn the big light on?’ he asked, pointing. ‘That switch.’
Melissa flicked the switch. Light flooded the room. The telltale flash of silver glimmered from the depths of the hidden shelf, and Callum gasped.
There wasn’t just one book back there. There were dozens.
All the books were bound in leather, but there the similarity ended. They were all different sizes, from small notebooks to thick, chunky tomes. Very few had anything legible written on their spines – either the letters had worn away or they had been blank to begin with – so it was impossible to tell what they were. But one thing was certain: hidden behind Gran’s discarded gardening journals was a row of books as old as the crumbling alms cottage itself. Maybe even older.
‘Is it up there?’ Melissa asked, craning her neck to see.
‘I can’t tell,’ said Callum. ‘She’s got a whole shelf of them here.’
The books were wedged so tightly together, Callum had to pull out a short, fat one to make himself some slack. It was bound in thick, cracked leather, like an old Bible.
‘What do you make of this?’ he asked, passing it down to Melissa.
‘Campanalogia – 1677,’ she announced, peeking inside the front cover. ‘It’s all about the secrets of ringing church bells.’
‘This is more like it,’ said Callum, pulling down another. He opened it and found it was entirely handwritten in painstaking eighteenth-century script.
‘What is it?’ Melissa asked.
‘Hard to tell – the writing’s awful. It looks like a collection of stories, though. Fairy stories or something.’
‘Well, your gran was obviously telling porkies when she said she didn’t have any books about folklore,’ Melissa said. ‘Can you see the one she was reading yesterday?’
Callum frowned, his eyes skimming over the spines.
‘No, I can’t. Hang on a sec, it must be here. It was a black book with silver binding.’
It wasn’t easy to find. Gran had double-hidden it, laying it flat against the wall behind the row of old books. Callum only noticed it when he pulled a third book off the shelf.
‘Got it,’ he said triumphantly.
It was heavy. Callum handed the book to Melissa carefully, holding it with two hands. It was wider than it was tall, and fat as a photograph album, but so old it looked as though it ought to be under glass in the British Library. The leather of the cover was slightly greasy with ancient mildew.
Callum hopped down from the chair and laid the book carefully on the drop-leaf table. He wiped his hands before opening the book’s heavy black cover. He and Melissa sat side by side and stared at the strange pages.
It was some sort of compendium of legendary creatures, made up of handwritten and pasted-in entries, like a scrapbook. Some of the collection was obviously hundreds of years old. The most ancient entries weren’t even on paper, but on thick, crackling parchment or thin skin, sewn on to pages of stiff linen cloth. Generations of collectors must have contributed to it.
‘This beats your Dictionary of the Supernatural,’ Callum breathed.
‘Is there an index? How do we look something up?’ Melissa asked.
‘I don’t think you can,’ Callum said. ‘See – it isn’t organised at all. The oldest entries are at the beginning. We’ll just have to go through it and see what we find.’
Neither Callum nor Melissa could make sense of the early entries, which were easily four hundred years old. The writing was faded and spiky, in Old English – some of it in Latin. There were drawings, too, of monstrous creatures emerging from tombstones and tree stumps, or rising out of chimneys and wells. One picture showed a thin, hairy creature, like a werewolf, with its stomach cut open. Three dead babies lay inside it. Melissa turned the heavy page over quickly.
Callum stared at the strange collection, astonished. Where in the world had Gran got this, and why did she keep it? Some of the pictures made him want to be sick. The book was like something from another world – a world which Callum had assumed his down-to-earth, no-nonsense grandmother neither knew nor cared about.
As they turned the pages, the entries became easier to read. Some of the sewn-in pictures were printed broadsheets; some were torn from other books; some were handmade sketches. One, of a strange, brown, leafy creature, was embroidered directly on to the linen page with thin, shining threads.
‘Wow, that looks like hair,’ Melissa said, and peered at the page up close. After a moment she announced triumphantly, ‘It is hair. The whole
picture’s made of human hair.’
‘Ugh,’ Callum said, startled but impressed by her boldness. ‘Don’t touch it. You don’t know where it’s been.’
Even Melissa did not recognise the forgotten names of some of the strange beings in this old, haphazard catalogue. The Great Horned Woman of Gaughall, Peg Powler and Jenny Greenteeth, the Duergar, Jack-in-Irons, the Mostyn Dragon – page after page of ghosts and demons and spirits, some malignant, some benign.
‘There might be something more recent towards the back,’ Callum said. ‘Skip forwards a bit.’
Melissa turned over a sheaf of stiff linen and the scrapbook fell open to a page full of faded brown photographs on thin glass plates with metal backing. There were six on each side of the page, each photo showing nothing but a haunting woodland scene of bare, tangled trees.
Each picture was simply labelled ‘Marlock Wood’, in neat, Victorian script, the ink faded as brown as the photographs. Callum turned the page. Another dozen slides of the same view were stuck on the yellowed linen.
Melissa shivered. ‘These are spookier than the monsters,’ she said. ‘The same picture again and again with nothing in it. It’s like someone was trying . . .’
‘. . . to take a picture of something that doesn’t turn up on the film,’ Callum finished. ‘Yeah. I wonder . . .’
He turned another page, and this time there were twelve pictures all lined up neatly and labelled ‘Nether Marlock churchyard’.
This time it was Callum’s turn to shiver.
‘Nothing in these, either,’ said Melissa. ‘Unless you count empty graves.’
Callum shook his head. ‘It’s the photos that are empty, not the graves.’
He turned the next page. He could tell by the weight of the linen that there were no more photos. This time there was a picture – a pen and ink sketch of two figures in a landscape.
The background scene was unmistakeable – it was Nether Marlock Churchyard, seen from exactly the same angle as the photographs, with the old yew tree in the background. Standing in the foreground were a boy and a dog.
The boy was drawn in stark contrasts: dark, longish hair, his tight-fitting Victorian clothes black as well, and a face as pale and blank as a field of snow. The dog beside the boy, crouched as though it were about to spring out of the page, was so big it still came up to his waist. Its fangs gleamed stark white in the black, impenetrable ink of its fur.
The picture was labelled ‘The Grim of Nether Marlock churchyard’. Judging by the yellowed paper and faded ink, it was at least a century old. But the boy that looked out from the page was, without doubt, the same one that Callum had forbidden to enter the cottage not quite an hour ago.
It was a picture of Jacob and Doom.
Chapter 13
Beneath the picture was a handwritten note on lined jotter paper. The handwriting was different to any of the other notes or entries they had seen in the book. Callum wondered how many different hands this book had passed through over the hundreds of years of its existence.
This sketch believed to be made by a local shopkeeper known to the photographer, the note read. After months of failed attempts to capture an image of the Grim with collodion and silver nitrate, this drawing was completed based on an accurate description given to the artist. No more accurate representation is known. The drawing dates to the latter years of the 90s.
‘It’s older than that!’ exclaimed Melissa.
‘It means 1890s, not 1990s,’ replied Callum. ‘Look how old the photos are. They’re on glass plates.’
‘Is that what your black dog looks like?’ Melissa asked.
‘That is my black dog,’ Callum breathed. ‘That’s the exact place I saw it, beneath that yew tree. Only I saw it there yesterday!’
And outside the door an hour ago, he added silently.
Callum turned another page, but now the entries moved on to more recent photographs of other churchyards, and other stories. Then, towards the back of the book, the entries suddenly skipped forward in time and became more or less contemporary. The dates on the yellowed newsprint were no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. Melissa and Callum both recognised the style of the local weekly newspaper, the Marlock Advertiser, which hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years.
Haunted Church Out of Bounds This Halloween, read the headline.
Nether Marlock Church, now an ancient monument, will be surrounded by a police patrol this year over the weekend of 31st October – 1st November. Due to reports of the graveyard being home to a ghostly black dog, Nether Marlock Church has recently become a popular site for Halloween visits. The Advertiser would like to remind readers in the strongest possible terms that ancient monuments can be dangerous. Under no circumstances should this site be visited in the dark, due to uneven ground and the danger of falling masonry. Police officers will be on hand this weekend to remove any trespassers.
Beneath this clipping was another note, a careless scrawl written in blue biro.
Others have seen it too. Who reports these sightings? A record of names will amount to a list of local chime births.
On the opposite page was a photocopied leaflet advertising a themed ‘Spooky Saturday’ at a local pub. The sketch that decorated the advert, a silhouette of a huge dog, looked very familiar. The owner of the blue ballpoint pen clearly thought so too and had commented: Definitely another recent sighting. Artist unwilling to discuss.
‘Is this your gran’s handwriting?’ Melissa asked, awed.
‘No,’ Callum answered. ‘It’s similar, but hers isn’t this spiky.’
As Melissa opened her mouth to reply, Callum heard the click of the front gate. He glanced up wildly at the clock – half past six.
‘Quick!’ Callum hissed. ‘It’s Gran! This has to go back on the shelf. We’ve got a minute if we’re quick. I put the bolt on -’
He glanced across at the door. The bolt was drawn back. Callum swore. He’d only bolted it against Jacob, not a second time when Melissa had come in.
‘Hurry!’
Melissa hauled her chair across the room and jumped on it in one frantic sweep of energy. Callum handed the book up to her and she slid it into place behind the back row of books.
‘Here,’ Callum gasped, pressing the gardening books into her arms. ‘They’ve got to be in the right order. Quick, quick!’
Gran was struggling with the door. Even without the bolt, it was still double-locked, and that gave them precious extra seconds. Callum shoved the books into Melissa’s hands and she banged them into place.
‘Callum?’ called Gran.
‘Wait a sec, Gran, I’m coming!’ Callum stalled.
He gave it ten seconds – just long enough for Melissa to slam the last handful of books into place and leap down from the chair.
‘Coming, Gran!’ Callum cried out breathlessly, and opened the door.
‘Why on Earth did you double-lock the door if you were inside, Callum?’ asked Gran irritably as she stepped inside. ‘There’s absolutely no need to -’
She broke off as she surveyed the scene. Callum, red-faced and breathing hard; Melissa standing guiltily beside the chair that she’d pushed haphazardly up against the wall beneath the window.
Melissa gave Gran a nervous smile.
‘Hi, Mrs Scott. I’m Melissa Roper from Callum’s school. I came to help him with some questions he’d asked about our geography homework -’
‘So what are you doing with my books?’ Gran asked, jerking the chair away from the wall.
‘I was just, um, closing the curtains,’ Melissa improvised.
‘They were closed,’ Gran said stonily.
‘Gosh, I’m sorry, Mrs Scott,’ Melissa stammered. ‘I thought there was a draught. I was just trying to get them shut properly before we started. Sorry about the mess . . .’
Cadbury had found the half-filled mugs still sitting on the hearth and was lapping cold hot chocolate out of one of them. Melissa swooped down to push the cat away but only man
aged to knock over the mug and spill the remaining contents on to the oriental rug. Cadbury tucked in happily.
‘Sorry!’ Melissa cringed, mopping at the rug with her sleeve. ‘I’m so, so sorry!’
‘Never mind that,’ snapped Gran. ‘Just don’t touch anything else! In fact, I think you’d better leave. Do your parents know where you are?’
Gran must have made a direct hit. Melissa winced. ‘I was going to ring my mum but I forgot,’ she stammered, gathering up her bag and books in a rush. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go.’
Gran turned her wrath on Callum. ‘I’d like to know ahead of time if you’re planning to invite friends round when I’m not here,’ she growled. ‘I can’t have strangers making themselves at home behind my back like this! What were you thinking, Callum?’
‘It won’t happen again, Mrs Scott,’ said Melissa, scooping up her green cape. ‘I’ll be sure to let you know ahead of time . . .’
‘We’ll see about that,’ was Gran’s frosty reply as she stood aside from the still-open door.
Melissa backed out murmuring apologies and excuses. Gran accepted them with a curt nod of her head. She didn’t speak as she shut the door.
‘Gran! Melissa came here to help me!’
Callum couldn’t believe how hostile his gran was being. He couldn’t even make sense of it.
‘She can help you without going near my books!’ Gran snapped.
‘Since when did your books become so precious? You never even look at most of them! I haven’t had anyone from school round since I came to live here. No one’ll come back if you scare them all off. Is that what you want?’
‘Oh, Callum, don’t be so melodramatic.’
‘I’m going to say goodbye,’ said Callum. ‘Someone told me that was called manners. Oh yeah – it was you.’
With that, Callum yanked open the door and followed Melissa into the darkness.
*
The Hunter is suddenly aware of its prey again.
The Hunter has never known such a thing to happen. It hesitates for a moment, wondering what this means.
