by Phil Rickman
...for the night is growing older
and you feel it at your shoulder ...
She could feel Matt Castle at her shoulder, a wedge of cold energy.
And more.
'Shut up,' Stanage said.
Could smell the peat in him now.
Pulling the blue plastic lamp between her breasts until it hurt. Feeling the shadow behind her, huge and dense and pungent with black peat. Don't turn around. Don't look at him.
But John Peveril Stanage was looking. Stanage was transfixed.
All at once there was complete quiet.
The rain,' Macbeth said. 'The rain stopped.'
Damn futile observation; everybody here could tell the rain had stopped.
He found he was in the middle of a crowd under the smiling snatch people called Our Sheila; been so busy watching the weird lights on the Moss he hadn't noticed the Mothers returning. Without their stones.
One of them standing next to him, shaking out her hair. 'Where's Moira?' It was Milly.
'She's not with you?' Cold panic grabbed his gut. 'You're telling me you haven't seen her?'
'We couldn't wait for her. We had thirteen stones to put down. Cathy's had to take two.' Milly glanced around. 'Cathy not back yet?'
'Listen ...' Macbeth grabbed her shoulders. 'Moira told Dic she'd gone to ... meet the Man. I figured that meant she was part of your operation.'
Milly shook her head. 'I'd be terrified to meet the Man. I don't know, Mungo. I really don't know what she meant. I'm sorry.'
'You all right?' Willie demanded.
'Tired. Exhausted. We've done all we can. Willie. That's the most I can say. I doubt it'll be enough.'
'Oh.' Mr Dawber, looking out across the Moss. 'Oh, good God.'
In the centre of rainless stillness, there came a noise overhead like deep, bass thunder. Like the exploding of the night. Like the splitting of the sky.
And they all saw it.
The reason they all saw it was that Bridelow Moss was suddenly lit up like a football ground.
The Beacon of the Moss was back, not blue this time but ice-white and a thousand times more powerful.
'It's Alf s arc light,' some woman explained. 'Knew he'd have it fixed before long. What was that b ... ? Oh, Mother. Oh, Mother, help us! What's that?'
At first, Macbeth was simply not able to believe it. There was no precedent. It was outside the sphere of his knowledge.
First thing he saw, snagged in the floodlight, was the malformed tree with branches like horns. The horns of a stag-beetle, he thought now. Because an insect was what the tree resembled.
Or a bunch of brittle twigs.
Insignificant compared with what was growing out of the Moss, beyond, behind and far, far above it.
It was happening on the edge of the light, at what was surely the highest point of the Moss. Macbeth thought of a mushroom cloud. He thought of Hiroshima. He thought of Nagasaki. He thought in images on cracked film in black and white.
He heard shrill screams from the Moss and he thought, Shit, it's the end of the goddamn world.
Mushroom was wrong. More like a dense bunch of flowers. Or a cauliflower. A gigantic, obscene black cauliflower burgeoning monstrously from the bog.
The silent air was dank with a smell like the grave.
And, up close, the sour smell of primitive, bowel-melting fear.
'What is it?' Milly screeched. 'What is it, Mr Dawber?'
'It can't be ...'
'What? What?'
People clutching at one another.
Ernie Dawber said hollowly, 'It's burst."
Macbeth just stood there watching the liquid vegetable form in a kind of slow motion.
'The bog's burst,' Ernie Dawber cried out, aghast. 'It's bloody burst! Everybody ... into the church! Fast!'
'Where's Cathy?' Milly shrieked above the tumult of rising panic. 'She went down to take the last stone.'
'Where? Where to?'
'To the pub. The back wall. Under the old foundation stone. It's the last one'
As the air suited to thicken, Macbeth began to run, down through the graveyard towards the street, and by the time his feet hit the cobbles, a wall of cold, black, liquid peat was thundering into the village like volcanic lava.
'What have you done?'
'I obviously have an affinity ...' John Peveril Stanage grinned, '... with the Moss.'
'You are a fucking insane man.'
'What is sanity?' Stanage said, as the high windows blew out and the whole roof of the barn was smashed down by the blackest of nights.
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow.
THE BOG BURST
The scale and severity of the Bridelow Bog Burst has caused widespread shock and disbelief, although it was not without precedent.
Such phenomena have occurred infrequently within recorded history, usually after a period of inordinately heavy rainfall when the surface layer of vegetation becomes too weak to retain the liquefied mass of peat beneath.
Several minor bog-slides have been reported in recent decades. After a midsummer thunderstorm in 1963, a peat- slide affected a large area of Meldon Hill bog in the Northern Pennines, leaving two scars in the blanket peat about 230 metres long and 36 metres wide.
Many centuries earlier but closer to the site of our own disaster was the eruption of Chat Moss, near Manchester, which Leland, an historian in the reign of Henry VIII, records as having 'brast up and destroied much grounds and much fresche water fische therabowt and so carried stinking water into the Mersey and carried the roulling mosse to the shores of Wales, part to the Isle of Man and sum into Ireland.'
One cannot but suspect a certain exaggeration in this account. But those of us who experienced the horror of that night, those who lost friends or loved ones or only their homes will carry with them to their own graves the smell, the texture and, for some, the very taste of the black and ancient vegetable matter we call peat.
From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):
A TALL ORDER, owd lad.
To try and unearth the truth from the Black. To make sense out of what happened. To consider whether my beloved Bridelow has a future. And, if so, what kind.
I thought at first to put it off until after the official Government inquiry, from which there'll obviously be a report for public scrutiny. However, that's not likely to emerge for months, and when it does it's bound to be a dry Civil Service document full of scientific guff and a list of safety recommendations for communities which happen to be situated on the edge of large, unstable peatbogs.
'Ernie,' you said, 'you're the only man who can put all this into any sort of human and historical perspective. You must get it down while it's fresh. Before it becomes part of Bridelow Mythology.'
What you really meant was. While you're still with us, Ernie.
'And who'll read it, owd lad?'
'Let's hope,' you said sadly, 'that nobody outside of Bridelow will ever have to.'
So I'm writing this in your study at the Rectory while you're up at the church, conducting your first evensong since the Burst. Thanks to your charity, I've been sleeping (whenever the Lord permits it) in the little spare room it the top of the house.
Emergency accommodation. My own house, exposed up by the school, being one of the first destroyed.
Seemed, when it was happening, like Armageddon: most of what we knew and loved engulfed by a dreadful destructive force ... perhaps the merciless anger of the Lord, which we had brought upon ourselves by clinging to our primitive Christian paganism while all those around us (them Across the Moss) had long since been converted and embraced the Light.
Embraced the light? Don't make me laugh. There's more black out there than you'll find in Bridelow even now, under its dark blanket of peat.
Peat preserves.
The Moss preserved the ancient dead and two millennia of fear, violence, sickness and dread. And other things of which we do not speak, of which we cannot speak. Of which Matt Castle,
all those years ago, could not speak, only let it pour away, out of the pipes, as he wandered in his agony upon the Moss.
It has absorbed all our overflowing emotions, this Moss, like a gigantic psychic cesspit. It has preserved and it has neutralized. An archaic chemical cathartic.
Ignore me, Hans, I'm getting too deep. Or too whimsy, as Ma Wagstaff would sometimes rebuke me, poor owd lass.
Avoiding getting to the simple physical horror of it.
Thousands of tons of the filthy stuff. Liquefied peat. Stink? I don't think I'll ever get rid of it from the back of my throat. And certainly not from the back of my thoughts. Not as long as I breathe.
Cowering in the choir stalls, we could hear it descending all around the church, still hearing the echo of that cataclysmic thunderclap in aftershocks of rumbling and roaring, and we thought the church would implode, the walls collapse in upon us with a shattering shower of stained glass.
But the church held. The makeshift Autumn Cross swayed and rustled, the lights went out and came on again, bar the one above the door, but the church held.
More than my house did. Reason it went: it was on the wrong side of the street. The first explosion, the actual burst, sent the fountaining filth hundreds of feet into the air ... why, bits of it were found on the moor, five or six miles away.
But when it settled into a mere tidal wave - a bit, they say, like the tip slide which killed all those poor kids in South Wales - it was the buildings on the west side of the street that took it: the Post Office, the chip shop, Bibby's General Stores (poor old Gus Bibby couldn't have known a thing; his flat over the shop was filled up in seconds with liquid peat as dark and evil-looking as the comfrey oil in one of Ma Wagstaff's jars).
Naturally, The Man I'th Moss, the most westerly building in the village, on the very edge of the bog, is now under a great morass of muck. Selling it won't be a problem for Lottie Castle now; just a question of collecting the insurance, more than enough for a semi in Wilmslow.
At least thirty people died in the village that night; how many were simply victims of the Bog Burst may never be established. Which is, you will agree, just as well.
Quite a few are believed to have perished instantly out on the Moss, although, again, an exact number will probably never be known. Perhaps, over hundreds of years, the bodies will be disinterred, perfectly preserved no doubt, like our Man. Museum pieces - although perhaps not, because the Burst will be part of recorded history, so people will understand.
Or will they? Do any of us, even now, know precisely what happened, or why?
Except for Dr Roger Hall, who was seen by his assistant, Mrs White, to be heading for the Moss a short time before the Burst, most of those who died out there, in conditions which recall what I've read of the black horrors of the Somme, will remain unidentified. Many were likely to have been men and women long estranged from their families or disowned by their relatives because of the unacceptable practices in which they indulged themselves.
I know very little about so-called 'satanism', whether this is simply a convenient name we have given to those who seek personal power over others through supposedly supernatural means. Whether, as some say, they sacrificed newborn babies out on the moor in order to 'reconsecrate' the stone circle, I certainly don't know that. I do not want to know.
All I do know is that extremism of any kind has never taken root in Bridelow, where a practical paganism and a humble Christianity have comfortably linked hands for so long. Many of the dead, sadly, were members of the fundamentalist Christian group called, if I have this right, The Church of the Angels of the New Advent. A large number of them, including their leaders, Mr and Mrs Christopher Montcrieff, heard the mighty thunder-roar and - believing it to be the dawning of the Day of Judgment, as forecast in the Book of Revelations - rushed out of the Rectory into the street with arms and (I would like to think) hearts upraised.
And, in seconds, were buried alive.
Not that many would have remained alive for long under that glutinous mess, most being crushed or drowned or suffocated very rapidly, mouths and noses and lungs clogged for ever. Some of those who did survive had been trapped in pockets of air under beams or walls or other protective bullwarks - although just as many were killed by masonry which was crumbling like crisp toast under the weight of hundreds of tons of peat.
The first death, largely overshadowed by what was to come, remains officially unexplained.
The body in the BMW motor car did indeed prove to be that of my old friend Eliza Horridge. There will be an inquest, and it will probably record an Open Verdict, for Liz appears to have died not of injuries sustained in a car accident and the subsequent fire but some hours earlier and of hypothermia, due to exposure.
There is no question that Liz was suffering from an agoraphobia exacerbated by the fear that her presence was no longer welcome in Bridelow following the sale of the brewery to Gannons (I feel, therefore, that none of us who knew her is exempt from blame) and that, fearing the imminent reappearance of her old lover, John Lucas (whom I shall henceforth, to keep him at a distance, refer to by his adopted nom-de-plume of John Peveril Stanage) courageously overcame her illness to seek the aid of her one-time protector, Iris Wagstaff.
And when Ma - who then had herself but a short time left to live - failed to answer her door, Liz, feeling she dare not return home, became confused and wandered out on to the moor. I cannot bring myself to contemplate those cold, wet hours of mental agony and desperation before she succumbed to fatigue and lay down to the sad sleep from which she would never awaken.
I can only assume that her body was discovered on the moor by the sick, satanic brethren recruited by Stanage and his temptress and conveniently employed, most of them, by Gannons. And then (remember, we are not dealing here with wholly rational people) someone decided to put Liz's body into the car, from which they had removed Miss Moira Cairns, before destroying it. As the police could establish no link whatsoever between Liz and Miss Cairns, it was assumed the car had been stolen, but inquiries, I am told, are not yet complete.
As to the part played in this affair by the brewery ... Well,
its the economic heart of the village, it was obviously a target for someone with malice in mind
I realise now that perhaps the very first death of what we might, quite justifiably, call Bridelow's War, was that of Andy Hodgson, the young worker who 'fell' to the ground during the reassembly of the rusted pulley-and-platform mechanism used originally for winching sacks to the highest level of the brewery ... that old malt store which was to become the unholiest of temples.
It is my belief that Andy Hodgson was himself a foundation-sacrifice to consecrate the malt store, in one of several corruptions of Celtic ritual performed in an effort to crumble the edifice of our tradition. The platform was later used, there can be no doubt, to winch up the body of Matt Castle, stolen from its grave for despicable necromantic purposes.
It was early days, though, and Andy's death was clearly less elaborate than that of poor Joel Beard, for whom I shall always have a certain respect, whose body remains buried somewhere out on the Moss, and perhaps far more deeply now than was ever intended.
The brewery, in an eastern corner of the village, much shielded by trees, was unaffected by the Burst. When a certain police officer paid a discreet visit the following morning he did not find what he apparently had been expecting. The remains of Matt Castle and Young Frank Manifold had disappeared.
A mystery? Not, I suspect, much of one. I think, if I were to question a few former regulars of The Man I'th Moss, particularly the estimable Mr Stanley Burrows, I might discover that, in the aftermath of the Burst and all the panic and confusion, the number of bodies in the bog had been surreptitiously supplemented.
The aforementioned policeman, an untypically thoughtful and philosophical officer approaching retirement, wishes it to be recorded that he was not in Bridelow on the night of the disaster and is unlikely to return. Although, I am informed, this
officer has been undertaking some private 'stress-counselling' with a certain widow, in his own time.
It was to be two days before the other bodies were discovered at the brewery. I shall come to this.
Those of us, including Benjie's dog and Ma's cats, who sought sanctuary in the church remained unharmed, although it was terrifying to feel the building almost rocking around us. Surrounded by rescue-squads in the wan light of early dawn, we could see peat four or five feet deep in parts of the churchyard, like an obscene black parody of snowdrifts.
Most of the graves had disappeared, just the heads of
crosses showing. Our Sheila remained in position, looking perhaps more disgruntled than usual with her most public parts gunged up with peat.
