The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

  Although their yards and gardens were submerged, the houses on the right of the street, had been spared the worst, and these included Ma Wagstaff's cottage, wherein we came upon something inexplicably strange.

  Dic Castle was sitting in Ma's old rocking-chair in an

  atmosphere of unexpected tranquility. He had been brought to the house at his own request after Stan Burrows and a certain policeman had been unable to find Cathy Gruber.

  Curiously calm, Dic had insisted they leave him alone, and with so many horrors competing for their attention they didn't argue for long.

  And so the lad sat himself down in the rocking chair and slept through all the roaring and the screaming, and he dreamed of an old lady rather irritably bandaging his wounds, continually assuring him that she had better things to do.

  I myself have seen those wrists. Now, still within a week, the scars are scarcely visible.

  I am a schoolteacher and an historian, a man of facts. I make no comments upon this.

  The American, Mr Macbeth .. . Mungo, why not? ... could so easily have followed the rest of us into the church and saved himself, but instead displayed exceptional and foolhardy courage.

  I doubt if he himself knew whether it was Cathy or Miss Moira Cairns he thought he could save. But in his desperate race down the village street he must have felt himself to be close to the epicentre of an earthquake, drenched by the insidious black liquid, with cobs of semi-solid peat falling like bombs all around him and the crackling roar of collapsing buildings on the western side.

  Eventually, the young man reached The Man I'th Moss, and must have been horrified by what he found.

  For the pub began with the second storey, its ground floor buried under a black avalanche, the lantern over the front door half submerged but still eerily alight.

  Mungo knew the peat would be far too deep to enable him to reach the rear of the building in the normal way, so he waded out to the boundary wall - now no more than a foot above the surface - clambered on to it and moved perilously, like a tightrope walker, around the forecourt until he reached the yard at the rear, at the end of which was the remains of the barn which had been used by Matt Castle for his music.

  An ante-room to hell.

  ... Oh, Jesus ... the fuck am I gonna do? I can't handle this. There's nobody alive here. There ... is ... nobody ... alive.

  Clawing at his eyes, filling up with the black shit.

  And what if I find her body? You expect me to deal with that, Duchess? You sent me down to here to bring her body back, that it? Well, fuck you. Duchess, f ...

  Hold it.

  Voices. Close up.

  Maybe these were echoes of voices from before the deluge, peat preserving the last blocked screams of the dying.

  'Drop it. Darling ... simply drop it. It'll pull you down. Drop the stone - listen to me, now - drop the stone and wade away because - believe this - another four or five paces and you'll be in over your head, and it won't matter. Drop the stone and back away now and save yourself. All you can do, m'dear.'

  'Get stuffed!'

  Cathy.

  Macbeth saw that after the rain, after the blast, there was a lightness in the sky, still night but somehow drained of darkness. A phoney dawn, bringing things and people into visibility.

  Cathy was waist-deep in the peat, her fine, fair hair gummed to her skull. She was looking up, but not at the rained-out sky.

  Above her, balanced upon a fallen roof-spar, an apparition glowing white, or so it seemed, undamaged by the night or the storm of peat, was the writer, John Peveril Stanage.

  Macbeth crouched on his wall.

  It was clear that Stanage knew exactly why Cathy was holding, above the level of the peat, a single grey boulder, the kind from which these tough drystone walls had been constructed.

  And it was clear also that he believed - part of the psychological mesh he'd helped weave, the mystical dynamic he'd set in motion long ago - that if this boulder should be put

  in place, in some particular place, he'd be able to proceed no further in the direction of Bridelow.

  He believed this.

  In the air, a glimmering, light on metal.

  Stanage had hold of a length - five feet or so - of copper pipe.

  This was not mystical.

  Even as Macbeth struggled to his feet, the pipe began to swing.

  'No!'

  As he fell from the wall, the pipe smashed into Cathy.

  Macbeth rolled into three feet of liquid crud and came up like a sheep out of the dip, found it hard to stand upright, the stuff up around his waist and it was so goddamn heavy, filling up the pockets of his slicker; he shrugged out of the slicker, stood there, breathing like a steam engine, black shit soaking into his fucking useless Bloomingdale menswear department cashmere sweater.

  'Cathy... where the f... ?'

  'Who are you?' said Stanage.

  Macbeth scraped peat out of his eyes. 'It doesn't matter,' he said.

  He heard Cathy spluttering beside him, glanced briefly at her - something oozing out the side of her head, something that wasn't peat. He pushed himself in front of her, slime slurping down the front of his pants; cold as hell.

  'Cathy, just do as he says and get outa here, willya."

  Cathy's hands came out of the mire with a kind of sucking sound and they were still clutching the grey stone. He saw her grinning, small white teeth in a small blackened face.

  'Go!' Macbeth screamed. 'Get the fuck outa here!'

  He heard the wafting of the copper pipe through the moist air and he threw himself forward and met it with his body, hard into the chest, and his skin was so cold and numb that if it cracked a rib, or maybe two, he didn't even feel it.

  He wrenched hard on the pipe and heard a grunt and then Stanage was tumbling from the end of his roofspar and, breaking the surface of the Moss with a splat, and Macbeth went under. And when he came up, the peat felt a whole lot colder and he couldn't even cough it out of his lungs because of the long fingers like a wire garotte around his throat.

  From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):

  Mungo Macbeth having instructed her, in his distressingly restricted New York parlance, to remove herself, Cathy realized she had little choice but to do as he said. The girl cannot swim - even if anyone could in liquid of this consistency and temperature - and her only hope was to get help.

  You must remember that Cathy was in a state of some bewilderment; she had not seen the bog burst, only heard the thunder roar, and, like most of us, could have had no concept of the scale of the devastation.

  But the village must have looked very different, shockingly so, with the converted gaslamps on one side of the street protruding no more than a few feet from the murky surface of what had now become an extension of the Moss.

  And the poor girl must have been appalled by the sight of the collapsed cottages, the telephone box protruding from the peat like a buoy and the Post Office in ruins behind it.

  She waded frantically back to the wall, placed the grey stone on top, hauled herself up after it and sat there a while, shattered by what she had seen and half-stunned by the blow from the pipe which had landed on her shoulder and rebounded on to the side of her head. She knew there was blood there, mingling with the rivulets of peatwater from her hair, but she did not touch the wound, preferring to remain ignorant of its extent and severity so long as she could function.

  Cathy tells me - rather ashamed - that her mind at this point had simply blanked out Mungo Macbeth and what might be happening to him at the cold hands of John Peveril Stanage. She sat on the wall, with the grey stone on her knees. Beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond fatigue, beyond thought... even beyond prayer.

  And when all feeling had gone, apart from a sense of

  failure and despair, something came to her.

  Now ...

  Problems.

  It is not my place to be credulous and speak of 'vision'. Nor would I wish to use the clinically dismissive
term 'hallucination'.

  Of course, I have read the stories, the 'eyewitness testimony', from Lourdes to Fatima to Knock and Walsingham, and occasionally I have been impressed and heartened but most times left cold and more than a little sceptical.

  I have heard of similar eyewitness reports from the edge of bubbling streams in the Peak District of Derbyshire and - yes - from our own Holy Well above Bridelow. And these have not been chronicled at all, for, in the view of devout Roman Catholics, Our Lady is hardly considered to be the same figure as Their 'lady', although both have been 'seen' to shine with a silvery aureole, as of the moon rather than the sun.

  Well. Cathy's Lady - you'll laugh, or perhaps you won't - wore a duffel coat.

  She appeared to be sitting next to the lass on the wall. She was not beautiful, Cathy says, but her aura of feminine grace was so powerfully calming that the air became still and soft and moist, and even the rugged stones beneath her felt like cushions.

  She remembers hanging her head, her chin upon her chest, and the lady stroking her hair. Or at least it was stroked.

  About the duffel coat.

  My researches tell me that the priests and priestesses of Ancient Britain - the shaman class, if you will - would usually be attired for ceremonial purposes in a loose, hooded garment of blue wool. Quite when the duffel coat, as we know it, reappeared I don't know; my knowledge of social history has never extended to fashion trends, but it has always struck me as curiously meaningful that, while most coats are fastened with plastic buttons or zips, the duffel is secured by pegs of wood. Or (even more interesting) of horn.

  But I digress.

  The next thing Cathy remembers is standing at a point halfway between the end of the pub forecourt and the first of the ruined cottages. The peat was up to her knees.

  Our Lady of the Duffel Coat was gone.

  And so was the stone.

  Cathy says she felt nothing; neither relief nor the old despair. She was an empty vessel. It was not until later that she would recall the lady in any supernatural sense. She had been as real as the stone, which Cathy had no memory of depositing.

  Now there was only the practical problem of avoiding death on the drowning side of the village.

  The Beacon of the Moss was alight again, courtesy of Alf Beckett and his floodlight. It threw a strange glimmer on the black surface of a new river flowing between great banks of peat down the middle of the street. From out of a mound of peat, a stiffened arm protruded, the fingers curled and black.

  From behind her, Cathy heard voices. She turned her back on the street and waded towards the sound, coming at last to the most southerly part of the village which ran down to the Moss near the causeway and where, she remembered, Lottie Castle was to have placed her stone.

  It was here that Cathy became the last person to see Shaw Horridge and Therese Beaufort - later formally identified as one Tessa Byford - alive.

  The effects of the Burst at this southern point were somewhat less marked. Although the Moss had overflowed the causeway in places (which was to cause serious delays for the rescue service vehicles) it had not reached a life-threatening depth for an adult.

  The man and woman were thigh-deep at the edge of the causeway, and Cathy was about to call out to them when she realized who they were. Lady Strychnine, as she'd referred to Therese, was hissing at Shaw to get back and leave her and attempting to disengage his hand from around her wrist. Shaw, it appeared, was trying to drag her back towards the village and laughing in a voice which Cathy has described to me as surprisingly coarse and cruel.

  'Come on,' Shaw was shouting, almost gleefully. 'Come back. You can do it. You'll feel so much better.'

  He kept repeating this phrase, hitting her with it, Cathy says, and pulling at her arm, and Therese was screaming shrilly and at one stage actually vomiting with fear.

  'Lottie's stone, you see,' Cathy is telling me. 'Therese couldn't go past the stone.' And it was then that I realized' - Cathy shakes her head in incomprehension - 'that it had worked. That we'd done it. That the Bridelow Mothers' Union was able to function.'

  And knowing what she knew about the woman (not half of what we now know) Cathy felt no great pity when Shaw Horridge quickly let go of Therese's wrists and suddenly delivered an enormous blow to her face with his fist.

  All this time Cathy had been backing away up the street towards the village centre, and she turned around just once to see Shaw Horridge walking very slowly and deliberately up the street with Therese's slender body hanging limply from his arms.

  As I recorded earlier, it was two days before the corpses were found. This happened when an executive of Gannons accompanied the company's insurance assessor into the brewery to see what minor damage had occurred.

  They would hardly have bothered to go into the malt loft even it had not been firmly locked and no keys apparent. As it was, they progressed no further than the second level where the 'coppers' stand.

  These are the huge tanks in which the 'wort', as the initial preparation is known, is mixed with the hops (or bog myrtle in old Bridelow Brewery days) which preserve the beer and give it that all-important bitter quality.

  It appeared that Shaw, quite methodically, had lit the oil- boiler and gone about the beer-making process on his own, something which, to my own knowledge, he had been able to do since the age of twelve under the paternal eye of Arthur Horridge.

  The operation must have taken Shaw several hours, by which time the village was teeming with urgent life: fire and ambulance personnel, moorland rescue teams, television crews; at least two helicopters overhead. I wonder, what state was Therese in during this period? Was she conscious? Did she know what was to happen? Was she - already forcibly conveyed beyond a boundary which she had been psychologically incapable of crossing unassisted - in any state to object?

  The copper, by the way, is also known as the 'brew kettle' because in it the hops are boiled into the wort preparatory to the addition of yeast.

  They say the insurance assessor passed out after finding the bodies of Shaw and Therese, which must have boiled for nearly two hours before the boiler, reaching danger-level, had automatically cut out.

  Was this, I wonder, another example - drowning, boiling and perhaps, in Therese's case, simultaneous strangulation - of that ancient mystery, the Celtic Triple Death?

  What was Shaw's state of mind? Was he angry? Embittered? Remorseful? Or a dangerous brew of all three?

  Tell me,' I ask Cathy. 'When you heard them on the edge of the Moss, was Shaw stuttering, as he used to do? You know ... You'll fer-fer-feel ber-ber-better?'

  'No,' she says. 'I'm pretty sure he wasn't.'

  'I'm glad,' I say.

  Poor Mungo.

  His larynx full of peat, his eyes staring up in terminal terror into the eyes of the madman Stanage, his mouth no doubt full of flip New York obscenities which he now knew he would never utter.

  Poor lad.

  The stranger in a strange land. Thrown upon the Scottish shore with the instruction, I am told, to discover his 'roots'.

  By 'eck. How gullible some of these Americans are apt to be.

  And the winds of fate ... nay, the typhoons of fate, can sometimes pick you up and put you down precisely where you wanted to be. Only when you look around, do you realise it's the very last place you wanted to be.

  He found his Celtic roots, all right. We might not wear kilts or speak a different language or owt like that, but I reckon we've been closer in Bridelow to the true Celtic way - Shades of things, Ernest! (Aye, thank you, Ma) - than you'll find in any lonely hamlet in Sutherland or Connemara.

  And I think it will survive. I think the Mothers will watch over the rebuilding of a stronger Bridelow, I doubt they'll ever again 'let things slide'.

  Cathy won't let them.

  Did you know, Hans, by the way, that your daughter was coming to the end of her second and final year at a very reputable theological college outside Oxford? I bet you didn't. I bet she just kept telling you
she was doing 'post-graduate research' or something of that order.

  But Ma Wagstaff knew. Ma Wagstaff spoke more than once of the 'one who'll come after me' and everybody laughed because it sounded so quaintly biblical.