Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  Then Bruno saw Elders themselves. And sure enough they had armfuls more of paper, were rapping on doors and scolding the occupants for not being quick enough to answer or too quick (‘Which must mean ye’re not occupying yerselves properly with some hard work!’). Bruno watched them press copies of the Eleven Decent Ways into the hands of the too-slow (or too-quick).

  He slowed enough to hear … The Elders were wanting donations. And information – ‘How many children do ye have? How old? Boy or girl? Oh, here he is now! Nine turns, did ye say? He’s big for his age, isn’t he? Looks very sprightly and strong, plenty of life in him! Would he be interested, I’m wondering, in spending some time with the Elders? Coz we’d be very interested indeed in having him for a few hours, teach him some of the rightly-decent ways.’

  Bruno passed Enforcers, door-knocking too, with harder fists and stamped warrants, demanding to see inside, to catch people out. Bruno knew that a pair – man and wife, both eighty-eight turns old – had been arrested earlier that week for having too much food in their cupboards. ‘On suspicion,’ said the Pitch End Journal, ‘of hoarding food to provide to the Rebels! (For more on the latest Elder predictions on the possible return of the Rebels, turn to page two.)’

  At the end of his street, Bruno stopped at the base of the large wooden sign on two tall legs that declared:

  1,915 DAYS SINCE ANY ‘UNPLEASANTNESS’ IN PITCH END – ELDERS BE PRAISED!

  Bruno couldn’t stop himself thinking, 1,915 days since everyone Forgot my da.

  Ducking under the sign, his feet sank into Diamond Beach. An outflung arm of sand, colour of faded fool’s gold, the beach reached towards the western headland and the lighthouse, its black and white whirl of a tower planted on a sharp shoulder of rock – stone and cement, not built from anything as ill-advised as glass.

  This was Bruno’s favourite place in Pitch End.

  Unblemished by Elder or Enforcer, the scene rippled with silence. He’d come with his father and mother many times, any season. Memories still un-Forgotten returned to him only when he stood on the beach. Nothing much moved. The Pitch End flag hung limp on its pole. He squinted, saw people. Not many and mostly unmoving. Could be flotsam or jetsam, Bruno thought, the Pitch Enders washed up, unwanted, laid out. Could be waiting just for the tide to come in and embrace, take them elsewhere.

  A half-dozen gulls passed overhead, wings arched, parting and then alighting, each on one of the wooden bollards carved into the shape of ravens that marked the tide, stalking down to gentle waves, to a sea that shrunk them shorter and shorter, then swallowed. Bruno would’ve remained there, nestled in memory, were it not for the voice of an Elder nearing –

  ‘Don’t worry yer head,’ the Elder was saying, in that special voice used by adults who don’t like children very much. ‘Ye’ll be home in time for yer SHUT-EYE. Tell me – would ye like to see what lies under the Clocktower in the town square?’

  Bruno moved on and minutes later – five, ten, who knew? – he stood before his old house. The oak in front had been reduced to a stump, its top scorched. Bruno looked left and right and behind him – every tree on Meadow Street had been treated the same. He remembered the Elder Order that came under their front door not long after the end of time:

  Every tree – big or small – on every street in Pitch

  End is to be cut down to size.

  This is for the precious protection of Pitch Enders.

  For trees are far too easy for people to be hiding in

  and behind.

  Signed,

  Temperate Thomas II, Head of the Elders

  Bruno went in. He stooped, moved deep into ash and darkness, into the ruin of the life he’d had until one week from five turns old. Bruno promised himself every time he went (and returned without detection) that it would be his final time, no more. And each time he broke it – the old house never failed to divulge some curio or other, some scrap, some remainder ripe for taking and poring over and keeping hidden.

  On into black, things all around broken and meaningless, and on further into the corner of the former cellar. Bruno stopped, looked up, saw Swelter Season sky fringed with thorns, splintered floorboards and rafters.

  He heard the slow trickle of water. He followed that sound, and beneath slabs and scorched soil, not hidden or locked up, just there awaiting discovery – on his Day of Discovery! – he found it.

  Immediately different. Vulnerable in his hands and forbidden, but formidable too, its pages singed, the cover rough and vaguely illustrated: a figure on a beach, apparently alone but with hands upraised like surrender. Bruno looked closer, licked his finger and rubbed away grime, revealing more … Behind and all around the figure stood tall, dark, faceless creatures. And then the title, a swirl of silver on black –

  Tall Tales from Pitch End

  By Dr Jonathan Bloom

  Bruno heard Miss Hope’s voice in his head: ‘The villain, Dr Jonathan Bloom, was the leader of the Rebels. He was a cruel, uneducated man. An animal, a monster, rightly-indecent and evil and filthy in his habits, he longed for nothing less than the complete destruction of rightly-decent Pitch End life! He also had shocking bad manners.’

  But in that moment of finding, thoughts of Rebels and the Single Season War and Miss Hope melted from Bruno’s mind. In his hands was something undiscovered. And without a thought for obeying Elder Orders – finding the nearest Enforcer and surrendering the book, freeing himself of the thing as a dubious object surely intended to muddy his mind – Bruno folded himself under a pair of scorched beams, opened the book and began to read.

  Each tale was devoured. Without break Bruno read – and read on into a true timelessness … And when he arrived at the back cover, letting it fall, he looked up and didn’t know where he was. Darkness had covered him without notice. He wondered how he’d managed to read with so little light to see by. Slowly he was restored to the world, with head light and limbs numb. He couldn’t part with it. Tall Tales from Pitch End went home with him.

  That night the stories, like sharp pips swallowed, germinated in Bruno’s imagination. Within hours, the Tall Tales were thriving in every bit of him.

  Next morning Bruno sent a message, a whisper, around Hedge School: all had to assemble at first break behind the privy – by the pump that gushed rust-flecked water. And they should not tell Miss Hope. At the advised time, Bruno stood on an upturned bucket, only slightly above the other children.

  ‘What is it, Atlas?’ Sabitha McCormack shouted at him as she arrived, standing at the back of the group. She folded her arms. ‘It better be good and not all boring like everything ye usually come out with!’

  Others agreed.

  Bruno took a breath, wet his lips. He held the book open on both hands. The title of the first Tall Tale was waiting, wanting to be read. The title alone was enough to get Bruno twenty or so whacks with the ruler, maybe worse. He knew this.

  ‘Come on!’ cried Sabitha. ‘Are ye simple or what!’

  ‘Quiet!’ Bruno told them, and then they were. He cleared his throat and began: ‘This is called ‘The Tall Tale of the Dishonest Elder.’

  Everyone gasped.

  He’d expected this reaction. He stood taller.

  ‘There was once a dishonest Elder (named Elder Dishonest, truly enough) who one dark night murdered the husband of a woman he had fallen in love with. The man was a farmer, and his wife a woman of fine breeding who had fallen in with what the Elders would call “a lower sort of man”. Elder Dishonest accomplished his murder like this: first, he sent a letter to the farmer, telling him that he was to be especially rewarded for his work for Pitch End – for his long hours of labour, for his general decency, he was to be given the not insubstantial sum of exactly sixty pitches, ten putts and thirty-three pence. Being a farmer in hard times, the promise of money was enough to lure the man to the meeting place noted in his official, Elder-stamped letter: the western headland, near the fourth lighthouse of Pitch End, at sundown.

  ‘B
ut little did he reckon on the scheming of Elder Dishonest. And little did he know that Elder Dishonest was waiting there for him, skulking in a nearby cave. When the Elder saw the farmer approach he skulked deeper, held his silence and waited for the right moment, because Elders are as slippery as serpents, cunning as cats and resourceful as rats when they need to be. And when the farmer turned his back, was at his most vulnerable, the Elder fired a burst of Talent at him, knocking the man into the sea.

  ‘Now, this wasn’t enough to finish the farmer off – the Elder had hoped for a stormy night, high winds and crashing waves, but the water was calm and the farmer simply began to swim back towards the headland. The Elder knew he would have to kill the man, but would also have to make sure it looked like an accident. He looked to the fourth lighthouse of Pitch End, knowing what already people were saying about the new glass lighthouse – that it would surely be knocked down at the first sign of storm. So Elder Dishonest summoned all his considerable Talent and sent cracks scaling the lighthouse, and it broke apart and toppled into the sea, little more than shards that tore the farmer to little more than ribbons.

  ‘So, deed done, Elder Dishonest went home to a snifter of brandy and then sleep, with untroubled dreams.

  ‘Next morning, news spread fast (as it always does in Pitch End) of the farmer’s death. No one suspected anything untoward, all claiming they knew such a thing would happen to the lighthouse, even if the night hadn’t been particularly squally. And Elder Dishonest was instrumental in promoting the idea that the man had probably been drunk, lost his way, leading to the terrible tragedy. Deeply regretful, sad … but still, as the Elders say, “When the drink goes in, the decency goes out!”

  ‘At the same time, Elder Dishonest went to visit the wife of the man he had murdered. He intended to comfort her, console her, offer her a life as an Elder’s wife (these were in the days when Elders still did such things as marry). But when he arrived at the farm and made his slow but firm advances, as he had long planned, the farmer’s wife rejected him. She was too overcome with grief, she explained, to contemplate a life without her husband. She could not, would not, ever forget him, would never love another, and certainly never consider remarriage. So Elder Dishonest left, broken-hearted.

  ‘That night, the Elder woke in the dead, dark hours to a terrifying sight: the farmer he had murdered was standing at the end of his bed. He was no more than a shadow, the farmer, but was as tall as the ceiling, imposing as a pillar, and he spoke in a voice like an echo of an echo, saying: “Never forget. Ye will never be Forgetting me. Never, ever forget what ye did!”

  ‘Elder Dishonest hid under the covers, recited eleven times the Eleven Decent Ways of the Elders, and when he dared to look out again the vision of the murdered farmer had departed.

  ‘The next night, however, the same thing happened again, and still all the words the dead farmer offered were: “Never forget. Ye will never be Forgetting me. Never, ever forget what ye did!”

  ‘And so on, for the next night and the next, and the one after that too – always the same vision, always the same words.

  ‘Elder Dishonest consulted with his fellow Elders, told them he was being haunted by the farmer who had recently (and tragically) died. They advised him to take a penny and engrave on it the name of the farmer, then fill a bowl of milk, drop the penny in it, then boil the milk. When the surface was bubbling, the Elder was to drink the milk in one go, penny and all. This, he was told, would rid him of all traces of the dead farmer.

  ‘Elder Dishonest did just this.

  ‘But still the farmer appeared to him: “Never forget. Ye will never be Forgetting me. Never, ever forget what ye did!”

  ‘Elders advised Elder Dishonest to shoot a hare, sever one of its paws and use it to dust the floor of his bedroom where the shadowy form of the farmer usually appeared. But this did not work either. Finally, they told him that he had one final option – to go to the spot where the farmer had perished, and hope there to encounter the man’s unsettled soul, and direct it out to the Sea of Apparitions, where all who die in Pitch End must go.

  ‘Elder Dishonest stood that night on the western headland, amidst the wreckage of Pitch End’s fourth lighthouse. The world was not calm as it had been on the night he had murdered the farmer: waves soaked him, cold wind chewed at his bones, and guilt gnawed at his soul. And there, on the shore of Pitch End, the farmer he had murdered appeared to him once more.

  ‘Elder Dishonest fell to his knees and demanded of the farmer, “Why do ye haunt me like this? Ye’re dead and gone, Forgotten, so why do ye not leave me be?”

  ‘And the farmer replied, “Because I am not truly Forgotten. No one is so easily gone, even the dead, if they have people left behind to remember them, miss them. We linger on still. A Shadow, a presence that is everywhere and nowhere as long as we remain in the minds of the ones who loved us, stays. And at times we can rise, face any great evil, put a stop to things done in the name of darkness – like the killing of a man in cold blood.”

  ‘From the churning waters rose other figures, other Shadows, others who Elder Dishonest had wronged, cheated, even murdered – tall, thin, with faces dark and voices sharp, their lament added to the farmer’s as they chorused to the night: “Never forget. Never forget. We are the Undying Voices, never Forgotten!”

  ‘Elder Dishonest knew then what he must do to be rid of the farmer forever – he shut his eyes, whispered a final prayer to the sea, begging its mercy, and then let himself fall into the waves, into the clutches of Shadows who bore him downwards into the dark.

  ‘His body was never seen again by human eyes, his voice never heard to tell others what they should be doing or thinking or feeling, and there was not a person left behind who remembered him fondly, who mourned him even. No one left at all in Pitch End who wished to be remembering that most dishonest of the Elders, Elder Dishonest.’

  Bruno looked up. Like before, he was surprised to find himself in the world.

  His audience were wordless.

  Eventually, one of the younger ones went: ‘That was brilliant!’ At the same time another, older, started to wail: ‘I don’t wanna see one of them Shadows!’

  ‘Shut up youse two!’ said Sabitha. ‘Quit yer whingeing, it’s only all made up!’

  But Bruno saw Sabitha look askance at her own shadow, its mid-morning length enough to blot some of the playground.

  ‘That Shadow wasn’t for hurting the Elder,’ Bruno explained, looking at the boy who still cried on. ‘He just wanted the Elder to know that he wasn’t just going away. He’d still stay because he’d murdered him. Things don’t just go.’

  As he said it, he wondered: his own father had gone, not been Forgotten by Bruno, yet he’d never seen a Shadow of him. He’d never returned, despite how lonely Bruno felt, how much in need and how lost.

  He spoke again to the one weeping – ‘Don’t worry. It’s not that scary a story.’

  ‘It was scary!’ Sabitha shouted, before any other words could be voiced by any other mouth. ‘The story was meant to be like in The Wrath when Jack Pitch talks about what’ll happen at the end of the world – scary. Missing the point as usual, Master Atlas!’

  A few sniggers – the same words Miss Hope used when Bruno was disagreeable.

  ‘It can be what ye want it to be,’ said Bruno. ‘Not just one decided thing. It’s not like The Wrath.’

  ‘So the things in that there book,’ said Gahern, a boy younger than Bruno, ‘they’re written down like in The Wrath, but they aren’t the right-real truth?’

  Bruno thought, and then nodded. Then shook his head.

  ‘How is it written down if it didn’t happen?’ asked Martha Tilly, looking not at Bruno but at Sabitha. ‘Where’d it all come from?’

  Bruno began, ‘Someone …’ But could barely understand it himself. ‘Someone must’ve just … made it up …’

  Some children scoffed, others looked thoughtful, or doubtful. But none bored.

  ‘Rubbish!
’ Sabitha decided. ‘Ye’re nothing but a liar, Bruno Atlas! I’m gonna tell my father!’

  ‘There’s other things in here,’ said Bruno, feeling like an Elder on his small but significantly raised height. ‘They’re stories too, but they’ve things in them about what happened turns ago – about why the slogg-barges are stranded in Mickleward Marsh, the way the Elders got into power so quick and why the ravens only have one foot and are able to talk and—’

  ‘Atlas!’

  Miss Hope’s voice across the playground.

  ‘What is that book ye’re reading from? It had better be The Wrath!’

  Knowing that it wasn’t and knowing that there was no way to hide or deny it, Bruno shut the book, finger turning down the corner to mark the page, and waited on Miss Hope’s approach.

  The book snatched from Bruno’s hand and less than a minute later – her face a squirm of shock and fear and disgust – Miss Hope delivered her verdict, a small tear leaking from her left eye: ‘Lies. Pure lies and nonsense and hearsay and …’ She could find no more words to articulate the crime that this book had committed by its very existence, and by Bruno’s reading it.

  ‘I’ll be putting an end to this!’ she announced.

  Miss Hope carried the book at arm’s length to the squat, rusted brazier that was a permanent fixture of the playground at Hedge School. Permanent, because every Tuesday afternoon the children spent one hour creating their ‘Weekly Confessions’ – scraps of paper bearing confessions of things done or thought or said that week which the children knew as ‘indecent’ (using the Elders’ Eleven Decent Ways as a guide), then submitted to the flames.

  ‘Stop!’ cried Bruno. ‘Don’t burn it! Ye can keep it or lock it up or something but just don’t bloody burn it!’

  He ran forwards but Miss Hope held him at bay on the strength of her Talent.

  Bruno could only breathe then, move his eyeballs, want to weep – no other movement was possible, and no intervention. He watched.

  Miss Hope opened the book (eyes averted), and laid it amongst the charred remains of confessed indecencies. And with her Talent – indignation so intense, so incendiary – drew flames from nowhere and tossed into them into the brazier.