“He took me then for an old man, a bit barmy though kindly intentioned. But later, when things turned out the way I’d said, it was generally talked of—how there was no use Matthew Bland trying to play tricks on Tommy Stonehouse, for the hobman had befriended him, and when t’hobman taks ti yan … aye, it was a bit of luck for Tommy that we woke early that spring.
“But to speak directly to a farmer so, that was rare. More often the farmer took the initiative upon himself, or his wife or children or servants did, by slipping out to spy upon us at work, or by coming to beg a cure. There was talk of a hob that haunted a cave in the Mulgrave Woods, for instance. People would put their heads in and shout ‘Hob-thrush Hob! Where is thoo?’ and the hob was actually meant to reply—and the dear knows how this tradition began—‘Ah’s tyin’ on mah lef’ fuit shoe, An’ Ah’ll be wiv thee—noo!’ Well, we didn’t go as far as that, but once in a while one of us might slip up there for a bit so’s to be able to shout back if anyone called into the cave. Most often it was children.
“Mostly, people weren’t frightened of t’hob. But as I’ve said, we thought it as well to keep the magic bright. There was one old chap, name of Gray, with a farm over in Bransdale; he married himself a new wife who couldn’t or wouldn’t remember to put out the jug of cream at bedtime as the old wife had always done. Well, Hodge Hob, that had helped that family for generations, he pulled out of there and never went back. And another time a family called Oughtred, that farmed over near Upleatham, lost their hob because he died. That was Hob Hill Hob, that missed his step and broke his neck in a mine shaft, the first of us all to go out since the very beginning. Well, Kempswithen overheard the Oughtreds discussing it—whyever had the hob gone away?—and they agreed it must have been because one of the workmen had hung his coat on the winnowing machine and forgot it, and the hobman had thought it was left there for him—for everyone knew you mustn’t offer clothes to fairies and such or they’ll take offense.
“Well! We’d been thinking another of us might go and live at Hob Hill Farm, but after that we changed our minds. And when a new milkmaid over at Hart Hall spied on Hart Hall Hob and saw him flailing away at the corn one night without a stitch on, and made him a shirt to wear, and left it in the barn, we knew he’d have to leave there too, and he did. One curious thing: the family at Hart Hall couldn’t decide whether the hob had been offended because he’d been given the shirt at all, or because it had been cut from coarse cloth instead of fine linen! We know, because they fretted about it for months, and sacked the girl.
“At all events we’d make the point now and then that you mustn’t offend the hob or interfere with him or get too close and crowd him, and so we made out pretty well. Still hoping for rescue, you know, but content enough on the whole. We were living all through the dales, north and south, the eleven of us who were left alive—at Runswick, Great Fryup, Commondale, Kempswithen, Hasty Bank, Scugdale, Farndale, Hawnby, Broxa … Woof Howe … and we’d visit a few in-between places that were said to be haunted by t’hob, like the Mulgrave Cave and Obtrush Rook above Farndale. It was all right.
“But after a longish time things began to change.
“This would be perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a couple of decades. Well, I don’t know just how it was, but bit by bit the people hereabouts began to be less believing somehow, less sure their grandfathers had really seen the fairies dance on Fairy Cross Plain, or that Obtrush Rook was really and truly haunted by the hobman. And by and by we began to feel that playing hob i’ t’hill had ceased to be altogether safe. Even in these dales there were people now that wanted explanations for things, and that weren’t above poking their noses into our affairs.
“And so, little by little, we began to withdraw from the farms. For even though we were no longer afraid of being taken for Satan’s imps and hunted down, concealment had been our way of getting by for such a very long time that we preferred to go on the same way. But for the first time in many long years we often found ourselves thinking of the ship again and wishing for its return. But I fear the ship was lost.
“Gradually, then, we drew back out of the dales to the high moortops, moved into the winter dens we’d been using right along, and set ourselves to learning how to live up here entirely—to catch grouse and hares, and find eggs and berries, instead of helping ourselves to the farmer’s stores. Oh, we were good hunters and we loved these moors already, but still it was a hard and painful time, almost a second exile. I remember how I once milked a ewe—thinking to get some cream—only to find that it was the jug set out for me by the farmer’s wife that I wanted and missed, for that was a symbol of my service to a master that respected what I did for him; but a worse time was coming.
“There were mines on the moors since there were people in the land at all, but not so very long after we had pulled back up out of the dales altogether, ironstone began to be mined in Rosedale on a larger scale than ever before, and they built a railroad to carry the ore right round the heads of Rosedale and Farndale and down to Battersby Junction. I daresay you know the right of way now as a footpath, my dear, for part of it lies along the route of the Lyke Wake Walk. But in the middle of the last century men came pouring onto the high moors to build the railroad. Some even lived up here, in shacks, while the work was ongoing. And more men poured across the moors from the villages all round about, to work in the Rosedale pits, and then there was no peace at all for us, and no safety.
“That was when we first were forced to go about by day in sheepskin.
“It was Kempswithen’s idea, he was a clever one! The skins weren’t too difficult to get hold of, for sheep die of many natural causes, and also they are easily killed, though we never culled more than a single sheep from anyone’s flock, and then always an old ewe or a lame one, of little value. It went against the grain to rob the farmers at all, but without some means of getting about by daylight we could not have managed. The ruse worked well, for nearly all the railroad workers and miners came here from outside the dales, and were unobservant about the ways of sheep, and we were careful.
“But the noise and smoke and peacelessness drove us away from our old haunts onto the bleakest part of the high moors where the fewest tracks crossed. We went out there and dug ourselves in.
“It was a dreary time. And the mines had scarcely been worked out and the railroad dismantled when the Second War began, and there were soldiers training on Rudland Rigg above Farndale, driving their tanks over Obtrush Rook till they had knocked it to bits, and over Fylingdales Moor, where we’d gone to escape the miners and the trains.”
“Fylingdales, where the Early Warning System is now?”
“Aye, that’s the place. During the war a few planes made it up this far, and some of the villages were hit. We slept through a good deal of that, luckily—we’d found this den by then, you see, an old jet working that a fox had opened. But it was uneasy sleep, it did us little good. Most particularly, it was not good for us to be of no use to any master—that began to do us active harm, and we were getting old. Two of us died before the war ended, another not long after. And still the ship did not return.”
Something had been nagging at Jenny. “Couldn’t you have reproduced yourselves after you came up here? You know—formed a viable community of hobs in hiding. Kept your spirits up.”
“No, my dear. Not in this world. It wasn’t possible, we knew it from the first, you see.”
“Why wasn’t it possible?” But Elphi firmly shook his head; this was plainly a subject he did not wish to pursue. Perhaps it was too painful. “Well, so now there are only eight of you?”
“Seven,” said Elphi. “When I woke yesterday Woof Howe was dead. I’d been wondering what in the world to do with him when I so stupidly allowed you to see me.”
Jenny threw the shadowed bunks a startled glance, wondering which contained a corpse. But something else disturbed her more. “You surely can’t mean to say that in the past hundred and fifty years not one of yo
u has ever been caught off-guard, until yesterday!”
Elphi gave the impression of smiling, though he did not really smile. “Oh, no, my dear. One or another of us has been caught napping a dozen times or more, especially in the days since the Rosedale mines were opened. Quite a few folk have sat just where you’re sitting and listened, as you’ve been listening, to much the same tale I’ve been telling you. Dear me, yes! Once we rescued eight people from a train stalled in a late spring snowstorm, and we’ve revived more than one walker in the last stages of hypothermia—that’s besides the ones who took us by surprise.”
His ancient face peered up at her through scraggly white hair, and Jenny’s apprehension grew. “And none of them ever told? It’s hard to believe.”
“My dear, none of them has ever remembered a thing about it afterwards! Would we take such trouble to keep ourselves hidden, only to tell the whole story to any stranger that happens by? No indeed. It passes the time and entertains our guests, but they always forget. As will you, I promise—but you’ll be safe as houses. Your only problem will be accounting for the lost day.”
* * *
Jenny had eaten every scrap of her emergency food and peed the plastic pail nearly full, and now she huddled under her sheepskin robe by the light of a single fresh candle, waiting for Elphi to come back. He had refused to let her climb up to empty her own slops and fetch back her own laundry. “I’m sorry, my dear, but there’s no roke today—that’s the difficulty. If ever you saw this place again you would remember it—and besides, you know, it’s no hardship for me to do you a service.” So she waited, a prisoner beneath the heavy doorway stone, desperately trying to think of a way to prevent Elphi from stealing back her memories of him.
Promising not to tell anybody, ever, had had no effect. (“They all promise, you know, but how can we afford the risk? Put yourself in my place.”) She cudgeled her wits: what could she offer him in exchange for being allowed to remember all this? Nothing came. The things the hobs needed—a different social order on Earth, the return of the Gafr ship, the Yorkshire of three centuries ago—were all beyond her power to grant.
Jenny found she believed Elphi’s tale entirely: that he had come to Earth from another world, that he would not harm her in any way, that he could wipe the experience of himself from her mind—as effortlessly as she might wipe a chalkboard with a wet rag—by “the power of suggestion,” just as Hob Hole Hob had “cured” the whooping cough by the power of suggestion. Somewhere in the course of the telling both skepticism and terror had been neutralized by a conviction that the little creature was speaking the unvarnished truth. She had welcomed this conviction. It was preferable to the fear that she had gone stark raving mad; but above and beyond all that she did believe him.
And all at once she had an idea that just might work. At least it seemed worth trying; she darted across the stone floor and scrabbled frantically in a pocket of her pack. There was just enough time. She burrowed back beneath the sheepskin robe where Elphi had left her with only seconds to spare.
The old hob backed down the ladder with her pail flopping from one hand and her bundle of clothes clutched in the opposite arm, and this time he left the top of the shaft open to the light and cold and the wuthering of the wind. He had tied his sheepskin on again. “Time to suit up now, I think—we want to set you back in the path at the same place and time of day.” He scanned the row of sleepers anxiously and seemed to sigh.
Jenny’s pile pants and wool socks were nearly dry, her sweaters, longjohns, and boots only dampish. She threw off the sheepskins and began to pull on the many layers of clothing one by one. “I was wondering,” she said as she dressed, “I wanted to ask you, how could the hobs just leave a farm where they’d been in secret service for maybe a hundred years?”
Elphi’s peculiar flat eyes peered at her mildly. “Our bond was to the serving, you see. There were always other farms where extra hands were needed. What grieved us was to leave the dales entirely.”
No bond to the people they served, then; no friendship, just as he had said. But all the same—“Why couldn’t you come out of hiding now? I know it could be arranged! People all over the world would give anything to know about you!”
Elphi seemed both amused and sad. “No, my dear. Put it out of your mind. First, because we must wait here so long as any of us is left alive, in case the ship should come. Second, because we love these moors and would not leave them. Third, because here on Earth we have always served in secret, and have got too old to care to change our ways. Fourth, because if people knew about us we would never again be given a moment’s peace. Surely you know that’s so.”
He was right about the last part anyway; people would never leave them alone, even if the other objections could be answered. Jenny herself didn’t want to leave Elphi alone. It was no use.
As she went to mount the ladder the old hob moved to grasp her arm. “I’m afraid I must ask you to wear this,” he said apologetically. “You’ll be able to see, but not well. Well enough to walk. Not well enough to recognize this place again.” And reaching up he slipped a thing like a deathcap over her head and fastened it loosely but firmly around her neck. “The last person to wear this was a shopkeeper from Bristol. Like you, he saw more than he should have seen, and was our guest for a little while one summer afternoon.”
“When was that? Recently?”
“Between the wars, my dear.”
Jenny stood, docile, and let him do as he liked with her. As he stepped away, “Which was the hob that died?” she asked through the loose weave of the cap.
There was a silence. “Woof Howe Hob.”
“What will you do with him?”
Another silence, longer this time. “I don’t quite know … I’d hoped some of the rest would wake up, but the smell … it’s beginning to trouble me too much to wait. I don’t imagine you can detect it.”
“Can’t you just wake them up?”
“No, they must wake in their own time, more’s the pity.”
Jenny drew a deep breath. “Why not let me help you, then, since there’s no one else?”
An even longer silence ensued, and she began to hope. But “You can help me think if you like, as we walk along,” Elphi finally said, “I don’t deny I should be grateful for a useful idea or two, but I must have you on the path by late this afternoon, come what may.” And he prodded his captive up the ladder.
Above ground, conversation was instantly impossible. After the den’s deep silence the incessant wind seemed deafening. This time Jenny was humping the pack herself, and with the restricted sight and breathing imposed by the cap she found just walking quite difficult enough; she was too sore (and soon too winded) to argue anymore.
After a good long while Elphi said this was far enough, that the cap could come off now and they could have a few minutes’ rest. There was nothing to sit on, only heather and a patch of bilberry, so Jenny took off her pack and sat on that, wishing she hadn’t eaten every last bit of her supplies. It was a beautiful day, the low sun brilliant on the shaggy, snowy landscape, the sky deep and blue, the tiers of hills crisp against one another.
Elphi ran on a little way, scouting ahead. From a short distance, with just his back and head showing above the vegetation, it was astonishing how much he really did move and look like a sheep. She said as much when he came back. “Oh aye, it’s a good and proven disguise, it’s saved us many a time. Mind you, the farmers are hard to fool. They know their own stock, and they know where theirs and everyone else’s ought to be—the flocks are heafed on the commons and don’t stray much. ‘Heafed,’ that means they stick to their own bit of grazing. So we’ve got to wear a fleece with a blue mark on the left flank if we’re going one way and a fleece with red on the shoulder if we’re going another, or we’ll call attention to ourselves and that’s the last thing we want.”
“Living or dead,” said Jenny meaningfully.
“Aye.” He gave her a sharp glance. “You’ve thought of someth
ing?”
“Well, all these abandoned mines and quarries, what about putting Woof Howe at the bottom of one of those, under a heap of rubble?”
Elphi said, “There’s fair interest in the old iron workings. We decided against mines when we lost Kempswithen.”
“What did you do with him? You never said.”
“Nothing we should care to do again.” Elphi seemed to shudder.
“Haven’t I heard,” said Jenny slowly, “that fire is a great danger up here in early spring? There was a notice at the station, saying that when the peat gets really alight it’ll burn for weeks.”
“We couldn’t do that!” He seemed truly shocked. “Nay, such fires are dreadful things! Nothing at all will grow on the burned ground for fifty years and more.”
“But they burn off the old heather, you told me so yourself.”
“Controlled burning that is, closely watched.”
“Oh.” They sat silent for a bit, while Jenny thought and Elphi waited. “Well, what about this: I know a lot of bones and prehistoric animals, cave bears and Irish elk and so on—big animals—were found in a cave at the edge of the Park somewhere, but there haven’t been any finds like that on the moors because the acid in the peat completely decomposes everything. I was reading an article about it. Couldn’t you bury your friend in a peat bog?”
Elphi pondered this with evident interest. “Hmmm. It might be possible at that—nowadays it might. Nobody cuts the deep peat for fuel anymore, and bog’s poor grazing land. Walkers don’t want to muck about in a bog. About the only chaps who like a bog are the ones that come to look at wildflowers, and it’s too early for them to be about.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 39
