By the time the men reached the lake, there was no sign of the girl, just the tattered remains of a white dress hanging from a willow tree on the bank. The girl’s corpse was never found, which came as no surprise—the lake was deep; its murky depths hid many a broken body and shattered dream. But four weeks later the lord of the manor was discovered—face down in his own fountain. And by the time the first snow covered the ground like wedding lace, the hapless blacksmith’s son was dead too. The doctor who examined his body refused to comment, but the villagers whispered that the young man’s face was twisted with terror and that clenched tightly in his fist was a single green-leafed sprig of willow. But surely these were just rumours—after all, willows shed their leaves long before winter falls. . . .
WOLVERSHIEL
John Gaskin
Wolvershiel lies close in at the base of Ravenscleugh. In 1774, Robt. Robson of Wolvershiel Hall was the owner. . . . Time and ruthless hands have both dealt hardly with (it).
Dippie Dixon
Cold beneath dark skies, shards of rain splattering themselves on dry ground and being swept away again by the wind, black clouds scudding over hard land, comfortless twilight throughout the long northern day—and the day June the third. I am supposed to be on holiday. My wife has taken our daughter to the Crimea to recover from her latest divorce. I had pushed off a book to my publisher some weeks earlier and received a polite rejection of the sort ‘very readable but we are afraid it will not fit in our stable’.
In a spasm of anger with everyone I swept a few things into a bag and drove up here to get away from myself, and with the excuse that I would have a look at a bit of country I thought I remembered visiting with my mother when I was very small, and to which we never returned. It is a shallow dish of land set into the side of the hills where it conceals a house of curious shape. The place is a mile or two from a minor road to the north that wriggles up the far side of the valley and eventually leads over the watershed to Redesdale. I seemed to remember something of it. But after the events of two days ago I am no longer sure what I imagine and what is real.
I am staying with Josephene and Harry Fogin at their farm at Westerhope which has been adapted for bed and breakfast accommodation. It is very comfortable; and Mrs Fogin has been most kind while I prolong my stay to recover from the fall, and whatever else happened. I am writing this in her little-used parlour while normal family life carries on in the kitchen. It is the normality that is so reassuring, and the thoughtless greetings of the Border Collies, ever eager to help by pushing their noses into your hand and upsetting tea cups.
It was two days ago that I set out full of enthusiasm to walk to Wolvershiel. The weather was unseasonably dreary, but not as forbidding as it is now, and on a long walk a man finds himself, even when he has to admit to being of an age that ought to have found itself years ago.
I told the Fogins where I was going, and that I would end by walking across the valley to catch the late afternoon bus. Harry looked a bit thoughtful and said I would have to cross the ford above Thorpcot, and that I ought to be careful poking around Wolvershiel. ‘Of what?’ I asked him. He said that it was a ruinous place. There had been cellars beneath it belonging to an older building, and some years earlier—before his time—there was an accident of some sort. So it was fenced off in the interests of safety to keep stock and hikers from straying in. I promised to be careful.
I set out with a flask of sherry and a ham sandwich in my pocket, and the general feeling of well-being one experiences on shedding for a time one’s own and other people’s cares. The sky was grey, but no rain was forecast, and the walking was good. I had originally intended to follow the contour from Westerhope, but it felt more enterprising to climb up to Ravenscrag by the forestry roads and take the long descent from the north.
It was past one o’clock when I broke free from the dense conifers at a point where a tumbled stone dyke went straight down the hill in the general direction I wanted. I thought I could see the abandoned steadings of Wolvershiel, and the stock enclosure, but it was some distance below, and I did not know precisely where to look, or where I had emerged from the forest. It could have been the outline of some other farm.
It is odd how unhelpful even a detailed map can be if you don’t already know the general lie of the land, or precisely where you are. The forestry had been established since mine had been surveyed, and I could find several indications of boundaries running more or less north-south, any one of which could have been the dyke I was looking at. On its right was scrubby woodland; on the left rough, very rough, almost precipitous pasture. I slithered and stumbled down to where the land began to flatten out. Wind torn hedges of thorn and brambles replaced the broken walls, and I could no longer see what I had taken to be Wolvershiel, although it must have been more or less straight ahead, concealed in the shorter horizon.
I sat down to enjoy the sherry and sandwiches. It was not cold, but neither was it light—merely one of those shadowless days when even in high summer everything looks drab and featureless. The dry gorse in the hedge rustled with some unfelt movement of the air. The usual sounds of sheep and cattle were missing. The experience ought to have been depressing, but I was pleased with myself: well exercised, pleasantly refreshed, and with an easy walk ahead across the valley. I was also strangely elated and expectant. It was here, if anywhere, that I would feel again the reassurance of familiarity. But beyond the hedge was only another nondescript field, and beyond that another hedge, and these meant nothing to me. Ahead, the beginnings of a path gradually evolved into a rutted track confined on one side by a stony bank pitted with rabbit holes, and muffled by half dead bushes and withered grass.
It was as I walked past a partly exposed boulder that I experienced the flickering of familiarity that is usually called déjà vu. I would prefer to call it simply ‘the already seen’. On closer inspection the already seen was not a boulder but a rough-hewn stone cut with a single step, almost certainly an old mounting-block. It lay abandoned on one side of the track trying to rekindle for me a familiarity that led nowhere. But for no reason I could identify the thing changed my mood from pleasant anticipation to a kind of empty, unfocused foreboding. I did not know if I had been there before, or if I had, whether for example it could have been before or after the death of the elder brother I had been too young to remember, and about whom nobody ever spoke. It was apparently one of those tragedies that are so painful that even to speak of them is to revive an experience of something dreadful. I always thought it must have been a fire, or some domestic accident for which my mother felt responsible. For some years I didn’t even know I had had a brother, and by the time childhood ignorance had become adult curiosity she was dead, and my father’s life has always been beyond the limits of memory.
However, none of these musings seemed remotely relevant to the mounting-block, and when I turned away I was at once diverted by the sight of Wolvershiel across a field. It looked as if there could have been two houses close together. The grey walls were half concealed by birch and alder, and a dark area, perhaps rampant nettles, obscured the ground close to the buildings. But it looked as if still roofed with the stone slabs common to old buildings in that area, and although the windows appeared to be no more than black holes in the masonry, there was no sign of general collapse. The place was really quite close and obvious, and I wondered how I had failed to see it earlier. The appearance was, however, not inviting, and I almost walked on leaving the ruin to its own devices. But, seeing it was the contrived excuse for my walking at all, and I would feel later as if I had cheated myself if I made no attempt to look closer. It would also give me something to talk about with the Fogins. Anyway, I was curious, and curiosity is difficult to resist, as a number of dead cats proverbially testify.
I left the path to cross an oddly triangular field that was fenced with the usual pig netting and barbed wire. At its far side a lane converged with another track that was obviously used for herding sheep, and by the ubiq
uitous quad bikes that modern farmers find indispensable and thieves irresistible. But at the point where I reached the lane a waist-high length of stone wall replaced the fence. I could see the buildings clearly, still with the forbidding foreground of dark growth that seemed to isolate the place from the surrounding country and threatened to make a direct approach impossible. Without thinking or looking properly I vaulted the wall.
For a fleeting instant that was strangely prolonged and slow I knew that the lane beyond was not where it should be. The wall was a kind of ha-ha, and the ground on its far side was a yard or more below the level of the field. I was in the wrong position in mid air and came down on my back. The blow was shattering, and I must have lost consciousness—for how long I cannot say, except that when I fell the sky was a light mottled grey. When I opened my eyes at the sound of a remote voice asking if I was all right, the sky was featureless and darker than it had been.
‘Let me help you.’
The arm was under my head and shoulders, and I was being lifted up and set on my feet; feet I did not quite own or feel.
My helper was a small, oldish man, with a bald or shaven head, who must have been much stronger than he looked to judge from the way he got me up. I did not seem able to focus clearly on his face, or for the moment on anything.
‘Can you walk?’ he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, he continued, ‘We must get you to the house. You’ll need to lie down for a while in case there are any after effects. One can’t be too careful with concussion. My wife will help. She has a lot of experience.’
It was only then that I saw he was not alone, and that on my other side stood a tall silent woman unseasonably draped in a long, flat, old-fashioned, belted mackintosh. I supposed, if I supposed anything, that the sky had been threatening rain when she and her husband left the house.
With one each side I walked—floated would be a better description—along a short drive to what now appeared to be two houses joined at ground level by a short, windowless passage or wall, the block on the right being an exact but smaller replica of the one on the left, the whole forming a symmetry like a dumb-bell with one end larger than the other. There was a central door in each building. I was led to the door on the right, the entrance to the smaller structure. As if sensing my confusion the woman said—
‘This is the children’s side. Those are their rooms. If any are ill, but not too ill, we put the bed in the middle so that they can share in the play of the others by watching it. We all do that here.’
I couldn’t find the right words to ask if ‘they’ were her own children or if we were in an orphanage of some sort. But the place seemed too quiet for a children’s home.
‘They are happy,’ she said, leaving me as ignorant as before.
What we had entered was a square atrium to which light was admitted by a central cupola. In the middle was a single bed, and I saw something moving restlessly on it in a way that made me wonder if the tenant was badly deformed in some way, but I was still too dazed to look closely. On the wall opposite the entrance and again on the right were symmetrically placed doors that must have been the children’s rooms. All were closed. In the middle of the wall to the left a single dark archway without a door led, as I was shortly to be shown, to a larger mirror image of the room where we now stood.
‘That’s a little boy who fell and hurt his head near here just as you did. His mother’s in the other wing. She’ll know you but you can’t see her yet. Come this way.’
She motioned towards the stone arch and a passageway beyond while I wondered how someone could know me without knowing who I was or seeing me first. At first I could only detect another arch ahead of us which turned out to be further away than it looked: then we were in a substantially larger version of the first room, except that in the middle, instead of a bed, and protected by a low stone balustrade, was what appeared to be a dark circle of water, somewhat akin to a cold northern representation of the fountain and pool in the atrium of a classical Greek or Roman villa.
‘It’s not water,’ he said apologetically. The woman had contrived to disappear. ‘We thought that would be too dangerous, and it might flood the lower rooms that we keep for the naughty ones, so we just painted the inside black to give the impression of water. It used to be the top of the old well.’
My head was beginning to ache abominably, and I was afraid I might be ill at any moment. Evidently he noticed my distress, and wafted me to a great sofa that was located against the far wall.
‘Lie still for a while,’ he said. ‘We’ll get help, but you won’t need it. The children will not disturb you. We have them under control.’
I was incapable of resisting or of thinking very much, and I was becoming concerned that I had really done myself some damage—not to bone or muscle, but to my nervous system, for I had no feeling of anything; only sight of a sort, and hearing. I lay still at his bidding, alone in the silence, facing across the room towards the pond, the dark archway leading to the smaller house beyond it. Only then did I register what was peculiar about the arch. It was in proportion to the room I was now in, bigger than the one at the far end. The connecting passage had been designed like a funnel so that anyone coming from the small atrium to the larger would feel as if they were walking down a passage shorter than it was, and wider than they expected.
My mind must have wandered, but to a purpose, for I knew why the building was familiar. Years earlier I had been in a place like it, but there the units were round, not square. That was in Perthshire. I believe Knockshannoch was the name—an old hunting lodge. The smaller circular building housed the servants’ quarters with a kitchen and stove in the centre. The larger one contained the guest rooms. Its central area served as common room and dining room. In the middle a huge fireplace had opened hospitably on four sides, not a dark pit of imitation water, and the stone chimney had soared up to the centre of the vaulted roof with all the confidence of a mighty column in a Norman cathedral.
The day-dream was reassuring, but I was drawn back to present things by a sound. Somewhere I could hear a voice that seemed to be speaking endearments that were not answered. The voice was a woman’s, and it stirred a remote sense of familiarity. It was not his wife. It must, I felt, be the mother of the little boy in the adjacent hall. The voice was gentle and comforting, like coming to a warm room and a loving family at the end of a journey undertaken long ago. But the sound was fading with the light, and I could no longer discern the whole room. Only the archway and the balustrade in the centre were clear, and now there was movement.
A vague shape hovered at the far end of the tunnel, and was coming closer. I almost laughed. It was a child in white pyjamas too big for him, playing blind-man’s-buff, holding out his arms, stationary in the middle of the entrance, too far from the walls to find them. Then I saw it was not a game. He was alone. His head and eyes were bandaged, and there was blood on the bandages. After his fall the wounds must have been dressed in that thoughtless way, or perhaps the bandage had slipped down and he was too frightened to push it back. He took a step forward, hands groping about in empty air encountering nothing. In his darkness he must have got out of bed to feel for a door or wall that would guide him to his mother’s voice. Instead of finding anything he had walked haplessly into the open tunnel, beyond the limits of the room, without touching the entrance, and on, impossibly far, lost into space without dimension, a void beyond meaning or natural terror.
At last the nightmare quality of his experience sank into my fuddled brain. I tried to get up to help him, but my limbs would not obey my will. Nothing connected between brain and body. It was like being turned to lead, or as a baby might feel rolled round with too many swaddling-clothes while his cot caught fire and burned around him. The physical paralysis was unbreakable. I tried to call out but could produce no sound. I could only see and experience his terror, and what I saw will be with me until I am unknowing dust.
He stumbled, and ran towards me crying, straight i
nto the balustrade that surrounded the imaginary pond concealing the well. The stone edge caught him below the knee and his forward momentum threw him forward, over and down. His scream fell away into the abyss and there was silence. A door opened. From somewhere in the darkness came a cry of anguish in a voice I knew. The knowledge fragmented into a fire of memory and fear while something vast and insane soared up into the firmament above me. I grovelled beneath it, helpless because it was without understanding.
A muddy wellington boot was close to my face, and above it, in grotesquely foreshortened form, I was looking up at the leggings and heavy jacket of a man. He bent down, and I could hear the whirr of an idle engine close by; a quad bike, ordinary and unthreatening. I don’t know what nonsense I blurted out at first, but it must have been enough to tell him I wasn’t much good for comments about the weather or discussion of stock prices.
‘Why man, lie still. You’re in a bad way. What happened?’
I mumbled something about a well, but he heard something else.
‘Yes, the wall’s a real deceiver. You’re not the first person who’s fallen. Stay put. I’ll have to get help. Ned’s borrowed my mobile.’
But I did not want to let him go for reasons I could not properly convey.
‘Let me see if anything’s broken,’ I croaked. ‘I may be okay.’
‘Take it easy then. Try one bit at a time.’
I had come to lying on my back. He helped me onto my side, and then into a kneeling position. My neck was stiff, my head hurt violently when I moved, and I felt sick, but nothing appeared to be broken, and upon trial everything seemed to be in working order after a fashion. When I stood up I nearly fell down again, but he caught me.
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