Dark World

by Timothy Parker Russell et al.

  ‘You can’t go on alone,’ he declared. ‘Can you sit on the bike behind me and hold on until we reach the road. It’s not far. Then I’ll get the van and run you home. Where are you staying?’

  I told him Westerhope, the Fogin’s place; which of course he knew, as all good farmers know other farms for miles around, especially when there are sheep involved.

  He got me onto the bike and I held on as a squirrel holds on to a tree. Every bump sent a shriek of pain down my neck, but the journey was brief.

  ‘Sit here,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll be back with the Land Rover in a moment.’

  He was about five minutes, during which time I managed to claw together some of the distraught fragments of my experience. I had seen it before. My brother climbing the mounting-block, tripping, and falling on his face. Our mother taking us to the nearest dwelling for help. The rest—the rest I could not have seen. I was with her. But I had heard. And now I wish I did not remember.

  The Fogins have been most kind, and Dr Bell has visited every day in the old fashioned way that most doctors now avoid. There are bruises, and a bit of a problem with my neck, but nothing that rest and care will not cure. Except that I set out to hunt memories; now I am hunted by them. I have not sought additional information about Wolvershiel. Part of me does not want to know, but Harry Fogin, knowing where I had the accident, insisted upon talking about the place. Had I found it?

  I said yes. I’d been quite close to it when I fell over the wall. It was a queer-looking double house. He gave me an odd look and said I couldn’t have seen much.

  ‘Apart from holes in the ground, a roofless barn, and the fenced-off well, there’s nothing there now,’ he said. ‘Brown the builder took most of the stone for one of his housing schemes years ago.’

  ‘But . . .’ I began, and just managed to stifle the question in time. I did not want to give him the impression that I was delusional, or had found the wrong place, or worse, that I had been under the influence of drugs of some kind. Unfortunately curiosity had been aroused. ‘So what became of the last owners?’ I asked casually.

  ‘They weren’t owners—not even locals. Only been in the county thirty years or so they say. They were tenants of the Robsons. Fancied they ran the place as a foster home. Loonies. According to my Dad there were never any children there, bar one, and he died. They went to live—well sort of live—in a “home” near Oxford. The Warnford. I remember the name because there’s a Warrenford up above Beaucastle.’

  ‘But why was the house abandoned? I would have thought a place like that would be quite valuable these days.’

  ‘Well it wasn’t these days then, and there was a dispute about access. Some said this and others claimed that, and no one wanted to live there. So it went away to ruin. You could probably dig up the whole story in old copies of the Gazette if you’re curious.’

  Yes, I probably could, but nothing good can come if it, and I must remember the fate of certain dead cats.

  THE ARNDALE PASS

  Corinna Underwood

  In the deepest shadows, furthest from the candle’s dance, there is safety. This is where I sit, where she cannot find me. Her strange being cannot reach beyond the rim of brightness; the blink of a solitary candle is enough to contain her. Only in the power of brighter illumination can she approach clarity.

  It was in the morning’s sunlight shafts sloping through the windows that I first saw her again. Drawn together in languid dust motes, her slim form stood there, watching me walk down the hallway. Between the two breaths I took on seeing her, enough time passed to take my life away. She was smiling almost, and I was reminded again of the last time I had seen her face; frozen in a contortion of disbelief and horror as she fell away.

  We bought this house because it is light and airy but now it has too many windows—but I have learned the efficacy of heavy drapes. She can no longer follow me from room to room, vanishing in the gloom only to reappear in the mid-morning halos. It began as my morning ritual to traipse through the house pulling the thick curtains closed before daylight crept in. Now I do not bother to open them, even at night. The full moon can be enough to tempt her from the shadows of death to watch me with her mocking grimace.

  I have reinvented myself to suit the night, sleeping while the sun shines and rising only at sunset to begin working on my manuscripts. Sometimes I catch myself listening as though I might hear the rustle of her skirt, the click of her heels or that final, silent scream.

  There is always the falling. If I blink my eyes too slowly it is there, and in my dreamloop of the fatal few seconds I begin to ask myself why I could not hold on. There is no answer either in her silent scream or her mocking sneer.

  It is morning. The sun is stabbing bright needles through a crack in the drapes and for a moment she is there and I cannot bring myself to rush forwards to blot out her traces. She stands hands on hips, as she often did to chide me, that taunting stare stretching her hard face into an ugly mimic of a smile. I gulp some air and rush to set the drapes close and for a split second before blackness resumes I hear it.

  I cannot leave the house. Where would I go? Perhaps on one of our favourite walks, perhaps the last one? Getting out of the house, the doctor said, would do me good. I could retrace my steps perhaps, and walk the Arndale Pass; awkward to navigate even in the best conditions. It is such a steep path, falling away at random intervals. It is said that many lovers have made a pact and jumped to their demise there. This is the kind of story that she loved; drama to excess. She called it passion and said that without it she could not live.

  It was on our first trip to the Arndale Pass that her obsession had begun. How many lovers had jumped there? How many loving souls had become entwined for all eternity? How strong would one’s love need to be to make such a pact? Her speculations became wilder and wilder and I became more and more anxious. I should have seen where she was heading.

  Why did I agree to go there that day? I had already decided that it was over.

  I was being cowardly; struggling for the right words to tell her, but I convinced myself it was just for old time’s sake. All along the pass she told me how much she loved me, how fate had brought us together and how we would always be, in this life and the hereafter. She said she would rather die than be without me. She really shouldn’t have said that. Until then, I hadn’t considered it an option. I had let her hold my hand just one last time. The path was slick from the rain, I barely nudged her. It was so easy to let go.

  There is a knock at the door. It is my grocery delivery. Usually I don’t answer. Eventually he will leave it on the door step where I can retrieve it after dark, but today it’s raining and I don’t want it to get wet. As soon as I open the door she is there, smirking at me as though she knows some dreadful secret. The box of groceries is heavy and in my haste to return to the safety of my shadows I slip on the door step. Everything after happens in slow motion. I drift through the air. A jar of peanut butter smashes on the lower step. I am a contortionist. My left arm is first to reach the ground, my right leg follows, then the back of my neck. I am surprised that there is no pain. The last thing I see is her smile of triumph as I fall away.

  ORACLE

  Rosalie Parker

  I was pretty angry when I first came to Coverdale, but I suppose that’s not altogether surprising. Most of the world was angry in 1940.

  My parents had decided that I’d be better off in North Yorkshire than Sheffield, where we lived in a leafy suburb called Kenwood. Their decision, the reason for which was ostensibly to spirit me away from the imminent bombing of the city, might also have had something to do with the fact that my mother had left the family home to move in with her ‘friend’ Mr Vickers. My father, an obstetric surgeon, was finding it hard to recruit a reliable person to look after me in the school holidays while he worked his interminable shifts at the hospital.

  I don’t know if it is possible to die of shame, but in those first months of my parents’ separation my father loo
ked as if he might. The 1940s were a different world—what the neighbours thought was a kind of life or death. My father was a proud man, usually fair, but he believed implicitly in the values of conventional life, and something in him was mortally injured by my mother’s desertion. He went about with a closed face, as if he hoped he was invisible.

  My parents’ arguments had been a constant factor throughout my childhood, punctuated by increasingly infrequent periods of glum reconciliation. I think they loved each other, but they were incompatible, she having much more spirit than him. I hadn’t seen my mother very often in the weeks following her departure, but she seemed happy, happier than she had ever been with us.

  I liked my day-school, and I had two very good friends, Stephen and James, who lived nearby and with whom I often played. So I was extremely unimpressed, to say the least, when, at the beginning of August I was told that I was to stay for the foreseeable future with my father’s cousin Millie. Aunt Millie lived in an obscure village some 100 miles north in the Yorkshire Dales, and was married to an army captain, a professional soldier in the Yorkshire Regiment. She was much involved with the local Women’s Voluntary Service and probably only agreed to have me because my father was able to pay her a generous allowance.

  For the first time in my young life I argued with my father. He seemed genuinely astonished that I should question his will. His face grew strained and white.

  ‘I have discussed it with your mother, Martin, and she agrees with me. You will be better off in the country with Aunt Millie. You’re only ten and we—I—am responsible for your welfare. I think I can still be relied upon to know what’s best for you. Now let that be an end to it.’

  I lost my temper—reason and restraint fled.

  ‘You know nothing about me! You don’t love me! You’re only thinking of yourself! . . . No wonder mummy left! . . .’

  I ran upstairs to my bedroom, slamming the door behind me so hard that the windows rattled. It took me some time to calm down, and when the anger left me, as it did all of a sudden, I felt deflated and sick with misery and resentment. When I put my ear to the door, all was silent. Throughout the evening, Father did not come. I finally put myself to bed and passed an uncomfortable, feverish night. The next morning, hunger and thirst drove me downstairs.

  Father was already sitting at the breakfast table. He looked tired.

  ‘Please try to make the best of things, Martin. It will be easier for you.’

  I merely took some toast and marmalade and chewed on it in silence.

  My father, by today’s standards, was a very reticent man. I have recently come to realise that I have turned out very much like him.

  ***

  We hardly exchanged a word until the next Saturday morning when my small blue suitcase, until then used only for our annual summer holidays in the West Country, was packed, and my father drove me in his new green Humber up into the hill country of the Northern Dales. It was a very hot summer and the car was stifling. For some reason of his own my father insisted on driving with the windows closed. The heat shimmered off the road and the desiccated grass on the verges.

  We had not visited Aunt Millie since I was a baby. I had often half-listened to my mother and father discussing her and Uncle Simon at the dinner table. I dimly recalled that my father disapproved of the fact that Aunt Millie had no children, and my mother that Uncle Simon was so often absent. Because of the War, his visits home were likely to be even less frequent. I knew also that they lived in a village that my mother had referred to on more than one occasion as ‘godforsaken’.

  During our journey, which took far longer than I expected, (after we had reached Skipton the roads became increasingly narrow and tortuous), my father began talking about the War.

  ‘I am going to treat you as a grown-up, Martin. As you know, our Spitfires and Hurricanes are shooting at German aeroplanes in an attempt to keep this country free. No-one knows what the outcome will be. Some people think that Hitler will invade within weeks. Days, even. I am doing what I think is best in making sure that you are safe.’

  It was a big speech for him. I sulked furiously and silently beside him.

  ‘When you have grown up, and I intend that you shall, I think you will understand me a little better than you are allowing yourself to now.’

  I’m afraid I was relentless, and merely stared out of the passenger seat window. As we passed through Kettlewell and headed up the steep pass into Coverdale, I let my dark mood colour my perception, and saw the astonishing landscape as only incalculably barren and bleak.

  The road that led into the dale was practically impassable, and it seemed to me that we were heading away from all that was civilised and worthwhile. I could see nothing but grass, sheep and moorland, and the occasional stone-built house or barn. The very few settlements we passed through were tiny and deserted. My father had grown silent, and as we drove around a right hand bend into Carlton, it seemed that there was an unbridgeable gulf between us.

  The village where Aunt Millie lived straggles along the road for almost a mile, and is by far the most populous settlement in Coverdale—which in all honesty isn’t saying very much. The stone houses huddle together against the Dales weather and were built mainly, I later discovered, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during a boom in the wool trade. Aunt Millie’s house, Clovelly Dene, was a tall, double-fronted Georgian house with clipped yew hedges growing in the small front garden and up against the house. My father, gripping the handle of my suitcase, steered me up the short path and rapped loudly on the front door. Despite my misery, I noticed that the door-knocker took the form of a finely-detailed brass fox’s head. It was only one of many curios and antique knick-knacks that I was to discover Aunt Millie had about the house.

  ***

  My father did not stay long, and when he had left (and I’m afraid I gave him only a cursory ‘goodbye Father’ at our parting), Aunt Millie, best described as tall and no-nonsense, showed me my room.

  ‘It’s serviceable,’ she said. ‘I hope it will do. You can light the fire whenever you like, but you’re responsible for cleaning out the ashes and resetting it. It’s probably a bit warm for a fire at the moment, but from September the evenings will be chilly. We have the same climate here as the Highlands of Scotland.’

  In fact it was a beautifully proportioned room, having the tall ceiling of all the rooms in the house, an array of intriguing inbuilt cupboards and a large original fireplace. There was newspaper and kindling in the grate, and a stack of firewood and a bucket of coal already in place beside it. On the mantelpiece was a selection of novelty Victorian vesta cases, some made of silver, in the shape of animals, each one of which I soon came to know intimately. An oil lamp stood on the bedside cabinet. It seemed electricity had yet to reach Coverdale.

  I managed a desultory ‘it’s fine,’ and pretended not to notice that Aunt Millie gave me a rather searching look.

  ‘I expect it will take you a little while to settle in, old chap. I won’t be around much in the daytime, so you can suit yourself. Have a good explore. Just don’t rub any of the farmers up the wrong way. They all carry shotguns around here.’ She laughed her hearty laugh, and I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.

  We got along together perfectly well for the next few days, me not saying much, she making the kind of inane conversation she thought a ten-year-old boy might like to hear. Despite my continued resentment, I became intrigued by her collection of curios. There were candlesticks on every surface, of porcelain, brass and silver. She also had some Japanese woodblock prints hanging on the walls, depicting the Kabuki actors and famous geishas of the Floating World. They seemed to me a little like the cartoon characters in some of my favourite comics. Everywhere you turned there was something surprising and novel. Eventually my fascination got the better of me and I plucked up the courage to ask Aunt Millie about them.

  ‘Oh, I have to keep myself occupied while Uncle Simon is away. As he’s usually away, I’ve acqu
ired a sizeable assortment of treasures! I haunt the local junk shops and auction rooms, and before the War I sometimes took the train to Newcastle or London, to see what I could find. Uncle Simon thinks I’m quite potty, of course.’

  She was busy with her voluntary War work for most of the daytime and early evenings. After the first couple of days of my stay, which I spent sulking and reading Great Expectations, found in the bookcase in my room, I began to venture out into the village. Apart from our holidays in Devon or Cornwall, which had been spent mainly at the seaside, I knew little about the country, and cared less.

  The village still basked in what seemed like a never-ending blaze of sunshine. I discovered that there were some amenities—Brown’s motor repair garage, a cheerful-looking public house called The Foresters’ Arms, a small grocers’ store and a butchers’ shop. A group of local children stared at me as I strolled past the stolidly-built Victorian church and school. I poked my tongue out at them and they scuttled away.

  The scenery was of course stunning, but Sheffield is a hilly, surprisingly green city, and I could at first find nothing to admire in my new surroundings. Everything seemed mean and small and alien, and there was very little that I could find to do.

  I could see that the fell-tops above the houses were clothed in purple, and when I asked Aunt Millie about it, she told me that it was the time of year when the heather was in bloom.

  ‘Why don’t you walk up on the moor and have a look? Stick to the paths and you’ll be fine. You might see some grouse.’

  Pride prevented me from admitting to her that I didn’t feel confident enough to venture that far into unknown territory. Instead, one afternoon in my second week in Carlton, feeling thoroughly disgruntled and out of sorts, I walked down to the river, the Cover, which ran along the bottom of the V-shaped valley. As I followed the grassy path across the fields, curlew warbled their mournful cries above me. I was startled by a long-legged hare which bolted from a tuft of rough grass and hurtled off into the centre of the field.