Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  For my first two nights in the house, the blizzard did not let up. Exhausted from weeks of packing and downsizing and lifting and driving on the first night, I collapsed on a bed of shirt and knitwear maelstrom at around 8 p.m. and fell instantly asleep. I woke again not long before 11 p.m., to the sound of Clifton making a mournful wibbling sound. I got up to check Clifton was OK. I found her, and my other two cats, in the kitchen, looking a little alarmed. All of them were silent. The mournful wibbling noise, however, continued. I sat awake for over two hours on the staircase, tracking the noise as it moved around the house, occasionally harmonising with the other chilling noises in and around the rooms: the whump-whump of the wind passing through the cooker extractor hood, the eerie tinkle of the resetting thermostat and the snow driving against the thick walls. So, so much snow. I pictured the bumpy, half-mile track leading up to the main road, getting more and more covered with it. Would I ever make it up it again? I made mental calculations about how long the small amount of food in my freezer and cupboards – some of it quite old – would last. Did a whole can of kidney beans from 2013 count as a meal?

  Being cut off in my first days in Eyam, with a cold, was entirely appropriate, as being ill and cut off were the two things Eyam was historically best known for. It was an ideal situation, I assured myself. I was sick of car travel anyway. I was here to explore in the way that was most ancient and natural: on foot. I walked past the lonely well named after Reverend Mompesson, which sits below a row of stripped banshee trees and where a ghost child of a blue hue clad in seventeenth-century clothes has frequently been spotted, then skidded and shuffled down the ravine beyond it. More ravenous than I’d been for half a decade, I ate enormous lunches at the cafes in two of the nearest villages. I couldn’t tell if all the portions were enormous here, or the owners thought I looked like I needed filling up, or the lack of trade in the bad weather meant they just had excess food. Possibly a bit of all three. After I’d paid, I told the waitress at one cafe that I’d just moved in up the top, where the snow was thickest. ‘You should have said!’ she replied. ‘Locals get discount and a bit extra free.’ My route took me past the Boundary Stone, an indented boulder marking the midpoint between Eyam and the neighbouring village of Stoney Middleton where coins – soaked in vinegar, as a rudimentary attempt at disinfection – were left by plague victims as payment for food from outsiders. Once, centuries ago, two lovers – Emmott Syddal from Eyam and Rowland Torre from Stoney – would meet here, just to stand at a safe distance and stare longingly at one another, until April 1666, when Emmott stopped arriving, forever. Two ruins are visible on the hill on either side of the footpath behind the boundary marker: buildings hundreds of yards from any road, long unoccupied, stuffed with colourless weeds and misery. I thought about the pain Emmott and Rowland might have felt on the days when they came to the spot, the aching space between them. It was easy to believe that aching space was still there: a patch of invisible three-and-a-half-century-old air too heavy with sadness to ever be blown away, even by the strongest Pennine gales. The whole ridge had a bad romantic history. A century later, another heartbroken woman, Hannah Baddaley, leapt off the rocks on the other side of it into Middleton Dale, after being jilted by her lover; but she was not even able to find the sweet release of death, since her petticoats spread out and acted as a parachute, transporting her safely to the ground.

  Nearly all the villages and landmarks around here sounded like session guitarists in progressive blues bands. As well as the lanky Stoney Middleton, who was in high demand everywhere from Hastings to Aberdeen from 1969 to 1973 but suffered from cocaine bloat during the latter part of the decade, there was his nemesis Froggatt Edge, who sat in with Fleetwood Mac on occasion just after Peter Green left the band. To this day he remained on decent speaking terms with Hathersage Booths, despite stealing his wife in 1978. And who could forget Wardlow Mires, whose guitar genius was suffocated by eighties show-off slickness, and who still appears on the occasional rockumentary, speaking in an inexplicable transatlantic accent? Usually, before heading home, I would stop at the Spar in Calver for beer and pickled onion Space Raiders, then, to cover as much new ground as possible, loop back along the other side of the Derwent; sometimes, if there was enough daylight left, climbing Froggatt Edge, before hitting the edge of Grindleford, whose lone 1969 album will now fetch over £300 on eBay or Discogs, if you have the original pressing of it with the black ice rim.

  The Derwent looked deathly cold and deep, with a malevolent lonely shine, no longer at all mistakable for the Dart. The river’s folkloric ghost, Crooker, an obscure branch-handed creature, is thought to feed the water when it is hungry, plucking passing humans from the banks, but letting them pass if they have an offering of wildflowers. But where did you find wildflowers around here? It looked like they could never grow again. Leaving the river’s side, I squeezed, snake-hipped, through narrow rocks into fields where the snow was mushier. The Peak District couldn’t decide whether it wanted you fat or thin: the cafes and footpaths were at loggerheads about it. One marker rock had a smooth, hare-sized hole in its middle, thus evoking a millstone made by nature, or a giant hag stone. No doubt, like a hag stone, it could potentially serve as protection against evil in the home, but there was no way I was lugging it back up the hill to my mantelpiece. From the summit of Froggatt, I tried to pick out my house’s position on the opposite side of the valley, but found it difficult. It was buried in the hill’s deep wooded layers, in a place even higher than the place popularly known as The High Place.

  Back in the valley I took a deep breath as I started the monumental climb for home. I passed Grindleford’s pinfold, and was thankful for the small mercy that I was not a nineteenth-century resident of my house, collecting an escaped sheep or cow from the pinfold, then dragging it back up the hill to its godforsaken pasture. All I was dragging was me and my beer and my pickled onion Space Raiders. The epiphany that I was no longer in Devon redoubled as I reached the quarter point of the ascent, which would have been enough hill in itself for many hilly places. It was not uncommon to see a balletic car glide past, spinning in full serene circles in the big silence. Soon, I would begin to think of this route to the house as The Hill That Never Ends. When it did finally end, you couldn’t call what happened relief, because by that point you were in a different, more scoured place, above the snow line, and something primordial and blunt had closed in, rebuffing all notions of comfort. The highest, toughest, least nurturing bits of Dartmoor were no match for it.

  During my first weeks in the house, as the mournful, wibbling ghost cat moved within and through the cavities in the walls, the snow licked at the bricks, two pictures fell off the wall and my salt shaker moved four inches across my work surface of its own volition, in my sleep-deprived state I came to a conclusion: all the historical sorrow of this area, all its terrible suffering, had oozed up the gradient and settled within the walls of my house. It invaded my sleep every night. I woke repeatedly at exactly 3.44 a.m. from nightmares which often featured violence being inflicted on me, although the most unsettling of these did not quite involve violence; it involved me walking down an impossibly black corridor, reaching out hopefully for a wall to get my balance, and having my ribs frantically tickled by three fleshless hands. On another night, I dreamed I’d been spooning the cold body of a skinless 300-year-old herbalist. I decided that something very bad had once happened in the house, or in the place where this house now stood, at 3.44 a.m. On the plus side, a story for my new book had written itself, one which I soon realised was a perfect fit for the book’s title, Help the Witch, which until then had just been a title, not relating to anything specific, simply a phrase and sentiment I liked. I’d been relishing the prospect of making the stories in the book anything but autobiographical, but there was too much going on right here to ignore. There was a lot of the narrator of the story that I decided to make very much not me – he was university-educated, academic, not very outdoorsy, born in the south, recently h
eartbroken – but there was a bit of me, or at least what I was experiencing, in there. On one particularly shaky morning, after a night when the ghost cat, which I had now decided was a ghost dog, had been particularly active, I phoned my editor with a progress report. He made little attempt to disguise a gleeful cackle, and over the beating snow I thought I heard the sound of skin on skin, like some palms – I’m not definitely saying his – were being frantically rubbed together. What he didn’t realise, what he couldn’t have realised, because he couldn’t see the barrier of dark white outside my window or hear the barn door creaking in the wind, was how genuinely scared I was.

  I was starting to believe that I had moved to permanent winter, wondering if, in being what I thought was quite kind to myself as a writer, I had done something unkind to myself as a human. The whiteness of the days always seemed deeply dark and the blackness of the nights was a sharp blade. On rare windless afternoons the tyre swing in the garden still rocked from side to side, as if comforting itself after a traumatic experience. Ralph and Roscoe, who had loved living at our previous house, all but refused to go out, cowered on the stairwell and stared in apparent terror at invisible objects, which they had always done anyway to an extent, being cats, but never anywhere near as much as they did here. The only one of the four of us who appeared unfazed was Clifton. She waltzed out into the snow and trotted along beside me as I observed the ancient Peak District tradition of walking half a mile to the Saxon Cross on top of the hill to check phone messages. From the cross, on a clear day, we could see Chatsworth House, seven miles down the valley, where the Earl of Devonshire had once lived, assisting with provisions for Mompesson and the plague victims. Had the Earl of Devonshire grown complacent and mistaken Derbyshire for Devonshire? Was that why he had ended up here? And when he lived here did he ache for the sea, like I already did, despite having only been away from it for a few weeks?

  One day, when Clifton had been gone for many, many hours in some of the worst of the snow and I was walking up the track looking for her, I bumped into Richard, the farmer who worked for my landlord. I’d earlier asked Richard to look out for Clifton, since it was one of her habits to take a nap in the driver’s seat of his tractor when it was not in use. ‘Found cat?’ he asked, now. I took a dive into Richard’s voice every time he spoke. It was a familiar and comforting place to go, in the midst of an awful lot that wasn’t. If you were from Kent or Berkshire and you asked someone if they’d located their lost pet by saying ‘Found cat?’ you’d sound curt and demented, but when you were from Derbyshire there was something rich and earthy in the dispensing of the surplus words in the sentence. Richard didn’t even say ‘t’cat’ as some from these parts might. I knew what he meant.

  Richard was boyish with an instantly disarming grin, but after over twenty years of farming up here, the snow and rain and wind were scratched into his face. He told me I had come to live in part of a ‘shit weather corridor’. The corridor was an extremely specific one: it came down from Bamford and Edale in the north, managing to totally miss Grindleford, yet hit us full on. It was bad, he said, worse than he’d seen it for a while, but it could get a lot worse. A few years ago, in the most devastating February in recent memory, Richard had walked out one morning into the field behind my house and found his sheep huddled against the wall, every one of their lambs frozen to death. Martin, who also helped out on the farm, told me that when Richard talked to you for the first time he liked to check out your hands, in case they were small and you might come in useful at lambing time. By late January, Richard had seen my hands several times but had not asked me to assist him with lambing, which was already beginning to happen. On more days than not, one or two of Richard’s sheep – which are Swaledales, and look like the kind of sheep Vikings would keep as dogs, if Vikings still existed and kept sheep as dogs – wandered into my garden, which solved the mystery of what my landlord had meant when he told me I didn’t need to worry about the lawn as it ‘sort of got cut’. In the blizzards, Richard and Martin checked up on me, bringing me wood, always making me feel welcome. This was in contrast to my landlord, who grumbled about everything, cited the snow as evidence that climate change was a myth, and had refused to give my parents a lift down the track in his four-by-four on my first day, as they dropped in to bring Clifton and Roscoe down to the house, skidding on the ice and having to hang on to the fence not to slip over.

  My dad fell in love at first sight with Richard and Martin and, when the snow cleared a bit and he and my mum were able to come and see me, impatiently dashed off to find them in much the same way a ten-year-old might go off to find some mates who were already up the park with a football. ‘I’VE MET EVERYONE AND I’VE GOT LOADS TO TELL YOU,’ he announced, after disappearing for an hour on his second visit. ‘IF RICHARD COMES OVER WITH A RAM’S SKULL, THAT’S FOR ME.’ He was in his element, the central contradiction of his personality – a desire to be far away from humans, coupled with a blatant joy in befriending every one he met, talking their ear off and interrogating them about their entire life story – operating at full throttle. North Derbyshire used to be his favourite place in the whole country, possibly in the entire galaxy, and during my childhood he’d yearned to live in its dark heart in an old building with as little connection to the late twentieth century as possible. Me being here gave him a vicarious thrill. Driving past many of his and my mum’s and my grandparents’ Derbyshire haunts, he spoke nostalgically and lyrically about the region, while also ticking off fellow drivers for their misdemeanours and filling me in on a book he was reading about the Napoleonic Wars.

  ‘YOUR MUM AND I WENT TO THAT CO-OP JUST AROUND THAT CORNER IN 1974 AND AN OLD MAN WET HIMSELF. IT’S NOT A CO-OP NOW. LOOK AT THOSE SHEEP. BRILL. SEE THAT? NO BLOODY SIGNAL. THAT WAS THE OTHER THING ABOUT NAPOLEON. PUT YOUR LIGHTS ON, YOU IDIOT. HIS SOLDIERS USED TO CUT OPEN THEIR HORSES WHEN IT WAS COLD AND SLEEP INSIDE THEM. THINK YOURSELF LUCKY.’

  I told him I thought my new house might be haunted. ‘DON’T BE FUCKING RIDICULOUS,’ he replied. ‘GHOSTS DON’T EXIST. YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOU WERE WHEN YOU WERE EIGHT. GROW UP.’

  My mum, who also does not believe in ghosts, was less sure. She would later admit that she’d found the house deeply unsettling. On the first day, while my dad and I had been briefly out and she’d been in the kitchen alone, she had found the weirdly vast amount of space at the top of the room frightening; she’d had to put the radio on, just for the company of everyday voices. She’d investigated the bathroom and discovered that the black paint on its walls had been employed to cover up rampant black mould. Later, I opened the cistern to find more mould, old and viscous, and around two dozen slugs. A man came over to fix the sewer system, owing to the fact that some previous tenants at one of the other two cottages on the farm had sabotaged it by the bizarre act of stuffing multiple kitchen rolls into it, after falling out with the landlord. Next to the black wall, with the black mould underneath it, after long walks I would let hot water blast the snow off my head and stare at the temperature ring on the shower, which was the exact same Mira shower my mum and dad had got installed at their house in 1984. The Mira shower pulled me back into the past, along with some sheep and coal I could hear beginning to return to my accent, and the pile of newspapers in the village shop ready for residents to collect. It all rushed at me, like a strange vision of home, with almost none of home’s reassurances.

  A calf was born in the barn out the front, the weightlifter moos of its mother creating a more frantic vibe to the spooky early hours chorus, like an overdub on top of the whump-whump of the wind in the cooker extractor hood, the sleet and snow howling down the Shit Weather Corridor and the mournful wibbling of the ghost dog. In bed, after waking up at 3.44 a.m. from my nightmares, I listened to weather pelt the front wall of the house. I heard furniture move upstairs in a loft where there was no furniture and no people to move it, and thought about the people who built the house for weather like this, building the house, in weather like this. I did not se
e a ghost in the house, nor even turn and expect to see one, but I keenly felt a collection of wretched events stored there. Maybe they were stored in that higher part of the rooms my mum had found so disturbing, where there was space for a whole other floor, and which dissuaded me from a long-held belief that all high-ceilinged houses create an atmosphere of lightness and positivity. A plant, a Clivia, that had lived in five previous houses in many different positions – near windows, away from windows – and had always flowered explosively without fail between late January and early February, now decided not to. A set of friends en route to the Proper North visited and, through lightly gritted teeth, told me how lovely the place was. ‘We lied,’ they would admit later, after I’d moved out. ‘It was fucking terrifying.’ Another friend visited with his girlfriend. The weather cheered up to all of two degrees, and we were able to get out to a pub a few miles away. As we walked through the door someone thrust a stuffed fox into my friend’s girlfriend’s face, and a man of seventy-ish immediately moved in our direction, running a hand down her back and slurringly warning her, ‘There’ll be some inappropriate touching later.’ A week later, I revisited the pub and the man was there again, drunkenly rebuking a Welsh singer for singing in her native language, rather than English. ‘Who is that bloke?’ I asked a regular. ‘That’s the landlord,’ he replied. I walked into my study a few days later and noticed that the wooden fish I own, carved by my uncle Paul, was on the neighbouring window ledge to the one where I’d last seen it. The fish had also changed window ledges just after I’d moved in too, and I’d assumed my mum had moved it, for some aesthetic reason known only to her. Something had stopped me from asking my mum if she’d moved the fish. Since I’d last seen the fish, in the second of its three positions, nobody had been in the house but me.