Dark Places

by Shaun Allan

  He just barely missed the truck as it leaped out of the darkness, but he hit the wall and the windscreen and the pavement with full force.

  In the ambulance, Albert's wife smiled down at her husband. He smiled back, closed his eyes, and the monitor attached to his chest flatlined.

  Host

  It whispers through the trees

  On a breeze that's fresh and light.

  Flames flicker fitfully

  As it passes through the night.

  Dogs go strangely quiet

  As it gently drifts on by,

  And people turn in their sleep

  In the wake of its sigh.

  It weaves,

  Meandering to and fro,

  As if on some dark quest,

  Never pausing,

  'Til at last,

  It finally comes to rest.

  It hovers briefly above the child,

  Who stirs and murmurs low,

  Then, with almost a caress,

  The babe's enveloped in its glow.

  The child draws breath

  And sucks in death,

  A vague smile darkens its face.

  And a distant rumble celebrates

  A new host - the Human Race.

  The House on the Moor

  When I first heard about the house on the moor (which was a good while before I actually saw it), I had an idea. I had a mental picture of what the house looked like - a large, rambling, run down, moody building with ivy covering one side like a comfort blanket, surrounded by a rusty iron fence which was set in a low, cracked brick wall and large wrought-iron gates that creaked with non-existent movement in a non-existent wind.

  There was an old, leafless tree by the side of the property that, over the decades, had assumed a suitably demonic pose; a predatory semi-crouch with clawed branches ready to grasp at any that might be foolish enough to trespass on its territory. A grey, perpetual autumn settled (or unsettled) over the house to complete its infernal disposition.

  The image was clear and acute, but then worlds and people and dreams can be born, lived, and ended in a thought, or a breath. As it turned out, I could’nt have been more wrong about the house's appearance. When I finally laid eyes on the building, I was surprised at how mistaken I had been, only about the look of the place though, only the look. The air was exactly as I had imagined. The sun could have been out and I would have shivered.

  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near. It simply wasn’t my job to trawl around the country investigating houses. I could do almost everything I needed from my office. A telephone and a computer were my only tools. I didn’t even have a company car. All that was required was for me to trace the owners of a certain cottage in the middle of nowhere and try to persuade said owners to sell. I had done so many times before and was sure I’d do so many times again. Usually the property had an address though… Normally I had complete autonomy when it came to the final selling price – the companies I worked for had budgets with more Zeroes than I had fingers. Their projects were vast developments that simultaneously dragged big money into an area and pissed off the locals. They wanted it both ways, the residents. They would smile as estate agents valued their homes at a couple more grand than before the shopping precinct opened or the leisure complex (complete with multi-screen cinema) began to draw in crowds. Then they would scowl at the hordes of people invading their territory and at the noise and the mess and the increased traffic.

  Never happy.

  But that didn’t concern me. I was the residents’ friend. I was doing them a favour. Maybe they didn’t really want to sell, but add a couple of grand on the estate agent’s couple of grand and they began to agree. Add ten and they were practically naming their children after me. After all, I’d tell them, the Company never did me any favours, did it?

  To be honest, that was more the truth than anything was. They didn’t do me any favours, but they paid my wages.

  So. They wanted to build somewhere, and a house, or a street (once or twice even an estate) happened to be in the way. How inconsiderate. But I was good at my job, and I got results. I’m a nice guy, essentially. Perhaps my job had me doing things that, if I thought about them, I might find disquieting, but I didn’t think about it. I’m a nice guy, and I could, it was felt, be trusted. The Company liked that, so they used it.

  This particular project was something of a new direction for them. I didn’t know the details, but I rarely did. All I knew was that they needed to acquire some land on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors and aerial photographs had revealed that someone had plonked a house right in the middle.

  I had the maps. I had the reports saying there was a house there. I had a grid reference. The photos had taken a detour somewhere on their way to my office, but I was used to that kind of thing. I often wondered if I worked in the equivalent to Heathrow’s luggage claim. Mail and reports meant for me would appear on desks along the corridor or on another floor. It was normal. I didn’t even notice that much anymore. They’d turn up.

  The first thing that struck me as odd was the lack of an address. There was a grid reference, but it wasn’t the same as 31 Chatham Avenue or somesuch. It would just take a little digging that was all. A computer (and the Internet) is a wonderful thing, and with the right passwords you can find out pretty much anything you want to know short of what your next door neighbour had for breakfast (although you could hazard a guess). So I dug.

  Three weeks later I’d still found nothing. The house seemed to have been on that land forever, yet nowhere could I find a record of anyone actually owning, or building it. I unearthed various references to it in texts, surveys and even in some folklore (apparently it was haunted!). Possession (perhaps an inappropriate word considering the place was meant to be inhabited by ghouls and ghosts and that sort of nonsense) may well have been passed down through innumerable generations, but there should have been somebody sitting at the top of that particular tree. There wasn’t. The deeds seemed to be non-existent. They could be locked away in a safety deposit box at Barclays, or hidden in an old shoebox under a pile of faded black and white (or grey and cream) photographs for all I knew. No one was laying claim to the property and I was beginning to get annoyed, not least because the Company was getting annoyed. I only really had one option, and that was to visit the place.

  The journey took four long hours. It should have been much quicker, my office wasn’t that far away from the moors, but the house was set back against their edge. Not a problem, one would think. Unfortunately, the nearest road was two miles away, the nearest town was thirty miles away, there were no signposts saying ‘This way to the Middle of Nowhere’, and I had a crap sense of direction. The weather was bad – it admittedly wasn’t Hurricane Annie, but it was a wee bit worse than Winnie the Pooh’s Blustery Day! The wind was strong enough to make me wrestle more than once with the steering, and the windscreen wipers were woefully inadequate for the downpour. I had passed where I needed to leave the road three times before I stopped to get my bearings. The road was completely non-descript – a single clean track of tarmac without even a white line to break the monotony. I had been along it and back again feeling my search was more and more fruitless as I went. It occurred to me that perhaps the photos were wrong. I hadn’t actually seen them myself, and had forgotten they weren’t in my file. A small red dot on the map was all I had to go by. Maybe that was why I couldn’t find the place. Maybe it wasn’t really there and the photographs had really shown just an old fallen down ruin – a shack that had once housed a farmer and his wife, their two daughters and the obligatory dog. Perhaps it wasn’t even a building – it could simply be a mass of dead trees or something similar. The Moors were not one of the most hospitable places I had visited. Still, I should at least attempt to find it, if for no other reason than to satisfy my own, somewhat idle, curiosity.

  I stopped my car to take another, more concerted look at the map. The road wasn’t wide enough for more than o
ne car to drive along at a time (if two passed each other I was sure one would end up on the mud verge) so I simply stopped where I was. The tarmac didn’t look as if it was exactly well travelled so I didn’t see any reason to worry that another vehicle might come careening along. Besides, it was a practically straight road. Any cars wouldn’t simply leap out of nowhere.

  The map was one of those huge foldout affairs, the kind that never quite folded back the same way that they unravelled. I hated them, but they served their purpose. Originally I’d had a few scans of the area, but they were next to useless for finding somewhere that probably didn’t even exist. I’d transferred the little red dot-marks-the-spot onto this monstrosity to be able to trace it from the nearest town. That wasn’t as easy as I had first thought, though. Sure the main road was right there on the map, I’d traced it with the same red marker I’d used for the dot. The lack of any road or even rut in the mud to the house meant I had no real idea where to turn off. The terrain was too rough for my meagre Mondeo so I regrettably conceded that I was going to have to walk. This was where my major indecisiveness came in. I didn’t fancy wandering around on the Moors for the rest of my days. I had seen the films – the moorland was inhabited by unwholesome beasts, eager to lunch on whichever part of your body their teeth bit first. It was either that or I’d end up with my foot getting caught in some pothole or other and be stuck fast. I had already checked my mobile phone and was unsurprised to find there was no signal. I could end up lost or dead and have no way to contact anyone either way.

  OK, so I was being paranoid. I was looking out of my window and seeing nothing but nothing and I didn’t fancy it. The downpour had abated, but the wind was still strong enough to bend what few trees I could see. I liked towns. They were cosy. I’m not even slightly agoraphobic, but I much preferred to be surrounded by houses and people than empty space with only a willow to keep me company. I had a dog. I took him for walks in the woods nearby. That was nice, and that was enough.

  Well the quicker I did this the faster I’d be done. Or something.

  I took one last look at the map; there was no way I could take it with me – if I tried to open it I’d probably have it snatched away by the wind. There were no real landmarks for me to have had any idea where I might be if I got lost, so I threw it in the back seat. I didn’t bother to fold it; I didn’t want to still be here tomorrow. Zipping up my woefully inadequate jacket, I stepped out of the car.

  The first thing that I noticed was that it was bittingly cold. Well, actually that was the second. The first thing was that the gale had, in the absence of the map, decided to snatch my breath. It was whipped away as if the wind had reached in an invisible hand and wrenched it from my throat. It took me a moment to recover and by then I realised I was shivering. I cursed my insanity. Come back tomorrow, I told myself, the weather may be less uninviting. But then it probably wouldn’t be. This was England, and England delighted in serving up great dollops of awful weather for her patriots. Besides, I was under pressure on this. I knew full well that I was not going to be getting back in my car until I’d found this house. I breathed into my hands and rubbed them together. It had no effect so I plunged them deep into my shallow pockets and set off. I knew the house was supposed to be about two miles from the road, so I figured if I walked straight out that distance, I could then turn right and walk a ways to try and find it. If that didn’t work, I’d simply turn around and go the other way. If I still couldn’t find it, I’d come back to the road and then try to find my car. I had a certain level of determination, but I wasn’t totally averse to simply giving up.

  The ground was firm, which was somewhat refreshing. It would have been just my luck, I thought, to find myself wading through mire. Granted the grass was just short of knee length, and wet (soaking my trouser bottoms in minutes), but walking was relatively easy. I was thankful for small mercies. I realised, as I went, that the most walking I did was either taking Tilly, my dog, for a walk, or going to the coffee machine at work. I had no real idea just how far two miles was, and I figured distances out here, where the only thing stopping you seeing forever was the horizon, would be hard to estimate accurately.

  I was depressing myself, I knew. There was quite a lot to see if I actually bothered to look. Trees, the names of which I had never really bothered to learn, dotted the landscape. I knew what a willow and an oak looked like and that was it. Both of these resided outside the pub my parents frequented. I had spent many a Saturday afternoon waiting outside that particular hostelry (named The Oak Tree for obvious reasons) waiting for my mum to just nip in to get my dad, and only having the one drink while she waited. Once, I remembered, I had been standing under the tears of the weeping willow when there was a loud crack and the thick branch above me slowly snapped and fell on me. I have no idea why I simply stood and watched, but that’s just what I did. Luckily I was standing out towards the end of the branch, which must have measure 12 inches across. I had been pulling at the leaves and the next thing I knew I was in them. I was still standing there, waist deep in tree, when my mum finally came out. She didn’t believe me, but I didn’t really mind. I wondered, at the time, if the ‘weeping’ willow had cried so much it had been broken by the weight of its tears.

  I looked behind me to check my bearings against my car. I could still see it, a small white scar against the grey of the clouds. I was surprised at how far I’d managed to walk. Hell, maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. I turned back and continued on, scanning the countryside for any sign of a building. I could see the Moors now, rising up from the flats like a – well - like a load of hills. I realised I had lost my imagination around the same time I was accosted by the willow. The realisation made me sad – I’d never noticed it was gone, slipping away like the proverbial thief-in-the-night. Sure, I could make clichéd metaphors, but I didn’t want that, not any more. I wanted to wake up the kid in me, assuming he hadn’t sneaked away under the cover of my imagination. Why I was thinking like this, I couldn’t fathom. I was a practical person and hadn’t particularly suffered from its absence. I didn’t know if it was due to the fact that, for the first time in forever, I was totally alone with my own thoughts. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t used to open spaces or silence (ignoring the violent gale) and my mind had been working overtime on this blasted house. Either way, I needed to perk myself back up. I thought back to my youth and the trees I’d climbed (and fallen out of). It worked, to a certain extent. At least I could concentrate more on the job at hand instead of wallowing in inconsequentials.

  After what seemed an age, and noticing I could no longer see my car, I stopped. I guessed this would be about far enough, and I should be able to see the house if I came within a good distance of it. I mentally flipped a coin to decide which way I should turn, and it came up Heads. So left it was. There was still no trace of a path of any sort and wading through wet grass, no matter how relatively short it might be, was tiring. The wind seemed to be hitting me from all directions while still being mainly right in my face, even though I’d changed my bearing. I couldn’t see the road or my car, but to my right were the beginnings of the Moors.

  They rose fairly sharply in a straight-ish line ahead and behind me, about a couple of hundred yards away. Mist clung to the slope giving a vague veiled look, as if they were slightly out of focus. It felt colder. I could see, further away, plateaux and hills rising to scary heights. I was so pleased my goal wasn’t way up there.

  As I walked, I realised the ‘straight-ish’ line was really nothing of the sort. The edge of the Moors dipped in and out like a coastline. Even with the roar of the gale I could sense a heavy silence from that direction, as if the storm couldn’t quite touch it. This hush was emphasised by the stillness of the fog – it might have been a painting it was so calm. It was strange, I thought, the tricks your senses played in unusual circumstances.

  I returned to my scrutiny of the Moor’s ‘coastline’. Various sized coves broke its edge creating small, and s
ometimes not so small, shelters from the elements. Branches and bushes had found their way into many, torn from their original abodes by the relentless wind. It was eerie and added to the desolate feeling. It seemed I had, at the most inopportune time, rediscovered my imagination. I was just walking across a blustery field. Granted I was in the middle of nowhere and alongside the North Yorkshire Moors, but it certainly wasn’t anything creepy. As for the brushwood in the ‘coves’, it did not look like grasping hands – it was simply deadwood. The mist along the rise of the Moors was not a ghostly veil, hiding untold horrors, and the fearsome breeze was not a Banshee scream. I knew all of this. I knew all of this. My only problem was convincing myself of it.

  I was getting tired of this. The house could be anywhere or nowhere. I knew I had intended walking in both directions, but I just couldn’t be bothered. I’d tell my company that it was clear – the land was OK. A few grand to the local council would secure it and they could go ahead. The decision was made and I was about to return to my car when I saw the post. It was wooden and rotten and mostly moss covered, but its regular, artificial shape stopped me dead in my tracks.

  A fence post.

  I drew a long breath through clenched teeth and let it out through my nose. A little further along, the moor edge slipped back again. The post was lying, pointing in no particular direction, just before the gap. The house was very likely set back in this bay – a natural place to set up home, as it would provide ample refuge from storms and the like. I used the term ‘natural’ even though I couldn’t imagine why someone would want to build here. I didn’t understand why I was suddenly so anxious. All I had to do was knock on the door, speak to whoever lived there, and go home. If nobody was in residence then I’d probably have a look round, but then I’d leave. It was nothing major.