Beneath the Moors and Darker Places Read online

  Now it is probably just as well that the majority of tales told by fishermen are usually recognized for what they usually are, for certainly a few strange stories wafted up from the riverside during that four-day period, and not all of them from rod-and-liners. Who can say what the result might have been had anyone really tried to check these stories out?

  For Planny was coming along nicely, thank you, and in no time at all he had accumulated all the nastiness of quite a large number of easily devoured pike of all sizes. He had developed a taste for them. Also, he had picked up something of the unreasonable antagonism of a particularly unfriendly, yappy little dog whose master called for him in vain from the riverbank until late into the fourth night.

  On the fifth morning, having almost given up hope of ever seeing the curious creature again, David went down to the pool as usual. Planny was back, and much bigger! Not only had he put on a lot of weight but his capacity for learning had picked up, too. The little dog had gone down (or rather in!) almost without a burp, and Planny’s very efficient digestive system had proved only slightly superior to his “natural” talent for, well, picking brains.

  But while the animal’s hidden abilities were not so obvious, his growth assuredly was!

  David gaped at the creature’s size—almost two feet in diameter now—as it came sliding out of the reed patch with the top three inches of its spongy, greyish-white bulk sticking up out of the water. The eyes were just below the surface, peering out liquidly at the boy on the bank. It is not difficult to guess what was going on in Planny’s composite knowledge-cells... or brain ... or ganglia ... or whatever! The way he had been hiding in the reeds and the way he carefully came out of them undoubtedly highlighted a leftover characteristic from his earlier, minnow period. The gleam in his peculiar eyes (of which David was innocently unaware) was suspiciously like that glassiness, intense and snide, seen in the eyes of doggies as they creep up on the backsides of postmen, and there was also something of a very real and greedy intent in there somewhere. Need we mention the pike?

  Up into the shallows Planny came, flattening a little as his body edged up out of the water, losing something of its buoyancy, and David—innocent David—mistakenly saw the creature’s approach as nothing if not natural. After all, had he not saved the poor thing’s life?—and might he not therefore expect Planny to display friendship and even loyalty and gratitude? Instinctively he reached out his hand ...

  Now dogs are usually loyal only to their rightful masters, and minnows are rarely loyal at all, except perhaps to other minnows. But pike? Why the pike is a notoriously unfriendly fish, showing never a trace of gratitude or loyalty to anyone ...

  ~ * ~

  Approximately one hundred and thirty yards away and half an hour later, Professor Lees and his wife rose up from their bed and proceeded to the kitchen where they always had breakfast. A rather pungent, stale-water smell had seemingly invaded the house, so that the scientist’s wife, preceding her husband, sniffed suspiciously at the air, dabbing at her nose with the hem of her dressing gown as she opened the kitchen door and went in.

  Her throbbing scream of horror and disbelief brought her husband in at the run through the open kitchen door a few seconds later. There was his wife, crouched defensively in a corner, fending off a hideously wobbly something with her bleeding, oddly dissolved and pulpy hands.

  David’s father did not stop to ponder what or why, fortunately he was a man of action. Having seen at a glance the destructive properties of Planny’s weird acid make-up, he jumped forward, snatching the patterned cloth from the table as he went. Flinging the tablecloth over the bobbing, roughly globular thing on the floor, he hoisted it bodily into the air. Fortunately for the professor, Planny had lost much of his bulk in moisture-seepage during his journey from the pool, but even so the creature was heavy. Three quick steps took the scientist to the kitchen’s great, old-fashioned all-night fire. Already feeling the acid’s sting through the thin linen, he kicked open the heavy iron fire-door and bundled his wobbly, madly pulsating armful—tablecloth and all—straight in atop the glowing coals, slamming the door shut on it. Behind him his wife screamed out something ridiculous and fainted, and almost immediately—even though he had put his slippered foot against it— the door burst open and an awfully wounded Planny leapt forth in a hissing cloud of poisonous steam. Slimy and dripping, shrunken and mephitic, the creature wobbled drunkenly, dementedly about the floor, only to be bundled up again in the space of a few seconds, this time in the scientist’s sacrificed dressing gown, and hurled once more to the fire. And this time, so as to be absolutely sure, David’s father put his hands to the hot iron door, holding it firmly shut. He threw all his weight into the job, staying his ground until his fingers and palms, already blistered through contact with Planny’s singular juices, blackened and cracked. Only then, and when the pressures from within ceased, did he snatch his steaming, monstrously damaged hands away...

  It was only in some kind of blurred daze that Professor Lees managed to set the wheels of action in motion from that time onwards. Once the immediate panic had subsided a sort of shocked lethargy crept over him, but in spite of this he cleaned up his unconscious wife’s bubbly hands as best he could, and his own— though that proved so painful he almost fainted himself—and then, somehow, he phoned for the doctor and the police.

  Then, after another minute or so, still dazed but remembering something of the strange things his wife had screamed before she fainted, David’s father went upstairs to look for his son. When he found the boy’s room empty he became once more galvanized into frantic activity. He began rushing about the house calling David’s name before remembering his son’s odd habit of the last month or so—how he would get up early in the morning and go off down to the pool before school.

  As he left the house a police car was just pulling up on the drive outside. He shouted out to the two constables, telling them they would find his wife in the house ... would they look after her? Then, despite the fact that they called out after him for an explanation, he hurried off toward the copse.

  At first the policemen were appalled by the loathsome stench issuing undiluted from the house; then, fighting back their nausea, they went in and began doing what they could to improve Mrs. Lees’s lot. The doctor arrived only a moment later. He could see instantly what was wrong: there had been some sort of accident with acid. Relieved at the arrival of this sure-handed professional, the bewildered policemen followed the scientist’s tracks to the pool.

  There they found him sitting at the poolside with his head in his tattily bandaged hands. He had seen the slide on the stone in the pool, and, in a dazed sort of fashion, he had noted the peculiar, flattened track in the grass between the house and the copse. And then, being clever, totalling up these fragile facts, he had finally arrived at the impossible solution ...

  It all hinged, of course, on those mad things his wife had screamed before fainting. Now, thinking back on those things, David’s father could see the connections. He remembered now that there had been a slide missing from his set. He recalled the way in which David had declared the flatworm—the planarian worm—on a certain slide to be alive.

  Quite suddenly he took one hand from his face and shoved it into his mouth right up to the bandaged knuckles. Just for a moment his eyes opened up very wide, and then he let both his hands fall and turned his face up to the patient policemen.

  “God ... God ... God-oh-God!” he said then. “My wife! She said ... she said …”

  “Yes, sir—” one of the officers prompted him, “what did she say?”

  Aimlessly the professor got to his feet. “She said that—that it was sitting at the breakfast table—sitting there in David’s chair— and she said it called her Mummy!”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  DAGON’S

  BELL

  I

  DEEP KELP

  It strikes me as funny sometimes how scraps of information fragments of seemingl
y dissociated fact and half-seen or -felt fancies and intuitions, bits of local legend and immemorial myth, can suddenly connect and expand until the total is far greater than the sum of the parts, like a jigsaw puzzle. Or perhaps not necessarily funny ... odd.

  Flotsam left high and dry by the tide, scurf of the rolling sea; a half-obliterated figure glimpsed on an ancient, well-rubbed coin through the glass of a museum’s showcase; old-wives’ tales of hauntings and hoary nights, and the ringing of some sepulchral, sunken bell at the rising of the tide; the strange speculations of sea-coal gatherers supping their ale in old North-East pubs, where the sound of the ocean’s wash is never far distant beyond smoke-yellowed bull’s-eye windowpanes. Items like that, apparently unconnected.

  But in the end there was really much more to it than that. For these things were only the pieces of the puzzle; the picture, complete, was vaster far than its component parts. Indeed cosmic ...

  ~ * ~

  I long ago promised myself that I would never again speak or even think of David Parker and the occurrences of that night at Kettlethorpe Farm (which formed, in any case, a tale almost too grotesque for belief), but now, these years later ... well, my promise seems rather redundant. On the other hand it is possible that a valuable warning lies inherent in what I have to say, for which reason, despite the unlikely circumstance that I shall be taken at all seriously, I now put pen to paper.

  My name is William Trafford, which hardly matters, but I had known David Parker at school—a Secondary Modern in a colliery village by the sea—before he passed his college examinations, and I was the one who would later share with him Kettlethorpe’s terrible secret.

  In fact I had known David well: the son of a miner, he was never typical of his colliery contemporaries but gentle in his ways and lacking the coarseness of the locality and its guttural accents. That is not to belittle the North-Easterner in general (after all, I became one myself!), for in all truth they are the salt of the earth, but the nature of their work, and what that work has gradually made of their environment, has molded them into a hard and clannish lot. David Parker, by his nature, was not of that clan, that is all, and neither was I at that time.

  My parents were Yorkshire born and bred, only moving to Harden in County Durham when my father bought a newsagent’s shop there. Hence the friendship that sprang up between us, born not so much out of straightforward compatibility as of the fact that we both felt outsiders. A friendship which lasted for five years from a time when we were both eight years of age, and which was only renewed upon David’s release from his studies in London twelve years later. That was in 1951.

  Meanwhile, in the years flown between ...

  My father was now dead and my mother more or less confined, and I had expanded the business to two more shops in Hartlepool, both of them under steady and industrious managers, and several smaller but growing concerns much removed from the sale of magazines and newspapers in the local colliery villages. Thus my time was mainly taken up with business matters, but in the highest capacity, which hardly consisted of backbreaking work. What time remained I was pleased to spend, on those occasions when he was available, in the company of my old school friend.

  And he too had done well, and would do even better. His studies had been in architecture and design, but within two short years of his return he expanded these spheres to include interior decoration and landscape gardening, setting up a profitable business of his own and building himself an enviable reputation in his fields.

  And so it can be seen that the war had been kind to both of us. Too young to have been involved, we had made capital while the world was fighting; now while the world licked its wounds and rediscovered its directions, we were already on course and beginning to ride the crest. Mercenary? No, for we had been mere boys when the war started and were little more than boys when it ended.

  But now, eight years later ... We were, or saw ourselves as being, very nearly sophisticates in a mainly unsophisticated society, that is to say part of a very narrow spectrum, and so once more felt drawn together. Even so, we made odd companions. At least externally, superficially. Oh, I suppose our characters, drives, and ambitions were similar, but physically we were poles apart. David was dark, handsome, and well proportioned; I was sort of dumpy, sandy, pale to the point of being pallid. I was not unhealthy, but set beside David Parker I certainly looked it!

  On the day in question, that is to say the day when the first unconnected fragment presented itself—a Friday in September ‘53, it was, just a few days before the Feast of the Exaltation, sometimes called Roodmas in those parts, and occasionally by a far older name—we met in a bar overlooking the sea on old Hartlepool’s headland. On those occasions when we got together like this we would normally try to keep business out of the conversation, but there were times when it seemed to intrude almost of necessity. This was one such.

  I had not noticed Jackie Foster standing at the bar upon entering, but certainly he had seen me. Foster was a foreman with a small fleet of sea-coal-gathering trucks of which I was co-owner, and he should not have been there in the pub at that time but out and about his work. Possibly he considered it prudent to come over and explain his presence, just in case I had seen him, and he did so in a single word.

  “Kelp?” David repeated, looking puzzled, so that I felt compelled to explain.

  “Seaweed,” I said. “Following a bad blow, it comes up on the beach in thick drifts. But—” and I looked at Foster pointedly, “I’ve never before known it to stop the sea-coalers.”

  The man shuffled uncomfortably for a moment, took off his cap, and scratched his head. “Oh, once or twice ah’ve known it almost this bad, but before your time in the game. It slimes up the rocks an’ the wheels of the lorries slip in the stuff. Bloody arful! An’ stinks like death. It’s lying’ feet thick on arl the beaches from here ta Sunderland!”

  “Kelp,” David said again, thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the weed people used to gather up and cook into a soup?”

  Foster wrinkled his nose. “Hungry folks’ll eat just about owt, ah suppose, Mr. Parker, but they’d not eat this muck. We carl it ‘deep kelp.’ It’s not unusual this time of year—Roodmas time or thereabouts—and generally hangs about for a week or so until the tides clear it or it rots away.”

  David continued to look interested and Foster continued: “Funny stuff. Ah mean, you’ll not find it in any book of seaweeds— not that ah’ve ever seen. As a lad ah was daft on nature an’ arl. Collected birds’ eggs, took spore prints of mushrooms an’ toadstools, pressed leaves an’ flowers in books—arl that daft stuff—but in arl the books ah read ah never did find a mention of deep kelp.” He turned back to me. “Anyway, boss, there’s enough of the stuff on the beach ta keep the lorries off. It’s not that they canna get onto the sands, but when they do they canna see the coal for weed. So ah’ve sent the lorries south ta Seaton Carew. The beach is pretty clear down there, ah’m told. Not much coal, but better than nowt.”

  My friend and I had almost finished eating by then. As Foster made to leave, I suggested to David: “Let’s finish our drinks, climb down the old seawall, and have a look.”

  “Right!” David agreed at once. “I’m curious about this stuff.” Foster had heard and he turned back to us, shaking his head concernedly. “It’s up ta you, gents,” he said, “but you won’t like it. Stinks man! Arful! There’s kids who play on the beach arl the livelong day, but you’ll not find them there now. Just the bloody weed, lyin’ there an’ turnin’ ta rot!”

  ~ * ~

  II

  A WEDDING AND A WARNING

  In any event, we went to see for ourselves, and if I had doubted Foster, then I had wronged him. The stuff was awful, and it did stink. I had seen it before, always at this time of year, but never in such quantities. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, however, and that probably explained it. To my mind, anyway. David’s mind was a fraction more inquiring.

  “Deep kelp,” he murmured, standing
on the weed-strewn rocks, his hair blowing in a salty, stenchy breeze off the sea. “I don’t see it at all.”

  “What don’t you see?”

  “Well, if this stuff comes from the deeps—I mean from really deep down—surely it would take a real upheaval to drive it onto the beaches like this. Why, there must be thousands and thousands of tons of the stuff! All the way from here to Sunderland? Twenty miles of it?”

  I shrugged. “It’ll clear, just like Foster said. A day or two, that’s all. And he’s right: with this stuff lying so thick, you can’t see the streaks of coal.”

  “How about the coal?” he said, his mind again grasping after knowledge. “I mean, where does it come from?”

  “Same place as the weed,” I answered. “Most of it. Come and see.” I crossed to a narrow strip of sand between waves of deep kelp. There I found and picked up a pair of blocky, fist-sized lumps of ocean-rounded rock. Knocking them together, I broke off fragments. Inside, one rock showed a greyish-brown uniformity; the other was black and shiny, finely layered, pure coal.