Tom had always loved the postcards his grandmother sent him from her holidays.

As each year went by and the world gradually gave up on mail for texts, then thumbs-up emojis and disappearing messages he missed them more than ever.

Every trip he took he bought lots, wrote fewer and never got round to posting any.

Over the years he accumulated dozens and dozens in a shoebox on a shelf in his study.

Blue seas and white cliffs, heather-topped mountains, mosques and minarets against red-gold sunsets, whales blowing steam into frigid air, places that forged memories, places he’d wanted to tell people about, but never had because things happened and then other things, and then the holiday was nearly over and how much did any of it really matter anyway?

Tom was 0.8 at work and on Wednesdays he did the school run.

After dropping off Martha and Mikey, if his chores weren’t too urgent, he liked to browse the Beckworth charity shops, a habit that exasperated Sarah, his wife.

“What are you going to do with another lamp?”, she’d say, hands on hips, somewhere between annoyance and amusement. “And before you say anything else it isn’t going in the bedroom.”

One hot July morning just before the school broke up and with holidays on his mind, Tom found a clutch of postcards in a basket in the Age Concern on the high street – mostly British coastal and countryside scenes, a few from further-flung destinations.

He turned over a postcard of a waterfall in a green wood.

Like the ones in his shoebox, it had never been stamped but unlike them was written and addressed. “Weather shit, food lovely,” it said in scratchy blue biro, “love you lots, see you soon. Bob.”

Tom turned over another, began to read and then he was lost in the forgotten inconsequentialities of other lives.

“You’d have loved the gardens we went to today.”

“Wish we could stay here forever but wish you were here with us too.”

“Went swimming yesterday, fancy meal this evening. Please remember to pay the milkman. Love Joyce. Wish you were here.”

“Wonder if they did,” Tom muttered to himself.

“Say something, mate?” asked a bored looking young woman from behind the till.

“Yeah,” Tom said, then tailed off. “It doesn’t matter. How much for these?”

The woman came out from behind the counter and looked over his shoulder.

“Not much use to anyone now,” she said. “Written already. If there’s a picture you like just take it and drop some change in the bucket.”

“I want them all,” Tom told her.

The young woman looked at him. “Why?” she asked.

“Dunno,” said Tom.

The woman looked as if she were about to say something, shrugged and changed her mind. “OK then – how many are there? Twenty or so? Say a fiver for the lot and you can have the basket too.”

…

Tom put the basket next to his shoebox where they sat quietly for a day or two.

Then in breaks between his Teams meetings, the cards began to talk to him.

“It’s even rainier than home”, whispered a woman with a scouse accent.

“Sea’s a lovely temperature,” whispered another in Brummie. “We’ve been swimming every day since we got here.”

“Ate a crab for the first time – not worth the fuss if you ask me.”

The postcards grew steadily more insistent until it was impossible to concentrate on anything else.

He moved them into the drawer of a roll-top desk in the lounge, but they raised their voices and put him off the TV.

“Maybe in the cabinet in the corridor outside Martha’s room? I could get some sort of thick box for them?” He half-heartedly suggested to Sarah.

She was having none of it.

“Oh no you don’t, Thomas,” she said. “You made this mess, so you clean it up. Martha’s only just begun sleeping through and I’m not risking that.”

..

An idea came to him in the middle of a humid, hot night as he was moving into the spare room where it was cooler.

Perhaps the postcards needed to be sent on.

He could do that.

…

Tom posted two of the cards the next day and that was that for them, but as if in protest at being left out the other cards raised their voices. The following morning, another Wednesday, he bought a book of stamps in a Beckworth newsagent and posted them all.

After that he did the charity shops and accepted, with a weary resignation, the appearance of another stack of written but unsent cards in Age Concern as an inevitability.

“Who brought these in?”, said the same woman. “I swear they weren’t here last night. It’s like they appeared out of thin air.”

Tom posted these, and those that came the following day and the cards that came the week after that too.

“This is getting silly,” Sarah told him, on the couch, her feet in Tom’s lap, as they stuck stamps to the latest batch of cards together. “You’ve done your good turn. Give it a rest or who knows where this will end?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Tom said. “I’ll make this the last lot.”

“Good,” Sarah said. “And stay out of the charity shops for a while. Poking around in other people’s old things is how this stuff always gets you. Now rub my feet.”

…

Two days later, a box of unsent cards arrived at the house. They were so loud that Tom could hear them from the bedroom.

He checked his email and discovered—though he had no memory of it—that he had ordered them from eBay at midnight, the night after his conversation with Sarah.

He took a photo and sent her a WhatsApp.

“You aren’t going to be happy about this.”

…

He posted them.

By Friday another parcel arrived.

By Monday there were two.

…

“We’ve got to put a stop to this,” said Sarah in the kitchen a week later as they got breakfast ready for the kids. “I can’t hear myself think!”

“Maurice loves the beach,” said a card above the others.

“Would you believe restaurants don’t even open until nine here?”, asked another.

“Your dad tried sardines!!! Guess what??? He didn’t like them!!! But I said well-done anyway!!!”

“Tom!” Sarah shouted above them, her fingers in her ears. “Do something!”

“I know, I know,” said Tom, moving the latest cartons and boxes into the office and shutting the door. “I’ll get rid of these today.”

“I think when you do that you just encourage them though,” said Sarah, kissing him on the cheek as she left for the school run. “Post these on but have a proper think too. Enough is enough. We’re not spending the rest of our lives in a Roald Dahl story.”

After posting the cards in the Willerby post box by the pub, Tom took a walk around the village.

He couldn’t stop thinking about all the undelivered messages in the world, at the bottom of bags, folded into books and magazines and in shoeboxes, all the many things everyone means to say and then forgets about.

As sad as this was, it was impossible to pass them all on.

They must know that, he thought.

What then, could they want?

But nothing came to him and then it was time for work again.

He tucked his shirt into his tracksuit bottoms and logged out of the uncanny and onto spreadsheets, reports and online meetings that were somehow both important and completely unimportant at the same time.

Every meeting about budgets and feedback loops would be archived forever, he thought, while the things people most wanted to say disappeared into drawers and shoeboxes.

At ten-thirty he took a break and, as he sipped his coffee the silence of his own cards on the shelf above his computer struck him as suddenly awful – at least the cards from the charity shops and the internet had voices.

He hadn’t given any of his even that.

He took them down and picked one out at random – a photo of the square of a walled Rioja town from a road trip through northern Spain he’d taken with Sarah only a year or so after they’d got married. The place came back to him – cobblestones so clean and white it was as if they’d been polished, flamenco buskers under the stars, the golden cat they found sleeping on the bed of their apartment when they came back from eating pinchos for dinner.

He tried to remember where exactly he’d bought the card from but couldn’t.

It didn’t matter.

Those days and nights had been among the best of his life.

Had he known then? Had he told anyone? Had he even told Sarah how happy he’d been?

He wished he’d sent a card to someone, anyone, even if all it’d said was he was having a lovely time.

Tom’s coffee grew cold as he sat with the memories until another meeting came and went without him, and then one after that too.

He rifled through his box until he found the card he was looking for. Then he took a pen from the Cool Daddy mug the children had bought him for a Father’s Day present.

“Dear Grandma,” he wrote. “Sorry, this took so long but better late than never, eh? Just wanted to say we’re having the time of our life. I’m so in love with Sarah I don’t know what to do with myself sometimes. Sorry you couldn’t make our wedding. Love Tom.”

He addressed it to the bungalow she’d lived in last. She wasn’t there now, but he didn’t think that would matter.

And he sent more and before long he was writing cards all the time.

He sent them to his brother and sister, to university friends, to his godchildren and most often to Sarah. The first he wrote her was about Rioja too.

“Sarah – I love you more than I did then,” it said.

Two days later he found her reading it at the kitchen table crying into her morning coffee.

“Thank you,” she said.

Two days later he got a card she’d written him.

Before long he ran out of unsent cards, but that was fine.

There were always more to buy because there was always more to say.

Thank you all for continuing to visit the village - we appreciate it.

Our community continues to grow and we get more visitors each week - thank you for spreading the word.

Keep doing it please.

Summer in Willerby is a quieter time. Everyone needs to rest.

Tomorrow we’re sending out our last orders of our book and will then be closing the Etsy shop until September on Friday.

In the run up to this, we’ve discounted the second and final printing of our first book, A Year in Willerby to £15, or £20 with the notes from John Macdebs cancelled lecture on Hugo of Willerby and his Natural History of Dragons.

Once we sell out of this run (around 50 of 100 are spoken for now), we won’t reprint this book, so this is the last chance to own a copy of the very first Willerby collection.

The book is locally printed, bound with original lino cut art and sent straight from the village via the nearest post office in Beckworth. Each copy is individually numbered and sent with a handwritten letter or postcard.

Reviews have been kind with this one from Kaye Ingliss particuarly lovely.

We ship anywhere in the world and probably beyond - we like a challenge.

Buying the book - if you are able - is a great way to support the village with our future plans.

And we have plenty of these - we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we have something to share.

Over the summer we’ve at least two more stories to publish and our BlueSky account will be sporadically active.

Keep an eye out for the emails.

Once again thanks for visiting.

Warmest regards

The Villagers.

The heat broke the evening after the third day in a violent storm that smashed parched leaves from desiccated trees and left main street an aisle of tempest-tossed curling yellow and brown confetti.

Walking Ninja in the cool breeze of the next morning Steve found a poor dead thing curled up in a puddle by the pub.

A thing with both fur and feathers.

It was three in the morning, and rain was beating hard against the bedroom window.

Max woke with a start and turned to the bedside alarm to look at the time.

For a bleary moment he allowed himself to believe it was only the weather that had woken him, but then the inevitable came.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Sunita stirred in bed beside him as he shrugged on his dressing gown.

“Is it them?” She mumbled.

“Yes. Go back to sleep.”

“OK, sorry love,” Sunita, said and rolled over. “Wish they’d learn to come in the day.”

…

Max’s misfortune began when he was in his mid-teens at his balloon stall at the Willerby summer fete.

He’d learned the basics of balloon animal modelling two years before from YouTube for his sister’s fifth birthday party, and she’d been so delighted by his dogs and giraffes he’d kept it up.

She told her friends about her clever big brother, who told their parents, who told Max’s parents and soon he was balloon modelling everywhere.

“It’s part of being a member of the community,” his dad told him when he moaned about the loss of another of his weekends. “This is why we moved here in the first place. It’s the village fete next week and you’re the Balloon Man now. There’s no escape.”

Max did some token grumbling, but he didn’t really mind.

It was sort of nice to have a job to do and sitting in the porch of his house listening to music as he fashioned the dragons, swords and unicorns he’d added to his repertoire beat the tearoom or lugging pots around the plant store with his mum.

All fetes attract eccentrics, mostly nice, some not.

The year before a middle-aged woman in a fleece and cracked glasses had become irate with him for being unenthusiastic about modelling at her village’s fete the next week.

“It’s only in the afternoon,” she said. “Your mum and dad could drop you off and pick you up no problem.”

“I’m really sorry,” Max told her, “But I’ve got rugby.”

“You could miss that just once, couldn’t you?”

“Not really,” said Max.

“Well then suit yourself, sounds like that’s what you’re good at,” she said over her shoulder as she stropped off down the street towards the bric-a-brac.

“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Max’s dad reassured him later, as he took a break from serving pork batches. “If it’s who I’m thinking of, you’re far from the only person she was horrible to. She was having a right go at Dennis over the teas going up 50p this year. Look – most people can’t help who they are, and when someone is difficult it’s usually about them not you. Try to remember that. And don’t let it ruin your day. Anyway, look lively - you’ve got more customers coming.”

Max got back to work twisting balloons, giving wide grins to the loud children and softer smiles to the shyer ones hiding behind the reassuring legs of their mums and dads.

“Every balloon guaranteed,” he said. “Another for free if it pops.”

It was cloudy but it stayed dry, and Max was soon so busy he lost all track of time until suddenly it was four and the flood of children was a trickle.

Then, finally, just as the first drops of rain fell there was just one family left, a father, a mother and a boy and a girl.

“How much is a balloon?”, the father asked, shapeless in a grey anorak in a low voice barely above a whisper.

“Just a pound,” Max told him, his stomach grumbling as he thought of the post fete barbecue at Dan and Sally’s house, wondering whether he’d be thought old enough for a beer this year without there being an embarrasing fuss.

“We would like balloons,” the two children said in unison, dressed identically in the same style grey anoraks as their mother and father.

“Balloons.” The mother said.

“Balloons,” repeated the father.

“Sure,” Max said looking up at them. “One each?”

The grey boy and girl stepped forward, nodding gravely as they held out their small oddly wrinkled grey hands.

But then the mother placed her hands on the shoulders of her children and gently pulled them back.

“The balloons will burst,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “And we will have lost two pounds.”

Max shifted uneasily, wishing the weird family gone but reminding himself of what his father had said about people not being able to help who they were.

“If it pops then come back and I’ll do another for free,” he said as brightly as he could manage.

“Ah,” said the grey father.

“Ah,” said the grey mother. “Any time?”

“Yes, why not?” Max said. “Call it a Willerby lifetime guarantee.”

The grey mother released her children as the grey father nodded.

“A good deal,” the mother said. “Thank you. We will take two dogs with the lifetime guarantee.”

Max reached for his pump and bag of balloons.

“What colour?”

“Red,” said the grey boy.

“Blue,” said the grey girl.

Then, after a cold, leathery handshake that made Max think of stone and earth, after the pumping, twisting and pinching and the money in the pot the Grey family walked away with their bright dogs, away down the street in the rain as the rest of the village packed away stalls, chairs and tables.

Later, sheltering from the rain in the pavilion on the green with a burger and a can of lager, Max told Mauve the old lady who lived next door about the odd end to his day.

“You gave them a lifetime guarantee?” She said, sipping a gin and tonic. “You might regret that.”

…

The Greys returned the next morning just after breakfast while Max was weeding the flower beds as part of his attempt to disguise the hangover his parents knew he had but were pointedly not mentioning.

He was listening to a football podcast and only noticed them after he stood to straighten out the knots on his back.

The family were standing close together under the cherry tree in their matching grey anoraks.

“One has burst,” the mother said. “And we have the lifetime guarantee.”

The boy held out the deflated limp latex.

Max took out his earbuds and thought of getting his mum or dad, but something in the steady, calm way they looked at him made him do someting else.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll get my stuff.”

…

They were back the next day.

And the one after.

And the one after that.

The Greys kept coming.

…

Close to his wits end, after a month with school about to start again, Max found a company on Amazon that made extra strong modelling balloons and the gaps between the Grey family’s visits increased to weeks and sometimes even months, which made the situation easier to manage.

But eventually they always came back, found him wherever he was – at school, on holiday, in hostels and beach huts on his gap year in Australia and South East Asia, in the morning before university and lectures, late at night outside pubs, clubs and kebab houses, even at his wedding where they stood patiently by the cake until the speeches were over.

They never aged, never changed, were always the same.

Max tried many times to reason with them but whenever he did it were as if he were speaking a language they could not understand.

“We have a lifetime guarantee,” they said many times over many years in their low, grey voices.

Max tried refusing, tried throwing away his pump and balloons, tried remonstrating with them, but when he did this, they didn’t leave at all, would instead politely and gently stalk him, waiting and whispering wherever he was until finally he relented and made a red dog or a blue dog or sometimes both.

It was disconcerting and maddening, and for years in his thirties and forties when life was busiest he was obsessed with ridding himself of them, spending frustrating hours he didn’t have spare on the internet and in strange bookshops and libraries.

But then, in a windy out of season November holiday in Anglesey, on a whim while Sunita and the twins were doing the charity shops, he visited a kohl-eyed and tattooed fortune teller in her early middle age in a cabin at the end of a spray-lashed grey pier.

She read his palm and cards and told him, matter of fact in a tone without much interest or concern, that he was cursed.

“Can you lift it?” He asked her, excited.

The fortune teller shook her head.

“No,” she said. “This is beyond my pay grade. But it’s only a very mild curse, really. People get a lot worse. To be honest I’d rather have what you’ve got than my IBS.”

“What should I do then?”

The fortune teller shrugged. “Probably best to just live with it. Apart from that, your fortune looks pretty good.”

It was enough, and Max left the cabin with a resigned acceptance he recognised later he must accept as peace.

…

Nobody but Max – of course – ever saw the Greys, not even Sunita or his children.

But after they moved back to Willerby just after Covid, Sunita learned enough of the village to know Max was telling the truth, and that made it even easier to bear and manage

The Greys were what they were.

They couldn’t help it and meant no harm.

…

Many years later they came to him in the hospice.

By his bed were the last animals he’d been able to make, when his fingers still worked, made for the children who had so little time.

They looked at him, silently, and then melted away back the way they’d come.

In a comfortable Cotswolds town, Marla, Connor, Gemma, Stuart were having a dinner party.

It was Saturday and they were all comfortable, healthy, and their children were old and sensible enough to look after themselves, so why not?

Near the end, after the tapas, wine and good bread, Marla cleared away the ice cream bowls and put out the cheeseboard.

Gemma held up her phone to take a photo.

“Gem!” Her husband Stuart protested. “Put that away. You’re getting as bad as the kids.”

“Ours take so many but they hardly look at any of them afterwards,” said Marla, arranging grapes between the edam and melted camembert. “They’re so busy recording everything they’re missing the best parts of their lives – I worry one day they’ll get around to scrolling back through it all and find they don’t have any proper memories.”

“I can’t remember any of my best memories!” Stuart said. “Put that thing away, Gemma!”

“Oh, stop fussing!” Gemma said, good-tipsy laughing, as she moved around to get better lighting and angles. “It’s just a bit of fun. And it can be really creative too. Tim’s got all these followers on Instagram from taking cool creepy pictures of abandoned factories and stuff. It’s called ‘urban exploration.’ It’s a whole thing. He says he even makes money from it somehow.”

“Urban exploring?” Marla put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Connor, isn’t that what you do with your Grimford friend on your weird weekends?”

Connor dipped the end of a baguette into the camembert. “It’s not the same.”

“It sounds the same. Breaking into old places, hanging out in them? That’s what you do.”

She turned to the rest of the table.

“He’s been doing it ever since I’ve known him. He got arrested for it while we were at university.”

“You got arrested? Stuart said. “Cautious Connor got arrested?”

“He did,” Marla said, then kissed Connor on the cheek. “It’s why I married him. I was a posh girl from Surrey, and he was this up-and-coming rebel writer from the north. And not long after we met, he was caught by the police in an old pub. He spent a night in the cells. I had to come and get him the next day. It was all very exciting and so of course I fell in love.”

“Never!” Gemma said, more impressed than shocked.

“I wasn’t properly arrested.” Connor said. They saw my torch and thought I was a burglar, but there wasn’t anything worth anything there worth taking. They took me to the station, but I wasn’t there for a whole night. They let me go after a couple of hours.”

“Do you still do it?” Gemma asked.

Connor shrugged. “When I get the chance.”

“Do you have photos and videos too?”

“I always ask him to, but he never takes any,” said Marla.

“Why do you do it then?” Stuart asked. “This urban exploring?”

“I always have. That’s all,” said Connor.

There was much more to it than that, of course, but Connor didn’t know how to explain.

…

Connor knew all about “urban exploration.”

He found the term forced and affected, a new label for something he’d been doing for almost as long as he could remember.

It began at the grammar school, where he hadn’t fitted in.

But he hadn’t fit in anywhere then.

Didn’t fit in the foster homes he bounced between, didn’t fit in the dirty, rainy streets of the decaying city he was born to, didn’t fit with his unstable, drink soaked and drug addled fragmented family, didn’t fit in with the cruel, clever children who nicknamed him, together with another boy, Hassan, The Two Stinkers.

Connor Morton.

Hassan Mohammed.

Next to each other on every register, next to each other in every classroom, Connor smelling of stale smoke, black mould and sweat, Hassan of his father’s takeaway.

…

Connor was quiet.

He knew it was best not to make a fuss.

But all children have breaking points.

At the beginning of his second year at the grammar, after a whole summer with an old couple who had been kinder than most, Connor ran after he was told his mother had decided she wanted him again and he had to go back to her and her new boyfriend at the end of the day.

When they told him, something snapped and he burst out of the small room, ran outside to the jeers and catcalls of the other boys, ran faster than the adults could run, ran for nowhere till his lungs burned and a stitch forced him to a juddering stop on a bench by a bus stop.

There he watched the pigeons, not knowing what to do next, trying not to think, until a few minutes later, Hassan found him.

“I ran as well,” he said. “I hate it there too.”

Connor looked at his old, dirty shoes.

“I won’t go back.”

“Hassan shrugged.

“I know a place we can go.”

…

They went to a wasteland.

They squeezed easily through a gap in a fence and pushed through thigh-high rough grass, moving carefully to avoid hidden broken bricks and twists of rusted iron.

The ground floor doors and windows of the old mill were barred, but most had been either weathered or wrenched away from the smog blackened stone.

Inside, they explored for a while and then sat together on a bench by a giant wooden table once used to cut fabric, making up insults and names for children and teachers they’d never dare use.

When it began to get dark, they went to Hassan’s terraced house where his father gave them both a bowl of deep, red savoury meat curry with chapati and a yoghurt drink.

The spices were strange, but the food was good and Connor was so hungry he ate two more helpings.

Hassan and his parents went upstairs to talk while he finished, and Connor waited quietly for them at their Formica table.

“Dad says you can always eat here or at the shop,” Hassan said when they came down. “But he says we can never leave school again and he says he has to call them now.”

When the Social arrived to take him away, Hassan’s mother took him into an unexpected embrace and kissed him on the cheek. She gave him samosas, wrapped carefully in white paper inside a brown paper bag.

He could not work out why she was crying as she waved goodbye to him from the street.

After he had his own children the memory of that day came back to Connor, and he found himself struggling for breath in his car as he watched them play in a park, because then he understood why Hassan’s mother had wept.

…

Connor could only bear school because of Hassan, and Hassan could only bear school because of Connor.

The Stinkers haunted the margins of the dark Victorian building hiding from the chants and taunts.

“Stinkers, stinkers, where are you? We know you’re near we smell poo,

Stinker, stinker, where is it? You can’t hide, you smell of shit.”

But the boys were wrong, because The Stinkers were very good at hiding.

The bushes around the field; the art resource room upstairs that was never locked; the boiler room of the disused swimming pool; the almost but not completely walled off auditorium; the snicket between the theatre and a fence with bars wide enough for the two Stinkers to slip thorough at the end of the day.

In the evenings, at the weekends and in the holidays when neither ever went anywhere, except the summer when Hassan went to Pakistan and Connor was every minute sick with fear he would not return, the two boys explored all the lost, abandoned places they could find.

Mills, factories, workshops, cellars, churches and pubs.

They became skilled at breaking and entering undetected, learning to love the places only they knew about.

Much later, long after he left, Connor heard another writer also from Grimford say she had grown up in the ruins of a fallen civilization and felt his soul rise in recognition.

It was exactly that.

Vast echoing factory floors whirring with the wings of startled starlings rising into strange helix murmuration and then away into the sky through the shattered windows.

Cavernous churches with rising, twisting dust clouds hazing green and blue in the light of high, splintered stained glass.

Aisles of cobwebbed black machinery throwing cogs and gears on sawdust rough wooden floors as it rusted away.

Small offices with page-three-calendars, blackboards and posters displaying shift start and finish times and the penalties for arriving late or slacking off.

Once, best of all, in a hanger-sized corrugated iron shed in a green jungled copse, a red and gold electric tram with the uniform cap of its last driver hanging from its massive brake handle.

Connor and Hassan spent almost all a hot summer there, playing, fantasising better lives, collecting the old coins, ticket stubs and cinema tickets they found between its seats.

They looked, but the year after they couldn’t find it.

Either someone had removed the tram and dismantled the shed or they’d both forgotten where it had been.

Or something else.

Because Connor’s memories of those hot months, riding the tram through busy streets, waving at cheerful men in bowler hats and women in colourful dresses, couldn’t have been real - must have been the shared invention of two lonely boys using their imaginations together to escape.

When Connor thought of them, other memories that could not be real memories came to him too, layers of old worlds that were not his, images of people and places that slid away when he tried to focus on them, leaving bittersweet nostalgia and loss – a sense of having been in places that were like dry riverbeds running suddenly with floodwater, gone as fast as it appeared.

Whatever it had been, whatever Hassan and he had done, was worlds away from Tim’s Instagram “derelique chic” photos Gemma sent to him the day after the dinner party.

They were staged.

The circle of velvet-upholstered chairs in the centre of the ballroom was too perfect, the crimson voodoo graffiti on the tattered wallpaper, lit by a professional off-shot lighting rig was too American and too fresh-sharp to be genuine.

This sort of stylisation, Connor and Hassan found, was happening more as the internet and social media drove new breeds of influencer to places that had become a tourist trail.

They’d become used to finding places that should have been theirs ruined by previous visitors.

Connor hated it, hated the realisation a place he had been spoiled, feeling like an Egyptologist excavating a tomb and finding it had been looted.

But disappointment never stopped them looking.

Every couple or so years, sometimes more often, they would meet at an unfamiliar station and take a day-and-night trip to somewhere they heard worth exploring.

It was an odd thing to do, but their friendship was odd and it was a surprise to both it survived the different paths they took.

Connor stayed for sixth form.

He had never thought of university until an intense young English teacher who’d been to Magdalen arranged some meetings after half-accidently reading some of Connor’s poems, and then there were more meetings, and suddenly it was all decided, and he was being asked about where he might like to live.

When he asked about money he was told not to worry, and he found he never had to.

Although there was never very much, somehow there was always enough.

All at once he was reading books in buildings older than even the oldest ones he and Hassan had explored together.

He saw others not fit in and how they worried about it, but he never found his loneliness a burden.

He was used to it, was content on the margins until a day in a seminar reading a poem about a man peeling potatoes with his mother, he realised for the first time he was able to understand what it meant to feel at home and what it might be like to have one.

Connor rarely looked back.

Sometimes but ever with much conviction, he wondered whether how little he felt towards the life he’d shed like a worn out set of clothes was unhealthy.

But mostly he found he didn’t care.

It had been bad. Dreadful, dark things had happened.

None of it was his fault. It was over.

…

Hassan, perhaps, had worse luck than Connor.

He left school after “O” levels to help at his family’s takeaway and stayed in Grimford, working at then managing the new restaurant until a sharper, flashier cousin took over and made it very successful before taking the business to the verge of bankruptcy when he defaulted on the loan he’d taken to turn sauce recipes into a supermarket brand.

The cousin vanished, leaving Hassan with only the takeaway his family had begun with and debt it took twenty years of working all hours to get from underneath.

Through all the changes, Connor and Hassan never stopped exploring.

Silenced sports stadiums hidden behind fences and trees in wind-blown concrete suburbs.

Rotting cinemas and theatres in unfashionable small towns. Farm offices with pig show rosettes and 1960s calendars from feed companies pinned to whitewashed walls. Dark dead floodlights looming over a grassy greyhound track next to a shuttered train station.

They never said much but it didn’t matter. They had never had much need for words.

Connor never introduced Hassan to anybody.

Hassan, and himself when he was with Hassan, could not be understood by anyone he knew. How could anyone know the life he had shared with Hassan all those years ago? How could he ever explain why it meant they must carry on?

Urban exploration? No.

Whatever it was they did, it wasn’t that.

So, he nearly ignored the next message he got from Gemma, a link below “HOT TIP” in block capital letters.

After a moment of three dancing dots another message appeared.

“Tim says he’s never been. He doesn’t think anyone has. He says nobody can find it!!”

“Where?”

The dancing dots again.

“It’s an old school called Saint Augustine’s. It’s off the A5, in a village called Willerby.”

Connor sat back in his office chair for a moment, then leant forward to his computer.

…

A month later Connor picked up Hassan from a smalltown midlands train station just after ten in the morning.

Hassan was standing in a metal and glass shed next to the station taxi rank sheltering from the steady grey drizzle and didn’t notice Connor until he honked his horn.

“New car?” He said as he slid into the passenger seat.

“Not that new,” said Connor. “Couple of years now.”

“It’s nice,” Hassan said, drying his glasses with a fold of his shirt.

“Yes. The last book did better than we expected. There’s talk of a TV series. I don’t know how they’d make one from poems, but they must think they can. Marla said I should treat myself. How are things going with you?”

“Mostly the same. People come and people go, but it goes on. How far is the school?”

Connor looked at the map on the car’s clever integrated screen.

“Says twenty-five minutes but this thing is always a bit optimistic. Probably more like half an hour.”

“OK,” said Hassan.

They listened to the radio together, Hassan so quiet it was almost as if he wasn’t there. Later, when Connor poured over this last outing, he was sure they had talked at least a little, but he could never remember what about.

…

“This is it,” said Connor, as they neared a white and black sign for Willerby. “Once we get in, we’ll have to ask someone for directions. I couldn’t find anything more specific than it’s supposed to be in this village. There is a good chance we won’t find it at all. Nobody else seems to have managed it.”

“We will,” said Hassan, in a voice barely more than a whisper, leaning forward to peer through the rain and the wipers as they made the turn.

Willerby – grey in the rain – was nondescript and unremarkable. Old farmhouses and cottage arranged along one main street. Allotments at the top end. An old church tower surrounded by small green mounds. A pond with a white picket fence around it. A green with a pub at its corner.

There was nobody around.

“Let’s see if the pub is open,” said Connor, pulling up outside on a lowered kerb by a sign advertising tandoori mixed grills and karaoke on Thursdays.

But it was closed.

The two men stood there together in the rain.

“It opens at eleven,” an old woman in overalls called to them from across the street. “The food is good if you want somewhere for lunch after your walk.”

“We’re not ramblers,” said Connor. “We’re looking for the school?”

The old woman trudged over, curls of grey and white hair wet where it wasn’t covered by a red knit bobble hat. “You’re in the wrong place then,” she said. “Nearest school is in Beckworth ten minutes away.”

Connor shook his head.

“Not a school that’s open. An abandoned one.”

The woman looked then up and down, shifting on her feet.

“You mean Saint Augustine’s?”

Connor nodded. “That’s it.”

“Why? You property developers? You won’t get planning on it, you know, even if you could buy it.”

“No, that’s not it. We just want to see it.”

The woman thought for a moment again. She shrugged.

“Follow me then – it’s by the church.”

She led them back up the street without looking back.

They went past the pond and a bus stop to a gap in a high hedge just before the gate to the churchyard.

“It’s up there,” she said, pointing. “If you can find it, you can’t miss it. If you miss it, you won’t find it. When you’re done just come back the way you came and don’t step off the path. People get lost here.”

To begin with the path – a muddy track weaving its way through overhanging blackthorn and gipsy-willow trees – was close and narrow. After a few minutes it widened and then it was paved in rough slabs with long, rough grass growing between the cracks.

There was a padlocked gate, but it was low and easy to climb.

Connor had been ahead of Hassan and was surprised to see him on the path beyond the gate already.

But then he remembered from all the time together spent exploring– things like this happened sometimes in the hidden worlds.

They pushed on together in silence. It was further than it should have been.

The school, beyond a mossy playground with rusting swings, a seesaw and a collapsing roundabout, was a small one room Victorian building of the sort that hadn’t really existed since the days when rural children lived mainly on farms and all ages were taught together.

High trees loomed above it, the rain, heavier now, pattering gently on the new year green leaves.

Apart from that, it was very still.

They stood before the front door.

With a soft sigh, the trees and other growth shrank back. When Connor turned around the equipment in the playground was brightly painted and for a moment, he heard children laughing.

A handbell rang. The children’s laughter died away. An instant later he felt small, warm bodies brushing past him, and when he turned again, the door of the old school was wide open.

For just an instant he was surprised but then he remembered this was what always happened and that afterwards, he always forgot.

Connor looked around and found that Hassan was not with him anymore.

…

A week later in his office he opened a hand-addressed letter with a faded photo and a note inside.

The photo, aged, dark Bluetack at each corner, the image, stained with spots of turmeric, was of himself and Hassan together outside the old Grimford takeaway in bright sunshine, each other’s skinny arms around each other’s skinny shoulders, both caught laughing, a pale white boy with a dark brown boy in that frozen instant, happy.

Connor couldn’t remember when or why it had been taken, or by who. Probably one of Hassan’s parents.

The note, written on a takeway order chit, in hard unfussy blue biro, was very short.

“My dear Connor, my Brother Stinker,” it said. “I’m glad one of us made it out and I’m glad it was you. I wish there was more, but this is all I have left for you. I hope it is enough.”

Connor turned the envelope over and saw by the postmark it had been sent a year ago.

He thought for a while.

“Thank you, Brother Stinker,” he whispered. “Thank you for coming after me.”

He stuck the photo, above the desk at which he wrote poems.

And then he sat there on his own thinking more, looking back, trying so hard to remember, hard to remember many things for a very long time.

Then Marla called for him, because it was glorious May outside, and it was time for brunch.

It was Saturday morning. They were comfortable, healthy, and their children were old and sensible enough to look after themselves, so why not?

Paratha and eggs with chilli-salt and pepper under their cherry tree.

Marla took a photo and sent it to the group.

…

The end.

The fields around Willerby follow the usual rhythm.

Bare and hard in the cold frozen months, muddy and rich in the wet early spring and then carpeted green as the life within them rises from the soil.

As May warms to June the fresh green ripens to dark and to yellow and gold and it is then the local farmland knits itself to the eternal fields that go far, far beyond our world.

It is from these strange dimensions the fieldsharks come.

Follow the rules and there is little reason to fear them. They stay away from the old rights of way and the sight of one from afar, its scarred and pitted two metre dorsal knifing through the corn or wheat is a magnificent sight.

But in the summer only a fools wander, for the sharks are silent, swift and merciless.

…

The characters in this story can also be found - amongst other stories - in:

Jack’s Pool.

The Big Top.

Tigist and the Wolf.

Folded In.

Ghosts Everywhere.

…

Sally saw the bedside clock said seven and screamed.

“What?” Dan asked her, blurry and muffled from beneath the tangled sheets.

“The baby, Dan! Check on Sammy!”

Dan looked at the clock, jumped out of bed and ran naked down the corridor to his son’s room.

Sally tumbled after him, her breath short and ragged.

“Oh, thank god, he’s fine,” Dan said a moment later, cradling the eighteen-month-old in his arms.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, he’s fine. Look.”

Dan handed the baby to his wife, who looked into his wide blue eyes and burst into tears.

“I thought he was dead,” she said. “I really thought he was dead.”

Dan found he could not stop shaking.

“Me too,” he said, with a laugh that was really a choke. “I thought I was going to find..”

Sally swallowed a final huge sob in a deep breath.

“Don’t, Dan.” She said, “I can’t bear it.”

…

They had breakfast in the garden. Croissants and coffee in the spring sunshine, the baby on a crochet blanket under the white blossom of their cherry tree.

“He’s never slept through before.” Sally said.

“First time for everything,” said Dan. “Who knows? Maybe we’re turning a corner.”

“Maybe,” said Sally, shrugging. “We’re due a break.”

Dan looked down at the baby.

“Is he trying to sit up?”

Sally peered down too.

“It looks like it.” She reached down, took a tiny hand and pulled gently. The baby rocked easily up onto its bottom and gurgled happily.

“Well, wow.” Dan said. “And there’s another milestone.”

Sally laughed with delight the looked more closely and frowned.

“There’s something different about him. Do his eyes look the same to you?”

Dan scooped the child up.

“I think so?” He said. “They’re the same colour, right?”

Sally shook her head. “Yes, but no. There’s something different, I’m sure.”

Dan looked again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they’re a bit lighter? Does eye colour change that suddenly?”

Sally shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought so. Let’s have a look in the book.”

Dan started to get up. “I’ll go get it now.”

Sally almost let him go but then changed her mind,

“Sit down. It can wait for a bit longer. We’ve both slept properly for the first time in goodness knows how long. Let’s enjoy the morning for a bit longer.”

Dan settled back down, gratefully, for it had been a very tough year.

Hospitals that were always too bright and too hot. Painful tests that made all three of them cry, doctors telling them the news was bad with the lesson it wasn’t bad at all, just different, not yet learned.

A year of so little sleep that both Dan and Sally felt disassociated from themselves, every waking moment unreal, each night never-ending and full of fear of the dawn tumbling towards them.

But there was wellspring of deep, ancient love too.

Years later, when things were more settled and they’d come to happy terms with their different lives, the three of them went to a bonfire night fireworks display in Beckworth park that was washed out by torrential rain.

Most of the crowd abandoned ship as it fell, melting home or to the pub but Dan had brought a huge umbrella he’d been given at a corporate golf day, so they hunkered under it and toughed it out.

Sally was struck by a massive Roman Cande spitting defiance at the stormy night, and how much that felt like her love for Sammy in the darkest times when the jaws of life felt like they were closing on her.

The nights she and Dan had spent after Sammy was finally asleep came back to her, the violent reality of it all rushing at her so strongly it made her gasp, the fear and love wrapped up all together, the bad-drunk singing and dancing in the kitchen, their stand against the horror, their two fingers at the abyss.

But this insight was only to come later.

In the middle of it all they were just exhausted.

…

Over the next week the baby made remarkable progress.

Sitting up became crawling and then, a week to the day it had slept all the way through for the first time, to Dan and Sally’s astonishment the baby took its first tottering steps.

By the afternoon it was walking confidently between the two couches in the lounge, and by the evening doing laps around them.

Then – after eating with gusto – the baby fell into a deep sleep and had to be carried to its cot.

After their own dinner, Dan and Sally sat at the kitchen table and talked over their dirty plates.

“I’m going to make an appointment with endocrine.” Sally said. “I’ve looked online and been on the forums and this just doesn’t happen like this for kids like Sammy.”

“It’s like a miracle.” Dan said.

Sally pursed her lips. “His eyes. That’s the bit that bothers me most.”

…

The doctor thought they were fussing and while he did agree to see them, with nothing actually wrong they weren’t offered an appointment for six weeks.

“They all develop differently,” the doctor said on the phone, in the soothing tones of a man so used to placating and mollifying anxious parents he was unable to recognise his own condescension. “There’s no rule book. It sounds like he’s doing well. Enjoy it!”

“It’s not about enjoying it,” Sally said. “He’s different – it doesn’t happen this way. Have you looked at case studies of other children with his condition? Has this happened before? It’s worrying us.”

“Well don’t worry,” the doctor said, breezily ignoring her questions. “Get out in the fresh air. Take him to places. Enjoy the spring. Doctor’s orders.”

“Doctor’s orders?” Dan said after Sally hung up. “What a prick.”

Sally frowned but then laughed, resolving to be more positive. “Yes, but the forecast for the weekend is glorious, so we may as well do as he says.”

…

They tried to enjoy it, but it was an unsettling two days.

The toddler – now undoubtedly more than a baby – slept through both Friday and Saturday night, waking well rested and good humoured each morning, so different to his usual colicky screaming and the sobbing fits that lasted for hours it felt eerie.

Sally did not sleep well.

She was uneasy and on Sunday night, unable to adjust to unbroken sleep after so long without it, she lay awake in the dark wondering why she was finding herself so uncomfortable around her own son.

The child, breathing easily in his cot had made more progress over the weekend than he had in months before it. At the park on Saturday morning, he’d looked straight at her and said “mama.”

Sally knew this should have been a moment to treasure, that the first words she’d waited so long for should have made her feel something good, but instead she felt – if anything – irritated, finding an entitled, almost proprietorial tone in just that one word.

At lunch, a shared ploughman’s in a close by farm kitchen, he’d eaten whole mouthfuls of cheese and even half a pickled onion, all at once completely uninterested in formula and breastmilk.

Sally should have been pleased but felt rejected instead.

By Sunday morning the child was walking confidently, eating anything solid he was offered and, along with “mama”, was saying daddy, more, yes and no.

It was all happening too fast.

She rolled over to listen to her husband’s breathing. It was regular, but shallow. Then he rolled over too.

“Dan? Are you awake?”

He sat up in bed.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can’t get down.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Sammy,” said Dan.

“Me too.”

“What are you thinking about Sammy?” Sally asked.

“That he doesn’t seem like our son. Does that make me terrible?”

“Only if it makes me terrible too,” said Sally. “I’m thinking that too.”

They got up and went to Sammy’s room to look at the child, peaceful and still, lit softly by the fairy lights Dan had woven between the bars of the cot so that when he woke crying in the night, he wouldn’t be alone in the dark before they could reach him.

“Does he look the same to you?” Sally whispered.

“Yes,” Dan whispered back. “But he feels different.”

The next moring they picked at their tea and toast quietly and spoke in whispers, scared the child in the cot upstairs might hear them.

“Should we call the doctors again?” Dan asked.

Sally shook her head. “What would be the point? If we said any more than we have already they’ll think we’ve gone insane. They’ll probably call social services. And I don’t think this is anything any doctor could do anything about.”

“What do you think is going on?”

“Something strange.”

“We should ask David and Mauve over.” Dan said. “They’ll know something about this.”

“I think so too,” said Sally. “Soon. Today.”

“It’s nearly eight – I could go over now if you want to get Sammy up?”

Sally looked up at the ceiling and shuddered.

“I’ll go to David and Mauve,” she said. “Can you him while I’m gone?”

Dan looked at his wife, her face creased and worried in the morning sun streaming golden through the patio window.

“Alright,” he said.

Sally met his eyes and nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

…

Mauve gave a quick, short scream when she saw the child sitting confidently in the highchair at the kitchen island, grabbing at marmite toast, more upright and stronger than Sammy had ever managed.

“Where’s Sammy?” She said, whirling around.

“I knew there was something wrong with him,” Sally said from behind the older woman, feeling a complicated rush of fear and vindication.

“Wrong with him?” Said Mauve. “Nothing, but he aint a boy and and he aint Sammy.”

…

“You can’t blame yourself,” said Mauve, later, outside on one of the patio chairs, after Dan and Sally had calmed enough to listen to her properly. “When they do this, they cast a spell on the parents so to you the baby looks mostly the same. If they didn’t, it would never work.”

Dan put his coffee cup to his lips then put it down on the table without taking even a sip.

“Who would do this? Goblins?”

David shook his head.

“They’d only ever take a baby if they needed to protect it. They got a knack for finding kids like that. There are old stories they took some orphans during the Black Death, brought ‘em up boggart and happy enough for that. More recently there’s talk they took adopted an evacuee who lost both parents in the Coventry Blitz the same night the old cathedral burned. Hard to be sure. To goblins once you’re adopted, you’re one of them. They forget where their foundlings come from. They don’t think it important.”

“Sammy wasn’t in any danger,” said Sally, crying a little at the thought anyone could ever think he would be. “Not from us.”

“Right,” said Mauve. “He aint no little lost foundling in need of a home. This aint that. He aint been taken by goblins, you can be sure of that.”

“Who then?” Dan asked.

Mauve pursed her lips and looked over at her husband who was picking at his hands.

“The High,” David said. “It’ll be the High that’s taken him. Swapped him for one of theirs. They do that sometimes as part of their festivals.”

“The High?” Said Dan. “Who are they?”

“We did tell you before, yonks ago though and just a mention of them so not surprised you forgot. They don’t come round here often now, thank goodness.”

“I hate we still call ‘em that,” Mauve said. “Makes them sound like they’re better than the rest of us and they aint. They’re arrogant, wicked things.”

“What are they?” Sally asked.

David looked up and shrugged. “They got lots of names Fairies is one. Or the Fae if you’re going to be posh about it. Elves. The one I think fits best I read in a book about what they’re called in some overseas place. Says there they call ‘em Grotesques. I like that because it fits the way they think they’re all special and beautiful and, I don’t know, well-fashioned when the truth is to anyone with any sense, they’re - I don’t know..”

“Extravagant,” Mauve interjected.

David paused to think for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes, that’s right. Extravagance disgused as elegance. That’s what grotesque is right enough.”

“Why would they take Sammy?” Dan asked.

Mauve got to her feet. “It’s a thing they do. Could be for any number of reasons, few of which we’d understand, fewer still I give a shit about. It’s not important now. We need to get him back soon as we can. We need to go now.”

Dan and Sally got up too.

“How? Asked Sally.

“Just follow me for now,” Mauve said, already walking back to the house. “We’ll swing by ours and then take the road.”

“The baby?” Dan asked.

Mauve stopped. “We’ll have to bring it,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s just a mite and it can’t help its people. Aint done nothing wrong. Don’t know what they’ll do with it mind. Cross that bridge when we get to it. One step at a time. We get Sammy first, everything else after that.”

…

“Are we sure this is the best way?” David said, looking up the iron ladder going up into the gloom of the church tower. “Not the old road? The path up to the fort?”

Mauve nodded. “This way is more direct,” she said, “and it brings us out right by their court. It’s better if they don’t have too much warning.”

She stepped forward and put her hands to the rungs. “I’ll go first. Then Dan with the baby, then Sally, then David. All you got to do is keep going up. It’ll be much longer than you’d expect so don’t fuss about that. Just keep climbing. If you need a break shout out, but remember the quicker we go, the better our chances of getting Sammy back.”

“The better our chances?” Sally gasped. “Does that mean you think we might not?”

Mauve turned round, troubled. “I shouldn’t have put it that way but – look - there’s no sense in worrying about that now. We don’t go fast we got no chance. We go fast we have one.”

The first part of the climb led to a small, dark opening and into a cobwebbed wooden floored and panelled room used to store the church’s seasonal decorations.

The four of them, the happily gurgling baby in a rucksack baby carrier on Dan’s back, picked their way through plastic crates of Christmas wreaths and baubles and fluffy Easter chicks to the opposite wall, where another ladder led to a closed trapdoor in the ceiling.

“This is the big climb,” said Mauve over her shoulder as she pushed it open. “And it’s dark. Just keep going up, one step at a time, and ignore anything you hear or think you hear.”

They went up and up, far, far further than the height of the old tower and afterwards Dan and Sally could never agree how long their journey had gone on for, although both were so worried neither felt they could trust their memories.

Dan thought they were in the deep dark much longer than Sally did but he had the extra weight of the baby which might have accounted for at least some of the difference.

But, just as likely – they later agreed – was time as well as distance was warped in the crossing of the boundary between the worlds.

Several times – again exactly how many they couldn’t agree on – there were senses of great space around them and at others a feeling of confinement.

Sometimes the rungs of the ladder were uncomfortably cold and at others it hummed under their hands and grew warm enough to make their palms sweat.

There were breezes and gusts as they passed openings they could feel but not see, and in the movement of air they heard, or at least thought they heard, the whisper of leaves in wind, the murmur of waves, the high cry of something that sounded like faraway gulls.

Once, abruptly, from nowhere a sudden cackle of wild, crazed laughter that broke into deep, throaty sobs.

“Ignore that and keep climbing,” Mauve shouted.

After a couple or perhaps more hours in the deep, the black around them became less dark and the air lost its smell of cold stone, warming, taking on an earthy, rich scent laced with a heavy perfume of manure and blossom.

The baby, sleeping or awake and silent up to then, began to stir, stretching and squirming, its strong fingers grasping and tugging gently at Dan’s hair.

“Dan,” Sally said from just behind him. “The baby – it’s bigger and its glowing.”

“Right enough it is,” said David, behind her. “It’s back where it came from. The spell they put on it won’t hold now there’s no need for it.”

“I can see their stars,” Mauve called. “We’ll be there in a moment.”

The final yards of the climb took them to a circular hole, glowing blue above them.

“Wait a moment,” said Mauve, hauling herself up through the opening. “You can come up,” she called a second after that. “There’s nobody here.”

A moment later they were all out and standing by a stone well in the middle of a flat, well-trimmed lawn in a small clearing in a close-packed forest beneath an indigo sky studded with red, green and gold stars, shimmering, winking and flaring as if behind a great curtain of shifting, restless heat.

“I hate it here,” said Mauve, flatly.

“Not guarded tonight at least,” David said. “Must be a party night. Wonder why they ever bother to be honest. What have the High to fear?”

“Nothing now,” said Mauve, “but there must have once been things they were scared of, and they do like to play at their traditions and rituals although I’m sure they don’t remember the meaning of any of them.”

She turned to Dan and Sally.

“It’s just a short walk. We can rest for a moment, but we shouldn’t stay long. There are things in the forest we don’t want to notice us.”

She settled herself on the edge of the well and took some bread buns and chocolate bars from her bag.

“Eat these,” she said, passing them round. “It’s been a long trip, and we’ll need to keep up our strength for this last bit. We can’t eat anything here.”

The baby on Dan’s back was wriggling again.

“It doesn’t look anything at all like Sammy,” Sally said as she picked it out of the backpack. “Now I can see it properly.”

The changeling kicked in her arms. She put it down and it stood up straight and looked around. It took one of the chocolate bars and then a couple of uncertain steps towards the only opening in the forest, a dark hole with a loamy path behind it. It didn’t go far before it stepped back towards the adults, the golden glow around it pulsing faintly as it breathed.

Mauve sighed.

“Poor lost thing,” she said, dusting her hands free of crumbs on her trousers. “Just a kitten without its mother. Can’t t help what it is.” She shook her head, clearing the distracting thought. “Don’t matter for now. You ready? We need to move.”

…

The path between the trees was narrow and winding, overhung in places by foliage that rustled gently in the still air.

In the gaps in the canopy the colours in the sky moved and shifted, weaving tapestries of light in the same green, gold and red as the stars.

Everything was red, gold and green - the bark of the trees rust, the branches gilded, the fine veined leaves twisting emeralds in the gloaming.

It was beautiful, but overbearing and intrusive too– like a florist window stocked with just one showy variety of hothouse rose – stunning at first, but then cloying and overwhelming as all subtly and nuance was drowned in the overbright fanfare.

“This place is a migraine waiting to happen,” Mauve muttered, as she led the way.

Ahead of them, faint at first, they heard music.

Snatches of some songs they recognised and some songs they didn’t played carelessly for a minute or so before the musician grew bored and moved on to another tune.

“And that drives me spare and all,” said Mauve, shaking her head, jabbing at where the music was coming from up ahead. “And that’s the High all in a nutshell. Everything in the moment, no sense of why anything worth anything needs commitment, everything a show, nothing ever finished.”

The snatches of music grew louder as the group grew closer and then they were on the edge of a clearing much bigger than the one they’d climbed up to.

And there they found the Court of the High – a smattering of brightly coloured ragged tents clustered around a larger striped pavilion from which the snatches of music were coming.

A tall, thin man-shaped thing in a long white robe, pulsing between soft pink and red pulled himself up from where he’d been sitting alone and cross legged by a flickering green campfire and gave a theatrical, sarcastic bow.

“Have you been invited?” He said from beneath a Roman cavalryman’s fine-wrought helmet, worn carelessly at an angle, the leather chinstraps unfastened below his sharp, pale jaw.

“Were you invited when you took our baby?” Mauve snapped at him.

The thing gave them a smile that was more a leer.

“Ah,” he said. “You must be here to thank us for our gift.” He looked down at the elven changeling. “Such a pretty, clever child. He’ll be loved in your world wherever he goes- he’ll make you so rich, so famous. Don’t let it ever be said the High don’t give charity to the unfortunate.”

“Charity?” Mauve said, the anger rising in her. She chose her next words carefully. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t want your charity. It aint welcome. “We want the human boy back.”

The tall figure’s eyes widened in surprise.

“The unmade child? But why? For what purpose? What good will it ever do?”

“He’s ours,” Sally said, stepping forward. “And we love him.”

“But how?” The thing said, with apparent genuine curiosity.

Mauve put a hand on Sally’s arm. “There’s no point trying to explain to it,” she said. “It can’t understand.”

She turned back to the elf.

“Just give him back,” she said. “And we’ll leave you alone to whatever this is.”

The figure said nothing for a moment, then shrugged.

“Come with me,” it said, then turned and walked lightly towards the striped pavilion, seemingly indifferent to whether the humans and the changeling were following.

…

In the half-light of candles, torches and LED camping lanterns, twenty or so of the High lolled on deckchairs strewn haphazardly over the dark grass underneath the bright, tattered canvas.

They stopped playing as the humans entered.

Some were in evening dress, some were in rags. One was in a suit of rusting chain mail and one, twirling to music only she could here, was in a dirty wedding dress with a long train.

Two in black tailored SS uniforms stood either side of a wooden dais on which sat a male figure in a golden throne, smoking a cigar and wearing a safari suit and pith helmet.

“You missed the party,” said the figure in the safari suit, sounding hungover and bored. “You should have been here hours ago if you wanted to come to the party.”

It turned to the guard.

“Why have you brought them?”, it said. “I’m tired. You should have known I’m tired.”

“They say they want the useless baby back.”

The safari-suited king pulled itself upright looked at them with something like interest.

“Why? What would you do with it? Perhaps people will pay to see it? Perhaps you have shows for this sort of thing? The one we have given you is much better.” It waved at them with a long-fingered hand. “No matter. I don’t care. Go away.”

“Very happily.” David said, evenly. “Give us the boy back and we’ll be on our way.”

The thing in the throne sighed.

“We don’t have it. What would we do with it? What would anyone do with a half-made thing like that? Take our gift to you, learn to be grateful and just go.”

“Where is he then?” Dan said, raising his voice, almost shouting.

The King winced.

“Tell him to lower his voice,” he said to Mauve. “Or I’ll kill him.”

“And if you do that, I’ll kill you,” Mauve replied. “I might be able to and even if I can’t, I can hurt you trying. Or you just tell us where the boy is and there doesn’t need to be any fuss at all.”

The King of the High flopped back in his chair, his pith helmet flopping over his bright eyes. “Fine. We never took it out of your world. Why would we? We left it by the old door. Now just go.”

Mauve’s lips became a thin, hard line.

“You abandoned it?”

“Who cares? Why would anyone care?”

Mauve turned to say something to Dan and Sally, but they were both already gone, running as fast as they could back the way they’d come.

“Take the gift with you,” the King called as David and Mauve whirled after them. “We don’t want it. It stinks of you.”

David shot the King of the High a furious look as stooped to scoop up the elven baby.

“More mess you leave for someone else,” he said.

The King waved at him. “Bye now,” he said, then slumped back into his throne.

…

“Dan! Sally!” Mauve called after them as they raced back to the well in the clearing. “Stop! Stop! Just for a moment, we need to talk.”

For a moment they ignored her.

“Sammy aint that way!” Mauve shouted.

They stopped just before the path through the forest, the younger two breathing hard, the older couple breathing harder.

“They left him!” Sally shouted between gasps that were also sobs. “All alone, they left him - like he didn’t matter at all.”

“They did,” said Mauve, “and I think that’s good news. Listen. They left him in our world by the old door – that’s the path that goes up to the old tower where the runners go most mornings. If he’d been left there, he’d have been found – everyone in Willerby knows him – he’d have been given back to you. If he’s not there then someone else took him and I think I know who.

“Ah,” said David, as he put the changeling child down. “That road doesn’t just go here – it goes to other lands too. I think someone else took him. People he’ll be safe with. We’ll go quickly because telling you aint the same as you seein’, but I think things are going to turn out right.”

…

Mauve returned Sammy in the early hours of the morning, wrapped in a tartan blanket.

He was fast asleep.

When Sally took him, he woke, stirred in her arms and began to cry, his face bright red, screwing his hands into balls as he arched against a colic only he understood.

Sally cried too and so did Dan.

“Our baby,” Sally said to him again and again. “Our baby.”

…

“They took other child?” David asked Mauve later as they sat by the Aga in their kitchen, both feeling old and tired.

Mauve nodded.

“They did. I knew they would.”

“A child of the High brought up goblin. You ever heard of that before?”

Mauve shook her head. “No and we’ll keep an eye out on how that turns out, but this is for the best. You know, they didn’t hesitate. I told them the human child had a family, but this one didn’t.”

“What did the queen say?”

Mauve took a sip of tea.

“Not much,” she said. “But it was nice. She said ‘all child need family. He got family now. Goblin child.’”

…

The End.

The second printing of our book, A Year in Willerby, is now available to order on Etsy.

The book is almost but not quite the same as the first printing, comprising twelve stories locally printed and bound with original lino cut prints.

The cover is lavender blue rather than green, and the cover illustration is a new print of Main Street.

One story and the encore are different stories to those in the first printing.

These stories have new lino cut prints by Edward W. Finch and have been edited by Flora Taxidermy.

As with the first printing, books are sent straight from the village with a handwritten letter and a small gift.

The differences between the first and second printings are subtle and we wouldn’t advise buying the newer edition if you have the first, unless you wish to build a collection of everything we publish, or you would like to buy a book as a gift.

If you wish to do this, we do advise ordering early, as we expect this book to sell out before very long.

This edition of the book is available either on its own for £20 plus P&P, or for £25 if ordered with the notes from John Macdeb’s cancelled lecture on Hugo of Willerby and the Natural History of Dragons. There are only twenty copies of the notes from John’s lecture so if you’d like one we urge you to order especially quickly.

Finally. we’d like again to thank you all for your regular visits to the village. Interest in our stories continues to grow and we welcome this.

We think our secrets should be open secrets.

Please carry on spreading the word about the village through word-of-mouth and by sharing our stories via social media. Help more people find us.

Book reviews, like this wonderful one from Kaye Inglis, are especially welcome.

Warmest regards

The Villagers.

“What did you invite Derek for? If I’d known you’d invited him, I wouldn’t have come.” Mauve said, hanging her coat on the usual peg by the front door. “As it is I’m only here because I won’t let Sammy down.”

Sally closed the oven and straightened up, wiping flour from her hands on her apron.

“I thought he’d be interesting,” she said.

“He’s not,” David said, helping himself from a beer and pouring it into a dimpled mug. “He’s the most boring man in the village.”

“How can a man who’s lived so long be boring?” Dan said. “Surely he’s got some good stories?”

“You’ll see soon enough. Just wait until he gets going on draining Top Field in 1786,” Mauve said. “A dull story the first time that doesn’t get any better in the retelling.”

“Or the time they closed the station,” said David, glumly. “The worst of that is odd stuff did happen, but he missed all of it because he was only interested in getting some of the benches for his garden.”

Dan gave the curry a stir.

“A thousand years old and nothing interesting to say,” he said. “Remarkable.”

“His age is the only remarkable thing about him,” David said. “He don’t know how he got so old and he don’t even care. Once I popped round after we had some fuss with the High to see if he knew anything useful about them, and he just went on and on about how he lost his hat the last time they came.”

“His hat,” Mauve said, shaking her head. “Twenty years on and he still goes on about that bloody hat.”

Sammy bounced into the kitchen blowing tunelessly on his recorder.

“Pappy David and Auntie Mauve! Are you ready for my show?”

Mauve lent down so he could run into her arms.

“Sammy, darling!” She said, laughing and tickling him. “I can’t wait! Been looking forward to it all week.”

Sally took advantage of the distraction to take the recorder from him, putting it out of reach on top of the fridge.

“After dinner,” she said. “Remember what we said about waiting for the right time?”

Sammy squirmed out of Mauve’s arms and for a moment be looked as if he might tantrum, but then David was tickling him too and the moment passed.

“I just can’t believe he’s got nothing worth listening to,” Dan said, a bit later, the five of them sitting at the kitchen table chatting while Sammy did Lego. “It’ll just be about asking the right question. I’m going to get something good out of him.”

“And you wouldn’t be the first to try,” said Mauve. “Dinner and the drinks at the Green Man that you can’t get him to say anything interesting.”

Dan laughed. He looked at Sally who nodded at him.

“You’re on,” he said, reaching over to shake Mauve’s hand.

There was a knock at the door.

…

You’ve really never had a curry?” Sally asked, a little later, watching Derek poke suspiciously with his fork at a piece of pheasant.

Derek speared a piece and examined it closely.

“Can’t say I ever have. I don’t eat out much these days and when I do, I usually get fish and chips on the way back from work. Beckworth Fisheries. Do you know it?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “We go there sometimes after Sammy’s swimming lessons on Saturdays.

“It’s very good,” said Derek.

And then there was a long silence.

…

Derek appeared to be in his mid-forties, wore wire-framed glasses, had receding medium-brown hair, and was average in height and build.

You’d never know from looking there was anything unusual about him, Sally thought, as she watched him chase food around his plate, eating only small, cautious bites of rice and naan.

Dan put down his spoon, wiped his hands on napkin and then rested his chin on them.

“What’s the first thing you remember happening?” He asked Derek.

Derek put down his own spoon gratefully.

“Now that takes me back,” he said. “Such a lot of things. Let me have a think.”

There was another long silence – so long Dan wondered whether Derek was going to answer at all.

“Perhaps the first lot of soldiers. I was just a boy then, but I remember. The ones who built the castle down by the river.”

“The Normans?”

“Yes. That’s what people called them later. My mother was frightened to begin with and then irritated by the castle they put up and tore some houses down to make.”

“This is amazing,” said Sally. “We learn about this at school. So much must have changed!”

Derek frowned, then shrugged.

“There was a bit of fuss to begin with, but after that not really,” he said. “Everyone just carried on farming the same as before. The big folk changed but hardly anyone had much to do with them day to day anyway.” He paused. “The new lot did put on a good spread at Christmas mind, once things settled.” He looked down at his plate. “Good, simple food it was.”

“We were taught they changed forest laws?” Sally said. “That must have been difficult?”

Derek shook his head.

“If you did what they said it was fine,” he said. “Always best to toe the line for a quiet life – best to keep your head down.”

“Forest laws meant people starved to death round here,” Mauve said, sharply, “in the bad winters.”

There was another long silence.

“Best keep your head down and mind your own business,” Derek said. “No point fussing.”

…

After the plates of the first course had been cleared away – Sammy tried to carry some to the kitchen, smashed one, cried and then laughed after David made a joke of how Goblins and Greeks smashed plates to signify approval at a good dinner – they moved to the lounge while Sally put the finishing touches to the home-made ice cream dessert.

“Can we ask you about something sad?” Dan asked Derek, drinking form the long neck of a bottle of Mexican lager. “While Sammy’s in the kitchen?”

Derek sighed. “Do you think he’ll be a while?”

“Bound to be. He’ll beg for sweet toppings.”

“He’s very loud.”

“You got a problem with that?” Mauve challenged, crossing her legs and folding her arms.

“Quiet is better,” Derek said. “Loud stirs things up. It’s best not to fuss.”

“You said that a few times already,” Mauve snapped back at him.

“It’s about the village moving after the Black Death,” Dan said before the argument could catch. “Everyone round here says it used to be on the other side of the road, but we can’t find anything anywhere backing that up.”

Derek thought for a moment.

“I wasn’t here then,” he said. “Moved out for a while. Waited for things to calm down. When I came back things were different, I’m sure, but I can’t remember much from back then. Things settled down after a while.”

“By then you must have known you weren’t – I don’t know – at risk though?” David said.

“No but there was no point making a song and dance about that,” said Derek.

Mauve stood up suddenly.

“You tellin’ us you saw all those people dying and you could have helped without any danger to yourself and instead you just – went off somewhere?”

Derek looked away.

“Best not to fuss,” he said. Then, more brightly. “Have you ever heard about the time they first tarmacked the road?”

“Bloody hell,” said Mauve. “I’m goin’ to help in the kitchen.”

“She shouldn’t get so angry,” Derek said, mildly. “Not good for anyone. It was in the 1930s. Between the wars.”

…

After dessert it was time for Sammy’s concert. He stood before the adults and took a theatrical bow.

“You all have to applaud me!”

David and Mauve began clapping wildly, Dan and Sally joined in indulgently.

Derek looked pained, but Sammy didn’t notice as he took theatrical bows and airkissed all four corners of the room.

“Don’t forget to actually play now!” Sally told him after a minute. “Remember we’re all here for this concert, just to see you, so really concentrate.”

Later everyone agreed it was Sammy’s best performance.

While he stumbled over many notes he carried on to the end of each song without stopping. First Three Blind Mice, then Old MacDonald, then a passable rendition of a Goblin tune he’d been taught on his last visit to their village.

“One more!” Sally said.

“No!” Mauve said. “At least one more!”

Banging on her knees she began a chant.

“At least one more! At least one more!”

Sammy stopped and for a moment looked crestfallen.

“I don’t know any others,” he said.

“Then play Old MacDonald and Three Blind Mice again,” Mauve called, then whistled. “You have to! It’s called an encore!”

“Oh, yes!” Sammy said, shouting. “I know about these. We did one at school! Stay here – I need to get something!”

He rushed off to his room.

“What’s he up to?” Said Dan.

“I think I know,” said Sally.

“Will it be over then?” Derek said, but everyone ignored him.

Sammy tumbled back into the room wearing a huge floppy straw hat he’d been given at a Mexican-themed restaurant in Centre Parcs.

Dan and Sally both burst out laughing.

“What?” David said.

“You’ll see,” said Dan. “I get it now.”

Sammy’s final renditions were technically less good but more enthusiastic – his mind on his showstopper.

As he played his last note, amidst his inevitable standing ovation, he took one of his hands from the recorder, took off his hat and threw it at the adults.

It sailed over and past the four clapping adults and right into Derek, knocking his glass of wine from his hand and spilling it all over his grey flannel trousers.

“Oh, sorry!” Sally said. “Just hang on and I’ll get you a towel.

“Ha!” Said Mauve, cackling. “You got your hat back!”

“I think I’ll go now,” said Derek.

…

“I told you,” Mauve said much later after Sammy was in bed. “He’s the most boring man who’s ever lived here. Just goes on and on.”

“Do you think he’s always been that way?” Asked Sally.

David shrugged. “Who knows. Perhaps the only way to go on for as long as he has is not to pay attention to life that much. Perhaps he learned it.”

“No,” said Mauve. “I think he’s always been that way. Some people are.”

She pointed up at Sammy’s bedroom.

“I tell you he’s already lived more life than that old husk ever has. It aint how long you’ve got. It’s what you do with it. Sammy knows how to live. Derek don’t. He could live a million years and he’d never live as long as Sammy already has. If you ask me, it’s as simple as that.”

Then the adults talked for a while longer, drinking whiskey and brandy, laughing in the easy way of people who’ve learned over time how much they liked each other and how important that was.

…

There were light footsteps on the stairs.

“Sorry don’t be angry, I couldn’t sleep.”

Dan and Sally looked at each other, sighed, then laughed at the same time.

“Come to me, Sammy,” said Mauve. “Why can’t you sleep?”

“I could hear you from my room,” he said. “I could hear you all having fun and I wanted to join in. Can I? Please?”

…

The End.

…

Close to Willerby, on a roundabout, there’s a petrol station everyone calls Gibbet Cross – or just the Gibbet.

It is spirit-soaked in unhappy ghosts and those of us living in the village – at least those with sense – won’t use it after dark.

There is much too high a risk of bringing home a phantom.

I learned the hard way.

I’d been in Willerby only a couple of months – long enough to have heard some strange stories but not long enough to have learned most were true.

David – a neighbour of mine – told me about the Gibbet during early-doors Friday drinks in the Green Man, but I dismissed it as just local colour.

“They gibbeted at crossroads because it was supposed to make it harder for the dead to get home,” he said, drinking the pint I’d got him in return for one he’d bought me, “and mostly it worked. And mostly it still does, but they’re always still looking for a way.”

“What does gibbeted mean?” I asked.

David looked at me and paused for a moment as if he didn’t want to answer.

“Hanging up the bodies of executed criminals as an example,” he said, “for the birds to eat. Sometimes for years.”

His wife Mauve came over with a gin and tonic.

“Just telling Mark – he’s recently moved into Emma’s old house on the terrace - about the Gibbet,” David said.

Mauve nodded. “Best not use it,” she said, “Morrisons in Beckworth is only five minutes further on and cheaper anyway.”

She was right and, until that night in late March, I had no reason to buy petrol there.

If the M11 hadn’t been closed, I wouldn’t have needed it then either, but it was, and the diversion to home from the airport took me an extra thirty miles. I could probably still have made it home with what I had and then coasted to Morrisons on electric the next day, but it was in the other direction to work and would have meant getting up early.

I decided the extra fiver was worth twenty minutes longer in bed the next day.

So, I pulled in at the Gibbet.

At night, all petrol stations – like motorway services and railway stations - feel uncanny. A blank placelessness makes them liminal, existing on the edges of many realities but not firmly in any.

In the day, when it’s light and busy, and there are warm sausage rolls in glass cabinets, the weirdness can be ignored. But at night, when the green and white canopies become bright islands in the rolling endless dark, the lurking terror of all that time and space comes rushing in.

The dark, scrub-wooded hump of the roundabout made the Gibbet even more unsettling.

As I filled up, I became suddenly sure the low hill behind me was where the many damned had been hung in their iron cages and, for a moment, I heard the low squeal of chains in the wind.

Wishing I’d gone home after all, and shuddering as imagined crows perched on hollow-eyed decaying faces, I went inside to pay.

“You remember to lock your doors?” the cashier asked, a grey unremarkable man neither old nor young, pushing the card terminal through the slot, “Always best to lock your doors this time of night.”

It was an odd thing to ask – and seemed odder, even suspicious, when I got back to my car and saw the front passenger side door wide open.

I looked back at the shop and thought of going back in but didn’t.

What would I say if I did?

Instead, I checked nothing was missing, turned the ignition and drove away, glad to leave, keen to get back home.

The way back took me first along a mostly deserted dual carriageway, then onto a deserted B-road that spidered past the neighbouring villages before finally turning to Willerby.

It was chilly, but turning up the heating made no difference – as if it were a different sort of cold.

On the bigger road, about a mile before the first turn, I realised I was not alone.

Somebody or something was sitting silently beside me.

I couldn’t see them, but they were there.

It had got in while I was paying for petrol.

Why else had the passenger door been open?

Why had I stopped at the Gibbet?

Why had I got back in the car?

My skin crawled. Part of me wanted to look round. Most of me did not.

I sped up.

“Yes, my lad, yes” a hissing voice said, rancid breath filling the car with the grave stench of corruption and death, “take me home.”

Willeerbei, March AD866

Jack liked soldiers.

He liked the chaos they brought with them. He liked their funny-serious faces and silly metal clothes.

He especially liked the sharp points they used to poke spurting holes in each other.

When they were fighting, he liked to join in with his white teeth and black claws, surprising them by jumping up from puddles and down from clouds, leaping around between them, singing cheerily at the top of his reedy voice, flaying skin, ripping off limbs and decapitating torsos.

Yes – Jack really liked soldiers.

Deep in his bower in his pond, he could hear them when they were close.

Dreams of rage, revenge and hidden fear were loud and easy to follow.

But frustratingly, sometimes they did not come close enough.

Sometimes they turned away and went elsewhere.

When they didn’t come, he was always bitterly disappointed, but an ancient bargain meant he was not allowed to give chase.

Instead, he had to make do with something else to play with until either it was dead or he grew bored and let it go, sometimes with a gift if it survived his games and was something he’d grown especially fond of.

Strictly speaking he wasn’t supposed to do this either, but small and then progressively larger experiments had taught him these people – not the same people he’d arrived with long ago – were not so vigilant and if he wasn’t greedy or obvious didn’t miss the odd goose, pig or child.

But soldiers were much better.

This time the men he could hear were particularly interesting.

They came from far away, from dark lands of ice and snow, bringing old gods long banished by the Christians with them.

The humans in the village were afraid – he could read that too – and this made it all the more delightfully exciting.

But – and he told himself this sternly – the soldiers may not come at all so Jack began his search of the village for something else to console him should his hopes be confounded.

…

Edward the blacksmith was the busiest man in the busy village, working at his forge until he grew so tired he couldn’t see through the sparks on the anvil and had to be carry-dragged back to his house to take rest.

He hammered enchantment into the iron where he could, but out of habit more than anything else.

The enemy on the way was of human flesh and human bone, immune to spell and charm.

It angered him that all his power could not protect his wife and children from the savagery of the raiding strangers.

He was a big, strong man and one-on-one he’d bet on himself to give as good as he got but he was also no fool and knew the war to come would not be a fair or even fight.

…

In all the fuss and alarm, Eliza, Edward’s five-year-old daughter found herself with more time than she was used to.

Nobody was setting her chores, and the eyes and hands of the adults were too busy to stop her wandering after the scurry of wild paws and the call of the early spring birds wherever they led.

Since she’d been big enough to walk, Eliza had known how to follow and find wild things.

Eagle, raven, owl, falcon, hare, badger, fox.

Still wilder animals too - just a year before she’d been found by the other children in a glade in the wood feeding a great she-wolf slices of pilfered cured ham. They’d driven it off with shouting and stones and brought her back to Edith, her mother.

She’d cried disappointed, angry tears all the way home.

Later, even after she’d calmed and the way of the world had been explained to her, she hadn’t understood.

After that her family kept a close eye on her and the other children told never to leave her alone.

“Don’t go further than you can hear me call,” Edith called, busily packing sacks and bags, too preoccupied by the pressing threat to watch her daughter as closely as she should.

“No, mother,” Elzia called back.

She was a good girl and meant it, but she was also too small to remember promises like this for long, which was why she followed a pompous vole further than she should have and found herself by the out-of-bounds pond.

There she met Jack, sitting on the bank, minding his own business, happily paddling his webbed feet and enjoying the prickle of the midday sun.

…

Ulf arrived in Albion on a warship from the northern dark lands with murderous plans.

Predator and prey – he had learned since birth – was the way the world was. Sheep ate grass and needed to be protected from wolves because they were weak.

The white bears ate men if they could.

Men preyed on weaker men.

Strong took from weak.

This was the law everywhere.

Ulf himself knew this as well as anyone.

His parents had been killed by stronger men and he had only survived the great massacre because he’d been stronger than they were – wise enough to know he could not defend them, wise enough to know to run and hide until he was big and tough enough to take revenge when the time was right.

That revenge – a glorious and triumphant raid with his band of other orphaned men – had got the attention of Ivar, later called the Boneless, and why he’d been selected as a commander in the army assembled to take the soft land to the South.

It had been an easy season and now, after a winter of preparation, it was time to move again.

Fireside stories told of a time when these lands had been defended by a mighty army who wore red and marched below eagles, but those stories were old and that army was gone, leaving behind just tales and the mouldering ruins of their great cities.

Those that came almost in their wake had been strong once too, men with the same ancestors as Ulf’s people, protected by the same mighty gods, but they’d abandoned these to worship a man who washed the feet of his followers and died on a cross.

The Christians were unnaturally and uncannily devoted, so much so that some of them died without recognising their own foolishness.

Ulf had been there when a band of the men shot arrows at one of the petty kings, aiming to maim not kill until in agony at last he succumbed.

Until the end he called on a god who did not come.

What sort of faith was this? A silly and disgusting religion that rotted the minds of everyone it touched.

Those living in Albion now were weak and without will, so foolish they left their greatest treasures in the care of feeble old men who could not defend them.

Wheat for the scythe.

After the plunder Ulf would make a home here – he would take what he needed for that from any who could not defend it.

Sheep to his wolf.

The living would be easy here, he thought, wrapping his cloak around himself as he took his turn on the top of the hill they’d camped on, casting his predator eyes on the campfire of the village below them, perhaps too small and poor to be worth the bother but on balance, probably not given how little risk the raid would be.

While there might not be riches there would be food, women and slaves.

…

Jack was delighted by Eliza’s blonde hair and her fragile, delicate arms and legs, so different to his own dark fur and strong, stubby limbs.

Then he was delighted by her singing, sang in a key he loved but could never quite reach himself.

She sang so sweetly that he sang for her too, then allowed her to pet him and place a wreath of white snowdrops around his sleek neck.

After that they played for a long time, hide-and-seek and chasing games around the pond and in the old-growth trees.

Eliza turned cartwheels and Jack applauded.

Jack walked on his hands and tried to teach Eliza. She didn’t have the strength or balance, tumbled, hurt herself and began to cry.

He stroked her hair and then, once she was consoled and he was content, made himself small and dozed in her little lap.

He was so happy with her he forgot all about the soldiers.

Jack would keep her – he thought between snatches of sleep – he would take her to his bower under the pool given to him until, as all living things do no matter what you did to try and keep them alive, she faded and rotted away until all that was left of her were little bones.

He might make a necklace from her teeth to remember her by.

She’d like that, he was sure.

…

“Eliza!” Edith called, the rising panic in her voice making her sound angry. “Eliza! Where are you we must go now!”

“Eliza!” Edward shouted too, rougher, heavier, just as afraid, hefting sword he’d just forged. “You come to us right now, girl, wherever you are.”

“Edward,” Edith said, “I won’t leave without her.”

The big man turned on her. “You will because we have a son and another child on the way,” he snarled.

“Edward..”

“I can see their torches up on the hill. They’ll wait for dusk and then they’ll come. They’ll kill any man they find, maybe worse for you. Go. You can’t help now. I won’t leave without her.”

“I’m staying too,” said Wiro, their oldest, dropping the bundle of clothes he’d been carrying. “I won’t leave you.”

“Christ’s tears, all the work I did and I raised a fool?” Edward said. “The men coming kill and torture for sport. Go with your mother.”

“I’m no coward.”

“Then prove it. Go with your mother to protect her and your new brother or sister. Cowardice would be to freeze here like a beast in thrall. Whatever happens they’ll need you. Go to the top of the old fort. They don’t know that ground. In the dark you and the others might be able to pick some off one at a time –with a couple of men dead, they might decide it’s not worth the risk and move on.”

Wiro hesitated.

Edward handed him the sword he was holding.

“I made this for you. Don’t waste my work. Now go – Edith you ahead, Wiro, behind to guard her.”

Edith looked at her son and then her husband. She paused as if she was going to say something, but instead went to Edward, held him tight and then kissed him on the mouth.

“Find our girl,” she said and then was gone.

Edward watched them until they turned off the main mud track onto one of the spider’s web shortcuts that led up to the old fort and more faraway places.

Wiro’s adolescent frame was barely more than a skinny scarecrow silhouette in the red light of sunset.

There was little hope for any of them, he knew, but what good to anyone would it do to dwell on that?

…

Edward searched close first – the woodstore; his smithy, from which he took the last good axe; the thickets of growth in eyesight of the house but found no trace of her.

Then he tried his neighbour’s houses, running to each and calling her name.

He tried the church, nested among the older round barrows surrounding it, its uncharacteristic desertion eerie in the gathering dark.

But not – he saw – completely deserted.

The Old Lady was in the porch.

Normally haughty and disdainful of the people in the village who were not of her time, today she beckoned to him instead, and then when he drew near waved and pointed up at the old fort, silently mouthing “go” at him again and again.

Edward did not have time to make her understand.

He turned and ran back down the path leaving her behind.

He searched in wider and wider circles, telling himself at the beginning of each that if he did not find her, he would go to everyone else, knowing he would not.

…

The sun was almost gone.

It was time.

Ulf got up, turned to his men and gave the order.

His band followed him down the hill.

They set fire to the first house they reached.

Then the next.

Then the one after that.

…

Edward did not even think to check the pond until he’d checked almost everywhere else and found himself right by it.

It was strange and wrapped in very old stories.

The wise woman who lived in the clearing where the cats gathered at night said a demon lived there, an old, powerful demon that could not be laid.

The old priest who visited from time-to-time said it was a devil from the old times, and that was enough for those who lived in Willerbei to stay away and to teach their children to stay away too.

There was only one child in the village Edward knew who might go there.

His own.

He’d looked everywhere else.

He was in such a blind panic that he pushed through the growth without thinking.

…

The village was abandoned – as Ulf had suspected it would be, but the residents would not have gone far.

While they would have taken what they could carry their lives were here.

He and his men would make camp here, feast on the animals, bread and beer left behind, and then in the morning they’d go in search of people to kill and enslave.

Perhaps they’d set fire to the whole village to try and draw them back in.

This worked more often than it really should.

But was it really abandoned? Ulf heard something and raised his hand to quieten the men.

Yes.

A child singing – a girl by the sound of it.

He turned, put his finger to his lips and with great care and surprisingly delicacy and elegance, picked his way through a thick tangle of blackthorn, his followers almost as quiet behind him.

…

Jack and Eliza had woken only minutes before. Eliza had decided it was high time Jack learned to sing proper songs but was frustrated with him for not being able to better follow her tune.

He wasn’t getting it at all. While his warbling wasn’t unpleasant it was nothing like the song she was trying to teach him.

He just wasn’t trying hard enough, she decided, and scolded him.

She was so engrossed in teaching her lesson she noticed neither her father nor the strangers from far away.

…

Ulf saw Eliza but not Jack, for he was hidden inside his own shadow to everyone except his new playmate.

A small girl alone on a curiously mown and level meadow by a dark, round pond.

A small prize, for sure, but a prize, nonetheless, a herald of greater riches to come.

Ulf made straight for her.

…

Edward did not see Jack either, but he did see both his daughter and the dark men.

Knowing he would die and his daughter would be taken anyway he gave a great shout and ran to the man closest to Eliza, raising his axe over his shoulder ready to make the only clear swing he’d ever get.

…

Jack was concentrating so hard on the melody he noticed nothing until Ulf’s hands were on Eliza’s shoulders and he was swinging her off her feet.

And then he did – and all at once Ulf got all his attention.

Outraged at the insult, in one effortless arc, Jack first removed both Ulf’s hands with a suddenly foot-long slashing black claw.

Eliza tumbled to the ground.

For an instant – unable to work out what had just happened – Ulf stood motionless, frozen in the stance he’d used to grab the little girl who was suddenly not there.

He lifted his spurting stumps up to look at them properly and then, as Jack took off his feet, fell to the ground.

Still unable to understand what had happened so fast, he tried to get up on feet he no longer had, a sight which made Jack roar with laughter and dance on the spot.

With great joy Jack realised that there were more.

Lots more!

The soldiers had arrived after all – he’d forgotten all about them!

He let the limbless one twitching on the ground for later and, hooting and hollering, rushed to play with the rest.

…

For the rest of his life Edward was haunted by image of what would have happened had he got to his daughter before the Viking had.

As it was whatever happened – and he was never certain of this – was so intense, so awful, that nobody noticed him take Eliza on his shoulder and back to the blackthorn growth on the edge of the meadow.

They hid there.

“Close your eyes,” he told her, putting his great, rough hands over her ears until the screaming stopped, pressing them so closely not a sound got through.

He would never speak to anyone about what he saw under the cold light of stars and moon.

Not to the wise woman. Not to the priest. Not even to Edith.

They asked but he said there was nothing to be gained by going over it now it was over and nobody pressed the point.

The screaming went on for a long time.

After it was all over, in the near silence, one man still moaned, softly and quietly.

“Stay here, don’t move, keep your eyes closed tight,” said Edward.

It was the first man. The man without hands or feet.

As Edward drew near the man called out. He was begging. Edward did not need to know his language to know what for.

He stood over him, considered leaving him there to bleed to death or worse.

But while this man might have been a beast he was not.

“You deserved it all,” Edward said, then swung his axe and killed him clean.

…

Eliza slept the rest of the night in her usual spot with Edward watching over her.

Sleep to him was unthinkable and he did not try.

He didn’t sleep at all for days and never slept well again.

He accepted this without complaint as a fair price for deliverance.

As soon as it was light enough to see he woke Eliza, lifted her onto his thick shoulders and took her up the path that led to the old Roman fort where he found his family cold, hungry but safe and well.

They all wept.

“There’s no danger, not now,” Edward said. “Let’s find the others and go home.”

…

Months later, after they felt it was safe to go to the pond, on the orders of the wise woman and the priest the village collected what was left of the bodies, burned them and then buried the bones in a deep pit in the worst field.

Jack woke briefly, but he’d taken the tokens and trinkets he wanted to keep and was too sleepy to move.

He drifted away again and didn’t wake at all for another hundred years.

He never thought of Eliza again.

…

For a while Eliza remembered Jack and, to begin with, asked when she’d see him again.

But she was only five and by the time she reached her teenage years she’d forgotten about him too.

…

Epilogue.

Willerby, March 2026

“None of it makes sense,” said John, three pints in, to David and Mauve in the snug of the Green Man. “We’ve got the archaeology suggesting the men they found in the bone pit were ripped apart –- but we’ve got the historians saying they were defeated by a Mercian army. But that can’t be right.”

“Historians!” David scoffed. “What do they know? They come up with their stories before they look at everything and then when they find something that don’t fit, they just ignore it.”

“They explain the state of the bodies by saying they must have been killed by the Anglo-Saxons, then left for wild animals to rip to bits, then gathered back up and thrown in a hole. I get that’s possible but nothing like that has ever happened anywhere else.”

“You can always get one-offs,” said David. “Sounds as likely as anything else.”

“Whatever happened, I think it’s important, look at this map, look!”

David rolled out a map of the midlands on the polished wooden table and used their drinks to weight down the corners.

He’d used a Sharpie to draw a dark line through the middle of it.

“That’s the Danelaw – that line. And we’re right on it. For some reason, the Great Heathen Army stopped right here. And we’ve got a great grave of dismembered Viking bones right here too. That can’t be coincidence. There’s got to be a connection.”

“Oh, stop fussing about it now, John Macdebs,” said Mauve. “Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. You’re never going to know. Leave it alone. You can’t resolve everything, especially not here. Go buy us another drink. It’s your round again.”

“I bought the last one!”

“Don’t fuss,” Mauve said. “It’s always your round.”

…

The end.

…

Jack can also be found here, here and here.

Mauve

The story which inspired my enquiry was related to me by Dan and Sally in the Green Man.

It can be found here:

Where do dragons go?

…

I am contractually obliged to begin by stating that nobody knows the location of any of the seventeen copies of Hugo’s Natural History that survived the explosion and that the tracing, summary and direct quotation that I use could just as easily have come from my imagination as any historical source.

Details from the frontspiece

Hugo of Willerby

Hugh “Hugo” Netherby was born in 1876, the second son of the cadet branch of the Netherby family. There being no land or fortune to inherit, he was given the choice of going into the church or the army. He seems not to have made great progress with either, although we do know that he was ordained deacon in Lichfield Cathedral in 1899 and gained a lieutenancy in the Royal Leicestershire Regiment in 1901. In 1902 his uncle, heir to the Netherby estate, died and left him a small legacy – enough to live a frugal bachelor life in the village which is what Hugh did, occasionally supplementing his income by taking services in the church when the rector was absent and, as we now know, pursuing his interest in dragons.

It says something of his life that he is best known for writing The Natural History of Dragons – total print-run 17 – and that it is this that has left the longest-lasting mark on the world, despite all seventeen copies having mysteriously vanished. There isn’t even a gravestone in the churchyard and everything else we know about him is what could be gleaned from the pages of his book were one to be granted an opportunity to read it.

Sketch of a wing showing calculations

The Natural History of Dragons

Under the pseudonym of Hugo of Willerby, perhaps trading on the aristocratic sound and his Netherby connections, Hugh persuaded the struggling London publisher L. Upcott Gill to print his manuscript. Upcott Gill’s heyday had been a decade or two earlier when they had published the definitive guide to British dragonflies – it’s possible that Hugh’s book was thought to be a more imaginative outworking of the same theme. I’ve been unable to track down whether or not this was Gill’s last work, but it was certainly the last one printed from his offices on St James’s square.

The cause of the fire is unknown and the question of whether the explosion was cause or effect remains open, but it spread quickly through the Upcott Gill workshop, destroying the presses and paper, which were claimed for through insurance, and the stock of printed books which were not. One theory is that Upcott Gill never planned for the Natural History, which was the only book on the presses at the time, to make its way out into the world and set the fire himself as a way to take a nest-egg into his retirement.

The Natural History of Dragons was cloth-bound in forest green with gilt lettering. As was the case with many of the Upcott Gill books, the illustrations were reproduced to a high standard and allowed Hugh to display his eye for detail to best advantage. The book carries a short introduction that describes turn-of-the-century Willerby with an accuracy fitting for someone we know lived here. There are then three chapters: The Hatching of Dragons, The Laying of Dragons, and The Aging of Dragons.

The Hatching of Dragons

Hugh writes at great length about where dragons come from and it seems that it was his first-hand experience of this in Willerby that sparked his life-long (and apparently fatal) obsession with these “creatures” (Hugh never calls dragons “animals”, “beasts” or “monsters” and I’ve decided to accept his language choice in this matter). He writes:

“Each bloodline of dragons has chosen a location in the isle of Great Britain where at regular intervals of many years, a flight will hatch in early spring. Four such locations are known to scholars, villages where the boundaries between worlds are rubbed thin and where there is magic enough to sustain the fledglings.”

The Willerby dragons hatched in 1886, the summer Hugh turned ten and it seems that this is what sparked his fascination with them. Hatchlings can’t speak, but he would have seen them hunting, learning to fly and then, as the days began to draw in, leaving. As I can confirm, village records are often sketchy (and sometimes, I’m pretty sure, deliberately censored1) but the 19^th century was one of scientific interest and the hatchings of 1817, 1840 and 1863 are all carefully detailed if you know where to look.

The young Hugh may have made notes and even sketches that summer, but it seems likely that the detailed accounts and drawings of the book come from 1909 – a summer he would definitely have been waiting for.

“When first hatched, dragonlets are bright green in hue, like the fresh green leaves of late spring among which they hide. They prefer to hang from the branches of lime or chestnut trees and feed on passing insects, which they consume at such a rate that they affect the natural pollination of plants in their hatching years.”

Hugh writes at length both observationally and speculatively on the diet of dragons. It’s clear that they do hunt and feed on increasingly large animals as they grow (having even been known to take small children and, on occasion, calves as well as their normal diet of smaller prey), but they also don’t seem to consume enough to satisfy either their growth or their flight.

“Three dozen large predators – and they grow to the size of wolves before leaving – would, over a summer, destroy the livestock of a small village and make a significant dent in its human population but, whilst the dragonlets are considered pestilential for their attacks on livestock, the impact is of an irritation rather than a catastrophe.”

Hugo’s second experience of dragons came the next summer (1887), not in Willerby, of course, but coincidentally on a family holiday in Colden up in Yorkshire. There he seems to have befriended an old shepherd who was grateful for a set of younger legs and eyes for spotting and driving off the dragonlets who showed an interest in his lambs. The shepherd told him of the previous dragon-summer in Colden, back in 1850, and it was this that started Hugh theorising on the periodicity of dragon hatching.

“Each population of dragons returns regularly to their village to hatch but because of the strain this puts on the magical energy of the country the number of years in a cycle is unique to that population. The Willerby dragons return every 23 years but those of Colden only come back every 37. There is a village in Wales to which they return every 29 years and I hope to establish that there is a Scottish population with a 31 year cycle.”

One of the things that is interesting about this paragraph is the idea (later abandoned for reasons that will be explained) that dragons lived cyclic lives, that those hatching from the eggs were the same creatures as had flown off at the end of the summer. Another is the indication this gives us that Hugh found it difficult to trace the Scottish population due to poorer record-keeping in the less densely populated highlands. With Hugh’s clue and the passing of time I’ve been able to establish that he was right and the Kinloch dragons appeared in 1912, 1943, 1974 and 2005. We know that Hugh set off north in late 1911 and that he was able to confirm his suspicions before meeting whatever fate it was that prevented his return.

Hugh’s trip to Wales in the summer of 1907 is shrouded in secrecy – it’s not known exactly where he went and he is careful not to mention the village’s name. He clearly found what he was looking for, however, because he was able to describe the differences in the populations.

“As they mature, the Willerby dragons change from leaf green to shades of crimson and burgundy, patterned and flecked with shades of their original verdant hue… [there are twelve pages of descriptions of the Willerby dragons of both 1886 and 1909 with sketches and even names – when Hugh states conclusively that they were not the same population, I think it’s fair to take his word for it.] The dragons of Colden mature to blues of ice and sapphire, also flecked with green, and the Welsh dragons are of such deep shades of grey that they look black in all but the brightest sunlight.”

The next section of Hugh’s book is a confusion of sketches and calculations as he wrestles with the problem of dragon flight, both the force needed to propel them upwards and the energy they would have to consume to fuel a day in the air. Since even young dragons are larger (and far heavier) than the largest birds, this is a reasonable concern, even if Hugh’s mathematical analysis is lacking in places. The conclusion is that dragons draw energy from the magical background of the place in which they are born (a theory that suggests that the prime numbers that appear in the cycle-lengths of dragon populations could be an evolutionary advantage that makes two coincident hatchings less likely). Hugh suggests that the villages the dragons choose are places with high background magic, although it’s just as possible that the dragons pull magic from somewhere else and have created these hot-spots themselves.

“At the end of the summer the dragonlets stop eating and survive on the body-fat accumulated in the long, hot days of the feast, supplemented, or so it seems to me, by a magical source associated with the place. For a few days, perhaps a week, they circle higher and in greater numbers than before, resting in the tallest trees before circling again, drawing more of their kind into the dance. Finally one ventures far enough and from soaring upwards appears to tumble downwards, but inexplicably away from the ground as though some kind of hill had been crested. The others follow, one by one, falling into the sky and disappearing.”

Hugh will have watched the tumbling of dragons out of our world into some other existence as a ten-year-old in 1886, and it’s clear that this first parting was heartbreaking for him, that he had already fallen in love with these strange creatures. When he saw it again in 1887 in Yorkshire he would have been ready for it and by the time the 1907 (Wales) and 1909 (Willerby) departures took place he was able to watch with the scientific eye of the adult scientist, only slightly blurred by tears. He uses the word “outtumble” to describe their final flight and writes:

“The outtumble of a flight of dragonlets is one of the most poignant sights in the natural world: these wise and curious creatures who have grown from nothing over the summer now suddenly disappearing into thin air, going on to the next stage of their lives and exploring worlds into which we, poor human observers, cannot follow.”

Hugo’s impression of the transotion between the dragons’ worlds

The Laying of Dragons

Having seen the development of dragonlets in Willerby and Colden in the 1880s, Hugh had a long wait before the next known hatching of dragons in Great Britain. During this time we know he was sent away to boarding school in the southwest where he was a middling student except for his imaginative writing and skill in orienteering. He went up to Oxford in 1895, returned to Willerby in 1896 at which point he must have enrolled in some theological training college but I’ve been unable to find which one. He was ordained, as previously mentioned, but did not complete his curacy, instead joining the army as a lieutenant. The death of his uncle came just in time to avoid the despatch of his regiment to South Africa in 1902 and he spent the next four and a bit years researching and planning his visit to Wales.

It seems that he got to the unknown Welsh village in early March 1907 in time to watch the dragonlets emerge from their shells but that this only stirred a curiosity into how the eggs found their way there in the first place. He was able to watch their development carefully and with a scientific eye for detail, but he now recognised that the summer of dragons could only be a snapshot of their life cycle.

“Even the most rudimentary philosopher will recognise that if a dragon hatches from an egg then there must, somewhere, be a larger dragon that laid the egg – they do not spawn from inert earth.”

Hugh’s problem now was that he had no idea how long before hatching the dragon eggs would be laid – he could find no record of the laying of dragon eggs and from the winter of 1907 he was torn between the libraries and book auctions of London and the hillsides around Willerby, not sure whether he’d find his answer between the pages of a dusty tome or coming out of the skies with jaws of flame. The answer came at dawn one morning in the early part of January 1909 when Hugh was bivouacking in the Old Fort on the rising land above the village.

“That morning I became, I believe, the first human being in history to witness the return of a dragon to our world. I had been expecting the arrival of a great red beast belching fire, but instead she arrived silently and almost invisibly, slipping between the pages of this reality and the next.”

The question of where the dragons go after the outtumble, and what happens to those who do not return remains a mystery, but thanks to Hugh’s devotion to science we know about one dragon who did come back. The rest of Hugh’s book extrapolates wildly from this one encounter – to a careful reader it’s obvious that we are foolhardy to assume that observations of this occasion are typical, never mind universal. On the other hand, we have no other observations to work from.

“At first, I just watched her work: scoring lines in the ground with her great talons; turning over the turf to expose the good soil beneath; lowering herself delicately to deposit an egg; replacing the grass and then finally blessing the spot with a snort of flame. As the sun rose and I continued to watch I began to feel that this was not just some dragon but a specific dragon, one that, perhaps, I recognised.”

Based on this one observation, we deduce that each clutch of dragon eggs is laid by a female from the previous outtumble. About forty eggs are laid, which seems to match observations of the number of dragonlets that hatch and suggests that dragons have few predators in our world. I would say none at all except that the eggs are green, slightly duller than the dragonlets that will hatch from them, camouflaged against the grass rather than the spring leaves. Species without predators don’t evolve camouflage – even if there are no threats now there must once have been – a somewhat worrying thought.

The eggs themselves are around eight inches (20cm) in length – much larger than a bird’s egg, but small compared with the size of the adult dragon which Hugh records as twenty feet (6m) long, not including its “magnificent” tail. The dragonlets’ call is a high pitched squeal, ranging from a keening shriek when in distress or pain to the series of chirrups they use to convey delight. Hugh therefore, expected the adult to have a deeper bark or growl and was both surprised and delighted to be proved wrong.

“ I watched her from the safety of my bivouac, sketching her markings so I could later check my suspicions, and bemoaning the childish efforts that would mean I could never be conclusively sure that this was one of the dragonlets I had observed twenty three years ago. As I watched, I became aware that she had noticed and was now watching me. A shiver ran down my spine and then she turned directly to me and opened her mouth – not, Thank God, to broil me with flame, but to call my name. ‘Hugo,’ she said.”

Dragons (or this one at least) do not have names at this stage of their lives: the name is a human affectation that they are intelligent enough to use but have no need of themselves. They also, it appears, have long memories (even from their early youth) and can distinguish one human from another by something that surely goes beyond facial recognition (the thirty-three year old Hugh would have been changed hugely from his childhood self). Names may not be the draconic way, but they are indispensable to humans and Hugh christened this one ‘Zade (possibly as a result of having got caught up in the Arabian Nights.)

“When she had finished her work, ‘Zade rested against the hillside enjoying the faint warmth of the winter sun. I was able to admire the burnished burgundy of her scales, patterned with brighter crimson and shot with the most gorgeous flecks of green. Her great wings folded against her sides, not leathery like those of a bat but smooth and muscled – devices that turn the energy of the body and the magic of the land into force and thence into flight.”

The visit of a laying dragon to our world is fleeting – she arrives at dawn and spends the morning disposing her eggs, then resting for a while before hunting (in ‘Zade’s case among the flocks that Willerby’s shepherds had left grazing the hills). The journey between the worlds takes significant energy – we know that dragonlets feast enthusiastically to build up the fat stores required for the outtumble, and ‘Zade crossed into our world whilst heavily pregnant and then later the same day slipped out of it. Perhaps, therefore, we can forgive the devastation she wreaked on the flock – twenty full-grown ewes is a large meal even for a creature the size of a dragon.

“Before she left, ‘Zade promised to return and gave me hope that I would see her again. I encouraged her to stay for a few days but her nature and instincts pulled her away before the sun set that day. I pressed her on where she was going but she had no words for me – for her it was simply another place that was not like this place.”

Hugh theorised (on what I believe to be woefully inadequate data) that the laying dragons come back from wherever it is that the outtumble took them as dragonlets but that they go on to somewhere else. He suggests that some of the dragonlets don’t survive the outtumble and that a further group die either from starvation or their wounds as the dragon population fight for scarce resources. Of those that remain, just one returns to lay eggs in our world and in that moment their path is sundered from their kind – there are simply not enough sheep to fuel the full outtumble of an adult dragon and so once the eggs are laid, the dragon slips into an intermediate place, out of this world but not in the next.

“As the sun gleamed red on the horizon and the last rays lit the undersides of the clouds, ‘Zade took to the skies again, circling and circling above me. As she circled she sort of faded, changing from the solid reality against which I had leant my back as we talked in the middle of the day to a transparent image, a shadow, and then just the idea of a dragon. The last I saw of her was a final plume of flame and the call, in her deep, musical voice, of my name ‘Hugo’.”

Sketch of dragon scales with data to compare with plate mail

The Aging of Dragons

We know that Hugh spent the summer of 1909 in Willerby, observing, sketching and writing about the dragonlets that hatched from ‘Zade’s eggs. After the outtumble, he started looking for an outlet for his research. He submitted a paper on that summer’s population to the Zoological Society in London but it was rejected from there and, one would imagine from every other scientific journal to which it was submitted. Eventually, with some edits, it did make it to the public in the autumn of 1910 as an unusual feature in the “Home Tapestry” magazine (since discontinued).

Either alongside this, or as a consequence of his rejection, Hugh was working on a book and looking for a publisher for what became his masterpiece. He wrote at a feverish pace – there is a satirical sketch by an unknown author “Observations of Willerby Life” that was published in the winter of 1911 to raise money for the church roof. Hugh may or may not have been pleased with the description “Our own Dickens sits at the window of his cottage, surrounded by clouds of ink and a flurry of quills, industriously turning fresh white paper into stacks of imaginative calligraphy.”

Alongside his writing, Hugh was wrestling with the question of what happened next, what dragons did after laying their eggs, where they went and whether they came back. He read legends of dragons from the Mordiford Wyvern and Sir Eglamor to the Lambton Worm, seeking the sniff of truth from years of imagination and storytelling (in some ways Hugh is both an inspiration and a warning to later Willerby historians). Most fruitfully, he began a correspondence with Jean Douglas, the widow of the famous Professor Douglas Douglas of Edinburgh university. By this time, she had returned to her home town of Stirling and was a collector and sharer of the folklore, quirks of everyday life and legends of Scotland.

It seems that Hugh had already tracked down the Scottish dragon population to Kinloch and had been planning to go north to celebrate the new year 1911-12 and to be ready for the laying. Jean Douglas now put him on the trail of Black Billy of Ben Mhaigdean, a legendary dragon of the remote northwest. He was said to be the wisest creature of all Scotland, but that the price of his wisdom was being devoured and so it would take a great fool to approach him with a question. Hugh now planned to extend his trip further north to confirm his suspicions about legendary dragons in general and Black Billy in particular.

“Both male and female dragonlets hatch but it is only females that return to lay eggs and therefore only females who remain attached to our world to grow old. We can therefore deduce that, whatever gender may have been assigned to the beast over the years, all the dragons of legend are female.”

Although the laying seasons are spread out, they are too common for it to be possible that all mother dragons return to our world – across the four sites known to Hugh there were fourteen clutches of dragons in the 20^th century alone, far too many for the agriculture of the country to sustain (never mind whatever burden this would apply to the magical framework). Most of these mothers, therefore, must remain until they die in the liminal world they fly off to after laying, and we have no way of knowing how long this might be. The only data we have on this is ‘Zade’s confident promise to return, although even Hugh acknowledged that the promise of a dragon is not always something one can rely on.

“The dragons of legend are known for their intellect, whether this be described as wisdom or low cunning, and for their deception. Many dragon-hunters have been tricked into believing promises and lies, often to their doom. This is at least partly a survival mechanism: despite their monstrous size and fearsome claws, they are inevitably vulnerable to sufficiently well-armoured and numerous humans.”

Legends describe dragons as being tens of metres long and blocking out the sun with their passage. It’s not possible to confirm a maximum size, but the legends of mountain ranges being formed of the fossilised bodies of long-dead dragons seem unlikely. A curious clue to their lifestyle comes from their appetite – despite tales of dragons carrying off cattle, sheep and people, there are few stories of the extended devastation that such a large carnivore would require.

“Dragons can live, if not forever, then at least for several hundred years: the legend of Black Billy can be traced back to the early 18^th century but (s)he may be even older than that. Most of their time is spent in solitary rest: dragonlets may be born in a village, but adults do not stay there. This is interspersed with hunting, those terrible seasons when a region is plagued by a dragon and calls on the services of a questing knight.”

Those stories invariably recount an extended battle (often spun out with choruses of “Fa la lanky down dilly” and the like) that results in victory for the heroic knight and the death or departure of the dragon. Hugh was very suspicious of these tales and filled pages with calculations of arm strength and sword length that would be required to break through the scales of even a modestly sized dragon based on scaling up from smaller creatures (as well as the scales of the dragonlets’ first moulting, he calculated based on what was known of snakes and crocodilians all of which parallels are clearly of dubious worth.) Hugh therefore sought to reconcile his calculations with both the legends and the undoubted fact that the country has not been overrun by dragon populations.

“When resting, dragons can slip between the worlds, vanishing for years at a time. It is not known whether or what they feed on in the other place, but they certainly gain enough sustenance whilst there to be able to survive periods of relative fasting in our world. The longer they live and the more often they slip between the worlds, the easier the transition becomes for them. It seems likely, then, that the dragon-hunters who have claimed to slay or drive off the dragons have usually simply provoked the creature to vanish for a little while.”

The question of why some dragons live this life and others don’t is not one that Hugh was able to satisfactorily resolve. It’s possible that many simply die quickly after laying, either because of natural causes or due to predators in the liminal space (other dragons would be prime suspects); Hugh, however, perhaps through sheer hope, found another potential explanation. He, of course, offers it as a certainty without any justification whatsoever.

“Few of the tales explain what it is that draws dragons back to our world, thin and hungry as it is, but my observations have brought me to the conclusion that it is the random coincidence of having formed a relationship with a specific human. The immediate, fierce, connection that is apparent to anyone who has spoken with a dragon is binding not just on the human, whose life will never be the same, but on the dragon. It is the call of this relationship that brings the dragon back through the wall between the worlds and it is only after the death of the frail human, a mere handful of decades later, that the dragon becomes cruel and avaricious.”

The avarice of dragons is well known and may have been one of the reasons that the ever-impecunious Hugh was drawn to Black Billy. The question of how they would get their talons on gold is, despite this, a fraught one. It’s possible that they may have picked up some from their victims but even allowing for the longevity this would never exceed the wealth of the area on which they predated. The idea of a dragon resting on a pile of gold bigger than herself is sheer fantasy as is Hugh’s rendering of the eventual death of a dragon.

“The end of a dragon’s life is a pitiful thing, hundreds of years after its first outtumble, after it soared high in the sky after laying its eggs, after the brief years of its passionate relationship with its human. As the centuries pass the dragon becomes twisted, weighed down by its own growth, which never stops, tortured by the thoughts of cruelties past and those yet to be practised. It also grows hungry, spending more time in the liminal world and less in ours, but it seems that there are limits even there, that the enormous bulk requires more sustenance than can be hunted. Eventually, then, and inevitably, the dragon begins to feed on the only source of meat large enough: its own body. Methodically, systematically, she rips the flesh first from her tail, then her hind legs and then her torso, literally feasting on her own body until there is nothing left but a pile of scales and another legend for the storytellers.”

Final Notes

I have managed to confirm that Hugh made it to Kinloch in December 1911 and stayed there until the outtumble in the late summer of 1912. From there he said that he was heading for Ben Mhaigdean, which he hoped to reach before winter began to bite. Whether he reached the mountain, and whether he got to speak to Black Billy we don’t know – this is where the trail runs cold. The last correspondence from Hugh was confirmation to Upcott Gill that he was happy with the proofs of his Natural History and that they should go ahead with publication.

The first printing of the book, and the immediate (though not necessarily consequent) destruction of the press, took place in May 1913. It’s not clear whether this delay was due to Huh’s disappearance or to financial problems within the business – the court records of the winter of 1912-13 contain two attempts to reclaim moneys owed and a bankruptcy proceeding seems only to have been averted by the wrapping up of the business after the fire.

There is just enough evidence to suggest that Black Billy is more than just a legend, and that it’s possible that Hugh could have met her although it’s not clear whether she is still alive a hundred years later. There is no evidence that ‘Zade has been back to Willerby: perhaps she came and found Hugh gone; perhaps she forgot or never intended to return; or perhaps, just perhaps, they were reunited in the autumn of 1912 somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland.

If that’s the case then their story may have continued, although if it did then it has gone far beyond the reach of a humble historian.

After finally getting rid of a Yamaha he’d never much liked, finding a 70s Lorenzo for sale in the Beckworth Bloodwise felt meant to be.

£220 – was higher than Dan expected for a charity shop guitar, but a few moments googling brought him quickly up to speed as to why.

The guitar – a jet back with bright blue-and-white birds perched in more muted green foliage on the scratch plate – was a minor vintage classic.

Nothing to get too excited about but interesting – a good quality rip-off of a Gibson that had a small and unfussy cult following online.

“Working man’s Hummingbird.”

“Brighter, with better bass than it has a right to have given the price.”

“Old guitars have souls and even knock-offs back then were better quality than most modern crap.”

“Worth fixing up, if you find one that needs some love.”

Dan put his phone away and looked at the guitar closely.

It had a few tiny scratches and nicks but was - polished to a high shine and newly strung - in a beautiful condition for an instrument at least fifty years old.

“Mind if I try this out?” Dan asked a bored-looking young woman behind the till with tattoos and piercings.

“Go ahead,” she said, then went back to scrolling.

Dan carefully lifted the guitar from its stand, settled himself into the leather chesterfield opposite and strummed a G chord, then a D, then a C.

“Wow,” he said to himself.

“Sounds good,” said the tattooed young woman.

Dan muted the strings and looked up at her. “It really does,” he said. “She sings, doesn’t she?”

He strummed out another pattern, picked out an arpeggio and then let himself drift away.

The woman came out from behind the counter and settled herself into a green velvet chaise long to listen

“You’re really good,” she said, when he stopped. “How long have you been playing?”

“Most of my life but really I’m no better than competent,” said Dan. “A few chords, a bit of basic soloing until I run out of ideas – but this guitar is making me sound much better than I really am.”

“You should buy it.”

Dan thought for a moment.

“It’s not super cheap,” he said. “You’ve done a good job pricing it.”

The woman shrugged.

“AI does it all now,” she says. “Harvey – he was working when it was donated, just left outside the shop actually, just took a picture of it and Chat GPT or something like it did all the rest.”

“Would you take an offer?”

The woman bit her lip and tilted her head to one side.

“I dunno,” she said. “I should check, but on the other hand fuck it. This is my last shift so why not? Make one, just don’t take the piss - it’s for people with cancer.”

“£150?”

“£180 and you get the other stuff that came with it too.”

Dan thought for a moment, then thrust out his hand. “Yeah,” he said. “That’ll do.”

After he’d paid and the guitar was safely stowed away in a black hardback case, the young woman followed him to the door to see him off.

“Thank you, and good luck with your new job,” said Dan.

The woman grinned at him. “I haven’t got one – I’m at college. Got done one too many times for shoplifting from Boots and I’ve just finished my community service.”

Dan laughed. “Learned your lesson?”

“Probably not,” she said, and laughed back. “I don’t even need the stuff. Life’s boring, you know, and you have to find ways to put something exciting into it or you go mad.”

…

“It’s pretty!” Sally said when he showed it to her back in Willerby. “What a lovely find.”

“It sounds great too,” Dan said, lifting it out.

“What’s all that stuff in the case?” Sally said, peering in.

“Some photos, some paper. I haven’t had a chance to look properly yet.

Sally reached in and lifted out a handful of faded Polaroids, fanned them out over the kitchen table.

One photo showed four young men in denim with long hair and moustaches, their arms around each other in front of a splitscreen VW Camper, another was two of the men with two blonde women; three of them standing within a ring of standing stones, then all four again on a small stage in front of a closely packed audience of men and women in flowing flowery shirts and bellbottom jeans.

“Ah, look,” said Sally, pointing at the final photo, which showed one of the men – the one with the longest and bushiest hair – sitting on a stool in a greasy-spoon café with Dan’s guitar cradled on his lap, grinning, forever frozen in a drag from a cigarette.

“Imagine looking as cool as that,” said Dan.

Sally smiled at him. “You did. We all do. But none of us know it at the time.”

Dan looked at the photos again, arranged them into a neat pile and pulled out a stack of paper from inside the case.

“Sheet music, mostly tab,” he said. “Flying Burrito Brothers, Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash, some early Dylan. Country-rock stuff. Makes sense. Goes with their look.”

“I wonder who they were,” said Sally. “They look like they’re having a great time.”

Dan spread the photos out again. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to guess Americans on tour here? The internet says the guitar was an import from Japan to the US so it wouldn’t have got here without someone bringing it. Probably our guy here.”

“And he left it behind,” said Sally, thoughtfully. “But we don’t know why.”

Dan nodded as he looked back in the case. “One last thing in here – looks like a child’s school exercise book.”

He put it down on the table, yellow cover facing up.

“Road Songs,” Sally read aloud, and opened it to reveal the handwritten lyrics of a song, the chords above the words picked out carefully in red. “Could you play them?”

Dan half-shrugged. “I could have a go,” he said. “But it’d only be an approximation. Without hearing it sung the chords won’t give me the melody.”

“You should,” said Sally, turning away and back to the washing up. “I think you’re being asked to.”

“Is that wise in Willerby?”

It was Sally’s turn to shrug.

“I think we’re beyond that. For better or worse, whatever’s going to happen is going to happen now.”

…

Dan waited until Saturday afternoon when he had the house to himself to have a go at the Road Songs.

He brewed a coffee, took the Bluebird to the swivel chair under a warm spot under the big window, opened the yellow book and began, slowly and tentatively at first, to strum through the songs inside it.

The chord progressions were nothing fancy – Gs, Ds, Cs, with some A and E minors thrown in to keep things interesting.

Once he had established a plausible pattern, he began trying out the lyrics of the first song – simple, clean and satisfying lines of travel – wheels on winding lanes, spring rain on windows, the whisper of wind in trees, poetry that went close to but stayed just on the right side of cliché.

For a while he couldn’t make them scan but then – just as he had suspected might happen – something clicked and suddenly he was high and low in all the right places and the song was there.

A few moments later he noticed – again with no surprise – that his voice was changing, now deeper with a gravelly catch in it, long southern vowels accenting the words, making them yearn, lonely and homesick for dust and heavy heat, depth to beauty that was already there.

Lonesome, not lonely, he realised just as he came to an end.

The sky had clouded over while he’d been playing, and rain pattered against the window.

His coffee had gone cold, but he’d forgotten about it anyway.

For a long time, he stared out the clouds.

And then he turned the page of the yellow book of Road Songs, picked up the guitar and began on the next song.

…

“He doesn’t sound like daddy when he sings,” said Sammy to Sally after coming down from upstairs the next week. “He sounds happy and sad at the same time.”

“Yeah, love,” said Sally. “Music can do that. How does it make you feel?”

“Happy and sad,” Sammy said. “I like it.”

…

Dan carried on practising. It was no effort.

He found it harder to stop than to start.

The songs – The Road Songs – were not particularly innovative or clever, but they were compelling.

“They sound as if you should have heard them before,” said Sally to Dan one evening after Sammy had gone to bed. The sort of songs you’re obsessed with for a while but then you forget about. And then one of them comes on the radio years later and throws you back in time to how you were then – all the people, the places you went to, everything.”

Dan looked down at the faded photo of the smoking young man in the café he now kept in the folds of the yellow book.

“I wonder what happened to him and his band,” he said. “They were good. I can feel it. They should have got somewhere. More people should know these songs.”

“Maybe there’s a way more people can,” said Sally. “You should play them through with the Wrecks.”

“Yeah, I was thinking about that too,” Dan said. “They do need a bit more. A bass. Another guitar. Drums. Other stuff.”

…

The Tumulus Wrecks were the Trigger’s broom village band - Trigger’s broom because the Wrecks were whoever happened to be playing with them at any time and nobody knew who the first members had been.

Whoever had the time met upstairs in the Green Man every Wednesday evening. Dan had played with them regularly when he’d been less busy but had dropped out of the habit and got an ironic round of applause when he appeared with the black bluebird guitar in its case and the yellow book of songs.

“There’s nothing new in any of them is there?” Asked Paul, rhetorically, sipping at a bitter in the bar downstairs at the end of the session. “But there doesn’t need to be. They’re neat and tight and they make you feel stuff. They’re good. The sorts of songs people bond over when they find out someone else loves them too.”

“Cult classics not best sellers,” said Ed the fiddle player.

“I’d like to keep on with these for a while,” said Paul. “This all feels like it’s headed somewhere. Dan, can you spare the time for a few weeks?”

“Yeah,” said Dan. “I think it’s something I’m meant to do.”

…

They practised a lot.

…

Over WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram to Willerby, Beckworth and beyond with the help of friends and family, The Wrecks promoted the Road Songs gig for weeks, and the Green Man was elbowroom only by the time they took the stage.

The show began at nine with the crowd just at the right point of tipsy – happy to be there, all ready on the band’s side, willing to do the work to make it perfect.

The magic began with the first chords of the first song strummed by Dan on the black bluebird, then filled in and out by Paul’s mandolin.

First it silenced the audience and then once they got the hang of the chorus had everyone singing along.

Later, Dan tried to explain the experience to Sally, but while he got close, he didn’t have the words to get all the way there.

“That sound at the beginning of a really big concert everyone there’s really excited about, when the band first walk on and the drummer thumps the bass drum – that cheer – that roar – if was like that the whole time.”

The set swept in another world and the room changed – hotter, steamier and good-sweat closer than the late winter dank February outside.

Songs of slow rivers, bayou and swamp, of neon motels and straight, endless desert roads, songs of fried roadside food, cold beer and crickets in the heavy dark, songs of love and lust, songs of a home far away.

Wild applause, hoots and hollers at the end of each – stamping feet, clapping hands from all the seen and unseen people.

And then when it should all have been over, when there were no more songs to play, an encore of a song that hadn’t been in the book but was somehow just as familiar as those that had been.

Dan wasn’t at all surprised to see, as the very last chord died away, a young man in denim with long hair and a moustache standing right at the back, applauding with everyone else.

He was in the bar too, sitting at a corner table on his own under a window, drinking lager, ignored by everyone.

Dan took his pint over and joined him.

“Feel like I know those songs you played,” the moustached young man said. “Feel like I know them very well.”

“I think I found your book,” Dan said. “With your guitar?”

“You did. An’ I’m glad you did,” the man said. “Was real good to hear them again. Real nice. You boys did a good job.”

“It should you be playing them,” said Dan.

“You’re welcome to have ‘em. I can’t reach ‘em now. Been gone too long, too far away. I can’t for the life of me remember what, but somethin’ must’ve happened to us – me at least, I can’t speak for these boys, they aint here.”

“I think you deserved more,” said Dan. “I think your music deserved more.”

“I dunno, man. Last thing I remember we were having such a blast in your little ‘ol England. Playing the pubs like this one – little halls, all the boys and the girls comin’ to see us. Writing the new album in that little book. It was good times.”

The man raised his hand and titled it from side to side.

“So, on the balance, I’m alright with it. Back in the US of A, we opened for a few of the really big guys, and they seemed no happier than we were. What we had was special – we were in our second beer buzz, you know? That feelin’ when you’re jus’ liftin’ off and the anticipation of all the fun you’re about to have is so high that you know even then nothing’ll ever be able to live up to it. I don’t think it can get better that that. Seems to me I might just have checked out at the top.”

“Hey,” said a voice from behind them.

Dan turned and saw the tattooed young woman from the charity shop standing behind them.

“You aren’t just competent,” she said. “That was fucking brilliant.”

Dan smiled up at her.

“This is the guy who wrote the songs.”

The woman’s eyes widened.

“Really? Why don’t you play them yourself?”

“I need my band for that, and they aint here.”

“What’s your band called?”

The man grinned. “The Tumbleweeds” he said, sweeping his arms out and dropping into a theaterical bow, “An’, darlin’, believe me when I tell you we could really rock a joint. Best night of your life. Come sit down and have a drink with me. I’ll tell you all about it.”

Dan stayed until it became clear both would be grateful if he were gone.

Happy as he could be, he left them to it and went back to drink with the Sally and the Wrecks.

“I ain't ever heard of any goblin called Lert.”

Mauve

The First Clue

The Smith of Willerby is an important person – traditionally the same would have been said of any village: the blacksmith held a key role with skill and knowledge passed down across generations and a status that put him (or, occasionally, her) on a par with the innkeeper and the priest if not quite the lord of the manor.

More recently smithing has fallen by the wayside along with other pre-industrial crafts and if a village still has a smith, then it will be as a form of artistry, a village luxury rather than an essential service.

Not so in Willerby.

The Smith of Willerby is an important person – and perhaps the best indication of this is that when the smith dies the smithy is immediately locked up and that night, after dark, a car arrives carrying officers from London who go through the smith’s belongings. Some they take away, some they destroy in the flames of the forge and some they leave to be passed on or sold. They go the way they came, still under the cover of darkness, with the smithy unlocked for the village to put straight whilst the next smith is chosen. Smiths being smiths there are rarely relatives to claim what belongings are left and so the village holds a sale of goods.

At such a sale I picked up a copy of Ralph Leake’s “Discourse on Silversmithing” from 1712, more for the hand-tooled cover than because I had a passion for the subject, but you never know what you’ll find nosing through old books. In this case I found that Ralph Leake may have had magnificent skill in metalworking but his gift for writing was, let’s say, poorly developed: overblown, vague and meandering are the politest adjectives I can find.

I also found a slip of paper – old fashioned parchment, in fact, tucked between the pages. In a bold hand on one side was a message written in ink. It read

Coventry
This Night
None of this Realm to know

In one corner someone else had neatly written the date 1490 and on the reverse were marks as though it had spent many years glued into some kind of scrapbook. My mind leaped precipitously to the possibility that the scrapbook in question was something that was taken away by car and that this had become unstuck before that event and put into Leake for safekeeping but that the smith had died before finding time to glue it back in place. If this were true then this was an original summons for the Willerby smith (from what authority remains unclear – to whom are the smiths answerable?), but to take part in or avert what event? This stumped me – 1490 was an exciting time to be in Hungary, France or Scotland but this period of time (between the court of Henry VI and the birth of Shakespeare) was a historically barren one for the area.

1940, however,…

The Second Clue

On 14^th November 1940 the most devastating attack of the Blitz hit Coventry. Over one night five hundred German bombers dropped waves of high explosives (which knocked out the infrastructure including the telephone lines and water mains that would have allowed an effective response by the fire brigade) and incendiary bombs (which consequently caused maximal damage) on the city. Although a full firestorm was avoided because the bombers dropped their loads over too long a time period the city’s industry, residential quarters and historical centre were to a large extent destroyed.

The next morning, standing in the ruins of the medieval cathedral, his home and life’s work, Provost Richard Howard put two twisted and burned roof timbers above where the altar used to be and ordered the words “Father Forgive” to be inscribed in the wall behind. Amidst the pain and fear and sorrow of a ruined city, hearing of a death toll of hundreds and still creeping upwards, Howard found the strength to look for peace rather than revenge, the courage to hope and rebuild rather than destroy, the humanity to reach out across borders rather than lash out against the enemy. It is largely because of him that the new Coventry Cathedral has been rebuilt alongside the remains of the old as a living symbol of peace and reconciliation.

In 1974, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British Government, and Winston Churchill in particular, had advance warning of the Coventry raid through decrypted messages but that they were unable to do anything about it for fear of giving away that they had broken the Enigma code. This was denied by other key figures in the Ultra programme that Winterbotham worked with and since 1996 (when they were declassified) it has been possible to read through the messages decrypted by Ultra and it’s clear that whilst they mention a significant raid, none of them specify that Coventry was the target.

Winterbotham died in 1990 still convinced that someone at Bletchley Park had known that Coventry was to be targeted – we know now that he can’t have got this impression from reading an intercepted message and, of course, it might have been an imaginative retro-fitting of what he knew later, but in a tight-knit and tight-lipped community like Bletchley we must consider the possibility that the information was gained through another source, possibly one even more secret than Ultra.

If that was the case, then the dilemma Winterbotham ascribes to Churchill would have faced somebody in the intelligence establishment: to save Coventry and give up the secret source of information or to leave it to burn. What if they knew enough secrets to try to do neither – what if they sent a secret message to a powerful agent located nearby, a message that was later filed away and marked misleadingly just in case of accident?

The Third Clue

Given the levels of destruction, the number of civilian deaths in Coventry was comparatively low. This is largely explained by two factors: the evacuation of the town by thousands of residents before the bombing; and the survival intact of most of the bomb shelters. One thing that isn’t explained is the low fatality rate for the city’s homeless: this is obviously a difficult thing to measure both because the figure is necessarily vague and because after the bombing the number of those needing temporary accommodation rose hugely. The cathedral records of those accessing support both before and after the bombing are, however, well-kept and in a group one would expect to be disproportionately affected there are almost no recorded deaths, or even unexplained disappearances.

You’d have to be a history nerd to know this – it’s only apparent if you go through some of the least interesting papers in the cathedral archives with a careful attention to detail. A perhaps better-known mystery of the Coventry Blitz is the myth of the “Sleepers Through”.

Whilst most of the people of the city were awake that night, hiding in shelters, heading for the countryside or valiantly fighting fires, there were a handful of families who survived the bombing having apparently slept through untroubled. They were never formally identified, of course, and some have put it down as an urban legend, unlikely in both detail and broad sweep, but the phrase Sleepers Through entered the town vernacular to describe those so inattentive that even a direct hit by the Blitz wouldn’t attract their consciousness, and letters to the Coventry Echo over the following decade suggest that it was normal, if not universal, to know someone who knew a Sleeper Through.

In searching for the truth of this story I spent time in the care homes of Coventry and the surrounding area, talking to old people of their memories of the Blitz, listening out for anything that might put me on the scent, hoping that some day I’d come across someone who had, as a child, been a Sleeper Through. Eventually, I think I’ve found one.

Elsie Knott was 90 when she died in 2024 and had been a resident of White Oaks for two and a half confused years before that. She didn’t have any family that anyone knew about and spent her days in a chair in front of the television, occasionally shouting out strange and unconnected thoughts that disturbed the other residents.

I was there one day when this happened, playing draughts with an old man I’d come to know. Suddenly, our concentration on the game was broken by a shout from the centre of the room. Elsie (as I came to know her) was standing up, pointing at the ceiling, and shouting “They slept through, but I didn’t, I didn’t.” She was quickly calmed down by the nurses and taken to her room, but my attention was grabbed and so I went to speak to her.

“Elsie, were you a sleeper through?” I asked, and her bony fingers closed round my wrist as she fixed bright, sparkling eyes on mine. “They said so,” she replied. At that moment I would have taken an oath that she was no more confused than I was but instead I took my notebook from my pocket, settled down in a chair by her bed and asked her to tell me more. This is Elsie’s story as best as I can put it down, the unlikely memories of a scared six-year-old recalled a muddling eighty years later.

It seems that her family had heard the sirens and left their house to go to the nearest shelter but hadn’t got far when they saw an accident – a speeding motorbike knocking down an old drunk before disappearing round a corner. Her parents stopped to help, telling her to hold tight to the tails of her mother’s coat so as not to get lost in the deep autumn darkness, and as she stood there she saw a pair of eyes looking at her from a hedge – straight at her from a face the same height above the ground as her own. It wasn’t another child though, an older face, strange, comic even. The other person said “hello,” introduced themselves as Lert and winked. Somehow the wink convinced her of Lert’s trustworthiness and she remained convinced as Lert stepped out of the hedge, heaved the drunk into a fireman’s lift and led her and her parents to an underground cave, or crypt that was being used as an unofficial shelter. She stayed there all night with half a dozen other children whose parents, like hers, seemed to sleep peacefully sitting up. Throughout the night Lert, and others like him, no longer comical but filled with solemn purpose, swashbuckling grace and a piratical glee, brought people down to the cellar where they were given soup from a great cauldron and then laid down to sleep with a blanket and a bed-roll. Elsie and the other children did their best to help but most of the work was done by Lert’s people directed by an old priest in a black robe.

When the sound of the bombs faded and they knew morning was coming another grown up person came down to the shelter – huge, bearded, black with soot, wearing leather overalls and carrying a hammer.

“Remember this night,” he said. “Remember that folk with no reason to help came to Coventry and saved lives. Remember the good that hot soup can do. Remember to hope. Children – to you we give lives filled with purpose: use them to rebuild Coventry over the coming years. Reverend – to you we give a fresh morning, the sky filled with smoke and the bodies of those we could not save on the streets. Make something good of it.”

With that he turned and left, followed, in single file, by a line of goblinfolk. Lert, towards the back, turned just before passing through the door and gave Elsie a last wink.

Epilogue

We don’t know who the other children were that night, who the other sleeper through families were, but we do know that Provost Howard was faithful to his charge, as was Elsie. She trained as a nurse and worked for almost fifty years in the hospital on Stony Stanton St, living in a small terrace in Bishopsgate where she was a stalwart of the local church: on the cleaning and flowers rotas and for a few years church warden. She’d be there every Sunday morning except for one day in mid-November, the closest Sunday to the 14^th when, without fail, she’d be in the Cathedral, remembering the Blitz. She never married, never had children but was Auntie, and then Granny, Elsie to generations.

We also know one thing more – we know that in December 1945, when the war was over, two weeks before Christmas, the Provost held a service of reconciliation in what was left of the old Cathedral in which he announced the plan to build a brand-new modern replacement in the space alongside the ruins. As part of the service a mixed choir of local adults and children sang a specially arranged version of the Coventry Carol and, in the photo taken for the Echo, there on the end of the front row in a beautiful new dress bought for the occasion is little Elsie Knott, winking.

Lully, Lullay, thou little tiny child.

This is a bad idea. I told John not to do it but he has anyway.”

Mauve

The tradition with this kind of biography is to put it in the third person, but let’s be honest, the village website has no official biographer – I’m John. I’m new to the village both in that I can only trace my ancestry in this part of the world back to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invasion of England (1745), and in that I’ve only lived here myself for a decade, moving here from the city when I semi-retired from my day job (I’m a maths teacher).

In the space that used to be filled with detentions, textbooks and marking, I now indulge my interest in history and, particularly, the history of Willerby.

Tolstoy said that history and mathematics are two sides of the same coin, but he was neither – what would he know? In maths there are problems for you to solve – in history there are also problems, but they will never be solved, only resolved. All you can hope for when presented with the evidence of the past is to find an explanation that makes sense of it all – and that’s what I try to do with the legends, folklore and plain storytelling of the village.

If you’re looking for hard-headed scepticism then you’ve come to the wrong place: just as battle plans never survive first contact with the enemy, so blind disbelief never survives long in Willerby – the place really is strange. Instead of debunking the tales, I see it as my role to look into them, find out the details, cross check and resolve some of the inconsistencies.

This corner of the website is a repository for what I’ve unearthed.

You might not believe my resolutions, the evidential history of Willerby – some might say it would be better if you didn’t, if you believed the disclaimer that this is a work of fiction – and it’s true: any similarity to events, places or persons living or dead is purely the result of bloody good research.

I would also add that there is no such thing as the Unofficial Secrets Act, I haven’t signed it, and absolutely nobody in the village has a copy in her dresser.

John Macdebs. February 2026

Our first book has sold out its run of 100 aside from the three we’re keeping for the village archives.

Copies went all over the world - lots to the UK, lots to the USA and Canada and a handful to Europe.

If you bought one, we hope you like it.

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Lothar arrived in Willerby on a freezing morning in January in a taxi, carrying a large oxblood leather travel wardrobe and a small titanium suitcase.

He had meticulous paperwork and impeccable references.

Although it was not yet on any of the websites, nobody objected to him renting the Sharp’s vacant Raven Cottage.

Tall, neat and thin, Lothar was never seen in anything but black three-piece suits, apart from Sundays when he wore brown corduroy and a floppy hat for a walk around the village.

His speech was entirely accentless and only his too perfect precision and the slightly archaic form of his sentences gave him away as being from overseas.

His work was watches and clocks.

They arrived with every post: sometimes in tracked packages, sometimes in plastic jiffy bags, sometimes in stiff card envelopes and sometimes in wooden crates as tall as he was.

He took them all in without fuss, worked at them in the dining room which he’d made into a workshop, and then, when they were ready, sent them back out again – all over the country, to Europe and to places further away.

“Everyone wants time,” he said to Josh, who lived next door, after he remarked on how good business seemed. “There’s always work for those who can provide it.”

Josh looked at him, squinting against the morning sun that made the man hard to see, as if the light was bending around his angular figure instead of illuminating in the way it was supposed to. “Do you sell clocks as well as fix them?”

Lothar gave a small, discreet shrug. “Yes,” he said, simply. “I do that too. Perhaps you would like to see some examples?”

Curious, Josh checked his watch, then sighed. “Maybe later today, after work? Will you be busy then?”

Lothar shrugged again. “I can make time,” he said. “Come whenever is convenient.”

…

Josh worked long hours, and had two young girls with hobbies and social lives busier than his own, which meant there was no opportunity until the next Saturday when Grace took them out to gymnastics and for a treat brunch in Beckworth.

Even then all the undone laundry and Friday night’s mess made him feel guilty sneaking out.

“I won’t be long,” he told himself as he knocked on Lothar’s door.

The house was kept very differently to his.

Used to toys, sports equipment and the perpetual cycle of clean-to-dirty, dirty-to-clean dishes and crockery, he found the neatness and order initially calming and then later unsettling.

It was – he supposed – easier for those with few possessions to keep tidy, but even then, the sterility of Lothar’s home was remarkable.

The dining room Josh was ushered into was free of all personal effects. The walls were bare and there was no furniture apart from a long wooden table and chair and a floor-standing Anglepoise lamp.

“Very neat,” said Josh.

“My work requires it. I cannot be distracted, cannot make mistakes. Please come here and see what I am working on now. It will help you understand more easily.”

Lothar gestured him towards the table where, in the pool of light cast by the lamp, sat a disassembled old cuckoo clock, its gleaming gold wheels and gears carefully arranged around an intricately carved walnut casing.

“A very good piece,” he said, “but not cared for well by its last owner. The new owner understands and respects it. He wishes to do things better – a full strip down and rebuild. He hopes this will restore all its original functions. If you wish you may watch me work for a while.”

“I won’t distract you?”

Lothar shook his head as he sat down. “No,” he said, firmly. “If you are quiet, you will not.”

Josh leaned in, fascinated. The delicate workings, each cog and spring, were beautiful and strange under Lothar’s long-fingered, pale and steady hands.

After some time, Lothar looked up, his expression so blank Josh wondered if he’d forgotten he was there at all.

“Would you like to see other examples?” he asked. “Wait here and I will bring more.”

He brought in timepiece after timepiece; gilded carriage and mantel clocks.

Alarm clocks.

Wrist and pocket watches.

Pendulum clocks so large they had to be wheeled in.

All the gold and silver, the mother-of-pearl, the precious stones and the intricate carving and finishings soon overwhelmed Josh. The extravagance made him nauseous – a feeling like eating too much chocolate on an empty stomach.

“I have to go,” he said, suddenly, looking at his own watch, a basic black Casio. “I’ve been too long here already.”

Lothar put down the gunmetal half-hunter he was holding. “I see,” he said. “You’ve run out of time. But if you let me have your watch for just a moment, I can give you some back. An hour perhaps? On my account this first time. On the house, so to speak.”

Josh hesitated, unsure whether to laugh or protest. Then, shaking his head, he unfastened his F-91W and handed it over.

Lothar looked at it carefully for just a moment, pressed a sequence into the buttons on the watch’s sides and then handed it back.

“There,” he said. “And call again if you’d like more. Any time.”

And then, without quite remembering leaving the cottage, Josh found himself in front of his own door.

He checked his watch, then the kitchen clock and then every other clock in the house.

They all said the same thing.

It was an hour earlier than it had been moments before.

…

The next Saturday, Josh went back to see Lothar.

“Hello, again,” he said, looking at Josh with unblinking eyes after ushering him into the dining room workshop. “You’ve come for more time.”

Josh thought about pretending for politeness’s sake he’d come to see Lothar work again but didn’t because he was sure the accentless man wouldn’t – maybe couldn’t – care.

“Perhaps just an hour again?”

Lothar nodded. “Of course. This can be very easily arranged. Sadly, this time I cannot give you the time for free. It would not keep balance.”

Josh had expected this and took out his wallet.

Lothar placed a light, delicate hand on his arm.

“No,” he said. “Time must be paid for with time. Second for second, minute for minute, hour for hour.”

Josh put his wallet away again. “How does that work?” he asked. “How do I pay?”

“Choose the time you choose to give. I do the rest. Perhaps later today in the evening? Or next year or perhaps the hour before your death, whenever that will be.”

Josh checked his watch and saw he had only a few minutes before Grace and the girls would be back, thought of how wonderfully cold and crisp the morning was and how quiet and peaceful the roads and lanes around Willerby would be to cycle through. He thought of the good a couple of hours on his bike would do him and how much better a father and husband he would be for the rest of the weekend.

He thought again.

“OK,” he said. “Seven till nine pm this evening.”

It was time well spent, he thought later as he came back just as Grace flopped down next to him on the couch with a glass of wine.

“Something on your mind?” she said. “You were a million miles away through tea and bedtime.”

“I’m fine,” said Josh. “Do you want to put a film on?”

Grace shook her head and then flopped down against his shoulder. “I haven’t the energy for it. Maybe tomorrow if we can get the girls down a bit earlier.”

“Maybe,” said Josh, knowing they wouldn’t.

…

Josh became comfortable with, then accustomed to, and then addicted to, buying and selling time.

At the start, finding time to sell was easy; the hour when everyone else was asleep before he left the house was the first of his regular slots; then the girl’s bath and bedtime – first once, then twice, then three times a week. Then gymnastics, swimming and dancing lessons.

Over the weeks and months and then for nearly two years, he took more and more shared time to pay for time to himself; spending his credits on long runs, bike rides, guitar practise, online German classes, special extra tasks at work and labour-intensive DIY and home improvement projects.His friends and colleagues were impressed by his increased productivity.

At work, his manager was so impressed that he wrote ‘inspiringly efficient’ on a letter recommending him for a promotion and a pay rise.

Grace could not work out why she didn’t feel more pleased. She knew she should be. She worried she didn’t because she was envious, and the possibility of this made her feel petty and small.

“I don’t know how he does it all,” she said to Maya, her sister, on the phone while also stirring stew and mostly unsuccessfully trying to get one of the girls off their screens and onto homework. “By nine I’m a shell of myself but Josh always seems to have done as much as me and then something extra on top too. Last week he built sunken seating and a brick barbecue for the summer.”

“Men!” said Maya. “They always have time for the glory jobs because they don’t even see the boring stuff that needs to be done just to keep the show on the road.”

“I know what you mean, but I don’t think it is quite that,” said Grace. “He’s always here doing... stuff!”

Then she paused for a moment, realising she couldn’t remember him being around that much recently.

But he must be, she thought, because if he hadn’t, she’d have noticed.

She dismissed the odd thought and carried on.

“No,” she said, “he is always around, even if he’s often… distant? Not all there? I dunno.”

Maya giggled.

“Grace,” she said, “is he there when you really need him to be there, if you know what I mean?”

“Maya!” Grace said, blushing but laughing at the same time too. “Yes, he is, thank you very much.”

“Poor you,” said Maya. “Stuck with a man who’s a bit reserved but meets all your needs while he gets cool shit done. Sounds awful. How do you cope?”

Grace laughed at that and they went back to talking about other things.

After that she made a conscious effort to appreciate Josh and how his now seemingly boundless energy was enhancing their lives. She tried hard to think about the better holidays they’d have, how nice their garden parties in the summer would be and even tried to get herself interested in the sort of new car they could now afford.

But she always found it an effort and couldn’t shake a sense of emptiness.

She tried, a couple of times at least, to talk to him about it but never felt heard. After each stilted, stunted conversation she couldn’t even remember what he’d said.

…

Alone.

Lonely.

The words for how she felt fell on her as she sat on the toilet in the middle of the night while the rest of the world was asleep and silent.

…

On a cruel Sunday afternoon in late July, Jasper, their three-year-old black-and-white collie, collapsed on the kitchen floor.

When he tried to get up his claws scrabbled on the lino as if his legs wouldn’t obey him.

Grace phoned the emergency vet while trying to calm the girls, who turned out to be right to be terrified. Jasper was dead by the time they got him there.

That night the girls slept in the same bed, Grace with them, until they’d cried themselves to sleep.

“Josh, where were you?” Grace hissed at him when he finally came to bed.

He looked at her strangely, thinking hard about what to say.

“What do you mean?” he said, eventually, too steadily. “I was here.”

“I don’t remember you being here,” said Grace. “Even if you were, it was as if you weren’t. You might as well have not been. I felt like I was all on my own.”

She turned her back on him, sobbed for a while to herself and then went to sleep.

Josh lay awake for a long time and after that cut down his transactions with Lothar.

But it was hard and it didn’t last.

Increasing amounts of his life felt too tedious and irritating to bother being present for.

Picking up stray clothes and discarded make-up and jewellery.

Sorting the recycling.

Stacking, unstacking and stacking the dishwasher.

Listening to monologues he didn’t care about.

Knowing he didn’t have to be there for any of it made it worse.

Lothar’s house was so close.

A short walk, a brief passionless conversation and then hours – so many glorious hours – to himself to be spent exactly how he pleased.

It wasn’t even as if being there more brought him any closer to Grace. They never had time to talk properly and, both dispirited by the mundanity of everything, their exchanges were tense and snappy.

“You know where the gloves are.”

“Would it kill you to put the bins out when they’re full?”

“How about you reply to your own mum and dad about next Tuesday?”

“I’ve told you, just don’t listen.”

…

“I need you to pay better attention,” snapped Grace at Josh in the middle of an argument about pick-ups from after-school clubs.

“But why?” Josh said, unguarded in the moment. “Everything we ever talk about is so boring.”

“What’s boring?” Grace shouted back at him. “Our girls? Me? Our whole fucking lives?”

There wasn’t anything Josh could say that wouldn’t make things worse, so he said nothing, sullenly and silently wishing to be anywhere else.

And soon he was.

It was good – he thought – to be able to so easily escape and for more weeks and then more months they all went on just like that.

…

Barely acknowledged and uninterrogated guilt Josh felt made him promise himself he wouldn’t buy any time from Grace’s fortieth birthday weekend.

He prepared mentally for it with the same grim determination that in-denial alcoholics approach Dry January; a necessary unpleasantness that would allow him to plunge back into his habit guilt free once it was over.

They chose the cottage in Hathersage for their memories of trips to the Peaks with the university mountaineering club where they’d first met.

Josh realised it was a mistake before they’d even unpacked to have tried to turn back the clock.

The cottage was smaller, gloomier and dirtier than the booking.com photos.

The girls argued about the beds and then seemingly out of nowhere Grace shouted at Josh for forgetting the cafetiere. He shouted back which made Grace cry in anger and frustration.

He stormed out, using the necessity of instant coffee as a pretext.

He found a shop quickly, and then went to the pub next door for a sneaky pint, which turned into two and an hour on his phone.

When he got back, Grace was asleep – or at least pretending to be – and the girls were in bed blankly scrolling their IPads.

He went back out again, drank more beer, and slept on the couch.

The next day was just as bad.

It began raining just as it got light at around eight and didn’t stop all day.

Unable to face the hills they trod the village’s sopping grey pavements in plastic anoraks, browsing overpriced art galleries and stuffy, overheated outdoor gear shops selling rucksacks and discounted tents.

They had an indifferent lunch in an indifferent café nobody wanted to eat in and then argued about whose fault that was.

Grace went for a walk on her own. The girls went back to the cottage for more screen time in their room, while Josh screencast a football game from his phone onto the modest flatscreen in the pokey living room.

It was a boring match and his team lost 1 – 0.

Grace’s birthday dinner was marginally better because they’d booked a nice restaurant weeks before and the starched tablecloths and sotto-voiced waiters conditioned them to better behaviour, but as soon as it was over low-level misery descended on them all once more.

What a waste of time it all was, Josh thought, just before he fell asleep.

…

Grace was up before Josh, packing, and they were on the road just after nine.

The rain had stopped but it was much colder and the sky was dark and heavy.

“Might snow,” said Grace, checking her e-mails.

“Surely not so early in November,” said Josh, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Would be just our luck if it did,” Grace said.

Half an hour after setting off, snow began falling – at first light sleet and then, very quickly after that, thick, fat flakes that flowered on the windscreen before being swished away by the wipers.

The snow began settling on the road and Josh slowed the car as he hunched over the dashboard, peering intensely out at the storm through the arc swept clear by the blades.

“This isn’t safe,” said Grace. “We should pull over and check the forecast.”

Josh nodded.

“Yeah,” he said, “you’re right – was thinking the same thing. As soon as I see somewhere we can, I will.”

Grace twisted in her seat to look at the girls behind her.

“You’ve both got your belts on, haven’t you?” she asked.

They crawled along for another mile or so in a high gear and touching lightly on the brakes.

“I see something ahead,” said Grace, squinting. “I think it’s the sign for a pub. Pull in there?”

Josh saw it too, flicked on the indicator and brought them in a wide, steady arc.

With the wipers off, the windscreen went white immediately, and in just a moment it was if the whole family were in an igloo.

“Are we stuck?” one of the girls asked, sounding more excited than scared.

“What does the forecast say?” Josh said.

“I can’t get on the internet,” Grace replied after a minute of stabbing at her phone. “There’s no signal.”

Nobody said anything.

Josh turned the car back on – for something to do rather than for any purpose – but the snow had grown so thick the wiper blades made an angry clicking sound but didn’t move.

“Right,” he said, “all out. We’ll go to the pub and ask.”

As they trudged through the blizzard the girls, already hand-in-hand, reached for Grace who reached for Josh.

The pub was open.

It was shabby but warm and clean, and while there was no signal there either, and the WiFi was bad, the landlord had a computer with a wired connection and told them the Met Office was saying the snow would fall all day and wouldn’t melt until the next at the earliest.

“You won’t get out before tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve got a room, though. Upstairs. It’s not that big but it’s got a double bed, a single and a futon I can pull out for you. I’ll give it to you 25% off. Call it an Act of God Discount.”

Josh sighed. “What about work?”

Grace put a hand on his arm. “Send them an email,” she said. “Then forget about it. There’s nothing you can do about it now. Let’s make the best of it. It might even be fun.”

They had huge brunches and then made snowmen and snow angels in the pub garden until the cold drove them back to the fire blazing in the open hearth. They warmed up and went back out again just as it began to darken, marvelling together at the white flakes against the hills and dark skies.

They ate pie and mash. The girls drank hot chocolate, and Josh and Grace drank pints. Exhausted by the day, the girls were asleep by nine.

Josh and Grace stayed in the bar, sitting next to each other, facing the largest window, their knees and arms touching.

Grace said she was cold, although she wasn’t really, and Josh put his arm around her.

She snuggled in.

The temperature rose rapidly the next morning. By breakfast the fallen snow had gone grey and slushy and the road outside was almost clear.

“Do you want to take the stuff to the car or settle the bill?” Grace asked. “And the correct answer is ‘take stuff to the car.’”

“I absolutely want to take the stuff to the car then,” Josh said, kissing her on the cheek.

“Good,” she said.

“Comfortable enough night given the circumstances?” The landlord asked her as she settled up. “If it’s any consolation, you were lucky. We’ve been cut off for much longer than a night before.”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” she said. “We’ve had a really nice time.”

“The room’s free all week if you want to stay longer.”

“That’d be lovely, but my husband has work,” said Grace.

“Shame,” said the landlord.

“Yeah, a shame,” Grace said. “Anyway, he’s been a while. I should go and check how he’s getting on.”

…

When Grace got to the car, following Josh’s footprints in what was left of the wet snow, he was bent over the dashboard, his chest heaving.

“Josh? What’s wrong? Are you crying?”

As Josh turned to her she realised he was laughing so hard he couldn’t speak.

“The car won’t start,” he managed to get out eventually. “I left it on overnight and the battery’s flat.”

“You’re joking,” Grace said, beginning to laugh herself.

“Nope,” said Josh. “I’m an absolute tool.”

“Yeah,” said Grace, “you always were.”

Then they were hugging, then wrestling, and then the girls who’d come to see where they’d gone were on top of them both and they were – all four of them – screaming in delight in a huddle on the wet ground.

…

“The thing I learned that weekend,” Josh told Grace years and years later when it finally felt safe to talk about worse times, “was that you have to be ready to be happy at any moment.”

…

The day after they eventually returned from the Peaks, Josh went to see Lothar one last time to put an end to it, but all the lights were off, and when he knocked there was no answer.

Later that day, in the evening in the Green Man, Josh asked Mauve, who always seemed to know everything, about what had happened.

“While you were away, they traced an infestation in that house,” she said, looking at him with her curious grey eyes. “The whole place was riddled with parasites. Crawling with them. He’s gone. He ain’t coming back. He was a dirty one. Good riddance.”

The End.

The Green Man groaned and shivered under an unnatural storm.

Forty mile per hour winds had driven snowdrifts against the pub’s thick walls and nobody inside dared step outside for fear of losing themselves.

In Willerby, going into a blizzard like this might mean disappearing forever.

In the snug, Sunny, Dan and Sally sat in a tight circle around the open fire quietly swapping village gossip and stranger stories.

There was a bang on the door.

“What was that?” Dan asked.

“Loose branch on the wind, probably,” said Sunny.

The bang came again, a distinct knock this time.

“Someone’s outside,” said Sally.

For a third time, the knock came. Unsteady, but purposeful and unmistakably human.

“I’m going to get it,” said Sunny.

“Is that wise?” Dan said.

“Can’t leave someone out in this,” Sunny said turning away from the fire and towards the closed door. “It’s against the law.”

He went to the entrance, “Who is it?”

There was no answer.

Another knock.

“I’m opening up,” said Sunny. “Get ready.”

Dand and Sally got to their feet.

Sunny unbarred the door and pulled it open.

Framed against the whiteout outside stood a figure in armour carrying a large, red and black square shield with a metal boss in its centre.

He looked around like a man lost in a strange dream.

“I lost my legion,” he said, “I don’t know where they’ve gone. I can’t find them. Even the hills look wrong.”

“Only one of them,” said Dan, relieved.

“Where am I?” The soldier asked.

“This is the Green Man,” Sunny told him. “You’re a long way from home.”

“How can I get back?”

“Wait until tomorrow,” Sunny replied. “The weather will be better then and perhaps you’ll be able to see the way. Take some food and drink and rest.”

The man turned back towards the door and looked for a moment as if he would walk out. Then he changed his mind.

“Rome thanks you,” he said, coming in, shaking the snow from his cloak.

“I’m going to get our guest some food”, Sunny said. “He’s confused. Leave him be in the meantime.”

Sunny fetched some bread from the kitchen and drew him a pint of beer.

The soldier wrapped himself in his woollen cloak and took a chair close to the fire. Sunny, Dan and Sally began to talk again but nobody felt able to really relax until, after an hour or so, the soldier disappeared leaving behind only a small puddle of water.

Dan shivered with more than just the cold.

“Glad he didn’t stay long,” he said, “they make me nervous when it’s as wild as it is tonight.”

“Me too”, said Sally.

Although Dawn never thought much what death would be like while she was alive, she never expected it would be quite so boring.

She’d thought it would be more dramatic – something with meaning – a flash of light, new knowledge, some sort of fulfilment at the very least.

Instead, she got pain, dreams and then this.

Mercifully she was not conscious most of the time, but she found her new existence dreadfully tedious when she was.

There was nothing to do but pace around Saint Leonard’s church and graveyard where she’d been the vicar for thirty years before her final cancer took her. Periodically – for something to do more than anything else – she tried to go further and into Willerby itself but always found she just couldn’t.

She wondered a lot about why she hadn’t gone anywhere.

She’d led a decent and uncomplicated life.

There was nothing she’d done or left undone that troubled her much.

Sometimes she wondered whether it was because her own faith hadn’t been rigorous enough. While she trusted and believed in God, she’d never found herself able to come to any sort of certainty about the deep questions.

She assumed if she did her best, was honest about her failings and shortcomings and then tried to do better, things would work out fine.

Perhaps – she thought- this uncertain, liminal existence was punishment for a faith she’d felt strongly but never had words or arguments for – for not being the sort of priest able to cleverly quote chapter and verse to make an ingenious point.

Maybe this was not enough for someone whose job it was to know scripture and gospel inside out – maybe she should have wrestled with the intellectual side of it all more than she’d bothered to. Maybe by not doing that she’d sinned in ways too profound for her to understand. Maybe by accepting her simple religion as enough she’d missed chances to do God’s work and maybe He was angry with her.

But she didn’t really believe that.

All she really knew was that she did not know why she was there.

Most of the time she was alone with only animals for company; the bats in the tower, the mice and rats in the yard and the owls, badgers, foxes and jet-black cats hunting them.

She didn’t think the wild ones were aware of her, but she knew the cats were by the way they called and fussed, and how they tried fruitlessly to rub themselves against her legs.

Occasionally she saw other ghosts; the woman who wept by the font; the boy who skipped down the nave and then vanished beneath the great stained-glass window; the angry overweight man in overalls who ranted silently at her as he jabbed and pointed with thick, rough fingers.

Some of these came and went to no pattern she could discern, while others were more predictable.

Her favourite ghosts were like this – the 1950s gardener – the 1980s postman - the group of young women in crinoline who gathered outside in the summer to chatter and coo at the living babies pushed by their mothers in prams and strollers through the churchyard.

These – she could tell easily – were good ghosts who meant no harm.

She saw the living even more rarely than she did the dead, and like most of the ghosts she found no rhyme nor reason to why she sometimes did but mostly did not. Occasionally she found herself by someone praying alone or she was inexplicably present at an otherwise unremarkable communion service, wedding, baptism or funeral.

She had little ability to interact with the living.

She found if she tried hard, she could summon a breeze strong enough to stir hair or rifle the pages of the thin-paged bibles on each pew, but that was the full extent of it and what was the point of that? The church had always been draughty, and nobody ever noticed.

Sometimes - and she liked it when this happened – she found herself amongst the happy chaos of Messy Church. These were for small children and were mostly crafting and singing songs with actions. When she’d been vicar, these were the only services Dawn really enjoyed, the only services she didn’t worry she wasn’t doing quite well enough.

Most of the time she was alone in the cool half-light gloom, wandering the church, counting the hours, wondering when she’d fade and what she’d see the next time she was summoned.

She could only be sure of consciousness at the carol service that always took place the last Sunday before Christmas Day.

She used these to track time.

Clothes and hairstyles changed. Hymns went from organ to piano and then keyboard, guitar and drums.

Here she saw babies grow to toddlerhood and then become teenagers.

Here she saw the young ease to middle age, and the middle aged lose vigour as they drifted into their final years, disappearing from the congregation as they journeyed past her to their undiscovered countries.

Naturally, there were some people she was more interested in than others.

One of these was baby Katy who she first saw sleeping in the arms of her mother and then often in the messy children’s services, grabbing at paints, glue and scissors with infectious enthusiasm and an explosive laugh that demanded others join in.

Everything she did, she did with gusto – even her singing– loud and tuneless, so gleeful it didn’t matter at all.

She sang like this as an older girl and as a teenager too – unselfconscious ear splitting inexpert descants that had those around her shaking with laughter even as they joined in.

Dawn loved Katy’s singing and wished she’d had the benefit of it while she’d been vicar – she loved how it lifted the whole church and got everyone belting out the hymns and praise songs so loudly it swept in even the shyest and quietest.

Then one Christmas Eve at the end of the service just before everyone went home, Dawn saw the latest vicar – a thin faced serious young man with a sharp haircut - take Katy aside and have a short, serious conversation with her, which he ended with a pat on her shoulder.

She didn’t hear what he said but whatever it was, it made Katy flush so red it was as if she’d been slapped across the face.

For a moment she stood stunned, frozen to the spot. Then she tilted her head up to the roof before pulling her face into a fake smile.

The next Christmas Eve, Katy did not sing.

Nor the one after that.

She wasn’t at the next three Christmas Eve carol services.

Dawn wondered whether she was away travelling or perhaps had a boyfriend she was spending the holidays with. She knew it was natural for young people to go their own way for a while at least, but knowing this didn’t stop her wondering about what the young vicar, who was always somehow too neat, too smug, too self-satisfied, had said that made her cry.

She suspected she knew.

Then, to her delight, Katy came back, with a young man her own age.

He was tall with a comfortable, kind face beneath a wild halo of curly dark hair and was wearing a beautiful dark blue suit. When he held Katy’s hand the way she leant into him made Dawn hope they’d marry before foolish youth had them second guessing themselves.

He sang well – in a loud and resonant baritone with confidence that spoke of a childhood in church.

He, Dawn saw, noticed that Katy did not sing, noticed the way she only mouthed the words, noticed the relief with which she sat down at the end of each song.

When it was all over, in the happy jostle of the pub-bound crowd, he asked about her silence.

“Why so quiet, Kat?”

Katy looked up at the vicar, then quickly looked away.

He was at the other end of the aisle, moving easily among the most prominent of his flock.

Katy shook her head, “I’ll tell you later, Marcus,” she said, “but not here, not now,” and then scurried – that was the only word for it – to the door.

Marcus stood where he was, confused, looking after her and then at the vicar.

And then it seemed very important – vital even – Dawn do something, as an inexplicable certainty arrived that all the years of waiting had been only for this moment, and were she to miss it, she might be trapped forever.

Dawn did the only thing she could do – she blew harder than she knew she could, harder than she’d ever done before, hard enough to flutter the hymn books, hard enough to blow open the bibles, hard enough to turn the heads of those still in church as they clutched at their hats and scarfs.

“What the..” said Marcus, looking around.

Dawn blew again, more softly this time, just enough to flutter the thin pages of the closest bible without turning them.

Marcus picked it up and Dawn moved to just behind him so she could look over his shoulder to see the page it was open to.

“Psalm 100,” she read to herself with words nobody else could hear.

She knew this one, and whispered it at exactly the same time Marcus read it aloud.

“Make a joyful noise to the Lord.”

Marcus nodded, picked up the Bible and carried it after Katy.

…

The next year Katy came back to church and sang, loudly, out of tune, first nervously defiant and then with more confidence, Marcus beside her singing even louder, both staring at the vicar until he lost his nerve and looked away.

Her family and her village friends sang with her at the tops of their voices too, for this had all been planned for months.

The final hymn was Hark the Herald Angel’s Sing and in the very first verse Marcus moved into the aisle where there was more room for him to dance, pulling first Katy and then her mum and dad after him, and then the everyone in the church was dancing too, clapping and swaying, laughing with delight at the unexpected miracle of it all, singing extra choruses to the triumph of the skies.

The final chorus was very ragged and so loud it all but drowned out the instruments at the front but that didn’t matter at a bit – the musicians were enjoying it as much as anyone.

And then it was over and everyone was laughing and wishing each other the merriest of Christmases, shaking hands and hugging each other.

Dawn would have loved it but - of course – she wasn’t there.

Tabitha arrived in Willerby a nervous RSPCA kitten only just old enough to leave her mother.

Simone called her Tabitha for her tabby coat.

She thought naming her that was cute and funny.

For the first few weeks of her life in the village she never left the house, but just as Simone was beginning to wonder whether she ever would, Tabitha tiptoed into the front garden for the first time.

As she grew bolder she ventured further afield. Past Jack’s Pool and the smokers outside the pub. Over the Green and past Sharp’s corner and then, at last, into the woods where she hunted rats, mice and other delicious things.

Then deeper into the trees where, at last and as she was supposed to, she found the wide clearing where the witches once met.

There she joined with the other village cats, all jet black from every nose to every toe.

On the night of each full moon in the clearing in the dark wood the cats sang their wordless song of meaning and power, summoning those who could hear, filling the forest around them with strange life.

Ogres and goblins.

Brownies and dwarves.

Ghasts, imps and hags, and other strange people for which humans have no name.

When all those invited have arrived the cats fall silent and the conference begins, sometimes in one big group but more commonly in subcommittees and working parties of common interest

Border disputes and cross-dimensional crime. The alignment of the stars in the sky and what this meant for all the hidden kingdoms. The guarding of the portals and the progress of the great war, noteworthy discoveries made by alchemists and explorers at the edge of their worlds.

The cats watch and listen to it all, taking silent notes and then when it is all over they noiselessly disperse to pass messages and agreed actions, going about their secret business in the dead of each night until the next full moon.

“Tabs is getting so lazy!” Said Simone to her boyfriend Matt one Sunday morning. “She’s always asleep apart from when she’s hungry and then after she's eaten she goes straight back to bed.”

Matt looked down at her snoring on the sheepskin under the radiator.

He looked away and then frowning, looked back.

“Did she always have black paws?”

Simone stretched and yawned.

“No - and it’s not just her paws. The tip of her tail is too now.”

Matt sat up.

“Cats don’t change colour though, do they?”

“They do here,” said Simone. “It takes a while, but they all end up that way in the end. In Willerby all the cats are black.”