Gibbet Cross

A Willerby Story

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.”