Not far from Willerby on a roundabout there is a petrol station everyone calls Gibbet Cross – or just the Gibbet.
It is spirit-soaked in unhappy and unquiet ghosts.
Those of us living in the village – at least those with sense – won’t use it after dark.
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 it during early-doors Friday drinks in the Green Man but I’d 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 just got him in return for the one he’d bought me, “and mostly it worked. And mostly it still does, but they’re always still looking for a way.”
His wife Mauve came over with a gin and tonic.
“Just telling Mark here – he’s just 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 stop there.
If the M11 hadn’t been closed I wouldn’t have needed it to then either, but it was, and the diversion from the airport took me an extra thirty miles.
I could probably still have got 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.
It was already late, and I decided the extra fiver 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 - are uncanny and disconcerting. Elemental placelessness makes them liminal, existing on the edges of many realities without being firmly in any.
In the day when it’s light and busy, and there are warm sausage rolls in glass cabinets the weird can be unseen or overlooked, but alone at night when their green and white canopies become small bright islands in the rolling endless dark, the soft and lurking terror of all time and space come rushing in.
The dark hump of the scrub-wooded roundabout the station squatted beside it made the Gibbet even more unsettling.
In the rumble and roar of passing continental lorries I filled up, realising the low hill behind me must be where the damned had hung in their iron cages.
Wishing I’d gone home after all, shuddering as I imagined rusting chains creaking in the wind and 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 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 in but didn’t.
What was there to say?
Instead, I checked nothing was missing and drove away, glad to leave, keen to get back home.
The way back took me first on a mostly deserted dual carriageway and then onto a completely deserted narrow B-road that spidered past the neighbouring hamlets and villages before its final turn 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 to the first turn I became sure I was not alone.
There was somebody or something sitting silently beside me.
I couldn’t see them, but they were there.
Something that 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. Most of me did not.
I allowed myself to accept the possibility there was nothing there and sped up.
“Yes, my lad,” a hissing voice said, cold rancid breath filling the car with the stench of corruption and death, “take me home.”
Chilling!