Jack's Pool

A Willerby Story

“It was a stupid thing to do,” David said. “When you’re new to a place it’s wiser to see how things lie before you go ahead all gung-ho.”

Sally stiffened.

“Dan and I have been in Willerby for a year and a half. Long enough to know if we’d brought it to a village meeting nothing would get agreed and nothing done because you two put everything off. And it isn’t about who’s been here longer. Willerby is our village too.”

Mauve put a hand on her husband’s arm.

“They didn’t know better. And we don’t know any harm’s been done. There are still things we can do to fix this. So, Sally you just listen.”

Sally closed her eyes for a moment and thought about shutting the door.

“David! Mauve! No, for God’s sake you two listen! I know you’ve lived here all your lives. You remind everyone all the time. But it isn’t just your village, and you can’t just keep it the same because you’ve been here longer than anyone else. That bloody pond – Jack’s Pool as only you two call it, was an eyesore, sat there stinking, no good to anyone. Look at it next time you go past it – at least now you can! The brambles are down, the meadow mowed, the trees cut back. When it gets to summer it’ll be a paradise. Perfect for picnics and barbecues or just lounging around with a book – a place everyone here can enjoy.”

“It was fine how it was,” said David. “Safe.”

“Safe? Really? You couldn’t even see it because it’s full of mud and goodness knows what else. Whenever it rains it floods. Once it’s dredged, we’ll have fixed that too. I don’t get why you can’t just be happy we went ahead and got on. You should be grateful.”

“Grateful! Hear her! Now that’s enough young woman,” Mauve said. “There’ll certainly be no dredging. What you’ve done might not do much harm but going into the pond? I’m afraid that’s out of the question altogether.”

“Mauve, I’m nearly forty!” said Sally. “And it will get dredged. It’s happening right now. Dan is there with the digger.”

Mauve fixed Sally with a look then wheeled after her husband who was already twenty feet away, head down and arms swinging.

When the three of them arrived at the pond there was already a small crowd of twenty or so people standing and watching a mini-digger pulling scoop-loads of sodden black and stinking mud from the centre of the pond.

“Stop that now!” David shouted. “Put all that back right now! This instant!”

Mauve jabbed at Sally’s arm. “Go tell your husband to get all that back in the pond and to send all this straight back where it came from.”

“I will not!” Sally shouted – partially because she was angry and partially just to be heard over the noise of the digger. “The pond is almost finished and we’re not stopping just because you won’t have progress.”

“Progress! Do you hear her?” David scoffed, talking to the crowd as much as her. “She doesn’t know what progress means and when she learns, she won’t want it any more than we do. We need to stop this right now. I will if nobody else will.”

To even Sally’s surprise David – in his polished leather shoes – began picking his way across the grass and towards the digger, waving his arms and shouting. “You stop right now I tell you! Stop this second!”

 Then he tottered, slipped and sat down hard.

There was a laugh from the crowd. David and Mauve had upset many of them at one time or another and seeing him grass-stained, sitting in mud waving his arms was funny.

Mauve glared at them and went to her husband to help him up.

“Leave them to it, love, “ she said, “looking at what’s been done – it’s too late now anyway. We’ll have to weather whatever comes as well as we can. We all will.”

Later that evening in the Green Man, Sally and Dan couldn’t buy a drink because every time they tried someone gave them one.

The drinkers – mostly young and either out-of-towners or new to Willerby – were keen to show gratitude; both for improving the pond and for standing up to David and Mauve.

It was a perfectly clear May evening with a full moon so bright it cast shadows.

On the two minute walk home, Sally and Dan picked their starlit way back to their cottage and felt – at last – Willerby was home.  

There was a note pinned to their front door.

“Things don’t lie still in Willerby. You must be more careful. Here to help when you’re ready.”

Sally and Dan read, looked at each other and then once inside burst out laughing.

They laughed about it when they first woke up too.

Then both their phones began buzzing.

The Willerby village WhatsApp group was lighting up with angry emojis and carelessly punctuated staccato text interspersed with image after image of the ragged edged edges of car fittings where wing-mirrors used to be.

“Ours too!

“Yep – us too. Both cars.”

“Yes – ripped right off.”

“Going to cost a fortune.”

It was hard to keep up.

Dan got out of bed and looked out of the window overlooking the street.

“Wow,” he said. “Sal, ours too – both mirrors on both cars ripped right off.”

Sally gasped. “Dan, look at the picture Bal’s just sent.”

Dan looked away from the window and at the phone in his hand. He whistled through his teeth. “What? How would anyone? Why?”

The photo – taken by their friend Bal on her dog’s walk – showed the ancient sycamore tree by the dredged and cleared pond festooned with mirrors torn from the village’s cars – perhaps a hundred of them sparkling in the morning spring light. 

“Wow. Come on,” Sally said. “Let’s go take a proper look.”

 They weren’t the first.

Ten or so other early risers, some still in pyjamas and dressing gowns, were standing around the tree. Bal and her collie, Soya, were standing on the other side of the street.

“She won’t go near it,” she explained. “She just digs her heels in and sits. Every time I put any slack in the lead she tries to go off home.”

Sally didn’t blame her.

It was unsettling.

The mirrors swung in the wind, winking as they caught the sun, spark white on the glass then coloured or chrome when their convex fairings turned outwards, each suspended in a fine weave lattice cradle of creepers and green twigs, knocking dully as they bumped against each other.

It must have taken hours.

“Too many hours. Not possible,” Sally thought.

“It’s begun again already then, has it?”, called David as he neared the sycamore. “Now you’ll see. Or suit yourself as that seems to be the done thing just recently, but don’t blame us if things turn out even worse than they are now.”

He turned away and went back the way he’d come.

“Looks like teenagers to me” someone said, to nods and a hubbub of agreement. “Probably drove here from Beckworth.”

“All those little cradles. Too many hours. Not possible,” thought Sally, even as she nodded in agreement.

Later that day somebody turned up to cut the mirrors down, put them in the back of a van and drove them away, but that was not the end of it.

For weeks things kept happening.

Sometimes annoying but harmless – like when all the village wheelie-bins were arranged in a line on the meadow between the pond and the road. Sometimes unsettling but oddly beautiful – like the time the Taylor children left their chalks out and repeating blue, green and red concentric circles were drawn on the whitewashed village hall, the same pattern as the whorls carved into the standing stones in the barrows behind the church.

The police weren’t interested. Not then and not ever really.

“Teenagers from Beckworth trying to freak us out,” Bal said at the village meeting called a month or so after it all began. “Must be,” she said, although she sounded far from sure. “They’ll get bored of it soon enough.”

“All takes too long. Nobody ever sees anything. Not possible,” thought Sally.

She wondered whether she should ask David and Mauve what they thought, but they’d become reclusive, only opening their door to collect milk and supermarket deliveries.

“They’re in lockdown again,” thought Sally. “As if there were something dangerous in the air.

…

“They killed Soya,” Bal’s message said. “Can you come over and get her down? I’m by the pond sycamore.”

The flayed dog hung from the tree, the grass beneath it black and sticky with blood and gore, the skin stretched out and pinned to the trunk with thorns.

A humming cloud of flies buzzed over the mess.

Bal was cross-legged on the road opposite holding Soya’s lead and crying.

“Who would do this?” she said, flatly. “I’ve been sick on myself. I need a shower.”

 “Of course, love.” Sally said. “Dan and I will sort this.”

“There’s something dangerous around,” thought Sally, “and that’s my fault.”

The next day she went to visit David and Mauve who opened the door to her with no rancour and asked her in.

“The Normans woke him in the late 1070s,” David said. “I suppose it made as little sense to them as it did to you there was a pond sitting there all chocked and snared up, no good to anyone when it could be used to keep fish or water cattle or whatever. They called it Jacques. I’m sure it had a name before that but those coming in always think they’re the first to find anything and go about changing stuff that’s best left alone. 500 years later it was just Jack. It’s as good a name as any for a something that aint human and has no business with a human name.”

The cottage wasn’t what Sally had expected.

All the books – every wall a shelf – weren’t a surprise but the décor was modern and there were expensive speakers mounted in the corners. The recipe books in an alcove by the sink were Jamie Oliver and Yotam Ottolenghi not Mary Berry and Delia Smith

“Jack’s very old,” Mauve called over the noise of the boiling kettle. “Though he doesn’t seem to know it. Don’t think he really knows what time is. But then do any of us really? Milk and sugar, love?”

“Just milk,” said Sally. “Did I do this?”

David looked up at her over the lid of his laptop. “Yes. But we don’t blame you. You couldn’t have known. There are some things you can only learn the hard way.

“The most important thing is we find a way to keep the kiddies safe until Jack’s pinned down again,” Mauve said sitting down at the table and handing round the mugs. “Jack don’t mean harm – not really. But that don’t mean he won’t do dreadful things. He has before. When our kids were small, they loved those funny rhyming Dr Seuss books, you know with that Cat and Thing One and Two? I never liked them. They reminded me too much of Jack. He wouldn’t mean to do harm but because he doesn’t know what harm is to us, he might anyway.”

“What has he done?”

David looked at Mauve. She nodded.

“It’s not just dogs that have been nailed up on that tree”, she said softly, “They hanged a woman on his tree by the pool for those poor kiddies just after the civil war, but it wasn’t her that did for them.”

“But that was a very long time ago,” said David, “and it hasn’t happened since. I think he’s weaker than he used to be. But this is a dangerous time – summer when everything is awake and full of life. When it gets to autumn there’ll be rain and trees and mud back in the pond. Next year he’ll be weaker and the year after that it’ll be all wrapped up tight and asleep again. But until then we’ll all have to be careful. Sally, you need to convince everyone to keep their pets in because nobody will believe us two biddies. And their kids. Most important of all is the kids are kept in. You do that. They’ll believe you.”

Keeping people away from the pond was easy.

After Soya it was shunned anyway.

Picnics and barbecues were out of the question.

Nobody wanted to sit there with a book.

People walked past it hurriedly with heads turned from the sycamore.

The meadow and hedges grew up fast and there was no talk of mowing or cutting.

In the pub and at village meetings Sally put around the idea anyone who killed a dog that way might do anything and that it’d be good to be careful with the village animals and children.

The police had no clues and could do little but said the same thing without having to say the exact words.

And so it was a strange, sad summer.

Families spent as much time as they could away and when there, they stayed in their gardens and didn’t let their kids go anywhere without an adult. It was hot and close and tense and uneasy, and everyone stayed on edge because Jack carried on playing.

One night he gathered all the wellies, flip-flops and walking boots people left in their porches around the sycamore. Another he got into the Green Man and turned all the taps on so the next day there was a flood of beer and cider that took a day to clean up. A week later at two in the morning all the dogs began howling in sequence as if something was walking past them, but nobody saw anything, and none were harmed.

All the wild rabbits disappeared – and most of the pet ones too - but that might have been nothing to do with Jack.

It was a bad year for hens too, but there are always foxes in the country.

As summer folded into autumn Jack slowed.

In September Jack pulled down a few bits of washing people had left on lines overnight. The next morning some was hung up in the sycamore but most of it was on the road – as if he’d lost interest on the way to the tree and his pool.

Then it was winter and cold. The days were gloomy, the nights dark and nothing happened.

The next April Sally went to check on the sycamore early each morning before work.

There wasn’t anything until late in the month when Sally found a solitary wing mirror – she never found out whose - on the grass beneath the tree.

There were a handful of twigs and creepers around it, but they were too loosely woven to have held it up for more than a few minutes in a fresh breeze, as if whatever had started had got distracted or perhaps just tired.

She went to tell David and Mauve.

“Ah it’s all over already then,” David said. “That’ll be the end of it. Jack all sleepy tight again and not too much harm done. The dog was sad and all but there’s been worse.”

“Thanks for the coffee,” Sally said getting up to leave. “And sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, love”, Mauve said, “You weren’t to know and when you did, you did right. Pop round soon for dinner. Bring Dan and tell him why. Now you know about Jack, there are other things you should know about Willerby too - the things that happen here. David and I won’t be around forever, and some things must be passed on.”