Here, for your delectation, is …
DARKEST TIME OF THE YEAR
I frowned. “I don’t think I have.”
He lapsed into thought. Briefly, there was only the spitting of the holly logs in the fireplace, and the ongoing rumble of laughter from other parts of his spacious suburban home. I waited, the firelight refracting through our brandies, casting wavering reddish sprites on the panelled walls of his study, glinting on the prettily hung evergreens. Aunt Juliet always went out of her way to turn their home into an atmospheric shrine when the festive time of year came around.
“It’s just …” Uncle Henry said, “that question Cousin Jennifer posed during dinner. About why do we tell ghost stories at Christmas.”
“Presumably because we’re more receptive to them?” I replied.
He eyed me with mild surprise. “Good answer, Milo. Keep going.”
“Well … isn’t it a continuation of the old pagan tradition? You know … spirit worship? That sort of thing?”
His face fell. “That’s a bit of guff, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t doubt there are some lingering remnants of those ancient beliefs. But all this ‘Christmas was invented to replace the pagan festival’ is wishful thinking by empty vessels with ‘New Age’ stamped on them. The truth is that many cultures in the Ancient World had their winter festivals: Saturnalia, Midvinterblot. There was no reason why the early Christians couldn’t have one too. It didn’t need to have been pieced together to replace the others. But there’s the rub. Why the depths of winter? We’re fairly certain that Christ was born sometime in September, so why celebrate it in late December? Why were any of these feasts celebrated at such an inhospitable time?”
“Isn’t it all about the end of one year and the coming of the next?’ I replied. ‘A rebirth, so to speak?”
“There’s no sign of a rebirth in December. You want my opinion, Milo … it’s not about life, it’s about death. And darkness.”
I listened, intrigued.
“December is the deadest part of the year,” he added. “And the darkest. If it wasn’t for Christmas, it would be a terrible time for all of us.”
“Everything is frozen and rotting, daylight is scarce … so doesn’t it go without saying that evil is abroad?”
“And that’s why our own Church declared it the most joyful time of year?” I said. “To counteract all this?”
He nodded. “I’d agree that many pagan customs were absorbed into Christmas, though I suspect this was a prolonged and accidental process. But I don’t think the whys or wherefores are relevant. Take Santa Claus. Whatever he started out as … the menacing druidic figure, the Spirit of Winter, Old Father Christmas as he was called in medieval times, who heralded wild days of feasting and debauchery, or even Odin, the Norse god who rode across the winter sky with a pack of devilish dogs instead of reindeers and reaped the souls of the unworthy rather than refused to give them presents … he is what he’s now become: the genial gift-giver we all grew up with. And that underlines what I’m talking about: the way the glorious Christmas feast is a beacon of light at the darkest time of the year.”
I followed him but sensed there was more to come.
Uncle Henry was my mother’s older brother by twenty years. I’d always known him as an avuncular and responsible adult, and of course very well educated. He was Professor Emeritus of Medieval Studies at Lancaster University, and even now, at seventy-five, there was something reassuring about his portly, tweed-clad figure. But beneath that conventional, conservative façade, I’d long known there was a man who’d travelled, a man who’d seen and done many things that he wouldn’t always talk about. So, it was a little disconcerting to see how serious he’d become.
“All this is connected to the barman in the chimney?” I wondered.
He pursed his kips. “The truth is, Milo, I don’t know. That was a tale I heard some time in my youth. I’ve no idea which pub it was supposed to have taken place in or whereabouts in the country. But some chap, a barman, as you say … an athletic, wiry fellow, he must have been – apparently had this party trick, where he would work his way up the chimney in the hostelry’s main taproom …”
“He’d literally climb up the chimney?” I said.
“Only to about halfway, at which point he’d crawl across a narrow horizontal passage, formerly an old bacon-smoking gallery, which by this time was bricked in and inaccessible from anywhere else in the building, and then descend again via the chimney in the snug.” Uncle Henry paused. “It can’t have been to the landlord’s pleasure. I imagine he’d bring clouds of soot back down with him. But apparently, it was a popular spectacle among pub patrons. Somehow or other, it would encourage them all to buy extra drinks. No doubt, the devil-may-care barman, filthy or not, was treated to several.”
“I see,” I said. “And where does the ghostly bit come in?”
“Well …” he sat back, “as I understand, and I repeat that I heard this story second-hand, so I can’t give firm guarantees … one Christmas Eve, the pub was full and the barman was encouraged to perform his famous trick. Which he did. However, on this occasion he didn’t descend again. Down either of the two chimneys.”
“What had happened?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea. At a guess, he’d got stuck somewhere. At first, they joked about it and called rude names up after him. But in due course they became concerned. Mainly because he didn’t call insults back. Or in fact make any sound at all. They shoved an old clothes-prop up there, but it encountered no obstruction. Someone then hit on the idea of lighting the fire, to smoke him out.”
“Good lord,” I said, half-laughing at the sheer lunacy of that.
My uncle remained serious. “They were inebriated, remember. So, it was long after they’d got a good old blaze going when someone else arrived in the pub, someone in a soberer state, who had them douse the flames. Even after they’d put the fire out, though, the missing barman didn’t reappear. And my understanding is that this was the end of the matter. Basically, he was never seen again.”
As before, I half-laughed, though it was noticeable that Uncle Henry didn’t.
“Are you serious?” I asked him.
“I’m afraid I am.”
“And they all just accepted this?”
“As I say, Milo, I’ve no actual facts. This was some time in the mid-nineteenth century. If it happened now, the Fire Brigade would be called, and the place dismantled brick by brick. But nothing of that sort seems to have happened … which may of course mean the whole thing’s a load of nonsense. A Victorian urban myth if you like.”
“It’s a horrible tale, even so.”
He nodded and sipped his brandy. “It’s not impossible there was a secret exit, and for some reason best known to himself, the barman wanted to disappear. Most commentators, though, were convinced that he’d found his last resting place up there, wedged in, smothered by the smoke, and within a few months presumably, cured and crisped like an overlarge bacon joint … which is where the really eerie part of the story starts.”
I’d sensed we were getting to the crux of it.
“Rumour had it,” he added, “that from this moment on, every Christmas Eve, once the pub had thrown out the last of its patrons and everyone was in bed, the missing barman would re-emerge from under one of the two chimney breasts, a smoke-blackened effigy of the person he’d once been. They’d hear him walking unsteadily along the pub corridors, sometimes trying doors, other times stopping where he stood, just waiting there in the darkness, listening.”
An ember spat loudly in the fireplace, making the pair of us jump.
I swilled some brandy. “I’m surprised you didn’t mention this over dinner, when the rest of us were telling ghost stories.”
He nodded slightly, his gaze elsewhere. “That’s because this is only background detail … and may be irrelevant to the rather personal experience I’m about to relate.”
“Personal experience?”
“So personal that I’ve always kept it to myself.” He eyed me, but without his customary twinkle. “But seeing as you’re my favourite nephew, Milo, and I’m now an old chap and have this burgeoning need to unload it …’
“And it concerns this particular pub?” I asked.
“I make no claim to that.”
“But I thought –”
He raised a hand. “Best to hear me out. We can discuss the possibilities later.”
I shrugged and gestured for him to continue.
He swirled the liquor in his snifter. “It was Christmas Eve, 1978. The same night I was taken ill on the West Coast main line …”
*
I’d been feeling unwell all day, hot-skinned and weary, a constant low-level headache churning between my temples. As such, the conference I’d been attending at Birkbeck had dragged interminably. When I got back to Euston late that afternoon, I was engulfed in chaotic crowds all seeking last-minute connections home for the holiday. Needless to say, my train, the 4-15 to Glasgow, was full, every seat taken. But I must have looked so under the weather that a young lady stood up for me. Now, you know me. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have countenanced a woman standing for a chap, but I barely even thought about it; just slumped down in a half-swoon, shoving my briefcase under my legs. But my ordeal was far from over even then. In that day, most of the West Coast main line services were stopping trains, and by that, I mean they stopped at near enough every station, so, even though I was only travelling as far north as Lancaster, I could still expect a good five hours’ worth of journey time.
If I’m honest, I don’t remember much about that train ride. I was in and out of sleep, though I never felt rested. After what seemed like endless hours, I felt quite feverish. I might even have been semi-delirious. Even when I realised that the train was stationary, and that we’d come to my stop, I was slow to react, scrabbling for my case, swaying to my feet. Fortunately, there were several people disembarking, so there was no danger that I wouldn’t get off in time. But when I was down on the platform, dimly aware that snowflakes were now falling – big heavy wet ones slapping the top of my head – it struck me there wasn’t a canopy, which meant that I wasn’t where I’d thought I was.
It seemed I’d disembarked somewhere in that woe-begotten industrial hinterland between Greater Manchester and Lancashire. A township called Stockridge. Formerly a mass of factories and coal mines, though by this time declining. Of course, I only realised what I’d done when the train was pulling out again. Groggy as I was, it came as a horrible shock, and worse was to follow: when I was able to focus on the platform clock, it told me that it was now after nine in the evening, and I had a terrible feeling that there’d be no further journeys north from Stockridge that night.
An elderly station guard confirmed this. “There might be a Ribble service from the bus station,” he told me. “But I can’t be sure.”
It sounded anything but promising, especially as he then provided the most complex and convoluted set of directions I’d ever heard.
My headache had now worsened. It was all I could do to get down the station stairs onto the forecourt. Stockridge Railway Station, it seemed, was in an elevated position just off a sloping main road, which passed it by downhill, before swinging leftward under an arched bridge. Of course, the main road I’d alighted on now thronged with Christmas Eve revellers, and all the while, the sleet fell. In the teeth of that noisy crowd, in all that cold, with head pounding, it was already impossible to work out which way I should go for the bus station, if I’d ever known at all. Here and there, though, I spied the open doorways to pubs, one of which stood directly across the road. It was an odd-looking building. Built from black brick, but tall and narrow, sandwiched against the railway bridge by other equally tall and dingy edifices. It was called The Traveller’s Rest, a name displayed in gold-painted calligraphy on a stone plaque above the entrance.
Inside of course, it was packed to capacity. To be fair to the hardworking, hard-drinking men and women of Stockridge, the mood was jovial rather than volatile, though the crammed, claustrophobic atmosphere was difficult to deal with for a man in my condition.
“Eh?” the barmaid said, certain she’d misheard me. “A cup of tea?”
“Well, actually,” I said, “yes, but … I’m afraid I’m rather unwell.”
“Too much drink, is it, dearie?”
“No … it’s just …” I barely understood what I was saying, myself. “A cup of tea would be nice … if that’s possible.”
She was an older lady, as I recall. Nicely made up, wearing Christmas tree ear pendants and a circlet of tinsel around her bouffant hairstyle. I remember her coming around the bar and guiding me by my elbow to a corner. Even sitting down, I found myself crammed between strangers. They were all good-natured, but they were roaring drunk too, and when a cup of tea was placed alongside me, they pushed it away, offering me beer or spirits instead, or even drags on their cigarettes. That’s an important point to remember; this was decades before the smoking ban was introduced, so the entire place was smoggy. Back then, even those of us who didn’t smoke were so thoroughly used to it that we barely noticed. Later on, though, this detail will become important …
*
“Why did the barmaid put you in the corner?” I asked. “Surely, she could see you were ill?”
He shrugged. “Different time, different place, Milo. The 1970s were a rough and ready decade, during which people were expected to fend for themselves. But on top of that, she was busy. It was late evening by this time, and I can’t stress how rammed full that pub was. The Christmas music had reached ear-numbing volume as well … and mostly they were songs you still hear now: Merry Xmas Everybody, I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday.”
“At least you were spared Wham!” I intruded.
“What? Oh, yes …” He half-smiled, though even this was an effort for him; these recollections were proving problematic. “One small advantage, I suppose.”
*
When the landlord came to see me, he was a big, bluff, middle-aged chap, bullnecked, square-shouldered, his thinning grey hair shaved to bristles. Interchangeable with so many other pub landlords in that era, I suppose; not the sort to show much concern for his fellow men. Not when he had a pub full of riotous boozers to contend with.
I remember hearing the barmaid asking what they were going to do with me.
“You sure he’s not just leathered?” the landlord asked.
“Can’t smell it on him if he is,” she replied.
“This is all we need,” he grumbled. “Any reason why we can’t just put him in a taxi?”
“I don’t know if he’s got any money, and we can’t be searching his pockets, Mal.”
“Do we know where he’s come from?”
“No. Can’t get any sense out of him. Just keeps saying he’s ill. Should we call an ambulance?”
“I’m sure they’ll be delighted if we do that,” he replied. “They’re running all over town like blue-arsed flies at present, picking up the pieces of good will to all men.”
The barmaid leaned down. “Listen, dearie …” She took my arm. “Let’s take you upstairs. We’ve got two or three spare rooms. We don’t usually rent them out on Christmas Eve, but perhaps if you just lie down for a bit … you know, in the peace and quiet. And if you end up feeling better, you can make your way down and head for home. There’ll be no charge or anything.”
The landlord took my other arm, and they eased me to my feet. I made no resistance, but I must have been near enough a deadweight. My legs were wobbling, my head swimming. That whole downstairs area was a kaleidoscope of laughing faces, tatty Christmas decorations and sloshing beer.
“Do you think we should?” the barmaid asked, as they hustled me through the mob.
“Doesn’t look like we’ve any choice,” the landlord replied.
“I mean, the state of this chap … he’s burning up.”
“Dawn, my love … the more out of it he is, the better for him.”
In retrospect, that comment meant much more than I realised at the time.
*
Uncle Henry jammed the poker into the fire, then added a couple of fresh logs.
“Have you ever been knocked unconscious, Milo?” he asked. “I mean really knocked unconscious? I don’t mean falling slowly asleep when you’re in bed or even being anaesthetized on an operating table. I mean … like when you take a blow to the head, and in the blink of an eye you’ve lost quite a few minutes?”
“I think so,” I replied. “It was a school rugby match. I was on the receiving end of a very high tackle. It sparked me out. One minute I was crashing through the defensive line with the ball in hand, the next I was lying on my back looking at the sky and the blank faces of both teams as they crowded around me.”
He nodded. “Okay, well yes, that’s what it was like. Though at least you were still on the rugby field. In my case, the immediate transference from one reality to another was far more extreme …”
*
I realised that I was lying on top of a bed, the mattress firm but the blankets musty. I was also cold. Not bitterly cold. I’d later realise that there was a lingering warmth in there from a central heating system that hadn’t been deactivated for very long, but it wasn’t enough to hold off the chill now spreading through me from my sweat-damp clothing. If nothing else, that meant my fever had broken. Temporarily as it later transpired, but at the time it granted me some minor respite. I sat up on the bed, a faint, pale light seeping through what looked like a curtain on the wall to my right. As the room became dimly visible, I saw that the bed occupied the majority of it, though there was one other item of furniture: a small table in the far righthand corner, with what might have been my briefcase on top of it. A single door stood in the lefthand corner. At which moment a sudden reverberation commenced …
It wasn’t an earthquake, more a dull juddering, but the bed, a horrible old iron-famed thing, clanked and clattered. A lightshow then followed, passing left to right on the other side of the window, flickering and glimmering through the cloth. I got up, lurched over there, and yanked the curtain back.
Not ten feet beyond the grimy glass, a freight train comprising many boxcars was chugging past along the West Coast main line. Once the train had gone, the outdoor light dwindled back to the vague ethereal glow of previously. Moonbeams, I realised, glinting off the paper-thin layer of snow covering the sleepers and the gravel, and the jumbled angular shapes of the town’s rooftops.
Obviously, I was still in the pub, in one of its upper rooms, but this didn’t enthuse me.
The simple of act of stumbling to the window had reminded me that I wasn’t functioning at full power. I tottered away, letting the dusty drape fall back, and found myself sitting on the bed in a semi-nauseous state. Already, a new headache was forming, and from the all-encompassing silence, both inside and outside the building, I guessed that it was now much later in the night than either I or my rescuers had intended.
But I knew that I couldn’t stay here.
I took a moment to gather my strength, rise to my feet, and lumber to the bedroom door. Here, I felt for a light-switch, found one and threw it, but nothing happened. Cursing under my breath, I opened the door on abyssal blackness. I waited on my night-vision adjusting again. It did so, but only in a minuscule way, the pale light leaking through the curtain finally creating enough of a smudge on the drably papered wall opposite my open door to indicate that I was in a room off a passage.
I listened again. Still, there was no sound. No vehicles, no raucous singing.
I ventured leftward, the darkness engulfing me, and so feeling my way along the wall with my fingertips. If I was on level with the railway, I must have ascended at least a couple of flights of stairs to get here. The last thing I needed was to plunge back down one of them, and so I halted every half-yard or so, probing ahead with my foot.
Delicate as I was feeling, a sudden madness of frustration overtook me.
This situation couldn’t stand.
Apart from anything else, Juliet would be out of her mind. There were no mobile phones in those days, remember. The thought of my wife fighting panic as she went first to Lancaster Railway Station, only to be told that all the trains had now been and gone, then enquiring with the police, who’d have no idea who or where I was, was appalling. It was the last straw.
“Hello?” I shouted. “Can anyone hear me?”
On that narrow corridor, high up, it had zero effect. I pictured my weak, wavering voice bouncing around those narrow confines before absorbing into the heavy iron and stone of this age-old, industrial structure. I blundered recklessly forward, all light falling behind me, and only by pure fluke, came to a teetering standstill at the top of one of those stairways.
“Hello?” I projected as loudly as I could, my lungs hurting. “I’m sorry to disturb you … but you haven’t forgotten me, have you? I need to get home!’
Feeble though my voice was, it resounded again and again through what seemed like a multilayered labyrinth of passages and rooms below, and while you may think that was satisfying inasmuch as help might have been summoned, it didn’t comfort me. To start with, it now struck me that the landlord himself might not be in the best mood to be woken like this. He’d already proved himself a gruff character, though I needn’t have worried about that at least, because no one responded, either to call upstairs to ask how I was or even to tell me shut up and wait until morning.
Again, all I heard was a dead, stony silence.
Surely, I thought, the landlord sleeps on these premises? Wasn’t that the normal way? Unless he was just a manager? But weren’t pub managers supposed to live on-site too?
Good lord, they hadn’t left me here alone?
I was still pondering the implications of this, perched at the top of that unlit staircase, when I finally heard something. A dull thud, I thought, followed by a muffled scraping sound. Like a door forced open or a table being shoved over. There was no doubt that it had come from downstairs, but again, I didn’t like it. Wouldn’t a normal person have simply shouted up to me? Another sound followed below, this one fainter – another thud, semi-inaudible.
I had no real clue as to what it signified and yet was discouraged from calling down again. A much louder impact sounded: a hefty clunk, with an echo attached. I pictured someone drunk, stumbling about in a darkened space. Slowly, I retreated along the passage.
When I reached the door to my room, I waited again. The sounds continued, progressively more violent – I imagined tables and chairs being hurled around – the cacophony suddenly transforming into a recognisable clomping of hefty but awkward feet on a stairway. It wasn’t the stairway connecting to this higher floor – I knew that much, the sounds weren’t loud enough – but this meant that whoever this was, he was now ascending.
I re-entered the bedroom and closed the door behind me, only to find that there was no lock. I scrabbled around the doorknob and up and down the jamb, to no gain. Re-opening the door by a couple of inches, I listened again. Another angry impact sounded from what was possibly the next floor down. I closed the door and went to the window, dragging the curtain all the way back. The same desolate scene greeted me: the overarching darkness, the thin snowfall glinting from the railway tracks. The window itself was a sash window set into one of those heavy, old-fashioned casements. The dirt of ages was compacted in its corners, and when I ran my fingers along its lower shelf, they brushed though the husks of flies and bluebottles. I tried to lift the central panel, but there was no budging it.
I moved back across the room, and for what seemed the umpteenth time, risked cracking the door open. More chaotic thudding and banging sounded on the floor directly below, only to resolve itself into an another irregular but distinct pattern: one short blow following another, following another, following another. Another ascent was in progress.
Look, I’m sorry, I almost shouted, I didn’t mean to disturb …
The feet halted again, as if whoever it was had read my thoughts, and was now listening, seeking to discover my exact position. I closed the door quietly and with no lock to activate, cast around for anything I could use. The table came into view. I threw my briefcase onto the bed and grabbed hold of it. Manhandling it towards the door, I tilted it, jamming two of its four legs against a protruding floorboard, and the edge of its upper surface under the doorknob. Hopefully, I’d created an immovable object. It seemed ridiculous; why did I need to do this? But now another bang sounded, this one quite clearly on this higher level of the building. Icy sweat stood on my brow as I heard the approach of heavy but uncoordinated feet. Frantic, I went at the window again, but it was still impossible to lift the main panel. The ancient fixture had warped over the years and fused into place.
I turned and stared again at my own door, on the other side of which those clumping, lumbering feet now stopped. There was a ghastly, ear-piercing silence.
I wanted to shout out a warning, a threat even. Go away, or …
Or what?
I was a thirty-year-old academic without a fighting bone in my body, and in a thoroughly weakened state.
The doorknob turned. Only slightly, but I heard it squeak. With a click, the catch disengaged, and the door shifted inward half an inch before the table-barricade bit, locking it in place. The pressure on the other side eased. A second silence – a pondering silence – followed. And then there was a massive, reverberating blow, as if a bulky, ungainly body had flung itself forward. The table legs groaned against the floorboards, but held – for now.
You want to know what the worst thing was about that moment?
Not so much the determination of the assault upon my bedroom door. Blow followed blow, each one full-blooded, everything the assailant had thrown into them, but more frightening to me was that, for all the banging and thumping, there wasn’t a single sound from that person: not such much as a gasp or grunt of effort.
There was, though, a strange smell. It struck me fleetingly, but it was distinctive. I’ve already said the reek of cigarettes pervaded that building. But this was much stronger, as if something other than tobacco, something thicker and denser, had been burned, or roasted … or smoked. And it was this that made my mind up.
With gunshot reports, the two table legs fractured but I’d already I grabbed my briefcase, which was heavy with documentation, and swung it around three hundred and sixty degrees, launching it at the central pane of the window. Glass exploded outward in myriad shards.
The next thing, my right foot was crunching dead flies on the shelf. My left followed, and then I’d stooped outside and was standing upright on the snow-covered sill, the frozen air enveloping me. Numerous blades of glass remained in the frame and might have gashed me, but this was no concern. Nor was it a concern that I wasn’t exactly on level with the railway lines, which lay a good seven feet below. As the bedroom door erupted inward, I stepped into mid-air anyway. It wasn’t a huge distance, I suppose, and even then, the drop was cushioned by a mass of dead, snow-caked vegetation.
I waded out of it onto the gravel, slipping and tripping as I tottered across one set of rails after another, only stopping to look back when I was halfway over.
Initially, I was unable to pick out the window I’d escaped through. All I could see was a cliff-face of black, shadowy brickwork. But then, when I did, there was something there in that jagged mouth, peering back at me. I squinted to see better, and it was just coming in to focus when I was struck by this sudden, overwhelming wall of sound: the most hair-raising, ear-blasting siren call, followed by a wave of blinding light, which flooded over me from both in front and behind …
You might consider that I’d been very unfortunate to find myself in this predicament on Christmas Eve. But at this particular moment the opposite was true. I’d stumbled blindly away from that hellish building and had halted to look back while standing, quite unintentionally but very fortuitously, between two sets of different railway lines. The freight trains that then came thundering past, one in either direction, missed me by centimetres. All that said, the combo of dazzle and cacophony were so apocalyptic that my senses literally folded in on themselves, and I collapsed into oblivion.
“You’ll recall that when I was thirty years old, I was diagnosed with meningitis,” my uncle said. “I was hospitalised for several weeks. This incident was the first onset of that.”
I watched him, awaiting more.
“I mean, it should have been obvious to me that night,” he said, “the way I was blacking out, that it wasn’t simply a cold or flu. When I fell unconscious after leaving the building, it again lasted for several hours. I was found on Christmas morning, lying insensible on the West Coast main line. When you were knocked out, Milo, you woke up to see a group of concerned rugby players. In my case, it was a bunch of concerned railwaymen.”
“At least you were found,” I replied. “You must have been frozen stiff.”
“Yes.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose I was lucky on that count too.”
“But, surely …” I said, “that wasn’t the end of the matter?”
“No, it wasn’t.” He sat back, cupping his brandy to his ample belly. “The whole incident caused a minor fuss. The landlord of The Traveller’s Rest, a chap called Malcolm Brazenhurst, was deemed to be at fault under the Health and Safety Act of 1974. As pub landlord, he was investigated for having neglected the safety of a guest. He insisted that he hadn’t abandoned me, saying that after he’d closed up for the night, he’d tried to rouse me but had found me in a comatose state. Several times, he said he’d tried to ring the emergency services only to find that they were too busy to take his call. He thus made his way on foot to Stockridge Infirmary to try and get advice, but had got caught up in chaos when he got there. Whether he did that, I have no idea. I was too ill to pay much heed to the actual enquiry.”
He stared again into the flames.
“And?” I said, “the business with that other person?”
“An hallucination,” my uncle replied. “Visual, audible and even olfactory. According to the doctor under whose care I was placed, such episodes were not uncommon to people in my condition, and they had it on absolute authority that there’d been no one else in the building with me.”
“Not even some drunk?” I suggested. “Who’d fallen asleep in one of the toilets and the pub staff had missed him.”
“That’s not impossible,” he conceded, “but there was no evidence of it. In any case, I didn’t enquire too hard. I wanted to put the whole thing behind me. Several years later, though, I found myself in Stockridge again, where I had an appointment at the local Technical College. On the day in question, I had some spare time, and so I strolled through the town to the railway station … where I was shocked to find the pub nothing more now than a flame-blackened wall, with tarpaulins over the windows and a steel shutter where the front door had been. When I spoke to the woman in the shop next door, she explained that there’d been a huge fire two or three months earlier, which had gutted the place. When I pressed her for further information, she became conspiratorial, telling me that there’d been talk of it being ‘an insurance job’. Apparently, Mr Brazenhurst had been ‘a rum character’.
“When I asked if Brazenhurst or any of his staff had been injured, she replied that there was ‘summat peculiar in that, an’ all’. It seems the fire had broken out during the night, not long after the landlord had locked up. The fire investigators concluded that some faulty plug had sparked into the upholstery of the pub furniture. To the shop lady’s mind though, the fire had still raged with uncommon speed and ferocity. And then there was that business with the poor victim…”
“Victim?” I asked, feeling strangely uneasy.
Uncle Henry nodded. “She explained that one person had died in the blaze, mainly because no one had known he was in there. The Fire Brigade only found him after quenching the flames. Brazenhurst, of course, denied any knowledge.”
“Another drunk?” I said. “Left in the toilets?”
Uncle Henry eyed me without humour. “Perhaps the same one?” He gazed at the hearth again. “It’s not totally implausible. But according to the shop lady, it was difficult for them to take the investigation further. Whoever this person was, it was impossible to identify him.”
“That badly burned?” I said.
“Very much so. When the Fire Brigade located him, he resembled, to use her exact phrase … ‘nothing human’.”
Obviously, I was still in the pub, in one of its upper rooms, but this didn’t enthuse me.
The simple of act of stumbling to the window had reminded me that I wasn’t functioning at full power. I tottered away, letting the dusty drape fall back, and found myself sitting on the bed in a semi-nauseous state. Already, a new headache was forming, and from the all-encompassing silence, both inside and outside the building, I guessed that it was now much later in the night than either I or my rescuers had intended.
But I knew that I couldn’t stay here.
I took a moment to gather my strength, rise to my feet, and lumber to the bedroom door. Here, I felt for a light-switch, found one and threw it, but nothing happened. Cursing under my breath, I opened the door on abyssal blackness. I waited on my night-vision adjusting again. It did so, but only in a minuscule way, the pale light leaking through the curtain finally creating enough of a smudge on the drably papered wall opposite my open door to indicate that I was in a room off a passage.
I listened again. Still, there was no sound. No vehicles, no raucous singing.
I ventured leftward, the darkness engulfing me, and so feeling my way along the wall with my fingertips. If I was on level with the railway, I must have ascended at least a couple of flights of stairs to get here. The last thing I needed was to plunge back down one of them, and so I halted every half-yard or so, probing ahead with my foot.
Delicate as I was feeling, a sudden madness of frustration overtook me.
This situation couldn’t stand.
Apart from anything else, Juliet would be out of her mind. There were no mobile phones in those days, remember. The thought of my wife fighting panic as she went first to Lancaster Railway Station, only to be told that all the trains had now been and gone, then enquiring with the police, who’d have no idea who or where I was, was appalling. It was the last straw.
“Hello?” I shouted. “Can anyone hear me?”
On that narrow corridor, high up, it had zero effect. I pictured my weak, wavering voice bouncing around those narrow confines before absorbing into the heavy iron and stone of this age-old, industrial structure. I blundered recklessly forward, all light falling behind me, and only by pure fluke, came to a teetering standstill at the top of one of those stairways.
“Hello?” I projected as loudly as I could, my lungs hurting. “I’m sorry to disturb you … but you haven’t forgotten me, have you? I need to get home!’
Feeble though my voice was, it resounded again and again through what seemed like a multilayered labyrinth of passages and rooms below, and while you may think that was satisfying inasmuch as help might have been summoned, it didn’t comfort me. To start with, it now struck me that the landlord himself might not be in the best mood to be woken like this. He’d already proved himself a gruff character, though I needn’t have worried about that at least, because no one responded, either to call upstairs to ask how I was or even to tell me shut up and wait until morning.
Again, all I heard was a dead, stony silence.
Surely, I thought, the landlord sleeps on these premises? Wasn’t that the normal way? Unless he was just a manager? But weren’t pub managers supposed to live on-site too?
Good lord, they hadn’t left me here alone?
I was still pondering the implications of this, perched at the top of that unlit staircase, when I finally heard something. A dull thud, I thought, followed by a muffled scraping sound. Like a door forced open or a table being shoved over. There was no doubt that it had come from downstairs, but again, I didn’t like it. Wouldn’t a normal person have simply shouted up to me? Another sound followed below, this one fainter – another thud, semi-inaudible.
I had no real clue as to what it signified and yet was discouraged from calling down again. A much louder impact sounded: a hefty clunk, with an echo attached. I pictured someone drunk, stumbling about in a darkened space. Slowly, I retreated along the passage.
When I reached the door to my room, I waited again. The sounds continued, progressively more violent – I imagined tables and chairs being hurled around – the cacophony suddenly transforming into a recognisable clomping of hefty but awkward feet on a stairway. It wasn’t the stairway connecting to this higher floor – I knew that much, the sounds weren’t loud enough – but this meant that whoever this was, he was now ascending.
I re-entered the bedroom and closed the door behind me, only to find that there was no lock. I scrabbled around the doorknob and up and down the jamb, to no gain. Re-opening the door by a couple of inches, I listened again. Another angry impact sounded from what was possibly the next floor down. I closed the door and went to the window, dragging the curtain all the way back. The same desolate scene greeted me: the overarching darkness, the thin snowfall glinting from the railway tracks. The window itself was a sash window set into one of those heavy, old-fashioned casements. The dirt of ages was compacted in its corners, and when I ran my fingers along its lower shelf, they brushed though the husks of flies and bluebottles. I tried to lift the central panel, but there was no budging it.
I moved back across the room, and for what seemed the umpteenth time, risked cracking the door open. More chaotic thudding and banging sounded on the floor directly below, only to resolve itself into an another irregular but distinct pattern: one short blow following another, following another, following another. Another ascent was in progress.
Look, I’m sorry, I almost shouted, I didn’t mean to disturb …
The feet halted again, as if whoever it was had read my thoughts, and was now listening, seeking to discover my exact position. I closed the door quietly and with no lock to activate, cast around for anything I could use. The table came into view. I threw my briefcase onto the bed and grabbed hold of it. Manhandling it towards the door, I tilted it, jamming two of its four legs against a protruding floorboard, and the edge of its upper surface under the doorknob. Hopefully, I’d created an immovable object. It seemed ridiculous; why did I need to do this? But now another bang sounded, this one quite clearly on this higher level of the building. Icy sweat stood on my brow as I heard the approach of heavy but uncoordinated feet. Frantic, I went at the window again, but it was still impossible to lift the main panel. The ancient fixture had warped over the years and fused into place.
I turned and stared again at my own door, on the other side of which those clumping, lumbering feet now stopped. There was a ghastly, ear-piercing silence.
I wanted to shout out a warning, a threat even. Go away, or …
Or what?
The doorknob turned. Only slightly, but I heard it squeak. With a click, the catch disengaged, and the door shifted inward half an inch before the table-barricade bit, locking it in place. The pressure on the other side eased. A second silence – a pondering silence – followed. And then there was a massive, reverberating blow, as if a bulky, ungainly body had flung itself forward. The table legs groaned against the floorboards, but held – for now.
You want to know what the worst thing was about that moment?
Not so much the determination of the assault upon my bedroom door. Blow followed blow, each one full-blooded, everything the assailant had thrown into them, but more frightening to me was that, for all the banging and thumping, there wasn’t a single sound from that person: not such much as a gasp or grunt of effort.
There was, though, a strange smell. It struck me fleetingly, but it was distinctive. I’ve already said the reek of cigarettes pervaded that building. But this was much stronger, as if something other than tobacco, something thicker and denser, had been burned, or roasted … or smoked. And it was this that made my mind up.
With gunshot reports, the two table legs fractured but I’d already I grabbed my briefcase, which was heavy with documentation, and swung it around three hundred and sixty degrees, launching it at the central pane of the window. Glass exploded outward in myriad shards.
The next thing, my right foot was crunching dead flies on the shelf. My left followed, and then I’d stooped outside and was standing upright on the snow-covered sill, the frozen air enveloping me. Numerous blades of glass remained in the frame and might have gashed me, but this was no concern. Nor was it a concern that I wasn’t exactly on level with the railway lines, which lay a good seven feet below. As the bedroom door erupted inward, I stepped into mid-air anyway. It wasn’t a huge distance, I suppose, and even then, the drop was cushioned by a mass of dead, snow-caked vegetation.
I waded out of it onto the gravel, slipping and tripping as I tottered across one set of rails after another, only stopping to look back when I was halfway over.
Initially, I was unable to pick out the window I’d escaped through. All I could see was a cliff-face of black, shadowy brickwork. But then, when I did, there was something there in that jagged mouth, peering back at me. I squinted to see better, and it was just coming in to focus when I was struck by this sudden, overwhelming wall of sound: the most hair-raising, ear-blasting siren call, followed by a wave of blinding light, which flooded over me from both in front and behind …
You might consider that I’d been very unfortunate to find myself in this predicament on Christmas Eve. But at this particular moment the opposite was true. I’d stumbled blindly away from that hellish building and had halted to look back while standing, quite unintentionally but very fortuitously, between two sets of different railway lines. The freight trains that then came thundering past, one in either direction, missed me by centimetres. All that said, the combo of dazzle and cacophony were so apocalyptic that my senses literally folded in on themselves, and I collapsed into oblivion.
*
I watched him, awaiting more.
“I mean, it should have been obvious to me that night,” he said, “the way I was blacking out, that it wasn’t simply a cold or flu. When I fell unconscious after leaving the building, it again lasted for several hours. I was found on Christmas morning, lying insensible on the West Coast main line. When you were knocked out, Milo, you woke up to see a group of concerned rugby players. In my case, it was a bunch of concerned railwaymen.”
“At least you were found,” I replied. “You must have been frozen stiff.”
“Yes.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose I was lucky on that count too.”
“But, surely …” I said, “that wasn’t the end of the matter?”
“No, it wasn’t.” He sat back, cupping his brandy to his ample belly. “The whole incident caused a minor fuss. The landlord of The Traveller’s Rest, a chap called Malcolm Brazenhurst, was deemed to be at fault under the Health and Safety Act of 1974. As pub landlord, he was investigated for having neglected the safety of a guest. He insisted that he hadn’t abandoned me, saying that after he’d closed up for the night, he’d tried to rouse me but had found me in a comatose state. Several times, he said he’d tried to ring the emergency services only to find that they were too busy to take his call. He thus made his way on foot to Stockridge Infirmary to try and get advice, but had got caught up in chaos when he got there. Whether he did that, I have no idea. I was too ill to pay much heed to the actual enquiry.”
He stared again into the flames.
“And?” I said, “the business with that other person?”
“An hallucination,” my uncle replied. “Visual, audible and even olfactory. According to the doctor under whose care I was placed, such episodes were not uncommon to people in my condition, and they had it on absolute authority that there’d been no one else in the building with me.”
“Not even some drunk?” I suggested. “Who’d fallen asleep in one of the toilets and the pub staff had missed him.”
“That’s not impossible,” he conceded, “but there was no evidence of it. In any case, I didn’t enquire too hard. I wanted to put the whole thing behind me. Several years later, though, I found myself in Stockridge again, where I had an appointment at the local Technical College. On the day in question, I had some spare time, and so I strolled through the town to the railway station … where I was shocked to find the pub nothing more now than a flame-blackened wall, with tarpaulins over the windows and a steel shutter where the front door had been. When I spoke to the woman in the shop next door, she explained that there’d been a huge fire two or three months earlier, which had gutted the place. When I pressed her for further information, she became conspiratorial, telling me that there’d been talk of it being ‘an insurance job’. Apparently, Mr Brazenhurst had been ‘a rum character’.
“When I asked if Brazenhurst or any of his staff had been injured, she replied that there was ‘summat peculiar in that, an’ all’. It seems the fire had broken out during the night, not long after the landlord had locked up. The fire investigators concluded that some faulty plug had sparked into the upholstery of the pub furniture. To the shop lady’s mind though, the fire had still raged with uncommon speed and ferocity. And then there was that business with the poor victim…”
“Victim?” I asked, feeling strangely uneasy.
Uncle Henry nodded. “She explained that one person had died in the blaze, mainly because no one had known he was in there. The Fire Brigade only found him after quenching the flames. Brazenhurst, of course, denied any knowledge.”
“Another drunk?” I said. “Left in the toilets?”
Uncle Henry eyed me without humour. “Perhaps the same one?” He gazed at the hearth again. “It’s not totally implausible. But according to the shop lady, it was difficult for them to take the investigation further. Whoever this person was, it was impossible to identify him.”
“That badly burned?” I said.
“Very much so. When the Fire Brigade located him, he resembled, to use her exact phrase … ‘nothing human’.”
***
Thanks for your attention, folks. If you’ve enjoyed this one, perhaps you’ll be interested in two collections of Christmas-themed ghost and horror stories of mine, published over the last few years: THE CHRISTMAS YOU DESERVE and IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER.
If you prefer something a little more substantial, you could always opt for SPARROWHAWK, a Christmas-themed novella of mine, set during a very cold winter in the dark depths of Victorian England.
In the meantime, once again, Happy Christmas to all.
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