Herald of the Hidden (22 page)

As for me, she knows what solitary ways I keep, and so found it hard to find some misfortune more compelling than the children dancing on my car.
This led her to become more inventive
. She stopped me as I came out of my
gate one morning and, in her abrupt way, asked if I had lost anything precious.

I thought for a moment about her meaning, then said I had not. A sense of humour is certainly not her strong point, so if I had said, ‘Only my virtue, and that many years ago’, or ‘Yes: I’ve sold my soul to the strongest bidder’ I do not think she would have understood.

Of course, I then asked—as she wanted—why.

Her story was a good one. She had been passing by last evening, and it was gloomy and the light was not good (she would report to Mr Acton that the streetlamp needed a new bulb), when all at once the rooks in the spinney that lies behind my house had stopped their cawing and started wheeling about in a great flurry. I said, yes, they do that from time to time, who knows why. However, they had got nearer and nearer to here, she said, pointing to the very spot on which she was standing, and they started bothering her—she might almost say they were mobbing her. Unusual behaviour, I noted, but not unknown. I hoped she was uninjured.

For quite some moments, she continued, they were all about her and she had to brush the air around her to shoo them off, and it was the more alarming because it was all so dim and she could not quite see what was coming from where. One even got in among her hair, briefly, before she beat it off. As at last they scattered, she thought she saw just a glimpse of one old dark miscreant perched upon my wall with something glinting in its beak, but she could not swear to it, for it was gone in a moment, and
no
doubt whatever it was had been taken to its nest. Perhaps if we were to call the fire brigade again, who were so very good that time of the moor fire, they would let you borrow a ladder, as those ash trees are so very high.

I did not think, I said to her again, that I had lost anything precious, but I thanked her for telling me, and uttered more words of solicitude, before she went away.

It evidently did not occur to her that the rook upon the wall might be coming to visit me, rather than flying away. Or that it might not be a rook, though it might be something that would look a bit like that, in the gloom, and would certainly account for the disturbance of the rooks.

Or that we now had something precious of hers: a few twists of
her
silvery-black
hair,
like fine feathers from a jackdaw’s neck.

I heard next that she had fallen ill with a very high temperature, and complained she was burningly hot all the time. Miss Prean, who went to see her, despite their little falling-out, (‘because she has no-one else, poor dear’) reported back, with that mixture of mortification and satisfaction we all experience when we come up against others’ misfortune, that her face was dreadful, quite drained of all its daubed lustre. But worse than that, Miss Prean reported, were the things she said, very gently and conversationally, but most insistently, which the doctor seemed unable to do much about. They were all about black men attacking the village, not one now, but many of them, which was really ridiculous, but of course they do not know what they say when they are like that.

**

So now people shun her and she walks alone and talks with no-one. But perhaps she no longer needs an excuse to walk around, anyway. They say she seems to have acquired some sort of a dog, a little dark-coated, wiry creature, which she takes up on the moors, or it takes her. They say that it bounds around about her and even sometimes nips and snaps at her heels, so that she shouts at it. I do not think she quite has the control of it yet, but it is very faithful. She is never seen up there without it, and I dare say it will outlast her, for it is young and full of tricks, and she, I’m sorry to say, looks more downtrodden every day. And if we now have no time for her, we like her lively new
companion, and I am sure that one of us will take it in, when she goes.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and publishers for the first appearances of some stories, as follows:

‘St Michael & All Angels’, ‘The Folly’ and ‘Madberry Hill’ in
14, Bellchamber Tower
, Crimson Altar Press (Jeffrey Dempsey), 1987.

‘The Grave of Anir’,
Dark Dreams 1
edited by Jeffrey Dempsey and David Cowperthwaite, 1984.

‘William Sorrell Requests . . .’,
Darkness Comes
, edited by Jeffrey Dempsey, 1983.

‘The Ash Track’,
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2
, edited by Richard Dalby, Robinson, 1991.

‘The Hermit’s House’,
The Doppelgänger Broadsheet
, edited by Colin Langeveld, April 1998.

‘Go to the West’,
Transactions of the Doppelgänger Society
, edited by David Cowperthwaite, 1990.

‘The Guardians of the Guest Room’,
Dark Dreams 3
, edited by Jeffrey Dempsey and David Cowperthwaite, 1985.

‘Tree Worship’,
Nerve Gardens 1
, edited by Keith Jones and Barry Duggan, no date (c.1985).

‘Twilight at Little Brydon Cricket Club’,
Haunted Pavilions
, edited by Mark Valentine, 1992.

‘Woken by Candlelight’,
Macabre
#6,
edited by Wieslaw Tumulka, 1986.

‘Their Special Glee’,
The Silent Companion 4
, edited by António Monteiro, 2009.

‘Heritage of Fire’ is previously unpublished.

‘Herald of the Hidden’ and ‘The Almanac’ are also previously unpublished, and were newly written for this volume.

Contents

HERALD OF THE HIDDEN

Mark Valentine

Introduction

St Michael & All Angels

The Folly

Madberry Hill

The Ash Track

The Grave of Anir

William Sorrell Requests . . .

The Hermit’s House

Herald of the Hidden

Heritage of Fire

The Almanac

The Guardians of the Guest Room

Go to the West

Tree Worship

Twilight at Little Brydon Cricket Club

Woken by Candlelight

Their Special Glee

Acknowledgements