The Hollow Land (8 page)

“Not good for the bed,” said Old Hewitson. “It's making music like the Sally Army.”

They passed the foot of the bouse, where James's geology book still lay surveying the evening sky, and turned the corner at the bottom of the cleft and the broken wire fence. They lifted down the bed, removed the old wire from the gap and fastened the bed-ends and the metal base across the dry beck.

“Fits a treat,” said Old Hewitson. “Very handsome. No need to mention it to the authorities.”

“Last a hundred years,” said Kendal, “and very interesting it looks. Just the thing for an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty . . . Hello?”

“What?”

“Did you hear something?”

They stood. The evening, gentle with the warmth of the long day, smelled of gorse and wild thyme and a hundred miles of clean turf. Through the silence came a faint sound of metal, rhythmically hammering from the top of the bouse, and thin and strange lamenting cries.

At the same moment Mrs. Bateman in her long apron paced into view and stood mournfully shading her eyes and looking into the distance.

James gave a scream and fled, kicking aside his geology book and vanishing into the sunset.

He was closely followed by Kendal, who made for the Land-Rover, shouting wildly to Old Hewitson to follow him, and starting the engine.

Only Old Hewitson—and Mrs. Bateman—stood their ground, and only Old Hewitson saw something come into view in queer jerks at the top of the bouse and watched a rusty and enormous chain emerge from what looked like the very earth itself, gather speed, slide lumpily forward, drop through the air and fall at last at his own uneven feet.

“Turn that car, Kendal,” he cried. “Get that James back here. Mrs. Bateman, stay up there on the bouse. We're in for a hard evening. It's going to take the lot of us.”

 

“And for my part,” said Mr. Teesdale at past ten o'clock at night, “I'd a mind to leave them there.”

“And mine,” said Mr. Bateman in his London suit, which was not looking its best.

“Sitting there like two fond monkeys. Deserve nuts and water for a week.”

“Beyond me. Beyond me,” said Mr. Bateman.

“I just couldn't believe—I couldn't believe it,” said Mrs. Bateman. “All I did was appear and everyone screamed and scattered. Ghost! Do I look like a ghost?”

“Yes,” said Eileen, Bell's sister, “you did. I seed it once. I seed that ghost when I was just about to be a teenager. Just before you're teenage you see ghosts easiest. I read it in a magazine. Just before you're teenage you're very psychic and impressionable.”

“I'd give Bell psychic and impressionable,” said his father.

“I'd not call that Kendal teenage,” said Mrs. Bateman, “at least not in years.”

“I saw no ghosts,” said Bell, “I was that busy getting us out.”

“Getting us out?” said Harry. “You was going on about dead skeletons and terrible Indians. Who got the chain moving?”

“Aye well, you did. I'll say that.”

“A pair of loonies,” said James.

“Who went running?” said Harry. “Ghosts of dead miners. Dead miners' mothers! And you a scientist.”

“That lad of Meccer's never got lost up the mines anyway,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “I heard tell he took off to South America and got to be a millionaire.”

“It was still very dreadful for his mother,” said Mr. Bateman.

“Tell me when it ever isn't,” said Mrs. Bateman, collapsed on the Light Trees sofa, still in her aprons. “Tell me when it ever isn't.”

“When they're safe home,” said Grandad Hewitson. “Give thanks. They're safe home. And both of them a bit wiser than when the sun rose up this morning.”

T
he Egg-witch had a mother, a very old woman nobody saw because she lived in bed.

She had been in bed for years. There was nothing at all wrong with her, but one day she just didn't get up. The Egg-witch and the Egg-witch's children and sometimes even the Egg-witch's wispy husband, who spent as much time as possible out of doors on his farm, began to carry up trays. Nightdresses of ancient design appeared upon the Egg-witch's clothesline but that was the only outward sign of Granny Crack. When anyone asked after Granny Crack, the Egg-witch's mother, she just said “Nicely thank you”. Or nothing, and glared. They had always been a glaring sort of family, the Cracks.

The Egg-witch had been a Crack, Mrs. Teesdale told Mrs. Bateman, before she married. Yorkshire people and we know what
that
means.

“No,” said Mrs. Bateman.

“They tell you nothing, Yorkshire people, they're not like here.”

“But Yorkshire is hardly ten miles away over the fell.”

“They're different folk.”

 

Now it happened that Harry had become a friend of the Egg-witch. All those years ago, before he was even school age and had trampled eggs into her front path and run off, he had been made to go back next day and say he was sorry. His father had gone with him but had waited at the gate.

Harry had knocked on the Egg-witch's black door and been told through it to go round to the back. His father had watched him depart and return with an enormous bucket and with the scrubbing brush they had brought with them. He had settled down to scrub the path, which was as white as snow already, having been scrubbed clean some hours before at the first possible minute after Sunday, when work is wicked. He had scrubbed the clean slabs all the way from the gate back up to the front door, making everything rather puddly. His father had settled down outside the gate with his back to the wall and a book to read.

As Harry reached the front door, wiggling backwards on his knees, it had opened behind him and there had stood the Egg-witch with an apple in her hand. She looked at the path and then at Harry. “It'll do,” she said and handed him the apple.

That the Egg-witch had given somebody a present had been talked about in the village for quite some time.

Later Harry's mother had met the Egg-witch in Market Street shopping, and nodded. The next summer when the Egg-witch was out in her garden digging a huge trench for potatoes, Harry and his mother went by and she straightened herself up and glared and said, “Are you comin' in?”

After that they looked in often and sat in the Egg-witch's kitchen (they never went into the awful parlour again) for a cup of tea, and on one occasion Harry's mother mentioned mothers—and then the flood gates opened.

“Seven years,” said the Egg-witch, “seven years she's been up there. The doctor comes and looks to her every now and then. Says she's right as a ninepence. Just given in, that's what she's done. Worked all her life—up before five every morning, milking fifty years, never a holiday all her life. Right away up on Kisdon we lived, miles from nowhere. Made her own butter and cheese and bread. Fed the nine of us out of twenty-five shilling a week, my father was a pig-killer till he died, going round the farms killing and helping here and there hay-times, as we did, us and mother too, carrying pots of stew on harnesses on our backs away up the fell. Such a cook she was! She'd fill a big black pot—one of them with bright, thick silver insides—with potatoes and onions and carrots and a bone, and cover it with water and boil it up slow. Beautiful. Every day oft' week, and bread and syrup for supper. Sundays there'd maybe be a spare rib pie. Proper spare rib, not this so-called spare rib now. And a crust over it. She could heft the sheep and clip the sheep and dip. She could salt the pig and make the sausage and the black puddings. She could stack a rick of hay and corn and she could paint a house inside and out and mend the great roof tiles. She could milk and separate and calve a cow. She never had a day's sickness in her life, no more had we. We never saw a doctor. She had us out of our beds six o'clock each day including Sunday, and she was always last to bed at night. And look at her now.”

“Doesn't she even want to talk to anyone?”

“No. She does not.”

“Doesn't she read or listen to the wireless?”

“No. She does not. She lies there night and day looking at the ceiling. Night and day, winter and summer, these seven years.”

“Whatever can have set it off?”

“We don't know. She'd been down here living with me for a bit when it happened. Mind I think I know.”

“Oh?”

“It was something on television. Something she saw on the news. It was about the time them Americans went to the moon.

“She's not silly, mind,” the Egg-witch added, “she's still sharp. What's more, we all know she doesn't stay in bed all the time. We can't catch her at it, but when we're out hay-timing or it's ram sales in Kirkby, or Ravenstonedale or Brough Show and there's no alternatives to leaving her alone, there's signs she gets up to things.”

“Up to things?”

“Up to things. However else would she know the colour we'd painted the kitchen? ‘Never liked black in a kitchen' she said the other day.
We
never told her. No—she'd been down.”

“What would happen if you just carried her downstairs and put her in the car and took her for a drive?”

“Oh—she'd create. She'd take a stroke after all this time, the doctor says. It'd be murder. It's the countryside she's turned against you see. It's the land she hates. She hates it. She's had enough—all them long Swaledale winters, all that scratting and scraping and never in all her life seeing anywhere more than ten-twelve miles from her home. She hates anyone that's a traveller. She always was venomous with the gypsies—there was never a gypsy dared come anywhere near Kisdon. I wouldn't take you up to see her, Mrs. Bateman. She's still got a very bitter tongue. I wouldn't trust her to see a Londoner. It's what got into her that morning we switched on the moon and saw them men in their suits bobbing about.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Bateman, “that she has really gone—well, a little bit off her head. In London they would take her into hospital now and then, just to give you a break.”

“That I will
not
have,” said the Egg-witch, all her whiskers bristling. “I know my duty.”

 

Just before the Batemans left at the end of summer there was a great blackberry picking going on in the Hollow Land. It was a wonderful blackberry year and everywhere you could see people patiently picking in the lanes with plastic bags and bowls and even buckets. The best place for a bramble, as everybody knew, was the Egg-witch's lane and they went there first as soon as the berries had ripened. Harry had been sent out to get some to take home to London. He got a lift down with Mr. Teesdale on the tractor to Teesdale's farm and then walked the rest.

But he was too late. The bushes were bare. He thought that he would walk on to the Egg-witch's and ask if she knew anywhere else there'd be some, down behind Blue Barns in the woods perhaps.

When he got to Blue Barns he was puzzled because everything was so quiet. It was as quiet as on the first frightening Sunday he had called there for eggs long ago. The yard and the garden were quite empty—even the kennel was empty. The whole farm stood sunbathing in peaceful early autumn light—rosehips by the gate, bright dahlias in the borders, healthy bright potato flowers, and two or three swallows sitting on a wire warm as toast and wondering if there was any point in going to Africa.

Harry went round the back and opened the kitchen door and called hello, as he always did now. He met complete silence. He looked in the rooms and they were empty. The kitchen fire was laid but not lit and there was an extra neatness about the table and the sink and draining-board that meant nobody had been there for some time. Harry remembered all at once the Show at Brough, where Bell and everyone had gone and where Mr. Teesdale had been hurrying to on the tractor. The kennel was empty because of the sheep-dog trials. They'd be hours getting back—sheep-dog trials being as long as it takes. And then all the judging of the plants and cakes and rum-butters.

Never mind, he'd just go home. He didn't like the feel of Blue Barns without the Egg-witch in it, and that was odd when he remembered how frightened of her he used to be. The house had a different quiet about it without her. Even a quiet house has some little noises in it if you listen—ticks and creaks, a hum from a fridge or a flap from a curtain or a squeak from a board. Today Blue Barns was so quiet it was like somebody holding his breath and listening for himself.

Harry thought of the old lady all alone upstairs and prickles walked across the back of his neck. I'm off, he thought.

And there was a tremendous and horrendous crash from just behind his head!

He was halfway down the yard, beyond the pump before he stopped running.

Then he listened. “I can't,” he said—and very slowly set off back.

The kitchen had become completely still again but from under the dairy door there trickled a stream of what looked like blood.

This time he ran out of the door, over the yard past the kennel, past the silos and a good way down the bramble lane.

Then he stopped again.

He'd have to go back.

If there had been anyone about he need not have gone back. If there'd been anybody at home in any of the farms along by the village he could have run into one and told them and left it at that. But everyone would be at the show.

Maybe he could telephone the police? He could telephone his father and mother packing up at Light Trees. He could reverse the charges since he had no money—or just dial 999.

Except there wasn't a telephone box.

But there was a telephone—back in the kitchen of Blue Barns. The kitchen with blood pouring out under the dairy door.

Harry walked slowly back, up the lane past the silos, past the kennel, past the pump and into the kitchen where a very old lady in a long frilly white dress was standing eating a slice of bread and drinking blackberry juice out of a jam jar.