The Man in the Moss (95 page)

           
'We couldn't wait for her. We had thirteen stones to put
down. Cathy's had to take two.' Milly glanced around. 'Cathy not back yet?'

           
'Listen ...' Macbeth grabbed her shoulders. 'Moira told
Dic she'd gone to ... meet the Man. I figured that meant she was part of your
operation.'

           
Milly shook her head. 'I'd be
terrified
to meet the Man. I don't know, Mungo. I really don't know
what she meant. I'm sorry.'

           
'You all right?' Willie demanded.

           
'Tired. Exhausted. We've done all we can. Willie. That's
the most I can say. I doubt it'll be enough.'

           
'Oh.' Mr Dawber, looking out across the Moss. 'Oh, good
God.'

           
In the centre of rainless stillness, there came a noise
overhead like deep, bass thunder. Like the exploding of the night. Like the
splitting of the sky.

And they all saw it.

           
The reason they all saw it was that Bridelow Moss was
suddenly lit up like a football ground.

           
The Beacon of the Moss was back, not blue this time but
ice-white and a thousand times more powerful.

           
'It's Alf s arc light,' some woman explained. 'Knew he'd
have it fixed before long. What was that b ... ? Oh, Mother. Oh, Mother, help
us! What's
that?'

           
At first, Macbeth was simply not able to believe it.
There was no precedent. It was outside the sphere of his knowledge.

           
First thing he saw, snagged in the floodlight, was the
malformed tree with branches like horns. The horns of a stag-beetle, he thought
now. Because an insect was what the tree resembled.

           
Or a bunch of brittle twigs.

           
Insignificant compared with what was growing out of the
Moss, beyond, behind and far, far above it.

           
It was happening on the edge of the light, at what was
surely the highest point of the Moss. Macbeth thought of a mushroom cloud. He
thought of Hiroshima. He thought of Nagasaki. He thought in images on cracked
film in black and white.

           
He heard shrill screams from the Moss and he thought,
Shit, it's the end of the goddamn world.

           
Mushroom was wrong. More like a dense bunch of flowers.
Or a cauliflower. A gigantic, obscene black cauliflower burgeoning monstrously
from the bog.

           
The silent air was dank with a smell like the grave.

           
And, up close, the sour smell of primitive, bowel-melting
fear.

           
'What is it?' Milly screeched. 'What is it, Mr Dawber?'
           
'It can't be ...'
           
'What?
What
?'

           
People clutching at one another.
           
Ernie Dawber said hollowly,
'It's burst."
           
Macbeth just stood there
watching the liquid vegetable form in a kind of slow motion.

           
'The bog's burst,' Ernie Dawber cried out, aghast. 'It's
bloody
burst
! Everybody ... into the
church!
Fast!'

           
'Where's Cathy?' Milly shrieked above the tumult of
rising panic. 'She went down to take the last stone.'
           
'Where? Where to?'

           
'To the pub. The back wall. Under the old foundation
stone. It's the last one'

           
As the air suited to thicken, Macbeth began to run, down
through the graveyard towards the street, and by the time his feet hit the
cobbles, a wall of cold, black, liquid peat was thundering into the village
like volcanic lava.

'What have you
done?'

           
'I obviously have an affinity ...' John Peveril Stanage
grinned, '... with the Moss.'

           
'You are a fucking insane man.'

           
'What is sanity?' Stanage said, as the high windows blew
out and the whole roof of the barn was smashed down by the blackest of nights.

From
Dawber's Book of Bridelow.

THE BOG BURST

The scale and severity of
the Bridelow Bog Burst has caused widespread shock and disbelief, although it
was not without precedent.

                       
Such phenomena have occurred infrequently
within recorded history, usually after a period of inordinately heavy rainfall
when the surface layer of vegetation becomes too weak to retain the liquefied
mass of peat beneath.

                       
Several minor bog-slides have been reported
in recent decades. After a midsummer thunderstorm in 1963, a peat- slide
affected a large area of Meldon Hill bog in the Northern Pennines, leaving two
scars in the blanket peat about 230 metres long and 36 metres wide.

                       
Many centuries earlier but closer to the site
of our own disaster was the eruption of Chat Moss, near Manchester, which
Leland, an historian in the reign of Henry VIII, records as having
'brast up and destroied much grounds and
much fresche water fische therabowt and so carried stinking water into the
Mersey and carried the roulling mosse to the shores of Wales, part to the Isle
of Man and sum into Ireland.'

                       
One cannot but suspect a certain exaggeration
in this account. But those of us who experienced the horror of that night,
those who lost friends or loved ones or only their homes will carry with them
to their own graves the smell, the texture and, for some, the very taste of the
black and ancient vegetable matter we call peat.

From
Dawber's
Secret
Book of
Bridelow
(unpublished):

A TALL ORDER, owd lad.

                       
To try and unearth the truth from the Black.
To make sense out of what happened. To consider whether my beloved Bridelow has
a future. And, if so, what kind.

                       
I thought at first to put it off until after
the official Government inquiry, from which there'll obviously be a report for
public scrutiny. However, that's not likely to emerge for months, and when it
does it's bound to be a dry Civil Service document full of scientific guff and
a list of safety recommendations for communities which happen to be situated on
the edge of large, unstable peatbogs.

                       
'Ernie,' you said, 'you're the only man who
can put all this into any sort of human and historical perspective. You must
get it
 
down while it's fresh. Before it
becomes part of Bridelow Mythology.'

                       
What you really meant was. While you're still
with us, Ernie.

                       
'And who'll read it, owd lad?'

                       
'Let's hope,' you said sadly, 'that nobody
outside of Bridelow will ever have to.'

So I'm writing this in your
study at the Rectory while you're up at the church, conducting your first
evensong since the Burst. Thanks to your charity, I've been sleeping (whenever
the Lord
 
permits it) in the little spare
room it the top of the house.

                       
Emergency accommodation. My own house,
exposed up by the school, being one of the first destroyed.

                       
Seemed, when it was happening, like
Armageddon: most of what we knew and loved engulfed by a dreadful destructive
force ... perhaps the merciless anger of the Lord, which we had brought upon
ourselves by clinging to our primitive Christian paganism while all those
around us (them Across the Moss) had long since been converted and embraced the
Light.

                       
Embraced the light? Don't make me laugh.
There's more black out there than you'll find in Bridelow even now, under its
dark blanket of peat.

                       
Peat preserves.

                       
The Moss preserved the ancient dead and two
millennia of fear, violence, sickness and dread. And other things of which we
do not speak, of which we cannot speak. Of which Matt Castle, all those years
ago, could not speak, only let it pour away, out of the pipes, as he wandered
in his agony upon the Moss.

                       
It has absorbed all our overflowing emotions,
this Moss, like a gigantic psychic cesspit. It has preserved and it has
neutralized. An archaic chemical cathartic.

                       
Ignore me, Hans, I'm getting too deep. Or too
whimsy, as Ma Wagstaff would sometimes rebuke me, poor owd lass.

                       
Avoiding getting to the simple physical
horror of it.

                       
Thousands of tons of the filthy stuff.
Liquefied peat. Stink? I don't think I'll ever get rid of it from the back of
my throat. And certainly not from the back of my thoughts. Not as long as I
breathe.

                       
Cowering in the choir stalls, we could hear
it descending all around the church, still hearing the echo of that cataclysmic
thunderclap in aftershocks of rumbling and roaring, and we thought the church
would implode, the walls collapse in upon us with a shattering shower of
stained glass.

                       
But the church held. The makeshift Autumn
Cross swayed and rustled, the lights went out and came on again, bar the one
above the door, but the church held.

                       
More than my house did. Reason it went: it
was on the wrong side of the street. The first explosion, the actual burst,
sent the fountaining filth hundreds of feet into the air ... why, bits of it
were found on the moor, five or six miles away.

                       
But when it settled into a mere tidal wave -
a bit, they say, like the tip slide which killed all those poor kids in South
Wales - it was the buildings on the west side of the street that took it: the
Post Office, the chip shop, Bibby's General Stores (poor old Gus Bibby couldn't
have known a thing; his flat over the shop was filled up in seconds with liquid
peat as dark and evil-looking as the comfrey oil in one of Ma Wagstaff's jars).

                       
Naturally, The Man I'th Moss, the most
westerly building in the village, on the very edge of the bog, is now under a
great morass of muck. Selling it won't be a problem for Lottie Castle now; just
a question of collecting the insurance, more than enough for a semi in
Wilmslow.

                       
At least thirty people died in the village
that night; how many were simply victims of the Bog Burst may never be
established. Which is, you will agree, just as well.

                       
Quite a few are believed to have perished
instantly out on the Moss, although, again, an exact number will probably never
be known. Perhaps, over hundreds of years, the bodies will be disinterred,
perfectly preserved no doubt, like our Man. Museum pieces - although perhaps
not, because the Burst will be part of
recorded
history, so people will understand.

                       
Or will they? Do any of us, even now, know
precisely what happened, or why?

                       
Except for Dr Roger Hall, who was seen by his
assistant, Mrs White, to be heading for the Moss a short time before the Burst,
most of those who died out there, in conditions which recall what I've read of
the black horrors of the Somme, will remain unidentified. Many were likely to
have been men and women long estranged from their families or disowned by their
relatives because of the unacceptable practices in which they indulged
themselves.

                       
I know very little about so-called
'satanism', whether this is simply a convenient name we have given to those who
seek personal power over others through supposedly supernatural means. Whether,
as some say, they sacrificed newborn babies out on the moor in order to
'reconsecrate' the stone circle, I certainly don't know
that
. I do not
want
to
know.