Have you ever bought an old house? Did you notice the gnarled trees and aged shrubs that were thriving close to its walls?
No?
Then read this.
There was an old rectory in a remote part of rural Dorset. It was a fine building, very square and solid with large sash windows whose white frames contrasted with the grey colour of the stone. It gave off an aura of permanence as it nestled within the wild growth which hugged the walls. It radiated a feeling of solid strength which lent a timeless support to the transient owners who seemed to change every decade or so. Families came and went with not even the slightest hint of anything unusual. And as long-serving as the house itself, was the family of old Eric, the retired herdsman who had been employed to look after the grounds for as long as anyone in the village could remember, as had his father before him, and his father before him. It was a connection that stretched back into a hazy past and which it was rumoured went back to a celtic, pagan antiquity.
One day, late in the year 1995 the Atkins family from London arrived as the new owners. Mark had been a successful commodity trader in the City and having made a great deal of money early in his life had decided to retire at the age of 45. He appeared one cold November day with his wife and two girls and was still young enough to want to change his environment; to “improve” whatever he saw.
“I hear we have an old gardener…I bet he’s so old he won’t want to change anything. I mean just look at all this jungle” he grumbled to Susan, his long suffering wife of twenty years. She shrugged her shoulders as experience had taught her to give way on the small things so that she could win the important disagreements which she knew were sure to come… friends for the girls, schools to choose; the potential battle field stretched before her.
“I will send for him and tell him what we want” Mark said.
Susan looked sharply at him. ”We?” She thought to herself, but mentally dismissed the irritation. Susan liked to drift and actually quite enjoyed the general feeling of tumbled-down anarchy which was the garden, but which clearly annoyed Mark. It was as if it were a challenge to his sense of order. She thought surely this couldn’t be important enough to make a stand on.
It was a raw windy morning when Eric arrived. He could understand how a man from the suburbs of a large city would be repelled by the soggy transition to winter with piles of leaves and plants, lawns and flower beds displaying an autumnal look of unkempt decay.
“I don’t care about that” Mark pointed out. “I just want to get rid of anything within 30 yards of the house. I need a swimming pool here” he gestured towards some straggly bushes “and maybe a tennis court over there” as he waved his hand at a grove of alder trees.
Eric froze. “You can’t do that.” He spoke in a very gentle west-country burr while looking at Mark with surprisingly blue eyes. “You must leave these. That is a bay tree. No witch will come near and lightning will strike away from the bay”. He pointed out a large bush about ten feet tall with a tangle of branches which should perhaps be clipped. “And you see that laurel hedge? That will protect against lightning”. Eric talked quietly through the various bushes and plants. There was an unusual oak which had been topped to make it bush, next to it was a massive yew with an old rowan tree gently mingling their branches as if to gather strength from each other. “These are The Guardians; they will protect you” Eric said casting his eyes around the garden with a look of deep and ageless wisdom. And then he spoke quietly about the smaller plants which were spreading over the gravel path that snaked around the house. Patches of clover which pre-dated Christianity; bracken which was running in all directions, and... Mark interrupted him, boredom clearly showing as his original view about Eric was vindicated.
Mark duly built his swimming pool while the house forlornly took on a naked look. All the trees, plants and anything natural was removed. This ancient elegance had become a depressing building site of mud which was cratered with holes and scars as if the face of a particularly gentle friend had been ravished by the smallpox. Now the house stood alone, in a modern suburban purity.
“No good will come of this” Eric told his friends of an evening in The Antelope. “This winter will be a hard one; I’ve never seen so many berries in the hedge-rows”. He was right of course. The winter of that year was particularly bad and rampaged through the village within days of the garden’s destruction. The first of the storms tore in from the Atlantic during the night, and bitterly cold winds drove across the land from the surging wastes of the oceans. The now unprotected house however stood firm even though there were no trees to shield against the wind. The storms produced thunder and lightning of extraordinary energy. The old building groaned and creaked as such houses do. The Atkins family found that the intensity of the violence, the drumming rain, the crashes of thunder with bayonets of lightning darting to earth was truly frightening.
Nobody in the village knew what happened next. That stormy night the skyline was suddenly lit up by a massive fire which brought a hellish glow to the area. By the time the firetruck had travelled the twenty miles to get there, it was too late. The blaze was so intense as to be out of control. Days later the fine old house was just a heap of ashes, with a charred structure pointing to the sky as if it were a supplicant from a medieval hell.
No bodies were ever found.
Eventually, as is the nature of such things, the ground was cleared and a fine looking “Executive Residence” was built. But what is so extraordinary is that there have been several owners, none of whom would stay for more than a few months. They all complained of strange feelings, sudden chills in the atmosphere, even adolescent screams punctuating the stillness of the night. So the house is now, once again, empty.
However Eric is still there talking of the past and of mysteries which have been lost to modern man. But Eric has no son so maybe the pagan link which allowed him to see the future, and which he alone seemed to understand, will one day be broken. Then, there will be no warning.
_
You can also read this short story at the Western Gazette website. Click here to follow me and be the first to know when I publish my next article, short story or book review.
_
No comments:
Post a Comment