Fear and Folly Page 9

  Suddenly Nathaniel no longer felt invincible. The feeling of imprisonment and guilt, so prevalent in the church, returned to the fore of his mind. Yet it was somehow worse than in the church, than being under the piercing gaze of the Reverend Bertram, for here it seemed to assail him from every direction.

  He spun around, fully expecting the Reverend to be propped up on the embankment, gesticulating with wooden arms. But he was met only by the blank stare of the mist and rain.

  Yet, now that he was facing the road, Nathaniel felt another icy serpent slither down his spine. A faint bubbling sound became audible, rising from the mire behind him. The hair on the nape of his neck sprang up, despite the best efforts of the rain to flatten it.

  Running his hand through his lank hair and taking a deep breath, he turned around.

  Initially he scanned the scattered timber without seeing anything out of the ordinary, but then he spied a confluence of bubbles amid the debris. And from this spot there rose – he focussed onto the object with frenzied fascination – there rose a hand. A hand so smooth and unblemished that it seemed that blood still coursed through its veins. A hand clenched into a fist.

  Nathaniel found himself shouting the very words which had unnerved him earlier:

  ‘Begone! Begone! BEGONE!’

  The name was flung back at him in eerie repetition:

  ‘Egon! Egon! EGON!’

  Frantically, he turned and ran, stumbling up the embankment and running headlong down the road. The mist absorbed everything around him, so that when he came to a halt, his lungs set to burst, he could not tell how far he had run or in which direction. He saw the same mud-churned road, the same dirt embankment, the same opaque wall of rain.

  Exhausted, he let himself fall to the ground.

  Nathaniel may have been lying there for some time when he felt a peculiar warmth stroke his forehead. He looked up to the heavens in wide-eyed wonderment.

  The rain had eased to a drizzle and a golden light was peering down from between parting clouds.

  As he doffed his wet cloak, he saw that the impenetrable mist, which had imprisoned and demoralised, was diffusing into nothingness. He began to wonder if he had somehow caused the rain to stop, if he had unconsciously expressed a willingness to atone and thus been forgiven for his moment of sin.

  Perhaps the Reverend Bertram’s words had been justified, that the deluge would cease upon the departure or death of the sinner.

  Yet Nathaniel found himself ridiculing this notion, for surely the storm would not break anew if he took but a few strides back down the road to Cromley.

  No. There was some deeper meaning. There had to be.

  But what of the hand? If everything had returned to normal, the hand should have vanished beneath the surface of the mire.

  Nathaniel stood up and, spying the half-submerged timber from afar, made tentatively for the place where Egon reposed.

  The hand was still there, that hand which had sought to strike him and rob him, but it was unmoving. The flesh seemed to be truly dead, for it was bloodless, a ghastly, ghostly white.

  As Nathaniel viewed the hand with a sullen eye, shouts of joy carried to him on the back of a breeze. In the distance he saw villagers mingling among their cottages, laughing, dancing and giving thanks.

  He made his way slowly back to the village. The rain did not start again, the sun blazed full and warm. A laugh escaped his lips. With a confident stride he entered the village to participate in the celebrations, when a lady, hurrying from the church of St. Thomas, raised a lamenting cry:

  “The Reverend Bertram is dead.”

  THE WHITE VEIL

  I often ask myself what possessed me to move to that little cottage called Balladoo last summer. I have somewhat simple tastes so all of the properties available would have suited me. They were all of a good size. They all had luscious gardens and splendid views but the one which I finally chose attracted me because the cottage and surrounds were above average and the price below average. The view did not encompass the emerald Irish Sea, but there was an exquisite shoulder of forested mountain to gaze upon from the porch as the sun set each evening. Whatever it was, something intrigued me enough to research Balladoo further. In my search, after all the hyperbole of the estate agents and a minor newspaper piece on the general area, the deciding factor was a link to a mystery and a brief mention of that wondrously weird word unique to the Isle of Man: buggane. I read the article and, although it described a supposed incident involving a mythical creature which took place almost a century ago, it was the sprig of local folkloric colour which sealed the deal for me.

  Within a few weeks, I was standing before the door of my new purchase. Balladoo was a delightful place, old enough to have seen more than a few bugganes pass below its eaves in the dead of night. The season and the sun heightened the vividness of the flowers ringing the cottage. A jolly redbreast sang from a rough rock wall, which circled around the back and up a slope to where a thick plantation of trees held their arms out to hold back a tumble of granite boulders.

  This purchase was not just a rash idea, a symptom of a midlife crisis. It was to be my hermit’s cave while I put the finishing touches to my magnum opus, a novel which had grown wild beneath distracted hands, neglected and feral as I spent most of my time negotiating the labyrinth of modern life. Like the garden flourishing around the cottage walls, my novel would require my full attention to prune it down and allow it flourish and blossom. The plan was for gardening and hiking during the daylight hours, allowing my mind to ripen thoughts, and then to pluck them one by one as the sun lay down behind the hills to the west. To let my ideas bathe in the artisanal atmosphere of a summer evening and a strong smoky whisky.

  I made the most of those long days which still echo with the solstice and often wandered beyond the garden, each walk increasing in distance. There was a lot of land to explore within only a few miles of my new home. I could wind my way down to the Path of the Gull and spend hours watching the grey fins and gaping maws of basking sharks in the choppy waters, without ever seeing the real thing. I could venture north or south along forgotten laneways hedged into dark tunnels and imagine being lost forever within, even though busy farms operated on either side. Or I could test my knees and thighs, struggle up into the woods guarding the slope above my cottage, and enter a land of twilight where the past had not yet become myth and all manner of furtive creatures scurried away at my approach.

  On one particular day, forever inked in my memory – as much as I have sought to erase it, to cover it in other memories, for it was drawn in the blackest, the most indelible of inks – I hauled myself over the garden wall, gritted my teeth at the gradient before me, and strode forth and upward.

  The magic of woods, of trees huddled thick and close, is that they appear so solid, so complicit in each other’s affairs, like conspirators. The interlacing of trunks, branches and even the tiniest of twigs breaks up the light enough to reduce the sunniest day to a grey gloom after venturing only a few yards in.

  Another element of woods, particularly in a realm as ancient and steeped in myth as the Isle of Man, is that, even in their darkest depths, one can suddenly find a surprise. There might be a small round knoll, a barrow or tumulus of great age, and there will be a small sign before it, explaining in faded letters the supposed history of the place. The sign, while mollifying the more impressionable and fearful facet of one’s mind, also dispels the magic in an instant. Any further myth-making is curtailed. Another regular surprise is the liquid purr of molten life flowing down through a hidden glen, a flirty stream, the trees hugging its banks greener than the woods above, more garrulous and more open to intruders such as myself. And then there are the more recent examples of human trespasses. I most enjoyed the basic wooden benches which seemed to proliferate in even the most random and remote settings. Here, one still stable and unsplintered while the path to which it owed its existence has all but vanished. There, one where there once must have been a look-ou
t over windswept fells but which is now dwarfed by the tops of trees many years its junior. But they are always very welcome, whatever their environs. Always placed at the perfect spot to rest one’s weary legs for a moment, to breathe in the sanctified air of nature’s silent business, before forging on.

  On this day, I found myself moving at an angle up the slope through the woods, partly because I knew that there stood just such a solid stoic bench a couple of hundred yards in that direction. Having engaged in daily walks of this nature, I had become quite fit and also quite familiar with the layout of the land, the access to the most accommodating slope, the quickest route to the most scenic spot, so that I had yet time to explore that little bit further each time ere the sun sought its sleep and I my writing desk.

  There was little in the way of undergrowth in this wood of firs and I did not have to look down a great deal as I walked. With my eyes on the evolving horizon high above, I soon saw the spectre of light which hovered over the slight clearing where my favourite bench was stationed but, rising a few steps further, I then saw a bright white shape seated upon the bench. I stopped in surprise, for I had never seen anyone else on my afternoon jaunts and, as far as I was aware, there were no other holdings in the area, only the plantation spread darkly across the hillside.

  I moved left and right rather than further up, trying to find a gap in the woods for a better view. The trunks of the trees before me rendered the shape amorphous at first. It seemed to be a person, only because that is what one assumes it to be and because there are no bright white beasts of such size in these woods or indeed in all the British Isles. The shape seemed to billow out at the bottom and for a moment I was struck by the notion that it was a large tarpaulin or linen sheet which had somehow blown up here and hooked itself onto the bench. But a few more steps, quietly taken thanks to the lack of undergrowth, allowed me to refocus and see the entire scene without hindrance.

  It was a woman. A woman dressed completely in white.

  A woman in white is hardly a harbinger of fear but there was something in her posture, in her utter stillness, which unnerved me. Her presence was accentuated by the sheer incongruity of her dress, a long gown more appropriate to a bride, with a cape draped over her shoulders and concealing her arms. Surely no woman of sound mind would wear such a voluminous and blindingly white dress and then seat herself on an old, mouldy, mossy bench in the middle of a wood with no clear path leading anywhere.

  Not of sound mind. There was a possibility presenting itself to the fanciful part of me. I am unsure how long I stood there. I believe that she was unaware of my presence, although I only assumed this because she had not moved for the entire time that I had been watching and waiting.

  Social etiquette eventually asserted itself, even here in the myth-riddled maze of an ancient wood, and I felt ashamed that, however inadvertently and without lewd intent, I had been spying upon a lady.

  I turned around and began to make my way back down the slope. As much as my intention had been simply to rest a moment on the bench and then move on, my better nature suggested that the lady surely wished to be alone; that this was a place of solitude for her as much as it was for me, and she might be fearful of strange men approaching her from out of the darkness of the woods.

  Turning around, with my thoughts as tangled as the branches entwined above my head, I failed to see a fallen branch lying across my path. A sharp snap echoed out, cannonading from tree to tree, heightened by the silence preceding it.

  I could not help but look back up at the bench. The figure in white had apparently heard me and had moved. From my vantage point, yet only for the briefest of moments, I saw her head turn towards me. The dense darkness of the ancient arbour in which I stood would have obscured my form from her gaze but, turning fully into a sweep of sudden sunshine, I could see her now more clearly than at any moment previously. And yet she turned no face to me. For where her head was, there was another swathe of white. She was wearing some type of headdress and beneath it, although I glanced but for a second, I saw clearly that her face was hidden behind a veil. The veil was also white, but it was too opaque to reveal the features beneath it. I saw no more than that before I turned again and all but ran down the hill back to my cottage.

  Naturally I accosted myself a thousand times that night with mutterings of ‘Fool!’ and ‘Idiot!’ I had run in fear down a dangerously-steep slope in deep shade from a woman wearing a veil. I began to hope not only that she had not seen me clearly enough to recognise me, should we ever pass at close quarters again, but also that no-one else – not even the rabbits and hedgehogs – had borne witness to my hasty descent.

  I laughed after that, but my mood was tempered as much by a good strong whisky as by a hefty dose of reality. Surely there was a reason for her to be where she was. Surely she was in more of a position to be afraid than I, hearing branches breaking near to her, hearing odd noises emanating from the dark woods falling away below her seat. She would probably never return to that bench again.

  But would I, also, not return?

  I could not dispel the eeriness of her presence. The absurdity of her dress. It must surely be explicable. Perhaps there was a farmstead or cottage further up the hill after all, beyond the treeline and serviced by a road reaching up from a neighbouring valley. I had not explored much further above where the bench stood, so it was certainly possible. She might be a bride-to-be, desperate for one last moment of solitude and silence before taking the most serious step of her life. Or perhaps she had been abandoned at the altar? Or, yes, here was a possibility – she was meeting a lover, that bench a secret rendezvous far from disapproving glances.

  Already I had come up with a handful of rational explanations. Unlikely, yes. Highly improbable, too, in this remote locale. Yet none of them were implausible.

  And so, slowly but surely, the sight of the lady in white settled in my consciousness as she had settled upon the bench. I returned to my novel, but every so often the image of her arose. Her head moved and there was the veil with no intimation of the features beneath.

  I tried to imagine what her expression might have been when she had heard me. And whether she was beautiful.

  Despite my best efforts, when sleep finally stole over me, I found that she had settled in my dreams, and it was with a heavy head and dark rings beneath my eyes that I awoke the next morning from agitated slumber.

  As I pulled weeds in the small front garden, I considered strolling down to the village and asking if any of the locals knew of the lady in the white veil. Surely such a character would be the talk of both the tavern and the pew. Then again, I was the newcomer, the outsider. Would they even answer my questions? And, if they did, would they be truthful or tease me with overused tales of bugganes, glashtyns, water-horses and the ubiquitous fairies?

  Being a rationalist and a sceptic, and, as such folk invariably do, attempting to ignore and dismiss the feeling of uneasiness shivering through my skin like a fever, I decided to climb to the same bench that afternoon. Perhaps if I seated myself there at an earlier hour, I could leave the decision to her, should she appear, whether to join me and introduce herself, or leave as I had – although undoubtedly in a much more dignified manner.

  I even began to entertain thoughts of a liaison there among the woods. Of a jilted bride revealing her shame and falling dejectedly into my arms.

  It was only with foolish fantasies such as those that I was able to summon any real enthusiasm for my ascent of the thickly-wooded hill. I found myself halting every few steps, simply to soak in the silence. And, as I did, I would hear again, indeed feel again, her complete silence upon the bench the day before.

  Despite my slow and thoughtful climb, I found the bench to be empty when I reached it. I strode around it for a little while before sitting down, looking for any evidence of her presence. There had not been any rain for several days and the dry ground revealed only a smattering of faded prints which may have been hers or possibly my own from a previous
visit. Nor had the bench been coarse enough to hold onto any fragment of her presence, any thread of her weirdly-wonderful whiteness.

  I sat there for several minutes, shooting sideways at the slightest sound, seeing here a blackbird and there a cuckoo, but never once a figure in white walking towards me in eloquent silence.

  After a time, I was on the verge of standing up, of giving up my vigil, when I became aware of an appealing aroma. It was like the rich fragrant scent of a tropical blossom dripping with nectar.

  Then there was a sound from my left which was unlike the scurrying, sniffing and scratching of the local wildlife. It resembled a sharp intake of breath, raspy, unwomanly, but I knew without looking around that it was her.

  It was a frightening sound, that breath, and, combined with the alluring scent which now seemed to waft all around me, it threw my senses into chaos. I urged myself to turn and look. And so I did, finally, fearfully.

  There she stood, about twenty yards away from me. Not a tree stood between us and I was amazed by the immaculate beauty of what she wore. I could see that not a grain of dirt or blade of grass clung to the radiant white of her dress, although its wide skirt could not have emerged untouched from any direction in these woods. I could see that her veil still lay across her countenance in some exquisite pattern of lace with the vaguest hint of dark features beneath.

  I felt fear flowing freely through my nerves and my blood, a tide of terror taking over my body and my mind, and all because of a woman in white who had shown not a hint of malice towards me.

  For a moment I was sane and almost smiled at her in greeting.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I stammered. ‘I was just leaving, if you wish to have your seat back again.’

  Fool! I thought. Now she knows that you were the one in the woods yesterday.