Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Shaw backed up twenty or thirty yards, pulled into the middle of the road. Felt his jaw trembling and, to stiffen it, retracted his lips into a vicious snarl.

He threw the Saab into first gear. Realised, as the stolen car spurted under him, that he was screaming aloud.

On the side of the bus shelter, the handsome man leaned over the smiling girl on the sofa, topping up her glass from the bottle. In the instant before the crash, the dark, beautiful girl held out the glass in a toast to Shaw before bringing it to her lips and biting deeply into it, and when she smiled again, her smile was full of blood.

You'll feel… better. The big lights came on in the bar and were sluiced into the forecourt through the open door where Matt Castle stood grinning broadly, with his tall red-haired wife. Behind them was the boy – big lad now, early twenties, must be. Not one of Ernie's old pupils, however; Dic had been educated in and around Manchester while his dad's band was manhandling its gear around the pubs and clubs.

'Happen he will bring a bit of new life,' Ernie said. 'He's a good man.'

'Goodness in most of us,' Ma Wagstaff said, 'is a fragile thing, as you'll have learned, Ernest.'

Ernie Dawber adjusted his glasses, looked down curiously at Ma. As the mother of Little Willie Wagstaff, long-time percussionist in Matt Castle's Band, the old girl could be expected to be at least a bit enthusiastic about Matt's plans.

Ma said, 'Look at him. See owt about him, Ernest?'

Matt Castle had wandered down the steps and was still shaking hands with people and laughing a lot. He looked, to Ernie, like a very happy man indeed, a man putting substance into a dream.

Lottie Castle had remained on the step, half inside the doorway, half her face in shadow.

'She knows,' Ma Wagstaff said.

'Eh?'

'I doubt as she can see it, but she knows, anyroad.'

'Ma…?'

'Look at him. Look hard. Look like you looked at t'street.'

Matt Castle grinning, accepting a pint. Local hero.

I don't understand,1 said Ernie Dawber. He was beginning to think he'd become incapable of understanding. Forty-odd years a teacher and he'd been reduced to little-lad level by an woman who'd most likely left school at fourteen.

Ma Wagstaff said, 'He's got the black glow, Ernest.'

'What?'

On top of everything else she'd come out with tonight, this jolted Ernie Dawber so hard he feared for his heart. It was just the way she said it, like picking out a bad apple at the greengrocer's. A little old woman in a lumpy woollen skirt and shapeless old cardigan.

'What are you on about?' Ernie forcing joviality. Bloody hell, he thought, and it had all started so well. A real old Bridelow night.

'Moira?' Matt Castle was saying. 'Aye, I do think she'll come. If only for old times' sake.' People patting him on the shoulder. He looked fit and he looked happy. He looked like a man who could achieve.

The black glow?' Ernie whispered. 'The black glow?

What had been banished from his mind started to flicker – the images of the piper on the Moss over a period of fifteen, to twenty years. Echoes of the pipes: gentle and plaintive on good days, but sometimes sour and sometimes savage.

Black glow?' his voice sounding miles away.

Ma Wagstaff looked up at him. 'I'm buggered if I'm spelling it for thee.' Part Three bog oak

From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:

Bridelow Moss is a two-miles-wide blanket of black peat. Much of its native vegetation has been eroded and the surface peat made blacker by industrial deposits – although the nearest smut-exuding industries are more than fifteen miles away.

Bisected by two small rivers, The Moss slopes down, more steeply than is apparent, from the foothills of the northern Peak District almost to the edge of the village of Bridelow.

In places, the peat reaches a depth of three metres, and although there are several drainage gullies, conditions can be treacherous, and walkers unfamiliar with the Moss are not recommended to venture upon it in severe weather.

But then, on dull wet, days in Autumn and Winter, the gloomy and desolate appearance of the Moss would deter all but the hardiest rambler…

With the rain hissing venomously in their faces, they pushed the wheelchair across the cindered track to the peat's edge, and then Dic lost his nerve and stopped.

'Further,' Matt insisted.

'It'll sink, Dad. Look.'

Matt laughed, a cawing.

Dic looked at his mother for back-up. Lottie looked away, through her dripping hair and the swirling grey morning, to where the houses of Bridelow clung to the shivering horizon like bedraggled birds to a telephone wire.

'Mum…?'

In the pockets of her sodden raincoat, Lottie made claws out of her fingers. She wouldn't look at Matt, even though she was sure – the reason she'd left her head bare – that you couldn't distinguish tears from rain.

'Right.' Abruptly, Matt pushed the tartan rug aside. 'Looks like I'll have to walk, then.'

'Oh, Christ, Dad..

Still Lottie didn't look at the lad or the withered man in the wheelchair. Just went on glaring at the village, at the fuzzy outline of the church, coming to a decision. Then she said tonelessly, 'Do as he says, Dic.'

'Mum..

Lottie whirled at him, water spinning from her hair. 'Will you just bloody well do it?'

She stood panting for a moment, then her lips set hard. She thought she heard Dic sob as he heaved the chair into the mire and the dark water bubbled up around the wheels.

The chair didn't sink. It wouldn't sink. It wouldn't be easy to get out, even with only poor, wasted Matt in there, but it wouldn't sink.

Maybe Matt was hoping they wouldn't have to get it out. That he'd be carried away, leaving the chair behind, suspended skeletally in the Moss, slowly corroding into the peat or maybe preserved there for thousands of years, like the Bogman.

'Fine,' Matt said. 'That's… fine. Thanks.'

The chair was only a foot or so from the path, embedded up to its footplate in Bridelow Moss. Dic stood there, tense, arms spread, ready to snatch at the chair if it moved.

'Go away, lad,' Matt said quietly. He always spoke quietly now. So calm. Never lost his temper, never – as Lottie would have done – railed at the heavens, screaming at the blinding injustice of it.

Stoical Matt. Dying so well.

Sometimes she wished she could hate him. It was Sunday morning.

As they'd lifted Matt's chair from the van, a scrap of a hymn from the church had been washed up by the wind-powered rain, tossed at them like an empty crisp-packet then blown away again.

They'd moved well out of earshot, Lottie looking around.

Thinking that on a Sunday there were always ramblers, up from Macclesfield and Glossop, Manchester and Sheffield, relishing the dirty weather, the way ramblers did. If it belonged to anybody, Bridelow Moss belonged to the ramblers, and they made sure everybody knew it.

But this morning there were none.

The bog, treacle-black under surface rust, fading to a mouldering green where it joined the mist. And not a glimmer of anorak-orange.

As if, somehow, they knew. As if word had been passed round, silently, like chocolate, before the ramble: avoid the bog, avoid Bridelow Moss.

So it was just the three of them, shadows in the filth of the morning.

'Go on, then,' Matt was saying, trying to pump humour into his voice. 'Bugger off, the pair of you.'

Lottie put out a hand to squeeze his shoulder, then drew back because it would hurt him. Even a peck on the cheek hurt him these days.

It had all happened too quickly, a series of savage punches coming one after the other, faster and faster, until your body was numbed and your mind was concussed.