Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'Moira? Moira!'

No answer. The rain continued.

'… the fuck am I gonna do?'

'Nowt,' said Willie Wagstaff. 'Nowt we can do. It's in the lap of the gods.'

Ernie Dawber was with him, leaning on a walking stick. They moved under the porch with Macbeth, gazing out toward the Moss. Nobody spoke for a while, then he said, 'Hallowe'en's over now, right?'

'Samhain, lad,' said Ernie. 'Let's not cheapen it. In Bridelow we used to celebrate Samhain on November first, so you could say our day is just beginning.'

'Or not,' said Willie. 'As the case may be.'

'Or not,' Ernie agreed.

Macbeth said, 'How deep is the, uh, Moss?'

'Normally,' Ernie said, 'no more than a few feet in most places. Tonight? I wouldn't like to guess. I don't think we've ever had rain this hard, so consistently, for so long, have we, Willie?'

'Could it flood?'

'Soaks it up,' said Ernie. 'Like a sponge. It's rivers that flood, not bogs.'

'There's a river running through it, isn't there?'

'Not much of one.'

'What are those women doing?'

'We never ask, lad,' said Ernie.

'Ever thought of becoming a local tour guide?'

Ernie shrugged.

Macbeth said, 'What are those lights?'

'I can't see any lights, lad.'

'It's gone. It lasted no time at all. It was, like, a white ball of light. It seemed to come out the bog. Then it vanished.'

'Didn't see it. Did you, Willie?'

'OK,' Macbeth said. He was getting a little pissed with this old man. 'Tonight, Mr Dawber, it's my belief you seriously offered your life for this place. I'm not gonna say that's extreme, I don't have enough of a picture to make judgements. What I would like to know is… that, uh, compulsion you had… has that… passed?'

Seemed at first like Ernie Dawber was going to ignore the question and Macbeth could hardly have blamed him for that. Willie Wagstaff didn't look at the old man. Rain apart, there was no sound; Willie was not performing his customary drum solo.

Then Ernie Dawber took off his hat.

'It seems silly to me now,' he said in his slow, precise way. 'Worse, it seems cowardly. I went to see the doctor t'other night. Been feeling a bit… unsteady for some weeks. They'd done a bit of a scan. Found what was described as an inoperable cyst.' Ernie tapped his forehead. 'In here.'

Willie's chin jerked up. 'Eh?'

'Could pop off anytime, apparently.'

'Aw, hell,' Macbeth said. 'Forget I spoke.'

'No, no, lad, it was a valid question. I've been writing a new history of Bridelow, one that'll never be published. Chances are I'll not even finish the bugger anyroad but it's about all those things I didn't dare put into the proper book. Maybe it's the first proper book, who can say?'

'I'd like to read that,' Macbeth said. 'One day.'

'Don't count on it, lad. Anyroad, I thought, well… it's given you a good life, this little place. You and a lot of other folk. And now it's in trouble. Is there nowt you can do? And when you're on borrowed time, lads, it's surprising how you focus in directions nobody in their right minds'd ever contemplate.'

He chuckled. 'Or maybe it's not our right minds that we're in most of the time. Maybe, just for a short space of time, I entered my right mind. Now there's a cosmic sort of conundrum for you… Mungo.'

'Thanks,' Macbeth said. He put out his hand; Ernie took it, they shook. 'Now, about those lights…'

'Aye, lad. I saw the lights. And that's another conundrum. The Moss is no man's land. No man has cultivated it. No man has walked across it in true safety. What we see in and on and around the Moss doesn't answer to our rules. I've not answered your other question yet, though, have I?

Macbeth kept quiet. There was another ball of white light. It came and it went. In the semi-second it was there Macbeth saw a huge, awesome tree shape with branches that seemed to be reaching out for him. Involuntarily he shrank back into the porch.

'Is it past?' Ernie considered the question. 'No. If I thought it'd do any good, I'd be out there now offering my throat to the knife.'

He turned back toward the Moss. There was another light ball. Coming faster now.

'Quite frankly, lad,' said Ernie conversationally, 'I think it's too late.'

And in the chamber of the dead forgotten voices fill your head…

It said, hoarsely. Going to show me?

Moira tried to stay calm but couldn't sing any more. She was desperately cold.

This famous comb.

This time she had no comb to show him.

But you never leave yourself open like that. You never confess weakness to them.

'What will you give me if I show you the comb?'

Six pennorth o' chips.

Laughter rippling from the corners of the room. The lamplight was very weak now in her face.

Behind the light, a shadow.

They had told Chrissie to look out for a seat at the top of the church field. It wasn't hard. The church field was the piece of uncultivated spare land continuing down from the last of the graves to a kind of plateau above the Moss. Chrissie's torch found the seat on the very edge of the plateau.

What she hadn't expected was to find someone sitting on it.

Normally, this time of night, she'd have been scared to death of getting mugged. Somehow, holding this daft stone, that didn't seem a possibility.

She found herself sitting next to him on the wooden bench in the pouring rain. Someone had lent her a long, dark blue cagoule and she knew very little of her face would be visible.

It was like a dream. 'Hello, Roger,' she said.

He turned his head. His hair was flat and shiny, like tin. His beard dripped into the neck of his blackened Barbour.

He peered at her. He didn't seem to recognise her nose. 'Is it Chrissie?'

'It is indeed. Not a very nice night, Roger. One way and another.'

He was silent a long time. Then he said, 'I spoke to him.'

'Him?'

'Him.'

'That must have been nice for you both.'

'So it was worth it,' Roger said. 'In the end.'

'Was it? Was it really?'

'Oh, yes. I mean, it's knowledge, isn't it? Nothing is more valuable than knowledge.'

'What about love?' said Chrissie.

'I don't understand,' Roger said.

'No. I don't suppose you do. So what did he have to say to you?'

'Who?'

'Him.'

'Oh.' Roger stood up, drenched and shiny, and rubbed his knees as if they were stiff. 'Do you know, I can't really remember. I expect it'll come back to me'

He didn't look at her and began, seeming oblivious to the rain, to stroll away along the path which led back from the plateau's edge and wound down towards the Moss.

Chrissie waited until he'd gone from sight and then gently placed her stone beneath the seat and stood very quietly and said the words they'd told her to say. A curious thing.

Soon as Ernie Dawber admitted he too could see the balls of light, then they became clearer.

'It's a bit like ball-lightning,' Ernie said. 'There's been quite a lot of research, although the scientific establishment hasn't formally acknowledged it.'

Talking in his schoolmaster's voice, Macbeth thought, because it puts him on top of a situation he doesn't understand any more than the rest of us.

They do seem to be a manifestation of energy anomalies within the earth's magnetic field. Often occur, I'm told, on fault-lines.'

'What's that mean?'

'And there's also a theory that they can interact with human consciousness. So that when we perceive them we actually bring them into existence, if that isn't back-to-front logic. What do you say, Willie?'

I'm more worried about that tree-thing, Mr Dawber. Young Benjie calls it a dragon. Bog oak, I thought it were. Come up out of t'Moss, all of a sudden like. Got a wicked kind of…'

Macbeth said, 'There are people out there, around the tree.'