Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

And so the lad sat himself down in the rocking chair and slept through all the roaring and the screaming, and he dreamed of an old lady rather irritably bandaging his wounds, continually assuring him that she had better things to do.

I myself have seen those wrists. Now, still within a week, the scars are scarcely visible.

I am a schoolteacher and an historian, a man of facts. I make no comments upon this. The American, Mr Macbeth… Mungo, why not?… could so easily have followed the rest of us into the church and saved himself, but instead displayed exceptional and foolhardy courage.

I doubt if he himself knew whether it was Cathy or Miss Moira Cairns he thought he could save. But in his desperate race down the village street he must have felt himself to be close to the epicentre of an earthquake, drenched by the insidious black liquid, with cobs of semi-solid peat falling like bombs all around him and the crackling roar of collapsing buildings on the western side.

Eventually, the young man reached The Man I'th Moss, and must have been horrified by what he found.

For the pub began with the second storey, its ground floor buried under a black avalanche, the lantern over the front door half submerged but still eerily alight.

Mungo knew the peat would be far too deep to enable him to reach the rear of the building in the normal way, so he waded out to the boundary wall – now no more than a foot above the surface – clambered on to it and moved perilously, like a tightrope walker, around the forecourt until he reached the yard at the rear, at the end of which was the remains of the barn which had been used by Matt Castle for his music.

An ante-room to hell.

… Oh, Jesus… the fuck am I gonna do? I can't handle this. There's nobody alive here. There… is… nobody… alive.

Clawing at his eyes, filling up with the black shit.

And what if I find her body? You expect me to deal with that, Duchess? You sent me down to here to bring her body back, that it? Well, fuck you. Duchess, f…

Hold it.

Voices. Close up.

Maybe these were echoes of voices from before the deluge, peat preserving the last blocked screams of the dying.

'Drop it. Darling… simply drop it. It'll pull you down. Drop the stone – listen to me, now – drop the stone and wade away because – believe this – another four or five paces and you'll be in over your head, and it won't matter. Drop the stone and back away now and save yourself. All you can do, m'dear.'

'Get stuffed!'

Cathy.

Macbeth saw that after the rain, after the blast, there was a lightness in the sky, still night but somehow drained of darkness. A phoney dawn, bringing things and people into visibility.

Cathy was waist-deep in the peat, her fine, fair hair gummed to her skull. She was looking up, but not at the rained-out sky.

Above her, balanced upon a fallen roof-spar, an apparition glowing white, or so it seemed, undamaged by the night or the storm of peat, was the writer, John Peveril Stanage.

Macbeth crouched on his wall.

It was clear that Stanage knew exactly why Cathy was holding, above the level of the peat, a single grey boulder, the kind from which these tough drystone walls had been constructed.

And it was clear also that he believed – part of the psychological mesh he'd helped weave, the mystical dynamic he'd set in motion long ago – that if this boulder should be put in place, in some particular place, he'd be able to proceed no further in the direction of Bridelow.

He believed this.

In the air, a glimmering, light on metal.

Stanage had hold of a length – five feet or so – of copper pipe.

This was not mystical.

Even as Macbeth struggled to his feet, the pipe began to swing.

'No!'

As he fell from the wall, the pipe smashed into Cathy.

Macbeth rolled into three feet of liquid crud and came up like a sheep out of the dip, found it hard to stand upright, the stuff up around his waist and it was so goddamn heavy, filling up the pockets of his slicker; he shrugged out of the slicker, stood there, breathing like a steam engine, black shit soaking into his fucking useless Bloomingdale menswear department cashmere sweater.

'Cathy… where the f…?'

'Who are you?' said Stanage.

Macbeth scraped peat out of his eyes. 'It doesn't matter,' he said.

He heard Cathy spluttering beside him, glanced briefly at her – something oozing out the side of her head, something that wasn't peat. He pushed himself in front of her, slime slurping down the front of his pants; cold as hell.

'Cathy, just do as he says and get outa here, willya."

Cathy's hands came out of the mire with a kind of sucking sound and they were still clutching the grey stone. He saw her grinning, small white teeth in a small blackened face.

'Go!' Macbeth screamed. 'Get the fuck outa here!'

He heard the wafting of the copper pipe through the moist air and he threw himself forward and met it with his body, hard into the chest, and his skin was so cold and numb that if it cracked a rib, or maybe two, he didn't even feel it.

He wrenched hard on the pipe and heard a grunt and then Stanage was tumbling from the end of his roofspar and, breaking the surface of the Moss with a splat, and Macbeth went under. And when he came up, the peat felt a whole lot colder and he couldn't even cough it out of his lungs because of the long fingers like a wire garotte around his throat.

From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished): Mungo Macbeth having instructed her, in his distressingly restricted New York parlance, to remove herself, Cathy realized she had little choice but to do as he said. The girl cannot swim – even if anyone could in liquid of this consistency and temperature – and her only hope was to get help.

You must remember that Cathy was in a state of some bewilderment; she had not seen the bog burst, only heard the thunder roar, and, like most of us, could have had no concept of the scale of the devastation.

But the village must have looked very different, shockingly so, with the converted gaslamps on one side of the street protruding no more than a few feet from the murky surface of what had now become an extension of the Moss.

And the poor girl must have been appalled by the sight of the collapsed cottages, the telephone box protruding from the peat like a buoy and the Post Office in ruins behind it.

She waded frantically back to the wall, placed the grey stone on top, hauled herself up after it and sat there a while, shattered by what she had seen and half-stunned by the blow from the pipe which had landed on her shoulder and rebounded on to the side of her head. She knew there was blood there, mingling with the rivulets of peatwater from her hair, but she did not touch the wound, preferring to remain ignorant of its extent and severity so long as she could function.

Cathy tells me – rather ashamed – that her mind at this point had simply blanked out Mungo Macbeth and what might be happening to him at the cold hands of John Peveril Stanage. She sat on the wall, with the grey stone on her knees. Beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond fatigue, beyond thought… even beyond prayer.

And when all feeling had gone, apart from a sense of failure and despair, something came to her.

Now…

Problems.

It is not my place to be credulous and speak of 'vision'. Nor would I wish to use the clinically dismissive term 'hallucination'.

Of course, I have read the stories, the 'eyewitness testimony', from Lourdes to Fatima to Knock and Walsingham, and occasionally I have been impressed and heartened but most times left cold and more than a little sceptical.

I have heard of similar eyewitness reports from the edge of bubbling streams in the Peak District of Derbyshire and – yes – from our own Holy Well above Bridelow. And these have not been chronicled at all, for, in the view of devout Roman Catholics, Our Lady is hardly considered to be the same figure as Their 'lady', although both have been 'seen' to shine with a silvery aureole, as of the moon rather than the sun.