Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Cathy looked serious, as she often did these days, as if she'd suddenly decided it was time to shoulder the full responsibility of being an adult, as distinct from a student.

'No,' she said. 'Not necessarily.'

'What do you…?' Hans looked puzzled. Then he said, 'Oh. That.'

'It's been exaggerated a lot, of course, but that doesn't mean it doesn't go on, Pop.'

'You're beginning to sound like Joel Beard.'

'Oh, I don't think so.'

'Well,' said Hans, 'if there really is a possibility of something of that nature, then he should tell the police, shouldn't he? But where's his evidence? His wife thought she heard a baby crying. As he said, it could have been any one of a dozen animals, or the wind or…'

Cathy said, 'A friend of mine at college did a study of so-called ritual child abuse. What it amounts to, in most of the cases which have been proved, is that the ritual bits – the devil masks and the candles and so on – are there to support the abuse clement. Simply to scare the children into submission. So in most cases we're not talking about actual Devil worship…'

'Just extreme evil,' Hans said. 'Where's the difference exactly?'

'I'm not an expert,' Cathy said, 'but I rather think there is a difference.' She grinned slyly. 'I think it's something Ma Wagstaff could explain to you if you caught her in the right mood.'

Cheeky little madam. Hans smiled. 'I'm the accredited holy man in these parts, in case you'd forgotten. Anyway, why didn't young Sam go to Ma Wagstaff for advice?'

'Because he hasn't lived around here very long. He doesn't know the way things operate yet.'

How they changed. There'd been a time, not so long ago, when Cathy had been dismissive, to say the least, of Ma Wagstaff and all she stood for.

'And you do, do you?' Hans said. 'You know how things operate.'

'I'm getting an inkling.'

'Perhaps we should discuss this sometime.'

'I don't think so,' Cathy said.

Hans frowned.

'I don't think words can really pin it down,' she said. Or that we should try to.'

She looked at him blandly. All open-faced and pain-free. Twenty-three years old, a light-haired, plain-faced girl – even Hans had to admit she was no great beauty. However, there was a knowingness about her that he hadn't been aware of before.

He felt old. Suddenly she was starting to look wiser than he felt. How they changed. Every time they came home from University they'd grown stronger and more alien. Catherine studying archaeology at Oxford and Barney, her twin (who he'd rather imagined would follow him into the Church) at the London School of Economics and now researching for a prominent Conservative MP – Barney, the one-time Young Socialist.

'Have you got a boyfriend, Cathy?' he asked suddenly.

'Why do you ask?'

'Because I'm your only surviving parent.'

Her nose twitched mischievously. 'And you'd got around to wondering if I was gay, I suppose.'

He felt his eyes widening. Was this indeed what he'd been wondering? One of those forbidding, shapeless lumps that lay in the mental silt.

Cathy swivelled suddenly on the piano stool, lifted up the wooden lid to expose the keys, and began to beat out the opening bars of 'Jerusalem'.

'I don't think I'm queer,' she said, addressing the keys. 'But some people find me a bit strange.' The frosted peat was quite firm where he walked. Didn't even need his wellies today.

Fifty yards out, Willie stopped.

Bog oak, he told himself, that's all. Probably passed it hundreds of times, but they get turned around by the wind, bits break off.

The Moss looked like a dark sea sometimes. You came down from the village, across the road, and it was like chambering over the rocks to get to the bay. That was on a misty day, when the Moss stretched quickly to the horizon. But on a bright morning, like now, you could see how the bog actually sloped gently upwards, then more steeply towards the mountains, Kinder Scout in the distance.

On a beach there was driftwood. In a moss, bog oak, great chunks of blackened wood coughed up by the peat. Made good, strong furniture.

Benjie wouldn't cross the road to the Moss, but The Chief had followed Willie, reluctantly, big paws stepping delicately over the black pools at the edge, where it nearly met the tarmac.

Now fifty yards into the Moss, The Chief stopped too and made a noise at the back of his throat that was half-growl and half-whine…

'Bog oak,' Willie said to the dog. 'You never seen bog oak before?

Point was, though, he personally had never seen owt like this before. The size of it. The fact that it had suddenly appeared in a place where there were no trees, save a few tatty corpses.

He walked up by the side of it, and its shape began to change, but it still didn't make you think of anything scarier than half an oak tree with its branches all crushed up and twisted.

But when he got around it, looking back through the branches towards the village, this was when his breath got jammed up in his throat, when he felt like he was swallowing half a brick.

Willie backed off to where the dog was crouching and snarling, his black lips curled back over his teeth. 'All right, Chief,' Willie said hoarsely.

He looked back to where Benjie stood, forlorn in his red tracksuit.

'You're going t'ave to explain this,' Willie told himself, his right hand building up a rhythm on his hip pocket where there was a bunch of keys. 'Lad's countin' on you. Better come up wi' summat a bit quick.'

He straightened up.

'Bog oak.'

He'd stick to his story. The fact that he'd never seen bog oak like this before was his problem. Just had to make it sound convincing for the lad.

Willie marched boldly up to the thing, grabbed hold of the end of one of its branches to snap it off, about nine inches of it. 'Strewth!' It was like trying to snap a crowbar. It came off though, all at once. 'Go on,' he said to The Chief. 'Fetch it.'

And he threw it as hard as he could, glad to get it out of his hand if truth were told. It felt cold and hard, just like iron or stone. But it was wood all right, nowt fossilized about it, too light – he'd hurled it into the wind and it landed barely ten feet away.

'Well, go on then!' Bloody hell, he'd thrown dozens of sticks for this dog over the years.

The Chief didn't move; the thick fur on the back of his neck was flattened, his eyes were dull and wary, his tail between his legs.

'You soft bugger,' Willie said.

What this was, the dog was close to Benjie, they'd grown up side by side. Only natural he'd picked up on the kid's fear. Aye, Willie thought, and it'd've put the shits up me too, at his age.

Then he thought, admitting it to himself, What do you mean, at his age…?

He tried to look at the thing dispassionately. It was amazing, like a work of art, like bloody sculpture.

But it didn't make him think of a dragon. Dragons were from fairy tales. More than that, dragons were animals. All right, they had wings and long scaly tails, but they were animals and there was nowt scary about animals.

Willie wanted to back off further, until he couldn't make out the details. He wanted to crouch down at a safe distance and growl at it like The Chief.

Basically he didn't want to see it any more, wished he'd never seen it at all because it was the kind of shape that came up in your dreams. This was stupid, but there was no getting round it.

The tangle of branches wrapped round, woven into each other like pipes and tubes, like a human being wearing its intestines on the outside.

And out of all this, the head rearing up on a twisted, scabby neck, and the head was as black as, as… as peat. It had holes for eyes, with the daylight shining through, and a jagged, widely grinning mouth, and on either side of the head were large knobbly horns.