Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

The graveyard packed like a dark fairground. But a circle of space at the top, where the moor looms above the rectangular hole in the soil, which, when the lamplight flares, is like the opening of a shaft.

Alfred Beckett, verger and organist, has lit a metal paraffin lantern which he holds up on a pole, hanging it over the grave as Hans completes the burial rite, his own version, some of it turned about, but all the old lines there.

'Man born of woman hath but a short time…'

As the phrases fade, like a curlew it begins.

The piping.

Ernie gasps, muffling his mouth with a leather-gloved hand, clutching a Victorian marble cross for support. A hush enclosing the churchyard as the cold and homeless notes roam the air.

He straightens up against the cross, brushing in relief at his overcoat. It's the lad. Dic. Matt's coffin on the ground at the edge of the grave and Dic standing by it, the Pennine Pipes under his arm and the wilderness music swirling up into the cold.

Only the lad. For just a few seconds…

Ernie moving closer. The lad plays well. His dad'd be proud. Tries to see Lottie's face, but her head's turned away.

Someone weeping behind him.

Can't see the coffin any more. The four bearers lined up on either side of Dic, concealing the grave. Lamplight shows him the fingers of Willie Wagstaff's left hand starting to move against his thigh, a slow beat, in time with the piped lament.

Ernie finds he's standing next to the lamp-bearer, Alf Beckett, when somebody – likely a woman – whispers, 'Put it out, Alf.'

'Eh?'

'Put lamp out.'

Silently, Alf Beckett lowers the pole to the ground, unhooks the lantern, lays it on the grass at his feet, shuffling around to put himself in front of it so that no light is cast into the grave.

'That do?'

'Fine. Ta, lad.'

Oh, hell.

Quite soon, behind the pipes, there's a scraping and a scuffling on the ground, like mice or rats. Ernie tries to shut it out. He's not supposed to hear this. He looks up, away from it, and the only face he can see clearly is the Rector's, upturned to the sky, to what light remains.

The Rector also knows he is not supposed to hear or to see. He has his eyes tightly closed.

'Get it over with,' Ernie hisses. 'Get it bloody done!'

Raises his eyes above the little graveside scrum but doesn't close them. Sees the black shapes of the sparse trees on the edge of the churchyard, where it meets the moor. The trees trembling. Has this withering, shrivelling sense of something blowing towards them, off the moor, off the Moss.

Irrational. His nerves. Like the night when he was scared the Moss would swallow the sun and it would never come up again.

Come on, settle down, calm yourself, there's nowt you can do except keep your mouth shut and your eyes averted. Nowt here for the Book of Bridelow.

Dic keeps on piping, the same melancholy tune, over and over again, but erratic now, off-key; he's getting tired… but the noises behind him go on, the scuffling on the ground, and now a jarring creak and an intake of breath.

And then all hell…

'Stop! Let me through!'

Rough hands thrusting Ernie aside.

'Mr Beckett, where's the lamp? Stand back, will you. Stand back, I said, or somebody… will… get… hurt.'

The lantern snatched up, its gassy-white flame slanting, flaring in the furious eyes of the Rev. Joel Beard, smoke rolling from the funnel.

Hands grab at him to hold him back from the grave, but Joel, snarling, is big and fuelled-up with rage, the metal cross swinging as his cassocked chest swells and his elbows slam back.

The lamp flies up into the night and Joel catches it by its base as it falls, pushing Alf Beckett so that Alf spins sideways into Dic Castle and the Pennine Pipes make a squirming, ruptured noise, subsiding into empty, impotent blowing and wheezing.

The Rev. Joel Beard steps to where the coffin of Matt Castle lies at the grave's edge, and he lifts the lantern high.

She was not among those weeping when the Pennine Pipes began.

It got to her in other ways…

Hanging back behind the crowd, still as the headstones around her, Moira felt confused, puzzled… the plucking at something inside her, starting this small, familiar tingle in her lower abdomen.

OK, she would have known anyway that it wasn't Matt she could hear, there wasn't the same lilting, light-as-air technique, the inimitable agility. Would have been no mistaking that.

And yet…

The Roman numerals on the church clock, lit-up, said 5.30. It would be dark at 5.30 this time of year. But the darkness had the icy, velvet quality of midnight, and whoever had organized this service had known it was going to end like this.

Why?

Sure as hell was the strangest funeral she'd ever been to, the minister and the principal mourners in a distant lamplit huddle, the freezing air over the entire churchyard somehow electric with this almost feverish, dreamlike tension, and the piping going on and on and on, like in a time-loop… so that you wound up mentally pinching yourself, asking, is this real?

Like, where am I? Did I drive across these unknown hills into some dream dimension?

Needing at last to break through, maybe talk to someone, hear the sound of her own voice, anybody's voice, she moved closer, symbolically tossing back the hood of her cloak… at the moment the lantern went down.

She saw the big shapes of the trees at the end of the churchyard. Below them, shadows intertwined. The amorphous tableau at the top of the small rise where Matt's grave was to be. From whence came the insistent, never-ending piping but no sounds of a funeral service, no suggestion of anyone leading the proceedings.

Only – under the pipes, as she drew close – a whispering, as if there was more than one person whispering but they weren't listening to each other, the voices rustling together like wind-dried leaves.

And she caught a passing perfume, a sick, sad smell.

Then, to her left, a small commotion. An expulsion of breath from a yard or so away, a dragging on her cloak and she was almost pulled down.

'Stop!' A man's voice, strong, authoritarian. 'Let me through': For just a second everything froze, and then there was this instinctive communal resistance, a tightening of the clutch of bodies around her. The whispering intensified, new urgency in it, the dead leaves really crackling now.

A scrabbling now, by her feet; some guy had been pushed over, rolled on to the cloak. He found his feet, she reclaimed the cloak. Somewhere nearby there was a struggle going on.

She didn't move. The lamp appeared again, bouncing wildly in the air, like some will-o'-the-wisp thing. In the spinning light she got a split-second picture of… must be Matt's boy, Dic Castle, playing the pipes, the bag trapped in an elbow, his face red with effort, and Willie Wagstaff next to Dic, Willie's eyes flitting anxiously, from side to side, and she could almost feel the rhythm of the little guy's famously impressionable fingers in her head, thud, thud…

Thud, thud… And then the oil-lamp went up again, was held steady.

And Moira looked down, oh, Jesus, into Matt Castle's face framed in quilted white.

The smell. The perfume of the dead. The coffin lid off. His hair gone. Grave-dirt spilled on his closed eyes.

The way you never want to see them, the way you can't bear to remember them. And still you can't turn away your head; it won't move.

What have they done…?

Moira began to shiver. She closed her eyes, and this was worse, like waking up in the fast lane, her senses lurching out of control, cracked images oscillating in the steamy half-light between perceived reality and illusion, the place where the whispers went.