Phil Rickman: The man in the moss

A cold midwinter fogbank lay on the Moss

It lay like a quilt on the black mattress of the peat, and nothing moved.

Not even the village schoolteacher standing on the promontory at the end of a ragged alley of graves where the churchyard seemed to overhang the bog's edge.

Damp January was clamped across the teacher's mouth and nose like a chloroform pad. He'd only been an hour out of bed, but the cold made him tired and the sight of the Moss only made him feel colder.

It was, as he'd explained to countless generations of pupils, the biggest surviving peatbog in the North of England, a gross product of violent death and centuries of decay… vast forests burned and torn down by the barbarian invaders… soaring greenery slashed and flattened and transformed by time into flat, black acres bounded by the hills and the moors.

The peat was dead. But, because of its acids, the peat had the power to preserve. Sometimes fragments of the ancient dead were found in there, from iron-hard limbs of trees to the arms and legs of corpses (which were taken away by the villagers and quietly buried).

Inside his long, deeply unfashionable overcoat, the teacher suddenly shivered. Not at the thought of the corpses, but because he was waiting for the piper.

The piper on the Moss.

The sad, swollen drone, the bleak keening of a lost soul, had reached him on a sudden, spiked breeze during his habitual morning walk before school.

And he'd stopped, disquieted. The air had been still, weighted by the fog; no breeze at all except for this single, quick breath. As if it had been awoken only to carry the message that the piper was on the Moss.

This worried him, for the piping was never heard in winter.

As a rule, it came on summer evenings, when the Moss was firm and springy and the sound would be serene, rippling along the air currents, mingling with bird cries… plaintive enough to soften the clouds.

But the piper did not come in winter.

Seeking reassurance, the teacher turned around, looking for the soft blue eye of the Beacon over the village. But the fog had closed the eye; he could not even make out the outline of the Norman church tower.

And while his back was turned, it began. A distant, drifting miasma of music. Notes which sounded ragged at first but seemed to reassemble somehow in the air and harmonize eerily with the atmosphere.

Cold music, then, with a razor-edge of bitterness.

And more. An anger and a seeping menace… a violence, unsuppressed, which thrust and jabbed at the fog, made it swirl and squirm.

Trembling suddenly, the schoolteacher backed away from it; it was as if the fog and the frozen stillness of winter had combined to amplify the sound. And the sound made vibrant, pulsing images in his head.

It was as though the sky had been slashed and the rain bled from the clouds.

As though the cry had been physically torn from the ruptured breast of a bird in flight.

Or the morning itself had been ripped open, exposing the black entrails of another kind of night.

And then the piper himself came out of the fog with the black bladder like a throbbing tumour under one arm, and the ground exploded around him, a sound as dark as the peat under his plodding boots.

A black noise. The piper in a black mood.

'Why can't you keep away?' the teacher whispered. 'Why do you have to haunt us?'

He pulled his hat over his ears to muffle the piping and hurried away from it, back towards the church until the beacon's ghostly disc emerged from the fog and he could see the vacant smile on the face of Our Sheila who fingered and flaunted her sex on the church porch.

He rushed past her and into the church, shutting the great oak door behind him, removing his hat and clamping it to his breast, staring up at the Winter Cross, all jagged branches, blunted thorns, holly and mistletoe.

He couldn't hear the pipes any more but felt he could taste the noise – that the oozing sound had entered his ears and been filtered down to the back of his throat where it came out tasting sourly of peat.

'Doesn't mean owt, does it?' he called out to the Winter Cross. 'We'll be all right, won't we? Nowt'll change?'

And nothing would change for more than fifteen winters of fog and damp. But fifteen years in the life of a Moss was barely a blink of the eye of God, and when the Moss revealed what it had preserved… then the changes would come, too many, too quickly and too horribly.

And the teacher, in retirement, feeling the kiss of the eternal night, would remember the first time the piper had appeared on the Moss in winter. Meanwhile, later that week, the fog would lift and there would be snow. then…

They were all around her at the stage door, like muggers in the night. She could smell the sweat and the beer… and a sour scent, like someone's rancid breath, squirting out of the darkness and straight to the back of her throat.

Coughing. Coughing at nothing. For as long as she could remember, hostility had occasionally come to her like this… like a single, piercing puff from a poisoned perfume spray.

But nothing there, really.

There were maybe twenty of them, but it was mostly OK, wasn't it? Mostly warm wishes and appreciation? Just never happened to her before. One of them had his jacket off, eyeing her. He was grinning and mumbling.

'Sign your what?' she said.

'Get used to it, lass.' Matt Castle grinning too. 'This is only the start of it. For you.'

Now the guy was rolling up a chequered shirt sleeve in the sub-zero night, handing her this thick black felt-tip pen. 'Oh, your arm.' She tried to smile, printing her name all the way up the soft, hairless underside of his forearm.

Moira Cairns.

Usually it would be just a handful of enthusiasts, harmless as train-spotters, chattering learnedly about the music and mainly to Matt. Dropping away as they headed for the car park. Shouting, See you again… stuff like that, mostly to Matt.

You should be loving this, hen, she told herself. Real fans. Can you believe that? You're a star.

Willie and Eric were loading the gear into Matt's old minibus, wanting to be away – more snow on the way, apparently. Two girls in leather jackets held open the back doors for the tea chest Willie kept his hand-drums in.

She felt it again, back of her throat. Nearly choked on it.

'Ta,' Eric said. Moira saw Little Willie sizing up the girls for future reference. Tonight, she knew, he was worried he wouldn't get home across the Moss, if the snow came down.

Matt got into the driving seat, Eric slammed the back doors and climbed in on the passenger side. One of the girls in leather – buxom piece – opened a rear side door for Willie. Willie rolled his eyes at her, gave her his most seductively innocent grin. 'See you sometime, eh?'

Moira's throat was burning up.

The girl said, 'Yeah, I'll be around.' She held on to the open door. 'Gina,' she said. The wire-caged light over the backstage exit threw a grille of shadows on to her pale, puffy cheeks.

Willie, five and a bit feet tall, liked his women big. 'Gina. Right," he said, 'I'll remember.'

The first sparse snowflakes hit the wet black asphalt and dissolved. Moira, tucking her long hair down her coat collar, smiled at the girl, put out a foot to climb into the van next to Willie.

And then the moment froze, like life's big projector had jammed.

Moira turned in time to see the girl's eyes harden, glazing over like a doll's eyes as she whirled – a big, clumsy dancer – and flung the door. Like the door was a wrecking hammer and Moira was the side of a condemned building.

Snarling, 'Traitor!' Discoloured, jagged teeth exposed. 'Fucking bitch!'