Horror begets horror. Seldom do instances of demoniacal dread possess the common courtesy to inflict themselves upon us in isolation. Rather, they enter our world accompanied by all manner of nighted terrors and hellish abnormalities. What at first appears to be a unique and singular event leads down only to further and deeper abysses and, if one is unfortunate enough in their encounter, rare glimpses into that great outside, where slumbering quiescent spheres occasionally awaken long enough to collide forcibly and terribly with our own tiny island of cosmic stability. One such event, and the subsequent horrid chain that would follow in its wake, would briefly enter my life in the early days of the ineffable winter of 1971. At that time, I was serving as a local constable in the village of Barton, Cheshire, having recently transferred there from my position in Manchester. I admit freely that my tenure in the police force was not the first choice I had in mind for a career. Early in my studies, I had set my heart upon pursuing the romantic, yet financially unstable, life of a writer, though an unplanned pregnancy and subsequent swift marriage had quickly dispelled any notions I may have entertained at pursuing that particular endeavor, at least in a professional capacity.
I cannot say exactly what rational led me to walk boldly into the Salford Central Police Headquarters and make enquiries as to their recruitment policies. I vaguely remember an aunt of mine making a comment about my height when I was around 15 years of age, “You’ll make a fine policeman if you continue growing at that rate,” she had said, whilst also mentioning that my grandfather and several other male relatives had also possessed a great tallness and broad stature. My father and both of my grandfathers had served in the armed forces, and I did consider following in their footsteps for a brief time. I ultimately decided against this, however, recalling the terrible lassitude and black moods that would, on occasions, grip my father after he returned from fighting in Europe. Both of my maternal and paternal grandfathers had died young fighting on the Western Front, and I had no desire to follow in their wake. Peace had of course returned once the jerries had been defeated, but there were numerous concerns facing Britain and her allies in the aftermath of World War Two. Chief among them were the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, as well as the specter of nuclear conflagration that would rise up whenever tensions between the West and the Soviet Union flared. Ultimately, I decided that the military was not for me, though I must have still possessed a strong desire to do something to serve Queen and country, now that my dreams of being a writer had been cruelly dashed upon the jagged rocks of necessity.
In those days, the criteria for joining the police force were far less academically stringent than they are today, though there were physical considerations in place that we would not dream of enforcing now. Back then, the height requirement was important, with men of 5 foot 10 inches possessing the minimum acceptable stature for recruitment. At 6’2, I more than qualified for this particular prerequisite. My general fitness was also above that of most young men my age, largely due to my strictness of diet, an avoidance to both alcohol and cigarettes, and my newfound interest in the martial arts. I therefore found the physical aspects of training to be relatively tame, though I struggled with some of the technical requirements, especially the newly integrated computer training. My aptitude for writing, it appeared, was wholly confined to the fantastical, rather than the scientific.
When all was said and done, I had passed my training with no concerns or issues and found myself a fresh-faced constable of the Manchester Police Force. The annual salary of £1025 was somewhat lower than that of a manual laborer, but much higher than all the combined fees I had ever earned through my writing. By the time I had finished training, my son, Thomas, had been born and the necessities of providing for my new family were very much in the forefront of my mind, so much so that it would be many years before I attempted to pen another piece of prose. Fortunately, I found that policing was very much to my liking, and although I did not write a full story, my encounters with Manchester’s criminal community often fired up my imagination and I dotted down dozens of notes and synopses to explore for any future narratives I may decide to tackle. It was difficult to ignore the urge to embellish my reports, and I was often scolded by my sergeant for adding unnecessary details to my paperwork or offering vague conjectures which had no place in an official police document. I will not lie, those early days were tough, both physically and emotionally. I will never forget seeing my first dead body, that of a transient who had slipped into the Rochdale Canal, presumably inebriated, and sadly drowned. He was in the water for a least a week, and I and my fellow bobbies had to work in tandem to heave his bloated, paled corpse out of the brown waters. I will never forget his wrinkled, sagging flesh, bulging eyes, and awful charnel stench, all of which has stayed with me for decades.
Thankfully, most of the crimes I dealt with were matters of petty theft, many of them spurred on by the rampant drug abuse and gang violence that was on the rise throughout the Northwest. My time patrolling the streets of Salford, Trafford, and Bury were to be short lived, however, as around ten months into my career, I got the notice of a statutory transfer to rural Cheshire. The government planned restructure of the force called for a greater presence in the small villages and towns of Britain, while a wide recruitment drive was put in place for the larger metropoles. I can’t say with honesty that I balked at the transfer, Manchester was, as I have said, quickly becoming a place where drug and gun crime were on the rise and the thought of patrolling a small rural village as opposed to the oppressive and industrial greyness of the Rainy City was quite welcomed. I quickly learned that my new post was to be Barton, a small village some fifty miles south of Manchester. Built atop a large sloping hill and not too far from the River Weaver, the village had once been little more than a collection of farms with a population of around 200 people but had rapidly expanded with the establishment of the Brunner Mond Chemical Company in the late 19th century. The influx of available jobs provided by the chemical plant transformed the village and Barton suddenly grew in importance. The village quickly became a coveted place to buy a home and start a family, and by the time I arrived the population had swollen to around 4,000.
I will never forget the drive I made with Susan and Thomas on the first day I arrived at the village. Though the drive was less than an hour, we had set off very early to avoid traffic and as we made our way through the lonely Altrincham roads the vast and lonely ruralness of the Cheshire countryside quickly eclipsed the industrial bleakness we had become accustomed to. Green fields, verdant and mist covered, appeared to be ubiquitous in the region, as did ancient and looming forests. Despite the greenery and the brisk, clean air however, I quickly found myself missing the throngs, paved streets and large shopping centres of Manchester. There was something so singularly loathsome and haunting about those forests and fields, and I could not shake the impression that in their oppressive isolation and endless gloominess there lay the possibility for all manner of wickedness.
Susan, on the other hand, greatly appreciated the countryside. She had, after all, been born and raised in Buckly, a rural town situated across the Welsh border, and delighted in the abundance of wildlife, the likes of which were rarely, if ever, seen in Manchester. She pointed out a menagerie of birds and beasts as we made the drive, hares, kestrels, rooks, a large badger that briefly appeared before shambling off into a nearby hedge. She even spied a buzzard that swooped in low over the car before perching on a nearby emaciated oak tree, though in my concentration on the road, I sadly missed it. By the time we reached the bottom of Barton Hill, I was growing apprehensive. Only natural, I reasoned, given that I was about to start a new position in a town whose population was wholly unfamiliar and alien to me. We passed by a large pub, the Red Lion, as we rounded the inclining bend and passed over the bridge that lay atop the canal. Almost immediately I spied the local police station on the right, perched as it was towards the end of Church Road. It was an impressive Edwardian construction, with a red brick exterior, large bay windows, and pointed gable roof. I just made out the station sign, a blue lantern, with Barton Police written on the side as we passed by and I excitedly pointed it out to Susan, who missed it, as she was currently focused upon a small gathering of magpies on a nearby roof.
Our home, Townfield Lane, was not too far from the station, and I was relieved to see that the removal van, resplendent with all of our earthly possessions, had arrived ahead of us. The two labourers were busy negotiating on how best to squeeze our large oak wardrobe though the front door of our terraced home as we pulled up.
“They’re going to scuff that!” Susan exclaimed, almost leaping out of the car before it had stopped. “Damn it Will, if they so much as scratch that wardrobe!”
I chuckled, knowing that the two workmen were about to have a ferocious new foreman in the form of my wife.
“I’ll head down to the station,” I said, getting out of the car. “I could do with stretching my legs, plus I told Sergeant Crawford I would pop my head in and say hello.”
“What, now?” She asked, briefly turning her disapproving look from the labourers and focusing it on me. “But, we have so much to do, plus you said you were going to help me with dinner.”
“I will, I promise.” I said with a smile. “I spied a butchers on the way up here, once I’m done at the station, I’ll pop in and get us a couple of steaks.”
She turned her head to glare once more at the workmen, who had been successful in their task and were quickly disappearing over the threshold.
“Fine.” She replied, opening the back door of the car and retrieving Thomas. “Just make sure you’re back quickly. Oh, and if you can, see if you can pick up some milk, I thought I saw a corner shop near, what’s it called, Lydyett Lane.”
“Don’t worry, ” I said. “I think there’s another shop just down the road, opposite the school. I’ll be back before you know it.”
I was already halfway across the street as I shouted my reply and heading in what I thought was the direction of Church Road. I quickly learned, however, that I had miscalculated and found myself near a large, open recreation ground, complete with a slide, some swings, and a roundabout. This being a Saturday morning, the field was already alive with several groups of children, most playing on the swings, with a small group of boys kicking around a football. I stopped briefly, my instincts as a policeman kicking in as I quickly spied the grounds for any suspicious activity that would be a danger to the children, but seeing nothing untoward, I retraced my steps before finally finding the entrance to Church Road. The tiny narrow street was in fact a one way only lane, as the various signposts denoted, meaning that traffic was only permitted to travel down towards Runcorn Road where we had entered Barton a few minutes ago, though to my shock, a blue Morris Minor sped towards me in the wrong direction as I walked down the street. I waved my arms at the driver, an elderly man, in a gesture that feebly attempted to convey that he was going the wrong way, but he either ignored me or simply didn’t see my efforts. As he passed by, I could make out the telltale white “dog collar” of a vicar peeking out over his green woolen jumper. Shaking my head in disbelief, I made a mental note of the car’s registration plate, before continuing on the station.
The building was even more impressive up close, standing as it did proudly above the nearby terraced houses. Behind the station, there was also a small graveyard and an adjacent church, no doubt this was where the inattentive vicar had just come from. I’ve never been a particularly pious man, but I thought it best to introduce myself to him at some point, not only to discuss his driving habits, but as a fellow Barton resident invested in the wellbeing of our community. The door to the station was closed, but unlocked, and as I entered I could see that the reception was unattended.
“Hello.” I called out. The stone floor and high ceiling working in tandem to create a booming echo that amplified my speech. I took a few steps forward, my eyes darting around the lobby and taking in the details. A black door to my left had a small metal plaque nailed to its surface with the words “Interview Room”, while a similar door further down simply read “Office”. Making my way closer to the reception I couldn’t help but notice the omnipresence of cobwebs anchored to the corners of the ceiling. They looked ancient, swollen and puffed up with what must be decades of dust. A few of them still had their vampiric tenants nestled inside, glaring at me, I fancied, with their numerous dark eyes. The floor didn’t fare much better, with thick layers of dust that stirred up with each footstep, causing stagnant, moldy particles to rise up and clog my nostrils.
“Hello,” I called out once more. “Sergeant Crawford, are you there sir?”
This time, in response to my inquiry, a large, bearded man appeared from the left of the reception desk. He was tall, taller even than me, with a large round stomach that was just barely contained by the tightness of his uniform. His hair was short and black, but with a few patches of silver at the temples. His beard caught me off guard, it was against regulations to be unshaven in the police force at that time, but I soon learned that Sergeant Paul Crawford was an unconventional man in many singular respects.
“Yes?” He asked, indignantly.
“I’m William West, I believe you’re expecting me.” I produced my police identification and transfer papers and passed them to him through the gap in the glass that separated the reception from the rest of the lobby.
He picked it up and squinted as he drew it closer to his face.
“William West?” He said, looking over the papers and directly at me. “You sound like a cartoon character.”
“ I can assure you I’m real.” I smiled. “Flesh and blood.”
“Well obviously.” He retorted, handing the card back to me. “You best come on through, I’ll show you around the place.”
He left the desk and unlocked the adjoining door, beckoning me in with a casual wave. He then proceeded to languidly give me a tour of the station. Apart from the reception, office, and interview room, there was also a kitchen and three holding cells located on the ground floor. The second floor was mostly used for storage, as the large amounts of dust covered boxes, filing cabinets, and desks stacked high with various yellowed papers attested. There was also a bathroom and changing room on the second floor, with a solitary locker for storage. It was a far cry from the much larger station I was used to in Salford, but it had a charm to it that I found myself appreciating in time.
Returning to the reception, my host turned to me saying: “Right, I’ll get the kettle on then,” before vanishing briefly into the adjacent kitchen. He returned a few moments later with a tray, upon which sat a teapot, two cups, and a small plate stacked high with an impressive variety of biscuits. He wasted no time in pouring us each a cup, before grabbing a small handful of said biscuits which he periodically dunked into his tea. We must have sat there for at least four hours, during which time he did his best to bring me up to speed on Barton and its various peculiarities.
Crawford had been born in Barton and spent his entire 48 years in the village. Prior to joining the force, he had been a postman, and as such had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the village. He knew every nook and cranny of the place, which admittedly was quite a rabbit warren, considering how many of its narrow streets and lanes crisscrossed and intersected with each other. He made sure to point out all the best short cuts in the village, especially those that led to the various pubs and stores. I also got the impression that he had been something of a miscreant and tearaway in his youth, as his various stories of childhood misadventures attested to. This too had assisted him in his capacity as a police officer, as having once been on the wrong side of the law, he had developed a sixth sense for sniffing out trouble.
“We don’t get a lot of mither ‘round here.” He started, his mouth half-filled with a custard cream. “In fact, I’m surprised they even sent you. Not that I’m complaining mind, can get a bit boring sitting here on your own. There used to be two of us, me and old Brookes, but he left the force and took early retirement a while ago, can’t say I blame him. Some madman attacked us with a spade some years back, did a good number on the old fella. He was never same after that, and went to live with his sister in Weaverham, not heard from him in a long while. Look here.” He parted his black hair on the left side of his head, revealing a long, pinkish-white scar about six inches long. “This is where he got me, damn lunatic.”
“I’m surprised you get that kind of trouble here.” I said, taking a sip of my tea.
“Oh, you’d be surprised.” He replied ominously. Barton is a quiet place, no doubt about that, but quiet doesn’t mean safe. There’s a place, up on Meadow Drive, Byron House, some kind of asylum, maybe you’ve seen it already?”
I shook my head, “No I haven’t. You say it’s an asylum?”
“Aye, something like that, I don’t know what you’d call it nowadays, a mental facility I guess. We do get called out there from time to time, but that’s not happened for a while. The madman who attacked us ended up there, but he escaped, murdered one of the doctors on the way out, poor fellow.”
“Did you catch him?” I asked, suddenly enthralled by the story, which sounded so similar to the kinds of weird fiction tales I would read in my spare time.
“I didn’t, no. Never saw hide or hair of him, up and vanished he did. We had ourselves a bit of a manhunt, officers from all over Cheshire were called in, but they never found him. Good riddance I say, hopefully he fell into the Weaver.”
“You don’t mean that,” I chuckled.
“I bloody do!” He replied, chuckling himself.
During the next several hours, he filled me in on many of Barton’s peculiarities. The Gunner’s Clough, he had said, was a large patch of woodland towards the back of the village, just past the larger of the two graveyards. That is where the madman had attacked him and Brookes, after they had caught him grave robbing. The Gunner’s Clough in particular appeared to be some kind of nexus, around which most of Barton’s strangeness appeared to converge. Crawford told me about all manner of local folklore and legend surrounding the place, how it was ill advised to be caught out amongst the wych elm trees on certain nights of the year, and how, unaccountably, there were several crumbling and dilapidated cottages half sunk into the mud clogged ground around the feeble stream that trickled across the forest.
And so, our conversation continued. By the time he had finished giving me a history of the village, the sky was already growing dark, and I thanked him for the tea and his advice.
“Well, I’ll see you Monday morning.” He said. “We’ll find a way to divvy up the shifts between us. We’ll both be on call 24 hours, but occasionally you’ll have to do a night shift by yourself. I’ll take my share of course, but you’ll need to do likewise.” I nodded, shaking his hand and thanking him for the tea and advice.
I returned home to Susan and Thomas, after picking up the steaks and milk as I had promised. She had already organised the house into an acceptable state, and I spent the rest of the weekend performing minor but necessary, chores around our new home and garden. Monday morning came around swiftly and before I knew it my first week had already passed me by. The shift in pace was jarring at first, days passed by with little of note happening in the village. I casually mentioned my encounter with the vicar and Crawford simply laughed, explaining that the local clergyman was prone to doing as he pleased in regard to observing the highway code. “He answers to a higher authority than us.” He had chuckled. “I pulled him over once, drunk as a skunk he was. He’s not a bad sort, so I let him off with a warning, but if I catch him again, I’ll take him in.”
I cannot say that anything distinctive happened during those early weeks. At the time, we had yet to receive one of the new patrol cars, dubbed “Pandas” by the British press, that were being rolled out to the police force and had to make do with patrols performed on foot or by bicycle. I preferred the former, whereas Crawford had a preference for the bicycle, which often strained under his vast bulk on the occasions I would see him peddling around the village. There was little to trouble us then, the occasional act of theft, some graffiti, a fight or two outside the Barn Owl pub on a Friday night, certainly nothing one could describe as sinister or troubling. I came to know a great deal of Barton’s residents in no time, especially those who had a reputation for causing mischief.
On one occasion, incidentally during the dark hours of my first night shift, I received a complaint about strange noises coming from the Gunner’s Clough. The complainant, an elderly woman named Caroline Duncalf, reported hearing several loud bangs coming from the woodlands, followed by an unusual display of lights. I won’t lie, that first trip through the darkened graveyard that led to the edge of the Clough was unnerving, and I half fancied that I too was about to be attacked by a madman with a spade as I passed by those endless rows of weather eaten gravestones. Thankfully, the commotion was a mundane occurrence, a few of the local troublemakers, Birtles by name, had got their hands on some fireworks and decided to let them off in the Clough. After a sound scolding, both from myself and from Crawford in the morning, the boys were let off with a warning and their parents told to keep a closer eye on them.
Of particular concern during my patrols was the new housing estate that was being constructed at the north end of the village, just off of Townfield Lane, where I lived. In those days, that part of the village was known simply as Reids’ Field and consisted of several acres of unused farmlands crowned with sloping woodlands that connected to the Gunner’s Clough and a large, dark pond of murky water that gathered at the bottom. The place was lonesome, even in the daylight, overgrown and neglected, with a few ancient farmhouses that were in the process of slowly disintegrating away into rubble. Only one home, which I learned was owned by Frank Naylor, was still in use. Frank had, so far, refused offers by the Locke Builders, the company responsible for the hundreds of new houses that were to be built on the old farmland, to buy his land and stubbornly clung to his orchards regardless of how much money was offered to him. Though his land hadn’t produced anything resembling a fertile harvest for decades, he had a great reluctance to abandon them. The Locke Builders had already started construction on the farmland they had acquired, and the few dozen skeletal foundations they had built quickly became the haunting grounds for Barton children, who would descend upon the construction site to play after the workmen left. Keeping these children out of the half-built houses and out of harm’s way became my greatest concern, and I would ensure that every single one of my patrols took me to the construction site.
Even with the new roads and modern homes, however, the region was still bitterly lonesome and depressive. The woodlands past the fields were clogged with damp moss and fungi and were wretchedly bleak and dismal. The worst of it was that horrid fell pond of black water that laid at the bottom of the field. The pond was crowned with a few skeletal trees and a thick wreath of brambles, briars, and nettles. I had expected to see the local boys fishing there or catching frogs there, but one look at that oily, thick water convinced me that nothing could live below the inky blackness. The ground around the pond was sunken and mossy in all directions for several hundred feet and not once did I see a bird flying overhead or spy a rabbit run into the underbrush near the water. The whole area possessed a disturbing evanescence that was particularly bothersome, and regardless of what time I found myself walking the field’s perimeter, day or night, there was an omnipresent and oppressive demoniac blackness that appeared to strangle the landscape in a stygian grip. Even at midday, when the sun was high over the fields, they appeared to be cloaked in long and deep shadows that anchored themselves onto everything with a ghoulish intent. The sun could never seem to break through the greasy clouds that hung over the field, resulting in a constant and roiling greyness. The strangest phenomena, however, was the pond’s bizarre influence on technology, particularly my police torch. Whenever I came within a few hundred feet of the waters at night, my torch would rapidly flash before growing dim and useless. My radio too would act queerly, static flooding the channel with a crackling hiss. On more than one occasion, I fancied that I could hear hushed voices behind the buzzing which caused me to turn the device off, lest my imagination run wild with horrid conjectures.
I quickly grew to hate the field while simultaneously feeling a strong pull of attraction towards it. A fragment of a writer’s spark still flickered in my heart, and I discovered that the field, and especially the pond, had the singular ability to rekindle the embers of my imagination, creating all manner of nightmarish scenarios to form in my mind. I would often visit the edges of the pond during my patrols and dot down a few thoughts and expressions that the dark waters inspired, and during one particularly brave moment, I increased the volume on my radio and attempted to write down the words I thought I could hear being spoken behind the sputtering static. This amounted to little of sense, however, and I guessed that the words must have been in some foreign tongue, for the scribblings on my notepad were so cryptic as to be nonsensical.
It was during one visit to the pond, perhaps during my second month in the village, that I first encountered Frank Naylor, the owner of the last standing farmhouse on the field. He was walking away as I was walking towards it, and upon seeing me, he raised his hand and started to approach. He was a short man, some fifty years in age, with a neatly trimmed grey beard and a craggy, yet friendly face. His boots were caked in mud and the bottom of his trousers dark with moisture, his hands too showed signs of wetness and there was a semi-translucent smear of dirt on his jacket.
“Morning.” He said loudly. “You must be the new constable?”
“I am,” I replied. “Officer West, but please, call me Will.”
“As you like.” He nodded. “You’ll be making your way over to the Mere. I’ve seen you walk by a few times, interesting place isn’t it?”
“The Mere?” I replied. “Oh, the pond? Yeah, I like to poke my head around, you know, make sure there’s no kids causing trouble.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, there’s no child in all of Barton that’ll go near the Mere, they’re too afraid that Aunt Agnes will get them.”
“Aunt Agnes?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, you don’t know? That’s what they call Ginny Greenteeth around here.”
“I see.” I laughed. I was familiar enough with the legend. Ginny Greenteeth, or Jenny Greenteeth as we called her in Manchester, was the name given to a hag-like witch said to dwell in rivers and lakes. Parents would use her to caution their children from playing near bodies of water.
“Well, I can’t say I blame them,” I said. “Not a place I’d like to fall into, God knows what’s in that water.”
He turned back to look at the pond over his shoulder and without turning to face me he continued.
“Used to be much bigger mind. The waters stretched all across the whole end of this area.” He swept his hand over fields. “From the Gunner’s Clough over yonder, all the way to the old Sallow House over there.”
He pointed at a dilapidated and loathsome farmhouse to the east of the pond. Even at a distance, I could tell it was odd, its roof slopping at strange angles that had caused many of the ancient slates to slide away, exposing rotting timber beams beneath. The left side was deeply blackened, as if scorched by fire, and an outside set of stone steps connected the ground floor and upper floors. Most of it was hideously overgrown, reclaimed by moss and ivy and its grey foundations lurched slightly forwards at the front, giving the impression that the whole edifice was slowly sinking into the soft ground.
Eventually, he turned to face me once more.
“Well, I best be going.” He sighed. “Valerie will be expecting me, and Kathy will want picking up from school soon. Nice talking to you Will.”
He patted me on the shoulder as he passed.
“And you.” I replied with a smile.
He got about twenty yards away before turning and playfully yelling.
“Watch out for Aunt Agnes!”
Naturally, I brought the topic up with Crawford when I saw him the following evening, during one of our many long and uneventful night shifts together. What he told me did little to dispel the morbid miasma that clung to the fields and their emaciated adjacent woodlands.
“Reid’s?” He said, lighting a cigarette whilst sat behind the reception counter. “You won’t catch me walking up that way, not after dark anyway. Didn’t I tell you about that place, about Aunt Agnes?”
I raised an eyebrow and half-scowled at him. Despite regaling me with every dark tale imaginable about Barton and its shadowed past, he had never once ushered the words “Aunt Agnes” to me.
“No. No you haven’t told me that story. Another piece of local folklore is it?”
“I must have told you about her Will, everyone in Barton knows about Aunt Agnes”. He replied, taking a pull on his cigarette.
I said nothing, only looking at him expectantly.
“Well, there’s bugger all else going on, may as well pass a few hours. Tell you what, get a brew on and I’ll tell you all about her.”
I did as he asked, fetching the teapot and customary plate of biscuits before meeting him at the table. He waited for the tea to brew before pouring us each a cup and lighting another odious cigarette.
“Aunt Agnes was an old ghost said to haunt Reid’s Field, in one of those big farmhouses. Can’t say how old the legend truly is, but I remember the whisperings about her when I was a boy and to hear my dad tell it, she was lurking beneath the Mere when he was still in short shorts. Terrible to look at, they said she was, all bony and grey, with just a few wispy strands of white hair on her head. ‘Don’t let Aunt Agnes get ya’ my Dad would tease. ‘She’ll throw you in a pie and gobble you right up!’”
He chuckled momentarily, before his face grew dark and he took on a more serious visage.
“When I was still a lad, I dunno, around 10 years old, a friend of mine, Michael Croutch, disappeared one night while walking home from school. First they thought he’d run off, didn’t get on with his parents you see. But when they couldn’t find him, some started to suspect that he’d been taken. Police made their inquiries, knocked on dozens of doors, but they didn’t find anything. Drove his parents to madness if you ask me. The pain of not knowing, sometimes I think it’s worse than facing the truth, no matter how ugly it is. A week or so passed and still no sign of the boy, then Michael’s mum, Sarah, claimed she heard him one night, screaming for help. She said she woke up in the dead of night unable to sleep, only natural given the worry she must have had, and heard him crying out for her. She ran out of the house to see if she could find him, but there was no sign of the boy. Eventually, she noticed that the screams weren’t coming from beyond the house, they were coming from above it, from the sky.”
“That’s not possible, surely.” I interjected. “She was probably having a nightmare or something.”
“Probably,” Crawford said flatly. “But she swore it was the truth. Not only that, after a few more minutes of hearing those terrible screams, she said that she heard another voice, that of an elderly man, still crying out for help in some kind of mocking imitation of her son. Then came the worst part, the part that saw her mind snap and sent off to Byron House.”
I leaned in closer to Crawford, as by this point his voice had lowered and he was speaking in little more than a whisper.
“Micheal’s Saint Christopher necklace fell from the sky and landed in front of her. She must have picked it up, because she was still clutching ahold of it when they found her screaming and wandering around the pond in Reid’s Field.”
A few minutes of silence passed between us. Only the incessant ticking of the grandfather clock in the reception room filled the air with any kind of sound.
“Well,” I paused. “What does that have to do with this Aunt Agnes? Surely you’re not telling me that she was some kind of witch who snatched up children and flew off with them on her broomstick?”
“No, of course not.” He said slowly. “But not too long after Sarah was taken away and committed to Byron House, the old Sallow place caught fire, you’ve probably seen the remains up on the field. It was Peter Croutch, Michael’s father, who started the blaze. They found him shouting and ranting by the flames, screaming about how he had to ‘burn it, burn the shadows away’. Reckoned that Aunt Agnes was coming for his other children. He was still ranting when they locked him up in the cells here, something about a ‘shape in the air’. ‘Called it down,’ he raved, until they took him away and locked him up for good. Here’s the weird part, Will, they found a body up in the attic. Burned badly it was, I guess there wasn’t much left of it to begin with, being a spindly old thing. Oddly, I was talking this over with the old Brookes before he retired. He was on duty that night, he’d only be a young constable back then. He swears, hands down, that when they brought that charred body out the house, it still had a full head of hair. Red he said it was, red as a copper penny.”
He took the last remaining sip of his tea before standing up and stretching his arms.
“Anyways, look, the sun’s coming up.” He pointed to the window where indeed, the first amber rays of the morning sun were sweeping over the horizon. “I’m off home, to bed. I’ll leave you to lock up.”
With that, he grabbed his jacket and his cigarettes and a handful of biscuits, before walking out of the station, leaving me alone to clean up and man the early morning shift. His bizarre story about Aunt Agnes and Michael’s disappearance stayed with me for some time after, however. As I previously mentioned, I was a great lover of weird fiction and strange stories, and this whole business with the burned house on Reid’s Field had energized my interest in the macabre. Later that morning, as I was preparing another pot of tea and trying hopelessly to tune the radio, it suddenly dawned on me that the various boxes and filing cabinets in the upstairs rooms could contain more information on the disappearance of young Micheal and the subsequent act of arson carried out by his father. So, tea in hand, I ascended the creaking stairs and set about the Herculean task of organising what looked like decades of neglected paperwork. Crawford had obviously been less than diligent in ensuring that the records were well maintained, and the various boxes and files were covered in a thick firmament of dirt and dust. At one point, I had to open the upstairs windows in order to eject the cloud of grime that was billowing around me as a result of my searching.
It must have taken a considerable amount of time to accumulate the most relevant documents regarding the arson on Reid’s Field, because Susan telephoned the station close to 3pm to inquire as to my whereabouts. I made some excuse about having to work an extended shift, but assured her I would be home for supper, which I would pick up from Ernie’s Fish & Chip Shop on Lydyett Lane, as was our Friday night custom. Luckily, I wouldn’t receive another phone call until around 6pm, which was simply from Crawford asking if we needed to stock up on teabags and biscuits before he started his night shift. Those three hours alone in the upstairs archives pouring over reports, statements, and correspondences felt like they lasted an eternity. To my shame, I was so engrossed in my work that I failed to hear Mrs. Roberts enter the station at around 5pm to make a complaint about some children who had been stealing the milk from her doorstep for the last few days, an incident that Crawford would later half-heartedly scold me for in his usual causal manner. When he learned that I missed the complaint due re-organising the archives, he showed some interest but grew more intrigued when I told him what I had found regarding Aunt Agnes and Reid’s Field. As I was due home by the time he arrived at the station, I promised that we would discuss my findings on the next night shift where our duties overlapped, but he was of course free to take a look at what I found in the meantime, an offer that his natural slothfulness prevented him from accepting.
The next three days were my ‘off days’ and I filled them with various household chores and spending time with Susan and Thomas, taking them both for a day out at the nearby Marbury Country Park on Sunday for a picnic. That blissful afternoon in the May sunshine marked one of the last times that my life would remain free from the cosmic annihilation that was to follow.
True to my word, both I and Crawford spent our next night shift together looking over the relevant paperwork I had assembled a few days earlier. Brookes, the former sergeant, had been fastidious in his collection of data, keeping newspaper articles, replies to his letters of inquiry, and various volumes he must have borrowed from the Barton library and never returned. I had organised the documentation into three broad piles. The first was relating solely to Reid’s Field and the various properties that dotted the farmlands. The second was any mention of Aunt Agnes, of which there was much. Lastly, a miscellaneous collection of documents that did not fit into the other two categories was placed to one side. This small pile also contained several aged and crinkled old photographs, some dating as far back as 1910. Many of them were innocuous enough, displaying various homes and their residents from across Barton. More than a few showed the Reid’s Pond, then called the Mere, taken from various angles. Arranged in order, they appeared to document the pond’s receding waters, and I was shocked to see that the earliest image showed a body of water that was more than ten times the size of what I had seen recently. To my horror, I found a slightly blurred image that depicted an elderly woman standing by the entrance of the charred and crumbling farmhouse I recognized from my patrols. The image appears to have been taken in haste, and its subject did not appear to be posing for the picture, in fact, she looked as if she had been taken wholly by surprise. Though the photograph was hazy, I could still make out a look of malice which emanated from the beldame’s large, black eyes. More bizarre, however, was her general appearance, especially when contrasted with the note on the back of the photograph which simply stated “Aunt Agnes? 1948”. The hag’s hairstyle and dress suggested a horrid antiquity far advanced of her obvious croneship, almost as if she had stepped out of a medieval woodcut image.
Brookes had managed to find references to one Agnes Sallow, who was no doubt the origin for the inspiration of the Aunt Agnes legend, as far back as the early 18th century. Sallow, the document stated, was a widow living alone in the farmhouse once owned by her husband, Edmund Sallow. The date of this particular document, which was some kind of legal papers relating to landownership made it impossible for this Agnes Sallow to be the same Aunt Agnes of later years, though Brookes had clearly thought the link important. Further research revealed that at this time, Barton was almost entirely farmland, with only a few hundred residents, most of them scattered around the southeast corner of the future village, but with newer properties appearing in the northeast, of which Reid’s Field was part of.
According to the other documents, Sallow and her husband had arrived in Barton sometime in the spring of 1723 and within a year had earned the enmity of most of their neighbors. Earlier accounts of the couple were more favorable, describing Edmund as a true ‘salt of the earth Englishman’ and his wife Agnes as ‘a rare Scotch beauty with hair like fiery embers’. Things rapidly turned sour, however, and there was quite a collection of crinkled, ancient newspaper clippings taken from the Cheshire Gazetteer which mentioned the couple in an extremely unfavorable light. A great deal of imprecations had been levied at the childless couple, and the locals seemed to constantly write to the local newspaper with a string of querulously composed letters. The editor of the paper, one Martin Birdwhistle, was also the vicar of the nearby St. Mary’s Church and appeared to take his reader’s concerns with a deep and sympathetic understanding. Chief among the complaints was that the land in Barton had somehow grown poisoned since the Sallow’s arrival. Crops were failing, or so it appeared, and a great deal of livestock were falling ill from some form of disease that neither layman nor learned mind could identify. Milk was reported to be curdling well before its time and there were several reports that the local heifers were bleeding into the bucket whenever they were milked. Father Birdwhistle, who appeared to be an authority on demonology, urged the residents of Barton to observe those nights of the year when evil is exalted, chiefly Walpurgis and All Hallows, and ensure that they kept a vigil over their lands and livestock during the dark hours.
Indeed, unnatural darkness appeared to also be a concern, especially in the woodlands and great pond beyond the farmlands. Residents complained that the forest had grown blacker since the Sallow’s moved into their home and that the waters of the Mere possessed a singular stygian quality that made them appear inky and opaque. Strange noises were heard around the pond and, on one occasion, a local man reported feeling a colossal surge of air that suddenly erupted over the water, blowing him to his feet and leaving behind the most awful fetor, the like of which he could only describe as resembling the putrid foulness of a corpse. But even these accounts, fantastical as they were, proved to be little more than adumbrations for the horror that was to follow.
Things appeared to have grown worse following the death of Edmund Sallow in 1727, the cause of which was deeply amorphous and shrouded in gossip. With her husband now resting in the cold ground of his grave, Agnes Sallow found herself the sole target of Barton’s wrath and the vexation caused by this singular resident appeared to grow a hundredfold in its perceived pervasiveness. More outlandish reports followed. Agnes was outright accused of conspiring with the devil, a crime technically still punishable by death at that time, though instances of actual witch executions were growing rarer across Britain. One nameless man’s account claimed that Agnes had been spied in the Christ Church graveyard “frolicking unclothed with her goodman’s corpse ‘neath the full moon’s gleam.” The account, unconfirmed and salacious in its implications, had all but accused the women of committing an overt and gross act of thanatophilia upon the expired remains of the deceased Edmund Sallows. To this accusation, Agnes Sallow had offered a rebuttal, averring her innocence by claiming that her accuser, who lacked the courage to put his name to his charge, was nothing more than a jilted would-be suitor, one who was already bound in wedlock and whom she had refused on more than one occasion.
A second, more sober tale, was found within a letter penned by one Elizabeth Rowe to her cousin, Elisiah, who resided in nearby Nantwich. In her letter, Elizabeth reports seeing Agnes, ‘Once more despoiled of raiment, and thus stationed nigh the brink of Reid’s Mere.’ Elizabeth went on to say that she heard Agnes ‘Invoking the Heavens in a language unknown, yet with a most infernal sound.’ It was not however, Agnes’s actions which caused her concern, rather what she had perceived as an audible answer to the witch’s summons, a ‘Ghastly ululation, which did both titter and gibber in the Heavens o’er the Mere.’
Though the various grotesqueries hurled at Agnes Sallow grew in their intensity, they would pale in comparison to that final horror levied against her and the one that would seemingly prove to be her downfall. On the morning of All Hallow’s, just before dawn, a frantic search appeared to be organised in response to the disappearance of a local youth. The boy, unnamed in Brookes’s various documents, was last seen in the vicinity of Reid’s Pond. The entire account and the subsequent actions taken by the Barton residents grew fragmented and obscured, almost as if steps had been taken to ensure that the truth of the matter remained shadowed. There was talk of finding the boy’s corpse some distance from the pond, but in a state that had left it almost unrecognizable even by the youth’s closest kin. It was bent and warped, shrunk in some ways and yet elongated in others. From the description, it was all but impossible to discern exactly what the corpse may have looked like and if not for a distinct crescent moon shaped birthmark present on the boy’s shoulder, it was quite possible that identification would have all but eluded those who were unfortunate to discover it.
It is unclear as to what Agnes’s fate was after the macabre discovery. Certainly, she was no longer considered to be a resident of Barton, as all mention of her vanished from the record. This was itself strange, given how predominantly she had featured in the grumblings of her neighbors. She did not appear in Brookes’s papers until around 1824, when her home was briefly mentioned as being sold at auction as bona vacantia, due to no intestate being put in place by the family that had once claimed it. The buyer, who wished to remain anonymous, and their descendants appeared to have done little with the property, and by the time it was once more up for auction in 1913, it had dissolved into such a cantankerous state of decay and neglect that no buyer came forward.
Of all the curious documents I unearthed in the dying light of the afternoon in the station, the strangest turned out to be penned by Brookes himself. At the very bottom of a water stained box, I found a weathered and sealed envelope with the words “For those who will come after,” hastily scrawled on the front. Peeling the envelope open, I found inside a typed letter of instructions concerning the policing of the area around Reid’s Fields and the adjacent Gunner’s Clough. Most of the instructions were vague and suggestible, and assumed a level of familiarity with certain topics that were caliginous and opaque in nature. For instance, the paper stated that, “officers were not to disturb or allow to be disturbed, the grounds around the Sallow Farmhouse or the property itself,” as well as instructions to increase police patrols around the field during the nights of May Eve and Halloween. Particular focus was applied to the pond, “under no circumstances are officers to allow children to play around the Mere, or swim in its waters,” with a singular importance emphasized that additional vigil must be held over this rule in the event of a passing storm or whenever the moon was full. One singular occultic instruction informed the reader that the pond was especially dangerous whenever “Mercury passes through the Seventh Gate”. Towards the bottom of the page, Brookes had written a small bibliography of various texts that would need consulting in the event of a crisis towards which he only half-alluded to. I had a haunting familiarity with most of the books, stemming from my earlier days as a poet of the macabre, though many of the texts I had never heard of. Chief among these esoteric grimoires was the Arcana Stellarum, penned by the mad astrologist Wilhelm Majzter in 1674, as well as the frightful Geister des Lufte of Friedrich von Armin. Another horrific text, Les Cultes de L’estre Noire, written by the infamous sadist, Matilda de Montford, otherwise known as the Viscountess of Bearn, was underlined with several sharp pencil strokes with a handwritten scrawl stating that all copies of this 12th century tome had been destroyed by the Church.
It was impossible for me to account how a village police officer possessed even a passing familiarity with the assembled grotesqueries, and I assumed that Brookes must have had some form of extended correspondence with either a learned bibliophile or occult specialist during his investigation.
By the time myself and Crawford had finished correlating the texts, a task which I largely performed in isolation, given the sergeant’s penchant for taking a nap or making us more tea, the sun had already risen over the police station and we both found ourselves in dire need of rest. I agreed to continue working through the morning, allowing Crawford to go home to his wife and get some sleep before his afternoon shift. As he shambled out of the station, looking somewhat disheveled and exhausted, I took most of the papers from the upstairs office and continued to read them while I manned the reception. There was a singular horror amongst those documents that I had yet to encounter, something hidden and tenebrous, that eclipsed all the wild talk of witchcraft and black magic with an aeonic monstrosity that chilled me with its implied magnitude. I felt strongly that the shrinking waters of the pond were at the center of this stygian mystery, though how I could only guess at with vague, unsatisfactory conjectures.
Weeks and finally months passed as the cool spring air eventually gave way to a blisteringly hot summer, the likes of which only rarely descend upon Britain’s gloom. We had our hands full that summer, ensuring that the mischief caused by Barton’s youth was confined to an acceptable minimum, with only a brief fire started in the woods near the canal leading us to take punitive measures against the culprits. Crawford appeared to have lost interest in Brookes’s investigation into Aunt Agnes, and rarely brought the matter up, confining talk of it only to the various patrols which brought us to Reid’s Field. I, however, could not shake my mind free from the matter. I had even taken the documents home with me, and annoyed Susan endlessly with my incessant reading of their contents. I made several inquiries into the Les Cultes de L’estre Noire, the tome that Brookes had placed particular emphasis on in his bizarre list of instructions, reaching out to my former coterie of friends with whom I had once shared a love of the strange and macabre. Most of my queries were frustratingly blockaded by the rarity of the text, though I was eventually put into contact with a scholar by the name of Professor Violet Grey who taught physics at Oxford. Grey, though undoubtedly a woman of science, had a strong interest in the folklore of the British Isles and had even contributed several texts to the subject, though under the pseudonym of Samual Gaunt, as to avoid her worlds of academia and mythology from colliding. She very kindly penned me a letter, informing me that a rare English translation of the text, penned by an unknown author in the early 18th century, could be found in the Oxford University Library, though access to it was highly restricted. A phone call between us followed, during which I learned the anglicized title of the book, The Cult of the Black Star. This was ominous enough, but hearing her list off the actual contents of the tome filled me with an unaccountable and adumbrative dread. There was something so hideously affirming in her talk of cosmic spirits and magical alienage that enveloped the core topic of witchcraft in a thick, Plutonic shroud, making the latter appear almost mundane in comparison. I asked her if she had a photocopy machine at the university, and anticipating my next question, assured me that the book was far too delicate to be put through such an operation. Instead, she offered to have a trusted student make copies of some of the text which she felt were of particular interest to me. These included portions of chapters such as, The Warding Against Miscreance, An Evocation as well as Calling Forth the Devourer of Epochs. She warned me, however, that it would take time to make such copies and could not commit to a dedicated date upon which I could expect to receive them. I thanked her profusely, and she assured me that she would be on hand should I have need of her. This last offer almost felt like a given on her part, as if she possessed some frightful insight towards which I was hopelessly ignorant.
In addition to expanding upon Brookes’s investigation into Barton’s history, I increased my patrols around Reid’s Field. The work carried out by Locke Builders had drastically increased, with dozens of new houses springing up along the new roads that had been installed. The feral fields and hedges were rapidly vanishing before the onslaught of modernity and I wondered how long it would be before the entire region was buried beneath bricks and mortar. The last crumbling property to be demolished was the old Sallow House. I freely admit that watching the house being torn down by the ferocious machinery calmed me, for whatever menaces its presence encouraged would also be buried alongside its ancient stones beneath the concrete of the new road. More concerning than the house, however, was the fate of the pond. While construction had been swift during the blissful summer months, September had arrived and with it the precipitous rainfall for which England is famed. The next few months would prove to be the wettest on record for some years and this greatly stymied the planned work to remove the pond. I learned from chatting with the work men, many of which I grew to learn by name, about what those plans were. First, they would drain the pond as much as possible, pumping its dark waters into the stream of the nearby Gunner’s Clough. After that, the tons of sludge and accumulated organic matter would need to be excavated, after which layers of gravel and structural filler would be placed in the resulting void. The matter would take weeks to see to its conclusion, as the thundering Autumnal tempests constantly hampered the work, filling and refilling the pond.
Despite the setbacks, however, the builders did manage to reach down to the vast deposits of sediments that had lurked quiescently below the oily waters for centuries. Though the various objects uncovered would pale in horror compared to what was to be unearthed later, they nonetheless resulted in some extraordinary finds deemed worthy of archaeological significance. Experts from Manchester University were called in to claim the finds, many of these items were rusted swords and other weapons that dated back to Saxon and Celtic times. It was concluded that the pond, obviously much larger in those times, had been a focal point of worship for the local tribes and that the weapons had been offerings to someone unknown deity. Comparisons were made to the various sacrificial bogs found across Northern Europe, most of them dedicated to gloomy pagan gods, such as Woden. Other finds, however, baffled both scholars and laymen alike. Singular among the finds were a cluster of oddly carved soapstone idols, seemingly thrown into the pond over the course of many centuries. These odd sculptures, which the academics concluded were made in the image of some unknown fertility goddess, were disgusting to behold. Their composition, a grotesque blending of animal and human, resulted in some of the most blasphemous forms ever put to stone. The salacious anatomy, pudendal in focus, was clearly at the forefront of the mad sculptor’s efforts, and when blended with the obvious animalistic imagery, compelled the most shameful and loathsome conjectures to involuntarily form in the mind. The blasphemous statuettes were taken away, where they were briefly put on display at the Manchester Museum, before being swiftly removed due to the volume of complaints their presence elicited from the public.
Once the archeological work was concluded, the academics packed up and left, leaving the planned excavations free to continue. By this time, however, the pond had been filled almost back to halfway by the relentless rainfall, severely setting the work back. I have no doubt that the ultimate horror lurking quiescently beneath the murky water would have made itself known much sooner than it eventually did, had the rain not replenished the dark waters of the pond.
Despite the ongoing work around the field, Frank Naylor, the owner of the last farmhouse, still refused to sell his land. He stubbornly clung to his own decaying property and rebutted every proposition made to acquire it. Some residents speculated that Frank was being strategic in his stubbornness, his reluctance to sell his land little more than a charade designed to inflate the offers once the Locke Builder’s patience started to fray. However, this did not appear to be the case and word around the village started spread that his wife, Valerie, was far less attached to the house and wished to accept the Locke Builder’s latest offer, which had indeed grown substantially, and the couple had been seen quarreling over the matter one Friday night while walking home from the Red Lion.
There was other talk about town, however, talk of how Frank’s behavior was growing increasingly odd. On several occasions, he was spotted at the local hardware shop frantically buying copious amounts of light bulbs and candles. He had complained loudly to the store clerk that the electricity on his property was failing, resulting in all the bulbs in the house blowing out. Several times, he called the station, complaining about noises coming from near the pond, as well as figures that he did not recognize loitering nearby. Neither Crawford nor I, when investigating these complaints, ever located the source of the noise or spotted one of the sinister strangers that Frank had insisted he had seen. Those older Barton residents, who still remembered the dark days of Michael Croutch’s disappearance, spoke in hushed whispers of a horrid reminiscence between Frank’s growing strangeness and the events that led Peter Croutch to torch the old Sallow House. Something was coming, the old codgers warned, something that could not be seen or heard, only felt. An abominable intrusion from the Great Outside, something that only those folks who know of such things can attest to. It would come soon, they said, and those who knew certain signs were warned to place them over their thresholds so as to keep out the approaching horror. I half-scoffed at such talk, but there was a disturbing authenticity to their warnings, the kind that only comes with the quiet confidence gathered by experience in such matters.
As September passed on, we received more reports of odd sounds and lights near both the Reid’s Field and the Gunner’s Clough, not just from Frank Naylor, but by many other residents who had homes near those twin loci of morbid strangeness. Several people reported missing pets and there was talk amongst the children that Aunt Agnes was seen stalking the graveyard once more. As it was, the coming horror would linger in the dark for a while longer, before making itself known to us the following month.
The alarm was raised during Crawford’s first night shift in October. The autumn chill had descended early upon the village, blanketing much of Barton in a freezing mist that lurched out of the canal like a specter, enveloping much of the village in an insidious Plutonic gloom. Despite the shorter days, the work on Reid’s Pond was progressing along now, with the nearby trees and thick brambles cleared away, leaving the pond waters fully exposed. The last six feet or so of sludgy black water left behind was all that stood between the builders and the last section of roadworks that needed to be laid down. Crawford had been asleep at the desk when Frank Naylor ran frantically into the station shouting for help, causing the sergeant to almost jump out of his chair in fright. Crawford, quick to act, tried his best to calm Frank, but it was hopeless. My phone rang at around 3:15 in the morning, waking Susan and upsetting Thomas, who proceeded to cry loudly, causing me to strain to hear what Crawford was desperately trying to convey.
“It’s Frank,” He panted, “Frank Naylor, from up on Reid’s. He says his girl, Kathy, she’s been taken.”
I shot out of bed, still clutching the phone to my ear with one hand as I grabbed my trousers from the floor. “Taken?” I replied. “Did he see who did it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Crawford stammered. “look, just get here will you, he’s gone raving mad, I’ve had to throw him one of the cells.”
“Ok, don’t worry, I’m on my way.” I shouted back, hoping that Crawford could hear me over the screaming rants I could hear in the background over the line.
I barely had time to explain the situation to Susan, but by the look on my face, I had little doubt she could tell it was bad. I ran out the house, my jacket flailing about my arms as I frantically tried to pull it over my shoulders while maintaining a full sprint. The fog was thick, and the feeble streetlights around me did little to banish away its perpetual greyness. I was sweating profusely by the time I made it to the station, and I could hear Frank’s ravings before I even made it inside.
“It’s taken her!” He screamed. “It’s taken my poor girl!”
Crawford was waiting by the entrance to the first cell, his face white as a phantom. As soon as his bulging eyes saw me, he ran over.
“Thank Christ,” He exclaimed. “I’m going to run over to the Naylor House now, you stay here, see if you can get Frank to calm down. I’ve already phoned the station in Eastwich, they’re going to send over some officers to help, soon as they get here, you come take them up to Reid’s and meet me there.”
With that, he ran out of the station, leaving me alone with the madman, whose frantic rantings echoed throughout the station, each raving word filling me with dread. It took some time to get Frank to come to his senses. At first, I allowed him to exhaust himself, until his screaming died down and ebbed into a melancholic cry. Then I approached his cell, where he was now lying upon the thin bench, his back turned to me and his legs pulled close to his chest in a fetal position. In that moment, he looked so small, almost like a child himself, shrunken and diminished by the trauma that had been wrought upon him. He was gently sobbing, his shoulders heaving and his body shaking. He was muttering nonsensically to himself, and I strained to hear the words that he was croaking out.
“Frank,” I whispered. “What happened? Where’s Kathy?”
He froze at the mention of his daughter’s name, turning his head slightly over his shoulder to look at me with his red, tear stained eyes.
“It got her. He muttered. “Took her up and away.”
“What was it?” I gently pressed, choosing to use his own words, rather than push for hard details.
He paused before mummering a reply. “It was just a shadow. Came out of the Mere. I saw it a few nights past. I told Valerie, but she didn’t believe me. Said I must have been drunk. Then, last night, I saw it again, it was creeping around the house, trying to get in. It tested the windows around Kathy’s room. She came screaming into our bedroom, crying that she’d seen a black ghost over her bed.”
“What happened tonight, Frank?” I stepped closer to the bars of the cell. “Did it come back, back for Kathy?”
He nodded and closed his eyes, a fresh stream of tears running down his face.
“It came out of the Mere again. Kathy was in our room. I only left her for a minute. It must have come down the chimney, taken her up through the fireplace. I could hear her screaming inside the roof and then…then she was gone.”
I could see his entire body relax as these words left his mouth. The last few syllables had been little more than a whisper as exhaustion finally overwhelmed him. Whether he was asleep or had fainted, I could not tell, but I decided to leave him to the merciful oblivion in which he now found himself. Exiting the cells, I reached the reception in time to pick up the phone which let out a shrill ring, causing me to jump. I picked up the receiver, expecting the caller to be from the Eastwich station, but it was Crawford.
“Will,” he stammered. “Will, it’s me, I’m at the Naylor House. Listen, I need you to get here now. I’ve found Valerie, she’s catatonic, I can’t get a word out of her. It’s bad Will. Leave a note for the Eastwich coppers and get here as fast as you can. Please Will, I don’t… I don’t want to be alone up here.”
He hung up, leaving a creeping, inescapable apprehension to crawl over my skin. There was horror in that man’s voice, horror the likes of which I had never encountered before. I hastily scrawled a note and pinned it to the station door with a small hand drawn map of how to get to Reid’s Field from Church Road. I prayed it was enough for the reinforcement from Eastwich to find us and sprinted back up to Townfield Lane. Crawford was outside of the Naylor House when I arrived, smoking a cigarette and shivering. The mist was particularly thick on the field, and he visibly jumped when I approached. His face was ashen and a slick layer of sweat was pooling round his forehead, causing it to glisten in the feeble light of our flickering torches. The front door was ajar, but there was no light emanating from inside.
“It’s dark.” I muttered. “Have you tried the lights?”
“Dead.” He replied, sharply. “Every bulb is blown, even my torch is playing up.”
Almost as if on cue, both of our torches flickered rapidly several times before stabilizing once more.
Reluctantly, I took the lead and pushed the heavy oak door inwards. It was difficult to penetrate the gloom beyond, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could start to make out the shapes of chairs, a dining table, and the kitchen beyond. There were no obvious signs of distress, except for the numerous shards of broken glass on the floor, doubtless from the blown bulbs.
“Where’s Valerie?” I whispered over my shoulder.
“In the bedroom.” Crawford replied, pointing a finger towards the ceiling.
We then commenced to do a full investigation of the downstairs, finding nothing of note in the dark and silent rooms. Looking back, I will admit that there was likely a great reluctance on either of our parts to ascend the narrow staircase that led to the bedrooms above. Eventually, with no excuse left at our disposal, we walked up the stairs and found Valerie where Frank had left her. She was, as Crawford described, catatonic. Whatever she had seen had caused her mind to violently revolt, irreversibly locking her within her own thoughts. I shone the torch in her eyes, but they remained wide open and staring in the direction of the bedroom fireplace. Any attempt to communicate with her failed and she remained unresponsive to all of our attempts. Her limbs were relaxed and loose and so together we were able to carry her downstairs and place her in a large armchair opposite the downstairs’ fireplace. Just as we were finished repositioning her, we both simultaneously pricked our ears before looking at each other. There was a sound coming from the room directly above us, the room where we had found Valerie. It was a quiet, and almost imperceptible sound, a sort of dragging or shifting noise. Cautiously, we creeped back up the stairs, not knowing what form the sound’s culprit would take. We entered the master bedroom once more and found it just as we had left it. However, as we both strained to find the source of the sound, we noticed that it was coming from the fireplace nearby, or more precisely, from the chimney above. Shining my torch over the alcove, I could just make out a small, but consistent trickle of dust and soot falling from the chimney and into the cold hearth below. The dragging sound was growing louder and within a few seconds, the trickle was joined by large black flakes and small chunks of broken mortar. Something was sliding down the chimney and towards the fireplace. I half fancied that whatever it was, it must have been dragging itself down and towards us with deliberate intent, though the revelation that swiftly followed made this an impossibility.
As we braced ourselves and crept closer, both of our torches suddenly cracked and shattered, plunging us both into blackness. This was followed by a heavy crashing sound that boomed from above and within seconds, a billowing cloud of dust and soot poured out the chimney, blanketing us both in a cloud of Pompeian ash. Within the torrent of that stygian cloud of cold embers, something large and heavy had also crashed down, sprawling out upon the bedroom floor before us in all its horrid glory. It was a body, that much was clear, and after we had opened the windows to let out the roiling shroud that had erupted around us, Crawford struck a match from a packet concealed in his trousers and we both crept towards it. We stood there in the dark for several moments, paralyzed by abject horror. The mass was redolent of the kind of body one would see on display in a museum exhibit. It was mummified, that much was clear, and appeared to be that of an elderly woman of advanced years. The head was skeletonic, with only a few whispery strands of long white hair feebly covering the largely bald surface. The limbs were long and withered, with tightened grey skin that lay stretched across protruding bone. One of the hands had been drawn over the withered face, almost as if to shield the eyes from some unseen dread, whilst the other clutched something close to its chest. The eyes themselves were present and open beneath the gnarled fingers, and on closer inspection, revealed that the milky orbs were protruding outwards to a frightful extent. Both Crawford and I had seen our fair share of bodies, and I can say with modesty that it was not the corpse itself that caused us to both stand there in horrid awe. Rather, it was what the corpse was wearing and the horrid connotations that resulted from acknowledging the impossible, for the body was dressed in the shrunken, contorted and half-torn pajamas of a child, whilst in its dried, wizened hand, it clutched a small soot-stained teddy bear.
Once we had come to terms and accepted what it was we were seeing, Crawford gained the sense enough to pull the blanket from the nearby bed and cover the mummified remains. Neither one of us had any intentions of moving the body or staying another second in the house and after briefly checking on Valerie, who remained silent and still, we decided to wait outside for the reinforcements.
I am running ahead of myself, however, for the abominable blasphemies revealed to us that night have yet to be fully accounted for. Horror begets horror. The discovery of the mummified girl was merely the catalyst for a chain of events that would swiftly unravel before us. Crawford and I were standing outside the Naylor House, Crawford smoking endless cigarettes in a vain attempt to calm his nerves, and I suspended in a twitching, timorous state as adrenaline coursed through my body. We saw the Eastwich bobbies arrive, pulling up to the field’s edge in one of the new police cars, the headlights of which briefly illuminated us both in a cold cone of light. I think we both breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the officers, but it was a short lived reprieve.
The beam of the car’s lights must have stirred something in the house behind us, for we both jumped in response to another set of crashing noises that thundered from the upstairs bedroom. Lacking the desire or courage to return to the house, I looked at Crawford for guidance. Though he was just as shaken as I was, his rank of sergeant must have stirred some sense of responsibility in his heart, and he drew his truncheon before entering the house once more. Reluctantly, I did likewise and followed him after taking a few seconds to gather my nerves. He must have desired to see the matter concluded quickly, and by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, he was already at the top and opening the door to the master bedroom. I took a hold of the banister, and barely before my foot touched the first step, he let out a cry of panic, the likes of which I had never heard before or since. It is not good for the nerves to hear an adult man, especially one possessed of a firm mental and physical robustness, to let out a shriek more commonly associated with a child awakening from a nightmare, and I almost dropped my truncheon in response. He hurled himself out of the bedroom, and came sprinting down the stairs towards me, a look of pure fright painted upon his ghoulish face.
“It’s back Will. For God’s sake it’s back!”
He hurled the words at me as he barged past, pushing me to one side and running out of the house. Valerie did not so much as flinch as he passed her, still locked in whatever paralysis her unfortunate exposure to the horror had invoked. I wasted no time in running after him, and as we reached the door, we could hear the Eastwich bobbies were close by and calling out for us, seemingly lost in the thick mist that had enveloped the field. Crawford cried out, “Here! We’re over here!” And almost as if in response, the crashing sound returned, this time coming from the chimney on the roof of the house. I glanced upwards and saw what I thought was some kind of chimerical disturbance in the air above the chimney. Then, with a feeling of rushing winds, it moved at high speed from the house and in the direction of the pond, reverberating and parting the mist as it passed overhead. A splashing sound followed and then all was still and silent once more.
We did our best to describe to the reinforcements what we had discovered in the house, but to my shock, they found nothing in the upstairs room. The disturbance of soot and ash was still present, but the corpse had seemingly vanished. What followed was a terribly protracted evening of explanations, theories, questions, and paperwork, none of which proved to satisfy the Eastwich inspector appointed to the case. The investigation was officially handed over to the larger force and both I and Crawford were ordered to take some leave from our duties. Neither of us could rest, however, what we had seen that night, especially what Crawford had witnessed upon returning to the master bedroom, prevented any form of peace from returning to our lives.
It took a few days, but Crawford eventually regained enough composure to describe to me what he had seen, though even this was little more than a collection of vagaries that failed to illuminate the truth of the matter. I eventually lost patience with his opaque mutterings and placing both of my hands on his shoulders, I looked him square in the eye.
“For the love of god man, what was it? What did you see?”
He refused to meet my gaze, instead lowering his eyes. “It was just a shadow, Will” He muttered, echoing the words of Frank Naylor. “It… came back for her. Wrapped itself around her and pulled her back through the fireplace.”
I didn’t press him any further, it was obvious that his mind was on the verge of cracking and, not willing to push him over the precipice, I dropped the matter. It took at least a week for any sense of normality to descend once more upon our duties. We occasionally heard word from the Eastwich inspector and his team, who used our station to interview possible suspects and witnesses to that singular and strange evening on the field. Crawford was clearly unravelling and refused to cover any of the night shifts. I sensed that he was too terrified of the possibility of having to return to Reid’s Field, should the need arise, and I begrudgingly offered to work them instead. It was one such evening, around ten days after we had discovered that awful corpse, that I would finally set upon a plan of action to deal with the horror that had so clearly made a home for itself in our village. Upon entering the station and relieving Crawford of his duty, I started to prepare some tea in anticipation of yet another long night shift when I noticed a large envelope on the desk, addressed to myself. Opening the package, I immediately recognized the contents, it was the copies of the requested English translation of Les Cultes de L’estre Noire, kindly provided by Professor Grey. Setting the tea to brew, I poured over the contents, which, despite being in English, were still obtuse and stubborn in offering clear information. The manuscript was eclectic, with various topics seemingly arranged in a random manner that made little sense to a laymen reader. The copywriter had taken no steps to modernize the archaic language, instead maintaining the original text verbatim. The first chapter, The Warding Against Miscreance, An Evocation appeared to be some kind of charm or talisman against “outside forces” and began with what appeared to be a warning, stating that,
“In the Daemon’s Sign’s creation, the Artificer must be circumspect, ensuring its form be precisely rendered. For those of the Outer Void shall seize any advantage to subvert the magick puissance enshrined within its contours.” Before continuing with, “When set aright in place and hour, the Daemon’s Sign shall work to cast forth the influences of those from the Great Beyond, ensuring they find no ingress to our space.”
There was a picture on the following page, no doubt depicting this “Daemon’s Sign”, which resembled a strange five pointed star-shaped hieroglyph with a fiery eye at its centre. Further in the chapter, a heading titled The Final Salve, provided the following illumination, “Should the Daemon’s Sign prove flawed, or wax imperfect, then the Gift of Prometheus alone remains thy solace”.
The following chapter, ominously titled Calling Forth the Devourer of Epochs, was similarly cloaked in esoteric symbols and formulas, with one particularly disturbing passage, given my previous research into Agnes Sallow, caught my eye.
“When Summoning forth the Devourer of Epochs, take heed, for the Sable Specter must be bound within hallowed heathen grounds, oft a vast expanse of pagan haunted water. Naught but water, dark and cool, and barren of light and life, shall suffice, for ’tis this estate alone, amongst all Earth doth hold, that doth bear semblance to the void from whence the dweller doth emanate. Once settled such and at the appointed hour, when the stars align propitiously, the dweller may be conjured at the Magician’s bidding. Its very essence doth crave the consumption of time Itself, whence it derives sustenance. The Adept, with formula aright, may then transfuse this quintessence into Thyself, thereby protracting thy days without end.”
A clearer picture was beginning to form, but the revelation did little to diminish the outré horror of the situation. On the contrary, each grotesque passage formulated abyssal affirmations that diminished all possibility that we were dealing with anything other than some half-forgotten and primeval form of black magic. There was little doubt as to my course of action and I set about frantically forming a plan, for if things were to be left as they were, there was no doubt left in me whatsoever that another innocent life would soon be cruelly snuffed out.
Arranging the necessary precautions and measures was simple enough and would prove to be the least difficult part of my plan. A large grey rock taken from the nearby Christ Church graveyard provided the perfect canvas for the carving which the manuscript had delineated as the ‘Daemon’s Sign’. I had no reason to believe that selecting that particular stone would have the desired impact, but I hedged my bets and reasoned that something which had laid undisturbed upon hallowed ground for a few centuries may at the very least be imbued with a little celestial potency. Securing fuel also proved to be simple, red diesel is mercifully abundant in the countryside and a few carefully planned nighttime raids of the nearby farms provided me with more than enough of the crimson accelerant.
Convincing Crawford, however, proved to be the hardest endeavor. Only by appealing to his sense of duty, to that inner core found in the heart of every bobby that wishes to see the innocent shielded from harm, was I able to elicit his help. The carving of the stone I did myself, carefully tracing the pattern found in the manuscript. I cannot say in all honesty that it was a perfect replication, but I reasoned that the intent of the craftsman was likely just as important as the form. The diesel we stored in a half-constructed house not too far from the pond, taking precautions to ensure that it was hidden under a large covering of tarpaulin. I wasn’t too concerned, should a large batch of stolen red diesel be discovered, it was more than likely that I would be called to investigate, the only complication arising being that we would need to move it to a more secure location. Fortunately, the call never came, and all five barrels of the stuff were waiting for us when we arrived shortly before midnight on Halloween. The date felt like an auspicious one, and lacking any knowledge of astrology, I had no hope of knowing if Mercury was past the Seventh Seal or any other kind of celestial omens which would benefit our mission. The rock had proven to be difficult to move, heavy and ungainly, we covered it up and hauled the thing in a wheelbarrow all the way from the station to the pond. Luckily, no one seemed to have spotted us as we took turns pushing it down Townfield Lane and we never had to furnish an inquisitive resident with our prearranged, but unlikely tale of how we had been called out to remove a dead dog from the roadside and return it to its owner.
The air was deathly cold that night. The mists had thankfully receded, but the ground was growing increasingly frosted as we approached the pond. The waters were unfrozen, somehow untouched by the Autumnal chill which had lain its grip over the field. The water was low, perhaps only a few feet in depth, and it reflected the light of the full moon and the stars above it with abominable clarity, like a polished cosmic mirror of black obsidian. The area was deathly quiet, which made me wonder how long it would be until we were discovered. Doubtless what we were about to do would raise an alarm at some point, and I could only hope that we would be long gone before any inquisitive locals came to see the impending commotion. First, we secured the diesel and set about draining each barrel into the pond as quietly and efficiently as possible. Crawford proved reluctant in stepping too close to the water’s edge, but I assured him by stating that once this night was done, we would be free to forever banish all thought of the pond and of the awful horror we had stumbled upon in that terrible night at the Naylor House. When we were content that every last drop was now floating upon the water’s surface, I lit one of the makeshift torches we had constructed from the legs of an old chair stored at the station and together, we tipped the wheelbarrow forwards, causing the carved stone to thud onto the soft ground where it laboriously rolled forwards, crashing into the laced water with a loud splash. I braced myself for some reaction, but the ripples caused by the rock’s entry gently faded until the water was once more still and restful. With no obvious effect taking place, there was nothing else to do except trust in the fiery touch of the diesel, and I arched the flaming torch over my shoulder before hurling it in. In an instant, the surface of the water erupted into a yellowy-orange conflagration, spreading from the point of where the torch had landed and quickly flowing outwards across the entire pond’s surface. We took a step back and shielded ourselves from the instant heat, which was already causing the air around us to grow torrid with frightful speed. For a few moments, there was nothing, nothing except the flames and us. Then, it came, exploding out from beneath the inky waters ablaze. I heard Crawford cry out in panic and I sensed that he had taken flight, leaving me to stare in perplexation at the cosmic traveler unfolding before me. Eventually, I too succumbed to panic and fled from the burning pond and into the chill night’s air.
When the workmen returned to Reid’s Field the next morning to continue their work, they found Crawford and I in a state of terror and madness. Crawford was discovered wandering the banks of the mysteriously drained Reid’s Pond, laughing hysterically, shouting at the sky, and intermittently singing songs in an unknown foreign tongue. His hair had unaccountably shifted and transformed into a shocking snow white. I was found nearby, unconscious and lost in the thralls of a deathly coma that would last some eleven months. When I finally regained consciousness, I found myself in the District Memorial Hospital in Crewe, my arms and neck hideously scarred by what I later learned were third degree burns. I was thankfully discharged a month after waking up and returned home, where Susan tenderly nursed me back to my former strength.
We were both quizzed on the events of that night of course, Crawford a few days after and myself upon returning home. Though no criminal charges were ever levied against us, I had a hard time convincing my superiors to allow me to keep my job. The force was of course ignorant to what we had truly seen that night and instead focused their questions upon the mass of organic matter that was discovered laying at the very bottom of the pond, deep within a strange funnel shaped burrow that had sat at its very centre. This organic matter, the description of which conjured up hideous reminiscences, was a confusing tangle of mummified bodies. It was impossible to identify all except one and even then, the police nor the coroner could accept the truth. I am loath to admit that certain facts were omitted from official reports and never formally acknowledged by the police force. That the mummified adult remains found in the Naylor House had been those of Kathy Naylor was apparent, made clear not only by the corpse being dressed in the child’s clothing, but also the braces worn over the teeth, the records of which matched the young girl’s exactly. No one, however, has ever gone on record as stating such. Valerie Naylor never regained her senses and to this day, lives in a permanent catatonic state in the Prestwich Psychiatric Hospital. What she saw that night is something that can only be guessed at by examining and accepting the horrid facts as truth, regardless of how maddening and implausible they must appear. Frank Naylor was seemingly lost in a terrible cycle of mania and depression. Refusing to accept that his only child was gone, he erupted into a rage the likes of which had never been seen by the attending physicians who later joined the investigation. He was eventually taken to Broadmoor Hospital after his violent tendencies became untenable to treat at Byron House. The Naylor House was eventually passed on to Frank’s brother in nearby Middlewich, who sold it to the Locke Builders shortly after.
Reid’s Field is gone now, the entire area home to hundreds of new families who have come to Barton to settle. Most of the new streets are named after the various trees that once dotted the briar tangled fields, pleasant names such as Elmwood Road, Chestnut Drive, and Cherry Tree Avenue. The spot where Agnus Sallow’s home once stood is now a large patch of grass and wildflowers where the local children spend their summer months playing football and chasing butterflies. The pond, once known as the Mere, is also a distant memory, its waters long since drained and filled in. Few, if any, of the residents of what would come to be called the Locke Estate, would be able to guess that a large pond, dark and ominous, had once brooded alone in the centre of the new housing project.
I continued to serve in the police force for the next thirty years and stayed in Barton long after my retirement. Crawford retired as soon as he regained his senses, but with his mind somewhat unhinged by his witnessing one too many of Barton’s odd occurrences. He eventually left the village and moved to Chester, where I assume he lived out his last days. I occasionally drive through the Locke Estate, imagining it as it was when I first arrived in the village, before the roads and new homes. I am thankful that those crumbling and ancient houses that once dotted that lonely and foreboding farmland are gone now, their bricks nothing more than rubble used to fill in the brackish pond where the horror had once laired.
But what of the horror? Just what was it that had so precipitously invaded our world from the Great Beyond? I cannot say that even now, I can justifiably answer that question in a way that will leave the reader satisfied. It did possess a form, the lambert aura of the burning diesel saw to that. It appeared to be amorphous and yet squamous, as it erupted inflamed out the pond, shrieking and tittering. I thought I could make out the beating of great leathery wings that moved the air above me in a curious buzzing vibration that rattled in my skull. As it flapped frantically in an effort to rid itself of the flames, great splashes of burning diesel rained down upon me, causing me to scream out in agony and cover my head. Pushing past the searing pain, I could make out a vast bulk of inky darkness, rising up and towards the sky. It was colossal, far bigger in size than the pond had ever been, and I remember being perplexed as to how it had ever laired beneath those acrid waters. Its blackness blotted out the light of the moon, almost appearing to pull the light deep into its abyssal surface. For the briefest of moments, I thought I spied some kind of long metallic proboscis and several elongated appendices, each of which terminated into a terrible set of crustaceous claws. I cannot say if I truly saw these things, or if they were a trick of the light, hallucinations conjured up by my brain feebly attempting to give form to the formless. But despite this these details were lost within the unfathomable Plutonic mass of the thing.
Frank Naylor had been right, it was just a shadow. An amorphous fragment from the Great Beyond. A transient visitor to our distant shores. It has come without malice, for such an emotion was alien to its nature, as alien to it as its appetite had been to us. It was a tenebrous chronophage, called down to our world by a force far more malignant than it could ever be. Harnessed, enthralled, and enslaved through black rites and unholy magic for the sole purpose of sustaining its profane mistress. Agnes Sallow, that terrible hag, how old she must have been when her body had finally succumbed to the flames set by Peter Croutch. Centuries must have passed around her, and yet she had survived, timeless, suspended at the threshold between life and death as her wicked body continued living on through the blasphemous transfusion of time itself. It must have slumbered peacefully after her death, with no ill designs upon mankind. It was we who had awakened it, disturbed it with our incessant need to build. It had done what any predator would have done after a period of hibernation, it had sought out its favored prey and fed. Doubtless, it would have continued to feed, sucking the life out of every child it could find, not out of a desire to cause harm, but simply from the instinct to survive. Mercifully, it is gone now, banished back to the black gulfs by that most primordial of elements. It was a shadow and nothing more. A shadow from beyond time and space. A shadow called down from the gloaming abysses of the unknowable cosmos. The shadow from the stars.
Credit: Nick Lowe
Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.