DARK COUNTY (13 page)

The village of Cofnin laid ten miles southeast of the city of Lincoln. It was a picturesque little village, the local council had insisted that any house built there fit in with the style of the village, so even the new build house were all made of the same sandstone. The village had several countryside walks that encompassed woods, lakes, fields, pubs and the old hall.

Cofnin Hall had once been the home of Sir Andrew Mayler and his family. It had been built in the early nineteenth century and had served as home to the Mayler family for four generations, until the family ran into financial trouble and were forced to sell the house in the early twentieth century. The house was bought by the Government. Originally, they used it as an office for the Ministry of Agriculture, to oversee all of the work they had to do in the county.

During the Second World War, the house was handed over to the military. It was used as a hospital, treating airmen injured in operations over Germany, and also used to treat soldiers sent back from the front line.

The military kept hold of it until the late 1960’s, at which point the house was sold to the national trust. They kept it open as a museum until someone decided to burn the place down in the mid eighties.

The fire ravaged the building. Though it still stood, the damage to the roof and floors throughout was far too expensive for the trust to consider restoring. So for the last thirty years, the hall has sat abandoned and ruined, surrounded by its overgrown gardens and the woodlands that ever encroached on it. Weeds now grew inside the once great hall, and vines had devoured several walls inside and out.

With its dereliction came the reputation of the hall being haunted and the punning nickname Coffin Hall.

Local kids used it to prove their bravery, or to scare their friends, but for one girl investigating Coffin Hall was very serious indeed. That girl was Laura Green. For the last two years, Laura had spent almost every night searching the hall, desperate to find a ghost.

This night was no different. As Laura walked up the winding drive that led to the hall the sun was starting to set. It was late autumn and there was a fine rain in the air, but that didn’t bother Laura. The house would be wet inside, but there were still some parts that offered shelter from the elements.

The previous night she had left some things behind, a few little experiments. She had written on the wall in chalk. A simple message, ‘Are you there?’ She had left the chalk on the floor near the message, hoping that tonight she would fine some sort of reply. It was of course always possible that someone living had found the message and decided to reply as a joke, but she hoped that she would be able to tell the difference.

She had heard all of the stories about the hall, and knew full well that most of them were rubbish. Supposedly, the ghost of a soldier who had died on the operating table in the hall when it was a hospital roamed the corridors at night looking for revenge on the surgeon who let him die.

Laura had done her research, though; she knew that it never had an operating theatre. It had triage, but most of the care that was done there was about recovery, not treatment. People who needed surgery were sent off to other hospitals.

There were stories, too, that Sir Andrew Mayler haunted the house. His anguished spirit was supposed to be in eternal torment, as his murderer had never been brought to justice. The problem was that Andrew Mayler died of natural causes at the age of eighty-seven; there was never any suggestion of murder.

Some of the stories about the house had some element of truth. There was supposed to be the ghost of a young boy, about eight years old, who had drowned in the pond in the grounds. He was supposed to search the house, looking endlessly for his mother.

Laura had found out that a boy of that age named Joseph Mayler, one of Sir Andrew’s grandsons, had died in the pond in the garden. This gave some validity to the claims people made of seeing him. Apparently, he was always soaked to the skin. One of the few hints of a ghost that Laura had encountered within Coffin Hall was a single, small, wet footprint in one of the upstairs corridors.

There was also a story about a shell-shocked soldier who had hung himself from the beams in the ceiling of the great hall. Legend said that his spirit could be seen still hanging from the noose. Though Laura had never seen the dangling ghost on any of her many visits to the hall, she had found documents pertaining to the suicide of the soldier, so she supposed it was possible his spirit was there.

Also, there was supposed to be the spirit of a sad woman dressed all in white who was often seen upstairs, in the servants’ quarters, wailing in despair. This could be the ghost of one of the maids for the Mayler family. She had fallen pregnant. Rumour had it that the father was one of the Mayler family, but the baby was stillborn. Unable to overcome her grief, she, too, had committed suicide, by jumping from the roof of the hall.

The most recent ghost that Laura knew about was the ghost of a young woman who had been killed when one of the walls of the ruined house had collapsed on her. This had been all over the papers a few years ago.

Laura came to the hall as often as she could, spending whole nights there on occasions, desperate to see one of the spirits with her own eyes. It had started when her father died, she wanted some evidence of a life after death as this would give her some comfort. In recent years, though, the Hall, and hunting for its spectral occupants, had become something of an obsession.

It was a Friday night and that meant that there was always the chance of her being disturbed in her investigation. Local kids wanting to test their nerve, or just mess around, often came at the weekends, as did drunk adults who really should have known better. She hated it if they saw her; they always wanted to know who she was and what she was doing there. So she had taken to hiding away when she encountered other people in the hall.

The first thing she did was to check the wall where she had written the message. The rain of earlier in the day had managed to run down the wall a little, fading her question, but it was still legible, ‘Are you there?’ She looked on the ground for the piece of chalk she had left. It was still there, but she could have sworn that she had left it under the word ‘Are’, but now it rested under the question mark at the end of the sentence. She looked back up at the wall; there was something, a white smudge of chalk. She peered at it, trying to see if there was some semblance of a letter or a word there. It was no use. If there had been any kind of intelligent meaning behind it, it had been washed away by the rain. For all she knew it could have been an answer from a spirit, or a joke from a living person, or just some of the chalk that had run off of her own message.

Disheartened, she moved to the great hall. The roof on this part of the hall was still intact, and the beams remained in the ceiling. One of them was the beam that the shell-shocked soldier had hung himself from. In here, she had lined three stones up on the floor and left a fourth nearby, hoping that one of the spirits would complete the pattern.

The stones were all scattered. Perhaps a spirit had been annoyed at her wanting it to play games, or perhaps someone living had walked through and moved the stones by accident. This was not evidence.

She heard it clearly, footsteps echoing through the ruin of the hall. She ran out of the great hall and stood at the foot of the enormous staircase. She tried to determine whether the sound was coming from upstairs or down here. She listened intently, for a moment she thought the footsteps had stopped, then she heard them again. The sound was definitely coming from above. She carefully climbed the staircase, some of the steps were rotten and it was easy to fall through if you stepped in the wrong place. When she reached the top of the stairs, she stopped and listened once more. Again, the sound had disappeared. Laura wondered if one of the spirits was playing with her. Then it started up again, it was coming from the corridor that led to the east side of the house. This is where the nursery and children’s bedrooms had been when it was a family home. Was this the ghost of the drowned boy, Joseph Mayler? She set off down the corridor, hoping that she would see something. The light in the corridor was quite good, the streetlights shone through the windows, upstairs they were not boarded up, and the moon shone brightly through the gaps in the roof.

It was a few years ago that she had a similar experience to this. She had heard the footsteps from downstairs and followed the sound down this same corridor. It was that night that she had found the wet footprint. It was right in the middle of the corridor on one of the floorboards, a small but perfectly formed footprint left in water. A child had obviously left it due to the size, and whoever had made it had been barefoot. The print was so clear that she could even see the small toe prints.

She was ashamed of the fact that she had run away that night, the shock of the print instigated an instinctual reaction and she had fled the house. It was that primeval fear of the unknown; it had taken over her and made her run. She had kicked herself later for giving in to such fear, but by the time she returned the print, and the sound of footsteps, had gone, and she had never encountered it again.

Now, though, the footsteps were back, walking the same corridor as that night. Was she about to find another wet footprint? If so, she would not run this time. This time she would stay and continue looking for the ghost of the drowned boy; she would try to communicate with him. Of course, she realised quickly that there was no hope of seeing a wet footprint this time. Though the night was clear and moonlit now, it had been raining all day. The wooden boards of the corridor were sodden with water.

Suddenly she heard another sound. It sounded like a whisper. It came from the room at the end of the corridor; this had been the nursery once upon a time. She stopped in her tracks and waited. She was starting to think she had imagined the sound when it came again, a clear sound of a human voice, a young human voice, whispering. Laura felt that same desire to run that she had experienced before, but this time she controlled it, she was determined. She quietly glided down the corridor towards the nursery. The whispering continued. When she reached the doorway, the door itself was long gone, she carefully peeked around it into the room. This side of the house was less well lit, as it faced away from the streetlights, but there was enough moonlight coming in for her to make out shapes, and after a few moments peering in her eyes began to adjust and everything became clearer.

At first, she saw nothing. The room appeared completely still. Then she heard the whisper again, and when she looked in the direction it came from she spotted a small figure in the room. She felt herself being overcome with emotion. The figure looked a little to tall to be an eight-year-old boy, though. Then she saw the second figure. They were stood next to each other looking out of the window. They whispered to each other in hushed tones, but from here she could make out the words.

‘It’s really creepy,’ the smaller figure said. ‘Can we go now?’

‘Don’t be a wimp,’ said the slightly larger figure. ‘I want to see a ghost.’

Laura felt utterly disappointed. They weren’t ghosts. They were just local kids, in here looking to be scared. She didn’t want to get into a conversation with them. She wanted to be left alone in the house to continue her investigation. She decided to slip back downstairs and wait for them to leave. She moved away from the door. Rather than walk back along the long corridor, she headed to the door that led to the servants’ staircase. As she made her way to the door, she felt her foot go down too hard on a very damp floorboard. The board snapped in half with a loud crack. Laura let out a little surprised scream and fell to the floor with a thud.

A loud, terrified scream came from the nursery. Obviously the kids had heard the noise she had made. They ran out of the room and saw her sprawled on the floor trying to get up. The fear in their eyes was amazing. Without saying a word to her, they ran back along the corridor. She heard their hurried steps all the way to and down the staircase.

She picked herself up and guessed that she once more had the house to herself. The hope she had felt when she heard the whispers and first saw the figure in the nursery had been overwhelming, and now that it had turned out just to be a couple of kids she felt utterly devastated.

Normally she would stay in the house until the sky outside started to lighten, but after that disappointment, she had had enough for the night. Slowly, she made her way back towards the main staircase. Her mood was low, she considered writing another chalk message for the spirits, but then thought what was the point?

She left Coffin Hall by the main entrance. As she walked back along the gravel driveway, she stopped and looked back at the ruined mansion. Were there any spirits in there? If so, would she ever find them? She carried on walking away from the hall, her mind swirling with thoughts that she was wasting her time.

She crossed the street and walked through the churchyard. She thought to herself that maybe she should give up her quest. It had started as a way to prove that there was an afterlife. She wanted to know that it was possible that her father lived on somewhere, but surely, she had enough proof of that now. It was after the accident that she had started going to the hall more and more often, no longer looking for proof.

She stopped and looked at a grave. A tear came to Laura’s eye when she saw the fresh flowers lent against the headstone. Her mother had been to the grave recently. Laura remembered the pain of her father’s death, and the agony of the wall in Coffin Hall collapsing on her, crushing her to death. Now both of their bodies were laid side by side in the churchyard.

Laura no longer needed proof that ghosts were real. Her own continued existence was proof enough. Now she searched the hall night after night for others like her. She was so very lonely.

David Barker was in trouble. Not the ‘this is going to cause a few problems’ kind of trouble, no, David was in the ‘heading straight up shit creek without a paddle’ kind of trouble. The way he saw it, he had less than three weeks before everything fell apart. Less than three weeks until those bastards at the bank came and took it all away from him. Not only would he lose his business, but also his home and the legacy of his family.

Hardwick Farm had been in David’s family for nearly a hundred and fifty years. His great, great, great grandfather had founded it in 1864. Thomas Hardwick had put his heart and soul into getting the farm and his blood, sweat and tears into making it a success.

It had passed down the line from oldest son to oldest son, until that is David’s grandfather, Maurice Hardwick. Maurice only had one daughter Jean Hardwick, who went on to marry David’s father John Barker. The two of them ran the farm, and when they retired, it was left to David.

It had not all been his fault. David had done all of the things he should have done. He went to university and studied agricultural management, gained a first class honours degree in fact. Plus, he had spent almost his whole life on this bloody farm, he knew how everything worked, or at least how it was supposed to work. He had just had a run of bad luck. Three years ago, half of his farm land had flooded, destroying all of the crops that had been growing in them. What he managed to save was barely enough to cover paying his workers. The following year, his entire potato crop had got blight. The disease had ravaged his crops, making them useless. Last year his entire wheat crop had failed. His land was becoming dead, unable to grow the simplest thing.

He looked out on his fields. This year’s crop looked like it would be a no go as well. He had sown the seeds nearly a month ago, and there wasn’t even the slightest hint of them sprouting. It was no use, his life as a farmer was over and his family legacy would belong to the bank within the month.

He looked at the sun setting over his barren fields. The sky was burning red. Red sky at night, the bank gets your farm. He laughed, a sad little chuckle to try and hide his despair, even from himself. He headed into the farmhouse. He needed to eat something, even though he hadn’t felt hungry in weeks, but more importantly, he needed a drink.

He made himself some beans on toast, but most of it went in the bin. He would fill up on whiskey, he decided. He pulled the half a bottle of Jameson out of the cupboard and sat down in front of the TV.

He wasn’t watching it, really. It was just noise, some sense of company. He found himself getting increasingly lonely of late. His wife Tanya had left him nearly a year ago, though things had not been going well for years before that. At first, he had enjoyed the freedom. After all, they had been together since they were in their teens. At forty-one, he had found it incredibly easy to adjust to single life. He would spend most nights in the village pub, and then at weekends he would head into town, checking out the bars and clubs. There had been a few girls, though none of them were much more than one night stands.

Lately, though, he had been feeling the isolation more and more. Part of it was the money worries. He had no one he could talk them through with, no one to tell him that everything would be alright. He called his parents once a week, and on a few occasions he had nearly confided in his mother; her gentle tone was so reassuring, but he always stopped himself. Why should he worry them, too? They had sunk all of their money into the house in Spain and were spending there remaining days in moderate luxury. How could he confess that he had all but lost everything they had worked for, everything her entire family had worked for.

The whiskey was soon down to less than a quarter. He didn’t bother with a glass, choosing to simply swig it straight from the bottle. It numbed the worry a little, never completely, but at least enough to allow him to sleep. Once he felt that warm, comforting numbness over come him, he headed up to bed, his big, cold, lonely bed.

He lay in bed a little while, thinking things through. There was no way he could get another loan from the bank. He was still paying back the one he took out last year, when things started heading south. He had no close friends anymore, or at least none who he could ask for the sort of money he needed. He began to think that perhaps if a fire were to destroy some of his out buildings and machinery, he might just get enough from the insurance to keep the farm ticking over for a few more months. If he prayed hard enough, perhaps God would hear him, and his crops would start to grow.

He fell into an alcohol-inspired sleep. His dreams were dark and confusing. He dreamt of Tanya, of strangling the life out of her. Then he dreamt of his mother, crying over the loss of the farm. He dreamt of looking up from his own grave as his father tossed a handful of dirt down on his face.

He heard the noises at first still in a dream, it sounded to him like farm machinery, only much larger and more powerful than anything he had ever heard before. It made no sense in the dream as he dreamt that he had destroyed all of his machinery. For a moment, he thought that the tractors, threshers and harvesters had returned for their revenge on him.

All at once, he was awake and aware that the noise was not only real, but deafening. Blinding lights shone through his bedroom window, sweeping across and then back again. First bright white, then red, then white once more. It was so bright that it made his head pound unless he shielded his eyes with his arm.

He virtually fell out of bed, rolling onto the hardwood floor. He crawled with his eyes shut in the direction of the door. He reached up, fumbling, for the door handle. In panic and the post drunken haze, it took him several attempts to locate it. Finally, he felt the cool metal in his hand and pulled it down. He dragged himself out onto the landing and slammed the door shut behind him. He rolled onto his back and laid there for a moment panting from the effort. The noise was still loud out here, but not quite as deafening, and the lights were barely visible from the landing window.

His bedroom faced north, and the landing window faced west. As his wits came back to him, he realised that someone was on his land. Most of his fields were off to the east and west. The only things to the north were his barns, the warehouses and the far field. He could not understand what was making all of the noise, but convinced himself that someone was trying to steal his machinery. He knew from experience that the lights on the harvester were brighter than the sun.

Earlier he had thought about torching all of the machinery himself to claim on the insurance, but that would be his own doing, and he was damned if he was going to let someone steal from him. It was just adding insult to injury. He was going to get his gun and confront the bastards head on.

He was pretty much fully clothed, as he was most nights these days. He still had his keys in his trouser pocket. He got to his feet and raced down the hall to the gun cabinet he kept in the spare room. The lock always seemed to stick, and in his current state, it took him a while to get it unlocked. He pulled out the shotgun, it was not something he used very often. Occasionally he would use it to take a pot shot at a fox trying to get at his chickens. Other than that, though, it mostly sat there in the cabinet. It had been his father’s, maybe even his grandfather’s, originally. He quickly loaded two cartridges into the gun and rand down the stairs.

He started to head for the kitchen, as the back door faced north and would allow him to see what was going on quicker, but then he remembered his boots were by the front door, and he was not heading outside barefoot.

He ran through the hall and grabbed his work boot. He tried pulling them on while standing. This was impossible however whilst holding the gun. He set the firearm down against the wall, carefully as it was loaded, and pulled on his boots. He was about to pick the gun up again when he noticed something out of place. On the doormat lay a white envelope that he was certain had not been there before. The post only came once a day, and he had picked his mail, mostly final reminders, up earlier that day. He left the gun where it was for a moment and bent down and picked up the envelope. His name was clearly written on the front, in some of the finest hand writing he had ever seen. There was no address written below it, the letter had been delivered by hand. He could not explain why he didn’t just ignore it and continue investigating the disturbance outside, he just had an overwhelming sense that he should open it.

He ripped the envelope open, noticing the feel of the paper. It felt heavier than a normal envelope, and more metallic, kind of like one you would receive a birthday card in, only heavier. He slid out the single, neatly folded sheet of paper that was inside. The paper felt the same as the envelope. He unfolded it and read the message written in the same fine script.

Your crops will grow quicker and stronger than ever before. This is our gift to you and will solve all of your problems. What grows in the far field is not for you. You MUST stay out of there.

There was no signature, but it was clear that whoever sent the note was responsible for the noise and lights outside. He did not know what they were doing, but thieves did not leave you personally addressed notes. Whoever was out there, and whatever they were doing, they knew his name and that he had problems. Something about this unnerved him and made him not want to go out there and confront them. He kicked off his boots once more and took the note and the gun into the living room. He sat on the sofa. The lights were not too bad in this room, but the noise was still deafening. He picked up the whiskey bottle he had left in the room earlier and took a large gulp of it; its burn was comforting. David did not sleep that night, he sat on the sofa, listening to the roaring and swooshing of machinery he could not imagine. He drank the rest of the bottle of whiskey and cradled the loaded shotgun in his lap.

As the sun began to rise, at around six, the sound of machinery ceased. David had finished the whiskey, and as the morning light crept through the window, he drifted off into a deep sleep.

He woke up feeling hungover at about eleven in the morning. The loaded shotgun was still in his arms. It took him a few seconds to remember why it was there. He wondered if it had all been some kind of alcohol-induced hallucination at first. After all, he had been hitting the bottle hard lately, but then he saw the note laying next to him on the sofa. If that was real, he guessed that the rest must have been, too.

He went upstairs and locked the gun back up in the cabinet. Last night it may have made him feel more comfortable. In the cold light of day, however, it made him feel very unsafe having a loaded gun lying around. He washed and changed, then went to the kitchen and made himself a strong cup of coffee. He felt sober now, but knew there would still be a lot of the whiskey in his system.

He looked out of the kitchen window. From this vantage point nothing looked amiss, but from here the view of the far field was completely obscured by the barns and warehouses. Everything looked in order with them, so he decided to finish his coffee and then take a walk up to the far field.

When he got outside, he was surprised by how bright it was, but guessed that his hangover was making him a little over sensitive to the light. He wandered across his courtyard, stopping at several of the outbuildings to check their locks were in place and untampered with. They were all fine, even on the machine sheds; whatever the people who had sent the note were doing out there the previous night, they had not been trying to steal his property.

As he rounded the corner of his last barn, he saw something that should not have been there. Normally the far field was only accessible by its southern most edge; each of the other edges was surrounded by a dense copse. That morning however, the entire southern edge of the field was covered by a twenty foot high metal fence. It was enormous and solid. David could not see into the field at all. He walked over to the fence cautiously. It shone in the sunlight like chrome. He could see no break in it, no gate, no way of accessing the field at all. He gingerly outstretched his arm and ran his fingertips over the surface of the metal. It felt cold, and also like it was vibrating ever so slightly.

He walked along the length of the southern edge, following the fence. He found not a sign of a way of entering the field. When he came to the copse, he decided he would walk through there to see if the fence continued.

Following the field’s perimeter through the rough terrain of the overgrown woodland took him thirty-seven minutes. The giant metal fence continued all the way around the field, totally cutting it off from the world. Though there had been points on the trip round that he had to veer slightly further away from the fence, to avoid trees and shrubs, he had tried to inspect it as closely as possible. Its surface appeared to be perfectly smooth, and as far as he had been able to see, had no entrances anywhere on it. Whoever had erected it would need either a very large ladder or a helicopter to get them inside.

David had a ladder back at the house, if he remembered rightly he had left it leaning against the front wall, from when he was cleaning the guttering out the other week. It was a long wooden one, and he was sure that it would at the very least get him high enough to look over and see what the hell was going on.

He rushed back to the house. Not wanting to waste time walking around it, he entered the house through the kitchen door and walked straight up the hall to the front door. When he got outside, he was about to turn right to where the ladder was propped up, but something stopped him in his tracks. His largest field, the south field, lay directly in front of his house. He always planted his wheat there, he made more money from the potatoes in the west field and the Brussels sprouts in the east field. They were very ugly plants, though, and he loved looking out of the window on a sunny day and seeing the golden wheat swaying in waves of breeze. This year, however, the seeds had not taken. In the month since he had sown them there had not been a trace of anything growing, until that morning.