Eleven New Ghost Stories (27 page)

It had to stop then; I was no
fun if I stayed at home. He couldn’t humiliate me if I was indoors.
No, he had to leave me alone for a while. Let me get my shit back
together, let me think maybe he was going to leave me alone.

He left me alone for a long
time, maybe six or more months without a touch. He let me get my
life back on track. I got a job with a cousin of mine, helping him
run his betting shop. I knows my games and my odds and numbers. I
get the council to come over and paint my walls get the dingy flat
looking a bit brighter. I even talks to my kid a few times. He’s
happy, so I suppose that’s something.

But it wasn’t long before he
decides to let me know he hasn’t forgot about me. This time it
wasn’t to humiliate me or wind me up. I was just shifting some
stuff downstairs from my flat to my storage cupboard on ground
floor. I was unlocking the door when his hand came down on my
shoulder...

It wasn’t a big too-friendly
slap like it used to be. It was just this slight touch, just a
reminder that he hadn’t done with me yet. And I didn’t take it like
I used to, didn’t go ice cold. I was expecting him, if not then,
but sometime. I know how this prick’s mind works. I knew he’d be
back. Pricks like Terry Coles can never leave well alone. That
probably annoyed him; I’d got over it a bit you see, there’s worse
things in life than being tapped by undead wind-up merchants.

I should’ve pretended, played
along. ‘Cos now he knew that he had to up his game.

He was quiet again for a while,
let months go by before he has another go. I’m at Stoke station,
waiting to catch train down to see City away. I’m on my own, cos
most people stay away from me these day ‘cos they think I’m a nut
job. But I’m still going to matches... Fuck the lot of them…

I’m stood on the platform
waiting and I see train coming in from the distance. So I pick up
my bag ready for when it arrives.

Then, just as it’s pulling into
the platform, I feel that hand on my shoulder. I go stiff, cold,
that’s normal – but then that hand pushes me. Shoves me right off
the platform.

I land on the tracks, just an
inch away from the electric line. The train’s coming towards me and
people are screaming and shouting and I can see it coming for me
and I cover me eyes and I scream, very nearly pissed my pants – no
joke.

But Terry, he knows what I
don’t. That this ain’t the long train; it’s just a short one, four
carriages instead of six. It’s already stopped well ahead of me.
I’m there screaming on the track like a bloody girl when it’s
already stopped still.

Fucking hilarious, eh?

That’s our new game. He’s trying
to kill me, but he hasn’t decided when yet. So he’s toying with me,
waiting till I let me guard down. Last week it was the tram – I’m
in Manchester for the away game and he gives me a shove just as the
tram’s coming into stop. I’m out the way fast enough before it can
hit me, but if I wasn’t on me toes it would’ve taken me down.
Driver has a right go, people are laughing, saying I just jumped
out. I don’t rise to it; what’s the fucking point?

He’s had plenty of goes. I can’t
walk down stairs if there’s no bannister. Can’t walk down the
middle, have to have my hand on the rail; he’s had a go at me on
stairs more than once.

Can’t walk on the road-side of
the pavement – he might shove me off. Got to be careful in the
kitchen to. You see that? That’s what happened when he pushed me
against the cooker that one time. Treatment in hospital for second
degree burns. Hurt to even wipe my fucking arse on the toilet for
weeks.

One day he’ll get bored and have
done with it. I won’t help him, but you know what? I ain’t gonna
put up that much of a fight either. I mean, what have I got? I got
no friends, my family doesn’t want me near them. I’m out of work
again ‘cos my stupid cousin fucked up his taxes. I got no friends
and no boozer. No pubs around here will have me in them anymore.
I’m trouble, a nutter, a fucking killer!

They only have me in here ‘cos
they think I’m funny. Fucking students. Crazy Carl, it’s all such a
fucking laugh to them. Buy Carl a drink and he’ll tell you about
the ghost that taps him on the shoulder. They have goes sometimes;
creep up behind me and touch me on the shoulder to see if I go
mental. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

They ought to have barred me
here too, but I think I actually bring the punters in. I’ve become
part of the fucking furniture, because I’ve got nowhere else to
go.

So you get it all down… you get
it all down for your book so you and your mates can have a good old
laugh at Crazy Ole Carl. I look forward to reading about it – I can
read you know. Then one day, when you hear about me, how I got
mowed down in the road, or pushed off a bridge or drowned in the
canal… well, you can have a big fucking laugh then too, can’t
you?

BENJAMIN WENT TO THE WELL

It’s a shame my uncle isn’t
still alive. He told the story best; he always said I made it sound
too much like a film. He was more of a man of words; he could tell
the legend so it made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on
end. And it’s all true, every word of it, at least as far as we
know it…

It’s become a sort of a family
tradition; all of us know it off by heart. We’ve all been down to
where the house stood, seen where the well once was… visited the
graves…

My family have owned land
here for generations. There was a time when Bullham Brook was a
bustling, busy, growing town, but that was when the mine was open.
Some people connect the closing of the mine with what happened with
the well
–
all the accidents, though my father was of the
mind that it was more to do with corner-cutting and corruption. But
superstition might be what’s kept it closed…

My father was the first in the
family to really study the story, try to separate fact from
fiction. I’ve got it all here, all his papers and it’s all borne
out. Well, most of it... we’ve got death certificates, and parish
records, testimonies and diaries. And crucially, the police report.
Whether it happened exactly how it’s supposed to have, who can say?
But did something strange, awful and wicked take place on that
hillside that night? Of that, there is no doubt.

It was my father’s ambition to
dig up the well, see if he could find bones. Of course, the money
it costs to maintain the estate meant that he could never get the
funds together. There was a time when this estate used to make
money, but those days are long gone.

It’s surprising the story isn’t
more well known, but I suppose this is an odd corner of the
country, not much here. But now, when we have heritage tourists
coming up to the house, the Trust like to wheel me out to tell it
every so often. My uncle was the master; he relished a chance to
tell it. Milked it for everything it was worth…

They called him the terror of
Bullham Brook!

From the end of the family
estate to the Cliffside tin mine, he ran and roamed, tucked and
rolled, tore and trod. He brought chaos to each sleepy corner, to
each garden and house from one end of the village to the other. No
one was safe.

Ladies cried his name as their
well-kept gardens were trodden through; shopkeepers rushed to
prevent the chaos of his clumsy fingers; farmers reached for their
forks when they heard the squawks and grunts that signalled the
terror was near and their livestock needed protection.

Yes, Benjamin Morris was a
little monster; precocious, hyper-active and mischievous; forever
in and out of trouble. But who could blame him? Bullham Brook had
so little to offer a young boy with a fertile imagination and
energy to burn. The town was so quiet; he had no brothers or
sisters to play with, and there were so few children, and fewer
close to his age. Perhaps he merely craved attention; his father
was always so busy helping old Parson – Zachariah Parson, my great
grandfather – and his mother was so fragile, so highly-strung, so
vulnerable, and with her spending so much time in her bed, she
could hardly care for the boy and see to all his needs.

Whatever the cause, Benjamin
Morris somehow, someway, always seemed to be close to trouble. Yet
it must be stressed that Benjamin Morris was not a bad boy. He had
not an evil bone in his body. But if it had not been for him,
Bullham Brook might be a thriving, bustling town, instead of the
ghost town it is today. You can see, if you look down into the
valley, where many of the houses used to stand. Though small, this
community once thrived. The busy tin mine brought workers, the
promise of industry. But within a decade, all that would be
undone.

Benjamin Morris would uncover a
secret so terrible, so shocking, that it shook this town to its
very foundations. When the tin mine closed, beset by accidents and
misfortune, the court records would state it was due to
carelessness, neglect and corruption. But for those who lived in
the town, every accident, every act of unpleasantness was as a
result of what Benjamin Morris discovered. People can be
superstitious, especially back then, and over time they would leave
and desert Bullham Brook. Which is why today, as a village, it is
less than a handful of houses and little else but ruins.

The year was 1890. Benjamin was
a boy of eleven; he was independent, spirited, and an unwilling
student. The law required that he should go to school, which was
carried out in the village hall – which is still there – adjoining
what was once the church, which is not. His father thought his
schooling a waste of time, that he should be learning a profession.
If not on the farm, with him, in the mine; a good man, but a little
backward-thinking.

When not in school, the fields
and hills were Benjamin’s stomping ground. Where he ran races,
hunted rabbits, fished, made secret hideaways, leaped hedges and
climbed trees. He had the lay of the land; he could do virtually as
he pleased. There was but one rule – he must never go to the
well.

It was his mother’s rule, a rule
which she imposed with absolute strictness. He had heard it first
when he was only five years old. His mother was taking his father
his food for lunch when they crossed the hillside field where the
well lay, the only mark on the otherwise unspoiled landscape.

Already a keen explorer, the
young Benjamin ran toward the otherwise unremarkable stone ring,
but his mother screamed for him to come back to her. Prone to
hysterics, she shrieked at him and made him swear that he would
never go near the well, that he must promise to her that he would
never, ever, go to the well.

It was foolish of her. Had she
merely warned him that a well was no place for a child to play,
then he might simply have never thought to go there again. However,
her overbearing insistance that he must never,
ever
, go near
this otherwise ordinary landmark instilled it with a sense of
mystique. And although he obeyed his mother, he would never forget
that spot and over the years it must have preyed on his curiosity
many times.

But he obeyed; whatever havoc he
might have wreaked, he was at heart a good boy. His mother’s
warning was severe enough for him to fear the consequences he might
face if he were to visit the well.

He kept his promise to his
mother; he kept it until he was eleven years old. As I’ve said, he
was not a good student, and at school he was the bane of the school
mistress, Miss Claxton, to all accounts a nasty, rather spiteful
old spinster. The children are said to have called her Miss Bones
because of her emaciated, sinewy frame. She had under her tutelage
about 20 pupils, all of different ages, which one imagines would
not have made her job simple and might well have contributed to her
legendary temper.

Miss Bones was one of the three
people Benjamin hated most in the world. He hated her boring
lessons and the way she appeared to pick on him. But there was one
person in class who he hated even more, one person who haunted him
and persecuted and bated him more than anyone else.

That was Penelope Lucinda
Revile. Penelope was the daughter of one of the mine owners, a new
wealthy breed who had come to town. She saw herself as above the
other students in the class and Benjamin particularly, who was
roughly her age and therefore a kind of, shall we say, competitor.
Now we’ve all known a Penelope at some point in our lives, usually
as children; the sweetest of sweet girls – butter would not melt in
her mouth. But when backs were turned, a different creature
entirely…

Now, the situation, as told, is
that during one of the school break times, the children were
playing in the yard. Benjamin was playing alone with a ball and
Penelope decided she wanted to play with the ball to. He did not
want to, but Penelope insisted and Miss Claxton forced him. But he
could not play well enough for her; he wasn’t throwing the ball
hard enough or he was throwing it too hard. And Miss Claxton, being
well disposed to the spoilt young Ms Revile – perhaps giving
deferential treatment to one she saw as being of a better class –
kept telling off young Benjamin, though all he wanted to do was
play alone.

Penelope tormented him all
through play time. He was giving up too easily; she wasn’t having
enough fun with him. He wasn’t responding as fiercely as she’d
hoped. So, as the children queued to go back to the classroom, she
waited behind Benjamin. And when Benjamin went back into the
classroom, she took the ball from his hands and threw it across the
classroom, smashing one of the teacher’s potted plants and spilling
soil onto the classroom floor.

“Benjamin!” his teacher screamed
– now she’d done it; he was in for it now. The shrill, shrieking
Miss Bones decided that his behaviour was so bad, so intolerable,
that he must be taken to the vicar for punishment.