Bull Running For Girlsl (22 page)

The old mother pointed at the mantel. “Up there.”

Up there was an old photo album with pictures of old dames and young children in below-knee dresses and white pinafores. On one page there was a drab photo of a man with brisk sideburns in a black, wide brimmed hat and he wore a dark, hollow expression.

I showed it to the old mother.

“That’s him. Mowly Jack.”

“Quite a stern character wasn’t he?”

“Stern? He were an
evil
bastard. I could understand anyone suspecting him of murder but me Jack, never.”

“Just one more thing. Is there an old cottage close by?”

“…There used t’ be, but it were pulled down years ago.”

I thanked her for the tea and left the farm, shivering as I passed the five moles nailed to the fence.

The nightmares started that night. First, I dreamt that I was seriously ill in a hospital bed. I couldn’t move but was fully aware of the nurses, doctors, and everything else. It is all very well to say that one should die in their sleep, all peaceful. I don’t think anyone dies in their sleep peacefully. They might look like it, but that’s not the way it is. They go down fighting every inch of the way, terrified of the demons or of serpents coiled around their bodies and that strike each part of their mind again and again. There will be no peace for any one of us. We will see what others cannot see and our minds will twist them into terrifying monsters and there is nothing any of us can do about it.

Then I had a nightmare about Mowly Jack and his moles. He was walking down the lane to Moffat’s farm with a sack over his shoulder. When he got to the fence I thought he was going to nail some moles to it, but instead, from out of the bag he took a small child who trembled and cried. I woke up in a cold sweat and rang my sister, before it grew light.

“Moffat will be out of police custody today, they can’t keep him any longer and there is no sign of the boy.”

“The boy’s dead Abbie. Sam told me that he passed over a few hours ago.”

“But Moffat is still in police custody, unless the child died where he was imprisoned.” My hands trembled. I could hear Sylvia sighing on the other end of the phone.

“A child has disappeared on the spirit side too. Sam won’t help us anymore.”

“I don’t see how you giving me information can have anything to do with a spirit child’s disappearance.”

“Well it has. Don’t you see? There could be killings on both sides now. It has nothing to do with me anymore. Sam won’t help if it means losing more spirit children. I have to stop, Abbie
—
I can’t carry on.”

“You think that the disappearance is connected to what we are doing. Doesn’t the spirit world know who has the child?”

“Spirits can connect to those who want them in our world, and they know some of what we cannot see, but they are just like us in their own world. In their world they live as simply as we do and there is mystery there too.”

“Sylvia.”

“Yes?”

“How can a spirit child die?”

“I don’t know, but spirits can cease to be and that death is every bit as valid as a death in this world. This is the first spirit disappearance that I have come across and the mother is distraught.”

“I know Sylvia, I know.” I tried to calm my sister down.

A soul is a soul, whether it is here or on the other side. I remembered how I had escaped my own death, with my sister’s help. She used Sam, her spirit guide to help her. He had led her to an old, disused steelworks where he had seen the teddybears, six in all. One stood out from the rest, small and made of plastic, beige with a blue bib and a chewed ear. It was mine, but it has never been discovered though I was found.

The next night was the longest I had known in a long time, the weather turned colder, windy, and it began to snow. I usually loved snow, but right now I wished it away and prayed that there would be no more deaths. I lay in a troubled sleep in my bed and it was just after midnight when twigs on the withered oak rattled against the window and woke me. I had been meaning to cut back that branch all winter, but kept forgetting. I decided to get up and go and get some hot milk.

My cat, Orphy, was huddled next to the cooker far away from the kitchen windowsill where he usually slept. “Yes, Orphy, it’s very cold.”

The wind died and I thought I heard a light knocking on the door. Not wanting to answer the knock immediately I peeped out the window curtain and switched the porch light on. There, standing on the porch, was the man that the old mother had shown me in the photo. I could see his face clearly by the light. My hand shook as I held the curtain, and I remained rooted to the spot. His eyes were the eyes of a dead man, sunken in and fixed against a bone-white skin. His eyes tried to hold my stare but I could not help but lower mine to look at the small forms that stood on each side of him. I recognised one tiny face immediately
—
it was the murdered boy, Jake Patterson.

Mowly Jack stared at me in defiance and turned to go up the road in the direction of the Puritan graveyard, his wide-brimmed black hat stuck to his head for all eternity. I could not let him take those spirits. I grabbed my jacket and quickly put on my boots. I had no time to do anything except snatch my phone off the hall table and go after him. What was I thinking? The snow had only been falling for a few hours but it was enough to isolate this part of the world. Anyway, who could I tell…that a dead man had captured the ghosts of two dead children? I was desperate as I followed him up the lane, and I tried to ring Sylvia.
Would there be a signal?
I panicked. I was chilled to the bone but I needed to help.

Finally I got a signal.

“Sylvia, Sylvia. I see the man who has murdered them. He has them with him right now!”

“Keep calm
—
this is what you do, trust me. Ask the spirit world, ask
them
for help, they have to get the children away or they will never be free of him. Are you still there? Do you understand? This is something you cannot do alone
—
”

I heard the phone fall from her hands and understood immediately. I closed my eyes against the death-cold snow and begged for help. I begged for a chance to stop him.

Mowly Jack dragged the poor children through the blizzard, nearing the iron gates of the Puritan graveyard. I pleaded as I had never done in my life for some force to come to my aid. I could hear the cries of the small children.

Then
—
thank God
—
I saw the graveyard gate open. I saw the Puritans, and Sylvia, reach out and haul Mowly Jack through the gate. He had to let go of the children and they ran to my side for safety. The child spirits kept close to me as I crept towards the open gate and peered through to see what was happening. I had to know. The Puritan spirits dragged Mowly Jack over to an empty grave. He was kicking and screaming and several Puritan spirits pulled a tombstone over him as he tried to scramble out. Mowly Jack was sealed into the holy ground and would walk the earth no more.

I looked down at the children. From each tiny face tears were falling, but their eyes were full of gratitude too. My sister took them by the hand and led them away. She looked back and smiled once more at me, and I watched as they simply melted away in the swirling snow.

When I got home, exhausted and shocked, I saw something lying on the doorstep. It was my teddy bear, small and made of plastic, beige with a blue bib and a chewed ear. I held it close and cried.

The next morning the boy’s murder was all over the papers. The police had returned to the farm and investigated the old farmhouse a little more closely. Anyone could have missed the wall. The plaster looked dry. No one had heard the whimpering coming from behind it. It was too late. The poor child had been left to die with the rotting corpses of four others who had already passed over. He was there whilst I had been taking tea with the old mother and admiring the willow pattern on the tea cup.

Author Note: For my sister Sylvia, who passed away 1st March 2008.

The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio, influenced the work of Shakespeare, Keats and Chaucer amongst others. A hundred novellas were written by Boccaccio between 1350
—
1353.

All the final arrangements were in place and Frieda was to travel to China soon. She was looking forward to the trip and couldn’t wait to get away. She looked up from her writing, gazed out the window at the sodden ground and realised that summer was not going to materialise in England at all that year. Global warming had taken its toll and the only decent weather that anyone could enjoy was in May and the rest stayed somewhere around The Azores. It was mid-July, but might as well have been early spring or late autumn for all the sun she’d seen.

Frieda was going to China to do research for a book on the Cherchen mummies. The last book she had written was about how different cultures handled death and bereavement. Frankly, it had made her maudlin and depressed. She had the luxury of being able to write full time which had an effect on the normal, acceptable biorhythms of her life. Affected by insomnia, Frieda would often write until 3 a.m. before finally falling asleep until mid-day. Weeks of that and shopping for more Bolivian Roast at 5 a.m. in the 24-hour Tesco and any writer would get irritable, and depressed.

Depression. Each bout a nightmare, with long days of inactivity caused by disinterest and perhaps biopolarism. At least she experienced the highs on that. During the bad times Frieda would lay flat on her back in bed with quilt tucked tightly under her chin. A prisoner in her own body, her mind locked down with a great big bolt driven through her brain. Trapped. There was no escape, except into morbid thoughts and the feeling that nothing was worth her effort or of any value. Alongside the depression came claustrophobia. To Frieda, hell would be sleeping inside one of those small hostel compartments in Japan.

She couldn’t get beyond the trap that human existence was a wasted effort. She could write about life in stories, journals, and facts but why bother, when it was only second hand and others should experience it for themselves?

Frieda had no desire to take her own life. It wasn’t that kind of depression. It was the sinking feeling that she could stay so still that she would simply die within minutes: switch everything off in her head just like a light switch, one after the other until her mind was in darkness.

Why write?
she must ask. Wouldn’t it make it worse?

But writing actually helped Frieda deal with the depression. Sometimes she was a frenzy of activity, putting her horror into words so that her character could feel worse than she did. She furiously thumped her computer keyboard as if punching in a secret code to escape, day after day.

Sometimes Frieda would walk the streets, close to the River Irwell in Salford, where she had lived since graduation. She walked to stave off the bouts of depression, thinking about her writing as she walked. She constantly talked to herself, acting out the dialogue like a madwoman. Some mad people lived their fiction. Were most writers merely rehearsing for the madness and loneliness of later life?

Frieda had never really got on with the opposite sex for more than one or two months, or one or two years in two cases. Habits irritated her and she preferred to sleep alone.

Before she left Salford, Frieda had been on a messageboard and saw a YouTube video, filmed in India. A beggar put down a baby on the street pavement, with a cobra (whose venom had been removed), and onlookers watched eagerly as the baby tried to catch the snake and strangle it. Bets would be on snake or infant and Frieda watched as the cobra, its neck held firmly in the chubby little fist, wound the length of its body around the baby’s neck. Frieda shuddered and hoped that China didn’t have any horrors like that on offer for her.

The city of Urumchi captivated her. It was located in The Tarim Basin and was one of the ancient cities that once was a hive for traders and the welcome refuge of the nomads on the Silk Road. Huge mounds of melon, tomatoes, and onions were placed in front of the stalls in the bazaar. Normally, Frieda avoided crowds but the hustle of the foreign city was light relief from the dull, wet, streets of Salford. She was excited by the fact that she could escape to another continent for three months, with its new sounds, spice smells, and cheerful activity.

Urumchi had modern changes like skyscrapers, but there was also that wonderful oriental feel to the city. Behind those skyscrapers she could see snow-capped mountains and she felt refreshingly invigorated as the wind whipped down from them in the late afternoons.

Frieda looked at the Indo-European mummies in the glass-topped cases in the Urumchi Museum. They had been preserved by the salt flats in which they had been found. The Loulan Mummy was from Qawrighul (Gumugou, in Chinese). She had a Caucasian face, reddish hair, and amongst her clothes a well-preserved material was found, a sort of Celtic plaid. DNA results of another mummy, Cherchen Man, revealed him to be related to Swedes, Finns, Tuscans, Corsicans, and Sardinians. Here, Frieda had an Indo-European woman, on the Silk Road thousands of years before she should have been there. Some scholars thought that western travellers arrived in China well before Marco Polo, and indeed they did not believe Polo’s writings, considering those to be eccentric accounts from a man who did not travel so far to the East.