Tanners Dell: Darkly Disturbing Occult Horror (5 page)

Chapter Five

Bridesmoor

              June 1972             

Cora Dean was down by the river when the pit siren went up. The day was still sunny with cotton wool clouds perfecting a picture postcard day. Sparkling water washed over her toes as she watched her three eldest children – Paul, Derek and Ricky – splashing around on the rocks. They all looked so like their father with those pale blue eyes and shocks of dark hair. Sometimes the resemblance was quite uncanny – there seemed nothing of herself in them.

She looked over at Bridestone Moor to where the pithead wheel was silhouetted against the skyline, and her heart didn’t miss a beat.

That gypsy girl
…
you knew it would be him…you knew and did nothing…

Desperately worried wives and girlfriends would be tearing out of their houses by now, revving up cars and making frantic phone calls, already rushing up to the yard to see who was being brought out on stretchers and who was unaccounted for. Many would be left without husbands after today, or fathers for their children. Not herself, though. She would not be one of them – Lucas would be just fine. The devil looked after his own and all that. Still, it would look odd if she didn’t show her face. It might be best to at least put on an act.

Although reluctant to leave the warm grassy bank and the hypnotic tranquillity, she heaved herself up and put babies Natalie and Kathleen into the buggy. “Come on, we’re going!” she shouted to the boys. Still in their infancy, all three ignored her. “I said, ‘Come on!’ Pit siren’s going off. We need to see if your dad’s okay.”

Paul Dean, aged nine, dead-eyed her. “We’re stopping ’ere.”

The little shit was defying her again, blatantly, and in front of the other two. “Now!” she snapped.

He grinned, clearly relishing the stand-off. “I said, ‘no’,
Cora
!”

Fury shot through her veins and she ran to grab him and slap him, but skilful as a fly-half he dodged her and plunged further into the river, egged on by the other two. “Drown then, you little bastard,” she said.

“
You
drown, you old witch.”

Cora staggered back onto the bank, the hem of her skirt soaked through, and yanked the buggy up towards the path.
Hell and hell again
. They were more like their dad than she cared to admit. All those women in the village eyeing her with pity, gossiping so she could hear:
What were the Deans doing with that great empty mill as well as a terrace when they’d got five kids to feed? What did her Lucas want with it? Don’t talk rubbish about it being renovated when they’d had it years and not done a thing to it. And those kids backchat like she shouldn’t stand for. And now that young girl missing, have you heard? It must be something to do with him…

She fought back the tears. It would be better for her if Lucas was one of the men trapped inside the mine – better for everyone, in fact – but he wouldn’t be. And even if he was stone dead it wouldn’t end there, would it? Paul was going to be just the blasted same. Give him another few years and he’d be every bit as nasty, especially since Lucas now had him tagging along at night. She’d begged him not to take the lad out so late, but with Paul standing there laughing at her, there’d been no point railing against it. He was ‘going to the bad’ just like his father.

The thought was horrific.

Surely Lucas didn’t take him to Tanners Dell?

***

She’d followed Lucas once – the night every last vestige of pretence between them was finally dropped. Her mother had offered to babysit so ‘they could have an evening out together.’ She’d had to lie about why Lucas had gone out first, spinning her mother a line about Lucas preferring a couple of pints with his workmates before she arrived – and that she’d join him a few hours later in the clubhouse.

“Oh yes?” Her mother wasn’t fooled – had never disguised the wary contempt she felt for her son-in-law – but eventually she went to bed and Cora let herself out of the back door sometime around ten o’clock.

For a long time she kept out of sight, lying low in the shadows of the churchyard for the pubs to empty and curtains to be drawn. No one, absolutely no one, must see her. Perhaps she’d dozed off a little, huddled with her back to a gravestone, because she’d jolted awake to find the night inky black and her limbs stiff with cold. She looked at her watch – it was gone midnight.

The track down to the mill was off the public footpath and unknown to anyone aside from the locals; and most of those wouldn’t venture into Carrions Wood even in daylight. There was an unearthly stillness in what was ancient woodland, reputedly planted on top of an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. Birds didn’t nest in the trees here, apart from a few rooks, and even those who liked to put traps down for rabbits complained there were never any takers. No signs, in fact, of life. At midnight the light was an ethereal blue, the only sound her own breathing as she tramped further and further in. After every half dozen footsteps she stopped to scan the myriad of tree trunks on either side, then behind, doing a three hundred and sixty degree reconnaissance before continuing; until eventually there came the unmistakeable sound of rushing water. Not far now. Once the mill was in view she darted off the path and hunkered down under the protection of a large oak.
Now let’s see what the old devil gets up to…

History had it that a miller had beaten his wife to death here and now it was haunted. Various tenants had come and gone but there had been no buyer, so by the time it lay in ruins Lucas had been able to purchase it for a song. Word spread that he planned to turn it into an idyllic retreat and sell it to a Londoner for a fortune; but that was four years ago now and not a single improvement had been made. In fact, part of the roof had caved in, one of the ceilings downstairs was propped up with an old tree trunk, and several window panes were missing.

So that was another lie she’d bought into. Every time she’d asked about the mill, though, it ignited the rage in him that never seemed far from the surface. Not for the first time she asked herself just who she had really married at Doncaster Register Office all those years ago. She’d been a sixteen year old virgin with no qualifications and he was a well-paid miner with a sharkish grin and wandering hands.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
… With no preparation for the sadistic, painful sex she would subsequently be subjected to, not to mention the perversions, the trap had been set and dressed in a catalogue bridal gown she’d walked right in. Wherever possible she avoided his sexual attentions these days – not that it mattered anymore because clearly he was being satisfied elsewhere, which was, quite frankly, absolutely fine as long as it wasn’t herself.

She should have vanished the night she followed him and found out just who and what he really was: the lost opportunity would haunt her for the rest of her life. But the chance had come and the chance had gone.
Where would she go?
He’d find her, seek her out and make her pay like others had paid. You didn’t hitch your wagon to a man like Lucas Dean and ever expect to be able to unhitch it again. The man was capable of inflicting the most unimaginable torture on someone who crossed him, but like most of the horrors revealed to her that night, the realisation came way too late.

In the end it was a three hour wait and she’d been about to give up and go home. If Lucas wasn’t going to turn up he might get back before her and there would be hell to pay. Indecision pulled her both ways. But then just before 3 am, a line of black robed figures emerged from a forest swathed in dawn mist, and silently entered the mill.

Cora’s eyes widened as she counted – ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen of them, gliding across the ground like spectres.

Once they’d disappeared inside she took off her shoes and hid them inside the roots of the tree, then keeping low, skirted around the periphery of the trees before scooting over to the rear of the building and skulking into its shadows. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest by the time she slid down beneath a window to catch her breath. Again her ears strained to hear anyone but there was nothing other than the cascading water, so after a few more minutes, slowly and carefully, she stood up and peered inside.

The filthy window pane was jagged and broken, providing a clear view into what was quite definitely an empty room. From the centre of the ceiling a wire hung down and bare floorboards, illuminated by slivers of moonlight, were clearly rotting. Puzzled by where the group could have gone, she crept around to the side of the mill. Not a glimmer of light broke the gloom here; the ancient ivy roots so thick, gnarled and twisted they’d cracked the mortar and pulled away stones.

Partially hidden by the creepers there was a side door.
They’d gone in that way, they must have done
…Cora peeped through the keyhole half expecting to meet with another eye, but was met instead by the ghostly interior of a large farmhouse-style kitchen, with a range, a stand-alone cooker, and the outline of a butler’s sink with a cupboard underneath it. She nudged the door and surprisingly it opened without so much as a squeak. Hovering in the doorway for several minutes she waited, shivering and listening, scanning the full radius, checking over her shoulder again and again…

Then she stepped inside.

With her back to the wall, ready to run out at the drop of a hairpin, she inched further and further into the building.
Jesus Christ, where had they gone
? The air was icy, the atmosphere brooding and oppressive. Again she checked over her shoulder, convinced there were eyes on her, stopping after every couple of steps; until something caught her attention. Riveted to the spot her ears strained to hear. Yes, there it was…definitely…the low hum of chanting.
Coming from underground
?

On tiptoes she flew across the flagstones towards the arched hallway and the cellar door.
Were they down there, then?

She hesitated: this was seriously dangerous. If she went down those steps there was a distinct and very real possibility she’d never come back up again.
Surely though, surely he wouldn’t kill his own wife? He’d threaten her, hurt her badly, but as the mother of his kids she was his veneer of respectability
. Something, she thought later, must have instilled her with enough courage though, because in the end she had pushed open the heavy wooden door and gone down.

With each cautious step the air became ever colder, and the darkness intensified until it was impossible to see anything at all. Finally at the bottom, she groped blindly for a wall to flatten her back to, happening on an iron hook that dug into her spine. There was a key on it. Instinctively she slipped it into her pocket while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The chanting was louder now and in the far distance firelight flickered in a corridor arched with stone – enough to decipher the vague outline of a vast water wheel; a great dinosaur that creaked and groaned with rust and age. She looked back at the way she’d come. It was coalface black and the floor beneath her bare feet was slippery with damp.
Could she run if she had to
? The lure though, of wanting and needing to see for herself, in the end, proved irresistible.

Using the wheel to feel her way across the room, she ventured closer to the flames; padding silently down the passageway under archway after archway towards a chanting that was beginning to escalate, the words indecipherable like nothing she’d ever heard or could try to describe later. She looked at her watch but it was impossible to see the time, guessing that maybe an hour or so must have passed since she’d left the relative safety of the woods. The smell of smoke and incense was stronger now, and there was something else too….something disgusting like a sewer…although strangely sweet. Only a few more yards to go…

Then all at once it was there in front – what she had craved to know. Cora pressed her back to the wall and peered around the corner into what was a huge, dark cavernous room. And almost vomited in shock.

The scene turned out to be nothing like anything she could ever have prepared for; any expectation of a witches’ circle or a pagan ritual being instantly erased. Set against the far wall stood an altar draped in dark cloth and adorned with stinking, black waxy candles that flickered, oozed and spat, their mustardy light licking the dripping chamber with lunging shadows; and above the alter hung an upside down cross. Her horrified stare quickly took in a trestle table set with goblets of dark liquid, together with plates weighed down with food – no doubt for a feast later – and a powerful, musty incense smoked in the air, drugging the senses.

The whole atmosphere fizzed with frenzied anticipation, and fear gripped her stomach. In the centre of the cave the robed figures had formed a circle, at their head a man in a goat-headed mask wearing a cloak of feathers and fur. The chanting now was much more guttural and becoming louder by the second as they whipped themselves up into a crescendo of excitement. The energy was palpable and her eyes widened and kept on widening as they began to dance around like savages and howl like wolves…

Oh dear God there was something live in the middle of the floor.

Mesmerised and unable to move she watched stricken. The thing in the middle had been bound in ropes and was thrashing around inside a sack, squealing like a stuck pig. Then without warning the howling ceased and they all turned to face the bestial figure at the head of the circle. An inhuman roar tore from his throat as he raised a knife above his head and lunged towards the creature in the middle, plunging the blade into the writhing, screaming flesh.