The Devils Harvest: The End of All Flesh. (2 page)

Devon has some outstanding beauty. Dartmoor mainly consists of smooth contoured hill after rolling hill, as far as the naked eye can see, often supporting large rocky outcrops. Wide expanses of bogs, which are continually filled by the mist and clouds that frequently shroud the hills and vales. It’s a painted canvas of blue hues and greens. More trees than a sane person would try and count, splattered here and there, or making up huge tracks of woodland. Alder, rowan, blackthorn, hawthorn, birch and large oak trees. What’s not covered in trees is plastered with bracken or spidery ferns, making large green-carpeted areas. And so many rivers and small streams that cascade down numerous waterfalls, and filling rocky gorges, that it seems like you’re forever driving over one kind of bridge or another – a mythical troll’s paradise.

It also has its fair share of ghost stories: supposedly, haunted houses and manors, mysterious graveyards and famous graves.

Sir Frances Drake is supposedly the Headless Horseman who rides a dark hearse coach, pulled by black headless horses. The legend is called The Wild Hunt, led by a psychopomp: the leader of souls to the Underworld. On certain nights and holy days you can see the hunter come for his prey, as the headless Sir Drake chased his quarry. He also supposedly rides out on every full moon to chase the lost souls back to hell.

There is the Spectral Hounds or otherwise known as Devil Dogs or Hell Hounds, with its red eyes and blood curdling howl, which still allegedly roams the misty marshes, the very ones that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about in
The Hounds of the Baskervilles
. Legends state that a hunter, Richard Cabell, the Squire of Buckfastleigh – who was described as a monstrously evil man – had sold his soul to the Devil. After Cabell died on July 5th 1677 a phantom pack of Hell Hounds was witnessed racing across Dartmoor to get to the promised soul. But his tomb was a large solid sepulchre, with a massive heavy slab of stone resting on top, to stop the soul from being removed. Having not accomplished their given mission the Hell Hounds apparently still roam the barren moors. Folklore also states that if you walk around the tomb seven times then put your finger into the large old keyhole, then it would be bitten off by the devil, who patiently waits for the tomb to crumble so his can get the soul beneath.

Jay’s Grave – or Kitty Jay – as she was known, was an orphan teenager who died late in the 18th Century, who was raped and then shunned when she became pregnant. Kitty hung herself and due to suicide laws at the time, all three parishes refused to bury her on consecrated ground, so she was buried at a crossroads – a traditional practice for suicide victims at the time. Her grave became famous because there are always fresh flowers on it, without fail, non-stop since she was buried. Local folklore claims they are placed by pixies.

During a full moon a ghostly collection of Roman legionnaires have been spotted at the old Roman hill fort on Hunters Tor, marching without purpose around the area of Lustleigh Cleave.

There are the Hairy disembodied Hands that pull at the wheel of your car or motorcycle as you drive along the deserted road near Postbridge, known as the B3212. These have supposedly caused numerous accidents since it started in 1910.

There is the famous out-of-the-way village of Princetown, with its ancient prison, which was built to hold prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, which has countless horror stories and ghostly happening associated with the brutality once used to keep the prisoners under control.

Most alarmingly, local legend states that during the Great Thunderstorm of Sunday the 21st of October 1638, Dartmoor’s town of Widecombe-in-the-moor (the closest settlement to my farmhouse) was even said to have been visited by the Devil himself. The local church of St Pancras was packed with three hundred people when it was apparently struck by ball lightning. Four died and sixty were seriously injured, and the church was badly damaged, having the roof almost completely ripped off. Folklore states that the devil had made a pact, a Faustian bargain with a local card player called Jan Reynolds. Reynolds received a diabolical gift, he was unbeatable at cards, but it had a catch, he was never to fall asleep in church. On that particular day, he had.

While en route to collect the soul of Reynolds the devil had supposedly travelled past the Tavistock Inn, in the nearby village of Poundsgate, where he stopped for refreshment. The landlady reported a visit by a strange man dressed in black with cloven goat-like feet riding a jet black, sweat dripping horse. The devil ordered a tankard of ale that hissed as it went down his gullet. Where he rested the mug on the bar it left a scorch mark. He left old strange coins that the landlady found had turned to dried leaves in her hand when she picked them up.

Also, Dartmoor is not just an untamed place of heather and bracken covered hills, with deep wooded gorges and twisting rock strewn rivers, and dangerous bogs and mires with plentiful ghost and occult stories, for amidst this abundant wealth of natural and mythical beauty are hints of the industries of the past and an abundance of ancient archaeological sites, including an abundance of burial chambers, cromlechs, kistvaens, countless stone circles and menhirs, more than anywhere else in Western Europe.

There are also remains of tin, zinc, copper, lead and silver mines and vast open pit quarries, ruined castles, ancient churches, medieval abbeys and countless bridges.

There is the famous Merrivale Stone Circle (also known as the Plague Stones) which is the largest prehistoric site on Dartmoor; supposedly – according to local folklore – it is the Gateway of the Dead, with its three rows of long standing stones and a cist and stone hut.

There’s also Spinsters Rock, Scorhill Stone Circle, Grey Wethers Stone Circles and Drizzlecombe, which is Dartmoor’s tallest standing stone at four and a half meters. There are also the seventeen stones, named the Nine Maidens of Dartmoor – why they are called the nine and not seventeen has no explanation. Supposedly, during a Hunters Moon, (or Blood Moon, the first full moon after the Harvest Moon, which is the closest to the autumnal equinox) these stones have been witnessed to sway back and forth as if dancing.

Occultism abounds in the area, stretching back as far as recorded history. There’s countless tales of witches and covens. One famous local witch was Vixana who nightly conjured up mist to confuse lost travellers, so they would stumble into a stretch of bog and slowly get sucked under.

In January 2005 seven dead sheep were found with their necks broken and eyes removed, and arranged in the shape of a heptagram – a seven pointed star symbol, which has for centuries been associated with the dark arts and black magic rituals. Then in November of the same year it occurred again near Vixen Tor.

Sacrificial examples, such as these, date back to the time of the druids (these being the priestly class in Britain during the Iron Age). The earliest known written description of druids was from the Roman military general Julius Caesar in his work the
Commentarii de Bello Gallico
; which was his first hand accounts of the Gallic Wars, dated from 50 BC.

Dartmoor teems with reference to the druids. Their presence exists in place names such as the Druid’s Stone, Druid’s Chair, Druid’s Altar, Druid’s Well, Druid Mine, and the Druidical Temple, and not forgetting the village named Drewsteignton; which its original name (Taintona) was first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.

As well as numerous stone formations accredited to the druids, there is also what are called Rock Basins, these were cavities cut into the rock to collect water, and for sacrificial purposes. One on Mis Tor is referred to as the
Devil’s Frying Pan
.

Strangely, it also has a negative gravity anomaly, due to
Cornubian batholith
, which is a group of associated granite intrusions which underlie the southwestern peninsula of Great Britain; and the main exposed masses of granite are at Dartmoor.

All in all, Dartmoor has more stories related to the devil, the occult, druid sacrifices and bizarre anomalies than any other section of land in Great Britain. I provide all this information to give you an idea of the region I live in, and the tales that inundate the folklore in the area.

This may all relate to why the Devil came knocking at my door, it was simply a matter of location, location, location, as the estate agents like to say.

I have a celebrated twelve horror novels under my belt, and a few awards adorning my walls and shelves. Some of these books have stories similar to myths and legends that prevail in this area. Funny, when I think about it, this is my thirteenth book. Does that have some bearing on what took place?

I have a few other manuscripts I’m working on at the moment. But no more horror stories. What happened changed that part of me for ever.

Why do I write?
Some people ask me. I would like to say it’s because I love to read, and also I like to see one of my books in the hands of a passerby. To see the look of concentration upon their face as they read the words that I have placed on paper.

But if I was to be brutally honest, I would say it is for the money. In this day and age everything always comes down to money. Supposedly, the route of all evil.

I have made plenty of money from my written creations. That’s how I can afford to live in such an out of the way location in a big farm house. Some ask:
Why do I stick it out, why do I put up with the critics’ sharp tongues when I could retire from writing and simply live off the royalties?
But as any writer worth his salt knows, it’s not that simple. Once you have one book in circulation it’s not long before another joins it. A natural high some say. It’s something needing to be done, needing to be written.

And the most asked question:
Where do I get my ideas from?
As my many ex-wives said, as well as friends and family, I have a very overactive imagination. Even more so now after I was released from his hold on me.

But all in its proper place.

Has not one of the greatest horror writers of our time, Stephen King written almost fifty novels? Each one a masterpiece in its own right. What if he had given up after his fifth novel or tenth novel? This generation would be different, would it not, without the works of his great mind?

Likewise, after only a mere thirteen novels – compared to his fifty – I still can’t steal the laptop away, not just yet. Over the last few years it has been my only companion, a good faithful friend.

I don’t use a typewriter, like you see in the movies; an author clicking away at an old classic machine. As they finish a page they pull it out and stack it on a pile of other crisp white sheets. In reality writing isn’t like that. I make mistakes with my spelling and grammar, just like everyone else (just ask my editor). And with a computer you can go back over, readjusting, correcting and fleshing-out. And with a typewriter there would be only one copy. Way to risky. As I write I back my books up on multiple external hard drives. Also sending them to myself via email, so if anything happened to all my drives I still have a copy in the digital world. Because that’s the other important thing with a laptop; the internet – the writer’s best friend – a world of information right at my fingertips. No more library visits, pouring over old books, or phone calls to collect information. Now it can all be done from the comfort of my desk. God bless Google and Wikipedia.

Maybe it’s because of my passion for writing or merely because of the location I choose to live, is the reason he decided to choose me. I don’t think I will ever know why he picked me. He never gave a reason. Then again I don’t think he needed to, or would have given me an explanation even if I had the courage to ask. And to be quite frank, I don’t think I ever thought to ask. That was my reasoning to start with; it all became apparent towards the twisted end.

It would have been many days, if not weeks, before I would have seen another human being, let alone whatever he claimed to be. That’s one of those small details I told you about.

When I opened my door to the intensive knocking on that cold, dark January evening, when most sensible people would be huddled up in the heat and comfort of their home. Not that anyone could even move about in the snow outside. And it was impossible to get to my out of the way house with all the blizzards blowing, snow piling up.

That’s when I saw him standing upon my snow-incrusted doormat. I noticed not one snowflake clinging to his clothing or hair. His black highly polished shoes still glistening from the warm light issuing from my open fire in the room behind me, as clean as if only having just been polished – no snow or mush on them (and no cloven hoof feet). And the fact that besides the freezing cold and drizzling snow, he was wearing no coat of any kind, just a simple black suit jacket that matched his expensive looking black trousers and waistcoat.

“Good evening,” he said, as if having met him on the sidewalk in town. A perfect gentlemanly voice, not one you would expect coming from someone like him. His eyes locked intently upon mine.

I stood transfixed in the small vestibule, looking at this figure stood under the lintel of my front door. The wind and snow was blowing relentlessly behind him. His face lit up by the reflection of my roaring fire. A vile smile on an otherwise ordinary face. Hair still impeccably groomed, not one single hair out of place from the fierce winds. A dry black umbrella held in one of his hands, still folded up with the little popper clipped in place. And most alarming, not one single footprint leading its way to my door.
Surely the snow wouldn’t have covered them that quickly
?

“May I seek shelter from this stormy weather?” He’d asked, his voice still flat and emotionless. His dark eyes still locked on mine, unflinching.
Something about those dark eyes
.