Griffiths Folk Devil

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9999263-1-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 349 Seiten

'Two Religions: Two Brothers. One Ancient Tradition'. Three Wells: a remote English village, steeped in traditions passed down for countless generations. The return of a man, John Stone, taken from there as a child sets in motion a battle between Paganism and Christianity. He is the last of the true Druids, the priests of the old religion, on a mission to raise a long forgotten god, Lugh, from a hidden well beneath the village. John's guilt ridden brother, Alan, has become the village Vicar. Their childhood friend Bob Farmer has become an internationally renown academic, whilst his sister Jane has stayed in Three Wells to become the village school mistress. The return of John and Bob sets in motion the chain of events foreseen in prophecies of the druid Merlin, culminating at the annual Well Dressing, a traditional ceremony dedicated to thanking God for deliverance from the plague. This final Well Dressing will see John pitting the villagers of Three Wells against the newcomers who have come there to live... and die. Folk Devil is The Wicker Man meets A Nightmare on Elm Street. A contemporary Celtic British horror novel. Folk Devil is set in the Peak District - the very centre of England and is based on Celtic British Myths and History and is a part of Dewi Griffiths' Borderland Creative Universe as are his other novels Black Valley and Witch Sight.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Griffiths, Dewi

Leseproben

Part I: The Stolen Child

Chapter 1: Bad Memories

“Sorcery and sanctity… these are the only realities.

Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life”

Arthur Machen – ‘The White People’

July 2022. The wind rattles the bedroom window. He stirs from his dream. Dream and reality mixing for a moment. A tapping in the darkness. Getting faster and harder. Like a child’s fingers tapping on the window. His little brother. Desperate to come inside from the summer rainstorm outside.

Alan looks at the bedside clock. It’s three a.m. His wife Julie rolls over and drops back into her deep sleep. The clock’s display gives the only light in the pitch blackness inside and out. The street lights are switched off at midnight to save money by the village council. The effects of the economic crash over a decade and a half ago still reaching deep into these remote hills of Derbyshire, one hundred and fifty miles from London. In Britain that is a very long way. A different world.

The Peak District always has been a different world. Between places, always on the peripheries. Between the mills of Manchester and the steel forges of Sheffield. A part of neither. A rural idyll set aside from those dark satanic mills.

The Peak is divided in two between the moors of the Dark Peak and the limestone landscape of the White Peak. Contrasts in beauty. Both sanctuaries from the world beyond.

It’s not the first time the outside world has reached into the White Peak, into this picture perfect postcard village of Three Wells. Three and a half centuries ago it was the Plague. The village of Eyam, only ten miles away, let no soul in nor out as the Plague ran its course. The village practically invented the concept of quarantine well before learned doctors discovered how the pestilence was passed on.

Three Wells as ever kept its head down, not appearing in any of those histories, but like most of the villages in The Peak thanked God for deliverance from the Plague with flowers. Turning to its Pagan past; the ritual of Well Dressing. Turning sacrifice into a celebration by the community to thank God for deliverance.

Alan stares into the darkness of his bedroom. You can’t cut yourself off in the modern world. No man is an island. He cannot quarantine himself against the anger and loss of someone kidnapping and murdering his little brother. An autistic kid. Special. His responsibility. He should have looked after him. That’s what he was told to do. He turned his back on his annoying little brother and John was gone.

Alan woke hoping that the tapping at the window was John coming back. The way John used to tap on their bedroom window in School House when the doors were locked after he had slipped out onto the Moor at night. But the tapping on the window right now won’t be John. John died thirty years ago.

The memory snaps Alan fully awake. Alan sits up quietly as to not wake Julie and swings out of bed. He leaves the room barefoot not making a sound.

Alan doesn’t need lights. He has been in this Vicarage for over a decade and walking around in the dark as to not to wake anyone is something that happens often. Most nights now. He closes his daughter Cathy’s bedroom door silently as he heads for the stairs.

He feels every creak in The Vicarage staircase as he descends to his study, nodding to The Cross on the wall even though it is unseen in the darkness. He closes the door behind him and switches on the reading lamp on his desk. The print out of his sermon with hand written notes is on the desk by his computer.

Alan takes a seat at his desk, leaning over to the old TV/VHS tape combo on the far side of the antique desk. Alan hits the round power button. Static on the old cathode ray tube lights the room softly. Alan knows that the tape is in there. There are no other tapes he plays now. He hits rewind. The machine spools back the tape noisily until the tape stops. Alan hits play. The tape is well worn. The picture rolls and wobbles for a moment. It’s a local TV News report from 1992. Grainy, too sharp, hyper-real. Too real. Nightmarish.

The news reporter speaking in RP English, back in the day when local accents were not shown on TV, even local TV. Alan turns off the sound as to not to disturb his wife or daughter sleeping upstairs. He knows every word anyway.

The report is very well edited, put together to tell a story, not like today’s reports which are basically some idiot standing in a place where something happened showing the viewers nothing but themselves. In fact, the report is so well done it’s a historical document.

The reporter stands in Three Wells village square outside the famous Market Hall. As he speaks his words are superimposed with images of the village and the search for Alan’s little brother. John Stone. Eight years old. Special needs child. Missing. Believed kidnapped. Everyone out searching the streets, sheds, woods, hillsides and caves. Hundreds of people mobilised. The streets and side roads filled with cars, bringing people from all over the area to help the Police search. Press and news crews. An event millions remember but no one speaks of anymore.

His father, Mr. Stone the headmaster. The village school teachers, Peter Wragg and his wife Betty Wragg. The village children, Alan himself as a teary eyed ten year old, his friends Jane and Bob around the same age, just slightly younger. The same age as the boy who is missing. John. A family snapshot of John with his parents, cutting out Alan. For thirty years Alan has balked at this. Why was he cut out of the shot? It’s his brother! His responsibility! Alan closes his eyes.

He opens them to the police mug-shot photograph of the Old Man who took John away. Long haired. A wild look in his eyes. The local people had called him a hippie. Alan had as a child associated the word with friendly long haired altruistic idealists. Later he found pictures of Charles Manson and saw a similarity with Myrddin Lloyd. That was his name. The New Age Traveller who kidnapped and killed his little brother.

The contact telephone number is the old Sheffield dialling code, which was changed a year or two later. Maybe that’s why no one ever phoned to report that they had found John. A dead number. Alan smiles to himself. Three a.m. logic. Three a.m. is the time when Satan and his forces are at their height, trying to convince him that he is not to blame for this, when obviously it’s all his fault.

Alan stops and rewinds the tape. He hits play again, turning up the volume. He watches this tape for hours sometimes. Not to ease his guilt. To expose it. Make it raw. Electronic flagellation for a modern holy man.

Tears well up in Alan’s eyes and he closes them, listening intently to the words of the BBC reporter as he explains how Alan allowed darkness into this perfect world.

‘Three Wells, in the heart of The Peak District. One of England’s most beautiful and remote places. This village known only for its ancient Well Dressing Ceremony has been brought crashing into the twentieth century, with the abduction of the village school headmaster’s son. John Stone, an eight year old with learning difficulties, has not been seen since Tuesday. What was initially the search for a missing child on The Peaks has been transformed into a kidnap manhunt after the sighting of the boy with this man: Myrddin Lloyd, a New Age Traveller with a trail of criminal convictions right across Europe. Lloyd was seen in the area over the past few weeks speaking to the missing boy and other village children. Police are asking for anyone who has any information as to the whereabouts of John Stone, Lloyd, or other New Age Travellers recently seen in the area, to contact White Peak Police immediately on this number.’

A hand on his shoulder. Alan jolts awake. Julie his wife leans forward and stops the tape and switches off the TV combo. “If you keep doing this, I’m going to burn that tape! You have to forget all that and move on. It’s thirty years ago Alan. 1992. It’s 2022 now. History. You can’t let it control your life. Let it go or get help. Please!”

“He was my little brother, Julie. I was supposed to take care of him. Keep him safe. He was only eight.”

“Alan please. You were a ten year old child. A child. It was a different world. People let children run wild in those days. Bad things happen to good people, babe. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I just wish I knew what happened to him.”

Julie frowns knowing that pushing this memory down is better than prising it out. It can’t be lanced like a boil, it makes Alan what he is. An altruistic person at the heart of the community. Loved by everyone but questioned wordlessly as to why he took a wife from the big city. Wasn’t a local girl what he needed? If you are not born in Three Wells you are an Outsider. Behind the smiles, the villagers don’t like having an Outsider in the Vicarage. They don’t want them in the village!

Julie hugs Alan from behind, putting her cheek against his. “Be careful what you wish for babe. Some dreadful old man took him away. Be thankful you don’t know what happened to him. Come back to bed. Please babe.”

Alan looks at a photograph on his desk. The children in the video; a more recent snapshot of three people taken in the village pub a dozen years ago. Alan with Jane and...