Help the Witch Read online

  Also by Tom Cox

  21st-Century Yokel

  Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

  The Good, The Bad and The Furry

  Talk to the Tail

  Under the Paw

  Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

  Nice Jumper

  ‘The house … was old enough and large enough – and had seen enough dark acts – to support a ghost’ John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Help the Witch

  Listings

  Speed Awareness

  Nine Tiny Stories About Houses

  The Pool

  Robot

  Just Good Friends

  Folk Tales of the Twenty-Third Century

  Seance

  An Oral History of Margaret and the Village by Matthew and Five Others

  Acknowledgements

  A Note On the Author

  Supporters

  Copyright

  HELP THE WITCH

  6 DECEMBER

  I have arrived! It feels like more of an achievement than I ever imagined it could. The snow started a little south of Northampton and became heavier all the way from there. A sensible person might have stopped long before that and checked into a hotel, but I am not a sensible person: I think, if there is one thing that this entire endeavour proves, it is that. I don’t know how I got up to the top of the mountain (I have checked the altitude in feet, and it does technically qualify as a mountain). The two routes I’d used before were totally non-navigable in a normal car but somehow the more gentle incline to the east worked out: the snow had not quite settled as thickly there. It still took forty minutes of violently revving in first gear and hanging on to the steering wheel for dear life, though. In the end I had to reverse into the track, then let the car spin back round. If aliens gazed down from above at the patterns I left in the snow, they might mistake it for a violent, impulsive form of art. But I am here. We are here. Nibbler, A Good Size Cat, and me. Just the three of us, an airbed, a sleeping bag, a kettle and a rucksack. The house feels bigger than I remember, and cold. There’s a lot of space in the top of the rooms, room for another room, really, in each. I find myself looking up into the space a lot. I’m exhausted, so I won’t write more. I fear I might gibber if I do.

  7 DECEMBER

  My hands are covered in burns. I’ve been running on pure adrenaline for a fortnight, and because of that I never took the time to look at the state of them until this morning, when I was washing them. This might suggest that I had not washed them for several days. I had; I just hadn’t noticed that I had hands. Before I left the cottage in Sussex I lit a giant bonfire, which burned for three days. You can take a dramatic angle on this, but I don’t see it that way. It is true that I did burn some old letters from Chloe, but I also burned far more old phone bills, chequebooks and receipts. I was drawing a line, I suppose, but the themes of the line were largely relocation and confidential waste.

  The burns on my hands are not battle scars, they’re namby-pamby, middle-class injuries. But Niall, one of the two removal men, who I sense is not middle class, did glance at the red blisters on my right wrist, and ask if I was OK. He and his colleague, Dan, performed a minor act of heroism to even get the van halfway down the track today. With their time constraints I had to muck in and help with the carrying. My speed and capacity to take weight amazed me, made me re-appreciate those stories you hear about mothers who somehow find the strength to lift entire cars off their children. I’m six foot four but built like a bunch of long, sellotaped-together twigs, so adrenaline is the only explanation for what I’ve achieved in physical terms over the last few days. I have an equal lack of doubt that at some point I’m going to crash, but that point is yet to arrive. All the furniture and boxes are in now, although snow has drenched most of it.

  No doubt Niall and Dan don’t blink an eyelid at any of this – they’ve moved all sorts of people to all sorts of places in all sorts of weather – but I did notice them give me a certain kind of look a few times. The look was perhaps at its most noticeable when they said goodbye and wished me the best in my new home. If you drew the look, it might resemble some kind of wilting, half question mark. Was it pity? Bewilderment? A bit of both? I imagine they saw the cottage in Sussex as a very gentle, safe place and wondered why anyone would abandon it for here. I can see why they might think that, but it is all more complex than that and I am sure I’ve done the right thing. Maybe they were just worried about how tired I looked.

  Last night, again, I failed to sleep in the part of the night traditionally designated for sleep. After conking out on top of the bedcovers at eight, I awoke to the sound of the blizzard pelting the thick walls of the house and either Nibbler or A Good Size Cat making a mournful wibbling noise, probably A Good Size Cat. Chloe named him A Good Size Cat because we’d yet to come up with the right name and, when we took him in for neutering, our vet called him ‘a good size cat’. After that, Chloe kept saying, ‘Look at this good size cat,’ or, ‘Where is the good size cat?’ and it kind of stuck. He’s the bigger of the two, as you might think with that name, but he is prone to night terrors. I got up and located them both, squatting nervously on a window ledge, looking out into a night of answerless black, but was surprised to find that the mournful wibbling sound continued, and was coming from neither of their mouths.

  The house is joined, being half of a mid-Victorian farmhouse, but next door is currently empty: has been for God knows how long. My nearest neighbour is my landlord. After about half a mile the track divides, with my building on one side and his on the other, about 700 yards further down into the valley where the trees begin to close in. He is a petless person, a man I do not take for an animal lover. After that, there’s not another house until you reach the next farmhouse, which – though their land abuts my landlord’s – is a full mile away. Soon after this the village gradually begins to materialise in the form of a row of grey pebbledash semis. Having written off ‘neighbour’s pet’ as an explanation, I did admittedly think ‘ghost cat’, but I don’t believe in ghosts and I am tired. The most likely explanation is rats.

  I sat on the top stair for a couple of hours, while Nibbler and A Good Size Cat paced anxiously and listened as the noise moved around the walls and ceilings. No doubt I could have used the time more constructively by being asleep, but I also think upon moving to a new house that it’s useful to take some time to get accustomed to all the unfamiliar sounds the place makes, and there are plenty here: the ‘whuooop-whuooop’ of the wind passing through the cooker’s extractor, the eerie tinkle of the thermostat as it resets, the snow pelting the walls, the branch of an overgrown willow thwacking the wall of what will soon be my study, the windy creak of a corrugated door of a barn, and the rats, if that’s what they are. I made myself a Cup-a-Soup, then read a few chapters of a book about the history of the area, purchased in a charity shop after my first viewing of the house. I spent the final few hours before the slow winter dawn sitting up in bed thinking about the people who built the house for weather like this, building the house in weather like this.

  8 DECEMBER

  When I first came to see the house, at the beginning of last month, a smattering of leaves still clung to the trees. It was the final mild day of autumn and I broke into a sweat as I climbed to the top of the gritstone edge that acts as a natural architrave for the opposite valley wall. I stripped down to my T-shirt and skipped over stones and decided that the north of our country was no different from the south, besides the fact that it was bigger, more beautiful, and more real. Why would anybody in their right mind not want to live here? But today as I walked to the top of the track, I had difficulty accessing my mental picture of that day; it was impossible to
imagine that any of the trees had ever been in leaf. I noticed the bare double sycamore that announced the mouth of the track, and realised more than before how it appeared to resemble a giant living scarecrow with enormous branch hands reaching up to the sky, about to wreak raging havoc upon an unjust universe.

  Over on the adjacent side of the valley the edge was smoked in fog – fog that was all threat, all future, fog that could never be mistaken for mist, with all mist’s nostalgia – and the only other person I spotted was the tenant farmer, laying traps for moles. He called hello to me and I wandered over. He introduced himself as Peter Winfield. He only works here, and lives down in the village. I put him at about my age, and he has a boyishness about him, but his face also speaks of the life he lives: it’s a face full of weather, very little of it over 6° Celsius.

  ‘So what you do think of him?’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Him over there. Old Conkers. T’landlord.’

  ‘I don’t really know, yet. He seems OK. He doesn’t smile much. I expected the house to be a bit cleaner.’

  ‘Tight-fisted, he is. I’d watch him if I were you. He owns all of this but he never even looks at it. Stays inside the house all the time.’

  The snow stopped mid-morning, but there’s no thaw in evidence and zero chance of getting out in the car. Probably won’t be for several days. I stocked up on food before I left Sussex and have plenty of tins dating from quite some time ago – many purchased in the Chloe Era by Chloe – but already I am making mental calculations about how long what I have got will last. Can a two-years-out-of-date can of kidney beans be reasonably counted as a meal? I walked down a narrow ravine into the village, looking for sustenance. Beneath my feet, the limestone path felt like a wet tablecloth being pulled from beneath me. The pub was closed, but in the tea room I was served a large plate of beans, scrambled egg, some bread, and half a tomato. I get the impression vegetarian meals will not be easy to come by here. I told the lady in the tea room I had just moved in up the hill. ‘Oh, you should have said!’ she replied. ‘Residents get thirty per cent discount.’

  Between the gritstone cottages the streets were corridors of silence, like everyone had shut themselves indoors to hide from a notorious wolf, and when a van door slammed up the road it sounded like an event. The churchyard is vast and all around the village – in fields, in spinneys and copses, even in gardens – are additional graves, marked and unmarked. When the Great Plague arrived here in the 1660s, the residents chose to seal themselves in, in an attempt to not spread it to other villages nearby. The most desolate sight of all is about half a mile outside the west end of the village where, in a field beneath a landslip, directly under an old oak, seven graves stand alone, enclosed by a wall. It was here that, according to legend, Winifred Cowlishaw – without assistance, in the space of one week – buried her six children and her husband, all of whom had succumbed to the virus. I do not think I have seen a more bleak spot in the whole of this country.

  Back at home this evening, I listened to the rats again. I am not sure it’s actually rats. It’s not a collective or various sound: it’s focused, has a persona and a certain autonomy as it goes about its business in the walls and, sometimes, apparently, in that big pocket of empty air at the top of the rooms, where there is space for another room. Also, there’s no scurrying to go with it. Nibbler and A Good Size Cat seem spooked, constantly turning around abruptly at invisible frights. But isn’t that just cats all over, all the time? Outside, the dark is very dark. But in the day, the whiteness is very dark too, sometimes even darker.

  10 DECEMBER

  The energy crash is finally happening. Last night, I saw the pepper mill move eight inches, all of its own volition. I could barely eat the mushroom risotto I made for myself without falling face first into it. Afterwards, I yanked my top half into bed, my legs following several yards afterwards, and heard the ghost cat make a new noise, much more questioning in tone. All this means, of course, is that I’m slightly delirious through lack of sleep. I think this is perhaps the intersection where what we call ‘the supernatural’ comes into being: a combination of weather, the visions of abnormally tired people with big imaginations, and an environment where not too much technology or science can infringe. Once you get on top of your sleep, and bring progress and electricity-based frivolity into the picture, the supernatural is banished.

  Was I inviting this idea of the supernatural by coming here, alone? Of course I was. I wanted to live in a place without too many explanations, where magic has a chance to breathe. Chloe could never have lived in a place like this. She struggled to live in a place half like this. She avoided the margins, the fuzzy areas. Enjoyed convenience, firm answers about the week ahead. Or – if you look at it another way – did not like to make life hard for herself. This morning, I saw Mr Conkleton go past the window, dragging his bad foot after him. It is just me and him for a mile, nobody else. He still hasn’t fixed the extractor fan, but I didn’t go after him. I was too tired. I alternately dozed and read more about the history of Grindlow. Still no internet. It will be three weeks, at least, the phone company say. Because of Christmas and all. No matter. More room for magic to breathe.

  At college I studied printmaking under a great man: a wide, hairy, big-handed chunk of human bread named Malcolm. He is long dead now. In his spare time, Malcolm carved the most exquisite forest creatures out of wood that he had foraged himself from parts of the South Downs near his home. The last time I ever saw him, on my twenty-fifth birthday, he gave me a wooden owl, and it has accompanied me to every house I’ve lived in since. Before I’d found a spot for almost anything else here, I placed it on the window ledge of the study, but tonight I noticed it had fallen into the wastepaper basket beneath the desk. This was clearly the work of Nibbler, who is getting antsy since I haven’t quite had the confidence to let her out to roam yet. I returned the owl to its rightful place on the window ledge. There is another owl carved on the gatepost of the house and I have to admit this is something that first drew me to the place: I thought the two could be companioned. I am reminded here of something Chloe once said to me during an argument: ‘Why don’t you just fuck off and write a book about owls or something?’ She was very angry at the time and later apologised, and promised she didn’t mean it. But I actually don’t think it was a terrible suggestion. There are far worse activities a person can partake in than fucking off and writing a book about owls or something.

  12 DECEMBER

  I moved here because of the wildness of the place, but I also underrated that wildness, perhaps because it is not an edge place. It is not at the end of anywhere. If you drive in any direction from here, before long you will hit a city, and when the cities do appear, they appear abruptly, full of industry and smoke. But it is wild. Behind my back garden, sloping down to the valley, are 300 acres of natural woodland: an undisturbed place, somehow simultaneously overgrown and barren, which I could probably walk for the next month and still not fully know. The skeletons of giant hogweed stand proud, despite the snow, beside a ruined pump house. So much vegetation here smacks of death effigy. Beyond is a horizon where nothing grows. I am starting to feel ringed by something here, something more than snow, something ice hot, but I don’t know what it is. I see it in my mind when I think about where I can go, what I can do, when the snow goes. It is a barrier, bigger than the snow itself, which stops me getting into the car and reaching the road.

  13 DECEMBER

  It couldn’t have worked out between me and Chloe. In the end, there were too many differences in what we wanted out of our futures. But am I allowed to say I miss her? One of the things I miss most is the way we fitted together, physically. I don’t simply mean in a sexual sense. I mean that all our shapes were right. We’d just fold and melt into each other. It wasn’t one of those relationships where you found your arm or leg sticking out somewhere inconvenient and yearned to move it. I also miss the sound of her talking to herself, or talking to a cat, i
n a distant room of the house. I still find myself listening for it here. Peter Winfield has been over with some firewood. He is such a kind man.

  15 DECEMBER

  The cats have been going into the garden for a couple of days now, but they don’t seem interested in being out there for long. There’s been a break in the snow and a small thaw, which has opened up patches of soil for them to piss and shit in, and meant that today I was able to risk a drive to Buxton to get food. It’s a town that once seemed high and windbeaten to me – an outpost a little above the world – but seems soft and low now, in context of my new life. I returned and couldn’t find Nibbler, who, I realised, after several worried hours, has discovered a gap at the back of the boiler room, leading to a small recessed space where it is warm to sleep. Before that I’d spent an hour outside, calling her name fruitlessly into the black wind. It feels like the night out there has fangs. Through the gloom I can see the branches of the double sycamore man-tree flailing at the sky. Beyond it are untold numbers of old bones from a different universe, but bones that in fact did their growing only thirteen or fourteen generations from where we are now. There is far, far more mould in the bathroom than I realised. I opened up the cistern today and found thick black goo, with dozens of slugs floating in it. The wind is whuooop-whuoooping furiously through the hood of the cooker. Four months tomorrow I begin my new job in the History department at the university. By then, there’ll be new growth and all this white around will be green. Or will it? It doesn’t seem possible.

  Ghosts are weather.

  17 DECEMBER

  Matthew, who was breaking up a journey to Scotland where he was attending a conference, came to visit yesterday. He parked the car at the top of the track and I trudged up through the snow to meet him. We had a fair bit to talk about, as I hadn’t had chance to say goodbye to him properly before I left Sussex: mostly him filling me in on what had happened on campus since my departure. He commented that the house was amazing and that I was pretty much ‘living in the eighteenth century’, but I thought I saw a few questions in his eyes, and I know he feels that I abandoned him a little with my abrupt departure. He produced his hand lens as we passed the footpath sign pointing to Wentworth’s Well and analysed the light green lichen stuck to the wood, which he informed me was a kind of Cladonia.