C - Echoes - Chapter Two

Chapter Two
Julie Hallett sat in the warmth of her bedroom and sighed with the
rain. It was a foul, noisy night, with the wind whipping through the
trees and making them scream, and driving the rain against her
window.
Julie was getting old, and the nurses who paced the corridors of
Wyndham Hall would look at her with sympathy, as if she were some
innocent child. She hated that. Her mind was as lucid as it had ever
been. Only her body was failing her. Her hands had been gnarled into
claws by arthritis, and sometimes, when she woke up, a film would be
covering her eyes and blurring her vision. She would cry out, terrified
that she was going blind, and her screams would burn the film
away.
Her memory was perfect. Her own mother had forgotten everything by the
time she was eighty, including her own daughter. That had really hurt.
She had vowed then never to go the same way, to be able to talk
intelligently to her children and grandchildren until the day she died.
After all, she had so much to tell.
It was so strange the way things had worked out. She'd married young, a
lad called Nathan from her village. In those days, marriages had
practically been arranged, and their respective parents had marked them
out as a couple from the day they were born. She sighed again,
pondering the passage of time. Such a life nowadays would seem
incestuous. They'd married in 1918; she remembered Nate jumping with
joy on November 11th. He would have been eighteen in December, and gone
overseas to add his name to the thousands who hadn't returned.
The sad thing was that he didn't live much longer anyway. Their
daughter Anne was born in 1930, and shortly afterwards Nate suffered a
fatal heart attack. No one seemed to live long in the family. Julie's
son-in-law, Barry, was killed in a car crash in 1979.
Life in the village had been idyllic for the most part, but she had
never really appreciated it. Thormalden was further north from where
she now lived, nestling amongst the crags and rushing streams of the
Pennines. The village itself straggled along the base of a
river-valley, its outer edges perched precariously on steep, green
slopes. Further up the grass thinned and the rock broke through like
bone robbed of flesh. Up there the wind howled and whistled, and bit
into your skin like a wolf's fangs. You could see Thormalden spread out
below you as still as a painting, with the sun glittering on the river
and people as small as ants.
But it wasn't safe up there. It wasn't just the coldness of the wind
and the steepness of the valley slopes. Here and there, forests grew in
the thin soil, and hid the folds of the land with their scented
darkness. Their edges were all pine trees, and their slender trunks
used to sway so much that Julie was always afraid they would topple and
roll down into the village. People said that the pines gave way to oaks
the deeper you got into the forest, but Julie was always too terrified
to find out. After all, she had heard things, mainly from the old folk
who sat you in front of a crackling fire and scared you half to death
with their tales.
The woods were haunted, of course. That went without saying. But they
weren't just normal ghosts, with white robes and clanking chains that
wandered through them at night. They were ancient, timeless things that
had lived there before man arrived, when the whole country was covered
in forest. They had been driven up into the high places when people
started living in the valleys, and had pined away in their misery and
loneliness. After all, they had once been worshipped and feared; now
their existence was disbelieved.
Julie had seen them once, but not up amongst the wind-swept boulders
and blasted heathlands. They had come down into the village on a still,
hot day in the heart of summer, thirsty for blood. Things had been
building up for a while; first, a young lad, Robert Baker, who had just
turned eighteen, disappeared with his beloved. Several people claimed
to have seen them clambering up the valley-sides, hand in hand, headed
for the woods. No one bothered to go up there and look for them until
the man Shieldsley had left, with his dark hair and intense, burning
eyes. Julie felt a shiver run down her spine at the memory of him, of
his face looming close to hers in the still of night. He had been her
first true love, and still, after seventy odd years, she missed him
terribly.
First of all, the weather had turned strange. She would wake in the
morning to see Thormalden basking in the sun. But by the time she's
washed and eaten breakfast and done her chores, the wind had whipped up
and was lashing the rain about, much as it was doing now. Then, a
matter of minutes later, the sun would be out again, and Julie was able
to run out and play with her friends.
Then, there had been the things at night. Julie lived with her parents
in a cottage on the very edge of Thormalden. Their garden rose up
steeply behind the house, and the moors loomed large outside her
bedroom window. She used to lie in bed at night and hear the heathlands
sighing above her house, imagining those cold, lonely expanses of muddy
grass. And sometimes she would rise and tiptoe on bare feet to the
window, imagining she could see the outlines of trees high up in the
night sky, their silhouettes sharp against the glare of the moon.
And once, not long before tragedy hit Thormalden, she was staring into
the darkness, her elbows resting on the window sill, and a vision
struck her. It was so powerful that she yelped in pain and her mother
came running. She saw hills undulating beneath a starry sky, and each
hill was topped with a copse of oak trees. There was no wind, and their
boughs were still and silent.
There was a figure standing in one of the copses, and, while the leaves
were still, a robe was flapping about her body, and her long hair was
trailing behind her. Julie stared into her eyes, and they were bursting
with white, liquid fire that overflowed and ran down her cheeks. When
her mother came, Julie sobbed and buried herself in her comforting
embrace. She never went to the window again at night.
Several weeks later the weather settled and summer came to Thormalden.
Nights were sweaty and stifling, and the days were blue and
magnificent. Julie ran with her friends up the lower slopes of the
valley, and the air was thick with the scent of flowers and heavy with
sunbeams. All the villagers wore beaming smiles, even the old people
who used to moan about the behaviour of the young, and the decadence of
society and especially Mrs Potter who lived next door, and often had
her friends Mrs Topstone and Mrs Grace round for afternoon tea. She was
always moaning about Julie, always complaining that she made too much
noise, but when the sun was out and the sky was clear blue, even she
relented.
Nate was there of course. His blond hair caught fire in the sun, and
once Julie even dared to kiss him. She smiled at the way he'd blushed
and mumbled before running home to the safety of sweet, innocent
childhood. She's thought at the time that she was madly in love. She
was fourteen, and found it difficult to make sense of her emotions.
When Shieldsley came, she found out what love was, and it was bitter
and painful.
Anyway, Julie and her friends paused from their play when the church
bells started ringing. That was unusual for a start, because in the
early days of the Great War, the bells were never rung. Such a
cacophony of noise and celebration would have been out of place when
young men were giving their lives for their country.
Julie and her friends, Nate and Emily, had stared down the valley,
where they could just see Reverend Cobham's church spire thrusting out
from the cluster of grey, flint cottages that clustered around it. He
was an unpopular man in the village; he was cold and severe towards the
children and aloof towards the adults. His sermons had been so fierce
and full of the threat of hellfire that Julie had burst into tears many
times in church.
Everyone's first thought was that the war had ended. There'd been much
talk recently of a renewed assault on the Western Front. Perhaps the
time had finally come. But then they'd heard screams from Mrs Potter's
house. and Nate and Emily had scattered, leaving Julie alone in the
middle of the dusty lane that ran past her house along the bottom of
the valley. For some reason she'd been frozen to the spot, as though
the dust had turned into mud and sucked her into it, and then hardened
into rock and held her fast.
She'd stared fascinated as Mrs Grace's face appeared at the front
downstairs window of her beautifully-kept, white cottage, her eyes wide
with fear and a face as pale as death. "Mrs Grace.." Julie had mouthed
silently as a hand appeared behind her and tugged her back by her
greying hair. There was a final scream, and then Mrs Potter and her
friends fell completely silent.
Then, the old woman's front door had opened, and there were Robert
Baker and his lover, Anne Hardcastle, standing there and staring at her
with lifeless eyes. At that moment, it had seemed as if a thick black
cloud had passed over the sun, and hidden its light and warmth. Julie
could feel the goose-pimples now, as the rain beat down.
"Robert Baker," she had said, hesitantly, her bare legs trembling
beneath her. "We've all been worried about you. Where have you
been?"
Robert had frowned and studied the ground for a moment. Julie noticed
for the first time that his dazzling white shirt was freckled with
blood. "Why, I'm not sure, Julie Hallett. I've been up in the woods, I
think."
Julie had stared up at the valley slopes, and seen the shadows of high
clouds racing over the grass far up, and the lines of crumbling, stone
walls that had once divided the land. At the top of the hills, dark
patches of forest brooded silently. Julie thought of the dream woman
with her fiery white eyes and somehow found the strength to begin
backing away from the couple.
Robert smiled, and Julie thought she saw lights flickering deep down in
his throat. Anne moved up silently behind him and grinned at her over
his shoulder.
"Don't worry, Julie," she said, and her voice was all wrong, as if
something else was speaking from inside her. "We won't hurt you. You
have a role to play. You and Nate."
With that, a sudden gust of bitterly cold wind blew down from the moors
and Robert and Anne vanished, blown away into nothingness like
dandelion seeds. When the wind slackened, a few leaves spiralled to the
ground where they'd been standing, and then there was nothing
else.
Julie had run far away, and never told anyone what she witnessed that
day. Not even the dark-eyed Henry Shieldsley, who had appeared in
Thormalden a year afterwards with his only child, and broken her heart
with his cruelty. The old Julie Hallett sat back in her chair and
listened to Wyndham Hall creaking in the gale. She had never understood
what the thing that was pretending to be Anne Hardcastle had meant. She
still had no idea what this role was she had to play, and indeed
whether she had already completed it.
For now, she was content to stare from her window and remember the life
she'd led. To the north, the sky burned orange with the lights of
Denton, where her daughter still grieved for her husband, and her
granddaughter bore the weight of her misery.
Julie was surprised to feel a tear making its way down the wrinkled
skin of her cheek. She was even more surprised to discover that it was
not her daughter she was weeping for, but for tall, dark Henry
Shieldsley, who had been in her life for a matter of weeks, but changed
it forever.