Haunted emptiness — a moorland tale
Yvonne and Bethany’s footsteps sounded on the stones as they hiked along the old track in the empty quiet of the moorland. The birds were still and not a breath of wind made any noise. The only sound, as a consequence, their footsteps. The mist that had fallen since the brilliantly blue and promising early morning and had enveloped their world in a blanket of silence. A rather wet, clinging silence which not only rendered their sense of hearing somewhat redundant but their sight as well. They could see, certainly—see each other—but not much else; certainly not the fabulous open views they had anticipated and, no doubt, still in reality stretched either side of them, if only they could see through the mist. It should not be thought they were cold, frightened or at all perturbed. Their way clear on the old road. Not a tarmacadam road, but metalled nonetheless with rock and chippings. Almost as if the Romans or Blind Jack of Knaresborough or John McAdam had been there. Roadbuilders all. Perhaps they had.
The girls had enjoyed a good day’s walking. They had come well prepared. They might be walking in shorts but they had warm clothes and waterproofs in their packs. They were not lacking in water or food—not that there was a shortage of water up on the moors. There were enough streams tumbling around to keep them well filled were they to scoop the water into cupped hands and drink their fill. And no shortage of places to squat and wee as a consequence, hidden as they were by the mist. Not that they had seen a soul all day. That was to change.
Their solitude, indeed the silence, was broken by a faint sound ahead of them. It ed quite quickly because of the silence. A wheezing, creaking, sort of squeaking. They might not have been at all frightened or perturbed as they had journeyed, by the silence, or the mist hiding everything from them, but they glanced at each other. The faint sound was odd. Their brows furrowed and they raised their shoulders in mutual indication of puzzlement.
Maybe a story they had been told about the track across the moor came to one or other of their minds—or maybe both at once. Spectral huntsmen are not unusual subjects for tales and the story of Albert Aldgate was very much one of those. Riding with the local hunt, gallant sportsmen all, he had become detached from the field. Unsure where his fellows were he had trotted, it was assumed, up the very track they were traversing, listening until in the distance he had heard the baying of the hounds. At the gallop, he had sped forward to and ride after, the hounds clearly on the scent of wily Old Reynard. Alas, for Albert, almost as he reached his fellow huntsmen, he was thrown never to re the excited and merry group on that hunt or, moreover, to ever again to hunt. When found, he was stone cold dead, his neck broken.
It is said, and this is where the story takes a less verifiable turn, that a spectral rider can be seen riding the road, chasing the faint sound of hounds in the distance. Some recount the rush of wind as (presumably) Albert Aldgate es by. The old boy who had recounted the tale said he had seen the horse and rider once on a mist-soaken afternoon. Had heard the hooves and hardly had time to let icy needles creep up his backbone before horse and rider had swept by, the horse foaming and the mounted man riding with a fixed stare into the distance. The old boy added, as he took another draught of his beer, that he had followed the soon distant shadow for a time, it appearing and disappearing elusively, or so he said, like a will-o-the-wisp in the swirling mists until all of a sudden there was silence.
Yvonne and Bethany had not quite understood how, if the rider was galloping at considerable speed, how the old boy had followed him much at all—still less ‘for a time’. But it had been a good story and they did not want to spoil it by too many questions. Perhaps not the sort of story best heard or recalled when out on a foggy moor whilst hearing strange sounds coming to your ears through the mist. It might make you wonder; might make the flesh creep; might give you goose-pimples or icy needles up your backbone!
Certainly, it would not have been the best moment for such a tale. Not the time to tell Yvonne or Bethany ghost stories. Spectral huntsmen are something of a tradition. There are a lot of them, as there are tales of giant black dogs and grey ladies. Seemingly these elusive figures, these spectral huntsmen, haunt highways and byways from Norfolk to Pembrokeshire and from Cornwall to Northumbria, riding at pace, accompanied by the ghostly wind of hunting horn and belling of hounds.
The wheezing, creaking, sort of squeaking sound, though, came from ahead of the girls rather than behind. That was a more comforting position. It was not something creeping up on them, rather they were doing the creeping up—moving forward towards the sound. Perhaps they might be gaining on a spectral huntsman in rather less of a hurry than Albert Aldgate, though the sound was not anything like a hunting horn or hounds. Difficult to think it had anything to do with a chestnut mare or piebald gelding. Difficult to think it was a sportsman at the hunt at all.
The girls were gaining on the sound and it was not too long before they discerned a shape ahead. It did, for a time, appear and disappear in the mist will-o-the-wisp like, ghostly indeed, given the propensity of the mist to swirl, thin and thicken. The shape was somewhat uneven, somewhat puzzling and certainly did not include a horse. It resolved itself into a man and a bicycle. Somewhat prosaic, after the fancies the girls might have had.
A figure becoming clearer, the closer the girls got, the man entering and ing their own little mist enclosed world, a moving, fading circle of visibility beyond which everything was vague or unseen. An old man, a little stooped, leather gaiters tied around his calves and leather jerkin to his chest, a hessian sack over his shoulders and wheeling an ancient bicycle, black and sadly in need of an oil-can.
The wheezing, creaking, sort of squeaking sound had not in any way ceased. It was merely louder.
“Arternoon.” The old man acknowledged the girls’ presence as they drew alongside. A sidelong glance appraised them.
The girls replied in unison, Yvonne choosing to comment upon the weather, as you do with strangers.
“Aye,” a long pause. “Could be worse.”
Undoubtedly. It was neither cold nor raining, just damp and obscuring.
Given the girls had caught up with the old man and his bicycle, it might have been expected they would now draw away from him and go ahead, pushing on to the village they were aiming for, still many miles away. Their pace had been greater than his. More miles per hour. Perhaps it was a feeling it would be rude to just stride ahead without saying more, given he was the only soul they had seen all day; perhaps they chose not to walk faster than him and pull away, though the girls did not feel they were walking any slower; perhaps they were tiring a bit, as they had kept up quite a pace; or it could have been he was walking a little faster, though the note coming from his bicycle did not change in pitch.
“Do you come this way often?”
“Aye.” Again, the pause. “For many a year.”
It was not over informative. It was not really conversation.
The girls had not been that talkative that day. It had not been a day that had inspired their usual chatter. Perhaps it had been the mist and their feeling of enclosure. Perhaps more a day for introspection than sisterly talk. They walked on in silence with the stranger.
It seemed to Bethany that it was getting darker. A little surprising, as in summertime it does not get dark that early. The old man sniffed. The air that had been so still began to move.
“I smell rain.”
It had not been in the forecast. ‘Low cloud and sun later’ had been what the BBC had said that morning.
The advent of a breeze started to move the mist, more swirling undoubtedly but features further out and ahead on the track began to appear. Grey shapes of rocks, hints of purple heather, dark patches of peat or bog. The girls might get their views after all. Not that they could yet see blue skies and sunshine appearing out of the mist as a photogenic accompaniment.
You know the moors then? The weather?”
“Aye.”
The girls waited expecting more. Just as they had decided it was not a pause and perhaps they should not have asked a closed question, the old man spoke again.
“I know.” Another pause. “Be right dark ahead over Bill’s Mother’s house.”
The girls’ eyes strained ahead looking for a house, a building—probably stone—where the newly mentioned William’s parent might abide. There was nothing of the sort to see. What they did see, as the mist lifted upwards to a grey canopy was a large black cloud coming from the east. It presaged rain.
The bicycle, the old man and the girls pressed on. A small group with a wheezing, creaking, squeaking bicycle. For a few minutes a shaft of blue and sunlight ahead drew the girls’ attention and their hopes of the weather coming good after all. And then it faded and with it the rain came towards them like a hanging grey curtain across the moor sweeping towards them faster than a horse could ride, faster than Albert Aldgate had ridden. Something of a wall of water hit them. Bare legs below shorts stung and battered. The girls should have got their waterproofs out of their packs. Should have pulled on waterproof tros and jackets, zipped them up and raised hoods. Should have disappeared into their own little nylon worlds inside their hoods, nylon rubbing against ears and cheeks, just noses left outside to get wet. Rainwater should just have dripped from noses rather than from everywhere. In a trice the girls were soaked. Tops soaked, bras soaked, shorts soaked, knickers soaked, socks soaked and water going down into boots to soak their toes.
The old man had pulled his sacking around himself as if used to such things—as no doubt he was—the water cascading off his flat cap.
“It’s raining,” said Bethany. A nice piece of understatement but the sort of thing people do say in such situations. The obvious spoken—as if others had not noticed.
“Aye.” A pause. “Rain it is.”
The downpour lessened to a heavy rain as they walked on. Across the moors grey rocks, heather and then the shape of a building, a stone-built house off to the left. Stark against the moor. A house built purely as a dwellinghouse, not as a statement. Simple, unadorned, solid. Nothing fancy. If it had drip mouldings over the windows, they were to shed water not impress.
“Is that Bill’s Mother’s?” Asked Bethany.
A chuckle from the old man. “Nay. Nor Bill’s neither, not his style... exactly.” A pause. “Mine. You come in.”
A track off the track, a path to the door. Stone chippings and mud. Water pooling in places. Raindrops splashing into them. A stone building, rain pouring off the roof. The old boy leant his bicycle against the wall, next to the door, against a stone window sill, and opened the door. Inside a stone kitchen, flagged floor, kitchen table and big fireplace with lit fire. It was warm inside. Cosy and homely. Fresh killed hares lay on the kitchen table ready for skinning.
“Tea?”
The girls more than ready for a cup. More than ready for something hot inside them. Putting packs down on the stone flags, they sat by the fire, by invitation, on wooden chairs as the old man put a black as soot kettle over the fire, on a hook. It was clear he did not have the electric.
“You’d better get them wet clothes off.”
They were wet. Shorts, shirts and everything underneath and beneath those as well. Their skin was wet. Waterproofs would have been a good idea. Not that the girls would not have been damp within even in waterproofs.
The old man poured the boiling water into a brown teapot. A little at first which he swished around to warm the earthenware. Tipping it out he put tea leaves in. One for each person and one for the pot, and then poured the boiling water, filling the teapot to the brim. The warm scent of tea and boiling water came to the girls’ nostrils, a change from the wet, moorland smell outside. The smell distinct and memorable.
The fire warming, a welcome blaze after the rain. The girls turned showing their bottoms to the fire, letting it warm their buttocks as they took the teacups and sipped. The tea hot, too hot, the sensation almost burning—and would have been had they drunk immediately.
The old boy seemed content to sit in an old wooden chair by the fire, dark wood, solid and old. Had his father and grandfather sat in it before him? He said little.
“You farm?” asked Bethany over her teacup.
“Aye,” the expected pause, “I did once. When...”
“A hard life.”
“Aye... hard.”
The girls drank. Accepted a second cup.
“You’d better get them wet clothes off.”
Their clothes were, perhaps, a bit drier but would certainly dry better off. Should they go into another room to change? They had other clothes in their packs. Perhaps upstairs to a bedroom.
Yvonne began to undo buttons. Bethany looked surprised but began to do the same. Shorts and shirts dry that much better when hung up in front of a fire, spread out and hanging so they could drip and be dried. Better than left upon bodies which were themselves damp all over. Without their cotton coverings those two female bodies were, themselves, going to dry quicker. Despite the fire’s warmth both girls skin produced little goose-pimples. Perhaps it was their almost unintentional disrobing in front of a stranger. He was an old boy but still a man and now, as he sat there in his chair, he was not looking away from them. His deep-set dark eyes were very clearly looking them over. Perhaps as he might have looked at a sheep, when he was a farmer, assuming he was a sheep-farmer, as seemed more than likely on the moors, or a pair of gambling lambs.
Bethany conscious her dark pubic curls would be showing through the thin material of her panties, made semi-transparent by their soaking, conscious too that her dark nipples and areolae would be equally on display through her wet bra. She knew that, because she could see much the same through Yvonne’s underwear. Yvonne’s little slit showing through her panties and the pinkness of her wet skin and slightly darker pinkness of her nipples showing through her lacy white wet bra.
The undergarments were as wet as the shorts and shirts. Given their transparency there was little point keeping them on. Better to hang them up to dry. It seemed the right thing to do.
“You don’t mind?” asked Bethany unclipping her bra and letting her wet boobies slip out.
“Seen it all afore.”
His face expressionless as he watched the girls. Two now naked girls standing in his kitchen in front of the fire with teacups and saucers in their hands. One dark and one fair, one with a dark triangle, the other with not a hint of fair curls; instead, a rather sweet little slit bisecting her mound. Both with ‘womanly’ breasts, full and firm. The sort that rather please men but do rather need if engaged in anything energetic—other, of course, than the sort of energetic sport that can happen in bedrooms.
“You’ll be staying... for supper.”
It was not quite a question. Bethany and Yvonne nodded. They looked away as the old man began to prepare the supper. Chopping sounds, ripping sounds, the more chopping sounds. The hare, onions, carrots, dripping, herbs went into the pot and it was placed over the fire. It was not long before the appetizing smell of onions and searing meat came to the girls’ nostrils. Water from the kettle sloshed in a little later. The bubbling sound, the pleasant steam and the crackle of the fire was all rather soporific. The girls settled into chairs and...
They must have nodded off. The girls awoke blinking, momentarily surprised to find themselves in a kitchen by candle and firelight. Outside the storm seemed to have got up again. It was very dark—over Bill’s Mother’s and everywhere else. The lolling, curled up girls straightened themselves in their chairs, conscious of their nudity. The old man seemed not to have moved. Not to have changed his position in his chair from teatime. For a moment Bethany had the rather odd idea he was simply a painting, a portrait of an old rustic fellow in his cottage from long ago. A painting on a wall or perhaps reproduced as a jigsaw or on place mats or table ware purchasable at shops like ‘Past Times’. For a moment Bethany had the fancy he was not really there, that she was seeing an image from the past. Then he spoke.
“Be supper time.”
“Perhaps we should get dressed. Dressed for dinner.” Their clothes looked dry. Toasty dry and warm, even bras and panties. Her mummy and daddy had always been keen her brother ‘dressed for dinner’ meaning put his shirt on in the summertime. Bethany had not gone around bare chested even in the summertime.
“I’m not fussed.” A pause whilst the fire crackled away and the pot steamed. “Don’t stand on ceremony.”
Already he was ladling the stew onto plates. At some point potatoes had been added. It was warming, tender and quite delicious. The steam aromatic from the herbs. All memorable. Not a dish the girls were likely to forget. It was, indeed, delicious.
The rain beat against the window panes. Small panes set in wooden frames. It was a filthy night. Not one to be out in. One to stay inside in the warmth, not venture forth. Bethany realised she had no desire to be out on the moor, out in the rain and wind, perhaps with flashes of lightning. A bit too ‘Wuthering Heights’ near Haworth or ‘Dracula’ at Whitby. Not too far away.
“You’ll be staying... the night.”
It was not quite a question. Bethany and Yvonne nodded. It was an aweful night. Not one fit for camping, not one for walking, not one for being outside at all.
What was unexpected -should it have been—was the single bed; the single room upstairs with just the one bed. Not a ‘single’ bed in the sense of being just for one person but denoting the presence of only one bed; not single but large, large enough for two... large enough for three. The bedroom not cosy and feminine. Not chintz curtains or anything like that. More hard and masculine, if the jug and ewer did have a single flower upon it—a lily. Wooden furniture, a rug, a hunting scene in a picture frame. The bed, wrought iron with eiderdown and counterpane, quite inviting in its own way. The linen clean and turned back. It would all be warm and cosy. Surely the old man did not expect... or did he?
No clothes to remove. The girls were already naked. No nighties set out upon the bed and the girls packs did not contain nightwear. They had slept in undies or nothing. It would be nothing. In between the sheets went Bethany and Yvonne.
“Sleep deep,” said the old man and blew out the candle plunging the bedroom into darkness. Outside the girls could hear the rain on the roof, hear it lashing at the windows, hear the wind moaning and wailing outside. They could not touch it, only hear the sounds of the wind and rain, but it seemed almost tactile as if they could indeed reach out and touch. Rather un-nerving sounds. It made them think of ghosts and the like abroad, out on the cold, wet, windswept moor. Thoughts of Albert Aldgate out a riding trying desperately to catch his fellow riders, endlessly riding, repeating the same sad ride over and over again.
A creak of the bed and a third person ed the girls in the bed. Yvonne, nearest moved closer to Bethany. Bare girl hip touching bare girl hip. For Yvonne there was the touch of another bare hip against hers the other side. Immediately clear the old man did not wear nightclothes either, however appropriate a nightshirt and nightcap might have seemed. He would have looked the part.
It was not just a hip for long. Soon fingers were crawling over Yvone’s skin, touching, feeling, exploring, going places few men had been. To Yvonne there seemed a certain inevitability about it; she did not resist, did not push the hands away. Her body was undoubtedly responding. She could feel that thickening of lips, that creeping warmth as the moisture came, the tickling feeling as her areolae contracted and her nipples rose. And then there was that special feeling of her clitoris erecting. Her body was preparing her for copulation, making her feel the need for sexual intercourse.
Bethany felt it, felt the movements of her friend. Was quite aware what was happening next to her. Her own body was reacting too, she could feel it; like Yvonne the moisture, the warm wetness was coming, her long clitoris was erect there in the bed and she had not so much as been touched. She was rather more touched and jostled when the old man mounted Yvonne. The bed creaked and the mattress bounced. Bethany was not quite sure whether she was relieved or disappointed the man had chosen to copulate with Yvonne. Sexually she was really aroused. Indeed, as she went up and down in sympathy with the adjacent copulation—the mattress leaving her little choice of movement—her fingers crept to and into her sex and she found herself playing.
Gasps from Yvonne, little whimpers and unexpectedly thrown out limbs rather indicated to Bethany that Yvonne at least had been successful in orgasm. Bethany thought as the pounding next to her reached a peak and then slowed to a halt, the old man had similarly come. Bethany had not got there on her own. Her fingers had done well but it needed a little more work and suitable thoughts and images in her mind. What she did not expect was for the old boy to move across onto her, his hips sinking between her own spread thighs and such a hard, almost bone like, male erection to push against her stiff clit before sliding easily home into her body. Bethany found herself being fucked straight after Yvonne. Barely a pause between leaving Yvonne’s vagina and pushing into Bethany’s own. The penis ready lubricated by Yvonne and... surely the old man had come, had ejaculated, yet he was as hard as a young man. And young men did not stay hard like that. It felt unreal, supernatural. Indeed, perhaps that was one of Superman’s super powers!
Even more unreal when Bethany felt the old man come shortly after her own rather strong orgasm, then pull out of her and clearly get atop Yvonne again. Such a big orgasm, it left Bethany all weak and confused but content. She was not quite sure what she meant by ‘big’, it was just so intense and she was just so aroused. Sopping wet, she must have been dripping down onto the sheet, even to the mattress. Her sex so sticky, so hot, so liquid. She wanted more. Outside the weather no better. Dark, stormy and unfriendly. In contrast there she was warm and cosy in bed having had a wonderful fuck. Beside her, Bethany’s friend seemed to be having another, Yvonne’s knees, if not her legs, up, pulling the covers away. Bethany reached and felt the , Yvonne’s sex as damp as hers, though denuded by any hair, and the old man’s cock embedded and moving. So hard, so rigid, so bone feeling.
And Bethany was covered again. That self-same cock slid back into her sheath and rubbed against her standing clit. Bethany came again. She knew it, but that was all she knew as sleep just swept over her. Did the old man complete the act a second time? Surely there could not have been a third? The old man fucking two big girls in their sleep.
What Bethany did know was what she found when she awoke. She was cold but it felt like recent cold as if bedclothes had suddenly been pulled from her when in a cold bedroom. She awoke blinking in the morning light. Certainly, she was there in the self-same bedroom; certainly, there in that room with her friend, Yvonne; certainly upon the very bed she had gone to sleep on, but otherwise all was very different. The hunting scene picture on the wall now at a crooked angle and the glass mostly missing; the counterpane and bedclothes all gone, the mattress old and snagging; the window glass cracked, broken and the window hanging. In part of the room the ceiling down and Bethany could see light coming in through the roof above.
Surprise too coming from her friend. Two naked girls suddenly on their feet and shivering not just from the cold but from the shock of the change. It was almost worse when bare feet came down the barely safe wooden stairs. The so cosy kitchen derelict. No kettle, no pot, barely a window, plaster falling from the walls, debris from birds nesting in the chimney in the fireplace, ivy growing in through the door. The only real thing as before were their clothes hanging in front of what had been a fire and their packs leaning against a wall. How quickly the girls dressed, how quickly were boots tied and the two of them shot out through the doorway—when, that is, they had been able to pull the door open. Against the stone sill of the window abutting the door leant the remains of a bicycle. Rusty remains. It was never going anywhere again, not wheezing, not creaking, not anything. No oil can would cure a squeak, the metal was completely seized, the rubber tyre at the front perished, the rear missing, the mudguards full of holes, the leather saddle long eaten away.
Up the path hurried the girls to the main track and then they stopped and looked back panting.
“What? Did we? Did I... did we dream. He fucked us, didn’t he? That stew, that cosy... bed. What?”
They couldn’t have dreamt it, they could not have slept all night naked on that damp, half rotten mattress with a storm raging. They could not both have dreamt the same thing. It could not have happened.
“Albert Aldgate,” exclaimed Bethany staring back at the ruinous house. “No, not him, nor his ghost but...”
“Who? That wasn’t a grey lady, a long dead prisoner rattling chains, Roman Centurions marching knee deep through a cellar, or a horseman repeating his last fatal ride.”
“Like, but more real, not an apparition... or was it time travel? Did we fall back through time to when he lived here,” her arms expansive across the landscape, “fell as we walked through the mist?”
“And then fell back this morning in time for breakfast—or no breakfast. It can’t have been. We couldn’t… surely?”
“We’d have felt right Charlies stuck, when was it? 1930s do you think? 1950s? Wartime? We’d have been locked up. Madwomen babbling about impossible things and listening hopelessly for a message on our mobile phones until the batteries died.”
“We didn’t ask his name.”
They stood looking, caught between a desire to quite the place and its eerie associations, yet it had all been rather… enjoyable. An experience. The shelter, the hot tea, the delicious meal, the cosiness out of the wind and rain, the sex... yes, the sex. They took a photo or two, and then began to walk on where they had planned to walk the day before—before the mist and the wheezing, creaking, sort of squeaking sound had come,
“I wonder who he was?”
“It’s quite a ghost story, isn’t it, we have a tale to tell, don’t we; better than Albert Aldgate.”
“One to tell that old boy back in that pub who told us about Albert Aldgate’s ghostly ride.”
“It’d quite make him upset his beer, I think, when our tale got to the sex part!”
The girls walked on, long legs sticking out of shorts and down into their boots. The thought in their heads that the old boy with the wheezing, creaking, sort of squeaking bicycle seemed to have found a better sort of haunting than Albert had done. Delaying young women, enticing them into his home and having his way with them—again and again, repeating the haunting again and again with those who ed that way. Quite a good sort of haunt to get as a ghost!
The girls wondered. It was a topic of conversation and speculation for many a day—what was the original story, what event had led to the cycle, to the haunting?