Cox Help the Witch

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-602-1
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Inspired by our native landscapes, saturated by the shadows beneath trees and behind doors, listening to the run of water and half-heard voices, Tom Cox s first collection of short stories is a series of evocative and unsettling trips into worlds previously visited by the likes of M. R. James and E. F. Benson. Railway tunnels, the lanes and hills of the Peak District, family homes, old stones, shreds fluttering on barbed wire, night drawing in, something that might be an animal shifting on the other side of a hedge: Tom has drawn on his life-long love of weird fiction, folklore and nature s unregarded corners to write a collection of stories that will delight fans old and new, and leave them very uneasy about turning the reading lamp off.

Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cox, Tom

Leseproben

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...