DARK COUNTY (5 page)

‘Oh, Benton?’ The thing said after him. Benton stopped in his tracks and looked back. ‘Stay out of trouble, or we might meet again.’

Benton ran, not knowing what hell awaited the others, just knowing that ‘Hell’ was exactly the right word. As he made his way quickly along the path, he could hear the tortured screams and cries and pitiful begging of the other boys, but he didn’t look back. From now on, he was staying away from trouble, far, far away.

I first laid eyes on the house by the marsh when I was fifteen years old. At that time, my family lived in a village called Wyberton, which was just outside the market town of Boston in Lincolnshire. It was a fairly dull place to be a teenager, but I was lucky enough to have a large group of friends. We would spend our time flitting between each other’s houses, hanging around the local SPAR shop, or just roaming the streets.

Sometimes, usually in the summer when the weather was good, we would wander across the A16, the road that had split the village in two, and head out into the countryside. We would walk past the church and the graveyard and down the narrow winding roads that led to the marsh.

There was a network of these single lane roads, all of which seemed to converge at the marsh. I thought that we had walked all of them over the years, but it turned out I was mistaken.

It was a warm May evening when we had set off from my friend Wayne’s house. He was the only one of us that lived on that side of the main road. That night there were seven of us hanging around in his bedroom. There was myself; my best friend Rob; Danny, the joker of the group; Rob’s sister Zara and her friends Lizzie and Wendy; and of course, Wayne himself.

We had grown bored of listening to music and drinking too-warm bottles of cheap French beer. We thought about heading to the shop or maybe paying a call on another of our friends, but we were all skint and couldn’t think of anyone who would be home that night. Instead, we made the decision to walk out towards the marsh. If nothing else did, this would always keep us entertained.

It was around seven in the evening as we left Wayne’s house. The sky had taken on that darkening grey colour of a spring evening, but the air was still warm. The group of us set out down Wayne’s road, passing the familiar landmarks on our way. First, we came to the bridge that went over a small stream. As always, Danny would try and pick Rob up to throw him into the stream, and as always Rob would fight his way free of Danny’s grip. He may have been small, but Rob was as slippery as a fish when you tried to get hold of him.

Then we turned down the road that led to the church. Even back then I always thought it was a beautiful little church. It seemed secluded and peaceful, tucked away from the main road, its churchyard surrounded by trees. It had a little graveyard around it, with crumbling old tombstones you could barely read anymore.

A little further down the road was the more modern cemetery; this was hidden behind a large, red brick wall and was accessible only through a wrought iron gate. Despite the fact that it was newer and tidier, this was the one that freaked us out the most. In there you could clearly see the names and dates of deaths and some of them were painfully close to home.

We carried on walking down the lane until we passed the last row of houses, then there was nothing around us but fields on either side of the road. The sun had sunk a little lower in the sky by this point, engulfing the bottom of the vast sky in shades of orange, pink and red. Due to the flat nature of most of Lincolnshire, you always got these massive skies. With nothing to block them, they were often breathtaking, and this was no exception.

As we walked the open country lanes, we laughed and joked, talked about school and all the random crap that went with it. Time always seemed to pass slowly on those walks, after all, we were young and without a care in the world, except for those we created for ourselves.

The air got a little cooler once we were out in the open. With nothing to stop it for miles around, the wind was usually quite strong. Out of nowhere there was a clap of thunder, the skies darkened significantly and then the heavens opened with a ferocity I had never seen before, nor have I seen since. The rain was so heavy that we could barely see. We ran blindly for an open barn in the field to our right, soaked to the skin and looking a rather sorry state.

The storm only lasted a few minutes, but made the earth soggy in the field. The girls had enough; when the rain subsided, they decided that they were going home. We decided, though, that as we could not feasibly get any wetter we may as well carry on walking out to the marsh.

After the girls had left us, Wayne pointed out the road opposite the one they had taken.

‘I bet that goes back to the church, too,’ he said with mischievous glee. ‘We could double back there and scare the shit out of them by jumping out of the graveyard.’

The general opinion amongst the rest of us was that this was quite possibly the greatest idea that Wayne had ever had. We hurried out of the field and went quickly up the other road, not running, but wanting to gain enough ground to get there ahead of the girls. The only problem was that the road suddenly took a swing to the left around a hairpin bend. Instead of heading for the church we were now back heading for the marsh. It was too late now to find another way back in time to scare them, so we decided to follow the road to its end.

Like all of the other roads we used to walk around there, this one was narrow and winding. Unlike the others, though, it was tree-lined most of the way down. Tangled branches reached for each other above our heads. There was something creepy and beautiful about it all at the same time.

As we got nearer the marsh, the smell of the sea became more apparent. Some people didn’t like the smell, but I always found it refreshing. The road veered off to the right, another hairpin bend. As I would find out a few years later, this road was a nightmare to drive unless you knew it well.

One thing that struck me as odd, even that first time walking down there, was there were no houses. The other roads were desolate yes, but there was always the odd home here and there, but this one was empty for miles. As the bank that ran along the marsh came into view on our left, we saw the house. It stood there alone, up ahead on the right. Even from that distance it looked wrong, out of proportion in some way. It looked like it had been a small house originally and then extended badly, to create something that just didn’t look right.

Something about the place had stopped us all in our tracks without one of us saying a word. I looked to my friends; each of them was staring towards the house with an expression of intrigue and trepidation on their faces.

‘That’s a creepy looking place,’ Danny said, finally breaking the silence that had befallen us.

‘Too right,’ Wayne seconded.

‘Let’s get a closer look,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Rob replied.

At this stage, I should point out that Rob and I were obsessed with horror movies and ghost stories. They scared us stupid sometimes, but nevertheless we were thrilled at the idea of exploring such a foreboding looking place.

The other two were a little more apprehensive, though they tried not to show it, not wanting to appear like cowards compared to us. So, the four of us continued down the road towards the house.

As we got closer, it became clear that the house was derelict. The windows and door were boarded up with slats with gaps in between. There were black marks above the front door and windows, evidence of a fire at some point. The garden was a state, it was overgrown, but all of the plants looked brown and dead. Its state of disrepair made it look even more ominous. As we approached the short fence that surrounded the property, a gust of cold wind blew across our faces, strong enough to bring tears to our eyes.

I felt something in the pit of my stomach, a kind of dragging sensation that made me feel queasy. I knew what had caused the feeling. It was the house. It was my body telling me to leave as the house tried to pull me towards it. I looked to the others for some sign that they were experiencing it, too. Though they looked a little nervous, I could see that none of them were having the physical reaction to the house that I was.

‘It’s burnt out,’ Rob said as we looked towards the house.

‘Yeah, but it doesn’t look like it was a bad fire,’ Danny, whose father was a fireman, said. ‘Looks like a small fire to have done that.’

‘Oh, God,’ Wayne said. ‘I know what this is. It’s the paedo’s house!’

We all looked at him, confused. He, in turn, looked back at us for some recognition and saw none. We had no idea what he was talking about. Wayne was often in possession of information about local goings on that we were not because he had an older brother who knew the area well. I was the youngest in my family and had two older brothers, though we had only moved to the area when I was twelve, so my brothers didn’t grow up round here or go to school here. Rob and Danny were both the eldest in their families.

‘It was about eight years ago, I think,’ Wayne began to explain. ‘They found out some kiddie fiddler was living out here. He had been abusing kids for ages. The police didn’t have enough evidence to convict him so they let him go. Some of the parents of the kids he’d messed with didn’t like it, so they came down here to burn his house down.’

So far, we were all pretty convinced that Wayne was in fact just repeating the origin story of Freddy Krueger, especially as we were all big fans of the
Nightmare on Elm Street
films at the time.

‘Thing is, the police were watching the house so they got the fire brigade here before the fire could really take hold. Your dad might have been one of them,’ he said to Danny.

‘Maybe,’ Danny said, knowing that his father would never tell them about actual fires he’d been to, just the dangers of fire.

‘Anyway,’ Wayne continued. ‘When they went in to fight the fire, they found the paedo hanging in the hallway, he’d killed himself.’

I got a chill down my neck as he said this. Six months earlier, unbeknownst to any of them, I had tried to hang myself. I wouldn’t find out for many years, but I was suffering from bipolar disorder. Sometimes I just felt like life was not worth living, for no reason. I had a happy home, a family who loved me, friends who were great, yet still there were these dark periods where nothing seemed to make me feel better.

‘They say that if you go and peek through the board on the doorway, you can still see him hanging there, reaching out to touch whatever kid dares to look.’

‘Bollocks,’ Rob said.

‘No, my brother told me one of his mates saw him, then went crazy,’ Wayne said.

‘Also bollocks,’ I added.

‘Well why don’t you go and look,’ Wayne said.

I had no good answer, accept that I was scared to. I, who was obsessed with the supernatural and horror films, was too scared to go and look through a boarded up door on a spooky house. It was not to do with Wayne’s, more than likely false, story. It was because of the way that looking at the house made me feel. The queasiness and the pulling sensation were too much for me to take.

‘I will,’ said Danny, in an uncharacteristically brave move.

He hopped over the short fence and made his way slowly through the decaying plants of the garden. I wanted to scream at him not to go, but all that would have achieved was to make the others mock me for being a coward.

Danny looked back at us as he approached the door. He seemed so far away from us, from the safety of the group, I imagined a hand coming through the boards on the door and pulling him into the blackness of the house.

He waved at us and grinned before kneeling down to look through a gap in the boards. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears; it felt quicker than it should have. We all stood in silence as Danny looked into the house, into the abyss. It felt like forever that he knelt there. Time seemed to stop. The breeze that was ever present down near the marsh was gone, there was no sound of birds or insects or even the rumble of distant traffic on the A16. All that I could hear was the thump of my own heart, and my own breathing.

‘Fuck this,’ Danny screamed getting up and running back across the garden. In the style of true childhood friends, we did not wait for him to reach us, instead we ran full pelt back up the road, and around the hairpin bend. We did not stop for him to catch up with us until the house was well out of sight. Danny came running up to us panting. His face was whiter than I’d ever seen anyone look. His eyes were wide. He looked terrified.

‘What did you see?’ Rob asked.

‘Nothing,’ Danny said, his voice sounding strange and distant.

‘You must have seen something,’ I said. ‘You look scared.’

Danny barged past us and headed up the road, back towards Wyberton. He looked back at us.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘I just want to go home.’

Rob, Wayne and I looked at each other, then headed off down the road after him. We walked home in silence.

The years went by and things changed. Rob went off to university in Nottingham, Wayne joined the Army, and Danny went off the rails. He got in with a bad crowd and started stealing and doing drugs. I stayed where I was and studied for my degree at the local college. Rob and I still saw each other as often as possible, but rarely did we see the others. That night, and the house, faded into the dark recesses of my memory. I continued to suffer, undiagnosed, with bipolar disorder. There were some dark times for me over those years. Self-harm was the big thing, not in the attention seeking way that so many people do, no, I hid it carefully for years. For me it was all about the sense of relief cutting gave me. I was in control of it and it seemed to release all of the pressure and negativity that built up in my mind. Several times, I ended up in hospital being stitched after cutting too deep, yet still I always found an excuse to explain it away as an accident, and not as something I has deliberately done to myself.

My next encounter with the house by the marsh came while I was studying for my degree in media studies. We had been assigned a photography project based on the theme of decay. The mention of that word brought the house screaming back into my head. I was still wary of the idea of going back there, but I told myself that we had just been scared kids, messing around. Danny was a twat, as he had proved since, and was probably just messing around. I decided to go back and take some photos of the house for my project.