As we go about our busy lives, so we are inclined to overlook or ignore that which may lie in the dark shadows at the edge of our gaze. For there may lurk a stranger, and sometimes more disturbing, reality.
Our story begins in the quiet days following Christmas during the early years of the last century. One fine morning a visitor arrived in a pretty East Anglian village, nestling in a river valley. He hoped to spend a quiet few days with his books and his dog.
One wintry morning, our visitor – let us call him Roberts – set off with his dog at a brisk pace from the cottage he had rented. His intent was to visit the inn on his return for a simple luncheon and a warming glass. The frost lay heavy in the meadows and there was ice in the puddles. Roberts crossed the river and headed towards the great bulk of trees known as Grimley Wood.
He was in good spirits, as was his dog, who capered in the frozen ruts. As Roberts walked his mind was on other things. So it took a while before he realized that his dog was no longer with him.
He called a few times, paced back the way he had come and called again. A scuffling sound drew his attention. Ducking under thick branches, he passed through a rusty iron gate. His dog, his snout buried in the undergrowth and tail wagging, had found something.
He poked at the spot with his stick, which grated against something hard. So he knelt. His gloved hands clasped what seemed to be a piece of masonry.
It was clearly very old and covered in moss. He removed his gloves, and his fingers discovered a small, perfectly round hole. Gouging away the soil he teased a small object from the hole and brought it out into the dim, wintry light.
It was, or at least had been, a bag or pouch of some kind. There was something inside, something small and hard. Drawing it out he found a piece of dirty metal, roughly cylindrical. With it was a rotted piece of paper that disintegrated at his touch. Although his interest was aroused, his hunger won through. So he pocketed his find, called his dog and picked his way towards the inn as the winter sun waned and the chill set in.
Returning to the river, he looked back at Grimley Wood. Against the horizon he thought he could see a figure. Another walker? Yet this new companion stood quite still and seemed to be staring at him.
Fed on bread, cheese and beer, Roberts asked the innkeeper if he might know the history of Grimley Wood. Overhearing him, a local piped up ‘begging your pardon sir, the archivist is the one to ask.’
The approaching dusk and strong breeze seemed to promise another wild night. Back at the cottage Roberts stoked his fire ready to settle down with book and pipe. But he felt restless, his mind wandering. The wind became gusty with spells of quiet and sudden squalls which rattled sharply at the windows. Occasionally he heard a scratching, as though of twigs against window pane. Or fingernails.
‘Dear me!’ he thought to himself with a shudder. ‘This thinking will never do.’
Eventually Roberts retired to his bed, his dog very eager to stay close to his heels. He could not be sure what woke him. His dog was sitting bolt upright, ears erect. Had the animal heard a fox? Or was there a miscreant of some kind, prowling about outside? He should look. But then again perhaps it would be unwise to venture outside in such a howling storm. So, a little unnerved, once again he retired.
With the promise of a sparkling day and a full breakfast inside him, Roberts put aside the fanciful thoughts of the previous night, attributing them to an excess of cheese. The wild winds had gone. Outside twigs and dead leaves had blown into heaps. A spot, directly beneath his bedroom window, attracted his eye. There were marks in the ground – a foot of some kind? A hoof?
Some creature had passed this way. Though what he could not tell. He convinced himself it must be a farm animal. So, dog at his side, he went to call on the local archivist.
He paused where the lane led up to Grimley Wood, and noticed he was not alone. As before an indistinct figure stood staring at him with an unnerving intensity that made him tremble.
He knocked at the archivist’s door, and a beaming woman answered.
‘Ah yes,’ said the lady once they had settled. ‘Indeed there was once a house. It belonged to a local family, the Allbarrows, who had lived here for some generations.
‘There were stories about the house, but you know what local people are like. As to the Allbarrows and the house? Well, both have simply disappeared.
‘Old man Allbarrow was not well liked. They say he had a library of books on astrology or alchemy or even witchcraft. Nobody knows for sure. It caught fire, you see.
‘One of the local girls is said to have disappeared, a servant’, she paused, ‘but she probably simply ran away, not that local people believed that.”
‘I have some papers somewhere, though they seem almost unintelligible and I have never been able to make anything of them.’
She shortly produced an envelope and gave it to Roberts.
That evening Roberts made up the fire and settled himself ready to open the archivist’s envelope. Inside was a page, torn from a diary, and written in a broad spidery hand.
The writing ended abruptly.
Once more, as darkness fell the wind grew. It came fitfully, gusting against the cottage, moaning down the chimney and making the windows shake. With such a noise about him, Roberts felt that the night seemed alive and restless. He found he could not concentrate on his reading and remembered his find in the wood. Upon opening the drawer where he had placed it the cottage seemed to be suddenly struck be a physical blow from without, and a tremendous gust blew a window open. Roberts slipped the pouch into his pocket and with much effort fastened the window.
That night he dozed fitfully. And no matter how often he woke, he was visited by the same nightmare. There was a house. Angry voices. A terrified girl fleeing through endless corridors and, in the darkness behind her, Roberts dreamed that some body or some dreadful thing followed.
The wind blew louder. But now there was another noise. A scratching and tearing. His dog, crouching with hackles raised, appeared terrified.
Checking the rattling window was well fastened, Robert looked outside and in a moment of horror he glimpsed a shadowy, skeletal figure, its head thrown back in a shriek of fury, its fingernails like talons. The malevolence of this unholy image haunted him through the many dreadful hours until day break.
But as daylight began to glimmer he began to chide himself for having a fearful imagination. Whatever can have driven his mind to conjure up such a ghoulish man? Because a man it was. Or at least, what had once been a man.
After breakfast, Roberts put on his boots. The footprint outside that he had noticed the previous day had now become a virtual maelstrom of wild gougings. On the window frame above he found something else – claw marks.
That day he went to the inn early, deep in thought. Feeling for his tobacco he discovered his pocketed find. Placing the bag gingerly on the table, he withdrew the rusted piece of metal from within. With his knife he began delicately to clean it. A curious local came over.
‘Well bless you, sir, I know what that is!’ he declared, ‘That’s a thimble, sir, just like my mother used when darning clothes. A thimble, such as a seamstress might use.’
A thimble, of course. A cold horror passed over him. What had the diary said of ‘one so worthless, a simple seamstress’?
‘I found it in Grimley Wood yesterday”, explained Roberts.
‘Oh ah,’ said the man, replacing the squashed thimble carefully on the table and seeming to shrink away. ‘It’s not for me to say. But perhaps it doesn’t do to go disturbing these old places. They have a mind to keep themselves to themselves.’
Here in the snug bar the thimble seemed perfectly innocent, yet Roberts had gnawing fear that it was the cause of the unpleasantness of the past two nights. The idea of spending another night in the cottage alone with this thing was repugnant to him, so he arranged to move to the inn. But first he knew he must return with the thimble to Grimley Wood.
The countryside was settling into an expectant silence as he hurled thimble and bag deep into the undergrowth of the wood.
There were no more alarms that evening and nothing to disturb his sleep. Beside him his dog snoozed quietly.
It was on the final day, when he was consulting the railway timetable, that he was approached by a lady he recognised.
‘I have found another document about the house in Grimley Woods,’ said the archivist, watching Robert’s face intently as she handed it to him.
And so Roberts bade farewell to the pretty village with mixed feelings, its beauty undeniable but its forgotten history rather more disturbing. The page was clearly torn from a book, like the other. Although his Latin was a little rusty, he found not too much difficulty in its translation.
The last phrase puzzled him: ‘Sig ego, gui custodem super eos’. ‘Custodem’ ought to mean ‘guardian’. He contemplated the phrase for a few moments until he realized in horror what the message meant.
‘So it is I who must remain guardian over them.’
There is little more to tell. Roberts never returned to the pretty village. Thereafter he remained wary of walking through brooding, dark woods and never retrieved anything from below the earth.
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