seemed to stare up through the trees at the Hall… at this very window.
As though the old girl had overheard Liz's thoughts. As though she could feel the agony.
When Liz turned around, wet-eyed, she found she was alone; Shaw had quietly left the room. Although he'll be cool enough when the Press and the radio and TV reporters interview him in a few hours' time, the County Highways foreman is so shaken up right now that he has to be revived with whisky from the JCB driver's secret flask.
What he's discovered will come to be known as the Bridelow Bogman. Or the Man in the Moss. Important people are going to travel hundreds of miles to gaze with reverence upon its ancient face.
'And what was your reaction when you found it?' asks one of the reporters. 'What did you think it was?'
'Thought it were a sack o' spuds or summat,' the foreman says, quotably. His moment of glory. But out of his hands soon enough – so old and so exciting to the experts, like one of them Egyptian mummies, that nobody else seems to find it upsetting or horrifying, not like a real body.
But, though he'll never admit it, the foreman reckons he's never going to forget that first moment.
'And what did you think when you realised what it was?'
'Dunno, really… thought it were maybe an owd tramp or summat.'
'Were you shocked?'
'Nah. You find all sorts in this job.'
But that night the foreman will dream about it and awake with a whimper, reaching for his warm missus. And then fall asleep and wake again, his sweat all over both of them and his mind bulging with the moment he bent down and found his hand was gripping its cold and twisted face, his thumb between what might have been its teeth. Part Two black glow
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
The first-time visitor to Bridelow is strongly urged to approach it from the west, from which direction a most dramatic view of the village is attained.
From a distance of a mile or two, Bridelow appears almost as a craggy island when viewed from the narrow road which is virtually a causeway across Bridelow Moss.
A number of legends are attached to the Moss, some of which will be discussed later in this book.
CHAPTER I
In early summer, Bridelow hopefully dolls herself up, puts on a bit of make-up and an obliging smile for the sun. But the sun doesn't linger. On warm, cloudless evenings like this it saves its final pyrotechnics for the moor.
Sunset lures hues from the moor that you see at no other time – sensual pinks and melodramatic mauves which turn its stiff and spiky surface into velvet
… a delusion, thought Joel Beard, soon to leave theological college. A red light tenderizing the face of an old whore.
He had his back to the sinking sun. To him, it seemed agitated tonight, throwing out its farewell flames in a long, dying scream. As well it might.
Most of the lonely village was below the moor, and the sun's flailing rays were missing it. The stone houses hanging from the hill were in shadow and so was the body of the church on its summit. Only the spikes of the church tower were dusted with red and gold.
Joel dismounted from his motorbike.
In the centre of the tower was a palely shining disc. Like a rising full moon, it sent sneering signals to the sun: as you fade, it promised gleefully, I'll grow ever brighter.
Joel glared at the village across the sullen, scabby surface of the Moss. He imagined Bridelow under moonlight, stark and white as crow-picked bones.
Its true self.
The disc at the centre of the tower was actually an illuminated clock face, from which the hands had long ago fallen.
Often said to be a friendly face which turned the church into a lighthouse at night, across the black ocean of the Moss.
… you see, at one time, Mr Beard, very few people dared to cross the Moss… except those for whom the Devil lit the way – have you heard that legend?
It was no legend. On a dark night, all you would see of the village would be this silver disc, Bridelow's own, permanent full moon.
Was this how the Devil lit the path? Was this the Devil's light, shining from the top of the stairs in God's house, a false beacon for the weak, the uncertain and the disturbed?
Joel's black leathers straightened him, like armour, and the hard white collar lifted his eyes above the village to the luminous moor. Its lurid colours too would soon grow dull under the night. Like a harlot's cheap dress.
From the village, across the barren Moss, he heard voices raised, a shriek of laughter.
The village would be alive tonight. A new landlord had installed himself at the decrepit local inn. The Man I'th Moss, thus saving it from closure, a side-effect of the widely condemned sale of the Bridelow brewery.
Joel waited, astride his motorbike, his charger, until the moor no longer glowed and the illusion of beauty was gone.
Everyone saw shadows in the blackened cities, those obvious pits of filth and fornication, where EVIL was scrawled in neon and the homeless slept with the rats. And yet the source of it was up here, where city-dwellers surged at weekends to stroll through the springy heather, picnic among the gorse… young couples, families, children queuing at the roadside ice-cream vans, pensioners in small cars with their flasks of tea.
It's all around you, Mr Beard… once you know what you're looking for. Look at the church, look at the pub, look at the people… you'll see the signs everywhere.
Beneath him, the bike lurched into life, his strong, gauntleted hands making the engine roar and crackle, spitting holy fire.
He rode away from the village, back into the hills. 'Shades,' Ma Wagstaff would say later that night. 'Them's what's kept this place the way it is. Shades of things.'
Of all Ma's famous sayings, these were the words that would keep coming back at Ernie Dawber during the short, anxious days and the long, chill nights of the declining year.
And when, as local historian, he tried to find the beginning (as in, What exactly started the First World War? What caused the first spark that set off the Great Fire of London?), he'd keep coming back to this particular evening. A vivid evening at the end of May. The evening he'd blithely and thoughtlessly told Ma Wagstaff what he'd learned about the death of the bogman… and Ma had made a fateful prediction.
But it started well enough, with a big turn-out for the official reopening of The Man, under its new proprietor. The two bars couldn't hold all those come to welcome him home. So several dozen folk, including Ernie Dawber – best suit, waistcoat, watch-chain – were out on the cobbled forecourt, having a pint or two and watching the sun go down over the big hills beyond the Moss.
A vivid evening at the end of May. Laughter in the streets. Hope for the future. Most enmities sheathed and worries left at home under the settee cushions.
A real old Bridelow night That was how it ought to have been enshrined in his memory. All those familiar faces. A schoolteacher all his working life, Ernie Dawber had known at least three-quarters of this lot since they were five-year-olds at the front of the school hall: eager little faces, timid little faces… few belligerent ones too – always reckoned he could spot a future troublemaker in its pram.
He remembered Young Frank Manifold in the pram, throttling his panda.
'Well, well…' Twenty-odd years on. Young Frank strolling up to his boss, all jutting chin and pint mug clenched like a big glass knuckle-duster. 'It's Mr Horridge.'
Shaw said nothing.
'What's that you're drinking, Mr Horridge?' Sneering down at Shaw's slim glass.
