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far from here; somewhere out near to where Fellside Hall stands now. The
long, hard winter had managed to get the better of him, and he’d taken to his
bed to recuperate from a fever. On hearing the news of his poor health,
Elizabeth was granted permission by her employer to visit her father at the
farm for a couple of days to care for him; her mother having died several years
earlier of pneumonia.
    ‘Anyway, she returned to The Cross two
days later and resumed her duties in the shop, seemingly in good health and
reasonable spirits. However, as the week went by, she began to behave in an
increasingly strange manner. The locals noted that she began talking aloud to
herself and making lewd, offensive gestures that were most out of character for
an otherwise gentle-natured girl. When eventually she grew physically tired and
weary on account of her erratic behaviour, she lay down and proceeded to mutter
randomly of events concerning her visit to her father; of how she had witnessed
a gathering of five faceless figures cloaked in black. She claimed to have seen
them standing together in a circle around a fire, taking turns to drink from a
huge ram’s horn as they chanted and burned effigies of Jesus Christ and various
symbols of His Church. The tallest of the black figures left the circle,
returning moments later carrying an object wrapped in a white blanket. Another
of the figures helped unravel the blanket, and to the floor fell a naked young
girl; with tangled hair and dark bruises all over her body. She lay still on
the ground, the beatings so severe as to have rendered her unconscious.
Elizabeth swore blind that the girl was Kathryn Wick, who only three days
earlier had gone missing from her home in The Cross. Records show she was only
six years old when she disappeared.’
    Charlotte and Olivia sat silently in
their chairs, hanging on every word as Bronwyn continued. ‘I’m afraid what
happened next may not be easy for you to take on board. Stop me if you’ve heard
enough; I’m only recalling what was documented at the time, but it doesn’t make
for easy listening. According to Elizabeth, the little girl was then lifted
from the ground by the tallest figure and held directly above the fire by her
ankles. One of the others reached into his cloak and pulled out a long knife
with a curved blade like the head of a scythe. A brief, hysterical frenzy then
broke out amongst the gathering, following which the blade came down and
decapitated the girl, her severed head and body being plunged into the fire. 
Elizabeth then claimed that a grotesque, horned animal emerged from the flames;
speaking in a foreign tongue, standing at least ten feet tall and with a face
that could only be that of Satan himself. What happened next has been the
subject of drunken speculation for the past three hundred and fifty years.
Nobody will ever know for sure how the story ended.’
    ‘Why?’ asked Olivia. ‘Was the rest of
Elizabeth’s evidence lost?’
    ‘No, the records are all intact.
Elizabeth simply passed out with fear. Following her statement, a group of men
from the village, including the father of Kathryn Wick, marched directly up to
the farm, intent on seeing for themselves what had happened. And they were
hell-bent on revenge. Many of them had good cause to seek justice; like Emily
said earlier, there’d been a series of dreadful crimes in the village; two
barns had been torched and several of the men had come across the slaughtered
remains of their sheep. Someone had to pay.’
    ‘What did they find when they reached
the farm?’ asked Charlotte.
    ‘They didn’t find anything. Not even the
slightest piece of evidence to corroborate Elizabeth’s story; it was like she
had made everything up from start to finish. There was no trace of Kathryn, the
five cloaked strangers, or the fire. When the men returned to The Cross, they
were called by their wives to the bed of Elizabeth, where accounts state she
was found laughing