Read Online The Man in the Moss by Phil Rickman - Free Book Online Page A

spurted under him, that he was screaming aloud.
                On the side of the bus shelter, the handsome man leaned
over the smiling girl on the sofa, topping up her glass from the bottle. In the
instant before the crash, the dark, beautiful girl held out the glass in a
toast to Shaw before bringing it to her lips and biting deeply into it, and
when she smiled again, her smile was full of blood.
                You'll feel... better.
     
    The big lights came on in
the bar and were sluiced into the forecourt through the open door where Matt
Castle stood grinning broadly, with his tall red-haired wife. Behind them was
the boy - big lad now, early twenties, must be. Not one of Ernie's old pupils,
however; Dic had been educated in and around Manchester while his dad's band
was manhandling its gear around the pubs and clubs.
                'Happen he will bring
a bit of new life,' Ernie said. 'He's a good man.'
                'Goodness in most of us,' Ma Wagstaff said, 'is a fragile
thing, as you'll have learned, Ernest.'
                Ernie Dawber adjusted his glasses, looked down curiously
at Ma. As the mother of Little Willie Wagstaff, long-time percussionist in Matt
Castle's Band, the old girl could be expected to be at least a bit enthusiastic
about Matt's plans.
                Ma said, 'Look at him. See owt about him, Ernest?'
            Matt Castle had wandered down
the steps and was still shaking hands with people and laughing a lot. He
looked, to Ernie, like a very happy man indeed, a man putting substance into a
dream.
                Lottie Castle had remained on the step, half inside the
doorway, half her face in shadow.
            ' She knows,' Ma Wagstaff said.
            'Eh?'
                'I doubt as she can see it, but she knows, anyroad.'
            'Ma ... ?'
                'Look at him. Look hard. Look like you looked at
t'street.'
                Matt Castle grinning, accepting a pint. Local hero.
            I don't understand,1 said
Ernie Dawber. He was beginning to think he'd become incapable of understanding.
Forty-odd years a teacher and he'd been reduced to little-lad level by an woman
who'd most likely left school at fourteen.
            Ma Wagstaff said, 'He's got
the black glow, Ernest.'
            'What?'
                On top of everything else she'd come out with tonight,
this jolted Ernie Dawber so hard he feared for his heart. It was just the way
she said it, like picking out a bad apple at the greengrocer's. A little old
woman in a lumpy woollen skirt and shapeless old cardigan.
                'What are you on about?' Ernie forcing joviality. Bloody
hell, he thought, and it had all started so well. A real old Bridelow night.
                'Moira?' Matt Castle was saying. 'Aye, I do think she'll come. If only for old
times' sake.' People patting him on the shoulder. He looked fit and he looked
happy. He looked like a man who could achieve .
                The black glow?' Ernie whispered. 'The black glow ?
            What had been banished from
his mind started to flicker - the images of the piper on the Moss over a period
of fifteen, to twenty years. Echoes of the pipes: gentle and plaintive on good
days, but sometimes sour and sometimes savage.
            Black glow?' his voice
sounding miles away.
                Ma Wagstaff looked up at him. 'I'm buggered if I'm
spelling it for thee.'

 
    Part Three
     
    bog oak
     

 
    From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
     

     
     
    Bridelow Moss is a
two-miles-wide blanket of black peat. Much of its native vegetation has been
eroded and the surface peat made blacker by industrial deposits - although the
nearest smut-exuding industries are more than fifteen miles away.