Ivy Cottage

Copyright © 2012 by David Martin.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART II

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

PART III

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

For my parents, David and Elizabeth.

Thanks for keeping me out of trouble

PART I

1986

FORBEARANCE

CHAPTER 1

S omething strange happened to me when I was a boy. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old at the time. I forget exactly how old because what happened was far too disturbing for me to want to recall it in any detail, but I’m pretty sure it was the summer of 1986, which would have made me eight years old when it all happened. In fact, if I think hard enough, through that sea of repressed memories in what passes for my mind, I can be pretty sure it was the summer of 1986, which would indeed have made me eight years old. Some of my friends were also eight years old at the time, while a few of them were only seven.

Now that I’m sixteen, and having already embarked on my seventeenth year on this earth, my thoughts these day centre far more on passing my exams, on the local population of females and how I can impress them, and trying to sort out my acne problem which has festered for several years around my face and which threatens to restrict my success with said females. The events of that summer in 1986 when I was only eight were so horrible that I repressed them from my conscious memory as best I could, and now all these years later, they appear more as fleeting remnants of an age-old nightmare rather than a real living thing that actually happened to us. It takes a good deal of effort, effort which I don’t especially have the desire to exert, to call these memories to the fore. I suppose that now is the time to do so though, before I lose my mind entirely.

I bring up the subject of what happened to me and some of my friends from the old carefree days because of something I saw today on my way to school, something which brought all the old forgotten memories flooding back through the dam gates in an unwanted torrent. That’s usually the way it happens with unwanted memories: you push them right back against the wall, but eventually a catalyst comes along and breaks them all out. When it happens, it is like the floodgates of time opening up and pouring an endless deluge into the conscious world. Had Sean not been there to catch me as I blacked out, I would probably be lying in a bed at the John Radcliffe Hospital right now, with concussion from where my head would have undoubtedly hit the hard concrete floor.

I lived, and indeed still live, in a quiet rural village called Chellington, some twenty miles outside of Oxford, off to the north-east. When I was eight years old, it felt like the most wonderful place on Earth, virtually cut off from the rest of the civilised world. Later years would see the A34 road become a dual carriageway and the M40 motorway would run right past the outskirts of the village. At night I could hear the cars roaring by, almost two miles away from the window from where I listened, as they endlessly pursued their way from one faraway place to another. Suddenly London was close by, just nine junctions down the motorway, accessible to us in under an hour.

Chellington became trapped inside a triangle of roads, the A34, the M40 and the A41, the latter of which had changed little, but its significance seemed to grow as the other roads grew. There were now direct access routes from our village all the way to London or Birmingham via the M40, and down as far as Newbury along the A34, which could then connect to the entire South of England.

With this, the village itself started to grow. Many of the old-timers moved away or more often passed away, leaving the remnants of their families close by. Much of the village population had been living there since the year dot and were so entrenched that it was hard to imagine the world without them. They were the long ago generation, back from the times when families stayed close together for decades, or even centuries, without moving far apart. The reliance on the family unit was much stronger back in the old days. Now, as new people (of which my own family was one of the first) started moving themselves in, the old-timers were gradually pushed away, and their families in turn escaped the old lifestyle, or were forced to abandon it as the new age dawned. These families eventually pulled up their roots and left the village altogether in search of more romantic adventures.

Chellington reminded me very much of an old American town in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a petrol station, a diner, and a few rows of houses. We didn’t have a diner or a petrol station, but we did have a pub and a village shop, which generally served the same purpose, although by the time I was fifteen, the shop had closed down and its space sat vacant and unwanted. The other difference between this town and most was that Chellington also had a legend.

Ivy Cottage was that legend, and I think all small villages have something quite similar. It is usually born through a few kids telling ghost stories to each other during sleepovers or on school trips. Most of it has absolutely no substance whatsoever and is usually the result of the behaviour and imagination of one of the towns’ eccentrics. There was certainly no shortage of them in Chellington. The old geezers seemed to be sat in their gardens come rain or shine, not really doing a lot, just sitting there, watching the world go by. To an eight-year-old, that could provoke images of something much more sinister. There was a guy who always seemed to be doing up his house, making modifications and renovations what seemed like all the time. Again to me, as a sixteen-year-old, I can see that he is simply doing up his shabby home, maybe he is a builder of just a DIY enthusiast, or maybe just a capitalist out to make a fast buck like everyone else seems to be these days.

But to an eight-year-old, whose mind isn’t yet constrained by logic or rationality, it can be the first thought in a train which leads to something far more evil. Maybe he killed his entire family, and unable to wash the blood from the walls was forced to redecorate the house. Of course the fact that his family were alive and well and helping him to redecorate did little to deter the imagination, and we could simply invent pieces of story to get around the problem. If the truth were to be told, it was actually the previous owner who had killed his family. He had been carted off a couple of years earlier, and the thought now ran that the new occupant might go the same way. That one had mysteriously stayed out of the papers, although nearly everybody in the village knew about it.

Mr Murray, who lived in the old house next to the vicarage, was a strange bloke. He always left for work around nine in the morning, smartly suited up, and always in his trust Volkswagen Golf. I never saw him change his car in the six years I had lived in the village up to that point. The story was a simple one. One day Mr Murray had come home to find his wife in bed with one of the other villagers. Naturally enraged, he ran to the kitchen, took a knife from the drawer, and stabbed the pair of them repeatedly in the neck and chest.

Once he had finished, he calmly picked up the phone and called the police. He was led away in handcuffs and sentenced to life imprisonment. He never made a fuss and never pleaded for a reduced sentence due to diminished responsibilities. His house was sold and a new family moved in.

Despite the obvious truth that we all knew about, it was not so much Mr Murray who caught our eyes but the slightly odd behaviour of the new owner of the house. Mr Murray had been a genial and friendly character, at least up until the point where he flipped. I heard that even when the police turned up to take him away, he still maintained that pleasant air of a true country gentleman, always ready with a smile and a wave. But the new family never spoke to us. They were therefore the real enemy in our eyes, although there was no reason other than that of simple dislike to say such a thing. That is one of the beauties of being a child—there is no limit to what can be imagined. There is also no limit to what can be feared.

More of my supposedly idyllic childhood later, but now at the age of sixteen, something had occurred which brought home all those old childhood terrors in one sharp dagger of focus. Something I saw made all those childhood unrealities seem real again, solidified and personified. Somehow my logical mind, the one given to me through years of brainwashing at the hands of the British educational system, had once more been replaced by that childlike state of mind which says that anything is possible.

In February, it snowed. Not just the usual light covering, it snowed heavily and unrelentingly every single day throughout the entire month. White and crisp, it settled over our houses, lawns, and roads, turning the whole village into a featureless white desert, cold and forbidding—a bit like the Sahara desert, but in reverse. I don’t much like the snow these days. I did as a youngster, but as I aged, I found it to be no more than an excuse for immature youths to behave like little kids again, and for people who didn’t really want to get involved to be forced to get involved for fear of looking like outsiders. Most of the girls I knew, and certainly the ones I was physically attracted to, all seemed to love the snow, which of course was the main reason I elected to throw the odd snowball now and then, hoping to impress them with my masculine prowess. I need not have bothered. Most of them were far too preoccupied with running around like five-year-olds in a sweet shop like everyone else to pay any attention to a hormonal teenager with raging acne, even if he could successfully fuck around in the snow with the rest of the local shitheads.

I tolerated this state of affairs for about two weeks. Mostly the snow fell at night, and by morning, I would awaken to the disheartening sight of a white blanket covering the otherwise beautiful landscape. The village itself was quite picturesque, and the snow actually made it even more so, like the paintings on a Christmas card. This is a romantic and idealistic viewpoint held by many people. I still thought it to be barren and featureless, but this could just be due to my overall dislike of the stuff.

There was no getting away from it. Even first thing in the morning, I could hear all the under ten-year-olds (the care-frees in other words) thrashing around in the snow. Why would anyone want to play in the snow? It’s freezing cold, and it gets you wet and uncomfortable! People told me it was magic powder, and this comment was generally met with the contempt it deserved. It’s not fucking magic. Clicking your fingers and making it go away would be magic, I used to retort, but as you can imagine, this attitude didn’t win me many friends, especially not with those lovely girls I was so desperate to impress.

On this particular day, I think it was a Tuesday, the day I stopped thinking about the snow and allowed by life to change irrevocably. I walked to the bus stop as usual to catch the school bus. As usual, I walked with Sean, my best friend since God knows when. I can’t even remember back to the days before we were friends. As far as I could recall, he had always been there. We had gone through primary school together, we were in the same form group in secondary school, we had been on holiday together, and we shared our most intimate thoughts and secrets with each other. As far as either of us could discern at that point, we were going to be friends forever. We lived just a few doors away from each other and had stayed over at each other’s houses on a regular basis from an early age. We were beginning to grow apart a little now though, his choice of destiny and mine didn’t quite agree, and although we were still friends of a sort, we didn’t really socialise with each other that much any more, nor did we share our secrets the way we used to. Somewhere along the line, that trust had been broken between us, our lives had split down the middle, and we went our separate ways. It was a little sad because we had once been wonderful friends, but I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable in the end. We all grow up, grow apart, and find new people to share our lives with.

On this day though, we walked to school together as we always did. This was the one tradition we hadn’t yet put a stop to. We had walked to school together since our first day in secondary education, more than four years earlier. We lived in a quiet cul-de-sac in the centre of the village. One single road, an old Roman road named Culchester ran around the perimeter and had always marked for us the boundary between our village and the rest of the world. The bus stop was right next to the Red Lion, the local public house. To reach it from my house, we walked out of the cul-de-sac and around to the left on to Culchester road. We followed the road around for maybe three minutes at a stroll before arriving at the pub. The bus stop was a few metres beyond the pub car park. Behind it was another small road leading up to a group of cottages, among them the new vicarage, the old one having been torn down when the old vicar decided to stop believing in God and retire to a place as far away as he could get from his former flock. I had liked the old vicar, but I never met the new one. I suppose when you’re a kid, you believe in the ideals of vicars, just as you believe in policemen, and you see them as the bright light of all that is good and just in the world. When you get a bit older and you are able to work these things out on your own, you often end up discovering that those who were supposedly so trustworthy and good are in fact more corrupt and deceitful than we ever believed possible.

Next to this road near the pub stood a house—a big house, but not a huge one by any stretch of the imagination, but still quite out of place with the rest of the surroundings. For the most part, the village was unspectacular in its architecture, most of the houses being simple modern space-saving designs as the cost of land spiralled. Forest Lane had a seemingly endless row of terraced houses, a few new developments of modern semis and detached, and then a few more terraced at the far end of the village. Some houses were set back from the road slightly, others hooked straight on to it. There were even a couple of thatched cottages on the periphery of the village.

And then there was Ivy Cottage. It looked kind of like an old manor house, and may well have been an old village hall or something once upon a time, or home to some important figurehead in the Chellington of old. Its front garden was tremendously overgrown and ill kept, its white pillars on the front porch were flaking, the once brilliant white paint giving way to the old decaying dark wood underneath, and the steps up to the front door were rickety and old. The door itself was made of heavy wood and painted black, although again the paint was flaking. The door looked heavy and dead, as if it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. The latch was rusty and could probably be moved quite easily without the need of strong tools to assist. The rest of the house, again all painted white, was similarly unkempt and in dire need of maintenance. The back garden was very much like the front garden, overgrown and in need of serious attention. The old fence with the iron gates at the back looked like the front door, as if it hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years.

There was a car parked in the back garden, an old Jaguar I think it was. It was hard to tell because it was in pieces. Its outer shell was still intact, but the wheels were missing and the body paintwork had been rubbed down. All the interior components had been stripped, and the car now simply sat there, lost and dead. It looked as if its owner had once begun a reparation job on it, which suddenly stopped, maybe through boredom, maybe through something else entirely. I imagine that in days of old, the house had probably been quite a spectacular sight, dominating the landscape and being the immense pride and joy of whoever lived there. Not so now, though.

This scene greeted me every time I walked past the house, which was just about every day. The only real difference today was that the snow had settled on and around it, giving the house an even more surreal appearance, given its surrounding lower middle class unspectacular demeanour. It used to scare me, and what I went through at the hands of its owner when I was younger would be enough to scare anyone, even a sixteen-year-old who thought he was scared of nothing, apart from maybe having the girls laugh at his face and tell him his spots needed squeezing. But I had grown to not fear it quite so much any more. The house was dead; it had stayed that way from as long ago as I could remember, ever since the legend of the old man was finally lain to rest and the ghosts of the past pacified, and the secret of the brutal murder which took place inside was finally uncovered, and the involvement of the six brave children who discovered the terrible secret and tried to expose the truth.

I had kept these thoughts and memories deep within my subconscious for a long time now, and with very good reason. As I have aged, the onset of time has sufficiently dulled my memories enough for me to suppress what little I recall of the terrible events I was subjected to. I knew that it would take only a relatively small catalyst to bring it all flooding back into sharp reality again, and this is why I have never spoken to anybody about what happened. I am writing this now because that catalyst was just around the corner, and to not say anything would surely be to seal my madness for the rest of my life. To tell the story might just release enough of the negative energy into the atmosphere to protect my sanity.

Here was the catalyst. There was a difference with the house today, only a very small difference, so slight that at first I didn’t quite register what it was, and then in a momentary flash of panic, I saw it. The front door, which had been trapped so tightly shut for so many years, keeping the house totally impenetrable had been opened. Ivy Cottage was alive again.

CHAPTER 2

Y oung children can be highly susceptible to suggestion, and those with a more vivid imagination can become more frightened by normal activities, if they are taken in an out-of-context approach. Take for example my friend Sean. He had a gun. Now I always knew that this was a real gun, but also that it had been blocked so that it didn’t work. Even I as an eight-year-old knew that young boys were not allowed to play with firearms, at least not in the quiet residential area as this was. Maybe in today’s world in certain areas in certain towns or inner cities, it might just happen, but I don’t know, for even now I’m not an authority on such matters.

But this knowledge didn’t spare me from terror the day Sean and his elder brother Matt held the gun out in front of me and offered to shoot me. For no real reason I can remember, I think they were just showing off to me. Naturally I ran away in terror, and when they came to call for me some minutes later, they were quite upset to be told to go away.

After a quick word from my parents and an apology from them, our friendship was revived.

I think that the point of that little parable is to show that I have a wide spanning imagination, and just like Conan Doyle had stated, that horror lay in the imagination; my mind was able to conceive of terrors and atrocities more terrible than many, because of my ability to see through the actual act of a crime, and at its more far-reaching consequences. In other words, Sean would see a dead body gunned down for no apparent reason and lying in a pool of blood on the floor. I would see a man wanting to get home to his family, tragically slain by a bunch of misfits, his dying wish as he lay wracked with pain on the cold stone ground to see his young child one last time, and just as the illusion reaches his that it may happen he suddenly freezes where he lies, his heart finally giving in and refusing to pump any more blood around his body. The poor man’s dying wish has not been granted.

All Sean saw was a dead body lying in a pool of blood, in the same way that he saw a replica gun while I saw a real one, with real bullets inside, waiting to kill me, and all I wanted at that time was to be back home to see my mum and dad who would surely end my terror at that point. There is a belief in all children that their parents have some kind of magical power that can overcome any evil. Again, my overactive mind can see that the average kid becomes a teenager before they discover this is not true, and some even hold the ideal way into their adulthood. There are a few poor souls however who have to find out long before that, and usually the hard way. They are the innocent bystanders as their loved ones are plucked away from them for no discernible reason.

Have you ever had to tell a small child that their parents aren’t coming back because some nutcase escaped from jail and shot them down, or that they’ve caught some horrid disease and have only a few weeks left to live? I’ve never had to do that, thank God, but I’ve had visions of losing those closest to me, and I know how bad that feels. I can’t even comprehend how it must be for real.

The legend of Ivy Cottage could not possibly be real. It only ever existed in the minds of kids. When I was eight years old, it existed strongly in my mind, and when I grew into a teenager, I no longer allowed it to exist. Adults, and even teenagers to some extent, have a cloud over their perception. I call it a perception filter. To an adult, only the truly possible can ever be attained. To children who have no or fewer perception filters, almost anything can become possible. I think this is how the legend of Ivy Cottage is able to live on in the minds of each successive generation of children who see it. It’s a creepy old building, and although nobody I know had seen the inside of it, everyone knew what it looked like. Everyone has seen the old woman in the bathtub; everyone has heard the noises coming from the house in the middle of the night. Yet nobody truly has, the whole story is a myth, an old folklore tale of the damned. I’m not sure anyone has ever seen inside; certainly no adult has ever been able to prove that anything abnormal went on in that old crumbling hulk of a house. There has always been a belief there though, mostly from children who believe that horror is a product of themselves and their reaction to certain surroundings, making even the trivial seem terrifying at times. I am a witness to the horror that went on inside Ivy Cottage, and even I, as my perception filters begin to deny my mind’s eye, struggle to believe what I think I saw. Maybe the shadows of time have clouded me as well.

I think every old village has an Ivy Cottage, whatever guise it comes in. Usually it’s little more than an eccentric old codger who keeps himself to himself. Soon ghost stories start to fly around on dark stormy nights when groups of friends gather together to see who can spook who out the most. I recall telling the tale of Ivy Cottage to a group of fourteen-year-olds when we were on a school trip, camping up in the valleys of North Wales. Of course I didn’t tell them the whole story. Like I’ve already said, this is the first time I have allowed myself the luxury of telling it from beginning to end. What I told them was merely the original legend, the legend which evoked the fear in us kids, but which was ultimately misplaced. None of the guys on the camp believed my tale, or so they said, but they all had to agree it was one hell of a story. It sent a ripple of dread around the room, as if the old man might indeed be waiting in the wings somewhere, ready to pounce and claim a new victim. It amused me slightly that after my story nobody wanted to get out of the safe haven of their bed and go close to the window. The interesting thing about this was that I had by that point in my life convinced myself quite thoroughly that it was all just a silly kids’ tale, yet I didn’t want to leave my own bed to shut the window either. I’m not sure if there is some kind of magic protectorate around a bed, but from the earliest days I can remember, hiding under the covers at night was a sure-fire way to keep the demons out, as if they were lying in wait for you, and if you failed to come out from your hiding place, they would just go away. These days I think we put it as: ‘What you don’t see can’t hurt.’

It was a long hot summer, that glory time of 1986. I was young and carefree enough to allow the world to sidle by without really worrying too much about anything. We were a small village community, and us kids would usually leave home in the morning, all meet up somewhere and play out, riding around the village most days on our bikes. When we were hungry, we would go to someone’s house for lunch. And then we would play out again until teatime. Then we would go our separate ways, although during the summer, we might meet up for one last attempt at the assault course, or whatever.

‘We’ consisted of me and Sean and our great friends Johnny, Chris, and Jason. Sometimes Bill would join us, but he was often out doing other things. We were a self-styled team of miniature Hells Angels, only instead of riding around on Harleys we were on BMX bicycles, that trusty chariot of the 1980s child. We were unconcerned by the thoughts of perverts or murderers, those terrors of the modern world, and the idea of real peril wasn’t one we readily understood. We would play out, and our parents would know that we were somewhere within the confines of the village, and somehow one of them was never too far away.

Probably this was because they knew our haunts, the places where we liked to meet or hang out. The local allotment was a good place to go tearing through on our bikes, single file and fast to the disapproving eyes of the old-timers who ploughed their bits of land. Although they didn’t seem to like us, they didn’t really seem to mind us that much either, and the young and old of the time were able to coexist reasonably peacefully.

The golf course was another place we liked to go. Of course we couldn’t actually get into it, as the perimeter was fenced off with barbed wire, but we could get near enough to be able to see what was going on, although I don’t recall any of us except maybe Johnny having an active interest in the game. I think it was the simple fact that it was fenced off with barbed wire and thus off limits to us, which made it all the more exciting to be close to. The lane leading past the golf course, which would in later years lead us up to the motorway flyover was well known for its abundance of blackberries, and we spent plenty of our summertime collecting these for our mothers, who would make us blackberry pie when we returned home. Of course, most of what we picked never made it home, ending up as they did in our hungry mouths, the temptation too great to pass up on.

Around the periphery of the village was to us by far the most interesting place to be. The inner circle of the village was far more densely populated and modern, quite unsuitable for young minds and bodies to grow. A single road ran right around, probably about two miles in distance. I’m sure I measured it once, but I can’t remember—past the bus stop and Ivy Cottage, past the church and down the road towards the shop. At the shop there was a road leading to Brownhill Drive where Bill and Jason both lived. Hazel Grove was the newest housing estate in that area, and earliest memory of this was walking our old dog along what was then no more than a muddy building site. I was with my mother, and I would have been about three years old. Past the shop and you come to the primary school which must have a load of good stories to tell, if I can just think hard enough about it. It’s one of those strange places which once you leave you never have any compulsion to return to.

Past the school and you were now getting towards the top end of the village. The few thatched cottages were all up here, and somehow everything seemed to become much darker and more sinister. Perhaps it was because psychologically we were no longer within screaming distance of anyone’s parents, and if something was to happen to us up here, we would be alone and vulnerable. That top end was always an area we rushed past, although nobody ever admitted the reason why.

Away to the right led the road into town, or at least one of the two roads which led into town. In later years, I would often walk that road, sometimes at night where I was convinced that ‘Pennywise the Dancing Clown’ was hiding in the bushes, and if I turned around, he would be standing there, grinning from ear to ear and holding an array of balloons in one hand whilst waving emphatically with the other. Before I could turn and run, he would offer me a balloon, and a bunch of dead kids would tell me what life was like in the sewer (they float, Georgie, they all float down here!).

I would run as fast as I could, seemingly equipped with magic legs to take me away from this nightmare, cursing Stephen King’s imagination all the way.

(And when you’re down here with us, you’ll float too!)

Down that road were a few more houses, but we rarely ventured that way. The houses were large and set well off from the main road, in their own grounds. We didn’t know the people who lived there, and we didn’t want to disturb them. They were little more than hermits, or at least that was how we saw them. We all knew that nothing less than trouble would meet us if we went snooping around that area of the village, so we kept a respectful distance. The woodland area nearby was also far too creepy and too far from our safe havens for us to want to go exploring anywhere near it. Ironically, there were probably loads of horror stories for us to discover round there, but even at a young age, our minds were working to keep us away from real danger, and the danger we eventually found ourselves to be in had not originally been conceived as being quite as macabre as it would later become. There is a fine line between kids playing around for mischief, and embarking into real peril.

There were cars on this road too, and most of them drove far too fast, so it was off limits to us. Off to the left instead of the right and you came up on the outskirts of the golf course, and on the other side of the road were the allotments which we would often cut through on our way back to the civilised world we knew, a world which consisted of houses, green areas, and people we knew. This was the safe zone. If we instead carried on along the road past the allotment, such a long way it always seemed, especially if we were not on two wheels, we would eventually come to a crossroads. The road straight ahead led on to the next village, where we only ever went occasionally, as there was absolutely nothing of interest at all there. To the right was the long land filled with blackberry bushes, which later would lead to the motorway flyover. We rarely went too far down this road; again the cars were simply too fast, and none of us relished the prospects of being run over. We were also too far from home out here, although this side of the village was considerably lighter than the dark street we had just traversed.

Turning left at the crossroads and we were on to Forest Lane, and within moments, the first of the long rows of terraced houses would be upon us. It seemed to us that the majority of the folks who lived there were old, ancient even, and most of them had lived in the same house for as long as anyone seemed to recall. It seemed to us that most of these people had been here forever and would continue to remain forever. Time moved very slowly in this part of the village. Thinking about it logically, how many sinister stories could there possibly be about a town polluted by coffin dodgers who stubbornly refused to give up their residence, even long after they had died? Yet none of us ever considered any ghost stories in this part of the village. It was just too normal, too rural, or maybe it was too ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. Not that any of us as eight-year-olds had yet seen any of Freddy Krueger’s nasty exploits, but some of us had older siblings who were only too happy to reveal the gore to our impressionable young minds.

Towards the end of Forest Lane you passed Orchard Close, the quiet cul-de-sac where both Sean and I lived with our families, he at number five and me at number fourteen. If you didn’t turn in to the close, and instead carried straight on Forest Lane to the end, you would come to the playing fields, another favourite place to be, where we once convinced Alan Judge, the then Oxford United goalkeeper and Milk Cup winner to come out for a kick about.

And then you were at the Red Lion public house, the extent of the local nightlife in the village. And then you were back to Ivy Cottage and the horrors which awaited us therein.

CHAPTER 3

O ne bright summer’s morning in early July, the six members of the ‘BMX Boys’ got together. This was the name we had given to our secret society, myself and a small group of my friends. Not exactly a secret society, I suppose, I doubt there could have been a family in the village who didn’t know about us or our name, given that we all used to shout it as we went tearing through the streets on our bikes like a miniature troop of Hells Angels in anoraks, or when the weather held Bermuda shorts.

Everyone was there, the whole gang. I had called for Sean, who was already with Chris. We biked over to Brownhill Drive and picked up Jason and Bill. Johnny joined us a little later, and by around ten in the morning, we were all assembled. After a quick ride around the village to announce to the world that we were open for business, we went to the playing field, which went about a third of the way down the back of Forest Lane and joined on to a cornfield just behind. The sun was warm, and we were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts. With the customary leap, each of us in turn ditched our bikes and jumped off, rolling commando style in the grass and coming to rest by the children’s play area. We assembled on the swings and settled down.

Sean was a small chubby kid and had been my best friend for as long as I could remember. His family moved to the village from Orchester, the neighbouring town when I was about two or three. I can’t remember how we met exactly, but I have no memory of not knowing him. He was a polite young boy in the main, not the brightest spark, but a good friend to have, loyal and thoughtful. He was also a leader, someone who was looked up to by others. I could never figure out how or why, but some people just seem to possess that quality without thinking about it or even knowing it.

Chris was a different breed altogether. He too was a leader, although why we all followed him I will never know. It was always he who led us into trouble and danger that summer, and I can never forgive him for that, or for the way he left us to it when the going got too difficult for him. He was a scrawny kid, one who always looked like he was in need of a good meal or two. His legs were so thin they looked as though they might splinter if he put too much weight on them. His feet seemed to fold in on themselves, giving him a very ungainly walk indeed. Despite this, he was a successful member of the football team, not a bad player at all, and I reckon this was where his leadership skills came from. Those in football teams could do no wrong in the eyes of their peers. Chris had rabbit-like front teeth, blond hair, pale skin, and freckles. Grown-ups used to hate him, but it wasn’t until I myself became a grown-up that I fully understood why. He was slimy and sly and would do whatever he needed to keep himself ahead of others. He had few morals or values and could also be cruel if he thought he had something to gain by being so.

Johnny was an adventurer. His family had moved to the outskirts of town a couple of years ago, and Johnny and his brother spent a great deal of their time in the outdoors. They lived right by several acres of woodland just next to the golf course and spent their days on adventure trails and hunts. Johnny was well built like me, and his personality was not dissimilar to mine in many respects either. He was amiable and friendly, courteous, and willing to help others. Adults liked him because he was generally well behaved, especially around them. He came from a stricter family than Chris did, and this clearly showed in his behaviour. He had no fear of anything though and was always the most likely one to wind up with a broken arm or leg, or to fall down a deep pit, or any of the other accidents that can befall a young child. Somehow though he always managed to survive intact and live to fight another day. The other aspect of Johnny’s fearlessness was that he never worried about getting into trouble and saw a good telling off as an occupational hazard. Not like me in that respect. I cowered in fear at the sound of an adult’s raised voice. Johnny could take it, then simply laugh it off.

Bill and Jason lived near each other and were generally the quieter members of our gang. Jason was a shy young kid, the same age as Chris but acting even younger than that. It was usually Chris who dragged Jason along, and Jason consented, often unwillingly in order to please his alleged friend. Bill was different again, not shy at all, but I believe it was his extroversion at times that was actually put there as a mask for his dire insecurities. His parents were not your average run-of-the-mill couple, and his whole life seemed to be built around fantasy. On his day he could be a great friend, but when he decided he wanted to pursue a different route, then woe betide anyone who stood in his way. Adults loved him for his sense of humour but hated his arrogance, bad attitude, and lack of respect. This would get him into significant amounts of trouble over the years, especially as he grew up.

The park itself comprised of a football field on one side and vacant space on the other. Later it would become two football pitches once the local boys’ team got themselves together and expanded, but right now it was just the one. There was a pavilion on the far side of the football pitch, and at this time of year, the cricket club had stamped its authority on it. This meant no more soccer for a while: the goalposts had been pulled down and the batting crease had been cordoned off. We all knew better than to shoot balls or ride our bikes on the cricket pitch during the season; this usually netted us a whole heap of trouble with the local club players, who always seemed to turn up whenever we did something we shouldn’t. Perhaps it was the spies they had on Forest Lane, one or two of the old-timers who just didn’t like us, and were trying to hound us away. Or maybe we were just being paranoid.

During the cricket season, the pitch boundary stretched almost the full perimeter of the park, giving us precious little space to ride our bikes through to the play area. We didn’t want to incur the wrath of the cricket club officials, who no doubt paid the council a great deal of money to use the field, so we always did our best to rides around the pitch rather than on it. Often Chris would put a wheel over the boundary line, just to show how big and brave he was. There was just a thin strip on the right-hand side of the field nearest the houses which we could ride up towards the play area. This play area was another of the things the council had built as part of their regeneration programme for the area. It consisted of a wobbly bridge made out of chopped tree trunks, a set of swings, a slide and a see-saw. There was also a small and inoffensive assault course where we could climb up, swing over and balance on the stepping stones, all the time trying to avoid being pushed off by one another.

I very much doubt that the assault course still stands there now. It seems to me that everything we enjoyed as children has systematically been abolished by those in power. Adventure playgrounds are now thought to be too dangerous for children, and in the age of lawsuits for just about anything greater than a tiny splinter in your finger or falling off the climbing frame and sustaining a mildly discomforting bruise, councils are understandably jittery about allowing kids to use such things. How did we ever survive in the old days? We took the bruises and cuts and just got on with things. There was never the thought of lawsuits or protests, for we were just kids doing what kids do best, push each other around and sustain minor injuries. It is such a natural part of growing up that nobody ever even seems to notice. I believe we were the last truly carefree generation of childhood, and as I develop into adulthood, I can’t help but mourn the future generations of kids who will have only a fraction of the blissful freedom I and my peers enjoyed as youngsters.

Today was going to be a special day for all of us, perhaps the day which truly spelt the end of our childhood innocence. Or at least this would be the beginning of the end. I also believe that this had an effect on the course of things elsewhere in our lives, and the experiences we shared that summer in Chellington were part of the ultimate movement away from childhood freedom and into a world of virtual imprisonment. Today was the day to learn the deadly secrets of Ivy Cottage.

Chris had been told the tale by his elder sister one dark and stormy night when the ability to tell a good scary yarn was intensified, and the subsequent belief in the tale, no matter how far-fetched, was equally intensified. Apparently, Chris’s sister Lynne had first learnt the ghost story from a friend at school who was a couple of years further ahead than she was. I don’t know who this older kid was, and, to be honest, I don’t much care. Whoever it was, it spelt the death knell for my immature life and took me to the gateway of my future. Whether or not any of these people had actually experienced what they said didn’t really matter. As a bunch of eight-year-olds (seven in the cases of Chris and Jason), we were prepared to accept anything the boys and girls in the older years chose to tell us, and this one was no exception. In fact its very grossness as a story probably appealed to us more in the initial phase, at least in some subliminal undertone, before we even understood exactly what it meant for us. From what Chris said, Lynne had told him the tale with such realism and effect that it was impossible to doubt its authenticity, even if he had wanted to.

The park was probably not the best place to hear a ghost story, especially not in broad daylight with the hot summer sun belting down on us and a brace of old-timers watching us amusedly from their back gardens which overlooked the playing field. Chris had heard the story in the dark, a torch shining eerily into his face as he trembled in terror as his sister spoke to him. She had crept into his bedroom in the middle of the night and the two had sat in his bed together, with him listening to the worst thing he had ever heard. Chris lived at the dark end of the village, and maybe it was this fact which enabled us to believe him so much more easily. Or maybe it was that he really was that convincing. Or maybe it was because we truly wanted to believe what we were being told. Or, most frightening of all, maybe it was because subconsciously we already knew…

After the preliminaries were out of the way, Chris set about telling us the tale that would change our lives forever.

I must point out briefly before we descend into the madness which waits that Chris was always prone to tremendous exaggeration. As you may have gathered from his character so far, he was unreliable, untrustworthy, and thoroughly self-centred. It was just possible that not one word he spoke to us that day had any truth attached to it at all. He had that strange knack as a child which enabled him to keep other children spellbound. He seemed to know at just what level each of us worked on, and he always said just the right words with the right tone of voice that kept each of us in the exact state of suspense at which we were most vulnerable. Despite preaching to a vastly differing audience in terms of mentality, maturity, and temperament, he managed to hook each of us very quickly and with disturbing ease.

‘An old man lives in Ivy Cottage. Indeed he has lived there for more than a hundred years. He has always been old, for as long as anyone can remember. All his friends have long since died out, and even the old folks down Forest Lane can’t remember his name or what he looks like. He’s just a strange old man with no friends or relatives—no sons or daughters, not even a pet to keep him company.

‘Throughout his entire life he has lived in Ivy Cottage. He was born there, or so we are told, yet nobody can remember him being born. Like I said, he has always been old. He lived in the house for many years with his old wife. Neither of them has come out in years, nor have they spoken to any of the other people who live in the village, at least not for many years. There was perhaps a time when they were more sociable, but that time is now long past. They have seen all the changes Chellington has been through over the years, right back to the origins of the village, when it was nought but a few fields ploughed by our ancestors, even in the days before Forest Lane sprung its houses. Yet as the more modern housing began to emerge around the village in the 1960s and 1970s, Ivy Cottage, which used to be like the grand manor house, has slowly been flanked by new housing estates and developments.

‘In the old days, the old man owned lots of land, spreading from where the pub stands, past the church and up as far as the shop. Of course the shop wasn’t there then, but he owned the land it is now built on. In later years, he sold some of the land, and the new manor house was built. This was a very sinister building with its black wrought iron gates and hedges to keep the sun out. Many people think a vampire lives there, but there isn’t a vampire in that house. It’s just a story, a way to keep us children out of the grounds. People say it was built that way intentionally, that it would deflect attention away from the real evil, in Ivy Cottage. I think for the most part it did.

‘As the years have passed by, the old man sold more and more of his land, so all that remains is the land and garden where the house now stands. As the old man grew even older, the house got into a worse and worse state of repair, all run-down and dilapidated. The last time anyone actually saw the old man in person was about ten years ago, and he was really old then. He put something into his car and went back indoors. He was never seen again after that: it was just him and his wife, left to grow old together.’

This tale probably doesn’t sound all that sinister when you sit back and read it, more like a tale designed to scare a weak-minded fool, and nothing that any even halfway intelligent kid would get sucked in by. It would have been a lot more sinister to talk about the manor house in between the church and the shop, which had a definite feel of a haunted house, or one where a vampire really did live. Set back from the main road and concealed within its own grounds, it had an almost impenetrable wall of greenery surrounding it. Nobody ever spoke of the place or dared to cross its threshold. As kids we were well known for trespassing in places we shouldn’t be, but this wasn’t one of them. I don’t recall ever being told directly to stay clear, it was just one of those natural reactions a kid sometimes gets when they know their life may be in danger if they don’t follow their natural survival instinct.

It would be possible to tell a truly great horror story about that place. All the ingredients were there, and a bit of artistic license could take it to even greater levels of gore. It would be easy even for a kid to invent a creepy butler who pulled open the huge front door slowly and creakily let the victims in, with a dramatic slow and overt politeness, to have brought in bats and cobwebs in the long stone passageways which lead to nowhere in particular. The finale of course would be where the butler leads the unsuspecting kids to the lair of his master, the bloodsucking vampire who slept in a coffin and killed ten kids a day, just for the fun of it. Anyone who has ever watched the Munsters or the Addams Family would subscribe to that image; such are the typical horror stereotypes which almost become funny once you get over the initial surprise.

That would all have been far too easy. It would have also been untrue. It was the less creepy (at least on the face of it) Ivy Cottage which grabbed our attention and led us into the worst nightmare we could have ever comprehended.

Chris continued his tale. I must add at this point that I am not quoting him verbatim, for it is far too long ago for me to be able to recall every exact word spoken. I do believe that I have stayed pretty faithful to the actual content, although some of the language used may have differed slightly.

‘The old man and the old woman lived together for many years. The village changed around them, but they stayed exactly as they were, as if they were stuck in a time warp or