As part of our new project, we challenged the good folk of Greenock Writers Club to come up with some new scary stories for us. There were some real crackers, and a few dark twists on local tales that we'll share with you in a future podcast or on the blog. We thought though, that we would share the winner with you first. Moonlight Over Inverkip is a really excellent take on the legends surrounding Mary Lamont. It was written by Mark Jones, who loves writing so much, he is also a professional proofreader. Hats off to Mark, and a big thank-you to the writers club for getting involved and helping us out.
Moonlight Over Inverkip by Mark Jones
Woozily, the world oozes across
her eyes. A kaleidoscope of oil-on-water colours, these high Inverclyde hills collide
and contract, expand and diffuse, images filtered through a mind befogged by
Valium and whisky. Spellbound, she stumbles over fields, glides by the loch,
slides through familiar places, past curious fleeting faces and out, out, out along
the wrong roads, a long way from home, a long way beyond the areas she and her dog
usually roam. Cauldron Hill, Blood Moss, Rotten Craig, Back o’ the World
disappear behind her.
He stands in the storm, observes
her approach, with eyes so dark you could think their sockets hollow. Long hair
whipped by the wind, he might almost have horns. When finally she arrives, he
pulls up her dress and sinks teeth into her thigh. As he cries with delight, her
spirit flies, borne on the breeze.
Valium and whisky have been
mother’s little helpers for years. Father hasn’t known how much she steals to
afford them, nor that six months ago she took from a man of the town a large
loan she must now repay in ever-increasing increments of interest. A shark in
the shadows of Greenock ’s undertow, he comes
pockmarked and parka-jacketed once a week to collect. Why the deal? Because although
hubby earns enough at Inverkip’s new power station for their needs, he can’t
afford her appetites. She struggles to scrape together repayments. Each evening
she walks the dog up in the woods of Crowhill and Leapmoor, searching for a
solution.
One evening she detours to a
lonely telephone box and calls the pockmarked parka man, arranging a meeting in
the forest itself. He knows wives require discretion, understands their need
for secrecy. Two nights later he waits beneath a fir pregnant with autumnal raindrops.
He expects her at seven. He doesn’t expect a brick in the nape, as high as she
can reach, felling him. Prostrate, his skull is easily bludgeoned. A wild gust bursts
the tree. Blood and rainwater run pink along the burn into which she rolls him,
making it look like he – a stranger amid a perilous landscape – tripped and drowned.
Breathless along the twilit track homeward, she feels surprisingly fearless.
Leaves weave in the swirling smirry dusk, whispering:
“Confess, confess.”
She ignores them. She’ll burn
his notebook containing the addresses of the indebted. She’s safe, elated. She’s
murdered more than the man, but her past also – and with it all morality. She
feels no remorse. She’s free. She cackles.
What tastes has she that make
her so restless, so greedy? Their marriage a sham, neither she nor Davey are
faithful but remain together for the sake of politeness and his promotion
prospects. She loved her daughter when young. Now she merely tolerates the
eight year-old. Sandra seeks solace instead in booze and pills and afternoons
in hotel rooms with a dipsomaniac journalist called Daryll. He says he loves
her; but she needs him, which is worse. They were to elope, but he won’t
commit. That’s why she took the loan, but Daryll frittered it. That’s how she
became stuck with the shark-in-a-parka. That’s why she’s killed him. She’s a
murderess because each successive decision she makes to enliven her dull life
leads to a worse one.
At home the staircase creaks:
“Confess, confess.”
At the back of her head hairs
pull uneasily. But it’s only Angela, incanting to the moon the story she’s
learning at school. The tale of Marie Lamont, the Inverkip witch. Why they teach
this local history crap is beyond Sandra.
“Mrs Munro says Marie was
mad, not bad.”
“Really?”
“She had an illness, didn’t
understand what she was admitting,” Angela elaborates. It makes more sense, at
least, than the charges brought against this real-life seventeenth century
teenage witch: milk-stealing from neighbours, storm-raising to drown sailors, and
bunk about meeting the devil at midnight to be marked on the body by his bite. Those
were backward times when even the educated believed in magic. For lowly Marie
Lamont, though, it wasn’t magic, but common sense: never weave widdershins,
it’s bad luck: a superstition with logic because widdershins not only entailed
defying the natural direction of the sun, but also, if you were right-handed it
simply made the task harder. This – and a whole bunch of weird behaviours –
seemed sensible to the likes of Lamont, and could be explained just as
rationally as, say, the fear of walking under ladders for fear of what might
fall from above. But to accusers, Lamont’s actions screamed irrationality:
witchcraft. She was burned at the stake.
But if neither magic nor witchcraft
exists, for what was the wretched woman slain? And why did she volunteer her
confessions in the first place? Maybe Marie – a humble village girl – sought
excitement, confessing such accursed acts because she was so restricted in life
by poverty and by convention. Telling lies made her life seem more exciting.
Lamont knew tales of witches – they were notorious. Notoriety was fame, and
fame was enticing then just as now. Ok, Sandra thinks, so the story from the
past has parallels with the present. But it’ll give Angela nightmares. She
tells her daughter to hush and sleep
Next day, Angela begs to walk
the dog at Leapmoor. Mum doesn’t want to return but has no excuse. They won’t
walk anywhere near the body.
But Angela runs ahead. Where
the moss grows green, Angela sees something and comes bounding back,
enthusiastic as the puppy.
“Mummy! Mummy! I met a
witch!”
“Ridiculous!”
But the girl persists: she’s
spoken to a witch down within the darkness of trees.
“She says I’m a good girl. It’s
not me but you she needs to see.”
As odd as these words are,
Sandra shivers from other thoughts: she has recognised with horror the very
spot at which she smashed in the parka man’s skull. How can Angela have stood
in that same spot and not spotted the corpse?
They depart quickly, Angela
reviewing aloud all she knows of Lamont – the satanic transformation of Marie
and her accomplices into animals; wild journeys by moonlight; demonic deeds.
Magic doesn’t exist, Sandra
repeats. Marie must’ve been mad to have admitted crimes she couldn’t have
committed. The words catch in her throat. She sighs to see the Morris 1100
again, clambers inside, turns the engine, drowns Angela’s voice.
Bewildered curiosity piqued
and fortified with Valium and whisky, Sandra returns to Leapmoor next afternoon.
Where’s the body gone? If someone’s found it, why aren’t the woods blue with
policemen? Did she hide it too well? Again she frets – why did she kill him? To
save herself – from bankruptcy, divorce, disgrace. She worries not for the man
or his family but herself. Her remorse died with him. But fear lives on. She
didn’t foresee this.
In the trees, dreich and
gloomy, Sandra’s not alone. Behind the branches, something lurks. Since it’s following
her, she takes to her heels. But this creature is fleet. Sandra tumbles, wipes
mud from her face, feels breath at her ear:
“Confess, confess.”
Sandra understands. This is
her last chance. The witch Lamont looks terrified:
“I was mad, led by
nightmares. You can still choose. Repent.”
But Sandra refuses, pushing past.
She is called: she sees him in her mind’s eye, standing on the far side of the
darkening forest. Pockmarked. Greasy hair. Hair whipped by the wind: he might
almost have horns. She sees beyond the disguise, recognises his true identity. Neither
man nor beast.
That she’d slay him he’d
known all along. But dying is easy when you’re always reborn.
Rejuvenated, he beckons her.
It’s unnecessary to take her forcibly. She volunteers. Marie Lamont may have
been as innocent as the beasts in the fields – deluded, driven insane by a
tough life, confessing to crimes she didn’t understand – but Sandra isn’t. No
nightmare, she’s not mad, walks purposefully. Casting off the costume of her
old life, she chooses death with relief.
He clutches covetously his
latest concubine, pulls her cheek to his chest. The sensation pleases him and
that’s really all that matters to her. This is the twist: she willed this,
wanted it. She sold her soul long ago to a loveless marriage and the tedium of
a life lived too leisurely. So bored and so desensitised did she become that she
embraces the eternal, infernal alternative. Now, the storm and the Devil caress
and carry her. By moonlight over Inverkip she travels, borne in his hirsute,
musk-smelling arms.
