Cantus Arcticus - Part Five

Cantus Arcticus is written by Mark Jones of Wordsmith Jones Editorial Services, it is told in 5 parts, one each night this week...Mark's story Moonlight Over Inverkip is part of our A Nip in The Air Ghost Story Collection. No less terrifying is Mark's brave rifling through his teenage diaries which you can enjoy at 20 years Ago Today : A Diary of Teenage Embarassment.

Catch up...Part One    Part Two    Part Three     Part Four

An hour or so later, upon waking, Duncan shuddered to recall the dream. But a dream it had certainly been – that was all. A combination of the strange phenomena of the previous evening and the whisky had conspired against the possibility of a relaxed and nourishing sleep. It was a shame for now he was not only hungover but exhausted.

He rose and wandered to the bathroom. But it was here on the landing that he received a shock. Glancing almost by chance into Dad’s bedroom, he saw it: the big cardboard box of Dad’s belongings had been pushed away from the wall, revealing a door left ajar to a cupboard full of dust and detritus. But it wasn’t really detritus. He could see from here that the cupboard was full of Mum, Dad and Janet’s ancient belongings. The same belongings, of course, he’d seen in the dream. He knew fine well he hadn’t dealt with that cupboard before last night – he hadn’t so much as opened the door in all the time he’d been back home – so he could only recognise its contents if the dream had been no dream at all, but instead an event – real, tangible, and, in consequence, far more terrifying than the simple nightmare he’d supposed he’d suffered.

Dumbfounded, Duncan staggered downstairs, almost too afraid to enter the living room and kitchen for fear of what he might find. He must now locate that box. He knew that. No longer simply for any hope of material gain, but because he realised – sensed deep in his soul – that he would not rest until he did. Dad had told him to find and bury it. Now, two apparitions appeared to have joined the search. The import those ghouls placed upon the box suggested to Duncan they sought it in earnest. Duncan didn’t know the reason, and he didn’t dare ponder why. He would search again today, search that cupboard. If he didn’t find it there, he’d search again tomorrow. But one thing was certain – he wouldn’t stay here again tonight. He would, if needs be, check in to the Premier Inn down by the river. Much as he hated the Clyde, it was about as far from this house as it was possible to go in Greenock.

He wandered back through the living room from the kitchen and into the hallway. He still wondered hopefully if what he’d experienced last night could have been a nightmare. But if that had been a nightmare, reality now turned a little darker, a little stranger still than even his sleep-addled subconscious. Through the clear glass of the front door he realised with relief that the rain was off. But then he jumped. With pale sunshine falling on him, he baulked at the sudden sight of Juliet and Marian standing in the street, evidently searching for the correct house number. His twin reasons for longing to escape Stirling. How, of all days, had they come to be in Larkfield? And together?

But the vision worsened for behind the two women – one with a face like thunder, the other a little thicker around the hips than when he had last seen her – there now appeared the two men of the night before. Hazy, they stood at a distance, on the other side of the road, watching, mournful and yet determined.

Duncan rushed up the stairs, not knowing what to do. Dad had been right. He must find this box. Why, he couldn’t fathom, but it obviously held the key to whatever strange chain of events was now unfolding – or rather, unravelling – in this house.

It was as though the very fabric of the house knew Duncan’s intentions, and found them disagreeable. As Duncan passed the photo of his father on the hallway wall, it leapt once more from its nail. But more than this, a great rumbling grew from the void of silence that had previously enveloped the house since dawn. Every pipe rattled, the walls seemed to shake, every beam and join and floorboard seemed to creak, disturbed. How ludicrous it was to feel that the house itself was attempting to prevent Duncan from reaching the box!

At the top of the stairs, Duncan tripped. Supine and struggling for oxygen, he heard the familiar sound of Mrs Dempster, talking to another neighbour in the gardens outside. He rushed to a window and pushed it open.

“I’m so sorry about the noise,” he shouted down to them. “I’ll try to sort out the problem as quick as I can.”

But Mrs Dempster and her neighbour only looked baffled.

“What noise?” the old lady asked. “Canny hear anything out here.”

Duncan listened. No, the noise, the rumbling, the infernal creaking had indeed ceased. But as soon as he closed the window, it began again. And more than this, what few of his father’s possessions remained began to fling themselves from walls and carpets in his direction. With violent speed, pictures, ornaments, a glass snow-storm, flung themselves at him. The carpet itself began to tear from the floor, snaking and bunching beneath his feet, slithering seemingly to trip him.

Battering every object away as best he could, Duncan yanked at the contents of the cupboard. These had held firm in the storm around him. He had to find that box. He had to open it. He had to find out what it held. The tumult grew worse, as though the house read his thoughts. Without turning his head, he felt the presence of people behind him. He knew the men had returned to the house. Then, in the corner of his eye, came movement. The world moved it seemed in slow-motion as he twisted far enough to see his father standing in the far corner of the room, a sorrowful look on his face.

Hideous. Every memento was a reminder of events Duncan had long attempted to bury deep within his soul. Mum’s old clothes-peg bag, a stuffed toy or two of Janet’s, Dad’s demob suit. All came tumbling from the cupboard – physical objects to represent the childhood he’d had snatched from him after the accident, as well as the childhood he’d always rejected. Dad’s love. He turned to his father with tears of remorse and terror. His father’s expression, sad and resigned, told a truth, however, that Duncan trembled and wept to accept. It was too late, the eyes told him.

Nothing more remained but the box. There it sat, black metal, chipped and scuffed and scratched and enigmatic. Silent. Duncan gazed down it, knowing he must now open it. All he’d life he’d run from circumstances outwith his control, or from the consequences of his actions, or from decisions he didn’t wish to make. A runner, a coward, forever hiding away from the world in the delusions and fantasies of his own creation, how often he’d been given advice – by Dad in particular – and ignored it. Now, in this moment, there was only one action left to take.

no no No NO NO! It began with a whimper, breath squeezed from his lungs to form sound, but ended with a shout, a great guttural roar of surprise and terror. It was too late to close the lid. The living air of the room had fused now with the dead air inside the box.

The consequences would reveal themselves rapidly. He knew that. Duncan stroked the contents of the box gingerly. Apples that weren’t really apples. At least now he understood. A monumental silence erupted and suffocated the room, noise deafening in its absence. And with it came the chill – an icy breeze like no other Duncan had ever experienced. Darkness drifted over the scene like a pall.

Sitting and awaiting the inevitable, Duncan was overwhelmed by a sudden truth, a sudden realisation. All his life he’d sought to understand and master death through his work – through telling ghost stories. Always, he’d tried to control and manipulate and explain the death that comes to all, the death he thought he sought. His work – his writing – was a bolt from reality, a flit from life, his miserable unfulfilled and unfulfilling life. How much easier it was to sit at a typewriter and imagine oneself in places and circumstances more pleasing than those he was experiencing. How much better one could feel about oneself to leave behind the lies and dubious actions of real life, and reside instead in fantasy?

Moreover, his whole existence had felt like one long quest for escape – escape from here, escape from there, escape to anywhere easier for him than this, whatever situation in which he found himself messing up at any given time. And death, of course, was the ultimate release from his worries, from himself.

Now he realised, fatally overdue, that, in truth, he’d only ever used death to try and understand life. He wanted to understand life, he wanted to live. He wanted to continue living. He wanted to be good at it. And, maybe, just maybe, he wanted simply to be good. But, here, in a cupboard in a bedroom in a house in Auchmead Road, Greenock, he discovered he was too late. Heat fled from Duncan’s body and the very last of the daylight drained from the room, seeped from his eyes. The now-gloomy room, the house, the town, the whole world, disintegrated before him, slipping from his grasp, or rather he from its hold.

It took a few months of renovation, but the house in Auchmead Road sold eventually and the proceeds passed, of course, to its owner, Juliet, widow to the man who’d been found dead there, one icy morning in early December, his body supine and rigid in an upstairs bedroom, eyes wide open and his skin as frozen as the Arctic itself, brittle fingers still clutching at the scratched and battered black metal casing of an ancient-looking but entirely empty box.

The coroner never determined a plausible explanation for Duncan’s death.

Understanding, in her quietly compassionate way, that neither Marian nor the baby were to blame – the one for her actions, the other for its very existence – Juliet split the profits of the sale equally with them.

Once again, a big hats off to Mark for this story. Mark's written a good few pieces for us now, he's pretty much a regular. But remember we're always on the lookout for new contributors to the blog, feel free to contact us.

Cantus Arcticus - Part Four

Cantus Arcticus is written by Mark Jones of Wordsmith Jones Editorial Services, it is told in 5 parts, one each night this week... Mark's story Moonlight Over Inverkip is part of our A Nip in The Air Ghost Story Collection. No less terrifying is Mark's brave rifling through his teenage diaries which you can enjoy at 20 years Ago Today : A Diary of Teenage Embarassment.

Catch up...Part One   Part Two   Part Three


Night led Duncan into dreams. It was his tiredness. It was the whisky. The dreams were uncomfortable, full of ill-defined landscapes and faces he felt he should recognise but didn’t. Once or twice, he awoke – firstly with the belief that it must already be nearly morning, when it fact it was still only 1 a.m., and then under the assumption that he’d slept just minutes when in fact a whole hour had passed since he’d last awoken. Soon, however, he slid towards a deeper sleep, uninterrupted, inescapable, and it was there, after a fashion, that he saw the men.

Snuggled in his bed, Duncan began to picture the house at night. Deluded that he was conscious (although aware at a certain level that he was, indeed, only dreaming), he shifted his gaze to the door, a black gaping rectangle in the wall since he’d drunkenly forgotten to close it. With only a mild sense of anxiety, he rose and moved through the door and on to the landing. There, he could see the bathroom door. Nothing interested him there, but beside the bathroom were the doors to the other two bedrooms. He knew – he could feel – that one of these, the furthest from him, contained not darkness but sunshine. Within that room it was already day, and, more than this – much more – he knew that his mother and sister were inside, Mum playing with Janet, sitting on the bed and holding up an item of clothing to make his young sister laugh. He saw the scene in his head. His heart yearned, but he knew that now was not the time for him to enter that room.

Disappointed, in fact a little embittered by the experience, he moved along the stairs, brushing rudely against his father – a much younger version of his father than Duncan had ever known. Dad was smiling. Curiously, Duncan felt that Dad, although entirely physical and present beside him, stood in black-and-white – the embodiment, the very manifestation, of the old photograph from the hallway wall.

He ignored his father, not caring whether this displeased or upset the old – or, rather, young – guy at all.

Entering the hallway and then the living room, Duncan became surprised – and rather pleased – at how convincing this dream was, for, again, at some level he did know this was all just his imagination at play. Dark, the front door behind him as he stood in the living room. Darker still the living room ahead of Duncan, between the living room and kitchen. He stepped forwards and walked gingerly into the kitchen. There on the worktop sat the whisky bottle and grimy, sticky glass tumbler. But, oddly, there were other things too: a loaf of bread, unwashed crockery, a wristwatch where the kettle should be but wasn’t, butter laying out melting in a dish of chipped, hairline-cracked china Duncan didn’t recall having seen before. The watch was an old one of Dad’s, though not a watch Duncan had ever seen but one that Dad had worn years before he’d even married, and then thrown away – Duncan simply knew this and considered how amazingly well the brain could fill in the blanks, telling him stuff now that he never knew before.

However, Duncan began to feel scared. The sensation grew that he wasn’t the only one present. Shadows seemed to move just beyond his line of sight. They lurked, but when he looked nobody was there. A curious whispering could be heard, but each time Duncan stopped to listen, so too did the whispering. It wasn’t a breeze, there were no windows left ajar.

Standing by the frosted glass window of the utility room door, Duncan realized how very much he’d stopped enjoying this dream. Deciding to return to his bedroom, he tip-toed out to the foot of the stairs. To his intense horror, a very faint light hung at the top, spherical almost, a cloud of light. Could a bedroom door be open, with milky moonlight seeping through the doorway and on to the landing? Duncan began gingerly to ascend the steps.

He seemed now to exist now in some kind of realm between reality and dream. A twisted, twilit kind of world, everything shimmered in a peculiarly ethereal luminescence, neither wan nor brilliant but somewhere curiously in between. The walls, the doors, the carpets, the furniture – the very furniture Duncan had earlier transported outside to the lawn – and the pictures on the wall all hung in a strange fog, almost transparent. In places he saw other furniture and picture frames, property that did not belong here, not to this time and space, anyway. Dad’s possessions stood ahead of these stranger objects, appearing almost superimposed upon them, as though they were unreal, mere light projections of a slide-show shone upon the true reality of the unfamiliar items.

Duncan wandered, dazed and perplexed. With the unearthly globe of light receding from his approach and sliding further along the landing, he reached the top stair and noticed how jumbled everything looked. Everywhere was hazy, blurry furniture and carpets and pictures and light fixtures stacked on blurry counterparts – like the negatives of two photographs of the house taken at very different times, with different inhabitants, but developed as one image. Upon nothing could Duncan fully fix his focus. Was it like this the whole house over? Duncan returned downstairs.

In the sitting room, within Dad’s armchair, sat an old man, tall and lean with long thinning hair. Duncan’s throat felt dry. Here at last was an image that appeared with perfect clarity. But this return to normal vision was not to Duncan’s liking. Nor was the vision before him particularly normal. The aged gentleman had the wrinkled, earthy and dignified features of a tribesman – an Inuit, perhaps; from the far north, at any rate, that much was clear from the furred collar and feathers that cloaked his neck, caught and illuminated by the bright milky-white moonlight that crept through a crack in the curtains. With his back to Duncan, the elderly man sat as though reading or sleeping. Finally, the aged nomad – for this was the only description for him Duncan could grab from the ragbag dictionary of his mind – turned and frowned.

Duncan felt a cold imprint on his belly and realised his hand was pressed flat against it, perhaps out of nervousness, perhaps out of sheer, naked fear. Clutching his stomach, he watched as another man – a sailor of haggard skin and tired eyes, and wearing a uniform some fifty years out-of-date – appeared and stood by the door to the kitchen. There were two doors there now, overlaid, each as pale and transparent as the other, one open and one shut. Following the sailor’s eyes, Duncan walked, as though directed, through the open door. He knew what they wanted. He was afraid, but knew he must comply – or, at least, attempt to – before they would leave. The nomad and the sailor wanted the box.

Now in the kitchen the sailor stood ahead of Duncan, and behind him – as though watching them both – the wizened old nomad. The sailor was trying to tell Duncan something. He sensed this, even though the sailor’s lips were clamped shut. Duncan felt the swarthy man attempt to transfer thoughts directly in his head. At last he began to sense what the sailor was trying to say. Thoughts came thick and fast now, and Duncan found his mind almost overpowered by them. He understood now, though, where the box was. Looking up, he exchanged a look of mutual agreement with the man. It was as if both knew that only this would pacify the cruel, malevolent expression furrowing across the nomad’s face. The two younger men took to the stairs, not stopping until they arrived in Dad’s old bedroom.

Pulling a large cardboard box full of his father’s last remaining possessions away from the wall, Duncan discovered a door he’d been aware of but hadn’t yet found the time to open. A small door, rising about three feet from the floor, it opened up into a cupboard. His expression turned to disgust. The cupboard contained every kind of junk imaginable, and all of it covered in a thick shroud of dust. The sailor looked cowed, scared. He stepped back into the shadows until Duncan could barely see him. The nomad moved ominously closer through the door of the bedroom.

Feeling the nomad’s eyes upon him, Duncan reached into the cupboard. He knew what he must withdraw. But at this, a terrible rumbling began throughout the whole house. Every pipe seemed to rattle, every wall begin to shake. Pure horror coursed through Duncan as a memory flooded back, like water into a drain. He froze. This wasn’t real. This was just a dream. His brain began to awaken and thaw. Realising with terror that he was caught between two states of reality and wasn’t quite sure to which he belonged, Duncan lashed out, arms flailing in empty dark air. The house continued to reverberate, but he now he became deaf to all sound. Was it from sheer fear that he could only see? Behind him, walls shook, the sailor retreated scared, the fierce gaze of the angry nomad fell upon him like a shadow, and there came a sensation – a tingle, the whiff of a familiar odour: stale tobacco and burnt food. Dad too was present in this hellish room. Duncan knew he was there, and knew his father was trying to help him, but still he couldn’t actually see the old man. Vibrations abounding all around, the house rattled on. Or – the thought came suddenly to Duncan from the disturbed depths of his mind – was the house really shaking at all? Perhaps in truth the house stood still while he himself shook?

Duncan awoke, covered in sweat, his T shirt bumfled up around his neck. He lay staring at the ceiling, gasping for breath. Peculiarly, despite the crushing fear he’d experienced only moments before, he then drifted almost instantly into a very deep and very proper sleep.

Had he known what was to come, or had he indeed been able, he might have taken care to enjoy this descent into peaceful unconsciousness. As it was, he never was aware of the two dark silhouettes that fell first across his bedstead, and then slid away: two shadows that withdrew and melted back into the black void of the open doorway.

Part Five...

A Nip In the Air - Ghost Story Ebook

So far this year, with the support of Heritage Lottery Fund Scotland we've given you TWO WHOLE FREE BOOKS, Wee Nasties and Tales of the Oak.

Now is your...let's call it an "opportunity", to give a little something back. Torch are currently fundraising for contributions towards our next years projects - we can't come right out and tell you what they are yet, but if you enjoyed this years mix of free childrens books, comics, folklore and storytelling...then you won't be disappointed. Music fans may also be in for some treats.

So, we've released a new ebook collection exclusively on kindle which is ideally suited for this time of year. There's a wee bit of everything from doomed love to haunted industrial wastelands and it can be yours for a mere 99p - just imagine you were scouring through the pound shop and found it beside all the cookbooks and second hand repackaged CDs.

Family member getting a kindle for Christmas? Know an elderly relative in need of a scare? Then show someone the price of your love - all 99p of it. Though I would argue there is at least £1.89 of value.

You can get A Nip In The Air on amazon now, all profits following enormous amazon cut, will be reinvested in local heritage projects run by volunteers, no individual contributors will benefit from it's sale...

And if you have enjoyed that, then don't forget our original classic folktale collection Tales of the Oak is on sale as well.

A Nip in the Air is named in tribute to Sir John Betjeman, here are the marvellous British Sea Power celebrating his genius

The Castle of Easter Greenock

A more detailed history of one of the last castles to fall in Greenock can be found in Williamson's "Views and Reminiscences of Old Greenock", from where the image above is taken.

In our illuminated manuscript Clann Abhainn Cluaidh, we used a pencil sketch of the same piece, which had appeared in an 1809 edition of  "Scots Magazine" along with the following text

"The view here annexed represents the ruins of the Castle as they appeared about five years ago. The Tower has since fallen, and in the course of a few years the plough will probably pass over the remains. And thus the ancient glory of Greenock is now crowned with a colony of piggeries."
We so loved that final phrase that in a nod to the situationist movement, we got some teeshirts printed for when we were out doing research / collection 'and thus the ancient glory of Greenock is now crowned with a colony of piggeries'...surprisingly these never caught on. Our Captain Kidd 'there is nothing in this world that can make it appear I was guilty of piracy' teeshirts were marginally more popular. I'd still buy one.

This ruined barony played host to a traditional castle spirit, a grey figure (gender not identified, but generally speaking, you would expect it to be a Lady) still randomly spotted wandering around the well ploughed piggeries for a period after the collpase of the castle itself, in a similar vein to the two doomed lovers who wandered down at Cresswell long after their home had crumbled.

The Ghosts of Oxford Street

Less dark and atmospheric, more just barmy, in this early nineties Channel 4 classic, Malcolm McLaren tours us around London. For purists, it is worth noting some of the ghosts in the title are metaphorical and symbolic, but there are some spooky stories in there, plus performances from Shane MacGowan, the Happy Mondays and Sinead O'Connor. What's not to like?

Check out The Ghosts of Oxford Street