I had walked these cobbled streets before. I had climbed the poplar tree at the walled off park by the pharmacy and broken my ankle tripping over the dodgy step with the rickety slab on Stonemason Way. This place had been home to me once, so why did it feel so very foreign? Woe, with a capital W; A sad little name for a town. It seemed to me that suffering had been etched into the stone they had built the place with. We didn’t stand a chance, not here.
I walked with purpose towards my destination with unease tugging at my gut. The schoolhouse was in a lonely little street under the shadow of a great mountain called Ben Thagad. I crossed the threshold into the playground with apprehension.
The hop-scotch was faded and the chute was rusted orange. The vines that climbed up the red-brick walls were withered and now hung limp. The years had been unkind to my old school.
“Harry!” An oddly familiar voice came from the climbing frame. It belonged to a man dressed in a shoddy leather jacket. He was leant against the playground equipment with a rollup in-between his lips that smelt a little too pungent to be tobacco.
No - couldn’t be? “Been what - fifteen years - do you even remember me?”
With a sad realization I put a warmly familiar name to the unkempt individual.
“Bertie. You’ve grown a beard.” If the years had been unkind to the schoolyard, they had been ruthless with Robert Grieves, otherwise known as Bertie, my old best friend. He was skinny, gaunt and didn’t look like he’d shaved in a fortnight.
“I didn’t reckon you’d come, nobody did. How’s the big city fancy pants.” He slapped me on the shoulder as a brother might have to a sibling.
“It’s different, that’s for sure. In truth I didn’t come home for the reunion - I was in the area anyway to visit my mum in St Fry’s and thought I may as well pop over to see what this was all about - school reunions aren’t really my thing.” I spoke candidly, Bertie twitched and held out his spliff. I shook my head. I’d had my fair share of the devil’s lettuce at university and it gave me splitting migraines.
“All the crews here. Charlie, Cabbage, Wee Jimmy - the FBI.” Bertie chuckled.
The FBI, the crappy name of our little rag-tag group of misfits. We’d built tree-houses, climbed mountains and tried to solve -
“It’s weird Harry, I had a dream last night that she was here. Miss Salt - that she was going to turn up at the reunion. I thought it was real for a second. When I woke up all the hairs on my arms were standing up…” Bertie grimaced.
We entered the school hall and awkwardly shuffled around the gymnasium, socialising and bragging, Bertie didn’t do much of the latter. I saw a few familiar faces; teachers I recalled as young, were now prostrated by many years of the education system. We found Cabbage and Wee Jimmy - they worked together at the mechanic’s on Main street.
Charlie was there too, he had a husband and three kids and Cabbage seemed uneasy around him for this very reason.
I caught up with Bethany Small too - she was a teacher at the school now, bright and happy. She was a walking miracle, when she was young she had leukaemia, it was terminal. Against all odds she made it. The locals like to brag it was the quality of the tap water.
When the night was nearly over I found Bertie again, stood at her old photo amidst a collection of many other teachers and principals. Dusty and lonely on the wall she sat; Miss Salt.
It takes a special sort of person to become etched into your mind so perfectly that you can still see their face clear as day twenty years later. Miss Salt had been beautiful with big rosy-pink cheeks and lips like rosebuds. She only ever wore red and even her hair had been a lovely rich auburn. She’d been everyone’s first crush.
She was kind too. Do you know how rare that is? someone beautiful and kind. Every Friday morning she’d bring giant blueberry muffins into class and let us watch videos instead of equations.
Then one Friday she was gone and we never saw her again. She vanished from Woe as if she had never been here at all. We searched for her, Bertie and me most of all. We weren’t convinced she’d just left for another job, for surely she would have said goodbye first?
We formed the FBI to look for her. None of the adults would tell us where she went, and we got into our heads that they were holding her hostage somewhere as she had fed us too many blueberry muffins. Childhood antics - the sort bored young minds concoct in small boring towns.
“Remember that time we scoped out Mr Walker’s property cause we caught him digging a hole in his garden?” Bertie chuckled as he took a fistful of muffins he’d pinched from the buffet table out his pockets. He shovelled them into his mouth with ruthless proficiency.
“Poor plonker, it turned out he was digging a hole for his cat, not a body. Gave us a right good hit with that rake of his. Miss Salt’s probably teaching at some private school now. Living it up.” I sighed wistfully. I hoped she was; that she’d gotten out of this depressing pit of despair like I had.
“I know it can’t be easy for you to be back here after your dad.” Bertie said to me softly after a moment’s silence. “I’m glad you got out. Got free of this place, I mean. Do yourself a favour and don’t stay too long, or you’ll end up like me. High as a kite and no better place to be on a saturday than school - or like your - like your dad.”
I saw it again; blue feet dangling and the light fixture half-pulled out of the wall as the weight of a man, garrotted with rope pulled it down. I still don’t know why he did it.
“What do you say we go to the Fork and Sheep?” Bertie whispered to me, face squinted as he swirled a mouthful of cheap wine. “I want something stronger than this - this - echo falls shit.”
The Fork and Sheep was our local; the only pub in town. Outsiders and city-folk don’t understand how important the local pub is. It’s a hub; a melting pot of personalities and gossip. Town halls sit empty while politics is poured into pint glasses and slot machines. We’d been drinking there since we’d been old enough to source fake IDs.
Bertie and I found a quiet booth in the corner, just beside the women’s toilets. The place stunk of stale ale and the floors, deep mahogany, were sticky and grimy.
“There’s something I never told you, Harry, I’ve been wanting to all night.” Bertie said, his voice was wavering and weary. I could taste the weed and lager on his breath from across the table. “It’s about Miss Salt.”
“Bertie, we were kids who missed our favourite teacher, bored out of our minds and desperate for something exciting to happen in our little dump of a town.” I leaned across the table. “Nothing happened to her. Get it out of your head alright? “
“You remember it, I know you do.” Bertie’s voice was low. He spoke with fluent paranoia only a stoner could muster. “You remember but you don’t want to, you’ve put it to the back of your head where you don’t have to find it everyday, that little niggle, that raw tug of instinctual dread. That night, Harry, you know the one, the night where all the adults went up the mountain.”
I see it now. An empty bed, my father’s jacket absent from it’s hook and the patio doors wide open. The imprint of my mother’s boots in the wet mud outside and the dim crowd of torchlight walking up the hill towards the mountain - towards Ben Thagad; a slow procession of trance-like light.
“So they went for a hike, what of it?” I grunted.
“In the cold of the night, every single one, without telling the kids? Shame they didn’t have the real FBI on it - just us silly kids. Bet Fox Mulder woulda had something to say.” Bertie looked around the pub suspiciously. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, a journal so familiar to me I almost recoiled at the sight of it.
THE FBI - INVESTIGATION INTO THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GUINEVERE SALT
“I’m not doing this with you Bertie, not tonight. I wish you well but I’m not partaking in your delusions, not anymore. I grew up.” I stood up. The scraping of my chair brought all the eyes in the room to us and for the briefest of moments I felt as odd and as paranoid as Bertie.
“Just take it, read it. You’ll see it if you do - like I do. We were kids then, you’re right, we were too innocent to imagine.” He thrusted the book at me.
I felt too awkward to reject him so I departed from the Fork and Sheep and Bertie with the weighty journal in tow.
When I returned home that night, as midnight encroached I found that sleep eluded me. I found myself in my tired emptiness cleaving to those worn and aged pages.
COLLECTED EVIDENCE (SO FAR)
Strand of red hair from firepit at the top of the mountain.
Red lipstick casing found in the burn with scorch marks
Mud sample from Harry’s dad’s shoe.
Cabbage’s mum’s scarf with speck of blood on it.
One adult molar tooth found by firepit (Probably a deer’s - Harry)
Miss Salt’s rosary beads taken from Bethany Small’s locker
Strange vibrating device found in Charlie’s mom’s bedside drawer
SUMMARY OF EVENTS OF 12/04/1980 - by Robert Grieves
Miss Salt leaves class early at 3pm and allows us to have free time until the school bell rings. She seems flustered and keeps looking over her shoulder. Bethany Small is very sick and is always upset, so Miss Salt gives her her rosary beads and a cuddle on the way out.
Bethaani Samll’s got a BALDY - CABBAGEEE - ROFL
Cabbage’s father fixes a lock onto his bedroom door on the outside. Harry’s dad comes home from work early and spends time in the garage. Charlie’s mum is groaning in her bedroom and is surprised when Charlie gets home from school early. My parents, are absent as usual. Wee Jimmy said that his dad was cutting firewood, and lots of it, even though it’s summer.
That night at approximately 2am, Cabbage hears his parents leave. He’s unable to follow them as his door has been locked. Wee Jimmy notes that his parents too were gone that night, but he was undisturbed by this, instead using their absence to eat butter straight out of the tub. Charlie slept through the night.
Harry’s account is most interesting. He wakes up and finds his parents gone as well as their coats - he goes outside and investigates. His house has a view up the mountain and he sees lots of adults walking up the mountain with torches. He says it must have been at least half the town.
Miss Salt is never seen again.
INTERVIEW WITH PRINCIPAL PHELPS - By Robert Grieves and Harry McBride.
RG : Where is Miss Salt Principal?
P: Get back to class
HM: She promised she’d give us feedback on our homework sir, do you know when she will be returning?
P: She isn’t returning. I will assess future assignments until a replacement is procured. Back to class.
RG: We know you were up the mountain two nights ago.
Principal Phelps looks uneasy and is silent.
P: Detention. Now!
INTERESTING INFORMATION MISC
Ben Thagadh roughly means “chosen mountain” in gaelic - is this important?
Miss Salt was from Oxfordshire - Was she killed because she is an outsider?
The buzzing device found in Charlie’s mums’ drawer stopped working after we played with it for a while and had sticky residue on it.
We saw Mr Jenkin’s burying something in his garden. Upon investigation we found it was his dog. He hit me with a rake. Mr Jenkins has a history of violent behaviour.
Everyone had pork broth for breakfast. Wee Jimmy says his tasted funny and had a bit of muscle in it.
Bethany Small’s hair has grown back and Principal Phelp’s bald patch has gone.
My mum gave me a cuddle, she never does this, she said she was sorry and regrets bringing me into such an awful world.
Charlie’s mums shopping list we found in the rubbish bin that listed the following: Carrot’s, Spuds, Lube, Butcher’s twine, hair shaver, tweezers, duct tape, beef stock cube.
Harry’s dad dies. Wee Jimmy’s dad told him it was suicide, but Harry insists he died fighting a bear that broke in to their house.
I gulped and dropped the journal to my knees. I felt it. I felt that feeling of dread and disgust gathering at the back of my head- the gnawing tog that Bertie so eloquently relayed. I tried to push it down, to explain it away, but it wouldn’t go. It was part of me now. It was as Bertie described, an instinctive feeling, as primal as it was undeniable.
I kept reading. Bertie had been a prolific writer and the journal was packed full. There were drawings of Miss Salt and maps of the mountain and the town. As the journal went on the handwriting grew neater and the dates that ordered the pages grew more recent.
Talk of Charlie’s mother’s vibrator was abandoned and replaced with complex timelines of how Miss Salt went from teaching us to gone without a trace. There were long sprawling texts on mayan ritual sacrifice and UFO activity in the mountains of Scotland. There talk of shared mental delusions. ROANOKE had been scrawled, so harshly that the pages had been bent from the pressure applied by the mad scribe.
He had never stopped.
I had left for university and found a job in the bank. Charlie had come out the closet that had bound him for so long and found a husband and happiness. Wee Jimmy and Cabbage had fixed god knows how many cars and. through all of it - all those long empty years -Robert Grieves, my dear Bertie, had kept this journal.
RITUAL SACRIFICE
Throught out history Woe has been host to Celts, pagans and picts. All but the Celts have a demonstrated proclivity towards human sacrifice. The Picts in particular are interesting to consider.
It is said that when the Roman empire came to Scotland to add it to its empire, the picts were the solitary reason for their inability to progress north. So frightened were they that they built a giant wall to keep them out of Roman lands.
Tall, red-headed and fierce warriors they were, but also deeply in touch with forces that the civilised Romans had long since abandoned for Papyrus and sewage systems.
Rowan McKintyre, author of Pictish Runes and Magical Systems, states that the “picts often consulted with the stars” and that they would often offer sacrifices on mountains and hills or “any high ground to maintain a close distance to the stars.”
Cecilia Corday in her seminal work Pictish Architecture in the Highlands, states that there was indentation suggestive of a wooden temple on the top of Ben Thagad in Woe.
UFO SIGHTINGS IN WOE
1862 - English author George Hancock on a visit to Woe states that he saw a a string of odd lights in the sky above Ben Thagad. Curious he hiked the mountain and found a strange stone with a Pictish rune on it. This was an interesting archaeological find and is now in the Kelvingrove Art museum.
1920 - There’s an article in a local newspaper explaining the interaction between a woman named Heather Tipple and a strange light whilst hiking Thagad. She said it came towards her and danced around her head. (Fairy activity??)
The last entry was his magnum opus - a collation of all his theories and work - a case so well-presented it might have convinced even the most dubious of jury’s.
WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT
Woe is a sick town, in every way imaginable. Tragedy marks this land and the mountain we live under. Ben Thagadh - The Chosen Mountain - Chosen for what? A holy place? I don’t think so. There is nothing holy about that dreaded peak. You can still see it, the soft divet in the land from where the firepit was all those years ago, the firepit where she was cooked alive.
Miss Salt had felt uneasy for a while. She had felt the incessant stares on her back and noticed the whispering. She did not know just what she was in for - otherwise she would have surely fled - she ignored that feeling of raw unexplainable fear. I so very wish she hadn’t.
Perhaps it was suggested by Bethany Small’s mother. Bethany was terminally ill with almost no hope of survival. Desperation is a funny motivator. Maybe it was her father, or maybe it was Principal Phelps who wanted his hair back.
The townsfolk agreed, some grudgingly, others eagerly. None refused, perhaps fearful that they might be offered instead. They picked a date and a time and carried out their task with ruthless proficiency.
Perhaps it was Mr Jenkin’s that grabbed her that night, I don’t know, he was certainly strong enough. They all gathered and took her up that mountain. They weren’t careful enough. They left behind a tooth and a lipstick case, all that was left to mark her fleeting presence.
Some couldn’t live with themselves after the gory act. Harry’s father found refuge in the noose. Bethany Small’s mother is addicted to prescription painkillers and Mr Jenkins drinks enough to warrant a brewery in his name.
It’s strange, we all think we saw her for the last time at school. I do not believe that to be true. We saw her once more, we just didn’t know it was her.
We all had the same pork broth at breakfast that morning, but it was not pork, not really.
My grandma always said that there was nothing like a broth to get the sick feeling well again. Woe needed a lot of broth.
I worry that it will soon need more.