The Man in Black: A Ghost Story
Read The Man in Black: A Ghost Story Online
Authors: Jordan Mason
THE
MAN
IN
BLACK
A G H O S T S T O R Y
JORDAN MASON
Copyright © Jordan Mason 2016.
Author photograph © Bethany Thompson 2016.
All rights reserved.
thejordanmason.com
The village of Stoney Grange is not real, though it does bear resemblance and borrow influence from locales in and around the moorlands of Durham, most notably the terraced villages close by, and including, Stanley.
The Grange Colliery and its disaster presented in this book is entirely a work of fiction, though its foundation is loosely based on a similar incident which took place back in the late July of 1973. In case of any upset, these historical incidents have remained, and will remain, confidential and nameless.
As for the supernatural presented in this book, well, you can decide for yourself.
It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature’s tough bracken, all picture-postcard like. Colour was something I’d only ever see blossom in a dream or in a memory from what felt like years ago; tacked up red and merry come the time for Christmas, perhaps, or printed onto the front of a Kellogg’s cereal box in the form of a grin-ridden furry mascot, orange coat ablaze and wooden spoon in hand: manmade and joyless, unless you were ten years old. Skies loomed grey and fog poured in plenty, and though the snow fell white and glorious, it lay dirty and black, piled up either side of the Rotten Row and its ashen cobbled curbs, unable to properly thaw out, but only to thicken and turn to sludge.
On weekends, the village, which was called Stoney Grange, smelled of damp washing and boiled vegetables in the mornings, as well as of coal dust and chimney smoke come the afternoons. Rows of red-brick terraces ran for what looked like an eternity in every direction, held to the sky in all of its industrial pride and glory, though now a mere ghost of the village it once must have been. By the time the children had been summoned back home for tea and their families had returned to comfort, day spilled into twilight and twilight into night, and the still wind lay lonesome upon the inky darkness, a-whislin’ its soundless tune.
That was when He would watch me, amidst that silence of night, but I never even knew it.
History had named my row the Rotten Row because it was simply just that, though vermin no longer roamed the yards and the huts and the coal sheds. The infestation had long since gone, but the tradition never faltered. The worst families lived on the Rotten Row. The noisiest thrived. Sometimes I’d hear screams through the walls, and sometimes the children wouldn’t leave for school on a morning, but instead stay home, stray to any decency. Beatings were harder back then.
Whack, then the tears.
I was living alone for the first time in my life, exiled to a matchbox flat on the bottom floor of a converted three-bed. I slept in the same room as the kitchen, but I didn’t mind. The house stood on the corner of the Rotten Row and overlooked the only remaining remnants of the Grange Colliery; a valley of pure brown, its hills bare of branch, all blanketed in white. Even in the summer when the sun shone a little more generously than it did that February, the fields beyond the cobbles lay dismal and plain. I’d sometimes see rabbits amongst the ferns, chasing the gentle wind, but never when it was cold. I suppose summertime kept me optimistic, but the winter sat bitter in my bones.
The pit had closed down ten months earlier in the Spring of 1972, paving way for a new generation of the working class. The disaster hit the North hard: eighteen men lost their lives, and a further eleven had fallen injured. The papers made good money from it, but it affected us closer to home, too. I knew this through my dad’s side of the family, how my uncle Jim - the one I was never to mention - had been one of the eleven, and how my dad never did lend a hand in the way my uncle perhaps would have wanted him to. We had money then, but my uncle wasn’t entitled to it, and that was how it was. It was never really spoken of; borders between families, boundaries not to cross. I suppose, looking back on it now, my dad was wrong. I found my own place in poverty, and the struggle is real. My dad’s family didn’t help, but I never met them.
My dad lost his life shortly after my uncle Jim’s accident. Pneumonia got to him. He was fifty, but by the time he’d become bedridden he looked more like seventy. We were living in a cottage just outside of Durham. My dad taught in a boarding school up in the village of Rothfield, Northumberland, whilst my mam stayed at home. I was eighteen when my dad came down with it. Nineteen when he passed.
My mam left with the money; somewhere far down south, apparently. Despite an education and a fair understanding of what money meant, I was left to fend for myself. Everything I’d studied, everything I was entitled, gone. I found my place on the Rotten Row shortly after the abandonment, and that was where I learned how to live proper.
As expected, the closure hit local amenities hard. Shopkeepers sold off their family names and families lived poorer than they ever had; men unable to find decent work, women unable to cook honest meals, children unable to eat. Although I’d been raised among generous wealth, the transition into the seventies was a hard one for homes like these. Even I knew it, growing up. But you never truly understand it until you’re living in the middle of it. Shops on the front of Stone Row were no longer owned locally, but by businessmen ten miles out in Durham. Though they still remained convenient, the aura of a genuine working village had been lost and a depression loomed in dire anticipation of the future. I had been lucky enough, however, to secure a weekday job down at the butchers a couple days after the move, handling change and wiping down worktops. The pay was bad and the work was lonesome, but it covered some of my rent and spared a little over each Friday for some of the essentials. The owner, William Roy, kept back some rashes of bacon at the end of each week and would slip me them after my day. Anything else went on the dogs out back or were otherwise minced together. I’d spend a little of my pay on milk and malt loaf at the shop on the corner, but even that had lost its locality. It was black owned. That was the thing: even the seventies weren’t safe from foreign influence. If anything it was a head start, communities being taken advantage of. Everyone thought it.
I didn’t have many possessions. There was nothing in my flat that anyone would ever want. My bed was a mattress from my old room with a couple of thick blankets thrown over it; the thing doubled as a couch, but I’d usually just sit down at the dining table. The table and chairs were left behind in the rush of it all. I managed to keep some little mementos from my dad’s desk, some papers, photographs, things like that. He kept the old collar from our dog Red in the top drawer, and so I took that. Red was a Jack Russell cross. He died at the age of nine, shot down by a farmer whilst out on a run.
My dad never forgot it. The farmer was shot down three weeks later.
My kitchen housed the bare necessities. The pots and pans came with the place, as did most of the furniture. The walls were wallpapered green, though they were hued more yellow, and most of the paintwork had blackened with damp. The front door came straight off the street and into the sitting room, and through an archway to the right of the fireplace was the kitchen, the back window, and the back door. There was a stove in the kitchen, and next to that was my mattress and the dining table. The toilet was out through the back door and along a narrow alleyway. It was an outdoor loo, but I was the only one who ever used it.
The bathtub was under the stairs; the ones leading to the above flat from the yard. The water was always warm, but usually I’d just boil some in a bucket and wash in the kitchen. On weekdays, after my shift, I’d follow a ritual of sorts. Boots off. Socks off. Water boiled and feet steeped. It kept me on my toes. Shoes back then were cheap; they’d smell bad after a few days of wear, of damp and faux leather. My feet were always sore with the weather. Bad genes, my mam had said.
I never did find any trace of the previous tenant. Not that I’d really want to; whoever they were made no difference to me. I thought they’d perhaps have gotten out and moved somewhere nice, somewhere colourful and prosperous. The furniture left behind had no real character about it. There was nothing you’d want to inherit from them, but that was all there was. I brought whatever I could with me in the van, the one I’d hired from James O’Neil to drive down to Stoney Grange in. James did it for nothing, and he even offered me some money to bide me over and get me through the first month or two. I didn’t take it. James was a friend of the family, and my dad always taught me not to be a charity unto myself. I had to make my own way.
I think he was trying to tell me not to be like my mam, and that I couldn’t disagree with.
I’d accepted my life on the Rotten Row, and that was all that I could do. Winters were colder there, and summers were brown and disheveled and lacking in nature. But even between all of that, beyond the poverty and the worry, nothing had prepared me for the haunting that was to follow.