DETECTIVE’S TALE

No serving police officer could ever write this story so I can only write it now from the haven of retirement. It was made very clear to us at the time that this file was sealed forever and not a word of these events should ever come out but I think I am safe now. The only way they could censure me over revealing these things is by admitting that the story was taken seriously and you can be sure they will never ever do that.

I was called in to take over the case of Gilly Parker, an eighteen year old who had disappeared from her home near Stoborough in Dorset. There was not the trace of a lead, no disputes at home or missing clothing to indicate she was a runaway and, as far as we could tell, no secret boyfriend who might have lured her away. Gilly was described as a nice homely girl who was not in any way streetwise and, although intelligent, was probably a bit young for her age. We did all the usual things but made no progress of any kind at all.

It was inevitable that the stories of The Curse would resurface. Country folk have long memories and going back as far as records go and as far as myths go, which is a lot further, there was a chain of missing girls in an area of around one or two miles of the farm where Gilly lived. Typically the girls would all be young and pretty and usually they would be farm girls or dairy maids or what might be called “Decent peasant stock”. Of course the time scale involved rules out a single offender because, if the crimes were all connected, the perpetrator would have to be over five hundred years old.

Legend is always ready to fill in the gaps left by hard fact and talking to old folks in the area brought up the name of Sir John Favenham who is said to have inhabited Creech Castle in thick woodland on land now belonging to the farm owned by Gilly’s family. There is no historical record of anyone called Sir John Favenham and there is no evidence, either in stone or written records of Creech Castle but those who whisper the myth are not deterred by that. According to the story Sir John was the local lord who drew maidens into his dark castle and did unspeakable things to them. The one woman whom he ever truly loved was an Irish maiden called Lady Constance and he took her into his castle wanting her for his wife. So great was his love for her that he could not take her by force but could only be satisfied if she willingly consented to be his own. When this consent was not given he kept her in his dungeon for a full year being constantly tormented by his brutal servant to make her yield and surrender herself to him as her husband.

Favenham was evil personified and so deep was his evil that one day his castle simply imploded and every last stone disappeared. There is no record of him or his castle because the locals were too afraid to speak of it but the myth says that in some form he is still active in taking local girlflesh for his depraved purposes.

The case of Gilly Parker hung over all of us who worked on it. The investigation wound down and was marked “Unsolved” to be left in the hope that some new piece of evidence would surface and give us a lead to follow. The team were all redeployed and that was it for three years until the fire.

Right in the middle of the Parker’s farm was a thick triangular patch of woodland which had never been farmed. You might think that in an age when farmers need to make money from every last acre something would have been done with that patch but I suspect that the wood was left because it was the site of the mythical Creech Castle and no-one would disturb it. The families in this area have lived there for generations and probably there is an unspoken fear handed down from father to son that the wood is to be left alone. It was fenced off and no-one went there. When our investigation team had to search the woods they had to use machetes to carve a way through vines and tangled trees and it was clear that no-one had entered the wood for centuries before our officers.

The first that anyone knew of the fire was when people in the area were awoken around midnight by what they described as a loud roaring sound. When they looked out they beheld a brilliant blue flame soaring perhaps thirty feet into the sky from the woodland. They said that it looked like a gas jet; it was a very narrow, high and bright flame. Of course everyone was terrified that the fire would spread to the nearby farmland and buildings and they all turned out to do what they could as well as phoning the Fire Brigade.

It was treated as a major incident but by the time the first fire appliances arrived the fire was pretty much out apart from the odd bit of smouldering and small fires on a few low bushes. The fire crews said that they had never seen anything like it and they said that the heat must have been so intense that it burned up all the affected fuel and then died out before it had a chance to spread. The trees were not left as bare, blackened branches as one might expect but they still had all their leaves. The leaves were black, dry and brittle because the fire had consumed all their inflammable sap and then burnt itself out before it could take the fabric of the leaves themselves. It had been a “flash fire” which just erupted from no known cause, burned at an incredible temperature and then died down leaving the woodland more or less intact but everything, even thick tree trunks, turned to dust as soon as they were touched.

But the odd aspects of the fire were secondary because the fire was eclipsed by the other occurrence. Gilly’s parents had rushed out into the night with the intention of carrying their effects out of their cottage before the fire took the old building but when they saw the flame they had been transfixed by it and simply stood staring up at the brilliant blue flare which looked like a knife blade thrust up into the air. They could see that the fire was not moving towards them but seemed to be rooted to the woods and was flaring directly upwards.

As they watched they became aware of a figure stumbling towards them. The figure was jet black like a human shaped hole in space and its outline soon showed that it was a female form. Gilly’s father rushed towards what he was sure would be a terribly burned victim and he later said that it reminded him of one of those 1930s pictures of coal miners who are completely black with just the tiny white points of their eyes visible.

Gilly ran into her father’s arms and collapsed sobbing into his shoulder. It transpired that she was not burned at all but was covered in a thick coating of soot which had rained down from the flare. She was totally naked and even her hair was covered in soot so that not a trace of the natural colour showed through.

It was some time before a coherent statement could be gathered from Gilly and there followed long interviews with a psychologist to try to make some sense of the story. The police statements and the psychologist’s report have been sealed and are now held in a secure archive where they will probably never see the light of day so I will recount the rest of this story from memory. That will not be difficult as every word remains with me as clearly as when I first heard it from Gilly herself.

My first impression on meeting Gilly was that she appeared exactly like the eighteen year old schoolgirl who had looked out at me from the school picture on the white board in the incident room. I thought that surely a young woman would have changed in the three years that Gilly had been missing but Gilly was surprised when she was told how long she had been missing. She was never able to give us a complete end to end account of what had happened to her and, in the circumstances that is not surprising. All she could give us were disjointed events without being sure of the order in which they happened but the things which she told us certainly do not add up to three years. She had no means of judging time but she said that she thought she had been held for “weeks”.

According to Gilly she had been “drawn” to the woodland in a way that she could not explain. She said that it was a sort of obsession which overpowered her so that all she could think of was that she had to visit the woodland. It was a deep longing like the compulsion to see a lover; she simply had to go there and it was unthinkable that she would not go. Gilly recalls climbing over the fence at around 9.30am on the Saturday morning and slowly making her way just a few feet into the tangled undergrowth. Then a huge hand clamped over her face and she was fighting for air as an arm locked around her waist and began to squeeze all the breath from her body. She remembers being terror-stricken and then she thinks that she fainted.

When she recovered she was in the dungeon where she was to spend the entire time of her captivity. It had a stone flagged floor and the walls were of huge rough-hewn stones. The only light came from lanterns set on iron sconces on the walls. Gilly did not at first have time to take all this in as she was being held from behind by a large man in a brown robe like a monk’s habit. A similarly dressed man was in front of her and she described his face as brown and shrunken with wisps of hair visible under the hood of his habit. Gilly had never seen an old corpse but she described perfectly the way that a cadaver looks when it has been dead for some time including the gnarled, claw-like fingers with extended finger nails and the sunken features of the skull with the eyeballs looking as if they are about to pop out.

This was her description of both men and she said that she could not tell them apart. The two monsters made a terrifying cackling sound as they clawed the clothing from her body and she said she became hysterical at the feel of the parchment dry hands on her flesh.

After this initial scene Gilly’s memories are fragmented but they are a catalogue of inventive and terrible abuse and torture. She was always naked, parched and hungry and usually shackled in heavy irons straight from a gothic fantasy. The ironwork included a broad iron collar and manacles on her wrists as well as heavy shackles on her ankles linked by chains with links large enough to moor a battleship. For some of the time she wore an oaken yoke around her neck and resting on her shoulders with her wrists chained to the ends of the yoke.

She has very clear memories of a small cage formed of a latticework of iron slats. The cage was low so that she was forced to remain on hands and knees and it had an iron collar built into one end so that she had to kneel with her head protruding from one end through the collar. Wooden rods were thrust through the bars from one side of the cage to the other so that she had to keep her belly very high and supported by a rod underneath with her back rammed tightly against the top of the cage. Other rods through the cage lengthwise prevented her from closing her legs so that anyone behind her had unrestricted access to her genitals and anus.

There was never a moment when the captive was free and sometimes she would be left alone in the flickering half light for many hours or even perhaps days and at other times she would be restrained in position perhaps chained to the wall or suspended from the ceiling to endure savage beatings or whippings. Her mouth and back passage were used regularly with a session ending only when she lapsed into unconsciousness. Often she would slip into a faint only to be revived with a bucket of freezing water to face more degradation.

The girl regularly had her genitals pinched, beaten and invaded by those rough, undead hands as well as by various implements so that her screams echoed from the walls of the cavern but at no time did either of her captors attempt actual intercourse. Whenever one or both men were present there would be a continuous soundtrack of insane and unintelligible cackling which Gilly would have done anything to shut out but the only times when either of them ever spoke directly to her were the many occasions when they told her to give herself willingly to them. There was a constant theme running through the entire ordeal that if she would just open her legs of her own volition and invite her tormentors to have consensual sex all the torture would cease.

But Gilly had been brought up a good girl and was a virgin. Despite the torture she could not do something which was so against every fabric of her being. She could not yield to these two monsters even had they been normal flesh and blood but she was aware that she was not dealing with living men but with something else. It is unclear whether Gilly knew the word necrophilia but she could not bring herself to perform such an obscenity.

Gilly was unable to give us a coherent account of the ending of her captivity. She just recalls that suddenly the whole world was blindingly blue and searing hot and she found herself face down in the dirt. The instinctive terror of being burned alive caused her to struggle to her feet and blunder forward away from the blue flame; then she was in her father’s arms.

There is not much more to tell. So great was the heat of the fire that it destroyed every last microbe in the soil so that the triangle was left black and barren. A mechanical digger was driven through the burned trees and they simply crumbled in clouds of chocking, fine powder leaving a flat, empty triangle like a scar in the landscape. Tons of topsoil were dumped around the outside of the triangle and shrubs were planted to form a screen hiding the inner emptiness so that the black scar can only be seen from the air. In time foliage will spread from the fertile land and cover the whole area.

Gilly has a close and loving family and she is gradually recovering just as the land is recovering. Perhaps one day she may even allow a lover to touch her but I suspect that will not come about for many years.

As to what really happened of course no-one knows any more than I have set down for you. My personal feeling is that the actual location of poor Gilly’s incarceration was some place which you will not find on any map. When I think of the ending of the story my thoughts are drawn back to the story of Lady Constance, the Irish beauty whom Favenham yearned to have give herself to him. I can testify that Gilly is a true beauty and I believe that Favenham wanted her in the same way. When, against all the odds, she held firm against all that he could inflict upon her I think his anger and frustration welled up into the supernatural flame which was witnessed by all around. Does that mean that all the other maidens whom he took over the centuries gave in to him? I do not know but it is my belief that in winning her battle against his evil Gilly may well have destroyed Sir John Favenham forever.

THE END