A red wool mitten on a fencepost. Someone has placed it there so it might be reunited with its twin. The next time you walk down the path, it's gone. Another walk, a red scarf hangs from a tree. You can see the wide loops of something home-knitted. You wonder if that's the same scarf you later see from a distance, wrapped around a scarecrow in a farmhouse garden.
As an outsider, you will not hear the story. You can mention in the pub that you've seen red woollen items around the village, but you'll get little more than a nod of acknowledgement. You don't even know if other people are seeing these things. You drink your pint in silence, hoping that if you come here often enough people will start talking to you.
A crow's nest with a piece of red wool among the twigs. Maybe this was a square from a blanket, it's hard to tell from the ground.
You're new to the village. There are a dozen places you could have picked in this part of the Downs. It's the quiet you want, and Withfield has that. The nearest pub isn't even in the village but on the the main road - a road that doesn't even pass through Withfield.
It's hard to settle in a new place. The crows seem to watch you with the same suspicion as the villagers. Then you wonder how crows would treat you any differently if you'd been raised here.
That scarecrow you saw with the red scarf was in a farmer's garden, and the farmer was once married to a much younger woman. Nobody knew what she had seen in him. Most people in the village felt that she was too pretty to be with him, to spend her days knitting in his house. When she vanished, her family called the police, who investigated. But there was a letter saying she was leaving him, the handwriting was hers, and there was no crime without a body.
Parts of the story have never reached the pub. The crows knew that the woman used the red scarf on the scarecrow to signal that her husband was out and not expected back for some time. Except for one time, when the scarf signalled something else. That time, the lover entered the house to find the farmer, sat on his chair, shotgun in his lap.
Only the crows watched what happened. How the young man was told to take his clothes off and made to sit in a trough. It was a cold winter's day, soon breaking him to shivering, but he was not allowed to get out. Eventually he stopped moving, and the farmer took him out to the fields that night.
You find a red bootie at the base of a tree in the woods where crows caw. You'll never be in the village long enough to learn this story.
Background
This story was written for my regular writing group, responding to the prompt ‘knitting’. It was inspired by the story of the weeping tree, which I read about in a post on The Ghost in My Machine. I wanted to transplant elements of this story to Sussex, particularly the idea of a haunted tree being used for firewood. But, going back to the story now, I can see very little connection to the initial inspiration other than two lovers who cannot be together and deaths.
Clownstarter
The True Clown Stories kickstarter has succeeded. Running a kickstarter campaign turned out to be harder and stranger than I expected. Conventional wisdom is that sign-ups tend to move most at the start and end with a slow down in the middle, but we had a fairly constant pace. This was because it is currently hard to reach a lot of people via social media. Even in the middle, people were learning about the kickstarter for the first time and signing up. In the current environment, being found is the hardest challenge for a creative project.
Having completed the kickstarter we now need to work on the final version of the text, and I want to write a couple of new stories for that. But, hopefully, the book will be out in the summer time.
Recommendations
I read a lot of horror fiction, but very little of it gets under my skin. Some things do give me that thrill of terror - more often movies than books - but it’s rare for a book to keep me awake at night.
Julie McDowall’s Attack Warning Red terrified me. It’s a history of Britain’s preparations for a nuclear war. I lived through a part of the cold war and never really thought about the horror that might have unfolded. And it amazes me that we are now so causal when the risk is still there.
The book is full of horrifying details, like hospitals planning to treat patients with folk medicines foraged in the countryside; or the results of people’s experiments with staying in the few bunkers that had been made.
Attack Warning Red is brilliantly written and gave me nightmares. Sometimes, I find myself gripped with fear about the possibility of nuclear war. I’m not sure this terror does any good, but it amazes me that there are people panicking about rogue AIs when there are more realistic issues.
Another excellent piece.