CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4

Three weeks ago:

Sally had popped into the library to cheer herself up. A coffee-morning at the community centre had emptied the place of pensioners and Jane was all by herself behind the desk. She waved Sally over when she saw her come in.

“I have something for you,” Jane said.

Sally wasn’t too sure about this, she didn’t feel like chatting with Jane, but she was excited to see what Jane might have picked out for her, it might be an Audrey Niffenegger or a new Jennifer Egan she hadn’t read. Jane nipped into the back room and appeared a moment later with a thick, green pamphlet.

“I think you might find this very interesting,” she said, handing it to Sally.

Sally found it hard to mask her disappointment. “Oh,” was all she could say looking at the battered green cover. It had an old woodcut on the front, showing a hare by a riverside, looking up at a smiling moon. The title, printed in crude block letters, was Highways, Havens and Highlands by James Hendry.

“It’s by a local author,” Jane said. “He was my uncle actually. He collected local folklore. He was hoping to get it published nationally or at least for the local tourist trade, but he couldn’t resist putting in a few things about our little town. Local legends and such, and well, you know how secretive folk are around here. There were objections, and in the end he just had a few copies printed for private circulation. A shame, because it’s really rather good. Anyway, I really think you’ll find it . . . educational. What with . . . what with living here and everything . . . ” Jane tried to smile. “You don’t have to check it out. It’s from my own private collection. Just get it back to me when you can.” She was looking up at Sally with one of her awful, earnest expressions.

Sally put the pamphlet in her handbag. She glanced at the new arrivals shelf and the Recommended Reads, but she’d gone off the idea of browsing. “Thanks, Jane,” she said. “I’ll look at it later.” Then she left, quite certain that she’d never once glance at the stupid thing.

The pamphlet sat for a couple of days under a pile of old magazines on the dining room table. Sally didn’t bother to go back to the library—she found a box of old crime books from the 50s and 60s in the attic, and she made do with them. Finally the pamphlet got transferred to the recycling.

It stayed there for a week with the old newspapers and empty tins, until Sally decided to have a tidy up. David was having one of his ‘episodes,’ as she’d taken to calling them, and Sally was in a righteous fury, purging the cottage of junk.

The pamphlet must have fallen from a pile of newspapers on the way to the car. It wasn’t until Sally came back from dropping off the recycling that she saw it lying on the floor of the hall. She picked it up and stared quizzically at it until she remembered where it had come from.

Her first reaction was irritation. Then she began to turn the pages and, despite the poor quality of the printing, it intrigued her. Sally made herself a cup of tea and settled down on the living room couch to read it.

There were chapters on hauntings, witchcraft, and faery folk that were local to the area. The chapter that really caught Sally’s attention contained a story about the Gaelic Teine Biorach, a series of Will o’ the Wisp sightings, and finally her heart raced when she read this passage:

“In addition to the Will o’ the Wisp and our Gaelic equivalent the Teine Biorach, who traditionally haunt the marshes, our Highland hills have been home to many otherworldly visitors, who sometimes choose the most unique places to inhabit.

In the small town of Dunballan, the locals tell stories of a strange presence that haunts the thickets and hedgerows. No-one has ever seen this mysterious entity. They’ve only ever heard its voice, and a frightening voice it is at that, for it is said to sound like no human voice ever did. Those who’ve heard it describe it as sounding like, ‘old leaves and twigs being crunched up’ or ‘lots of little pixies, all talking at once.’ The locals call this eerie voice ‘Hettie of the Hedgerow,’ and claim she is either an ancient spirit, or a daemon from another realm. She is drawn to those in the depths of despair, and she often gives dire warnings which you would be foolish to ignore.

This can be seen in the earliest surviving tale of Hettie, from the late eighteenth century. A Poacher, who couldn’t pay his fines, fled the bailiffs and hid in a ditch near Dunballan. In deep despair over his future, the Poacher called out to God to relieve him of his misery. God didn’t answer him, but a voice from the hedgerow did.

Hettie told him to fashion a bow and arrow and to go deep into the old forest near Dunballan. Here he would find a maiden doe by a stream, which he was to shoot and to take to market the next day in Dunballan. The Poacher did as Hettie told him. He found the deer, shot it, and took its meat to market. The meat was so tender and sweet, it was said to bewitch all who tasted it. The Poacher sold all his wares for a premium and returned to the same hedgerow to ask for Hettie’s help.

Hettie agreed to his pleas but cautioned him against ever growing horns himself, lest he come to a very bad end. The Poacher did not understand Hettie’s warning, but he did follow her directions and once again bagged a prime maiden doe. He took the doe to market and even more people fell under the spell of its succulent meat. Soon, his hunting expeditions were proving so profitable that the Poacher not only paid off all his fines, he even opened a butcher’s shop in Dunballan and took a young Wife.

His Wife was not faithful though and, unbeknownst to the Poacher, took a young Lover for herself. The poacher sold many types of meat in his shop, but people still clamoured for his venison. Because of this, the young Wife begged him to go and hunt more venison and to take her Lover with him. At first the Poacher refused. He had grown tired of asking for Hettie’s help, but his Wife would not let up and wore him down with her moods and nagging, till eventually he relented.

After consulting privately with Hettie, the Poacher took his wife’s Lover into the forest to hunt for deer. The poacher and his wife’s lover became separated in the deep, dense forest and lost sight of each other. The Lover saw what he took to be a giant stag, he drew his bow, shot at it and his arrow landed true. When he came to claim his prize however, the Lover saw that he had not shot a stag, but had mistakenly killed the Poacher with his arrow.

The Poacher had failed to heed Hettie’s warnings. He had grown cuckold’s horns and as a consequence he had come to a very bad end at the hands of his young wife’s Lover.

A later tale tells of a young Woman from Dunballan who took herself off to the forest to end her own life. The cause of her misery was the Laird of Dunballan, who had cast her aside and gone back to his wife as soon as she had given in to his attentions. With her honour in tatters, and her name besmirched, the Woman had vowed to end it all.

As she approached the forest, an otherworldly voice called to her from the hedgerow and asked why she was so sad. The Woman was taken aback, but confessed she could live with the shame she had brought on herself, but what she couldn’t live with was the neglect the Laird had shown her.

Hettie told the Woman to go to a clearing in the forest and there she would find a hare. She was to kill the hare and bring it back with her. When the Woman had done this, Hettie told her how to prepare the hare with special herbs. Then she instructed the Woman to take the hare to the Laird’s manor and to have the Laird and his wife eat it. Hettie cautioned her against letting the smoke or flames of Elm tree wood come into contact with the hare’s flesh while it was cooking.

The Woman took the hare to the manor and bribed the cook into serving the hare to the Laird and his wife. She made him promise not to use any elm tree wood in the fire. She did not extract that promise from the young kitchen hand though, and the boy used wood from the single Elm tree in the grounds of the manor to stoke the fire.

Once the Laird and his Wife had eaten the hare, the Wife took sick and died quite suddenly. Instead of mourning her death, the Laird became obsessed with the young Woman he had seduced and spurned. He pursued her doggedly and did not give up until the Woman agreed to be his new bride.

The marriage was not a happy one, however, for soon after they were wed, the Laird fell prey to the ‘Curse of the McCavendish family’ and neglected the Woman far more as his wife than when she was his spurned mistress. Unable to face this terrible outcome, the Woman hanged herself from the branches of the Elm tree in the grounds of the manor.

For more on the ‘Curse of the McCavendish family’ and Hettie’s part in all this, see the section on the ‘Beast of Dunballan’ in the next chapter.

Reading this, Sally skipped ahead to the relevant section in the next chapter. What she read there opened her eyes. She saw how complicit everyone in Dunballan was in what was happening to David, including Jane. How complicit they were in Sally’s own suffering.

This enraged her more than anything ever had in her life, and when the initial storm of her anger had passed, it hardened into a cool, livid purpose. Without knowing it, Jane had also given Sally the answer to all of her problems.

Sally walked out of the cottage and into the nearby field. She stood by the long hedgerow and took a deep breath.

“Alright then,” she said. “Talk to me.”

There was a brief pause where nothing happened. Sally felt very self-conscious—she’d just spoken to a row of bushes. What if it really was all in her mind?

It was with a huge relief that she heard a few disparate twigs cracking beneath the hedge. The breeze came again, only this time it was stronger. It didn’t only shake the hedge’s branches, but also rippled the grass at Sally’s feet and lifted her hair. It bent the branches of the trees by the hedge and excited all the leaves beneath it.

There was no substance to the breeze. Sally did not feel the air move, she only saw the things around her in motion, including her own billowing jacket. It looked like wind but it did not feel like it. It was an entirely different phenomenon altogether.

It didn’t sound like wind either. As it intensified, it gave off a low, keening moan that started to modulate its frequency. More twigs snapped like little fire crackers going off beneath the thicket, and the leaves rattle and danced.

Sally strained her ears for a pattern. The noises of the leaves and twigs began to order themselves as though they were mimicking a tongue, teeth and lips. The varying pitch of the wind seemed to solidify into vowels, and a voice came through. The voice that Sally had heard before.

She wasn’t hallucinating, she couldn’t be. No human mind could bend these sounds into such a complex symphony. Something utterly inhuman was talking to her.

“You are not alone—not alone—not alone anymore—anymore—anymore.” Hettie said.

Sally swallowed and her eyes misted over. She blinked and a tear ran down one cheek. “Really?” she said. “I really don’t have to face this on my own now?”

“We’re here to give you—give you—give you back what the Beast—what the Beast—what the Beast has stolen.”

“You better not be lying to me,” Sally said. She bit her bottom lip and clenched her hands into fists. “Because if you are, I don’t care how old you are, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

Sally was surprised at how fierce her reaction was. An unearthly voice had addressed her. An inhuman presence beneath the bushes of the hedgerow had reached out and made contact. Yet she didn’t doubt her sanity, and she wasn’t afraid.

Instead, Sally felt something she hardly dared accept, something she hadn’t felt since moving to the remote Highland town. She felt solidarity. It had seemed, since arriving in Dunballan, that everything was against her, not just the townsfolk, freezing her out with their appropriation of David, or even the landscape and the ancient forest above the hill, but also some unseen, primal force that imposed itself on them all.

Now Sally had a strange phenomenon all of her own, something to counteract the unknown powers she was up against. One that understood her predicament and wanted to help.

“You want to take—to take—to take back your man—your man—your man.”

“And you’ll help me?”

“We will school you—school you—school you, little sister.”

“So, there is a way to fix this, to release him I mean?”

“You can release him—release him—release him, but you must never try—never try—never try to unlock him.”

Sally wondered if Hettie was giving her a warning or relationship advice. She had wanted to unlock David practically as long as she’d known him, but she’d always been afraid of the consequences.