Read by Ben Crystal
I had a Scottish friend. She was a Socialist, an intellectual. Yet at New Year, which she called Hogmanay, she was very superstitious about who she would let over her threshold for the first time after the hour had struck. I remember her turning away a dog-faced, pale-skinned orphan once. Don’t you bring your muddy paws across this threshold, she said, trying to make it sound like a joke. It was minus fifteen that winter, and the kids' yellow teeth were chattering, and he was rubbing his cold, white hands together, but he had nothing in his pocket by way of money, or of coal, and he had a thin red scarf around his throat that the wind whipped and made look like a ragged cut. When I remember Henry, I always think of that night.
He-lo-immy.
I said, you're breaking up, Henry.
Ho-don-imm. Then he came through clear and strong, and we wished each other a premature best for the New Year. He said, I've come upstairs. It's the only place I can get a decent signal. He told me the weather was cold: a starry sky and snow on the ground, but he sounded tense, and there was a whining in the background that might have been a keen wind.
Is everything OK? I asked him. You sound a little strained.
I’m great, he said. Then he said, I had a run in with the neighbour. I told him, keep your dogs under control, and he said he hasn’t got any dogs.
I wondered if this was the time to tell Henry what I’d found out, but he hadn’t finished. He said, I know damned well he's got dogs. I’ve been finding their tracks in the snow around the house for the last couple of mornings, and you can hear them howling all night long.
Henry had bought the house back in the nineties. Property prices had taken a nose-dive. It'll only be temporary, Henry said. That wasn't the point though. He loved the place. He and Miriam went up every year and stayed the summer. Easter till All Souls. I don’t think Miriam was all that fond of it, but Henry would have stayed the year round if he could. He said, maybe, if Miriam isn’t too upset about it, I'll stay over one winter on my own.
I said, just do it, while you’ve got the chance. I mean, what else was I going to say to him? I hadn't heard the story by then.
He said, why don’t you come up with me and stay for Hogmanay?
What do I want with porridge and bagpipes?
You might like a wee dram, he said.
I could get that in London, I told him.
The locals, down the pub, told me the story. Some black-shirted fascist had lived there during the nineteen thirties. He'd had a German Shepherd dog, named Adolf. That was all the rage those days, among fascists.
There was a gardener in the story. Perhaps he was some kind of leftie-intellectual, or gay, or Jewish. Well, this gardener, he subverted the dog called Adolf. He taught it to respond to the name Schicklegruber. That's what Adolf Hitler's proper name was. So when the gardener called out, hey, Schicklegruber, here, boy! the dog would come running. When he said, Schicklegruber, die for your country! the dog wouldn’t roll over. This gardener had a sense of humour; and people say the Scots are dour. He says, Schicklegruber, Die for your country, and the dog would cover its nose with its paws and whine. Isn’t that some trick?
The Highlands are bleak in winter. Cold winds howl across the heather, carrying the sting of snow. It banks up against the shadows under the pine trees and covers the log piles beneath which dogs scrape and scrape, looking for food, as if they thought the white mounds were buried corpses.
It was what they call a bothy up there, with small square windows deep-set in thick walls and the bedrooms pushed up into the roof space with crooked little garret windows, and the chimneys capped with slates, to keep those cold winds out. Henry told me it hadn't been lived in since before the second world war, because it had no running water, or sanitation, or electricity. That didn't put him off though. He said, we can do the place up, and that's what he did, though it took him a while, and they wouldn't let him change the outside because of their Scottish heritage.
They're so laid back up here, he told me, except when you want to make something better. I went up early in the new millennium. He'd been nagging me for years, and I could see he was hurt that I hadn't gone. So I went up with Bob and Doreen.
We flew to Glasgow in midsummer. You'd never have guessed. It was fifteen degrees and cloudy, and the tarmac was wet from recent rain. I said, is this the best they can do for a summer? and Bob told me I should think myself lucky.
We had a great time though, despite the weather. We stayed a week or two. I slept downstairs on a folding bed in front of the open fire. Henry put Bob and Dee in the master bedroom and took the smaller spare room for himself. I rather liked the place. Sure, it was cold and dark, but it was a proper old-fashioned Scottish house.
I looked out one night. There was a skylight in the bathroom, which you could open and stick your head out of. I'd never seen anywhere so dark. It was like being trapped in a lift with the power off, except that you could feel the distance all around you. It pressed against you, just as oppressive, as if you were trapped in it, in the darkness. And you could hear sounds. You could hear sounds that were a mile or more away: the stiff branches of the pine trees clicking and rubbing together. The sound of animals, deer I imagined, coughing in the forest. The slap of waves on the beach, which must have been a good half mile off. And you could hear closer sounds too. Like pattering feet, or breathing, and I felt the whisper of unseen wings as they flew past my face. There was no sign of any other house. There was no traffic noise. I could smell something acrid that must have been woodsmoke, but which made me think of fresh meat and congealed blood.
Yet, when I pulled my head back inside, and closed the skylight, and made sure that it was firmly locked, I got a feeling of safety like I'd never had before, as if, so long as you kept the place tight shut, nothing could get through its thick old walls to harm you.
If you go up there these days, high up on the western coast, you'll find new houses going up all over the place, huge structures, built out of glass and timber. I wouldn't feel comfortable in one of those. During the day it would be like being in a shop window whichever way you looked. And at night, when darkness fell and the wind got up, you wouldn't see a thing, only your own reflections. You'd see what anybody outside, whoever or whatever was watching, would see. You wouldn't see them, or it, until it pressed its muzzle against the pane. Unless you turned off the lights of course, and then you would see whatever was roaming around, if there were moonilight enough, for the darkenss would be on the inside with you. And you would hear nothing of what was out there, no matter how closely it had approached.
Jody has stayed there. She just loved the place, Henry said.
I never thought any more about it, till I was talking to Jody, about the time she stayed. I asked her, what did you think of the place? She said well, don't get me wrong, I had a great time up there, but the house itself, it was kind of creepy.
Creepy?
She said, you know. It had that atmosphere you get sometimes. I said, did it? She said, it certainly did? Didn't you feel it, when you stayed? Well, I couldn't say that I had, except for getting a cold shiver every time I went along the corridor to the bathroom upstairs, but they’ve got rudimentary heating up there, and no insulation and you know what Jody's like. I would have left it at that, except that I ran into Bob and Dee a couple of months later. They told me that Henry had finally decided to take himself off and stay the year round in his Scottish house. He would be spending his first New Year there in a few weeks.
I asked them, did you like the place? They said, we liked the countryside, but the house itself... Then they made sheep’s eyes at each other.
What? I asked.
Didn't you feel it? Bob asked
Feel what? I said. I remembered how relieved I had been when I shut that skylight.
In that little room we stayed in, Dee said. Well, it was, you know, creepy.
Creepy? I said. What does that mean? I had never been into either of the bedrooms.
Like someone had been ripped to death in there, Bob said.
A couple of days before New Year, the fascist had found out, about the Schicklegruber trick. He went berserk, but he didn't take it out on the gardener. He took it out on the dog and beat it to death with a spade. Then he got the gardener, who must have been feeling pretty guilty by that time, and told him to bury it in the cellar. The ground outside must have been too hard to dig.
But there isn't a cellar at the house, I said. That's because they’ve bricked it up. After they told me that, I wasn't so keen on sleeping down there, by the open fireplace, for a couple of nights, but there was no growling or scratching at the floorboards that I could hear, so after a while I gave up worrying. Besides, it was nowhere near Hogmanay. I said to Henry, have you heard what the locals are saying about this place? But Henry doesn’t go down to his local, because he brought the builders in from outside.
I should have told him then.
The internet is a wonderful thing. You can find out almost anything you want. I did a little surfing. The story of the dog was there okay, in grisly detail. The locals hadn't told me everything. Not only had the fascist guy beat the dog to death, but in the early hours of New Year’s Day, something had crept into his bedroom and attacked him in his bed and torn his throat out. That was why the place had stood empty for so long. No one in his right mind, it said, would stay there nights over Hogmanay.
Then I could hear the clock chiming, down his mobile, and Henry said, it’s striking twelve. It’s New Year’s Day! I said, Henry, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, but he said, it’ll have to wait Jimmy, I’ve got to go, they’re rattling the door down there, but Happy New Year, and he cut off.
(c) Brindley Hallam Dennis, 2013
Brindley Hallam Dennis has published the novella A Penny Spitfire (Pewter Rose Press, 2011), and a collection of short stories is available from the same publisher. He has also published That’s What Ya Get! Kowalski’s Assertions with Unbound Press in 2010, and around 100 short stories. As Mike Smith he has published poetry, plays and critical essays. He blogs at http://Bhdandme.wordpress.com/
Ben Crystal is an actor, writer, and producer. He works in TV, film and theatre, and is a narrator for RNIB Talking Books, Channel 4 and the BBC. He writes about Shakespeare while living in London and can be found online at www.bencrystal.com. His book, Sorry, I'm British! is a perfect stocking-filler and is available in all good bookshops.
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