THE BLACK THURRICK
I could see Holmes doing his best to mask his scepticism. In his view, ghosts did not exist, nor any other form of paranormal phenomenon. He was adamant that that which purported to be otherworldly would, when subjected to proper analysis, invariably be exposed as a misapprehension of the data, a hitherto undiscovered natural occurrence, or a downright falsehood. As far as he was concerned, the bright, hard light of empiricism could disperse all shadows.
I myself was less confident when it came to such matters. To me there seemed plenty of room in this world for mysteries that science and logic could not explain. Human understanding only reached so far before it ran up against the ineffable and the irrational, and without that extra, unknown dimension, life would truly be a poor, drab affair.
At any rate, where Miss Allerthorpe’s words served to have no effect upon Holmes other than to cause him to purse his lips, they sent a small chill up my spine.
“With regard to the ghost,” she said, “perhaps I overstated when I said I am being haunted by it. I have not personally experienced any of the various manifestations that might lead one to conclude that a revenant walks the corridors of Fellscar Keep. There have been reports from several of the servants, however, concerning inexplicable noises in the castle’s east wing at night. Thuds, bangs and suchlike. Strange breezes, too, that extinguish candle flames like a puff of breath. I do not frequent that part of the building, so cannot attest to any of this first-hand.”
“The east wing is where your mother took her own life,” said Holmes. “I imagine it holds negative associations for you.”
“Exactly. There is little call for me to go there anyway. It is a somewhat remote corner, far from the usually inhabited sections of the castle. Only during the Christmas family get-together, when we are overrun by houseguests, are its rooms occupied. For most of the year it lies, as it were, fallow.”
“The question, I suppose, is whose ghost it might be. How long have these manifestations, as you call them, been occurring?”
“For several months now. Since spring at least, if not earlier.”
“I am hesitant to suggest this, but might the spectral shade conceivably be that of your late mother?”
Miss Allerthorpe nodded. It was apparent that this unhappy thought had already occurred to her. “Hence it is fair to say that I am being haunted by it, even if I have not seen it with my own eyes. What if it is my mother? What if Mama’s restless departed spirit has returned to the very place where she drew her last breath?”
“Strictly speaking, your mother drew her last breath in the lake, not in the east wing.”
“Holmes!” I rebuked him.
“I apologise, Miss Allerthorpe,” my friend said with a small bow. “I am a stickler for accuracy, but I appreciate that in this instance my comment may have seemed poorly judged.”
The young woman tendered a forgiving nod. “In any case, I have no desire to meet the ghost. Would you, in my shoes?”
“What about this ‘creature from nightmares’, then? Have you had an encounter with that?”
“Yes,” Miss Allerthorpe said firmly. “Let me ask you, sirs, has either of you heard of the Black Thurrick?”
I shook my head. Holmes did likewise.
“There is no reason why you should have, I suppose,” Miss Allerthorpe said. “London lies many miles from Yorkshire, and what I am talking about is very much a regional thing, confined principally to the East Riding. The Black Thurrick is, one might say, the dark antithesis of Father Christmas. It is an entity that appears only at yuletide, but unlike Father Christmas, the Black Thurrick is evil.”
“What has it done to earn such a reputation?” said Holmes.
“According to the tales Mama used to tell, the Black Thurrick punishes children who have behaved badly during the course of the year. It replaces the presents they were due to receive from Father Christmas with clusters of birch twigs.”
“That is hardly evil. Mischievous, perhaps, but not evil.”
“It is the least of it. Legend also says that the Black Thurrick steals infants from their homes. If parents do not leave out food for it on their front doorstep on Christmas Eve – a loaf of bread, perhaps, or a handful of vegetables – they will wake up to find their children gone the next morning, never to be seen again. The Black Thurrick will have shinned down the chimney and stolen the babes from their beds while they slept. It stuffs them into the sack it carries on its back and scurries off to its underground lair, where it eats them at its leisure.”
“I stand corrected. An anthropophagous, child-abducting monster is, indeed, very much the epitome of evil.” The hint of facetiousness in Holmes’s voice was perceptible to me but not, I thought, to Miss Allerthorpe.
“On many a dark winter’s night, Erasmus and I would sit by the hearth while my mother told us about the Black Thurrick,” she said. “She was a Yorkshirewoman born and bred and had been raised on a diet of local folklore. The county abounds with it, the East Riding most of all. There is the Gypsey Race river, whose waters are said to flow only when calamity is about to strike the nation. There is the Rudston Monolith, a mysterious ancient standing stone reckoned by some to be a portal to the fairy realm. There are numerous reports of werewolves, dragons and phantom hounds, and once, almost a century ago, a meteorite fell to earth near Wold Newton during a thunderstorm.”
“Nothing too preternatural about that last example,” said Holmes.
“Yes, but the meteorite’s glowing journey through the sky had a queer effect upon the passengers of a stagecoach below, who fell into a swoon and came round afterward with no recollection at all of anything that had happened. The Black Thurrick is yet another of these legends from the area, and is the one that has left the strongest impression upon me. Mama would portray the creature in such vivid terms. Its long, gangling limbs. Its bright white eyes. Its coal-black skin, darkened by chimney soot. Its sinister, loping gait. The sack upon its back, which writhes as its living contents fight vainly to break free.”
Miss Allerthorpe’s descriptive powers seemed every bit on a par with her mother’s. I was easily able to conjure up an image of this horrid demonic being in my mind’s eye, and although I was safe in the confines of Baker Street, in the heart of the greatest city in all the world, bulwarked by modern civilisation for ten miles in every direction, I could not suppress a small shiver.
“Whenever Mama told us about the Black Thurrick,” she went on, “I would experience a thrill of fear and reaffirm my resolve to be well-behaved. Sometimes, during Advent, as Christmas loomed, I would have nightmares about it. I would dream that the creature was slithering down the chimney to kidnap me, and would awaken in a cold sweat, panic-stricken. I took to placing an offering of food outside the castle for the Thurrick every Christmas Eve, to ward it off. In this endeavour my mother assisted me. I doubt she believed the Black Thurrick was real, but she encouraged my fancies. Mama was all in favour of her children developing their imaginations, and read to us extensively from the classics when she was not filling our heads with folklore. It is to her that I owe my love of literature and in particular of poetry.”
“Did they disappear?” I enquired. “The offerings you left for the Black Thurrick?”
“A valid question,” remarked Holmes.
“They did indeed, Doctor. At the time, this seemed to me concrete proof of the Black Thurrick’s existence. With hindsight, I am inclined to think that my mother simply retrieved the food and returned it to the kitchen once I had gone to bed.”
“A no less valid answer,” said Holmes. “I am to take it, then, Miss Allerthorpe, that the Black Thurrick has now incontrovertibly graced Fellscar Keep with its presence.”
“One morning a little over a week ago, I went out for a walk. It was a fine, clear day and I felt the urge to stretch my legs. There is a paved causeway some twenty yards long, connecting the castle to the lake shore. It serves as a drive, and at its shore end stands a gateway. As I passed through this, with the intent of taking a stroll through the woods nearby, I noticed an object lying in the snow at the foot of one of the gateposts. It was a small bundle of twigs.”
“Birch twigs?”
“I did not identify them as such immediately. At first glance, they were just twigs to me. They were bound with string, and clearly had been left there by someone. Curious, I picked them up to examine them. When I realised which species of tree they came from, that was when I made the connection in my head.”
“The Black Thurrick.”
“The Black Thurrick,” she confirmed. “Well, Mr Holmes, I dropped that bundle as though it were suddenly red hot. My heart started racing. I looked around, feeling both fearful and foolish. I half expected to see the Thurrick, perhaps peering out at me from the woods. At the same time I kept reminding myself the creature was merely a figment of fantasy. ‘You are a grown woman, Eve,’ I chided myself. ‘Such things as the Black Thurrick do not exist.’ Suffice to say, there were no eyes upon me. No sinister being lurked close by. There were just the trees, the whisper of the wind through the bare branches, the cawing of rooks – nothing out of the ordinary. I nerved myself to pick up the bundle of twigs again and hurled it as far as I could into the woods.”
“Who do you think might have put the twigs there?” I asked.
“I decided it must have been local children,” Miss Allerthorpe replied. “There are a number of scallywags in Yardley Cross, semi-feral little tykes born to inattentive parents. Yardley is the nearest town to Fellscar, only three miles distant – I say town, but it is barely more than a village – and I sometimes see those children out by the lakeside, in a gaggle. The castle seems to hold a fascination for them. They are on our land and know they should not be there, and they dare one another to approach as close to the causeway as possible before running away. Their antics are harmless, and all I could think was that the birch twigs were a prank perpetrated by them. They, like me, will have heard of the Black Thurrick. Perhaps they were sending a message. Perhaps they consider us Allerthorpes to be undeserving of Christmas gifts, for some reason.”
“Your conclusion strikes me as eminently logical,” Holmes said. “A childish prank seems the most plausible explanation. Tell me, were there footprints in the snow around the gatepost?”
“Several sets, as I recall.”
“Had snow fallen recently?”
“Not for three or four days.”
“And in that time, I presume a number of people must have passed to and fro through the gate.”
“Servants make the journey into Yardley Cross at least once a day, to fetch groceries and other supplies. My father and my uncle often go out shooting, too.”
“A pity. Footprints in snow can speak volumes, but in this case, in the absence of a single set of distinctive tracks, they would seem to have little to tell us.”
“I curtailed my walk anyway, and returned indoors,” said Miss Allerthorpe. “I had rather lost my enthusiasm for exercise. Then, the very next morning, Erasmus came down to breakfast with a bundle of birch twigs in his hand. He brandished them irritably and demanded to know who had left them on the window ledge outside his bedroom. My father replied that nobody could have, because Erasmus’s bedroom is on the first floor. ‘Are you proposing that one of us scaled the wall to deposit a bunch of twigs outside your window?’ Papa scoffed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, boy!’ I, for my part, was dumbfounded.”
“Had you told anyone about the twigs you found the previous day?”
“No. I hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. I was a little ashamed by my reaction, to be honest, and was rather hoping to forget the whole incident. Moreover, if the culprits were children from Yardley Cross, as I believed, I did not want to get them in trouble. My father would take it greatly amiss, and would probably go out and horsewhip them the next time he saw them. However, the sight of another set of birch twigs in my brother’s hand utterly undid me. Even as Raz and Papa exchanged words hotly – one adamant that somebody had placed the twigs outside his window, the other adamant that such a thing was impossible – I found myself in a sort of partial faint, feeling at one remove from all the fuss and vexation around me. I must have said something, because all at once I realised that every pair of eyes at the table was fixed upon me. ‘What’s that, Eve?’ Uncle Shadrach said.”
“Uncle Shadrach?” said Holmes. “Would this be the same uncle you mentioned a moment ago? The one who goes shooting with your father?”
“Yes. Papa’s younger brother. He is resident at Fellscar, along with his wife Olivia, their daughter Kitty and her husband Fitzhugh.”
“Erasmus answered Shadrach’s question for me. ‘Eve uttered the words “the Black Thurrick”,’ he said. ‘I distinctly heard her. And in truth, that had not occurred to me, but now I see it. Yes. My goodness. These are birch twigs. Who else leaves a bundle of birch twigs outside a house but the Black Thurrick?’ There was a discomfited frown on his face. Raz remembered as well as I did Mama’s stories and was reliving the eerie dread those tales had engendered in us.
“‘The Black Thurrick?’ my father ejaculated. ‘What preposterousness is this? Everyone knows that’s just superstitious claptrap! Give me that.’ So saying, he snatched the bundle of twigs from my brother’s grasp, strode over to the fire and tossed it onto the flames. Twigs and string burned to cinders in a trice.
“As you may imagine, I was thoroughly discombobulated throughout the rest of that day. No longer could I pretend to myself that this was the handiwork of children. Some other agency was involved, and if not the Black Thurrick, then what?
“The next morning, I went to my study. I am fortunate enough to have a little room of my own where I keep my books and where, when the mood takes me, I write poetry at my desk. It is my refuge. On that day, however, its sanctity was breached, for when I got there I discovered, to my horror, that there was a bundle of twigs perched on the window ledge, just as there had been outside Erasmus’s bedroom.
“I’m not embarrassed to admit that I screamed. Erasmus heard and came running. I was beside myself with fear. He held me until my shudders subsided, uttering soothing words in my ear, but I could tell that he, too, was alarmed. Plucking up his courage, he opened the casement and shoved the bundle of twigs off the ledge with a sweep of his hand. They tumbled into the snowdrift below the window, vanishing from view.
“I told Erasmus about the first bundle of twigs I had found by the gate. ‘Three times, now, Raz,’ I said. ‘Three times birch twigs have been left at the castle. Who is doing this to us? Who hates us so much that they would conduct this sinister campaign?’
“‘I do not know, Eve,’ replied he. ‘But one thing is certain. It is not the Black Thurrick. There is no Black Thurrick.’ He did not sound any too convinced by his own statement, however, and I was little comforted.
“I remained in a feverish state all day and, fearing I would not sleep that night, took chloral hydrate at bedtime. I dropped off straight away, but then at some point during the small hours I snapped wide awake. Moonlight was streaming in through the window, bright enough almost to read by. I realised I had fallen asleep so swiftly that I had neglected to close the curtains. I got out of bed to remedy the oversight. As I began drawing the curtains, movement outside caught my eye.
“My bedroom, Mr Holmes, faces outward from the castle. It has a triple aspect, the main set of windows looking northward over the lake. Currently the lake is frozen over. Did I mention that?”
“You did not,” said Holmes. “Now I am the wiser.”
“Upon its icy white expanse, I spied a figure. A spindly, dark figure, picking its way across the frozen surface. A figure bent almost double, with a heavy sack upon its back.”
Miss Allerthorpe’s voice lowered to a hush.
“Mr Holmes,” she said. “I knew, in that moment, just what I was looking at. It could surely be none other than the Black Thurrick itself.”
