Beyond Here Lies Nothing - By Gary McMahon Page 0,59

in May. What he found there (here?) enraged him. The people of the village had embraced ancient rites and rituals and even created new ones of their own – normal pagan beliefs had been supplanted by something stranger, like a mutated, nameless religion. They prayed to unnamed deities and Mowbray claimed that they offered up children – twins were thought to be the most prized – as a sacrifice. The children were stabbed to death at the centre of a grove of oak trees, their blood left to soak into the earth. A path of black leaves is said to have led the way from the village to the grove.3

Mowbray apparently noted many strange sights:4 visions of a tall, grey structure at the centre of the grove of trees, birds that hummed and flew backwards, a young girl with multicoloured wings, and animals that he could not name – a horse with a single truncated horn, like a mutilated unicorn, dogs with the faces of humans, a large, bloated snake that smelled of offal and was drawn to the site of the bloodshed. He called this giant serpent the Underthing.5

Mowbray was enraged. He ordered the village cleansed. People were hung, burnt in bonfires, and quartered by his men. After the massacre,6 he and his men slept one more night in the village.

The rest is sketchy7 at best. Some say that a great number of ghostly twins appeared in the village, and others say that it was a pack of ravenous human-faced dogs. I was even told by one drunken old-timer that it was giant hummingbirds.

However it happened, Mowbray’s men were killed, their skinned bodies hung from the branches of the oaks. Only he was left alive. An envoy sent by the King arrived a few days later and found Mowbray, starving and filthy and jabbering, sitting at the centre of the grove of oaks, surrounded by the rotting, flyblown remains of his men’s bodies. He spoke about other worlds, and gateways, and secrets that should never have been disturbed. He whispered the words Croatoan and Loculus. Upon his face and body, beneath the mask and the cloak, were the buboes and postulant sores of the Plague. He had brought it here, to the place that had previously remained untouched. His spirit had polluted the sanctity of Groven, first with the sin of his banal evil, second with the blood of the villagers, and then finally with Black Death itself...

The only whisper I heard about what happened next makes little sense out of context. Apparently Terryn Mowbray stood, bowed, and started turning in a slow circle upon the ground. He disappeared as if he were sinking into the earth, corkscrewing away into infinity, chanting a single word over and over again: Loculus.8 All that was left in his place was a small mound of blackened leaves.9

The King’s envoy was imprisoned, a gibbering idiot after what he’d found. The King said he was a liar and a heretic. The man killed himself in his cell three years later.

1Groven – Grove – the Concrete Grove.

2Edward Plantagenet clearly hoped that some great and hidden knowledge would be revealed to him if he discovered why the village of Groven remained Plague free.

3Surely a metaphor?

4I could find no trace of these notes. I assume they went with him, wherever he vanished to.

5I have no idea what this means. Could it represent the nameless forces the villagers worshipped?

6There’s no record of how many victims there might have been.

7I got some of this story from obscure Fortean literature, and the rest has been told in the back rooms of certain pubs for decades, changing, like a game of Chinese Whispers, with each telling.

8Again, this word. This place. Where is it? Is it here, in the Concrete Grove? How does one find it, and how to gain access? Was this the secret knowledge King Edward, through Terryn Mowbray, was seeking?

9What’s with the black leaves again?

Marc set the notebook down next to him on the sofa. He leaned back and tilted his face up towards the ceiling, closed his eyes. It was madness. None of this could be true – it was all myth and hearsay, local legend given the kind of attention that it surely did not deserve. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. There was a large cobweb in one corner; he could see the fat black body of a spider, motionless against the white plaster ceiling. The spider seemed to be watching him.