News from Norfolk

Category: Supernatural fiction

31/10/2025

Smugglers’ Rest

Katy was more or less the last person I’d have expected to run into while queuing for the ATM tucked away behind the drinks section in our tiny village shop. As she mimed exaggerated amazement, rushing to kiss me loudly on both cheeks — and, in doing so shoved poor old Mrs Wigglesworth out of the way, so that she had to brace herself against cases of cut-price lager —I reflected that I probably hadn’t seen Katy in real life since someone else’s half-forgotten wedding back in the mid 1990s, if not before. 

Seeing Katy in the media was, of course, something else altogether. As a sort of comms person and all-around fixer for one of our better known and, at least in electoral terms and until relatively recently, one of our more successful political parties, there had been times over recent years when Katy could be glimpsed almost daily in the background of prime ministerial walkabouts, press conferences and, not infrequently, resignation announcements. 

Toby and I, recalling her all too well from university days, used to laugh about this. Governments rose and fell — Katy, with her undentable enthusiasm and utter lack of shame, endured. 

And now here she was, standing in the Coop, tall and thin and antic, laughing gaily at me as I helped Mrs Wigglesworth pick up her far-scattered shopping, filling the air around her with wafts of some expensive modern scent resembling no flower that ever bloomed on earth, taking the opportunity to push ahead of me and take a great fist-full of notes out of the ATM before we resumed our conversation outside on the little lane.

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29/10/2025

The Gargoyle

“What — what is it, exactly?” asked Pamela, her voice suddenly hoarse. Having glimpsed the thing on the floor, she recoiled from it. Yet at the same time, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” replied Liam, slightly crouched, hands on his thighs, still struggling to catch his breath. “It’s fu —” 

And then there was a pause, although whether this was because Liam was still gasping — or, possibly, because he suddenly remembered that he was standing in the sacristy of the church, hence rapidly self-censored — remains unclear. 

“It’s — it’s flipping, flipping heavy!”

“It’s also quite remarkably dusty.” This was Magnus. Magnus, at any rate, was his name, although everyone in the village called him the Colonel behind his back. 

On that particular October morning, Magnus happened to be wearing a pinafore, and carrying a dusting-cloth. It was this, perhaps, rather than his habit of taking charge of problematic situations, that caused him to bend down. Using the cloth, carefully and methodically, he cleared away thick cobwebs from the item at their feet. 

From the door to the steps leading up to the room over the chancel, there came a draught of cold, damp air, and with it a musty smell, redolent of unused places, darkness and very great age. 

Pamela shivered. With bony hands she drew her mauve cardigan more tightly around her, and pushed an errant strand of grey hair back into her untidy bun. Turning, she closed the door perhaps more emphatically than she had intended. “That’s better,” she said to no one in particular, as if to justify the loud noise, although in truth her action had made very little difference, at least as far as the musty smell was concerned.

The men, meanwhile, were still regarding the object on the ground. Now that Magnus had scraped away the largest and most insistently sticky of the cobwebs, the large block of stone was, at least, a little easier to examine. 

“Is it a sort of water-spout?” hazarded Liam. “Look, you can see it has a mouth, there. Well, a sort of a mouth. But what’s that?”

“It’s a horrid old thing!” pronounced Pamela, fastidiously. She grimaced. “Why did you bring it all the way down from the tower? You’ll only have to take it back up again.”

Magnus, in contrast, was transparently delighted at the discovery. The history of his parish church was almost his favourite thing about it. Ignoring Pamela, as he so often did, he thumped Liam on the back, causing the much younger man to catch his breath. “By Jove, you’re right, you know. It’s a gargoyle! Well done for spotting it up there, Liam. Good lad!” 

Liam, though, was still face-to-face with the thing on the floor, his strangely innocent-looking eyes exploring every inch of its surface, trying to figure it all out. “What is it, though? I mean, what’s it supposed to be?”

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04/10/2025

An Old House in the Fens

“A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes” — Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

“I suppose what I mean,” said Edmund, rather slowly — he was selecting his words carefully, conscious of the need, even with Silvia, to avoid blatant discourtesy — “is that the Fens don’t seem like your sort of place. There isn’t anything very enchanted about the Fens, is there? 

“Maybe it’s to do with the flatness, or the straight lines, or all that industrialised, obviously hugely useful, but also totally charmless agriculture?  

“Oh, you’re going to tell me, I expect, that there were all sorts of fascinating and extraordinary things that once happened here. And if there’s anyone who can take those long-ago things and weave them into something magical, it’s obviously you, not me. That’s why you’re the novelist, and I’m just a barrister! 

“But even you have to admit, surely, that if there was ever anything magical about the Fens, all of that has totally gone now? It’s all just so — well, so ordinary. You know what I mean — everything that I saw on the drive up from London — that ugly new spill-over housing — ghastly Peterborough — the dead-straight roads — those huge boring fields, the flat horizon, the ditches —” 

Realising, not before time, that his oratory was working itself free from grammatical coherence, Edmund wisely returned to his basic point. 

“The Fens just don’t seem like your sort of place, somehow. You’re all about the romantic things — dreams, magic, poetry. You always have been! But if there were ever a landscape written in hopeless, charmless, utterly lumpen prose, surely that’s the Fens?” 

Outside — and, to a lesser extent, inside too, because the old house was still very much a neglected, mistreated, rotting wreck — the rain streamed down, pouring off the huge, sagging Collyweston roof in erratic eddies, sending sharp shudders through the leaves of the beech trees beyond the tall crooked windows, pooling in what had once been the low part of the long, tangled garden, until it made for itself the start of a sodden little lake. It was dark out, too. Although the clock at the Abbey down the road had only just struck noon, the leaden sky made it seem far later. 

Or was the house always like that? Was it always so dark in here?

“You’re very quiet at the moment,” prompted Edmund, after an interval. “Sorry, I hope you didn’t take that the wrong way. You know me — you can see right through me, you always could, so there’s no point not being honest with you. And I know you’ll make something amazing of this place, too. 

“I just don’t understand what you see in the Fens! Heaven knows, there are plenty of other old houses in all sorts of places — the nice parts of Cornwall, the Sussex Downs, even the North Norfolk coast, as far as that goes — with plenty of history and character and all the rest. Surely you could have found something there instead? 

“Yet here you are, in a dying market town surrounded by acres of ugly new-built sprawl, set out in the middle of nowhere, without so much as a hill or a coast within an hour’s drive. And what have you got by way of compensation? Piles of sugar-beet. Potatoes. Sewage works, and the odd light industrial unit. So many straight, weed-filled, probably foetid-smelling, mosquito-infested ditches!

“Oh, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. You always do. I just don’t see it yet. Help me. Help me, Silvia! What do you see in this place? Why, Silvia, are you here?”

Silvia, however, far from being offended, simply fixed her old friend with an apparently furious glare — which dissolved, after a few moments, into a warm smile, then a giggle, then a tinkling, tolerant, wholly affectionate laugh. 

Silvia had known Edmund for more than four decades — since they were both children, in fact. He had always been like this. So had she. This was why they both found, so many years later, a kind of obscure and necessary comfort in these admittedly very occasional, still very welcome meetings. 

No, there was no point in being cross at Edmund. Silvia uncurled herself from the rather battered plastic garden chair in which she was sitting, rose and, scooping up a cafetière from an inverted milk carton functioning as a table, shared out between Edmund and herself the last of the coffee. And then, at least, she spoke.

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