The Well

The summer we moved into Riverbank Cottage the Kennet dried up.  Stranded creatures clustered in shrinking pools.  As the heat continued unabated, the last water evaporated and the cracking, stony river bed began to sparkle again with flapping, dying fish.

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Rob and I paid it little mind as we were busy restoring our new home.  A previous generation of occupants had done their best to modernise the interior of the seventeenth century thatched building: squaring corners and boarding and cladding over features. 

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Really it was Rob who did most of the work, and he threw himself into it.  We had both abandoned our successful London careers in the choppy wake of the financial crisis, clutching sizeable payouts as we ran for the country.  He was the older, more practical one, never more happy than when measuring, sanding or sawing.  He seemed to retreat to a calm inner place, a world of precise physical challenges, quite at odds with the messy intangibles of people management which he’d hated.

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While he toiled, I earned what I could as a freelance copywriter for less than glamorous local clients: brochures for an industrial fan company in Swindon, web copy for the local Catholic school.  At first I sat trying to write at the kitchen table while Rob hammered off pine cladding but eventually the noise and dust drove me out to the churchyard of St Luke’s next door, which became my summer office.

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I loved the peace and the way that life seemed to congregate and teem in the churchyard in the shape of squirrels, birds and flowers.  I wondered if it was something in the soil.  

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I got to be on chatting terms with the vicar, Reverend Michael Baldwin, a pleasantly unobtrusive old man who was happy for me to use the facilities with no spiritual purchase necessary.

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One morning, sat in the shade of a yew tree with my laptop on my knees, watching the blue-tits flitting between the gravestones, I saw Rob wave from the doorway of the cottage.  I pulled myself to my feet and headed back, the sun beating down on my bare shoulders.  There was a stir of breeze and the acrid waft of rotting fish carried from the river bed.

“What’s up?” I called as I creaked open the iron gate.

“I’ve found something,”  he said, “you’re not going to believe this.”

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He led me inside, through the low cellar door under the stairs and down the worn stone steps.  It was only the second time I had been down in the three months we had lived there.  It was blissfully cool after the relentless heat, the only light filtering through a little dirty window flush to the ceiling.  It smelt like old dirt and mouldy dust sheets.

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Rob had been using the cellar as a storage room for his materials, and had, typically, stacked everything neatly against the walls in perfect order.  This left the broad flagstones open and clear, and even in the dim light I saw at once why he had called me in.

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One of the flagstones had been lifted up, in fact looked like it was hinged on the under-side, revealing a circular stone chute which descended straight down into darkness.

“It’s a well!” I said, “how did you find it?”

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He showed me the top of the raised flagstone, “Look,” he said, “there’s an iron ring embedded in the stone.  It was covered by dust but I was having a bit of a clean up and realised it was a kind of trapdoor.  It was a bugger to lift.”

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We stared down into the pit.  I squinted to try and make out the bottom.  It seemed to exert its own gravitational pull and I had a sudden wave of dizziness.  I grabbed Rob’s sleeve to steady myself.

There were the rusty remnants of an iron bracket screwed into the stone, “I reckon there was a winch here they’d lower a bucket down on,” Rob said.

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“Why have a well inside the house, when the river runs at the bottom of the garden?” I said.

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He shrugged.  Then he took a ten pence piece from his pocket and dropped it down the hole.

“Make a wish,” I whispered.

It fell for some time, but finally there was a hollow, echoing splash in the blackness.  The reverberations faded to something that sounded like a whispered hiss.

“I guess there’s water down there even when the river dries up.  Maybe there’s an aquifer or something under the house.  It is strange isn’t it?” he said.

“I don’t like it,” I said with a shudder, “cover it up again.  It’s not safe.  I don’t want you stepping back with a bag of cement and falling down there.  You’d be killed.”

He nodded, still staring down the pit, transfixed.

“What did you wish for?”

He didn’t respond.

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The summer faded and browned into autumn; heavy rain resurrecting and then swelling the river.  

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I moved back from the churchyard to the kitchen.  I kept the doors shut and damp towels under the doors to try and block the dust and noise.  Getting a decent signal on my phone was a nightmare. 

Rob worked tirelessly through the turning point where the modern fittings were scraped away and the true nature of the building revealed itself.  

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It was nerve-racking.  Some of the underlying walls were rough historic lime plaster and animal hair, needing work to make them structurally sound (we crossed our fingers that the hair wasn’t old enough to be infected with anthrax).  The electrics were a potentially lethal rats’ nest of loose connections and perished wires.  The lead plumbing was likely toxic.  As we called in the help of specialists to fix things our budget whittled away.  I had to take on more work.

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There were lovely surprises too - a connecting door between the snug and the kitchen which had been covered on one side by plasterboard and on the other by kitchen units.  Under the floorboards we found a tin poster advertising “Tommy’s Golden Ale” with a cheery First World War soldier and nurse both knocking one back .  There was a small fireplace in one of the upstairs bedroom complete with a rusting cast iron grate behind which in the ashes we found fragments of a burned diary.  The only legible script in the brittle tatters was a date 14th September 1933 and the words ‘She’s gone.’

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I wondered at the words and about all the generations who had lived and maybe died in the cottage, resolving to visit the library to see if there was any census records which might be interesting.   I wondered if my new friend the Reverend knew anything of the cottage’s past.

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One thing I did notice as the days shortened was that Rob began to spend more time in the cellar.  With the weather turning he had relocated many of his tools from the somewhat leaky shed in the garden down there, and had rigged up a light.  It seemed to be a comforting space for him and I figured that he had found his own, somewhat literal, man-cave.  Sometimes I heard his lowered voice carrying up the stairs, as he talked on his phone to his mate Simon back in London.

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I spoke to the Reverend Michael one afternoon after wading to the church in my wellies.  After some persuasion and a box of chocolate ginger biscuits it turned out he did know some stories about the cottage.  It had been in the same family for years, centuries, he said, until between the wars when something had happened.  There had been some trouble.  The wife had disappeared, everyone thought she had run off with someone, and the husband ended up being arrested and tried for murder.  In the end he’d saved the police a job and hanged himself in his cell.  She was never found and it was never proved what had happened.  

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I thought about the fragment of diary.

I worried about the well.  The flagstone hatch was lowered now but I didn’t want Rob messing around with it.  There was something about having that deep pit beneath our home made me uneasy.  I nagged at him to keep it covered, which he took with the same calm annoyance that he increasingly seemed to treat most of my attempts to start conversation.

His mood had changed since we had left London.  I worried that after the first blush of freedom, the reality of not being the bread-winner was telling on him.  He had become more irritable, closed off.  He was so absorbed in his work and the pressure of our spiralling renovation costs was obviously a worry for him.  At some indefinable point we had stopped sharing our anxieties with each other.  These days he was more likely to retreat to do yet more work in the cellar.

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I think I knew for a while before the rains came that something wasn’t right.

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We had just replaced the thatch in time.  It poured for days, filling the Kennet till it burst its banks and flooded the churchyard and our own little garden.  We watched anxiously from the porch as the water spilled across the lawn, turning the vegetable patch into a paddy field.  The church yard which stood lower than us, was completely submerged, the gravestones poking out of the water.  We helped the Reverend Michael put sandbags around the church door.  He seemed quite used to it.  

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By some miracle the flood stopped half-way up the garden path and the cottage was spared.

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We were housebound for a few days.  On the second evening I heard a shout from the cellar and I hurried down, panicking that Rob had had an accident.  When I reached the bottom of the steps I saw that he had raised the hatch.  He was staring, exultant into the well with a torch.

“Look!” he said.  

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I craned my neck to look down the pit, edging my feet closer to get a better look, painfully aware of my centre of gravity tipping.  There was water visible now in the well, only three or so feet from the lip.  I could see our faces reflected in it, bobbing and shifting.

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“The rains must have soaked through,” Rob said, “ We’ve got our own internal water supply!”

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I didn’t know whether the water made me feel better or worse about the well.  There was something that made me feel queasy.  “You don’t think that it’s undermining the house do you?”

“No, it’s been here for years.  Fancy trying some?  I have.”

I thought about where the water had been, rats, the submerged graveyard next door and declined.  

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For some reason the water fascinated him.  I brought him a beer down later and found him sat cross legged at the edge of the well staring into its depths, smiling. 

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He looked up and I thought for a moment that he had been crying.

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It was the same night that I saw her for the first time.

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Rob and I were in bed together.  He had been asleep for an hour or so but I couldn’t settle.  The light of the Kindle was hurting my eyes and so I finally put it down and lay listening to the rain beat against the window in uneven squalls. 

After a life of metropolitan living I still wasn’t used to the darkness of the countryside.  In the absence of a moon or stars the bedroom had melted into an undefined void in which I floated at the centre.  Only the stale warmth of Rob’s breath on my face anchored me in reality.

Then I heard something out in the corridor, a distinct, slow shuffle, as if a wet bag was being slowly dragged along the boards.

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I froze, trying to still any movement, straining my ears and trying to throw my attention to the other side of the door, to figure out what was making that noise.  There it was again, moving away from the bedroom.  It was not footsteps.  What was it?

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I thought about waking Rob, but I was lost in the darkness, absorbed with the noise.  I groped for my phone on the bedside table, upsetting the glass of water that stood there and splashing my pillow.  The acid yellow light came on my phone as I picked it up and the shadows in the room sprang back to reveal the comforting walls, the bed and my sleeping husband.  

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The shuffling noise came again, further away now.

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I swung my legs out of bed and, using the meagre light of the phone found my way to the door.  I opened it slowly and carefully.

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Out in the corridor it was darker, a spongy blackness that seemed to absorb the screen’s thin light.  I fiddled for the torch app and as I did I heard the noise again.  Louder, closer.  I stabbed at the torch icon with my fingers but it wouldn’t work.  Instead I flipped the phone over, blinded by its glare and tried to see what was making the noise.

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Something was crawling in the shadows towards me, a thin, wet, naked figure with limbs like broken sticks.  It wheezed with gurgling, perforated gasps.  

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I shot back into the bedroom and closed the door with a slam, falling against it and sinking to the ground, bracing my weight against the wood.

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Rob turned on the bedroom light and I found myself, night dress pulled up around my knees, sprawled on the rug.  

“Are you alright?” he said, groggy.

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He turned on all the lights and walked with me around the cottage, as you might do with a child who has had a bad dream, to prove that there was nothing.  There had been a leak somewhere in the new thatch, drips of water had left pools of water on the boards, but there was no sign of any intruder. 

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The only place he didn’t look was the cellar.

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I refused to be left alone in the cottage after that, and certainly not at night.  I think Rob thought that I was starting to lose the plot.  Without local friends, or a break from each other to go to the office we started to get on each other’s nerves. 

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I would have like to row, to get it out of our systems, but Rob hated conflict, preferring to bottle up and simmer.  He became more withdrawn and effectively moved into the cellar.  I heard him beneath my feet on an evening while I read or watched TV, talking and laughing on his phone or moving things around.

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Then one night he was called away.  His mother was sick, we had been to visit her in hospital in Bristol the previous week and we had a call from his sister that things had changed for the worse.  I offered to come with him, pleaded, but he’d have none of it.

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“I want to be on my own with her,” he said, “please.”

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So he went, taking the car and leaving me stranded.

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The first thing I did was turn all the lights on around the house.  Then I turned on the radio in the kitchen and the TV in the living room.  I called my friend Claire in London for a chat but she was out at the theatre.  I missed the theatre so much.

I cooked a ready-made fish pie and ate it from the foil container.  I drank most of a bottle of Pinot Grigio while half watching the TV.  I was jumpy, my eyes flitting to the corners of the room whenever the shadows flickered.  I didn’t want to go to bed.  I didn’t want to stay up.  My shoulders ached from the tension.

I opened another bottle of wine.

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Finally I began to relax a bit.  I thought about how stupid I’d been.  What a big baby being left alone in a house and being scared because of some silly dream.  There’s only one way to deal with fear, I thought, and that’s to face it.  I thought about a presentation I’d had to give at work, years ago, how I’d dreaded it for weeks, and then when I’d done it it was fine.  Absolutely fine.  This was the same.  It was the unknown that was frightening.  It’s just a stupid old house, I thought.  The only way to deal with fear is to face it.  

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I knocked back the rest of my glass of wine and went down into the cellar.

It had been weeks and the rigged up light was much dimmer than I remembered. 

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The stairs snaked down into a gauzy half darkness.  As I descended, steadying myself against the cold, damp wall I smelled again that musty, mouldering odour.

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I had my phone ready this time, torch lit.  Its beam skittered over the steps and cast a pool of light across the flagged floor as I reached the bottom.

Rob’s building materials were neatly stacked against the walls.  A camp chair was set up in the centre of the room by the hatch to the well, which was open.  

I looked around, tracing the corners with the beam of light, but there was nothing untoward.  It was just a cellar.  I stepped closer to the edge of the well and, after a moment’s hesitation, cast the light down into the water.  Although the rains had eased the water was still high, a few feet from the lip of the well.  It was black, murky, but still.

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I let out a sigh of relief and whispered to myself, “See?  You’re just an idiot.”

I checked my phone to see if Rob had any update from the hospital.  There was no signal.  Not even a single bar.  No reference to a network at all.

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The cellar was completely dead to phone signal.

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I thought for a moment.  Rob was on the same network as me.  We had talked about going onto separate ones in case either went down, so we’d always have a chance of coverage, but had never gotten round to it.

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So how had he managed to phone from down here?  Had he even been on his phone?  Who had he been talking to?

I heard the front door slam above me and heard keys land on the kitchen table.  I turned to the steps.

“Rob?” I called “Is that you?”

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A cold wet hand closed around my right ankle.  

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I didn’t scream.  Its grip tightened, long nails digging into the bone.  I just stood there, not daring to look round.  In my peripheral vision I saw something filthy and sopping, with long tangled hair, broken limbs arrayed around it like a half crushed spider, half emerged from the well.  I felt icy breath on my legs. 

Clammy, rotting fingers began to claw their way up my calf and across the back of my knee.

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I broke, screaming, shaking my leg as if to rid it of a dog.  The grip tightened, hurting me.  I gave a final wrench and got free.  I ran for the steps only to find Rob silhouetted at the top of them.

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“You’ve met her then,” he said in a low sad voice,  “I’m so sorry it had to happen like this.  I’ve been wanting to tell you, but she wouldn’t let me.”

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I ran at him, pushing past.  He didn’t make any attempt to stop me.

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I took the keys from the kitchen table and span, wild eyed to see him step down into the darkness of the cellar and close the door behind him.

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I took the keys and ran.

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I drove for a few hours until I ran out of

petrol and the car loped to halt somewhere in the midlands, outside a retail park.  I called Claire again and she came to get me, arriving just before lunch, taking me for a hot drink and some food, and then back with her to London.

I never went back to the cottage, or saw Rob again.  

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Claire got the police to call but there was no sign of him in the house.  Everything was as I had left it except that the flagstone hatch to the well was closed.