Short Story: Defined by Sand by Jonah Jones

Jonah Jones

As they walked through the dunes of Kenfig Nature Reserve towards the Bristol Channel, Siôn, their guide, told them they were walking on top of Kenfig Town.

‘Buried by the shifting sands, centuries ago.’

‘Was anyone killed?’

‘There was no reason for anyone to die.’ His eyes darkened as he looked across the dunes. ‘It happened over years. Slowly but surely, the people gave up fighting it and moved out, but there’s a whole medieval town under our feet.’

While each of the trekkers thought about what he’d told them, one of them fell into a sand-filled hole up to her knees. Once they had pulled her out and established that she was all right, Siôn continued on his theme. ‘Happens all the time. Bits of the old buildings give way, resettle, you know.’

He watched as the sand continued to flow slowly into the depression. ‘Looks quite deep, that one. Better stick to the path. It’s getting dark. Don’t want to lose anyone.’

They moved on, obediently remaining on the path as they followed their leader, listening to the piping of the oyster-catchers over the low rumble and shoosh of the waves, never hearing the sobs and sighs from the children able to breathe the air again, never seeing the sand released towards the sky in a fountain of returning souls.

The walkers reached Sker Point as Orion took to the Southern Sky above the lacy trails of the waves. They were tired. ‘Walking on sand seems to suck the energy from you,’ one said, much to the agreement of the others. Nevertheless, Siôn set them to collecting driftwood and pitching tents before the light faded. To the Southeast were the brash entertaining lights of Porthcawl, to the Northwest, the industrial monster of Port Talbot but they set camp in the dark, wind carved dunes between the two.

‘Could be a cold one,’ he told them as he looked at the clear skies around The Hunter.

Once the fire was crackling nicely, the coffee on the brew and the sausages hissing on their sticks above the flames, he looked around the circle of faces and asked them if they wanted to hear a ghost story.

They were eager and so he settled back and began.

Daughter

‘You see the house over there? That’s Sker House. Abandoned now but it was once the home of a certain Isaac Williams who was without doubt one of the most evil people who ever lived in these parts. Immoral and sadistic, he locked up his own daughter Elizabeth because she took a fancy to a local boy and wanted to marry him. Isaac considered this boy to be an inferior and so incarcerated his own daughter lest she should continue the relationship.’

He leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘They do say that you may see her still, weeping inconsolably as she gazes out through the window. Dead though she be, The Maid of Sker still longs for her lover.’

His audience reacted accordingly with theatrical shivers and comments about how spooky or tragic that was and how things had changed since.

Siôn knew that he had them in the palm of his story-teller’s hand and loved the control it gave him. ‘And she’s not the only ghost that walks around this place,’ he added after a considered pause,

He nibbled at the samphire in his hand and then took a bite from his sausage.

‘Indeed no.’ Another nibble and bite to heighten the anticipation as he held them in thrall.

‘This evil man Isaac Williams also organised wreckers along this stretch of the water. They would set lights as if they were safety lights or the lights on ships in safe harbour, luring the unwary onto these terrible rocks, where the wicked gang would plunder the wrecks.’

He pointed to the sea. ‘They tell of a captain of one of these wrecked ships, whose sheer will-power brought him ashore to confront the wreckers and whose ghost rises up from the sea and walks to Sker House to scream at Isaac Williams whenever moon and tide conspire to bring him back.

‘One ghost born of sorrow, one of retribution.’

Ghosts

Once again, the listeners shuddered dutifully in simulated fear. Although not one of them believed in ghosts, they loved the pretence of it as they huddled around a real fire in the heart of darkness, away from the comforts they had chosen to leave behind for the duration of the trip.

‘What’s that light over there?’ one of them asked, pointing to what appeared to be a lantern in the dunes, part shielded by the marron grass, moving from side to side and flickering in the wind.

‘Shh,’ whispered Siôn, ‘maybe it’s one of the wreckers.’

There were smiles all round. No one was taken in.

‘Probably a farmer. Looking for his sheep,’ one of the group said. ‘Don’t they have salt-marsh lamb around here?’

‘Not here,’ Siôn said. ‘Along the Ogmore and the Lougher rivers, but not here. They use sheep to keep the vegetation down on the reserve, though. Highland cattle too. Keeps the grass down so that the orchids can get a grip.’

The light moved around them, flickering and dancing to the hissing rhythms of marram grass in the wind and through that sound they heard the distant eerie calls of the Cyhyraeth, the ancient harbingers of ungodly death.

Although everyone truly knew that sound came from another world, they dismissed it as the calls of vixens on heat or children trying to frighten each other. Their greater memories knew that there was another hunter stalking its prey out in the darkness.

The camp fire started to burn down and so they piled more driftwood on it, but it continued to lose strength, while the light outside the circle seemed to brighten as it fluttered and fragmented, reflected by the first moths of spring. Above the lantern, the watchers could now discern an old man’s face, sad-wrinkled by time.

The hooded and cloaked lantern carrier approached and began to prowl around the fire. Siôn told the others to form a circle facing outwards. ‘Hold hands! Keep the circle unbroken!’

Then he called out to the prowler. ‘Who are you?’

‘The one who carries the light. Will o’ the Wisp, Jack o’ Lantern, perhaps it’s the corpse candle that I bear. I cast a light upon the evil that hides itself here. Isaac Williams was consumed by it. Dowse the fire and I will come amongst you.’

The fire was burned down to near embers as Jack o’ Lantern joined the circle. His face no longer appeared old. It was as if he had stepped back a hundred years.

Placing his lantern on the ground to bring a greater light than the fire, he smiled at them all, that new light glinting from his deep-set eyes as he pushed back his hood. ‘I am also a teller of stories which may enlighten or mask the truth. It is given to me to explain why we are all gathered here.’

Not one of the circle thought it strange that they were being addressed by a creature from mythology. The purpose of this congregation was emerging from their collective sub-conscious and the storyteller could see it in their eyes.

Community

‘In the latter part of the Fifteenth Century, Kenfig was a vibrant town as important as Neath or Merthyr Tydfil. A castle, a church, a thriving community. Then the nature of the place began to impose itself upon the little civilisation that was here and the sands began to shift as if they had developed minds of their own.

The people saw their homes being inundated by the sand. They watched their crops being relentlessly buried. They prayed in the church to no avail. The restless sand continued to cover their home.

‘One day, a peripatetic priest came to town. He called himself a priest but he was of an older tradition – a wiseman. He took the Biblical tale of Abraham ordered to slay his own son by Jehovah Himself and convinced the people of the town that it was the only way.

In madness induced by fear of God, they took the first born of each family and locked them in a barn on the seaward edge of town, believing that God would protect them and therefore everything further inland.’

The soothsayer paused as he studied each of the faces around the smoky fire. ‘One of the children took upon himself to grant absolution to the others. He gave them all to God as he cursed the parents who had abandoned them to this appalling fate. “Our parents who must go to Hell…Damnéd be thy names…” I shiver as I recall that travesty of a prayer.

That curse entered their souls and gave meaning to the sand that was their doom. Their own salt tears flowed down and cemented the sand around them and they were gone from this world.

Over the many years, their bodies atrophied to dust and then emptiness, preserved as the shapes of children. So you see, there really is nothing to fear.’ He laughed. ‘Except that this nothingness is the empty shapes of children preserved in the sand and is the very source of the fear that will consume you.’

The Carrier took his lantern from one face to another.

‘It’s a terrible thing when your own children curse you. Even more terrible when you know that they have good reason to do so. And yet you continue to watch them be covered by broken stone in broken towns.

‘The rocks that wrecked the ships long before the times of Sker House were themselves crushed by the sea to make the sand that destroyed the town; the sand cursed by the ancient peoples and damned to live out that curse until the evil is resolved. These are the sands that close-bound those children, moulding their shapes into its own.’

He picked up a fistful of the sand and allowed it to flow through his fingers in a slow stream as if he were an hourglass.

‘Consumed by emptiness.’

‘Time is pinched by the clawed fingers of retribution, just as tide is pinched by the rocks, which is why you can hear them out there. You’ll never see them for they are the spaces between the sands. Would that I could bring light to the children of the murderous sands but they have no eyes. I can only speak to them.’

Lifting his head up towards the starry sky, he howled and the dread children howled in response as they closed in on the dying fire.

‘Sometimes I can see them when their surroundings have some substance – if it’s raining or misty. On star-shimmering nights I may see their footprints before the devouring sands take them into themselves.’

Rooted

The listeners realised that the sand had been blown across them as they had been fixed in obeisance to the story. Their feet were slowly becoming trapped, yet still they listened to this terrible preacher. Rooted in horror, they watched the children die.

‘You hate me because I bring illumination to your trespasses but I am to be feared even more, for my light demonstrates that your fears have substance. Yet your greatest fear should be of those you have wronged by abandonment, both then and every deathly day since. These children are vengeful.’

‘Why do they want to harm us?’ one of the circle asked.

The Watcher of Ancient Days turned to address the questioner. ‘Don’t you realise why you felt the urge to come here? Why you wanted this particular guide to bring you to this cursed place of darkness? The generations have carried this dreadful secret, hiding it from themselves this long while. You are the walking ghosts of those parents who murdered their children.’

Next, he turned to Siôn the Betrayer. ‘And you are the Wiseman, hiding behind God, the bearer of evil for those poor souls.’

The Light Bringer stood and slowly turned to look at each member of the damned. ‘Every one of you abandons the innocent every day. The hourglass has been turned and that which was empty is being filled, as the emptiness watches.’

Their minds became catatonic as the defensive structures they had built against the appalling truth were inundated, paralysing them with sorrow and guilt.

The vengeful spaces in the sand deemed that The Wiseman should be the first to go. They created a mound over his trapped body which stilled further as the sand rose up towards his head, some of it falling away from him as he shook his head in disbelief, but there was no end to the sand. It piled up and over the dreadful herald of sacrifice.

His fear-stricken congregation remained in a circle, their eyes stinging with the tears of bitter sorrow as the sand continued to form around them, entombing their bodies and reaching ever upwards to bring its own sting to their staring eyes. The last image offered to them was that of The Hunter, watching them from darkening skies that will never lighten again.

There would be a new sweep of the sand dunes, The Lantern Bearer mused, as he carried his story onwards through the shifting landscape. New reasons for hauntings along the ghost-patrolled coast. New unreasonable spaces between the understood.