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The Kinder Horror

Cornell Brett

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Set in the eerie moorland of Derbyshire's Peak District, a region where standing stones and Druid temples abound, this weird tale is told mainly from the point of view of a Victorian walker and travel writer, whose uncanny experience on the Kinder plateau leads him to unravel the terrible truth about the great plague which wiped out most of the village of Eyam, in the seventeenth century.

A story with Lovecraftian undertones, involving paganism, witchcraft, old manuscripts, and the bubonic plague...with colour photographs of the Kinderscout plateau.

Sample

I discovered the manuscript in a strange little corner-cabinet with this inscription on it: ‘May The Creator preserve us from the Destroying Angel,’ and above, carved in the blackened old oak, the date, ‘1666’. On an oval panel below the inscription was carved a hideous creature resembling a gargoyle, with an evil, grinning face, cruel talons, and stunted wings. The cabinet was in a run-down antiques shop in Eyam Village, not far from the famous ‘plague cottages’. The date on the cabinet was the same as that year of terror in which the community of Eyam was struck down by the terrible contagion which carried away 267 out of the 350 inhabitants of the village.

Perhaps it was the coincidence of the date which first caught my eye, or the obvious quality of the cabinet, for there was little else in the shop of value.

The owner of the shop had been watching me as I examined the cabinet. He now shuffled over to me and said:

‘Ideal for books or china.’ He removed the home-made cigarette from his mouth, spat out a loose thread of tobacco, and coughed hackingly into his handkerchief. He was an emaciated old fellow with thinning, grey hair and a straggling moustache that was yellow-stained with nicotine at the edges of his mouth.

‘Where did it come from?’ I asked.

‘It’s from the old rectory here in the village. The Church of England’s not what it once was - they’re short of funds, like every other institution these days. I believe they’re fund-raising to do essential repairs to the church roof.’

I crouched down on my heels to look at the cabinet more closely, and the old man continued:

‘There’s a rather interesting feature of it. Here, let me show you.’ He lowered himself down next to me, clutching the small of his back as he did so, and grimaced with pain; then he extended his nicotine-stained fingers to a whorled knob on the side of the cabinet, which I had assumed was solely decorative. He pushed and then turned the knob slightly; there was a creak and then a click. He moved his fingers to the front of the cabinet, and pulled gently at the sides of an area of inlaid ebony between two rustically carved mouldings, where the fascia had popped out about three-quarters of an inch. Slowly and carefully, he eased out the fascia until it was clear that it concealed a secret drawer.

‘There are often secret drawers in pieces of this age,’ he said; ‘mementoes of the troubled times when the lives of a relative or a neighbour depended on the safely with which compromising documents could be hidden away.’

‘It looks as if there’s something in it,’ I said. I pointed to a fawn-coloured object, which was visible inside the drawer.

I asked him if I could have a look. He shrugged his shoulders in reluctant assent and eased out the drawer far enough to enable me to remove a yellowish-brown leather bag; the hide was quite soft to the touch, apart from a few coarse hairs which were embedded in its wrinkled surface. I turned over the bag in my hand and looked at the old man questioningly.

‘Pig skin,’ he announced, with conviction. Inside the bag was a little book bound in red cloth, tooled with gold decoration. I opened the book. It was handwritten in a faded, ornate script, and appeared to be a diary or journal of some sort.

‘Oh that’s nothing,’ said the old man - ‘I had a look at the first couple of pages of it. It’s just an old account of someone having a walk on Kinderscout.’

I asked him whether he would mind if I had a read of it. He shrugged his shoulders again, turned his back and wandered off to another corner of the shop.

I could barely make out the faded, spidery handwriting in the dim light; I threaded my way through the jumble of old furniture until I was standing in the bay-fronted window of the shop, and by the grey Autumnal light which was filtering through the dirty panes, I began to read...

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