Sciron Read online

  Sciron

  A ghost story

  David Rashleigh

  ©2010 David Rashleigh. All rights reserved

  Prologue

  April 1941

  In the docker’s pub on Watery Lane, two men conversed in a corner of the smoky public bar. The younger man sipped his appropriately watery beer, occasionally glancing nervously at the other customers. His companion, sat with his back to the wall, spoke in hushed tones.

  “We have a mission for you. An attack is planned against us. You and your associates are to help prevent it.”

  “’Course we will. What’s the job?”

  The older man explained for a few minutes, then glanced at the small suitcase by his side. “I have some small charges for you. A ship is due into Preston Dock tomorrow; the SS Orestes. She is coming to collect a cargo of munitions that are to be used against us. We want you to see that these munitions do not reach their destination.”

  “We’ll never get near the ship” said the younger man. “And I don’t suppose those firecrackers of yours will make much of a dent in her anyway.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Are munitions coming by...” he broke off as an inebriated seaman stumbled past them. “Are they coming by rail?”

  “We assume so. It is a cargo of rifle and artillery ammunition, grenades and so on. They are coming from the ordnance factory near Chorley, according to our sources.”

  “Well then. There’s only one rail line down on to the dock. We’ll just have to take it out of service for a while.”

  ***

  “See you in the morning, Dot.” Jack Rimmer kissed his wife on the forehead and patted her swollen belly. Tin sandwich box in one hand, he slung his gas mask over his shoulder, picked up his flashlight and strode out of their red-brick terraced house. Another lonely night in the signal box beckoned: eight hours of quiet solitude occasionally punctured by the rattle of a passing train and the strident insistence of the bell that passed information to and from his neighbouring signalmen.

  Born at the twilight of the Victorian era, Jack’s youth had spared him from the carnage in Flanders that had taken his elder brother and two cousins. Now his age, and reserved occupation, kept him out of the current conflict. Marriage and impending fatherhood had come late to him: a career on the West Lancashire railway working shifts, coupled with a natural shyness, had not been conducive to socialising with the fairer sex. Having been employed in signal boxes serving the small villages between his native Southport and Preston had not helped, either. Two years earlier, following another move, this time to the north-easternmost box on the line at Penwortham Junction, he had married Dorothy Sellers who, now twenty-seven, was fourteen years his junior.

  The shower-damp grass clung to Jack’s boots as he climbed the railway embankment next to the fire station on Leyland Road, taking his habitual short-cut to work. As he crossed the wide bridge carrying the railway over Stricklands Lane, he thought, with some trepidation, about how life in their two up, two down home would change when their child was born. After all, what did he know about being a father? His life revolved around being a signalman, where virtually every eventuality was covered in the Rule Book. Jack was concerned that he may have left it too late: after all, his father had been a young man, only twenty-two, when Jack was born.

  He was still contemplating parenthood as he passed the small, brick-built privy and climbed the steps to the signal box.

  “Evening, George” he called. “How’s...” he broke off when he spied their Inspector standing at the opposite end of the row of painted levers. “Good evening, Mr Richards. To what do we owe this pleasure?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, Jack. I need to speak to you. Hurry and change shift, you two.”

  The formalities completed, Jack and Richards were left alone in the signal box.

  “There’s a special train tonight, Jack.” Richards was a large man, and was sweating in the warmth of the small room. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and continued. “Did you hear what happened earlier? Some bastard blew up the dock railway, that’s what. Set bombs under the track and on the tunnel portal. The track’s fixed easy enough, but the tunnel isn’t safe. There’ll be nothing moving down there for the best part of a week.”

  “So how does that affect us?” asked Jack.

  “There’s a munitions train leaving the Royal Ordnance factory at Euxton tonight. It was due to go straight to the docks, but now it’s coming our way. Set him back into the old station to unload then send him back to Euxton.”

  ***

  “We need to finish the job.”

  Three men in their late teens and early twenties were sat on the south bank of the river Ribble. Two were smoking, partly from the adrenaline that still coursed through their veins and partly to hide the stench of the low-tide mud.

  “But we did for the tunnel mouth!” protested the non-smoker. “That line’ll be shut for a month!”

  “They’ve found another way around” said the first man. “Truckloads of squaddies from Weeton barracks are coming to move the munitions by hand. The train’s going into the old station at the bottom of Fishergate hill.”

  “We used all the charges. How are we going to stop it?”

  The third man pitched his cigarette end toward the slack water. A shower of sparks pierced the gathering gloom as it ricocheted off a small rock and disappeared with a gentle hiss. “We’ll have to derail it. Somewhere where it’ll stop any more getting through: one of the bridges on the Penwortham Triangle should do the trick.”

  ***

  Jack sat in the semi-darkness of the signal box; his chair faced the railway with the serried row of sixteen painted levers stood vertically before him. His fire spluttered and crackled, warming the twenty feet by twelve feet structure despite the pitiful amount of low-grade coal that constituted their meagre ration. The last scheduled train had passed; the dim red glow of its tail lamp heralding the solitude of the small hours that had been Jack’s regular companion for much of his adult life. He allowed his eyes to scan the shelf of instruments in front of him: all appeared to be in order. Apart from one. Where there should have been a yellow glow in one of the matchbox-shaped indicators above the yellow lever at the right-hand end of the frame, there was nothing.

  “Bugger!” thought Jack. The indicator told him that the lamp in one of his furthest signals had gone out: without it he would be unable to “give the road” to Whitehouse West signal box, and the munitions train would be delayed. This was an increasingly common problem. With so many people called up for military service, the lampmen who ensured that the paraffin in the lamps was topped up regularly were visiting less often, leading to the lamps simply running out. Several times recently, Jack had been forced to climb the signal post himself, fill and relight the lamp before returning to the signal box to allow a train to pass.

  The signal in question was, fortunately, close not to Jack, but actually the other side of his colleague in Whitehouse West. A simple phone call would see the problem rectified within minutes. Jack lifted the handset of the direct line, to be met with silence in the earpiece.

  Jack almost swore out loud. He tried other phones, he tried an emergency bell signal, but all means of communication were dead. The Rule Book didn’t cover this one. Jack thought quickly. He realised that his only option was to walk the half mile or so to Whitehouse West, report the problem and relight his signal. He pulled on levers ten and eleven, setting the points to protect himself from an unscheduled train. Grabbing his flashlight, he left the comfort and security of his signal box and set off into the night.

  The black, moonless night closed around him, punctured only by the beam of his flashlight. A sudden rustling noise startled him, and he shone his flashlight in the dir
ection of the sound in time to see the tail of a large rat disappear down the embankment. Smiling grimly to himself, Jack continued, occasionally stumbling in the darkness and looking out for the faint yellow glimmering of Whitehouse West’s twin distant signals. As the iron girders of the Stricklands Lane bridge became silhouetted against the stars, a movement, above the horizon, caught his eye. This time, it wasn’t an animal. On the other side of the bridge, a man was clinging to the telegraph pole, one of a line that ran between the signal boxes carrying the phone lines and other electrical circuits.

  “What are you doing up there?” shouted Jack, making his way across the short span. “Come down here, or I’ll get the police!” There was another movement in front of him, and Jack shone his flashlight into the face of a man that stood before him with a yard-long platelayer’s spanner held high in both hands. Jack felt the blood drain from his face with the shock of realisation. The man froze momentarily, opened his mouth to speak, then swung the spanner and Jack knew no more.

  ***

  Sixty hours later, the ship that had been awaiting the munitions was making poor time. Despite the calm weather in the Bay of Biscay, they were barely making ten knots instead of the sixteen or so of which the ship was capable. The captain, a veteran of the previous world war, was regretting his decision to chase the convoy whose sailing they had missed after the delay in loading the munitions at Preston. He interrupted his pacing the bridge to speak to the chief engineer via the voice pipe.

  “What’s the hold up, Chief?” he asked for the third time in an hour. “We’re a sitting duck at this speed!”

  “I know, Sir.” The laconic nature of the response was somehow accentuated by the heavy Welsh accent. “We’ve tried everything, but the fact remains that the boiler tubes are coked up. We need to blow them through, or we’ll just get slower.”

  The captain already knew this, as he knew that the process of blowing tubes would create a huge pall of smoke that would mark their position to anybody within twenty miles.

  “As soon as it gets dark. We daren’t do it any sooner.”

  Their fate was already sealed. Less than two miles away, the ship was being observed intently. The entire twenty-two man crew of U145 were utterly silent, as they had been so many times before on their unsuccessful three-week mission. They had two torpedoes left, a result of having failed to sight any targets for them before returning to Lorient. The captain watched the ship through his periscope, passing fire control orders in a harsh whisper that reflected his barely-contained excitement.

  On the bridge of the SS Orestes, a young lookout was scanning the sea’s surface when he spotted the two tell-tale tracks heading straight for him.

  “Captain! Torpedo tracks to starboard!”

  “Hard a-starboard!” shouted the captain to the wheelhouse. As the ship slowly, too slowly, began to turn, the captain knew that his vessel was doomed. Running back to the engine room voice pipe, he screamed once more at his engineers.

  “Torpedoes! Get out of there, now, all of you!”

  It was too late. Before a single stoker managed to reach the upper deck, one torpedo passed harmlessly ahead of the vertical prow of the ship. The second struck thirty feet back from the bow, five feet below the waterline, on the number two hold. That hold had been loaded at the ship’s first port of call on the Clyde, where it had been filled with 250-pound bombs destined for the Blenheim light bombers of the RAF.

  The sympathetic detonation simply vaporised the forward half of the ship. The remaining wreckage rolled over and sank within a few seconds, entombing forever the few men that had survived the initial explosion.

  Monday

  The town of Penwortham sits to the south of the river Ribble, opposite its larger and better-known neighbour, the city of Preston. From the air it vaguely resembles a fan held pointing south-west, one straight side formed by the river and the other bounded by the West Coast main railway line. Ancient thoroughfares to Liverpool and Wigan pass through, the latter running first south-eastward alongside the river, then turning south and shadowing the railway. This Leyland Road winds its way between late Victorian houses of varying sizes at river level before climbing the side of the river valley to what the locals call Pear Tree Brow after the pub at the summit. On the left of a traveller leaving Preston, streets of smaller terraced houses form a triangle as the river curves first south, then away to the east. A few of these short, dead-ended roads delight in being ironically termed “Avenues”, conjuring notions of shady, tree-lined boulevards, whilst in reality a thin veneer of tarmac covers the original cobbles and trees are notable only by their absence. Named after birds, such as Wren, Lark and Swallow, these narrow dead-end roads are frequently cluttered with cars that, when the houses were built, were as rare as private jets are today. To the right, the former homes of the nineteenth-century middle classes, some terraced, some semi- and a few detached, back onto an artificial embankment constructed in the early 1880’s to carry trains directly from Blackburn to the West Lancashire railway’s station at the bottom of Fishergate Hill, across the river.

  Opposite Dove Avenue is Stricklands Lane, which, like the main road, climbs the side of the river valley and once ended in the grounds of Penwortham Hall. Crossed by the same railway that forms the backdrop to Leyland Road, the bridge was a wide steel lattice structure constructed to take two diverging lines and forming a point of what was known as the Penwortham Triangle. In the early twenty-first century, a developer had seen the potential for selling hard-core to the ever-hungry road industry whilst enabling him to make a tidy profit by building on the resultant land. This had entailed the excavation of the wide former railway embankment to the east of Stricklands Lane that had been dormant for nearly forty years, and had created a “brown field” site with sufficient land for a mini-estate of flats and small houses grouped into one cul-de-sac unimaginatively called The Junction.

  ***

  Returning from her regular afternoon shift, Katie Melling pushed open the door of the second-floor flat at the entrance to The Junction that she shared with her husband and their son. Joshua was nearly two years old and quite a handful for the again-pregnant Katie. Her part-time job in the nearby Spar shop acted not only as an essential part of their income, but also gave her a break from Joshua’s incessant energy. The climb to the flat left her increasingly tired; as she approached the door she braced herself for the whirlwind of exuberance that she knew would greet her.

  “Mummy!” Joshua launched himself at Katie before she had time to close the door behind her.

  “How’s my little man?”Katie picked him up and was rewarded with an enthusiastic hug. “Have you been a good boy for Grandma?”

  “Little angel, as always.” Katie’s mother called from the kitchen. Katie awaited the inevitable litany.

  “You should let me do more to help” said her mother for the third time in a week. “And you should be looking for a bigger place to live.”

  “I know, Mum, but we can’t afford to move. We can barely afford this place as it is. Besides, it may not be a great view, but it’s a good area and we’ll get the little ones into good schools from here.”

  The view that she referred to was the top of a huge sand-coloured stone wall, built over a hundred years previously as a bridge abutment. Above the wall, mature trees blotted out the sun in the summer; in the winter the west-facing aspect ensured that the sun was below the horizon before it could penetrate their home. The Melling’s flat was almost at the level of the old railway line: anybody below their level had no view at all.

  The flat was small but functional. Katie had had misgivings about moving in: something about it just didn’t feel right. However, it was the best that they could afford, and her husband, Steve, had persuaded her that she was being irrational. Still, she occasionally had the feeling, when alone, that there was somebody in the flat with her.

  “I’m off” called her mother as she tugged on the front door. “See you tomorrow.”

  �
�’Bye, Mum” Katie replied, putting Joshua down and walking into the compact living room. Joshua followed her. “Man!” he shouted, pointing out of the window at the abutment opposite. Katie, who had been in the process of sitting down, looked round but, despite sensing a slight movement, saw nobody.

  “No, Josh, no man. Where’s your book. I’ll read to you.” Katie was still looking across the lane.

  “Man gone” burbled Joshua, and toddled off to fetch his Spot the Dog book.

  Steve Melling returned home that evening, his hands grimy from labouring for a local landscape gardener. He followed his usual routine: a hug for his son, a kiss for his wife and a beer for himself. Two hours later, with their evening meal finished and their son put to bed, Steve and Katie exchanged small talk in front of the television. Katie stood up to close the curtains and was surprised by a torch shining through the trees across the road.

  “Steve, there’s somebody over there. I can see a torch being waved.”