'Years Gone By' -A Christmas Ghost Story

The story that I am going to tell you is true, it happened at Christmas, 10 years ago. In those days I had just qualified as a Doctor and was working long hours at a casualty unit in South London. It was a stressful time, my mother was dying and I was to be the last surviving member of my family as my Father and Brother were killed in a car crash the year before. One good thing that came out of those times though was the fact that I met Jayne, my now wife. She was a music student then and used to busk at my local tube station. I still claim that I put the best part of six months wages, into her violin case, before she even looked at me. But look at me she did and as our relationship bloomed it was decided it was time for me to meet her parents.

Jayne came from a remote part of the North Yorkshire moors, a place called Scarfell Pass. Her family had farmed sheep there for as long as could be remembered, and her parents and two brothers tried to make the best of an increasingly difficult way of life. Jayne went home every Christmas and I was cordially invited. Due to my heavy workload though I couldn’t leave before the morning of the 24^th.Whereas Jayne finished her semester the week before and wanted to spend some time with her family. Therefore it was decided that she would travel up by train to York where her father would meet her and I would drive up on Christmas Eve, in the old jalopy that I pretended was a car.

After a stressful night in the emergency room, dealing with drunks and their victims I headed for the carpark and slept in my car for two hours before hitting the road north. Ten hours had passed by the time I had finally managed to shake the rat race and the last of light pollution. It was pitch black as I headed out onto the moors. I knew from the directions that Jayne had given me that I had less than 10 miles to go, when the snow began to fall. Well fall would be an under estimation, tear down out of the sky with upmost malice would be nearer the mark. A city boy like me was unused to conditions like these, the road soon disappeared from view, and I could only guess where it was from where I thought the verges were. My luck didn’t hold for long though, I ran the car off the road and got the front wheel stuck in a ditch.

No amount of cursing, pushing, ranting or crying would get that devil of a car out of the ditch and I was well and truly stuck. What’s more my phone had no reception, so I couldn’t summon help. At least I had spoken to Jayne half an hour before so she knew I wasn’t too far away. I was weighing up my chances of walking to her family’s farm in the blizzard that had engulfed me, when as quickly as it had started the snow stopped, and to my amazement I saw the lights of a house less than a few hundred feet away in a small valley to the left of the road. Perhaps they have a phone I thought and better still a tractor that could pull me out of the ditch. I grabbed a torch from my emergency bag in the boot and found a small track running down to the house and a rundown farm yard.

I stomped through the snow to the front door of the house and knocked loudly on the wooden door. I could hear people moving on the other side of the door and whispered voices but no one answered.

“Hello is there any one there” I called knocking again. Still nothing.

“Please, if I could use your phone, I have had an accident and need some help” I added making things seem perhaps a bit more serious than they were. With that I heard the shuffle of feet from behind the door and I opened just enough for a thin worried looking woman of about thirty or so to peer out.

“What is it ye want, are ye injured lad?”

“No, but my car is stuck in the ditch, up there on the road, can I use your phone?” I asked pleadingly.

“I, ye can, but be quick” she said opening the door and beckoning me in; as I entered she gazed out in the night in fearful apprehension, before shutting the door with a slam.

“Through here lad, phone is over there” she gestured to a small hall table with an old fashioned plastic phone with a round dialler on it. As I headed towards it I passed the kitchen door and saw two children, one girl and one boy, both about 10 or so ‘twins I thought’.

“Brian, go to front window and keep an eye out for him” the woman said to the boy and he nodded and went to the window facing out to the yard.

“Is everything alright?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, but please be quick, my husband is due home and he doesn’t like strangers” she was almost pleading with me, and I knew that my presence was making her uncomfortable.

I dialled Jayne’s mobile on the almost antique phone, but all I got was the continued hum of the dial tone. Strange, perhaps her mobile was down to, what with the weather and the remoteness of the location. I fished out a piece of paper from my pocket that had the phone number for Jayne’s folk’s farm scribbled on it In my spidery scrawl. The number began to ring and a woman answered.

“Hello Mrs Patterson” I said

“Aye, how can I help ye?”

“It’s Derek calling can I speak to Jayne”

“Derek, Derek who, we don’t know any Derek”

“Derek Reynolds, Jayne’s boyfriend” I replied a little exasperated at this stage.

“Jayne’s boyfriend, what’s this, some kind of joke or somat”

“No, no it’s me Derek!” I said beginning to feel panicked.

“Nuff of that lad, get off line or I’ll call police!” she warned hanging up the phone on me.

“Well I never” I sighed under my breath, had Jayne neglected to tell her parents about me and if so why. Perhaps I was in for a very awkward Christmas. Well I was stuck now I didn’t know what to do.

“You finished mister?” The woman asked hovering by the kitchen door.

“Yes, yes, I guess I’ll have to head back to my car and try and flag down some help”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you any mo…” her words turned to a low moan or even a whimper as the boy came running into the hall “he’s coming” he hissed. A cars headlight’s flooded into the kitchen through the front windows. A door slammed and a heavy body fell into the front door.

“Open the door now I say” a drunken voice boomed.

The woman opened the door and a brute of a man burst into the hallway, he was so large he seemed to drive the light from the house, with his presence.

“And who is this?”

“He’s had an accident and needs to use the phone” pleaded the woman.

“Has he now?” said the brute staring me down. “Get out, we don’t like strangers here” he scowled.

“I meant no offence” I said heading for the door. His only reply was to push me out and slam the door after me. I lost my footing in the snow and went sprawling. From inside the house his voice boomed and I could hear things being thrown around and the children wailing. I had to act and fast. I turned and tried to enter through the front door, but it was locked. Then I heard a sound which sent shivers down my spine. WHOOSH. The sound of something very flammable, like petrol, catching fire. I looked into the kitchen through the front windows and saw the room sheathed in flames. I charged the door again hoping to burst it open. Instead I bounce painfully back into the snow. As I lay there the door opened and the man stood, shotgun in hand, silhouetted in the open doorway, with all the flames of hell behind him. The children wailed as they tried to revive their mother who lay unconscious in the hall floor.

“Run stranger” he whispered “RUN!!” He shouldered the gun and let off one barrel. The window screen of the car in the yard exploded into a thousand shards, as did my courage. I am ashamed to say I ran, I ran like I had never run before. I left those children and their mother in the hands of that devil. I tore up to the road and saw to my relief that a car was coming, as it approached my car in the ditch it flashed it’s lights.

“Help help” I shouted running towards them and waving my arms in the air. The car a Land Rover flashed its lights again and came to a halt. The passenger door opened and I heard Jayne’s voice call out “Derek, thank god we found you”

“Jayne, Jayne quick the fire, have you got your phone?”

“What fire?” she said looking at me puzzled.

“The house there” I said turning to point. But to my utter surprise there were no flames, no lights, just darkness. I stood there shocked and disbelieving for a moment and then fell to my knees, my legs refusing to work anymore. Strong arms grabbed me and guided me to the car. I later found out it was Peter, Jayne’s older brother.

“No no” I whispered “we have to help them”

“Who?” said Jayne concerned.

“The people in the house, over there”

Jayne and her brother exchanged a worried and puzzled glance.

“No one has lived here for at least twenty years, by my reckoning” said Peter.

“No no there’s a family, and the fathers drunk and he’s going to kill them” I blurted the panic giving me the frantic tones of a mad man.

“Ok, we had better have a look” said Peter, exchanging another glance with Jayne. We walked back towards the house, but no house was there, only some derelict farm buildings, the roofs long since gone.

“But I, I…?” How could this be?

“Come on love” said Jayne soothingly “I think you may have banged your head when you went into the ditch, back there”

“Yes, yes I think you could be right”. We left my car suck in the ditch, with a note in the window screen saying no one was hurt or lost on the moors and headed back to Jayne’s family farm. There after the hello’s and formal introductions, I was given a large brandy and ordered to bed by Jaynes mother, a woman not to be argued with.

Christmas morning dawned bright and clear, and the snow filled panorama of the north Yorkshire moors was truly something to behold. I sat with Jayne and her family around their kitchen table eating possibly the best breakfast I have ever eaten, homemade sausages, bacon, black pudding and potato cakes, the breakfast of kings. Talk turned, as it was bound to, of the events of the night before. I expressed to all my embarrassment, as I was now certain that I must have suffered some kind of concussion when my car slid off the road. As I began to explain to all present how concussion can affect the behaviour I was cut short by Jayne’s mother.

“There was a house and there was a fire”

“What?” I blurted.

“There was a house and there was a fire” she repeated.

“oh”

“But they didn’t all die” she said taking my hand “he did, he was drunk you see and he tried to kill his family, but a stranger was in the house, a man who had had an accident on the road” as I went ashen pale, she squeezed my hand and smiled “he saved them”.

She got up and went to the kitchen dresser, she opened a drawer and brought out a bundle of photos, from it she produced a photo of a woman and two teenage children, one boy, one girl.

“My best friend in school Esther Peters” she said handing me the photo “in Canada, in 1986, two years after her husband died trying to kill her and the children”. She reached up to one of the Christmas cards on the dresser.

“Here’s the card she sent me this year” she smiled at me “something’s just are, something’s don’t need to be explained”

“Amen to that mother!” said Jayne’s father leaping to his feet “Now who’s for a bloody good walk!”

I have been lucky to know Jaynes family for the last ten years and what happened that night has never been spoken of since, as if something fragile could be broken, if it was unwrapped again and shown the light of day. We spent a delightful Christmas together. Upon returning from rescuing my car we ate possibly the largest Turkey that ever roamed the earth. I was able to switch off from the pressures of work and relax for a while. My phone lay silent for perhaps the longest time that I owned it, mainly due to the fact that I could not get a signal. As evening wore on I decided that I should ring my mum to see how she was getting on. As Jayne passed me her mobile it began to ring.

“Go on answer it” she laughed as I went to hand it back to her.

“ Hello Mr Reynolds, Derek Reynolds” said a woman with what sounded like an American accent.

“Yes speaking”

“Hello Mr Reynolds I am calling from Petershill hospice….”

“Yes is everything ok”

“YOU NEED TO LEAVE TONIGHT” the phone went dead.

“Hello, hello” the line was dead.

“What is it?” asked Jayne.

“My mum I think she doesn’t have long”

“I’m coming with you” she replied

“Thank you”

Like a whirlwind we gathered our things and with rushed farewells we fled into the night. The roads were still snow covered, but I was able to follow the tracks of other cars and so find my way through the night. As we neared the place where I had come off the road however a new blizzard sprang out of nowhere. This time though I decided to stop rather than end up in the ditch for a second time. After five minutes of white out, like the night before the blizzard stopped as quickly as it had started. And there before me, before us both were the lights of a house, the house.

“Please tell me you can see that too?” I said turning to see the amazement in Jaynes face.

“I… I….I mean what the?”

There are moments in a person’s life when there is uncertainty, they are many, and they plague us all. But sometimes there are rare, rare moments where there is nothing but certainty, if we are lucky to have known this even once in our lives we can say we have lived. I have lived. A clarity of thought descended on me as  I opened the glove compartment taking out the note pad and scribbling a quick note. I tore the note from the pad and stuffed it into my pocket.

“Stay here Jayne, it’s meant to be me” it looked at her straight in the eyes, and saw for a brief second that she knew, and I loved her for it, still do.

I got out of the car and opened the boot pulling out the wheel wrench and stuffing it under my coat, and into the waist band of my trousers. I grabbed my torch and headed for the house. As before I banged and pleaded until the door was opened. This time though I only rang Jaynes parent’s home. A woman answered a younger version of a woman I now knew.

“Hello Mrs Patterson” I said.

“Aye, how can I help ye”

“You don’t know me” I whispered “You must get help for your friend Esther Peters, she needs you tonight!” I slammed the phone down and turned to face Esther.

“You finished mister?” she said.

“Your husband is going to kill you tonight” I said, the words leaving me brutal and blunt. She gasped all spirit disappearing like the wind from a balloon, the writing was on the wall, she knew what was coming, had hoped, pretended it would never happen. But from the mouth of a stranger the truth had snuck up and cornered her and could no longer be denied.

“ Save my children” she gasped as the boy ran into the hall.

 “He’s coming” he hissed. A car’s headlights flooded into the kitchen through the front windows. A door slammed and a heavy body fell into the front door.

“Go out the back” I whispered “go to your friend Mary’s house, Mary Patterson, she will meet you on the road”.

“Open the door now I say” a drunken voice boomed.

“ Take this” I whispered taking the note from my pocket and handing it to Esther “ Do what it says or I cannot save you” She looked on doubtful, beaten down.

 “Trust me” something passed between us, I don’t know what or how, but we both knew what had to be done. She took her children and left by the back door.as I drew the wheel wrench from my waistband as I opened the door with a jolt. With wrench in hand I stepped to the side as the brute lost his footing and sprawled onto the hallway floor…..

As I and Jayne drove away into the night, a woman stood reading a piece of paper by in the light of a burning house:

Ring 00717764432 9.p.m Greenwich meantime on 25th December 2004

Talk to Mr Reynolds say you are calling from Petershill hospice

Tell him he must leave that night.

Only then can I save you and your children!