It was the strangest thing and I just had to mention it to Connie.
Slowing the car, I gestured out the window and asked, “Have you noticed how all the leaves here have turned a golden yellow or a brownish yellow?”
“So?”
“There’s not a one that appears to be russet.”
“So? They’re probably all the same type. These are orchards – look, you can see the apples on the trees.”
“Also yellow,” I pointed out. Maybe I was being silly and Connie was right, but it seemed odd to me. Sure, you would see yellow leaves on the autumn trees, but, for me, the colours of the season were red, orange and brown; the glorious blaze of treetops that looked almost aflame in the sunlight and the crisp brown heaps for children to leap into. To see only different shades of yellow on the trees was unusual. Even those plants and trees that appeared to be evergreen seemed to be some shade of yellow-green, adding to the peculiarity of the scene.
“You don’t find it odd?”
“Unusual, sure. I think it’s kind of pretty.”
I suppose it was, in a way. Yet, I couldn’t quite shake the nagging feeling that the otherwise perfect country scene was a little off, not quite right. I felt almost as if by driving out of London, we had driven into a whole other world. Maybe I had well and truly become a townie!
“Why don’t we see if we can find a pub so we can stop and have some lunch?” I suggested, deciding to change the subject onto something straightforward. “We could get a ploughman’s.”
Connie affected a sigh. “Oh, please! The ploughman’s lunch isn’t traditional. It’s just something the admen back in the ’seventies dreamed up to sell cheese. An apple pie would be more traditional than that, round here. Hey, that gives me an idea – we should stop at a farm shop and get some baking apples for supper. That’d be a treat with a load of sugar, eh?”
“Sure.” I would much rather have the apple pie.
We drove for a while longer. Time seemed to lose meaning in those winding, yellow-fringed lanes. For all I knew, we could have been driving in circles. The world seemed to be transforming into a blur of yellow about us.
The leaves were falling fast and thick, enough that I had to switch on the wipers to maintain a view of the leaf-obscured road ahead. I said a silent prayer, asking that we wouldn’t end up in a ditch hidden by leaves. If it wasn’t for the hedgerows, I wouldn’t have been certain where the road ended at all. It reminded me of a Steven Scott painting I once saw, all yellow with hints of detail in it.
“Be careful,” Connie told me, “these leaves are just awful.”
“You don’t say? Thank you for pointing out the problem.”
“Hey, I’m only saying!”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. But, I do have eyes, I can see – and I am trying to be careful.”
I slowed the car again to emphasise the point.
“Village,” said Connie, suddenly.
Startled, I almost spun us off the road. There was a village welcome sign half-buried by a pile of yellow leaves. All that was visible was ‘come to’ on the top row and the end of the village name, the letters o-s-a below that.
“Switch on the satnav,” I told Connie, “see where we are.”
Going for a Sunday drive to enjoy the delights of autumn, we had just been cruising about at random with no particular destination in mind. Now, I really wanted to know where we were.
“It’s on the blink,” she told me, hitting it as if that would sort the problem. “I said you shouldn’t have bought a cheap one.”
“Fine. Well, we’ve reached a village – hopefully we’ll see a pub in a mo’.”
I had spotted the outline of a house amongst the trees and there was a street sign ahead.
“Typical!” I laughed as I read what was written on it.
“What is?”
“Apple Lane! Around here that could be every lane!”
Pointing in the direction we were headed, an arrow attached to the same pole directed us to St. Barnaby’s.
“If there’s a church, there might be a pub,” I said, hopefully. “St. Barnaby? Not your run-of-the-mill St. John or St. Peter. I wonder what he did to rate a church?”
We were passing houses, spread out on large plots amongst the trees.
“Even the buildings are yellow,” I told Connie. “Well, yellowish, anyway.”
The houses were of that half-timber Tudor sort with the black timber framework, but instead of bright-white whitewashed walls or the pink colour you got when they added pigs’ blood to the mix, the plaster was coloured a pale yellow like a washed-out lemon hue. Assuming the colour was traditional and not some modern fad, I wondered just what they added to the whitewash to get the colour.
“Anyone would think you had a phobia of the colour!” Connie laughed.
Maybe I had and had just failed to realise it till now? No, that was silly. It wasn’t the colour, just the preponderance of it: it was overwhelming.
Turning the corner, we arrived at the village green. Even that was yellow, the grass having been submerged beneath a deep layer of leaves. On one side was the tower of a church, grey flint, a deviation from the monotony. On the other side was a solid, half-timbered country pub: The Chestnut, according to its inn sign. A sign that, aptly enough, showed a stylised tree painted in bright yellow.
“I guess that’s its namesake,” I said, nodding at the large tree that appeared to be responsible for shedding its leaves all over the green.
“There must be a legend attached to it,” Connie said. “You don’t just name a pub for a tree. There has to be some story connected with the tree. We must remember to ask them.”
I drove over to the pub and pulled up in an open space beside it that I presumed was the car park.
Stepping out of the car, leaves crunched beneath our feet as we made our way over to the pub’s door. Pushing it open, we went inside. It was good to find a village that still had a pub. Even better, it seemed decent and had several patrons already at the bar or seated at tables. A grey cat slunk between table legs and disappeared behind the bar.
Connie and I went over to the bar.
“Yeah?” asked the barman in a rather surly manner. Not a great surprise as these country publicans weren’t always keen on outsiders – no wonder so many such pubs were failing. He looked rather like a stereotype with a ruddy face and big muttonchop whiskers; if he had spoken in a Mummerset accent, I would have laughed.
“Hi. Could we have two pints of cider, a ploughman’s and – ?”
“Um... a toasted ham sandwich, if you have one?”
The barman grunted in a vaguely affirmative way.
“Thanks,” I said, guiding Connie over to a dark-wood snug in one corner.
“Not bad,” I commented to her after a few moments of silence, nodding at the panelling.
“Bit dark,” she replied, a little distractedly.
“Would you rather have sat by the window?”
She just shrugged. Probably worrying about cleanliness in the kitchens, I suspected.
Looking over, I saw the barman had put our drinks on the bar, so I went over and collected them, trying not to slosh any more out of the glasses than he’d already managed. Looking about the place, I was fascinated by all the agricultural history loaded onto the walls – real old, rusty tools, not the ersatz stuff stuck on the walls of horrendous pub chain outposts in an attempt to look rural. There were sickles and scythes, large, heavy hammers and other tools I didn’t know the names of, as well as horse shoes and tarnished horse brasses, and even some large frame of metal and wood that looked too complicated to be a plough and made me wonder if it was some sort of early combine harvester. It was better than some museums I’d seen.
Rejoining Connie, I pointed the tools out, but she gave a sniff and a sort of half-shiver, and said, “I don’t like them. I’m glad we live nowadays and not back then. They all look so horrible – like weapons, not tools.”
“Oh, aye, you could use a fair few of them as weapons and they often did during uprisings,” said the barman approaching with my ploughman’s lunch of richly-yellow cheese, chunky granary bread, pickle and a little limp salad that was on its way to being as yellow as the leaves outside.
“Yours’ll be ready shortly,” the man added, glancing at Connie before she could ask.
She pouted slightly at the delay and muttered something about London, doubtless an uncomplimentary comparison, as he walked away.
“After lunch, we’ll head home,” I said, feeling the day was ruined by now. “We can look for a farm shop on the way.”
Connie nodded, taking a sip of cider.
The barman returned with her toasted ham sandwich.
“Excuse me,” she said as he started to walk away.
“Yeah?” From his expression, it was clear he expected a complaint.
“I wanted to ask about the name of this pub,” Connie told him. “The Chestnut. It’s unusual. I mean, I know how The Grapes was adopted as it signified wine for sale, but why a Chestnut? Did they sell roast chestnuts here or is there a legend connected with the tree out there?”
The barman suppressed a chuckle as if he thought her foolish, but was trying not to be rude.
“The chestnut tree is the symbol of the lords of this manor, the Castain family. There is a story that the first lord hid in the branches of the tree in order to assassinate Athelred the Atheling, for which act he was made a lord by the King.”
“Atheling? That was the Saxon term for a Prince.”
The barman shrugged. “That’s the legend.”
He started to walk away again, then I called after him with the other question we wanted an answer to: “By the way, what’s the name of this village?”
The barman glanced at me with an odd expression on his face and just said, “You know.”
“No, I don’t. The satnav wasn’t working and the welcome sign was buried beneath a load of leaves.”
He laughed. “Oh, you know, right enough! You might not know you know, but you know, all right. Only those who know this place, who are part of it, ever come here.”
“Um, right, thanks...”
Once he was back at the bar, Connie whispered, “Nut job!”
“Well, you know how it is,” I whispered back, “nothing else to do in these sorts of places but inbreed.”
That raised a brief flicker of a smile.
We turned our attention to our meals: the barman hadn’t supplied cutlery, so we had to eat with our fingers. That was fine by me – there’s nothing better than breaking off a chunk of cheese and dipping it into the tart pickle – but Connie was wrinkling her nose at what she perceived as the indignity of it all.
“This isn’t bad,” I told her, enjoying mine. It was the best meal I’d ever tasted.
Connie didn’t respond, which I took to mean she wasn’t enjoying her meal that much, but found it too good to actually complain about.
As we sat there eating our food and taking the occasional sip of cider, I had the distinct impression that the locals were eying us in a not-entirely-friendly manner. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Glancing out into the saloon bar, I couldn’t catch any of them actually staring, but the impression didn’t change. It was as if they managed to avert their gaze every time I looked round at them. Only the cat, now sitting at the end of the bar, seemed to be looking towards us. I began to wonder if I was being a bit paranoid; I had been out of sorts all day, it seemed.
I was just pushing aside my plate with a limp leaf of yellowed lettuce I had no desire to eat still on it, when one of the local patrons of the bar wandered over to our snug. He actually had on one of those smocks farmers used to be depicted wearing, as if this village were one of those ‘living museums’ where actors recreate the past.
“’Ullo,” he said, and I very nearly did laugh at his ridiculous accent. If he wasn’t an actor, he had to be a bit simple or something. “’Ast doo seen it?”
“Seen it?” asked Connie. “Seen what?”
“The sign,” he replied.
“Yes, we’ve seen the sign.” She was clearly thinking of the inn sign, but I wasn’t certain he meant that – assuming he meant anything sensible at all.
“Aye, me, too,” he said, nodding and smiling widely, before wandering out the door, muttering “Me, too. Me, too.”
“Another nut job,” Connie murmured and I had to agree.
“Must be something in the water,” I replied.
“As long as it’s not in the cider,” she said with a laugh, draining the last of hers.
She finished the last crumbs of her sandwich, then sighed. “Speaking of cider, I need the loo. I shan’t be long.”
Connie got up and went to the bar to ask directions. The barman pointed her to a flight of stairs going up and she disappeared up them.
I got up and asked for another pint. The barman was scratching the cat behind its ear.
“Local cider?” I asked him as he pulled the pint.
“Aye. Apple orchards as far as the eye can see.”
“And, yellow leaves as far as the eye can see, too,” I told him as he handed over the pint of yellow-brown liquid.
He chuckled.
“In fact, this entire area seems yellow,” I elaborated. “Not that I have anything against the colour, but... I suppose I find it overwhelming in such fulsome abundance.”
“Oh, aye, yellow is very much our colour.” He paused, then added, “It’s a colour for the whole year, if you think about it. An autumnal colour, yes, but also a vibrant one for summer, and one that might be seen in spring.”
“And, yellow snow in winter,” I joked.
He didn’t crack a smile. The cat yawned, stretched, then jumped down to the floor.
“The colour of the sun, no matter what time of the year,” he finished.
“But, still, it gets a bit much, doesn’t it?”
“You can never have too much yellow,” he replied with a solemnity as if he were pronouncing some sage piece of advice.
“Yeah, well... Cheers for the drink.” I picked up my cider and retreated to the snug to nurse it and wait for Connie.
Who showed no sign of returning.
After a while, I began to worry. It wasn’t like Connie to disappear like this. I didn’t think the place could be so large or complicated that she had gotten lost. I worried that maybe she was ill or had had some sort of accident. Eventually, I decided to look for her.
Swallowing the last of my pint, I went over to the bar again.
“Excuse me; my wife seems to have gotten a bit lost. Where are the toilets?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “Up the stairs, along the corridor to the right, third door on the left. Gents to the left, ladies to the right.”
I followed his directions, and feeling a little nervous doing so, as if breaking a taboo, pushed the door to the ladies open and called Connie’s name. There was no reply.
Stepping reluctantly inside, I pushed each stall’s door open in turn, but she wasn’t there. Each stall seemed to have been tagged by a vandal using the same swirl of yellow paint. I checked the gents to see if she had gone in there by mistake, but it was also empty.
I went back downstairs to check she hadn’t somehow managed to slip past me, but the snug was empty. Even our glasses and plates had been tidied away.
“Okay, she has to be upstairs,” I told myself as I went back up the stairs and began to check each room. There was a large room that I supposed was rented out for stag-dos and the like, and several guest rooms, but there was no sign of her. There was a fire escape door with a set of stairs down to an empty, leaf-scattered beer garden, but it was tightly closed and there was no sign of her down below.
Exasperated and confused, I headed back down to the bar and demanded that the barman tell me where Connie was. Somehow, I just knew he was responsible in some way for her disappearance. I had no idea how or why – I just knew.
“Calm yerself, sir,” he said in a placating tone which utterly failed.
“I won’t be calm! I want my wife! Constance! What have you done with her? Where is she?” I lunged over the bar and grabbed his shirt, not quite certain what I intended to do.
The barman swung his fist, smashing me in my jaw. It sent me sprawling back into a chair, which went flying, then down onto the floor.
Blinking, I sat up and saw with a shock that one of the locals had seized a heavy hammer off the wall and was coming at me. From beside the bar, the cat hissed at me and showed its claws.
Scrambling to my feet, I backed away until I hit the wall and could retreat no more.
“Calm yourself, sir,” the barman was repeating, holding a kitchen knife in his hand. Beside him was the man with the hammer. The other locals clustered menacingly behind him.
Looking up, I saw a sickle mounted on the wall above me. I reached up and pulled it off the wall, gripped it almost as if it were a talisman.
“Come any closer and I’ll use it – I swear I will!”
I wasn’t quite certain how to swing a sickle, but my threat seemed to do the trick and they paused. I didn’t want to abandon Connie to whatever fate they intended, but I didn’t want to hang around and see how I would do in a fight with them. So, I turned and ran out the door into the green, the cat hissing at my heels.
Yellow leaves crunched beneath my feet. I ran over to the car, but as I fished the keys from my pocket, my agitated fingers fumbled them, and they fell amongst the leaves. Glancing back, I saw the barman coming out of the pub and, behind him, a man wielding an enormous-looking scythe.
I turned and ran.
Not really thinking, I headed for the church. Maybe I was thinking of how in the old days you could claim sanctuary. Maybe I just hoped they would respect its sanctity. Whatever, that was where I ran, sickle in hand, leaves crunching with every footfall, more than once nearly slipping over on the treacherous yellow surface.
The churchyard was as leaf-filled as the green, but I kept my footing and ran for the doors to the church.
As I reached them, the doors were flung open and I reacted instinctively, raising the sickle and bringing it slashing down into a bloody impact with the shoulder of the priest.
The man exclaimed a meaningless syllable and fell backwards, the sickle buried deep in his shoulder.
Horrified, I staggered back, staring down at him. Blood dribbled out over his chin and the light faded in his eyes.
Glancing around, I saw the men from the pub drawing near, more enraged than ever.
All I could do was run around the corner of the church, past graves and great sandstone tombs half-concealed beneath the ever-present leaves that crunched under foot. Unable to discern the course of the path, I found myself stumbling over raised grave edgings and into sunken graves so that I only managed to remain upright by grabbing at tombstones as supports.
Reaching the far end of the churchyard, I was confronted by a low sandstone wall over which I threw myself. Clambering to my feet on the other side, I began to run again, this time through an orchard dense with apple trees.
The leaves concealed roots and the odd fallen apple that made the ground as treacherous as in the churchyard.
For all that the ground was deep with leaves, the canopy above was unthinned and I could see nothing of the church tower as I glanced back. Nor could I see or hear my pursuers, if they even continued to chase me. The orchard was enormous, unless I was running about in circles, yet despite the impression of immensity, I felt constrained. The trees seemed to press in on me.
I paused and listened for the sounds of pursuit, but could hear nothing, except the soft sound of the leaves dropping.
I tried to focus my thoughts. I had to get out of there. I had to find Connie and rescue her.
I turned around to face the direction I hoped I had come from. I had to go back, no matter how scared I was, no matter the risk.
I seemed to thread my way through the orchard for hours and hours, certain I was going in circles.
Slowly, I became aware I was not alone amongst the trees. At first, I began to sense a presence ahead of me, then I thought I caught a flash of movement amongst the trees. I assumed it was the men from the pub.
Then, I saw the figure and knew that I was wrong. The person – I hoped it was a person, although I had my doubts – was tall and gangly and moved in an awkward, jerking fashion as if I were watching a film with frames missing. They were dressed all in a yellow; shirt, trousers, and long ragged coat. Their face was a stained white sack mask – the face of a scarecrow, as suited the tatty scarecrow outfit that it wore.
I stood and stared for a moment as it jerked awkwardly towards me, wondering if my unintended act of murder had broken my mind.
Drawing near, the yellow figure reached out with yellow-gloved fingers towards me, its expressionless sackcloth face staring at me with an awful intensity.
I turned and ran. I may have screamed, I can’t recall. My mind seemed to go blank. All I can remember of that time is the unrelenting, all-consuming, horrendous yellow. I felt as if that colour had filled my very soul.
The next thing I remember is falling over the low churchyard wall and tumbling headfirst into yet more of the leaves. My hands and knees scraped on hidden gravel, then I stumbled to my feet. Was I safe here on holy ground from that horror?
I looked back over the low wall and thought I saw movement, but chose not to wait for confirmation.
I considered returning to the pub, but Connie hadn’t been there when I’d searched the place and I had no desire to repeat the search. Instead, I skirted around the edge of the green towards the pub, heading for the beer garden and the orchard that lay beyond.
My assumption, insofar as I could make one, was that Connie had exited down the fire escape, fleeing one of the locals, and had run off into the orchard and got lost, just as I had. If she was running about in circles in there, I might have had a chance to catch up with her. At least, that was my hope.
I called her name, desperately hoping to hear her voice. “Connie! Constance! Connie!”
There was no reply.
As I crossed the beer garden, I realised there was a mound rising above the general levels of the fallen leaves. The grey cat from the pub was sitting beside it and hissed as I neared, but stood and ran off as I kept walking. As I approached it, I felt a sick feeling growing in my gut.
I slowed my pace, unwilling to see what was hidden beneath those leaves, knowing what it must be, terrified, yet certain I must look regardless.
Crouching beside the mound, I brushed a few of the yellow leaves away at one end to reveal a foot. The foot was encased in a woman’s shoe of the sort I was quite certain my wife had been wearing. My stomach churned.
Feeling faint, I reached over to the other end, I brushed a few more leaves away to reveal part of Connie’s face. I think I screamed. I couldn’t quite believe it, yet knew it to be true.
Suddenly, a voice spoke; a horrible leaden voice that stabbed into me like a chill dagger.
“It is a terrible thing,” I heard the voice saying as I looked up to see the impassive sackcloth face of the yellow scarecrow figure gazing down at me.
Unthinking, unhearing, I staggered up from my crouch and ran as fast as I could, desperate to get away from that horrible, taunting figure. I couldn’t think straight and did not want to hear whatever words it had to say.
I found myself beside my car again and fell to my hands and knees, desperately clawing for the keys amongst the leaves. I thought I heard the crunch of approaching footsteps, but paid them no heed as I searched.
With a jubilant, inarticulate cry, I felt my fingers close upon the keys. Fishing them up, I fumbled them into the lock and got the door open. Tumbling inside, I thrust the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine grumbled into life as I slammed the door shut.
Looking up, I saw that expressionless scarecrow creature standing in front of the car. Just standing there. For a moment, I stared back, then I thrust my foot down onto the accelerator and the car shot forward, churning up a cloud of yellow leaves.
I must have shut my eyes and let my foot slip from the accelerator, for the next thing I knew, I was blinking my eyes open as the car coasted to a stop.
Looking around in confusion, for I was certain I must have hit the scarecrow figure yet had felt nothing – even a mannequin filled with straw ought to have made some impact – I was even more shocked to discover that the village and its green had vanished. I was alone in the car in an empty country lane between orchards.
Assuming I must somehow have managed to speed through and out of the village, I slowly reversed to look for it, but found no sign of it. There were still yellow leaves, but now they intermingled with ones of red and orange and were nowhere as deep as they had been. It was as if I had blinked and arrived in some totally different place.
I tried the satnav and it worked instantly, telling me where I was. But, though I searched diligently, I could discover no village ending with the letters -o-s-a. If only Connie had been in the seat beside me, I would’ve assumed I’d dreamed the whole thing, but she wasn’t. She was still missing and that implied that what I had experienced was real. Yet, it seemingly couldn’t be.
I put the car in gear and started to drive, neither knowing nor caring where I was going, nor why. Nothing mattered anymore. Truly, it was a terrible thing.