by Sarah Blackshaw
They say Old Macy came here fifty years ago, with a name like a weapon and a head full of dark, black thoughts. Her family were normal enough; her daddy worked on the railways and her ma stayed at home with Old Macy and her two sisters. Old Macy was the youngest back then. They say that’s what saved her, at the time. They say that’s what damned her, in the end.
Back then life was more simple than it is now, and in some ways that made it more complex. Sure, you didn’t have to worry about what people were saying about you on the internet, and there were more interesting things to do with your time than making videos for social media. But that also meant that your only source of information was the people around you, the observations they made, the gossip they shared. Powerful stuff, gossip. You think that you’re just talking about someone else but really you’re creating them in your mind, over and over, deciding what you think they did and said and felt. You’re giving them motivations and intentions that they might not have. You’re giving them power that they might never see. Ain’t no fact-checkers out in the woods, down the lane, away from the Wi-Fi password. Gossip turns into rumour, and rumour turns into legend.
They say her daddy died first. An accident on the railways, a signal turned green rather than red, a train where it shouldn’t have been and a man who ended up spread across half a mile of track. It took them four long nights to find all of him, according to the rumours that came from the other railwaymen and their wives. Then her sister – the oldest one, Miss Samantha – went out fishing with her best friends one afternoon and came back drowned. They say that if you hang around the lake at dawn you can still see her, calling for her ma with her hair all wet and her skin pale as eggshells. I hear that she’s made some friends for herself down there in the depths, unsuspecting children who wandered too close to the water’s edge, but that’s a story for a different time.
People started to talk, as people often do. Old Macy’s ma was a single parent now, and that’ll do tough things to a woman’s heart if she wasn’t expecting it. Old Macy’s second sister was named Eloise, and she was just about the sweetest little girl that you could imagine. They say she once nursed a dove back to health by feeding it every hour, even through the night. She took her daddy’s death pretty hard too, and Samantha’s drowning. But Old Macy, she didn’t seem worried in the way her family were. She didn’t seem concerned at all. Some people put that down to her being the youngest and less aware of the gravity of the situation. Some people wondered where she was slipping off to on an evening when her family were grieving back at home, having seen her walking the forest paths as the light grew dim.
She was carving a different path for herself by then, was Old Macy. A path of woodland walks and healing plants, if you see where I’m going. A path of solitude, of quietness, of being almost invisible until you realised that she was right behind you, her breath in your ear and her clammy hand on your arm. Not as beautiful or as sweet as her sisters, none of her daddy’s work ethic or her ma’s fortitude, a strange child when all was considered. It was difficult for girls back then, there weren’t as many options available to Old Macy and Eloise as there are to you now. An influencer was what we might have called the local politician or union man. But I’m getting off topic, and I’m sorry. You asked me about Old Macy, and that’s the story I’m going to tell you, if I can remember it all. It gets harder as I get older, to recall what happened and what was made up at the time. Rumours are writhing, wriggling things, like earthworms on the end of a hook.
I think she would have been fine with a little cabin in the forest, mixing herbs and poultices and staying away from the other townsfolk. They say that she even started building that little cabin, up at the foot of the mountain, on the dark side where even the light wouldn’t bother her. She cut the wood herself, stacked the logs and fitted everything together tightly and tidily, no gaps, no mess. A perfect place where she could grieve for the loss of her family members and go on with her small contribution to this part of the world. And then her other sister died.
Eloise was sweet as I’ve already mentioned, but they also say that she was cunning. She knew that her ma was worried about Old Macy and grief-stricken for her husband and eldest daughter, and she knew that meant less attention on her. Eloise used that to her full advantage from what I can tell, stealing away from home most evenings to meet her friends and strangers to the group who might give her candy or a swig of their whisky, or both. Because Eloise was both sweet and cunning, nobody really knows how it happened. But they say that she snuck out of the house for the last time one year to the day that her sister was drowned and they found her the next morning with candy on her breath and water in her lungs. Three miles from any natural water source.
Old Macy’s ma, having lost two of her children and her husband, simply died of a broken heart. That’s what I believe anyhow, not the stories that they tell of her oldest two children coming back one night and taking her into their embrace, crushing the life out of her so that they could take her with them into the deep beyond. When they tell that story they say that Old Macy was there too, that she knew more than just herbs and poultices. That she had command over the dead, that she forced those little girls to take their ma back with them to wherever they came from. But I don’t know about that. Some rumours are too outlandish to be true, right?
They say that when her ma was found with a broken heart and a crushed windpipe, the suspicion on Old Macy became as thick as the gorse bushes that she hacked through to clear the ground for her cabin. That when Old Macy found out that the townspeople had turned on her, were planning to confront her about her involvement in the deaths of her family, she burned down the cabin and moved as far away as she could. They say that the cabin burned for thirteen nights, and that the smoke each night was a different colour. That they could hear screaming deep within the foundations of the cabin, but that no bodies were ever found. That the townspeople had nightmares for weeks afterwards of Old Macy’s family, back from the dead and haunting the foot of the mountain, searching for their kin. That it only stopped when they burned the herbs from the forest and scattered the ashes over the cabin site. That kind of thing gets passed down, you see – generational knowledge in case it’s ever needed again.
After that, we lose Old Macy for a few years. A couple of decades pass and then she pops up again in a town about 50 miles away from here, which is about 50 miles away itself from her home. They say that the rumours about her eventually reached her new home only by this time she’d got a job and a reputation to protect, working as she was as the classroom assistant in a school run by the church. People were starting to move about more widely then, and someone from back home had moved to Old Macy’s new town with her family. Her husband had found a job with the town newspaper, and even though it meant moving away from everything they knew, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. She didn’t expect to see Old Macy, sullen and uncommunicative as a stone, in the playground of the school she was enrolling her son in that very day. Of course she had been nine when Old Macy had burned down her cabin and fled, and time does funny things to the brain, but she swore that it was Old Macy all right, even if she was going by Maria in this new town. She’d know Old Macy anywhere. After that, it was just a matter of rumour and time.
Now we all know that these things happen, that statistically there’s going to be more than one accident in a school with even twenty children in it, but I don’t like the fact that Old Macy was there once again when little Billy Fletcher was found face-down on the ground before Sunday School, having taken a nasty tumble and hit his head on a rock. The school didn’t like it either and Old Macy was on the move again before you could even spit. Billy Fletcher’s parents thought about suing the church – that was becoming a fashionable thing to do – but their hearts weren’t in it, in the end.
So Old Macy turns up here, a few years after the incident with Billy Fletcher and a lot of years after the business with her family, and we don’t know who she is at first. She’s just another outsider with long, dark hair and bright blue eyes that seem to look right through you into your soul. She seems kind, talks to children, and isn’t calling herself Macy or Maria or anything like that. She’s Emily this time. She’s softly-spoken and polite, and she takes a job in the local bakery. Bakes us all our daily bread, and us not ever realising what she is. At first, anyway.
They say it was Sally Malone’s daughter who first noticed it. She’d shiver and move away from Old Macy whenever she was around, would say that she had a cold aura about her. Old Macy would smile and give the child an extra cookie, trying to bribe her to be silent I wouldn’t wonder, but when that didn’t work her tactics became more extreme. Eventually Sally’s daughter choked to death one day on a chocolate chip cookie, and we all knew who had done it. Some said that the cookie wasn’t even one from the bakery, that Sally’s daughter had always been prone to wolfing her food and it was high time something like this happened, but they didn’t know what we knew. This was Old Macy again, up to her usual tricks. We’d all heard the rumours from down in the valley, and we were prepared for her this time.
We all decided that something needed to be done, but we didn’t want Old Macy to get the jump on us and steal away under cover of darkness. So we pretended that we knew it was an accident, that it was just one of those terrible things that happens sometimes, and then we met one night, just the five of us; Fred Malone, your Uncle Alex, Christopher and David Green, and me. We talked about what our parents had taught us, what we had passed down between us about women like Old Macy. About what was to be done. And then we did it.
Well, to be truthful they did it. I was more than happy to help but I was sick the night we’d decided to do it. Your Uncle Alex saw how sick I was, he vouched for me. I know what they say about me, that I was faking it so that I didn’t have to take responsibility, that I was a coward who was trying to avoid a curse. It’s only rumour. It can’t hurt me now. Does wishing ill on someone but not doing ill mean that you’re damned as well when Judgment comes? I don’t know, and I hope I never find out.
I never did ask them exactly what happened to Old Macy, but I’ve got some ideas. It’s best not to think about it, child. It’s just a cautionary tale now, like the bogeyman – oh, go to bed or Old Macy’ll come and gobble you up for her tea. It’s just something we tell the little ones so that they’ll do as they’re told. Honestly, you don’t need to worry.
But if you’re ever out on the street past midnight, you might just notice the way that the fog rolls in from the sea even though we’re miles from the nearest shoreline. You might see the tiny curls of white vapour spreading out across the ground, coating your sneakers in a fine mist that’s cool to the touch and disappears the second your hand comes into contact with it.
And you might hear Old Macy, clawing her way out of the grave that they put her in, voice cloying with dirt and decay and desperation. You might hear her asking, again and again, who did this to her, who burned her body and left her for dead, who came back three nights later to finish the job and cover her still-smouldering corpse with soft brown earth. You might hear her asking for their names so that she can take up her grievance once again, steal into their homes on a cold September evening and press her face up close to theirs until they wake in a sweat and find themselves eyeball-to-eyeball with a nightmare that they thought they had put to bed long ago.
But if you do, you didn’t hear anything from me.
Sarah Blackshaw is a psychologist and writer who lives in the north of England.
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