Free The Man in Black: A Ghost Story by Jordan Mason

THE ROTTEN ROW

    It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature’s tough bracken, all picture-postcard like. Colour was something I’d only ever see blossom in a dream or in a memory from what felt like years ago; tacked up red and merry come the time for Christmas, perhaps, or printed onto the front of a Kellogg’s cereal box in the form of a grin-ridden furry mascot, orange coat ablaze and wooden spoon in hand: manmade and joyless, unless you were ten years old. Skies loomed grey and fog poured in plenty, and though the snow fell white and glorious, it lay dirty and black, piled up either side of the Rotten Row and its ashen cobbled curbs, unable to properly thaw out, but only to thicken and turn to sludge.
    On weekends, the village, which was called Stoney Grange, smelled of damp washing and boiled vegetables in the mornings, as well as of coal dust and chimney smoke come the afternoons. Rows of red-brick terraces ran for what looked like an eternity in every direction, held to the sky in all of its industrial pride and glory, though now a mere ghost of the village it once must have been. By the time the children had been summoned back home for tea and their families had returned to comfort, day spilled into twilight and twilight into night, and the still wind lay lonesome upon the inky darkness, a-whislin’ its soundless tune.
    That was when He would watch me, amidst that silence of night, but I never even knew it.
    History had named my row the Rotten Row because it was simply just that, though vermin no longer roamed the yards and the huts and the coal sheds. The infestation had long since gone, but the tradition never faltered. The worst families lived on the Rotten Row. The noisiest thrived. Sometimes I’d hear screams through the walls, and sometimes the children wouldn’t leave for school on a morning, but instead stay home, stray to any decency. Beatings were harder back then.
    Whack, then the tears.
    I was living alone for the first time in my life, exiled to a matchbox flat on the bottom floor of a converted three-bed. I slept in the same room as the kitchen, but I didn’t mind. The house stood on the corner of the Rotten Row and overlooked the only remaining remnants of the Grange Colliery; a valley of pure brown, its hills bare of branch, all blanketed in white. Even in the summer when the sun shone a little more generously than it did that February, the fields beyond the cobbles lay dismal and plain. I’d sometimes see rabbits amongst the ferns, chasing the gentle wind, but never when it was cold. I suppose summertime kept me optimistic, but the winter sat bitter in my bones.
    The pit had closed down ten months earlier in the Spring of 1972, paving way for a new generation of the working class. The disaster hit the North hard: eighteen men lost their lives, and a further eleven had fallen injured. The papers made good money from it, but it affected us closer to home, too. I knew this through my dad’s side of the family, how my uncle Jim - the one I was never to mention - had been one of the eleven, and how my dad never did lend a hand in the way my uncle perhaps would have wanted him to. We had money then, but my uncle wasn’t entitled to it, and that was how it was. It was never really spoken of; borders between families, boundaries not to cross. I suppose, looking back on it now, my dad was wrong. I found my own place in poverty, and the struggle is real. My dad’s family didn’t help, but I never met them.
    My dad lost his life shortly after my uncle Jim’s accident. Pneumonia got to him. He was fifty, but by the time he’d become bedridden he looked more like seventy. We were living in a cottage just outside of Durham. My dad taught in a boarding school up in the village of Rothfield, Northumberland, whilst my mam stayed at home. I was eighteen when my dad