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The New Cut	By : pip Category: Fairy Tales, Fables, Folklore, Legends, and Myth > Folklore Views: 1432 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own The Babes in the Wood and make no money from this. Additionally, this is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any person(s), living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Chapter List
- 1-The New Cut
- 1
Pen Name: Pippychick

Review Replies: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/index.php/topic/55863-pippychick-original-fiction-review-responses/

Prompts Used: Three elements: An antique quilt, a green candle, a cedar chest.

Type of Fic: ShortStory

Rating: SFW

Warnings: AFFO, ChallengeFic, COMPLETE, NoSex, Horror
Content Tags : AFFO ChallengeFic COMPLETE NoSex OC Oneshot Violence

Author’s Note: This is a ghost story written for the monthly AFF Forum challenge. I also used a couple of prompts from my writing group, which were a picture of a river surrounded by reeds, and the first sentence.

The original sixteenth century poem ‘Babes in the Wood’ tells the story of two infants, the oldest three years old, whose parents’ estate was held by their uncle until they came of age. Of course, should anything happen to them, their inheritance passed to their uncle, so he arranged for them to be murdered in the woods by two ruffians.
In the story there is a disagreement, and instead the children end up left alone in the woods to fend for themselves, where they died of exposure after surviving on blackberries. After which a robin covers them with leaves.
Folklore holds that this is set in Norfolk, in a place called Wayland Wood. I’ve taken liberties with that and with the events to suit my own purposes.

The New Cut

Edward, seated in the chair on the other side of the fire, leaned forward intently. “If it be stories you want, then I have one for you, all right.” He paused, satisfied he had the attention of the young man sat opposite, and leaned back again in his seat, puffing at his pipe.
The conversation died down among visitors and locals alike, as they all settled down to listen. Even the landlord rested his elbows on the copper tray at the bar and paid attention. Since the end of the war, hearts were lighter. People came here to the Broads to play at being boatmen. This new thing called leisure. Holidays. Most of them had hired small yachts which were moored up outside on the river with badly made knots.
There hadn’t been time for stories in those long, careworn years. Most had enough real sorrows of their own. Now people had the taste for them again, and there wasn’t a better storyteller than the old man, Edward, who must have been well into his seventies, old enough to have his own horrors to recount from the first great war, but those weren’t the kind of stories he told.
Only once there was utter silence did he continue, and though his voice carried, it had a quality about it that seemed he was sharing some kind of personal confidence. It made everyone lean in just that little bit closer. “This is a true tale, told me by my grandfather, though it didn’t happen to him, but to his father.”
“There wasn’t a way between the rivers Waveney and the Yare originally. You all know what I’m talking about. Some of you’ll have been on it this day. The New Cut. Not so new now, nearly a hundred and fifty years old, but the name sticks.”
There was a general murmur of assent: the new cut was a bang straight stretch of waterway that connected the two nearby rivers. Someone placed a fresh drink on the table by the side of him. He nodded gratefully.
“Anyway, before that you had to go all the way upriver to Burgh Castle to get onto the Yare. My great-grandfather, and I am his namesake, was one of the locals employed by the company that parliament commissioned to get that done, and he worked hard. It’s no easy task clearing reed beds, as any of the farmers around here can attest. This was the first half of the eighteenth century, and it was while he worked with that crew that he had his only experience with the other world.”
“Their days were long and hot, and even then they worked well into the evening, with lanterns to provide light in the dusk.” He looked around the room at each person in turn. “You’ll all know how quick the temperature drops on the river when the sun goes down, and it wasn’t no different back then.”
“There was a chill in the air that dried the sweat of the day as he hacked and bundled the reeds to be used for thatching. Progress was painfully slow. Coots were flying everywhere in the dusk. Moorhens too. They disturbed a lot of nests making that waterway. When he came upon another abandoned one he stood up straight to stretch his back, looking away from the little eggs that would never hatch, and saw something unusual.
There were the lanterns, but a strange light flickered through the reeds in front of him, passing so close he could almost have touched it. It was a little, pale, greenish, sickly light, not at all like the golden mirrored light of the lanterns they used, and he was so curious that he pushed the reeds aside to look.
You have to remember, he was a young man, and what he saw didn’t scare him, only made him determined to know the truth of it. Two men with a spade and a candle each were struggling to make a path through the reeds, carrying something heavy between them, like a chest, and it must have had some weight, the way their boots sank and squelched in the boggy ground.
It was the candles giving off that greenish light, and he determined to follow them at a distance, dousing his lantern, keeping well back since it was clear the two of them were up to no good. Didn’t they know the area was being worked on? They were lucky that only he had noticed them.
Anyhow, he followed them right up to the riverbank, and watched them guide a rowing boat to the other side of it, hoisting their burden out with some difficulty and plenty of noise, one of them splashing about in the river.
At the other side of the Waveney just there is a wood. You might have seen it if you’ve come into St. Olaves that way today. Most of it is called Waveney Forest, and back then that’s all it was called. He watched until the green light began bobbing unsteadily through the trees, then came out of his hiding place to the side of the river. There were little dinghies up and down the bank. The trees were coming in useful as a wood supply for various purposes in the construction of the new waterway. That being the case it was easy for him to follow, grabbing one of the rowers and pulling himself across the river with a lot less fuss than the two men before him.
At first, he feared he’d lost sight of them, but then caught that tiny bit of green light through the trees. He kept his distance, watching from quite a few feet away as they came to a halt some twenty minutes’ walk into the woods.
From the start he’d suspected, but when they buried the chest they had been carrying between them he was convinced they were a couple of smugglers, hiding their contraband. After all, the Waveney is connected to the sea by Breydon Water, and it would make sense to get out from under the watchful eye of the revenue authorities in Yarmouth.
So, he simply sat down to wait, keeping well hid, hoping that he hadn’t been missed on the work site. Eventually, the two men were done, and he let them slip away because who knew if they might kill a witness? But he had to know what it was they were hiding. They passed by him, that strange eerie light from their candles seeming to pull the very life out of the leaves on the trees, until eventually he was left in the dark. Night had fallen fully while he waited, and it made him glad he had brought the lantern.
Now he lit it, walking over to where the men had buried their treasure, only to find the ground completely undisturbed. All there was to be seen was a scattering of leaves. He was sure too that they had left their tools behind, but he couldn’t find a one of them.
Driven by curiosity, and impatient, he used a nearby fallen branch to churn up the earth he thought they had been working on. When it was loose enough he fell to his knees to scoop it out with his hands. Now it was as if something else worked through him, something insistent that couldn’t be denied, and he carried on digging and churning the earth with the stick, sweating in the dark as if the full sun was on him again, tearing his fingernails though he didn’t notice that until much later.
Eventually, his stick found the top of the chest, and he spent some time working around the edges of it, carefully scraping back layers of earth from the sides of it until he could haul it out. It seemed light to him, hardly enough weight to warrant two full grown men struggling with it so much.
With his pocket knife, he picked at the rusted lock, but it was no use, and in the end he had to carve away at the wood around it to get the lid to open. Inside was an antique quilt, made up of scraps of tapestry and embroidered samplers dating (if he could believe the numbers) right back to the sixteenth century. He realised that it must be worth a pretty penny all on its own, but as he prodded at it, it seemed it was being used as a wrapper for something else. Something hard.
All the things that went through his imagination. Silly things. Gold, jewels, riches. As if he had caught two pirates of old instead of smugglers. Hands shaking, he lifted out the quilt, which was so aged and delicate parts of it came to pieces in his hands.
When he had it laid down on the ground, he carefully unwrapped what lay within, only to be confronted with two tiny human skeletons that faced each other as if in some kind of embrace at the point of death.
Well, he cried out, but that wasn’t the end of it. Not quite. As he looked up, he saw a flash of movement in the trees, and a tiny boy and girl were holding hands, staring at him, barely old enough to stand. They flickered, as if touched by green light, though the men with the candles were long gone. The younger of the two wailed, and it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up to attention.
My great-grandfather took one look at them, one look at the contents of the quilt, and ran back through the wood almost screaming, his lantern swinging in his hand madly, as if he was pursued by Hell itself.
Somehow he made it back across the river, that strange keening cry ringing in his ears, a greenish cast to the water that made him sure he was to drown in it, but he didn’t, and when he reached his workmates he collapsed, completely exhausted.
Next day, he reported what he had found to the police, and they found the cedar chest and its contents exactly where he said they would. The bones were easily as old as the quilt, so he wasn’t under any suspicion, but all the same he did lose something, for he never went back to work on the New Cut after that, and took a less well-paid job in Yarmouth at an alehouse there.”
Edward drew in a long breath, and puffed on his pipe, apparently oblivious to the silence of his audience. “That, my friends, is how part of Waveney Forest came to be called Skeleton Wood. And it’s the true tale of the babes in the wood. There are those who swear they’ve seen the children, but mostly what gets seen is greenish bobbing lights in the depths of the reeds along the side of the river. And, sometimes, in the night, you might hear them crying.”
He held up his drink to the patrons of the pub and nodded. “Best be careful tonight to lock the doors to your cabins,” he advised gravely. “At least while you’re on the Waveney.”
There was a hushed silence for a few minutes before the quiet murmuring of the pub began again, and attention drifted away from the old man sat by the fire, though a few more people bought him drinks by way of thanks for the entertainment.
By the end of the night, he was the last customer left, and he rose to his feet, leaning on his stick as he returned his glass to the bar, ready to head home.
“You shouldn’t scare them like that,” the landlord admonished with a sly smile as he polished the last of the glasses.
“Scare them?” said Edward. “Boy, you know the truth of that story yourself.” The landlord shook his head. “You’ve seen the lights, Peter.”
“Children, playing around,” he replied, dismissive, clearly uncomfortable.
“I didn’t say it was anything else, did I?” Edward asked. “Children, playing. I think they’ve earned the right, don’t you?” He smiled. “Goodnight, Peter!”
When he was stood outside, he heard the landlord lock the door tightly behind him, turned up his collar to the chill that drifted in off the river and headed home, leaning heavily on his stick, certain that somewhere out there in the dark, children played. After all, from time to time, he too had seen the lights.
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The New Cut