Kat Wright Tic Tocc 2

Tic tocc 2 696 words by mooncakelizzie

In the day this stone circle is a place passed by walkers and visited very occasionally by enthusiasts of megalithic stone circles.But....

What happens here at night or/and when no-one is watching? Who or what can be found here then? What changes occur?

Behind the stone circle lies a quarry, disused now. If you walk back down to the carpark and head Northeast you'll come to a track that leads to this old quarry. By day it looks innocuous enough, a bit brooding and grim maybe. Hard to imagine that it once teemed with men and women at work, noise, dust, the clanking of carts carrying granite to the railway.

There are always stories of ghosts around places like this. The quarryman whose son died in an accident haunting the rocky heights, calling for his boy. Or maybe a girl, dressed in grey, who killed herself for love. Look down into the brooding green water, it could hide anything.

More difficult, then, to imagine something much more everyday and unromantic being the scourge of such a wild and austere place. Look harder. Let's say you're standing looking North, where the track curves off to the right and you've taken half a dozen steps straight on to the edge of the pit, where the steep sides veer down to the water. See that bit of rusting metal sticking up, under cover of the bracken and reeds? Most people think it was part of the old machinery from the quarrying. But if the water was to drain away you'd see it was once an ice cream van. It might even have 'Tonibell' still faintly visible on the side. Traces of the greeny blue paint remain. When I was a kid, swimming in the quarry, I dived down and saw it there. We weren't allowed to swim, so I couldn't tell anyone. (I'd have been kept in for a month.) I pulled off the big plastic icecream that was still stuck on the roof. It lit up once I suppose. I've got it in my garage now.

But after a few years of odd happenings and a lot of people being really scared out of their wits by horrible noises up there at night, I found out that in my Dads day, the 1960's, old Norman was a regular sight round the villages, selling 99's and mivis' and such. He married a Betty Coney, from over Tavistock way. Norman hadn't got a lot going for him in the looks department, but he was a good old boy, Dad said. And he was devoted to Betty, proud. She was his dream girl.

Shame she soon got tired of him, ran off with a man from the garage in Tavi, old flame from school days apparently. Met up with him at the Goosie fair and never came back to Norman. Well- he took to the drink. Used to go up to the Circle and sit up against the stones, knocking back whisky and crying. Kept on for a few more years, then one day he parked up on the moor and stumbled out of the van with his whisky, passed out in the heather. Next morning the van was gone. It wasn't found for a couple of days, and neither was a young boy, one of Dad's school mates it was.

His Mum said he'd gone up camping on the moor for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme or something. He must have seen the van empty and drove it off down the track. You can guess the rest. Norman thought it was his fault, and while they were dragging the pool for the boys body he went to Boots and bought the biggest bottle of painkillers he could. You could get as many as you liked in those days. Took the lot and no one thought to look for him.

Two days after that the boy came back. He'd met up with one of his mates who lived on a remote farm and gone to stay with his family for the rest of the week. Told them his Mum wasn't expecting him back.

So how did the Icecream van get driven into the pool then? No one knows. And no one knows what might still be down there. Something ancient maybe, that took offence at old Norman's boozing up there in the sacred circle.

So, in a roundabout way, that's what I'm trying to tell you. The ghost of a sad and mad icecream man haunts the stone circle on summer nights and what makes it all the more scary; on top of his groaning and roaring and regrets; is the tinkle of the ice cream bell rising up from the water. Because- who is making that bell ring?

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