One.

                The screen flickers to life and Julie sits in the centre of the image. She is framed by a bed, a bookshelf, and a potted plant, along with bland wallpaper and cheap fittings. The back ground screams of being student accommodation. She is still young, maybe only a year or two older than I remembered her. Her short bob of hair has become a frizzy mess of locks that dangles seductively over her head, her lower lip is now pierced, she has learnt to use make up to subtly enhance her own skin tones, rather than to look like make up. She has a cheeky grin, that is all dimples and front teeth, that should belong on a cherub, or a girl of a more innocent age.

                “Hi.” She says, then comes to grinding, giggling, halt. “Hi, by the time you see this tape, you probably wont remember me. Lets be honest, we were never close friends. But I have to leave five of these, to explain what may happen next. I have done some for my family, and my best friends, and my boy friend, and, well, I wasn’t sure who else to tell, and I put names of people I had known in a hat and... So Hi.” She even held up a hat to demonstrate her point. It was a small woolly bobble hat. “The truth is, we were never close, but you always listened when I had problems anyway. And you trusted me. I came to your house a few times, I got drunk, I even killed your dad’s carp that one time. But I never did my share, I never asked you along when I went clubbing, never took an interest in your life, never... Oh I can’t do this meaningful stuff ok? The simple fact is, the more popular you are, the harder it is to find some one who acts as though they genuinely care about you. And for what I have to say I need some one who genuinely cares. “

                The screen goes blank for a second. Maybe she stopped recording for a while, then she restarted later. Maybe she went through a long speech and wasn’t happy with it, so she went for a second try. Maybe nature called. I have no idea, but when, a second later, the screen pops to life again, she is holding a battered enamel mug. “I hope you have forgotten about me.” She says softly. Her eyes are deeper now, more intense, any of her humour and joy in her expression has been hung drawn and quartered. “I hope you have gotten on with your life. When I saw you last we were taking our A-Levels. You wanted to be a policeman. I know you wont be, your eyes are too short sighted for that. Which is a shame, as you would have been a great policeman. Not a detective, not a riot officer, but a Dixon of Dock Green. The Policeman on the beat, looking out for people. I don’t know where your life will take you, but you will have a good, honest life. Me? I’m going to spend the next four or eight years studying at university and making all the great mistakes we are allowed to make university. I’m going to wreck my life with bad choices of lovers, worse sex, drinks, drugs, and what laughingly passes as culture for students these days. Then one day I am going to disappear. I am going to go some where on a pilgrimage, some where I wont be found, some where I will never be heard of again. And that is why I’m making this tape, so you will know I go of my own free will, that I go there to be happy, and to make a new life for myself that will be worthwhile. I have no wish for any body to try and find me, or to mourn for me, I will be very much alive, and very happy. Please believe me in this matter. Trust me.”

                Then the screen blinks off for a final time.

***

                I pulled the car to the side of the road, and sat back in my seat, to rub the sleep from my eyes, and drink a swig of coffee from the travel mug. It was hours before dawn, and already sea mist was beginning to roll in to the coast, catching the moonlight as it danced and played across the road. I poked and jabbed at the GPS console, trying to tease it back to life, but it beeped and sulked and continued to tell me that I was sixty three miles into the north sea, which I would have understood if it was even the right sea. I turned it off, and dug out my atlas, hurrying to find my destination and plan a suitable route.  I left the atlas open on the right page and delved once more into the night.

                As the first embers of morning began to show in the sky, I was on a road that overlooked the coast, the slate coloured sea constantly attacking the cliffs of sandstone and chalk. The car radio gave a howl of complaint and Radio Four faded into static. I flicked the control as I drove. One by one the stations I could stand to listen to became lost. At last I gave up, and drove in silence.

                The village of Kneale should have been a den of ghosts and lost souls. The skeletal remains of houses and a cold grey stone sea defence were half submerged in the mist. They loomed as shadowy shapes nestled at the foot of the cliffs, windows that had long ago lost their glass, and the rotting remains of solid wooden doors. Shadows managed to cling to every nook, and every cranny, draped across each and every pock mark and crack in the crumbling stone work. I sat in my car, watching the abandoned hamlet through the telescopic lens of my camera. Even with my attitude to life, there was a tiny grain of my soul that half expected to glimpse a shade or phantom. I slipped the camera back in my satchel and made my way out of the car.

                Kneale can only be accessed by one road. This now disused track used to join the main coastal road, but has long since been removed from public access. The first few hundred yards have been totally dug up, the main road paved and hedge rows planted, to disguise its exact location from casual observation. If you leave the road, pas through the hedges and make your way towards the cliffs edge, you will be greeted by the same sight that greeted me: Tall and sturdy wire fencing has been strung across the road with danger signs posted at regular intervals in a variety of languages. The illustrations on these signs are the standard stick figure variety that are the recognised standard across the world. They leave little to the imagination. As well as the Bio-hazard symbol, regular exclamation marks, signs of coastal erosion and tumbling stones, there are images of gas masks and other worrying pictorials. Despite the official quarantine of the hamlet being lifted in the mid eighties, and it no longer being technically illegal to cross the fences, it was abundantly clear that only a fool would have ventured forth.

                I began making my way through the fence at once.

                The scattering of old fishing cottages that made Kneale were as sad and dangerous up close as they had been from a distance. The stone work that had once been a comfortable barrier against the elements was now cold and merciless. The road in front of the houses and boat sheds was a mixture of flagstones and cobbles, that had been carpeted by sea weed and puddles. The crashing of the waves and the mournful wind echoed through my body. The evacuation had been careful to destroy any signs that these houses had once been homes. Slate roofs had been caved in, doors and windows shattered, walls reduced to piles of rubble. I peaked into the houses, to see bare walls and missing floor boards. Cellars had been filled, upper floors and lofts torn down, the wooden structures of the houses set on fire. I snapped away with my camera, recording the devastation as I went.

                The church was small, and fortress like, and had been vandalised in much the same manner as the rest of the hamlet. The grave yard had been dug away, and left as a crater that had been reclaimed by hardy coastal plants. Rough weeds and shrubs clung to life in the chalky ground, but dared not venture past the knee high wall of the church yard. I scrambled over the wall, and into the church. A large portion of the church has fallen to rubble. Only the spire, and one wall of the main hall still stand. It was this wall, that once ran the length of the church, that had drawn me into this forbidden corner of Cornwall on a frosty November morning.

                Carved into the wall, in crude letters, were thirty three names. The size of the letters grow and shrink almost at random, sometimes in the middle of words, as the letters were carved with make do instruments, perhaps pocket knives, or chisels, or what ever else could be used to scrape away the thick slabs of stone. Thirty two of the names were those that census records tell us would have been residing in the hamlet on Christmas Eve, nineteen fifty four. One was a name that belonged in long forgotten religious law and the deluded scribbling of want to be witches and occult societies that were briefly in fashion some time in the nineteen twenties. That last name was carved in letters a uniform thirteen inches tall, that towered above the other names, sloping downwards as it was written:

Tethylla.

                I snapped as many photographs of this as I could, before the cold, and the noise and the seething unease of the atmosphere got to me. I walked back to the old road as quickly as I dared with out cracking my neck on the wet stone. When I climbed back into my car I made sure to lock the doors behind me.

                As I turned back on myself and began to drive back towards civilisation I saw the first vehicle to have crossed my path in hours: An unmarked black van. As I approached the burly looking figure in the passengers seat was talking into a radio on his lapel. Both men watched my car carefully, and I could not escape the impression that they were making a note of my number plate. Twenty minutes later the same van had turned around and was following me, until I reached the dual carriageway and aimed myself back towards London.

                Let me explain a little. What you are reading now is not the book I intended to write. This is more a book about how I came to not write the book I wanted to. A few months before I had begun an investigation into Kneale, that I intended to write, sell, and because I was both youthful and stupid, I assumed it would jump on mysterious conspiracy bandwagon and make a fortune. I did not have an exciting job, I was not a journalist, I had never written a book, or investigated anything before. But I treated it as a hobby, and kidded myself that if it made money or not I would not care. By trade I am a document analyst. I work for in London for one of the larger Museums.

                I would love to tell you that my investigation began because a mysterious stranger had left a box of old waxy papers at the museum, or an anonymous tipster had sent me a crumpled photograph on a dark and stormy night. But it did not. It began the weekend after my Nan died, and myself, my parents, and my sister were clearing out the flat she had retired to in Lewisham. It started as I made the tea and my sister found the shoe box tucked under Nan’s bed that housed her birth certificate, health insurance papers, passport and other odds and ends. In fact it started as my sister held my Nan’s birth certificate up to the light and said “So where is Kneale anyway?”

                No one seemed to know. We knew it was in Cornwall, but we couldn’t say where exactly. None of the family had ever visited there. So I started to look into it. And as it bugged me at work I started to look into it on census records, old maps, old atlases, even military surveys. And I found a village that had disappeared between Christmas Eve 1954, and News Years Day 1955. I had a sudden urge, to use two new laws: To use the Freedom of Information Act, to find out what happened to Kneale, and use the Right to Roam to walk there, if it had not dropped away into nothing.

                On the morning in question I had accomplished both those tasks. Though at the time I was yet to understood what they had meant. Over the course of months, I had compiled masses of notes, letters, photographs and documents, all of which I was planning to turn into a gripping and thrilling best seller. There was one small flaw in my plan: I could spend hours at a time staring at a computer screen with no idea how to write a book other people would want to read. I had managed to write the opening chapter many times over, just never one that any one with an ounce of sense would want to read. The simple fact was that my mystery was just not as interesting as, for example, anything Charles Fort investigated, or a good old fashioned UFO, or even a Biblical Cover Up, when I put it on paper. Some where between the facts entering my head and reaching the page they were sucked of all life and entertainment.

                I should have known I was onto a loser the day I met Chris in the Star and Crown. The Star and Crown is a strange place, even by London Pub standards. Chris is by far their strangest regular customer. He is the only man I have ever heard utter the sentence “Do you have a dry lemon tea? No? Ok, Irish Cider then mate.” I have a clear idea in my mind of what a Lemon Tea is, and even a dry cranberry juice or vodka. But a dry Lemon Tea? Surely that is a teabag? A friend of mine had put me in contact with Chris. He described the cider drinker as “a man who dabbled”. Apparently, depending on which day of the week you ask him, Chris is either a geography teacher, magician, writer, folk singer, or artist. I was speaking to him as an expert on Fortean affairs.

                “Ah yes.” He said sucking on his cheeks. He was tall, slim, and hairy. The small percentage of his body that was not curling orange hear and beard was mostly eyeballs. “Kneale! An excellent place! A mystery! I have always wondered if it was connected to the Green Ship.”

“Ah! That’s a ghost ship!” I beamed, impressed at my knowledge. “If you sea it, you are lost at sea forever!”

“Yes, and a bit of a disappointment.” Chris sulked.

“Well it would be, being lost at sea forever...”

“No,” he berated me, “my investigation was a disappointment. You see the flaw in the plan is, if every one who sees the ship is lost at sea, then who spreads the story about it?”

“Oh I see.”

“I spent months trawling through the recorded logs of all radio transmissions from ships lost of Cornwall. None of them reported seeing a green pirate ship.”

“Why?”

“Because they didn’t see one.” He giggled. “Nah mate, personal project. It was supposed to sail right close to Kneale. Truth is, that is a dangerous coast. Was worse still back in the day. There were wreckers and pirates. Easy to see how the ghost stories emerged. Maybe a folk tale with a coded warning at its core: Beware wayward lights!”

“So what can you tell me about Kneale?”

“Now there,” Chris said with aplomb, “is another good story! And it only costs you the next round!”

                Actually it was several good stories. Stories of the MOD sending soldiers down to the beach and sealing it off. Stories of cattle on the moors disappearing, to be found weeks later as ash on a pyre. Stories of mysterious black vans patrolling the near by villages at night. Stories of screams heard on the wind and stories of people from the village thinking they were going to be rich shortly before the incident. But time and again there was the story of the bodies. Found in the church, huddled around the name of a forgotten god.

                The sad part was that as I sat there in the pub, at the start of my investigation, they all seemed to be just stories. As I started checking up on them, they too fell apart, just like the Green Ship. The soldier who had allegedly found the bodies did not seem to exist: I ran his name through every record I could find, but the name only triggered one response, to a guy born fifteen years earlier, who served in the RAF, not the army. I wrote to the farmers who should have lost sheep or cattle. They either never wrote back, thought I was speaking out of my arse, or laughed it off with “oh yeah, some one else told me that once!”

                But time and again, one little thread kept coming up. Over phone call after email, after letter, I was told time and again of the church.

                “Mind you,” one of the farmers confided on a phone call, “when I was a boy I sneaked down there to have a look. I had heard that it was Satanists you see, and I wanted to see the Devil Worshippers church. So I crept to the church and saw that word on the wall. Tethylla. I read it aloud, and everything went still.”

                “We were told it was a disease.” Another local wrote to me. “An infection brought from Africa by migrating birds. I heard the priest carved the name of the disease into the wall of the church to warn others to flee. He called it Tethylla.”

                “This one local girl she said she was looking forward to escaping from the village.” Another told me. “She didn’t want to be a fish wife. She wanted to see the world, be something special. She said she was a funny sort, believed in spirits and darkness and that guff. I was told by one of the soldiers she had written a spell as she died.”

                That is the sort of tantalising nugget of information you just could not ignore. I redoubled my efforts to contact the environment agency for the official truth. The official truth seemed rather slim lined and vague. Over the course of the Hamlets last Christmas and infectious fungus was discovered in there. The government hit some kind of panic, and placed the area under a quarantine for fifty years. The Environment Agency inherited the situation and kept the fences maintained until the quarantine ended, at which point no provision had been made, so the site was quietly forgotten about.

                “At the end of the day,” a contact in the agency told me, “although the land itself is no longer private property it is such a ruinous state I think the fewer people who go getting themselves into trouble there, the better.”

“Would I be able to go there?”

“Legally? Yes. Is it a smart idea? No.”

                As to the nature of the infection? The documents I had collected copies of under the freedom of Information never claimed anything more precise than a “Fungal Infection.” If you ever find a fungus called Teythella let me know, as I couldn’t. I couldn’t find any one who had ever heard of it. Though I suspected at the time that a number of the myths about Kneale had interbred. The name of the disease had become linked to the carved word, although the two could have been entirely unrelated.

                I arrived back home in the evening, and felt that I had satisfactorily wasted my weekend on my obsession. I climbed into bed and took some prescription sleeping pills, before allowing the darkness of the void to embrace me. I hoped it would be dreamless, but it was not. As always I my nightmares were of drowning.