The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout 2026. For March, we are delighted to publish a new piece by David Frankel.

---

It looked like an old tool box, handmade from planks, screwed together at the corners. A cloth cover, stiff with grime, failed to contain the disconcertingly sweet reek of rotting meat.

Dale had sworn me to secrecy before admitting me to the shed, and, as I took my oath, he displayed his serrated fishing knife to make the consequences of grassing crystal clear. I remember that, even in the sun of late summer, the shed was gloomy. It was tucked away at the bottom of his garden, out of sight of the house and almost submerged beneath the low hanging boughs of the surrounding trees. Hidden from the light, its damp corners never seemed to dry and there was always a smell of decaying timber and creosote.

When Dale peeled back the filthy cloth, the smell intensified as though the contents of the box were dissolving into the air, to be carried on my breath down into the unseeable spaces inside me where it would taint everything it touched. In the gloom I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. The smell told me that, whatever it was, it had once been alive, but it was a few moments before my eyes adjusted and I could see that it was some kind of offal, blackened and stinking.

‘Jesus, what is it?’

‘An ’eart.’

‘Gross. What’ve you got it for? It stinks.’

‘Growing maggots for fishing, aren’t I.’

‘Where d’you get it?’

‘The butcher’s. Where do y’ think, retard.’

As I got used to the darkness, I could see the thing was moving — for a moment I thought the heart was beating, like something from the horror films we rented from the video shop. But the unnatural, pulsing throb wasn’t a heartbeat, it was the squirming of maggots seething in the juice that sweated out of the rancid organ, pooling in the shadowy corners of the box.

 

Dale called for me the following afternoon. He wanted to show me something on The Moss; a secret more important than the heart full of maggots. As we walked, he looked at me closely, his face screwed up in a frown.

‘You know what happens if you grass?’

I nodded and we climbed through the fence at the end of the road, then crossed the dual-carriageway, the final boundary before the cinder path that would take us out onto to The Moss.

The path wound through scruffy paddocks and the small, black-eyed houses scattered at the town’s hem. After a mile or so, it joined a narrow road that led between run-down farms. The land was laced with paths and narrow concrete roads that seemed to go nowhere, petering out in the drab fields. Some areas, sodden, infertile, had been left as rough bog, riven with pits and pools where peat had been taken for burning by earlier generations.

‘Where are we going?’

‘It’s a secret, I’ve got to show you.’

I felt like we’d already gone too far. ‘If you don’t tell me, I’m going back.’

‘I know where Tricklebones’ grave is. I found it.’

‘You what?’

‘Worked it out from old photos and a thing in an old newspaper.’

‘No way.’

‘So, go back if you don’t want to see it.’

I wasn’t sure I did want to see it, but we’d come a long way and I was scared to go back alone. Tricklebones haunted The Moss. We all knew it. He was both real and not real. On an autumn afternoon twenty years before Dale and I were born, peat cutters found him, a yard or so down, in the wet ground. Skin and hair still clung to his skull. He’d been sleeping under cotton grass and bog myrtle for two-thousand years, folded in the preserving darkness, pressed into the stasis of everlasting life. When they dragged him free of the sucking ground, the twine garrotte that killed him was still in place around his neck, so tight it had cut through skin and gullet into bone. Black water filled the cavity where a tongue had once moved. It was said that, because of this, his voice had been left as a whispered gurgle that could be heard only by those caught alone on The Moss after dusk… Tricklebones is coming. Peddle faster, children. Run quicker. Tricklebones will get you. Tricklebones did it.

We turned off the road past a farmhouse that looked as though it had struggled for the last hundred years against the moss’s attempts to suck it down, slumping inwards at its centre from the effort. Like most of the other farms we’d passed, trees had been planted around it as a windbreak, but the branches were bare, dead perhaps. Beneath them, grass and weeds grew through the plastic carcasses of abandoned toys.

When the farmhouse was far behind us, we left the path, following the line of a ditch into the fields. Pushing through withered nettles, it felt as though we were following a trail that others had used before us, but I couldn’t imagine why another human being would want to go there.

The sun was dipping towards the hazy line where distant trees scratched at the sky. Dale began scouting around as we walked, hacking at the tall grasses with a stick he’d broken from an elder tree, and I sensed we were near the grave. As we followed the line of a long-disused drainage channel, I noticed Dale’s swinging of his switch growing more aggressive and, when I drew level with him at a widening of the trail, I could see that his face was set and a deep frown darkened his eyes.

‘What’s up with you?’ I assumed he’d gotten us lost, or wanted to go back. ‘I thought you wanted to come.’

‘I did,’ he said tightly.

‘We can go back, I’m not bothered. It’ll be getting dark soon anyway.’

I started to turn. I wanted to go back even if he didn’t. It was a part of the moss I’d never been to. The perspectives of farm tracks and drains that crisscrossed the landscape could disorientate you and lead you away towards the faraway horizon. These intersecting lines were broken only by occasional pools or the small clusters of stunted trees that grew at irregular intervals. There was a breathless density to the air, as though the sky above weighed more, and it was easy to imagine the place was haunted.

I was assessing the landscape nervously, trying to get my bearings and work out how much daylight we had left, when Dale said, quietly, ‘Dad found my maggot farm.’

‘Oh.’

‘He went mental. Made me bury it.’

It felt like he wanted me to say something, but I was worrying about our objective, about where we were, about how far from home we’d come. When I didn’t replay, Dale carried on,

‘He went straight to where it was hidden, like he knew where to look.’

‘He probably followed his nose.’

‘I reckon somebody grassed.’

Dale walked on, swinging his stick violently back and forth across the path until we came to the top of a steep embankment that plunged down into an area of rough ground in the elbow of a dirty stream.

‘This is it.’ He pointed with his stick.

From what I could see, the burial site was a hollow at the base of the bank. Peat-stained water had filled one end, the other end opened onto a boggy area. A muddy track led down into the hollow from the end of the little scarp where we stood.

‘Come on.’ He grabbed me and dragged me down the slope into the marshy ground and across it to the pool. Long before we reached it our feet were sinking into the spongey carpet of moss and course grass.

‘Is that it?’

Dale just nodded. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t a boggy pool.

‘What now?’

‘We summon Tricklebones,’ he said solemnly.

‘How?’

‘You have to kneel in the grave with your eyes closed and say his name three times.’

I waited nervously. Part of me was excited, but I had no desire, or intention, of kneeling in a muddy pool. But, as I started to think about going back up the embankment, leaving Dale to work the spell, he shoved me hard in the back, forcing me into the pool,

‘Go on then.’

‘What are you doing, dickhead. My pants are soaking, now.’

‘Say it,’ he said, his face twisting with anger.

I said it, twice.

‘Say it again, shit head.’ He swiped me with his stick, and I yelped.

‘Tricklebones!’

Something hard hit me on the head, a stinging blow, and I felt strong bony fingers gripping the back of my neck painfully hard, pitching me forward into the hollow, pushing me down into the foul water of the bog.

As my mouth and nose filled, I began to choke. I gulped for air, but swallowed only stinking water and rot. I felt needles in my lungs, convulsions spasming through me as my body tried to push it out, and I thought of the filthy juices from the rotting offal Dale had showed me, brown, fetid, sweet. Flapping my arms in sudden panic I pushed against the darkness below me but seemed only to sink deeper, blinded by fragments of dead grass, and clouds of mud swirling around me. I felt myself slipping deeper and deeper into the shadow where Tricklebones hid. In the soft decay that seemed to have no bottom, I heard his voice gurgling. I felt the bones of his cold fingers digging into my neck, an unyielding grip from which I knew I couldn’t break free.

I knew he wouldn’t stop. He wanted me to die, and I could feel consciousness beginning to slip away from me. Down in the dark, I dreamt of a game we used to play called Dead Man’s Fall. Taking turns, we’d pretend to die in different ways, chosen by our peers, as though we were auditioning for a part. Your turn. Die like a soldier being shot — no, die like you’ve been poisoned — you’re becoming a zombie — you’ve been hit by an arrow — blown up by a cannon —fallen from a tower — hit by a car — no, die like you’ve been garrotted and left in a bog.

Play dead. He’ll stop then. He’ll stop…

I was good at it; playing dead. I was never melodramatic like the other kids, and I could keep it going, stringing it out until they started to think I might not be faking it. As Tricklebones’ weight continued to bear down on me, I let myself sink, fighting the urge to break free, or to look over my shoulder, afraid of what it would cost me to look into his eyes.

As I lay still, drifting further into the dark. The burning in my lungs eased and I felt less frightened. The mud seemed to hold me in suspension until I felt him release his grip. When I surfaced, vomiting out the ooze from my throat, half-blinded by the filth in my eyes, Dale was gone. He must have seen Tricklebones and run. I fell back and glimpsed above me Tricklebones climbing, wet, black, from the hollow of the grave, disappearing over the lip of the embankment, leaving me for dead in the gathering dusk. When I climbed unsteadily to my feet, I was still choking on the stinking water that had filled my mouth and nose. It was inside me — in my lungs and stomach. Shivering and rigid with shock, I climbed up the bank and glimpsed the distant shadow of Tricklebones running across the moss, towards the edge of Darnforth and out of sight.

I waited until dark before walking back to the town, afraid of what might happen if my parents saw me covered in the filth of the bog. When I got home, I washed off the mud under the garden tap and crept across the hallway where TV voices spilled around the door of the living room. I hid my clothes in the laundry basket, then crept, shaking, into my bed. By morning I had a fever.

 

When I woke on the second day, there was blood on the pillow. At first I didn’t realise what it was; it was almost black, dried onto the fabric, and around it a yellowish stain spread where the plasma had leached into the soft fibres. I remember that I was embarrassed rather than frightened. I had no frame of reference for it. I thought perhaps it was like wetting the bed.

My mother wiped my face and neck with a cool, damp face-cloth. There was more blood when I vomited, and a taste of something rotten. I thought of the water in the grave, and the liquid running from the decaying offal in the box. I pictured it pooling inside me. The the room seemed to spin slowly. My eyes stung from the sweat that was running down my face. Everything I looked at seemed to shimmer, and it all felt like a dream. The fear came later, when I saw the anxiety in my mother’s face.

The doctor came and went. The voices in the room around me were muffled, as though I was still underwater. The first days and nights that passed were like swimming intermittently in darkness or the shifting colours of sunlight coming through the leaf-patterned curtains. After the first morning, I slept in my parents’ bed with my mother so she could keep an eye on me. My father slept in my narrow bunk in the room next door.

He came into the room only occasionally, to take clothes from his drawers or wardrobe, or to check on me during the rare occasions that my mother went out. One morning, as he refilled the water jug beside the bed, he cleared his throat and said, assertively up-beat, ‘You’re looking better. Ready to go back to you own room?’

‘No, he isn’t.’ My mother’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs where she was setting down shopping bags and taking off her coat.

That night I woke to find Tricklebones sitting on the bed watching my mother — a black figure, hunched beside her, silhouetted against the moonlit curtains. I wanted to warn her but I was frozen with fear and, voiceless, I pretended to sleep while he crouched over her. I pretended not to hear her murmur as he closed above her. The sound of his wet breathing seemed to fill the room. I lay sweating, the world swimming around me, until I slipped into fevered darkness again.

The next day, the doctor returned. He pressed the warmed diaphragm of a stethoscope to my chest. ‘Deep breath. And again. Good lad.’ Watching my rib cage rise and fall, I felt the rattling in my chest and remembered the heaving of the thing in the box, the seething of its flesh, I knew the rot was inside me, the rank water of The Moss… Tricklebones.

I was terrified that whatever I had brought into the house would spread; that Tricklebones now had the power to extend his reach to my parents. Especially my mother who had bathed me and changed my pyjamas and bedding, poured medicine onto spoons and sat with me while I drank broth, propped up with pillows. I thought of him, on the bed, hovering above her in the night, and I began to panic.

The doctor tried to hide his annoyance, ‘What is it?’

I was crying, and trying to turn away so my father wouldn’t see.

‘Silly boy. Nothing to be afraid of, it’s only a stethoscope.’

My mother put her hand on my chest to calm me. ‘Sorry doctor. He’s always been highly strung.’

I heard my father leave the room, closing the door firmly behind him.

 

*

 

These things come back to me unexpectedly when I return to Darnforth, many years later, to look after my father. We barely spoke for months at a time, but there was no one else to do it. My mother abandoned our home long before I did, leaving Darnforth and disappearing into the world. I was still too young to understand what was happening, except on the most immediate, practical level. Of course, I wanted to know where she’d gone and I asked, often at first, then less often, then only occasionally. I never got a straight answer. Ran away to join the circus – Ran off with the milkman – It’s just you and me now, a team — What are you looking at me like that for? It’s me that keeps a roof over your head, you ungrateful little shit — Go and find her if that’s what you want. By the time I was old enough, her trail was cold. Maybe Tricklebones got her.

So, I come back to the dripping of the kitchen tap and the softly ticking mantlepiece clock. Beneath the familiar smells of old carpet, stale fruit and furniture polish the house has taken on a new smell: that of the sickroom, of disease.

Dad seems more-or-less pleased to see me, but he speaks even less now than when I was last here. They’ve already removed part of his throat to buy him some time, and his speech has become a wet rattle that has to fight its way out of his collapsing body. He smells of decay. His breath reeks of it. I had almost forgotten about my experience out on The Moss, but every time my father speaks speaks I’m propelled back to those childhood memories of sour offal, and Tricklebones.

Dad sleeps a lot, and there are lengthy stays in hospital during which I am left alone in the house. Duty dictates that I visit him every day to help him pass time and check his decline. In the hush and dimmed lights of the post-op recovery unit I watch him breathing noisily, each stolen gasp catching somewhere in the bruised ruins of his throat as the ventilator forces air into him. He seems collapsed inwards as though the man who was there during my childhood is leaking away through one of the tubes that tether him to the world.

I try to talk to him, but I have little to say, and his voice is gone. He communicates only through poorly written notes. He mostly sleeps. Eventually sleep lapses into something deeper and I realise we are never going to have the man-to-man conversation that part of me had always expected, or maybe hoped for. There would be no explanations, no clearing of the air or reminiscing, and, if he’d ever wanted there to be any kind of reckoning between us, I knew it wasn’t going to happen anymore.

Even so, I think I need the visits more than he does. They give the days some sort of structure. There is nothing else to do but walk. I spend hours following the paths of my childhood around the town and its fringes, but I don’t venture out onto the moss until the morning my childhood dreams return. I wake shivering and gulping for air. Somehow I’ve thrown the sheets off the bed and I can feel the cool autumn breeze on my skin, glossed with sweat. The dream is still in my mind — ‘Deep breath…good lad.’

 

Out on The Moss, morning light leaks through low cloud and the city lies like smoke along a horizon. It is strange to be out here again, after all this time. Most of the boggy fields I remember have been drained and re-landscaped for horse paddocks and toy farms, but the old concrete road remains. I follow it far out, away from town, retracing the steps I’d taken with Dale as accurately as I can. I’m surprised we came this far. It seems an impossibly long way far for a ten-year-old to wander. I begin to think I’ve misremembered and gone the wrong way, until I reach the old farmhouse. I don’t recognise it at first. It’s been modernised, re-glazed, re-roofed, extended. The overgrown garden with its abandoned toys and dead trees has been relandscaped with a neat lawn and rockery. Beyond it, I find the trail that Dale and I followed, just visible behind a thicket of young trees and a fence, which I’m forced to climb.

I find the place where we summoned Tricklebones into the world. It sits in the scruffy limbus between two fields. It seems unaltered in all the years since I was last here, but not, I think, because it is important, or the site of a burial, but because it’s been overlooked, insignificant. And, while it is apparently unchanged, it isn’t as I remember it. What I recalled as a plunging escarpment now seems no more than a scrape in the landscape, and the pool just the flooded bottom of a broad, grassy ditch. And yet, there is something disturbing about it. The dark-stained water absorbs the thin sunlight as though the black core of the planet has risen to the surface, bringing the cold from the depths below. This small patch of forgotten land is a reminder of what the whole Moss once was: a soft scab on the surface of the world.

Dad never wanted to know what had happened to me on The Moss, and I never told anyone about Tricklebones, afraid of not being believed, or of what might happen if I was. Afraid of what Dale might do if I grassed. Dad guessed Dale had been involved and that was as far as his curiosity went. There was no way he’d confront Dale’s father.

I think, in some ways, I was jealous of Dale and his father’s ferocious love, which swung between violence and devotion. I always knew his father used to slap him around, but he was always happy to do battle with the angry parents of other kids, our teachers, or the police if it came to it. He took Dale fishing, and they went to football together. Dale’s father had his back. To me, it seemed worth the thrashings he got.

When I first began to venture out alone into the world, to The Moss or into town, my father told me, in no uncertain terms, how it would work between us from then on: ‘If you get in any trouble, don’t bring it back here.’ But I did bring something back.

After the worst of my illness — a lung infection, I was later told — had passed, I was sent away to convalesce. They said the dry heat where my aunt lived would be better for my lungs. Dale never spoke to me again, and not long after school he went to prison for stabbing some guy. That made it easier to forget. In time, I recalled what happened, and what I brought back with me from The Moss, as a dream. Even the place itself began to feel like somewhere I’d imagined. Tricklebones went back to being a shade that lurked in the stories we told each other in the playground. So, for a moment, it’s disorientating to find the place we’d thought was his grave is real.

 

When they first found Tricklebones — Darnforth Man, as he was known in the press — they supposed he was a murder victim. The presence of hair and skin implied a recent burial, and out here, a violent death wasn’t all that surprising, then or now — it still hasn’t quite been civilized. The desolate site, away from the lights and watching eyes of the city, was the perfect place to hide a body. The area was closed off and the detectives arrived. Forensic examination determined that he’d been beaten, garrotted, and beheaded — but it wasn’t the gangland retribution they’d expected. It turned out that he’d been waiting for two millennia, down there in the dark, where time stops working. They’d killed him and sunk him in the bog, miles from the nearest community, banishing him in death, to the deep Moss.

Years later, I visited him in his new resting place, at the Metro Museum. It had been a long time since we first met, and back then I’d never had the courage to really look at him. He’d appeared to me only as a silhouette, a coagulation of the bog’s filth. Peering through the museum case in the dim light of the exhibition room, I felt the breathlessness of the crushed chest, the weight of peat, the press of the bog. His arms were pushed into his body; an awkward pose to hold for centuries — no comfort in the bog’s black bed. His skin was tanned to rind and, through the glass, you could almost smell its salt-stink. Clinging to the cracked dome of his skull, his hair was like a web of fine roots sun-baked onto rock. His eyes were pressed shut against the flash of tourist’s cameras, but his mouth was open as though he was about to speak, his lips parted, pursed, as though he was talking in his sleep. Whatever words had been on his lips had stayed there, frozen in time, unspoken, forever.

I wonder sometimes if his ghost is still down there, under the embankment at the field’s end, where the knuckles of long-dead roots claw at the peat as though they are trying to climb towards the light. Perhaps, down in the preserving stink of the bog, there is still some echo of him, pushing towards the surface.