Horror Stories from Horrified - Volume One (2)

T he D ancing Children
by Sam Cossey
The inspiration for The Dancing Children came from growing up in the
East Anglian countryside. Underneath the big Norfolk skies, and
wrapped up in the deep, black meres, and the flat expanses of fields
there was the haunting inevitability of a rural, barely concealed horror
watching and waiting.
The stor y whi ch I am about to r el ate i s one of t he m ost si ngul ar and f ant ast i c of m y
l i fe. The follow ing events occur r ed w hen I was a young man not too long out of univer sity
and w or king for an ar chiving company in the Midlands. The company in question
specialised in litur gical documents and my w or k w ould involve tr avelling the length and
br eadth of the countr y to leaf thr ough r ecor ds w hich had been br ought to the company's
attention, in the hopes of finding something of inter est. The w or k was invar iably quite dull
but, for tunately, I spent only tw o year s at this employment befor e an oppor tunity ar ose
elsew her e w hich saw an incr ease in pay and decr ease in hour s. I can honestly say that in
those tw o year s, ther e was only one occasion in w hich I was pr ivileged to r ecor d anything
of inter est.
I had been called to a tiny village in Nor folk, called Car br ooke, to examine a new ly found
manuscr ipt in the chur ch of St Paul and St Peter. I ar r ived in the village and was astounded
at the size of the chur ch. The population of the village was only a couple of thousand but
the chur ch loomed above the settlement and looked big enough for a tow n thr ee or four
times the size. I was met by the chur chwar den and he let me into the chur ch w her e I was
to begin my cataloguing. The war den explained that ther e was no r egular pr iest of the
chur ch, it being par t of a small amalgamated family and that the vicar was housed tw o
villages over to the nor th. As such, he explained, I w ould have the chur ch essentially to
myself dur ing w hich time I w ould be able to per use the manuscr ipt at my leisur e.
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