Back when I was in primary school, we had a teacher that everyone hated. Mr Handscombe, his name was. He taught English.
Mr Handscombe was probably about five foot five, with a ratty face and thick glasses. Fat little pot belly. Losing his hair on top. Pretty much every genetic disadvantage you could think of, all rolled into one arsehole.
Fuck, I hated him. I don’t know if the power of being taller than 30 other human beings in one classroom went to the guy’s head, but he treated us more like we were prisoners than his English students.
He yelled and screamed at kids. He humiliated them. He’d put you in detention for anything he could think of. He was a nasty, nasty piece of work.
He had his favourites, too. Not kids he liked, but kids he particularly liked to pick on. There was an overweight boy called John Pickard, for instance, and every time Handscombe took the register he’d call him "Pig-arse" and act like it was all a big mistake. Always made him read the part of Piggy when we studied Lord of the Flies. Then there was a girl called Mary Richards, who had a lisp. Whenever there were no volunteers to read out loud, he’d make Mary do it every time.
But the kid he loved picking on most of all was Grant.
Grant was a new kid who joined us at the start of Year 6. Mum told me he was a traveller, which meant he moved to lots of different places and lived in a caravan. Other kids at school had different names for him, but they’d never have said them to Grant’s face. The kid was about a head taller than the rest of us, for one. Big boned and broad. He had this steely, don’t-fuck-with-me look about him that meant the other kids left him well alone.
It didn’t stop Mr Handscombe, though. Not one bit. I don’t know whether it was because Grant was almost as tall as he was, or because Grant’s family were travellers, but Handscombe had him marked from day one. He hated Grant. You could just hear it in his voice, every time he spoke to him. He did not like the kid one bit.
Mr Handscombe alternated between telling Grant off in front of everyone — this could be for literally anything, like sneezing while Handscombe was talking or having his shirt untucked — and trying his best to embarrass the kid. The first week he had Grant come up to the front of the class, then he berated him for 10 minutes because his shoes weren’t properly polished.
Another time he told us we were going to practice synonyms, then wrote the word DIFFERENT in the middle of the blackboard. We had to take turns going up and writing words around it that meant something similar.
When we were done, Mr Handscombe gave a thin smile.
"Now, we need someone well versed in this subject to volunteer to read all these words out loud to the class," he said. "How about... you, Grant?"
I think he’d been expecting Grant to be a slow reader, but he was wrong. The kid might’ve looked like a thug, but boy, could he read. He rattled through those words with no problems at all, never giving any hint that the subject matter affected him. I could see Handscombe’s smile slowly turning to a scowl the longer it went on.
Things carried on in the same vein for most of the autumn term. Handscombe needling, and Grant putting up with it as best he could. Then, come October, we had a special assignment. One for Halloween. The idea was to go away and write a scary story, so we could take turns reading them out loud in class on October 31st.
I don’t remember many of the stories the other kids told that day. I barely even remember my own. I think it was something pretty generic about a monster in the cupboard of my room. But I remember Grant’s. Even all these years later, I still remember it. The story Grant told was sort of a folk tale, and it had me hooked from the moment he began.
Here it is, in Grant’s words, as best as I can remember it:
Once upon a time, there was a family of witches who lived in a cave. The witches kept to themselves, and most of the people and creatures in the nearby village left them well alone. But there was one exception.
A large, ugly troll terrorised the woods surrounding the village. The troll was eight feet tall, with a big green belly the size of a boulder. Hideous red boils and warts covered his face. He ate anything that was foolish enough to get in his way.
Now the troll thought he owned the woods, and he didn’t like the fact the witches were living in a cave so close to them. He didn’t like it at all.
But there wasn’t much he could do about it. Whenever he’d see the witches he’d give chase, but they’d always run back into the safety of their cave. They’d crawl back into the darkness between the rocks, and the troll was too big to follow them.
He’d stand at the mouth of the cave, and he’d bellow the same thing each day:
"Witches, hiding in the cracks,
Leave this land and don’t come back!
If you refuse and choose to stay,
Know that I will make you pay."
Now, the witches were afraid of the troll — everyone was — but they didn’t have anywhere else to go. So for a long time, they survived as best they could. They’d sneak out of the cave to get food, and to fetch the items they used to brew their spells, whenever the troll was out of sight. And whenever they saw him they’d run back into the darkness.
The troll was never smart enough to catch them, and he got angrier and angrier. Soon, he started killing animals and leaving them to rot in the mouth of the cave. Badgers, foxes, birds — one day he even caught a child from the nearby village and left his tiny, broken body in the cave’s entrance.
When the witches came out the next day and saw this, they were horrified. But they also spotted something else; something the troll would never have noticed. Stuck amongst the blood and broken remains of the child’s body was one thick, black hair. A hair from the head of the troll. And when the witches saw this, they finally knew what to do.
They took the hair, and they gathered up some twigs from the forest, and they wove it all together into a miniature wooden doll. They made it tall and fat and ugly, so it looked as much like the troll as possible. Then they gathered around it in a circle to cast their spell.
And when they were finished with their magic? They got the doll and took turns sticking pins in it. Pin after pin after pin. By the time they were finished the thing had over 100 sharp sticks of metal peppering its wooden body.
The next day, there was no dead animal outside their cave. There was no sign of the troll at all. The witches went looking for it in the forest, and soon enough they found some black troll’s blood staining some ferns by the river. They followed the trail. The blood got thicker the further along they went, and the stains grew more and more frequent. Fresher.
Finally, in a clearing not far from the village, they found the troll itself. It was slumped in the shade of a giant oak tree. Eyes closed. Pulling in shallow breath after shallow breath. And it was bleeding from a hundred tiny mouths that had been carved into its green flesh, its black blood leeching out of it in the most slow and painful way imaginable--
I remember Mr Handscombe stopping the story at this point.
He had a familiar scowl on his face as he gestured for the class to be silent. You could tell everyone had been into the story, because a bunch of kids groaned when Handscombe put a stop to it.
"Yes, yes, okay," he said, holding his hands up for quiet. "I think we’ve heard enough, Grant. That was... predictably unpleasant. I suppose you can take the boy out of the caravan, but you can never quite take the caravan out of the boy."
That wasn’t the last day I saw Grant, but it must have been close; he left our school a couple of weeks later. Family moved away. I heard they went further south, but no one really knew for sure. All we knew was that one day Grant was in lessons, and the next his chair was empty. Gone, just like that.
And a few days later, so was Mr Handscombe.
It started when a supply teacher appeared one morning to take his English class. We didn’t think much of it at the time — just assumed he was sick or something. That was until we saw the front page of the next day’s newspaper.
We never found out all the details. There was a talk from the headmaster and whispers in the playground, sure — but mainly just a lot of rumours. No one knew quite what to believe.
The one thing everyone could agree on was that Mr Handscombe had been murdered. The police had no leads. And the details of his death were apparently too grim for the paper to print.
*
I don’t know what it was that drove me to go looking for the spot where Grant’s family had been camping.
Simple curiosity, perhaps. Maybe the fact I couldn’t quite shake the memory of the story he’d told. Whatever it was, I spent the weeks after Handscombe’s murder riding my bike around the local countryside after school and at weekends. Trying to track down their old campsite.
And eventually, I found it.
It was a man who worked in a newsagent on the edge of a nearby village that gave me the tip. Pointed me in the direction of some fields alongside a forest. Said the travellers had been staying somewhere over that way.
It didn’t take me long to find the right field after that.
It was close to the edge of the woods, not that far from a river. Reminded me a bit of the setting in the story Grant had told. Just swap the cave for a field. I set my bike down and began looking around.
Grant’s family has been gone a few weeks by then, but the signs were still there. Flattened patches of grass. A couple of rusted metal chairs. Cigarette butts. And, in what I guess must have been the middle of their campsite, a stone circle.
I don’t know why, but I had a funny feeling in my stomach as I approached that circle. Butterflies, I suppose. Maybe a little fear.
The stone circle was empty but for one thing in the middle. A tiny shape, propped up against a rock. I think my mind knew what I was going to see a second before I got close enough to make it out in detail. I drew in a sharp breath.
The object leaning against the rock was a doll.
Wooden, painted. Carved out of some nearby tree, was my guess. The doll was small, but it had been decorated with careful detail. A little pot belly. Thinning hair. I recognised Mr Handscombe almost immediately.
There was only one thing different — only one thing that separated the likeness of the doll from the image of Mr Handscombe that had appeared in the local paper. Something subtly wrong with the face.
I leaned closer to get a better look, and felt a wave of nausea roll through my stomach.
Both the doll’s eyes had been gouged out.
---
Credits
Mr Handscombe was probably about five foot five, with a ratty face and thick glasses. Fat little pot belly. Losing his hair on top. Pretty much every genetic disadvantage you could think of, all rolled into one arsehole.
Fuck, I hated him. I don’t know if the power of being taller than 30 other human beings in one classroom went to the guy’s head, but he treated us more like we were prisoners than his English students.
He yelled and screamed at kids. He humiliated them. He’d put you in detention for anything he could think of. He was a nasty, nasty piece of work.
He had his favourites, too. Not kids he liked, but kids he particularly liked to pick on. There was an overweight boy called John Pickard, for instance, and every time Handscombe took the register he’d call him "Pig-arse" and act like it was all a big mistake. Always made him read the part of Piggy when we studied Lord of the Flies. Then there was a girl called Mary Richards, who had a lisp. Whenever there were no volunteers to read out loud, he’d make Mary do it every time.
But the kid he loved picking on most of all was Grant.
Grant was a new kid who joined us at the start of Year 6. Mum told me he was a traveller, which meant he moved to lots of different places and lived in a caravan. Other kids at school had different names for him, but they’d never have said them to Grant’s face. The kid was about a head taller than the rest of us, for one. Big boned and broad. He had this steely, don’t-fuck-with-me look about him that meant the other kids left him well alone.
It didn’t stop Mr Handscombe, though. Not one bit. I don’t know whether it was because Grant was almost as tall as he was, or because Grant’s family were travellers, but Handscombe had him marked from day one. He hated Grant. You could just hear it in his voice, every time he spoke to him. He did not like the kid one bit.
Mr Handscombe alternated between telling Grant off in front of everyone — this could be for literally anything, like sneezing while Handscombe was talking or having his shirt untucked — and trying his best to embarrass the kid. The first week he had Grant come up to the front of the class, then he berated him for 10 minutes because his shoes weren’t properly polished.
Another time he told us we were going to practice synonyms, then wrote the word DIFFERENT in the middle of the blackboard. We had to take turns going up and writing words around it that meant something similar.
When we were done, Mr Handscombe gave a thin smile.
"Now, we need someone well versed in this subject to volunteer to read all these words out loud to the class," he said. "How about... you, Grant?"
I think he’d been expecting Grant to be a slow reader, but he was wrong. The kid might’ve looked like a thug, but boy, could he read. He rattled through those words with no problems at all, never giving any hint that the subject matter affected him. I could see Handscombe’s smile slowly turning to a scowl the longer it went on.
Things carried on in the same vein for most of the autumn term. Handscombe needling, and Grant putting up with it as best he could. Then, come October, we had a special assignment. One for Halloween. The idea was to go away and write a scary story, so we could take turns reading them out loud in class on October 31st.
I don’t remember many of the stories the other kids told that day. I barely even remember my own. I think it was something pretty generic about a monster in the cupboard of my room. But I remember Grant’s. Even all these years later, I still remember it. The story Grant told was sort of a folk tale, and it had me hooked from the moment he began.
Here it is, in Grant’s words, as best as I can remember it:
Once upon a time, there was a family of witches who lived in a cave. The witches kept to themselves, and most of the people and creatures in the nearby village left them well alone. But there was one exception.
A large, ugly troll terrorised the woods surrounding the village. The troll was eight feet tall, with a big green belly the size of a boulder. Hideous red boils and warts covered his face. He ate anything that was foolish enough to get in his way.
Now the troll thought he owned the woods, and he didn’t like the fact the witches were living in a cave so close to them. He didn’t like it at all.
But there wasn’t much he could do about it. Whenever he’d see the witches he’d give chase, but they’d always run back into the safety of their cave. They’d crawl back into the darkness between the rocks, and the troll was too big to follow them.
He’d stand at the mouth of the cave, and he’d bellow the same thing each day:
"Witches, hiding in the cracks,
Leave this land and don’t come back!
If you refuse and choose to stay,
Know that I will make you pay."
Now, the witches were afraid of the troll — everyone was — but they didn’t have anywhere else to go. So for a long time, they survived as best they could. They’d sneak out of the cave to get food, and to fetch the items they used to brew their spells, whenever the troll was out of sight. And whenever they saw him they’d run back into the darkness.
The troll was never smart enough to catch them, and he got angrier and angrier. Soon, he started killing animals and leaving them to rot in the mouth of the cave. Badgers, foxes, birds — one day he even caught a child from the nearby village and left his tiny, broken body in the cave’s entrance.
When the witches came out the next day and saw this, they were horrified. But they also spotted something else; something the troll would never have noticed. Stuck amongst the blood and broken remains of the child’s body was one thick, black hair. A hair from the head of the troll. And when the witches saw this, they finally knew what to do.
They took the hair, and they gathered up some twigs from the forest, and they wove it all together into a miniature wooden doll. They made it tall and fat and ugly, so it looked as much like the troll as possible. Then they gathered around it in a circle to cast their spell.
And when they were finished with their magic? They got the doll and took turns sticking pins in it. Pin after pin after pin. By the time they were finished the thing had over 100 sharp sticks of metal peppering its wooden body.
The next day, there was no dead animal outside their cave. There was no sign of the troll at all. The witches went looking for it in the forest, and soon enough they found some black troll’s blood staining some ferns by the river. They followed the trail. The blood got thicker the further along they went, and the stains grew more and more frequent. Fresher.
Finally, in a clearing not far from the village, they found the troll itself. It was slumped in the shade of a giant oak tree. Eyes closed. Pulling in shallow breath after shallow breath. And it was bleeding from a hundred tiny mouths that had been carved into its green flesh, its black blood leeching out of it in the most slow and painful way imaginable--
I remember Mr Handscombe stopping the story at this point.
He had a familiar scowl on his face as he gestured for the class to be silent. You could tell everyone had been into the story, because a bunch of kids groaned when Handscombe put a stop to it.
"Yes, yes, okay," he said, holding his hands up for quiet. "I think we’ve heard enough, Grant. That was... predictably unpleasant. I suppose you can take the boy out of the caravan, but you can never quite take the caravan out of the boy."
That wasn’t the last day I saw Grant, but it must have been close; he left our school a couple of weeks later. Family moved away. I heard they went further south, but no one really knew for sure. All we knew was that one day Grant was in lessons, and the next his chair was empty. Gone, just like that.
And a few days later, so was Mr Handscombe.
It started when a supply teacher appeared one morning to take his English class. We didn’t think much of it at the time — just assumed he was sick or something. That was until we saw the front page of the next day’s newspaper.
We never found out all the details. There was a talk from the headmaster and whispers in the playground, sure — but mainly just a lot of rumours. No one knew quite what to believe.
The one thing everyone could agree on was that Mr Handscombe had been murdered. The police had no leads. And the details of his death were apparently too grim for the paper to print.
*
I don’t know what it was that drove me to go looking for the spot where Grant’s family had been camping.
Simple curiosity, perhaps. Maybe the fact I couldn’t quite shake the memory of the story he’d told. Whatever it was, I spent the weeks after Handscombe’s murder riding my bike around the local countryside after school and at weekends. Trying to track down their old campsite.
And eventually, I found it.
It was a man who worked in a newsagent on the edge of a nearby village that gave me the tip. Pointed me in the direction of some fields alongside a forest. Said the travellers had been staying somewhere over that way.
It didn’t take me long to find the right field after that.
It was close to the edge of the woods, not that far from a river. Reminded me a bit of the setting in the story Grant had told. Just swap the cave for a field. I set my bike down and began looking around.
Grant’s family has been gone a few weeks by then, but the signs were still there. Flattened patches of grass. A couple of rusted metal chairs. Cigarette butts. And, in what I guess must have been the middle of their campsite, a stone circle.
I don’t know why, but I had a funny feeling in my stomach as I approached that circle. Butterflies, I suppose. Maybe a little fear.
The stone circle was empty but for one thing in the middle. A tiny shape, propped up against a rock. I think my mind knew what I was going to see a second before I got close enough to make it out in detail. I drew in a sharp breath.
The object leaning against the rock was a doll.
Wooden, painted. Carved out of some nearby tree, was my guess. The doll was small, but it had been decorated with careful detail. A little pot belly. Thinning hair. I recognised Mr Handscombe almost immediately.
There was only one thing different — only one thing that separated the likeness of the doll from the image of Mr Handscombe that had appeared in the local paper. Something subtly wrong with the face.
I leaned closer to get a better look, and felt a wave of nausea roll through my stomach.
Both the doll’s eyes had been gouged out.
---
Credits
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