From Just North of Hell
Sweet-natured, handsome Elvin James Barris, with his shaggy, collar-length honey-blond hair and eyes the color of China blue corydalis flowers, was Terry Bruckham’s fiancé and second cousin to her longtime friend and fellow author Aldon Quay. He was 54 years old and was the singer for Indigo Reflection, a respected British blues band. He was also a partner in the London-based IndigoCorp, which owned and operated the highly successful Mood Indigo nightclub in London, its sister venue The Indigo Leaf in Toronto, and the newly opened Red White and Indigo in New York.
Elvin and Terry’s romance had initially provided minor tabloid fodder, but they quickly proved to be exceedingly tame when compared to the British Royal Family and the American Hollywood Monarchy. Anyone who really knew them, however, would be quick to say that their lives were far more interesting than the histrionics exhibited by the attention-seeking members of either of these glamorous dynasties.
Elvin had been born on July 20, 1955 in Lichwold, United Kingdom; a hamlet located about five miles south of the city of Bradford. In the early part of the 21st century, the decaying hovels had been razed and a few select buildings donated to the town by Elvin’s family had been turned into a living museum in which actors played out an idealized version of an English village at the time when the Bradford Canal had initially been constructed.
The new Lichwold was a charming village set along the beautifully renovated Bradford Canal, serving as home to young professionals, as a place for a joyful day’s outing for a family or as a romantic rendezvous for lovers. During Elvin’s childhood, however, Lichwold had been a decaying backwater of unsavory repute, belonging to another time and desperately clinging to a life that it should have ceased hold on centuries ago. A silt-laden slough covered with reeds was all that remained of the former Bradford Canal, and there never seemed to be a time when the smell of decaying fish didn’t sit thick in the air. Nowhere but Lichwold did this fishy stink arise, despite the fact that there were certainly no fish remaining in the canal, let alone water to speak of.
Many hair-raising tales surrounded the village and its residents. Elvin, his brothers Randall and Billy, their cousins Allan and Niles, and even their usually sweet-natured sister Cordelia got into repeated scraps defending themselves against taunts by their Bradford schoolmates of “fish-man” and “inbreed idjit.” Although they were outraged at having such descriptions levied against them, they suspected that the epithets might be true regarding their fellow townsfolk, who were without question a debauched lot.
Lichwold had originally been built as a dwelling place for workers hired to construct the Bradford Canal in the early 1770s. It had initially been called Junction, but when disease and a disproportionate number of fatal accidents created a need for proximal burial grounds, a churchyard was set up behind the newly constructed Kirk of St. Wilfrid, a small Anglican church catering to worshippers of any denomination under the kindly ministration of the Reverend Randall Emerson, who was Elvin’s eight times great uncle. Upon the dedication of the churchyard, the town was unofficially named Lichwold due to the multitude of burials in such a short period of time, lich being an old English word for corpse and wold being a tract of open country or a moor, and the name stuck.
All of the important buildings and much of the better land belonged to the Emerson family. The infamous Nykk Inn had been in the family until it burnt down in 1830 following a fight between one of the malformed townsfolk and a peculiar dark-haired man claiming to be both Ottoman royalty and one of Napoleon’s lieutenants. It was never restored. They also owned the infirmary, the church and land accompanying, the cemetery, and also the parsonage, which had been built into a sizeable dwelling due to additions made over the years. Theirs as well was the central way station, which had once served as a stopover for travelers between Northern England and Liverpool, and the post house, which provided food and water for travelers’ horses, and more importantly, at least to the canal teamsters, food and water for the canal’s draft animals.
Parson Randall Emerson went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1786 and no replacement could be found, so the church fell into disrepair until 1840 when his grandson Xavier Emerson, himself an Anglican bishop, insisted on its repair. During that time, bones, later found to belong to the Reverend Randall Emerson, were discovered in the church’s crypt. When madness overtook Xavier in 1860, his son Yves assumed responsibility for the church although there was little call for Christian worship among the impious residents of Lichwold. For forty years, Yves attempted to do God’s work in the malevolent hamlet, but eventually died broken and discouraged. Yves’ son Frederick continued living in the parsonage and ministering to shut-ins in surrounding towns, but the church was closed and boarded up and the cemetery fell into disuse, its last customer, one Publius Symons, being buried there on November 5, 1903.
Frederick tried to make the parsonage a pleasant place for his family to live and his diary recounted pleasant tales of his children playing hide and seek and “Ghosties” among the headstones of the churchyard, but in 1910 he abruptly gathered his family and moved to Leeds. He told the majority of people who asked the reason for his hasty move that he could no longer abide the depraved nature of the citizens of the wicked hamlet. Frederick’s diary, however, revealed accounts of inhuman monstrosities frolicking in the graveyard at night; of unholy tittering which caused his wife Moreen to have a nervous breakdown and which very nearly drove him insane; of overturned headstones and ravaged graves; of the cellar of the ancient church being broken into on certain Pagan holidays and animal sacrifices being left on makeshift altars; of his daughter Wanda’s unwholesome dreams and fascinations which threatened to condemn her eternal soul or at the very least drive her to madness; and of the infernal fishy smell which emanated from the dead canal. The smell was in some way the worst of the horrors because it served as a constant reminder of the moral and physical decay of the town.
After Frederick’s departure, nobody dwelt in the parsonage again until 1953, when Rodger Barris and his fellow Birmingham steel workers Pete McBain and Ben Ferguson formed a contracting business specializing in industrial construction, including plumbing and electrical systems. Rodger’s cousin Robert Emerson served as the company’s accountant. In spite of the less than savory atmosphere of Lichwold, the young entrepreneurs decided to renovate the Emerson family buildings. They could live in them rent-free, which would allow them to save money. Despite the protests of his father, Phillip Emerson, whose father Cinaed vividly remembered the horrors described in his own father Frederick’s diary, Robert Emerson and his Irish-born wife Elsie O’Connor moved from Grantham into the parsonage. Rodger Barris and his wife Amelia Doane, who was Elsie’s cousin, moved into the Emerson Inn, which had been built by the family in 1776 and abandoned in 1834. Benny and his wife Kory had two young daughters and another child on the way, and the vast former infirmary provided plenty of space for what was promising to be a good-size family.
Pete’s Swedish wife Lovisa found the way station charming and was delighted with the kiln which Pete constructed in the large back yard for her to fire beautiful pottery, which she sold on consignment in several high end Liverpool shops. However, the fishy smell from the decaying canal made the nausea that plagued her throughout her pregnancy nearly unbearable and as the years went by, the oppressive atmosphere of the hamlet combined with despair over the death of her infant daughter Fyfa from pneumonia in 1963, resulted in a dependency on tranquilizers and changed her cheerful disposition to one of maudlin resignation to an intolerable fate.
Elvin, Randall and Billy and their sister Cordelia were grateful for the presence of their cousins Niles and Allan; for Pete’s sons Frank, Pete Jr. and Edward; and for Benny’s daughters Elizabeth, Wilhelmina and Zoë and sons Harry and Jim. The other children in the town were dirty and suffered from strange skin conditions which the Barris, Emerson, Ferguson and McBain youngsters feared they might catch if they came too close. Some had horrific birth defects and all exhibited varying degrees of mental deficiencies or disturbances. The adults in the town were no better. The Barris, Emerson, McBain and Ferguson parents wouldn’t let their children play outside after dark. When summer came, the Barrises and Emersons would escape the objectionable atmosphere of Lichwold and stay in family-owned cottages near Southport. Their cousins from London joined them, and Elvin had many happy memories of summers spent by the sea.
After Elvin’s father died from cardiac arrest in 1973, Benny and Pete dissolved the business. Benny moved his family to Blackpool and Pete moved his to Liverpool. Twenty-year-old Randall insisted that their mother Amelia, seventeen-year-old Elvin, and fourteen-year-old Billy move to Liverpool with him and “let t’fuckin’ historical society have t’bloody house, or let it fall into t’stinkin’ cesspit that used ta be t’canal for all I care.”
23-year-old Cordelia insisted that their father be buried in Liverpool rather than “that bloody strong’old of Satan.” Following Rodger’s funeral she hurried back to London, where she was attending art school, vowing never again to return to the foul hamlet.
Robert and Elsie Emerson and sixteen-year-old Allan also moved to Liverpool, joining eighteen-year-old Niles who was working there as an electrician. Elvin, Randall, Billy, Allan and Niles threw themselves into their band Indigo Reflection to counter the pain of losing Rodger. They played the blues music that Rodger had always been so fond of as well as the rock and roll that they loved, and though their sound had become cleaner and more structured in the 36 years since the band’s conception, the original format still served them as well as it had when they’d dedicated their music to memory of their beloved father and uncle.
Cordie, Elvin and Randall believed that rather than the tendency to overwork that Dr. Gage cited as the cause of their father’s heart attack, the foul atmosphere in their hometown was ultimately responsible for Rodger’s untimely death. Many years later, following Billy’s suicide, they also agreed that the evil that permeated Lichwold had played a principal role in destroying their baby brother as well.
Sweet-natured, handsome Elvin James Barris, with his shaggy, collar-length honey-blond hair and eyes the color of China blue corydalis flowers, was Terry Bruckham’s fiancé and second cousin to her longtime friend and fellow author Aldon Quay. He was 54 years old and was the singer for Indigo Reflection, a respected British blues band. He was also a partner in the London-based IndigoCorp, which owned and operated the highly successful Mood Indigo nightclub in London, its sister venue The Indigo Leaf in Toronto, and the newly opened Red White and Indigo in New York.
Elvin and Terry’s romance had initially provided minor tabloid fodder, but they quickly proved to be exceedingly tame when compared to the British Royal Family and the American Hollywood Monarchy. Anyone who really knew them, however, would be quick to say that their lives were far more interesting than the histrionics exhibited by the attention-seeking members of either of these glamorous dynasties.
Elvin had been born on July 20, 1955 in Lichwold, United Kingdom; a hamlet located about five miles south of the city of Bradford. In the early part of the 21st century, the decaying hovels had been razed and a few select buildings donated to the town by Elvin’s family had been turned into a living museum in which actors played out an idealized version of an English village at the time when the Bradford Canal had initially been constructed.
The new Lichwold was a charming village set along the beautifully renovated Bradford Canal, serving as home to young professionals, as a place for a joyful day’s outing for a family or as a romantic rendezvous for lovers. During Elvin’s childhood, however, Lichwold had been a decaying backwater of unsavory repute, belonging to another time and desperately clinging to a life that it should have ceased hold on centuries ago. A silt-laden slough covered with reeds was all that remained of the former Bradford Canal, and there never seemed to be a time when the smell of decaying fish didn’t sit thick in the air. Nowhere but Lichwold did this fishy stink arise, despite the fact that there were certainly no fish remaining in the canal, let alone water to speak of.
Many hair-raising tales surrounded the village and its residents. Elvin, his brothers Randall and Billy, their cousins Allan and Niles, and even their usually sweet-natured sister Cordelia got into repeated scraps defending themselves against taunts by their Bradford schoolmates of “fish-man” and “inbreed idjit.” Although they were outraged at having such descriptions levied against them, they suspected that the epithets might be true regarding their fellow townsfolk, who were without question a debauched lot.
Lichwold had originally been built as a dwelling place for workers hired to construct the Bradford Canal in the early 1770s. It had initially been called Junction, but when disease and a disproportionate number of fatal accidents created a need for proximal burial grounds, a churchyard was set up behind the newly constructed Kirk of St. Wilfrid, a small Anglican church catering to worshippers of any denomination under the kindly ministration of the Reverend Randall Emerson, who was Elvin’s eight times great uncle. Upon the dedication of the churchyard, the town was unofficially named Lichwold due to the multitude of burials in such a short period of time, lich being an old English word for corpse and wold being a tract of open country or a moor, and the name stuck.
All of the important buildings and much of the better land belonged to the Emerson family. The infamous Nykk Inn had been in the family until it burnt down in 1830 following a fight between one of the malformed townsfolk and a peculiar dark-haired man claiming to be both Ottoman royalty and one of Napoleon’s lieutenants. It was never restored. They also owned the infirmary, the church and land accompanying, the cemetery, and also the parsonage, which had been built into a sizeable dwelling due to additions made over the years. Theirs as well was the central way station, which had once served as a stopover for travelers between Northern England and Liverpool, and the post house, which provided food and water for travelers’ horses, and more importantly, at least to the canal teamsters, food and water for the canal’s draft animals.
Parson Randall Emerson went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1786 and no replacement could be found, so the church fell into disrepair until 1840 when his grandson Xavier Emerson, himself an Anglican bishop, insisted on its repair. During that time, bones, later found to belong to the Reverend Randall Emerson, were discovered in the church’s crypt. When madness overtook Xavier in 1860, his son Yves assumed responsibility for the church although there was little call for Christian worship among the impious residents of Lichwold. For forty years, Yves attempted to do God’s work in the malevolent hamlet, but eventually died broken and discouraged. Yves’ son Frederick continued living in the parsonage and ministering to shut-ins in surrounding towns, but the church was closed and boarded up and the cemetery fell into disuse, its last customer, one Publius Symons, being buried there on November 5, 1903.
Frederick tried to make the parsonage a pleasant place for his family to live and his diary recounted pleasant tales of his children playing hide and seek and “Ghosties” among the headstones of the churchyard, but in 1910 he abruptly gathered his family and moved to Leeds. He told the majority of people who asked the reason for his hasty move that he could no longer abide the depraved nature of the citizens of the wicked hamlet. Frederick’s diary, however, revealed accounts of inhuman monstrosities frolicking in the graveyard at night; of unholy tittering which caused his wife Moreen to have a nervous breakdown and which very nearly drove him insane; of overturned headstones and ravaged graves; of the cellar of the ancient church being broken into on certain Pagan holidays and animal sacrifices being left on makeshift altars; of his daughter Wanda’s unwholesome dreams and fascinations which threatened to condemn her eternal soul or at the very least drive her to madness; and of the infernal fishy smell which emanated from the dead canal. The smell was in some way the worst of the horrors because it served as a constant reminder of the moral and physical decay of the town.
After Frederick’s departure, nobody dwelt in the parsonage again until 1953, when Rodger Barris and his fellow Birmingham steel workers Pete McBain and Ben Ferguson formed a contracting business specializing in industrial construction, including plumbing and electrical systems. Rodger’s cousin Robert Emerson served as the company’s accountant. In spite of the less than savory atmosphere of Lichwold, the young entrepreneurs decided to renovate the Emerson family buildings. They could live in them rent-free, which would allow them to save money. Despite the protests of his father, Phillip Emerson, whose father Cinaed vividly remembered the horrors described in his own father Frederick’s diary, Robert Emerson and his Irish-born wife Elsie O’Connor moved from Grantham into the parsonage. Rodger Barris and his wife Amelia Doane, who was Elsie’s cousin, moved into the Emerson Inn, which had been built by the family in 1776 and abandoned in 1834. Benny and his wife Kory had two young daughters and another child on the way, and the vast former infirmary provided plenty of space for what was promising to be a good-size family.
Pete’s Swedish wife Lovisa found the way station charming and was delighted with the kiln which Pete constructed in the large back yard for her to fire beautiful pottery, which she sold on consignment in several high end Liverpool shops. However, the fishy smell from the decaying canal made the nausea that plagued her throughout her pregnancy nearly unbearable and as the years went by, the oppressive atmosphere of the hamlet combined with despair over the death of her infant daughter Fyfa from pneumonia in 1963, resulted in a dependency on tranquilizers and changed her cheerful disposition to one of maudlin resignation to an intolerable fate.
Elvin, Randall and Billy and their sister Cordelia were grateful for the presence of their cousins Niles and Allan; for Pete’s sons Frank, Pete Jr. and Edward; and for Benny’s daughters Elizabeth, Wilhelmina and Zoë and sons Harry and Jim. The other children in the town were dirty and suffered from strange skin conditions which the Barris, Emerson, Ferguson and McBain youngsters feared they might catch if they came too close. Some had horrific birth defects and all exhibited varying degrees of mental deficiencies or disturbances. The adults in the town were no better. The Barris, Emerson, McBain and Ferguson parents wouldn’t let their children play outside after dark. When summer came, the Barrises and Emersons would escape the objectionable atmosphere of Lichwold and stay in family-owned cottages near Southport. Their cousins from London joined them, and Elvin had many happy memories of summers spent by the sea.
After Elvin’s father died from cardiac arrest in 1973, Benny and Pete dissolved the business. Benny moved his family to Blackpool and Pete moved his to Liverpool. Twenty-year-old Randall insisted that their mother Amelia, seventeen-year-old Elvin, and fourteen-year-old Billy move to Liverpool with him and “let t’fuckin’ historical society have t’bloody house, or let it fall into t’stinkin’ cesspit that used ta be t’canal for all I care.”
23-year-old Cordelia insisted that their father be buried in Liverpool rather than “that bloody strong’old of Satan.” Following Rodger’s funeral she hurried back to London, where she was attending art school, vowing never again to return to the foul hamlet.
Robert and Elsie Emerson and sixteen-year-old Allan also moved to Liverpool, joining eighteen-year-old Niles who was working there as an electrician. Elvin, Randall, Billy, Allan and Niles threw themselves into their band Indigo Reflection to counter the pain of losing Rodger. They played the blues music that Rodger had always been so fond of as well as the rock and roll that they loved, and though their sound had become cleaner and more structured in the 36 years since the band’s conception, the original format still served them as well as it had when they’d dedicated their music to memory of their beloved father and uncle.
Cordie, Elvin and Randall believed that rather than the tendency to overwork that Dr. Gage cited as the cause of their father’s heart attack, the foul atmosphere in their hometown was ultimately responsible for Rodger’s untimely death. Many years later, following Billy’s suicide, they also agreed that the evil that permeated Lichwold had played a principal role in destroying their baby brother as well.
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