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The Sour Ground (Season 1)
Episode 1: The Green Drown
The thing about the Marshwood Vale, the thing you don’t get from maps or chirpy travel blogs, is the way it swallows the light. Michael Corrigan, a historian whose own light had been considerably dimmed of late, felt it pressing in on him as his rented Land Rover grunted its way down another lane that was less a road and more a suggestion. The hedgerows, ancient and gnarled as arthritic fingers, clawed at the wing mirrors. Above, the canopy of oak and ash was so thick it turned the mid-afternoon September sky into a kind of permanent, green-tinged twilight. A green drown, he thought, and the phrase pleased the writer-part of him, the part that hadn’t been entirely suffocated by academic squabbles and the slow, grinding death of his marriage.
He was chasing a ghost story.
No, that wasn’t right. He was chasing the bones of a ghost story. He was here to deconstruct it, to lay it out on the historical operating table and show his readers—all twelve of them, if he was lucky—how the sausage of folklore was made. The screaming skull of Bettiscombe Manor. It was a classic of the genre, a grade-A piece of English Gothic hokum, and his agent, a man whose optimism was as relentless as it was unfounded, thought a book debunking it and other Dorset legends could be Mike’s comeback. ‘True Ghosts of Old England: A Historian’s Autopsy,’ Marcus had chirped over a boozy lunch. ‘It’s got legs, Mikey-boy!’
Mike figured it had about as many legs as the mangled badger he’d passed three miles back, but the advance had cleared, and it was enough to rent the very source of the legend for three months. An immersion, he’d called it in his proposal. A chance to live with the history, to breathe the same air, to walk the same floors as the Pinney family and their sad, unnamed slave. The truth, of course, was that he was running away. Running from a silent London flat that still smelled faintly of his ex-wife’s Chanel perfume and a university department that had made it politely, but firmly, clear that his services, and his increasingly sour disposition, were no longer required.
The Land Rover rounded a final, gut-wrenching bend, and there it was. Bettiscombe Manor.
It wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d been picturing something out of a Hammer film, all jagged gables and brooding, sightless windows. But the house was… dignified. That was the word for it. A solid, straightforward block of Queen Anne respectability, its stone walls weathered to the colour of old parchment. Two storeys, a tidy pediment over the door, windows that seemed to look out on the world with a kind of calm indifference. It didn't look haunted. It looked like the sort of place where people lived quiet lives, paid their taxes on time, and died peacefully in their beds. It was almost disappointing.
Almost.
But there was something else, something you couldn't see in the pictures. The house sat low in the landscape, nestled in a fold of the hills, and the sheer, oppressive ancientness of the land around it was palpable. Behind the manor, a steep hill rose, crowned with a dense thicket of trees. The old Celtic settlement, he knew from his research. The Iron Age ghosts. Two thousand years of them. The house hadn't been built on the land so much as it had been pinned to it, a polite architectural noticeboard tacked over something immeasurably older and wilder. The air here felt heavy, thick with the damp, loamy smell of deep earth and decaying leaves. It was the kind of silence that wasn't an absence of sound, but a presence of its own.
He killed the engine, and the silence rushed in, filling the void. For a moment, he just sat there, listening to the ticking of the cooling engine and the frantic thumping of his own heart. You’re being stupid, Corrigan, he told himself. It’s just a house. An old house, sure, but it’s bricks and mortar and wood, not some repository of ancient evil. The words felt hollow, a scholar’s flimsy shield against a feeling that went deeper than intellect.
The front door creaked open, and a woman emerged, wiping her hands on an apron. She was stout, with a face like a weathered apple and iron-grey hair pulled back in a severe bun. Mrs. Albright, the caretaker, dispatched by the estate agents to hand over the keys and show him the ropes.
"Mr. Corrigan?" she called out, her voice a classic Dorset burr, thick as clotted cream. "Thought I heard a motor. We don't get many up this way.”
"That's me," Mike said, climbing out of the car and feeling the damp chill seep instantly into his thin London jacket. He offered a hand. Her grip was like a blacksmith’s.
"Eleanor Albright. I look after the place for Mr. Conran when he's not in residence. Which is most of the time, these days." She gave the house a look that was a mixture of proprietorial pride and deep-seated suspicion. "She's a good old house. But she has her ways.”
"Ways?" Mike asked, grabbing his bags from the back.
"Drafts," she said, a little too quickly. "Pipes that groan. The usual for a place this old. You'll get used to it.”
She led him inside. The interior was much as he’d expected from the rental brochure: dark wood floors, a grand staircase that ascended into shadow, the faint, tripartite smell of lemon polish, woodsmoke, and something else… something that reminded him of a freshly dug garden after a hard rain. It was cold inside, a deep, cellular cold that the humming radiators seemed powerless to combat.
"Kitchen's through here," Mrs. Albright said, her tour brisk and business-like. "Aga's a temperamental beast, but you'll get the hang of it. Larder. Downstairs loo. Sitting room. All the usual.”
Mike nodded along, his eyes darting everywhere. He was trying to see it as a historian, to peel back the layers of modernity—the Jasper Conran-approved minimalist furniture, the sleek appliances—and see the house that Nathaniel Pinney completed in the early 18th century. He could almost picture it: the flicker of candlelight on the dark panelling, the smell of roasting meat and unwashed bodies, the rustle of silk and the clink of a clay pipe.
"And this," she said, pushing open a heavy oak door off the main hall, "is the study.”
The room was lined with books from floor to ceiling, a scholar’s dream. A huge, empty fireplace dominated one wall, big enough to roast an ox in. A heavy mahogany desk sat before the window, looking out over a lawn that was already surrendering to the evening mist. It was perfect. This was where he would write his book. This was where he would exorcise his own ghosts by dissecting someone else’s.
"Now," Mrs. Albright said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "I suppose you'll be wanting to see it.”
Mike’s stomach gave a little lurch. He tried for a casual, academic tone. "The famous skull? Yes, I suppose I should. The centrepiece of the whole story, after all.”
She didn't lead him to an attic, as the earliest accounts suggested. Instead, she walked over to a small, unassuming cabinet built into the wall next to the great fireplace. She opened the door with a click.
Inside, on a shelf, sat a shoebox.
A perfectly ordinary, modern-day shoebox. The faded red logo on the side said Clarks.
For a moment, Mike felt a wave of anticlimax so profound it was almost comical. All the build-up, all the dread-soaked atmosphere of the drive, all the centuries of legend and terror, and it came down to this? A skull kept in a bloody shoebox like a pair of old school plimsolls.
"The old owners, the Pinneys, they used to keep it on a beam upstairs," Mrs. Albright explained, as if sensing his disappointment. "Mrs. Pinney, the last one before Mr. Conran bought the place, she said it gave her the willies up there. Said she preferred to have it where she could keep an eye on it. So in the box it went.”
"May I?" Mike asked, stepping forward.
"It's your house for the next three months," she shrugged. "Do as you please. Just…" She hesitated, chewing on her lower lip.
"Just what?”
"Just don't take it out of the house," she said, her folksy demeanour gone, replaced by a sudden, stark seriousness. Her eyes, the colour of faded denim, fixed on his. "That's the one rule. The only rule. Don't you ever take it over the threshold! Not for a walk in the garden, not for a drive in your car. It stays. That's the way it's always been.”
"Because the house will rock to its foundations and I'll be dead within a year?" Mike said, a small, superior smile touching his lips. He couldn't help it. This was exactly the kind of local superstition he'd come here to dismantle.
Mrs. Albright did not smile back. "Some things are best not tested, Mr. Corrigan. Even by clever men from London.”
She made her excuses soon after, leaving him with a final, "I'll be by on Tuesday to see you're settled," that sounded more like a warning than a promise. The crunch of her old Morris Minor's tires on the gravel drive faded, and then the silence, that deep, watchful silence, descended again.
He was alone. Alone with the house, and the history, and the thing in the shoebox.
He stood in the study for a long time, just looking at the cabinet. The writer in him was itching to open it, to hold the artifact, to describe it in his journal. The historian in him wanted to catalogue it, to measure it, to treat it as a piece of archaeological evidence. But another part of him, a much older, more primitive part that he usually kept locked away, was screaming at him to leave the damn thing alone. To get back in his car and drive until he saw streetlights again.
Curiosity, as it always did, won out.
He walked to the cabinet, his footsteps echoing unnaturally loud on the floorboards. He reached in and lifted the shoebox. It was lighter than he expected. He carried it over to the desk, the lid rattling slightly. He felt a ridiculous, theatrical urge to say some sort of incantation before opening it. This is stupid. It’s a box. Just a box with a two-thousand-year-old piece of bone in it. He knew the science. Dr. Gilbert Causey, Royal College of Surgeons, 1963. European female, 25-30 years old. Iron Age. Nothing to do with a slave from Nevis. The legend was a lie, a confabulation of guilt and grief and time, slapped onto a conveniently available relic.
He lifted the lid.
The skull sat nestled in a bed of yellowed cheesecloth. It was small, delicate, the colour of weak tea. The bone was smooth, almost polished in places. It was missing its lower jaw, giving its empty grin a look of perpetual, silent surprise. The eye sockets were vast, dark pools of nothingness. He looked at the sutures on the cranium, the delicate arch of the brow ridges. Definitely female. Causey had been right. It wasn't the skull of a man, black or white. It was the skull of a woman who had lived and died on that very hill behind the house, two thousand years before the first Pinney ever set foot in Dorset.
This woman had seen Roman soldiers march through the vale. She had seen things he could barely imagine. And now her head, her actual head, was sitting in a shoebox in a fancy designer’s study. The indignity of it struck him with a sudden, surprising force.
Almost without thinking, he reached out a hesitant finger and touched the smooth, cool dome of the forehead.
A shock, fierce and electric, jolted up his arm. It was like touching a live wire, a blast of static electricity a thousand times more powerful than any he'd ever felt. He snatched his hand back with a yelp, stumbling away from the desk and knocking a stack of books to the floor. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The air in the room had gone impossibly cold, the kind of cold that feels wet and heavy, sinking into your bones.
He stared at the skull. It hadn't moved, of course. It was just an object, an inanimate piece of calcium phosphate. But it felt different now. It felt… awake. The empty sockets seemed to be watching him, judging him. The silence in the room had changed, too. It was no longer empty. It was charged, humming with a low, inaudible frequency he could feel in the fillings of his teeth.
Coincidence, he thought, his mind scrambling for a rational explanation. Dry air. Wool sweater. Static electricity. Perfectly normal.
But it hadn't felt normal. It had felt like a connection. A circuit being completed. A jolt of ancient, dormant energy passing from it to him.
He quickly, almost furtively, put the lid back on the shoebox and shoved it back into the cabinet, closing the door with a decisive snap. He backed out of the study, not turning his back on the cabinet until he was in the hall. He closed the study door, too, feeling an insane urge to lock it.
He spent the next few hours unpacking in a haze of forced normality. He made tea in the kitchen, wrestling with the Aga. He set up his laptop in a small room upstairs that he designated as his bedroom, pointedly avoiding the grand master suite. He called his agent, Marcus, and gave him a clipped, cheerful update. "The place is great. Full of atmosphere. Yes, I've seen the skull. Fascinating. No, no screams yet." He laughed, and it sounded brittle and false in the quiet house.
By ten o'clock, the exhaustion of the drive and the adrenaline of the arrival had caught up with him. The house was a symphony of groans and creaks as it settled in the cooling night air. The wind had picked up, and it moaned around the eaves with a sound that was unnervingly vocal. Mike stripped down and climbed into the narrow guest bed, pulling the thick duvet up to his chin. He tried to read, but the words swam on the page. His mind kept drifting back to the study downstairs. To the cold. To the shock. To the shoebox.
It’s just a story, he told himself, closing his eyes. A fascinating confluence of colonial guilt and pre-existing pagan artifacts. A perfect case study. That’s all.
He must have drifted off, because he was suddenly awake again. The room was pitch black. The luminous hands of his watch on the bedside table read 1:17 AM. Something had woken him. Not a loud noise. Something else.
He lay there, straining his ears, listening past the moan of the wind and the ticking of the old house.
And then he heard it.
It was faint, so faint he thought at first he was imagining it, that it was just a trick of the wind in a chimney flue. A high, thin sound. A keening. It was the sound of utter, inconsolable grief. A woman, weeping in the depths of the house.
Pipes, he told himself, his throat suddenly dry as dust. Old house. Water in the pipes. That’s all it is.
He lay rigid, listening. The sound rose and fell, a thread of pure misery woven into the fabric of the night. It wasn't the pipes. It wasn't the wind. It was a voice. A human voice, stretched and distorted by a sorrow so immense it was barely recognizable as human at all.
And it was coming from downstairs.
It was coming from the study.
The sound from the study is no longer a legend to be debunked, but a reality to be survived. Michael came to observe history, but he is about to discover what happens when history observes you back.
Episode 2 available Thursday, September 25, 2025. 9am ADT