by Mark Lindsey

Surrounded by packing boxes I stand alone in the small, white-walled kitchen of the house that belonged to my Dad, awaiting the second removal van. The furniture has gone and there’s nothing left to do for now, so I make tea in a mug without a handle and take a stack of books from the window ledge, knowing that I won’t have the focus to read. I step out into the air.

On the cast iron bench that rests by the garden’s boundary wall I look back at this house. It suited Dad. It’s square sandstone walls and tiled roof are dependable, and a splash of foliage running beside the door breaks the symmetry, removing any hardness. The spearpoints of the daffodils we planted have started coming through. Dad loved the North Yorkshire Moors. He wanted to live near Whitby since he’d been a child.

I wish my own children were here, but Alex is taking them to his parents. It wouldn’t be right for them to be here while I’m sorting things out for Dad. One final time.

I turn my back on the house and gaze over the moors. It’s beautiful, yet this place unsettles me. The emptiness is overwhelming. Off in the distance are the wedged radar structures of RAF Fylingdales. Dad claimed they listen to phone calls, read emails, spy on your web browser. The wedges poke from the ridge like plates on the spine of some ancient buried reptile. The base’s motto is vigilamus – we are watching. Nothing moves up there. Nobody uses the gates. Nobody is seen within its many fences. Who is watching? I don’t see them.

This was where Dad would retire with his second wife. Cancer took her a year ago. He came anyway.

Back in the summer, just after he’d moved, I helped Dad to paint what would become his guest room, though on that visit, Alex, the boys and I slept crammed into the folding couch in the lounge. While we worked Alex was on beach duty with the boys. I knew that a day of being buried in sand and drenched in bucketsful of North Sea would leave him the worse for wear, but he agreed it was a good idea for me to spend time alone with Dad, give him a chance to talk about his grief. Not that that’s what Dad did. Six months on, he wanted to pretend it was a new start.

‘I’m writing a book you know,’ he told me, stirring up the paint. ‘About local folklore.’

As the roller coated the white plaster with pale lemon, he informed me of his preparations – the purchase of a new, blue journal for his research, a box of his favourite pens, trips to the archives – and began to share stories that would make up the meat of his book: phantom fishermen and the Lyke Wake Walk, the route by which mourners would carry coffins across the moor. His voice rose a pitch when he got to a story about something he called the Barghest. ‘It was a black dog, as big as a calf, with great glowing eyes. They said that if you saw it, it was a warning that you were doomed to die. An aristocrat once tried to hunt it, but it bit his horse in two.’

‘Dad, that’s horrid.’

‘That’s not the worst of it. The steed kept charging on without hindquarters, guts trailing like a kite’s tail.’ He was getting into his stride now, tapping out hoofbeats with a brush and enjoying my squeamishness. ‘If you want, before you go back, I’ll take you and the kids to Pannett Park Museum and show you the Hand of Glory.’

‘The what?’

‘It’s a severed hand. Mummified. Used in witchcraft.’

I declined his kind offer.

Later I caught a splinter from a ceiling beams. In the bathroom, rooting around his medicine cabinet for a plaster, I found a blister pack with one capsule left – half yellow, half green. I looked up the name that was printed on the foil. He was on antidepressants.

I started back to the guest room with the drug – why on earth hadn’t he told me? – but I stopped before I got there. Through the doorway, I saw him before he noticed. His smile was gone. He looked small, wounded.

I didn’t confront him then, but knew I had to tell him what I’d found at some point. But I never did. Perhaps I was a coward; It hurt to be that direct.

Back in the room I put my arms around him, told him that if he needed anything he must say and that I loved him. He cupped my cheek as he did when I was a girl and looked at me through moist eyes.

‘I know you do sweetheart.’

I returned in mid-October without Alex and the boys. Talking to Dad on the phone, I had noticed he’d become flat, monotone. I parked in the lane and trod the path to the door, noticing my breath in the air for the first time that year. As we hugged I took in the room: stacks of plates, food still on them; unopened letters in piles on spare surfaces; cups with old, cold tea; dust in the air. Dad wore a brown dressing gown over his clothes.

On the table were piles of books, copies of old newspapers, scrawled notes in the blue journal; his research. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he popped a bookmark in the journal and closed the page.

A look around the cupboards revealed few groceries. I made tea with powdered milk and sat across from him. There was something stale in the air. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t Dad.

We talked till the tea went cold before I got him to admit he hadn’t been out for three days. The question of whether he’d washed in that time kept nagging me, but I didn’t ask. Instead I insisted he go shower and shave.

‘We’ll go out to eat – my treat – then we’ll do a big shop. OK Dad?’ He weighed up the offer for a moment, before taking my hand and nodding. He looked tired.

While he was out of the room, curiosity overpowered my guilt and I peeked into the blue book. Most of it was research, though I noticed several times he mentioned feeling watched while out on the moors. His RAF neighbours spying on him? On the page with the bookmark he had pasted a picture of his black dog, copied from some old book, like an ugly black burn on the page. I worried that he was becoming isolated. I promised myself I’d raise this.

It was difficult to know what to do. I really needed to be helping Alex to organise our youngest son’s birthday party which was only three days away, but I couldn’t leave Dad alone. Not like this. I tried to get him out as much as I could, so we went browsing bookshops in Robin Hood’s Bay, peeling prawns on Staithes harbour wall – things Dad used to do with his own parents. Staithes was too grim for me, but Dad’s mood was brightening.

After dinner, the night before I had to leave, I suggested a walk on the moors. I thought he wouldn’t go, but after washing up he shrugged on his jacket without a reminder. On a crumpled map by the door, he showed me a route that took us over moorland to a brook, then along a ridge leading back to the house.

The rain of the afternoon had left a sheen over the landscape; it was as if we walked through a Daguerreotype, the stone walls and stunted trees etched dark grey on a silvery background. We might have been the first change to the land in a century. I followed behind, wondering if this place was good for Dad, but when he clambered over a stile he turned towards me, pink cheeked and puffing through an unselfconscious grin.

He became talkative as we trudged on, testing me on the names of plants and trees, but as we approached the stone bridge that would take us over the brook he stopped short. He squinted at the bridge, taking short breaths through his nose. Nothing was there.

I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Dad?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Dad? Is something wrong?’

He jolted, as though I had surprised him. ‘I … I’m fine. It’s OK.’

He turned back the way we had come and marched off, shouting over his shoulder, ‘We’ll go back this way.’ Arriving home, he snatched up his journal from the table and headed straight upstairs. I knocked on his door later to check on him and got no answer, but a little after one I woke to hear him pacing in his room.

The next morning he was up before me. The kitchen table was bare, his research gone. He never mentioned his book again.

Dad came to stay with us that Christmas and over cognac admitted, finally, that he’d begun therapy. He’d been seeing a nice young woman at the clinic in Byland Road. He opened up about how he’d been struggling and what he was doing to help, amused that on his counsellor’s advice he had begun jogging. Against his expectations he was enjoying it. For a moment he seemed younger again.

After Dad had gone to bed and Alex piled the boys’ gifts under the tree, we turned in ourselves and, snug under the covers, whispered to each other. ‘He is getting better. Isn’t he? I worry.’

Alex kissed my forehead. ‘I know you do sweetheart.’ Between yawns, he continued, ‘I’m sure the running is doing him good.’

We dozed for a while, then Alex said something I didn’t catch. I asked him to repeat it. ‘It’ll keep his … black dog … at bay.’

When Dad left, it was the last time I would see him.

The removal van has arrived, accompanied by Alex in the saloon. We box up the last of Dad’s things and make a final sweep of the rooms. Nothing is left.

Dad was found early on the last day of February by a neighbour walking her red setters. He was laid in heather at the bottom of a gorge a quarter of a mile from his home, close to the stone bridge. The coroner said he had been there all night. The police had wondered whether it was a … suicide, but the coroner recorded an accidental death. I couldn’t decide if they were just being kind. That night had been clear, and the moon was full. They thought he had got lost while running. That he hadn’t seen the drop.

Dad was cremated. He wanted his ashes scattered in the sea.

Alex carries the last of the boxes to our car and just as we’re ready to pull away, I remember the stack of books I left on the bench. As I go to pick them up, I drop them and notice one is Dad’s journal. I reach down and dust off the pages and read Dad’s account of my visit in October. I get a flash of his face by the stone bridge. At the bottom of the page is another note, written in a different, less steady hand. I read four words beside my finger:

I have seen it.

• A version of this story was first published in Route 57.