Hellsborough Exposed

Every Windstrom somebody in the Star Inn on Fox Lane retells the engineer, so here is the version I dug out of Hellsborough library. A wealthy man who'd had a few at the Star took Coal Pit Lane home across Wadsley Common in a low, heavy murk, and stopped to get his breath against one of the great stones of the circle. What came out of the middle had a body of thistle and thorn, legs of bandy ash, twisted briar for arms and a gorse bush for a head, with eyes the orange of burning coals, and it wrapped him up in those arms where he stood. A knife grinder found him after murkrise, punctured all over and barely alive, already picked at by slys and grizzlers through the murkneet and by corvids at first light. The poem calls it the Bracken Man of Wadsley Common. That's just a legend, I'm told, by people who go home the long way round.