The Grieving Stones by Gary McMahon Page A

ceremonial site. It is said by some that druids once sacrificed children beside these stones, and the grief of the murdered children’s wailing mothers fuelled whatever power was buried there.
In the 1600s, during the English Civil War, two sisters lived in a house close to the stones. They were named Mag and Meg Staple, and they made a living creating medicines from locally foraged plants and herbs. They were known as witches, but because they helped the local farmers with their ailments, they were pretty much left alone to live in peace.
This all changed, however, on the day Mag experienced her vision.
She was up on the crag above the cottage where she and her sister lived, collecting herbs for a poultice. The day was a dreary one; it had rained in the morning and the terrain was tricky underfoot. Mag made her way down from the crag with a full basket. When she reached the Grieving Stones, she stopped for a rest. The sisters knew of the power associated with the ancient stones, and the place was a location of special interest to them. They often prayed here, but not to the Christian God. The deities they spoke to were older and darker, and part of the brutal landscape.
On the day in question, Mag was not here to pray. She simply wanted a rest before going home to her sister. She sat at the foot of the stones, staring across the expanse of the moor, past the point when it began to slope steeply downwards towards the village below. A narrow stream wound its way between small rocky outcroppings, where it ran down to join the river a mile and a half away. Mag stared at the water, perhaps thirsty. She stood and walked across to the water, knelt beside it, and cupped her hand beneath its surface. The water was cold and refreshing. She closed her eyes as she drank. When she opened them again a thin girl was standing directly in front of her, facing the other way. The girl was dressed in dirty rags; her legs and feet were bare.
Mag greeted the interloper but received no response. Again she tried to speak with the girl but the stranger just stood there staring across the moor. Mag stood and backed away. She had a strange feeling about this.
The girl began to turn around, but instead of a face coming into view, all Mag saw was the back of a head. The girl was the same all the way round: wherever she turned, she was facing away. Mag fled the scene and didn’t stop running until she was back at the cottage with her sister.
This was not the first time someone had seen the “Backwards Girl”, but nobody else had been so close. The other sightings over the years had all been at a distance. They were mere glimpses, as opposed to Mag’s up-close encounter. The story spread through the area, and people stopped coming to Mag and Meg for their cures. People said that the witch sisters were meddling with things best left alone. They said that the Backwards Girl was the devil, come out to play.
A local farmer and land-owner, Hedley Mills, took an interest in the story. He was fascinated by the dark arts, and had never been comfortable with the sisters living so close to the borders of his own land and potentially interfering with his own studies. He stirred things up, sowing more seeds of mistrust, and this culminated in a small group of villagers climbing up to the cottage where the sisters lived.
Hedley Mills had always coveted the land upon which the sisters lived. It was theirs by right, left to them by their late father, but Mills had always wanted to own the land, and the Grieving Stones. He knew what power it was said they contained and believed it to be real; he wanted to claim that power for himself.
He led the villagers up to the cottage. Earlier, he had visited the Grieving Stones and covered the fresh corpse of a baby with gorse, as if it had been hastily hidden. Hedley Mills was no stranger to killing: many years before, he had raped and murdered a wandering waif, a young girl dressed in rags. Her legs and feet bare and her face