THE SHENLEY SHUCK

In the days when Shenley Church End was a little less built up than it is now, a marketing executive called Michael lived in what had been the old village, just around the corner from the church. Michael had just started seeing a new girlfriend, a doctor at Milton Keynes General. One winter night, around about nine o'clock, she phoned up to say she had just got home from work and had her dinner, and did Michael fancy a drink? Being in marketing, Michael always fancied a drink. They arranged to meet at the Clock House in ten minutes, this being as long as it took for Michael to walk round, and as long as it would take Deborah to drive from her house in Wolverton.

So Michael put his coat on and took the stroll through five centuries that is involved in walking from the village to the new local centre, just off Watling Street. As well as a grouping of shops and a school, there is a leisure centre, and Shenley Leisure centre has a great bonus. It must have taken an act of genius to realise that the best place to site a pub is in a leisure centre. The Clock House always has at least a couple of real ales on, and they're always pretty good. After a hard time making yourself think you're fit on the treadmill or the exercise bike, there's nothing like a few pints to relax. Michael was often known to use the exercise room himself, before crashing onto a chair in the Clock House for a couple.

He wandered along Burchard Crescent. The aroma of frying drifted over from the chip shop and wondering if he had time for a quick bag of fish and chips before Deborah got there. As he walked past Denbigh school, he saw ahead of him for the first time a crumpled form on the pavement. Running up to it, he gasped as he realised it was a young man, face down in a heap. Next to him was laying a sports bag and a squash racket. Michael rushed to the leisure centre, arriving just as Deborah walked round from the car park.

"Deborah! There's someone laying on the pavement down there! Quick!"

She followed him as he rushed back to where the man was laying. She ran over to the man, and did the necessary checks.

"Mike, can you phone an ambulance. But can you tell them he's dead."

Mike called an ambulance from his mobile. When it arrived, Deborah drove him back home.

"I suppose it does happen, doesn't it? Squash player having a heart attack?" he asked.

"It can, even in people as young as this chap. Mind you," continued Deborah, "it doesn't normally happen when they haven't played yet - his hair was dry and so was the towel in his bag. That's all a bit odd."

The inquest opened. It heard that the squash player, a man well known for his physical fitness, had died of a heart attack, as Mike had imagined. There was no obvious reason - he had passed a medical just a few days earlier. A verdict of natural causes was recorded. By a few weeks later, everyone had forgotten about him. The big news in the local papers was that a teenage girl, walking home through Shenley at three o'clock one Sunday morning, had been chased by a large dog. Then, four weeks after the first event, somebody else was dead in the street. The inquest opened, no obvious cause was established, verdict natural causes. The local papers started to hypothesise about electric pylons being responsible, but then somebody pointed out that there were no electric pylons in Shenley.

A day or so after the second inquest, the priest in charge at St Mary's Shenley heard a quiet knock at the door at about ten o'clock one night. Opening it, he saw an old man whom he recognised as being a resident of Shenley, and in fact someone who had lived there all his life - long before Milton Keynes had been built around the little village.

"Sorry to bother you, Vicar. Can I have a word?"

The vicar led the man into his study, and invited him to sit down. The man thanked him but remained standing.

"We've got a Shuck, Vicar."

"I'm sorry?"

"We've got a Shuck. It's what's made those two young men die. I'm sure about it."

The priest looked in bewilderment.

"What is a Shuck?" The priest found it hard to keep the capital "S" out of his question.

"Well, your reverence, it's hard to tell. When I was a boy, they used to tell us about old Shuck. He's a black dog. Not a natural dog, you understand - a spirit dog. Very big, as well - about the size of a rottie, or maybe a wolfhound. Not some phantom poodle, that's what I'm getting at. Whether he's a good spirit, or a bad one, or something in between.... well, you're the professional. You ought to know better than I do. Normally he'd be guarding some graveyard, or out in some quiet spot near a burial mound. But he's started hanging around here for some reason. They say that if you see him, it's all right as long as you don't shout at him. If you do that..., you're dead. I think we know what those squash people did - but then squash players always were agressive." His eyeballs rolled in their sockets, like Frazer from Dad's Army.

"Well thanks for the information," began the priest, "but I'm sure that in this day and age we don't....."

"I'll tell you what I reckon has upset him, if you like."

The priest indicated that he might as well.

"It's that new Catholic Church - Edmund the Confessor, is it?"

"Edward."

"Well, Edward the whatever. I reckon old Shuck was having a quiet life, but building a new church has stirred him up. He don't mind old churches so much - he knows where they are. But a new one - that's something he hasn't reckoned with. So he's wandering."

"Well thank you."

"That's all right, your reverence. But make sure you do something about it."

The vicar, naturally, wrote the whole thing off as the mumblings of a crazy old man. Three weeks later, a young woman was found dead in the street. The inquest came up with the usual inconclusive answers. The priest spoke to his Catholic counterpart, and agreed that maybe a quiet blessing service would be in order. They agreed to meet up in the early hours of the following Sunday morning. Somehow the word had got out, and at the agreed time they found three Anglican priests from neighbouring parishes had tagged along as well. Not only that, but a Methodist preacher, a United Reformed minister and the pastor of one of the Pentecostal churches. The Pentecostal claimed to be there because he had prophesied about the meeting, but then admitted that the Catholic priest's housekeeper was his sister.

Together the group of clergymen processed from St Mary's to Edward the Confessor's. They said prayers outside each church, and then walked past Denbigh school to the point where the first man had been died. Then the Catholic chanted solemnly, the Pentecostal launched into a full-scale denunciation of all evil spirits and the Methodist wondered what on earth he was doing there.
The priest of St Mary's was quietly praying, when he felt a presence wander past him. Afterwards, he always said that it felt like something - something he did not understand - was just going about its normal night-time affairs, and that the clergymen had disturbed it. Nobody saw anything, only the priest of St Mary's felt what seemed to be a cooling in the air for a moment, but they all thought they heard a quiet growling, dying away into the distance.

They never had an unexplained death in the street in Shenley after that. The word got about that the Church had done something, and that was that. The Pentecostal pastor always maintained that the fervour and devoutness of his prayers had sent the evil spirit back to Hell, where it came from. The Catholic priest thought much the same, but attributed the effect to the Handkerchief of St Bogwald, which he had picked up in a church sale in Newport Pagnell. But the priest of St Mary's always thought that the Shuck had suddenly just found it too noisy, and gone somewhere a bit quieter. If not Hell, then maybe Buckingham.

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