Mourner in the Wood

Mourner in the Wood

They say if the Mourner ticks, death is already in the house.

The croft sat low under its slate roof, timbers bowed with age, set just north of the border near Coldstream where the moor runs wide and empty for miles. Wind moved over it day and night, steady as a hand that never lifts.

Ailsa Scott came into it by inheritance. Her uncle passed in his chair beside the hearth, head dipped forward, hands still. No struggle. No warning. The kind of passing folk speak of with relief, then fall quiet after.

The place had held her family for three generations. Above the hearth, a beam of oak stretched thick and dark, its surface smoked near black. A stag’s head had been cut into it long ago, the lines worn soft from years of heat and touch.

That first night, she heard it.

Tick.
A sound like a small finger rapping the wood. Deliberate. Not hurried.

Tick.

A stretch of silence, then again.

Tick.

She lay still, listening. Pipes, she thought. Old stone settling. Something small tucked behind the wall. She had scrubbed every inch of the place herself. There was nowhere for anything to hide.

The next morning, she told Fergus, the old groundskeeper from the next glen over. He went pale beneath his weather creased face.

“Dinnae give it voice,” he muttered. “No oot loud. No if ye heard it in the beam.”

She laughed, though it sounded thin in the mist. “It’s just a beetle, is all.”

Fergus spat into the heather. “That’s worse, lass. If it’s the beetle, it means it’s listenin’.”

By the third night, the tapping grew louder. Rhythmic. Constant. She’d wake at midnight with the sound crawling down her spine. She pressed her palms into the mattress and waited for it to stop. It did not.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

No one died.

And that’s when the unease took root not of what had come, but of what hadn’t. In the old telling, the Mourner knocks thrice, then the soul leaves. Quiet in the night. But when the death doesn’t come, it grows restless.

Hungry.

Ailsa stayed, stubborn as her kin. She filled the cracks with wax, tried sleeping in the barn, burned juniper in every room. Nothing stopped the sound.

No one else heard it. Then Fraser’s dog went missing. Then the birds left the trees. Then the well water turned cloudy for a day, just enough to make her doubt the taste of it.

Still the tapping.

Still no death.

She sat one night in front of the hearth, wrapped in her uncle’s old blanket, staring at the beam.

“Ah’m no for leavin’,” she whispered.

The fire hissed low.

The ticks slowed.

Then stopped.

She breathed, for the first time in days, through her whole chest.

In the morning, she found the beam split clean through its length. Hollowed. Inside, nestled in dust, was a single dead beetle.

Its body brittle. Its legs curled inward, as if in prayer. And beside it a sliver of bone. Human. Old. They buried it in the churchyard with no name.

The ticking never came back. Yet in the still stretch before snowfall, Ailsa swears she hears something almost like it.

Waiting.

~by Heather Patton / The Verdant Butterfly

Audio: The Ticking of the Death Watch Beetle - Deep within the hollow of an ancient oak beam, contact microphones picked up a series of soft, deliberate knocks, the mating call of Deathwatch Beetles, echoing like ghostly taps from within the wood.

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2026 Heather Patton · The Verdant Butterfly
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