Robert Bramley had spent most of his life in an orchard.
Not the same orchard, strictly speaking. There had been three of them over the years, although Bob insisted that trees cared considerably less about land ownership than humans did. As far as he was concerned, if there were apples above him, mud beneath his boots and somewhere nearby to make tea, he was at work.
Everyone called him Bramley Bob.
He claimed this was because of his talent with apple trees.
His sister claimed it was because Robert Bramley was a ridiculous name for a man who spent half his life smelling faintly of cider.
Bob preferred his explanation.
The orchard he eventually called home stood beyond the village of Little Barrow, tucked between a low hill and a narrow stream that flooded enthusiastically whenever it rained for more than twenty minutes. It was not a grand place. There were no ornamental gates and no carefully measured rows. The trees leaned where they pleased, some old enough that their trunks had split and grown together again.
Bob loved every one of them.
He knew which trees flowered first, which needed pruning and which produced fruit so sour that even wasps seemed offended by it. He could tell whether an apple tree was unwell from the colour of the bark and claimed he could predict a good harvest by listening to the sound of bees in May.
Nobody believed that last part.
Bob did not particularly care.
There was, however, one thing about the orchard everyone agreed was peculiar.
The rabbits were white.
Not some of them.
All of them.
The surrounding fields were full of ordinary rabbits in every shade of brown and grey. Yet inside Bob’s orchard, particularly around the oldest trees, only white rabbits appeared.
Bob had noticed them almost immediately after taking over the place.
The first was sitting beneath an apple tree when he arrived one winter morning. It watched him unload tools from his cart, then hopped away between the trunks.
A week later there were three.
By spring, Bob regularly saw six or seven.
“Escaped pets,” suggested Arthur Webb from the neighbouring farm.
“All of them?”
“They breed.”
“Still need parents first.”
Arthur shrugged.
Bob accepted that as the end of the scientific discussion.
The rabbits did no harm. They nibbled grass and occasionally investigated fallen apples. Bob became fond of them. During particularly cold winters he left vegetable scraps beneath an old wooden shelter, althoughhe denied this whenever anyone mentioned it.
The peculiar thing was not that the rabbits lived there.
It was when they appeared.
The first time Bob noticed the pattern was before a storm.
He arrived early one August morning and found eleven white rabbits sitting beneath the trees nearest the stream. They were not eating. They were simply facing uphill.
All eleven.
Bob stood beside them for several minutes.
“What are you lot looking at?”
The rabbits offered no explanation.
By lunchtime the sky had turned almost black. Rain began shortly afterwards and continued through the night. The stream burst its banks, flooded the lower orchard and carried away one of Bob’s sheds.
Bob thought nothing more of it.
Until the rabbits did it again.
This time there were five sitting beside the gate.
That afternoon a horse and cart lost a wheel on the lane outside. Nobody was badly injured, although the driver broke two fingers.
Several months later, seven rabbits gathered beneath the window of Bob’s cottage.
The following morning, Bob received word that his brother had died.
After that, Bob began paying attention.
He kept notes in the back of an old ledger.
Three rabbits near the eastern wall.
A chimney fire in the village.
Nine beside the stream.
Another flood.
One rabbit sitting directly outside Bob’s door.
Nothing happened.
Bob stared at that particular entry for years.
Perhaps, he decided, sometimes rabbits were simply rabbits.
He never told anyone about his records. People already considered him eccentric enough.
Then came October 1971.
The harvest had been excellent. The branches sagged beneath red and green fruit, and Bob spent most days moving ladders, filling baskets and complaining that his back had become significantly older than the rest of him.
One morning he entered the orchard and stopped.
There were white rabbits everywhere.
Twenty at least.
Perhaps thirty.
They sat between the trees in complete silence.
Bob had never seen so many together.
His first thought was weather.
The sky was clear.
The stream was low.
There was barely enough wind to move the leaves.
Then the rabbits began moving.
They crossed the orchard towards the oldest tree.
Bob called it Grandfather.
Nobody knew exactly how old the tree was. The trunk was broad, twisted and hollow in places, yet every year it produced a modest crop of surprisingly good apples.
The rabbits formed a loose circle around it.
Then one began digging.
Another joined it.
Within moments, half a dozen were scratching at the earth around the roots.
Bob watched.
“You’ll have that tree over if you carry on.”
They ignored him.
Bob walked closer.
One rabbit stopped digging and looked at him.
Then it scratched again.
Bob frowned.
“All right.”
He returned to the shed and collected a spade.
The rabbits moved aside when he came back.
That bothered him more than anything else.
Bob pushed the spade into the earth.
The soil beneath Grandfather was unusually soft.
He dug perhaps ten inches before the blade struck something hard.
Bob stopped.
Stone, he thought.
He cleared more earth.
Not stone.
Leather.
Old leather.
He dropped the spade and began digging with his hands.
A shoe emerged.
For several seconds Bob simply stared at it.
Then he saw the bone.
The police arrived before midday.
By evening, the orchard had been cordoned off.
Beneath Grandfather they found the remains of a woman.
She had been buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in what remained of a woollen coat. The body had probably been there for decades.
Nobody immediately knew who she was.
Bob did.
Or at least, he thought he did.
He remembered a story from when he was young.
A girl named Margaret Vale had disappeared from Little Barrow during the winter of 1933.
Bob had been a child himself.
He remembered search parties.
He remembered adults speaking quietly whenever children entered rooms.
Margaret had been seventeen.
Some believed she had run away.
Others claimed she had been seen boarding a train.
Eventually people stopped searching.
Life moved on.
Bob never forgot the name.
Neither, apparently, had the orchard.
Dental records eventually confirmed it.
Margaret Vale had been beneath the tree for thirty-eight years.
The investigation reopened.
People who had been young in 1933 were questioned again.
Old stories resurfaced.
One name appeared repeatedly.
Edwin Carter.
Carter had worked at the orchard when Margaret disappeared. He had been twenty-three, married and
known to have been friendly with her.
He had also left Little Barrow less than a month after she vanished.
Carter was still alive.
Police found him living nearly a hundred miles away
He denied everything.
Then investigators discovered letters.
Margaret had written to him.
She had been pregnant.
Carter had promised to leave his wife.
Instead, Margaret disappeared.
The evidence was imperfect after so many years, but eventually Carter confessed.
He had met Margaret in the orchard.
They argued.
He struck her.
She fell.
Whether he intended to kill her was something only Carter knew, but he buried her beneath the oldest tree and left the village soon afterwards.
The story spread quickly.
Reporters arrived.
People came to look at the orchard.
Bob hated every minute of it.
He refused interviews.
When one newspaper photographer climbed over the fence, Bob chased him halfway down the lane with a rake.
Eventually things became quiet again.
Margaret Vale was buried properly.
Her family placed flowers on the grave.
The orchard returned to apples, weather and tea.
But the rabbits remained.
Bob noticed something different afterwards.
They no longer gathered around Grandfather.
Instead, they began appearing elsewhere.
Two beneath a collapsed wall.
Bob investigated and found an old jewellery box somebody had hidden there years before.
Four beside the stream.
Bob discovered a pocket watch tangled in reeds. It had belonged to a local man who had lost it twenty years earlier.
Three beneath another apple tree.
Nothing.
Bob dug anyway.
He found a dog's collar.
The name on it belonged to an animal that had disappeared when Bob was a boy.
That was when he began to understand.
The rabbits did not predict death.
Not exactly.
They found things that had been lost.
Sometimes those things had been lost only for hours.
Sometimes decades.
Sometimes they were objects.
Sometimes they were people.
Bob started following them.
Not obsessively. He still had an orchard to run.
But when several white rabbits gathered somewhere and refused to leave, Bob paid attention.
Over the following years they led him to wedding rings, old coins, missing tools and once an entire bicycle buried beneath nettles.
They also led him to things people would rather have remained hidden.
A stolen purse.
A box of letters.
A rifle thrown into the stream.
Bob developed a simple rule.
If the rabbits showed him something, it was meant to be found.
Not everyone agreed.
One autumn evening, Bob found six rabbits gathered beside an abandoned shed on neighbouring land.
The property belonged to Arthur Webb's son, Michael.
Bob knew Michael reasonably well.
He also knew Michael did not like people poking around his property.
The rabbits sat beside one corner of the shed.
Bob sighed.
“You couldn't pick somewhere easier?”
They watched him.
Bob fetched his spade.
He had barely started digging when Michael appeared.
“What are you doing?”
“Rabbits.”
Michael stared at him.
“That isn't an answer.”
“Usually is.”
Michael ordered him off the property.
Bob went.
The rabbits stayed.
For three days they remained beside the shed.
On the fourth morning Bob called the police.
Beneath the floor they found several boxes containing stolen antiques from houses throughout the county.
Michael Webb went to prison.
Bob received considerably fewer Christmas cards that year.
By the time Professor Barnabas Ravenwood heard about Bramley Bob and his white rabbits, Bob was already well into old age.
Ravenwood arrived at the orchard carrying notebooks, a camera and enough equipment to make Bob suspicious immediately.
“You one of them ghost people?”
“I prefer paranormal investigator.”
“Ghost person, then.”
Ravenwood smiled.
“I understand you have unusual rabbits.”
“They're rabbits.”
“I was told they locate lost objects.”
“They're still rabbits.”
“White rabbits.”
Bob stared at him.
“You've seen rabbits before, haven't you?”
Their relationship improved slowly.
Ravenwood visited several times.
He watched the rabbits.
He recorded where they appeared.
He inspected Grandfather and measured unusual fluctuations around the roots.
Bob found this endlessly entertaining.
“You know what your problem is?”
“I have been informed I possess several.”
“You think everything needs explaining.”
Ravenwood considered that.
“Doesn't it?”
“No.”
That answer stayed in Ravenwood's journals for years.
Bob died in the autumn of 1984.
He was eighty-one.
His neighbour found him sitting beneath Grandfather with a basket of apples beside him.
There were twelve white rabbits around the body.
Bob looked peaceful.
They buried him overlooking the orchard.
For several months afterwards, nobody saw the rabbits.
People assumed whatever strange population had lived among the trees had finally moved elsewhere.
Then, one spring morning, a little girl lost a bracelet while walking along the lane.
Her father searched for hours.
That evening the girl saw a white rabbit sitting beneath one of the orchard trees.
Beside it stood a tall red figure.
She thought at first it was a man wearing a strange cloak.
Then it turned.
Its body was the bright glossy red of an apple. A brown stalk protruded from its head and a green leaf curled down one side.
A large bite was missing from its body.
The girl screamed.
The figure raised one hand.
Then pointed.
Beneath the tree sat her bracelet.
By the time her father arrived, the red figure had disappeared.
The rabbit remained.
Stories followed.
People began seeing Bramley Bob walking through the orchard again.
He was rarely alone.
White rabbits hopped behind him or sat watching from beneath trees.
Those who knew Bob in life recognised something about the way the ghost moved.
Slowly.
Patiently.
Usually as though mildly irritated about being disturbed.
The bite missing from his side became the subject of considerable debate.
Ravenwood had his own theory.
During his final autumn, Bob had supposedly joked that after spending sixty years caring for apples, he expected the orchard would eventually take a bite out of him in return.
Whether the ghost simply remembered the joke, or whether something stranger happened after his death, Ravenwood could never determine.
Bob himself refused to explain.
The white rabbits continued finding things.
A child's toy buried beneath snow.
A wedding ring dropped in long grass.
A missing purse.
Occasionally something older.
Something somebody had hoped would never be found.
That is the important thing to remember about Bramley Bob.
He does not judge what the rabbits uncover.
He simply shows you where to dig.
Some people find lost treasures.
Others find evidence.
Some find answers to questions their families stopped asking generations ago.
And once, according to one of Ravenwood's later journals, the rabbits gathered around a grave.
Not beside it.
Around it.
There were twenty-three of them.
Bramley Bob stood among them.
He did not point towards the grave.
He pointed away from it.
Ravenwood investigated.
The grave was empty.
Nobody ever discovered where its occupant had gone.
To this day, white rabbits are occasionally reported in old orchards throughout Derbyshire.
Most are probably exactly what they appear to be.
Probably.
But should several gather together and begin staring at the same patch of earth, Professor Ravenwood recommends paying attention.
If Bramley Bob appears beside them, fetch a spade.
Just be certain you really want to know what is underneath.