by David Neal
As dusk fell, it started to rain. I hoped Sanderson had recovered from the shock I’d given him and returned to the shelter of his little nest in the shed. I looked out the kitchen window as I stirred the soup on the hob, checking for signs of him. At the end of the strip of lawn the high blackthorn hedge, still winter bare, for it had been a cold late spring, revealed scraps of the field beyond. Where the ground rose in the distance I could see the ramshackle metal barn, randomly patched with bits of wood. Behind it was the buckled roof of the house, a narrow ribbon of smoke rising from one of its four chimneys. Tom Ranscomb was right about the field—the Sleators didn’t appear to pay it much mind. Earlier in the week I’d balanced on an upturned bucket to look over the hedge, curious to see if a crop was growing there, but was left none the wiser. Nothing there but a collection of diseased grey seed heads rising from collapsed rosettes of leaves, patches of thistle and rough weed, claggy earth and stones.
The fading light and the rain lent a greyness to everything that evening—a dreary sodden aspect that made me glad to be indoors. The radio burbled from the mantelpiece and the simmering soup, bought from a city deli, smelt good. Then I saw something walking past the hedge in the Sleator’s field. The parts that were visible through the twisted thorn darkened, then lightened, then darkened again. I was sure it was a person. The person had to be a Sleator. With the unruffled movements of someone unaware they are being watched, I carried the soup pan to the table and then returned to the window, pulling the chintz curtains shut in a casual, everyday way. If they couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see them.
But I couldn’t let it go. For the rest of the evening I was as jittery as a rabbit who knows a fox has caught its scent. I forensically analyzed any unexpected sound, turned the radio down at every creak and crack of old timber and brick and checked that the doors were locked again and again, in case I’d been mistaken the last time. I pictured a Sleator lurking outside, waiting for me to emerge so he could inflict lively scars upon me as had happened to the man in the pub. I had, after all, caught Jacob Sleator’s eye. Perhaps he would come for revenge and I could only guess at what he might think suitable. In the end the wine and the warmth of the sitting room stupefied me sufficiently for sleep, and I tottered up the narrow stairs to the bedroom I had made my own. I went to draw the curtains and paused when I noticed that the rain had stopped and a perfect full moon was shining, dazzling, over the Sleators’ field. And there, at the brow of the hill, I saw a hunched figure with a coil of thick rope slung around his upper body, laboring, head down, towards the barn. He passed into the shadow of some trees and was gone.
* * *
I rose late the next morning and had a proper fried breakfast, washed down with several cups of strong coffee, and seeing as it was a cheerful blue-skied day, set off for a walk along the river and past the old mill ponds that were dotted around the outskirts of the village. I checked the shed before I left, but there was no sign of Sanderson and his food looked untouched; but I was pretty sure there was no cause for alarm with a cat like that. I laughed at the state I’d got myself in the night before. For God’s sake, I told myself, you live in a city where you take your life in your hands every time you walk home at night, and here you get jumpy at a shadow behind a hedge. It was, after all, only extraordinary circumstances that had led me to know of the Sleators’ existence, and in all likelihood I wouldn’t see them again before I went home.
It was possible, I’d been told, to walk in a circle from my cottage, through meadows and small orchards and scraps of copse, whilst never leaving the banks of some water course or another. The area had once been home to several watermills and a leather dying industry, remembered in names like Tanner’s Lane and Mill Road and the first stream I was to follow, the Mill Leat. I found this stretch of water, sheeny, leaf-clogged, barely moving, at the edge of a meadow that was halfway turned to liquid mud. A comparatively dry footbridge at the far corner took me over a white swirling weir, and then I was on the bank of the little river Chase, whose maundering, sedimented course I followed for the next mile or so. The path then cut away from the bank through sharp hawthorn thickets, past scatterings of leafless apple trees, and on to skirt round pastures whispering with the bubbling, licking sounds of watery earth. I passed a series of ponds covered in floating islands of broken reeds, a collapsed and abandoned tractor trailer, a pile of man-sized concrete pipes, moss-grown and forgotten in a field, and then I was again by the river, crossing a rusty metal bridge back in the direction of the village. My hope had been that a walk would lift my spirits but in fact it seemed to have left me feeling a bit demoralized, perhaps due to the effects of the sludge underfoot and the sluggish, despondent look of the landscape in those few square miles. Even the willow branches overhanging the river held snags of decaying vegetation, circling in the breeze like the corpses of tattered birds. Knowing that the final section of any walk always seems the longest, I increased my pace, which wasn’t easy with boots plastered with wads of grass and mud. Then I came to a sudden stop. A deep masculine shout rang out, as clear as a cannon, from somewhere back the way I came. But it was more of a bellow than a shout; aggressive, full of guttural threat, the kind deployed to scare a savage animal away. Nightmare images of violent pursuit sprang panting into my mind—bloody wounds and matted fur, yellow teeth bared in gruesome slavering mouths. I pictured the crazed dread of the animal as it tore through the spiked thickets, headlong, dangerous like the man giving chase, prey and predator deadly to anything which crossed their paths. Having turned myself lightheaded with fear, I broke into something near a jog, and didn’t dare slow for the last half mile, not until the path turned back to the lane where my cottage was. My breath was still ragged when I walked into the back garden and saw, framed in the open door of the shed, the goblin form of a Sleator child.
I recognized it as the larger of the two I had seen in the Old King’s Inn. My guess was that it was a boy from the cut of the stiff hair, but the features of the child were ambiguous to say the least. He gazed at me listlessly and stretched out a stubby arm.
“I was looking,” he said.
For a moment I was at a total loss. What did you do in situations like that?
“Is your…daddy here?” I ventured. “Or mummy? Someone?”
I went to the back door and found it locked as I had left it.
The child began to sniffle. “I was looking,” he whimpered.
“Well, that’s alright,” I said. “Looking’s alright. Now how did you get here? Do mummy and daddy know you’re here?”
He shook his head and pawed his cheeks with his shrimpy fingers.
What the hell was I meant to do? Of all the kids that could end up in my woodshed, why this one? One thing I was sure of was that I was not going to be the one to return it to the Sleator farm. Then I thought of Tom. I only had to get the child to Tom. He’d know what to do.
“Now, I bet your mummy and daddy are looking for you. We’ll go and see Tom at the Old King’s—you know, where you were yesterday? And then he’ll get your mummy. How about that?”
The child nodded, staring at me with a sort of awe. I suppose he was trying to work out what I was—Sleator or Burchard, or something entirely wonderful and new. I got him to follow me to my car, strapped him into the front seat (feeling exactly like an abductor) and drove the half mile to the pub.
There was only one punter in the public bar, much to my relief—an ancient, flat-capped fellow, lingering over the dregs of his beer. Tom Ranscomb was behind the counter, drying a glass, holding it up to the light for smears, humming a merry tune to himself. When he saw me, he put the glass down with care.
“Well, now. What’s all this?” he said.
I went up to the bar and slid onto one of the high stools.
“Tom, I’ve just found a Sleator child in my woodshed. He’s outside in my car. I didn’t know what to do.”
Tom scratched his head and blew through his teeth. “Now let’s see. Take him back?”
<
br /> “I know, I know, but what with them being a bit hostile—”
“You wondered if I might do it instead?”
“Well, I thought it might be better. But you could phone them couldn’t you? Then they could come and get him.”
“Hmm. Thing is, they don’t have a phone. Barely got electricity. And the thing is, they’ll know you found him soon enough and they’ll wonder why you didn’t take him back yourself. And we don’t want Sleators set all a-wonder. So what I suggest is I come with you and we’ll return the errant child together. How about that? Just give me a minute to lock up.”
I’d rather hoped not to involve myself at all but I deferred to Tom’s judgment.
* * *
I wasn’t in the least surprised that there was a handmade “Keep Out” sign at the start of the potholed drive that led to the Sleator place. The drive branched off a narrow lane that ran past the tiny medieval church and graveyard. I’d already walked the lane and discovered that soon after the church it became unsurfaced track through apple orchards, narrowing to a dirt path that led up Mardham Hill. The child sat quietly in the back seat as I drove, sniffing every now and then. I thought he was probably enjoying his little adventure.
“You better wait here,” Tom said when we pulled up in the yard in front of the house. “I’ll see if anyone’s about.”
I nodded assent as I looked at the smashed windows on the ground floor of the dirt-colored building, the door swinging on one hinge, the bits of clothing and pots and pans and glass strewn around the muddy concrete yard.
“Christ!’ I said. “What the hell’s been going on here?”
“Sleators been going on here,” Tom replied.
I watched him go up to the house and call out. When no answer came, he walked round the side, probably to check the barn. I didn’t like him being out of sight—what if they turned up now, and me with their child in the back of the car? The yard was situated behind the miserable field that backed onto my cottage, and through a gap in the trees—stricken, wind-sheared things—I could see the upper floor and the humped clay tiles of the roof. I sat forward in my seat. Through the gaps of the hedge I could see something white, moving slowly, in a way that even from there was suggestive of a living thing. A big hand thumped onto my nearside window and the door behind me clicked. It was Tom. Across the yard, hovering at the side of the house, was the Sleator matriarch, her arms crossed over her old khaki sweater, her face set in an inexplicable expression of defiance.
“Come on littl‘un,” Tom said, helping the child from the back seat. “Grandma’s waiting for you.”
The boy hopped out and scampered over to the woman, who made no move to hug him or even ruffle his hair. Instead, she kept her eyes on Tom and me as I started the engine and reversed the car out of the yard.
“Well?” I asked him, as we jolted back up the track. “Why was the house all smashed up? And had they even noticed the kid was gone?”
Tom shook his head wearily. “What can I tell you? I asked her if there’d been any trouble and do you know what she says? Ha! She tells me a goat got out the top field and went a bit mad. That’s where the rest of them are, she says, putting the mad goat back in the field. Little Adam must’ve wandered off in all the fuss, she says.”
“A goat? A goat that rips doors off and needs a whole gang of Sleators to restrain it?”
He looked at me and sighed. “What can I say? I’d like to say it’d be nice for them to do something normal for a change, but I suppose the shock’d kill me if they did. Now, how about a whiskey in the pub before you head back? On the house?”
I said I would pass on the offer, but agreed to go to the Old King’s Inn that evening. Tom promised me free beer “to make up for all this fuss.”
Back at the cottage, I inspected the garden for evidence of an animal having been there, particularly a white one, but there was nothing I could see, not even Sanderson. I reminded myself to let Tom know that the cat had made himself scarce. Perhaps someone in the village had seen him. Perhaps he’d moved in somewhere else. But maybe he was sick—
perhaps that stuff he’d got hold of didn’t agree with him. I cautiously lifted the dustbin lid to have another look at it, but either it had sunk down into the rest of the rubbish or it had dried up into the shrivelled black curl of stuff that lay on top of yesterday’s papers.
I ended up passing a pleasant evening in the Old King’s. I got roped into game after game of euchre (which luckily I’d played a few times before) with three of the old boys and what with the generous supply of beer from Tom, the gruff, sarcastic banter, and the soothing crackle of the log fire, I wandered back to the cottage with the satisfied feeling of a few hours well spent. There had been, however, one moment of awkwardness, although I swept it aside at the time—when I returned from the bar after a pause in play, my three companions cut short a hushed conversation. The last few words sounded like “one more day” but I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking what they meant.
I went up to bed relaxed and content and fell asleep straight away, only to come awake some hours later—horribly, coldly, certain that someone was in the house. I lay rigid, listening to a sound which may have been just outside my bedroom door—a prolonged, yawning creak like a slice of floorboard being prised from the frame below. As if sensing I was now fully conscious, the noise stopped. I clenched the blankets, staring into the dark, until my awareness of every sound, and then of the mournful, hollow circling of the wind outside, reached such an unendurable pitch that I leapt from the bed, smacking the light switch on and slamming the bedroom door to and fro with a cry of “I can hear you! I can hear you!” Silence answered me. But I detected a change, a lifting of pressure, a new texture, as if what had been there had now gone. I turned the light back off and went to the window, opening the curtains a crack. Out there, in the almost phosphorescent light of the moon, I saw two figures crossing Sleator’s field and one of them, I am sure, turned briefly, as if he knew I were there.
* * *
As I made a late breakfast the next morning, I started to toy with the idea of cutting my holiday short. But then I became annoyed with myself for letting my over-anxious nature get the better of me, for giving way to the imagined rather than the actual, as was my habitual wont. So I came to a compromise with myself. I’d give it one more day and if I still couldn’t find it in me to relax, I’d admit defeat. I knew I couldn’t expect a refund for the remaining days, nor would I ask, but if I was going to spend half the night jumping out of my skin, I would be better off at home. I decided to spend the day further afield and, after another futile search for Sanderson (who Tom assured me often did disappearing acts), I set off for the nearest quaint Kentish town. I visited churches and antique shops. I had tea and cake served to me by girls in black dresses and white aprons. I dawdled in a local history museum. I bought a book on smuggling in the 17th century, and I had dinner in a lovely restaurant with views of a fine church tower. Then I drove back through the unlit country roads in a lighthearted mood, looking forward to a tot or two of the 15-year-old rum I’d bought from a little shop in a honey-colored market square.
I parked the car outside the cottage but I didn’t get out. Instead I sat listening to the impatient tick of the cooling engine, reluctant to move at all. “Stupid!” I shouted and I gathered up my bags decisively and went around to the back of the house. But I couldn’t shake the unease. I went to the woodshed and fetched the axe that was kept next to the pile of logs. Insurance, I told myself. Who wouldn’t sleep easier with an axe under the bed?
The back door was unlocked. No need to panic, I thought, no need. Didn’t you forget to lock it once last week? Yes, yes you did. Thought you’d done it but you hadn’t. Putting down my bags, but not the axe, I felt for the light switch inside the door. The bulb flickered and extinguished with a snap and in that brief moment I saw illuminated as if by lightning, the gurning, malevolent features of Jacob Sleator and a Sleator son, bent over someone huge and ghastly w
hite into whom they were aiming brutal, driving blows. In the dark, the room seemed to drag itself towards me. Everything dropped from height and crashed into the ground, churned and broken, then rose flying upwards in a furious squall. A mass of flesh smashed into me, crushing me into the wall, surrounding me with choking stench, the smell of dung and airless earth and diseased breath. Then it spun away, barrelling through the open door with the others, out into the night.
I stumbled in panic to the kitchen, shoved a chair up against the door and felt my way to the window. Even though what I then witnessed is burnt into my mind, even though I see it again and again in paralyzing, death-like dreams, despite all this I still question how we can ever know if our memories are truly real. I mean the quivering heave of the wet, white flesh that the Sleators were battling to restrain. The fluttering of the root-like fingers, the flailing, clotted, swollen arms and bowed, half-melted legs. The distorted head which juddered through restless attempts at features—a nose that spasmed into the form of an eye, an ear that emptied into a mouth. Jacob Sleator, horribly cut and bruised about the face, had managed to tie some rope around the thing’s upper half, and the Sleator son, unflinching, was throwing his own rope over its head. With a united grunting effort they pulled their ends of rope tight, penning the creature between them, and dragged its spasming body to a newly hacked gash in the hedge, through into the rotten furrows of their moonlit field.
