Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  ‘Workers?’

  ‘The cons the Party sent down to work on the place.’

  ‘What did go on?’

  ‘Just heard some stories, no big deal. Grennaught would have been the man to ask. If you could. Poor bastard. Stories don’t mean anything though. They’re just stories, right? You tell a lot of stories living this life.’

  ‘Yeah? Well indulge me then. You really want to talk about the weather?’

  ‘They just had some people go walkabout, that’s all. Workers. Party built a shelter in the grounds. A bunker. Wash central it was supposed to be. Somewhere to shove all the shit they were up to.’

  ‘And they deserted the place?’

  ‘Yeah. That.’

  ‘What’s Grennaught got to do with it?’

  ‘Kendrick sent him in after they disappeared. He wanted him to oversee the building and keep an eye on things and make sure no one else walked. Maybe have a poke around too, see if he could dig up some answers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, something rattled him. He was back at HQ after a week, refusing to go anywhere near the place again. Wouldn’t speak about it, well not to the rest of us hired hands that is, if he fessed up to the top table they never said.’

  ‘That doesn’t bother you?’

  Turtle shrugged, his shoulders seeming to catch a shiver as he did. ‘Just stories man, don’t mean anything.’

  ‘What do you think happened to them, the workers?’

  ‘I dunno. Some people reckon they all killed each other. That they went nuts and started in on one another. But no one ever found any bodies. They say that, but I doubt they ever really looked. With what Schaeffer was doing there, what was a few more stiffs to the Party?’

  ‘I heard that name earlier…’

  ‘Daddy of The Wash. He’s the mad, bad, bastard that sold the Party on the idea in the first place. They say he says he could control minds. All I ever saw of the Wash there was no control going on, there was nothing there to control. He emptied their minds. Blasted them till there was nothing left. He was just a butcher, another lunatic just as they were becoming old hat. It don’t matter any more anyhow, they pulled the plug on him, that’s all done with now. Kendrick sent a team in. This guy Hennessey, top Party plod, he took Schaeffer down. You see there are more of us than just this sorry bunch you’ve met. There are groups around the country. North, south, east and west. The Party’s got them in place and when the time comes, we come together, and…’

  ‘We take back the country?’

  ‘Nah, I doubt that, place isn’t worth the fuss and fluster any more. But what we do is we start again. That in itself, being in at the start of that, that’s worth it all. It’s got to be, right? I love that idea. It’s exciting don’t you think?’

  Sullivan leaned back against the cave wall and stared up at the hole. ‘I dunno, Turtle. Who the hell can be bothered to start again?’

  2

  A feeble light crept in through the hole in the rock wall above them, bringing dawn’s announcement in a tired suggestion, the greying sunlight washing Sullivan’s eyes and forehead, bringing him awake slowly and gently. Turtle was already up, his hands feeling into the rock wall for places to find purchase. Below them the others were stirring awake, yawning and stretching and wincing with stiffness and discomfort. Maddox remained on watch, unmoving, his eyes never leaving the tatty canvas door until Bergan slapped him hard on the shoulder and moved him on.

  Turtle was the first up the wall, scaling it in a series of clumsy fumbles, his stocky frame then squeezing out of the hole above and sending a shower of snow down on to the others, prompting a series of sighs and grunts that echoed out through the cave in a ghostly reverberation. Turtle disappeared briefly, then his face was back at the hole and he was giving the thumbs up. The rest scaled the wall one at a time, Bergan and Maddox following Davenport and Kendrick in turn, pre-empting the two suited men’s flailing around on the rock wall and their need for support, which in another world would have been comedy gold. As it was Bergan struggled not to scream at them and try out drop kicking them through the hole with one large toe capped boot.

  The hole, as Bergan had predicted, came out about halfway down the opposite side of the valley wall. The skeletal winter forest around Bleeker Hill was below them, bending around their vision on all sides. The trees, stripped and fragile looking, were speckled heavily with snow, the pathways between them chaotically sprinkled white and dotted with fallen branches and brittle foliage. Beyond the forest they could see the break where Bleeker Hill dropped down to the estate, before picking up again just at the tip of the horizon. They were close. But somehow no one seemed to want to say so.

  The valley wall was steep and the snow was piled high and solid in the gaps between the rocks, oozing through it like toothpaste. In places the snow was up to their kneecaps – waist in Turtle’s case – and moving through it was next to impossible, so they used the scattershot rocks like stepping stones, crawling between each slick grey mound on their hands and knees, before invariably slipping off and thudding into the hard snow cushion and then climbing back on to the nearest rock and repeating the process until the valley wall played out. By the time they reached the forest edge they were exhausted and slumped to the ground, wringing the wetness from their trousers and coat sleeves and shaking with the unforgiving cold, their teeth chattering and limbs pulsing under their wet clothes.

  ‘Well that was fun, Turtle,’ Maddox seethed, squeezing his cuffs. ‘Remind me to take the scenic route with you again sometime.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Bergan said, standing and moving between them. ‘Go check ahead, Theo. Find us a route.’

  Maddox sauntered off, the rifle swinging loosely in one hand, his free hand reaching into his jacket and plucking out another fat cigar.

  ‘Are you okay, Sullivan?’ Davenport was at his side, resting a precious hand on his shoulder and squeezing lightly. ‘No bumps or bruises?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Sullivan said, shrugging him off.

  Bergan stood a few yards into the forest, staring ahead at some fixed point, his black eyes latched to something. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest, his body rigid and imposing; he looked like a bouncer, an impassable object to stop anything getting in or out of the forest. Davenport approached him from the side, Bergan towering over him like a monument, almost casting shadow over Davenport’s neat little body. They said nothing for several minutes, just stared ahead into the forest, eyes squinting to see, and ears straining to hear. The sounds of the forest came to them in short, whispered moments – the snapping, the rustling, and the gentle creaking. It was a tease, and it was beckoning them in. Davenport gazed upward at the tops of the trees and then further up still to the dirty glass sky.

  ‘No birds,’ Davenport said a few moments later, half to Bergan, half to himself. ‘There are no birds here.’

  ‘No,’ Bergan replied, and it sounded like an answer as well as an instruction.

  ‘You’ve heard about…you know the stories?’

  Bergan remained silent. He uncrossed and then re-crossed his arms, his eyes never leaving the point in the forest they had found.

  ‘Frank?’ Davenport gazed up at Bergan, trying to read something from his inscrutable expression and his statuesque body. ‘Frankie?’

  ‘Yes?’ The word came so quietly that Davenport wasn’t sure it came from Bergan at all.

  ‘Should we be worried?’

  Footsteps crunched through the snow further into the forest and Davenport jumped, his hand instinctively reaching to his side, for a gun that wasn’t there. Ahead of them Maddox was coming back, rifle in one hand and a strange object – something that looked like a withered branch – in the other. He stopped still and stared back at Frankie, swinging the object back and forth in his grip.

  ‘Always,’ Frankie said quietly to Davenport and then stepped forward, further into the forest. ‘Well? he asked Maddox. ‘What’d you find?’

  ‘Blood. Pat
ches of blood. Then a trail of it, across the floor and up the trees, all over the place. Something took a hit.’

  ‘An animal?’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Maddox tossed the object towards them and it landed with a weak thud at Bergan’s feet. It was a man’s arm, blue and bloodied and chewed off at the elbow. Davenport recoiled in horror and turned away. The others held firm, gazing down at the ground and the grotesque souvenir Maddox had foraged.

  ‘Pretty sure, Frank,’ Maddox replied and turned back into the forest, rifle up in front of him.

  One by one the others followed him in.

  3

  They moved in a line behind Maddox and picked up the blood trail quickly. There were dried splats and blobs here and there along the patches of ground free from snow; others ran up nearby trees, soaked into the bark. Bergan kicked up snow and found yet more, frozen into the mossy ground. At the place Maddox had found the arm there was a larger, darker streak smeared across a felled tree trunk, and beyond it a haphazard series of tracks.

  ‘Human?’ Kendrick asked the group, staring down at the tracks and then to each man in turn.

  ‘Possibly,’ Bergan replied, flicking away bits of twig and moss with a long stick and squatting down for a closer look. ‘There are human footprints here, then something else, been walked through several times.’

  ‘An animal?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘It was an animal took the arm off, right?’

  ‘Possibly. Probably.’

  Bergan got up and walked on, joining Maddox at the head of the line and following the vague human prints deeper into the forest. They moved up and down the inclines of the forest floor, the tracks breaking and then starting again, sometimes deep and firm in an obvious human footprint, most times a scattered hotchpotch of scuffed up snow as if someone had been over the tracks half-heartedly trying to cover them and kick them away. Finally, as the trees grew in number around them and the snow became less and less, the tracks faded out into a carpet of fallen branches and browned threadbare moss mounds, before stopping completely at a narrow frozen lake snaking through the forest in front of them. A small derelict bridge straddled it covered in a thick white frosting that made a mockery of the tired, warped wood underneath.

  It was Sullivan who saw it first. As the other men wandered one by one to the edge of the lake, stuck in an awkward silence, tapping the ice with shoes and boots and looking beyond it to yet more tangles of branches and trunks, Sullivan hung back and took his rest straddling a tree stump. He watched the men, these strangers he was glued to, and suddenly, for the briefest, most wondrous moment, he felt like he wasn’t there, that he was watching the men play their part out through the luxury of great distance, perhaps through a TV screen that he could switch over whenever he chose, and that they couldn’t touch him, they couldn’t sense him or even see him. It was a glorious emotion, an exquisite con of the mind and he gave himself to it. He pushed himself forward off the stump and on to a soft cushion of moss and then slowly he leant back, tilting his head upwards, his eyes ready to swallow up the calm misery of the sky, to drink it all in and know that, for that moment, it couldn’t corrupt him.

  He was looking at the body for a good minute before his mind accepted it for what it was. The feeling didn’t fade instantly, it was more a gradual trickle as it drained away, falling from his ears and his eyes and out of his imagination, drifting away to become a memory to grab at, unsure it were ever his in the first place. At first he thought how small the man’s feet were, then how blue the body was, then he was fascinated by his bare legs, seemingly bent comically into directions in which they shouldn’t be able to move, and then finally he wondered where the rest of his right arm was. It was then reality clawed hard at his face and dragged him back to the here and the now and the what’s to come.

  Sullivan was screaming, jumping up and staggering back, then falling on to the ground again as the others turned to him, and then he was pointing up at the body, stuttering words that meant nothing, trying to escape his body again, just for a minute, but finding himself anchored to the earth.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Bergan said, as he walked slowly to Sullivan and stared up at the body.

  It was about ten feet from the ground, facing to one side, a snapped branch feeding through the side of its neck and then poking out of its mouth, holding it up in place. It was naked but for a ripped pair of briefs. The corrupted face of a man was frozen on the last sight it ever saw, the eyes bulging from their sockets in horror.

  ‘Get this man down,’ Kendrick said quietly, the words stuttering from his trembling mouth.

  Maddox jumped at the tree, caught the nearest branch and hauled himself up until level with the man’s shoulders. His free hand went to the man’s head and started pushing it, wiggling it from side to side, trying to free it from the branch. It wouldn’t budge, giving little more than an inch. He pulled at the hair, shoved the body at its back, and then finally, his patience worn through, he let go of the branch, jumped on to the back of the body and brought his weight down hard. The body came free in a horrid snap of branch and bone, and then it was flopping to the ground underneath Maddox, both bodies landing with a thud on the mossy forest floor.

  Kendrick bent down to the body, carefully rolled it over and stared deep into its eyes.

  ‘You know him?’ Maddox asked, getting to his feet, dusting himself down. ‘I’m guessing anyone who wears undercrackers like that comes from your side of the divide. Am I right?’

  ‘His name was Wallace,’ Kendrick said into the corpse’s face before turning to Maddox. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, now he’s a dead man, shall we move on?’

  ‘You’re a nasty son of a bitch, aren’t you, Maddox?’

  Maddox smiled to himself and picked up his rifle, smoothed a hand down the butt and then swung it up into his grasp. ‘You fucking got that on the money, chief.’

  ‘Enough!’ Bergan’s voice made them all jump. The deep, booming rasp of his words whenever he was close to shedding his composure was more terrifying a sound than anything the forest had to offer. They looked to him, one at a time, looking up at his giant body and his blank face, waiting for instruction or idea, but Bergan seemed to be searching for words, staring down at Wallace’s body and then back to his men, rummaging around for the right thing to say. As it was, he had only one thing: ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘We move on, yeah, Frank? Nothing to be done here, right?’ Maddox was asking through one side of his mouth, planting the stubbed cigar back into the other.

  ‘The man was a friend of mine!’ Kendrick snapped, pulling himself up to his feet and steadying himself against the tree. ‘Show some respect!’

  ‘Lucky you, having that luxury.’

  ‘I don’t need to take this shit from you, Maddox. You have no idea who I am.’

  ‘Best you come here and let me know then, Joey. What you say? Huh?’

  Kendrick and Maddox were about to come together, stepping forward to each other like the worst sort of posturing drunk, when a noise – the sharp cracking sound of a breaking branch – echoed out through the forest, bouncing around them between the trees and then coming back in seemingly from all sides. They all turned, each in a different direction, then turned back the other way. A second branch broke and then a small log tumbled down towards the lake and skidded along the icy surface. A figure jumped between the trees beyond it, ducked down and then ran on, bobbing up and then disappearing from sight. Maddox had the rifle trained before anyone even had chance to take in what they had seen, and fired off a blind shot into the trees. Bergan was in front of him quickly, blocking him off and pushing the rifle away.

  ‘Preserve ammunition, damn it. It’s all we’ve got.’

  Maddox pushed past Bergan and bounded off towards the lake, crossing it in one stride and then leaping into the trees behind the figure.

  ‘Turtle, with me! Move!�
�� Bergan shoved Turtle on and then the two men were jumping the lake behind Maddox and moving off through the trees, hot on his heels.

  4

  The trees in front of Bergan shook as Maddox charged on, almost seeming to run through them, the brittle winter branches no match for the fury that was rolling along their path. Turtle was out of breath, wheezing and coughing against the great exertion his little legs were being asked to accept, but he kept to Bergan’s side, like a dog on a short lead. They ran left and right, scrambled over felled tree trunks and squelched through ice crusted patches of mud, and then finally Bergan pulled to a stop, one hand thrusting out to his side and knocking Turtle to the ground as if he had just run into a door.

  Ahead of them a small one-berth tent was pitched between a small cluster of trees. Empty tin cans of food and drained bottles of drink formed a rubbish path to the partially unzipped door. A charred patch on the ground beyond, a blackened circle, betrayed a recent campfire, and there was still a delicate tang of burnt meat in the air, something slight yet sharp, a keen smell to the hungry. Maddox was stood amongst the rubbish, his rifle up, pointing at the door to the tent. Waiting.

  Bergan crouched down and shuffled over to the dazed Turtle, and the two men took position in a small ditch about thirty feet back.

  ‘That arrogant, gung-ho, son of a bitch is completely exposed. I’ve got to get to him. Stay here, Turtle.’

  Turtle didn’t need telling twice. Bergan lifted one great arm and started hauling himself up. He crawled for a few yards, his beady oil-well eyes swishing slowly left and right looking for anything approaching, and then, nearing a thick enough tree to hide him, he jumped up and swung behind it. He stretched to his full height and began to move his body around the trunk, those eyes now falling on Maddox and the small tent in front of him, all the while searching, probing, willing the reveal. He began to move out from behind the tree, and then he stopped, suddenly unable to move forward, his legs buckling from under him and his mind unwilling to comprehend what had just happened.