"It'll be easier if you just keep turning the pages," he said.
I looked back down at the album. The second of the two pages facing me, the one that didn't have corpses on it, was similar to the very first page of the album. On it were photos of four blissfully happy looking people with the same rural backdrop. Looking at this second set of smiles I realised they reminded me of people in some kind of religious ecstasy. They all looked like people who thought they'd seen the face of God.
I didn't want to turn the page because I thought I knew what I was going to see those faces transformed into but I did. The next double page was the same as the previous one had been: death on one side, smiles on the other.
I turned the pages, seeing the same thing again and again. And then on the third page turn I stopped because suddenly it was starting to make sense. Some sense anyway. Smiling back at me from the book open on my lap was Joan Mabey.
I felt sick again and sucked in a deep breath of the air that was streaming in through the open window. My head was suddenly full of things I'd been trying to forget for years. The frustration and the anger that had accompanied the disintegration of my career.
I looked at the driver again and realised that at last I knew who he was. That I’d met him before.
“I interviewed you didn’t I?” I said. “Back then.”
“Yes you did,” he said.
“You worked at the hospital. What were you? A surgeon?”
“Yes. It was the end of my career too, you know. Not just yours. There’s no smoke without fire, as they say.” He didn’t sound angry when he said it. Just like for me the pain of it had faded over the years.
“Why did you do it? Why do you do it?” I realised that he was almost certainly still killing. That I was probably his next victim.
He stopped the car. My eyes had been fixed on either him or the book for minutes but now I looked out of the car. We were pulled off a quiet country road into a small lay-by with a footpath leading away from it to a copse of trees about fifty yards from the road. Before I could say anything he climbed out of the car and went to the boot, opening it and pulling out a shovel. Then he turned and started walking up the path.
I pulled my door open and followed him, running to catch him up.
“Why did you kill them?” I said again when I reached him.
“I didn’t,” he said, still walking. “I helped them to die. He spoke through me and they were happy to die for him. That isn’t what you should be asking though. You should be asking why I’ve brought you here.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because I need you. He needs you.”
My heart was pounding now. Pumping my blood fast through me and filling me with a sick fear that was making my head spin. He started walking towards the trees and I felt myself follow him.
“I had to photograph them before they died,” he said as he walked. “It’s only right that the sacrifice they made is recorded. Remember that.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, my voice sounding small and desperate even to my own ears.
“You’ll feel him in a minute,” he said. “Then I think you will.”
We were near the trees and I could hear them now. Hear their branches and leaves swaying in the slight breeze.
“I first came here ten years ago,” he said. “Me and an old school friend just out for a walk in the countryside. We walked into the trees, those trees, and I felt him immediately. Felt his presence. He spoke to me and told me what I needed to do. What he needed. I served him since then.”
We were at the edge of the trees now. I half expected him to stop. To pause dramatically and continue his story but he didn’t, he walked straight in. I followed.
The light was different in there. The summer sun was diffused through the roof of green leaves above our heads and that was part of it but there was something else too. Something like a heat haze in the air, although it was actually cooler here than it had been outside. Everything I looked at had a slight distortion to it that made it seem almost supernatural. The sound of the trees was louder here, a white noise that felt like it would blot everything else out.
“Do you feel him?” said the man and I was surprised I could hear him at all above the trees.
All of a sudden I felt it. A presence that filled the whole copse. I felt like I was standing on a crowded tube platform, claustrophobic from all the people around me. I could see that only the two of us were there but my body was telling me different, telling me that I was surrounded.
“He’s very ancient. Impossibly so. I don’t know how many of us have served him over the centuries.”
“Us?” I said. This was all too much for me, my mind was reeling.
“Humans. Those humans who he has chosen to serve him.”
He had been facing away from me but he turned then and I could see a sadness on his face. “I’ve done it for a decade. Done it well. Brought him fresh sacrifices whenever he needs.”
I looked down at the ground and saw the graves then, so many of them amid the tree roots and the patches of bluebells.
He carried on speaking. “And now you’re here with me.”
That feeling of claustrophobia was getting worse, pushing in on me from all sides. The sound of the leaves in the breeze was rising, covering everything and starting to drown his voice out.
“I remembered you from all those years ago” he was saying. ”I knew I could get you to come up here. Here where I needed you. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”
“You’re going to kill me,” I said and realised that I didn’t care. That I could turn and run but I had nothing to go back to.
He shook his head. “No,” he said and then the noise of the trees blotted him out completely. I could see his mouth moving but couldn’t hear the words coming out of it. Through the shushing of the leaves rose another voice. One that was so totally familiar it felt like I had been hearing it my whole life. It wasn’t speaking in English or any language I recognised but I knew what it was saying. It was telling me to open myself to it. I didn’t want to but I couldn’t resist. My soul felt impossibly small next to the force that was surrounding me. Small and powerless.
I felt it fill me up, take me over. My mouth opened and rather than my own voice I heard the other speak through me. The sound of it was musical and I saw the jittery man’s face change as he realised what was happening.
He fell to his knees in front of me, his face tilted up towards me like that of a child or someone staring up at the priest as they took communion.
I heard a voice. A voice that was partly mine and partly that of the being that was surrounding me, flowing through me. The voice said, “Your time is now.”
I still couldn't hear him but when his lips moved this time I knew he was saying thank you. I’m not sure if it was me that understood what he wanted or the ancient thing that was now part of me. He wanted to die. He wanted to make the ultimate sacrifice for me as he had helped so many others to do. I bent and picked up the spade from where it had fallen to the ground next to him. One swing was all it took. Not to the throat like in the dream but down on the top of his head, the dirty blade smashing through his skull and burying itself in his brain. He died with a smile on his face. That same beatific smile that I’d seen on the corpses in his album. I realised then what he’d been trying to say to me earlier, the sentence I hadn’t heard over the noise of the trees. He hadn’t just needed me to kill him, he’d needed me to replace him.
With some effort I pulled the spade out of his head and started to work. I whistled as I did, a tune that felt as old as the ground I was digging. I was smiling too. Smiling because now I knew where the bodies were buried. And because I knew there would be more of them.
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