Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘Gar was right about the dog,’ he said. ‘It’s an absolute monster.’

  ‘Shh, baby,’ said Ardwyn, and took his hand in both of hers as they walked towards the allotment’s offices. ‘Leave the monsters to Mother.’

  After signing the necessary papers they drove back to their new home.

  He Who Eats the Moon had provided for them in the form of a semi-derelict farm a mile outside Dodbury. A solicitor’s notice posted in one of the windows of the farmhouse indicated that the Council had issued a closing order on it due to some kind of long-running legal wrangle, but that was the first thing to go on the fire when they started clearing out. The last inhabitant had obviously been a hoarder; they found teetering piles of yellowing newspapers and magazines blocking the hallways and staircase, rooms full of plastic bin bags stuffed with old clothes and crushed lager cans, and a kitchen rancid with rotting takeaway containers and crawling with vermin. The owner obviously hadn’t been able to get into his own bathroom for years because he’d been washing in one bucket and shitting in another in one of the outbuildings, which were in an even worse state.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ gushed Ardwyn, all dewy-eyed and clutching Everett’s arm in mock adoration. ‘It’s perfect! Our very first home!’

  He carried her over the crumbling threshold and they collapsed into the hallway, laughing like drains. Gar looked on, bemused, then shook his head and went to look for some food.

  Their ability to undertake any repairs to the place was going to be limited by the necessity to prepare the ground at the allotment first, but after fleeing Swinley and sleeping in a stolen van for two weeks in the depths of winter, a slightly mouldy mattress was positively palatial, and a small sacrifice to make in the cause of a much, much larger one.

  3

  THE SHED

  DENNIE FIRST MEETS SARAH NEARY IN THE SPRING OF 2003, three years before Brian will be found dead in his own driveway. The Iraq War has ended and even though Dennie swore that she would never vote Labour again, not after the Winter of Discontent (having to keep two toddlers clean and fed in the middle of electricity blackouts and blizzards is a thing she said she would never forgive them for), in her opinion Saddam Hussein was a bullying bastard who deserved what he got. Christopher is twenty-nine and living the hedonistic lifestyle of a chartered surveyor in Burton-on-Trent – which is to say he’s left home and hasn’t asked them for money yet so he must be doing all right for himself – while Amy is sofa-surfing around America ‘finding herself’, and Lizzie has got herself an NVQ in Hospitality and Catering and is sharing a flat in Brighton with a nice young woman called Niamh on a basis that Dennie suspects is something more than platonic; Dennie herself is still only in her late-forties, with the children allegedly able to fend for themselves and enough of her life ahead of her, she hopes, to think about training as a social worker. But it is daunting. Her schooling finished at about the same time that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and studying for a diploma-level qualification seems just as remote. The textbooks are huge and expensive, she has to read them with a dictionary to look up every other word, and Brian makes no effort to disguise his disapproval of the cost but tolerates it because he’s convinced she’ll never stick it out.

  Between this and keeping the household, the allotment provides a welcome respite. The fruit trees have established themselves and she’s got herself into a nice seasonal rhythm which means that she really only has to keep things ticking over. Brian doesn’t bother her here, of course. He has his own routine built around a calendar of the four sporting seasons: cricket, football, rugby, snooker.

  So it is that in May of ’03 she sees a young couple exploring the vacant plot which is nowhere near as overgrown as it will be. Sarah is slim and blonde and heavily pregnant, while Colin is large, verging on overweight, and maybe it’s the fact that he’s wearing glasses which gives her the appallingly wrong first impression that he’s basically harmless. Dennie doesn’t introduce herself because they’re wandering away even as she notices them, but they seem nice, she decides. It’ll be nice to have new neighbours.

  * * *

  That Friday her new neighbours Ardwyn and Everett turned up with a van, a wheelbarrow full of pickaxes and shovels, and a helper: a tall slab of a man with a lantern jaw that made him remind Dennie of that big American actor from Sons of Anarchy. Big enough to be the hulking figure she’d seen – or dreamed – chewing the soil, although the more she thought about it the more likely it seemed that Angie had been right, so she tried to keep her head down and mind her own business. He didn’t say anything – not to his friends and certainly not to any of the locals who stopped by to pass the time of day or offer advice – he just got stuck into the work of hacking back the forest of brambles with a silent intensity that was almost monomaniacal. She heard through the gossip in the Pavilion that his name was Gareth and that he was Everett’s brother.

  Over the next three weeks the new tenants of Plot 27 made a favourable impression with the neighbouring allotment holders by keeping largely to themselves and not changing anything too much. There was so much litter and overgrowth that it took them that long to clear and level the first few metres. Everett was often in the Pavilion making small talk with the old-timers and picking their brains for tips, though they told him he’d be lucky to get that wreck of an allotment into a fit state for planting by next spring, never mind this year. If any of them told him the Neary story he didn’t seem to be bothered by it, because he and his ‘brother’ kept right on hacking and digging. He didn’t make small talk with Dennie, though, and she wondered why.

  Then their shed appeared, and first feathers began to ruffle.

  It wasn’t just that it seemed to spring up overnight – it was the kind that you bought as a kit from a garden centre and put up in a few hours with a drill and an extra pair of strong hands, if you knew what you were doing. It was the size of the thing. The Briar Hill Allotments by-laws stipulated that a shed could be no larger than six feet by eight, which was more than enough for most purposes, including the occasional illicit sleepover. The newcomers’ shed was half that again, a size which caused much shaking of heads and muttering in the Pavilion about ‘that bloody aircraft hangar’.

  The first Friday of the month was Committee Night at the Pavilion, and more often than not there was so little allotment business needing to be sorted that it was not much different from an ordinary Friday night’s drinking and chatting, but on this occasion Angie and the other committee members were pressed to Do Something About It. The loudest voice belonged to Hugh Preston, a grizzled man in his sixties and former Welsh Guard with one eye. He claimed to have lost its partner in a hand-to-hand scrap with an Argentinian soldier in the battle for Port Stanley in ’82 armed only with a spatula, and whether this was true or not his undisputed military credentials gave his opinions the weight of authority. ‘They might very well be a nice couple,’ he said to Angie. ‘But if you let that sort of thing slide at the start then who knows where it will end up?’ He was playing darts at the time and was being given a wide berth by the other drinkers; despite claiming that his lack of depth perception didn’t affect his accuracy in the slightest, the wall to the left of the dartboard was pocked with holes that suggested otherwise. ‘They’ll be having raves and orgies before you know it.’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’ said Edihan ‘Big Ed’ Rimedzo, to general laughter. He owned the Turkish barber shop in town and was so called because he stood only a little over five feet tall. ‘It’s just a shed, Hugh, not a massage parlour.’ Big Ed was deep in a game of dominoes with Ben Torelli, himself a veteran of three tours of Afghanistan, who made no secret of his disdain for Hugh’s pronouncements and usually avoided the Pavilion altogether.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Angie replied. ‘I’ll have a word with them about it.’

  But she didn’t have to, because later that evening Everett came in with a home-printed A4 flyer that he pinned to the Pavilion noticeboard beside the bar. He clea
red his throat a few times to get everyone’s attention. ‘So, just to explain,’ he said, nodding at the flyer. ‘Ardwyn and I would like to invite you all – and your families too – to a barbecue that we’re throwing as a way of saying thanks to you all for welcoming us here and being so generous with your time and advice. It’s next Sunday, and it’s mostly going to be kind of a hog-roast thing, though of course there will be other options if pork isn’t your thing. And it’s all on us. Just bring your own good selves. And a big appetite,’ he added with an embarrassed smile as if it were a lame punchline that he’d been rehearsing. ‘Anyway, the details are all there. Hope to see you.’

  He ducked out, leaving a murmur of surprise rising in his wake.

  ‘They can’t be short of a bob or two if they’re offering to feed everyone,’ said Torelli. ‘Hey Angie, are you going to throw the book at him before or after he treats the whole allotments to a free hog roast?’

  ‘I told you they seemed like a nice couple,’ said Hugh, with a wink of his good eye that raised laughter from the room.

  * * *

  Viggo was growling again. Dennie twisted in her sleeping bag, consciousness trying to fight its way clear of a smothering weight of sleep that gummed her eyes and chained her limbs. ‘Brian,’ she murmured. ‘The dog’s going off again. See what he wants.’ But Brian didn’t answer, and when she rolled over to prod him her hand whacked against something hard and wooden and the pain was like a cup of cold water in the face.

  She sat up. Past and present swirled around her like different coloured dyes in water, making it murky. Brian didn’t know who Viggo was because she’d got him as a puppy a month after her husband had died. Brian was gone. Shed. She was in her shed. There was a man eating soil on the Neary plot. Colin Neary. No, Colin was dead too, buried in pieces under the earth.

  She whacked her hand again on the shelf above her head, deliberately this time. ‘Wake up, you stupid cow,’ she growled at herself.

  Then Viggo licked her face and that did the trick.

  She cradled his head in her hands and scrunched his ears, partially to tell him that she loved him and she was all right, but mostly so that he would stop slobbering at her. He whined a little, appreciating the gesture, but was soon growling again. The sense of déjà vu was so strong that even when she checked her watch and confirmed that yes, it was 3:07 in the morning of Saturday the 14th of March – exactly the same time she had woken up to see the soil-eating man, which was a funny coincidence – the act of getting up and putting her boots on had a dreamlike quality to it, as if she were not entirely in control of her own actions.

  She shushed him and followed him outside. Heavy cloud had insulated the ground from the frost, and this time when he led her to the Neary plot the bulk of her new neighbours’ shed was a square shadow against the night. A thin strip of light showed under the door, and from inside she could hear the low murmurs of soft conversation between a female and male voice. In the weeks that they’d been clearing the ground and after the structure had appeared she hadn’t bothered herself with interfering, because as far as she was concerned they could have any size shed they liked. And if the figure she had seen that first night had just been Everett’s brother Gareth then, bizarre and terrifying though it might have been, it hadn’t been burglary and no crime had been committed. If anything, she was in the wrong now, sneaking around and spying on them. So what if they were having an illicit overnighter? She could hardly accuse them of breaking that particular by-law. They weren’t playing loud music or being a nuisance. She should go back to bed; live and let live.

  Then came a sound she knew intimately well, but one that she had never heard coming from inside a shed: the scraping of shovels and the digging of earth.

  ‘What?’ she whispered to Viggo. Digging at this time of night? And how were they managing it inside – did their shed have no floor? It was so nonsensical that she listened more closely, trying to find an alternative explanation for the sound, something that her old ears had misinterpreted, something that made sense. Maybe they were mixing potting compost. It was still a chilly night; maybe—

  And then the door opened, and Gareth stood framed against the light, having to duck his head under the frame, stepping outside with a shovelful of soil. He saw her, tossed the shovel to one side and came for her, just like before, except this time he opened his jaws and snarled. No human face could unhinge so widely or boast such close-clustered and overgrown teeth, like the business end of a construction digger, and the noise that came from it was like nothing she had ever heard out of a human throat: and the shock of it paralysed some tiny, terrified animal part of her brain. The figure – it’s no man, whatever that thing is it’s not a man – came for her, and Viggo went absolutely berserk.

  Dennie screamed and ran, only realising that she had forgotten to lace up her boots until the moment her feet tangled and she was pitching forward, hands outstretched, and her head smacked into something so hard that—

  * * *

  Viggo was licking her face and whining, but the whining was also coming from inside her skull, rising and falling with a throbbing headache that filled it like a festering sore about to rupture. She groaned and dragged herself slowly into a sitting position, wincing as the headache shifted and sloshed with her movement. Wooden floorboards were hard beneath her hands. Morning light stabbed at her through the window, making the headache worse.

  She was on the floor of her own shed, half-covered by the sleeping bag that had slithered off the folding camp bed which was tipped on its side next to her. Finally done it, idiot, she chided herself. You’ve finally gone and fallen out of bed and given yourself a concussion. Now they’ll all know that you’re going gaga. Happy now? She inspected herself with her fingers – there was a lump the size of a golf ball above her left eye but no blood, it seemed. That was some relief, but the bruising was going to be spectacular, and the pain in her head nothing compared to the ‘I-told-you-so’s’ that she was going to have to endure from her children, from Angie, and from the other allotment holders—

  A strip of light under the door.

  The sound of digging.

  A mouth with far too many teeth.

  She levered herself to her feet and yanked the shed door open, squinting into the glare of daylight. It should have been bolted shut from the inside, but it swung freely. Unless you just forgot to bolt it yourself last night. Or unless someone had dragged her in and dumped her but been unable to bolt it after themselves when they left. The combination of headache, bright light, and suddenly being upright threw her guts into revolt – nausea twisted her, and she was nearly sick on her own threshold, but she held it back. No. Not in front of other people. Have some dignity for once. She staggered outside.

  It was Saturday morning, a busy time of the week, and all around she could see her neighbours clearing the winter rubbish, preparing cloches, planting out seedling crops. Over on the Neary plot Everett and Ardwyn were digging away just the same as everyone else, but no alleged brother. She marched over, a little unsteadily on account of the nausea and the fact that she was in her socks.

  ‘Just what in hell do you people think you’re playing at?’ she demanded.

  The pair of them paused as she approached, expressions of confusion turning to concern.

  Ardwyn’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, Dennie! Your head! What’s happened to you?’

  ‘That looks like a nasty bump,’ said Everett. He stuck his spade in the ground and took out his phone. ‘You need an ambulance. You could have a concussion.’

  ‘Don’t give me that bollocks!’ Dennie retorted. ‘And you’d better put that thing away or I’ll stick it somewhere you’ll need a spade to get it back out again.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Ardwyn. ‘Dennie, what’s happened?’

  ‘At least let us get an icepack on that,’ Everett offered, putting his phone away. He gestured back to their shed, the door of which was shut. ‘Why don’t you come in and sit d
own? We’ll make you a cup of tea and have a look at that.’

  ‘Icepack my arse!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not setting one foot on this plot, and I don’t know what’s wrong with that “brother” of yours, but if I see him around here again I’m having the police on him for assault. Do you understand?’

  ‘Dennie,’ said Ardwyn, ‘you’ve obviously had a fall. I don’t think you’re thinking clearly. Is there anyone we can call?’ She was talking in the gentle tone and making the placatory hand gestures of a person who has realised that they’re dealing with someone drunk or mentally unstable, but behind the concerned frown there was a sparkle of amusement in her eyes that just made Dennie even more angry. She’s enjoying this, the little bitch.

  ‘Oh, piss off!’ she yelled, and now she was drawing the attention of those nearby. Heads came up, digging paused. If any of the neighbouring sheds had net curtains, they were twitching. ‘Just keep away from me and my dog, got that?’

  * * *

  ‘Did we get that?’ asked Ardwyn as they watched the old woman totter away.

  ‘Loud and clear,’ Everett replied. ‘As did I think most of the neighbourhood.’

  ‘Good. Honestly, this is the best way.’

  ‘I know, and I agree, but try telling Gar that. If that dog comes for him again there’s no telling what he’ll do.’

  Ardwyn kissed him, stroking his hair. ‘If you think about it,’ she said, ‘she’s actually doing us a favour – anything she sees will be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy old bat. Who knew she actually slept here? Does she even have a home, do you think? Maybe she eats out of bins.’ She chuckled at the thought.

  ‘It’s a problem,’ he insisted.

  ‘Not if properly managed,’ she replied. ‘Assuming that she comes to the feast, we’ll have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t?’

  She took up her spade and resumed digging over the ground. A worm appeared, pink and squirming, and she chopped it in half with the blade, watching it writhe as its juices oozed out, fertilising the soil with its death. ‘Then we might have to let Gar off the leash.’