Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘Sarah, who’s coming?’

  The reply did not come from Sarah’s mouth, though it was uttered in Sarah’s voice. It came from the doll clutched in her hands.

  ‘He Who Eats the Moon.’

  Then something seemed to burst out of Sarah, or through her, shredding her form like smoke, something that was huge and bristling and tusk-mouthed, that leered at Dennie and snarled in a voice that was an animal squeal in human words: Go, and stay gone, you interfering old witch! It might have done more, but at that moment there came the great full-throated baying of a hound and Viggo was there in front of her, feet planted, raging against the thing that threatened his mistress. Whatever the thing was evaporated, no more substantial than Sarah had been, and Dennie found herself alone with her barking dog in the middle of her allotment, shuddering at the pain of something that felt like a rail spike being hammered between her eyes.

  Her nose and lips were wet. Had she been crying? She put her fingers to them, and they came away red.

  She left the gardening fork where it was and stumbled back to the shed to find a rag to staunch the bleeding, gathering her things one handed with the other pressed to her face. No way was she going to sleep here tonight. Bolts and locks and fancy gadgets weren’t going to help her against, against…

  ‘He who eats the moon,’ she whispered.

  She locked up and hurried home. By the time she got there she had a thumping headache, so swallowed a couple of paracetamol and hoped that a night’s sleep would take care of it. But she wasn’t even granted that respite, because her phone rang at a little after two the next morning. It was David Pimblett, calling in his capacity as Neighbourhood Watch liaison.

  Her shed was on fire.

  PART FOUR

  AGGRESSIVELY WEED

  1

  ASHES

  DENNIE STOOD IN THE STROBING BLUE OF THE POLICE and fire appliance’s lights, too stunned to weep.

  By the time Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service had responded to the call there was nothing they could do except stop it spreading to the other allotments, and by the time Dennie had arrived they were dampening down, and there was nothing to save. The nearest half of her crops were gone along with it – scorched by their proximity to the flames, ruined by the jets of high-pressure water, or just plain trampled on. Her precious grafted tomatoes had been annihilated.

  The shed itself was little more than a scorched black platform covered in sodden ash and the metal debris of anything that wouldn’t burn – she saw her kettle, some paint tins, the thin struts of a stunt kite that they’d taken up Kinder Scout one blustery weekend, and the melted lump that had once been her battery lantern. Her folding chair that she’d sat on for so many nights was a twisted skeleton of blackened aluminium, and the glass of her old cold frame, that she had built herself with panes scavenged from an abandoned plot, was a crust of shattered and blackened fragments that crunched beneath the boots of the firefighters as they moved to and fro. It had been her refuge, her bolthole in times of trouble – more of a home than her actual house, and it was gone.

  Sian Watts had her arm across Dennie’s shoulders, gripping tight, and Angie was on the other side, and despite Angie’s recent harsh words she was glad of the company because she felt that without someone to hold her up she might end up like Lot’s wife, who had looked back to watch her home destroyed and been turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her presumption by a vengeful lord.

  There had been a wooden panel beside the door where Christopher and Lizzie had chalked their names when they had been little and her shed had been not just a place for keeping tools but a playhouse, a castle, a Tardis. That was gone too.

  That was when the tears came, and Sian and Angie held her up.

  * * *

  Eventually the emergency services packed up and left, and the residents of the surrounding roads who had watched either from their driveways or back windows returned to their beds. Angie vowed that first thing in the morning she would put wheels in motion to get it all cleared up and to sort Dennie out with a new shed, new tools, whatever she needed, and departed for her own home. Sian asked three times if Dennie wanted a lift home, or someone to stay with her, but took the hint after the third refusal and went her own way, leaving Dennie to stare at the wreckage alongside David Pimblett.

  ‘They did this,’ she told him, stating it as a simple, bald fact. She didn’t feel angry, not at the moment. Her soul felt like ash. Anger would come later.

  ‘They?’ he asked. ‘Who do you mean, they?’

  ‘The newcomers. That Farrow Farm lot. Somehow they must have known I’d seen something and this is their way of punishing me.’

  ‘Wait, that’s ridiculous. There’s absolutely no reason to think—’

  ‘Come here.’ She walked over to the sodden mess that had been her shed, and pointed. ‘See that?’

  ‘What, that? It looks like a storm lantern.’

  That was exactly what it was. A faux-retro metal lantern with a glass bulb protecting a cotton wick fed by a reservoir of paraffin in the base. Except that the glass bulb was smashed and the whole thing was bent out of shape, either from the heat or from having been stepped on. The fire crew commander had pointed it out to them as the likely cause of the ‘accident’.

  ‘I don’t own one.’

  ‘Are you sure? You had a lot of stuff in that shed. Maybe you got one a long time ago and then forgot about it.’

  She shook her head. ‘Nope. I’ve never allowed naked flames. Cooking gas aside,’ she added, as he opened his mouth to object. ‘That’s controlled and switched off when it’s not used and comes home with me. I never leave it in the shed. If I want light I have – had – my little battery lantern. No candles. Not even tea-lights. Despite the tendency of many people to think of me as some kind of semi-moronic old fart, I’ve always been careful about fire. Always. For God’s sake, the bloody thing was insulated with Styrofoam! That thing,’ she said, prodding the twisted object with her foot, ‘came from the newcomers’ shed.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘Because I saw it there.’ She briefly described yesterday’s adventure, and finished by pointing out that the fuel reservoir of the broken storm lantern was missing its little screw cap. ‘They want people to think that it was an accident, that I did it myself because I’m careless and stupid and not to be believed. Why do they have a trapdoor in the floor of their shed, David? What are they doing at the start of every waxing moon? Why are two people missing and nobody else seems to be concerned about it?’ What was the thing that attacked me? Who is He Who Eats the Moon? But of course she couldn’t ask that because then he really would think she’d lost it.

  ‘Three,’ he said, so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him.

  ‘Three? What do you mean, three?’

  ‘Ellen Webster. She’s a retired librarian, in her seventies, lives alone.’

  ‘There’s a surprise.’

  ‘She was supposed to be running an adult literacy class in Abbots Bromley last week and didn’t turn up. The organisers tried to contact her but had no luck, so put a request on the online community forum to see if anyone knows where she is. Apparently one of her neighbours went around but she wasn’t home.’

  ‘Dear God. David, we have to tell someone. You have to tell someone. They’ve already done a good job of making it seem like I’m paranoid and losing my marbles, but you’re a police officer, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I’m only a volunteer.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter! They’ll take you seriously! Tell me that you’ll say something – or at least that you’ll look into it. Please!’

  ‘I will look into it. But don’t expect me to go around kicking doors down and shouting “You’re nicked, scumbag!” because it doesn’t work like that.’

  She took his hand and squeezed it. ‘Thank you. Thank you for believing me – and for being one of the few people around here that I can trust.’

  * * *<
br />
  David saw Dennie safely back to her house and then went home, feeling sick at his own hypocrisy. He tried to tell himself that he hadn’t deceived her, hadn’t actually lied to her by omitting the fairly significant fact that he had shackled his family to the fortunes of Farrow Farm, but it didn’t do any good. The only thing that allowed him to put it to the back of his mind was the fact that Alice – who had been looking and feeling a lot better since eating Daddy’s magical hot pot – was going to have her blood tested tomorrow.

  2

  GIVING THANKS

  ‘EXPLAIN THAT TO ME AGAIN,’ SAID BECKY. DAVID watched her biting the inside of her cheek and twisting her wedding ring, evidence of a war being waged inside her: the desperate hope that what the oncologist had just said was true battling with the fatalistic certainty that somehow it was a mistake, that it would turn out to be an equipment error or a mix-up with another little girl’s results or just some inexplicably sick practical joke. There were no miracle cures, they knew this. They were in it for the long haul. Through the window in the doctor’s office door he could see Alice playing a card game with Gavin, her ‘onkie’ nurse, chattering and laughing, brighter-eyed than he’d seen her in months.

  ‘Frankly, I am at a bit of a loss how to explain it,’ said Dr Barakhada. ‘But we’ve tested three separate samples from Alice and had the results cross-checked and verified by Birmingham Children’s Hospital and there really can be no doubt. Her count is a little on the low side still but well within the normal range for her size and age, and we can find absolutely no lymphoblasts in her blood at all. It’s as if she’s somehow leapfrogged the next eighteen months of treatment and gone right into complete remission.’

  Becky glanced at David, her eyes swimming, and then back to Dr Barakhada. ‘But that’s impossible.’

  He closed Alice’s file and sat back in his chair. ‘I don’t like to use the word impossible, especially when it comes to kids,’ he said. ‘There is such a thing as spontaneous remission, but it is staggeringly rare – about one in a hundred thousand patients, though that may be a conservative figure – and it isn’t really something you can hope for as a treatment option. There is some evidence to suggest that whatever mechanism is at work can be jump-started by an infection, which we know Alice had, but sometimes at the end of the day you simply have to throw your hands in the air and thank the universe for whatever it’s doing. Kids bounce. Sometimes they bounce in unpredictable directions.’

  Becky put her hands to her face and wiped away the tears that insisted on spilling free. ‘So, what do we do now?’

  ‘What I’d like to do now is take another bone marrow sample and see if that’s clear too, and we should probably make an appointment to have her port removed. Remember that remission doesn’t mean she can’t suffer a relapse – she’ll still need all of the standard follow-up. But for the moment…’ He smiled and spread his hands.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said David, getting to his feet. It took a moment for Becky to join him, as if she’d forgotten how to make her legs work or she was still waiting for the bad news. She wouldn’t get that from Dr Barakhada, he thought.

  No, the bad news was that they were going to have to move house. David was going to get his family as far away as possible from the people at Farrow Farm. Somehow they were poisoning Dodbury, and if Dennie’s fears were true then they were also capable of extreme violence. He knew that he was taking the coward’s option in deserting his hometown, and he would tell the police about the thing in the barn eventually, but not until his loved ones were safe.

  He had absolutely no intention of telling Becky any nightmare fairy stories about eating a dead god’s flesh, and she wouldn’t believe it anyway – no sane person would – especially not with spontaneous remission as an alternative. David didn’t know how this first flesh business worked – whether it was permanent, whether it required regular consumption, or whether, as the doctor had said, the leukaemia would come back. If it did then they’d be no worse off than they were before. For the moment, Alice was cured, and that was the end of it.

  ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,’ Becky kept saying as they left the office. She took his hand and gripped it tightly. ‘Do you think there actually might be something up there looking out for us?’

  ‘I really think there might,’ he answered.

  * * *

  Lauren Jeffries would not normally have walked home through the park after work, but it was nearly midsummer and would be daylight for hours yet. It had been another unseasonably hot day and there were families all over the place – in the playground on the swings and slides, picnicking on the grass, queuing at the ice-cream kiosk, riding bikes and scooters, throwing bread to the ducks and splashing in the Pent Brook that fed into it. This was Dodbury, not some inner-city shithole. She’d played on exactly those swings and slides when she’d been that age, and when most of her friends couldn’t wait to escape the village that they called the most boring zit on the arsehole of the country, she had got herself a nice little flat and a job in Free Range Travel on the High Street. Which was ironic, when you thought about it: helping other people find exotic locations to jet off to when she was perfectly happy here, thank you very much. Hopefully one day she would take a daughter of her own to play on those swings and slides, and the thought of it made her feel solid and centred and happy; her feet were on the earth, her head was in the summer breeze, and she was on her way home to a tuna salad and Bake Off on the telly. Maybe a drink with Pauline down in the beer garden of the Golden Cross if she was up for it.

  She didn’t notice the lads on the bikes until she was nearly at the point where Pent Brook exited the park over a short bridge onto Cathcart Road, because the park crowds had thinned but that tight little knot of a dozen or so figures on bikes with their hoods pulled up was still there, not exactly following her, but too close to be just minding their own business. When she had been little her dad had told her the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and for years afterwards whenever she’d had to cross the bridge she’d always checked underneath it carefully for trolls first.

  Lauren picked up her pace. Cathcart Road led onto Osier Road, which was just around the corner from her block of flats. Ten more minutes at most.

  ‘Hey, love!’ shouted one of the lads from behind. ‘Where ya goin’?’

  She heard sniggers from the others, but didn’t turn around. Put her head down, and walked. They weren’t going to do anything; this was Dodbury. They were just being a bit cheeky. It was what lads did.

  Two of them whizzed past her on their bikes, one on either side, one of them close enough to brush the material of her skirt with his handlebars. They powered up to the bridge and parked right in the centre of its span. Now they were ahead of her and behind.

  ‘Come on, love!’ he shouted again. ‘We just want to have a chat!’ More sniggers.

  This time she turned around and got a good look at them. They must have been about fourteen or fifteen, mostly white but there were a couple of black lads too. Nobody she recognised, but they were bound to be the younger brothers of the friends she’d grown up with, so not exactly strangers either. They all had their hoods up and one or two had buffs covering their faces, which meant that they had come for trouble because you didn’t wear that kind of thing in this weather.

  ‘Going skiing, are you then?’ she shouted back, even though her heart was pounding. One thing she did know was that lads like this were brave when they were mob- handed, but they were maddened by your fear like sharks smelling blood.

  The one who had yelled at her – red-faced and acne-ridden, with a scrappy little weasel’s arse of a moustache – frowned in confusion. ‘What?’

  ‘Or are you just too ugly to show your faces in public?’

  ‘Why you being so nasty, love, ay? We’re just trying to be friendly.’

  ‘Oh, just fuck off and go wank each other, why don’t you?’ she shouted, turned and marched towards the bridge. The tw
o that were there had left just enough space for her to squeeze between them, and their unwashed clothes reeked of body odour and musky deodorant. The trolls are on the bridge! she thought, and in her head it sounded like an alarm.

  ‘You’ve got a bit of a mouth on you, darling, haven’t you?’ shouted the Scarlet Pimpleface. ‘A real rude bit of a mouth!’

  The troll on her left leaned in and said, in breath that stank, ‘Why don’t you use that rude mouth on me?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ she spat, and scurried past, but not before he’d grabbed her bum, laughing.

  She made it over the bridge and started running, and as if that were their cue they all started jeering and catcalling, pursuing her through the wooden park gate and onto Cathcart Road, fanning out on either side of her and in front so that she felt like she was being mobbed by crows, and she was trying not to cry.

  Then a car pulled up in the road directly ahead – a canary yellow Astra that she didn’t recognise – and the driver leaned out of the window.

  ‘Hey, Lauren!’ he shouted. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  It was Matt.

  ‘Oi, mate! Fuck off, yeah?’ shouted one of the trolls.

  ‘Seriously, Lauren, get in.’

  Lauren had no love lost for Matthew Hewitson; he’d been a dick of the first order and under any other circumstance she’d tell him to get knotted, but right now he was the lesser of two evils so she hurried around to the passenger door, which he had already opened, and got in.

  * * *

  ‘Thanks, Matt,’ she said as he drove away.

  ‘Hey, no problem.’

  He watched the figures grow smaller in his rear-view mirror. One of them waved. If Lauren was watching she’d probably just see it as sarcastic, but to Matt it was a wave that said ‘job well done’. That had been the best hundred quid he’d ever spent. When this was all over he’d probably even buy Jason and his mates a round at the Golden, sort of as a bonus. She really did look terrified: flushed, out of breath, and almost on the verge of bursting into tears.