by Jacob Rayne
The moon was a bleached sickle scything through the overbearing darkness and tumorous clouds that hung above them. The sickly pale light cast the field in an eerie glow, making even the most normal thing seem like a figment of a living nightmare.
Osmo breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. His skin crawled. The stories had really gotten into his head.
‘What do you think it is?’ Graham asked.
Marie shrugged with the kind of nonchalance that one about to enter her teenage years can easily muster. ‘I think it’s a dinosaur.’
‘I heard it was a werewolf,’ Graham said.
Osmo wanted to join in, but he was too on edge. ‘Can we cut this out, kids? It isn’t helping.’
‘Ok, dad.’
‘Your mother’s been in there a while,’ Osmo said, trying to sound flippant.
‘You know mam,’ Marie said. ‘Her two minutes is like twenty, especially if she gets gassing.’
This brought a welcome chuckle from Osmo, lightening the mood a little. ‘Yeah, if she gets banging her gums we might be here till sunrise.’
Marie snorted laughter.
Graham didn’t say anything. He didn’t like it when they talked bad about his mam.
‘I’ll give it a few minutes then I’ll go in after her,’ Osmo said. ‘Sure she’s just talking to the receptionist or something.’
His kids both nodded.
‘It’s been five minutes, dad,’ Graham said.
Osmo eyed the clock on the dash to see that his son was right. He’d had a feeling it had been five minutes, he just didn’t fancy getting out of the car. He’d hoped Grace would come out of her own accord, saving him the worry of having to go in. He was going to give her a bollocking when he saw her. She’d known how much he’d dreaded coming here and now she was deliberately making him wait. It wasn’t on and boy was she going to know it.
He got out of the car, pleased that he’d oiled the squeaky hinge before setting out here. His feet crunched on the gravel. Even this minute sound seemed too loud, like it was going to bring the owners of the farm down on him like a ton of vengeful bricks.
‘Lock the doors and don’t open them for anyone but me,’ he whispered to Marie.
‘Not even mam?’ Marie said, smiling.
‘Of course your mam, but I’ll be with her, won’t I?’
Marie shrugged.
‘What about Misty?’ Graham said. ‘If we see him should we let him in?’
‘Misty’s dead, Graham,’ Marie said, then clapped a hand over her mouth as if blurting out a secret her brother shouldn’t have been privy to.
Graham nodded as if he had indeed considered this as a possibility.
‘Misty’s not dead,’ Osmo insisted. ‘We’re going to find him and your mam and get the hell out of here. Now do as I say, lock the doors and don’t open them till we come back.’
Marie nodded.
Osmo carefully shut the door and waited until he heard the click of the central locking. He gave Marie a thumbs up and strolled over to the glass door. Loathe to create unnecessary noise, he dispensed with the formality of knocking and opened the door to find himself in a pleasant, wood-lined room. There was a long, polished mahogany reception desk, upon which sat a phone and a guestbook.
‘Grace?’ he called. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
Grace did not reply.
He approached the desk, eyed the guestbook. It was blank. This struck him as odd, but he didn’t want to spend any longer here than necessary. He noticed that there was nothing on the other side of the desk. Again, he found this odd but tried not to dwell on it.
Behind the desk were two doors, one against the back wall and one to his left. The one to the left was open slightly, so he headed for this one first.
‘Grace?’ he called out, trying to keep his voice as low as possible.
Silence greeted his cry.
The sign on the door read, ‘Treatments room’. He pushed it open, wincing as the hinges squealed. The room was totally, utterly, empty. This he found very disturbing. Was this even a spa, or a front for something more sinister?
‘Grace, honey. Let’s fucking get out of here,’ he shouted. The only reply was his own voice echoing off the bare wooden walls.
He left this room, leaving the door slightly open, and headed for the back door. Shoving this door open revealed a long room that was as bare as the treatments room. The skin on the back of his neck began to crawl. His throat felt as dry as the gravel on the path outside.
Suddenly it occurred to him that Grace was in hiding, wanting to scare him to teach him not to be so nervous about things. If she did, he would gladly scream like a little bitch as long as it meant they got out of here.
The light died towards the end of the room, but he could see there was a door set into the back wall. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket, using the feeble light to illuminate the floor in front of him. There was a small object at the far end of the room near the door. He couldn’t tell what it was at this distance, and after squinting his eyes it still wasn’t clear, so he was forced to move closer.
‘Grace, this isn’t funny,’ he said, his voice shaking much more than he would have liked. ‘Let’s just go, alright? You scared the shit out of me. Let’s go.’
Silence swallowed his cry.
He slowly made his way up the room, scanning round with the torch to see if his wife was lurking anywhere. The room was bare so it quickly became obvious that she wasn’t. He reached the mystery object and glanced down to see that it was one of Grace’s shoes. A few small splashes of bright crimson marked the floor around the shoe.
‘Very funny, Grace,’ he called out, and tried a laugh that died in his throat. The shoe was in keeping with Grace’s sense of humour, but the blood made this unlikely to be a joke.
He grabbed the handle of the door and pulled it open.
A long, dark path led through the mud towards the forbidding silhouette of the barn. Trails in the mud made it look as though something – or someone – had been dragged up there recently. He knelt and looked at the scuffs, noting a few flecks of blood against the blades of grass.
He gulped and set off towards the barn he’d heard so many bad things about.
II
‘They’re sure taking a long time,’ Graham said, evidently inheriting his father’s nervousness.
‘They’ll be arguing. I can tell you exactly how it’s going down. Dad’ll be like, “You know how dangerous it is out here.” Mam’ll be like, “I’m only talking. Get over yourself, you big girl.”’
Graham shrugged.
‘Anyway, little brother, I’ve got this to keep us safe from the monsters.’ She showed him a small red object in her pocket.
He gasped.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said, pulling out her Swiss Army knife. ‘Someone in this family had the sense to bring a weapon up here with us.’
‘Dad’ll kill you if he sees that. Remember when he found it the first time?’
She nodded gravely. ‘But if it gets us out of here safely it’s worth having, isn’t it?’
Graham shrugged. He didn’t like the idea of the knife. He’d seen how angry dad had got the last time he’d found it in Marie’s pocket.
‘Shit,’ Marie said.
‘Don’t say that word, we’ll get wrong.’
‘It’s worth it in this case.’
Graham furrowed his brow.
‘See anything missing?’
His brow scrunched up even more.
‘Like the creepy-ass scarecrow that moved before maybe?’
He let out a cry when he saw that the pole against which the ominous scarecrow had stood was now bare.
‘Fucker,’ she muttered. ‘Where in the hell did he go?’ She glanced around quickly, desperate to spot the vanishing man.
‘I’m scared.’
‘Hey, listen to me. You’ve got to trust me, Graham. Do exactly as I say and I’ll get you out of this.’
Graham nodded, his eyes wide. He let out another cry.
Marie followed his gaze to see the dirty, dishevelled man moving past the back of the car.
‘Right, get down,’ she whispered. ‘He might not have seen us.’
They ducked down into the floor wells, crouching as far down as possible. Marie fumbled the long blade out of her knife and held it ready. Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind the car.
‘I think he might have gone,’ Marie said when the footsteps stopped.
As though the man had heard her, the footsteps started again, this time heading for the car.
‘Shit,’ Marie said.
Graham couldn’t help but look up.
The tramp loomed large in the window.
‘Freeze, he’s looking in,’ Marie whispered. They actually felt his eyes crawling over them, both hoping that the darkness in the field would help to hide them. He seemed to scrutinise them for an eternity.
Marie risked a glance up. The tramp’s eyes were bloodshot, looking like his eye sockets were bruised and sunken into his face. His dark beard was matted and twisted into strange formations. His teeth were yellow and looked as though they had been sharpened. His breath fogged up the glass.
He didn’t react to her looking at him. Probably high as a kite, she thought.
It seemed he was going to leave them be, but then his hand grasped the door handle and pulled.
Thank God dad told us to lock the doors, they both thought.
The tramp tried the door again, grunted when he found it locked. He turned away.
Marie breathed a sigh of relief.
The sigh cut off abruptly as the tramp’s fist smashed through the window and grabbed Graham by the scruff of the neck.
His heart racing a little more with every step, Osmo had approached the grim edifice that was the much talked about barn. As he’d neared he’d heard wet, slurping sounds that reminded him of feeding. He didn’t want to even imagine what the noises were, let alone find out for sure, but he had no choice but to see what had happened to Grace.
The dirty scarecrows standing around the field made him shudder. Their glazed eyes seemed to follow him. He blotted them out as best he could and continued his trek to the barn.
The side of the barn that he could see was slowly being consumed by rust.
Don’t let the stories freak you out, he told himself. I’m sure there ain’t nothing in that barn but rusted tractors and spiderwebs.
He didn’t believe that for a second, but did his best to cling to this seemingly vain hope.
The barn was huge, its floor thick with mud. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, just the rusting vehicles – a tractor and a combine harvester – he had anticipated and a selection of farming tools lined up against the left hand wall. He was relieved, but he still didn’t see Grace.
His skin still crawling, he moved into the barn. He heard the wet noises that reminded him of feeding again, and realised that they were coming from behind a small door at the rear of the barn.
He edged closer, shoved open the stout wooden door carefully. The thick smell of fresh blood crawled into his nostrils. In the centre of the small room was a large hole in the ground. The gaping maw seemed to be the source of the smells and sounds. A pool of wet blood glistened by the side of the pit. In the middle of the pool was Grace’s other shoe. He cried out, despite himself.
The feeding noises in the pit continued. He moved closer, shining his phone down the hole in an attempt to see what was lurking there. The pit stretched down maybe fifteen feet, from what he could tell from the pathetic torch on his phone.
The twin scents of death and decay rose from the pit in a stinking cloud, making vomit creep up his throat.
He knelt to get closer to the pit, to penetrate the darkness a little better, and saw a shock of peroxide blonde that looked suspiciously like his wife’s hair.
Next to it was a huge bloated shape. The flesh was pale and transparent, revealing knots of bulging black veins just below the surface. That was all he saw as a scream from the vicinity of the car made him turn. The phone fell from his trembling fingers. The thing in the pit made a horrid noise as the phone bounced off its head.
Without looking back, Osmo ran to the car. He knew there was no hope for his wife. He had to get to the kids before they met with a similar grisly end.
The tramp’s filth-smeared hand had Graham’s collar in a vicelike grip. Marie moved faster than she thought possible and slammed the blade into the tramp’s hand. It sunk in between his first and second fingers and a few inches of the tip poked through his palm. He let out a cry that made her bowels squirm. Dark blood immediately began to leave the wound, dripping down from the tip of the blade.
Marie pulled the knife loose and dragged Graham away while the tramp was distracted. He held his bleeding hand for a moment, watching the blood rolling down his fingers as if entranced. Marie shoved her door open and dragged Graham out of the car. Their knees hit the gravel, sharp points driving into fragile tissue, but they neither noticed nor cared.
Marie grabbed her brother’s arm and dragged him to his feet, nearly wrenching his arm out of its socket in the process. There was a thick oak tree ten feet from the car. Marie headed for that, dragging her brother with all of her might.
They reached the tree in the blink of an eye, and hid behind its thick base, sucking oxygen into their burning lungs. Marie clapped a hand over each of their mouths as they were both panting hard from the rush.
Marie risked a glance. The tramp had gone. This should have been a relief, but wasn’t; now they didn’t know where the hell he was so had no idea which direction was safe.
Graham tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to their left. He was shaking with fear. She saw that a number of dishevelled forms were making their way across the field towards them. The tramps who’d been standing as scarecrows were on the move.
Marie heard the crunching of gravel from by the car and snuck another glance. The tramp was nowhere to be seen.
‘Where are you, you fucker?’ she muttered.
She did her best to think. Panic was threatening to make her heart burst but she found she was still able to focus and assess the situation logically. They’d probably be best off just getting the hell out of here before the rest of the tramps could reach them. They were young and fit and should be able to outrun some malnourished drunks.
The idea was moot when the tramp from by the car suddenly loomed over her. Blood ran down from his hand and pooled on the gravel by his side. He smiled, again exposing those yellow, pointed teeth.
Marie quickly took her eye off him and pulled the corkscrew from the Swiss Army knife. She thrust it into the tramp’s eye before he could move to attack them. The blade sunk into the bloodshot orb with a sickening squelch. She screamed as a spray of thick blood hit her in the face. Dark blood oozed from around the blade. The tramp let out an inhuman cry, raised his hand to the foreign object which had so brutally been jammed into his eye, then fell back.
Marie moved in slowly, wanting to retrieve the weapon, but Graham tugged on her sleeve.
She turned to see that the tramps were most of the way across the field and one was almost close enough to touch them.
She forgot the weapon and scrambled towards the path which led out of the farm. The tramp’s filthy hands gripped her arm and swung her backwards. Breath burst from her as she slammed into a tree trunk.
Graham’s fists beat ineffectually at the tramp’s back. With a hard backhand swing the tramp took him off his feet.
His hands grasped her throat. He had a hungry, greedy look in his eye as his fingers sunk into her windpipe. Feeling life slipping away from her, she clawed weakly at his arms, scoring bloody furrows in his hands and forearms but doing little else. She knew that she was dying at the dirty hands of this disgusting man and she could do nothing about it. Her peripheral vision shut down. It felt like the time she’d nearly drowned in the swimming pool. Only this time there was no lifeguard
to dive in and rescue her. Her head sunk limply down on her chest and the world began to blacken.
III
The pressure on her throat suddenly relented, allowing her to rasp in a breath. Relieved but puzzled, she looked up to see dark blood pouring from the tramp’s mouth, tangling up in his filthy beard. Three metal spikes stuck out from his chest, looking like murderous robotic fingers. Dark blood glistened on the ends of the spikes and dripped down to the floor. The man convulsed, impaled on the spikes. Marie knew this meant he was dying.
‘Told you this place was dangerous,’ Osmo said. He slid the prongs of the pitchfork out of the tramp’s chest and let him slump to the floor before spitting on him.
‘Your mother didn’t make it,’ he said. ‘So let’s get the hell out of here.’
Marie struggled to her feet, her body still starved of vital oxygen. Graham was wincing and his left leg had a distinct limp to it. The urgency of the situation prevented them from dwelling on their mother’s fate.
‘Come on, before the rest of the hobo patrol get their stinking asses over here,’ Osmo said. He held the pitchfork by his side and used his free hand to drag Graham along.
There looked to be close to a dozen of the tramps streaming across the field towards them, all of them dirty, long-haired and bearded, all of them with complexions the colour of candle wax.
They hurried out of the field.
‘Why don’t we use the car, Dad?’ Marie said, thinking clearly despite the haze of pain, fear and oxygen-deprivation.
‘Fuckers have burst the tyres, sweetie.’
Marie nodded. They reached the stone wall that marked the perimeter of the field and each sucked in a deep breath. The snaking path that led back to the main road seemed clear, all of their enemies seemed to be in the field. They were home free.
Until the man dived out from behind the wall.
The man who rushed out in front of them almost got all six inches of the pitchfork prongs until Osmo realised that he wasn’t bearded and hairy and scruffy like the tramps. He looked well-groomed and was dressed smartly considering the lateness of the hour. He also held a shotgun in his hands, levelling the twin bores at Osmo’s stomach.
