‘Trouble.’ He added a grunt which bared his teeth and which seemed to be saying I’d understood so much that no further questions were necessary, and I nearly lost my temper. ‘Care to tell me what kind?’ I suggested.
‘What would you expect?’
‘Not a woman.’
‘See, you knew. Be tricks. The trouble’s what I got her into, as if you hadn’t guessed. Cos she got me going so fast I hadn’t time to wear anything. Can’t beat a hairy woman.’
This was a great deal more intimate than I welcomed. ‘When did you last see her?’ I said as curtly as I could.
‘Last year. She was having it then. Should have gone down after, but I, you know. You know me.’
He was hugging his baggage so hard he appeared to be squeezing out the senseless vegetable smell. ‘Afraid of her family?’ I said with very little sympathy.
He pressed his chin against his chest, but I managed to distinguish what he muttered. ‘Afraid of the whole bloody place.’
That was clearly worth pursuing, and an excuse for me to stay on my usual route, except that ahead I saw all three lanes of traffic halted as far as the horizon, and police cars racing along the hard shoulder towards the problem. I left the motorway at the exit which immediately presented itself.
Framilode, Saul, Fretherne, Whitminster . . . Old names announced themselves on signposts, and then a narrow devious road enclosed the car with hedges, blotting out the motorway at once. Beneath a sky clogged with dark clouds the gloomy foliage appeared to smoulder; the humped backs of the hills glowed a lurid green. When I opened my window to let out the vegetable smell, it admitted a breeze, unexpectedly chill for September, which felt like my passenger’s nervousness rendered palpable. He was crouching over his luggage and blinking at the high spiky hedges as if they were a trap into which I’d led him. ‘Can I ask what your plans are?’ I said to break the silence which was growing as relentless as the ancient landscape.
‘See her. Find out what she’s got, what she wants me to.’ His voice didn’t so much trail off as come to a complete stop. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know where his thoughts had found themselves. ‘What took you there to begin with?’ was as much as I cared to ask.
‘Beat ricks.’
This time I grasped it, despite his pronouncing it as though unconvinced it was a name. ‘She’s the young lady in question.’
‘Met her in the Cabbage Patch, you know, the caff. She’d just finished university but she stayed over at my place.’ I was afraid this might be the preamble to further intimate details, but he continued with increasing reluctance ‘Kept writing to me after she went home, wanting me to go down there, cos she said I’d feel at home.’
‘And did you?’
He raised his head as though sniffing the air and froze in that position. The sign for Warrendown, drooping a little on its post, had swung into view along the hedge. His half-admitted feelings had affected me so much that my foot on the accelerator wavered. ‘If you’d prefer not to do this . . .’
Only his mouth moved, barely opening. ‘No choice.’
No reply could have angered me more. He’d no more will than one of his own vegetables, I thought, and sent the car screeching into the Warrendown road. As we left behind the sign which appeared to be trying to point into the earth, I had an impression of movement beyond the hedge on both sides of the road, several figures which had been standing absolutely still leaping to follow the car. I told myself I was mistaking at least their speed, and when ragged gaps in the hedges afforded me a view of oppressively green fields weighed down by the stagnant sky, nobody was to be seen, not that anyone could have kept pace with the car. I hadn’t time to ponder any of this, because from the way Crawley was inching his face forward I could tell that the sight a mile ahead among the riotous fields surrounded by hunched dark hills must indeed be Warrendown.
At that distance I saw it was one of the elements of the countryside I most disliked, an insignificant huddle of buildings miles from anywhere, but I’d never experienced such immediate revulsion. The clump of thatched roofs put me in mind of dunes surmounted by dry grass, evidence less of human habitation than of the mindless actions of nature. As the sloping road led me down towards them, I saw that the thatch overhung the cottages, like hair dangling over idiot brows. Where the road descended to the level of the village, it showed me that the outermost cottages were so squat they appeared to have collapsed or to be sinking into the earth of the unpaved road. Thatch obscured their squinting windows, and I gave in to an irrational hope that the village might prove to be abandoned. Then the door of the foremost cottage sank inwards, and as I braked, a head poked out of the doorway to watch our arrival.
It was a female head. So much I distinguished before it was snatched back. I glanced at Crawley in case he had recognized it, but he was wrinkling his face at some aspect of the village which had disconcerted him. As the car coasted into Warrendown, the woman reappeared, having draped a scarf over her head to cover even more of her than her dress did. I thought she was holding a baby, then decided it must be some kind of pet, because as she emerged into the road with an odd abrupt lurch the small object sprang from her arms into the dimness within the cottage. She knotted the scarf and thrust her plump yet flattish face out of it to stare swollen-eyed at my passenger. I was willing to turn the vehicle around and race for the main road, but he was lowering his window, and so I slowed the car. I saw their heads lean towards each other as though the underside of the sky was pressing them down and forcing them together. Their movements seemed obscurely reminiscent, but I’d failed to identify of what when she spoke. ‘You’re back.’
Though her low voice wasn’t in itself threatening, I sensed he was disconcerted that someone he clearly couldn’t put a name to had recognized him. All he said, however, was ‘You know Beatrix.’
‘Us all know one another.’
She hadn’t once glanced at me, but I was unable to look away from her. A few coarse hairs sprouted from her reddish face; I had the unpleasant notion that her cheeks were raw from being shaved. ‘Do you know where she is?’ Crawley said.
‘Her’ll be with the young ones.’
His head sank as his face turned up further. ‘How many?’
‘All that’s awake. Can’t you hear them? I should reckon even he could.’
As that apparently meant me I dutifully strained my ears, although I wasn’t anxious to heighten another sense: our entry into Warrendown seemed to have intensified the vegetable stench. After a few moments I made out a series of high regular sounds - childish voices chanting some formula - and experienced almost as much relief as my passenger audibly did. ‘She’s at the school,’ he said.
‘That’s her. Back where her was always meant for.’ The woman glanced over her shoulder into the cottage, and part of a disconcertingly large ear twitched out of her headscarf. ‘Feeding time,’ she said, and began unbuttoning the front of her dress as she stepped back through the doorway, beyond which I seemed to glimpse something hopping about a bare earth floor. ‘See you down there later,’ she told Crawley, and shut the door.
I threw the car into gear and drove as fast through the village as I reasonably could. Faces peered through the thick fringes over the low windows of the stunted cottages, and I told myself it was the dimness within that made those faces seem so fat and so blurred in their outlines, and the nervousness with which Crawley had infected me that caused their eyes to appear so large. At the centre of Warrendown the cottages, some of which I took to be shops without signs, crowded towards the road as if forced forward by the mounds behind them, mounds as broad as the cottages but lower, covered with thatch or grass. Past the centre the buildings were more sunken; more than one had collapsed, while others were so overgrown that only glimpses through the half-obscured unglazed windows of movements, ill-defined and sluggish, suggested that they were inhabited. I felt as though the rotten vegetable sweetness in the air was somehow dragging them all down as it was threatening t
o do to me, and had to restrain my foot from tramping on the accelerator. Now the car was almost out of Warrendown, which was scarcely half a mile long, and the high voices had fallen silent before I was able to distinguish what they had been chanting - a hymn, my instincts told me, even though the language had seemed wholly unfamiliar. I was wondering whether I’d passed the school, and preparing to tell Crawley I hadn’t time to retrace the route, when Crawley mumbled ‘This is it.’
‘If you say so.’ I now saw that the last fifty or so yards of the left-hand side of Warrendown were occupied by one long mound fattened by a pelt of thatch and grass and moss. I stopped the car but poised my foot on the accelerator. ‘What do you want to do?’
His blank eyes turned to me. Perhaps it was the strain on them which made them appear to be almost starting out of his head. ‘Why do you have to ask?’
I’d had enough. I reached across him to let him out, and the door of the school wobbled open as though I’d given it a cue. Beyond it stood a young woman of whom I could distinguish little except a long-sleeved ankle-length brown dress, my attention having been caught by the spectacle behind her - at least half a dozen small bodies in a restless heap on the bare floor of the dark corridor. As some of them raised their heads lethargically to blink big-eyed at me before subsiding again, Crawley clambered out of the vehicle, blocking my view. ‘Thanks for, you know,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll be coming back this way, will you?’
‘Does that mean you’ll be ready to leave?’
‘I’ll know better when you come.’
‘I’ll be back before dark and you’d better be out here on the road,’ I told him, and sped off.
I kept him in view in the mirror until the hedges hid Warrendown. The mirror shook with the unevenness of the road, but I saw him wave his free hand after me, stretching his torso towards the car as though he was about to drop to all fours and give chase. Behind him a figure leapt out of the doorway, and as he swung round she caught him. I could distinguish no more about her than I already had, except that the outline of her large face looked furry, no doubt framed by hair. She and Crawley embraced - all her limbs clasped him, at any rate - and as I looked away from this intimacy I noticed that the building of which the school was an extension had once possessed a tower, the overgrown stones of which were scattered beyond the edge of the village. It was none of my business whether they took care of their church, nor why anyone who’d attended university should have allowed herself to be reduced to teaching in a village school, nor what hold the place seemed to have over Crawley as well. They deserved each other, I told myself, and not only because they looked so similar. Once they were out of sight I lowered the windows and drove fast to rid the car of the stagnant mindless smell of Warrendown.
Before long the track brought me to an unmarked junction with the main road. I wound the windows tight and sped through the remains of Clotton, which felt drowned by the murky sky and the insidious chill of the dark river, and didn’t slow until I saw Brichester ahead, raising its hospital and graveyard above its multiplying streets. In those streets I felt more at ease; nothing untoward had ever befallen me in a city such as Brichester, and nothing seemed likely to do so, especially in a bookshop. I parked my car in a multi-storey at the edge of Lower Brichester and walked through the crowds to the first of my appointments.
My Christmas titles went down well - in the last shop of the day, perhaps too well. Not only did the new manager, previously second in command, order more copies than any of her competitors, but in a prematurely festive mood insisted on my helping her celebrate her promotion. One drink led to several, not least because I must have been trying to douse the nervousness with which Crawley and Warrendown had left me. Too late I realized my need for plenty of coffee and something to eat, and by the time I felt fit to drive the afternoon was well over.
Twilight had gathered like soot in cobwebs as wide as the sky. From the car park I saw lights fleeing upwards all over Brichester, vanishing home. The hospital was a glimmering misshapen skull beside which lay acres of bones. Even the fluorescent glare of the car park appeared unnatural, and I sat in my car wondering how much worse the places I had to drive back through would seem. I’d told Crawley I would collect him before dark, but wasn’t it already dark? Might he not have decided I wasn’t coming for him, and have made his own arrangements? This was almost enough to persuade me I needn’t return to Warrendown, but a stirring of guilt at my cowardice shamed me into heading for that morning’s route.
The glow of the city sank out of view. A few headlights came to meet me, and then there were only my beams probing the dim road that writhed between the hills, which rose as though in the dark they no longer needed to pretend to slumber. The bends of the road swung back and forth, unable to avoid my meagre light, and once a pair of horned heads stared over a gate, rolling their eyes as they chewed and chewed, rolling them mindlessly as they would when they went to be slaughtered. I remembered how Crawley’s eyes had protruded as he prepared to quit my car.
Well outside Clotton I was seized by the chill of the river. Though my windows were shut tight, as I reached the first abandoned house I heard the water, splashing more loudly than could be accounted for unless some large object was obstructing it. I drove so fast across the narrow bridge and between the eyeless buildings that by the time I was able to overcome my inexplicable panic I was miles up the road, past the unmarked lane to Warrendown.
I told myself I mustn’t use this as an excuse to break my word, and when I reached the Warrendown signpost, which looked as though the weight of the growing blackness was helping the earth drag it down, I steered the car off the main road. Even with my headlight beams full on, I had to drive at a speed which made me feel the vehicle was burrowing into the thick dark, which by now could just as well have been the night it was anticipating. The contortions of the road suggested it was doing its utmost never to reach Warrendown. The thorns of the hedges tore at the air, and a gap in the tortured mass of vegetation let me see the cottages crouching furtively, heads down, in the midst of the smudged fields. Despite the darkness, not a light was to be seen.
It could have been a power failure - I assumed those might be common in so isolated and insignificant a village - but why was nobody in Warrendown using candles or flashlights? Perhaps they were, invisibly at that distance, I reassured myself. The hedges intervened without allowing me a second look. The road sloped down, giving me the unwelcome notion that Warrendown had snared it, and the hedges ended as though they had been chewed off. As my headlights found the outermost cottages, their long-haired skulls seemed to rear out of the earth. Apart from that, there was no movement all the way along the road to the half-ruined church.
The insidious vegetable stench had already begun to seep into the car. It cost me an effort to drive slowly enough through the village to look for the reason I was here. The thatched fringes were full of shadows which shifted as I passed as though each cottage was turning its idiot head towards me. Though every window was empty and dark, I felt observed, increasingly so as the car followed its wobbling beams along the deserted lane, until I found it hard to breathe. I seemed to hear a faint irregular thumping - surely my own unsteady pulse, not a drumming under the earth. I came abreast of the church and the school, and thought the thumping quickened and then ceased. Now I was out of Warrendown, but the knowledge that I would be returning to the main road whichever direction I chose persuaded me to make a last search. I turned the car, almost backing it into one of the overgrown blocks of the fallen tower, and sounded my horn twice.
The second blare followed the first into the silent dark. Nothing moved, not a single strand of thatch on the cottages within the congealed splash of light cast by my headlamps, but I was suddenly nervous of what response I might have invited. I eased the car away from the ruins of the tower and began to drive once more through Warrendown, my foot trembling on the accelerator as I made myself restrain my speed. I was past the school when a dim shape lurched
into my mirror and in pursuit of the car.
Only my feeling relatively secure inside the vehicle allowed me to brake long enough to see the face. The figure flared red as though it was being skinned from head to foot, and in the moment before its hands jerked up to paw at its eyes I saw it was Crawley. Had his eyes always been so sensitive to sudden light? I released the brake pedal and fumbled the gears into neutral, and saw him let his hands fall but otherwise not move. It took some determination on my part to lower the window in order to call to him. ‘Come on if you’re coming.’
I barely heard his answer; his voice was indistinct - clogged. ‘I can’t.’
I would have reversed alongside him, except there wasn’t room to pass him if he stayed put in the middle of the road. I flung myself out of the car in a rage and slammed the door furiously, a sound that seemed to provoke a renewed outbreak of muffled drumming, which I might have remarked had I not been intent on trying to wave away the suffocating vegetable smell. ‘Why not?’ I demanded, staying by the car.
‘Come and see.’
I wasn’t anxious to see more of Warrendown, or indeed of him. In the backwash of the car’s lights his face appeared swollen with more stubble than an ordinary day could produce, and his eyes seemed dismayingly enlarged, soaking up the dimness. ‘See what?’ I said. ‘Is it your young lady?’
The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05] Page 11
