‘How’re you doing, Marc?’
‘Fine, Dad.’ Marc thrust a white plastic box forward. ‘My lunch,’ he explained. ‘Mum said don’t buy me any more of the sort of food you gave me last time.’
‘You told her about that?’
‘I had to. She asked.’
Automatically, Daniel turned and looked up towards his wife’s window. He could just see her, standing well back in the room, with her hands clasped together under her chin, as though she was cold. He waved, but got no response.
‘A bit of fried chicken every now and then won’t kill you, Marc,’ Daniel observed, as they walked down the street.
‘Mum said there’s no need to eat animals. It’s cruel.’
Daniel didn’t want to get dragged into that. ‘The car’s parked around the corner,’ he said, ‘as close as I could get. The town’s very busy.’
‘It always is on Saturday. You usually come on Sundays.’
‘I thought we’d do something different today,’ Daniel said carefully, anticipating opposition to this proposal.
‘You mean we can’t go bowling?’
‘We’ll give it a miss for once. The weather’s so fine. We’ll drive out into the country.’
The boy was silent then, but Daniel could sense his disappointment. As they drove away, to change the subject, he said, ‘How are your eyes now? No more headaches, I hope?’
Marc had had minor eye surgery a few weeks earlier. Daniel had been working in Scotland at the time, and hadn’t been able to visit him in hospital.
‘They’re okay. I can see for miles. And they say I won’t have to wear those thick glasses again. That’s why I’d rather have gone to the Indoor Sport Centre. I wanted to see if it made my bowling better. I bet I could beat you nearly every time now, Dad.’
‘You did pretty well before.’
‘But you were better.’ Marc reached out towards the radio. ‘Can I have some music?’
Daniel nodded resignedly. After all, the boy had taken his disappointment about the bowling quite well, and his reason for wanting to play games was a good one.
The car filled with yelping, thudding, electronic pandemonium.
From then on, conversation was out of the question.
* * * *
Half an hour later Daniel had driven deep into the countryside and was following his inclinations, rather than map directions. He had more or less lost his way, though he didn’t want to admit that to Marc. When the boy, taking advantage of his newly improved vision, pointed out a limestone village, gleaming in the glaring sun, that had come into view a couple of miles ahead, Daniel drove towards it automatically, as though it had beckoned to him, and he was unable to resist its allure. It was the only point of interest in an otherwise featureless landscape. It seemed to be hovering a little way in the air, like a vision or mirage, but it sank back into its surroundings as they got nearer. The narrow lanes Daniel found himself negotiating to get to it were maze-like and confusing, but he navigated his way through into the little community at last, after a deal of twisting and back-tracking, and stopped the car at the first opportunity. He turned off the blaring radio at once, and clambered out of the car into an austere silence that was almost a shock.
The village was backed on three sides by hump-like hills, the lower slopes of which were divided into mutton- and lamb-infested fields enclosed by low stone walls. Ahead, a substantial, if somewhat squat looking, eighteenth-century house and an even older pub stood at right angles to each other, apparently blocking the way, though a sign indicated that the road turned left between them. A broad, deep stream slid smoothly alongside the street. Tiny houses, each with its own natty bib of garden at the front, clustered round the dusty parking space where Daniel had come to a halt, and others similar climbed one side of the slope the car had just descended. It was a picturesque setting, and the whole village had a neat, compact, scaled-down, almost toylike look about it.
‘This’ll do,’ Daniel said, leaning back into the driver’s door. Marc showed no sign of wanting to get out. He was gazing out at the clear, shining water of the nearby stream with a peculiar expression, as though the sight of it slightly annoyed him.
‘Is this where you wanted to come, Dad?’
‘I had nowhere in particular in mind.’
‘But there’s nothing here. What are we going to do?’
‘We don’t have to do anything. Just take a look around.’
Marc pulled his hat lower down his brow, said, ‘I’m thirsty,’ and hauled himself out of the car reluctantly, huffing like an old man. Daniel noted how overweight the overgrown boy still was, in spite of the health-food and vegetarian regimen his mother imposed at home. His big face was waxy, and beginning to go spotty. He was at the awkward age, changing inside and out. In less than two years he’d be a teenager, but he looked like one already, and a troubled one at that. Daniel wanted to tell him to take off the ridiculous hat, but he had only himself to blame for that, and Marc seemed proud of the thing, so he let it be.
The nearby pub looked shut. ‘A village this size is bound to have a shop that’ll sell us a can of Coke,’ Daniel stated optimistically, still feeling he had, perhaps unjustly, for selfish reasons, deprived his son of his ten-pin bowling. ‘Let’s go and find it.’
Marc grunted noncommittally, but did as he was bidden. As they ascended into the village, Daniel, who liked to think of himself as a countryman (because, thirty-seven years earlier he’d been born in a very remote part of England) was aware that he, in his sky-blue jacket and black shirt, and Marc in his baggy bad-boy town clothes and big, clumsy trainers, probably looked an odd and out-of-place pair. Not that there was anyone to pass judgment: nobody else was visible on the streets.
The village was made up of a number of large, ancient, characterful buildings linked together by clusters of small cottages and undistinguished terraces of minute nineteenth-century farm workers’ houses. These dwellings were tightly packed together: uncomfortably so, as though their inhabitants had been reluctant or unable to extend the boundaries of their community into the fields beyond. The streets were narrow, with many sharp turns. There were few people about, and they had a preoccupied, self-contained air, and hardly seemed to be aware of the two visitors as they passed.
Marc spotted a small shop down a side road, but it sold only faded arty-crafty souvenirs and dried flowers, and was shut anyway. It looked as though it had been shut for ever.
‘I wouldn’t like to live here,’ he moaned. ‘Would you, Dad?’
Daniel had to admit not. ‘But it makes a change,’ he insisted. ‘A bit of peace and quiet.’
In fact, the last remark was an understatement. The village was perfectly silent. No dogs barked, no human voices could be heard, no traffic disturbed the peace, no birds sang, and the few people they encountered moved without sound, as though they walked on shoes shod with velvet soles. The only audible noises were those made by Daniel and Marc, and they too soon grew quiet, hushed by the awesome taciturnity of their surroundings.
In the centre of the village they came upon what seemed to be a walled-off field, though it could have been an ancient village green, with what at first sight appeared to be some kind of ornate monument set in a hollow in the centre. This land, occupied in one corner by half a dozen seedy-looking sheep and their lambs, was more or less trapezium-shaped, and had a single point of entry and exit - a narrow lych-gate, like the entry to a churchyard, in the centre of the shortest of the two roughly parallel sides.
Daniel and his son emerged from the village at a point very close to the gate which, on inspection, they found to be held shut with a tightly wound chain and padlock.
‘Do you think that’s meant to keep the sheep in or us out, Marc?’
Marc missed the irony, and looked confused. Daniel smiled, and gave the gate a shove. The sound of the chain links grinding against the wooden gatepost tweaked the nerves of the sheep who raised their heads and stood still as statues for seconds, bef
ore sinking back into browsing complacency.
‘What’s that thing out there in the middle, Dad?’
‘Not sure. A war memorial for people from this place who died? That sort of thing. I can’t think what else it could be.’
‘It looks as though someone’s been throwing paint at it,’ Marc observed. The object was criss-crossed with streaks of red and green.
‘Vandals. That could be why they’ve padlocked the gate.’
‘That’s silly. It would be easy to get over the wall.’
‘Or the gate,’ Daniel agreed. A mischievous note in his voice appealed to Marc.
‘Shall we, Dad?’ he said, encouragingly.
‘Why not?’
For some time now Daniel had felt the urge to make a gesture of protest at the oppressive, silent stillness around them: to metaphorically wave two fingers at the village and its invisible or indifferent inhabitants, and it seemed to him that the padlock offered an opportunity to do something of the kind. Nevertheless, he felt rather foolish as he put his foot on one of the cross-bars of the gate and lifted his other leg over the top. He sat astride the gate for a moment, wondering if he had gone too far, but it was plain from the expression on Marc’s face that his son thought he had not gone nearly far enough. Daniel realized there was no going back, if he wanted to retain the scrap of outlaw credibility he had so easily acquired, so he dropped down to the ground on the other side of the gate, making room for the boy to follow him.
‘Lots of people come here anyway,’ Marc said.
The unmown grass in the field was inches high. Ahead of them a well-worn path, that had obviously been trodden recently by many feet, stretched towards the middle of the enclosed area.
They walked on in silence, through the intense quiet.
The field naturally inclined towards the middle from all directions but as they got nearer to the object of their excursion it became obvious that the structure, whatever it was, protruded out of the centre of a steep-sided, circular pit about thirty feet across and five feet deep.
When they reached the edge, Daniel saw there were dozens of different sets of footprints in the dust around the rim. Marc tumbled awkwardly down into the pit and moments later, feeling some small, unaccountable misgivings, Daniel followed him.
The thing itself, when they got close to it, was rather disappointing. Inside a six-foot circle of extraordinarily thick iron railings were entrapped a number of broad tree trunks that had all been severed just above head height. The railings had been there a long time because, over the years, the sides of the trees had bellied out between the constricting iron uprights in huge bark-splitting blisters that were uncomfortable to contemplate. Up out of the centre of the tight cluster of stunted trees extended what was in all probability a sculptured form representing the top half of a human being. This figure was posed with one arm stretched down, as though taking hold of the top of one of the trees to push itself upwards. Its other arm, bent, and half-raised, was held aloft in what could have been an appeal for help, or a gesture of despair, anger or even triumph. It was impossible to be quite sure if the figure was exactly human, because the whole thing was overgrown by a complex network of thorny tendrils, like briars, that concealed every inch of its surface. Two overgrown lumps on its back suggested to Daniel that it could originally have been the representation of an angel, with wings that had broken off at the base, but nothing about its posture was in any way conventionally angelic.
What had seemed, from a distance, to have been streaks of paint, were in fact strips of torn, brightly-dyed red and green cloth, tied together with yards of ribbon, that had been wound round the edifice in a way that looked entirely haphazard.
Daniel was gazing mystified at all this when Marc called out from almost under his feet, ‘There’s something down here with writing on, but I can’t read what it says.’ The boy was crouching down, peering at something close to the ground on one side of the - ‘monument’ - Daniel could still think of nothing better to call it. He went and stood next to his son.
A stone tablet, like a simple, unornamented gravestone, was trapped behind the iron railings. The thrust of enormous pressure from the swollen trees behind had cracked it diagonally in two places, and shifted the sections upwards and apart. Close to, it was possible to see some kind of inscription had been cut deeply in the stone. Daniel squatted down to try to make out what was written. ‘I can read the letters, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s foreign, isn’t it Dad?’
‘It must be, I guess, but God knows what language that is.’ A lot of the individual letters were hidden behind the railings, and the surface of the stone had flaked away in places, but, from what remained, it was obvious to Daniel that the original must have been almost unpronounceable.
‘—jabber-jabber-jabber,’ Marc chanted, in exaggerated mockery. ‘Try reading it aloud, Dad. It makes your tongue hurt.’
Daniel grinned, but didn’t take up the invitation. He’d given up trying to decipher the memorial message, if that was what it was. Finding solutions to pointless puzzles didn’t interest him.
Marc reached up, took hold of the stump of a lopped-off branch of one of the trees, clambered up on to the horizontal iron band through which the tops of the railings protruded, then started cautiously tugging at the tendrils that encrusted the half-emerged figure.
‘Watch out for thorns on that thing up there,’ Daniel warned, sure that the plant that covered it was some kind of briar.
‘It’s okay. There’s no problem. They all grow inwards.’
‘What? Are you sure?’
Marc didn’t like it when his father doubted his word. ‘It’s true,’ he protested, tearing away whole sections of the plant with the tips of his fingers. ‘See for yourself. All the spikes point towards the middle.’
Daniel climbed part of the way up until his face was close to the lowest sections of the briar-like growth that seemed to sprout from around the base of the figure they concealed, and saw that the boy was right. ‘That’s unusual,’ he observed. ‘Plants like that grow spikes to protect themselves - against cattle, or people like you and me, for instance, who might want to root them out and destroy them.’
‘With all the thorns pointing that way,’ the boy said thoughtfully, ‘it’s as though they’re trying to keep something in, down there between the trees.’
Daniel grunted noncommittally. His arms, supporting most of his weight, had quickly grown tired, and he dropped back to the ground. Marc, however, climbed higher until he stood on the crest of the ‘monument’, held on to the upraised arm of the enclosed figure, and yelled out joyfully, as though he had attained the top of an Alp.
Almost at once, to his and his father’s surprise, his call was answered: someone yelled back, in what could have been elation. Daniel and Marc twisted round to face the sound.
Because he was standing chest-deep in the pit, and the ground around him rose in all directions, Daniel couldn’t see much more than the slope of the field in front of him, a stretch of the wall that enclosed it, and the tops of a few trees beyond. Whoever had shouted was presumably on the other side of the wall, some distance back, and thus out of his sight.
The shout came again, sounding louder and sharper.
‘Who’s there? Can you see, Marc?’
The boy, still clasping the upraised hand of the statue, was up on tiptoes, bending towards the sound. ‘I think it’s a woman.’
‘Are you sure? It sounds like a man.’
‘I know. But if it is, he’s wearing a dress.’
‘What kind of dress?’
‘Green and red. Very long and loose. The wind’s flapping it about, like a big flag.’
‘There isn’t any wind, Marc: there hasn’t been all day.’ Daniel started to climb back up to join his son.
The voice called out again.
‘I think it’s shouting at us, Dad.’
‘Whoever it is wants us out of here,’ Daniel decided.
‘He doesn’t sound
unfriendly.’
‘Even so, I think we ought to go.’
Daniel had hauled himself up almost to the top of the monument and turned in the direction his son had been looking. He saw, some distance beyond the wall, what seemed to be a large article of clothing that had been blown off a washing line by a gale, flapping and fluttering towards him. It was almost impossible to make out the human shape that must be in there somewhere. Some of the movements indicated the actions of hidden arms and legs, but the head remained invisible.
The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05] Page 37
