The Ghosts of Sleath

by James Herbert

  Mickey, who had bumped into Grover yet again in the dark, quickly stepped back to avoid a flailing fist. He lost his balance when his heel caught a trailer and he toppled backwards into a bush, hessian sacks and crossbow crashing among the leaves as he fell.

  The other two men winced at the noise. ‘Let’s leave him here, Len,’ Crick grumbled in a low voice. ‘He’s a bloody menace.’

  ‘He’d only get himself lost and make more of a nuisance of himself,’ Grover groaned. He hauled the struggling figure to his feet, then pushed his face close to the youth’s so that their noses were only inches apart, and hissed, ‘Shut up, you fuckin little git!’

  Mickey became still. ‘Lenny, I -’

  ‘Shut it!’

  ‘All right, all right.’ At least his whine was quiet. ‘But you shouldn’t have -’

  ‘Shut IT!’ This time it was nearly a shout.

  ‘Lenny,’ Crick moaned in dismay. ‘Bloody Christ, you’re at it now. If Buckler’s around he’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks.’

  Grover thrust Mickey away. ‘I told you, if Buckler’s out tonight he’ll be miles away. Right, let’s get goin an’ no more stops till we reach the spinney. You hear me, Mickey?’

  There was a grumbled response and then they proceeded through the woods once more, this time Grover pushing Dunn ahead so that he was between himself and Crick. In revenge for having the crossbow sticking into his backside for the first part of the journey, he occasionally prodded the youth with the barrel of his shotgun. He sniggered at Mickey’s muffled complaints.

  After a while, however, the pleasure of this small torture began to wane, for the deeper into the woods they went, the more uneasy he began to feel. There was something wrong and he didn’t know what. The woods were quiet enough and there were no lights twinkling between the trees in the distance, a dead giveaway for approaching keepers. It was only after they’d gone some distance further that he became aware of exactly what it was bothering him. He gave a whispered command to the others to stop.

  They did so and turned round to see what the problem was.

  ‘Listen,’ Grover told them.

  They did. They heard nothing.

  ‘What you on about, Lenny?’ grouched Crick. ‘I can’t ’ear nothin.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Grover. ‘There’s nothin to ’ear.’

  They stood in silence, listening more intently. Crick realized his partner was right. Even in the dead of night there were sounds in the forest - small nocturnal animals shuffling through the undergrowth, the odd bird shifting in its nest, the screech of a mouse as an owl swooped from the darkness. But tonight there were no such sounds. None at all.

  Yet it wasn’t just the quietness that worried the three men: it was the stillness, too.

  ‘I don’t like this, Len,’ Crick murmured. ‘D’you think old Buckler’s set a trap for us?’

  ‘I dunno. But’s there’s somethin funny about this place.’

  ‘Yer bloody daft, the pair of ya,’ scoffed Mickey. ‘What d’ya expect in the middle of the bleedin night?’

  The other two men ignored him. ‘Whadya think - get out while the goin’s good?’ said Crick.

  ‘Might be the thing to do,’ answered Grover.

  ‘Oh come on,’ moaned Mickey. ‘We’re close to the spinney now.’ They heard him fit a quarrel into the crossbow.

  ‘What you doin?’ asked Grover with more patience than he actually felt.

  ‘Gettin ready before you two frighten everything off with yer muskets.’

  ‘I just told you we’re gettin out.’

  ‘No way. The boss told me he’d ’ave all the pheasants I could get for the weekend.’ His boss was the town butcher he worked for on Saturdays.

  Once more Grover grabbed the younger man by the lapels, lifting him onto his toes. ‘I won’t say it -’

  He froze, holding Mickey there on tiptoe, as a low noise came through the trees towards them.

  Slowly all three turned their heads towards the source.

  Gaffer was like a statue. And then gradually, starting with its haunches, it began to tremble. Soon every part of the dog, from its long narrow head to its short erect tail, was quivering. A peculiar whining-mewling came from the back of its jaws.

  Jack Buckler turned the light on the dog. ‘What is it, Gaffer?’ he urged quietly. ‘What’s it yer hearing?’

  The dog continued to stare directly ahead, its small black eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance.

  ‘Nearby, are they, Gaffer?’ The keeper straightened, his face set in grim lines. ‘Well, we got ’em this time.’

  The Airedale managed a growl, a long, drawn-out sound, before the whining-mewling resumed. But this time it became more urgent, more of a cry.

  ‘Steady there, old son.’ Buckler was perplexed: he’d never known Gaffer to act in this way before. Normally the dog was fearless, always ready to leap in and mix it no matter what they faced, be it poachers, cornered foxes, or even crazed badgers (and did they get crazed sometimes). But never had it reacted like this in all the years it had served him. What in God’s name could be spooking the dog so?

  He heard the other noise then, the noise that seemed to come from the very air itself. It was a moaning, an eerie lamentation that stiffened the hairs on the back of his neck. He suddenly felt uncommonly cold, as if the temperature had abruptly dropped into the zero regions, and now it was not only the hair on his neck that stiffened, but the hair on his arms and legs and scalp also.

  Coming through the trees was a piteous ululation of deep and terrible distress, the unbroken cry of those in utter despair. He narrowed his eyes, peering into the night’s gloomy substance, searching for the source of such misery, of such pain. He saw nothing but shadow.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out the telescope-like object he’d slipped in there earlier, clicking a switch as he held it up to one eye. The image intensifier weighed no more than .6kg and was operated by a single battery; it was an instrument often used by gamekeepers when they did not want to give away their position in the darkness by using flashlights. He pointed it slowly from left to right, aiming it in the general direction of where he thought the noise might be coming from, and drew in a sharp breath when tiny floating objects appeared on the small phosphorescent screen. It was like viewing greentinted flotsam floating in disturbed water.

  He took the night-sight away from his eye and stared without it at the spot where he’d located movement. Now he detected a slight greyness there in the gloom.

  ‘Come on, Gaffer,’ he said softly but resolutely, ‘let’s find out what’s goin on.’

  But the dog was no longer at his side. He heard the rustle of undergrowth behind him as Gaffer fled. Astonished at his dog’s cowardice, he almost called out its name, but stopped himself just in time: no sense in alerting whoever it was up there among the trees. More mystified than angry with Gaffer, he turned back towards the greyish light and began to creep forward, stopping every once in a while to raise the night-sight and see if he could discern any of those dancing shapes. It was odd - it was damned peculiar - but each time he looked with his naked eye all he could see was that shapeless grey, almost like a mist without the wispy edges, and no inner, moving shapes whatsoever.

  Something told him to get away from there, to follow Gaffer back the way they had come, back to the Land-Rover; something else, though - the earthy, practical gamekeeper side of him, the man who protected the animals and the land in his charge with love as much as professionalism - told him something was amiss here and it was his job to find out what it was. He went on.

  When he had halved the distance between himself and the mist, he paused to take stock. The unearthly sounds still came to him, but they were no louder than before. Raising the night-sight again, he looked through it and saw that the images, those greenish pieces of dancing flotsam, were sharper but no more discernible. Differing in shape and size, they weaved and whirled in no set pattern and with no overall fo
rm.

  Buckler lowered the instrument and noticed that seen without it the mist had now become more opaque at its centre. He set off again, even more cautiously, curiosity as well as duty overcoming his trepidation. He hardly breathed, not because he did not want to give away his presence - the twigs snapping under his boots would have already done that - but quite simply because he had almost forgotten to. Although partly obscured by bushes and trees, the mist appeared to have a stronger texture as he drew nearer, as though it were a fine gauze rather than vapour, and there was more movement inside.

  Oddly the noises, still no louder, were becoming clearer and as he approached he realized it was human voices that he could hear. And he was suddenly sure that they emanated from the centre of the … the what? What was it? Haze was the best description he could think of right then.

  He was close, very close, only one or two trees and bits of shrubbery between himself and the enigma. Through the eyepiece of the night-sight the floating objects began to take on even more clarity and, with a gasp of disbelief, Buckler started recognizing those with definite forms.

  One piece had three points to it, two long, one shorter and certainly thicker, and the keeper could have sworn this was part of a hand - two fingers and a thumb attached to a lump of flesh.

  Another tinier piece was rounded and had a darker circle within it; a long sliver hung loose behind it like a tendril or the slender tail of some species of deep-sea fish. With a shock, Buckler realized it resembled a floating eyeball.

  A solid chunk weaved into view and - or so it seemed to the bewildered keeper - another larger piece chased it. The one behind caught up and they joined together, fitting snugly, like some three-dimensional jigsaw.

  Buckler jerked the night-sight away in horror as it dawned on him just what he was witnessing. The sounds were a wailing-moaning, at times a howling, and the dancing flotsam was segments of human flesh.

  Without the use of the image intensifier, they appeared as faint shapes with no particular form, but now, knowing what they were, he could detect a pattern to their movements. They were all seeking each other, joining and fusing together, gradually becoming more of a mass.

  Fascinated, perhaps mesmerized, the keeper inched closer, the night-sight held loosely at his side, no longer necessary as the haze grew paler and the shapes inside became more defined. Something very close to the ground stirred in there and began to rise.

  A notion, albeit a bizarre one, entered Buckler’s mind and it was that inside this mysterious haze was a disassembled body, its parts circling, weaving, constantly seeking the whole; only there seemed to be too many bits, for they clustered together and made no sense, too many were jostling for the same position, so that they were forced to disjoin and begin again.

  The scattered parts swirled into a maelstrom, each morsel, large or small, becoming a blurred particle of light. Buckler did not remember to breathe, his instinct did it for him. He swayed and reached out to grasp the trunk of a nearby tree, his fingers curling into the rough bark to hold himself steady, the giddiness leading to an urge to vomit. He managed to control the rising bile by closing his eyes against the soft, yet somehow dazzling glare.

  When he opened them again, the movement inside the haze was slowing down, taking on a more disciplined order. He realized his original notion had been right: this was a body trying to assemble itself, for the fragments were more perceptible, their shapes more recognizable.

  But there were still too many parts …

  Another, larger chunk squirmed on the earth and this too, like the one before, began to rise, sending the smaller pieces - the fingers, the eyeballs, tongues, ears and other body parts - into excited flurries so that they swarmed, he told himself, like flies over dog shit.

  ‘Good God in Heaven,’ he murmured as two bodies gradually formed, ragged lines indicating where the flesh joined, an eyeball in one of the heads protruding uncomfortably from its socket, a foot twisted the wrong way round on one of the ankles, a glistening, rubbery tube of some kind flopping loosely from a breach in one of the shoulders.

  The keeper felt his knees weaken and he dropped the night-sight so that he could cling to the tree with both hands. He wanted to run away, but the strength just wasn’t there. He wanted to cry out, but the sound was locked tight in his throat. He wanted to close his eyes, or at least look away, but the abominations before him would not allow it.

  As he watched - was forced to watch, the hypnotic grip too strong to break - he noticed there was more movement beyond the haze.

  Grover, Crick and Mickey sprinted through the woodland, hoping they were leaving the dreadful low moaning behind; but it stayed with them, coming neither from left or right, nor from in front or behind - it was just there, all around them, only inches outside their own heads.

  Through the undergrowth they crashed, heedless of their own noise, stumbling over tree roots and trailers, low branches and bushes snagging and flailing them almost wilfully it seemed, as if the forest itself was in league with the tormenting noise. They did not try to understand what it was that they were running from; they didn’t care what it was. They only knew that never in their lives had they been so frightened. Perhaps it was the moon-hidden blackness they fled through that made the sounds so terrifying, for unseen and unknown were formidable allies. Perhaps it was the deep, heart-wrenching gloom of the sounds that sent them scurrying so, for it reached deep inside them, seeming to touch their very souls and propagate an oppressive and threatening despair. Whatever, they cared little for reasons and even less for quizzes. They just wanted to be far away from that inky woodland and as fast as their suddenly clumsy legs would allow.

  Such was their fear, and such was their cravenness, that when young Mickey smashed into a tree and went down with a split lip and a startled screech, Grover and Crick stumbled on, leaving their companion to writhe among the rotted leaves and tree roots of the forest floor.

  Blood trickled through his fingers as he held them to his mouth and tried to call out. ‘’Enny! ’Ennis! ’Um mack!’

  They were gone, though, and had it not been for the constant moaning that filled his head, now complemented by the buzzing of his brain from the knock it had just taken, he would have heard their thrashing retreat fade further and further away.

  His face numbed by the collision with the tree, Mickey slowly pushed himself to his knees. He felt around the crumbly floor for the crossbow he had saved so hard for. Still kneeling, and because he was so frightened - even more so, if that were possible, now that he had been abandoned by Grover and Crick - he checked his loaded weapon, stifling sobs as he did so. ‘Mastids,’ he cursed them, wincing at the pain from his lips. ‘’Uckin mastids.’

  Once on his feet he staggered off, clutching the crossbow to his chest, not realizing he was headed in the wrong direction. He stumbled through bushes, scraped past trees, the moaning that had developed into a wailing driving him onwards. He pulled a rolled-up handkerchief from his trouser pocket and pushed it against his cut lip to stem the flow of blood, while tears spoiled his already appalling vision.

  ‘’Enny!’ he cried out again, not caring if he was heard by the keeper or whoever was making that awful racket. ‘’Ennnniiissss!’

  He tripped, sprawled, and his finger slipped through the crossbow’s guard to release the trigger. He felt the discharge of tension and heard the quarrel thunk into the trunk of a tree a few yards away.

  Mumbling a curse and driven by panic, he reached inside his shoulder bag for another arrow. Although he had sat inside a cupboard at home and practised loading in the dark at least a hundred times, his fingers still refused to take instructions from his brain. He even managed to drop the quarrel once and had to search through the dusty soil to find it again; eventually the crossbow was loaded and he was on his feet, hobbling through the woods with a heaving chest and sob-like murmurings.

  Quite soon he blundered into a clearing where a peculiar light glowed. He blinked his eyes rapidly so that he c
ould see more clearly. His numbed mouth dropped open and his eyes pressed against their sockets as they stared at the two pale, naked bodies inside the funny light, bodies that were not quite right because they looked as if they had been crudely stuck together with glue or invisible tape and several bits had gone wrong, like the foot that was back to front and a buttock that was hanging by thin threads and a shoulder that was too far back. One of the heads was swivelling round to look at him and he didn’t want that, he didn’t want this thing to see him standing there in case it decided to acknowledge him. No, he didn’t want that at all.

  The crossbow was already pointing. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger again, this time intentionally. It was easy. It didn’t even need thinking about. He just had to do it. So he did.

  And when the arrow sped through to the other side, seeming to touch nothing at all inside that curious shell of grey light, he heard a high-pitched scream that sounded much more human than the howling of the two mix-’n’-match creatures before him.

  17

  THE RUSHING WATERS close over his head and unseen forces conspire to drag him down into the murky depths. He screams, but the sound is muffled in an explosion of bubbles. He sinks, deeper, deeper, and his arms smash at the currents, his hands claw at the silky fronds. A shape glides towards him from the gloom, tiny, pale fingers stretched towards him. He calls out her name, heedless of the water that fills his mouth, and he sees that she is smiling as she draws near; her dark hair frames her ghostly face, the tresses curling and weaving in the turbulence. She is close and her smile festers into a grin so malevolent, so vicious, that he screams again and tries to turn away …

  Ash twisted in the bed, one naked arm thrown across his brow as if to resist the dream’s spectre.

  Now this pallid vision changes: she is no longer his sister, a child, but a woman whose grin is as evil, whose glare is as insane. Her slender arms slip around his neck, the gown she wears billows in the flow, her lips move closer to his, and her eyes gleam with madness … and desire. Her mouth is on his and he feels her pressure, feels her draining his life as the waters have drained his breath. He ceases to struggle, he gives himself up to her embrace. Blackness consumes him …