When the Dead Come Calling

by Helen Sedgwick

  ‘You’ve found something?’ Frazer steps towards him, suddenly hopeful.

  ‘I’m not… I mean, I don’t…’

  ‘What is it?’ The DI overtakes him, and Fergus steps back. Maybe between them they’d made him feel surrounded. He seems like such a gentle sort of bloke.

  ‘I think there’s a – I’m not one hundred percent – but I think there’s a fire out in Mungrid Woods.’

  ‘A forest fire, in this weather?’

  ‘No, no, I mean … more like a campfire. I saw something with the drone, but then it ran out of charge and it’s been taking ages to … and I just thought maybe I should, well, here I am.’

  ‘You think Dawn’s camping in the woods?’

  ‘Erm, well actually my first thought was—’

  ‘Walt,’ the DI says.

  ‘Where?’ DC Mackie is closer now.

  ‘It was away from the main paths, far as I could see. And the flames were … it was a funny colour.’

  ‘It’s him. I have to go.’

  ‘Hold on, Trish.’

  ‘Now!’

  Frazer can almost feel himself fading out of view. He’d like to help, but Uncle Walt and camping and graveyards are not what he does, not by a long way. But as he steps out of the room, coat in hand and ready to leave, he hears footsteps follow him out into the hall.

  ‘I see it,’ says the DI. For a second he’s not sure what she means but he turns, looks her in the eye. ‘I see what’s happening in these villages. I want you to know that.’

  He nods, just once.

  ‘You have my number, Georgie.’

  And walks away.

  WHAT CAN BE FOUND WHEN YOU LOOK RIGHT

  There are no cars on the road. Rain battering the windscreen and the wipers struggling against it. Georgie is driving, Trish beside her, hood up. Fergus is sitting quietly in the back seat. In the headlights, the rain looks like slashes of metal. As they approach the dark shape of the motte she remembers that iron figure he pulled out of the ground and foreboding curls around her neck like the cold. The road curves past the hill and down an unlit track, pitch-black and smoother than water until her front wheel hits a patch of gravel, then another, water splashing right up to the windows as the road disintegrates into deep puddles and gravel and muck. They judder to a stop and Trish is out fast, racing to the broken metal gate. It’s beside the faded sign that was put up twenty years back to encourage tourists to visit, though Georgie’s never seen a tourist out here, nor ever heard about one being spotted. Still, they had their big ideas: a woodland trail, an untouched beach, a sleepy village, a quaint playground on the clifftop. None of it quite true, or quite right. When she turns the headlights off the scene is plunged into darkness, but no matter. She swings her legs out of the car and over the puddle she’s parked in, makes her way to the sign through the lashing rain.

  There’s not a word on it can be read any more, even in daylight. Bleached away in the sun seems unlikely, more chance it’s been gritted away by the salt in the air, rubbed raw with it like sandpaper on fresh-grown skin. The lichen is making its way up and over, the edges of the sign mottled with it like the tree trunks hereabouts. Except that as the lichen retreats, it is replaced by the grey and brown of hardened globs of guano. The gulls spend plenty of their time here, though there’s not a one of them in earshot now. Trish is testing the strength of the fence with her hands, then planting her foot on the middle rail and swinging her leg up and over. Georgie follows, Fergus behind her, but then they all stop. The woods are vast, largely unmarked; they don’t even know where to start. Except for Fergus. He steps past her, treading gingerly in the mud, nods to Trish, holds his torch out in front of him and starts to lead the way across the patch of drowned grass and mud that leads to the edge of the deep, tangled woods beyond.

  ‘I think it was… I think north. A mile in, at least. Away from the main path.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Georgie frowns in the rain.

  ‘All I could see was a flickering,’ he says as they reach the trees. ‘And it was hard, on the phone screen, to make it out.’

  ‘You’re right though,’ Trish says. ‘This was where they found him before, wandering out of the woods. I should have thought…’

  ‘There’s been a lot going on,’ says Georgie, and somehow her voice silences the others, though that wasn’t her intention. Her shoes are filled with the squelch of wet mud already and her trousers are clinging around her shins. Water is seeping up from the ground and pouring from the skies. Big storm on the way, no doubts about that. Fergus doesn’t say any more, he just starts to walk, carefully, and they both follow, their torches picking out fallen branches and raised roots before they fall.

  The track winds through the trees, for a while, dotted with puddles and stones and edged with gorse – Georgie wonders if it’s a deer path, though something stops her from voicing the question. There’s something about the feel of it beneath her feet, the soft fur of the ground that’s making her queasy, but as the woods get denser and Fergus leads them further in, the track disappears altogether and is replaced by the unpredictable depth of sodden heather. All around them, between them, tall oaks twist and rise as they edge their way around beech and ash. Georgie reaches out a hand to a trunk and is met by the sting of nettles. She thinks she can hear the rustle of aspen in the distance. Fergus stops. Turns. There’s not been an oak for a while, it’s all birch trees here, the older trunks reaching far overhead, branches knotting together, saplings filling in every gap they can find on the ground. They don’t even have their leaves yet, still just spindly branches and tight little buds like promises.

  ‘This way,’ says Fergus, his torch pointing down a fresh track curving away to the left. He sounds more confident than he did before, and reasonably so – she can see something’s been down there, animals maybe, or a man. But she’s just seen a clump of snowdrops that’s been planted by one of the trunks over to the right. Someone must have done that. Someone’s come out here in autumn to plant bulbs for the spring.

  ‘Georgie!’ Trish shouts. ‘This is it.’

  Georgie, though, is reaching down to the snowdrops, letting her fingertips brush through their stems. Walt is waiting for her.

  ‘Come on!’ Trish shouts. ‘We’re close, the smell…’

  Georgie can hear their feet running through mud, but her own won’t follow.

  ‘I’m going to check this way.’ She says it quietly, and there’s no reply, and that’s okay with Georgie.

  You can see it, in the rocks, Walt had said to her two days ago. In the ancient rocks and stones of the land. You’re sensitive, aren’t you Georgie?

  The cup and ring. That’s what he’d meant – the old stone carvings buried somewhere in these woods. The thought of them both draws her in and repels her, like the night itself, the dark velvet of it heavy and rich and thick. Now the others have gone, there’s no sign of life. Just the deep blackness of the air, and the ancient symbols and marks calling out to her through the night.

  She doesn’t know how far they are, she just starts walking through the dense birch woods, letting Walt guide the way. She can see him as clearly as if he was in front of her, his dressing gown flapping back in the wind, his shoulders hunched. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t given up yet. It hasn’t been a complete failure, this case – she isn’t a complete failure. There’s nothing she can do for Dawn now, or Alexis, but she’s going to find a way to help Mrs Helmsteading. An innocent person shouldn’t take the blame, so that’s something Georgie’s going to see to. She straightens up, determined again, keeps walking through the trees, through the undergrowth until she can see a break in the woodland ahead and she stops dead in her tracks; there is something, or someone – a dark shape, low down and slumped, in the middle of the circular clearing where the stones are waiting.

  She walks through the rain, her legs heavy as dread, the mud pulling her down, until she can see that the figure is a man, that he’s wearing a dressing gown, that it must
be Walt, and that he’s laid out on the ancient stone carved with the circles and lines of the cup and ring. His eyes are open, reflecting the ghostly light out here. They swivel over to her when she kneels down.

  ‘It’s me, Walt,’ she says.

  He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t move. He is lying flat out on the stone slab like a sacrifice. No lenticular clouds up there tonight, no beams of starlight, only cumulonimbus swirling into a great mass overhead. He must be frozen in just his soaking dressing gown and pyjamas. She touches his wrist, locates a pulse.

  ‘It’s Georgie.’

  Suddenly his fingers clasp her hand and she is pulled forward through air and night, she is weightless, she is lying above the ancient stone of the cup and ring and they have come. Everything is darkness except for them. She can see ghastly light reflected in the whites of their eyes. More, in every direction. Faces obscured, cloaked with layers of fabric, their hoods rising to sharp points; she knows them. They are getting closer. Ten of them, more, a dozen, more with every second she looks, encircling the stone, and their voices chanting in a strange language, words she can’t translate but that she understands nonetheless. They have come to kill her. Dawn. They’ve come to kill Dawn. Walt’s hand is tight on her wrist. What is he doing? They are closer, their voices rising, chanting, inhuman through the masks they wear, they’ve surrounded her, they’re everywhere and the birds – circling overhead, hundreds of them, the noise of beating feathered wings and Walt is gone and her brother is beside her, his wound already seeping blood, his lungs gasping for breath and at last she can feel the cold of rock beneath her head, her hands are free and she screams, she screams at the figures to get back, she sees them, she’ll fight them and there: her torch. Her fingers curl around it. She points it towards them.

  Trees. Grass. The swirl of low-lying cloud and her own footprints in the mud. This case has been too much. Got under her skin. She needs sleep, food, rest. On the stone, Walt’s eyes are wide with terror. The quiet, though. The silence around them, it is something extraordinary.

  ‘It’s me, Walt,’ she says again, calmer now. ‘It’s Georgie. Can you sit up for me?’

  Slowly but surely Walt pushes himself up until he is sitting on the stone slab with his legs hanging down the side. Georgie takes a breath. He is okay. She is okay. There is nothing here but the dark and an ancient stone.

  ‘You know people have been looking for you?’ Georgie says, soothing as she can, gentle and soft. ‘Me, Trish, Fergus, we’re all out here looking.’

  His shoulders slump, his face in his hands. His whole body like a shadow, undefined and billowy in the wind. Trish and Fergus will be here soon, following their voices, but Georgie knows there are things that need to be said first. She pulls out her gloves.

  ‘Do you want to wear my gloves, Walt? They’re good ones.’

  ‘No, Georgie,’ he says, as though the speaking costs him some effort.

  ‘I’ll put them on myself then, I think,’ she says. ‘They’re good gloves, these. And it’s always easier to think when you’ve got warm hands.’

  ‘They didn’t come, Georgie.’ He looks up at her then, his eyes swimming, but that could just be the way the darkness is shimmering now.

  ‘Why are you here, Walt?’

  ‘I was trying to call them again. I thought if I could summon them here… We need their help, don’t we?’

  Georgie wants to say no, but can’t bring herself to speak.

  ‘This is the most powerful place we have – you can feel it too, I know you can. But they didn’t come.’

  ‘I did, though,’ Georgie says.

  A crack of thunder is followed a second later by a sharp burst of light that fractures the sky.

  ‘The bag was a sign,’ he says. ‘Found it by the sea, left it in the church weighed down with my pebbles. Just like the birds told me.’

  The rain is pelting the stone, their skin, their faces.

  ‘You knew Jack Helmsteading, didn’t you, Walt? You were friends?’

  ‘We were once. Long time ago now. We used to protect the village, you see. But he didn’t speak to me much, after…’

  ‘What happened?’

  Sheets of water are being hurled at them from the sky but neither of them moves.

  ‘I was out walking the cliffs, like I often did back then. Twenty years ago now. It was dark and late and at first, when I saw them, I was drawn in; I could hear voices on the wind and I felt the presence of the Others – at least I thought I did. Till I got closer.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  Walt shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. There was a gang of them, in masks, twisted into something spiteful. And they had little Dawn – I could hear her sobbing before it all went quiet.’

  ‘You were there,’ Georgie says, though her voice sounds more like a sigh.

  ‘I couldn’t have fought them all off, there were too many of them. But I shouted and yelled, so they’d run after me and leave her alone. It worked too. I drew them away and lost them in the village, but by the time I’d looped back round to the cliffs little Dawn was gone. And Jack had arrived.’

  ‘Did you call him?’

  ‘Not me,’ Walt says. ‘But he told me he knew where Dawn had gone, and that he was going to get her, to save her. That she’d be okay. He promised that. And…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said that I mustn’t tell anyone. Please go home and don’t say a word, he said. Like he was desperate.’

  ‘My God, Walt, why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘He begged me not to. Said it was all in his family and he had to be the one to put it to rights. I figured it was up to him. Besides, by the next morning she was home and safe, and we villagers, we take care of our own. In our own way, Georgie. That’s how it’s always been.’

  Georgie feels a shiver climb up her arms, scratch at her neck.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s our way,’ he says again, and something stubborn settles around his jaw despite the chattering of his teeth. ‘But I didn’t see much of Jack after that, and then he passed away and things started to turn … and poor Alexis… The village needs help,’ he says eventually. ‘This is where the Others arrived before. Our ancestors drew it, you see? On the stones.’

  ‘We need to get you home, Walt.’

  ‘I don’t want to live here any more,’ he says. ‘Don’t want a be a part of this world no more, Georgie.’

  ‘I know, Walt. I know. Sometimes I don’t either, and there’s the truth of it. But we keep on going, Walt. People like you and me, we find a way to keep on going.’

  ‘You think they’ll come for me, one day?’

  His watery eyes are full of hope now.

  She sits on the stone beside him, an old man crying streams on an eight-thousand-year-old carving on an ancient stone in a muddy clearing in the middle of the woods. She gives him the time he needs, waits silently while the stream slows and the rain starts to get lighter again. It can never last all that long, rain that heavy, dies down as fast as it arrives usually. Clears the air.

  ‘Come on, Walt,’ she says, eventually. ‘Come on now. You’re soaked and you’re freezing, and Trish will be here in a second. Her and Fergus, I think they found your campsite.’

  ‘Trish doesn’t believe in the Others.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘S’why you were the only one I’d trust with my bees.’

  Georgie realises something then, and it’s a good realisation, because all she has to do is tell the truth.

  ‘Trouble is, Walt, I don’t like bees.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I hate the noise they make, the scurrying indoors, and the buzzing when they fly.’

  ‘But they protect us, they’re—’

  ‘Well, I hate the thought that they might sting me. I haven’t been able to sleep with them in the house at all. I’m scared of them.’

  ‘You’re scared of my bees?’

  He looks di
straught, but Georgie carries on.

  ‘Afraid so, Walt. I don’t want them in my home, that’s the truth of it. There is someone who loves them, though, just as much as you do.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Your Trish, of course. She loves those bees.’

  ‘She does,’ he says. ‘You’re right, Georgie. She loves them, just like me.’

  ‘Uncle Walt?’ Trish’s voice rings through the air, out of breath and desperate.

  ‘Through here,’ Georgie calls back.

  ‘Uncle Walt, I’m coming!’

  Walt nods and stands up, like he always knew this would be how it would end.

  ‘But you believe me, don’t you, Georgie?’ he says under his breath. ‘You do understand?’

  She holds his hands, standing still in the mud by the stone, and looks into his eyes by moonlight. Those heavy clouds have gone, replaced by glitter and satin over the village and she feels it, the sky pulling her back to the job, rooting her again, reminding her there’s something here worth saving.

  ‘Yes, Walt. I believe you,’ she says. ‘I understand.’

  Trish runs through the clearing and Georgie steps aside, watching as she throws her arms around her uncle and holds him in a tight hug.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Walt is saying.

  ‘Uncle Walt, don’t you ever—’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I was so worried.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I love you, you know? I…’

  Georgie steps further away to give them a moment, and notices Fergus standing at the edge of the clearing. He shines his torch low towards her, the light making a diffuse circle on the ground, and she raises hers towards him.

  ‘You did well,’ she says quietly.

  He stays where he is.

  The rain running down his face almost makes it look like he’s been crying.

  LATE-NIGHT SAILING

  There will be no more going home for me. I’m nearly there. I can see the orange lights in the dark of the harbour up ahead and the rest is far away and free and never coming home again. No wrong faces painted into my dreams any more, and maybe that’s a step towards something. Or maybe it’s just the storm and an ocean crossing.