by Graham Joyce
‘Does she drink?’ Linda whispered to Sam. ‘She sounded half-cut, and it’s only six thirty.’
Eric and Betty Rogers were more obdurate, however, and for a while it seemed as though Clive was going to have to fall back on the expedient of climbing from his bedroom in the dead of night. But then a well-timed tantrum, blaming all of his misfortunes and misery on the Epstein Foundation and the fact that he’d never been allowed a whiff of normality, unlike Terry and Sam, who were being allowed to stay overnight at Alice’s house, neatly steered his parents round.
‘It’s not as if they’re going to get up to anything at their age,’ Betty reasoned. Eric, having no illusions about what thirteen-year-olds could or couldn’t do, preferred not to answer. Betty, who’d been baking all afternoon, thoughtfully iced a cake with Alice’s name and insisted that Clive take it to Alice’s party.
The whole idea had been Alice’s. After the boys had gone to her house, she’d whisked them up to her bedroom and played loud music while her mother readied her face for a night on the town. Alice knew from experience that June wouldn’t get back until two or three in the morning, rapturous with gin. Any phone calls after six o’clock could be dealt with by Alice’s impersonation while the genuine article soaked in her perfumed bathtub as Vivaldi blasted, with cannons, from the bedroom.
So it was that at eight thirty the three boys arrived at Alice’s house, each toting a sleeping bag and a bottle of Woodpecker cider. Clive in addition sheepishly supplied a large iced cake, Sam a packet of cigarettes and Terry a disconcerting, frozen smile reflecting an admiration for Alice that was growing by the minute.
They played records. They drank the cider and smoked cigarettes. They ate the cake.
At midnight the three boys waited, crouching behind a hedgerow beside a five-bar gate. The gate opened on to the field adjacent to Wistman’s Woods. A large canvas tarpaulin had been pillaged from a nearby building site, where things had already started to go wrong. While cutting the ropes that lashed the canvas to some building materials Clive had gashed his hand with his penknife. Then the canvas was so incredibly heavy that it took two of them to carry it away. They were grimy and exhausted before they had even entered the woods.
A gibbous moon illuminated the field and the road beside the hedgerow, the kind of moon they didn’t want. A few scudding clouds were not enough to dull its lantern.
‘What if she doesn’t come?’ said Clive, sucking his wound.
‘She’ll be here.’
‘I’ve been wondering about this other body they found in the woods,’ said Clive. ‘The police said it had been there about seven or eight years.’
‘So what?’ Terry said uneasily.
‘Well, I’ve been figuring out how old we were at the time. I figure that person, whoever it was, would have been killed around the period that . . . about the time when . . .’
Clive’s voice trailed off when he saw Terry’s face. Terry’s eyes were closed, and his eyelids fluttered wildly.
‘Shut it!’ Sam hissed. ‘Just shut it!’
A car’s headlights appeared along the road, and they flung themselves full length to the ground until long after it had passed. After some minutes they heard a horse snorting, and Alice appeared in the moonlight, her leather jacket gleaming. She was leading the skewbald mare across the grassy field on the other side of the road. Girl and horse seemed to glide noiselessly through the field. Mist rose from the grass under her feet and beneath the horse’s hooves.
‘She’s here! She’s done it!’
She stopped at a gate on the other side of the road, fumbling with the latch. The horse tossed its head, its breath a silver plume in the night air. Suddenly another car’s headlamps appeared in the road, speeding towards them. ‘Get back!’ cried Sam. ‘Get back!’
Alice ducked back, tugging sharply at the horse’s reins, trotting it away from the gate. The boys flung themselves on the ground again.
But the car didn’t roar past, as expected. It slowed as it approached, stopped in the middle of the road and then eased into the gateway entrance, its headlamps sweeping across the field, throwing the trees at the edge of Wistman’s Woods into sharp relief. They heard the ratchet of the handbrake applied before the lights dimmed and the engine was switched off. The car had come to a halt on the other side of the hedge, not nine feet away from where the boys lay sprawled.
They kept their heads down for some time. After a few minutes, a whimper issued from inside the car, followed by a deep sigh.
Clive, with the side of his face pressed against the earth, mouthed a blasphemy. It was a courting couple. ‘They could be here for hours.’
‘Depends,’ Terry whispered through gritted teeth.
‘On what?’ Sam was thinking of Alice trying to keep the horse quiet on the other side of the road.
‘On whether she gives out.’
They waited. A little squeal of protest sounded from the car’s interior. Then there was quiet again. Terry got to his knees, prepared to take a squint into the car. ‘Careful,’ said Clive. ‘Careful.’
Terry crawled across the ditch, pushing his head through the hedgerow. The car’s windows were misted with condensation, but there was no mistaking the shape, in the passenger seat, of a woman’s breasts exposed to the moonlight. The driver put his head to the bared breasts, taking a strong erect nipple between his lips. ‘Hey!’ said Terry. ‘Hey!’ Suddenly he stiffened. ‘I don’t believe it!’ he hissed. He pushed his head further into the tangled hedgerow. ‘It’s Linda! Linda and Derek!’
The other two boys scrambled up and pressed their faces into the hedge, close to Terry’s. In an instant, Linda had turned and was vigorously wiping away the condensation from the passenger window. The boys retreated slightly, trying to draw branches across their faces. They froze as she appeared to stare right through them. The muffled conversation from within the car was easily audible.
‘I heard something,’ they could hear Linda saying. ‘Then I thought I saw three horrible, dirty faces in the bushes. Like demons. It was horrible.’ She was still trying to wipe the window.
‘Want me to take a look?’ Derek’s muffled voice offered.
‘No, don’t.’
‘It’s all right. I’ll get out and take a look round.’
‘No. I’m frightened. Let’s go.’
‘Come on!’ Derek made another dive for her nipple.
‘Get off !’ Linda buttoned herself. ‘I want to go.’
‘Shit!’ Amid complaints from Derek, the engine sparked to life. The headlamps blazed and the car reversed out of its parking spot. Tyres screeched as they accelerated away, red tail-lights disappearing down the lane.
They breathed a collective sigh. Then Alice called from the other side of the road.
‘Come on, Alice! It’s clear.’
Alice led the horse to the gate again, but she couldn’t get it open. Sam darted across the road to help her. It was tied with baling twine. ‘I’ll get Clive’s knife.’
‘Forget it,’ said Alice. ‘Get out of the way.’
Though there was no saddle on the horse, Alice leapt up on its back. She trotted the mare several yards away, reined it round and broke into a sprightly canter back towards the gate. Sam scrambled out of the way as the horse launched into the air. He saw five, six, seven horses in a single but staggered image, making a bridge through the air from takeoff to landing-point, in a vision brittle with moonlight. It was a moment of inspiration, charged with force. They cleared the gate easily, Alice’s hair streaming behind her as they arced through the air. The horse came to a halt just a few paces on the other side of the gate. Alice slipped off its back and led it across the road. Clive and Terry held the second gate open.
Without a word, Alice led the horse to the edge of Wistman’s Woods. The boys fell in behind, hauling the tarpaulin. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘In you go. And don’t be long about it. Remember we’ve got to get back before my mother does.’
The plan had been tha
t the boys would recover the body and drag it to the edge of the woods in the tarpaulin. They would throw the corpse over the horse’s back and take it to the pond. There they had already assembled ropes and a collection of heavy weights to lodge the thing on the bottom of the pond. Meanwhile the horse tossed its head, its breath steaming in the night air. The boys dithered, looking for leadership.
‘Get going!’ Alice hissed.
The three stepped inside the woods. Moonlight probed as far as the second or third depth of trees, silver on the vulnerable clusters of bluebells at the edge of the woods, but beyond that it dimmed, leaving barely enough light to pick out the winding pathway through the trees. It had been nightfall when they were last in the woods together, on the evening of the Wide Games. Sam led the way; Clive and Terry followed closely in single file.
An owl screeched somewhere in the depths of the woods. Sam stopped to listen. Within the darkness of the trees, slender silver birches reached above the treetops to act like conduits, slender tubes of faint luminescence channelling dull blue moonlight down into the blackness. The exhalation of the trees was everywhere, a watchful presence, attentive, waiting. He continued, and the other two followed.
‘We’re going the wrong way,’ Clive said after a while.
‘No.’ Sam was confident he knew where the hollow stump stood. He quickened his pace, sure that the others would follow.
At the junction of two pathways Sam was surprised by a sudden whiff of something familiar, a smell with such a precise character that it caused him to stumble from the path in the dark. Ferns whispered under his feet.
‘You’re taking us the wrong way!’ Clive tried again. ‘It’s way over there!’
‘This way!’ Sam insisted.
‘I think Clive’s right,’ Terry cut in. ‘I don’t remember any of this.’
‘That’s because we’re in the wrong neck of the woods!’ Now that he’d recruited Terry to his opinion, Clive was furious with Sam. ‘It’s nowhere near here!’
‘How would you know? You were tied down with your arse in the air when it happened.’
‘Look,’ said Terry reasonably. ‘If you were about to have Tooley’s fat, diseased, swollen dick shoved up your arse, you’d probably remember exactly where it happened, wouldn’t you?’
‘That’s just it. If I was about to have Tooley’s fat, diseased, swollen dick up my arse, I wouldn’t be making a note of the exact compass co-ordinates, now would I?’
‘Fuck off, both of you!’ Clive bellowed, not happy at being reminded of the experience which he’d narrowly been spared. ‘Follow me.’
Terry shrugged and waved Sam along with a gesture. They marched behind Clive for ten minutes or so, Sam growing more convinced with each step that his first instincts were correct. The screech owl sounded closer. ‘It’s around here somewhere,’ Clive murmured.
Sam caught a whiff again of something close, of something dangerous in the dark. He looked back down the path. Each tree offered a cloak of blackness behind which anyone could hide. ‘Someone’s following us,’ he hissed.
Clive and Terry stopped and looked back. They strained to listen. ‘Alice?’ said Terry.
‘No, not Alice.’
‘Are you sure?’ Clive said.
‘Yes. I think so. Maybe. I mean, I’m sure it’s not Alice.’
‘You’re spooking us,’ Terry said.
The screech owl called, loud and shrill, only yards away. Sam saw it sitting on a high branch, looking down at them.
Clive pressed on. They came to a small clearing. ‘This is it,’ Clive announced. ‘That’s the tree where the Scout was hanging. I was tied up over there. We dumped Tooley’s body in that hollow stump.’
Sam felt sure Clive was mistaken. But Terry was nodding, sizing up the boughs of the tree. Together they shuffled across to the hollow designated by Clive. It was half filled with dead leaves, rotting branches and other woodland debris. No one was ready to lift any of it clear. ‘Right,’ said Clive.
Terry was first, and the other two joined in. Slowly at first, and then with mounting hysteria, they flung the debris clear of the hollow, until their fingernails dug into the soft, organic matter beneath.
‘Ugh!’ said Terry.
Clive pulled up a handful of the stuff. Sam too.
‘It’s just earth,’ said Sam. ‘Leaf mould. There’s nothing here.’
‘It’s been moved,’ Clive breathed.
‘No. This isn’t the place. You’ve brought us to the wrong place! Look at that tree! You couldn’t hang the skinniest Scout from that tree! And where were Terry and me supposed to be hiding? This just isn’t the place, you dumb bastard!’
Terry was scratching his head, looking round. ‘Sam’s right,’ he conceded.
‘I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it!’
Sam got a blast of that overpowering smell again. Bird shit; rain-mashed leaves; tree lichen; fungus; rotting hay; wild bulbs waiting to flower. He knew they were in the presence of a power. The hair bristled on his neck. ‘Never mind, Clive. We were led here. We were tricked.’
‘What do you mean?’
Sam looked up. The screech owl left its branch and flew overhead, going north. He knew they wouldn’t find anything that night. When he looked back, the other two were staring at him with appalled fascination.
‘Tell him to shut his fucking mouth,’ said Clive.
‘Yes,’ said Terry. ‘You’d better button it, Sam.’
Sam led them in silence back to the place where he’d first intended they should go, to the clearing where he’d seen the fox in the winter snow. Its features were similar to those of Clive’s venue: but the tree was a more likely candidate, the cover was better, the hollow stump was much deeper. It was also artificially piled with uprooted bushes and broken sticks. After they’d uncovered it in a second frenzy, the results were no different from their initial endeavours.
Clive sank to the earth, his face blackened with dirt and sweat. He wept with frustration. Then he stopped suddenly, simply staring ahead of him.
Sam helped him to his feet. ‘Come on. Alice will be going out of her mind.’
They trooped dispiritedly to the edge of the woods, Terry and Sam dragging the useless tarpaulin. Alice was crouched on the ground, hugging herself for warmth, smoking a cigarette down to its filter. There was no need for anyone to explain. The failure of the enterprise was apparent.
They led the horse across the field and over the road. Alice jumped the gate again, and they climbed into the field behind her. ‘I’ll see you back at my house in about fifteen minutes. Sam, can you ride bareback? Jump up behind me.’
But Sam was distracted. Over Terry’s shoulder, sitting on the gate, was the Tooth Fairy, watching them. The moon reflected balefully on its white face. It smiled at him with evil satisfaction.
‘You wouldn’t allow us to find it, would you?’ Sam murmured, so softly that the others, standing a few yards off, did not hear him. ‘You wouldn’t want that, would you?’
Terry dropped his end of the tarpaulin and pushed past Sam. ‘I’ll come if Sam won’t!’ He was up on the horse behind Alice in a second. Sam spun round. He saw Terry’s arms fold around Alice’s waist. Alice dug her heels into the horse’s flanks, and they were away, cantering across fields streaming with mist and flooded with moonlight.
30
Premonition
‘What a good thing,’ said Alice.
Alice and the three boys studied a planning-application notice posted on the football-field gate. Redstone Football Club, having purchased the land outright, was proposing to level the ground to construct a second pitch. The enterprise would require infilling half of the pond.
‘I mean, what a good thing you three never found anything that night in the woods. They might dredge the pond.’
Over a year had passed since the disastrous project to recover the body of the dead Scout from Wistman’s Woods, and this was the first time the abortive effort had been mentioned. There
had been sleepless nights immediately afterwards, and dreams of bodies composed entirely of leaf-mould rising from the paths through the trees; but the police had made their threatened renewed search of the woods with no more success than the boys’. Now, as they read the planning application pasted on a wooden board, the implications of what might have happened had they been successful that night were dawning on all of them. None of them knew whether the infilling of a pond would cause a submerged body to surface or seal the matter for ever.
‘Anyway,’ said Sam, and the word ‘anyway’ temporarily infilled the gaping nightmare for all of them, ‘anyway, they can’t just come and fill in half of what’s left of the pond!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s our pond! It’s It’s been our pond since we were little kids. They can’t do it!’
‘They can and they will.’
‘Well, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’ Sam looked across the water, a distance from bank to bank of about seventy or eighty yards. ‘They’re going to reduce it to the size of a mere puddle.’
‘A mere spit,’ said Clive.
‘A mere flob,’ said Terry.
This was the current delight among the Redstone Moodies: anyone foolish enough to try out a word drawn from beyond their immediate range of vocabulary would have it gleefully and mercilessly bounced back at them.
‘Someone ought to bomb the football club off the face of the earth,’ said Sam.
‘Easily done,’ said Clive. ‘What sort of bomb do you want?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I could serve you up a nice Molotov Cocktail in under a minute; a more cultured device might take me a full day.’ Clive’s garden-shed chemistry set was capable of anything.
‘Cultured,’ Sam said in a thin, reedy voice.
‘Hmmm, I say, cultured,’ Terry echoed.
‘Or I could knock up a pipe bomb in ten minutes.’
