The Wood

by Guy N Smith

  She had not noticed the mist creeping in. It had crept stealthily, silently across the wood under cover of darkness and she only became aware of it now that the moon was showing itself intermittently. Grey tentacles of vapour curling around the tree boles, touching her with their cold clammy outstretched fingers as though to ensnare her. This is the land of the damned and you shall not escape.

  Carol Embleton broke into a run, heedless of the squelching mud. The trees around her became moving living things, slapping at her with low branches, reeds clutching at her bare ankles as though to drag her down into their evil mire. Come, join us for eternity in our stinking cold mud. She blundered into a deep bog, somehow extricated herself, found a way round it. Running breathlessly, blindly, not knowing if she headed in the right direction, only that she had to keep going. A lurking fear that her attacker might suddenly spring out on her for surely he must have heard her by now. She had to find that strange parachutist, only then would she be safe. Suddenly her flight was brought to an abrupt halt. She would have screamed her sheer terror aloud had not a cold wet hand been clapped over her mouth and nostrils with asphyxiating force. Another arm encircled her body, lifted her up off the ground.

  And in that moment she gave in, surrendered to whatever Fate had ordained. The fox had given the hounds a good run for their money and now, exhausted, accepted the inevitable. She was going to die, she prayed that it would be quick, that whatever he was going to do to her he would inflict upon her corpse, spare her the terror and the shame of undergoing a second rape.

  'Mein Gott!'

  She heard the thick nasal tones as she was flung to the ground, sodden marsh grass breaking her fall, lying there with her eyes tightly shut, not wanting to look up into that crazed lusting expression again.

  'Kill me,' she whimpered. 'Don't play with me. Do what you want after I am dead.'

  Silence, She was aware of the mist fingers exploring her obscenely, trying to prise her thighs apart, evil aiding evil. She felt the penetrating stare of her attacker, heard his breathing.

  'Mein Gott,' Again, unfamiliar, a ring of amazement in the voice. In a strange sort of way it was reassuring.

  Fearfully Carol Embleton opened her eyes, gazed un-comprehendingly at the man who stood looking down upon her, the mist hanging back from him as though in some way it was afraid to approach him.

  Close-cropped blond hair, his figure made bulky by the thick flying suit he wore, the padded jacket ripped, the material hanging down in ribbons. High cheekbones, a nasty gash just below the left one but it appeared to have stopped bleeding. Heavy knee-length boots dripping foul marsh mud. The patchy moonlight glinted on something metal in his hand and with a start she identified the object, a pistol, the barrel trained unwaveringly on herself. For several seconds the two of them stared at each other and finally it was the stranger who spoke, slowly as though he had to search some long-forgotten vocabulary to produce words in the English language.

  'What is it that you do here?'

  'I…I…'

  'Answer me. Quickly.' The pistol jerked threateningly.

  'I'm lost,' Carol swallowed. She had to be mad, this awful wood had snapped her mind playing cruel tricks on her. And then she remembered the parachutist who had come drifting down out of the sky. If that had really happened then this must be him.

  'A whore plying her trade in a marsh wood by night,' he laughed humourlessly.

  'A trick to lure me by the mad British who persist in fighting a hopeless war.'

  'I… don't understand.' Oh God, he was a madman too. 'I was attacked. Raped. I fled in here, got lost. I saw your plane crash. I thought that together we could escape. '

  'It is a trick,' he said, advancing a step, and for one awful moment she thought that the finger on that trigger was going to tighten, blast her into instant oblivion. 'The British have tried many tricks to capture me. Sometimes they send men in sailing boats from the sea, a ridiculous ploy. Other times they dress as ancient worshippers, but still Bertie Hass remains at large for a Nazi is no fool.'

  'A Nazi!'

  'You still persist with this ridiculous story.' There was a note of anger in his tone now. 'But an honoured member of the Fuhrer's Luftwaffe is above the temptation of a common whore. Your trick has failed and now you must pay for your folly. On your feet!'

  Shakily Carol struggled to her feet. She had to be mad but she had no choice other than to obey this mysterious gunman. She stumbled, felt something hard boring into her back. The fog was so thick now that she could not see more than a yard or two in front of her yet her companion seemed oblivious to it, an urgency about him as though he knew exactly where he was going. But that was impossible, he had only landed a short while ago!

  It had stopped raining now and the moonlight was fighting to infiltrate the thick mist. And far away she could still hear those continuous explosions. Suddenly she saw the building looming up before her, a huge castle-like edifice with high turrets, sinister in the gloom. The only house in Droy Wood is Droy House, she thought, and they reckon it's no more than a shell these days, but this was sound with no signs of decay.

  'My castle,' he said with pride in his voice as he pulled up sharply, grasping her wrist in an icy grip as though he feared lest she might decide to make a dash for freedom. 'Just as the Fuhrer has his Crow's Nest so Bertie Hass has his own impregnable refuge. The British have not found it for here it is screened from them, protected by the wood and the marshes.'

  'But. but the war's been over for almost forty years!' She turned to face him. 'In 1945. This is nineteen-eighty

  'Fool!' For one moment she thought he was going to strike her across the face. The war is nearly over, the stubborn British and their allies still believing that they can thwart the advance of the Master Race. I have served the Fatherland and it is my lot to remain here in this place until the might of Germany finally overthrows Britain.'

  She nodded dumbly; to argue further would have been to invite swift retribution.

  'Now let us go inside.' The Luger prodded her forward again. 'You will remain here as my prisoner.' He laughed, a hollow sound that had her naked flesh goosepimpling. 'Indeed, I, too, am a prisoner here until the German army comes to release me.'

  There was no visible sign of ruin inside the building, just bare stone walls and floors, empty of furniture, cold and eerie. Moonlight shafted in through a window, illuminating the hall, and something fluttered in the shadows squeaked as though protesting at this intrusion. Bats, Carol grimaced. There were probably rats, too.

  A flight of steps going downwards. She would have fallen had not the man who called himself Bertie Hass caught her. His fingers were deathly cold like the touch of dead flesh: a corpse. An overpowering stench of dank staleness had her coughing, an almost airless atmosphere down here that was icy cold. She felt cobwebs brush her, adhere to her face and hair, the rough floor scraping the soles of her feet as her captor dragged her with him. Impenetrable blackness all around her.

  She felt something cold and hard encircle her wrist, snap and tighten with a metallic click, could not hold back her whimper of fear. Her other arm was seized, pinioned to the wall behind her in the same way. Instinctively she struggled but no way could she prevent her ankles being manacled. Straining, hearing chains rattle, only too well aware that she was fastened to the wall.

  'Please. ' she sobbed.

  'If you scream nobody will hear you.' the German's voice was a whisper in the darkness. 'Here you will remain, a prisoner of war… A spy.' Venom, hatred.

  'Perhaps when the German army arrives you will be executed as such. I cannot say, for such a decision will be left to the Gestapo. You will not have long to wait. The cities of your country are being razed to the ground by the devastating raids of the Luftwaffe, Britain totters on the brink of defeat.'

  Fanaticism. She thought she caught a click of heels, visualised an upraised hand, a Nazi salute. Then he was leaving her, a fast walk. Marching. Self-discipline even in madness.

&n
bsp; Oh please God this is all some terrible nightmare. She strained at her manacles but they were real enough. She was just able to stand, the balls of her feet touching the dungeon floor, her arms already beginning to go numb as the blood drained from them.

  Andy, where are you? I'm sorry; if I hadn't lost my temper with you this would never have happened. But Andy Dark wasn't likely to find her here; nobody was. Something brushed against her feet and she let out a scream as she felt the rough fur of a moving body, heard scuffling sounds. Her eyesight had adjusted to the darkness and now she saw a myriad of dull red pinpoints like minute unpolished rubies set out on a black cloth. Rats! Dozens of them, just squatting in the corners watching her; waiting until she was carrion to feed on. She wondered if they might attack her while she still lived, tear at her flesh with their tiny sharp teeth. But at the moment they seemed prepared to be patient.

  There was a roaring in Carol's ears, the echoes of the bombing raid lingering, the staccato return fire from the sparse defences. A red haze before her eyes, the reflections in a night sky of a burning city. The constant drone of heavy aircraft; the smell of burning in her nostrils.

  Exhaustion again, her body sagging so that her wrists hurt as they took the strain. And her recent nightmare came back to her, this same stone-walled cell of hopelessness. An interrogator who might have been Andy. Or James Foster. ' Or Bertie Hass.

  'You dirty whore, answer my questions!' 'No, please!'

  Jerking back into awful wakefulness, seeing that the rats had moved in closer.

  Five

  Still that trail of broken, trodden-down reeds wove on ahead of Andy Dark. In places it backtracked where the mud was too deep and only his keen eyesight picked up the trail again. Every time he came upon a patch of dense undergrowth he paused to part the foliage, steeled himself to search it, afraid of what he might see. But there was nothing. Surely they had not come this far? In places he found the heavier tracks where the man had followed in blind crazed pursuit but in the pitch darkness of night Foster had been unable to see the tracks which would have led him to the girl.

  Through a long narrow stretch of thick reeds and out again on to wet but firm ground; veering to the right, back again to the left, and then he came upon that patch of ground beneath the aged and rotting tree where Carol had spent the night, saw how the springy grass had been flattened, had barely started to straighten up again. A matter of only an hour or two ago perhaps. His pulses were racing, there was a roaring in his ears. She had still been alive then, the killer had not found her. Perhaps with the coming of daylight she had made her way back towards the road. She might be home already, his own mission a fool's errand.

  And then he saw the tracks again leading off in the opposite direction; eastwards, seawards. Oh Christ Almighty, she had lost all sense of direction, had blundered off towards the marshes. She.

  He stopped, a movement catching his eye amidst the darkness of the trees. A wisp like smoke, as though somebody unseen had lit a cigarette. Not dispersing, thickening; more of it, billowing.

  The fog was coming in from the sea again!

  He leaned his body up against a tree, wrestled with his decision. It needed an army to search Droy Wood effectively. Carol was lost already, maybe panicking. She would wander around in circles for ever, deep bogs cutting off what seemed to be the obvious exits. And with the mist coming down anything could happen. The rapist was in here, too. Oh Jesus!

  Andy Dark cupped his hands, yelled 'Carol. Ca-rol!'

  Nothing, not even an echo. Just the mist thickening with unbelievable rapidity. He sighed, remembered all those stories about the wood. Every place had its legends, stories spread and added to by superstitious locals. The villagers were scared of Droy Wood but there were logical reasons for keeping away. Deep bogs that could suck you down if you panicked and floundered in them, these damnable mists, caused by the adjacent gaseous marshes, doubled the perils. The dangers were only too real,

  'Ca-rol!'

  He was wasting his breath. Just a cloying silence everywhere, the old trees dripping with condensation. He ought to go for help but that would take time, maybe an hour before he got back to the village, God knows how long to muster a search party, and it could be late afternoon by the time they got back here. Then darkness, another night in this awful place for Carol. No, it wasn't on, he must carry on searching, pray that he found her. He looked at his watch. 9.25. No, that couldn't possibly be right, he had been in here much longer than that. Holding it to his ear, shaking it, tapping it. Sod it, his watch had stopped and with this damned mist drifting in like this it was difficult to even guess what time of day it was. Andy set off, wished that he had a compass with him, the one he always used when he went bird-watching on the marshes. But he didn't and he would have to make the — best of it. The tracks were becoming erratic now as though Carol had had several changes of mind, met up with a wide channel and tried to find a shallow crossing, eventually finding somewhere to cross. It took him several minutes to find where she had crossed over; a sluggish black stream that came up to the tops of his Wellington boots, slopped over once and wet his socks. The mud was sticky, pulling back on every step he took until finally he reached the opposite bank. He clambered out, looking for a continuation of the trail he was following. It wasn't there, not a single imprint of Carol Embleton's feet in the squelchy black silt. There had to be! He looked about him, his task being made doubly difficult by the encroaching mist. He walked ten yards to his right, found nothing and retraced his steps. Tried the left; nothing again. Perplexed, worried. There had to be tracks unless she had followed the course of this stream. Upstream or down? He sighed, then tensed as a faint noise caught his ears, some kind of movement, a long-dead branch snapping, a squelching footstep.

  Andy Dark tried to see through the fog but it was thicker than ever now, visibility reduced to a maximum of ten yards or so. He heard the noise again, almost like long wheezing breaths, somebody who moved with difficulty. Certainly not Carol; in that case it had to be… the rapist! Anger, hatred welled up inside Andy. Only yards away from him was the man who had subjected Carol Embleton to terrors beyond male comprehension. She might even be. dead! The conservancy officer experienced a wave of dizziness at the thought. He might be too late, the multilated body already sucked down by a vile bog. Gone for ever.

  The bastard! Andy moved forward, fists clenched. He would make the fucker pay for what he'd done, mete out a punishment beyond the laws of civilisation. The other would scream for mercy, but there would be none. No softly administered legislature, no protection from the fury of an outraged public. Here in Droy Wood it would be man against man, the death penalty the sentence imposed upon a sex-killer; Andy Dark judge, jury and executioner. His face was twisted into a mask of malevolence, moving cautiously in the direction from where the sounds had come, through stunted spreading oaks whose boughs no longer sprouted foliage, a dead silent world of murk and rancid marsh odours.

  Andy tensed, caught sight of a fleeting shape in the mist, grunted with bewilderment. He had expected to see a naked man whose clothes remained in the parked road-side Mini after he had satisfied his lust. Instead he saw a long coat, a three-cornered shaped hat, the fashion of a bygone age. A silhouette that merged with the grey swirling vapour and was lost again. He hurried forward, paused once more to listen. Squelching footsteps going away from him, hurrying, seeming to traverse patches of bog that Andy had to circumnavigate. And leaving no tracks in his wake.

  Andy Dark sweated profusely but somehow he could not catch the other up. Just fleeting glimpses as the man in front forged ahead into the fog, never once glancing back, no suspicion of pursuit. The sweat on Andy's body chilled; there was something uncannily inexplicable about this, the way the other crossed deep bogs and left not a single broken reed to mark his passage]

  And suddenly Andy was aware of other movements around him, the tramping of feet, the splashing of water. Voices, muffled shouts but he did not understand the tongue, more like a
nimal grunts. Frightening, recalling again the old legends, of happenings in here when the mists came in off the marshes and people disappeared never to be seen again. Rubbish! Somehow he could not convince himself of that right now, was prepared to believe things which he would have scoffed at in the safety of his own office back at the bungalow. He stopped, pressed himself flat against the nearest tree. Two men, only yards apart, emerged from the trees close by, passed within feet of him. Oh Jesus wept, you only had to see those faces, even partially obscured by the mist, to know that something was dreadfully wrong. Gaunt and wizened, the features of long-dead corpses, decomposition just beginning to set in, dressed in long greatcoats, those triangular hats pulled well down as though they wished to spare any hidden watcher the horror of looking upon their putrid countenances. Passing him and going on, heading in the same direction as the first one. And there were more of them, Andy could hear them to the right and left of him. Fear of a different kind now, not just for Carol Embleton's safety, but the terror of being alone in this dreadful wood with things that had no place in the realms of the living world!

  He smelled the marshes and the sea shortly before the weird trees petered out, the fog not so dark now. They were out in the open, heading directly towards the sea. Andy paused, doubted the wisdom of following, yet Carol might be out there. He prayed to God that she wasn't but he could not chance it. Moving cautiously, stooping low even though the fog hid him, following the progress of the others by ear. Some urgent calling had brought them out on to Droy marshes, some terrible purpose to be fulfilled which he was about to witness.

  Suddenly he almost blundered into them, checked just in time, ducked back into the fog. There were half a dozen of them crouched behind boulders on the narrow rocky shore, their backs to him, their attention focused seawards, otherwise they would almost certainly have seen him. Lurking, waiting. For what?