“Is this where you live?” Harriet asked. “Is this where I’m going to live?”
“For the next few hours,” Algernon replied. He pulled up at the end of the alley in a small courtyard surrounded on all sides by high brick walls. There was a row of garbage cans and a single door, sheet metal with several locks. “Here we are,” he said.
Harriet got out of the van, and as she did so the door opened and a short, fat man came out, dressed entirely in white. The man seemed to be Japanese. He had pale orange skin and slanting eyes. There was a chef’s hat balanced on his head. When he smiled, three gold teeth glinted in the afternoon light.
“You got her!” he exclaimed. He had a strong Oriental accent.
“Yes. This is Harriet.” Algernon had once again unfolded himself from the van.
“Do you know how much she weigh?” the chef asked.
“I haven’t weighed her yet.”
The chef ran his eyes over her. Harriet was beginning to feel more and more uneasy. The way the man was examining her . . . well, she could almost have been a piece of meat. “She very good,” he murmured.
“Young and spoiled,” Algernon replied. He gestured at the door. “This way, my dear.”
“What about my suitcases?”
“You won’t need those.”
Harriet was nervous now. She wasn’t sure why, but it was not knowing that made her feel all the worse. Perhaps it was the name. Sawney Bean. Now that she thought about it, she did know it. She’d heard that name on a television show or perhaps she’d read it in a book. Certainly she knew it. But how . . . ?
She allowed the two men to lead her into the restaurant and flinched as the solid metal door swung shut behind her. She found herself in a gleaming kitchen, all white-tiled surfaces, industrial-size cookers, and gleaming pots and pans. The restaurant was closed. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch was over. It was still some time until dinner.
She became aware that Algernon and the chef were staring at her silently, both with the same excited, hungry eyes. Sawney Bean! Where had she heard the name?
“She perfect,” the chef said.
“That’s what I thought,” Algernon agreed.
“A bit fatty perhaps . . .”
“I’m not fat!” Harriet exclaimed. “Anyway, I’ve decided I don’t like it here. I want to go home. You can take me straight back.”
Algernon laughed softly. “It’s too late for that,” he said. “Much too late. I’ve paid a great deal of money for you, my dear. And I told you, we want you here for dinner tonight.”
“Maybe we start by poaching her in white wine,” the chef said. “Then later tonight with a béarnaise sauce . . .”
And that was when Harriet remembered. Sawney Bean. She had read about him in a book of horror stories.
Sawney Bean.
The cannibal.
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Of course it’s impossible to scream when you’re having a bad dream. You try to scream, but your mouth won’t obey you. Nothing will come out. That was what was happening to Harriet. She could feel the scream welling up inside her. She could see Algernon and the chef closing in on her. The room was spinning, the pots and pans dancing around her head, and still the scream wouldn’t come. And then she was sucked into a vortex and the last thing she remembered was a hand reaching out to support her so she wouldn’t bruise herself, wouldn’t damage her flesh when she fell.
Mercifully, that was when she woke up.
It had all been a horrible dream.
Harriet opened her eyes slowly. It was the most delicious moment of her life, to know that everything that had happened hadn’t happened. Her father hadn’t gone bankrupt. Her parents hadn’t sold her to some creep in a white van. Fifi would still be there to help her get dressed and serve up the breakfast. She would get up and go to school and in a few weeks’ time she and her mother would leave on their Caribbean cruise. She was annoyed that such a ridiculous dream should have frightened her so much. On the other hand, it had seemed so realistic.
She lifted a hand to rub her forehead.
Or tried to.
Her hands were tied behind her. Harriet opened her eyes wide. She was lying on a marble slab in a kitchen. A huge pot of water was boiling on a stove. A Japanese chef was chopping onions with a glinting stainless-steel knife.
Harriet opened her mouth.
This time she was able to scream.
Scared
Gary Wilson was lost. He was also hot, tired, and angry. As he slogged his way through a field that looked exactly the same as the last field and exactly the same as the one ahead, he cursed the countryside, his grandmother for living in it, and above all his mother for dragging him from their comfortable London house and dumping him in the middle of it. When he got home he would make her suffer, that was for sure. But where exactly was home? How had he managed to get so lost?
He stopped for the tenth time and tried to get his bearings. If there had been a hill he would have climbed it, trying to catch sight of the pink cottage where his grandmother lived. But this was Suffolk, the flattest country in England, where county lanes could lie perfectly concealed behind even the shortest length of grass and where the horizon was always much farther away than it had any right to be.
Gary was fifteen years old, tall for his age, with the permanent scowl and narrow eyes of the fully qualified school bully. He wasn’t heavily built—if anything, he was on the thin side—but he had long arms, hard fists, and he knew how to use them. Maybe that was what made him so angry now. Gary liked to be in control. He knew how to look after himself. If anyone had seen him stumbling around an empty field in the middle of nowhere, they’d have laughed at him. And of course he’d have had to pay them back.
Nobody laughed at Gary Wilson. Not at his name, not at his place in class (always last), not at the acne that had recently exploded across his face. Generally people avoided him, which suited Gary fine. He actually enjoyed hurting other kids, taking their lunch money or ripping pages out of their books. But scaring them was just as much fun. He liked what he saw in their eyes. They were scared. And Gary liked that best of all.
About a quarter of the way across the field, Gary’s foot found a pothole in the ground and he was sent sprawling with his hands outstretched. He managed to save himself from falling, but a bolt of pain shot up his leg as his ankle twisted. He swore silently, the four-letter word that always made his mother twitch nervously in her chair. She had long since stopped trying to talk him out of using bad language. He was as tall as her now and he knew that in her own, quiet way, she was scared of him, too. Sometimes she would try to reason with him, but for her, the time of telling had long since passed.
He was her only child. Her husband—Edward Wilson—had been a clerk at the local bank until one day, quite suddenly, he had fallen over dead. It was a massive heart attack, they said. He was still holding his date stamp in one hand when they found him. Gary had never gotten along with his father and hadn’t really missed him—particularly when he realized that he was now the man of the house.
The house in question was a two-up, two-down, part of a terrace in Notting Hill Gate. There were insurance policies and the bank provided a small pension so Edith Wilson was able to keep it. Even so, she’d had to go back to work to support Gary and herself . . . no need to ask which of the two was the more expensive.
Vacations abroad were out of the question. As much as Gary whined and complained, Edith Wilson couldn’t find the money. But her mother lived on a farm in Suffolk and twice a year, in the summer and at Christmas, the two of them made the two-hour train journey up from London to Pye Hall just outside the little village of Earl Soham.
It was a glorious place. A single track ran up from the road past a line of poplar trees and a Victorian farm-house and on through a gap in the hedge. The track seemed to come to an end here, but in fact it twisted and continued on to a tiny, lopsided cottage painted a soft Suffolk pink in
a sea of daisy-strewn grass.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” his mother had said as the taxi from the station had rattled up the lane. A couple of black crows swooped overhead and landed in a nearby field.
Gary had sniffed.
“Pye Hall!” His mother had sighed. “I was so happy here once.”
But where was it?
Where was Pye Hall?
As he crossed what he now realized was a quite enormous field, Gary found himself wincing with every step. He was also beginning to feel the first stirrings of . . . something. He wasn’t actually scared. He was too angry for that. But he was beginning to wonder just how much farther he would have to walk before he knew where he was. And how much farther could he walk? He swatted at a fly that was buzzing him and went on.
Gary had allowed his mother to talk him into coming, knowing that if he complained hard enough she would be forced to bribe him with a handful of CDs—at the very least. Sure enough, he had passed the journey from Liverpool Street to Ipswich listening to Heavy Metal Hits and had been in a good enough mood to give his grandmother a quick peck on the cheek when they arrived.
“You’ve grown so much,” the old lady had exclaimed as he slouched into a battered armchair beside the open fireplace in the front room. She always said that. She was so boring.
She glanced at her daughter. “You’re looking thinner, Edith. And you’re tired. You’ve got no color at all.”
“Mother, I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. You don’t look well. But a week in the country will soon sort you out.”
A week in the country! As he limped onward and onward through the field, swatting again at the wretched fly that was still circling his head, Gary thought longingly of concrete roads, bus stops, traffic lights, and hamburgers. At last he reached the hedge that divided this field from the next and he grabbed at it, tearing at the leaves with his bare hands. Too late, he saw the nettles behind the leaves. Gary yowled, bringing his clenched hand to his lips. A string of white bumps rose up, scattered across the palm and the insides of his fingers.
What was so great about the country?
Oh, his grandmother went on about the peace, the fresh air, all the usual rubbish spouted by people who wouldn’t even recognize a crosswalk if they saw one. People with no life at all. The flowers and the trees and the birds and the bees. Yuck!
“Everything is different in the country,” she would say. “You float along with time. You don’t feel time rushing past you. You can stand out here and imagine how things were before people spoiled everything with their noise and their machines. You can still feel the magic in the countryside. The power of Mother Nature. It’s all around you. Alive. Waiting . . .”
Gary had listened to the old woman and sneered. She was obviously getting senile. There was no magic in the countryside, only days that seemed to drag on forever and nights with nothing to do. Mother Nature? That was a good one. Even if the old girl had existed—which was unlikely—she had long ago been finished off by the cities, buried under miles of concrete motorway. Driving along the M25 at 100 mph with the roof open and the CD player on full blast . . . to Gary, that would be real magic.
After a few days lazing around the house, Gary had allowed his grandmother to persuade him to go for a walk. The truth was that he was bored by the two women and, anyway, out in the fields he would be able to smoke a couple of the cigarettes he had bought with money stolen from his mother’s handbag.
“Make sure you follow the footpaths, Gary,” his mother had said.
“And don’t forget the country code,” his grandmother had added.
Gary remembered the country code all right. As he ambled away from Pye Hall, he picked wildflowers and tore them to shreds. When he came to a gate he deliberately left it open, smiling to himself as he thought of the farm animals that might now wander onto the road. He drank a Coke and flung the crumpled can into the middle of a meadow full of buttercups. He half snapped the branch off an apple tree and left it dangling there. He smoked a cigarette and threw the butt, still glowing, into the long grass.
And he had stayed off the footpath. Perhaps that hadn’t been such a good idea. He was lost before he knew it. He was tramping through a field, crushing the crop underfoot, when he realized that the ground was getting soft and mushy. His foot broke through the corn or whatever it was and water curled over his shoe, soaking into his sock. Gary grimaced, thought for a moment, and decided to go back the way he had come . . .
Only the way he had come was somehow no longer there. It should have been. He had left enough landmarks after all. But suddenly the broken branch, the Coke can, and the torn-up plants had vanished. Nor was there any sign of the footpath. In fact, there was nothing at all that Gary recognized. It was very odd.
That had been over two hours ago.
Since then, things had gone from bad to worse. Gary had made his way through a small wood (although he was sure there hadn’t been a wood anywhere near Pye Hall) and had managed to scratch his shoulder and gash his leg on a briar. A moment later he had backed into a tree that had torn his favorite jacket, a black-and-white-striped blazer that he had shoplifted from a thrift shop in Notting Hill Gate.
He had managed to get out of the wood—but even that hadn’t been easy. Suddenly he had found a stream blocking his path and the only way to cross it had been to balance on a log that was lying in the middle. He had almost done it, too, but at the last minute the log had rolled under his foot, hurling him backward into the water. He had stood up spluttering and swearing. Ten minutes later he had stopped to have another cigarette, but the whole pack was sodden, useless.
And now . . .
Now he screamed as the insect, which he had assumed was a fly but that in fact was a wasp, stung him on the side of the neck. He pulled at his damp and dirty Bart Simpson T-shirt, squinting down to see the damage. Out of the corner of his eye he could just make out the edge of a huge, red swelling. He shifted his weight onto his bad foot and groaned as fresh pain shuddered upward. Where was Pye Hall? This was all his mother’s fault. And his grandmother’s. They were the ones who’d suggested the walk. Well, they’d pay for it. Perhaps they’d think twice about how lovely the countryside was when they saw their precious cottage go up in smoke.
And then he saw it. The pink walls and slanting chimneys were unmistakable. Somehow he had found his way back. He had only one more field to cross and he’d be there. With a stifled sob, Gary set off. There was a path of sorts going around the side of the field, but he wasn’t having any of that. He walked straight across the middle. It had only just been sown. Too bad!
This field was even bigger than the one he had just crossed and the sun seemed to be hotter than ever. The soil was soft and his feet sank into it. His ankle was on fire, and every step he took, his legs seemed to get heavier and heavier. The wasp wouldn’t leave him alone either. It was buzzing around his head, round and round, the noise drilling into his skull. But Gary was too tired to swat at it again. His arms hung lifelessly in their sockets, his fingertips brushing against the legs of his jeans. The smell of the countryside filled his nostrils, rich and deep, making him feel sick. He had walked now for ten minutes, maybe longer. But Pye Hall was no closer. It was blurred, shimmering on the edge of his vision. He wondered if he was suffering from sunstroke. Surely it hadn’t been as hot as this when he set out?
Every step was becoming more difficult. It was as if his feet were trying to root themselves in the ground. He looked back (whimpering as his collar rubbed the wasp sting) and saw with relief that he was exactly halfway across the field. Something ran down his cheek and dripped off his chin—but whether it was sweat or a tear he couldn’t say.
He couldn’t go any farther. There was a pole stuck in the ground ahead of him and Gary seized hold of it gratefully. He would have to rest for a while. The ground was too soft and damp to sit on, so he would rest standing up, holding on to the pole. Just a few minutes. Then he would cross the rest of the field
.
And then . . .
And then . . .
When the sun began to set and there was still no sign of Gary, his grandmother called the police. The officer in charge took a description of the lost boy and that same night they began a cross-country search that would go on for the next five days. But there was no trace of him. The police thought he might have gotten into a car with a stranger. He might have been abducted. But nobody had seen anything. It was as if the countryside had taken him and swallowed him up, one policeman said.
Gary watched as the police finally left. He watched as his mother carried her suitcase out of Pye Hall and got into the taxi that would take her back to Ipswich station and her train to London. He was glad to see that she had the decency to cry, mourning her loss. But he couldn’t help feeling that she looked rather less tired and rather less ill than she had when she arrived.
Gary’s mother did not see him. As she turned around in the taxi to wave good-bye to her mother and Pye Hall, she did notice that this time there were no crows. But then she saw why. They had been scared away by a figure that was standing in the middle of a field, leaning on a stick. For a moment she thought she recognized its torn black-and-white jacket and the grimy Bart Simpson T-shirt. But she was probably confused. It was best not to say anything.
The taxi accelerated past the new scarecrow and continued down past the poplar trees to the main road.
A Career in Computer Games
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Telephone: 0181 340 1225
Horowitz Horror Page 9
