The Feast of All Souls

by Simon Bestwick

  She liked the sound of that, even if she wasn’t sure she believed it. In the meantime, the problem was deciding what to do. For the moment, she’d have to cope with the episode, and the best way of doing that was to find a safe place to wait until it passed. If she wasn’t in an ornamental garden, she must be somewhere else, which could be anywhere from her bedroom to Browton Vale or the middle of Radcliffe New Road.

  The safest thing to do, she knew, would be to stay still and wait it out, make sure she didn’t step out in front of a car or off the top of a staircase thinking she was on a straight path. But somehow she kept moving. There was a sense of threat, of urgency, that kept her going.

  It could be dangerous to listen to her instincts at a time like this; it could be just as dangerous to ignore them. She kept going. The path wound into a tunnel of trees and bushes, where overhanging branches interwove and meshed. Alice clenched her fists as she walked; it was dark all around her, except for the archway full of moonlight up ahead.

  When she stepped out into it she breathed out in relief, then breathed in. The air was cool and clean, scented by unfamiliar plants, no hint of petrol fumes. The moon shone in the sky, turning rags of cloud into silhouettes beyond which lay the cobalt-blue night and the scattered dust of the stars. Normally you’d never see this many in a built-up area; light pollution rendered all but the brightest invisible. But here there were stars beyond counting, ranged by distance in layer upon layer. Alice couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a night sky like this; the holiday she’d taken with John in the Lake District, after they’d graduated, maybe. They’d gone out in some woods near Coniston one night, sipped beer and smoked a joint, but she hadn’t really needed the spliff. Just the sight of that sky – and her realisation of its sheer vastness – had been intoxicating enough.

  And it had also been about twenty years ago. Alice shook her head. All the same – she stole another glance at that unspoilt sky – as hallucinations went, it was extraordinarily detailed.

  She looked down again, took stock of her surroundings. She was in a clearing of some kind – but not a natural one, she realised. No, this was a paved, circular space carved out of the garden, and in its centre there stood a statue; a noble, knightly figure with a broken sword, chin upraised, its posture defiant. Carved into the base was an inscription. Alice bent to make it out:

  Their name liveth forevermore

  She straightened up and looked at one of the paths that led away from the clearing. It angled steeply downward – this place, too, was on a hillside – stretching out across overgrown lawns before vanished into thick black foliage far below. Something in Alice shied away from there; it was too like a path in a fairytale wood, the kind the big bad wolf would be waiting down.

  But then, she didn’t have to go anywhere. She’d been looking for a place to wait out the episode, and the clearing seemed as good as any. There was even a seat, she realised, set into the low walls that marked out the clearing’s boundaries. Alice sank into it with a deep sense of gratitude. Her feet were starting to ache, and so was the rest of her, as the adrenaline drained away. She was shaking a little.

  She curled up on the stone seat as best she could, trying to warm herself. She looked up at the stars, and listened. It was quiet: none of the usual urban night-time sounds, no traffic or revving bike motors, no voices, no chatter of rotor blades as a police helicopter passed overhead. Only the gentle trickle of a nearby stream. Between that and the view, Alice thought she could put up with the hallucination a while yet.

  When she heard the rumbling noise, Alice’s first thought was of a roll of thunder, but then she remembered that the sky was clear. When the rumble became a rattling growl, she realised it wasn’t coming from above her, but below. When it sounded again, she turned slowly until she was looking down the hillside at the path that vanished into the thick woods below.

  The second growl was followed by another sound, one she knew from somewhere; a sort of medley of crashing and rustling and snapping. Undergrowth, leaves and twigs, she realised, as something big stormed through them. When she felt the stone seat vibrate under her, she recognised it; she’d felt it the other day – back in reality, or the reality she knew – out on Browton Vale. Something had been coming for her then, but had been stopped. Tonight, though, there was nothing to oppose it.

  The woods below began to ripple and heave as whatever moved through it reached the perimeter. The moonlight gleamed on vast, feral eyes that saw and pinned her. And then there was another growl, and the thing burst free of the woods, rising and expanding as it lumbered towards her.

  Its outline was vague at first, but grew clearer as it advanced. It was roughly – very roughly – man-shaped, but much larger than a man; hunched, and bristling with hair. Something of a man, something of a beast. And it was coming for her. Its eyes’ unwavering glare told her that.

  She had to run. She must get up, run down one of the other paths – but it was like one of those dreams where you feel someone sit on the bed but can’t move, can’t turn to face them. Sleep paralysis; she’d had that once or twice, especially after Emily’s death. It came with certain dreams. So maybe this was a dream after all, in which case it didn’t matter if she ran or not. She’d wake up at any moment.

  Except what if she didn’t? What did happen to you if you died in your dreams? She had no doubt that she would if the thing laid hands upon her. Another part of her cried out that this was no dream, couldn’t be, was too real to be, but she ignored it. That part was surely impossible.

  Whatever the truth, when the moonlight fell on the thing from the woods, her paralysis abruptly broke. It was nearly twenty feet tall and naked, with piebald skin. Its scalp and back were covered by black, bristly hair that stuck up in sharp spines like porcupine quills. The same hair sprouted across its chest, in a thick thatch around its groin and in random tufts dotted across its body. It gave the creature a dirty, matted beard that covered the lower part of its face. Its forehead was low, almost nonexistent, with a brutal ledge of a brow. Its eyes, in contrast, were a pale, almost delicate blue, with a cat’s slitted pupils stretched wide by the dark. They looked out of place on that body, that face: they were poised above a wet, pig-like snout of a nose and a mouth that looked swollen and misshaped.

  In fact the whole lower half of the face – what she could see of it beneath the beard – had a lumpy, malformed look, but when its mouth finally yawned open she understood. The lumpiness came from jawbones that had grown thicker and heavier than any normal human’s should, and the knotted clumps of muscles that had thickened and swelled in order to work them. And the mouth was crammed with teeth too large even for itself: an array of canines and incisors like knives and chisels, and molars like the heads of club-hammers.

  The sight was accompanied by the stench of its breath, which almost made her retch. The part of her that had screamed this was too detailed, too real, to be an hallucination no longer seemed so irrational. Whatever the case, her paralysis broke; she swung her legs from the seat and stood.

  The thing had almost reached the clearing; saliva trickled from the gaping mouth, hung in wet, yellowish ropes from the beard. It reached out and parted the vegetation at the clearing’s entrance. Its hands were dirty, its thick nails sharpened to points and clogged with filth and dried blood.

  Fee, fi, fo, fum...

  As it stepped towards her, Alice turned and ran. The path shuddered underfoot as the ogre gave chase. She came to turning after turning, path after path, taking each on instinct. Where she was going didn’t matter, only that she kept moving, ahead of her pursuer.

  A small, calm part of her – the part, perhaps, that had simply accepted what was around her as reality – told her she couldn’t hope to escape the ogre. It was too close behind her; it was bigger and faster, and had her scent. As if to underline the point, the ogre roared, and she felt her innards shake from the thunder of it.

  Something made her glance round. She screamed, or would have i
f she’d had breath: the ogre was almost on top of her, lunging at her with one enormous hand.

  Alice dived forward, rolling on the ground, and the ogre’s grip closed on empty air. But before she could rise, a huge foot slammed down ahead of her on the path, and another behind. The ogre loomed above her. The stench of it threatened to make her vomit: old blood and spoiled meat, stale piss, excrement and semen. Its hands reached for her and its jaws stretched wide as it bent forward.

  And then there was a sound, and the ogre was still, a dazed look on its dull face.

  She knew she’d heard the sound before, even as it slithered away from her. Her memory wouldn’t hold onto it – but then, that was why. It had done the same on Browton Vale just after she’d arrived, leaving only a confused, jumbled impression of song, chant, horn, gong. But whatever it was, it stopped the ogre – just as, on Browton Vale, it had stilled the approach of another huge shape through the trees.

  Feet crunched in gravel. She turned and saw them: they were long and white and bare beneath the hem of a red robe. She looked up; the robe flapped around a thin, spare body. The walker pointed with a pale hand. A tight red cowl clung to his head, framing a long, lean, masklike face. His lips moved and the sound came again.

  The ogre moaned; she looked at it in time to see it flinch and recoil from the sound – whatever the sound exactly was. It stumbled away from her – or rather, from the figure in red – before turning to rush headlong down the path back towards the woods.

  Bare feet crunched in gravel again. Alice looked up to see the Red Man standing over her, gazing after the fleeing ogre. He stayed like that until its grunting, and the crash and rustle and snapping sounds of its passage, had died away. Only then did he turn his head and look down on her.

  Chapter Eight

  Relics

  29th October 2016

  ALICE WOKE UP shivering with cold and stabbed with pain, curling up smaller in an attempt to warm herself. She fumbled for the bedsheets, to pull them closer round her, but they weren’t there. Other details dawned on her; she lay with her cheek pressed against cold leather and she was fully clothed – right down to her shoes. She opened her eyes.

  She was lying on the living-room sofa, with bright sunlight streaming through the front room windows. The time, what was the time? Her mobile phone was in her pocket; she fumbled it out and stared at it. Nearly half-past nine.

  She sat up, shivering. She remembered the dream – it had to be a dream. The children had attacked her, driven her out into a hostile and unfamiliar night. The warrior, or whatever he’d been, throwing spears at her, and – the ogre.

  Alice breathed out and smiled, amused and relieved in equal measure. When had she fallen asleep? Clearly, she’d never made it as far as her own room. Well, coffee would make it all clearer. She got up, wincing. Christ, she was stiff; well, that would teach her to fall asleep on the sofa. Her right shoulder was particularly sore. She flexed it, but that just seemed to make the pain worse. She yawned and went into the kitchen.

  As the kettle boiled, Alice stretched and flexed a few muscles, trying to get the stiffness out. On the whole it was working, except on her shoulder. The soreness wasn’t going. She prodded the area gingerly and winced, then pulled down the shoulder of her sweater.

  “Bloody hell.”

  A belt of livid bruising ran across her shoulder. An image from the dream came back to her: the front door being pulled closed as she stood outside, her thrusting an arm through the gap so it closed on her shoulder instead. But it hadn’t happened, couldn’t have. It had been a dream.

  She needed a better look at the bruise, to see how it could have been formed. She went out into the hall; she’d use the full-length mirror in her room. But she hadn’t even reached the stairs when something crunched and gritted underfoot.

  Gravel? Was the dream invading the reality already? She looked down and saw that perhaps it was, although not in the way she’d imagined. The hallway was strewn with glittering crumbs and shards of broken glass. In the same moment she became aware of a cold draught, and looked up. One of the glass panes was missing from the front door.

  Alice steadied herself against the wall; all of a sudden, her legs felt weak.

  Where had the dream stopped and reality started? It must have been local kids, throwing stones, perhaps a firework – they were only days from Bonfire Night, after all. The glass had shattered and she’d half-heard it, worked it somehow into her dream, just like the bruise on her shoulder.

  She got to the bottom of the stairs, glanced up the hall once more before starting up.

  And saw something else; something that made her walk unsteadily towards it, on legs that felt less and less substantial by the step.

  The object lay a few inches from the kitchen door. From it trailed a faint dark smear of what proved to be some sort of powder. It smudged her fingers faintly; when she sniffed them they smelt of damp wood. The smear was perhaps two or three feet long. Two or three feet that had rotted away. No. That was ridiculous; it could not be.

  But the object couldn’t be either, and it was. She touched it and her fingers found something cold and hard, pitted and worn, the edges nibbled ragged by time. She lifted it carefully, almost with reverence; it felt as delicate as a dried, fallen leaf. No leaf, though; no, this was a long, tapered spearhead of bronze.

  THE JOINER CAME round within the hour, in a white van marked A.F. GRANT AND SONS LTD. He was younger than Alice had expected; twenty-two or -three, she guessed, in a smart-casual uniform of plain jeans, workboots, a lumberjack shirt and a baseball cap, offering his hand. “Miss Collier?”

  She could have said Ms, but didn’t have the energy to press the point. “Hi. Mr Grant?”

  “Darren.” He smiled. Nice white teeth, blue eyes – yes, and about half her age, too.

  Alice glimpsed something to her right, at the edge of her vision – something white, something that grinned. She gasped, wheeled – but it was only another of those bloody plastic skulls, in the window of the house next door. “Christ,” she said.

  Darren followed her gaze and laughed. “Halloween, eh?”

  The look on his face said poor scared little woman; on another day she’d have let him know in no uncertain terms that he was wrong, but she didn’t have the energy today, so she forced a smile and said, “Yeah.”

  “So what’s happened here?”

  She indicated the broken pane.

  “I see.” He crouched to study the damage. He was very tanned, and it wasn’t the kind you got from a sunbed either. Someone could afford to take foreign holidays, at a guess. Which was a good sign. Unless of course the money was really someone else’s – she doubted he was the A.F. GRANT whose name was on the side of the van. His dad’s, maybe. “How’d that happen, then?”

  “Kids,” she said. “I mean, I think it was. There was a stone, I found it in the hall. One of them must have thrown it.”

  “Little fuckers. ’Scuse me French. Want bloody hanging. Well, this shouldn’t take five minutes, Miss Collier. Get a new pane put in in no time.”

  “No,” she said. “I want a new door.”

  “A new –”

  “A new door.” She gestured weakly. “I mean, it’s just got me thinking how vulnerable it all is. All that glass – anyone could just smash through it and get in.”

  Darren opened his mouth to argue the point, then realised there was a lot more money in a replacement door. “Yeah, course – see where you’re coming from. Well, we’ve got wood and uPVC in stock –”

  “UPVC’s more secure, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “More expensive too, though.”

  “That’s fine by me. I’d rather pay a bit more and feel safer.”

  “Right. Right. Okay, Yeah, of course, understand completely.” Darren obviously knew enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “I’ll just go get the catalogues and you can pick.”

  DARREN CROUCHED TO measure the
doorway. Muscles stood out under the jeans and shirt: pecs, biceps, abs. She studied the catalogue, occasionally casting glances at him. “This one, I think.”

  “Which?” he peered. “Okay, yep, that’s fine. Right then, and I should be back about early afternoon – one-ish, two-ish?”

  “That’s great. As long as it’s put in today.” She’d waved a cash bonus under his nose to make sure it would be. “I’ll feel a lot safer.”

  She hated how she sounded; jittery, anxious, needy. Of course, that was how she felt. Everything that had happened had left her scared, and she doubted this pretty-boy workman would have fared much better if he’d had an experience like last night’s, but she didn’t have to show how shaken she was. Even now, she had the nous and the self-possession to hide it. Perhaps she didn’t want to: perhaps the new her, the broken, post-Emily her, had less pride and was more willing to play the scared, vulnerable little-girl-lost. Well, if it worked...

  And yet of course it wouldn’t. Because the spear had come through the door, the bruises on her shoulder were a lividly discoloured bar on either side of her body, as if she’d been slammed between two hard surfaces. Because it hadn’t been any kind of dream at all.

  “No problem then, love. See you later.”

  “Bye, Darren.” Well, at least it was nice to know she hadn’t lost whatever charm she’d had entirely; she’d caught him eyeing her several times. Probably thought she was going to play Anne Bancroft to his Dustin Hoffman. Good luck with that, young Darren. Then she shook her head; it was hard enough persuading herself she still had a right to even the simplest kind of happiness any more, without bringing sex into the equation.

  Casual encounters had never been her thing anyway: for her, sex was the natural product of the right kind of emotional intimacy, the kind that became a lasting relationship. It had been like that with John – she’d been so sure they’d marry – and then with Andrew. Before John there’d been Tom Passmore at school – she’d given her virginity to him because she’d really believed it was love. Within a week she was dumped and he was practising his smooth talk on another girl. And after John there’d been a brief fling with David, a work colleague’s friend – God, she couldn’t even remember his surname now. Everything had seemed pointless after the split; she’d had some idea that relationships driven by some great passionate love were doomed to burn out. Perhaps it was best to just find someone you could get along with and settle for that: share the mortgage payments and the bills, have someone to provide TLC and cuddles when you were ill or miserable (with the occasional shag thrown in, of course.) That had been David, and it had lasted all of three weeks. That had been the closest to a casual relationship she’d ever had. And, after that, there’d been Andrew.