Hell Cat of the Holt

by Mark Cassell

  Leo lived in one of the two cottages I’d often walked past on my search for Murphy. Both gardens were as overgrown as my own, although on his driveway sat a silver BMW. It had a registration plate from last year, hiding beneath accumulated grime that I suspected was just as old.

  Inside his home, sparse and contemporary furniture dotted the place. This, for some reason, surprised me. An ugly yellow coffee table sat in the middle of the lounge. An aroma of coffee disguised a lingering stale smell, and I wondered how long it had been since he’d opened a window. I followed him through to a back room which suited him more than what I’d seen of the rest of the house.

  He switched on the light and gestured for me to sit in a threadbare armchair beside a window without curtains. From what I saw of his rear garden in the swiftly-falling twilight, it looked just like the front.

  I didn’t sit down.

  Books of varying age covered a small computer desk in the corner. A laptop sat askew in the middle of a bunch of papers. Some newspapers, too. Empty Budweiser bottles filled the wastepaper basket beside a swivel chair.

  The most dominant thing in the room was an impressive world map which almost filled a wall from floor to ceiling. Cryptic diagrams were pinned across it and coloured string connected several locations, surrounded by photographs and printed images. One was of an amber mask, another of a Mediterranean island. There was a close-up of a group of suited men talking in a restaurant, and even a hazy photograph of a jungle tribe. The latter had an arrow pointing to it in thick black marker pen, and scribbled over the Atlantic Ocean were the words: DEVIL’S SKULL. From that, a smaller arrow pointed to what my limited geographical knowledge made me see as Peru. I couldn’t be certain because most of that continent hid behind curled notebook pages containing chunks of text. Great Britain was a mess of coloured pins, and so beside it was a larger map of the British Isles and another of Kent, highlighting Mabley Holt itself.

  “What is this?” I asked as I approached it.

  Pinned beside the map of Mabley Holt were two photocopied images: one of an hourglass which appeared to have a leather strap attached to it, and another of an ornate knife.

  “What does it all mean?” I looked at him. He’d been watching my reaction all this time.

  “This is my life,” he said.

  This was chaos, that’s what it was. On the desk, askew with the laptop, an acrylic painting half hid under a book. It was square, not much larger than the book itself.

  “What the hell …?” I snatched it up. “What the hell is this?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

  His jaw muscles rippled and he breathed out, his face giving away nothing.

  It was a painting of a woman underwater, wearing shoes and a familiar coat. She had her face against a rock at the bottom of the river.

  “It’s me …” I whispered.

  In the painting, the rocks had traces of reds and yellows, like some kind of underwater cave painting. Just like I’d seen the moment before Leo had rescued me. In the corner, there was a large pair of boots evidently running – the motion was captured with incredible talent.

  “You painted this?” My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “How did you know what I saw? I didn’t tell you what I saw!”

  Leo said nothing, only stared back at me.

  “Answer me!” I threw the canvas back on the desk and it landed beside an ancient-looking tome titled Necromeleons. I had no idea what that meant and didn’t care.

  “That was painted last week,” he said.

  “Impossible. You must have painted it after you pulled me out of the water. You went home and painted it then, yeah? That’s what happened.”

  “I didn’t paint it.”

  “Who did then?” My cheeks burned.

  “A lady called Pippa, a fine artist.”

  “Who the hell is Pippa?”

  “She’s my neighbour.”

  “What?” I laughed. “Next door?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to meet her. Now.” I knew I was getting hysterical again, but this was all getting too much.

  “You’re not ready.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” This guy was seriously pushing my buttons. I grabbed the painting again, my knuckles white.

  “Anne, honestly, there’s something about Pippa that isn’t entirely … um … normal.”

  “And what does that—?”

  There was a knock on the door. Soft at first, then frantic.

  Leo’s brow furrowed and he straightened up. “Stay here,” he said and strode into the other room.

  I threw myself into the chair and groaned. The stupid chair was not even comfortable; thin cushions allowed the wood to press into my bum. This was all getting far too crazy for me. I glared at the canvas, at the way the artist had painted those markings. It was precisely what I’d seen.

  “Insane,” I said.

  Leo’s voice boomed through the house: “Holy shit, man!”

  I leapt up and tossed the painting onto the chair, and jogged from the study. My legs ached. I went through the dining room and—

  Leo had a man’s arm around his neck, staggering into the lounge. Whoever it was had blood caked over his yellow jumper and on his neck and face. It slicked his grey hair flat.

  “What happened?” Leo demanded.

  My stomach twisted as I approached.

  “Clive?”

  INTERLUDE (PIPPA)

  Last summer

  Pippa hated deadlines. She packed too much into the day and she knew it.

  Kneeling, she yanked aside the carpet and a cloud of dust plumed. She coughed. The underlay crumbled as she pulled further and rolled it halfway across the room to lean against an easel and a box of acrylics. As always, getting carried away with any project at hand. She intended to dedicate an entire week to an approaching deadline and to finish the studio. Her studio. She found it pretentious to call it that, but now that she received paid commissions it was time to do this.

  She coughed again and leapt to the window. Whatever she’d inhaled clung to her tongue like bitter chalk. As she opened the latch, birdsong washed into the room and the countryside stole away the dead air. Beneath an overcast morning and beyond her garden, fields stretched across the Kent hills like a stitched blanket of varying shades of green.

  She moved from the window to face the room.

  Something had once burnt the floorboards: scorch marks zigzagged the timber, some curled to create arcs that disappeared beneath the roll of carpet.

  Weird. Two years since buying the place and she had no idea they were there. Crouching, she rubbed the gritty timber. Her palm was smeared black as though she’d been sketching with charcoals. Rubbing her hands together made the stuff crumble away like black breadcrumbs.

  She stood and pain lanced her temple. Agony shot across her forehead, into her brain, and darkness pressed in from the corners of her eyes, tighter, tighter and …

  Cold air rushed into her lungs. She staggered. Twigs snapped beneath her shoes.

  Where was she?

  Below the brilliant slice of moon, branches creaked and leaves hissed on a wind that stabbed her clothes. The wet smell of undergrowth and foliage overwhelmed her. Her knees weakened, her legs buckled, and she fell. Her fingers pushed into the soggy ground, freezing. She groaned. A myriad of colours swept across her vision.

  “What—?” She was somewhere outside, in the fields behind her cottage perhaps. Yet it was so cold. This surely couldn’t be a summer’s night. And it had been morning a second ago.

  Fragments of stone squatted in the shadows; mossy and jagged, half buried. Gravestones? Maybe she wasn’t near home at all. But there were no other markers and certainly no churchyard, only looming trees and that sliver of moon.

  The darkness beyond deepened, shifted. A silhouette broke the shadows.

  A woman approached.

  Her dress whipped around thin legs and bare feet, movements slow and jittery.
It was as if she waded through water.

  Pippa pushed herself backwards, her shoes digging into the earth.

  The moon cast a silver halo around the woman’s unkempt hair, leaving her face in shadow. Closer, closer … and Pippa pushed herself back further, and further.

  The rough bark of a trunk dug into her spine.

  Still no more than a silhouette, this woman, this phantom, reached out a slender arm. The moonlight reflected from young skin, her fingernails chipped and raw, skin bleeding. Closer.

  She pressed icy knuckles against Pippa’s forehead.

  A short scream tumbled from Pippa’s quivering lips and echoed through the trees.

  Something rumbled, deep, grinding. Black lines scorched the ground, singeing the leaves and twigs and even the earth itself. Cracked and broken stones pushed through the earth. Silhouettes flickered and shimmered between trees. More phantoms. All dressed in rags, some clutching shreds of fabric to thin bodies. All featureless and blank, hidden in the shadows.

  Those fingers still pressed her forehead, numbing her brain. Darkness swarmed her, the images of the women blurring. Blending and churning.

  Pippa jerked upright, eyes wide.

  Back in her studio, a low evening sunshine poured through the open window. The comforting smell of paint clung to the air.

  In front of her stood five easels, each supporting a canvas displaying her bold style. A smaller one balanced on the roll of carpet. Paint of every colour smeared her hands, her clothes. She tasted acrylics on her lips.

  One canvas was of an oak tree that towered over the bloodied bodies of men, their clothes torn – perhaps even clawed – open. Blood soaked the grass. From a twisted branch above dangled a hanging woman dressed in little more than rags, her head angled in a noose. Another was of a market square in an unfamiliar village, focused on the thrashing body of a woman tied to a wooden post. She was on fire and screamed into the night. The flames illuminated both the surrounding crowd and billowing smoke. Several onlookers writhed on the ground, their heads a bloody mess against uneven paving. The other paintings depicted similar scenes of women dying; stabbed, drowned, beheaded. This last was particularly nasty.

  She’d dedicated an entire day to this insanity; a day that should’ve been for commissioned work. Why couldn’t she remember painting these?

  The smallest canvas that rested on the roll of paint-spotted carpet was unfinished. The least menacing, it depicted a wall of looming rock, moss-covered and ancient. Across the leaf-strewn ground, dark clumps of mushrooms or fungus darkened the shadows. No death scene here. She recognised it; she’d recently been there. Yes, on one of her long inspiration-searching walks across the fields.

  Her head pounded and she was hungry, tired.

  She snatched up the bottles of acrylics and brushes that were scattered about the floor and threw it all in to cartons. She couldn’t keep this stuff; she’d have to buy more. She had work to do, deadlines to meet.

  She glanced at each painting. Finally, her gaze dropped to the floorboards, to those scorch marks. She had somewhere to go, somewhere to visit: that sheer-faced rock wasn’t too far.

  So much work to do.

  Deadlines.

  She hated deadlines.

  EVERYTHING CHANGED

  Leo bustled into the kitchen, half-carrying, half-dragging Clive. Blood and black filth smeared the poor man’s hands and face. His bottom jaw quivered, his eyes darting all about the room. I helped guide the old man to the sink. Leo ran hot water and squirted washing-up liquid into the bowl. The smell of fresh lemon filled my head.

  “Good as anything,” Leo said when he caught my disapproving look.

  I guessed it would be better than simply using hand wash, so I grabbed a cloth and turned to Clive.

  “Janice …” He pushed my hand away. “Janice!”

  I thought of the image I’d seen at his window, and that he believed he could speak with the apparition. Given all that I’d recently learnt, I now believed him.

  “I woke up with this blood everywhere,” he sputtered and finally allowed me to help clean his hands. “I don’t understand.”

  “What happened?” I asked as I searched for cuts. There were none. “Whose blood is this?”

  “I can taste that bloody awful fungus that’s growing everywhere!”

  Leo stood aside as I tried to wipe Clive’s face. He now seemed more willing to allow me to help. The water in the bowl was dark grey and clumps of muck floated on the surface. Luckily, all I could smell was lemon.

  “Whose blood is this?” I repeated.

  “That’s just it,” Clive said, “I don’t know!”

  As I wiped it from his face, I only succeeded in smearing it across his skin. This was not something I was used to. I looked at Leo.

  He nodded. “I’ll get the bathroom ready so you can have a shower. Some clean clothes, too.”

  Clive and I watched him leave the room.

  Whatever was happening, I was starting to feel like it was spiralling out of my control – if I’d ever been in control in the first place.

  The old man, who right now looked even older than his 80-odd years, whispered, “Janice spoke to me, Anne. She spoke to me.”

  “What has she been saying?” Having cleaned him up as best I could, I scrubbed my hands and dried them on a tea towel.

  “That’s just it, the more I think of it, the more I can’t actually remember. It doesn’t make any sense, and when I try to remember, it really bloody hurts my brain.” As though to reinforce his words, he placed a hand to his forehead. His palm was pink with smeared blood. I had done a pretty useless job at cleaning him up.

  “Tell me about all this blood, Clive,” I said.

  “I … I don’t understand what’s going on.” His eyes flashed large and bright. A fleck of the black stuff clung to an eyelash. “Help me!”

  I wondered how he came to be here, and assumed the pair must already be friends. Leo’s house wasn’t too far from our side of the village, just along the bridleway as I’d recently discovered.

  “Did you walk over here?” I asked.

  “Again,” Clive whispered, “I don’t remember.”

  I looked up from my nails that I hadn’t realise I’d been picking. The varnish was embarrassingly chipped. “What do you mean?”

  With a stronger voice, he said, “First I was on my sofa, watching … watching … TV … I can’t remember what I was watching.” His gaze lingered towards a corner of the kitchen.

  “Then what?”

  “It was like the shadows just …”

  Somehow, I think I knew what he was about to add.

  “… They just closed in on me. I don’t know what happened then, but I found myself in the fields out back, near some rocks.”

  “Rocks?” I thought of what Leo had said about the shadows, and also the map of the world, and in particular the detailed map of Mabley Holt. The rocks were containment stones, Leo had said.

  “I came to, covered in all this blood!” He held out his hands.

  “Those stones are proving to be a large part of all this madness.”

  His shoulders slumped, and right at that moment the poor old man looked smaller than I’d ever known him to be. “Anne, whose blood is this?”

  I opened a cupboard and pulled out two glasses. The light caught thumb prints and it made me question Leo’s hygiene – I guessed he had a lot going on right now so who was I to pass judgement? I filled both glasses up with cold water and offered one to Clive. For a moment, he just stared at it. It was as though he didn’t know what to do with it, so I placed it on the counter and sipped mine – deliberately slow so I no longer had to talk. The cold water chilled my throat, sharpening my senses. All I wanted was to head back home and sleep, and I had no idea of the time because the kitchen clock had stopped at 3:33.

  When Leo returned, Clive quickly snatched up the glass. Water splashed his sleeve and spattered the floor. He gulped it, allowing some to dribble down his neck a
nd soak his blood-stained jumper.

  “Clive,” Leo said, “come upstairs. You can clean yourself up here. I’ve left a towel and some clothes in the bathroom for you.”

  “Want me to come?” I asked.

  Clive flashed a look of what could have been embarrassment, with eyes perhaps a little more focused. I guessed the cold water had stolen away his confusion.

  “It’s okay,” Leo said, seeing the old man’s look, “we can manage.”

  The two men left and I listened to their footsteps up the stairs and along the landing. I went back into Leo’s study.

  That damned painting.

  What the hell was going on? I wanted to call the police, but knew there was so much more to come. Just as Leo had told me earlier, I doubted the police could do anything anyway. This was beyond anything I’d ever before experienced.

  I glared at the canvas that sat crooked on the armchair. Leo claimed it was by a woman called Pippa, his neighbour for God’s sake. Disregarding how incredible the whole thing was, I could not deny the woman’s talent. The damn thing could stay there; I didn’t want to touch it. I set about rummaging through the chaos that littered Leo’s desk. I didn’t give a shit if he cared about my invasion of his privacy.

  That painting was an invasion of mine.

  I flicked through the papers on the desk. Nothing made sense. The aged book titled Necromeleons was heavy and the page it fell open on was one that had been bookmarked by a receipt for bread and milk. The page depicted a black and white sketch of a jagged outcrop of rock covered with interesting symbols. And it was no surprise that those symbols were precisely like those I’d seen in the river. Another sketch was of a row of stone fragments set out in a circle on a grassy hill. It reminded me of Stonehenge. The text was a mix of German and French. Perhaps even Latin. I had no idea; numbers had always been my thing. A flick through the book showed more chunks of text and peculiar sketches of demons and devils and dark patterns that I could only describe as twists of shadow. Which, given all that had been explained, came as no surprise. I placed the book back down.

  Poking out from under a bunch of photocopied notes on witchcraft and demonology and stone etchings, an aged Polaroid snatched my curiosity. It was a close-up of one of the symbols. Just like one I’d seen in the river: two triangles with facing apexes, one hollow and the other solid, separated by a crudely shaped X.