by Steve Mosby
And no symbols on the pillars.
I had a moment of doubt. Perhaps I was being an idiot.
An idiot in a fucking wood.
It was possible. But then, perhaps I'd just strayed off-course when the path vanished, which I could at least check. So I followed the line of the fence down the Ridge, all the way to the edge of the cliff face there. Found nothing. I went back up again. And a little further past where I'd started, a faint white circle had been painted at the base of one of the pillars.
The strands of barbed wire here had been forced apart to form an eye-shape: one bowing down, the other rising up. On the other side, the undergrowth was slightly broken and trodden down. Wherever the symbols led, it looked like someone else had also followed the trail. How recently was difficult to tell.
I turned around, listening carefully. The wood was vast, open and empty, with sunlight dappling the ground. Beyond the quiet trills of unseen birds, I might have been the only living thing in the world. A part of me hoped so.
Without considering it any more, I turned back to the fence and stretched the top strand of barbed wire a little higher, then clambered awkwardly through.
Immediately, something was different.
The feeling that wasn't quite excitement spread out inside, reaching all the way to my skin. As I began moving forward, every touch of the grass sent a tingle through me.
Holy ground.
It was irrational, but that was how it felt.
I followed the broken-down trail, watching my footing and taking my time. After a minute, I stopped to listen: I couldn't even hear the birds any more. And that was when I first noticed the smell.
Jesus. What is that?
I breathed in again slowly - gingerly - then immediately wished I hadn't. It wasn't the stench of rotting vegetation, but it was like it. I glanced around at the tangles of grass, expecting to see something obvious, but it all looked green and healthy. And actually, the smell was much worse than that. I started off again, but with every step it became more potent, until it felt as though I could almost see it in the air and feel it settling on my skin. It awoke some primal instinct in me.
This is a bad place. Leave here now.
Death, I thought. That was what I was smelling. The rank odour of decay. It was coming from somewhere around me in the grass, or maybe from somewhere up ahead. There was something dead and rotting here, and every step seemed to be taking me closer to it.
Do you want to see?
No, I really didn't. But even so, I found myself moving forward, placing my feet down carefully, anxious not to stand on anything but convinced that, at any second, I would. Yet there was nothing in the grass. I checked to either side of the rough path I was following. Nothing.
No more symbols either. From this point on, I guessed, I was expected to follow something else entirely.
Up ahead, there was a break in the trees.
I lifted my T-shirt and held it over my nose and mouth, approaching cautiously, every nerve in my body singing. The silence was broken here as well: I could hear the gentle trickle of water, so quiet it was almost secret.
The break led into a small clearing, and as I stepped into it the shock hit me, and that hum in my heart fell away, leaving only a solid thudding.
I knew this place.
Oh fuck.
I was standing at the bottom of another cliff face. The rocks looked like the landscape had been formed by shaving small layers of stone away at a hundred random angles. Far above, right on the top, trees stretched even further up into the sky. At the other sides of the clearing, the ground fell away downwards. But my attention was caught by the base of the enormous natural wall to my left, where a large metal pipe emerged from the land, brown and rusted around the rim.
It had been in the most recent photograph Christopher Ellis had posted on his website. 'Dead woman in wood', I remembered - the picture I'd thought might be of Sarah, and then assumed was a police shot. The decomposed body of a girl tucked just beyond the lip of a pipe.
This pipe.
The Water I could hear was trickling out of it, spattering on the ground below. The water, slapping the wet mud below, was the loudest sound in the world.
I couldn't quite see inside.
Another step forward revealed a fraction more of the pipe's interior, but it jolted me too. Every little movement here was amplified. There was a power here that made the atmosphere thick and charged, and I remembered my earlier thought. Holy ground. In this clearing, away from society and almost within touching distance of the pipe, it felt like standing in a church. Not a modern-day building, but something primitive and old, hand-built from rocks. A real church: one where God was present, numbing the air.
And I realised it didn't matter whether I wanted to see. It felt like I didn't have a choice. With the T-shirt still pressed over my nose and mouth, I stepped closer. A stick clicked under my feet, the sound immediately hushed, and I thought:
Emily Price…
Except the pipe was empty.
I let go of my T-shirt and allowed it to fall back into place.
Water was running along the centre of the metal, and leaves and mulch had built up at the entrance. Behind that, the blackness seemed to stretch back indefinitely into the earth. If this was the right place - and I was sure it was - then it meant her body had been removed.
By the police? I thought.
Or by the kind of person who'd steal a body from a field?
And then I realised something was wrong.
The smell was faint here.
Everything around me became very still, as though the undergrowth had suddenly held itself motionless. Because if that odour really had been death and decay, then it should have been concentrated here, shouldn't it? This was where the body had been. And yet I could barely detect it at all.
So what the fuck had been causing it?
I turned around - very slowly - and scanned the path behind me. There was absolutely nothing to see, but the woods there were suddenly full of threat, and the clearing now felt electric for an entirely different reason. There was no sound except for the spatter of the water.
You're being watched.
I shivered. Even though I couldn't see anyone, I knew that was true. There was someone else here. Back in the undergrowth, that rank thing I'd been smelling, maybe…
Maybe something that wasn't dead at all.
There was no way further past the pipes, and I had no chance of climbing the cliff face above them. The only way out of this clearing was to go back the way I'd come.
So that's what you'll have to do.
I forced myself to keep calm and take deep, careful breaths. And then I started off. The path was trodden down, but the undergrowth to either side was thick: walls of grass, punctuated by occasional bramble bushes or solid tree trunks. Difficult to see through. Impossible in places. Anyone could have been there, and as I walked I kept expecting something to leap out from the foliage.
What kind of person would smell like that? I didn't even want to try to imagine. Breathing in now, it remained faint. And listening, the woods were quiet.
Perhaps whoever had been here with me was gone.
I reached the point where I remembered the smell being strongest. It still lingered here, but I thought it was more of the ghost of a scent now. And then I looked to my left and the hairs on my neck stood up.
There was a second trail of flattened grass.
It touched the main path, but led away backwards at an angle. Someone had been there. Perhaps they'd been crouching in the undergrowth at the side of the path. And although I couldn't know it for certain, I thought that, after I'd walked past, they had stepped out behind me.
That new break in the undergrowth filled my vision. I stood there for a moment, half hypnotised by it. And then I stepped forward onto the second path.
It was like triggering an alarm: the terror flared up in my chest, and I heard a high-pitched ringing in my ears. But I forced myse
lf not to step back. Instead, peering carefully to either side, I moved a little further in. The trampled-down undergrowth curled around, forming a path that ran parallel to the one I'd arrived on.
It didn't go far. Barely thirty seconds later, I stepped out onto a precipice of rock. In front of me, looking over the tops of the trees below, I could see all the way out to the fields at the horizon. At my feet, the rock face seemed to go almost vertically down, its hard angles fuzzy with moss and looped with roots. I couldn't see how far it was. The ground down there was lost in the trees.
It looked all but impossible for someone to have clambered either up or down it, but I couldn't see any other explanation. And whoever the man was, he had definitely been here: there was still a trace of the smell in the air. But it was fading now, and I realised I could hear the birds again. The woods seemed to be returning to life, as though something awful had been here for a time, and the world had been keeping still until it was gone.
My heart was returning to normal as well.
I turned around. Headed back.
What the fuck is going on, James?
Because this must have been what he wanted me to see. For some reason I couldn't fathom, he knew about the bag at the Chalkie, and he'd expected me to come here afterwards. What I didn't understand was why.
I looked around the wood, then started up the steps.
James would be able to answer my questions, of course, but I couldn't see him until tomorrow morning. In the meantime, there were at least two other paths I could follow. One was to try to find out more about Emily Price. The second was to get hold of Christopher Ellis and wring some fucking answers out of him.
Whatever was going on here, Ellis had to be the link. I knew he'd posted the photograph of the dead girl online; and I knew Sarah had been to interview him, and had a copy of the symbols noted down in her research. It seemed reasonable to believe those two facts were connected: that Ellis had known about them, and, for some reason, he'd told Sarah.
But knowing that wasn't any real comfort. Because the real question was why there was a trail of symbols up here in the first place. Who had left them, and, even worse, who the hell had been meant to follow them?
I emerged back out of the treeline and glanced up. Above me, the top of the Ridge formed a ragged black line against the sky.
I was beginning to think she was a ghost or something.
I half expected to see a girl standing up there, staring out at this desolate patch of land. But like the pipe back in the clearing, the Ridge was now empty.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Three
The instructions he had been given were relatively simple, but, just to be on the safe side - and because he was sure he must be missing something - he read through them again now.
Head north along the ring road, the instructions began.
Half mile, right onto Winchester Lane.
Quarter mile, right onto Winchester Pass.
And so on.
That was the straightforward part: no problems there. Morgan was basically a glorified delivery boy, and he was used to going places for his boss - although normally it was warehouses, and he got directions from an A-to-Z, rather than a neatly typed piece of paper.
But anyway, he'd followed the various junctions that were listed, gradually leaving the centre of town and heading out into the wilds of the nearby countryside. The directions had eventually brought him here, to a curl of road on the outskirts of Castleforth.
There is a lay-by on the left-hand side of the road.
All he'd been able to see at first was the sheer face of the Ridge, but he'd spotted it as he rounded a corner. A dirt track, little more than the width of the car, angled up and disappearing around a cluster of rocks. He'd slowed the car and driven up, the tyres undulating gently on the hard clumps of dry mud.
The track led to an elevated patch of gravel and yellow sand, with the road out of sight below and to the right. Morgan had pulled ahead, so that whoever he was supposed to meet could fit in behind him, then cricked on the handbrake.
Wait for the delivery to be made.
And so here he was, sitting patiently, listening to the soft click and buzz of the woods, the almost subliminal background music of birdsong.
Waiting.
After a few minutes, he rolled down the passenger window and peered out. He was at the base of an enormous cliff. The Ridge itself seemed to have stepped back a few ancient paces to accommodate this small parking area. Directly to his left, there was a thick wall of trees and undergrowth, and then the rock began some distance beyond, rising sharply. He could see birds, tiny and black, and the silhouetted outlines of distant trees at the top.
The road he'd left wasn't busy, and the few cars he did hear sounded subdued and far away: part of another world. The trees and undergrowth were louder, and the slight breeze brought a musty smell from somewhere deep between them. Midges fluttered lazily around the car.
His sheet of instructions was balanced on top of the map he'd been told to spread out - somewhat theatrically - across the steering wheel. The intention was to allay the suspicions of anyone else who pulled in here, so that Morgan would look like just another lost traveller, unsure exactly where he was, checking the route.
It was ridiculous, of course.
But then, so was the next instruction on the list.
Do not under any circumstances get out of the car.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Morgan didn't like it one bit. He had a vague idea what he was here for: that it would involve meeting someone and picking up a package. That was what his job generally entailed. Usually he was expected to hand something else over in exchange, but this time his employer had clearly made other arrangements to pay for what he was getting. That was OK too. But he'd never dealt with people who provided instructions like these.
Do not under any circumstances get out of the car.
It was the type of advice you'd give someone if there were wild animals around. What was it - was some kind of bear going to pad up to him with a parcel in its jaws? It was rural around here, but it wasn't that fucking rural.
Coming up on three o'clock, which was supposed to be the time of the meet. Morgan alternated between checking his watch, the sheet of instructions and his rear-view mirror. Behind him, the lay-by was slightly distorted and completely deserted. Every time he heard a car approaching, somewhere out of sight on the main road, he expected to see it come bumping up behind him. But there was nothing. And then…
And then he noticed the smell.
It was insidious and it was vile. Slinking into the car inside the pine aroma of the woodland at first, then becoming stronger and more potent within just a few seconds of him noticing it.
Jesus.
One time, back in his student days, he'd moved into a flat but hadn't had time to sort out a full shop, so he grabbed bread, a roast chicken and spare ribs from the market. The bag of leftovers had ended up piled in the hallway, forgotten amongst all the empty cardboard and bin bags: the harmless stuff there was no rush to get rid of. It had been over a month later, suspecting he had a gas leak, that Morgan had tracked the smell to the corridor. He'd lifted away an old box and found the bloodstained bag pulsing and writhing, with twenty or thirty maggots poking through the white plastic skin like acne. Malformed flies, black and dead, had been trapped in the fuzzy curls of the old carpet.
The smell wafting into his car now was like that. It wasn't just the odour itself, but the slow realisation that you were smelling something horribly wrong, and then you found it: oh my God, it's that.
Slowly, Morgan turned his head to face the woodland.
And then quickly turned it back.
The map slid to one side as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands, repeating the instruction to himself, over and over. Do not under any circumstances get out of the car. On a primal level, it now made total sense.
He wasn't even sure what he'd seen.
Something crouched at the edge of the treeline, folded over itself as though bowing in prayer. Impossibly thin. And it appeared to be naked, the nubs of its spine standing out.
Morgan kept facing forward.
A moment later, the side of his face began itching. He was sure it was because the thing in the trees was looking at him.
It's just a man, he told himself.
Some kind of man, anyway. And even though that must have been true, it didn't make him feel any better. He began nodding gently to himself, as though listening to music only he could hear. Breathing through his mouth.
What did a man have to do to smell like-
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and he jerked his head round, expecting to see something right up at the passenger window, staring in.
But the man was gone.
There were just the trees now, their leaves shivering gently, the branches bobbing. Some way back, between them, darkness began. When he risked breathing in through his nose, Morgan realised that awful smell was fading a little. The man had come out of the forest and then retreated back within.
His heart was pounding.
Something had been left for him. It was at the base of the tree where the man had been squatting - praying, or whatever the fuck he had been doing. It looked like a bag. A red and gold sports bag, slumped at the edge of the undergrowth.
Do not under any circumstances get out of the car.
So he sat there for a while, calming himself down. When he checked his watch again, it was twenty past three. The lay-by remained empty. It was naive to hope that the delivery he'd been instructed to pick up hadn't already been dropped off, but a part of him was stubbornly clinging to the idea. Deep down, he knew. He hadn't been supposed to get out of the car until the delivery had been made. Now that it had, he was safe to do so.
Eventually, he fumbled for the instructions.
