A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

  Talking of stagnant, just past the memorial was a dwindling duck-pond, empty and half-turned to a swamp with a thin crust of dried mud round the rim. Clumps of limp, weedy-looking rushes sprouted from it and he almost gagged on the smell.

  The street was deserted; the whole village might have been devoid of life, as empty as the farmhouse had looked, with the exception of the pub. Its doors were open and there was a low babble of voices drifting out from within. An old man sat outside on a bench before a low table, nursing a pint of bitter or stout. He wore paint-spattered corduroys and a threadbare check shirt, and despite the baking-hot weather, a denim jacket. His face looked like a walnut dried almost to dust, eyes watery and blank, a beard of coarse white hair, like sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire, straggling down the front of his shirt in an unruly spill.

  Dan risked a smile and a nod. The old man just stared at him, through him, unblinkingly, as though blind, then raised his pint to his lips and took a swallow. Several. His thin, wattled throat rippled and bobbed as he gulped. Dan’s smile twisted and froze to his face, but not for long—as he passed into the pub it slithered away. Well, in this weather, nothing was going to stay frozen for long.

  The pub was quiet, a low-beamed ceiling, hung with tarnished brasses, compressing the tobacco smoke into a thin, choking smog. Maybe half-a-dozen faces were scattered throughout the snug, in a cluster of three older men here, skin as dark and dry and wrinkle-cracked as drought-dried earth, two pallid, vaguely inbred-looking teenagers there, and a lone man perched on a stool at the bar, talking to what Dan presumed was the landlord. The man on the stool was the only one who didn’t turn around and look at him. The youngsters followed him with unblinking, blank-eyed stares that he couldn’t help thinking rightly belonged in an aquarium; the older men crouched over their table and their pints as though he might attack, and watched him malevolently through narrow, beady eyes like fissures in stone. The malevolence was real, not imaginary; the hostility in the pub was tangible, like the static charge that builds in the air before a storm. The barman, overweight, sweat-stained, balding, and unshaven, took his elbows off the bar and straightened up as Dan approached, folding his arms across his chest and glowering from under beetling brows.

  I’ve seen this film, thought Dan, dreading the moment when someone would call ‘Make like a pig, city boy.’ He almost smiled, then decided not to. They’d only think he was taking the piss, which he didn’t want, even though he was. He was acutely aware how alone he was here, how vulnerable, how reliant on the goodwill of the locals. Not a pleasant prospect.

  The barman was looking at him like a toad on a lilypad surveying a particularly tempting fly. Only the man on the stool kept his back to Dan, staring into his pint as though you could read the future in the traces of froth clinging to the sides of the glass.

  ‘Er . . .’ Dan’s voice came out like Brando’s in The Godfather. Had any of this lot seen that film? Hell, had they even heard of it? Or of cinema, come to think of it? He cleared his throat. ‘Hi.’

  The barman just looked at him, not even blinking. Great start.

  ‘My—er—my car broke down? About three, four miles up the road?’ Any sense of being an outsider, with his clothes and his taste and his views, that Dan had felt back in the big city, was squared, then cubed, then both of each again here. ‘I was wondering if you’ve got a phone I could use.’

  There was one, he could see already, at the end of the bar; already he found himself taking a step towards it. But the barman moved towards it too, ready to block his way, and said ‘No.’

  Dan stopped. One of the inbred teenagers sniggered. Christ. Great. Of all the places in all the world, he had to break down outside the biggest rural cliché on the planet. Like the set of fucking Straw Dogs.

  The man on the stool glanced up, in the direction of the youngster, and the sniggering stopped abruptly. Dan glanced at them both. They stared insolently back at him, pallid doughy faces as empty of expression as a maggot’s, daring him to take exception. The three older men were all very still, beady eyes still focussed as one. The man on the stool looked back down at his pint as Dan turned back to the barman. There was a suspicion of a smile on the landlord’s face. He was a big, brawny bastard, despite the flab. Tattoos crawled up his hairy arms like malformed spiders etched in blue ink. A fly buzzed briefly in the air. There was the sound of a hand slapping flat against polished wood, and its buzz ceased, flight and life both cut short. Somebody struck a match; there was a whiff of sulphur.

  The barman smiled openly now. ‘Phone’s for patrons only,’ he said.

  ‘Fine.’ Dan sighed and pulled up a stool, dumping his backpack on the floor. ‘I’ll have a pint.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Got any lager?’

  ‘No.’ The barman was grinning smugly. Christ, teeth like a row of gravestones. Crooked ones.

  ‘Pint of bitter, then.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Whatever’s best.’

  ‘Depends what you like.’

  Great. No help. Dan selected a pump and random and pointed. ‘Pint of that, then.’

  The barman pulled it. ‘Two-seventy.’

  Christ alive. At least Dick Turpin had the manners to wear a mask. Still, best not to rock the boat. Dan paid and took a swallow. Flat, warm, and it tasted like it had already been drunk at least once. But he sighed and smiled as if he’d just downed an ice-cold gulp of Stella Artois. ‘I’m a patron now, aren’t I?’

  The barman smiled and nodded.

  ‘So can I use the phone, please?’

  He was ready for another refusal, another stupid dance round the mulberry bush on some excuse, but the barman just shrugged, still smiling. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Dan crossed the bar to the phone and picked it up. Who was it best to call? He was still wondering that when he put the phone to his ear, and at that point the question became irrelevant. He jiggled the cradle without success. Someone sniggered again, touching off a ripple of hissed chuckles. Dan bit down on a surge of anger; he was outnumbered here and alone. Hostile territory, he thought.

  He turned; the barman was grinning, leaning on the bar with amusement. Dan didn’t look around, in case the sight of the mirth on the others’ faces provoked him beyond all endurance. Only the man on the stool didn’t seem to be joining in, just sat with his nose in his pint. He wore a jacket too, despite the heat, and a cloth cap.

  ‘There’s no dial tone,’ Dan said.

  The barman nodded, sagely. ‘That’d be ’cos the phone lines are down. Have been for a week. Christ knows when they’ll go back up.’

  ‘Shit,’ Dan muttered. All right. Stuff these wankers. Next village along might be more helpful. ‘Which way’s the nearest village after here?’

  The barman jerked his head back. ‘’Bout twenty miles, that way.’

  ‘Twenty-two that way,’ said a voice from behind him.

  ‘Twenty-four to the north.’

  ‘Twenty-six to the west.’

  Truth or lie? Could well be the latter, just having fun baiting the townie. Trouble was, could he risk the chance? Twenty miles in weather like this was no joke. Could be fatal.

  ‘Is there a garage, anything like that?’

  ‘Oh aye. One here. Cash only, though. How much you got?’

  Dan considered how much was in his wallet. A couple of quid, maybe? Nowhere near enough. ‘Don’t suppose there’s a bank here?’

  The barman grinned wider than ever, displaying the full extent of the dental nightmare he called his teeth, and shook his head.

  ‘Think you’re a little bit stuffed, aren’t you, mate?’ one of the teenagers called from behind. Dan’s face and fists tightened for a moment, but he calmed himself. Tempers run high in this heat. Don’t let something start, because it might not stop till your blood’s on the floor.

  One of the older guys was laughing. ‘Going to have to get some more money, lad!’

  The barman snorted a chuckle.
<
br />   One of the boys chipped in again. ‘Could always try walking the The Crows, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Arthur!’ The man on the bar-stool spoke for the first time, head snapping up furiously. There was an uncomfortable silence. As if Dan didn’t feel threatened enough, now there was something else, some fresh undercurrent he couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

  He glanced round to see one of the teenagers shifting uncomfortably, a slow flush creeping up through his loose, flabby neck. ‘Aw, fuck off, Smithy.’

  The man was off the bar stool in a moment, taking quick steps forwards. ‘What’d you say to me, lad?’

  The teenager went from red to an even whiter shade of pale. ‘Nothing, Smithy.’ He raised his hands as if in surrender and flapped them weakly in the air, like crippled birds. ‘Nothing. Nothing, mate.’

  Smithy nodded. He was youngish, about thirty, but with the weather-beaten look of a man who spent most of his time outside in the sun, the wind, or the rain. His eyes were blue and very sharp. There was another silence, all in the pub a frozen tableau. Then smoke puffed through the air from someone’s pipe or roll-up and a fly buzzed again. This time no one swatted it.

  ‘Right then, Smithy,’ the barman said, leaning casually on the counter. ‘What’s he going to do, then? You going to help him out with a few bob?’

  Another chuckle rippled through the pub. ‘We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we lads? So if he wants his money, it’s The Crows or nothing.’

  Another of the teenager’s sniggers again. Dan’s hands clenched tight into fists. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘what’s this crows lark, then?’

  ‘Easy,’ said the barman. ‘You get your money; we patch your car up and send you on your merry way. All you’ve got to do is walk through The Crows.’

  ‘Piece of piss,’ one of the older men laughed.

  ‘Walk through a bunch of crows?’ Dan shook his head. ‘What, without making them all fly off or something?’

  ‘No.’ It was Smithy who spoke. Everyone went quiet now. He looked down at the floor. ‘The Crows is a place. And no one wins this bet. Forget about it, mate.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do?’ Dan appealed. ‘How else do I get out of here?’

  ‘You could always stay,’ said one of the older men.

  ‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘Come on. Stay. Join us.’ The tone was half plea, half command. And there was, thought Dan, a kind of hunger to it. One he didn’t like.

  He didn’t look round. He ignored the barman now. He looked directly at Smithy, willing the man to meet his eyes. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  Smithy looked up, and his eyes were unreadable. He chewed his lip. ‘Go on, then, Smithy,’ the barman said, tauntingly. ‘He’s up for it. Show him.’

  ‘He doesn’t know what he’s up for,’ Smithy said harshly. He didn’t look at the barman either, just stared straight at Dan, almost pleadingly.

  ‘Well, then, Smithy—I suppose you’d better show him. Hadn’t you?’

  Another bloody snigger. The air felt thick, stifling, unbreathable. The heat of the place pressed down on him like a weight, more so than ever. Was it blood heat, the temperature at which the most murders were committed? How close to that temperature was it now? Too close; it felt as though at any minute Dan might try to kill one of these people, turning on them and lashing out in bind fear and fury, or they him, seeing perhaps in this outsider, in this outsider among outsiders, a scapegoat and whipping-boy for all their community’s manifold—and obviously terminal—ills.

  Smithy chewed his lip, eyes down, then finally looked up at Dan. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, and beckoned him towards the door.

  ‘Wey-hey!’ whooped the barman; whistles and cheers followed Dan and Smithy to the door. As they went out, the old man with his wiry white beard took another gulp of his pint, turning as he did to stare at—through—Dan, and inside the pub they started a slow handclap, one that followed Smithy and Dan all the way up the road in the hot, motionless air.

  They walked on up, past more boarded-up shops and houses and a few still occupied. Smithy said nothing, only looked straight ahead blankly. The garage loomed up on the right hand side of the road, and then they were through.

  A gnarled, dead-looking tree jutted from the roadside at an angle as they passed out of the village proper. Beyond that was another field, fallow and choked with half-dead weeds. And beyond that, the road rose slightly, and when it dipped . . .

  ‘There,’ said Smithy, pointing. ‘That’s The Crows.’

  A field it was, like any other in dimensions, but in contents . . . Dan walked slowly down the slope of the road until he was in front of it. Only a thin fence, broken and cracked and rotten, stood between him and The Crows.

  There was a space of maybe three feet of soil between the fence and The Crows’ true beginnings. It was grey like ashes that had been mixed with water and left to dry hard—hard, like the dead moss on the signs, like the rime of shitten mud round the edge of the pool.

  ‘Are those . . . ’ Dan asked.

  ‘Aye,’ Smithy came up behind him to stand at his side.

  ‘But they can’t grow here. Not in this country.’

  ‘No. But they do.’

  The whole field called The Crows, from one end to the other, was jammed full of cacti.

  All tall, they came in all shapes; trident-pronged saguro, others that consisted of fat spiny discs glued one to another and attached to thick, barrel-like bodies. Here and there, flowers bloomed. A sea of spiny green lumps and protuberances, stretching out and out and out. They were practically shoulder to shoulder, and surely that was impossible too? Didn’t the roots of a cactus spread out a long, long way? Then again, these were the comparatively lush fields of England, not the desert. But still, surely, impossible. Just like their very existence. The Crows was, in itself, a whole huge acre of impossibility, cut loose from the fabric of all the other impossible things and plonked down here.

  ‘They grow here,’ Smithy nodded. ‘Suck up all the goodness out of the land. Nowt we can do. We’ve tried. Nothing else will grow there, and whatever we do to it, they always grow back. So bloody fast you’d not believe it. We feed ’em best as we can so they leave something for us.’

  ‘So this . . .’ He gestured towards it. ‘This is what I’ve got to walk through.’

  Smithy nodded uncomfortably, mordantly. ‘If you can cross The Crows, you’ve won.’

  ‘And if I don’t? What’s the penalty?’

  Smithy didn’t answer; he just stared out across The Crows. Dan looked at it. Right in the middle of it, there was a gap. He could see a long way, through gaps in the cacti. He thought he could almost see past to where the field opened out again. Could it be that hard? What was the worst that could happen? A few scratches? Worth it to get shot of this place, surely? Come on. Stay. Join us. Christ, they were that hard up for a bit of company, for something to do?

  Two heavy cacti loomed each side of the gap. A limb of one of them bobbed, stirred by something, and for a moment it made Dan think of some hunched, crabbed old man, nodding to himself as he chuckled with senile malice. The other, towering and straight, no limbs, just a tall, jutting column (how phallic, wouldn’t Freud love that) put him in mind of a night-club bouncer, almost statue-still, till you tried to get past it.

  ‘One question,’ he said.

  Smithy struck a match and lit a prison-thin roll-up cigarette. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Why’s it called The Crows?’

  There was a clattering sound and Smithy smiled grimly. ‘See for yourself.’

  Dan looked towards the field. A pair of black, glossy birds had flapped in and touched down, each atop one of those two, sentinel-standing cacti. Crows, of course.

  ‘There’s always been a pair of them. Two, no more, no less. Round this way, you know, it’s said that two crows together means the Devil’s here.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  Smithy just puffed on his roll-up. ‘They get fat
off all that’s here. Easy to get lost in The Crows. Get caught on the thorns, stuck there. Lot of animals and suchlike go in and they don’t come out again. Easy pickings for those two when that happens.’

  And on that pleasant note . . .

  Smithy puffed a few last times on his roll-up. Then dropped it and ground it out with the toe of his boot. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good luck. Away you go.’

  Dan scowled, wondering if maybe a twenty-mile walk wasn’t such a bad idea after all. ‘Hang on a minute. I’ve not said I’m doing it.’

  Smithy looked at him pityingly. ‘Who said you’ve a choice?’

  It might have been something in his tone, or maybe his eyes wandered over Dan’s shoulder; whichever it was, Dan turned. They were coming over the rise and stopping to watch: the old man from outside the pub, the two teenagers, the three older men, and a few others, girls and women with slack mouths and vacant eyes and squalling babies like swaddled lumps of mottled dough. They stood, packed together in the narrow roadway as tight as the cacti in The Crows. And of course, at the head of the crowd, who should be standing there but the barman, arms folded across his barrel chest, and smiling, smiling, smiling, eyes fixed straight on Dan. All the fear and threat rose up anew, threatening to choke him.

  Was this what Smithy meant by ‘feeding’ The Crows? Or was it their only entertainment, the only relief in their blighted lives, sucked dry by this thing that drained the vitality from their land? Perhaps the death of a stranger. Or just his terror, his humiliation. Maybe it was all a big put-up and when he couldn’t make it through they’d come and haul him out, have a laugh, fetch his car. . . .

  You really believe that, Dan?

  Course I do, Dan.

  ‘Best of luck,’ said Smithy again. ‘And off you go.’

  His face wasn’t as hard or pitiless as those of the others, but there was no more help here than anywhere else. Dan glanced from him to the barman and the rest, and saw the same implacability.