by Tim Lebbon
Looking back down at the stream, Rachel leaned to one side until the sun to struck the water. It glittered and gurgled, flowing happily from left to right … and even now some of the weeds on its bed were still shifting around, twisting and tangling, changing their direction of flow.
“No,” Rachel muttered, her voice much louder than the background hum, startling her. Maybe there’s been an earthquake, or something? Maybe some kids were damming the stream and it was backing up …
Maybe the village was having a nightmare.
“Who said that?” Rachel glanced about nervously, the silent words a warm breath in her ear. There was no one there, no company except for a magpie pecking at the path she’d just walked along, smashing something against the ground and pulling out a wet thing from inside.
Rachel turned and ran. She really wished she’d accepted that lift home. That way these things would have remained unseen and unheard, and perhaps her day could have been normal. But she’d be in the square soon and there were people there, she could hear them muttering above the sound of her pounding feet, and they would provide comfort. Looking back she saw that the magpie had gone, but there was something on the path where it had been, glinting wetly where it steamed in the sun. Much, much too big to be a snail or a baby bird.
What was that? Rachel wondered, and although her mind threw up some options she chose to ignore them.
She rounded a bend in the path and the stream was still flowing the wrong way.
The bushes and shrubs and brambles growing from the bank seemed wilder here, uncut and untended, even though it was the height of a drought summer and the stream path was well-used. Something snagged at her cheek and she felt the skin rip. She cried out, stopped and put her hand to her face. There was blood on her palm. When she looked back she saw the offending branch, a fist of thorns at its end. The bush grew from a high bank, one of many thorny branches reaching across the path to dip in the water of the stream, drawing moisture where they could.
There was a house here. Where this tall bank stood now there was a house … or had been a house. Rachel was certain she was in the right place: the square was around the next corner; a fence across the other side of the stream bounded a few bare allotments; a handrail had been built alongside the stream here, perhaps in honour of those mythical drunkenly drowned men. Yes, she knew where she was, and there was a house here. It was an old cottage, a listed building that retained its original windows, doors and internal staircases, and the vicar lived there, it came with the parish and there were rumours of a tunnel between it and the church, stretching out beneath the square. The vicar only smiled and shook his head when kids asked him about it, but he never gave them a rigid denial. Most of them thought it was because he was lying, but Rachel thought he just liked them believing the mystery. Mysteries were important, that’s what her parents told her, and she knew that mostly they were right …
But mysteries were frightening as well.
Like why was the stream flowing the wrong way?
And just where had the vicar’s house gone?
She climbed the bank a little way, grabbing hold of a stem of clematis. It was almost as thick as her wrist and must have been growing for decades. The humming was still there in the background, its distance and direction fogged by the twists and turns of the path and the overgrown banks of the stream.
Rachel moved several feet up the bank and peered into the chaos of stems and trunks and foliage, certain that she’d see the whitewash of the cottage wall, bitterly disappointed that she did not. The undergrowth stretched way back until its profusion prevented her from seeing any further in. She loved mysterious places – paths that led in unknown directions, glades in the woods that felt untouched and untainted – and she wished she could force her way into this hedge to see what lay beyond. Maybe there was a clearing somewhere in there, an old hidden garden overgrown decades ago and forgotten as the village grew up around it. Perhaps she would find a penny-farthing bicycle leaning against a crumbled stone wall, rusted solid now, more a fossil than anything else …
But this is where the vicar’s house should have been.
Rachel tried to jump backwards down to the path but she’d forgotten just how high she’d climbed. Her feet met the bank and she slipped, twisting her right ankle, reaching out to grab hold of something and missing. She landed heavily on her side in the middle of the path. Stones and thorns drove into her palms, elbows and bare legs, and she would have cried out if she hadn’t been badly winded.
She twisted on the path, staring down at its heat-cracked surface. There were yellow ants there, marching to and fro carrying tiny, wrinkled white grubs, taking them somewhere or disposing of them. Maybe her breath would never come back. She seemed to be watching the ants forever. She’d been winded before and she knew it was only a matter of seconds, but maybe she’d cracked her ribs and driven them into her lungs, and fresh air would elude her until her vision blanked and her hearing faded, until a cold dark night came to claim her.
If only, someone said, and Rachel drew in a huge shuddering breath. She sat up and scurried away from the ants, gasping in several huge breaths and feeling the dizziness pass. In her pain and shock, she forgot the voice.
She examined her hands and legs, crying a little when she saw the dribbles of blood and the muddied scrapes on her palms and knees. She should get home and let her mum bathe them, apply plasters where necessary and use tweezers to remove the tiny bits of grit ground into her skin. She’s done it before. She called Rachel a Tom-Boy, but in reality she was just a country girl who enjoyed the place she lived in, and sometimes found pain because of that. Usually she didn’t even care, but now …
She knew that she should never have fallen from that overgrown bank, because it should not be there.
Rachel stood and ran, heading for the next corner that would take her into the square.
“Mum,” she gasped. And then she came to the end of the path. She wanted to call for her mum again, plead with her for help, a natural exhortation from a scared young girl. But her voice betrayed her, and all that came from her mouth was a disbelieving hiss.
The square had gone. The path opened out into a small courtyard surrounded by several buildings. There was a tall, grey house on her left, windows spotting its wall seemingly at random, a thatched roof looking ragged and untended. To her right lay an open shed where rolls of hay rotted and steamed slowly in the summer sun. Movement caught her eye and she saw a big rat scurrying around in there. Straight ahead, a building that could only have been the old slaughterhouse. She knew it was not used any more – Andy and his mates sometimes went in there to do things, they never told her what, but she guessed they were looking at dirty magazines and stuff – but now the stone drain running in front of its sliding entrance door was clogged with filthy blood. Leaves and scraps of hide were floating on its surface, and the doors stood wide open.
Above the slaughterhouse, much further away than it should have been, she saw the church spire. She smiled in relief ... but the feeling was short-lived. Apart from her not actually recognising it, the whole place looked strange, off-kilter, and it took Rachel a while to figure out why: the buildings were old, but they all looked new.
She turned back confused, looked again, wondered where the Tarmac road had gone. This one was merely compacted mud, and there were mounds here and there that could only have been horse shit.
“Mum!” she said, and her voice invaded the place.
She walked forward. It must be a farm, she’d taken a wrong turning somewhere and come out into a farm at the edge of the village—
--but there was no farm this close to the village—
--and if she headed through the farmyard she’d emerge onto the main road that lead into the square, the one she’d have travelled if she’d accepted that bloody lift from Mandy’s mum.
The frightened girl ran across the courtyard, fully expecting to emerge into the square when she rounded the corner of the tall buil
ding. The humming seemed louder here, she was nearing its source, and she never thought she’d be so keen to see her fellow villagers. She passed the slaughterhouse and tried to ignore the stench that came from within, held her breath, but breathing in again a few seconds later she found the rank odours clinging to her clothes and hair.
She looked up and the church spire had vanished.
Rachel rounded the corner but the square was not there. There was something else instead, another place she’d never seen before even though she’d lived here all her life, and she felt everything closing in.
The looming walls, the bright blue sky, the humming torturing her with its insistent beat, the fear that she’d stepped off the path into part of the village that she’d never visited, and the greater fear that this could not possibly be the case. Reality was crushing her with impossibilities. She wanted to stop and scream but, if she did, she thought it would have her.
So she screamed as she ran, crying her fear into open doorways she did not recognise and gardens she had never seen, shouting up at birds which she was sure must live somewhere other than her village, and the only response to her cries was the constant humming. It shook inside her skull as she tried to make sense of it.
She ran faster, willing the distracting stitch in her side and the burning in her knees, because she felt sure that making sense would not be a good idea.
Five
Andy burst through the back door into the kitchen. His mum was sitting at the table reading the newspaper and she jumped, dropping her cigarette and splashing ash across the pine surface. She went to scold him … but then her expression changed when she saw his face.
“Andy, what’s wrong?”
He thought he was all right. He thought Stig would be crying in his mother’s arms by now, snotty and shuddering like a little kid, and Andy would be able to take the piss out of him later. He thought he was all grown up and that what he had seen would have a grown up explanation, so he should not let it get to him.
But as his mother stood at the table, hands shaking by her sides as she approached, reaching out for him, reaching for her little boy … Andy felt his lips start to quiver. His eyes stung, his face felt numb, and when the tears came he could do nothing to hold them back. He hadn’t cried for a while, now – the last time he remembered was hunkered down under his bedcovers as his parents rowed in the next room, and that had been months ago – and certainly not where someone could see him.
“Andy.” Her voice was soothing but questioning, a lot of meaning conveyed in one word: calm down, cry it out, tell me what’s wrong.
He grabbed his mum, holding her around the middle and tucking his face under her chin. She smelled of perfume and boiling ham and cigarettes; she smelled of safety. He only wished his dad were not in work … he needed them both. As he cried and bawled, he realised just how much he needed them both.
“Saw a man,” he gasped, amazed at how much his voice shook. Kids cried like this, babies, not thirteen year old lads. She stroked his hair and said nothing, waiting for him to continue. No one else could see this, this was his mum, so he let the comfort wash through him without fighting it. “A man,” he said again, “in .. in the air … and…”
His mother started rocking slowly from side to side, an unconscious gesture from a decade ago, perhaps, but still so comforting now. Andy felt tears cooling his sunburned face and he closed his eyes, but that brought back the memories. Instead he stared at the bubbling saucepan on the cooker as he told his mum what he had seen.
“He was up in the air behind the station buildings—“
“What were you doing back there? That’s somebody’s garden, Andrew.”
“Mum, we heard screaming!” Andy pulled away so that he could look into her face. He needed that eye contact now, had to show her how honest he was being, how genuine. He was not a liar, he knew that she knew that, but he had to communicate this as it was. “We heard someone screaming, really screaming, and we went to the square to get a policeman, he ignored us so we went back to see. The screaming had stopped but it all felt ... too quiet. Like a scene in a movie, a murder scene, where nothing’s moving and the camera goes around a corner to see the body … and he was there, in the air, moving but not going anywhere. And Mum … he was a million miles away!”
“I don’t understand, Andy. Son, you haven’t been taking anything? Please Andy, tell me…” And, unbelievably, his mother started to cry. Her face screwed up and tears squeezed out, and Andy could not believe what he was doing.
“Mum! Of course I’m not taking anything. I promise!”
She sat back at the kitchen table and wiped the tears away. “It just worries me so much,” she said.
“There’s something else weird,” Andy said, ignoring his mother’s fears because he knew them to be wrong. “We tried to cycle out of the village. We were scared and it seemed the way to go, but we couldn’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“Something wouldn’t let us.”
His mother frowned. “You wanted to come home? Andy, you’re safe here, you always will be, however old you are.”
“No, something stopped us. Something turned us around.” He knew how crazy it sounded. Here and now it sounded unbelievable to him, so that even though the memory was hazed by disbelief he could picture as clearly as day himself and Stig deciding to turn back and come home. The image was there, even the false memory of doing it, and if he was someone else he may have been happy with that. But he knew that was not the way it had been. And he wasn’t someone else, he was his parents’ son, and they always took delight in telling him how he was as stubborn as them.
He could only believe the truth, however unbelievable that may be.
His mother lit another cigarette and frowned through the smoke. Andy exhaled through his mouth to blow it away from him, trying not to let her see. He hated her smoking, but he never wanted her to know that.
He began to shake and had to sit down opposite his mum, putting his hands flat on the table so that they did not twitch in his lap. “It’s a lovely day, Mum, but something really bloody weird—”
“Why was the policeman in the square?” she said.
“Oh fuck! The church, the body—“
“Language Andy!” She started as if whipped by his words, and Andy could barely believe her concern at his swearing when he was telling her all of this. But she hadn’t seen any of it, hadn’t felt just how far away that guy was, even though he was there behind his house in their village he was as distant as anyone had ever been from anywhere …
“Sorry, he said. “But Mum, there was a body in the church. Someone drowned while they were working in the crypt.”
“Drowned? Andy …” She breathed out slowly, took another drag on her cigarette and closed her eyes for a couple of seconds. Andy could see the veins at her temples, a sure sign that she was losing her temper. “A man in the air, a village that won’t let you escape and a man drowned in a church. You, my son, have had a very interesting morning. Now … swear to me that you and Stig haven’t been eating any of those damn mushrooms that grow up near the woods.”
Andy almost shouted, but he knew that would go against him. This all felt so unreal, more so because even he was doubting most of what he was saying. The church thing was true, yes, they’d seen all those people there, but maybe the heat and excitement had affected them. Perhaps he and Stig had wound each other up to such an extent that—
The telephone rang and his mother went out into the hallway to answer it. Andy looked at her packet of cigarettes. He’d only smoked a few times, coughed his guts up, but for some strange reason he wanted to light one up now. Then he looked down at the paper and read the headline to what his mum had been reading upside down. Dreaming Awake: a new study in Narcolepsy.
“Yes, he’s here,” he heard his mother say. “Yes … yes, very agitated. I know, I can hear him in the background.” Her voice lowered and Andy knew straight away who was on the phone. “No,” he heard
, “no, I’m certain he hasn’t taken anything. I’m positive, he’s not a liar. Something in the square, he said. Oh … who told you?” A pause. Andy tapped his fingers against the cigarette packet, picked up the cheap lighter and flicked the wheel. Sparks danced before him. “Really? Two?” Another pause, longer this time. “Well that’s the same thing Andy told me. Okay … yes, you’re welcome, I’ll put the kettle on. Bye.”
“That was Stig’s mum,” Andy said as his mother came back into the kitchen.
She nodded as she filled the kettle. “She’s worried to death about him. I heard him crying in the background, he was frantic.” She glanced at Andy as she plugged in the kettle, then looked away again. “She’s heard that two workmen were killed in an accident in the church.” His mum trailed off then, leaned against the sink and looked out into their garden.
“Someone should check on that guy behind the old station, too,” Andy said.
His mother did not answer. She continued staring, seemingly lost somewhere, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She did this when she was deep in thought. It drove Andy’s dad mad when she was working on a crossword puzzle. Like a bloody metronome, he’d told Andy one day in the garden. Puts me to sleep.
“Mum?”
“Huh?” She turned back and smiled. “Oh. Stig and his mum are coming over. We can chat about this, then maybe go down to the square.”
“Why?”
“To see what’s going on. You want this explained, don’t you?”
Andy nodded, but suddenly the prospect of going back to the square filled him with dread. One guy drowned … wonder how the other one died.
“I’ll just nip in and change,” his mum said, and Andy knew straight away that she was lying. He hated that. The idea that she had to hide things from him was detestable, more so now. “Only be a minute.”
He sat at the kitchen table and heard her walk across the timber-floored hallway. She pushed the bedroom door almost shut and he was left alone, with only the growing rumble and hiss of the kettle to keep him company. Outside he could almost hear the blazing sun baking the ground, the trees gasping in the heat, grasses withering their last . He loved the summer and he loved the summer holidays even more, but now there was a blight on his enjoyment. The idea that today’s events could spoil the rest of the summer was unbearable. What if Stig was too upset or scared to come out again? What if they found that guy dead behind the old station, and his own parents decided he shouldn’t be wandering the village on his own? He didn’t want an adult’s holiday, he wanted a kid’s holiday, he was thirteen and he knew just what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go and with whom. The village was his for the summer. Being cosseted by his parents would be as good as being imprisoned.
