Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

  ‘I don’t mind what you do,’ Kelly snapped.

  ‘Holy cosh…,’ he mused. ‘That was actually quite funny. Well done you.’

  Kelly rolled her eyes.

  ‘So you like giving things up, then, Kelly?’ the Reverend asked.

  ‘I’d like it if you gave up,’ Kelly opined, returning to her reading.

  ‘Could I ask you a special favour?’ the Reverend wondered.

  Kelly glanced over at the curtains for a second time.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It’s just that now we’re on this fast together…’

  ‘Whaddya mean? Fast? I ain’t on no fast.’

  ‘Now that you’re dieting for Jesus…’

  ‘Who cares why I’m dietin’?!’ she expostulated. ‘It ain’t none of your damn business.’

  ‘But it is my business,’ he maintained calmly, ‘Jesus is my business, which makes you my business.’

  Kelly threw down the photocopied sheets with a frustrated hiss.

  ‘Why’re you in here, anyways?’ she asked, crossing her arms. ‘Brain tumour?’

  ‘I’m here because God willed it,’ he informed her.

  ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘He struck me down three times…’

  ‘What? With his fist?’

  ‘…and each time,’ he ignored her, ‘I was blessed with a singular vision.’

  Silence

  ‘An’ what do the doctors make of that?’ she asked.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of God’s willin’ it an’ stuff?’

  ‘The doctors don’t give a hoot about God’s will. They think it was probably a minor stroke.’

  ‘But God told you different, huh?’ she sneered.

  ‘Yup.’ Reverend Jacobs seemed very sure on this point.

  Kelly snorted, derisively, and grabbed a hold of her papers. She tried to find her place, but couldn’t.

  ‘If God made you sick,’ she reasoned, slitting her eyes, ‘then why don’t he make you well again?’

  ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ the Reverend quoted.

  ‘How old are ya?’ she asked, scowling.

  ‘I’m forty-two.’

  (Hmmn. A mite younger than she’d calculated.)

  ‘Old enough to know better…’ she mused.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he informed her, curtly. ‘And I pray I never shall be, either.’

  She stared at the curtains, quizzically. ‘Why’d they keep your curtains shut?’

  ‘It’s the glare,’ he sniffed, ‘it makes me dizzy. The environmental stress.

  I’m actually wearing dark glasses behind here.’

  Kelly pondered this for a moment.

  ‘What kind?’ she asked.

  ‘Calvin Kleins,’ he answered promptly, ‘but a nice pair.’

  She frowned.

  ‘Are you a real Reverend, or is it your street name or your tag or what?’

  ‘I suppose you could call me a kind of missionary. I work mainly in Canada. I’ve been on a sabbatical in England for seven months…’

  ‘I broke my leg in three places,’ Kelly promptly interrupted him, ‘fallin’ off a wall, an’ I’m allergic to prescription painkillers…’

  She paused, “spose you prob’ly think God had a hand in that, too, huh?’

  ‘I try not to think, in general,’ the Reverend sighed. ‘I find those intellectual Christians such a bane, don’t you? I’m what they call a “Charismatic”. I’m sensitive. My relationship with God is predicated not on thought but on love.’

  ?!

  Kelly slowly shook her head and returned to her papers. After a minute or so, however, she suddenly looked up, with a nervous start, swore, turned sharply and peered behind her, scowling, as if a mischievous hand had just snapped at her bra strap.

  He didn’t know Bixley Woods well. He’d visited them once, at best, ten (possibly even fifteen) years ago. It’d been spring – he recalled – and the Bluebells had been in full splendour; the forest floor a dense and seemingly infinite tapestry of gently shimmering cobalt-blue.

  He’d been especially moved (he remembered) by the plight of the Wood Anemones, which – like the plainer, smarter sister in a Brontë novel – had been gradually shoved (by their more popular sibling) into the wood’s inhospitable outer margins, where they clung on, tenaciously, seeming to positively thrive in the poor soil and dappled shade there. They were such fragile plants, so plain and sweet and tender…He smiled, fondly. But that was spring – his smile rapidly dissipated – and this was winter.

  Once he’d left Elen –

  Elen –

  No…

  Stop.

  – he’d driven – his breath still irregular – along the A268, took a left at Two Hoven’s Farm and pulled on to Bixley Lane. It was ludicrously dark here and so unimaginably wet that he felt like he was ploughing though a vicious jar of black Quink.

  He changed down a gear as he headed past the old saw mill and a couple of small cottages, then put his lights on bright as he drew beyond. The woods crowded ever closer, glowering down at him, encroaching.

  He didn’t want to stop, but he took an old Landrover in a small layby –

  Abandoned?

  Dumped

  – as a signpost (a pointer) and parked up close to it, in the hope of shading his bike (in its lee) from the worst of the weather.

  He was quite wet already (tiny rivulets of water trickling down his back). His scarf was damp. He wore a woolly hat (which he’d hurriedly yanked from his rucksack after removing his helmet) and his thick, leather biking gloves. He had a compass – hung on a black cord around his neck – which he quickly inspected. He tried to pull out the map, but it was tipping down and the wind howled, so he thought better of it.

  He was wearing solid boots (biking boots) but this didn’t equip him for the voluminous puddles and the sticky expanses of mud on the initial track. It was a wide track. A good track, really, all things considered. He had a torch. Without a torch any kind of progress would’ve been totally unfeasible.

  He trudged into the darkness, calling out, woodenly, at ten-second intervals.

  ‘Dory?’

  He felt strange – surreal – as if this wasn’t actually a real search, just a pretend search, a search in a film, perhaps, which had already been carefully scripted to fail.

  ‘Dory?’ he called. ‘Isidore?’

  Two minutes in and he was drenched. He felt hopeless.

  ‘Dory?’

  After five minutes, he entered the pine forest. The weather wasn’t nearly so extreme here and the ground was softer underfoot. The soles of his boots were cushioned by rotting ferns, old moss and pine needles which stuck to the mud he’d already accumulated until soon his feet were like two, huge, weighted blocks.

  He stopped for a moment, out of breath, closed his eyes and tried to inhale the forest. He sniffed (as if desperate to reactivate his storm-battered senses, his curiously fragile sense of self), but the only thing to enter his nostrils was water. Water from the perpetual drip on the tip of his nose. He coughed.

  He moved doggedly onward. Soon the wide track fractured into a dozen much smaller paths. He inspected the compass, shivering, then took a bold step forward and almost fell. A tendril of Bramble had hooked on to the sleeve of his coat. He pulled it off, cursing, but as he pulled he noticed something – a piece of cloth. He reached out for it, unhooked it and drew it closer to his face. He grimaced –

  Boxer shorts…

  He wrung them out and shoved them (grimacing, fastidiously) into his pocket.

  ‘Dory?’

  He felt overwrought. He felt too old to be heroic. Too old to be brave and dependable. Too old.

  He tried to look around him, to focus, but his glasses were streaming. ‘Dory? Are you there?’

  Then, quite out of the blue – with almost no warning – his hackles rose. It was entirely unconscious – unwitting – automatic.

  ‘Dory?’ he pivoted on his heel. ‘Is that you?’ He
lifted his torch from ground-level, into the rain-soaked black, then gasped, stepping back, almost tripping.

  Behind him – 7 feet away, at best – stood a stag. A giant stag. ‘Holy Mary,’ he said.

  The stag gazed at him, blankly. It seemed dazed. It was an old one. Its horns were broken. Its pelt was thick in certain places (the shoulders, the rump), but intensely threadbare in others.

  ‘Holy Mary,’ he repeated, panicked, feeling the beat of his heart, almost entering his own heartbeat (through a funnel, a dark funnel, through his…his head? Where? His ear?) and then suddenly – an entirely different sensation (and yet the same, somehow) – he felt the beat of the stag’s heart, he felt himself crushed up against it, against this bold and extraordinary counter-beat – he felt the stag’s ears pricking up, turning towards him, he felt himself sucked in – the two beats merging and becoming one, pumping in tandem – charging on, careering on, in a riotous, shuddering gallop, twice as strong, twice as powerful – the same beat, the same breath, the same…

  He took a second, blind step back, then a third, his boot hitting a tree trunk. He tried to push himself up against the tree, to become the tree (as he’d become the stag) but his rucksack blocked his body.

  The stag glanced over its shoulder, away from him, distractedly. He felt the individual bones rippling in its neck.

  He could still feel its heart, but softer now. The flare of its nostril…

  ‘Heart,’ he thought, then, ‘hart. Hart…’

  He scowled –

  No.

  ‘Dory!’ he yelled, swinging the torch around.

  ‘Dory?!’

  He returned the blaze of the torch to the deer, but the deer was disappearing into the darkness, sinking into the darkness, being engulfed by the squall…Its beat gradually grew softer.

  ‘Dory!’ he yelled again, and as he yelled something hit him, square on the head.

  He froze for a second, blinking, terrified, then he laughed – a cone, a pine cone! He took a small step forward, still laughing, searching for the cone with his torch, and as he searched – still chuckling, oddly engrossed, childishly engrossed in the search – a large, heavy branch came crashing down on to his back.

  ‘I had three visions,’ he told her, a little later on that evening (as she swallowed her pre-lights-out medication).

  ‘Yeah,’ she murmured, boredly. ‘You already said…’

  ‘In the first,’ he continued (refusing to be put off), ‘a man is standing next to a house. Everything seems fine. And then the house simply collapses. Totally collapses. But it’s like in that old Buster Keaton gag – that black and white short – where the house falls around him but the man remains standing, apparently unhurt, in the middle of all this mess and chaos…’

  ‘Hmmn. Fascinatin’,’ she said, picking up her phone and sending a quick text.

  Nite MumXX

  ‘In the second vision I saw a sheep leading its lambs to slaughter. Or if it wasn’t a sheep it was a duck, or…or some generic creature…Animals aren’t really my bag…But the kind of animal it was doesn’t really matter – it was a symbolic image, a metaphor…’

  ‘’Course it was.’

  ‘And in the third I saw a boy awaken from a long, deep sleep. He sits up. He looks around. He speaks. He says two words, very clearly…’

  ‘Oh yeah? An’ what’s he say, Rev?’ she asked, idly.

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t remember.’

  ‘Great.’

  Kelly checked her texts. There was one from Gerry, one from her aunt, one from her dad, one from Jason, one from Gaffar and one from her mum.

  Eh?!

  She scowled, mystified.

  ‘And now I’m dieting for Jesus,’ he said, with apparent satisfaction.

  ‘Well bully for you, mate.’

  She rapidly scrolled down the messages and pressed ENTER.

  FOUR

  He was huge, or at least he appeared to be. A veritable titan. He was in his late thirties, early forties, heavily built with a pallid complexion (but flashes of high colour on his nose, chin and cheeks), wore a large, thick moustache (with tinges of red in it), a deer-stalker hat and an impressive collection of all-weather gear, topped off by a smart, camouflage jacket decorated with – Beede squinted – what looked like a bizarre photographic montage of twigs and leaves.

  He was shining a torch directly into Beede’s face as he lay – prone and winded – on the forest floor. Beede didn’t realise (at this point) that it was actually his torch.

  ‘Well that wasn’t very clever of you,’ the giant observed mockingly, ‘was it now?’

  He was drunk, Beede surmised. His breath reeked of alcohol –

  Rum?

  Brandy?

  Beede slowly pulled himself up into a sitting position and blinked, owlishly, into the light. He flexed his shoulder, then his neck, then his leg. He felt a little stiff and creaky, but there was –

  Thank God

  – nothing sprained or broken, so far as he could tell.

  He frowned, then put a tentative hand to his face –

  Damn…

  He’d somehow managed to dislodge his glasses in the fall. He pulled off his gloves, stuffed them into his pocket, then felt around, clumsily, on the ground surrounding him. As he reached out, blindly, a cold, wet snout suddenly made contact with his bare skin. A warm tongue licked his knuckles. He snatched his hand away, alarmed.

  ‘Enough, Gringo,’ the man snapped. Beede squinted into the darkness. Just to his left he made out the rough outline of a small and extremely overweight, pure-white Jack Russell.

  The man drew a step closer and peered rudely into Beede’s face. ‘You’re getting a bit long in the tooth for this kind of lark, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Pardon?’

  Beede adjusted his hat which was currently hanging – somewhat rakishly – over one brow.

  ‘A bit long in the tooth, a bit old…’

  ‘I seem to have lost my glasses in the fall…’

  Beede continued to pat at the floor around him.

  The stranger shone the torch helpfully on to the ground, then took a step back.

  ‘Careful not to stand on them,’ Beede cautioned him.

  ‘Nothing happens in these woods,’ the man informed him, slurring his words a little, ‘without me or Gringo here knowing about it.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Beede glanced up, distractedly.

  ‘She’s been hard on your trail for the past twenty minutes,’ he stared down at the dog, fondly, ‘all in a bait, she was, so I left her to it. She tracked you down a real treat, she did.’

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Beede asked (neglecting to mention that he hadn’t actually been in the woods that long). ‘I really can’t function without them…’

  ‘No,’ he said, barely even bothering to look.

  ‘Are you sure? They must be around here somewhere.’

  ‘I heard a voice calling out earlier,’ the man said. ‘Was it you?’

  ‘Probably…’ Beede was crawling around on his hands and knees now. ‘I’m searching for someone. A friend of mine…’

  ‘A friend?’ he sneered.

  ‘Yes.’ Beede glanced up. ‘Perhaps you’ll’ve seen him? Tall, blond, German…He might’ve appeared…’ he paused ‘…distressed.’

  ‘A male friend?’

  ‘He’s German,’ Beede continued, ‘but he speaks excellent English…’

  Beede stopped his search for a moment as something odd suddenly dawned on him –

  The branch –

  The fallen branch…

  ‘Where’s the branch gone?’ he asked, rocking back on to his heels.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The branch. The branch that fell on me.’

  The man stared at him for a second, blankly, and then, ‘Oh. Yes. The branch. I moved that off,’ he said, ‘I threw it over there somewhere…’ He gesticulated, vaguely, towards the distant undergrowth.

  Beed
e frowned. He felt a brief moment’s disquiet.

  ‘Isn’t that my torch?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  Pause

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could I have it back, then?’

  Beede held out his hand. The man passed it over, sullenly. ‘That’s a good torch,’ he said, ‘very powerful.’

  ‘It’s an old torch,’ Beede said, ‘I’ve had it for twenty-odd years.’ ‘An oldie but a goldie,’ the man quipped, leering down at him.

  ‘So you live locally?’ Beede asked.

  ‘Me?’

  He pointed to himself, stupidly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Roundabout.’

  ‘In Beckley?’

  ‘Roundabout Beckley.’

  ‘It’s a filthy night to be hanging around in the woods,’ Beede mused.

  ‘We patrol these woods,’ the man said (placing his hands on to his hips, as if rehearsing some kind of formal speech), ‘summer, autumn, winter, spring – come rain or hail or shine.’

  Beede nodded, his eye casually alighting on what he took to be –

  No.

  Surely not…

  – some kind of ornately decorated, American-Indian-style –

  Holster?

  No.

  Scabbard?

  – sheath hanging around the man’s waist. A sheath for a sword. Or a large hunting knife, perhaps.

  ‘So you spend a lot of time here?’

  He stated the obvious.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Are you a warden of some kind? A gamekeeper?’