Brie glanced at the camera for a moment, then back at the entrance to the underground chamber.
“I … I saw something scary in my room,” she said after a moment's hesitation. “I'm not sure what it was. It had a weird face, deformed, freakish. I don't want to think about it at all. I just want to leave this place. Now. Please.”
“Brie,” said Gould, “would it help if I told you the whole truth about my own experience? The one I … I glossed over earlier?”
Brie looked uncertain, but did not reject the idea out of hand.
“I knew it was bullshit!” exclaimed Marvin, triumphantly.
“True, I lied earlier when I was interviewed,” Gould admitted. “Or rather, I told a heavily-edited version of the truth. That story about getting lost in the woods. It wasn't that straightforward. Maybe it will put things in perspective if I tell you what really happened – and what I discovered much later.”
He paused, then looked Brie in the eye.
“We call what you saw an Interloper.”
Chapter 4: Little Girl Lost
“Okay, so what did happen in that forest?” asked Denny.
Around the big kitchen table, the various team members looked on expectantly. Matt seemed angry at Gould for jeopardizing the show. Marvin had his characteristic half-smile of superiority. Brie was jittery, a mess of disordered hair and streaked mascara. Even Jim had lost his composure and glowered at his boss.
“If I tell you, promise you won't interrupt? I'm happy for Frankie to record this,” he added. “People should know.”
There were nods, noises of agreement. Frankie took out a small digital camera, began to film across the table. Gould sat back, looked into his coffee mug for a couple of seconds, then took a gulp. Another sigh, then he looked over at Denny and began to talk.
“She was called Lucy,” he said. “She was my little sister, a couple of years younger than me. Of course, when you're an eight-year-old boy, that age difference can seem enormous. And my friends and I found her to be a terrific nuisance, always following us around. We had what we considered to be a gang, you see. We were the cool kids, and she was spoiling it, a little girl following boys around and wanting to join in with our games. It was particularly galling for me, of course – I was responsible for her. My parents made clear that I should always look out for Lucy. And naturally I didn't want to.”
Gould paused then looked away, out of the kitchen window into the pitch darkness.
“And then one day I decided to play a nasty little prank.”
***
“We've never come this far before,” said Martin. “There's supposed to be an old well.”
“My uncle said it's an abandoned mine shaft,” interrupted Paul. “He said it's all overgrown and not properly fenced off.”
“The point is,” said Martin, sounding peeved, “that we're not supposed to go out of sight of the village.”
Edward felt rising anger. His friends had complained incessantly about Lucy following them around. Now he had a plan to deal with it, and instead of doing as they were told, they were whining.
“I thought we didn't want girls in the gang?” Edward said, putting as much sarcasm into his tone as he could manage. “You two should be wearing frocks. With ribbons in your hair.”
Martin's freckled face reddened, while Paul started to stammer – sure signs that Edward's insult had struck home. He pointed back along the forest trail at the tiny figure in red that was scampering through the autumn leaves. He could just make out Lucy's voice, plaintively shouting.
“Slow down, Edward! I'll tell Mummy!”
Always whining, he thought. She never shuts up. Never leaves me alone.
“Guys, you want to play with Lucy every weekend?” Edward demanded.
The other two shook their heads.
“Right,” Edward went on. “So let's give her a scare. Operation Little Red Riding Hood is under way.”
Edward signaled to Paul, who nodded and stepped off the trail and behind a gnarled old elm. As he moved out of Lucy's line of sight, Paul opened his backpack and took out a Halloween mask. It was Dracula, complete with dripping fangs. Edward would have preferred something more disturbing, but they had had to work with what they could get in the village shop.
Besides, he thought, Lucy is a real scaredy-cat.
While Paul moved off into the undergrowth, Edward and Martin stood waiting for the little girl. Lucy was almost out of breath by the time she reached them, but she still had sufficient energy to pound her little fists on Edward's chest.
“I'm telling Mummy on you!” she exclaimed, in an irate squeak.
Grabbing his sister's wrists, Edward made placatory noises.
“Calm down, Luce! We were just messing around.”
Lucy did not show any signs of letting her big brother off the hook, and resorted to kicking him in the shins. Edward gave Martin a significant look. Martin rolled his eyes, then stepped forward and patted Lucy gently on the shoulder of her red duffel coat.
“There, there,” said Martin, awkwardly. “We're both sorry.”
Lucy snorted, but stopped kicking Edward, who made a mental note to call Martin 'Lucy's boyfriend' for the rest of the weekend. The little girl pouted up at Martin, who was notoriously soft-hearted and an easy target for Lucy.
“Hey,” said Edward, trying to deflect her attention, “we're playing a game of hide and seek. Do you want to join in?”
Lucy looked dubious.
“We shouldn't be in the forest,” she said sulkily. “You know Mummy said we shouldn't go inside.”
“Oh, rules are made to be broken,” said Edward breezily. He had just learned the phrase and liked to use it whenever he could. “We can have more fun playing hide and seek where there are lots of places to hide. Can't we?”
Lucy looked from her brother to Martin, who nodded encouragingly.
“All right,” she said. “At least hide and seek is better than pretending to be soldiers. That's so boring.”
Typical girl, thought Edward. No idea how to have fun.
“Paul's already gone to hide,” explained Martin, pointing in the direction their friend had gone. “All we have to do is go and look for him.”
Lucy nodded solemnly, but made no move to step off the trail.
“We have to split up to search better,” added Edward.
At that, Lucy began to pout again. She clearly suspected something, and for a second Edward thought their scheme was going fail before it had properly begun. But then Martin rescued the situation.
“And there's a special prize for the first person to find Paul,” he said. “Chocolate! Just catch Paul and he'll give you a bar of Cadbury's Fruit and Nuts.”
Lucy's eyes widened. She had a well-defined set of values, with candy of all kinds very near the top. After a moment's contemplation she smiled, and with a cheerful 'Okay!' set off into the undergrowth. As the little red figure vanished into the wild greenery, Martin and Edward took out their own masks – Frankenstein and a Mummy – and set off slowly after Lucy.
***
“Wow!” exclaimed Frankie. “You were a real Grade A douche, Ted!”
Denny silently concurred, but then felt guilty. The expression on Gould's face told its own story. The pain he felt was that of a raw wound, not some half-forgotten trauma he had come to terms with. Again, the Englishman scratched at the pale scar, half-hidden by his shirt sleeve.
“Kids don't always think about consequences,” said Brie quietly. “We all did dumb stuff when we were small.”
Gould gave Brie a faint smile.
“I tell myself that,” he murmured. “But it's a flimsy excuse. I knew we were doing something bad, but I did it just the same. Organized it, persuaded the others to carry it through. I was quite simply a cruel, selfish little turd.”
That silenced the rest of the group. Gould folded his hands and, again gazing out into the night, resumed his story.
“It was a stupid idea and it all went wrong, of
course,” he said. “But not in the way any of us could have predicted.”
***
Edward realized the flaw in his plan half a minute after they had set off in pursuit of Lucy. The girl was too small and the woods too dense. Sneaking up on her and giving her a scare necessitated knowing where she was. Edward and Martin had spread out until they were about twenty yards apart. They tried to signal with gestures, but it was getting harder to see each other. It was mid-afternoon in October, and there was still enough foliage on the trees to block much of the slanting sunlight. Also, they were trying to move stealthily, and that slowed them down. There was no sign of Lucy and no sounds. Edward had expected his sister to thrash her way noisily through the under-brush. But everything was silent except for the occasional bird call.
What if she has an accident?
The thought struck Edward like a blow in the pit of his stomach. He had never taken his parents' warnings about the forest seriously. It was just a big clump of trees between his house and the village. The grown-ups were close-mouthed and vague about why the area was shunned. But the more he thought about Lucy picking her way through the darkening forest floor, the more he wondered about the mine shaft, or the well, or whatever danger might be hidden amid the greenery.
The scream was shocking, cutting through the cool air and making Edward jump. It was so piercing that for a moment he doubted if it could be Lucy. Then he sighed with relief.
Paul found her. He jumped out at her, gave her a scare. She's probably wet her knickers!
Edward smiled at the thought and started to move more quickly. The scream had come from somewhere ahead of him. He took off his mask, hid it in his bag, and began to shout Lucy's name. The plan was to make her believe there were monsters in the forest so that she would never come back. The scream, Edward reflected, sounded promising.
She'll be having nightmares until Christmas, he thought, with grim satisfaction. If it keeps her away from us, it'll be worth a punishment from Dad.
The second scream was fainter, but drawn out for longer. It was worse, somehow. The first time had sounded right to Edward – the reaction of a silly girl surprised by a plastic mask. But why would Paul continue to torment Lucy?
Unless it's someone else.
Again, assorted grown-ups' warnings came to mind, swirling around his head as he began to stumble in a half run over the uneven ground. This time it was not the risk of accidents in the forest, but something even worse. The sort of thing that parents talk about in low voices after they've switched over in the middle of the news.
Don't talk to strangers. Never go anywhere with somebody you don't know. Never accept sweets. Even if someone says they know your mother or father, don't go with them.
“Oh God, please don't let it–” he gasped in an attempt at a prayer. “Please God, let her be all right. I'm sorry I did it, I didn't mean–”
Lucy's voice, plaintive now, sounded from somewhere ahead of him.
“Edward! Help!”
The brushwood grew denser, fallen branches, drifts of dead leaves, and dense clumps of weed all hindering his progress. It seemed to grow darker with each passing moment, now, and he told himself it was because a cloud had passed in front of the sun. Then he burst out of the undergrowth into a circular area about twenty yards across. It was thick with weeds but there were no trees, not even saplings. In the center of the clearing was a lightc0lored stone about five feet tall. It was lumpy, squat, somehow menacing.
Edward stopped in surprise. He had had no idea the clearing existed. The stone looked as if it had once been a statue of some kind, but almost all the carving had worn away, reminding him of the ancient gargoyles on the village church. It was, he realized, in the heart of the forest. He did not need to think about its significance. Edward knew, with terrible finality, that this was what people really feared about the forest. He felt a sudden urge to run away.
“Leave me alone!”
Lucy's voice came from the other side of the pale stone. Edward dashed around the stone and stopped, more astonished than scared by what he saw. Lucy was being dragged into a hole in the air. He saw her legs kicking out. One of her little black shoes was missing. The lower part of her red coat was visible, but not the rest of her. Lucy's upper body was invisible. But Edward could still hear her voice, screaming for help, but faintly as if she was at a great distance.
“Lucy!”
He ran forward and grabbed her legs, began to pull her out of the impossible aperture. As he struggled to save Lucy, part of Edward's mind registered that the 'hole' was a kind of foggy sphere, a region of air that shimmered like a heat-haze despite the cool October day. It was about four feet across, but its edges were hard to make out.
Edward did not try to make sense of it all. All he simply knew was that Lucy was vanishing, that it was somehow his fault for being mean to her, and that he had to save her. He dug in his heels and pulled harder. After a couple of seconds, Lucy came unstuck and was released, then he fell backwards. He fell against the white stone, and it winded him. Lucy dropped out of the air into a patch of wildflowers, her face pale, eyes staring, but apparently unhurt.
As soon as she focused on Edward, she jumped up and flung herself on him. She did not cry, simply clung to him. Her utter stillness scared him even more than her screams had done. He saw red welts on her arm, felt terrible shame at his part in what was happening.
“It's all right,” he said, trying to convince them both. “It's all right, we're going home now, Lucy.”
He staggered to his feet, tried to set his sister down, but she was determined to cling to him with arms and legs. Rather than argue with the terrified girl he turned to leave the clearing via the rough trail he had forged.
“Hurry,” he heard her say into his shoulder. “She's coming!”
Edward wanted to ask who ‘she’ meant, but before he could ask he felt a blow in the middle of his back. He fell forward, heavily, crushing Lucy underneath him. The girl's screams blended with another sound, a kind of low snarling and hissing. Sudden, intense pain shot through his back. He felt his shirt rip, and his flesh. Edward screamed, rolled over, punched and kicked blindly at his assailant. His fist connected with a face that he could just make out in the gloom. The figure crouching above them jumped up, making a kind of mewing noise.
I hurt it, he thought. And it's not very big.
Then another figure appeared, and a third. They leaped at him, their hands making the slashing motions he had seen in fighting cats. They were all child-sized, but fast-moving and disturbingly strong. Their faces were hard to make out, especially as they darted and lunged at him. Edward raised his hands in front of his face, and a burning pain shot through one forearm.
Two of the creatures were keeping him occupied, while the third dragged the screaming Lucy back towards the shimmering, cloudy sphere. No matter how much Edward tried, he couldn’t get to her. Then the sky must have cleared, and a shaft of sunlight lit up the clearing. The golden glow caught one of the monsters on the face, and Edward reeled back, almost falling, hands raised now not to ward off attack but to block a horrific, impossible sight.
The thing had Lucy's face, but the features were not quite finished. The snub nose seemed half-melted, like candle wax, the mouth was little more than a crude slit, the eyes small and beady. Yet the resemblance was still there in the shape of the face, the proportions of the small body. The hair that straggled from the nightmare being's head was the exact color of Lucy's auburn.
“You shouldn't be so nasty to me, Edward,” lisped the half-formed mouth. “We're family, after all.”
***
“The next thing I remember,” said Gould, after a pause, “was running through the forest, shouting for help. Martin and Paul found me, and tried to calm me down, get me to explain. But I couldn't – I couldn't make sense out of what had happened. I just kept saying 'Lucy's gone, they stole her face'.”
“Oh my Lord,” whispered Brie, eyes bugging. “The thing's face – li
ke the one I saw. Not quite human, but so close it was horrible.”
“I saw one, too,” murmured Denny. “Complete with unfinished features. Maybe mine couldn't decide on a face.”
Gould nodded, then reached into the jacket that he had hung on the back of his chair. He took out a flask and poured amber liquid into his coffee. He offered the flask around. Only Frankie took a mouthful, coughed. Denny caught the distinct odor of Scotch whiskey.
“Wow, that's the good stuff all right,” she spluttered.
This prompted nervous laughter, and everyone started talking at once. Matt seemed to think the entire experience was a kind of false memory covering a more disturbing, but entirely natural, incident. Marvin dismissed that idea, while Denny tried to mediate. Frankie continued to film what became a heated discussion, while Gould sat looking into the distance, evidently wrapped up in his memories.
“Okay,” said Matt loudly, holding up his hands for silence, “the stone in the forest, whatever it was. If people knew it was there, warned their kids not to go near it, why didn't they do something about it? Smash the stone, maybe concrete over the whole clearing. Hell, why not tell the police, MI5, whatever?”
“Good question,” Gould conceded, absentmindedly running a finger along the scar on his forearm. “But many years later when I asked local people, including my parents, about the forest, none of them could say why it was reputedly a bad place. It just was. Nobody went there. That was the key fact. Stories about a well, or an old mine, or lurking perverts were concocted after the fact. As for the stone, well, it was just a bit of old rock. For the authorities, there was nothing to connect it to a little girl vanishing.”
Matt gave a noncommittal grunt.
“But you're right,” Gould went on. “The police did investigate the whole area, and they did the clearing. There was no sign of a struggle, not a trace of Lucy. None of her clothes, or her shoes, were found. Not that day, at least. It was a mystery – made the national papers. The place was swarming with reporters.”
Nightmare Abbey Page 7
