The hedgerows gave way to low grass verges that suggested something vaster beyond, but rather than the shadowy pasture fields she had expected to catch a glimpse of in the darkness, the fog left just a white blindness on either side, giving the illusion of space which could easily give way to dark houses and hedgerows set back a short way from the road.
But somehow, she didn’t think so. As she drove across a cattle grate, the shrieking metal of the loose rollers startling her, she understood.
Moorland.
Images of old Christopher Lee films raced through her head,
Village of the Damned, The Wicker Man,
their low–budget, shock-tactic frights flickering across the old black and white TV in her room at university, herself with the duvet pulled up over her eyes, Matt beside her, lain back on the pillows, chuckling softly.
Good times
, she remembered, but now those films served only to conjure images of heathen people and crazy rituals, witches, warlocks, evil sorcerers and black magicians, burning children or worse –
outsiders
– on funeral pyres erected in moorland hollows, their Pagan idolatry hanging from the trees: crosses, corn dolls, evil eyes. It was enough to make Rachel shiver and scan the edge of the fog nervously as the car trundled along, its speed diminishing with every minute that passed as the fog grew thicker.
Then on her left a sign flashed past, Tamerton, two miles,
giving Rachel hope, but not enough to quell her unease. Matt was up ahead in the fog, and with him, only Heaven could say what.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she muttered quietly to h
erself, checking again the rearview mirror, not for cars behind her – hell, she wouldn’t miss their lights in this utter blankness – but for the
person
she felt certain would appear in her backseat at any moment. She had heard the myths, the urban legends about the vanishing hitchhikers, the madman banging the head of your dead husband on the roof of your car as you sat trapped inside by the edge of the road; they were enough to put the fear of God into her, make Rachel itch to turn the wheel, pull the car sharply around and head back the way she had come.
She was actually seriously considering it when a woman ran out in front of the car.
Rachel’s eyes squeezed shut even before she hit the brakes. The car skidded on the damp road, the tyres squealed and Rachel cried out in terror, losing sight of the figure for a moment as it loomed large in her headlights and then vanished again.
Then came a dull
thump
and the car ground to a halt.
Rachel made herself take a couple of deep breaths before she opened her eyes.
She felt sure she wasn’t hurt, although her head had struck the steering wheel hard enough to cause a small cut to open above her eye. The warmth that spread there felt strangely comforting.
No, she made herself take a couple of calming breaths
before
she opened her eyes.
Only then did she begin to scream.
#
##
Bethany’s Diary,
May 3rd, 1998
Hello diary. How are you doing?
It’s been a long time, I know.
I guess I just gave up on you, had nothing left to say. With Mother nearby I’ve had someone to talk to, someone to voice all my fears to. But I’m getting older, now . . . I don’t know.
She’s started telling me things now she thinks I’m old enough to understand, things she’s always kept hidden, and I’ve needed someone else to talk to, because sometimes I just don’t u
nderstand unless I can put it all down in front of me.
Thank you for helping me, even if you do nothing other than listen.
The days tend to drift into one. I still do work that they give me down at the special place Father takes me to. I read and I look at magazines sometimes, too. But it’s all meaningless. I’m not like other people. None of this really matters to me, because I can’t talk about it. Can’t talk about any of it. If I can’t talk about it, it can’t really exist, can it? Something can’t exist unless someone else knows it’s there.
Do you know what I mean
? Mother tells me this, at least. That’s how I see her, yet sometimes, it’s so hard. Before, it never mattered, I had nothing to say. But now . . .
While I stay silent I can be with my mother.
If I talk, I lose her forever. And what’s more . . . oh, God. I can’t stand it.
I can’t stand it.
I didn’t think I needed you, now I have her. Thought I’d found someone to talk to, someone who could talk back. But it just makes it harder, more confusing. I get just one opinion, and mother’s words frighten me at times. I can’t just accept them as gospel, but there’s no one else to talk to.
She told me I’d get sick if I ever spoke to anyone, but only recently has she told me why.
She said I’d go the same way as her. Even now she won’t talk much about it, only babbles on about decay and weakness, how my silence protects me, saves me from the disease that so overwhelmed and eventually destroyed her. Sometimes I think she’s gone mad. If I didn’t know she were only a ghost or a soul or whatever, I’d definitely think it. It’s only because a ghost can’t go mad, surely? It’s not alive! I don’t know.
I can’t lose her, for all of her strange talk.
Dad gets angry at me a lot, begs me to talk. He seems to know what floods of words rest on the tip of my tongue. He goes crazy sometimes, throws stuff around, but I think he drinks too heavily. I smell it on him a lot.
Only Uncle seems to like me.
He sits on the end of my bed sometimes, and just talks to me. Talks about the world, about the stars, the planets, about foreign countries, strange peoples and cultures. He tells me stories, talks about bizarre animals, and sometimes even talks about the people I look at in the magazines Dad buys for me. He never wants anything back, never wants me to speak. He accepts me as I am.
I like Red.
He’s so very kind to me.
13
Just a shadow, but a shadow with horns and blazing eyes and dripping teeth, and he thought he understood now.
Not his mother.
Well, not all.
Out in the woods he could hear her voice, calling him.
Soft, shrill, delicate like silver lilies coated with frost, like cookies sprinkled with icing sugar. Shrill, but rich like honey and cinnamon and toffee treacle and rooms full of cakes and so
warm
,
like the childhood assurance of a sucked and torn comfort blanket, like a lover never disagreeing, never commenting always
loving
, always, always loving.
Her shell, a residue, a creature borne of the darkness she
had become, had been trapped in that room like a beast in a circus sideshow. Her soul drifted out here, lost to him, but still,
here
. He could sense her, and he fought his way through the suffocating undergrowth, the clawed hands that raked at him and grasped for his feet, in a desperate struggle to reach her.
Like a fish on a hook, wound slowly, unknowingly in.
Just as it had wanted him before, it wanted him again. Why? His soul could free it. Could it?
He ran on, the darkness irrelevant for the tears
left him blind anyway.
Rachel, oh my darling Rachel, how have I done this to you, how have I hurt you so bad
? My children, Luke, Sarah, so beautiful, why do I alienate you from me?
I alienate
myself
.
I
am the corruption. The corruption is
me
, not around me.
A rock tripped him, and he rolled over and over through soggy bracken, the sharp ends of a few dead stalks snagging his clothes and scraping at his skin and his hot, feverish face.
He cried out in pain, but more as a reflex than for the actual hurt he felt; his body had numbed to it, his senses and his nerves were packed inside his brain like hostages trapped inside a building.
Somewhere down below he heard the river, and moments later he burst out of the trees, a
lmost sprawled headlong but just managing to remain upright, leaping the small, busy stream in a single bound. He stumbled onwards as the ground began to rise, fingers grasping at the wet, sticky undergrowth, feeling like a desperate fugitive with a dog pack on his tail. He breathed hard, sucking in the scents of damp vegetation and the warm peaty odour of decomposing matter; around him the world seemed to sway and circle his head as though he were lying on the ground drunk rather than climbing with desperate necessity. The sounds of the forest – bird calls, the rustle of foliage in the wind and the roar of the river had vanished behind a howling in his ears like a great wind, but more, like a thousand voices raised together, all of them lost somewhere terrible, all of them screaming.
He grabbed at his ears as though to tear them
from his head, screamed his own rage up at the towering, swaying trees, but to no avail. The voices filled him, ripped him apart from within, sucked out his life, consumed him.
And then he stumbled out into what he would once have recognised as a clearing, had his eyes not been blinded by images of dark shadowy creatures, his ears not filled with their tortu
rous wails.
He stumbled a few feet further, his whole body weary from the climb, then sprawled fo
rward on to the damp earth. His face struck ground as soft as a sponge, and a moment later he came up choking, spitting bits of grass and mud from his mouth. Around him the world seemed to shimmer, and it took a moment to recognise it as driving rain.
‘Rachel . . .’ he called to no one, desperately crying out for help, but to the one he thought
the least likely to hear, the least likely to aid him. ‘
Help
me
!’
His arms buckled under him and he slumped forward, the ground coming up to embrace him like an eager, long forgotten lover.
Watery mud rose up to fill his mouth and he found himself biting down on it, choking, feeling matted grass pressing into his eyes, blinding him.
‘H
elp me . . .’
His sobs were real, his agony immense.
Tears flooded from him as his age disintegrated, his body fled back from its tormented adulthood through adolescence and beyond the catastrophic anger of his youth, back to his young childhood and his infancy; gradually he lost the ability to walk, to talk, to crawl and then even to think . . . and as he reached up to embrace the dark tunnel that had appeared before him, he looked up to see
her
standing there, just metres away, ephemeral, translucent, but still –
there
– his mother oh Mother oh Mother
oh Mother
–
And beside her another:
a girl, her beauty almost equal, but younger, closer to his own age and with features that almost matched his own. Haunted like his, tormented, yet at peace, at ease. He craved for her, he craved for them, and as he reached out for them a sound fell from his throat, harsh, breaking through the screaming in his ears and shattering the swirling glass that wavered before his eyes.
A baby’s cry.
Interlude Two
14th May 1984
‘Tears can shatter clouds like rain can shatter clouds, tears are rain, tears are human rain, human rain . . .’
Matt strokes his chin with one finger. He reads the line back to himself once more in his head, eyes lingering over the words that dance drunkenly across the crumpled page in his own erratic handwriting.
Maybe this one might do.
Maybe this one would be okay.
Matt hates the stupid English assignments Mr. Birkswill set them.
Write a short narrative piece about an emotional state of your choice.
Okaaaay . . .
Sadness.
Why sadness? The first one to come into his head. The first emotion he felt when he sat down to think about it.
His dad is out.
Bethany is, as far as he knows, in her room. His mother is
(––––––––––)
Who? (––––––––––) Where?
. . .
upstairs
. He thinks.
The word
mother
seems to turn a lock in his mind and he immediately stops thinking about her. That shut off seems to happen more and more often now, and he starts to forget about her up there.
Upstairs
.
Mother has not gone anywhere.
Nothing has happened to her. She’s just taking a nap, that’s all. A nice, long nap. She’ll feel better soon.