He heard the slow, deep scrape of what he thought might be a single thorn against the wood; a single, probing finger of fibrous intent. The well cover trembled and rose very slightly and then eased flat again. He shuffled back in a careful retreat on his stomach, picked up the stick, rose to his feet and crept away from the spot.
He was a mile from Loxley’s Cross when he took out his mobile and saw that he had a signal. He called Andrew Carrington.
‘You’ve taken your bloody time.’
‘People are disappearing. And you were right about Crawley’s thorn bush. We weren’t successful in destroying it.’
‘I’m afraid this is one of those rare situations where being proven right offers me not a shred of comfort, Tom.’
‘We found Gregory’s tomb this morning. It’s all true, the legend.’
‘Of course it’s true.’
‘She’s here.’
‘You’ve aided and abetted her.’
‘Gregory’s tomb had been robbed. The things he took from her had been taken from him.’
‘And I know by whom. And I know who bought them from his thieving wastrel of a second-son. And God help me, I know where they are now.’
‘You should come here.’
‘Are you inviting me?’
‘I’m asking for your help.’
‘You’ll have to pick me up from a convenient station. I don’t drive. I’ll work out the route and text you later with the time of my arrival. Trains permitting, I’ll see you early tomorrow afternoon. It’s probably too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘Too late for any of us, Tom.’
Had Pete progressed beyond the cave mouth on his return south along the beach, he would undoubtedly have seen Dora’s abandoned clothing at the water’s edge a few hundred metres further on. He would have recognized them and, because mobiles never worked on the beach, he would have gone as fast as the quad bike could carry him to raise the alarm. But Dora was already dead by that point and Pete didn’t get beyond the entrance of the cave before stopping.
There was no sign of Amelia. You couldn’t see the cave mouth until you were almost upon it because of the angle there at which the cliff face was configured. But he had confidently expected to reach the place and see her sitting on the sand with a bulging student backpack ready for her lift to civilization. Or at least ready for her ride back to a cold drink, a square meal, a hot shower and a comfortable berth.
Was Dora’s graduate student an ill-mannered ingrate, or had she decided to stay for stubborn practical reasons? She hadn’t said specifically what it was she was studying. Maybe she needed to be close to the spot where she was doing her fieldwork. On the other hand, maybe she was just late. Women sometimes were. Dora, emphatically all-woman, was the exception to that particular rule. But Amelia might have got into a flap, packing. It had happened to other girls he’d known in the past.
He dismounted and walked into the cave mouth. He peered through the gloomy interior as far as the dog-leg, but there was no sign of her and there was no luggage either. He called out her name through his cupped hands and he heard it bounce and reverberate, echoing along the stone like a fading rumour.
‘Here,’ she said, from beyond the dog-leg. ‘Come here, Pete. I’ve got something for you.’
She had a voice as pretty as her smile. There was just the hint of an accent and a huskiness that made her sound slightly exotic. Tension slipped out of him and his shoulders dropped slightly. He realized that, without consciously knowing it, he’d been a bit worried about her. It had been cavalier to abandon her on the beach earlier when they still didn’t know the cause of the disappearances.
He walked along the cave, through the dog-leg, unshocked when it confronted him with the reeling blackness of the cave interior beyond because this time he was prepared for it. He had his mobile in his hand and he’d switched on its torch.
She was standing before him half-naked. The curve of her breasts had a luscious weight in the light of his torch beam. Her nipples were small and pink and proud. Her skin was very smooth and pale and her hair hung in dark blonde tresses falling down to her shoulders. She licked her lips. They were full and ripe and looked almost black in the bleached light he played across her face and body.
‘I want you to fuck me, Pete,’ she said. She reached out a hand. Its fingers twisted undone a button of his shirt. The hand trailed down his chest and stomach and she stepped towards him and cupped his groin and squeezed. When she spoke, she whispered and her breath smelled lightly of cinnamon and musk. She said, ‘I haven’t been fucked by a man for a very long time.’
She turned abruptly and began to walk back along the cave and he followed her, seeing the shape of her back, her perfect shoulder blades and, below the base of her spine, the youthful switch of her hips with each step under the cream gossamer of the skirt clinging to her pert behind.
He almost stumbled. He slithered on something that gave off a faint stink. His mind felt gluey with lust, his breathing was shallow and his cock bulged throbbing in the confinement of his jeans. He’d never felt so aroused. He thought that the cloth pressing against his erection, just the rhythmic friction of walking might make him come before they got to wherever she was leading them.
‘Calm down,’ she said, reading what passed in his sluggish mind for thoughts. ‘I don’t want a single drop of you wasted, Pete.’
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had sex completely sober. There was always a drink involved somewhere in the preamble. He knew that he should have felt nervous, but the throb between his legs suggested that erectile dysfunction would not be a problem and he was too filled with the gobsmacking wonder of the moment to care.
They didn’t require a drink. He knew with a tingling thrill of expectation that sexual inhibitions weren’t Amelia’s thing at all. She wanted to be fucked and he’d be happy to fuck her senseless.
Something lumbered and splashed in the distance. Pete paused. Fear clarified his thinking momentarily. Instinct fought the intoxication and a bewildering sort of terror clutched at him. He felt cold. A shiver convulsed through him. It was a trap, wasn’t it? He’d been lured there.
Oh, no
, he thought.
Please God, not like this.
Amelia turned and pounced, fumbling the phone from his grip and hurling it at the cave wall, smashing it to fragments, casting them into absolute blackness, her laughter light and cruel as she walked past him back in the direction they had come, her retreating steps blindly confident as he heard something maul and slither from the end of the cave, approaching him.
They were cold and clammy and their skin was rough and barnacled when they reached him. The stink of them made him void his bowels in the moment before he felt the first rude, assaulting touch.
Then they were on him.
He was a strong man. He loved life. And so he struggled and fought and screamed until the blood loss brought unconsciousness and death. And Amelia, who had brought him there for them, was made by them to be as good as her word. They didn’t waste a single drop of him.
That was the last day on which anyone was able to fool themselves that things were well or even normal among the workforce on the Abercrombie estate, or across the domain generally. By the following morning, everyone knew that Dora Straub and Pete Mariner were now numbered among the missing.
Dora had been more respected than liked. She’d turned heads, though, as she’d rightly observed on her own account. She was an immediate and conspicuous absentee. So was Pete, who had been popular in a way Dora had never cared to cultivate. It was clear when those two disappeared that whoever orchestrated the vanishing was no respecter of rank.
Even more damaging to morale in Dodge, though, was the disappearance during the same night of Phil Carter, the picturesque ganger with the tattoos and the piercings. He’d been charismatic, hugely popular and the compound’s leader in all but name. He was an expert at his craft and physically formidable.
He still went, leaving no trace, as he supervised the twilight rescue of a birch, planted too close to the cliff edge and threatening to topple unstably down on to the shingle and sand a hundred feet below. He went down the face on an abseil rope and he never came back up. His silver crucifix proved a talisman incapable of saving him when the moment came.
The great machines fell silent after that. To Curtis, it was as though the Forest of Mourning was staging a silent vigil for the latest of its victims. He harboured a gloomy certainty that Pete was dead. The same was confirmed about Dora shortly after dawn when her clothing was discovered by a search party. It was not long after breakfast when the guards at the western gate called him to tell him that the workforce were deserting in numbers that made them look like a column of fleeing refugees.
The tracking device on Pete’s quad bike led them to it at 10 a.m. By then Curtis felt like the sheriff in a frightened town trying and failing to raise a posse to confront the bad guys. It was just Fran Abercrombie and him. Saul was by turns ailing and tinkering in the comms room pretty much like someone under house arrest. Gregory’s remains awaited burial under the protection of a tarpaulin staked at his grave’s edges in the ground. Eddie Stanhope had said his boys were all far too tied up with a convenient backlog of jobs to come and intern him afresh.
Curtis didn’t want to go into the cave. He was tired and shaken. He’d had no stomach for breakfast and he had the cantankerous Andrew Carrington to endure meeting later in the day. But Pete had been his friend and he’d had and still had a duty of care towards a man he’d personally recruited. He had to explore the cave to its gloomy conclusion in looking for anything that might survive of him now. He felt certain, but he still had to make sure.
He made Fran wait on the beach. He thought she’d be safer there. He didn’t think she’d be safe – nowhere on her father’s domain was any longer safe. The work he’d organized had seen to that. It was corrupt, enchanted and malign. It was a place of deliberate danger. But it seemed safer in the sunshine against the glittering backdrop of the sea than it did in the stone sepulchre nature had tunnelled underground. It was light versus darkness, an equation an infant could solve.
The walk underground was the longest mile he had ever travelled in his life. He’d brought a Maglite torch. Like Alfred Crawley before him, he’d brought a rope attached to a grappling hook. He’d also overcome his own distaste for them and brought along a gun.
He had a semi-automatic Sig-Sauer pistol strapped into a shoulder holster. It carried seventeen nine-mil hollow-point rounds. He was an inexpert shot, but he could slip off a safety catch and squeeze a trigger and there wasn’t much space in the cave for bullet dodging. Saul had told him sombrely an hour earlier that the weapon would put an exit wound the size of a dinner plate in anything he hit. He hoped not to have to test this claim.
He reached the gallery eventually. He clambered through the crack as Alfred Crawley and Dora Straub had done before him and he saw with the same sinking heart as Crawley the dismal refuge of the enchantress he had described and Dora had been spellbound into forgetting about.
Nothing with any belief in life or hope or light could have endured residing there. It was a resting place for a creature without a soul. Soft and loathsome, the fungus grew and blossomed palely to grotesque size all around the driftwood bier. The walls moved furtively in his torch beam with insect life. Something, a large moth or possibly a bat, skittered across his scalp. His gorge rose on a surprised gulp of the reeking air. He had to get out of there. He felt at once wretched and afraid.
He slipped a few times on puddles of slime on his return to the beach. Once or twice his own heightened senses conjured noises for him to hear. But nothing had followed him in, nothing had lurked inside and nothing followed him out of the cave. And he reached the dog-leg and the sunshine only with the chill certainty he’d felt all morning that Pete Mariner was never coming back.
He thought Francesca brave. He also thought her loyal. She was loyal to her father but she was also the only ally he had left in whatever was happening here. She had accompanied him there. It had been a comfort to have her travel the route at his side through the malevolent kingdom of trees he’d created. It was a comfort to see her, concern etched across her lovely face, when he emerged back into daylight. She smiled and then she brought her arms wide and hugged him.
He thought he might lose his composure at that. Pete had been easier to love than Dora but he had grown to love them both really over the years they had worked and laughed and bickered and drunk together. He had cherished memories of both of them that would never now grow beyond the point they’d already reached. The loss was abrupt and deep and he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d been not just complicit in their destruction but the cause of it.
‘Thanks,’ he said, returning Fran’s embrace.
‘I owe you one,’ she said.
‘Well, not anymore.’
‘It isn’t your fault.’
‘I’d have to beg to differ on that.’
‘Dora took her own life, Tom. She left her clothes behind. God knows why she did it, but she drowned herself.’
‘Pete didn’t. Neither did Phil Carter or any of the others.’
‘I didn’t believe it until yesterday morning. I didn’t really believe any of it until I saw the proof of Gregory’s remains. You didn’t either. I could see it in your expression, Tom. That was the moment you finally became convinced of it.’
‘Trees don’t breed the way rats do, Fran.’
‘Freemantle Theory?’
‘There’s nothing theoretical about it. It’s hard to quantify from the ground because of the sheer magnitude of the job. But we had the aerial evidence almost from the start. Something unnatural has been happening here from day one. It’s gathered momentum ever since.’
‘My mother – my mother’s ghost – said the place is reverting.’
Curtis only shrugged.
‘Can it be stopped?’
‘There’s a fellow arriving this afternoon might have the answer to that. If he thought it was no, I don’t think he’d be coming.’