Wildwood (6 page)

There were some faint paths, tracks made by rabbits perhaps. I followed one winding between the boulders and the tree
trunks
, hoping it would take me to the crown of the hill, but it soon peeled away and began to circle the flank. There were birds singing all around, though I couldn’t see many, only little flickers of movement at the periphery of my vision. A grey squirrel hung head down on the bole of a tree and stared at me until I pointed a warning finger and mouthed a silent gunshot, at which it fled and I grinned. The smell of damp wood and moss was intoxicating, overlaid with the very faint sweet smell of the bluebells. I didn’t write anything on my paper after ‘acid oak–birch woodland’. I just let it all sink in, in a daze. It wasn’t as if there were any of the noteworthy features Michael Deverick had been looking for, not even any very tall trees. From a timber point of view this place was a dud, and in fact anyone trying a paintball game here was likely to break a leg.

‘Wow,’ I said to myself.

Something shiny hanging from a branch caught my eye. I left the path and crossed down towards it. To my surprise, I found it was a glass ball, crimson coloured and as big as my two fists, strung up and spinning slowly on a length of fishing line that was almost invisible. I frowned and tapped it. A strange thing to find in a wood, I thought. Like a giant Christmas bauble.

It wasn’t the last. As I switched to another path and resumed my same general drift northwards I caught sight of others glinting in the sunlight, some red but others blue or yellow or green. And there were other decorations too: little bundles of twigs tied with red wool. The more I looked, the more of them there were.

‘Someone’s been watching
Blair Witch
,’ I muttered. Those signs of human presence made me feel less comfortable, though not because they were sinister in themselves. There shouldn’t have been anyone in these woods, that was all. Nobody had lived in Kester Grange in years. When Michael Deverick bought it the house had been near-derelict and the estate gone halfway to wilderness.

I crossed the rocky bed of a stream. There was a big boulder in the centre of the course, and straddling that a hawthorn bush. Multicoloured rags had been tied to its twigs and hung, some faded and some still fresh, among the last of its white blossom. I gnawed my lip, hands on hips. Then I turned to follow the clearest path, down beside the water, away from the hill. I marked the stream tentatively on my sketch map, but I had no idea where it was flowing from, or to, and was beginning to think I’d have to buy a compass. I made an attempt to scramble up the bank but a branch of sallow I was pushing back slipped from my hand to smack me hard across the top of the thighs and I slid back down and decided to continue downstream to a clearer patch. If I’d not been wearing padded leggings, or if I’d been a bloke, the blow would have been really painful.

I remembered the slap of the plastic ruler on Scott’s skin as I rubbed my stinging legs.

God, it was long time since I’d given my ex much thought, at least by daylight. I didn’t miss him and our break-up hadn’t been particularly painful as these things go – or at least not for me. I grinned at the thought.

I’d driven down to the house he shared in Norwich as usual that Friday, except that after three weeks of serious overtime clearing windthrow I’d wangled an early departure and I got to Scott’s place a couple of hours early. When no one answered the doorbell I wandered through into the overgrown back garden, where I half-expected to find him and Alex and Stacy knocking back beers and contemplating the algae scum on their pond. No one was there, but I did notice that lights were on in the high windows of the detached garage where they all kept the wetsuits and boards ready for the weekend. The side door was unlocked. They’d be packing the car, I assumed, and called, ‘Scott?’ as I entered.

No one replied. The smell of board wax and seaweed was strong and comfortable. I looked down the garage and there was Scott all right – about two-thirds of the way down, stark naked, his arms and legs spread wide. His wrists were roped to the metal brackets on either wall that held the surfboards. His ankles were held apart by the broom pole taped between them.

My first thought was that he hadn’t got himself into that position.

Scott hadn’t seen me; he was wearing a blindfold. He hadn’t heard me either, though I’d made quite a bit of noise getting the swollen old door open, because there was an MP3 player clipped to a bracket too, the earplugs pumping out what sounded to me like a tinny wasp buzz of music. Old school metal, I’d have guessed; it was what he liked to drive to when he got use of Alex’s car, or mine. It was what he’d been listening to when he totalled his own, the idiot. But he must have felt the draught from the door, because he said ‘Stacy?’ in that loud voice people use when they can’t hear themselves properly. ‘We’d better hurry up; Av will be here soon.’

My second thought wasn’t really a thought at first, just a wave of relief that it was all over. No more insane drives on a weekend down some of the most choked motorways in Britain trying to snatch a few hours with a boyfriend on the other side of the bloody country. No more waiting in Penrith station for his train. No more half-assed explanations on the phone that he’d been forced to stay on too late at the office and that he wouldn’t be with me until tomorrow morning – make that lunchtime, probably. It was over. At least I’d be able to use my vibrator and fantasise about other men with a clear conscience from now on.

‘Stace? Come on.’

I walked down towards him, fists bunched, wondering what
exactly
I was going to do now. He looked very vulnerable, spreadeagled like that. And just a little bit silly. The black hair beneath his arms stuck out in wild tufts. His nipples were hard from the chill of the concrete garage and I could see the gooseflesh around them. His cock stuck straight out like a short peg, stiff but not distended. His balls were bunched up high. I put out my hand and stroked that fat pouch, stirring the hairs. He did have really hairy balls, did Scott, even though years of wearing a neoprene suit had rubbed the hair off his arse and legs where you’d expect to find it.

He reacted to my touch, squirming in his bonds and making appreciative noises. The headphones pulsed: zing, zing, zing. I tickled his fancy a moment longer then passed under his arm to take at look at him from behind. Lines of dark hair marched up the unguarded nape of his neck. His back was narrow and strong, his hips lithe. Those familiar buttocks, muscular yet bald as a baby’s, sported a red mark like the imprint of a bar across their fullest swell. I didn’t understand what it was until I looked down. Arrayed on the beach blanket on which he stood – and he was still wearing his socks, I noted, with a contemptuous wrinkle of my nose – was a ruler, a table-tennis bat and a bright-yellow kitchen glove.

I couldn’t really be sure what the rubber glove was intended for – Flicking him? Wanking him off? Sticking a finger up his butt? – but the other two seemed pretty obvious. I picked up the ruler, twelve inches of transparent plastic of the sort we used to use in school, and laid it across the welt to see if it fitted. Which it did perfectly. Scott felt the chill.

‘Stace!’

I bent the plastic back with my other hand and let him have it, stingingly. He jumped and quivered and gasped, ‘Ah! Yes! Go on!’

He was a gobby bugger for someone who was tied up so
submissively
, I decided. I’d had no idea that he got his jollies doing this. He’d never once asked me to spank him. I checked his cock and saw that it had grown in response to the stimulation to become a proper erection. It needed teaching a lesson, just as Scott did. Moving back round before him, I slapped his cock sideways with the ruler. Then I slapped it back. Its moist eye winked as his foreskin eased back from the swelling glans. Scott rolled his own head from side, exposing his throat.

A good job for him I wasn’t really vindictive, I thought viciously as I slapped his cock back and forth, my smacks getting harder. His tool lurched and lolled like a tree in a storm and he gasped and bit his lip and bared his teeth, strung between the pleasure and the pain. I struck at the tops of his thighs too, as I gained in confidence and ire, and that made his pinioned legs thrash. I laid a couple of strokes across his lower belly, just over his bladder, ignoring his protests. In fact the only target I avoided was his full scrotum; I wanted to punish him, not castrate him. When his cock was bright red I stopped and inserted the ruler between his thighs though, beating up with measured, warning taps on his spunk-bag, letting him know what I could do, if I wanted to. He spread his knees as much as he could and groaned, sweat running down the inside of his thighs, his prick dancing.

I got irritated with that. He was enjoying it too much. Abandoning the torture without warning I crossed back behind him to pick up the ping-pong bat. The rubber had been removed from one face revealing the plywood, and holes had been drilled through the paddle. Well, experimentation was the only way to find out the effects of this one, so I brought it across in a resounding smack on his arse. I was delighted to find that the unclenched male bottom is just as capable of a delightful wobble as the female one.

I spent some time appreciating the subtle difference in
sound
and vibration I got from the two different faces of the paddle and, by that time, Scott’s bum was flushed red all over. I could hit his buttocks a whole lot harder than I could his prick, too, which gave me great satisfaction. Scott, I could tell, was trying not to sound too wimpy, but his grunts were coming out as half yelps. My own breathing was coming hard from the exertion.

But my other hand was feeling left out. I decided the only way forwards was to stand at Scott’s side, right under his straining arm, and, with the familiar perfume of his deodorant and his sweat in my nostrils, to punish him fore and aft at the same time: one jouncing blow on his pert buns with the bat, followed by a lighter stinging slap on the shaft of his cock. Over and over, until he was red in the face and gasping and crying out, ‘Stace! Suck it! Suck it please!’

I wasn’t going to stoop to that. I gave him three really hard smacks on the behind, enough to make my own arm ache, then turning the ruler I scraped its narrow edge up his prick from root to bulging helmet. It was like squeezing a bag of icing. His spunk shot out in a long sticky line at the first spasm, falling through the air to bespatter the concrete floor. A second gobbet followed. The weaker aftershocks just splashed and oozed down his cock. Scott pitched forwards in his bonds, babbling like an idiot.

At that moment the door opened and Stacy walked in, saying, ‘Scott, Avril’s car’s out the front –’

She stopped when she saw me and went red to the ears. Stupid cow. She didn’t even remember that he couldn’t hear her. I stepped back, raised the bat one last time and let him have it on the arse with everything I had left in arm and shoulder and chest. I nearly lifted him off the floor. Scott wasn’t expecting an epilogue and certainly nothing that hard; this time he let loose a scream of pain. Flicking out one earplug
I
told him, ‘You’re dumped, dipshit!’ and marched out past a cowering Stacy.

I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since.

I came out of my reverie, surprised at myself and more surprised by the effect it’d had on me; I was tingling and a bit flushed. This wasn’t great timing for the female equivalent of a rogue erection I told myself and, for a moment, I was tempted to stick my hand down my waistband and work it all off. There wasn’t anyone to see, I reasoned, and I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I released some of the pressure. Then I finally spotted my first real landmark – an outcrop of particularly large boulders off to my left – and I pushed thoughts of sex firmly away as I turned to it.

The trees seemed to be thinner there, the bracken higher. I hoped in vain for a path, but none came into view and eventually I just breasted the ferns. The damp from the leaves started to soak into my clothes and the smell of the bruised stems was curiously unpleasant. Just before I reached the rocks I broke out into clear ground – a wide patch of trampled bracken. The smell here was worse. A cloud of flies rose buzzing. There was something lying on the crushed leaves, something red and black, thin like stripped branches and twisted like driftwood. I stared at it for a long moment before I realised what I was looking at.

It was the remains of a deer. A big one, with a burgeoning rack of antlers. There wasn’t much left of it but bone.

I made a face. Then movement caught my eye and I looked up at the rocks, straight at a huge dog that had appeared on one of the boulders. As I hesitated another jumped up next to it; both were watching me with ears pricked. They were dark grey with amber eyes. The muzzle of the first wrinkled into a snarl. My head told me I must be looking at a couple
of
German shepherds, and I’m not normally at all nervous of dogs. Ancient instinct from somewhere deep inside me had a very different theory: I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

‘No,’ I said, starting to back off, trying to keep calm. The big canine gathered itself to jump. Instinct won: I turned and fled, crashing through the bracken. I had a good head start and I’d turned downhill, but there was no way I was going to win that race. Within seconds I heard it rustling through the leaves behind me. I redoubled my efforts, completely reckless now, my feet catching on the bracken stems and nearly tripping me flat. I had a vague idea of climbing a tree, and I fled towards the only one that promised spreading branches I could catch hold of and jumped for the lowest branch. My fingertips grazed painfully across its underside. I landed heavily, realised that I wasn’t going to have a second chance because the animal was crashing through the ferns nearly at my heels, and just managed to put my back to the trunk, throwing my arms up to shield my throat and face. I caught a glimpse of the beast, jaws gaping, in mid-leap, and I shut my eyes.

It hit me full on, sharp teeth and claws raking my skin. But there was no real weight behind the attack. It exploded around me and when it had passed I was still standing, my back crushed to the bark of the oak, gasping in the sudden silence. I looked down and saw piled up against me a great shapeless mass of dead holly. Some of the dried leaves were still falling away, snapped by the force of its impact. I pushed it off and the clump collapsed onto its side amidst the bracken.