by Tim Lebbon
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Something grey, speckled with unmelted snow because it was so cold.
He needed the phone but curiosity had him. And maybe a dread sense of the inevitable as well, because even as he knelt in close Dan knew what he was going to find.
He wondered if Nikki had known all along. A hateful thought, but deep inside where civility and morals are slaughtered by honest lizard instinct, thoughts so often were.
Only part of Jazz’s head was uncovered, and an arm, and one side of his chest. His jacket was torn and patched with black swathes of dried blood. There was more damage to his arm, too, although Dan guessed that some of it was from where he’d just run over the barely concealed body, the wheels must have been still churning to be able to whip him up out of the ground like that, buried not too long by the look of it, not long enough for the ground creatures to burrow in and make him their home-Petrol dripped into the dead boy’s eye.
“Holy fuck!” Dan fell backwards and tried to scrabble away from the car, pushing with his hands and feet but unable to tear his gaze from the messed-up kid. His whole body screamed at the pain but that only made him crawl and kick more, as if to distance himself from his own agony as well as the dead boy beneath his car. His bruised hands and his coat and his shoes all picked up sticky mud, and soon he could barely lift his limbs such was the weight pulling them down. He slumped back to the ground, unable to tear his gaze from the crumpled form beneath
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the Freelander, willing the snow to fall heavier and thicker so that it would obscure the view and give him blessed whiteout.
Dan suddenly realized how cold he was. The Freelander’s air-conditioning had buffered him against the chill until a couple of minutes ago, and now that shock was biting home and pain was flaring, the cold bit hard and relentless. His hands were numb. His face and ears stung where the fat flakes struck. And there was a dead boy beneath his car …
Dan had never disliked Jeremy, but he was a teenaged boy going out with his daughter, so Dan justified his distance and suspicion by saying that he was a father. He knew what he’d been like at Jeremy’s age. He knew that Jeremy and Nikki got up to more than just hand-holding when they went to parties or friend’s houses. And he hated that.
Well, now Jeremy was dead.
He must tell someone. He had to get the mobile phone from the car, call the police, call Megan. That became the one thing he focussed upon-ignoring the pain, the cold and the corpse-because it provided some sort of temporary refuge from what had happened.
As for the shape in the road … a shadow in the snow. And quietly, so that maybe he would not even hear it himself, Dan whispered about how well he could lie.
He stood and groaned, coughed, making noise to kill the dreadful silence. Nothing else moved; only the snow. No shape emerged from the hedge as he approached the battered Freelander. No
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whisper came in the snow as he drew closer to the open door and lost sight of the corpse. No cold hand fell on his shoulder.
So who killed him?
Dan shivered, as if the voice in his head belonged to someone else. He recognized his own fear coming through, his own voice giving words to the terrible thought that had been circulating, seeking release, since he’d fallen down and seen the corpse of his daughter’s boyfriend.
Who killed him? Who buried him? Shallow grave, always meant to be found, that’s what they say on the news. Shallow grave. As if surprised that a murderer has such disregard for their vietim; expecting that a decent killer would dig a six-foot hole for the bloody remains of their latest crime.
Dan grabbed the phone and squeezed tight. Even switched off it was a link away from here, and soon he would be talking to Megan. And however odd she was acting, the sound of her voice would help him. He was phoning to warn her-to scare her-but at least that would be a positive action. Better than falling on his arse in the mud.
He turned around as he pressed the memory button. He didn’t like having his back to the snow, and whatever hid behind it. The electronic beep that told him the number was being dialled seemed loud and alien in the ever-whitening landscape. Snow landed on his eyelids, turning the sky white and forcing him to blink faster than usual.
The phone let out a long, single tone.
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Not connected: try again?
He stared at the little display screen, willing it to change, but a snowflake struck and obscured his view. He wiped it away and pressed the redial button.
A car passed on the road. Dan turned and shouted, waving his arms at the high hedge and stomping along in his mud-heavy shoes. It passed by quickly, although it did not seem to be driving fast, as if the snow was distorting sounds from afar and swallowing them whole. He saw the bloody glow of tail-lights through the hedge, and for a couple of seconds he thought the car was braking. They would pick him up and call the police, drop him home to his family while he spewed his story and demanded protection, begged for help.
But then the car was gone, fog lights fading quickly in the snowstorm.
“Jesus, I’m cold.” His voice sounded loud, almost an echo, but it provided company. The phone joined him with another long, unavailable tone. “Damn thing.” He stared at the screen again and then pocketed the useless scrap of technology, despairing that a snowfall could knock out his only line of communication so easily.
“It’s the blizzard,” he said. “It is.” It seemed that today he was good at believing his own lies.
And then every lie shed its insulating skein of disbelief as the enormity of what had happened finally struck home.
Turning the corner where they had first picked up Brand several days ago; the shape in the road,
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the shape that was Brand, forcing him into a skid that resulted in a crash; Jeremy, Jazz, dead and buried and just begging to be found; and Megan and Nikki only a mile away through the woods.
Dan’s heart skipped double-speed for a few seconds. He breathed in long and deep, although panic sought short sharp breaths, and sat down again in the mud. Brady would have called the police, he knew that, but he was not certain. He had to be absolutely, no shadow-of-a-doubt certain.
Whatever had been in the road (Brand, it was Brand and I fucking know it was Brand) … now had a five minute head start.
Dan stood and ran. If he was going to have a heart attack so be it, but it would happen while he was doing his best to help and protect his family, not as he sat quivering in the mud, afraid of the snow and mourning his inability to believe what was there before him. He was leaving the scene of an accident, fleeing his Freelander smashed in a field with petrol leaking out and a body jammed half-under one of the rear wheels. But there were more important things happening. Deep at the back of his mind there was hope, but almost smothering that was the dark dread that clouded his thoughts, rolling like thunderheads as he ran and tried to see his way through to the light on the other side.
Gusts of wind picked at his clothing, stronger gusts every time, sending sheets of snow waving across the field and driving the cold in deep.
Five minutes head start, but Dan knew the fields and the woods, he knew his way home
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across country, whereas Brand would have to take the road, especially in this weather—
So thinking, Dan realized that he stood within a whiteout. Ahead of him was the edge of the woods at the far edge of the field, surely, but he was no longer sure which way was ahead. All around the snow came down, and although he caught brief glimpses of vegetation in the distance between waves of white, they could have been hedges or trees in any direction.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…” He carried on running blind until he tripped over the shape in the field. He cried out, sure his toe had broken, already feeling the warmth flooding his shoe as a smashed nail spewed blood. It turned cold quickly. He rolled and stood up, ready to escape into the blizzard if the shape so much as moved, revealed itself as more darkness at the heart of
the whiteout. Wind gusted, snow shifted on the thing and Dan tensed.
It was a motorbike. It’s front wheel was buckled, fuel tank dented, its covering of snow giving it an even more abandoned look. Jeremy’s bike.
“Left for me to find.” A wall of snow blew at him in agreement. A hundred shapes swirled and eddied there, changing into each other, swapping forms until the breeze stopped and the flakes found their way downward again.
Dan ran again. If the bike had been left for him, whoever left it knew that he’d be taking this route across the field.
Impossible, he thought. No way. That was just too much to bear.
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The driver’s door of the Freelander slammed shut.
Stopping suddenly tipped his balance and he went sprawling, but he lay there in the mud, supported on cold hands and muddied knees, listening. He was not sure which direction the sound had come from-it may have been from the left, in which case he was going the wrong way; or from behind, so that he was still heading to the woods-but even though he held his breath, and listened, there was nothing more to hear.
“Wind,” he whispered, but there had been no gusts strong enough to do that.
He stood again, trying to shake some of the wet mud from his shoes, scraping it from his hands and the sleeves of his jacket. He breathed softly, still listening. It could have been a car on the road, perhaps, bumping into the hedge, skidding and denting its bumper against one of the stone walls that lined the road further along.
Dan knew the sound of his own car door. He had left it open. Somebody had closed it.
He ran again. Heading straight ahead, he hoped that in his panic he had not spun around and got his orientation all messed up. Two minutes, he guessed, and then he’d be at the tree line. Once inside the woods the snow may be lighter, although without the leaf canopy overhead, not much. And he’d be able to move faster.
One mile, in the snow, direction uncertain. He should be home within half an hour.
He glimpsed a hump in the snow from the corner of his eye. He ran on, trying to ignore or explain away what he had seen, and then the
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Freelander loomed before him, blue body-work smudged white, the ragged shape of Jeremy’s body now almost totally covered by snow.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Dan hissed, and he glanced around because his voice was so loud. Then he looked back at the car to make sure it was his and realized how ridiculous and just so fucking desperate all this was fast becoming. The driver’s door of the Freelander was closed. He tried calling home again. The long low tone of unavailability interrupted the silent snowfall, so he turned the phone off and jammed it down into his pocket.
Wind blew snow in his eyes and laughed at him.
“That way,” he said, turning his back on the Freelander and Jeremy’s body, aiming across the field to where he knew the woods to be. Then he started running again. This time he saw the remains of Jeremy’s motorbike pass by on his left. He kept running. Even when he heard the Freelander’s doors opening and closing, opening and closing, he continued running, panting with fear now, seeing his breath mist around his face and feeling eyes on his back, even though to see him the watcher would have to be no more than twenty paces away.
Dan ran. He did not turn because that would make him stumble and fall, and he’d lose his way again. He ran because Megan and Nikki were in danger and he had yet to hear a police siren, and he was beginning to wonder whether Brady had called the police at all. He ran because of the shape he’d seen in the road, and the knowledge
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that it had been Brand startling him into a skid, a swerve, a crash, all planned, all contrived so that he would unearth Jeremy’s body and then stumble across his motorbike, so far into the field that it must have been dragged there.
Dan’s loud breathing seemed to echo back at him. He could hear only his pounding feet and his manic breaths, feel only the cold, smell only the snow. He hadn’t realized that snow had a smell before but here it was, clear and clean and fresh, all-encompassing. It seemed so anomalous in this field, which should smell of spilled petrol and fear and rot. Body rot. Dead body rot.
He ran faster. Even though he had heard the doors opening and closing and seen the shape in the road, he felt alone. That was good. If he’d had even the slightest hint that something or someone was accompanying him through the snow, he was sure he’d have just curled up and suckled mud until whatever or whoever it was arrived.
The trees appeared suddenly, thrusting branches out over the fence to impale him in his headlong flight. He ducked and didn’t stop running until he bounced up against the fence. He glanced around, and saw that he’d reached the forest. Thank God, he thought, wondering why such words came when he never thought of himself as a believer. That made him think of Megan, and that made him climb the fence, mindless of the scratching thorns and grasping branches of bushes and shrubs spaced along the forest boundary.
Once beneath the trees he paused to find his
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bearings, tried the phone again, hoping against hope. It was as dead as ever. The snow seemed lighter in here, even though the leaf canopy was a summertime memory and a springtime promise. There was still a layer on the ground but the going was easier, rotting-down leaves supplying the underlay as opposed to turned, wet mud.
“Good, right way, ten minutes and I’ll be home.” His voice didn’t sound so loud in here with trees to lose itself between. Itself and himself; if he rushed in headlong he could end up anywhere. The woods weren’t that big, not this side of the clearing where the houses stood, but if he went the wrong way he could end up travelling parallel to the far boundary, and eventually he’d find himself in deeper woods he didn’t know. At least he walked in here occasionally. He’d know the three fallen trees when he found them, and the stone bridge across the stream, and-Footsteps. Fast, pounding, echoing the beating of his heart, as if trying to use his fear as camouflage. Distance was confusing in the blizzard, but Dan turned his head hurriedly left and right. The field. At last, he was being followed across the field.
The snow could part into a sprinting shape at any second.
Dan set off between the trees. A more certain knowledge of who was out there only made him more scared. In this instance he would have preferred mystery, a more ambiguous fear, to this taste of terror spiced by the rotting reality of Jeremy’s death. Murder, Dan thought, it was a
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murder. Bounding between trees, hands held out to ward off branches aimed for his eyes, Dan knew that he should have called the police days ago. What false pride had stopped him? What foolish certainty that he could protect his family had lead them deeper into danger?
“Murder,” he whispered. It sounded like a last gasp.
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The Book of Lies
Lost. Loss. Losing. Odd words for an even odder situation. A human foible, perhaps, the idea that mislaying or yielding something-a possession, a memory, a way-is a bad thing, a lessening of the soul or the soul’s belongings. It implies that one possessed something to start with, and so it hints at riches. To lose something worth crying about is to admit that one was fortunate, once. Some are never fortunate. Some never experience loss, only forfeit, because something of no value should never be mourned.
Lost. Loss. Losing. Words of the rich and fortunate, the gifted and blessed, words having no real meaning for the basest in society, the silent majority that goes about its chores, complaining only in badly lit drinking houses as they breathe in the disease-laden smoke of others, muttering
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dismay into half empty glasses which can never be half full, and following routes laid out by those preparing for their own inevitable loss.
Because everything must, eventually, go. You can’t take it with you, so they say. And believe me they’re right. What they don’t know is that you can’t just lose it either…
Whatever fortunes you have, material or ethereal, they must go somewhere the m
oment you die.
Anyone who knows that will be rich in seconds. And in centuries, no one will touch them ever again.
Lost. A definite use of the word, a finite judgment, for if something is lost it can never be found again. Most things judged as lost are merely mislaid. A memory cannot truly be lost because everything seen, heard, tasted and experienced is remembered and retained, somewhere. It’s always there, reverberating and affecting and steering. All that’s lost is the ability to retrieve.
But lost in the woods, now, that’s easily done. Especially with fear and desperation guiding the way, because these are the two grossest liars, players of nasty games and spinners of wild, misleading yarns.
Lost in the woods …
How about something worse? How about lost at home? Lost in the place you know and love because there’s no way to find yourself, rescue your shivering soul from the inevitable outcome of madness. Lost at home, and losing …
Losing. The state of approaching loss,
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knowing it is coming but unable to avert, dodge or talk oneself out of its way.
Loss is tenacious. Once its empty self sinks its fangs into something, there’s no hauling it back.
Well, maybe on occasion. But even then it’s simply delaying the inevitable.
Sometimes loss gets lost, just for a moment.
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Chapter Thirteen
“Nikki, let me in.”
More crying from behind the door. Megan frowned and held her breath, trying to hear the giggle hidden by the tears. She was still holding the poker. It would smash the lock on the bathroom door, she supposed, but she liked to think that Nikki was still there somewhere. She liked to think that her daughter could fight the bastard.