Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  Mike heard something. An animal or a human voice, he could not tell. He searched the thick blanket with his watering eyes. There. He saw the shapes again, indistinct in the fuzzy distance. He wiped his eyes with the cuff of his jacket, as though in doing so he might wipe away the fog too. Eager to move from the soggy, sucking bog, he stumbled across the increasingly uneven surface in an approximation of the direction in which he had seen the figures.

  “Alex? You there?” he whispered, wondering if he was doing so merely to reassure himself with the sound of his own voice. Adrift in the fog, that sound was all he had to cling on to. Even his breathing had become muted to thin rasps, swallowed by the dense shroud of mist.

  On he walked, his hands outstretched partly in search of his fellows, and partly to break his fall if he should stumble over an outcrop of rock or a sudden dip in the land. Mike had begun to miss the reassuring weight of the shotgun, but Alex still had hold of it after his disastrous accidental shot.

  Mike must have walked for a quarter, or even half, a mile through the thick fog without encountering a soul. He slowed his pace again and wondered if he should go back the way he had come. But which way was that? He could be walking around in circles for all he knew.

  He heard the sound again.

  It was low and booming, like a cough that had been slowed down and stretched out across time. The sound had come from behind him, he was almost certain of it. Perhaps he had walked past the half-glimpsed figures in the fog and they were trying to alert him to it. Perhaps he should just stand still for a while and let them catch him up. That was it, he could see them now. They were moving, and to his relief they were moving toward him. But his relief was short-lived. The figures appeared altogether too thin, somehow, the closer they traveled to him. They were taller too than he remembered Alex or either of the old men.

  “Who – who’s there?” The words escaped from his lips like an apology before being devoured by the fog.

  Another sound, this one like chattering teeth, came as the long, dark shapes closed in. Mike narrowed his eyes, trying to focus. He felt the vibrations of footsteps through the earth as they drew near. They seemed heavier than human footsteps and more like hooves pounding the ground. The fog swirled clear for a moment, and Mike glimpsed antlers atop the tall, dark figures. He thought they might be stags, but then he saw they were walking upright on two legs. Their antlers were huge and dark, almost black.

  Mike took a few fearful steps back. Then he saw another shape piercing through the fog. A shotgun barrel. A flash ripped through the fog somewhere to the left of him, and, what felt like seconds later, he heard a gunshot. In the mercurial fog, it sounded like a depth charge. Another flash tore into his vision from his right flank this time, followed by another delayed boom of gunfire.

  He turned on his heel and ran into nothingness, almost falling as the ground gave way to unseen crags and hollows. Chancing a quick glance over his shoulder he saw the dark figures looming, and the black lightning shapes of their antlers snaking through the fog. Mike gasped for air as he pushed himself on. Hearing another barrage of shots, he clamped his hands over his ears. The sound was deafening as shot after shot was discharged into the fog, seemingly all around him now.

  He ducked to one side, almost twisting his ankle, to avoid more black shapes up ahead. His heart was pounding at a furious rate. His legs felt shaky beneath him as adrenaline coursed through his body. Sweat and tears clouded his already impaired vision. And then he crashed into something hard and tumbled over it. The impact bloodied his lips, and he coughed at the sudden and unpleasant metallic taste coating his tongue.

  He looked up at the object he had blundered into and saw it was a raised slab of stone, supported by two smaller blocks. Then the smell hit him. A stench of ripe decay. Atop the makeshift altar lay a writhing mess of dark fur and bloodied flesh. A dark tail hung limp over the edge of the flat stone. Mike had only to glance at it to know he was looking at what used to be Oscar. But it couldn’t be. They had buried the dog so carefully. A hideous lapping noise came from the center of the writhing mass of spoiled flesh within Oscar’s ribcage. Mike tried not to look but saw all too clearly what was there before he could avert his gaze.

  Not only maggots were feasting on the dog’s corrupted flesh.

  A trio of newly born puppies, their eyes not yet fully opened, were eating Oscar from the inside out, like baby spiders devouring their birth mother. Their black fur was slick with Oscar’s blood. One of them made little snuffling noises as it tried to loosen a piece of gristle from the hole where Oscar’s beating heart had once been. Mike gagged and lurched away from the horrific scene to empty his stomach on the rough grass. He reached out his trembling hand to steady himself and felt the rough-hewn surface of a large upright stone beneath his palm.

  Mike whirled around and saw the shadowy shapes of the stone circle looming through the fog. The stones seemed impossibly high, so vertiginous that he felt as though he were shrinking in their formidable presence. The altar, the intact stones, all of it was so different to when he and Alex had found and concealed Oscar. Mike blinked, vainly willing away his confusion at finding the area so changed. The fog swirled between the dark pillars of the circle, and he was reminded of dust motes he had once seen dancing in the aisle of a church—

  He had been a pageboy at his uncle’s wedding. Only eight years old. His parents had scolded him after the service for tapping a loose floor tile with his sandaled foot all the way through the vows. His uncle was dead now, burned to ash at a crematorium. His wife had long since left for a new life in New Zealand with her personal trainer.

  —and then Mike’s ears started to ring, the tinnitus rising to a fever pitch as he thought about making a break for the edge of the stone circle. But hearing a wet crunching sound followed by a whimper that froze the blood in his veins, Mike stood rooted to the spot.

  How he had not noticed her before, Mike could not be sure. Had she been there all along, hidden in the foggy shadows between the standing stones, watching him?

  She was dressed in a heavy woolen shawl that covered her body from throat to ground. Her bare arms were long and thin, and protruded from the shawl. In her wrinkly hands she held what looked like a knife. As she raised it over the altar where Oscar’s body lay, Mike saw that it was a shard of thick, black glass. The black glass curved slightly to a sheer tip. It looked lethally sharp. She grinned at Mike, revealing stained and crooked teeth. Her look seemed to twist his guts deep inside of him. It was a look of pure delight. But in the context of what she was so delighted about doing, it turned Mike cold with fear and disgust. She had killed the first of the puppies. Its limp little body lay inside Oscar’s. The woman brought the shard of black glass down and into the second puppy’s body, twisting it and working it down the dog’s sternum in the manner of a fishwife gutting a prize trout. She licked her cracked lips and performed the movement again, the black glass making a wet crunch as she slammed it into the third defenseless canine. The blade made an unbearable scraping noise as its tip scratched against the stone beneath.

  “It is never enough,” she said, her voice at once melancholy and ecstatic.

  She lifted the blade again, and Mike watched the dark blood pooling at its tip.

  “Never enough to restore the balance.”

  Her dry lips parted in a hideous approximation of a smile once again, and Mike looked on, unable to stop himself, as a droplet of dog’s blood dangled and then fell from the tip of the black shard and into her mouth. She closed her eyes and swallowed. Her face flickered with pleasure, then darkened once more.

  “More are needed.”

  Her eyes met his, and Mike felt more fear than he could bear. She began to laugh. She raised the black shard and pointed it straight at him. She turned it over in her hand, and for an instant, he felt as though it were twisting into his heart.

  “Much more. More blood. More ruin. More sac
rifice.”

  He gasped. Recoiling from the woman’s gaze, he almost ran straight into the stone nearest to him. Ducking out of its way, he dove into the fog, which billowed around him, betraying his presence.

  “More souls,” she shrilled.

  Then he heard the woman’s distant laughter. To Mike, it sounded like the end of the world.

  His panic drove him on and out the other side of the stone circle. After careering over a steep bank, he followed the dip of the land onto a mist-cloaked plain beyond. Clumps of sod almost tripped him a couple of times, but he managed to right himself without falling. Only when his lungs were fit to burst, and his throat burning from panicked exertion, did he risk pausing for breath.

  Bent double, Mike gripped his knees with his hands and coughed. His airways had turned cold from so much damp, foggy air. A layer of clammy sweat coated every pore on his body. Panting, he made a conscious effort to slow his breathing and to calm the hell down. Whoever she was in the stone circle, the mad, murderous woman, she was gone now. Although when he blinked he could not help but see her gaunt face and accusing eyes. Nor could he rid himself of the horrific sound of her black blade, slicing into the warm, defenseless bodies of the puppies as they feasted on Oscar’s flesh.

  He had endured more than he could of such nightmares. As soon as he got his breath back, he told himself, he would navigate his way back to lower ground and the path that led to the cottage. Once there, he would have a stiff drink from the bottle he’d picked up at the village shop. Maybe he’d follow it with a fat spliff – and to hell with whatever Helen might have to say about it.

  He was just beginning to feel better, buoyed by his intended return to form at the cottage, when he saw a shape looming within the fog. It was dark, and tall, and for a moment he fancied he saw antlers again. But as the fog swirled and reassembled into new cloudlike variations, he saw that it was a man. Mike saw the dark barrel of a shotgun protruding through the mist.

  “Hey, over here!” Mike called.

  The figure faded from view for a few seconds, then disappeared completely. Hadn’t he heard him? And how had he passed Mike by without even seeing his shadow in the fog? Then, Mike felt something hard and painful at his back. It felt like the tip of a shotgun barrel. Mike’s heart pounded, and he tried to raise his arms in surrender, but fear had frozen him.

  “Don’t move,” a commanding voice said.

  “Hey, it’s me.… It’s Mike…Alex?”

  It sure had sounded like Alex to him. Mike felt sure his friend would realize his mistake, any second now, and drop the gun. Perhaps the two old codgers were in on the game. They were just playing a trick, that was all. A pretty mean trick, but a trick all the same. Mike began to turn around. But then he felt the shotgun push harder into his back, and now he was really scared. He remained still, his heart thumping.

  “Wait, wait! Alex? It’s me!”

  “I know who you are, you fucking cunt,” the voice whispered with a harshness to match its words. It really did sound like Alex, and yet, at the same time, it sounded like no one he had heard before.

  “What are you doing, man?” Mike almost sobbed as he spoke.

  He didn’t care if the two old men might jump out from the fog, laughing at his expense. Humiliation would be a welcome respite from the terror he was feeling right now with a shotgun aimed at his spine.

  “I know what you did, Mike,” the ragged voice whispered, so close to his ear now that Mike could feel hot breath on his skin.

  Mike could no longer speak. He couldn’t breathe. All he could feel was the barrel of the shotgun digging in between his vertebrae. He tried not to think of the noise it would make when Alex—

  It really does sound like Alex, doesn’t it? Oh my god, Alex what are you.

  —pulled the trigger, tried not to think of the mess and pain a shot fired at point-blank range would do to his spine. Definitely tried not to think of the confused explosion of flesh and blood it would make as it hurtled through his body and created an exit wound through his chest. Mike tried not to move, to lurch forward, although he desperately wanted to kneel in the wet grass and vomit.

  “I know what you did,” the voice repeated.

  Mike closed his eyes against the cold wetness of his tears and swallowed. He gritted his teeth and waited for the noise and the pain – and the blackout.

  Then the pressure at his back was released.

  The shotgun had gone.

  He stood, barely daring to breathe, unsure of what to do next. Feeling the empty air behind him with one tentative hand, Mike willed himself to turn.

  He was alone in the fog.

  He looked down to see if his assailant had left any footprints, for any sign in the soil and the grass that he had been there at all. Mike could see none, not even when he fell to his knees and began sobbing into a wet tangle of grass.

  He had felt sure that the man with the gun had been Alex.

  And he had felt sure that his friend was going to shoot him.

  Part Three

  Under dark, dark skies

  There are dark, dark mountains

  And beneath the dark, dark mountains

  Is a dark, dark road.

  On the dark, dark road

  There is a dark, dark turn

  And beyond the dark, dark turn

  Is a dark, dark cottage.

  In the dark, dark cottage

  Is a dark, dark window

  And through the dark, dark window

  Is a dark, dark room.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mike trudged wearily back toward Hearthstone Cottage, feeling numb from the day’s many traumas. He had found the path that led to lower ground only when the fog lifted. He had been wandering, lost, for over an hour since being separated from Alex and the others. His friend’s words hung over him, heavy as a rain cloud, and he wanted – or, rather badly, needed – a drink. The constant, pervasive mist had worked its way into his bones, making his limbs feel leaden. He felt something close to elation when he spied the old codgers’ Land Rover. It was still parked up where they had begun their ill-advised adventure a few hours earlier.

  “Here he is, the city boy straggler.”

  Mike heard Edward’s muffled voice before seeing his ruddy face reflected in the wing mirror of the passenger door. Mike circled the vehicle and found both Jamie and Edward were sitting up front, sharing a pack of thick-cut sandwiches that lay open between them atop the handbrake column. He licked his lips involuntarily at the sight of the food and heard his stomach gurgle in pained hunger. He then watched in dismay as Jamie claimed the last of the sandwiches, the thick, rustic bread filled with what looked like corned beef. His stomach made a pathetic whining sound as he watched Jamie chew, then swallow and wipe a streak of mustard from the corner of his mouth.

  “Have you seen Alex?” Mike asked.

  Jamie chuckled though his sandwich, and Mike saw him elbow Edward, giving him cause to chuckle too.

  “Aye, about an hour ago!” Edward chortled.

  Mike wondered how long it had been, exactly, since his terrifying encounter in the fog, first with the dog-murdering hag and then with the business end of his friend’s shotgun jabbed into his spine.

  It must have been Alex.

  Mike could almost hear the bastard’s voice ringing in his ears, even now.

  “Where’d he go?” Mike asked dumbly, peering around the side of the Land Rover. He almost expected Alex to leap out from behind it as a finale to his performance up on the high ground.

  “Back to that old cottage of his,” Edward said, wiping his greasy hands on the lapels of his already rather grimy hunting jacket.

  Mike stood back as Edward opened the passenger door and, with a slight groan when his knees audibly clicked, climbed down to stand before Mike.

  “Better catch up with him, lad
die,” Jamie advised sagely. “He bagged a lovely grouse for your table tonight. Said he might let you taste some, if you help him pluck it first.”

  Jamie’s eyes twinkled in Edward’s direction, and his friend picked up the thread Jamie had started.

  “You look like a plucker and no mistake,” Edward chortled.

  “Aye, a right little plucker,” Jamie added for good measure.

  Mike tried to ignore their jibes. “He shot one, you say? A bird?”

  Jamie chuckled, the sound raspy and dry inside the Land Rover’s cab.

  “He did, sure enough,” Edward muttered, “and he did’nae fall over from the recoil neither.” The old man’s lips curled into a sly smile, and Mike felt sick to see a fragment of corned beef jelly dangling from his bottom lip.

  “Better luck next time, laddie,” Jamie said before starting the engine.

  Chuckling, Edward climbed back into the vehicle and slammed the passenger door. Soon, Mike was enveloped in a poisonous fog of diesel fumes. Jamie sounded the horn as they drove away, kicking up mud and stones as they went. Mike felt lighter now that they had gone. He supposed he should feel indignation that they hadn’t even offered him a lift back to the cottage, but in truth he was glad to see the back of them. As he pulled his jacket tightly closed around him, he began to imagine the old men sneaking back to their Land Rover to retrieve antlers to wear in the fog to scare him. Or maybe they had already concealed them at strategic points on the path to the stone circle. He felt sure Alex was in on the joke, something that his outrageous behavior with the gun would seem to support. Mike hadn’t even wanted in on the shoot in the first bloody place. He recalled how eager Alex had seemed about the venture when the two old weasels had proposed it back at the pub. A massive joke at Mike’s expense, that was all it had been. And now he thought of it, Mike wondered what else Alex had been masterminding since they’d arrived at the cottage. He almost had a heart attack when they were out fishing on their first full day. Had his friend somehow engineered that little shock for him too? He wouldn’t put it past him. Mike’s anger now propelled him toward Hearthstone Cottage.