by David Neal
“What are you doing?” Hutter asked.
“Waiting on you,” he said. Gone was the vicious tone, the vitriol. Wolfric spoke flatly, as a man traumatized. “I have something to show you.”
“The Puritan wants it done today,” Hutter said. “I thought that would please you. Is the girl in there?”
Wolfric shrugged. “You’re not listening to me. I want to show you something.”
“What is it?” He noticed now that dry mud caked Wolfric’s hands.
Wolfric stood. There was no evidence he had had anything to drink. He was too steady. “Follow me,” he said. “Those things aren’t here. At least they’re hiding themselves better now. And it isn’t far.”
“Who’s guarding the girl?”
“After what you saw, that isn’t a sensible question. She chooses to stay.”
Hutter could not argue with that.
Wolfric led Hutter past the oasis where they had interrogated Rosamond. For Hutter, there was still a residue in the air here. The feeling moved beneath his skin. He turned his gaze from the oily surface of the pond. The trail forked. To one side, the path led onward, deeper into the forest. To the other side, the path opened into a fenced clearing, a cemetery with simple wooden crosses. Wolfric looked at his hands. “It was the only fresh grave,” he said.
“What have you done?” Such an abomination shook Hutter to the core. His anger swelled.
“I had to see,” Wolfric said. He would not be intimidated. The larger of the two, he reached out and gripped Hutter’s arm. “You have to see.”
Hutter struggled to free his arm but couldn’t break Wolfric’s iron grasp. He stopped short of striking his assistant, but his anger remained high. Wolfric pulled him through the graves and crosses, stamping with disrespect over the bodies in the earth. The grave was at the back corner beneath the fence, a mark of the unbaptized. Wolfric had not replaced the dirt in the infant’s grave. Earth and stone remained piled at the side.
A stained shroud covered what lay at the bottom of the hole.
“It’s very real,” Wolfric said. He released Hutter’s arm. “She did not lie to you.”
“I didn’t ask for proof,” Hutter said.
“Here. Look.” Wolfric knelt and pulled back the hardened shroud. A faint trace of moss had begun to grow over the cloth. “There’s no smell,” Wolfric said. “No rot. Just the smell of the dirt.”
Of the mound, Hutter thought. Almost pleasant.
Although a black, peeling layer of skin covered the skull and erupted in swaths over the body, there were other areas of the child exposed. Rather than bones, tree roots formed a skeleton beneath the flesh. It occurred to Hutter that the infant had been growing flesh, and that the process was incomplete. The child had no nose and no more than a lanced boil for a mouth.
Wolfric touched one of the legs. “Light as kindling,” he marveled. “Just sticks. Like a doll.”
There was another presence in their midst. Hutter started. His heart was hard against his chest. He turned, expecting the Puritan to be standing among the crosses. It was not Israel Croft whom he saw, but Rosamond Wise. She gripped a hatchet, not unlike the one Hutter wore, and there was blood up her arm. The blood, he could see, was her own. There was a wound on her forearm as wide and wet as an open mouth. Mites scuttled from the gash.
“You see now?” she asked.
Hutter wanted to turn away, but he was mesmerized by the woman’s approach. He couldn’t look away. Wolfric, still on his knees, his mind battered, began to weep.
Rosamond handed the hatchet to the executioner. She did so with calmness. She lay her wounded arm across the fence. “Take one of the fingers,” she said. “Sire of the hatchet,” she purred. “Cutter of the cross.”
“Why do you call me that?”
“There once was a woodsman,” she started, as if she were telling a story to a child, but left the thought unfinished.
Hutter, delirious, gripped the hatchet. As instructed, he brought down the blade against one of her fingers. When the blow was done, the finger severed, Rosamond recoiled in pain. Tears rimmed her eyes, and each turned to a flea and bounded forth into the woods. She did not cry out, although she felt agony as anyone would feel it.
Wolfric picked the finger from the pile of grave dirt. He wiped the blood on his shirt. “No bone,” he said. He wiped the tears from his face. “Just a piece of the root.”
Madness, Hutter thought, but he looked. Indeed, the still warm flesh encased a dark, splintering root. His stomach grew sick, his head light.
“Leave us,” Rosamond said. Her hand, although she gripped it tightly, bled profusely. Her face was ghastly white, her thin lips colorless.
Hutter helped Wolfric from the ground. The assistant, he noticed, placed the severed finger in his pocket. Rosamond did not object. What could be hidden now? As the two men, absorbed and silent, moved through the graves, Rosamond went to her knees. She began to sweep dirt into the child’s grave with her undamaged hand. And now she was weeping, too.
In the boughs of a sprawling tree, Hutter saw the skeletal movements of other infants, moving with the deftness of felines. With the knots of their eyes, he presumed, they watched, but they did not interfere.
Who, here, knows their mother?
A crowd gathered by the river in Strattonwick, but there was no feast. Tables had not been brought forth. There were no fire pits to prepare the fish or roast the vegetables. The sun was at its pinnacle and the day was hot. No one spoke or bustled for space. Tension laced the air. The men and women and children, poor, dirt-caked peasants, God-fearing, demon-haunted, simply stood and looked on at the Raven Stone in wonder, as they would’ve done if Jesus Christ lowered from the clouds. There were nearly forty villagers. The river behind the stone moved slowly, unchanged. The sun shone over the oily water. The boat that would have been used for drowning Rosamond Wise lay against the shore, punched into the mud. There was a large and empty burlap sack in the vessel. None of these things drew the attention of the villagers. It was the grisly vision upon the Raven Stone that arrested their minds. The sight would either turn the villagers pious or make them debauched. Time would tell.
The blood seemed like nothing to them. Other, more personal, details brought them horror.
Hutter and Wolfric, emerging from the forest, traipsing through lines of hovels, passing through the gardens, caused no disturbance in this gathering by the river’s edge. Their presence was unheeded. Nor did the executioner and his assistant speak to one another once the sight was clear. What was there to say? What could ever be said? There would only be the images, sights like this.
The villagers, and now Hutter and Wolfric, gazed in awe upon the work of Rosamond’s hatchet.
Master Croft, his Puritan shield of brown cloth removed, his flesh splayed, razored open, lay across the stone in a pool of blood. How she had overpowered him, or even caught the old man by surprise, was unclear. Maybe the roots in the forest did more than watch. The Puritan’s head had been severed, cut without precision from his shoulders. Where the skin had been removed from his body, where bones should have protruded, there was only a system of roots. The sinew at his neck looked like vines, the meat like wet moss.
He, too, Hutter thought, awed. Who, here, knows their mother? Who else has severed a piece of their body to learn?
Wolfric, dazed, retrieved Rosamond’s finger from his pocket. He examined the digit closely, like a Catholic with his relic, preferring it to the sight of Croft.
Hutter wondered if his companion would ever regain his mind. “There’s nothing for us here,” Hutter whispered. He took Wolfric by the arm and tried to lead him, but the man was too stubborn, too strong. He separated from Hutter’s grasp and melted into the crowd of villagers.
Hutter looked to the forest road, so near, and felt dread. The road passed the mound, the mother’s belly. He would have to look upon the knoll once more, and he’d have to do so with nothing more than a hatchet.
*
/> It’s funny, but I can’t remember how the game ended, or if it ended at all, but I do remember that I had just set my last but one domino on the old wooden counter, and that Tom Ranscomb was chuckling softly as he looked at the piece he held shielded in his hand. I don’t remember if he was amused by victory or defeat, because then someone said, “There they all go,” and in such comically doom-laden tones that I turned from our game to see what was meant. Outside the deep bay windows of the Old King’s Inn a hearse was rolling past. It was moving at little above walking pace, slow enough to accommodate the black clad mourners following on foot. A dense tumble of greenery, mainly ivy I think, was heaped over the coffin, piled so high that a great deal had spilled into the cavity around, snaking up the windows as if it were growing still. Ten people followed the car, amongst them two small children, heads bowed and hands clasped tightly, prayer-like, in front.
There was a stir of interest in the public bar and some whispered comments that I couldn’t quite catch.
“Whose funeral?” I asked Tom.
“That’ll be old John Sleator’s.” He leaned on the counter with his arms straight and the fingers of his big hands spread, watching the procession with narrowed eyes. “About time too, some would say.”
Tom was the landlord of the pub and of the holiday cottage I was renting—and a man whose words you listened to. He was intelligent, well read, and possessed an air of calm sagacity, born, I liked to think, of a lifetime’s study of the human dramas played out in his domain. So although I was surprised to hear him make such an unkind comment I was prepared to believe it wasn’t lightly said. He continued: “They’ll be in here later for the wake, in the back room. Sleators have always held their wakes at the Old King’s.”
“How long’s always?” I asked.
“This pub’s been here since 1453 and so have the Sleator family, though they were here even before then. That’s how long always is, young man. Now—do you need another drink, because I’d better get those sandwiches laid out? Best pack the dominos away. Don’t want them catching us engaged in madcap frolic.”
I ordered another beer. I had been meaning to leave after our game, but now I wanted to stay and take a look at the Sleators. After ten minutes or so Tom reappeared and said to me: “Now, when they come in, make sure you don’t catch any of their eyes.”
“Right. Are they really that bad?”
“Not always, but I’d advise caution where Sleators are concerned. Just in case. Everyone in here knows about them, but you, being a visitor, don’t.”
One of the old men playing cards at a corner table, and clearly not hard of hearing, spoke up. “You’ll do well to listen to Tom, young’un. I still got some lively scars from the day I looked at a Sleator wrong. Here—you know you can see their farm across the field at the back of your cottage?’
“That place? That’s theirs?”
“Oh, yes,” Tom said. “Lucky for you there’s a field in between. You’re out of harm’s way, don’t worry.”
“Is it their field?”
“Oh, yes. But you’ve seen it. They don’t pay it much mind. Mainly they raise goats and brew cider from their orchard. We sell it in here, the cider. People come from miles around to drink Sleator Special.”
“Knock your socks of that will,” said a grizzled man sitting on his own near the door.
“And you’d know all about that, Arthur,” said Tom.
The public bar of the Old King’s Inn was small, making a private conversation difficult when, as on that day, so few people were there. I wanted to question Tom further about this notorious family, but was held back by the thought of being overheard. Had it been the weekend (which was when I’d first arrived) it would have been a different matter. Then the pub would be packed with people from surrounding towns come to enjoy its unchanging rustic charms, the low beamed ceilings, the thick cave-like walls, open stone fireplaces and the barrels of beer stacked up behind the bar. Then, even the back room would be lively with shouts and laughter, and the Sleators and their funereal gloom would be far from anyone’s mind.
As Tom said, I was a visitor, yet even an outsider could sense the tension growing in the room. No one left and little was said. Tom took to wiping things down behind the counter and quite unnecessarily, I suspected, to counting the takings in the till, filling small bags with the coppers and silvers and replacing them in the drawer with an impatient sigh. Then a blast of March air put an end to the vigil, as the door swung open so abruptly that it bounced off the frame with a splintering crack. Tom winced.
“Everything’s ready,” he said. “Just go through.”
I didn’t turn my head after the warning I’d received, but I watched the party as they trooped past the end of the counter, through the low door and into the crooked passage that lead to the back room. There was no missing the family resemblance in the three generations, although it was split between two types. The three younger men, one of the older men, and a woman I placed in her late sixties, represented one branch of the clan. They had heavy, prominent, simian jaws which didn’t quite fit with the high narrow foreheads and small sunken eyes above. The other older man and the two younger women had flat, mask-like faces with squashed noses and thick-lidded, watery eyes. The children, perhaps aged five or six, had these same liquid eyes and already a marked thickening around their chins. An unpleasant thought occurred to me and when they were all safely out of hearing I said to Tom in an undertone: “Close-knit lot, aren’t they?”
Tom raised an eyebrow and leaned across the counter. “So you noticed that, eh? Sleators marry Burchards and Burchards marry Sleators and if your cousin is your third or your second or your first or even your half-sister, well who’s counting? The little ones haven’t become one or the other yet, but they always do. They don’t combine, you see. One side always gets the upper hand and then the face comes out. The Sleators have that Cro-Magnon look and the Burchards look like fish. Oh yes, you see it all out here. And you thought all the excitement was to be had in the city.”
For all Tom’s counsel, a few minutes later I did just the thing he had warned me not to. Before leaving I needed to pay a visit to the gents’, which were situated perilously close to the back room, just off the connecting passageway. When I emerged from that tomb-like chamber, I simply couldn’t resist a glance through the open door. Emotions were clearly running high. One of the older men, he with the Sleator looks, had pulled one of the younger male Sleators towards him by the lapels of his funeral jacket and was shouting in his befuddled face. “You should know what to do by now you mangy idiot! You’re less use than a turd! I’ll have to take care of it myself then, won’t I?” The rest of the party looked on, not shocked by the man’s behavior but rather approving of it, it seemed to me. The senior Sleator tossed the younger one aside, sending him crashing into the table where Tom had set up plates of sandwiches and bottles of cider and beer. Then, swearing loudly, he pushed his way out of the room, only to meet the eye of the puny stranger cowering just beyond the threshold. If it weren’t for his obvious distraction, I am certain he would have punched me in the face there and then, but as it was, he shoved past me, uttering something like a growl. I was shaking when I returned to the bar.
“You just met Jacob Sleator, didn’t you?” said Tom, when he saw me. “Cheer up. You’re still alive.”
* * *
I took the scenic route back to the cottage, over a field and through Larke Woods, the box of dry food that Tom had given me for Sanderson rattling in my bag as I went. Sanderson was a big bruiser of a ginger cat who lived in the wood shed behind the house. Tom Ranscomb fed and cared for Sanderson, a stray, but had utterly failed to persuade him to move into his flat on the first floor of the Old King’s Inn. Sanderson preferred his independence and his bed in an orange crate full of rags and wadding to life as a bachelor’s companion. Tom said he hoped Sanderson might change his mind when he got to be an elderly cat, that he might see the wisdom of pooling resources, but that for now
he was resistant to logic. As soon as I was back, I filled Sanderson’s enamel bowl with the food and called for him. But then I spotted him over near the dustbin by the kitchen door. He was hunkered down, patting lazily at some small creature in the grass, so completely possessed by that feline mix of playfulness and cruelty that he was oblivious to my presence. I shouted at him and advanced, hoping to rescue the bird or mouse from a slow death by torture. Sanderson looked up, amazed to see me there, and scooted away through the hedge into what I now knew to be the Sleator’s field. I squatted down to assess the condition of his prey, then leapt straight back up with a yelp. Armed with a stout twig, I approached again. It wasn’t easy to say what it was. It was as white as squid, with the same slimy gloss, but as thick and muscular as a steak. The shape I can only compare to a hugely magnified wheat berry, pointed at the ends and fatter in the center, slightly convex at its widest point. It lay oozing a thin grey liquid that shimmered as it leaked into the grass. Perhaps Sanderson had got his claws on the afterbirth of some farm animal, I thought. I prodded it with the twig then lifted it towards the dustbin. As I dropped it in, it twitched. Retching a bit, I banged down the lid and wiped my hands on my trousers even though I had not actually touched the thing.
I had by then cancelled my plans to drive into the nearest town for dinner that night. It struck me as far too much effort, and I was instead looking forward to a cozy night basking in the warmth of the cast iron wood burner, some soup and bread, maybe a glass or two of wine and bed before ten. That, after all, was the idea of staying there—I’d intended walks on the High Weald, early nights, wholesome food, peace and quiet. I could just as easily have had a couple of weeks in Italy or Greece or France instead of the safe option of rural Kent, but I felt tired just thinking about airports and taxis and museum crowds and hire cars and other languages and trudging along endless dusty, incomprehensible streets. I needed, at that particular time, familiarity, snugness, ease. I’d been working too hard for too long and after one incident too many of losing my temper with someone I shouldn’t have, I finally took my head of department’s advice to have some time away. A friend of mine recommended the cottage in the hamlet of Mardham. She’d stayed there one Christmas. “It was bliss,” she said. “One pub, one church, one shop. Houses that really look like gingerbread. And everyone was so nice.”