Mildred Drinkwater remained quiet in the rear, as she had since leaving the environs of Knight’s Crossing. Her head lolled one way, then another with the track’s drops and thrusts, but her gaze stayed fixed ahead, dull and unseeing.
“Just a few more minutes, Sarge. That was the worst of it.”
Stark grunted.
They descended out a bleak stand of trees, narrow-trunked and leafless and pale as death, into a flat area surrounded by barren rolling hills. The path here was easier going, Stark agreed, but only by comparison.
Stark almost uttered a relieved sigh. He had, he realized, been searching the spaces between the trees for hanging bodies. Ahead, he saw two vehicles off to the side, an estate wagon and a Land Rover. They were thick with dust, as if they were long-abandoned relics of some apocalyptic event.
Ware braked near the vehicles and cut the motor. “We’re here.”
As far as Stark could see, there was no ‘here.’ Closing the car door was like setting off a cannon, but the bang! was immediately devoured by a profound silence, a deep hush that pressed painfully against his ears. His voice seemed muffled, as if he were speaking through layers of smothering wool.
“Where’s this farmstead you mentioned?”
Ware pointed up at an angle from the track.
Stark squinted against the bright amethyst sky. Just over the rise he saw a dark bump, perhaps the tip of a fence post or the lone remnant of a toppled tree. Letting his gaze slide back down the hill, he saw a meandering dusty path recently trampled.
He turned as Mildred forced herself out of the car. She looked past him, muttered something in a strange, harsh tongue, then made a gesture with her left hand, not the sign of the cross but something more complex. She spat on the ground.
“Cursed earth, Sergeant.” She joined Ware. “I do pray we find Harold, but not here.”
A pang twisted the constable’s face, as if she were embarrassed by Mildred’s actions and words. Yet it was clear to Stark that Ware, in her heart, wanted to utter words of defence, make a protective sign and spit upon the cursed earth, but would not do so within his view. All three of them were children of the Twenty-first Century, but the roots of these women reached down to a dark, prehistoric past that Stark could not even begin to imagine.
Catching up, Stark recalled Ravyn saying something enroute to the village about some long-ago murders, about a shunned family, but the details refused to come to him. Unlike Ravyn, Stark kept his memories not in easily accessible pigeon-holes but at random in a complex maze in the centre of a dark, impenetrable forest, or so it seemed to him at times.
“Entire family killed, murdered in the middle of the night,” the constable murmured. “Decades ago. The Strykers.”
The name kicked up more memories, but they remained elusive. “Never found the murderer, did they?”
“They knew who he was, all of them did,” Ware said. “Dale Stryker, youngest son. He did it.”
Mildred moved away from the two police officers.
“But if he was never…”
“Stands to reason,” Ware said. “They had the bodies of all the others, from Old Wizard Ezekiel to daughter Heather, but not Dale.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean…”
“It’s what everyone said, what everyone believed, the way it had be.” Her tone carried a solid certainty. Having heard the story since she was old enough to toddle, she could believe nothing else. “Even the police believed it. They sent up detectives from Stafford, Albert Dorry said. Everyone dead, young Dale scarpered – who else were they going to look for? Not that they looked.”
“What do you mean?’ Stark said.
“It was obvious who done it, so the detectives spent little time overturning stones here. They figured young Dale had scarpered to foreign parts, Liverpool or London, maybe France or the States.” Ware shook her head. “People were as glad to see the backs of the detectives as they were to see the last Stryker flee.”
“They didn’t want him in the dock for his crimes?”
“Had Dale been run to ground and killed, there’d have been no tears, as there were none for his clan. People were scared of Wizard Ezekiel, scared of them all, but him most of all. People were glad to see an end to the Strykers, but no one wanted Dale brought back. He was only a boy, but a boy who could best Wizard Ezekiel at his own magic was as wanted as an adder at a christening.”
Stark snorted. “I know how things are here, but…”
“Do you?” She threw him a sharp glance.
Stark had not been long in Hammershire County and would ever be to all a strapper, same as any man who could not count five generations back, but he had seen enough to know all villages were different and all villages were the same. They had the technology and tools of a modern world, but it was naught but a veneer over an ancient savagery. Villages that seemed quaint and rustic to weekend antiquers and ramblers down from London were, to Stark, illusions, picturesque bandages covering corruption, ignorance and malice. This drivel about magic and curses marked Knight’s Crossing as no different than any other village where the limit of the known world was the near horizon.
“You seem to know a lot about it, Constable Ware, but you could not have been…what? A few years old?”
“It was afore I was born, Sarge, but I heard all the stories,” the young woman replied. “Not just from Mum and Gran, but from Old Albert Dorry too. He interviewed anyone who had anything to say, submitted reports to the CID. Talked about the case, he did, but not much about the Strykers. Not good to do that, not even now.”
“Seems a rum way to run a murder investigation.”
Ware shrugged. “Even if they never caught him, they knew he done it, so case solved. It happens.”
Stark nodded. Even at Scotland Yard, some cases were solved, yet unclosed. Sometimes, orders from on high, amid winks and nods. Or a perpetrator unfit to plead, maybe unavailable to confess or simply beyond the reach of the law, for whatever reason. But there would have been a decent investigation first. Of some kind.
“It was a long time ago, Sarge,” Ware said.
“Not long enough,” Mildred Drinkwater muttered, though she kept her distance from the coppers discussing so freely that which should not be discussed at all.
Stark felt increasing dread on the dusty path, each trudging step revealing more fence-line. He had never seen such a miserable and lonely place. The village was only a few miles off, but it might have been on the far side of the moon. It stood to reason they should soon see a farmhouse, or what was left of one. He could not imagine any man, much less a whole family, living amidst such desolation, but Stark was certain that viewing a habitation, even an abandoned one, revealing the hand of man in the wilderness, would surely break the crushing feeling of solitude.
Stark was wrong.
When Stryker Farm hove into view, Stark fought an instinct to turn back. In London’s East End, such forebodings had assailed him at the mouths of shadowed alleys or in narrow streets where violent yobs kept hidden watch. Here, as there, a sensation of latent menace was palpable, the awareness of imminent peril, but here there were no shadows, no signs of habitation, no watchers, just a feeling that something awaited him amidst the sun-bleached structures.
He had never before felt the hairs at the back of his neck rise.
He did now.
“You feel it, too, don’t you, Sergeant Stark?”
Mildred Drinkwater stood quite close to him, her voice low and grating. Suddenly, he realized he had come to a complete halt upon seeing the abandoned farmstead. He turned to her.
“It’s just a derelict farm, Mrs Drinkwater.”
She snorted and turned to Ware. “Where’s them searchers?”
“Mr Knox should have them at the rear of the property by…” Her mobile chimed and she looked at it. “Speak of the devil.” She accepted the call. “Yes, Mr Knox? They are? Keep them there. I’ll be with you shortly.”
She rang off, looked to her companio
ns. “As I expected, he has them at the back fence between the marsh and Braikey Pond; and as I also expected, they’re threatening to scarper again.”
“We’ll see about that, the silly ponces.” Almost unhesitatingly, Mildred strode through the gate and across the cursed earth.
After a few seconds, Ware caught up with the enraged mother. Stark followed the two women, finding himself hard put to keep the pace set by Mildred, even with his long stride.
The farmhouse was huge and rambling, fit for a large, extended family. Its central portion, oldest part of the structure, was smaller, probably two rooms and a kitchen, but it had been built onto over the years. Or centuries, Stark thought. Its architecture was of a plain country style, no ornamentation or flourish of any kind, nothing to tie it to any era. Rain and sun had conspired with neglect to strip the paint and bleach the wood.
He frowned as they passed well away from building, not at first understanding what was amiss. A stray reflection of sun off glass raised an unconscious notice to a conscious realisation.
None of the windows were shattered.
They glared outward like a cluster of eyes.
To Stark, lack of broken glass was more unsettling than the isolation. After decades of abandonment, not a single pane should have been left intact. Boys with rocks, he thought. Ride your bike to the murder house and break a window, mate, unless you’re afraid, or maybe just a poof. A rite of initiation, like the many Stark had himself endured. If nothing else, the glass should have fallen prey to the malevolent mischievousness that was part of the warp and woof or every boy.
But no one had dared violate the house that squatted in the midst of cursed earth. The panes were layered with dust and grime, but they were intact.
Stark’s hope of finding the missing boy here dimmed.
They followed an arching path between the farmhouse and a barn, then left it, heading out into what once must have been fields. But fields of what, Stark wondered? The ground was barren, rocky, totally unfit for agriculture, not even the hard-scratch subsistence farming that kept men between starvation and death. Stark was a city man, wished he still was, but even he could see the sterility of the soil. No matter how a man broke his back working this land he would never get back what he put in.
In the distance, Stark saw another fence and a small assemblage of men. He caught up with Ware.
“The searchers?”
She nodded. “They don’t want to move onto Stryker land, but they can’t very well head back through the marshlands or make their way around Braikey Pond…not lest they risk having their souls snatched by the demons and elementals dwelling there.”
Stark gave her a look.
“Belief is infectious, powerful, and sometimes useful.”
Superstitious sods, he thought, but even he was dismayed by the landscape he saw beyond the searchers. Left of them rose a pale swirling mist. Solitary gnarled trees shone dimly through the vapours rising from boggy earth. Stark saw no men hanging from their branches, but the swamp trees seemed themselves like corpses. To their right an expansive pond glinted like mercury under the dim sun. The rocks and vegetation along its shore seemed like goblins through the haze.
Stark cursed himself and the fates that had banished him to the backwaters of Hammershire. He shifted his gaze from the disturbing shapes along the torpid water and frowned.
“What are those?” Pointing.
“Standing stones,” she said. “Megaliths.”
“Like in the Village Green?”
“Exactly like them,” Ware said. “Except the ones on the Green are only a thousand years old, raised in the time of the Knight.”
“Only a… Well, how old are these?”
Ware shrugged. “They’ve always been there.”
“Since time immemorial?” He gave her a snarky smile. “Since the beginning of time itself?”
“So people believe, Sarge.”
Stark dropped back, recalling Heln’s instructions and Ravyn’s advice. He would have to, he thought, strike a balance between the two, and hope he did not take a tumble. He watched as Ware and Mildred Drinkwater approached the reluctant searchers.
“Stop all this silly buggers and start searching for my boy!”
“But this was where…”
Mildred cut the speaker off with a glare, strode to the fence and brought her nose within a inch of his. He gazed back with all the courage of a sheep facing a wolf. She stepped aside as he climbed the fence, the others following.
“Well done, you.” Then Ware took charge, sending them across the farm in twos. “Look in, around and under everything. Nobody leaves till this whole area is searched.”
Knox shook his head. “I tried to get them started, but the stupid sods quailed when they saw where they were. Even the strappers were spooked by the place, but none had the heart to find their way back through the marshland, or risk the spirits of Braikey.”
“I appreciate what you did, Mr Knox.”
Anything to help, Mildred.” He looked at Stark, then at Ware. “I see you found another strapper along the way.”
“DS Stark, Hammershire CID.” He extended his hand.
“Franklin Knox. Charmed.”
“Mr Knox is something of a local celebrity,” Ware said. “An author. He’s written… Oi! Mildred! Where are you off to?”
“Looking for Harold.”
“I’d rather you stay here.”
“I will look for my son.”
“It’s all right, Constable,” Knox said. “I’ll watch after her. The more hands, the better.”
Reluctantly, Ware nodded.
She watched Knox and Harold’s mum walk off. Though the air rang with the cries of searchers, it seemed to her a hush attended the farm, the kind of stillness that comes over a sleeper the moment before awakening. Stories of the evil attached to this patch of earth, which she had always avoided, rushed back from the fog of memory. Seeking a distraction, she turned to Stark, but he was gone.
A moment later, she saw him some yards off. He stood under the Worship Oak, staring into the spreading boughs.
Stark felt someone approach, but could not turn from the oak tree’s loathsome fruit. Clay effigies in the hundreds hung from the branches. They were small and misshapen, like toys imagined by a mind filled with dark malevolence, crafted in mockery of human form. The faces were vague, with little round holes for staring eyes and large ragged holes for screaming mouths.
“Blood for old gods,” Ware said. “Lures for any demons and elementals summoned. Blood draws them.”
“Blood?” He shook his head. “They’re just clay.”
“The blood used to not be so…” She paused. “…metaphorical.”
He bit down on the question seeking release.
“Babies and aborted foetuses,” Ware said, answering anyway.
He turned from the tree.
“So the stories go, Sarge.” Ware felt a guilty satisfaction at his paleness, his greenish cast. If they wanted to judge her, they could also learn that being resident constable in Knight’s Crossing was not all tea and choccy biscuits. “Long time since a season’s been marked with even the simulacra, not for thirty years or more.”
“How long…” He paused. He did not want to know, but had to ask. “How often are…were these things put up?”
“No more than once a lustrum, they say.”
“A…”
“Five years.”
Stark glanced back to the tree and shuddered. Some looked new, but most were weathered to such a point that the human form was more suggestion than statement.
“Villagers call it the Worship Oak,” Ware said. “The Strykers danced ‘round it at Beltane and such. They called elementals from sky and earth, demons and hamadryads from wind and water. Lots of cavorting between the Strykers and the entities, and also between Stryker and Stryker, all being sky clad, so the stories say.”
“Sky clad”
“Naked they were, at least during the workings
.”
“Workings? What do you mean by that?”
“Magical rituals,” Ware said. “Ceremonies and rites.”
“There were witnesses to these...workings, as you call them?”
“No, it was a dangerous thing, spying on Stryker Farm,” she said. “No one wanted to incur Wizard Ezekiel’s wrath. No on came here uninvited – Martha Stryker had friends in the village and some magicians came here bartering for knowledge; it’s said that Wizard Ezekiel also accepted acolytes from time to…”
Stark held up a silencing hand. He refused to journey into the dead past, refused to delve further into a subject that had nothing to do with finding a lost boy, refused to descend into madness.
“Stories die hard, Sarge,” she said. “In fact, there are more tales now about the Strykers than there were then. Some say Wizard Ezekiel is more powerful dead than he ever was alive.”
He gave a snort of disgust that encompassed not only Ware and the superstitious and probably inbred residents of Knight’s Crossing, but also Heln, Ravyn and the whole blighted darkness that was Hammershire County. He thought he had achieved a measure of acceptance regarding his lot, but now felt ready to chuck it all.
“I’m just telling you the way it is, Sarge,” Ware said. “If you and Mr Ravyn are going to pass judgement on me…”
“What are you on about, Constable?”
“You and your guv’nor are here to decide if I stay as resident constable,” she said. “Nothing to do with the boy.”
“Who told you such rubbish?”
Ware bit her lips. She could not draw back her rash words, but she could stop more from tumbling out. Stark took out his mobile.
“Who are you calling?”
“DCI Ravyn. He should have Winsell sorted out by now.”
Chapter 5
The Other
Besides house and barn, the abandoned farmstead held dozens of outbuildings. Most were merely sheds, but all had to be searched. Also needing enquiry were many isolated copses, water-gouged ravines, sinkholes, bramble-choked fields and lonely outcroppings of rocks. At first, the search proceeded at a worm’s pace, but picked up a bit when no searcher was attacked by ghosts or devoured by demons, as half of them now expected.
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