by Simon Clark
EIGHTEEN
The rain came. Thunder growled in such a way that it sounded as if an angry dinosaur prowled the valley. Lightning had struck a tree on the village green. The intense heat transformed the oak into an ugly black skeleton. Floodwaters engulfed potato fields by the river. The rain came even harder. Huge drops exploded against the road. In Chester Kenyon’s workshop, the din of falling rain could have been angry fists beating against the roof.
That wasn’t the worst of it. Chester Kenyon stared at Tom Westonby as if his friend has suddenly stabbed a knife into his stomach.
‘Jesus, Tom, you are joking, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Nicola Bekk?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re seeing Nicola Bekk?’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Jesus Christ, Tom. You idiot!’ Chester flung a hammer down on to the workbench, then ran his fingers through his hair. His eyes bulged as he stared at Tom. ‘Nicola Bekk’s retarded.’
‘Hey, take that back. Nicola’s a great girl.’
‘Tom, she’s got problems here.’ He touched his forehead. ‘Learning difficulties. Backward. Retarded. Do you understand?’
Tom kicked aside a chair. ‘I thought we were friends. Truth is, I feel like punching you in your damn face.’
‘Oh my God. You’ve not had sex with her?’
‘None of your business.’ After the incident last night, when Owen had wandered off into the forest – sleep walking, he guessed – his nerves felt raw. His parents had said they would keep a close watch on Owen after Tom had explained what happened. They wondered if Owen’s grief over his mother’s sudden death had triggered frightening nightmares.
Right now, Tom needed to see a friendly face. Yet for some crazy reason Chester was making these disgusting accusations. Good grief, they were bizarre accusations at that.
Chester grabbed Tom by the elbow. When he spoke it was in a caring voice, though; he seemed deeply troubled. ‘Tell me you haven’t had sex with Nicola Bekk.’
Tom didn’t reply. The rain fell harder. The furious drumming on the roof became frenzied – it would be easy to imagine the weather itself was growing excited by the atmosphere of violence in the workshop. Thunder roared across the valley.
‘Tom. This is important. Have you had sex with that woman?’
‘Shit . . . I thought we were friends.’
‘Spit it out, Tom. Have you screwed her?’
‘No.’
Chester let out a yell of relief. ‘Thank God for that!’
‘You’re just like the other people in the village, you bastard. You hate the Bekk family. You’ve got a grudge against them.’ Tom stormed out into the rain.
Chester ran after him. ‘Listen, we need to talk.’
‘I never want to talk to you again.’
‘Tom—’
‘If you don’t let go of my arm I’m going to break your jaw.’
Chester spoke gently: ‘Go ahead, punch me. But I’m going to tell you something important.’
Tom said nothing.
Raindrops streamed down Chester’s broad face as he continued speaking: ‘You must have seen for yourself. Nicola doesn’t talk.’
This statement flabbergasted Tom. ‘Of course she talks.’
‘OK, she says a word here and there.’
‘No. I’ve had conversations with her.’
‘We’re talking about the same Nicola Bekk, aren’t we?’
Tom looked him in the eye. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Come inside.’ Chester’s voice was friendly. ‘There’s something you should know . . . It might just save your neck.’
NINETEEN
The rain kept slamming at the roof. Once again thunder crashed from the clouds. Fury and anger were there. As if Mother Nature threatened to punish the population of Danby-Mask.
Chester Kenyon handed Tom a mug of coffee before pulling a book from a shelf on the workshop wall. That done, he sat down on a chair alongside Tom.
Chester thought for a moment before speaking. ‘I’m going to show you something. I want you to know that I’m not doing this to insult you, or hurt you. But it’s important that you know the truth, even if that means you knock my teeth out.’
‘After what you’ve said about Nicola I might just do that.’
‘OK, you say she’s your girlfriend. You kissed her. But haven’t had sex yet.’
‘Chester?’ Tom’s voice held the same warning growl as the thunder.
‘Listen. I’m twenty-three years old – the same age as Nicola. We went to the village school together. When she was twelve she stopped going. That was the end of her education.’
‘So explain why you think Nicola has learning difficulties.’
‘For seven years I was at school with Nicola. In all that time I never heard her say a sentence of more than three words.’
‘You only have to look at her,’ Tom protested. ‘She’s normal. And she – she’s beautiful.’ What’s got into Chester, he wondered. Why’s he trying to break Nicola and me up?
Chester opened a book covered with children’s drawings. Tom showed him the first page; a title had been printed in green: CLASSROOM FRIENDSHIP BOOK.
‘We used to do these at the end of the school year,’ he explained. ‘The teacher told us to swap the books round in class. We’d draw a picture of the owner of the book and write messages. That way everyone in the class would have drawn your picture and written something about you. You know, a memento?’ He flicked through the pictures. Lots showed a broad-faced boy that was clearly supposed to be Chester. ‘We did this one when I was eight.’ Each page had a child’s drawing of Chester – in one he was playing football, in another eating gigantic cakes; one even had him being fired from a canon. One caption ran: Yo! Fat Neck Kenyon.
‘Fat Neck?’ Tom gave him a questioning look.
Chester touched his formidable neck. ‘Yeah, the nickname stuck.’
The drawings were typical of those by an eight-year-old. The girls’ pictures tended to be neater and dispensed with the ‘Fat Neck’.
‘I’m showing you the next page,’ Chester said, ‘because it backs up what I’ve been saying about Nicola.’
Tom’s blood drained from his face, leaving him cold inside as Chester turned the page. In the centre of the white paper was a dense black scribble. All jagged lines. A frenzy of black pen-marks. This wasn’t so much a picture as a savage attack on the page. An adult hand had written: Nicola Bekk says, ‘Hi, to my nice friend, Chester.’
For a moment, Tom couldn’t speak. ‘Nicola did that?’
‘I didn’t bully her like the other kids. Even then I knew it was wrong to call her names because she couldn’t read or write.’ He pointed to the nice friend message. ‘Miss Kravitz added that.’
The rain hissed against the roof, rising and falling like angry breathing. A searing flash of blue lightning lit up the workshop.
‘Sorry to do this to you, Tom.’ Chester closed the book, hiding that scribble – there was something tormented and desperate about those bursting lines of ink.
‘She’s not like that.’ Tom shook his head.
‘She was. She still is. When Nicola comes into the village she doesn’t speak. If she buys stuff at the store all she does is point.’
‘No. You’re lying.’
‘Come on. There’s one more thing to show you.’
He led the way into a back room that had been fitted out as a rest area. There were ancient saggy armchairs facing a television complete with a DVD system.
‘Wait here, Tom.’ Chester spoke in a kindly way. He obviously didn’t want to hurt his friend. There was a sense he did this reluctantly.
Chester left Tom for only a few moments. He soon returned with a DVD, which he fed into the player. He then switched on the TV.
‘My Grandad filmed this at the Christmas nativity show at school.’ He glanced back at Tom before pressing the play button. ‘I’m doing this becaus
e you’re my friend, Tom. If the police knew you were . . . you know, with Nicola, and with her being like she is . . . there’d be trouble.’
Tom could only shake his head. Thunder crashed around the building. That’s the sound of my world falling down, he thought.
The television screen flashed. A Christmas carol sung by children flooded the room. The poignant notes of ‘Silent Night’ always had a melancholy air for Tom. The carol celebrated the birth of the Boy Child, yet the melody hinted at tragedy lying ahead. Tom watched as children acted out the Nativity story. Seven-year-olds, wearing towels on their heads, pretended to be Bethlehem’s citizens, and here came the Three Wise Men with cardboard crowns decorated in gold foil. Tom identified one Wise Man as a seven-year-old Chester Kenyon, grinning hugely as the crown kept sliding down to cover his eyes. All the schoolchildren seemed to be taking part, as angels, shepherds, townsfolk, the apologetic innkeeper, and Mary and Joseph.
All the children, that is, except one.
In the background, by a door, stood a little girl. A tiny blonde sprite. She stared at the Nativity play as if the children had deliberately acted in some way that was inexplicable to her. She wasn’t in costume. Her blue eyes glittered with fear. If anything, she resembled a wild fawn from the forest that had been caught in a trap.
Chester’s grandfather had been filming the children in long shot, to get as many on screen as possible. For some reason he zoomed into close-up on the strange sprite of a girl.
The thin, heart-shaped face filled the television screen. The eyes looked into the camera lens. Tom felt as if she stared directly at him. Without a shred of doubt he knew the name of that unearthly child.
That was a seven-year-old Nicola Bekk.
Her eyes narrowed – the Christian festival seemed to be the cause of physical pain.
At that moment a teacher’s voice rang out as she narrated the Nativity. ‘And, lo, a boy child is born. And His name is Jesus!’
In the video, Nicola Bekk let out a piercing scream. The girl was terrified. She pushed open the door behind her and ran into a corridor. There were no lights in the corridor. It looked for all the world that she raced into a tunnel, which led down into the depths of the earth.
Tom’s heart went out to the frightened child that was Nicola Bekk. ‘The poor girl.’
‘You might think that, Tom. The truth is, nobody likes Nicola Bekk. What’s more, the villagers hate her mother. Five years ago, Mrs Bekk tried to set fire to St George’s church. She was lucky she didn’t end up in prison.’
‘There must have been a reason why she did that.’
‘Oh, there’s a reason alright. Mrs Bekk is crazy.’ Chester’s expression was grim. ‘Dangerously crazy at that. If you’ll take some advice, Tom, don’t have anything to do with the Bekk family. Don’t speak to them. Don’t even acknowledge they exist.’
Tom shuddered at the sound of Chester’s words. They had the same chilling tones as a sentence of death. But whose death? Mine? Nicola’s?
Thunder crashed again. Such a forbidding sound – as ominous as the pounding of monstrous fists breaking down the doors of a tomb to set the dead upon the living.
TWENTY
Chester Kenyon’s shock warning still rang in Tom’s ears: don’t have anything to do with the Bekk family. Don’t speak to them. Don’t even acknowledge they exist. As Tom walked from Chester’s workshop to his car, the words continued to roll about his skull with the same grim resonance as the thunder rolling across the landscape.
Moments later, he drove away along Main Street. Danby-Mask had radiated charm when he first saw the place. The ancient stone buildings, beneath red tiled roofs, nestled alongside the River Lepping. This could have been a quaint hamlet right out of a Victorian painting.
However, beneath those looming storm clouds, Danby-Mask had been transfigured. It had become a troubling place of dark secrets and spiteful prejudice. He couldn’t help but think about Nicola Bekk. Her mother must have warned Nicola from an early age that the village was a dangerous place. For hundreds of years the Bekk family had been despised for being foreign invaders.
The whole situation worried him deeply. He shook his head as he recapped the Bekk family legend. Over a thousand years ago the Bekk family leave Denmark. They arrive here in northern England, perhaps as part of the invading Viking army. Then the Bekks create their settlement in the valley. Danby-Mask hates the invaders; its people launch a surprise attack and slaughter most of the family. Somehow, the surviving members of the Bekk clan hang on. (In the family legend, they’re protected by some monster dreamed up by a Viking god.) OK, there are lots of stories like that in Yorkshire. There are myths about dragons that live in wells, about witches stealing babies, and ghost dogs with fiery eyes. But what makes this story different is that Mrs Bekk told her daughter that it was all true, and that Nicola faces terrible danger from the village.
Tom switched on the wipers as the storm launched its watery attack on the car. Raindrops hit the roof with the same kind of harsh rattle as stones being thrown at metalwork. Falling rain blurred the houses. Those ancient structures began to resemble phantom dwellings: as if they’d manifested here from a sinister realm.
He couldn’t help but picture Nicola attending the village school when she was a child. By then she’d have heard her mother’s stories of local people murdering her ancestors. Nicola would undoubtedly hurry by the church, while shooting scared glances up at the huge stone tower. After being brainwashed by her mother into believing that Danby-Mask was an evil place, Nicola Bekk must have seen St George’s as nothing less than a demon’s lair.
Nicola would have been too young to differentiate her mother’s fantasies from reality. Attending school would have been an ordeal. No, scratch out ‘ordeal’ and substitute ‘torture’. She’d think the other kids were planning to murder her. No wonder she ran screaming out of the Christmas Nativity play.
At that moment, his anger at Mrs Bekk’s treatment of her child blazed furiously. His heart pounded. He wanted to protect Nicola. She’d been through an incredibly cruel upbringing. No child should have to endure that. How she’d remained so sweet-natured was nothing less than a miracle. Mrs Bekk had tried to twist her mind. The twenty-three-year-old Nicola should be dosed to the eyeballs with drugs.
Instead, she’d risen above the madness. She’d survived.
And I want to help her stay that way, he told himself. Maybe when you’re twenty-three you feel it’s your duty to be the knight in shining armour: to protect the vulnerable maiden from danger. But, damn it all, I’m not going to let her life be wrecked by that lunatic mother of hers. I’m going to put things right.
Tom accelerated away from the village, his heart pounding. Wipers swept water aside, yet he still couldn’t see clearly. The road, trees and fields had been transformed into a ghost world. Lightning added its own strange magic by splashing the fields with electric blue.
‘Shit!’ He’d rounded a bend to find a figure standing in the middle of the road.
He braked. No good: the wheels glided across the slick road.
‘Nicola!’ He stared through the windscreen as the car hurtled on a collision course towards her. What on earth’s she doing in the road? He wrenched the wheel. The car’s tail swung outwards. Its back wheels struck the turf at the side of the road, gouging mud in an explosion of black.
At least the car had stopped. He sat there panting. His mouth turned dry as dust.
‘Oh my God! Nicola!’ He expected to see her broken body lying in the road. Where is she? He could see nothing through that wall of grey rain.
Then there came a thump. Someone had opened the door.
Nicola stood there. Rain streamed down her face.
‘Thank God.’ His heart thundered. ‘I thought I’d killed you.’
She stared at him. Was that suspicion in her eye? Did she suspect him of betraying her in some way?’
‘Nicola, what’s wrong?’
Her next words were very precis
e. She must have been thinking about this question. Perhaps even rehearsing the saying of it. ‘Tom. When you look at me, what do you see?’
‘What do I see? I don’t understand.’
‘What do I mean to you?’
Her face wore an expression of dreadful anxiety. It was as if she stood before a sheeted figure lying in a morgue, and someone was just about to drag that sheet away.
‘Nicola! I could have killed you. Why were you in the road?’
‘Tom,’ she hissed. ‘What do I mean to you?’
‘Get in.’ His voice softened. ‘Please, get in.’
She climbed into the passenger seat.
He looked her in the eye. ‘I’ll tell you what you mean to me in a moment. But there’s something important I’ve got to do.’
‘What?’
‘This.’
He kissed her. The stiffness in her lips only lasted a second. Then she was kissing him back with the same furious passion. This was wonderful. More wonderful than anything he’d ever done before.
He, Tom Westonby, was kissing a beautiful woman in a thunderstorm. The car was slewed across the road. The back half of the vehicle rested on a bank of earth. This is madness, said a voice in the back of his head.
Damn right, he thought. It’s glorious madness. I don’t care if anyone sees me, honks their horn, or shakes their fist.
I’m kissing Nicola. She’s kissing me. And that’s exactly how it should be.
TWENTY-ONE
After the kiss, everything started to go wrong. Not at first, though.
At first, everything seemed to be going so well.
Tom Westonby reversed the car until he’d freed it from the dirt bank. Nicola sat beside him.
‘Is that kiss your answer,’ she asked, ‘to what I mean to you?’
‘I like you.’ He smiled back. ‘You’re intelligent, you’ve a great sense of humour.’