The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Marc, alarmed by the anxiety in his father’s voice, made a hasty move to climb down, then seemed to panic. The lower sleeve of his jacket had become entwined in the briars surrounding the part of the statue he had been trying to uncover.

  ‘It’s got me,’ he said. ‘It won’t let go.’

  He snatched and tugged wildly at the plant, calling out to his father for help. A section of the briars suddenly snapped, causing him to lose balance. He toppled down against Daniel, and the pair of them, with nothing to cling to, slithered down the sides of the trees to the ground.

  Neither was worse than shaken by the fall. Marc got up at once and, without speaking, ran off towards the gate. Daniel looked back towards the wall. A section of green and red striped fabric billowed over the top briefly, then vanished. Daniel waited to see if it would reappear. When, after half a minute, it hadn’t, he shrugged, and trudged out of the pit in pursuit of his son. He was angry now, for allowing himself to become so flustered by what was probably some local eccentric in fancy dress, and cross with Marc for overreacting. They must both have looked very foolish to the character in the striped gown, whoever it was. He was half inclined to seek out and confront the culprit, but then remembered the peculiar way that person’s garments had swirled about in air that was totally still, and thought again.

  Marc was waiting for him on the other side of the gate, inspecting the damage done to his jacket.

  ‘That wasn’t a good idea, Dad. We shouldn’t have done that.’

  Daniel noticed his son avoided his eye. He said, ‘Well, no harm’s done.’

  As if he wasn’t too sure about that, Marc plunged his hands into his pockets and hauled his shoulders up closer to his ears in a truculent gesture. ‘I’m hungry now,’ he complained. ‘Can we go and eat?’

  Daniel realized he’d left the packed lunch his ex-wife had provided in the car. The heat in there would not have done it any good.

  ‘Let’s get back,’ he said. He pointed down a different street to the one they had taken into the village. ‘I think if we go down there, it should be a short cut.’

  Marc was clearly not enthusiastic about this proposal, but he said, ‘Can we go then, Dad? Away from this place. Please?’

  ‘Okay,’ Daniel said, finally defeated.

  * * * *

  ‘That wasn’t a short cut,’ Marc complained a quarter of an hour later. ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’

  ‘You can’t really say that, in a little village like this, but, yes, we seem to have lost our bearing at the moment.’

  ‘We’ve been walking twice as long as it took to get to that field already.’

  ‘It just seems like that because you’re hungry.’

  ‘And thirsty.’

  Daniel decided not to admit that he was too.

  An elderly man was coming slowly towards them: the first pedestrian they had seen for some time.

  ‘Ask that bloke the way back to the car,’ Marc urged.

  They stopped and waited for the man to reach them. His movements were circumspect and indecisive. At the last moment, when he was about six feet away, he must have sensed their presence, and he looked up. His face shocked them both. He was very old, bent and tiny: his features seemed half obliterated by time. His nose was almost flat, like a partly raised flap in the centre of his face, but had huge nostrils; his lips were so thin and withdrawn as to be virtually absent, and his round, creamy eyes looked blank. He was screwing up his eyes to get the two figures in front of him in focus. His contorted expression would have been comical if it had not also indicated that he was confused and alarmed. Assuming the man felt threatened, and aware that Marc looked intimidating, like the archetypal hooligan, Daniel made his face look friendly.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find our car. I left it near a pub down by the river.’

  The old man shook his head as though Daniel’s words were outrageous, incredible.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. Off you go. Carry on.’

  Marc moved a couple of steps towards him. ‘We’re lost, mister,’ he explained. ‘We don’t know where we are. We just want to get out of here.’

  ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘But you live here, don’t you?’ Daniel said. ‘You’re a resident?’

  The man made no answer to this. ‘Go up to the church,’ he said. ‘You’ll find someone there who’ll show you where to go.’

  Daniel was becoming annoyed. ‘All we need is directions to our car. Which way is the river?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ the man said. ‘The river runs all around.’

  Marc was about to speak again, but Daniel waved a hand to stop him. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ll go to the church. We’ll ask there. Where is it?’

  ‘Keep walking the way you were going,’ the old man said, as though it was obvious. ‘You’ll see it.’

  Repressing his anger at the old fool’s discourtesy, Daniel pushed Marc ahead of him. The man cowered away as they passed. Daniel looked back after they had gone a little way and saw he was feebly fiddling with the latch of a gate. ‘I knew he was a local. Ignorant old bugger.’

  They trudged on uphill for five minutes before they heard people talking nearby. It was a relief to have the vast, seemingly solid silence broken by something other than the sounds of their own feet. The voices called to each other quietly but urgently, as though instructions were being transmitted over small distances. There were also various tappings and frutterings: work, of some kind, was in progress.

  A short footpath leading off the road to the right pointed towards the apparent source of these sounds. A high, thick hedge concealed this place, but a lych-gate, very similar to the one Daniel and his son had climbed over earlier, offered ingress to whatever lay beyond.

  Marc, panting and sweating from the uphill climb, dropped down on a grass verge and stretched out on his back. ‘I need a rest, Dad,’ he said.

  Daniel saw the boy’s damp, swollen face and worried again about his physical state. At that age, he was sure, he could have walked all day and thought nothing of it. He hoped Marc’s flabby, flaccid condition, and resentful, peevish attitude were things he would grow out of soon. He said, ‘Take it easy for a while, then. I’ll go and see what’s happening over there, and try and find someone with enough sense to tell us how to find the car.’

  ‘Okay.’ Marc clasped his hands behind his head and shut his eyes.

  This second gate was half open. As Daniel pushed it wider and passed through, a little old lady, sitting next to it at a green baize-covered card-table, rose out of the chair beneath her as if to welcome him. Daniel returned her polite smile, but came to a halt when she held up a hand to restrain him.

  ‘You are just a little early,’ she said, speaking slowly and precisely. She gazed along the length of some shadows stretching across the ground towards her, thoughtfully, as though she were making some calculation. ‘We are not quite ready for you yet. We don’t start until ten past two.’

  That seemed a peculiar time to start anything. Automatically, Daniel glanced at his watch and saw it was one fifty-six. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t realize. Some kind of event is about to take place, is that it?’

  ‘Of course.’ The woman turned and indicated the area behind her. ‘As you can see,’ she added.

  Daniel looked beyond her and found he had entered a large private garden. The design was basic, with a long rectangular stretch of sloping lawn, surrounded on all sides by hedged beds of the usual domestic flowers, leading away towards an unattractive two-storied modern red-brick house. A row of trees formed a curtain behind this dwelling, through which could be seen sections of what was probably an even uglier, off-white, and apparently featureless building beyond. A thin tower attached to this edifice rose a good way above the trees that surrounded it.

  On the lawn, at various points, there was orderly activity. A number of stalls had been set out and a group of men were putting the fin
ishing touches to the erection of a big sun-faded green canvas tent; stretching the final guy-ropes and hammering home tent pegs to secure them. Members of a small brass band were emerging from a side door of the red house and forming a cluster at the far end of the garden, blowing gently into their instruments and resting sheets of music on flimsy metal stands. The musicians, male and female, were buttoned tight into old-fashioned, cheerful-looking, but probably uncomfortably hot jackets with wide, vertical red and green stripes. Each one wore a red cap.

  ‘There’s going to be some kind of fête or bazaar,’ Daniel observed. ‘Good! I hadn’t realized.’

  Feeling quite pleased with the way things were turning out, because, at such an event, there were bound to be stalls where he and Marc could buy cakes, sandwiches and tea or maybe even, in the tent, beer to drink, Daniel said, ‘I’ll wait then, since it’s only a few minutes. My son’s over there,’ he explained, unnecessarily.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘I know. We saw you both from a long way off.’

  ‘Did you?’ Daniel wondered about the ‘we’ since the woman was alone and none of the other people assembled in the garden could have seen his approach up the hill through the gate in the tall hedge.

  The woman gave him another tranquil smile.

  ‘We have been observing your progress,’ she said, giving her quizzical expression another twist, and Daniel remembered the peculiarly dressed figure Marc and he had seen, that had called to them when they had climbed the ‘monument’. Presumably, word of their presence had spread that way. It must be a very lonely village indeed, he reflected, where news of such a non-event was instantly turned into hot gossip.

  Daniel went back to where he had left Marc, who seemed to be asleep. The sun shone full on his face, but he’d only been there a few minutes, so Daniel knew he was unlikely to come to harm. The child was rarely in the open air, and strong sunlight might even help clear up his acned complexion.

  Daniel sat down himself, leaned back against a tree, and enjoyed, for the first time that day, some contentment.

  Back in the garden, very softly, the band began to play. They experimented with the first few bars of some jaunty, folky tune then fell silent again.

  It was odd, Daniel reflected, that there were no people making their way towards him up the hill: one would expect the population of the dull little hamlet to turn out in force for any kind of diversion. He wondered if most of the village was in fact uninhabited: many of the houses did have a look of shut-up vacancy. Perhaps most of them were second homes, used by the well-off only occasionally, or untenanted holiday cottages. He had heard of cases where whole villages had become depopulated because most of the properties had been bought up by outside investors. This idea made him feel a little better about his experiences since he had arrived at. . . Where? He realized he didn’t even know the name of the place! Anyway, the deep, awesome silence, that still surrounded him on almost every side was no longer quite so inexplicable and disturbing. It was, of course, quite natural, and only-to-be-expected, if the village was almost deserted.

  * * * *

  Just before ten past two Daniel roused Marc and told him what was about to happen. The boy, who had not attended a similar function before, seemed nervous at the prospect. Daniel did his best to explain what lay before them as they wandered to and through the lych-gate that now stood wide open. Daniel offered a handful of change to the waiting woman, but she said there was no entry charge.

  As father and son stepped on to the lawn, the band struck up with audible enthusiasm. Daniel was mildly surprised to find that they seemed to be the only visitors so far. In fact, there were fewer people about than there had been earlier, when he had watched some of the last-minute preparations for the event. Perhaps the helpers he had seen then had withdrawn into the marquee to refresh themselves: he could hear the murmur of voices from that direction.

  The first stall he came to was covered in tumbling heaps of White Elephants. Daniel paused dutifully as he passed, but hurried on when the over-anxious assistant stooped to retrieve various articles he dislodged when he clumsily lifted a faded lampshade at the bottom of one of the piles of sad junk. He bought five tickets at an instant raffle of bottles of wine and spirits and bathroom soaps and medications, but won nothing, then moved on to a book stall covered in old, valuable looking volumes mostly in a foreign language. The printed words looked to be in the same language as the inscription on the base of the monument, or whatever it was he and Marc had discovered. He wanted to ask about this, but the stall was unattended: a tin with a slot cut into the top, next to a small sign saying CONTRIBUTIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED acted as a receptacle for self-assessed donations. Daniel nearly purchased a book, out of curiosity, but it was surprisingly heavy, as though its leather bindings concealed lead covers. He decided he did not want to be burdened by it for the rest of the day, put it down, and moved on.

  Next was some kind of game he couldn’t understand, but had a go at nevertheless. The rather glum, shifty-looking man behind the trestle table told him, when asked, it was called ‘Lost and Found’. It involved a large number of brightly covered cards spread over a white sheet, and a vertical board, nailed to the trunk of a nearby tree, on which had been drawn a diagram of baffling complexity. Daniel paid the man fifty pence, and was told to select three of the cards and turn them over slowly, one by one. On the reverse of the first was written ‘LOST’. The man took it from him and, referring to the design on the board, traced a path along the centre of it with his finger. When he came to a stop, he turned and said, ‘Very good, sir: excellent,’ and reached out for the second card. Daniel was slightly dispirited to find, as he handed it over, it also had ‘LOST’ on the back. The man seemed to cheer up a little when he saw it, however, and turned eagerly back to his chart. He used two fingers to plot converging courses this time, and gave a grunt of what sounded like triumph when the tips of them came together at the top right-hand corner of the board. He actually smirked at Daniel then, and said, ‘And the next one sir? Is it going to be third time lucky?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Daniel said, trying to smile back. But his heart sank as he turned the final card, because he was sure he was going to see the word ‘LOST’ again.

  He was wrong.

  ‘“FOUND”,’ he read aloud, sounding absurdly relieved. ‘There you are,’ he added as he handed the card over, as though some kind of bargain had been struck.

  ‘And there you are, sir,’ the man said as he accepted it. This time he hardly consulted the board: after glancing at it in mild puzzlement for a second, he stabbed a finger towards a point in the centre of the design, then held up the card - - and called out, ‘Congratulations - well done. You’ve won something, sir.’

  At this, quiet clapping sounded nearby. Daniel glanced around and saw that more visitors must have entered the garden. Half a dozen or so close by were watching him, nodding their heads sombrely in approval, and bringing their hands carefully together.

  ‘Would the boy like to choose a prize?’ the stall assistant asked, looking almost jovial now. He held out a box full of objects identically gift-wrapped in gold and silver paper, like birthday presents.

  Marc, who had been standing some paces back from the table in an attempt to disassociate himself from his father’s activities, shook his head and tugged at his hat with both hands in embarrassment.

  ‘You’re all right,’ he muttered awkwardly, ‘I’m not bothered.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Marc.’ Daniel was aware of the small audience around them, and anxious to move on to where they would not be the centre of attention. ‘Pick one out, and we’ll go and find something to eat. Let’s get on.’

  For a moment it looked as though the boy was going to refuse to comply. At the first sight of rebellion the stallholder’s face took on an impatient, intolerant look. He stepped forward and thrust the box towards Marc, who gave way immediately. He blushed, snatched the nearest prize, and held it out to his father. Daniel grabbed his arm and st
eered him away towards the big tent.

  ‘Don’t you want to see what you’ve won?’ Marc asked.

  ‘We can open it later. If it’s any good, you can have it.’

  ‘It’ll just be rubbish,’ Marc complained. ‘Something useless.’

  ‘You never know,’ Daniel said, aware, however, that his son was right. They would probably end up throwing his ‘prize’ away.

  They had to walk around the tent twice before they found the way in. The entrance was a flap that hung closed and almost invisible in the dark shadows cast by the descending sun. Daniel pulled it aside and peered in.

  About a dozen small, stocky men were gathered together at one end of the marquee, drinking beer from disposable plastic tumblers. They stood in a line along a makeshift bar, with their backs towards the two newcomers. They were talking quietly but somewhat excitedly to each other with the easy familiarity of the long-acquainted. Locals, Daniel thought, probably village-born: they’d be sure to be able to tell him how to find his way back to his car. He stooped and stepped into the tent, then turned and waited for Marc to join him.