Tales from the Dubh Linn

by Niall Teasdale

‘Thank you, Belvedere.’

  His hand shifted higher and she gasped. ‘We had a deal, Lis.’ This time there was the familiar tremble. ‘And it has been my pleasure. Would you be offended if I took further advantage of your… condition?’

  His thumb was massaging her clitoris. ‘I’d… I’d be… disappointed if… oh… if you didn’t.’

  ~~~

  Huddled behind a crate, Lis waited for the boat to arrive with a photographer named Stan. The lighting around the dock was not great, but his camera was fitted for low light and he assured her that he could get good enough pictures. The plan was simple; follow the shipment, call in the police when they got where they were going, take pictures along the way.

  A dark blue van arrived at two minutes before eleven. Three big men got out of it and waited quietly. The boat arrived five minutes later; Lis could just about hear its engine over the sound of her own heart. Stan lifted his camera onto the packing case and began to snap photos. Lis watched as five women walked up from the jetty, followed by a tall, pale-skinned man with hair shaved down to a minimum. He paused at the top of the rise and looked around, then he walked across the dock to the van.

  There was something odd about the women. Lis squinted, trying to work out what it was. They did not seem scared, or excited, or anything really. They stared straight ahead and followed instructions, climbing into the back of the van without a word. They were not restrained in any visible way. It just seemed… odd.

  The van started, beginning to move away, and Lis hissed, ‘After them!’ They stood up, rounded the boxes, and stopped. The pale man was standing there, waiting for them. He said nothing, but lifted his hand in front of his face and blew into it. A cloud of white powder filled the air around Stan and Lis. Her vision blurred…

  ~~~

  When she regained consciousness, Lis was strapped to some sort of trolley in what looked like a warehouse. Her jaw ached, probably because of the ball gag which had been rammed between her teeth. She was also naked, but that somehow did not alarm her as much as she thought it should have. Maybe it was the fact that, being strapped to a trolley in a warehouse could not be made much better by still having her clothes.

  ‘You’re awake, good.’ The voice was deep, masculine, with an accent she did not recognise. She turned her head and saw the pale man from the jetty standing nearby. Up close she could see suggestions of negro features and the skin looked odd; he was an albino. Beside him was a table with various bottles on it. Lis did not want to know what was in them, but she suspected she was going to find out. ‘Your friend,’ the man said, ‘was of no use to us. We weighted his feet and dumped him in the river. I thought you should know this.’

  Lis bit down on the gag and pulled at her restraints; they were very firm. Her vision blurred again. The bastard wanted her to know that she had got Stan killed.

  ‘We never land at the same place twice. Your police will not interrupt our operation, but obviously you can identify me. You understand that I can’t allow that.’

  He was going to kill her. Belvedere had said they would not do that. No, wait. If they were going to kill her they could have thrown her in the Thames with Stan… There are much worse things than death, Lis.

  ‘I generally work with younger girls, but you are attractive, fit. I think you’ll cover our costs.’ He turned with a syringe in his hand, pressed it into a hole in the rubber ball in her mouth, pinched her nose closed, and squirted a bitter liquid into her throat. She had no choice but to swallow. ‘The process takes a short while. I perfected it in New Orleans over a number of years.’ Another syringe was inserted and drained into her mouth. ‘I killed over two hundred people before I got it right.’ He sounded amused! ‘You’re getting the benefit of a lot of research.’

  Pain shot through her body and she pulled hard on her restraints, her back arching off the trolley. Another shot of fluid, this time sweet, filled her mouth and she was in too much pain to think about anything but swallowing. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it does hurt at this point, but it won’t last.’ As he said it, she started feeling numb. The pain died in her extremities, and then got less throughout her body as another fluid, thick and tasting of burnt sugar, was pushed into her throat.

  Lis sagged back onto the trolley. He was undoing the gag. Pulling it out from between her teeth did not hurt; in fact she could not feel it at all. She could not feel her body at all and she felt like she should be panicking, but… Numb, she felt numb, like the world was receding away from her.

  ‘Get up,’ the pale man said. She swung her legs over the side of the trolley and got to her feet. When had he undone the restraints? She could run… Except that her body was not doing anything she told it. ‘Good. I’d imagine you are still relatively aware. Don’t worry, that will recede. I don’t believe you’ll ever be entirely unaware of what’s happening to you, but your mind will become further dissociated over time. Follow me.’

  Her body was responding to his commands even if she did not want to, or chose to act on them. It was as if her consciousness had been separated from her brain; what was Lis was locked away inside her own body.

  He walked through a door and down a corridor, Lis following behind like a leashed dog or… a zombie. Through another door and into an office. A sliver of hope sparked in her muffled mind when she saw the man waiting there. Belvedere showed no sign of recognition as she walked in. He just nodded to the albino and ordered Lis to follow him. Did he know how to turn her back? Could he free her from whatever alchemical bond she was under?

  The hope continued as he took her out to his car, put her in the passenger seat, and draped a blanket around her. It started to fade as she realised they were not driving to his home. It died completely when he said, ‘I’m sorry, Lis. I did warn you. These people are very good at what they do and I knew they would catch you. I’d like you to know that I did not tell them about you. I’d imagine your “friend” Winston did that. Yes, I know all about Winston. I’m afraid that this is now just a business matter. I own you.’

  Lis could not even cry.

  ~~~

  ‘She won’t respond to me in any way?’ The man was fat, bald, loathsome, and naked. Lis would have recoiled from the sight if her body was able to respond to her requests at all. Instead she looked straight ahead and tried not to really see him.

  ‘She’ll do what you tell her to do,’ the brothel’s Madam replied, ‘but she’s basically a living zombie.’ The fat man’s smile was leering. Lis wanted to be sick, but that was another thing denied her. ‘You’ll need to use plenty of lubricant,’ the Madam added, and swept out of the room.

  The fat man’s eyes roamed over Lis’ body for a second. ‘Down on all fours,’ he said and Lis’ body did as he said while her mind struggled to stop it. ‘Spread your knees.’ There was the sound of a lid being unscrewed.

  Outwardly entirely impassive, inside her mind Elisabeth Mannors began to scream and found herself unable to stop.

  Changeling

  Cardiff, Wales, February 2012

  The whine of the interview room tape recorder hit Dilan Hughes’ ears like a drill and he closed his eyes, waiting for it to end. Damn, but he needed a cigarette.

  ‘Interview of Peter Gwent beginning at ten-forty-three,’ Hughes’ partner, David Croft, told the tape. ‘DI Hughes and DS Croft attending. For the record, Mister Gwent, have you been told your rights and been cautioned?’ Somehow the English voice still felt wrong in a Welsh interview room; Hughes considered a sign that he was getting old and grumpy.

  ‘Yes.’ Gwent was a medium height, but heavily built, man, not good looking, not ugly. His muscle mass was about his only distinguishing feature. He was a farmer from out near Abertillery and, until recently, he had been happily married. He had operated a farm with his wife which, while not hugely successful, was breaking even.

  ‘You understand why you’re here, Mister Gwent?’

  ‘I told you,’ Gwent replied, ‘I didn’t kill my wife.’

  ‘Your finge
rprints were found on the hammer which broke her skull.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘And on the jerry can which was used to douse the body.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  Hughes sighed, bringing the interchange to a halt. ‘Why don’t you tell us your story, Mister Gwent? From the beginning, please.’

  Gwent heaved a sigh of his own. He was not really sure why he was talking to yet another set of cops about this. He had told the whole thing before, but he was stuck here until someone believed him so…

  ‘It started last autumn, just after Halloween…’

  Green Bridge Farm, November 2011

  Peter sat at the kitchen table watching Anwen. He could watch her for hours at a time when his work allowed it. Small, slim, long of leg and small of breast, she had long hair the colour of straw which she refused to tie back and was constantly flicking out of her pretty face. Her eyes were the best; clear and blue as a hot day in high summer. He could, and did, stare into her eyes for minutes at a time, just because God had given him the chance to do it. Up to her elbows in dirty water as she scrubbed potatoes, dirt smeared on her cheek where she had brushed a stray curl away with her wrist, Anwen was the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven.

  ‘I was up in the north west field this morning,’ she said, breaking him partially out of his reverie.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It looked like something’d been digging in that mound in the corner. Dog or a fox maybe.’

  The air in the room seemed to drop a degree in temperature and Peter suddenly felt as though something had crawled into his stomach and was wriggling. ‘I’ll take a look in the morning. You stay out of that field for the time being.’ Right after All Souls too. Had something come through?

  ‘It’s just a field. I like walking out that way.’

  Maybe it was stuck and just trying to get back. ‘Aye, but do me a favour and stay away for a few days, love.’

  She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at him. She had a beautiful smile and the sun took that moment to shine in through the kitchen window, picking out the outline of her body through her thin dress. ‘Of course, love,’ she said, looking like an angel in his eyes, ‘if you think it’s important.’

  Peter was watching his wife’s body shift within thin cotton; important was a relative thing.

  ~~~

  It did look as though something had been digging at the mound. Maybe twenty feet across and four foot high, it was not much of a monument, but some Man from the Ministry type had come along a few years ago and said that it was a Site of Historic Importance and they could not plough it. He had said it was a tumulus. He had been wasting his time because no one on Green Bridge Farm was ever going to touch the mound. According to family tradition, Peter’s Great-grandmother was still in there somewhere, vanished away with the fairies.

  It was mostly packed earth and covered with rough grass still parched a little yellow from the dry summer. Then again, the grass never grew strongly on the mound. The man from the ministry had said it was the chalk near the surface making for thin ground with high drainage; the grass never got enough water. Peter’s father had told him the grass did not grow because the mound was evil, though Peter had been more inclined to believe the scientist.

  Seeing the white scars in the side of the hillock, Peter was suddenly more inclined to believe his father. Something had pulled big sods of earth out leaving the chalk beneath showing. It felt wrong, unnatural, dangerous, and Peter took his spade and began to cover up the holes. He made damn sure that the soil was pressed back over the mound and the shining white rock beneath its surface.

  Satisfied, Peter stood back and looked over his work. ‘You stay in your castle, and leave me and mine alone,’ he muttered, though there was no one within half a mile to hear him. Then he turned and started back toward the house.

  ~~~

  The following morning Peter swung past the mound, not meaning to, but drawn to it to check. There were fresh wounds in the surface of the little hillock, but worse than that was the sight of a dead rabbit perched at the top. Jumping from the little four-wheel-drive bike he used to get around the farm, Peter darted up the mound and grabbed the animal’s corpse. The throat was a bloody ruin. It had likely been a fox, though why it had not carried its prize away was a puzzle. Then again, foxes could be like that.

  The rabbit was laid on the back of his bike, the soil pushed back into place again. Once more satisfied with the unsullied nature of the tumulus, Peter drove to the other side of the farm and buried the rabbit.

  He did not mention the damage to the mound, or the dead rabbit, to Anwen at lunchtime. Not exactly anyway. ‘You’ve not been up to the north west field, have you, love?’

  She smiled at him. ‘You asked me not to.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone out that way either?’

  ‘Just you, this morning.’ She laid a plate of thick sandwiches down on the table in front of him; crusty white bread, lots of butter, thick slices of ham. ‘All yours, I got hungry earlier.’

  She sat across the table, her chin resting on one hand, the fingers of the other playing with the handle of her mug. Her eyes were on his face, a small, contented smile on her lips as she watched him wolf down his food.

  As he tucked away the last of it and sucked down half his mug of tea in one gulp, her attention made him look up. It was usually him looking at her. ‘What?’ he asked, bemused that the tables should be turned.

  ‘My big strong man,’ she said. ‘Have y’ anything needs doing that can’t be put off for an hour?’

  What she wanted was obvious, even to Peter, and his body responded almost instantly. ‘For you, love, I’d put back my funeral.

  ~~~

  It was afterward, as he went to check on the sheep in the southern paddock, that his thoughts turned in odd directions. His wife had never been keen on using her mouth on him and there she had been, naked and beautiful, sinking to her knees before him without him saying a word. With the heat of his desire assuaged she had teased back to full strength and their lovemaking had been all the better for it, but he could not help feeling that something strange was going on.

  Little things started occurring to him which he had not noticed before. It felt like she had been a little distant all through the summer. He had not noticed at the time, busy as he was with the farm, but now the contrast made him think of it. The last couple of days, maybe since All Souls, she had been far more… his.

  It was almost as though she was a different person.

  ~~~

  Another day, another dead rabbit on the mound and more signs of digging. Anwen had brought his lunch out to the top field saying she had eaten already and dressed in a tight T-shirt and some very short denim shorts he had not seen her in for years. With his lunch consumed she had teased him into taking her, bent over the seat of his bike, and afterward she had told him she loved him and wanted him before strutting back toward the house.

  Somehow it left him feeling hollow. Anwen, his wife, had never been so wanton. He found himself wondering what had happened to her.

  At dinner he had told her he would go out that night to watch the mound. ‘Something’s digging there,’ he said. ‘I want to find out what it is. Could be something that’ll have a go at the sheep.’ He did not mention the rabbits.

  ‘All right, love. Perhaps we should go to bed a bit early. You can set an alarm and go out later.’

  He nodded, but when they had turned in she had been playful and the alarm had been forgotten, and when they were done he had collapsed onto his pillow and fallen asleep with Anwen cuddled beside him.

  She had woken him in the early hours, getting back into bed. ‘I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep,’ she had explained. ‘I went to get a glass of water.’ With her body against his he had believed her, slipping back into sleep as her fingers stroked his short hair.

  But in the morning there had been another furry corpse on the moun
d.

  ~~~

  It went on for over a week before Peter decided that he was going to stay out all night to watch for whatever was scratching at the mound. Anwen had pouted, looking like a child denied her favourite toy, when he had told her, but he had kept his resolve and gone out as soon as it was dark, two thermos flasks of instant coffee in his bag and him wrapped in his warmest coat.

  It was a cloudless night with no moon and he had huddled in the corner of the field away from the mound itself. Cold and miserable, and with only his own thoughts for company, he had waited and brooded because he had nothing else to do.

  He was beginning to think that his wife was a little taller than he remembered. Her breasts were a little bigger. Her eyes, those beautiful eyes he had spent hours looking into, seemed a little paler than he remembered.

  Then there was the sex. He thought that it was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but suddenly he was getting too much sex. They had always had a relatively healthy relationship, but not, perhaps, a particularly exciting one. Now Anwen was almost insatiable. It seemed like she would have kept him in bed all day if she could. Instead she would persuade him into bed after lunch, or come out to meet him if he did not come in. She had found him in the barn one day and they had spent the rest of the afternoon making love in the hay. She had suggested he use bailing twine to tie her to the bars in a stall they kept for birthing lambs. He had refused, but it was hard to refuse her.

  That was another thing. He felt as though his mind was not his own when he was with her. She just had to smile and he would do whatever she wanted. Surely he had always done that? No… This was different. This was…

  …supernatural. He awoke with a start. There was light in the sky. He had nodded off and now…

  Dead, throat torn out and stomach ripped open, one of the sheep was lying on the mound in a ring of uncovered chalk.

  ~~~

  It was the same for another three nights. In the morning, Anwen would help him dispose of the dead animals, a look of profound sadness on her face. She was right to be sad, Peter thought, since he was sure now that she was doing the killing. Some sort of sacrifice to the mound. A way to open it and return to the other side? The sacrifices were getting bigger. How long before she decided that she needed a human to be lying there?