by Kevin Brooks
I move back to my original position. The flock tenses up. I take two steps to my right, and the flock relaxes again.
They’re not going to move.
They might if I got closer to them, but I can’t. And I can’t get to the gate without getting closer to them.
“I don’t know what to do, Ella.”
There’s no reply.
“Ella?”
She’s gone.
It happens sometimes. She’ll be with me, talking to me, and then — for no apparent reason — she suddenly disappears. I don’t know where she goes. And neither does she. I just kind of stop being, she told me once. I don’t have any awareness of anything. I’m just there, and then I’m not. And then I come back again.
I’m so cold. And tired. The bone-deep pain in my bare foot is creeping up into my leg, and my foot feels black and rotten. Like a dead thing.
I need to rest.
I need to lie down and go to sleep . . .
But I can’t.
I need to get out of here.
I start moving back from the sheep, and when I can’t feel the force field at all anymore, I stop and gaze around, searching for another way out. On this side of the field, the side next to the road, there’s enough light from the streetlamps to see that there aren’t any other gates, and that the hawthorn hedges surrounding the field look impenetrable. They’re about six feet high, and so thick and densely packed — and the thorns so razor sharp — that if I tried squeezing through, I’d be cut to pieces in seconds. And even if I could find a gap somewhere, I can see now that on the other side of the hedge there’s a three-foot-high wire-mesh fence, topped with double strands of barbed wire, and on this side of the hedge there’s a fairly deep ditch, which effectively makes the hedge and the fence even higher. The rest of the field is too dark to see if the fence and the ditch go all the way around, and I know that beyond that darkness at the top of the field, there’s another darkness, deeper and blacker . . . the nightmare darkness of the woods.
I don’t want to go there.
I can’t . . .
I’d rather be cut to pieces.
I head off back the way I came, following my tracks in the snow.
There has to be another way out of here . . . there has to be. And if the only way to find it is by walking all the way around the field, checking every inch of the perimeter, then that’s what I’ll have to do.
I look at my watch.
It’s 4:45.
Under normal circumstances, my last fear pill shouldn’t be wearing off just yet, but these are far from normal circumstances, and I’ve got a terrible feeling that Mr. Beastie will soon start rattling his cage. And if that happens before I find Mum and get my pills . . . ?
No.
It can’t happen.
It can’t.
I’ll dig myself out of here with my bare hands if I have to.
The four men (and a dog) were walking back to the village after a Christmas drink in the Holly Tree Inn when the Thwaites’ car pulled up beside them. One of the men — Davey Price — was the Thwaites’ next-door neighbor, and the other three were all from the village too, so they knew Joe and Olive fairly well. The men were about halfway between the pub and the village when the car stopped, and because there were no streetlights here, and no sidewalks either, they were all carrying flashlights.
Olive quickly told them about the strange boy from the big house who’d run off into the field, and when she’d finished telling them what had happened, she asked them if they wouldn’t mind keeping an eye out for him.
“I went to the house,” she explained, “but there was no one there, and we’ve been trying to call the police but neither of us can get a signal.”
“Do you think he’s in some kind of trouble?” Davey Price asked, leaning down to the open window.
Olive could smell the alcohol on his breath, but although it was quite strong — and she guessed they’d all had quite a few drinks — she could tell that Davey wasn’t drunk. A bit tipsy maybe, but not drunk.
“I’m just worried about him being out on his own in this weather,” Olive told Davey. “I don’t think he’s used to being out of his house at all, let alone in a blizzard, and if he’s still out there somewhere, wandering around on his own in the darkness . . .” She shook her head. “I would have gone after him myself, but with my hip the way it is . . .”
“Did the woman with the dogs go after him?” Davey asked.
“She was going to . . . I think she felt really bad about her dog scaring him so much. But then I pointed out that if she went after him with her dogs, it’d just scare him even more.”
“So what did she do?”
“She said she was going to take her dogs home and then come back out again and look for him on her own.”
“Do you know her?”
“I’ve seen her around. She lives in one of the new houses at the top of the village. But I don’t know her name.”
“What about the boy? Do you know his name?”
Olive shook her head.
“I think it’s Elton,” the man standing beside Davey said.
Davey turned to him. “What?”
“The kid’s name . . . I think it’s Elton. Or Ellis. Something like that anyway. Maybe Elmer.”
“Elmer?”
The man shrugged.
Davey frowned at him, then turned back to the car. He lowered his head and looked over at Joe in the driver’s seat, who so far hadn’t said a word.
“What do you think, Joe?” Davey asked him.
“I think if we don’t get going right now,” Joe said grumpily, “we’re not going to get to the station in time to meet our daughter and granddaughter off the train.” He looked at Olive. “That’s what I think.”
Davey smiled. Same old Joe, he thought, as cheerful as ever.
He turned back to Olive. “We’ll find the boy, don’t worry. You go and get your daughter.”
The field is rectangular. The shorter sides back onto the road at one end, and the woods at the other, and both the longer sides are flanked by more fields. There’s definitely no way through the hedge/fence that runs parallel to the road, and when I get to the end of it and turn right, and start following the longer hedge/fence that leads away from the road and up toward the top of the field (the side that backs onto the woods), it soon becomes apparent that this hedge/fence is just as impassable as the shorter one. It has the same solid thickness of hawthorn, the same three-foot-high wire-mesh fence, and the same deep ditch at its base. And the added problems with this side of the field are that 1) the farther it gets away from the road, the less light it gets from the streetlamps, which means that by the time I’ve gone about twenty yards, it’s so dark I can barely see where I’m going. And 2) even if I do somehow manage to find a way through the hedge/fence, there’s no knowing what awaits me in the field on the other side. It could be just as inescapable as this one. Or just as sheep-infested. Or, even worse, it could have horses in it . . .
Horses.
I can picture them now in the gloom . . . grayed visions in the blackness . . . great long heads, like giant hammers . . . huge chomping teeth . . . venomous eyes . . .
A sudden burst of noise comes from the hedge/fence, the sound of rapid movement, and the shock of it hits me so hard that I stagger backward, with my hands raised to my head (to protect myself from the hedge-crashing horse), and as my booted foot slips on something, I lose my balance and fall over into the snow.
There’s another brief eruption of noise, but this time it’s more of a panicked rustling than a burst, and then whatever it is (and I know now that it’s too small to be a hedge-crashing horse), it scurries off across the field on the other side of the hedge.
As I lie there on my back, my heart hammering in my chest, Ellamay comes back to me.
It was just a rabbit or a badger or something, she says. Maybe a fox. She smiles. Whatever it was though, it wasn’t a monster.
“A fox is a monste
r if you’re a mouse,” I tell her.
Well, yeah —
“And a mouse is a monster if you’re a tiny insect, and a tiny insect is a monster if you’re an even tinier insect. Everything’s a monster to something.”
Silence.
“Ella?”
She’s gone again.
As I carry on lying there, gazing up into the infinite blackness, I can’t help wondering if Ella’s up there somewhere . . . up among the stars, a thousand million miles away . . . or maybe she’s beyond the stars, beyond everything . . . in a place with no life, no darkness, no light . . . no time, no where or when, no nothing, forever and ever and ever and ever . . .
No . . .
I can’t think about that.
I grab a handful of snow and rub it into my face, and the ice-cold shock does the trick — dismissing the dark thoughts from my mind and bringing me back to reality.
I sit up and look around. It isn’t snowing anymore. The wind’s died away too. The ice-cold air is still and quiet, and a pale slice of moon is showing through the clouds.
I get to my feet, brush myself down, and get going again.
The field seems to go on forever, and although the all-round whiteness prevents the darkness from being absolute, I still can’t see anything with any real clarity. The seemingly endless hedge/fence is just a blurred presence, a long dark shape to the left of me, its darkness a slightly different shade to the darkness surrounding it, and while I’m still keeping my eyes on it all the time, searching hard for any sign of a gap, I honestly don’t know if I’d see one if it was there.
But what else can I do apart from keep going?
There’s no point in turning back, and the only other option is to simply give up — dig myself another snow cave, curl up inside it, close my eyes, and go to sleep.
I might never wake up . . .
Would that be so bad?
Yes, it would, says Ellamay.
“We’d be together again,” I tell her.
We’re together now.
“Not all the time.”
What makes you think I want to be with you all the time?
I smile at her.
She smiles back. Just keep going, okay?
“Okay.”
There’s a weird kind of lightness at the top end of the field. It’s only faint, but it seems to run all the way along the fence that separates the field from the wooded valley on the other side, and what makes it even stranger is that the valley is so utterly dark, so dense and black, that it’s almost beyond darkness. It’s like a vast black hole, sucking everything into its depths, devouring every little flicker of light . . . and I wonder if that’s why there’s a lightness to this side of the fence. The light feels safe here, the black hole can’t reach it . . . or maybe it just appears lighter here in comparison to the ultra-black void of the valley.
There’s no hedge or ditch on this side of the field, just the barbed-wire-topped fence, and as I hobble along through the snow — my right leg is numb from the knee down now — I’m reasonably sure that without the added barriers of the hedge and the ditch, the fence wouldn’t be too difficult to climb over. There’s a narrow dirt path on the other side of it. It’s hidden beneath the snow now, but I know it’s there because I’ve seen it on Google Earth. It runs all the way along the top of the valley — with perilously steep paths leading off it that wind their way down into the dark heart of the woods — and eventually it comes out into the fields at the back of the houses in the village.
I pause for a moment, closing my eyes and picturing Shirley’s house — the small yard at the back, the ramshackle fence, and beyond that the fields . . .
If only the woods weren’t so paralyzingly terrifying . . .
If only.
I open my eyes.
I wouldn’t even have to climb over the fence. There’s a stile . . . right there in front of me. A wooden stile set into the fence. All I’d have to do is step up onto it, step across, and step down, and I’d be on the dirt path on the other side . . . the path that leads along to the field at the back of Shirley’s house.
If only . . .
Why don’t you just try it? Ellamay says. You can always turn back again if it really is too scary.
“No.”
It might not be as bad as you think.
“It is. I know it is. And so do you. You’ve been there with me in the nightmares, haven’t you?”
Well, yes, but they’re nightmares. This is reality.
“You think there’s a difference?”
She goes quiet, and I wonder for a moment if she’s leaving me again, but when I can still feel her presence after a minute or two, I know she’s not going anywhere just yet. She’s just being quiet.
I move on, leaving the stile behind, and I start heading over to the right-hand side of the field, the final side of the rectangle.
Whatever little hope I had of finding a way out is all but gone now. I’m pretty much just going through the motions — struggling along through the snow, peering into the gloom, looking for gaps in the hedge/fence, gaps that almost certainly aren’t there . . .
And then I see the lights.
At first I only see them from the corner of my eye — a flash of bright lights down at the bottom of the field — and for a second I assume they’re just the headlights of a passing car, but when they don’t go away, and I stop looking at the hedge/fence and focus instead on the gate at the bottom of the field, it’s obvious that the lights aren’t headlights. They’re flashlights, down at the gate, and there’s at least four of them, which means there’s at least four monkems down there.
It’s too dark — and the monkems are too far away — to see clearly, but as the powerful flashlight beams keep sweeping around, I catch momentary glimpses of illuminated faces and figures, and I’m pretty sure they’re all men — big coats, hats, boots. Big voices. The still air carries the murmur of their voices up the field, and although I can’t make out what they’re saying, there’s a hardness to the voices that gives me a really bad feeling. I’m not sure why, but there’s something of the hunter about them.
I hear a metallic creaking then, and as one of the monkems directs his flashlight at the gate, I see another one — a big rough-looking man with a black beard — clambering over into the field. The sheep are still there, but they’ve moved back from the gate now, and when the bearded monkem turns around and shines his flashlight at them, they all suddenly take off, running away into the darkness on the left-hand side of the field.
The fear’s flooding through me now, emptying my stomach and chilling me to the bone, and the next sound I hear makes me feel even worse. It comes from the gate, a short sharp bark, and as my breath freezes in my throat, and I stare wide-eyed down the field, I see that three of the monkems are in the field now, and the fourth one — who’s still on the other side of the gate — is bending down to pick up a dog. It’s a big hefty-looking thing, and the monkem has to cradle it in both arms to lift it up. The dog barks again, and the monkem passes it over the gate to one of the others. He then climbs over the gate himself, takes the dog’s leash from the other one, and squats down beside it. As the bearded monkem shines his flashlight on them, I can see the fourth one holding something out to the dog, letting it smell it. For a moment or two, I can’t work out what it is. It looks like the lower half of a human leg, including the foot, but it seems kind of floppy too, which doesn’t make sense. Why would a human leg be floppy? And for that matter, why would these monkems have half a human leg in the first place, and why would they be encouraging their dog to smell it? But then one of the other monkems directs his flashlight at the monkem with the leg and the dog, and because the change of angle gives me a better view, I can see now that it’s not half a leg — of course it’s not — it’s my Wellington boot. They must have found it on the other side of the gate, and they’re letting the dog get my scent from it, and then the dog’s going to follow my trail around the field and lead the monkems to
me.
They’re going to hunt me down . . .
You haven’t done anything wrong, Elliot, Ella starts to say. There’s no reason for them to —
“THERE HE IS!”
The guttural shout comes from one of the monkems. I can’t see which one because all of a sudden I’m blinded by the dazzling light of a flashlight, and as I raise my hand to shield my eyes, another beam lights me up, and then the dog starts yapping and more voices ring out.
“HEY, YOU UP THERE!”
YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .
“HEY, KID!”
YAP-YAP-YAP . . .
“DON’T MOVE! JUST STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
As I run off up the field, back the way I came, I’m remotely aware that the shouts are getting louder and more desperate, but I’m not really conscious of them. I’m not conscious of anything now. I’m in automatic fear mode. My body’s taken over, and all it cares about is running, getting me away from the danger. It’s making me race through the snow as fast as possible, making me ignore the awful pain in my frozen foot, and at the same time it’s assessing all the options and making split-second decisions. Is it best to keep going in a straightish line, following my tracks in the snow — for easier and quicker running — or is it better to start zigzagging, darting from side to side, to make it harder for the monkems to keep me in their flashlight beams? An instant later my body lunges to the right, out of the lights and into the untrammeled snow, and before the monkems have time to redirect their flashlights, it veers to the right again, and then immediately to the left. And then, as someone shouts, “WHERE’S HE GONE?” my bare foot hits a snow-buried rock, and I scream out in agony and tumble over into the snow.
The pain’s so bad I have to grit my teeth and clamp my hand over my mouth to stop myself crying out, and as I lie there in the snow — with the flashlight beams sweeping around — I can feel the cold stickiness of blood oozing between my toes, and although it’s too dark to see the gut-wrenching redness, it’s still terrifying enough to sicken me to the stomach. I roll over onto my side and vomit into the snow. My stomach’s empty . . . all that comes up is some yellowy goo. I spit it out, retch again, spit again, and when I feel the nausea subsiding, I rinse out my mouth with a handful of snow, and use another handful to clean up my face.