by Lee, Frazer
It was then that Tom realized he was not the only witness to this unspeakable Grand Guignol. Just a few feet away stood Cosmo, axe in hand. He stood, impervious, watching the desperate man—he couldn’t be older than twenty-five—dragging his dead limb away from the trap. Sobbing in pain, the logger looked like he would pass out any moment. Cosmo stepped forward, clearly intent on denying his victim any such release. He towered over the tortured logger, swinging the axe, low this time, until the blade was embedded in the poor man’s crotch. The logger roared like thunder, unable to process the agonies being visited on his already ravaged body. With another swing, and another, the looming vagrant used the axe to open up his victim from bottom to top, only stopping when his blade had ploughed a furrow of flesh right through to the sternum.
Tom gagged, tasting the bitter acid bite of mulled wine scorching his throat. He tried not to regurgitate, clamping his hands over his mouth as he careered away from the scene on trembling legs. He half-ran, half-fell from the dreadful scene, following the incline of the forest floor as it led him down a steep bank then up again over loose earth and knotted roots onto higher ground. Then, somewhere amidst the firs and the fire that raged behind him, another explosion rocked the forest.
The remaining buildings at Electricity Substation D-5 went up, lighting the sky with a shower of white sparks and ochre flames. Tom saw the forest before him light up too, a vista as clear as on a summer’s day. He was standing in the glade before the ancient Jack and Jill Trees.
The sight illuminated before him was an atrocity to behold. It was as though Tom had wandered into the fabric of his worst nightmare.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Tom stood dumbstruck and took in the horror before him. It was as though all his recurring nightmares and his waking, rational life had somehow blurred—two universes combined; the veil between them torn open by the sheer madness of what he was witnessing.
All around him lay the bodies and body parts of the logging team. There were the remains of six or more men, maybe even as many as ten, it was hard to tell given how far and wide their limbs were scattered. The shocking viscera of the amputated limbs, smashed torsos and severed heads was punctuated by the occasional flash of a bright yellow florescent tabard here and there amidst the leaves and gore. Blood seeped from the body parts, turning the leaf-strewn ground around the ancient trees into a dark quagmire. Tom became aware of a wet dripping sound, like raindrops that had gathered on the leaves and branches overhead. He looked up and saw a crimson rain of blood dripping from the sodden leaves above, bright droplets dancing in the golden flicker of the fire. Clamping his hand to his mouth in a vain attempt not to gag, he saw the source of the torrent and realized with a growing sense of terror and despair that he had seen this before.
He recognized the way the lower branches were bowed beneath the weight of so many internal organs; a sight that had haunted his nightmares for over thirty years. The men who lay eviscerated at his feet had been torn open; their intestines and internal organs draped across the lower branches of the Jack and Jill Trees like bright red tinsel. An eyeball dangled sickly, attached to a tree branch by its stringy optic nerve, next to a section of scalp that flapped and bled in the wind.
Sacrilegious offerings to the ancient trees; grim gifts from a madman.
And there, at the foot of the tree stood that madman; leaning on his axe and admiring the ripe, red fruits of his labors.
Tom, unable to stop himself from vocalizing his fear, let out a whimper. At the sound, the man turned and looked at Tom with indifferent eyes. In the light of the sub-station fire, Tom could see him clearly now. He was broad shouldered and powerful framed, dressed in a large, filthy, hooded overcoat, with ragged combat fatigues beneath. This man who had been watching Tom, haunting his every step in the forest and beyond was no supernatural force; Tom felt sure of that now. He was just a man, and a vagrant at that.
“You have no right to wear The Green.”
The man’s voice was a rough as gravel; it sounded like his throat had been cracked apart by screaming. His thick Eastern European accent made him sound like a gypsy to Tom, giving his words an earthy, mystical quality.
“You’re the second person who said that to me today—Cosmo, isn’t it?”
The vagrant grunted and took a single, lumbering step forward.
“You have no right to be here, these woods are mine. No one hunts or ruts here but me. No one but me has the right to wear The Green.”
Every fiber of Tom’s being told him to back off, but he held his ground.
“Is that why you’ve been following me around, because I’m pissing on your patch? It was you who sabotaged our brakes, wasn’t it?”
The axman just snorted.
“And you who took the incriminating snapshot of me and Holly…”
“It surprises you I can use a mobile phone camera? Because I wear rags? Because I sleep rough?”
“Not at all,” Tom said. “But it does surprise me you had the wherewithal to MMS it to my wife.”
“Picked the first name I saw in your sent messages. City people always think you’re so superior, but you know nothing of real life, of real struggle.”
“Maybe I have no right to be here as you say,” Tom said, trying to speak Cosmo’s language. “But no one owns these woods. People buy and sell them, but no one really owns them, do they? They’re too wild. They live on, whatever we try to do to them.”
“What do you know about it?” Cosmo sneered. “You come here with the stink of pollution on your clothes—in your hair and skin—and you bring chainsaws to hack and cut the trees where they stand. Where they have stood for centuries. You don’t know what it takes to earn the right to wear The Green.”
Tom looked at the charnel scene around him, all those men, so brutally slain.
“Slaughtering innocent people? Is that what it takes?”
Cosmo lifted the axe.
“I am their true protector. And I am here to hack and cut the likes of you down.”
“Like you did to Dieter? My partner, the one whose clothes you put on that ridiculous scarecrow, remember? That was a nice touch, Cosmo; the police were particularly interested in that little maneuver. In fact, they’re on their way now, not long until they find you…”
“Then they’ll find you dead, also,” Cosmo growled.
Tom froze as the huge man lunged for him, swinging the axe up high. He was intent on smashing it into Tom’s skull. The vagrant roared a berserker’s cry. Seeing the flash of the blade against the gloomy sky, Tom prayed to gods he did not even believe in that he would be able to dodge the sudden attack.
Then, someone else came crashing out of the trees, screaming bloody blue murder. Holly crashed into Cosmo, clinging to his long coat for dear life and knocking him off course. The axe swung wide of Tom’s head and into the ground. Slipping on the miasma of blood and ruin at his feet, Tom fell.
Cosmo’s axe had cut right through the conjoined roots of the Jack and Jill Trees, separating them. Foul, black fluid spurted from the severed roots like congealing blood. The vagrant gasped, choking at the blasphemous sight. He looked bereft, like a child whose toys had been confiscated from him. Cosmo spun around, glaring at Holly with hate-filled eyes.
Wrestling free of her grasp, he jabbed the flat end of the axe right between her eyes.
Tom stood watching, aghast, as Holly’s legs buckled beneath her. She fell, lifeless, to the ground amidst the detritus of dead bodies and the oozing roots of the ancient trees.
Heaving the axe so that he was holding it with two hands again, Cosmo advanced.
Tom scrambled to his feet, turned on his heels and ran.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
As he ran, Tom tried to wrestle himself free of Tommy MacGregor’s costume. If he had no right to wear it, as Cosmo had said, then let the mad, murderous fool have it; especially if it would slow him and his axe down a bit. But it was no good, the webbing and fake leaves were all in a tangle aroun
d him. The only way he might stand a chance of extricating himself from the costume would require stopping still for a minute or two, maybe more. That was a delay he dare not risk with a crazed axman at his heels.
Tom pushed on, beyond the huge trees and their cousins and into a glade. He saw a structure at the heart of the clearing, a ramshackle house in the woods, overgrown with ivy, weeds and young trees both inside and out. The front door was open, hanging off its hinges. With renewed vigor, Tom broke into a full-fledged sprint for the open door.
He was within twenty feet of his target when he glanced down to avoid tripping on some fallen branches. As he did so, he saw another potential peril in his path; the serrated metal jaws of a huge trap, lying partially hidden in the carpet of leaves that covered the forest floor in the clearing. He was running too fast to stop in his tracks and so, powering forward with three wide strides, he leaped into the air and over the trap, landing safely on the other side of it to continue his mad dash for the door.
Behind him, Tom heard an almighty snap. Had he triggered the trap somehow during his flight? He risked slowing his pace a little in order to glance over his shoulder and saw Cosmo, standing and swaying slightly, his face a rictus of pain. The man’s scream rang out next; a wolflike howl that echoed off the branches of the surrounding trees like hell and damnation. Cosmo had become ensnared by his own trap. He had been so intent on catching up to Tom that he had missed the metal jaws at his feet. Fighting to keep his balance, Cosmo lost the battle and toppled to the ground and was even now desperately trying to free his damaged leg from the trap.
Tom charged on towards the door, crossing the threshold and crashing inside the tumbledown house. He slammed the door behind him and turned around to inspect his surroundings.
And found that he was home.
Home in the context of all the nightmares of his thirty-six years.
The small foyer in which he was standing was as recognizable to him as the taste of bread. The staircase, leading up to the second storey in a gentle curve, was as familiar as an illustration from a bedtime story. Even though the floorboards were warped and covered in moss and litter from the forest outside he felt sure he was standing in the arena of his dreams.
He walked on into what had once been the living room of the dwelling and drew a sharp breath upon seeing the fireplace. It was the mirror image of the one from his nightmares. He shivered, half-expecting to see red eyes, hot and searing like coals, glaring at him from that darkest of dark places. He crossed to the corner of the room where he had crawled so many hundreds of times in his tortured dreams; the same spot where he felt the hot, wet caress of the human viscera decorating that infernal Christmas tree.
With shock and disbelief, he saw that a fir tree had taken root beneath the stagnant floorboards, erupting through them in a defiant display of life, in the exact same spot where the Christmas tree stood in his nightmares. Remembering the branches of the Jack and Jill Trees bowing under the weight of their dark fruit, Tom backed away from the tree, eager to be at a distance from it and the long shadow it cast on the floorboards. As the weight of all his childhood fears closed in on him, he felt that the walls of the ramshackle house might collapse at any moment.
Then he heard a pained murmur.
The muffled sound had come from beneath the house, and he was about to dismiss it as an aural manifestation of his own dread when he heard it again, louder and more intense this time. He walked in the direction of the sound, weathered floorboards creaking beneath his feet with each step. In answer to the creaking of the floor, he heard the sound again as it took on the aspect of a child’s plaintive moan. Tom shuddered, recalling the pitiful, wretched sounds he had made each time that horrific nightmare had woken him from his restless sleep almost every night for the past thirty years. Was the sound a phantom, come to torture him to madness then a slow death in the venue of his worst fears? He stumbled backwards, his heels becoming entangled in something heavy, and soft. He looked down, nervous that he would find yet more body parts like Cosmo’s exhibition of atrocities he had witnessed in the woods. Relieved, he saw his feet were tangled in a dusty old rug. He kicked the thing away, making a cloud of dust, and noticed something beneath the tattered weave of the rug; the edges of a hatch, laid into the floorboards.
He knelt and dragged the heavy rug fully to one side, revealing the hatch in its entirety. He glanced around for something with which to pry the hatch open and found a broken chair leg that had been sheared off to a point lying nearby under a musty armchair. Driving the pointy end of the stake into the narrow gap between the hatch and the surrounding floorboards, Tom pushed then lifted. He repeated the movement, each time getting the stake a little farther into the gap until he had the hatch open a full two inches or more. Holding the stake in place, he used his free hand to grab the edge of the hatch and swing it up and over until it clattered onto the creaking floorboards amidst a plume of dust and earth. Peering down into the opening, Tom saw the wooden rungs of a ladder descending into the gloom.
He swung his feet over the precipice and onto the first rung of the ladder down to hell.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The sweet-sour stench of decay hit Tom’s nostrils before he was even halfway down the ladder. He swallowed, willing the churning pit of his stomach to settle. The whimpers he had heard through the floorboards were louder and more urgent now. Someone down there needed help, and he was the only person who could help. Gripping the rough sides of the ladder, he continued his descent into the stinking gloom.
Drip, drip, drip.
Something was leaking down there. Tom prayed it was just water.
His right foot hit the floor, which felt solid like stone. Still holding on to the ladder with one hand, he reached out and felt along the wall to his right, searching for a light source. Finding nothing, he felt along the wall with his left. Christ, but the smell was bad down there, a sickly, ripe odor like rotting onions.
Bingo.
Tom felt the unmistakable shape of a switch beneath his searching fingers. He hesitated before pressing it, uncertain that he wanted to see what was down there in the stink and dark. Hearing another pained whimper, he flicked the switch and shut his eyes tight against the sudden glare. He opened his eyes again slowly, allowing them to adjust to the light, and turned. A single, bare light bulb dangled from the wooden beams above illuminating a stone-floored cellar some fifteen feet square. The meager space had been converted into something resembling a home. A small kitchen area had been set up in one corner, with a few pots and pans poking out of a large wooden container. A bucket sat next to the pans, and Tom saw the source of the dripping sound; water was leaking from the ceiling above into the bucket.
Tom made his way around the foot of the ladder and saw the source of the whimpers. The dreadlocked protester Tom had tangled with at the airport, then the pub, was strapped to a chair. Bound and gagged, the young man’s face was a mess of bruises and livid cuts. His eyes wide with terror, the protester murmured frantically through the gag, struggling all the while against his bonds. Tom rushed over to him and wrestled the blood-soaked gag free from the poor man’s mouth.
“You have to get me out of here, before he comes back! He’s fucking mental, made me watch him…do it. Says he hears a voice, talks to some demon upstairs all the time, please he’s crazy…”
The frantic young man looked in the direction of a chair standing next to a makeshift bed fashioned from wooden pallets in the opposite corner. Mildewed blankets were piled up over two large, long shapes—one on the bed, one on the chair. Tom crossed to the chair and leaned over it to take a closer look. It smelled worse over there.
“No! Don’t look! Just get me out of here, man! Before he comes back, please!”
But Tom already had a hold of the blanket covering the shape on the chair. Clutching his hand to his mouth, he pulled the blanket away, and recoiled from what he saw beneath.
Strapped to the chair was Dieter, or what was left of him, h
is wrists bound with binding wire that had cut all the way down to the bone. How he must have struggled. The savage wounds that had been visited upon his flesh made Tom wish that Dieter had been dead already when they were inflicted. An angry head wound still oozed with drying brain matter. The rest of his body had been flayed, gouged and torn by hands that did not know tenderness, in turn guided by a mind that knew no mercy. As Tom pulled the blanket back farther, Dieter’s lifeless, broken head lolled to one side and his dead mouth spewed maggots down his blood-smeared chest. Tom looked into the spaces where Dieter’s eyes had been before they were gouged away, leaving red raw sockets that described the horror of his colleague’s final moments.
Tom knew that the shape on the bed next to Dieter was another body. He knew it was the source of the unspeakable stench permeating every square inch of the cellar. Tom swallowed his fear; he had to see what was under the blanket, he had to know what had happened down there in that filthy cellar in a vain attempt to understand it. He crossed to the bed, crouched down and pulled back the topmost blanket, then the next. Peeling back the final blanket, he gagged at the smell.
The girl still wore a shock of white-blonde hair, but it was the only thing about her that looked alive. Her skin was a pallid gray-green color, and bore livid welts and bruises. She was dressed in a silk chemise, the hem of which was thick with dried fluids. Beneath the hem her legs ended at the thigh where they had been amputated and crudely cauterized. The concision had been clumsily executed and the wounds unsuccessfully sealed. They wept with foul-smelling yellow ooze that was alive with writhing maggots. She had been no more than twenty years old when she died, but that had been several months ago. Somewhere beneath the ruinous odor, Tom could make out the faint scent of perfume. He saw a perfume bottle standing next to makeup containers, all of which stood in a neat row on a little shelf above her side of the bed. Perversely, Cosmo had painted the corpse’s nails with pink nail polish and had applied a layer of red lipstick to her dried and peeling lips.