by Guy N Smith
Anticipating another scream, Janie clung frantically to the man at her side. It came as an anti-climax, so different this time, harsh like the dog's barking had been earlier; but not so ear-shattering, not so hellish, as the one which had awoken her. It died slowly away and somewhere there was an answering bark.
'Foxes!' Suddenly Peter burst out laughing, a peal of enforced mirth and relief. 'My God, that's what those screams were that people reckon they hear up on Hodre after dark, the screech of vixens! I read somewhere that vulpine mating begins any time from mid-November onwards. You'd think country folk would know that.'
'No!' Janie gave an indignant hiss. 'That's not what I heard, Peter. The first scream was nothing like that at all! It was the most unearthly sound I've ever heard!'
Damn it, her nerves were getting the better of her, he thought. Of course it was foxes; Janie, like the villagers, was letting herself be scared. He had to reassure her right now before she became hysterical.
'I tell you it's foxes. Listen again for a moment.'
Silence. Peter thought he could hear Janie's heart pounding; maybe it was his own. He prayed that the vixen would screech again. It did, a few seconds later—a wild, hideous scream that shattered the stillness and made the prowling male of the species bark again. Both animals were somewhere in the big forest.
There, what did I tell you? That was a fox, all right.'
'That was. 'Janie's voice quavered. 'But the other wasn't. I tell you, Peter, it was the most unearthly, awful sound I've ever heard in my life.'
He clicked his tongue in annoyance. Women! Once they got a stupid notion into their heads there was no way of changing their minds. 'Have it your own way, but I'm getting back to sleep because I've a lot of work to catch up on tomorrow. As far as I'm concerned it was mating foxes up in the forest and I don't want to hear any more about it.'
'But it wasn't up in the forest, not the sound I heard, anyway,' she almost screamed. 'Peter, it came from that stone circled
'For Christ's sake! This is sheer nonsense. You're forcing yourself to believe what that pair of bumpkins in the pub were ranting on about. No wonder Gavin's scared. You're frightening him to death. Now, I'm getting to sleep. You please yourself.'
Janie went over to the window, and stared out forcing her confused brain to register details; the sloping grassland ethereal and silvery, the bare hedges. In the distance the mass of pine trees seeming to glower threateningly. She tried not to turn her head, but in the end was compelled to, mentally flinching from the stunted pines only a couple of hundred yards away—so eerie, so majestic, so vibrant that she could almost feel their power. Wide-eyed, frightened, she was held there at the window as though they were hypnotising her, warning her.
Finally they let her go and she shuffled barefooted and trembling back to bed and lowered herself down alongside Peter. He was already asleep, she could tell by his regular breathing. The fool, he had scorned the final warning, scoffed at it. And there might not be another . . .
For the rest of the night she lay there just staring up at the ceiling, watching the latticed square of moonlight pale until finally it was replaced by the cold grey light of a mountain winter dawn. That scream—she could still hear it like a catchy tune that persistently sticks in the brain. She heard it again and again, a long-drawn-out cry of agony, the embodiment of every fear known to man or beast, the ultimate in terror.
Her train of thought led back to wild beasts, ferocious creatures that had escaped from captivity to return to the only way of life they knew: stalking their prey with a ruthless patience, pouncing out of the darkness and ripping it to shreds with huge sharp claws. Nature's law, the law of the jungle.
And Hodre was now that jungle.
5
Malcolm Hughes had been headmaster of Woodside school for the past twenty-five years. He had lived in the village from an early age, and he had studied there himself before progressing to university. A number of postings had followed but in the end the trail had led back to Woodside because that was his ambition. At fifty-five they would let him see his retirement there and even afterwards, he told himself, his presence would be indispensable, for truly no outsider could fully understand the people of this place.
Well-built and balding, the schoolmaster had a reputation for being bad-tempered and a law unto himself. Miss Haverill, who taught the infant class, lived in fear and trembling of the headmaster but, Malcolm decided, that was the way it should be. Had not assistant teachers in his own schooldays feared the headmaster? Of course they had. There was one word to sum it all up—discipline! And discipline stemmed from the top of the tree, found its way right down to the roots and ensured a strong and healthy growth throughout. That was the trouble with society today: no discipline. The blame for recent city rioting and looting lay with parents and school teachers, principally the latter. A schoolmaster did not simply discipline his pupils, he disciplined the parents as well.
Malcolm Hughes took his time lighting his large rustic pipe as he weighed up this young man who had deemed to presume upon his valuable time first thing on a Monday morning. Outsiders could cause problems because they had not had the Woodside upbringing and looked for psychological reasons behind their children's inability to conform to what this small society demanded. They did not accept what you told them; they came up with ideas of their own which were all nonsense anyway. This fellow sitting before him was a writer; well, he'd written a book, put it that way. Mass market fiction, a sacrilege to the English language, laced with bad grammar and even worse language. It was all a con-trick, damaging to the tradition of English literature. A semi-hippy, he had not even bothered to put a suit on to consult his son's headmaster. Certainly discipline was lacking here. Hughes sighed audibly.
'My son is afraid of being bullied,' Peter Fogg said, moving his head slightly in an attempt to dodge a drifting cloud of scented tobacco smoke.
'But he hasn't actually been bullied.' Hughes knitted his bushy eyebrows into a stern countenance, which in his younger days he had practised in front of a mirror. 'Young boys are prone to many fears, their imaginations are fertile and often play-ground quarrels are magnified out of all proportion.'
'He's frightened of the Wilson boys.' Peter watched the other closely for a reaction, and saw the grey eyes beneath the brows narrow slightly.
'Oh, the Wilsons . . . ' The schoolmaster drew heavily on his pipe and took his time expelling the smoke. They can be a bit over rumbustuous at times but there's no harm in the lads. I've had to stamp down on them on the odd occasion in the past, mind you.'
Their elder brothers tried to run Gavin down on their motorbikes.' Peter sensed Hughes erecting barricades, a kind of stonewall psychological defence. They could have killed him. I sent them packing but the younger ones are threatening to beat Gavin up today, because his parents aren't Welsh!'
That's nonsense.'
'Precisely. That's why I'm here now.'
'I assure you Mr—er—um—Fogg, that no such thing could take place on the premises of this school. I would not allow anything more than an exuberant friendly brawl on the playground, I promise you.'
Then how is it,' Peter spoke slowly, his words seeming to cut a path through the thick haze of pipe smoke which enshrouded the big man on the other side of the desk, 'that these two young hooligans blacked Kevin Arnold's eye and got him down on the ground and kicked hell out of him?'
Malcolm Hughes started visibly. 'Come now, Mr Fogg, that really is taking it too far. I know the incident which you are referring to, of course. The Wilsons and young Arnold quarrelled over something during playtime one day last week. There was an argument and I believe a blow was struck but Miss Haverill was quick to intervene and—'
'But she didn't intervene quite quickly enough,' Peter snapped, 'Look, Mr Hughes, suppose you drop all this facade you've built up about school discipline and the like. I know as well as you do that the Wilsons and probably some of the other kids are hooligans, given the chance. I'm not here
to complain about young Arnold's black eye, just to tell you that it's not to happen to my boy. If it does. . . '
'Is—is this some kind of threat, Mr Fogg?' Malcolm Hughes leaned forward, the veins in his thick neck standing out like lengths of blue cord.
'It depends.' The other stood up. 'On whether anything happens to my boy. It's your responsibility to see that it doesn't.'
Hughes was puffing steadily on his pipe. How dare this upstart of an outsider come here and talk to him like this. He thought of the Wilsons and remembered how the tyres on his car had been slashed. There were things that were best left alone, but when parents complained it made life very difficult, especially if you weren't Welsh! Malcolm Hughes was English. With a Welsh name but born in Stoke-on-Trent, he'd come to Woodside with his parents at the age of three. Most people thought he was Welsh—except the Wilsons! Somehow they'd found out and life was a kind of brinkmanship. You never knew for sure what they would do, and if they did anything you never found out until it was too late. You could never prove anything. They were a kind of private terrorist organisation that you couldn't get to grips with, fighting you under the cover of darkness. They had obviously got it in for the Foggs, which wasn't surprising. Mark and Jon would rough the young kid up at school, the elder twins would—well, there was no way of guessing to what lengths they would go. The holiday cottage that had been burned down one night last winter, that was the Wilsons' doing for sure. You had to tread carefully. Run with the hare and the hounds.
'Leave it to me.' The headmaster blew out a thick cloud of smoke, which he hoped would hide the flicker of fear in his eyes, the slight trembling of his lower lip. I'll see that no harm comes to your boy.'
'Good.' Peter smiled. 'In which case I'll not take up any more of your valuable time, Mr Hughes. Good day to you.'
Peter had not missed that brief expression of fear on the schoolmaster's face. He's shit-scared of the Wilsons, Peter thought. In fact he's scared of everything, including his own shadow. A big bluffing coward, another breed of the bullying species.
He drove slowly back to Hodre, a kind of unwillingness to go home because Janie would be waiting for him, demanding a word-for-word report of his meeting at the school. OK, he'd tell her. But it wouldn't satisfy her. It didn't really satisfy him, because Malcolm Hughes was just stalling, hoping that the Wilson boys wouldn't beat Gavin up and that everything would be all right.
Peter was surprised to see that Janie's Mini was not parked on the verge adjoining the cottage. In a way he was relieved, because it would give him a respite from her continual nagging barrage that there was something odd going on. After a while he almost believed that there was, but he must not believe it, or they would never stick it out for a year. It was just the sudden contrast between town and country life, that was all. Janie would get used to this place in due course and in the meantime he just had to show a little forbearance.
He had intended to go straight back to work on that difficult chapter conclusion. Now, suddenly, he wasn't in the mood. He needed to wind down, to relax for an hour or so and get Malcolm Hughes and the Wilsons out of his system.
A walk, maybe. He remembered the missing cat. Not that he was bothered much about it himself; it was only a stray that had appeared from somewhere and taken up residence at Hodre, and he had never liked cats. But Snowy would reduce the mice and rat population and save an awful lot of trouble where Janie was concerned. Also, it kept Gavin happy. So the sooner it was found the better, and the search offered the chance of a walk and some much-needed fresh air. He could still smell that schoolmaster's rank pipe.
The cat could be three or four miles away, satisfying its sexual needs on some willing mate; on the other hand, it could have found an infestation of rats somewhere nearby in one of the hedgerows.
Peter went into the porch and donned his Wellington boots and duffle coat. Then he stood for a moment wondering where to begin. Somehow he didn't fancy going up to the forest again. The place had an inhospitable look about it, especially today when there was an abundance of low cloud.
He had woken with a slight headache, the kind which gets progressively worse as the day goes on, probably because of the disturbance last night, coupled with his anger over that stupid conversation in the Cat. And the meeting with Hughes had made him tense. Perhaps he was suffering from eye-strain too.
He groaned to himself. If this mood didn't evaporate soon he'd never be able to get down to any more work today. There was something nagging at his subconscious, a depression of sorts; and all this totally unnecessary bullshit which was upsetting Janie and Gavin.
And something else! Oh Jesus Christ, he was getting edgy, peering ahead of himself into the low cloud, which seemed to be thickening, as though he expected some kind of apparition to appear suddenly. Take a grip on yourself, Peter Pogg, or eke you'll be getting as nervy as everybody else. All the same it was a bit creepy out here, a silent lifeless grey world. Not even a crow or a magpie about; the sheep which had strayed down from the forest were nowhere in sight. Perhaps they had returned whence they had come (probably back to Ruskin's huge flock), or else they were huddling in some corner hidden by the fog. Frightened, like himself!
Damn it, I'm not scared.
Yes, you are. You just won't admit it.
Where the hell had that bloody cat gone? What chance was there of finding it out here in thickening low cloud? None, but he was going to search for it just the same, a show of bravado that wouldn't fool even himself.
Well, he wasn't going up to the forest again. There wasn't any point, because if it was up there he'd never find it. Walk the boundaries, follow the tall straggling hawthorn hedge that marked the perimeter of Hodre, and in due course he would complete the circle and arrive back at the cottage. He'd have a good look at that stone circle on the way.
Peter shivered; it was the raw damp atmosphere, of course. He struck off to the left, found the hedgerow and began to follow it. A sudden thought crossed his mind: Janie hadn't said she was going anywhere today, but then why the hell should she? They'd had quite a tiff in the night over that screaming vixen and when Janie went into one of her sulks it might be days before she got back to normal domestic conversation. Sod her, he couldn't pander to her every little tantrum. Let her work it off in her own good time.
Gigantic shapes loomed out of the opaque greyness ahead of him, mighty pine trees that would have attained fifty or sixty feet in height if the winds hadn't bent them, fashioning them over the years into weird misshapen caricatures.
Something glided from the topmost branches of the nearest tree, flapped its massive black wings just once to maintain its elevation and gave a deep cronk, before the thick grey vapour swallowed it up. A raven; while there are ravens in the Tower of London England will never fall to a foreign foe. Peter smiled to himself and tried to remember where he'd read or heard that saying. Stupid really, because they were nothing more than oversize crows. Maybe they had some kind of magical powers. He shivered again and began fastening the toggles on his coat. Coming up here didn't seem such a good idea after all; the atmosphere was damp and far from healthy, and if anything his headache had worsened. It would have been preferable to have remained in the small front room, got a fire going until the place was unhealthily snug and tried to wrestle with the conclusion to chapter one. Chapter endings were an art in themselves; they had to make the reader want to turn to the next page. If the author got it wrong, then the book was likely to be put down and not picked up again—and that was how more than a few best-selling writers had drifted into oblivion.
So this was the stone circle! Somehow he had climbed above it; possibly the bank of cloud caught up on the mountains had screened it from him until now. It was only three hundred yards from the cottage, yet the steepness of the incline made it seem like a mile.
It was situated in a kind of no-man's-land. The hedgerows seemed to peter out here as though the rocky earth was too poor to support the growth of hawthorn. Or perhaps it was left unsc
reened for the convenience of tourists. Peter could not imagine anybody wanting to climb all the way up here just to look at that. There was nothing to see except a few pines that had obviously been planted long after the druids (if any had ever used this place) had passed on. Some stones; he counted them—nine. Maybe there had been more and local farmers had dragged them away for their own use over the centuries. Just a bare, roughly circular, patch of land; the entwining branches of the trees, which had been planted too close to each other, shut out the sunlight. A gloomy place; even Peter Fogg as a writer could not find words to describe it more fully. An historical nonentity. Eerie!
A deep-throated croak and a swish of wings had him cowering, throwing up his hands to protect himself. In a momentary pang of fear he became primitive man in a world that was still young, with some hideous prehistoric winged monster about to swoop down on him. That bloody raven again! The damned thing was persistent, cheeky, in no way afraid of man. Now why the hell had it come back here to this circle of desolation when surely there was food to be scavenged in the fields? Even now, it was circling beyond his range of vision in the fog, calling angrily as though it saw him as a trespasser and was ordering him to leave.
And as he turned in a half-circle to follow the irate cronking of the invisible bird, Peter suddenly saw why the big black bird was eager to return to this stone circle. Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty!
It was Snowy. Well, it was a white cat, anyway, although it was doubtful whether it was still individually recognisable. Peter stepped back a pace, his instincts screaming at him to run and keep on running; only it seemed that all the strength had drained from his legs. He felt the bile rise in his throat and thought he was going to vomit. But he neither fled nor spewed, just stood and stared in disbelief with bulging eyes. It couldn't be; he must be imagining it, in the same way that Janie had been letting her fears run riot lately. Nobody would possibly commit that kind of atrocity on a harmless cat.