by Guy N Smith
So Donna found a winding path that took her into the deep woods where it was almost like night. She didn't worry about food. She hadn't eaten for the last twelve hours and she still didn't feel hungry but when she did she knew which herbs were edible; not that there was much growing in Gabor Wood except one or two species of fungi but she could always go and search the fields and hedgerows. She was wearing the green dress that Mrs Flaherty had given her, and walked barefooted because the soles of her feet had hardened over the years so that whenever she wore shoes they hurt her.
She felt uneasy, almost as though she was being watched but she didn't care. She didn't care about anything now that her father was dead. No plans, just wander aimlessly, eat from the wild, drink from the streams. Nothing else. Ever.
It was almost too dark to see now and she was beginning to feel tired, remembered also that she had not slept since that awful night. She peered around, looked for somewhere to lie down. At length she found a thick carpet of pine needles beneath some giant ferns and stretched herself out.
Above her she could just see patches of night sky, and a single star that twinkled brightly as though it was looking down on her, gave her a feeling of not being entirely alone. Somewhere she heard a badger snuffling as it hunted for insects, the light swift tread of a stoat. She read the sounds as other girls of her age might have read a book for that was the way she had been brought up.
It was so warm and comfortable here, not like the stuffy Flaherty caravan and she wondered why she had not thought of running away before. Suddenly she did not miss Big Sean anymore; he hadn't really cared for her, she was just an encumbrance.
Sleep came gradually like drifting on the gentle swell of an ocean, letting the tide take her wherever it may for she had no plans for tomorrow nor any other day. She didn't even hate those boys who killed Sean now because she didn't need him. If she thought about it she had always been alone.
Her acute senses worked even in the depths of slumber, aware of the presence of passing animals, the dog fox that gave her a wide berth because he mistrusted any human scent, and the hedgehog which foraged in a pile of dead leaves that remained from last winter. Noises that her subconscious accepted.
Hours passed. The moon fought valiantly to illuminate this dark woodland but only a few slivers of silvery light penetrated the interwoven branches. Gabor Wood maintained its right to remain enshrouded in shadow, the way it had been for centuries as though it had some secret which must remain hidden forever.
Donna stirred uneasily, tossed as though she lay on the hard narrow bed in Mrs Flaherty's caravan. Figments of a dream, disjointed; trying to piece them together although they would have been better left scattered so that they did not come to fruition. Somebody was looking for her. The tinkers … no, it wasn't them. Somebody else …
Her eyes flickered open, saw a strange world where moonlight and shadows struggled for supremacy, knotted tree trunks that took on face shapes in the half-light. Eyes that saw, mouths that moved in mute meaningless speech. Not exactly hostile but wanting her to leave. Warning her!
She sat up, shivered, looked about her. Darkness all around yet something was moving that was neither fox nor badger yet not wholly … human!
Childhood fears crowded her mind, urged her to run. But where to? She did not know where the path she had followed led nor how far it was back to the encampment. A strange sensation, one that she had not been aware of during her trek here but now, with her terror rising, made itself known. The track she had walked had been a circular one, one that went nowhere except back on itself. She was lost!
And with this terrible realisation she knew that whatever peril lurked in the darkness there was no escape from it. Run, but it will get you just the same!
Suddenly she saw the man. There had been no warning of his approach, no footfalls on the soft ground; one who moved more stealthily than the creatures of the wild themselves. Now he was standing before her in a slender moonbeam so that she could see him clearly. Her first thought was that it was a scarecrow, the kind farmers put in their fields to protect the crops from ravenous birds, that it had been here all along and she had failed to notice it. Ragged clothing that hung from the stooped body, a misshapen hat squashed down on the large head from which protruded a mass of hair that might have been hay or straw, a cock pheasant's tail feather sticking up out of it. Boots that were split and had ragged tops as though they had been deliberately shortened so that they would not meet with the frayed trouser bottoms.
Donna stared at the face, let out a shrill cry of horror. The features were gaunt and ugly, eyes so close together that they gave the impression of being affixed to the bridge of the nose; the mouth a slit that revealed broken stumps of teeth when the lips were drawn back to resemble the snarl of an animal. So much hair on the face that it was impossible to determine the age of this stranger, the thick beard matted with congealed food that had fallen from the mouth, bare patches here and there as though mange had taken its toll.
‘You're tired.’ The voice had a strange accent combined with a lisp, spittle bubbling as the lips moved.
Donna nodded, she didn't know what else to do. There was a pungent smell that had her wanting to turn her head away only she could not take her eyes off the other, a stench like that rotten black fungi that grew in damp woods such as these and smelled like rotting flesh. That was what it was, she attempted to convince herself, not the body odour of her nocturnal visitor.
‘You'm better come with me,’ he stretched out a hand, the fingers of which were thin and white like those of a skeleton. ‘else you'll get lost.’
She backed away, cowered. ‘No, I'm not lost. I don't want to go with you.’
‘But you must,’ he was still smiling. ‘else they'll get you.’
She felt his touch ice-cold on her wrist, strong and tight like a steel manacle, wanted to struggle but couldn't, found herself being pulled along at his side, her legs somehow managing to walk.
It had to be a dream, and in due course she would wake up back in that clearing beneath the pine trees. It would be all right then.
Suddenly the silence of the wood was broken by a long-drawn-out howl, a sound that rose to a crescendo, multiplied into a thousand deafening roars. The man by her side checked, she felt him stiffen and grasp her even more tightly.
‘Dogs,’ he lisped. ‘They'm set the hounds on us!’
‘I like dogs,’ Donna said. It seemed a silly thing to say but she had always loved dogs and could not imagine them harming her.
‘Not'n them dogs,’ her companion hissed. ‘Them's the Gabor hounds and they'll not give up till they drop, once they'm got your scent.’
The hounds were obviously somewhere in the wood, possibly only a hundred yards or so away, crashing through dense thickets and giving vent to their tongues, blood-chilling baying that had Donna thinking of climbing trees for safety except that she couldn't because this man had got a firm hold on her.
‘I knows a place where we might be safe,’ he hissed, dribbling frothy spittle down his unkempt beard. ‘but we'll ha' to run 'cause they'm close on us.’
Donna would not have believed that he had the speed, those feet seeming to be steel-sprung, leaping in the manner of a hunted deer regardless of the brush which threatened to hinder their progress. She knew she would fall, braced herself, cried out as she found herself being dragged along, briars tearing her clothing and cruelly raking her bare flesh. But her captor, for that was what he was, fled heedlessly, as though unaware of her pain and discomfort, trailing her in his wake.
They came to a path, an intersection where they stopped briefly. She clutched at his jacket to pull herself to her feet, felt it tearing as though the cloth was rotten. He wasn't even breathing heavily and here where the moonlight broke through the trees she could see his face clearly; the expression of a hunted man, but not of fear, rather that of one who revelled in being the beast of the chase. Holy Mary, it was horrible to look at and Donna prayed that soon she woul
d wake up, find herself back on her bed of pine needles in that tranquil place where no hounds were to be heard baying for blood.
Seconds that seemed eternity. A creaking sound as though branches strained under a heavy weight had her looking round, pressing back against the one who grasped her for even his company was better than … that!
A silhouette but she knew it was a human body, a limp form that dangled from a thick bough by a rope, swinging lifelessly this way and that, groans that might have been the straining branch or they might have come from swollen blue lips.
She screamed, managed to say ‘Look!’
But he did not appear to have heard, was starting off again and she forced herself to run with legs that were weak and threatened to throw her to the ground again. The pursuing dogs were louder, closer. A human voice amidst them, incomprehensible but by its tone urging the beasts to greater efforts.
The ground began to slope sharply uphill. Donna O'Brien was fighting for breath, her lungs threatening to collapse at any second. She closed her eyes, didn't care whether she fell or not; if she did then perhaps she would wake up with a start, the way she sometimes did when she tripped over something in her sleep.
They had stopped. She could feel the ground beneath her hard and rocky, so different from the soft peaty soil of the wood, and in her nostrils was that rancid smell again which she tried to tell herself was black rotting fungus.
She opened her eyes, gasped at what she saw. They were on some kind of narrow rocky ledge, a sheer drop on the one side down to black water, so murky that even the moonlight did not glint on it. Above them a towering cliff that went up beyond her vision to disappear into the night sky. Donna pressed herself against her repulsive companion, felt herself starting to go dizzy like she always did when she scaled high places; wanting to close her eyes but the lids seemed to have stuck. Whilst below them the pack of pursuing dogs had bunched in the darkness, baying mournfully as though they feared to follow their prey any further.
‘We've beat them,’ the stranger muttered. ‘as I knew we would.’ He dropped to one knee and she tried to turn her head so that she would not have to come face to face with him but she could not move. His eyes seemed to burn into hers with a strange heat that scorched her brain. ‘We beat them, lass, and now we goes our separate ways. Me, I goes back to the wood. You must go to the only place where you can do.’
Donna was unable to co-ordinate her mind and body. She felt herself moving, being lifted up; airborne, that icy grip no longer restricting her movement, as though she was a bird flying but without the freedom of choosing its own course of direction. Falling, blackness all around, knowing that any second she was going to hit that water below but she didn't mind because when she did she would wake up, find herself back in the clearing, maybe even back in Mrs Flaherty's caravan. Noises. The hounds baying frantically, somebody laughing, an eerie sound that was barely human. But she didn't care because it was nearly all over.
With devastating force that knocked the remaining air from her lungs Donna O'Brien hit the water with an icy impact, felt herself going under. Trying to breathe, suffocating but telling herself not to panic because it wasn't really happening.
A black watery world, so cold, devoid of air, her terror trying to come back, screaming at her that she was drowning. She dismissed it with the reminder that her nightmare was almost over, that she would maybe sleep a little while before she awoke.
Her senses began to slip away and she knew it was going to be all right. The nightmare was over but there would be no waking reality for Donna O'Brien.
Amanda was asleep by the time Marie Halestrom had struggled to lock the bedroom door and returned to bed. Exhaustion was stamped on the child's sprawled form, splayed across the sheets so that Marie had to edge herself carefully alongside her daughter.
Marie knew that for herself there would be no further sleep this night. Not after that! She trembled, wished that she could forget it but she knew that the confrontation in the clearing between Amanda and Beguildy would remain forever in her memory, a nightmare that would haunt every moment of slumber.
There was a definite link between the man and the child, something that went deeper than a shared infirmity, the workings of two minds in a strange world of silence that had built up a relationship and now was bent on destroying it. An unhealthy friendship had escalated into a mutual hatred, Marie decided, in which Amanda was stronger, more powerful than the Gabor vagrant. It was a frightening thought.
Marie lay there staring up at the ceiling, praying for dawn to hasten. Things never seemed so bad by day but night would come again. Maybe tomorrow she would go down to the stores and see if that gossiping woman could tell her any more about what was going on here. That might be a good idea; on the other hand it might not.
She glanced at the luminous alarm clock: three-ten. God, it was going to be a long night, no chance of sleeping and …
The noise came like a distant incoming tide, growing in volume, a dominant force that couldn't be shut out. Marie wondered what it was, held her breath listening. Certainly not Beguildy, not even he could make sounds of those proportions. Then she knew; dogs! Howling, baying, a whole pack of them somewhere in Gabor Wood.
She almost got up and went to the window. No, she wasn't going to look out there, didn't want to see that silvery landscape again in case … She shuddered. The baying had subsided, the silence was rolling back. Even more frightening.
Automatically she was searching for a logical explanation. Dogs were common enough in rural areas. The tinkers, they were bound to have dogs or maybe it was poachers after the deer. Yet she was unconvinced; a woman's intuition again, nothing more. Only somehow that howling and baying hadn't sounded quite … normal! She shivered again and wished that it would hurry up and get light.
Marie took Amanda down to the village with her the next morning. The child had hardly spoken since breakfast, which she had only picked at. Uncommunicative, looking anywhere but at her mother as though she remembered the previous night's happenings and was ashamed of them. No, Marie decided, that wasn't quite right. Amanda was angry, not her usual tantrums but instead a smouldering silent inner anger which was directed at her parents as though she still resented their interference whilst she had been lashing Beguildy. It wasn't healthy, she had to have ordinary everyday things to occupy her mind.
‘We'll go down to the shop and I'll buy you an ice cream,’ Marie had said as she took her daughter's hand, aware of the other's unwillingness to accompany her.
Amanda had not replied. Marie suspected that she might have deliberately switched off her hearing aid to shut herself in her own little world and if that was the case then she did not relish another scene right now. Amanda could remain in her personal angry world but they would go down to the shop just the same.
The village shop, like everything else in the main street, had not changed during the last half-century. A bowed window with bottled panes, old-fashioned glass jars full of colourful boiled sweets, tin advertisement plates for brands of tobacco and cigarettes which had long been discontinued; a gloomy interior that had a sweet pungent aroma which also might have been preserved from a bygone age.
Mrs Mainwaring could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy, grey hair done up in a bun, a blue and white checked apron tied around her thin body. She had probably looked exactly the same thirty years ago, Marie thought. Gabor was one of those places which so far had resisted the march of progress and its inhabitants were still clinging to yesteryear.
‘Yes?’ A staccato unsmiling greeting, so different from the other day that Marie felt herself tensing, sensed the hostility, an invisible force that came at her.
‘A few things I need.’ Marie Halestrom fumbled with a list she'd made, dropped it so that it floated to the floor, had to stoop to retrieve it and was aware that her fingers trembled. As she straightened up she glanced at Amanda. The child was staring fixedly in front of her, a glazed expression on her face as though she did
not even see her surroundings.
There was an embarrassed silence whilst Mrs Mainwaring searched for the items on the list, piling them untidily on the small counter, jotting the prices down on a notepad. Seemingly, automatic tills were unheard of in Gabor.
‘Four pounds, seventy-four.’ No ‘please’ or ‘thank you’.
Marie passed over a five-pound note and the change was picked out of a biscuit tin on the shelf, slapped down alongside the wares. A glare that said ‘You don't need to stay here any longer now’.
‘Our conversation the other day …’ Marie found herself lost for words, suddenly a nervous schoolgirl again.
‘What conversation?’
‘About … about Bemorra.’
The silence was poignant, heavy like before a thunderstorm.
‘There's no more to tell.’ Mrs Mainwaring's voice was a hostile whisper. ‘Not about Bemorra, anyway. And there won't be if you outsiders will get out and leave us alone!’
‘I don't know what you've got against outsiders.’ Marie spoke sharply, feeling her anger begin to rise. ‘If people don't move into a … remote place like this it will just die and your business with it.’
‘Maybe it'd be better that way.’ The woman's eyes blazed, her small mouth twisting into a humourless smile. ‘Maybe we'll all die, anyway. Did you not hear the Gabor hounds last night?’
Marie Halestrom experienced a sudden chill, an urge to flee from this small gloomy sweet-smelling shop out into the bright sunlight. ‘I heard some … dogs barking, if that's what you mean.’
‘They weren't just barking and they were no ordinary dogs, you mark my words. The Gabor hounds were a breed of their own, like giant mastiffs, wild as wolves and if you got caught in the open when the Mainwarings were hunting, the creatures set on you, pulled you apart. And Mainwaring didn't care because what was one peasant more or less to him?’
‘But that … that was centuries ago.’
‘Aye, but they still live on. You ask any one o' these folks in the village. No, on second thoughts you'd better not because they'll not speak with outsiders. Gabor is meant to be Gabor, for the folks who lived here for generations, not for townies coming in trying to change everything.’