Hinton Hollow Death Trip

by Will Carver

  It’s a small story. A small town with small lives that you would never have heard about if none of this had happened.

  Hinton Hollow. Population 5,120.

  Little Henry Wallace was eight years old and one hundred miles from home before anyone talked to him. His mother placed him on a train with a label around his neck, asking for him to be kept safe for a week, kept away from Hinton Hollow.

  Because something was coming.

  Narrated by Evil itself, Hinton Hollow Death Trip recounts five days in the history of this small rural town, when darkness paid a visit and infected its residents. A visit that made them act in unnatural ways. Prodding at their insecurities. Nudging at their secrets and desires. Coaxing out the malevolence suppressed within them. Showing their true selves.

  Making them cheat.

  Making them steal.

  Making them kill.

  Detective Sergeant Pace had returned to his childhood home. To escape the things he had done in the city. To go back to something simple. But he was not alone. Evil had a plan.

  HINTON HOLLOW

  DEATH TRIP

  WILL CARVER

  For nothing

  Choice is free but seldom easy.

  —A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  DAY ONE

  DAY TWO

  DAY THREE

  DAY FOUR

  DAY FIVE

  DAY SIX

  DAY SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  Where you will be introduced to:

  A boy on a train

  A detective

  A pig hater

  A food lover

  A window breaker

  and your narrator.

  DON’T READ THIS

  You can leave now, if you want. Don’t even bother finishing this page. Forget you were ever here. There must be something else you could be doing. Get away. Go on.

  This is the last time I try to save you.

  Go and work out. Cook yourself something from scratch instead of ordering in. Binge on that TV show everyone is talking about. Enrol yourself in that night-school photography course. Because you will think this is strange. Then it will make you angry. Then it gets worse.

  I know what you’re thinking. Who am I to tell you what to do?

  Okay. Don’t listen. You weren’t, anyway.

  It’s a small story. That’s what you’re getting here. A small town with small lives that you’d never have known about if you’d left when you had the chance.

  Hinton Hollow.

  Population 5,120.

  There’s a crossroads.

  You can see the park from the woods. And the school rooftop just beyond. There’s a bench in between now. Where it happened. The golden plaque screwed into the wooden seat is for the young boy. The message, from his older brother and his father.

  The mother isn’t mentioned.

  Of course.

  It’s less than a minute to drive into the centre of Hinton Hollow but people in this town tend to walk. That will take seven minutes at a brisk pace. Ten minutes on the way back because it’s slightly uphill and you often have a bag of shopping. It takes Mrs Beaufort twice as long but she is much older. And she had that scare. With her chest. When it all happened.

  The summer had seemed to stretch on for an extra month, keeping the skies light and the air warm. Parents had no need for the autumn cardigans that lined the racks at Rock-a-Buy but, still, they bought them. Because that is what you do in Hinton Hollow. It is the same reason there is still a bakery on the high street, though bread is much cheaper in the supermarkets of neighbouring towns, and it lasts longer. And there’s one pub that everybody goes to – The Arboreal – and Fourbears independent bookshop, which refuses to go out of business.

  Hinton Hollow was safe. It was exactly the same as it had always been. A place preserved. Existing in a time that has long since passed.

  Then I came. And I didn’t care about any of that.

  It took five days. Small time for a small story. But long enough to touch every path and shopfront, to creep through every alleyway and caress every doorstep. To nudge almost all who lived there as I passed through.

  I’m not sorry.

  The more awful people become, the worse I have to be.

  It’s getting harder to be me.

  So, if you’re not at the gym or boiling some pasta or scrolling through Netflix, it means that you didn’t go. You didn’t take my advice. You’re still here.

  And I’m still here.

  That says it all, doesn’t it?

  You want to know.

  You want to know about Evil.

  THAT THING AROUND HIS NECK

  You will think she is an awful mother.

  You will judge her.

  Judgement has been around for as long as I have, but I find, in recent times, judgement comes quicker. And it is louder now.

  Little Henry Wallace is eight years old but looks like he is six. And that boy is more than one hundred miles from home when somebody finally talks to him. They ask him where his mother is. But he doesn’t answer. He’s not allowed to talk to strangers.

  That buys him six miles.

  It’s another mile before anybody notices the thing around his neck.

  The mother wasn’t always mad. Something to do with the father walking out one day. He left a note. And some unanswered questions. Quite the scandal in a place like Hinton Hollow. It changed her. People looked at her differently.

  Little Henry Wallace, on the train alone, is still. He doesn’t seem frightened at all. Just doing what his mother told him. He is to sit in the carriage and not talk to anybody. Not until they ask him about that thing around his neck.

  While travellers are more vigilant in current times – they are often drawn to a person of a certain age, sex and ethnicity when a backpack is left on a seat – they are not looking out for a boy, eight years of age, who only looks about six.

  You may tell yourself that you would have talked to Little Henry Wallace before this point. But you, too, would have waited. It doesn’t look right, does it? That’s what stops you from approaching.

  A NOTE ON BYSTANDER BEHAVIOUR

  You wait because you think somebody else will help.

  You hope they will.

  You are scared because you don’t know the outcome.

  You want to feel safe.

  You are the most important person to you.

  Henry has an older brother. The mother didn’t put him on a train with something around his neck. She kept him. She kept him with her in Hinton Hollow. One hundred and seven miles away.

  And now there are four people around her son, on a train bound for the north of England and the elderly woman has grabbed something hanging around the boy’s neck.

  ‘What’s this?’ She is not asking Little Henry Wallace or her fellow passengers, she is thinking out loud. Then, within a few seconds, she is reading out loud.

  ‘“My name is Henry Wallace. I am eight years old. My mother put me on this train to get me away. I can’t tell you where I came from until I have had seven sleeps. Please take care of me until then.”’

  The elderly lady looks at the young boy’s face. He’s not afraid. She turns to the three passengers who have also taken an interest in the boy’s welfare.

  Then she moves back to the boy and turns over the brown label in her hand that hangs on a string around Little Henry Wallace’s neck. This time, she reads in her head.

  Please take care of
my boy. I’m scared. Something is coming.

  ONE THING TO KNOW ABOUT THE ELDERLY WOMAN

  She does not stand by.

  RED HORNS AND A PITCHFORK

  A drunken uncle at the bottom of the bed. Aeroplanes flying into skyscrapers.

  G o s s i p.

  Cancer. See also: disease, politics, the Western diet.

  Being nailed to a cross. Guilt. Animals in cages.

  Children in cages.

  A naked nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, screaming in agony, running from her village after it is incinerated in a napalm attack.

  Lies.

  H o n e s t y.

  Some other ways that Evil may present itself:

  Propaganda. Television talent shows. Telling another person who they can and cannot love. The school caretaker who informs the news there’s a glimmer of hope about finding the missing girls that he knows he dumped in a ditch four days ago.

  Harold Shipman. Racism. The dairy industry.

  Nine people with ropes around their necks jumping off Chelsea Bridge.

  B l a c k f l a m e s.

  I LIKE IT THERE

  I have bigger stories. Of course. You think of wars and famine and plagues, I was there. If you believe in Jesus then you believe I was at his crucifixion. But I am not Hitler. I am not influenza. I am not Judas. I may appear to some with red horns but I am not Him.

  I do not hold the knife and I do not pull the trigger.

  People do that.

  My job is to caress and coax and encourage. But I am not Harold Shipman or pancreatic cancer. I do not administer the lethal dose of morphine and I do not press the button that releases the napalm.

  It is people that do that.

  I am not Death, with his skeletal face and robe and scythe, and his tap on the shoulder.

  I am Evil.

  I am the killer-clown nightmare. I am the deviant sexual thought. I am your lack of motivation, your disintegrating willpower. I am one-more-drink, one-more-bite, one-more-time. I do not stab. I do not rape. I do not pour the next gin. But I am there.

  Are you still here?

  This is difficult to explain with the big stories. That is why I have chosen one of the smaller ones. That’s why I chose Detective Sergeant Pace.

  I had been with him, watching him. Gently manoeuvring him into place. He was not inherently evil, that is rarer than you think. But, like cancer, all of you have the ability to develop into something darker and more cynical. I can bring that out in you.

  I brought it out in him.

  With every case, I chipped away, making him question his own involvement with each event. He blamed himself more and more with every subsequent victim he could not save. Then I appeared to him. Burning across his walls and over his ceiling. I trapped him in his paranoia and danced black flames around his life until he snapped.

  I didn’t fuck the wife of a serial killer. I did not handcuff somebody to a tree and leave them to die. No. Because only people can do that.

  Detective Sergeant Pace left. He packed one small case and took the first train home. Home to Hinton Hollow.

  And I went with him.

  I like it there.

  This was my second trip.

  DON’T HATE THE MOTHER

  Maybe her tea leaves fell in a certain way.

  Or she drew the Ten of Wands in the future position in her spread – this can indicate that you are about to experience the very worst of something, you must prepare for sudden change and disruption. Or The Moon card, which can represent uncertainty and emotional vulnerability. Maybe even The Hermit. An innocuous-looking image, but can be interpreted as a harbinger of future strife and turmoil.

  Or her crystal ball turned black.

  Perhaps she lit a candle and somebody who had been dead for years spoke to her but only managed to reveal the first letter of their surname. Like that’s a thing.

  It’s easy to be sceptical about all that medium crap but that armchair fortune-teller got one of her kids away fast. Too fast. She tied a label around the boy’s neck and ditched him on a train before I even arrived in town.

  The Wallace woman couldn’t say for sure that it was me who was coming but she had faith in her tea leaves or Tarot cards or rune stones or whatever she used.

  One of the worst things I see in people now is how easily they believe in something. Anything.

  Little Henry Wallace escaped me. One boy. Gone.

  One boy. Safe.

  Hinton Hollow.

  Population 5,119.

  More than enough to infect. To test. To darken. Dampen. Devour.

  So, don’t hate the mother. She wasn’t choosing between her children. She didn’t pick her favourite to stay with her. She didn’t give one away. She got in there before me. She made a decision that day so she would not have to make a choice once I arrived.

  She picked them both.

  She saved them both.

  The locals think she is mad. Mad for the way she dresses. Mad for the way she wears her hair. Mad for the way that she talks to her children, kisses them goodbye, for the food that she buys and the hunched way that she walks. Her spirit makes them uncomfortable.

  And they will think she is mad because she put her youngest son on a train by himself and told him not to talk to anybody or say where he is from until a week has passed.

  I see her. I watch her.

  SOME THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE MOTHER

  She is not mad.

  She is good.

  Better than them. Better than you, even.

  I like her.

  As long as the rest of the town behaves as I expect they will, there will be no need to taint the Wallaces.

  THREE THINGS

  Little Henry was one hundred and seven miles away when I arrived for my first sweep of the old town. I just wanted to get things moving before Detective Sergeant Pace arrived. Nothing fancy. A couple of disturbances, perhaps. To get the ball rolling.

  It’s not quite as simple as finding someone and making them evil. That is not how it works. I can’t just pick a person and turn them into a killer or a fraudster or have them create Facebook. I have to massage what is already within them.

  Sometimes I get adultery or shoplifting or cheating on a school test.

  On that first breeze through the town I got three things:

  – Some salted pork

  – An angina attack

  – A broken window

  SALTED/ASSAULTED

  This was an easy one. Just to get going.

  Lazy, old Evil.

  You can’t be around so much death, all the time, every day, and not have it affect you in a negative way. A way that makes you act out of character. A way that shows you have become so desensitised by what you see, things you once may have found disturbing are now your normality. You may even take some pleasure in those terrible things you do in order to afford your rent.

  Darren merely needed a poke towards evil.

  I don’t care that Darren left school at sixteen with limited qualifications. He wasn’t a smart kid. He wasn’t even average. He wasn’t naughty or disruptive. He tried hard enough and he did as well as he could. He can read. He can write. He doesn’t know how to calculate the circumference of a circle but, like almost everybody, he has no real need for that information. He works in an abattoir.

  That’s what I care about.

  Slaughterhouses employ people of a certain psychological make-up, background and level of education. There is a high staff turnover. And a high rate of employee suicide.

  It was almost cruel of me to pick Darren out.

  His workmates driving the truck opened the doors and the pigs started to run out into the open. Some were clearly excited at having some space; they jumped and bucked. Some fell over and couldn’t get back up. Others were injured inside the truck, while many were coaxed out with a whip on the snout or an electric rod in the anus.

  This part is nothing to do with me.

  This is what people do.
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  Darren’s job is to round them inside where they are stunned, slit open and dipped into boiling liquid to soften their skin and remove any hair. He has worked there long enough that the sound of the animals squealing and crying doesn’t even bother him any more. He can’t even remember when it last had.

  One of the pigs was acting like it knew where it was heading. It refused to leave the truck. It was whipped and probed and shocked. It ran around the courtyard, avoiding the doors that would lead to its death.

  I blew past Darren. A split second. An inaudible whisper in his uncultured ear. And the thing inside him burst out.

  He kicked the animal towards the door. He shouted at it and punched it in the face. Then kicked it again. He dragged it inside and grabbed a handful of salt, which he pushed into the cuts of the pig’s snout. It screamed. Darren couldn’t hear. He was already grabbing another handful of salt to shove into the animal’s anus.

  TWO THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

  This is not uncommon.

  This is people.

  He stunned the pig but did not slit it open. The conveyor dragged it to be dipped in the boiling water while it was still alive.

  Only the other workers saw it. And they don’t care. They’ve done the same. They’ve done worse. It is not on the village’s radar. That’s not what this visit is about.

  Darren’s actions will sink in over the next two days.

  Darren is changed.

  ATTACK/REWARD

  There are only fifteen steps, it should not have been that challenging. And she probably deserved some kind of let-up for walking to the shops rather than driving there. Instead, wheezing-through-her-fifties Dorothy Reilly had me circling above her and sprinkling her with a taste of trouble.