Hinton Hollow Death Trip

by Will Carver

  At least he’ll never know why, something whispered.

  Incidents and accidents.

  The man ran back towards the trees, the shriek behind him curdling the cooling Hinton Hollow air. He panted as though ready to cry but as soon as he was within the woods, his emotion evaporated once more. He looked back over his shoulder at the boy she’d chosen and he didn’t understand how she could do such a thing.

  She’s his mother.

  She’s a monster.

  She is to blame.

  The woods were not what they seemed.

  He could have stayed there and been safe. The woods held in the darkness. They protected it. They knew things.

  But he hadn’t done that. He’d shot the Brady child, run off to the woods, walked a path straight through and emerged on the other side where his car was waiting.

  He couldn’t believe she had said that.

  He couldn’t believe it was true.

  This was Faith Brady’s fault. That ordinary man was not to blame.

  He’d need to try again.

  WHAT PEOPLE DO

  Now you’ve seen it. From every angle. From everybody who was there. The ones who lived. The one who died. The one who fucked everything up.

  So, let me tell you this:

  I did not go anywhere near Jacob or Michael. Children give me very little to work with. Jacob had no political stance. He had not developed the true capacity for hatred. He had a Daniel, a Xi-Shu, a Kasheeni, a Naveed and a Roisin in his class at school and, if you asked him who was who, he would choose the colour of their jumper to tell them apart.

  I can’t do much with innocence.

  There was something with Michael. He had a couple more years under his belt. He’d been picked on at school from time to time. He’d been chosen last for sports. He’d been reprimanded by teachers. He’d seen the way his parents were, sometimes, with Jacob and had interpreted it as preferential treatment, which manifested itself as resentment.

  But not enough for me to use.

  And I didn’t want to.

  The woods, the man in the woods, they were different. He harboured a lot of anger. Those trees held in the darkness. There were secrets in there. There was history. And there was fear. That can all be used. It was used. To rile him. To give an ordinary man some courage to commit a heinous act.

  I do not choose the act.

  That is what people do.

  I am not an ultimatum. I am not a gun, nor am I the bullet that pierced Jacob’s chest.

  The boys were love. They were learning. They were ruffled hair and enquiry and practical jokes and teasing and laughing and running so fast that their legs couldn’t keep up.

  And I do not choose them. But I cannot be held accountable for what happens to them and I can not be forced to care.

  And here is the only thing you need to know about what happened in the park that first day in Hinton Hollow: I did nothing to Faith Brady. I did not touch her, whisper to her, brush past her shoulder or run fingers through her hair. I did not tap into the evil inside of her. I did not pull on her inner struggles and force her into anything.

  I was with Mrs Beaufort.

  Faith Brady came to that decision all by herself.

  A strange man snuck up behind her while she was loaded up with schoolbags and coats and the shoe her son had lost that afternoon. She was smiling and doting over her two sons playing so contentedly together. She was exhausted but happy.

  And I did nothing to her.

  I watched.

  I was watching everyone.

  He came out of the woods, put a gun into the nape of her neck and gave her a choice. One of the two people she had brought into the world could die. Right there. In front of her eyes. Or she could take the bullet and let them live.

  Her. Faith Brady. Exhausted. Unhappy. Failing at life and love. No sex drive. No ambition. Her priority in life had boiled down to one thing: she was a mother. Everything was about being a mother. That’s what she told herself.

  I did not go near any of the Brady family that day. My energy was with the ordinary man and the woods.

  Faith Brady chose to kill Jacob all by herself.

  I do not kill children.

  I do not choose to take one brother away from another.

  People do that.

  Faith Brady did that.

  And she deserved what was coming in the following days.

  JUST UNDER A MILE AWAY

  Mrs Beaufort was the town grandmother. The heart of Hinton Hollow. She ran a small store in the centre of the high street called Rock-a-Buy. It sold second-hand kids’ clothes, toys and accessories. She had lived there her entire life. A part of Hinton Hollow lore.

  And I was with her when it happened.

  I helped her to hear.

  Mrs Beaufort had not heard about the Brady shooting when I visited her shop. It had only just happened. But she was Hinton Hollow. Any change in its landscape, any alteration in its culture, any fluctuation in its mood, she felt it first.

  When the bullet passed through Jacob Brady’s sternum, it echoed through the town.

  And Mrs Beaufort heard.

  Another three bags of unneeded clothes had been donated to Rock-a-Buy. The shop had not changed its name since the days when Mr Beaufort ran it as a record store over thirty years ago, when the Rock in Rock-a-Buy was associated with guitars and beards and long hair rather than cribs and cardigans.

  The elderly lady, pushing steadily towards her nineties, had seen the men and women of Hinton Hollow as young children buying the latest Simon and Garfunkel record, lowering their heads as they purchased something by The Who, hoping ‘Mr B’ would not mention it to their parents. And she had witnessed these same kids flicking through the winter coats section of the new Rock-a-Buy, hoping to snap up a bargain for their own children.

  Mrs Beaufort took the first item from the top of the donated black sack. She sniffed at it to determine its cleanliness then folded it neatly and placed it on the desk next to the cash register. She repeated this for every item in the bag, sorting clothes into different piles according to age, sex and season. Anything deemed to hold odour was thrown on the floor next to her sensible orthopaedic shoes. She would take the pile home and wash it that evening.

  There was only one customer in the store at that time. She knew them. Of course. They exchanged pleasantries when the new mother entered, but Mrs Beaufort waited before engaging in deeper conversation, as she always did. Everyone talked to Mrs Beaufort, though, whether there was a queue of people or not. She was kind and selfless and respected in the community. And loved. Nobody had ever been witness to her wicked tongue and her spite. She herself had never experienced it. But Hinton Hollow was not yet fully changed.

  Then, just under a mile away, somebody was shot in the park.

  The gunshot was loud but not enough to be heard in the centre of town.

  Not behind the double-glazed windows of Rock-a-Buy.

  But, it was that exact moment that Mrs Beaufort held her hands to her frail chest, dropped to her knees, then fell sideways onto a pile of unclean baby clothes.

  When the heart of Jacob Brady gave way, so did the heart of Hinton Hollow.

  TWO ROADS INTERSECT

  The wind pushed through the leaves and soothed him; I made sure of that. He forged on through the shaded copse and thought only of what lay ahead, not what had already passed. He didn’t care.

  The gunman, once so ordinary, was confused at the outcome, but that merely made him more determined. He got into his car and drove it down the hill to the crossroads. A mother was kneeling somewhere behind him, rocking a dead child in her arms.

  He told himself that she had killed that boy. Not him.

  Not us.

  He turned the ignition of his unremarkable car, a silver Volkswagen, and it started first time. The engine did not sound hurried. He did not screech the tyres and power away from the scene of his crime. He popped the car carefully into gear, checked his mirrors fo
r other vehicles then released the handbrake before slowly crawling away down the hill, checking his mirror again with a quick glance as he pushed it into second.

  He should have been feeling some kind of remorse but he, too, was in a state of shock at the outcome. It was a different feeling to when he had shot the first mother.

  He never gave her a chance.

  She didn’t have a choice.

  The man who had shot Jacob Brady stopped at the top of the hill where two roads intersect. He’d be long gone before the authorities were speeding through this crossroads, one ambulance heading up the hill towards the park by Hinton Hollow Primary School, the other whizzing in the direction of the town centre to Rock-a-Buy, where a beloved local woman had collapsed in pain.

  Turning right would have led the gunman back to May Tambor’s side of town. To the left was Mrs Beaufort. The road straight over led to something new. An area untapped, not yet touched by the malevolence creeping steadily around the back roads of this preserved-in-time Berkshire town. There he would find another school. Another mother. Another opportunity.

  Another choice.

  It would bring him a step closer to that final bullet meant to erase Oscar Tambor.

  And lead him out of Hinton Hollow. Back into the light.

  He looked left. There was no traffic.

  He looked right. There was no traffic.

  That ordinary man drove straight across the intersection.

  He had a question for one of the mothers who lived over there.

  METROPOLITAN LIFE

  Two calls came in at the same time.

  ‘Shot,’ the paramedic said to his female colleague. ‘A shooting. In Hinton Hollow.’

  The sirens blared.

  The lights had been used before, but it was rare that an ambulance made a sound in this town. Emergencies were few. A generation of expected heart attacks and strokes but nothing that severe. Drunken antics were the height of crime, usually.

  ‘Fuck. And they think it’s a kid. It can’t be. That can’t be right. I can’t even believe that somebody has a gun, let alone that they’d shoot a fucking child with it.’

  They were silent for a moment. Running through the residents of the close-knit community they had both been a part of since birth. Their collective unconscious flicked through a handful of unsavoury characters, nobody too pernicious – the anti-social farmer, the quiet widow, Mrs Wallace and all her voodoo – but their directories both stopped at the same point.

  Detective Sergeant Pace. Word had already spread. He was back.

  He had only just returned to Hinton Hollow, and now this had happened. They told themselves there couldn’t be a connection. They were thinking of anything other than the prospect of a dead child to attend to. Of course, they knew Pace, everybody did, but they hadn’t seen him since he left for a more metropolitan life. And he was unrecognisable from the boy that once kicked a ball against the wall or rode a bike down the street. They’d need an introduction, a reintroduction, but that would only confirm their suspicions.

  They would see a blackness.

  The sinful dark purple of a troubled shadow.

  I’d make sure of that.

  The ambulance tyres screeched as they whipped around the corner, passing over the spot where a murderer had sat only minutes before, deliberating which way to indicate. There was no traffic for the paramedics to worry about.

  Then they reached the woods.

  ‘You’ll have to drive up the kerb.’

  ‘I know. It all seems a bit much. Like all we’ve done is arrive sooner to a dead kid. I don’t want to do this.’

  They were scared. Afraid the child may still be alive. That they would have to fight, knowing the outcome was inevitable.

  There was nothing for them to worry about.

  Jacob Brady wasn’t coming back.

  He was too broken.

  HOME

  This was not why he came back to Hinton Hollow. This was exactly what he had been trying to escape. Instinctively, Pace peered backward over his shoulder before rounding the corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of the horror he felt had followed him.

  Maybe then he could stop it.

  But there was nothing there. Nothing that could be seen. Because I do not want to be seen. Evil cannot be seen. It can only be felt. Though some have suggested the smell of sulphur on occasion.

  Pace pulled the front of his coat together as he picked up speed on the hill. At least he’d have other officers in the city, to bounce ideas off, to share thoughts and theories with, concerns. He tried so hard not to think of that. In Hinton Hollow, he was alone, and his memories were the worst company. The things he had witnessed could not be unseen.

  And that thing he had done.

  He’d imagined a return to his childhood home would be an escape. Hinton Hollow is so separate from the depravity of the world. A place whose values and ethics had been preserved in time, unspoiled.

  He’d been wrong.

  Pace snapped himself from the melancholic reverie that had become almost routine over the last few months and picked his feet up a little, accelerating towards the bleeding boy and the woods. Running in the opposite direction of the man he should have been chasing.

  Welcome home.

  Hinton Hollow. Population 5,118.

  TWO PEOPLE

  You see what I’m saying now, don’t you?

  She picked one of her children.

  How am I supposed to exist in this world when a mother would choose to live and let her child die? Let her child get shot in the chest. Let her other child witness it.

  Let me watch as it all unfolds.

  How am I supposed to preserve the balance of evil when people will do something like that, all by themselves?

  Jacob Brady. The little boy with the hole in his heart. He saw the man who killed him. But the last thing he remembered was his mother’s brown eyes, so big they seemed to take up her entire face. She was crying. She called out Michael’s name and both boys turned around from the dead beetle. Jacob was a little slower. Even though Faith Brady had called his brother’s name, Jacob could see that she was only looking in his direction.

  He didn’t even have time to be confused about that. The bullet hit him and he dropped to the ground. And then his mother rocked him and pushed his chest, trying to plug the blood that was pouring out of the wound. He knew she was desperately trying to put things right; to turn back time and fix it all.

  But there was no turning back.

  What had she done?

  She had broken his heart.

  And then put a bullet through it.

  SOMETHING UNFATHOMABLE

  Holding her hand over the hole was not going to help.

  The paramedics could have told her that.

  But they didn’t.

  Her five-year-old son had a bullet through his heart and putting pressure on the wound was not going to save him. She’d had that chance and she blew it.

  She didn’t even react when the sirens came blaring around the corner, the blue lights rotating on the roof of the ambulance. She just continued to rock back and forth on her knees with her youngest child dead in her arms, her eldest son sat cross-legged ten feet to the side on the grass, not speaking. Not moving.

  In shock.

  The paramedics could have told her that, too.

  But they didn’t say anything. This was a mess. The aftermath of something unfathomable in a town like Hinton Hollow. People were standing agog on their doorsteps in front of doors they had been known to leave unlocked. Some had entered the park, what was now a crime scene, and didn’t know what to do. Should they have stopped the distraught mother from rocking her injured child? There may still have been enough time to rescue him from an eternal darkness. What about the other boy? Was he hurt? Why was he not moving?

  They knew who she was, of course, from the town meetings and the school playground and her lack of attendance at the Church of the Good Shepherd.

  Faith
Brady paid no attention to the gathering crowd. She couldn’t hear the hiss of confused whispers. She didn’t even know how much time had passed since Jacob had dropped to the ground and his cowardly murderer had fled without even glancing back at the circus left behind.

  She knew Michael was near her but she didn’t want to see him right now. She hated him for being alive.

  What was Owen going to say?

  Her hand was soaked in the blood of her innocent, oblivious son. But she pressed harder against the deep black circle that had spread out into a pink, deathly rose against the white, long-sleeved hooded jumper that Faith only bought from Mrs Beaufort the week before.

  Between the redundant male and female paramedics, ahead of the spot where she continued to rock and press and curse herself, a figure emerged. She noticed him because, at first, she saw the man with the gun. A long-coated silhouette. She held her breath.

  It couldn’t be.

  As he neared, his frame became bigger than the light behind him and his face came into focus. Stubble washed his skin to a bluish grey; a cigarette hung from the right of his mouth. His hair was ruffled and dark and his walk was languid and almost uncaring. Detective Sergeant Pace had never really fit in to Hinton Hollow. People said he was too urban. There was a darkness around him.

  Faith Brady continued to rock her half-sized cadaver, ignoring her other son, who had not seen the man approaching, and she waited for him to speak.

  He introduced himself to the paramedics initially.

  It’s not him, she told herself.

  That’s not his voice, she confirmed to nobody who was listening.

  I’d know that voice.

  A member of the onlooking horde offered Faith’s name to the detective.

  ‘Mrs Brady?’ She just looked at him. Rocking. ‘Mrs Brady, you are going to have to let the paramedics take a look at your son.’