by Bill Hussey
‘Jack? It’s Dawn. Have you seen the news …? Jack, are you there?’
‘News?’ he asked. ‘News? No. No, I’ve … I’ve been asleep …’
‘It’s Father Brody. You remember, Garret mentioned him? Used to be the priest at Crow Haven when Simon Malahyde was a boy. Gave his father the last rites?’
‘Dawn, is Jamie okay …?’
‘What? Of course he’s okay. What are you …?’
‘Nothing. I had a nightmare. I’m sorry, go on.’
‘Jack, you’re worrying me.’
‘It’s nothing. I don’t know what I’m saying. Still only half-awake, I suppose.’
He heard her take sharp breaths, as if she was about to challenge him further. Finally, she sighed and said:
‘Last night, this Brody disappeared from the care home where he lived. A nun was knocked unconscious. It has to be connected with Malahyde’s disappearance. I don’t know how, but … Jack?’
‘Yes …’
‘What is it?’
‘Dawn, there’s something I have to …’
‘I can’t hear you. What did you say?’
He rallied himself.
‘Nothing, sorry. I’m a bit light-headed. Can you come in tomorrow? I know I said …’
‘Of course. Jack …’
‘Goodnight.’
He replaced the receiver.
He had been about to tell her what the dreaming had shown him. That a child was going to be murdered. Tortured. Torn apart. Left to rot. And that the child in his dreams was no stranger. It was her son.
SUNDAY 27th OCTOBER 2002
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish, he’d stay away
Hughes Mearns, Antigonish, 1899
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
Shakespeare, Richard II, c 1595
Eleven
Brody stood before the ladder that led to the derelict signalman’s box. He was back in the midst of Redgrave Forest, starting at the slightest sound. His body ached from the rigours of his clumsy escape. After Sister Agnes had locked him in his room, he turned to a game played often in childhood. A game practised by those seeking guidance as far back as the early Church: the Sortes Biblicae. He took up his bible, riffled the pages, and jammed his finger against a block of text. The passage so found was Matthew 2:14: the flight of the holy family to Egypt. The message was clear: Death had stalked the Nazarene. Death was coming for Asher Brody. Had Death, he wondered, in the shape of a Doctor, visited the Home the night before last?
Before he started to climb, he offered up prayers for those he had left behind.
Until the reforms of Dr Beeching, a branch line had run past the village of Crow Haven. This decaying watchtower was one of the few reminders of its presence. Redgrave had long reclaimed the ground that the railway had cut through it. After forty years, there was only the vague impression of a line beneath the cushions of lichen and wildflowers that strangled the tracks and fishplates.
Brody went gingerly up the steps. The rusted padlock gave way without much resistance when he put his shoulder to the door. Waving away clouds of dust, he peered into the gloom. Insect cocoons rotted in the corners of the filthy windows and webs hung between the levers stationed at the front of the signal box. On a small table stood a glass, as if full of milk, in which a spider had spun a thick grave.
Brody sat at the table and took a handful of pencils, a packet of foolscap and the three Crow Haven diaries from his bag. He had planned his course of action across the many weary miles of his journey to Redgrave. Now the time had come to put it into operation. The story he had to tell would be set out in three parts. The first would cover both the background history of Crow Haven and Brody’s first encounter, in 1976, with the creature known as ‘Mendicant’. The second would detail that period after Mendicant’s ‘vanishing’ and the arrival in Crow Haven of Peter and Anne Malahyde in 1984. This second bundle would also cover Peter’s horrific death and the birth of his son, Simon, in 1985. The last bundle would deal with Mendicant’s return; with the ‘soul-rape’ of Simon in 1995 …
‘With my final failure,’ Brody murmured.
In order to write this story, he would refer to his old diaries for guidance. The diaries themselves, full as they were of other day-to-day matters and irrelevancies, could not serve. It must be a single tale, told fully. And he must write it with great haste: the man for whom these depositions were intended – the prophesied stranger – must soon take his part in this drama.
Brody began:
BUNDLE 1 –
CROW HAVEN: THE HISTORY
My name is Asher Brody. I have three diaries in front of me that tell of my own direct experiences in the village of Crow Haven. In each is a record of the crimes and depravities committed there by Dr Elijah Mendicant between the years 1976 and 1995. ‘Mendicant’ is not his real name, of course, and neither is it The Crowman, though he is known by both. I believe his true identity to be lost within the pages of his own dark history.
My aim here is to record these events in as full and frank a manner as possible. I am convinced that somewhere in this story lies the key to the undoing of the creature that haunts my dreams and plagues my conscience. The nature of this key is a mystery to me, yet I feel certain that, if I give a complete record of my experiences, a wiser eye may pluck it from the text. I therefore beg for both your patience and your attention.
I ask these things of a stranger, for your identity is unknown to me. But it was foretold that you would make this last stand against him. I feel your time is drawing near.
Before I begin, I would like to give you a potted history of Crow Haven. This may be no more than stalling on my part (a cowardly act to postpone the moment when I must meet him again in the pages of my old diary) but I think you might understand things a little better when you realise it was no accident that the Doctor came here. By his own admission, he was attracted by the Darkness that dwells in this place. So let us follow Thomas Aquinas’ instruction that, in order to first understand the particular, we must begin by understanding the general: in other words, you must know this village before you can understand how the Doctor was able to achieve his victory here.
Once upon a time, this entire area, including Crow Haven and Redgrave Forest, was part of a great marshland. Until the mid-sixteen hundreds, there was nothing in these parts but shifting bogs and sinking sands, layered with grey sea frets that knitted together land and sky. It was a dangerous place, and even the fen fishermen, who traversed it on stilts, were sometimes claimed by the marshes. Such places, with high incidents of accidental death, often acquire an evil, superstitious reputation. Suffice to say that there are many strange tales, and I have no time to set down all the stories of ghostly ferrymen or of rivers giving up their dead long before the time appointed in Revelation. But you must hear the story of Elspeth Stamp.
Thirty years before Crow Haven existed, Elspeth lived alone on an island in the heart of the marshes. It was a remote place, accessible only to those familiar with the topography of the swamp. Elspeth would leave it only to come to Darrow to sell corn dollies on market day. In the diary of Edward Stearne, Adjunct to the Witch Finder, she was described as a malicious, cunning old woman, well versed in the Dark Arts. The letters of Hector Fernival, Bishop of the See of Ely and defender of Elspeth at her trial, tell of a sour, misguided heathen, but clear her of any charge of witchcraft.
Elspeth was accused of murdering two children in 1623, of consuming their fat and of burning their swaddling clothes, so that she might take of their life essence and be made young again. There was precious little evidence, except the customary testimony of ‘witnesses’ (neighbours who bore a grudge, and fantasists) who had seen Elspeth ‘converse with her familiars’: a cat named Heggaty Tom and a great black crow called Lucky Wilt. Witches had been hanged on less. The defence of Elspeth by Hector Fer
nival (one of the few forward-looking clergy who did not take his cue from James I and see the Devil in everything) saved the woman. She was allowed to return to her island and there the matter may have ended.
In any other part of the country, it would have. But not here. The fen folk, who would later make up the residents of Crow Haven, waited until the bishop, the witch prickers and the justices left. Then they went to Elspeth’s island. A well-read yeoman farmer, who had studied some European texts on demonology, led the group. They burned Elspeth alive, throwing her cat, Heggaty Tom, into the flames with her. Lucky Wilt was not found.
By the mid-seventeenth century, manorial lords and entrepreneurs were putting the fens to work. Using elaborate systems imported from the Nordic states, dykes and sluice gates were devised to drain the land. Two decades after Elspeth’s death, the water receded and Crow Haven was raised. When completed, it was a fair size town, bisected south to northeast by the Conduit Road. It boasted a manor house built for Sir James Gratin, Earl of Walmshire (the man who had half-financed the drainage), a sizeable market square, a town hall, a brick-built schoolhouse and a tavern. The town was prosperous almost immediately, dealing mainly in livestock, wheat and barley and some textiles.
By the time of the Civil War, relations had soured between Sir James and the peasant farmers. The knight demanded more of the common land to be turned over to him, in recompense for his expenditure on the drainage scheme. Ill feeling festered for six years with petitions to an indifferent Parliament raised on both sides. In 1644, the militia was called in to calm rising tensions but the stretched unit was overrun. Sir James and his two young daughters were dragged from their beds and butchered in the town square. The girls were lashed, head-to-toe, between a pair of horses and pulled limb from limb. Sir James was made to watch and was then pilloried and stoned to death.
The captain of the militia reported to Oliver Cromwell (who was too involved with the Second Battle of Newbury, and his dispute with the Earl of Manchester, to much care) that, when the townsfolk had sated their bloodlust, what was left of Sir James was hardly recognisable. Just a mass of wet meat, of which the crows made short work. From a town of three hundred, five men were arrested and executed for the crimes.
As a side note, I must mention the crows. The town took its name from the flocks of these birds that plagued the newly divided fields. Superstition had it that the crows were descendants of Elspeth Stamp’s lost familiar. They have, at any rate, guarded their lands jealously ever since. You will never hear the trill of a song thrush or see the fiery flight of a linnet between the boughs of Redgrave Forest. The crows suffer no interloper in their woods. But enough of them for now, they will take a larger role in this story later.
For three hundred years the rate of murder, rape, infanticide and other assorted violence in Crow Haven far exceeded that of its neighbouring towns. Although these crimes were sporadic, reference was made to their high incidence in history books. Few authors drew any conclusions. What conclusions could be drawn? That the town, which shrank to a village in 1840, was diseased? That it was a place of endemic evil?
The last incident on record before 1976 was the disappearance of a ten-year-old girl in October 1944. When Jessica Newhart didn’t come home from school, her mother alerted the village constable. Door-to-door inquiries were conducted and, by early evening, the village had been roused and a search made of the Redgrave woods. Few people in Crow Haven ever went into the forest. Children were told stories of a witch, who had been burned years ago on an island when all the land hereabout was swamp. There was a raised area in the forest, so the story went, a clearing that she haunted.
Despite these stories, little Benjamin Bradstreet had seen Jessica wander into the wood. He had called to her, but she had not seemed to hear him. Throughout the night, Jessica’s name rang through the trees, and did so for three consecutive nights thereafter until the search was abandoned. Jessica Newhart was never found and a fresh name entered the folklore of Crow Haven.
Thirty-two years passed almost peacefully. A bad place slept. Then, in 1976, the Doctor came to Crow Haven.
So many stories could be told here. A catalogue of horrors, but nothing compared to what was to come. Had Crow Haven been readying itself, I wonder? Preparing since Elspeth Stamp was burned on her island? And can I do anything but wonder about the innocence of that long-dead woman, knowing what I know?
Twelve
Earth rained between Jack’s fingers, peppered his eyes, blinded him. He woke with a start, his body braced against the driver’s seat, his hands clawing the dream-soil from his face. He had been inside his mother’s coffin. Through the elm wood lid, he had heard his father’s braying sobs somewhere above. His child hands (whenever he dreamed, he always saw himself as the twelve-year-old boy he had been the night of his mother’s death) pushed at the velvet lining, as clumps of soil began to thud arrhythmically above. He had glanced down at his feet. His mother’s cameo, shining in the gloom, was pinched between the fingers of something rippling and black. The creature, about the size of a large cat, began to skitter up Jack’s body. Then the lid cracked open and dirt had covered his face.
Now he was awake and felt comforted by the biting cold. He dug sleep out of his eyes and checked the time. He’d nodded off for twenty minutes. He rubbed the steamed windscreen and scanned the front of Dawn’s building. Frost glinted on the pavement and on the windows of the cars parked outside the entrance to the flats. The street was empty.
This was ridiculous. He couldn’t keep watch every hour until …
‘Until he comes for Jamie.’
Vocalising it made it seem real. Otherwise it was just pictures in his head, and what he could read between the lines of the dreaming. In the first dream he had seen a man, or the semblance of a man, feeding off the corpse of a young boy. Last night’s vision had shown that boy to be Jamie Howard.
Jack had thought long and hard during the hours of watching. He still could not understand what the dreaming had shown him. When he had touched the Redgrave oaks, he had sensed that they belonged to the dream-forest. He had to believe that. Jamie’s life might depend upon him accepting what he saw. So, a clearing, somewhere in that sprawling wood, was where Jamie would be taken. That surely meant that Jamie’s murder would be connected in some way with Simon Malahyde: the geographical coincidence of Simon’s home being surrounded by the trees from the vision told him that. Did this then suggest that Simon, the sadist of Doug Winters’ story, would be responsible for Jamie’s death? Possibly, but even if Simon’s penchant for cruelty had developed into a more serious form of psychosis there were other puzzling factors to consider. Firstly, Simon – youthful and well-built – did not resemble the cadaverous killer from the dreaming. Secondly, where was Simon and why had he disappeared? Always, Jack came back to the same conclusion: the only point of connection in all of this was Redgrave Forest. And that was a connection so thin it was impossible to draw any inferences.
Jack got out of the car and wandered down the silent street. As the morning sun yawned across the city, night retreated, slipping under porches and stealing down narrow alleyways.
Last night, Jack had considered telling Dawn everything and then dismissed the idea. Tell the most grounded person he knew that he, Jack Trent, mild-mannered policeman by day, had superhuman gifts? That he could catch glimpses of her innermost thoughts just by touching her hand? That on their final night together, he had unintentionally probed deeper, and learned how she had loved and hated Jamie’s father in equal measure. How she would rather die than ever let her son feel the sense of abandonment she had felt. And then he would have to tell her about the visions as well. He scooped some ice from the bonnet of a Lotus and held it to his face. Tell Dawn all those things? Impossible.
There was only one thing he could do. He checked the time. A little early, but he took out his mobile and dialled. A weary voice answered.
‘Yeah? Peterson’s Motherfucking Private Detectives. It’s Sunday, for
Christ’s sake.’
‘Bob? It’s Jack Trent here.’
‘What the motherfuck? Don’t you sleep, Jack?’
‘Not well. Listen, I need a couple of your boys to watch somebody. Day and night. I’ll pay your usual rate plus expenses.’
‘What? Aren’t you boys capable of doing surveillance anymore? Got to outsource it like the motherfucking prison service?’
‘My business. If you do this starting in … one hour, I’ll forget to file the report about you keeping a loaded rifle in your office.’
‘Hot fucking dog, Jack! You’re a mean motherfucker when you want to be.’
‘Cut the Yank bullshit, Bob. The nearest you’ve been to Dixieland is Country and Western night at the Dog and Duck.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, got my fourteenth trip to Graceland booked for Christmas. Let me get a pen. Susan! Pen! Okay, what’s the name of the guy you want watched?’
Jack hesitated. A slender man in a long trench coat had stopped in front of the entrance to the flats. Jack took a few steps in his direction. The man took out an A-Z, checked the reference section and walked on.
‘Jack? You there?’
‘Jamie. The name is Jamie Howard.’
Thirteen
Dawn was still wondering about last night’s telephone conversation. Jack’s concern for Jamie puzzled her, but also confirmed some recent suspicions. She had been angry all Friday night and yesterday morning because she had lost her temper in the car and told Jamie the truth about Jack’s reason for leaving – that he had no interest in the boy. As the anger cooled, she started to check the reality of Jack’s behaviour against that reason. Now she saw, with breathtaking clarity, how transparent the lie had been.
They had to have this out.
Light flickered beneath his office door. She went straight in without knocking. The blinds were drawn. A TV and video unit sat on Jack’s desk. His face was inches from the screen. His expression puzzled her: Guilty? Relieved? Unnerved? She couldn’t decide. He punched the pause button.