“No harm in that,” the old man conceded. “As long as you don’t hang about. Trouble is, we get people in scavenging. Can’t have that, for health reasons. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do,” said Maurice vaguely. “I won’t be long.”
He stumbled as he walked away towards the tip.
Behind him, the skinhead said, “Pissed!”
“As a rat,” the old man agreed.
Maurice didn’t want to go back past the trees. He didn’t feel ready for that. Perhaps he could find another way out onto the road? He looked around. The whole area was enclosed by wire fences, as far as he could see, and he was in no mood to climb over them. He was barely able to walk, to keep upright, as it was.
He wandered into a mangled landscape of many levels. The earth rose and fell away in strange, half-related planes, like a cubist composition. Rough roads of cinders swooped up to sudden edges that led nowhere, or down and around to pools of oily, glinting rainwater and randomly dumped heaps of soil or refuse. It seemed that whole buildings had been dropped from the sky. Piles of bricks, toys, carpets, plaster, furniture, in violent juxtaposition, were dotted everywhere, and mounds the size of small hills, the remnants of unimaginable ruins, formed miniature alpine chains down into the old, unused quarries. All was covered by a dust-crested crust of varying thickness that split under him as he walked. His footprints behind him oozed fleshy mud.
Paper and plastic scraps drifted endlessly across the site in the wind. Occasionally, larger segments of light-weight litter broke loose from the clotted mass and carved into the air, scaring up flocks of shrieking gulls and starlings. Smoke, or steam, puffed up mysteriously from various points, as though a huge engine was building up pressure deep under the earth. A machine made a pumping, clunking sound somewhere out of sight, and the strident alarm of a reversing earth-moving vehicle called out every few minutes from some hidden excavation.
He almost tumbled into a deep hole, about two feet wide. It reached diagonally down, like a giant rabbit’s burrow, into the compacted garbage. At first he thought that someone had been tunnelling, for some unimaginable reason, but noticed that loose matter from underground had been pushed up around the lip of the hole, as though it had been dug out from under. He found other similar holes. He knelt beside one, and peered down into it. Buried wires, wooden laths, and plastic pipes had been torn apart by some powerful, or desperate, digging. He couldn’t even guess at why the holes were there.
He wandered aimlessly amid the desolation, stumbling like a blind man searching for his lost stick, until he came to the edge of one of the so far unused quarries. Down inside it there was a small lake of pure, shining water reflecting the scudding clouds and the vivid blue of the sky. The sides of the quarry were steep, bare cliffs, or slopes of tumbled stone covered with blossoming shrubs and rich grass. To Maurice, it glowed and beckoned like the Promised Land. He looked for a way down into this pleasant place, but saw that he would have to walk a long way round to gain access. Too tired and depressed to make the effort, he sat down on a chunk of creamy marble, part of an old fireplace, to review his situation.
He still felt wretched. His body ached. Obviously, he needed to get to a doctor. He hoped that, when he got back to his car, he would be able to drive. It was only three miles into Buxton, but somehow, that sounded like a long way. He dreaded the thought of the journey.
He sat for a while, still as a stone, trying to read his own mind, to make sense of his recent experiences.
He seemed to be gazing out from some painful place deep within his skull.
The landscape in front of him, beyond the quarry, had a hectic look. Cars passing on the A6 chased each other viciously, the sound of their passage an angry, waspish buzz. Sheep, grazing in the long sweep of fields that climbed up the side of Combs Moss to the rough crest of crags called Black Edge and Hob Tor, looked like fat, lazy maggots browsing on a green corpse. The hurtling clouds cast swooping shadows, like dark searchlights, across the pastures. He felt that he had slipped into another reality, similar to, but alarmingly unlike, the one he had previously inhabited.
Disgusted with the increasingly morbid turns his mind was taking, he got to his feet and looked back the way he had come. In spite of the indications of activity suggested by the various, continual mechanical noises, he had seen nobody since he had left the two men in the porta-cabin. Now his eye caught the movement of five long-shadowed shapes moving slowly towards him across an area strewn with household waste. The figures stooped from time to time to lift objects from the ground, and stood still, heads down, as though inspecting their finds. Then, they would either drop whatever they had discovered, or walk over to one of their number who was awkwardly hauling a little cart of some kind, and carefully place their discoveries inside it. Their movements were even-paced, and languid to the point of listlessness.
With the low sun behind them, it was impossible to make out details of their features. He thought that two of them, including the smallest, who was tugging the cart in some sort of harness, were female. He got the impression they were dressed rather quaintly. As they got nearer, he could hear their voices, quiet and even-toned, like people at prayer. Presumably, they were discussing the treasures they were finding. They gave no indication that they were aware Maurice was there until the tip of the hugely extended shadow of the most forward of them touched his feet. Then that figure stopped, raised his right hand to his shoulder, and the others behind him ceased all movement, as though they had become unplugged from their energy source. The man at the front raised his hand even higher, with his index finger close to his brow, and tapped a battered cap lodged above his ear, in an antiquated gesture of respect.
Maurice, embarrassed and irritated by the subservient gesture, which he automatically assumed was one of mock humility, found himself lost for a suitable response. He said, “Hello there!” in the tone he would use to greet one of his colleagues, met by chance on the streets of Manchester.
“I wish you a good day,” said the man who had touched his cap, then, after the slightest pause, he added, “Sir.” His voice was strangely accented, but there was no note of mockery in his unassuming tone.
Maurice looked hard at him, trying to read his expression, but the man’s face was in shadow, and he was too far away. There was a similarity in the posture of the five people, and Maurice was sure that they were a family. They all had a similar shape and stance. The woman pulling the cart was older than the other female, and he guessed she was the wife of the man who had addressed him, who had the air of a paterfamilias. The other three appeared to be in their late teens.
Their stillness (they remained static as waxworks) and their dumb silence as he stared at them, quickly got on Maurice’s frazzled nerves.
“They’re wondering what I’m doing here,” he thought. “I must appear very odd to them. It’s obvious why they’re here; they’re scavenging, but what the hell can they hope to find that’s worth taking away? Can people be so desperate, that they have to search in this foul place for the battered, useless things that others have thrown away?”
And; “yes,” he thought, “they do look that abject.”
Tired of standing pointlessly in silence, Maurice decided to return to his car. He set off in a line wide of the right of the group who, to his surprise, began themselves to move. They went to their cart and began sorting through its contents.
“Sir,” called the man. “Would you be at all interested in anything we’ve got here? Come and see. We’ve a few choice articles.” He held some object up. “Look at this. This is for you, sir, don’t you think? This is something you should have.”
Maurice glanced across, and shook his head. He couldn’t make out what the man had in his hand, and, for some reason, he was glad of that. “I have to go,” he called, and quickened his stride.
“Give us a chance sir,” the man pleaded, in his odd accent. “Just look what we’ve got here. You’ll curse yourself, if you don’t.”
&
nbsp; “That he will,” called a female voice, in a kind of soft wailing drawl. “You’ll curse yourself later sir.”
Maurice hurried on, almost at a run. They continued to call after him, but he couldn’t hear what they said. He looked back a couple of times. They seemed to be following him, but he was well ahead of them, and the distance was widening.
The porta-cabin was shut when he reached it. He looked at his watch. It was almost seven, hours later than he thought! Where had the time gone?
He didn’t look at the line of trees as he passed, but something in them called out its chattering, scolding cry.
He drove home along the empty back lanes slowly and furtively, glancing in his rear view mirror every few moments.
Maurice’s wife was a hypochondriac. In the three years of their marriage she had built up an impressive collection of pills and potions for all her ills, real and imagined. They filled two drawers of a medium-sized chest in the bathroom. She kept alphabetical lists of them, stating what each one was good for.
Next morning, after a troubled night, Maurice browsed through the lists, selected four bottles, and gulped down a possibly dangerous mix of medication. He checked his post (more confirmation from the bank of what he already knew; he was on the brink of bankruptcy) then went to see if he had been faxed any better news. He found more of the same.
He sat for a while in the cold grey computer-dominated room he used as an office, listening to a CD of natural and electronic sounds his wife had bought him to help him relax after he had told her they were going broke. She had left him three weeks later.
The pills started to work, and he fell into a deep sleep. The doorbell rang twice before he was even half awake.
He got to his feet too quickly. The room wobbled under him. His eyes wouldn’t focus, and his mouth tasted and felt like the inside of a carpet sweeper. The bell rang again. Whoever it was, was in a bloody hurry! He glanced at himself in a mirror as he passed along the hall, and hated what he saw.
The front door was a fancy affair with beaded glass panels, and lots of expensive brass fittings. He had seen one like it on a backdrop representing the Ugly Sisters’ house in a pantomime version of Cinderella at the Buxton Opera House. It represented the taste of the house’s previous occupant. What he liked about it was that you could get a good idea who was on your front step through the glass without being seen and, if expedient, could take evasive action. He was finding he had to do that more often recently.
This time however, his caller was standing well back, and was just a thin blur.
As soon as he opened the door a man stepped off the drive and held a card up in Maurice’s face. The card was a dirty, eggy yellow and bore a tiny photograph of someone who may have been the person holding it. It was creased in a hundred places, as though its owner had used it to practise origami. Maurice didn’t even try to read what was printed on it.
“I’ve been unemployed,” the man on the step said, “and I’m trying to do myself a bit of good. Trying to help myself.” He had a pallid, pinched boy’s face, with small features and a gap between his eyes so wide it seemed to be an effort for him to see straight. His head kept drifting evasively round from side to side. He looked in need of a lot of square meals. He could have been any age between fifteen and fifty. He poked the card down into his shirt pocket and started to open a cheap, bulging plastic sports bag.
“No thanks,” said Maurice, “I never buy anything at the door.” He began to push the door shut.
“You never do?” echoed the man in a bewildered tone. “But I’m trying to keep myself, I’m notjust sitting back. It’s to make a living.”
Maurice was about to say something like, “That’s highly commendable, but no thank you,” when he realized that the man had an unusual accent; one that he had heard before; yesterday, in fact! The pills had blurred his mind, or he would have noticed it at once. He looked keenly at the man and, yes! he could have been one of the people he had seen scavenging at the tip. He couldn’t be sure, but he had the stance, the pleading, praying voice. He had opened the zip along the top of the bag and was pulling things out – a child’s shoe, a partly melted and twisted comb, a two-foot length of hose-pipe, a battered, lidless coffee jug, a tangle of used bandage . . .
“Is any of this any use to you?” the man asked, like a child or a simpleton, totally unaware of the inappropriateness of his words and actions. He spread the bandage out along his arm, as though it were particularly worthy of attention.
Maurice looked at the dirty, bloodstained strip of muslin, and hoped that he was asleep and dreaming. He placed a hand over the sports bag to stop the emergence of more items. “You couldn’t have followed me here,” he said. “No one did; I watched the road. How did you find me?”
“Were you lost?” the man asked, puzzled. He didn’t seem to be joking.
The pointless, silly question enraged Maurice. He growled something like “Get out!” and was about to slam the door shut with his foot when the man slid his thin fingers round inside the doorframe.
Maurice strode onto the step. He grabbed the intruder’s wrist, and hauled him to the front gate. The man’s loose skin slid back alarmingly along his almost fleshless bones. He put up no resistance. He was surprisingly lightweight. He made sad, bleating sounds. He was searching automatically in his bag with his free hand. As Maurice forced the man out onto the pavement, he was aware that something was pushed into his jacket pocket. He gave the man a final shove on the back, to get him on his way, and marched back into his house.
He waited a few moments, then glanced out of a window to check that his visitor had gone.
The creature was on his knees, carving something on the wooden gatepost with a pen-knife.
Maurice’s frayed patience stretched and snapped. He ran out and kicked the man on the upper arm. He felt and heard something break inside the shirtsleeve. Turning an anguished face towards him, looking totally lost and confused, the man reached up and seemed to be trying to protect his whole body with a single, upraised, skinny hand. Feeling furiously disgusted with himself and the pathetic being in front of him, Maurice kicked out again. The heel of his shoe hit the man in the breastbone, and his chest gave way. Maurice felt his foot sink in, and he was reminded of the sun-dried crust he had broached with every step he had taken at the tip.
Evidently, unsurprisingly, the man had had enough. He lurched away, clutching his bag in front of him with both arms. He sounded as though he were choking. He didn’t look back.
Maurice bent down to see what he had been carving on the post. Underneath a deeply scored, slightly wavy line was a matchstick figure with over-long legs, rudimentary arms, and a tiny head, in a breaststroke posture. He seemed to be swimming downwards.
Some sort of hex, thought Maurice, contemptuously. A tinker’s curse! He spat on the crude drawing, and went indoors.
He was horrified at what he had just done. He was still experiencing the sensation of the second kick; of feeling the man’s chest caving in under his foot.
He went into his office, sat in the armchair he kept there for visiting business associates, and pulled out from his pocket the little parcel that had been pushed into it. He unknotted some thin string tied around it and removed a layer of charred newspaper. Underneath was a grubby pale-pink plastic box such as a child might keep cheap jewellery in. He pressed it open with his thumbs. Inside, in a bed of more crumpled half-burned paper, was a purple-brown egg like the one he had burst. He placed it carefully on his desk. He spread his hands out in front of him and studied them. The blotchy stains had almost gone, but the skin still looked chapped and raw.
After a while, he got up and turned on all the machines in his high-tech office. He had the latest of everything a computer could do to assist him with his work. He was continually updating his equipment. To stay ahead in his field, he had invested a fortune, and what he produced was acknowledged to be the most advanced work of its kind in the country.
Even so, he had gone
bust; he was ruined.
When everything was on and running, the room was full of the soft humming sound that sometimes soothed him. But not this time. He went around the house in search of a strong drink.
Before he had located a bottle, phone bells rang all over the house. He went to the nearest receiver, a black, Bakelite antique, hesitated for seconds, obscurely reluctant to answer at all, then snatched it up.
It was Neville Gale, one of the partners in his firm calling, ostensibly, to commiserate with Maurice on the departure of his wife. He soon got round to the real subject on his mind however; the failure of their business. Maurice was aware that Gale blamed him for much that had gone wrong, and could tell by his tone that the man wanted to scream and swear down the phone at him like a drunken football fan. But he wouldn’t ever do that. Old Nev was far too civilized.
Maurice listened to Gale’s reasonable despair for some time, then shouted, “It’s too late Nev; I’m sunk, and you’re sinking. We’re all going under, and there’s not a thing we can do to stop it. We’re in very deep shit, so get used to the idea, and get off my back!”
He slammed the phone down.
Then, feeling the need to make one more gesture of finality, he picked the instrument up and hurled it at the wall.
Maurice went into his back garden. He poured a heap of charcoal into the middle of the barbecue, placed the egg-like thing on top, and pressed it down a little so it couldn’t roll off. He sprayed the pyre with “Betterburn” lighting fluid from a dispenser, and set a match to the lot. He stood well back, half expecting a small explosion, or even a big one. The egg burned slowly, and made a lot of smoke. It hissed and spluttered like breakfast in a pan, emitting tiny crimson flames. When it had almost gone, he poked the ashes and returned to the house for an hour. When he came back, there was no trace of the egg.
He swallowed another mouthful of medicaments, got in his battered car, and drove to Dove Holes the way he had come back last time, along the side lanes.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 22