by Nick Brown
He could see the old boy clearly now, he looked like some type of vicar or something. He was unsteady on his feet and Jed knew it had taken quite a lot of drink to give the old boy the courage to set out for the phone.
In fact, Jed knew all he needed to about his victim. Strange that, when he didn’t even know where he was. The wind was getting up now, blowing the snow about: it was beginning to drift and there weren’t any lights for miles. Best get it done now, shouldn’t take long, the old ones were always the easiest to roll. He stepped out of the hedgerow, where apparently he’d been waiting, and confronted the old man.
He was standing right in front of him now, and he’d been right about him being a vicar. He had one of them white collars on back to front. An old, stained one. His face was pinched white in the cold except for his nose and the patches of cheek alongside. They were red and covered in purple veins: the sign of a drinker. He looked as if he were near the end, so what was he doing out here on a night like this?
The old man didn’t seem to see him at first, even though he was right in front of him; it was like he was invisible or something. No one blanked Jed Gifford and got away with it, except Si Carver, of course, but he was different. Jed wasn’t going to take no disrespect from some old git.
He grabbed him by the throat, wanted to teach him a lesson, scare him into respect before he killed him. It couldn’t hurt to have a little fun first, could it? The throat was frail and scrawny yet softish: Jed could have circled it with one hand. The man scrabbled at his throat with both hands. Then, at last, he saw Jed.
His eyes locked onto Jed’s, they looked surprised, but, to Jed’s surprise, not scared. This took away some of the pleasure, he should be frightened, Jed was a frightening man, at least when his victims were smaller and weaker -which they always were. He’d give him a bloody scare all right.
“See me now, doncha?”
“Yes, I see you.”
“You’ll know me next time, innit?”
Jed could have kicked himself; there wouldn’t be a next time. He wanted him to know what was going to happen, make him snivel. But before he could correct himself the man said something that surprised Jed.
“I knew you as soon as I saw you.”
“What do yer mean? You never seen me before.”
“No, but I’ve been waiting for you.”
This was really pissing Jed off now; this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He snarled:
“Go on then, you clever little bugger, who am I?”
“My death, I’ve been waiting for you a long time and now you’re finally here, you’re welcome.”
“What you mean you bin waiting a long time? I just got here.”
“You’ve been shadowing me since I lost my way, you’re my punishment and I’m glad it’s over, glad I didn’t have to take my own life and risk my immortal soul.”
“What you mean? What you on about? Listen, do you know who I really am, eh? What I really am?”
“In your corporeal form not really, you appear in many guises, but you’re the black dog that’s been stalking me.”
“Don’t you bleeding call me a dog.”
“I intended no offence, it was merely a metaphor.”
“Call me a fucking metarfour and I’ll....”
But he already had and, without noticing, the man’s throat was mangled and Jed could see the life draining out of him. This wasn’t what he wanted, it was too quick and now he’d missed the best bit. But the conversation had wrong footed him and there was something he needed to know.
“Wait, what’s that all about? Who are you? Who bleedin are you?”
It was too late, the man’s last breath was being exhaled. As it went there was a hoarse whisper that sounded something like “Marrcuuss Fox”.
Jed dragged the body, light as a child’s, to a snowdrift building up by the hedgerow. Then he went through the pockets. No point in letting stuff go to waste. There wasn’t much, two tenners and a fiver in the wallet and a cross round the neck that he hoped was gold. The small black book of prayers, much annotated, he tossed over the hedge. While he was doing this he heard a growing noise above him. Looking up he saw movement in the bare branches of the trees. Dark shapes agitated and growing in number. Birds, bloody great black birds, like those above the mound the day that fat lezzer had decked him. They shouldn’t be about now. What was going on? The thought chilled him. Where was he? How had he got here? Where was he going?
“Jed! Jed here are your drinks, pint and rum, like you said. I’ve no money left so I’m going. Jed, are you all right?”
His head was swimming. He forced his eyes open and saw that he was leaning on the bar in The Bull’s, staring at Dave. What the fuck was happening?
Chapter 26: Seen From An Armchair
The ring of a phone. Getting up from the armchair was bad enough, but after a few shuffling steps across the carpet the chest pain that all day had been hovering just beyond the horizon kicked in. Davenport came to a halt and seconds later the phone ceased ringing. It had been ringing over the last twenty minutes. The first two times he’d ignored it, but there’d been no message on the answer phone and after a short period of time it had begun to ring again. He stood suspended halfway between the silent phone and the refuge of the armchair, trying not to move.
The pain felt like it was splitting his chest and he tried to breathe steady and deep to make it relent sufficiently enough to enable him to totter to the bureau where he kept his tablets. He knew one of these attacks would finish him off, which he thought might not be too bad a thing. He also knew, or rather felt in some way, that this call was sweeping something terrible towards him, something he couldn’t avoid.
He’d been dreaming about it, about Skendleby: the mound, the Hall and the chapel. Not normal dreams. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he was asleep when they swarmed into his unconscious. All he concluded from these dark occluded visions was that his old inheritance was ready to gather him in. In a way it was a relief. Since he’d moved out of the Hall he’d felt himself begin to dwindle. He shouldn’t have run from his responsibility, he’d learnt in the army that you could never dodge the bullet.
More to the point, his moral compass told him that he was responsible, in part at least, for the disastrous excavation and botched resealing of the mound. He’d suspected for some time that their attempt at magic had proved incomplete and the reappearance of the unearthly flocks of black corvids these last days confirmed this. Also, despite the central heating being permanently on and the fires lit, the house was cold. Far colder and also darker than it should reasonably be expected to be.
The pain diminished sufficiently for him to make it to the bureau, extract the tablets and wash them down with whisky and soda. This last detail was forbidden by the doctor, not that Davenport had ever intended to comply with that particular stricture. In fact, the only variation to his pattern of intake since the attack had been to recommence smoking.
He was ready to sit down again but the pain was worse when seated so fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he found himself standing by the phone when it again began ringing.
“Davenport here.”
There was a delay before there was any reply, as if whoever was on the other end hadn’t expected an answer. The voice when it came was muffled and imprecise and Davenport didn’t recognise the caller.
“Sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
Before he managed to replace the handset a more intelligible but panicked reply from his unknown caller jogged his memory.
“Sir Nigel, it’s Gwen. Have you heard from Marcus? Is he with you? Please tell me he’s there safe with you.”
He knew who he was dealing with now, but the voice on the line sounded very different from the calm, imposing but strange woman who he’d collaborated with in their failed act of necromancy the previous Christmas.
“No, he’s not here. Why should he be?”
There was a gasp of dismay then a stuttering reply.
“I thought, I’d hoped he might be; he liked you. I’ve tried Claire, I’ve tried…”
Davenport thought she might be weeping and his natural kindness and good manners kicked in. He began the process of attempting to reassure her.
“No point in distressing yourself, Gwen, why not explain some of this to me and we’ll see what we can do about it.”
It hadn’t proved as easy as that. She’d taken so long to calm down that during the process his tablets had begun to work their chemical magic. The pain had receded and he’d gratefully slid his weary body back into the armchair before he’d picked up the gist of her anxiety.
“So, since that rather strange and disturbing message you’ve heard nothing from him, Gwen?”
“No, that’s what’s worrying me.”
“But you’ve said yourself that he’s prone to vanish from the radar for extended periods of time.”
“Yes, but...”
“And there’s no phone or electric in his cottage in the borders?”
“No, but…”
“And remember, it’s snowing pretty hard up there at present. The same snow that, if the weather people have got it right for a change, is going to cause us problems in the next few hours. So he’s likely to be snowed in and out of contact, nothing worse than that.”
“No, but you don’t know him as well as I do, he’s troubled. He said he could feel something from Skendleby reaching out for him. He’d realised our ceremony hadn’t worked. He said it was far worse and very different from what we thought and that we’d played into its hand and made things worse.”
She came to a stop and he heard her snuffling to herself. None of this Davenport understood, and there wasn’t time to work it out as she continued.
“He told me he’d been following up some research leads but nothing he said made any sense, that’s why I’m worried. I think his old illness has returned. I’m worried he might harm himself.”
“Now you’ve no evidence for that, Gwen.”
Davenport sounded calm and logical but he didn’t feel it. He felt whatever it was that Marcus had uncovered was consistent with his own fears, and he needed to know what it was.
“So, tell me, what was it that you think put Marcus in this state?”
“I’ve already told you, it made no sense. He was rambling on about us being tricked, some nonsense about portals and time warping. He kept quoting from Milton’s Paradise Lost: some nonsense about a demon called Mulciber being thrown out from heaven to land on an island in the Aegean. He seemed to think that we had been tricked into doing something that served the purposes of some power not even from our time or universe.”
This certainly made no sense to Davenport and he began to suspect that maybe Gwen was right and Marcus was a risk to himself. Gwen must have picked up on his change of mood.
“That’s why we have to find him, he’s so disturbed, to such an extent that he even told me to be wary of Claire.”
Davenport didn’t know why but for a second something deep in his subconscious resonated with the warning. He brushed it away and said:
“Right then, we need to take some measures to ensure he’s alright. What steps have you taken?”
“I rang Claire, she wasn’t in but I left a long message on her answer phone alerting her to Marcus’s condition.”
“Including his reservations about her?”
“Of course, if anyone can make him better it’s Claire, she has particular gifts and power. You should remember that.”
He did remember but again, for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on, he felt like someone was walking over his grave. Gwen hadn’t finished.
“Claire lives close to you, could you contact her and see if she can help? I’m going to ring the emergency services, see what they can do. The snow here is getting awfully deep.”
Then the line went silent, she must have rung off. Davenport had forgotten his physical problems but was more troubled in his mind than hitherto. He mixed himself another whisky and soda and slumped with it into his chair by the fire. Debo popped her head round the door and said:
“I’m taking the dogs out before the weather breaks, the wind’s getting up and the clouds look thick with snow. Don’t you dare have any more of that whisky, you know very well that Dr Padkin told you to lay off it.”
Moments later he heard the kitchen door close. He sat sipping the forbidden drink wondering if he’d ever be fit enough to take the dogs out like he used to. Then he remembered that he’d promised to contact Claire. As soon as the thought entered his mind the phone rang. He managed to reach it before it rang off, something he attributed to the efficacious powers of the whisky.
“Davenport.”
Again there was a female voice on the other end, but this time one he did recognise.
“Sir Nigel, have you seen Ed? He went out this morning for a couple of hours and nobody has heard from him since.”
Mary, Ed’s wife, was not sounding her usual levelheaded self.
It seemed to Davenport that history was repeating itself. As with Marcus Fox, he was unable to help, but this time he was far more worried. Particularly for Ed, he felt responsible for him, had come to like him as a man. There was something connected and deeply wrong about these disappearances. Why should the two clergymen involved in the Skendleby sealing and exorcism disappear on the same day?
He was still fretting when his wife and the dogs returned shrouded in snow. Looking through the open door he saw that the predicted storm, which had brought traffic to a stop in the South West and Midlands, had arrived in the North. It was early and in full spate.
There was no answer from Claire’s cottage, neither from her nor Giles, not even an answering machine, which was unusual. Too unsettled for sleep by bedtime, Davenport remained downstairs in his armchair by the fire. He would hold his ground and wait, like he had that night in Aden when he’d saved his men and won the Military Cross. What he was waiting for he didn’t know but he knew something was coming. But before it could arrive the combination of booze and medication carried him off into an uneasy doze.
In his dream he was back by the estate wall on the day they’d resealed the mound. By the wall, alone and cold, confronting his legacy, the thing his family had feared over the centuries, the awful ‘Hades bobbin’ image from a Yeats poem. Strange then that when it arrived, its awful dislocated body swathed in corpse wrappings, it seemed familiar rather than frightening as he stared up at its unnatural height.
It was familiar to such an extent that he was on the point of understanding what it was when it stretched out a hideous bone white finger and touched him above the heart. After that any cognition dissolved into darkness. Gradually, a noise of knocking percolated through to his senses. For a moment he considered it must be Debo returning with the dogs. Then he remembered that they’d long since come back and gone off to sleep. The hammering continued and he forced himself out of the chair and towards the front door.
The blast of cold air that greeted him as he opened it froze him to the core. A violently gusting wind blew the heavy falling snow in all directions, including straight into his face. Temporarily blinded, he failed to see who was hammering so loudly at his door at this ungodly hour, but he felt hands grip his shoulders.
He wiped snow from his eyes and found himself staring into the face of a wild eyed Giles.
“Help me get him in, help me get him in, he’s freezing.”
Davenport didn’t understand. All he could see was Giles and he was indistinct in the storm, the howling noise of which Davenport now noticed for the first time.
“Move then, I’ll get him in on my own.”
Giles turned and crouched down, and in the pool of light flowing from the house Davenport saw the thing. He couldn’t believe his eyes at first, but it was there. Behind Giles, foul and besmeared, crouched a hideous feather-covered thing conjured by some ancient shaman. Davenport, normally the most courageous of men, opened his mouth to scream.
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Chapter 27: Women’s Work
Claire was in sparkling form from the moment of her arrival. She’d swept into the house radiant, leading a pale, short-haired young woman as if she were a present brought as an alternative to wine or flowers. She spread infectious good humour and greeted all of the women with a hug and kiss as if they were long lost friends. All except Olga, that is.
This was the most unusual house meeting Olga could remember, and that was saying something. Margaret had set it up to ratify the proposition that Lisa Richardson should take Kelly’s role, with all that implied. Olga and Margaret had argued about it the night before: about Claire, about the community, and about their relationship. It was the first time they’d been like this: spiteful and bitchy - so untypical of both of them.
Olga had moved back into her own room. It felt cold and empty as she lay there weeping with rage and frustration. Neither of them slept and they hadn’t spoken since. Margaret couldn’t understand why Olga wouldn’t back her, and Olga thought that Margaret had been seduced by Claire - in everything the word implied.
When Olga managed to calm down though she realised it wasn’t only a seduction there was also an element of psychic coercion, something she had bitter memories of experiencing before. The Vanarvi woman unsettled her. No, it was more than that, she was frightened by her. To Margaret, she appeared quite different and Olga suspected that she had cast a type of glamour over her, like she did over everyone else who was even slightly susceptible.
Now here she was, Claire, holding forth to the community, trilling with laughter and being regarded with something akin to worship. She had introduced Lisa and outlined why she was such a suitable replacement for “our poor dear Kelly”. She didn’t look suitable to Olga, she looked sedated, but none of the others appeared to notice this detail. Now Claire moved on to something else, something she presented as an amusing anecdote.