by Nick Brown
Why was she acting the way she was? She was trying to work out where all the missing time had gone when her mind shifted again and she got a distinct flash of memory, and it wasn’t her memory.
Suddenly she was outside by the estate wall watching Skendleby mound. She’d found herself by this place quite often lately, for reasons she couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t a place she felt comfortable but it seemed to draw her towards it. Now she was here again opposite the mound that had put Si in such a state. There was a man on top of it with a spade. He was funnily dressed, looked like some weird kind of vicar. But it wasn’t Ed. In fact, it looked to her like something out of the olden days.
She could tell that the vicar, or whatever it was, felt uneasy - he was frightened. Then something black and disarticulated, like a great bunch of rags, came bounding out of the tree line heading towards the man on the mound. It had come running out from the very place she was standing, so why hadn’t she noticed it?
Suzzie-Jade was running with it and the vicar had dropped his spade and was sprinting back towards the church. She seemed to be seeing through the black thing’s eyes, which couldn’t be right. Then she found herself looking at something completely different. Somewhere hot, Greece or someplace like that. She’d never been there, but in a strange way it felt familiar.
She was pulled back from wherever she was by the noise of banging, and found herself back in the shower. The banging at the door was still going on, getting louder if anything. She grabbed a towel and got ready to face up to Si in whatever shitty mood he’d got himself into. She could hear his voice abusing her from the other side of the door.
“Get out here now, you slag, I’ve got things to say to you, things you’re gonna listen to, right?”
She pulled back the bolt and opened the door, prepared for the worst.
But it wasn’t what she’d expected. The door opened revealing Si’s enraged and unhealthily red face, but he didn’t try to hit her or shout at her. He stared in horror for a second then screamed, turned round and legged it downstairs shouting to his bodyguard:
“It’s back, it’s got in the ’ouse again; get up there and get it out, get it out.”
She heard the man reply:
“What’s up boss? What is it?”
“It’s in the shower. Go and see, go and fuckin see, what do I pay you for?”
The minder grunted and Suzzie-Jade heard him rumbling up the stairs towards the bathroom. When he reached the door she saw the gun in his hand.
“Where is it, where’s it gone?”
Suzzie-Jade replied.
“Nothing here, only me, innit?”
The minder looked baffled, he shouted downstairs:
“Nothing here, boss, just the missus. What am I supposed to be looking for?”
Si’s voice, scared and angry, came from below.
“That thing, the shadowy one that got in before, black and rags and stuff, like bleedin Halloween. The thing the police couldn’t find, the thing that killed the foreign slut and put her down that ’ole.”
As he was saying this, Suzzie-Jade got the distinct image of the fantasy she’d drifted into in the shower, because the horror Si described matched exactly the way she would have depicted the disarticulated bunch of rags she’d watched chase the vicar off the mound. The thing that she’d felt herself slipping into. Instead of commenting on this she had the presence of mind to reply:
“No, nothing up here, only me and I’m not what Si’s interested in.”
She shut the door again, dropped the towel and returned to the shower, turning the water up to maximum power to drown out Si’s shouting. Despite the relief that now he had something else to think about he’d forget about whatever he wanted from her, she couldn’t relax. Strange things were happening round the place and worse, strange things were happening to her.
Later that night, after taking a couple of pills washed down with more than a couple of Tequila Slammers, fragments of her encounter with Claire in the bistro began to infiltrate her memory. Oddly enough, this didn’t disturb her the way it should have done and her last thought before descending into a deep, drug-induced sleep was that perhaps it would be a good idea if she paid a visit to the little Greek detective.
*******
Viv woke up late in an unfamiliar bed in a room she didn’t recognise. Her memory of the night before was only partial and despite its nightmarish quality she understood that something of significance had occurred, something that chimed with her strange experiences of the previous weeks. Bright daylight was shining through the curtains. She got out of bed, crossed to the window and looked out.
It was a beautiful crisp winter’s day, the sun was shining but without the power to melt the snow. She saw that the snowplough had managed to clear a channel in the road, along which traffic was moving slowly. She decided she’d talk to Theodrakis and, having resolved upon that, felt better, or at least less isolated.
Then her phone bleeped from the depths of her handbag and she fished it out to discover a long list of missed calls. What had happened while she’d been away?
Chapter 31: Hunted by the Dark
His feet were wet. Glancing down he noticed there was water bubbling up through the snow-shrouded ground. Wiping the sweat from his eyes he looked round at the dark, not much to see; flat land intersected by snow filled drainage ditches. He must be on the Moss. He hated the Moss, a poxy miasma of waterlogged peat, how had he got here? What was going on?
If he carried on he’d probably stumble into one of the deep pools that littered this damp land and drown in the black, freezing water. He stopped, stood breathing heavily trying to get his mind working. He remembered the pub and Dave saying:
“Jed, Jed you alright?”
But he also remembered the sensation of killing the old guy, the priest. One of these memories must be false but the damp stains on his coat felt and smelt remarkably like blood. However, neither of these vague recollections was anything like as bad as that other fleeting glimpse into an unreal and increasingly frightening last few hours. This one couldn’t be real, made no sense.
He’d found himself outside the door of the vicar’s house in Skendleby. He vaguely recalled something important driving him, something he had to tell the vicar, something he had to get off his chest. Then the door opened and there was the vicar, the stuck-up ponce he’d smacked that day on the mound before the fat lezzer had decked him. Then everything seemed to slide away, like it did in dreams, leaving just a blank.
Except it wasn’t quite a blank, although Jed wished it was. He remembered the vicar, or to be more accurate, the vicars. Because as he’d stood there trying to remember what he had to say (Joyce, that was the vicar’s name, he recalled), the vicar started to speak and Jed became very afraid. Not because of the words, Jed hadn’t been able to understand any of them, even though he reckoned they were some kind of warning. No, it was what he was seeing that frightened him, scared him so much he began to blub until he could feel the warm tears on his freezing cheeks.
It was the way the vicar kept shifting and sliding into different forms, the way he was changing as he spoke. It looked to Jed like he was turning into something that wasn’t from now, but from way back. He was turning into something older.
Everything about him was growing older, looking different, like something out of an old film. Jed hadn’t remembered much from his history lessons at school, he’d skipped most of them, but he thought he saw the vicar change into the type of one they must have had back when the Romans were fighting the Spanish Armada.
Jed didn’t want to look at him even though he knew that what the vicar, if he still was the vicar, was trying to tell him was important, important to him, Jed. But he just couldn’t stand to look any more and the last glance he dared direct at Joyce, before he’d turned to run, revealed a gaunt figure in a mouldy black cape with a crow’s beak staring out from under a cowled hood.
Jed tried to pull himself together; he looked round across the wa
steland of the Moss. This felt real enough, it was certainly bloody cold enough. Perhaps what he thought he was remembering was like a series of acid flash backs that seemed real but weren’t. He tried to rationalise.
Maybe he’d been smoking too much of the crazy stuff that he’d got from that whore in Stocky, the one he liked to knock about a bit. But he couldn’t convince himself and his heart started pumping again. Something really bad was happening to him. He thought of his mother, hadn’t thought of her in months. He heard himself begin to whimper. He had to get out, find his way back home.
Then he heard the noise.
Very faint at first, a putative pulse, but strangely threatening. Jed shook his head attempting to clear it, then he tried to reassure himself about the growing sonic intrusion: at least it sounded far off. Far off now maybe, but it was getting closer. It sounded like a duvet being shaken out, or more like a load of duvets. Then, as the cacophony drew nearer, got louder, it began to sound like duvets fashioned of old leather, creaking and scratching across the sky.
It was time to get away from here; Jed forced his feet to move into a slow jog. But this was difficult across the freezing claggy terrain where the very earth seemed to be sucking him into its greasy grasp with every step he tried to make.
While he struggled, the moon dodged out from behind the clouds and shone its silver light over the wetlands, transforming the Moss into a Christmas card scene, glittering and radiant, stretching away into the distance towards the hills. But not for Jed the comfort of a Christmas card.
For Jed the translucence brought a hideous clarity. Below the moon, picked out in night-dark relief, a dense swarm was approaching. A black mass of crows, ravens, rooks and jackdaws was hurtling across the desolate plain towards him. Then, as if at the command of some corvid emperor, the din of their leathery wings flapping was augmented by an outbreak of ferocious cawing and carking. They swept across the face of the moon and the night momentarily reverted to black in an avian lunar eclipse.
Now he was running, running for his life and screaming at the top of his lung capacity. All his life he’d never believed in anything other than gain and self-interest. Now he believed; but in all the wrong stuff, the nightmare stuff the belief of the damned. But there wasn’t time to do anything about it now, as he lurched and galloped for life at full tilt across the Moss.
Then his right leg missed the grass tussock he was aiming at and plunged deep into freezing water. He was down on all fours slipping and sliding in the mud at the bottom, pulling at his leg and trying to extract it from whatever was holding it down. Just mud, he tried to reassure himself, it must be clinging mud. But it didn’t feel like mud.
What it felt like, oh God, what it felt like was fingers: bony fingers, leathery fingers, several of them. Not just one hand but many tugging him down to Hell in the mud and slime of the pool. What was it down there? He squealed in terror and kicked out against the unspeakable horrors. However, the more he struggled, the deeper he sank. The sound of the birds was intense. Looking up, he saw them clearly now. Not as an undifferentiated mass but as individual beaks, claws and venomous eyes. He started to scream.
Then they were on him, all over him, ripping and tearing, cutting and gouging. Even through the agony and terror he was aware of their stench, the carcass breath, death reanimated. Within seconds his clothes were in tatters and his flesh shredded. His life force was already seeping away when he felt their frenzied weight pressing on him, forcing him down into the black water stained with his blood. His head was forced under last, tattered, torn and bloody, cutting off his screams.
Even through the terror he understood this was retribution for his attempt to demolish the Skendleby mound, and probably for more. The face of the old priest he’d killed flashed across his closed eyes. The man’s face didn’t seem angry, it seemed more like he understood, but there wasn’t any more time. Jed’s lungs were bursting and he opened his mouth to gasp for air knowing it would be filled not by air but by water.
But it wasn’t. It filled with something else, something he couldn’t place and for a nanosecond his spinning mind registered surprise but it didn’t last. Time ran out, then blackness, then nothing.
*******
Anderson had been eating a flaccid bacon roll from the canteen when the call came through. Disturbing as the message was it was almost a relief in that it shook him out of the bout of bleak introspection he’d been locked into. He’d sat slumped in his chair staring out at the Christmas market without really seeing it. His guts ached; his stomach had felt off for weeks now. He knew it was just stress but it still generated hypochondriacally induced anxiety.
He blamed Skendleby, blamed it for sucking the joy and anticipation out of Christmas. It had been the same the previous year, maybe it was ruined for good. His mood was exacerbated by the boss going AWOL. He’d been trying to reach her for the best part of twenty four hours and had just been about to try her cell phone number again when the duty sergeant called him.
“Jimmy, you’ll love this, there’s been another.”
“Where?”
He asked but inside he knew already.
“Skendleby, of course, where all your business comes from. Body in the Moss, some poor bugger found it walking his dog this morning, there’s a car waiting to take you.”
He considered ringing Viv but decided to wait until he knew for sure what he was dealing with, so he just grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and headed for the stairs, too preoccupied even to wonder over the implications of the sergeant saying ‘in’ rather than ‘on’ the Moss.
There was one nice surprise though: the driver was Gemma Dixon, back on duty as a driver after arresting the attacker on the Skendleby mound the previous Christmas. She’d been honoured for that, been to the Palace for a medal. Jimmy was surprised she’d stayed in the force; she was close to making it as a singer. Jimmy had fancied her for ages but reckoned she was out of his league. She seemed pleased to see him though, and smiled before saying:
“Strange to be going back to Skendleby almost exactly a year on, Jimmy, sorry, I mean, Sarge.”
He hadn’t noticed the slip and decided to sit in the front next to her rather than enjoy the benefit of rank in the back. But he couldn’t really think of much to say to her until they’d crawled out of the city in the snake of slow moving traffic, and even then it was only in response to her saying:
“You know, Sarge, since that night, Ges Wilson hasn’t been able to come back to work, it’s changed him, I don’t know what to say to him any more when I go to see him.”
“Was harder on you, Gemma, and you made it back.”
“Messed me up though.”
“You don’t look messed up to me.”
He wondered what had made him say that. He needn’t have bothered though, she smiled. For a moment he was on the brink of asking her if she’d like to go for a drink after work; she was looking at him as if urging him on. But too late, they’d reached their destination. She turned the car off the road and onto the track into the Moss. They could see flashing blue lights ahead and he felt a tightening in his stomach and the acid bile of reflux rising in his throat.
He wasn’t the only one. A white-faced constable he didn’t recognise blurted out:
“Sorry, Sir, we moved him, and that’s when.”
He hesitated.
“That’s when?”
Anderson could see he that wasn’t going to get much further so he pushed past to see what the boy had seen, looking over the shoulder of an officer from the forensics team who was crouched down on his knees inspecting something lying on the cold ground. At first he couldn’t identify what he was seeing, everything was blackened with peat staining and there didn’t seem to be any recognisable form. The man on his knees said, without bothering to look back at Anderson:
“Hard to separate out what’s what here, never seen anything like this before.”
Anderson hadn’t either. He stood rooted, waiting for the man to ex
plain what he was seeing. The forensic turned his head to look up and Anderson saw that he too was pale faced and hollow eyed.
“This one here’s the one you’ll be interested in. Problem is he’s got mixed up with these others, God knows how.”
Anderson still couldn’t understand.
“So, what have we got here?”
The forensic gave a mirthless chuckle.
“Right mix up is what we’ve got here, Jimmy. Looks like your customer’s got mixed up with some old ’uns from under the bog. This other shit, the flint pot and old wood covering them, must have come up with them from the bottom. Have to get the archaeologists out when you’ve finished.”
Anderson stammered:
“How? How? I don’t understand.”
“None of us understands, and none of us want to be here either. I can’t risk moving any of the bits of the old ’uns, they’re too fragile, but watch while I turn his head towards you, see, look there.”
Anderson’s cell phone bleeped and part of his mind registered it was Viv calling. A few minutes previously answering would have been his priority. Not now.
“This is his face, see the mouth’s wide open.”
Anderson still didn’t understand.
“What’s the black stuff covering the mouth?”
“Not covering it, in it.”
“What are they?”
“Feathers; his mouth’s stuffed full of feathers, they’re the only sign of a mark on him.”
Chapter 32: Haunted By Stars
In the chill gloom of twilight, Ed steered his car through the traffic choking the southerly urban fringe of the Northern Powerhouse, relieved at having discharged his duties. He’d stood in, at the last moment, to officiate at a funeral, replacing a local vicar who was unavailable following a visit from the police that the diocese was unwilling to elucidate upon.