by Gary Fry
Table of Contents
SAVAGE
Connect With Us
Other Books by Author
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Epilogue
About the Author
About the Publisher
SAVAGE
Gary Fry
First Edition
Savage © 2014 by Gary Fry
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Other Books by Author
Conjure House
Emergence
Lurker
Menace
Severed
The House of Canted Steps
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1
The conference had almost been a disaster.
Driving slowly home from Durham, Daryl’s mind turned over all the events of the last few days. As usual, he’d done everything he could to prepare for his academic presentation: reread all the literature, refined his PowerPoint slides, rehearsed the talk in his hotel room. But he was always dogged by the one thing he was unable to prepare for: the Q&A session at the end. On this occasion, several smug academics from another university had taken malign pleasure in asking some really difficult questions. And even though Daryl believed he’d defended his position admirably, he’d come away feeling unsettled by the experience.
Still, at least he could go home now and relax, maybe even start reading a new book he’d just bought about the way human memory functioned. Before traveling to Durham, he’d told Frederique, his girlfriend of five long years, that he’d actually be returning tomorrow, which at least guaranteed him some solitude this evening. Daryl hadn’t felt guilty about resorting to this small lie; sometimes he just needed to escape from chaotic demands of everyday life…and there was surely nothing wrong with that.
Nevertheless, the traffic jam that had formed up ahead, just shy of York, did little to console this fastidious aspect of his character. It was early autumn, pitch-dark, and the shadows around his car fumed with exhaust smoke that resembled spectral fog. Feeling sweaty and uncomfortable, Daryl leaned forward and consulted his sat-nav unit mounted on his windshield, selecting icons onscreen with one tense forefinger. After glancing again at the snarl-up of traffic, he’d decided to see if he could identify an alternative way back to Leeds, maybe a country route that avoided all the busy A-roads. As organized as he always was, he had the unit preset on QUICKEST ROUTE, but now he clicked the icon for SHORTEST ROUTE in the hope of learning what his options were.
As results started appearing in the cramped LCD panel, he heard his mobile ring, startling him slightly. He’d never been fond of unplanned-for events, would rather keep everything inherently predictable, like life in a scientific laboratory.
But he quickly plucked his phone from one trouser pocket, while simultaneously addressing a new set of directions on his sat-nav screen. After greeting the caller with clipped efficiency—“Hello? Daryl speaking…”—he noticed that a turning a few hundred yards up ahead would take him along a narrow country lane, cutting out all the congestion likely to occur on the A-road during this fretful rush hour.
Then a voice said in one ear, “Oh hi, Daryl. How did it go?”
It was Frederique, and she sounded as dismayingly chirpy as usual.
“Hey, not too bad, thanks,” he replied, telling himself that he wasn’t lying again. Other than all those awkward questions at the end, his presentation—in which he’d outlined a cognitive model he’d recently developed, of psychological processes involved in identity formation—had been well received. There’d been nods of recognition from many delegates and, later, much applause. “I think I won over a few new adherents. In fact, I’m…I’m just going down to the bar to speak with a bunch of them. There might even be a funding opportunity here or at least a future collaboration.”
Surely Frederique was unable to hear his idling engine, let alone that of any of the other cars nearby. Despite feeling slightly uncomfortable about lying to his girlfriend, Daryl realized he could now probably convince her he was anywhere he pleased.
“Okay, I won’t keep you long,” she said after an uneasy pause, during which Daryl feared he’d been caught. “I just wanted to make sure everything had gone okay.”
“Yeah, thanks for calling.” He hesitated, realizing how nice it was for her to have been concerned, even though he’d barely spared her a thought while away at the conference. Then, his mind processing fragile thoughts, input leading inevitably to output, he added, “I did plan on calling you later, of course, but I’ve…well, I’ve been so busy, you know.”
“I know, love. Don’t worry about it. We can meet up tomorrow, when you get back. Fancy coming to mine for supper?”
Frederique lived in an apartment on the far side of Leeds, an ideal location from which to access her job in marketing based in one of the swanky buildings over there. And despite the many years—five, this spring—she’d spent dropping unsubtle hints, Daryl had yet to agree to consider the possibility of maybe thinking about mulling over the likelihood of them both moving into the same place together… But that was such a big step, perhaps the biggest of all.
“Sure, that’s a good idea,” he said at last, and then noticed all the cars ahead beginning to lurch forward. He judged it an appropriate moment to say good-bye—he didn’t want his girlfriend to hear their aggressive engines or maybe someone honking their horn with understandable impatience. Perhaps this person would be as exacting as Daryl, as eager to avoid life’s everyday messiness.
Moments later, Frederique was gone, and Daryl was free to move on. It seemed to take him a geological age to reach the turnoff he’d identified on his sat-nav unit, but he eventually managed the trick, accelerating away from the smoldering serpent of a thousand harried motorists, bent inside their vehicles, and advancing at the pace of an arthritic snail. Daryl chuckled quietly to himself, watching as his headlights carved giant silver discs into the lane up ahead.
After traveling a few miles with unimpeded leisure, he noticed his petrol needle start edging toward its red “empty” zone, the light underneath glowing like an accusatory eye. He flicked his glance at the sat-nav unit and noticed that it was forty miles to Leeds. Then he looked back at his dashboard, learning from his onboard computer that his remaining petrol would last for about fifty. Taking this alternative route was certainly a risk, especially when he’d always liked being so organized and prepared, but Daryl felt confident about reaching at least one small village that had a service station. Where else would locals acquire petrol to travel to their jobs in nearby cities; thinking otherwise was just bad science. Then, surrounded by only dry-stone walls and countless pleasant hedgerows, he switched his car into cruise gear, relishing the freedom afforded by all this Yorkshire countryside
, however dim the night had already rendered it.
Before long, he began reflecting on his relationship with Frederique. His reluctance to get too involved with her wasn’t because he never wanted to get married, settle down, have children, secure a mortgage, and all the rest of it; it was more a question of establishing his career first, dedicating his time to research and publication. He knew for certain that he was in a strong position to make significant contributions to knowledge about people, to humankind’s attempts to understand itself. After completing his PhD with some distinction three years ago, many respected peers were expecting him to fulfill his considerable promise by producing groundbreaking work. This was of course why he’d been given such a hard time at the conference earlier today, but he shouldn’t let this throw him off his predetermined path. The basic truth was that he was going places, and he could surely console himself by thinking that less able academics were unlikely to be targeted for criticism by such envious rivals.
Steering up steep hills and around sharp bends—the countryside here had certainly been a challenge to road planners—Daryl adjusted his posture in his seat until he occupied it symmetrically. Whenever he felt uppity, he did this kind of thing by habit, and had done ever since childhood. He knew that his academic discipline would describe it as obsessive-compulsive behavior, a common human trait about which he was trying to develop a comprehensive theory, in the hope of alleviating the symptoms for people who suffered it much worse than he did. Nevertheless, despite all the condition’s inhibiting and meddlesome aspects, Daryl believed it was this strand of his character that underpinned his work ethic, as well as his frequently inspired insights.
“Ah well,” he said, directing his vehicle through areas of countryside with no seemingly residential dwellings at all, “we must put to good use what we’re unable to overrule.”
It was twenty minutes later, with the world growing much darker and colder, before he admitted that he might be in trouble. Great hillsides, rendered shadowy by seasonable gloom, stretched away to distant horizons, where heavy cloud loitered like contemptuously indifferent gods. Rain started falling, its innumerable drops snatched off the windshield by his squeaking wipers; before long, he was unable to see more than ten yards in front of his car, the headlights mooted by driving diagonals of water. His sat-nav unit had ostensibly abandoned him, now registering only an UNKNOWN ROAD. This satellite failure occurred most commonly in newly built areas, where the software originally installed on the device predated its construction. But Daryl reflected that some of these country roads were as old as the first motorcars and might not even have been explored by the navigators who’d miraculously created GPS. The lane along which he was traveling was decidedly narrow and curbless, little more than a track made out of age-old tarmac. Perhaps, while mulling over his career earlier, he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, which had confused the gadget and its automated instructor. Daryl exhaled sharply, finding all this very frustrating…and not a little embarrassing for someone with his exacting nature.
“Twenty-five and eaten alive,” he said, summoning the rhyming couplet from some poem he’d learned as a child, whose source he was unable to identify at the moment. But then another unsettling saying occurred to him: “He was a fine fellow, and had such a splendid future behind him.”
Only minutes later, with still no sign of humanity in sight, his car went creepily silent and then began gliding to a halt in the lane. He’d run out of petrol, and as little as a brief glance at his sat-nav screen, which displayed only a graphical representation of green nothingness, was enough to convince him that he was now lost in some hopeless void.
2
It was seven o’clock and the sky had dimmed to the shade of an old bruise. Daryl sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes, trying to summon enough courage to remove his mobile phone again and make a call for help. With characteristic cautiousness, he’d taken out a membership with a roadside recovery outfit as soon as he’d bought a car and had stored the company’s contact number in his electronic address book. Then, after producing the handset, he scanned down the small number of people for whom he’d recorded contact details—his parents, who lived nearby; a few choice colleagues; and Frederique of course—before selecting the one he needed.
He was unable to contact his girlfriend and ask her to drive out here to rescue him, because that would expose his lie. Even so, requesting her to bring a drum of petrol would be his preferred solution to this predicament. She knew him better than most people and was familiar with certain imperfections he still felt uncomfortable about revealing to others, even anonymous folk like a mechanic who might help him restart the car. He trusted Frederique implicitly, surely a good sign…but none of this speculation was helping him solve his problem. He quickly returned his attention to the call.
A few minutes later, after trying to establish the connection at least eight times, he was forced to accept that, in this remote location and with nothing man-made within sight, he was unable to get a reception. The phone was as good as dead, boasting only a wallpaper image of his academic hero, the Swiss cognitive scientist Jean Piaget, and little else other than innumerable icons and many useless apps.
Daryl swore out loud, thumping his steering wheel and inadvertently honking his horn. But then he immediately felt guilty. He’d rarely lost his temper in the recent past, preferring to tackle any difficulties in life with both patience and reason. He genuinely believed there were few problems that couldn’t be overcome by a calm application of logical thought. This idea constituted the core of his cognitive theory of human behavior, the one still under development. People, he’d claimed in several early papers, were rational beings, computers grafted onto undisciplined animals, and consciousness was a major evolutionary transformation that had altered living creatures forever. Errors of judgment rather than lapses of reason stood at the root of many social ills, he’d argued at a number of academic events, including the conference up in Durham where he’d been given such a hard time by his catty rivals.
“Oh, balls to the lot of you,” he yelled, before shunting open his car door. He knew he’d just resorted to “projection,” a psychological mechanism that was little more than a childish way of dealing with stress. But the simple truth was the memories of that morning’s Q&A session refused to leave him alone.
He climbed out of the vehicle and looked around. The lane in which his car had stalled had no road markings, was just a narrow strip cutting between acres of featureless fields. A breeze scudded across the landscape, bringing with it a foisty scent of damp grass and rotten bark. Indeed, these were the only things in view: nondescript foliage and countless clustered trees. The sky wrestled with clouds like an angry child manhandling toys.
Now feeling a bit calmer, Daryl stooped back inside the car to access its rear seats. His only option surely was to walk along the lane until he reached either a house or some commercial outlet. With access to a landline, he could make a call for help, but in truth he hoped to locate a service station or perhaps even a village from which he could buy a drink and something to eat. He was now hungry and thirsty, nature doing what it always did, reminding him of his mortality and the irrepressible needs of his body.
He reached across the backseat to take hold of his jacket. In an attempt to keep the garment clean and tidy, he’d wrapped it in a polythene sheet back at the hotel, and as one hand grabbed hold of this substance, his thumb sunk into it, causing a large bulge in the flimsy material that would never be reversed. This limp mass of polythene hung down like a flaccid crater and made Daryl hesitate a moment, examining the distension as if it should mean something to him…
But then he looked away, focusing on his task ahead. After stepping away from the car, he tugged on the jacket and prepared to walk along the lane, hoping for a serendipitous encounter, preferably with someone who had access to petrol as well as food and drink. But frankly, Daryl thought his chances were remote; this was a cognitive assessment, with all its var
iables factored in, but hardly one requiring any complex theory to account for it.
He tried his mobile phone three more times before ceasing to believe it would ever help. He struggled to understand why he couldn’t get a reception. Most places in the modern world were wired up for telecommunications, weren’t they? While continuing to walk along the deserted lane, Daryl imagined, with uncharacteristically humor, remote African tribes bopping along to iPods, desert dwellers watching satellite TV… Then, smiling for the first time since his unwitting breakdown, he looked again.
It was then that he spotted the buildings.
He felt lucky to have noticed all these walls and windows, each presumably belonging to housing or shops. They were located on his left, behind a pack of trees on the far side of a dark field. Then, hunger motivating him with untypical speed, he climbed over a dry-stone wall before beginning to trudge across moist grass, dampness seeping immediately into his shoes. It was now so gloomy that he feared treading in some animal waste, though the field, with its knee-high crop and so much lumpy earth underfoot, seemed unsuitable for cattle or sheep. The air here also felt colder, leading him to become light-headed, as if this wasn’t simply an effect of his mounting thirst… But moments later, as he passed the middle of the field, he suffered what his mother had always referred to as a “funny turn.”
Daryl had been heading inexorably for the fringe of trees on the far side of the field when he experienced a sudden lack of balance. He was put promptly in mind of episodes during his childhood, after he’d reluctantly agreed to sit on a seesaw with another boy. Daryl hadn’t liked the loss of control such playground entertainments involved, and had always screamed as the plank had been elevated, jolting his delicate body as its reached the top, before plunging down with even greater speed. After a few minutes, he’d grown used to it, realizing how safe and thrilling the ride was. But the simple truth was that he’d never enjoyed the transition from one physical state to the other, and had always tried avoiding this form of recreation and many others like it.