The Dreables, A Merryweathers Mystery

by RA Jones

  “Bah,” it said finally and shuffled off through the door.

  Sam emerged, trembling, from his “bedroom.” He waited until Troop went slinking to the front door and looked back with a faint wag of his tail. It was only then that Sam dared run towards the door, jumping high over Libby Brown as he did so, and slam the door shut. He sat down with his back to the closed door and hugged Troop’s big head.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Troop,” Sam said, hearing the tremor in his own voice. He looked down as a second warm furry body rubbed against his leg. “Okay,” said Sam, “and you too, Ginger.” But it was hard to ignore the big lump that was Libby Brown in the passageway. Her chest was moving up and down quite faintly and he crept forward on his knees to look at her face. It was peaceful but very pale. He turned and stood up and went in to the kitchen. Gran was lying in an untidy heap under the table. She was as pale as Libby Brown but she too was breathing slowly and steadily.

  “Gran,” said Sam, shaking her gently, “Gran, wake up.”

  She didn’t stir.

  “Gran, please. What’s happened to you?” He heard the cry in his voice but was helpless to stop it. “Gran, please wake up. Please. I don’t want to be here on my own, please.”

  He shook her more forcibly but she didn’t respond. He got up and fetched some water from the tap and splashed it on her face. That worked in all the films. But it didn’t this time. Stifling a sob, he stood up and saw the vanilla custard tarts on the table. Quickly, he scooped them all up and threw them in the bin under the sink. He even fetched the one from the passageway – just in case Troop was tempted – and all the while he was thinking about what he should do.

  The police! Of course. That was it.

  He found the phone in the living room. He picked up the receiver but it sounded odd. In fact, it sounded of nothing. There was no dialling tone. After a while, he heard some snuffling and grunting on the other end, like someone was listening. Quickly, Sam put the receiver down again. It was no good. He was stuck in the cottage with his gran and Libby Brown unconscious and there was no help from the police and it was starting to get dark outside. With heart as heavy as Gran’s old iron poker and his brain full of frightened confusion, Sam went around the cottage from room to room to make sure all the windows were locked tight and the doors bolted. Then he went back to Gran and made her comfortable with a cushion and a blanket and did the same for Libby Brown.

  He ran some water into a glass from the tap and took it to his bedroom with Troop and Ginger. He took the suitcase off the bed where Gran had dumped it earlier, drew the curtains and sat on the springy mattress. Sam didn’t know what was happening, but he did know that something was very, very wrong with this place. Eventually he lay down with Troop next to him and Ginger standing guard in the doorway. He dozed fitfully in a dreamless sleep. Twice he woke up to the sound of Troop growling quietly. Sam held his breath to listen. Outside he could hear grunts and shuffling noises and sometimes deep chuckles. Once he heard the noise of scrabbling from the front door and he was really, really glad he’d locked and bolted it.

  “I know what they are,” Sam whispered to Troop in the darkness. “I know what they are and why Gran is here.” He reached out and touched Troop’s fur and felt Ginger rub against him and was never more glad of their company than in that dark moment.

  “They’re the Dreables, aren’t they?”

  Neither the dog nor the cat made any noise in response. But they didn’t need to because deep down Sam knew he was right.

  Chapter 5

  Dreables

  Sam must have fallen asleep between Troop and Ginger. When he opened his eyes, it was light outside. He went to the toilet and almost fell over Libby Brown on the way back. He checked on Gran and she seemed to be okay but her face was the colour of his white bed sheets at home, and his efforts at waking her again were just as useless as the day before. He drank some water and realized that he was starving. Memory of the vanilla tarts in the bin made his stomach burble and he made himself forget them. He fetched a chair to stand on and looked through the cupboards. Gran had brought some tins of food with her; broccoli, tinned peaches, mulligatawny soup as well as porridge, boil in the bag rice with peas, and, to top it all, dried figs. It was as if she had made a list of all the things that Sam hated most in the world and decided to bring them with her. He wouldn’t, couldn’t bring himself to eat any of that stuff.

  Under the sink, Gran had stashed some dog and cat food and Sam opened a sachet of salmon and prawn in jelly for Ginger and lamb with peas and carrots for Troop. It smelled disgusting, but the look of it made Sam even more hungry than he’d been.

  “I wish Gran had brought just one thing I liked,” he said as Troop and Ginger tucked in.

  It was then he remembered Mrs Walpole’s cherry bakewells, and his stomach did an instant impression of a small earthquake at the very thought of them. He jumped up and ran to the front door. He slid back the bolts and pulled it open very gently. Outside, there was no sound of aeroplanes or cars or birds. The road was empty and the garden looked quiet too. The car was exactly where Gran had parked it. But then he remembered the key. He closed the door, ran into the kitchen, and found the keys in Gran’s handbag on the draining board. He opened the front door again and pressed the unlock button on the key fob. Two flashes of orange lights and the car unlocked itself.

  Sam waited.

  Nothing happened.

  Sam took three deep breaths and sprinted for the bush he’d hidden behind when Gran had first gone into the house. He looked up and down the road – still empty. Then he made a dash for the car. The cakes were still on the passenger seat in the Tupperware box. Quickly, Sam grabbed them and ran for the house. It was only as he got to the threshold of the front door that he saw the deep claw marks gouged into the wood. They hadn’t been there yesterday. Memory of the scrabbling noise he’d heard the night before sent a deep shudder through him. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Troop was sitting in the passageway looking stern.

  “I had to, Troop,” Sam said. “I’m starving.”

  He hurried to the bedroom, sat on the bed, and opened the box of cakes. Twenty-four large cherry bakewells sat there. Gran had obviously not been tempted on the journey down. He took one out and bit into it. An explosion of fantastic flavours detonated in his mouth. Never, in all his ten years of life, had he tasted anything better. The rich cherry jam mingled with the sweet almond extract and the crumbly pastry and Sam closed his eyes in ecstasy. He ate three right off. He drank some more water and within five minutes felt a great deal better.

  “Thank you, Mrs Walpole,” he said to Troop and Ginger, who were by this time watching him patiently. “Okay,” said Sam, nibbling his fourth cherry bakewell, “this is what I know. Dreables are horrible. But they don’t like you two and according to Gran, adults can’t see them but I can and I bet you can too. Somehow, they’ve put Gran and Libby Brown to sleep and we have to do something to help them. But this place is really spooky and I can’t phone the police. So that leaves us with just one person who can help and that’s the girl that sent for Gran in the first place. Trouble is, I don’t know her name or where to find her...”

  Troop stood up and whined and trotted towards the back door. Ginger followed in his own cat time.

  “Want to go out, boys?” Sam asked.

  Troop wagged his tail, but when Sam opened the back door for him, he just stood resolutely at the door and both he and Ginger just kept looking at Sam. Neither of them moved.

  “This is no time for a walk,” Sam said, but then an idea hit him between the eyes. “Do you know where the girl is?”

  Troop’s tail started wagging and Ginger’s shot straight up.

  “That’s why Gran brought you, isn’t it?”

  The tails did their thing.

  “Okay, but we need provisions. Just wait a minute.”

  He rummaged in an old boot room and came up with a dusty rucksack into which he put another half do
zen cherry bakewells, including the half-eaten one he’d nibbled, and a plastic water bottle that he washed out and then filled from the cold tap.

  “Okay,” he said finally to Troop and Ginger. “Let’s go.”

  ~~~~~

  Sam followed as the cat and dog left through the back gate of the cottage. Instantly, they were out onto an open field. To their right, beyond two more fields, the open moor seemed to stretch away forever with no sign of habitation. They crossed the field and went through a gap in a dry-stone wall and Troop immediately turned in the direction of the village. But Sam could see that if he kept low, no one would see them from the roadway. On the far side of the road, less than a mile away, Sam was struck again by the regular mounds of grass-covered earth. He counted seven of them. Beyond, there were bigger hills which were topped by the white mist that still encircled the narrow vale. The morning was bright but there was a chill in the air that seemed to seep through Sam’s clothes and in to his bones out here on the moor.

  Troop led them for ten minutes until they reached the far end of the village. There the dog stopped. There was another gap in the stone wall and a path which led directly down to the road. From where they sat, waiting and watching, Sam looked back at a sign on the road that said,

  Welcome to Wihtlea on the Barrows.

  Weird name for a very weird place.

  “Now what?” Sam asked Troop.

  The dog whined and looked up and down the road and then swiftly trotted down and across to the other side. Ginger followed with Sam at the rear. They were quite near the houses now but still Sam saw no one. Troop ducked behind a fence and Sam followed. The place seemed like a ghost village with none of the usual noises of children playing, or cars revving or ice-cream vans chiming that you would expect.

  But then they did hear a sound. The sound of a child laughing. Troop’s ears pricked up. He trotted up the road to a small park. At the far end of the park was a children’s play area. To his utter amazement, a woman and a small boy were in the park, the boy laughing with delight as the woman stood behind him, pushing him higher and higher on the swing.

  Hope flared in Sam’s heart. An adult. That meant she would know what was going on. But then he saw the way she was glancing around, her head turning towards a car that had been parked close to the other entrance to the park. It was loaded with camping equipment and the front doors were both open. It looked like she was waiting for someone. The child was no more than four or five, squealing with delight as he went higher and higher on the swing.

  Sam wondered if they’d stopped for a break on their way to somewhere else. Perhaps there was a man who had gone off for supplies or to find a toilet. It had happened to Sam on trips with his parents before now. He thought about walking over there and introducing himself. He thought about what he might say. It was going to sound really weird, but then he didn’t have much choice.

  But Troop wasn’t moving. He wasn’t even looking at the child; he was looking off to the left, to where the strange grassy mounds began. Sam followed the dog’s gaze. Something was moving, loping down from between the furthest mounds. The child on the swing saw it too and began pointing, but the woman seemed oblivious. She just carried on pushing the child. Sam could only stare in frozen horror at what happened next.

  It was difficult to make out what exactly the thing was, but Sam could guess. It seemed as if the air shimmered about it and Sam thought he could hear it grunting as it ran, its long arms reaching forward to the ground like a gorilla’s. It was making straight for the woman, but she seemed totally unaware, whereas the child was turning in the chair swing to watch its approach with growing alarm.

  But there was no stopping the thing. It flew straight at the woman. It seemed inevitable that she would topple over but the most curious thing of all was that she didn’t. The thing seemed to smash right into her, to become one with her like two bits of Plasticine thrown together. She swayed slightly and then put out her hand to slow the child’s motion on the swing and quickly, she got him down.

  They started walking towards the grassy mounds, the little boy holding up his hand for his mother to take. But she seemed distracted, lost in thought, and the hand remained empty. Sam stayed hidden, flitting from tree to tree around the edge of the park, keeping them in sight. But Troop wasn’t moving.

  “Come on,” Sam said. “I have to see what happens”

  Troop got up and followed. The park narrowed to a point under the ruin of a stone archway which led through to a group of standing stones and a line of dark gorse and brambles, beyond which sat the mounds. By the time Sam and the animals had reached the point where they could go no further except over another stone wall, they could see the standing stones quite clearly. It was here the child and its mother stood. Suddenly, the woman turned to the child and said, “Let’s play hide and seek.”

  The little boy nodded vigorously.

  “Me first,” said the woman. “You go in to the middle of those stones and count to twenty. I’ll hide.”

  The boy immediately ran to the centre of the ring of stones and put his hands over his eyes and began counting. The woman didn’t hesitate. Sam had played hide and seek in ruined castles with his dad when he was about this boy’s age. He knew the rules. His mum or his dad were never far away, and they’d leave little clues to make it easy for him to find them. But this wasn’t what was going on here. The woman turned and ran back through the archway as quickly as she could and turned left towards a patch of reeds and bushes. When the count got to nineteen, Sam saw her collapse onto the ground in the middle of the undergrowth. She was totally out of sight. It was as if she’d never existed.

  When the boy looked up, he shouted, “Ready or not,” and began looking about him. But there was no sign of his mother.

  “Mummy,” he cried, instantly aware of the fact that this was not a version of the game he was used to playing. “Mummy, where are you?”

  But the boy’s confusion was momentary, because his attention, like Sam’s, was suddenly drawn to what was happening around him inside the stone circle. Out of the ground in front of each of the standing stones something was erupting. They looked for all the world like the tops of huge mushrooms, but it was soon clear that these were just the heads of something far worse than fungi. Barrel chests followed and then long, muscled arms. In seconds the circle was full of lumpy, horrid, grunting things, dribbling saliva and stretching and yawning.

  “Dreables,” whispered Sam.

  The little boy screamed in terror and instinctively turned to run. Too quick and nimble for the Dreables, he slipped between them and for a moment it looked as if he might break free, but at the very point of breaking through the circle, he fell backwards as if he’d run straight into a wall. Then they were upon him. One of them had a net and within ten seconds and despite his kicking and screaming, they had him in their clutches, laughing at his moans and cries for help.

  Sam’s instinct was to get up and go to the boy, but even as he pushed himself up from his crouched position, he found he couldn’t move. Something had his trouser leg in its grasp. Sam looked back. It was Troop.

  “Let go, Troop,” Sam protested. “We’ve got to help him.”

  But Troop had his jaws clamped on Sam’s jeans and wouldn’t let go. When Sam turned back to the ring of stones, it was empty. The boy and the Dreables had all gone.

  Sam gave up fighting Troop and hit the ground with his fist angrily.

  “I hate Dreables even more now.”

  Troop whined and let go of Sam’s jeans.

  “Okay, I won’t go after them, but I have to see if his mother is alright,” Sam said.

  They found her near a stagnant pool. Sam pulled her away from the water as best he could and made her comfortable in the way he had Gran and Libby.

  They left the woman and Sam followed the cat and the dog again, his mind reeling from what he had just witnessed. What the Dreables had done – using the little boy’s own mother to trick him – was horrid and
disgusting. More than anything, it made Sam very, very angry.

  They headed back towards the village, but stayed on its periphery. Troop came to a stop at the bottom of what looked like a very long garden, at the end of which were four big sheds built into a bank. In front of the end shed, two big and particularly ugly-looking Dreables were snoozing in beaten-up armchairs.

  Sam could see that they were different from the thing that had been in Libby Brown. These were very solid creatures of the earth, just like the things that had stolen the little boy. They were covered in lumps of mud and parts of their bodies were craggy and scabbed with lichen, as if they had been wrought of the very ground they sat on. Their snores rumbled in the still air and a very large collection of flies buzzed around their heads, resulting in the occasional flailing Dreable arm being thrown up to ward them off.

  “Know what flies like more than anything, don’t you, Troop?”

  Troop made a low grumbling noise in his throat.

  “Is that where she is? In that shed?”

  Troop whined again.

  “So how do we get to her? I don’t fancy creeping past those things.”

  Troop trotted away to the left and waited for Sam to follow. The dog took them the long way round, back through some of the streets they’d just slunk along to the opposite end of the garden. There were some big wooden gates and a sign that said Beety’s Market Garden – home grown vegetables for sale. This side of the garden was covered over by long tunnels of polythene. Troop went into the first and trotted along its length. The polythene was too opaque to see through and the tunnel was sealed at the far end, but this was where Troop now stood, whining softly. Sam tried, but soon realised that it was too thick to tear with his hands.