“Friggin’,” Everett said. “She was burned down to nothing. It had to be murder, but the police didn’t want to know. I knew the horror had to be too good to be true…” He shook his head. Long exposure to the monster had taken its toll, and a part of him, perhaps a large part, wanted to be well rid of it. Now we had supplied him with justification. “Here, do you have a pencil and paper?”
I handed Everett my notebook and a stub of pencil that I always keep ready. He sketched quickly and passed it back.
“That’s Spa Hill there,” he said. “X marks the spot. Madam Hester took me there so I could put a trap down and catch that thing. She was getting half the take; that was the arrangement. I’ve not been back, but I know where it was.”
“Is there water there?”
“Aye, a small pool. You won’t mistake it, believe you me.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re a pal, Bertie,” said Skinner.
“Just get out of my gaff, Stinker,” said Everett. Then, to me, he said, “Your word of honour you’re not tricking?”
“Word of honour,” I said, holding out my hand.
We shook, and his grip was powerful.
“You think I need to change my line?”
“I would,” said Skinner.
We left Everett looking troubled, tapping his knee with his swagger stick but already working on his next plan. It might not have been the first time he had a sudden change of career.
I was pleased to get out of the freak show, but the carnival mood had drained out of me. The music coming from different directions was discordant, and the smell of urine mingled with the candyfloss and toffee. The ground was littered with losing tombola tickets, and a man sat, weeping drunkenly, against a tent peg. The giant papier-mâché clown looked grotesque and ominous.
The image of that thing in the cage was still with me. My excitement had curdled into a dull sense of dread. Like a child who’d had too much running around and too many goes on the merry-go-round and too much candyfloss, I felt deflated, overstretched, and overtired.
“I thought we were going to have to tighten the screws on Bertie,” said Skinner. “But you put the windup on him without so much as a raised fist.”
“I didn’t care for the look of that thing in the cage.”
“Me neither,” said Skinner, looking at his watch. “We’ve still got a few hours before H-hour. Time for a drink or two and some entertainment. There’s dancing girls here, Harry.”
Two women in oriental costumes were dancing listlessly outside a sideshow tent that promised “Dances of the World.”
“They’ll have a Turkish belly dancer, and a Polynesian dancer with nothing but a grass skirt and a garland of flowers. That’s always worth seeing, and”—he nudged me in the ribs—“the Dance of the Seven Veils at the end.”
“I’m not in the mood,” I said.
“Harry, do you want to die without ever seeing a naked woman?”
He laughed, but I turned away. We had found a way forward, thanks to his keen insight, but his flippancy was troubling.
“I was not planning on going to my death,” I said.
“Nobody ever is. You can at least have a drink with me.”
We headed for the crowded beer tent.That was the last time I ever had a pint with Skinner.
Chapter Seventeen: Night in the Woods
It was an exceptionally warm evening. Jackets and coats were out of the question, so we carried the essentials with us in leather satchels: electric torches, a storm lantern, some stout cord to bind Pierce with when we caught him, and flasks of water.
“Do you think it’s dangerous?” I asked.
“Of course it’s dangerous,” said Skinner. “Otherwise, Miss Yankee Doodle Dandy would be front and centre. I called her on the phone, and she’s leaving us to it.”
“Perhaps she has other business.”
“You can always tell something’s up when the top brass decide they need to be somewhere else. Stafford knows something was up tonight, and something made Pierce tear his leg off to get out. I think we’ll find him a changed man. Changed into what I wouldn’t care to say.”
I unwrapped the knuckledusters that I had retrieved from the bottom drawer in my lodgings. I was reluctant to employ them except in the most extreme circumstances, but it seemed we were coming to that.
There was a letter on my desk. One of the girls from the office next door must have left it. The address was written in Sally’s handwriting, but the envelope was a plain one rather than her usual smart stationery.
“A billay-doo, eh?” said Skinner. “Always cheering to get one on the eve of battle.”
“It’s not a love letter.”
There were several crossings-out and false starts, and it had obviously been written under considerable duress.
Dear Harry,
I am very sorry to be writing this.
I have to inform you that I am being held against my will.
My kidnappers say that to see me again you have to bring a certain object—they are sure you know what it is—to the Knyght’s Head public house, and no funny business.
They say not to tell the police, and I am sure that you would not do that in any case.
I am safe and well and have not been harmed, but please, please do what they say.
Yrs as always,
Sally.
Elsie’s thugs must have grabbed her on her way home from the factory, or maybe when she was out somewhere in the afternoon. They could not take on me and Skinner, but they could certainly handle a woman.
“That’s low,” said Skinner. “Though it is clever. You have to hand it to that Elsie.”
“Kidnapped. This puts me in a difficult situation. If we get the idol, I’ll need it to get Sally back.”
Skinner smoothed his moustache but did not seem overly troubled. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all change after tonight anyway. Whatever happens, you and me are out of a job after this.”
“I suppose so.” I looked at the letter again as though rereading it would change the meaning.
“It’s the truth. Except I’m not thinking of the labour exchange; I’m thinking of staying alive. Madame told us a lot today, things she never wanted to tell us before. She doesn’t like it when people know too much. That can affect their life expectancy.” He nodded solemnly.
“You really want to try and get the idol?” I asked.
“You’re going to.” He opened and closed his pocketknife, testing the smoothness of the action. “So I’d better come along and keep you out of trouble.”
“What do we do?”
“We follow our instincts,” Skinner said, “and we make it up as we go along.”
The shadows were lengthening as we approached the woods, but it was still hot. The concrete pavement and the brick buildings were throwing back all the heat they had soaked up during the day. There was not a breath of wind, and it felt hotter than it had at noon. Every window was open, and families were sitting out on their doorsteps, quietly taking the evening air. Even the road had a tacky, melted look to it.
I patted my face with a damp handkerchief. Skinner turned Everett’s map around in his hands, orienting it.
“So if that’s Beulah Hill there, we want to go this way.”
Under the trees, it was cool and shady. The heat of the day had not penetrated there. The path was hard mud, cracking in places from the lack of rain, and it led upwards through brambles and nettles under the great oaks. We walked slowly because of the temperature and the gradient.
“If you go down to the woods today,” Skinner sang in a low voice, “you’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today…”
“We can’t be far from the old Beulah Spa here. Same sort of phenomenon—a spring carrying particular minerals up from the depths. A spring that appears and disappears from time to time.”
“Except you wouldn’t drink from this one for your health,” Skinner shot back.
Hoverflies struck sparks of light as sunbeams struck them in a clearing, and the spiderwebs glittered like silver mesh. Then we were in the green shade of the forest, stopping at intervals because the path was steep and we were still hot. Once a robin stopped on a branch a few feet away, cocked its head at me, and flitted away.
A lesser path, more of an animal track, led off to one side through the undergrowth. We stepped over a double strand of rusty barbed wire, all that was left of an old fence. Nobody had been that way in years.
Skinner found a stick and used it to beat his way along the track, beheading the nettles and thistles that crowded in on both sides.
I am sure that the possibility had occurred to him that Everett had sent us on a wild goose chase and even now was laughing at the thought of us stumbling around, bewildered, with thorns catching on our clothes.
We stopped for a swig of water, and I scanned the area methodically. I inspected the undergrowth, the tree trunks, and the leafy canopy for signs of malformation. The first things that caught my attention were the spiderwebs—not actual webs but individual long strands. I moved my head to make out more of them, and they radiated out at odd angles like the illustration in a geometry textbook. Ordinary spiders did not spin these webs.
“It has to be near here,” muttered Skinner.
“It is.”
The fungus on a fallen log grew in long spikes; seen up close, they were faceted like diamonds and towered like a futuristic city in miniature, the little towers connected with horizontal bars unlike any fungus native to this planet. And they pulsed as though there was something moving within.
As I straightened up, something moved on a level with my face.
The earwig was a harmless creature for all that people claimed it would crawl up their noses or in their ears when they were asleep. That was just a myth, and I had no objection to earwigs that minded their own business.
But this earwig was a big, brown, glistening thing as thick as my finger and as long as my forearm. It had far too many legs, and it snaked around a branch, feelers twitching in the air like small whips. By the time I had realised what it was, the thing slithered into a narrow crack in the tree. I did not have a chance to point it out to Skinner, but from the way he was scrutinising the ground by his feet, he must have found something similar.
“We’re close,” I said, still looking around, and pointed. “That way.”
I do not know exactly what had attracted my attention about the one tree, but it was subtly altered. Like the monster that Everett displayed, there was nothing you could put your finger on, but the set of its branches and the arrangement of leaves were different to its neighbours.
“This one, you reckon?” Skinner gazed up warily.
A few feet from the tree, a spring broke the surface, and a thin trickle of water led to a pool that was more of a puddle. The vegetation around it was lush and unmistakably alien. Neither of us approached any closer.
I felt myself shiver. My sweat had cooled, leaving my shirt cold and clammy. I resisted the impulse to go back down the path and into the warmth.
Skinner was no more comfortable but made a show of cheerfulness. “So Bertie Everett is an honest man, and we’ll be able to get this all wrapped up in time for last orders.” Putting his satchel beside him, he brushed off a fallen log and sat down with an air of unconcern. “We’ve got a clear view of the path here, and we’ll hear Pierce coming ahead of time.”
I continued to stalk about quietly, cautiously examining the site. An earwig, even a monstrous one, was most likely harmless. Other creatures might be less benign.
The active agent only had the power to mutate things that were growing. The big oak, which must have been all of four feet in diameter, was two hundred years old or more and showed all the indications of having been infected. That spring had been bubbling up and then receding again for more than two centuries. Perhaps it had been there much longer, and one of Hester’s predecessors had found it—maybe by noting the plants in the vicinity—and had discovered its unusual properties.
Paracelsus said that the gipsies knew many things unknown to scholars. What they used the water for, except making monsters for people like Everett, I could not imagine.
Forty years ago, a young boy had been rambling through these woods on a summer evening like this one, and he had seen blackberries unlike any other. He could not resist the temptation to try one. The taste must have been vile, but in the hours and days that followed, the active agent had worked its way into his system. He would never be able to find the spot again, and even if he had, the berries would have been gone, and the spring withdrawn again to subterranean regions.
The thing had been quiescent in his system for years, but it had emerged again. Stafford had been seeking, like the poor man seduced by a faerie who vanished, the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun. Now he was able to grow them in his own greenhouse. Having seen the effects of ingesting a larger quantity, his desire to taste the fruit again might have abated, but perhaps not. To him, the changes it brought about might be a sacred transubstantiation—weak human flesh sloughed off as the Holy Spirit of alien fire burned through it.
“There go the last rays now,” said Skinner as the canopy above us slipped into shadow. “You take your post the other side of the pool so we can catch him whichever way he comes in.”
The light drained away almost imperceptibly, minute by minute. When we arrived, you could have read a newspaper by it, but without obvious change, the gloom had become so deep a person trying to read would have struggled with the headlines.
As the dark fell, the light that daylight had been masking gradually emerged. The glow was noticeable first directly over the pool, where it was brightest, but in fact, it suffused everything around us to a greater or lesser degree. The luminescence was so faint you could not be sure it was there until you looked twice. It had no colour at all, or rather, it was every colour mixed together. I can only describe it as being a grey light, impossible as that might sound.
“D’you see it? Like foxfire,” I murmured. “Or will-o’-the-wisp.”
“Like the corpse lights in Flanders,” said Skinner.
The light over the pool shifted. I went to look into it. Shapes like ghostly goldfish congealed out of the surrounding water, swam a few strokes, and then, while going through a succession of shapes, slowly dissolved back into the pool. Watching it was hypnotic. There was a definite upwelling; the light was coming up from deep below. It cost me some effort to pull away and return to my post.
The trunk of the oak tree was limned in odd light, and it outlined the fern fronds. Little luminous blurs flowed over the vegetation. Perhaps a more poetic soul would have seen them as bespangled with angels’ wings.
The light seemed to grow as the darkness settled in. That was probably an illusion, just as the moon that seemed pale in the blue sky in daytime was almost too bright to look at when the sky was midnight-black. We would not need our torches to see in the immediate vicinity of the big oak, although the lighting was as strange as a photographic negative, with the ground bright and the sky dark.
How much darker would it need to be before Pierce would come out? Surely he did not have far to go. Time always passed more slowly when you were waiting. If I had been able to read my watch, I doubt whether more than two minutes would have passed since I last wondered what the time was.
I made my own preparations, carefully unwrapping the cellophane that Miss De Vere had given me and holding the pellet in my hand. I noticed that it too had a faint glow, but dull red like an ember trapped in smoky glass.
“It’s dark where you are,” said Skinner.
Puzzled, I stood up, took a few steps, and looked back.
“The dark’s following you,” he said. “Like you was in a shadow.”
I looked closely, and he was right. A bubble of darkness seemed to enclose me as though the light would not approach me closer than arm’s length. At first, I thought it must be con
nected with the pellet, but a little experimentation showed the effect was centred on my person.
I could not account for it until I recalled the ring with its ancient gemstone on the chain around my neck. My collar was already unfastened, and I gingerly lifted the chain and placed the ring on the forest floor in front of me. Sure enough, the faint light dimmed where it rested. Whatever the alien forces were, they were clashing with each other. Perhaps that was inevitable, if Miss De Vere’s view of Darwin and the struggle for supremacy was accurate. I conjectured that the makers of that stone were no friends of the meteorite riders, and the stone acted against their influence by some built-in mechanism.
I restored the chain around my neck.
A moth fluttered awkwardly past, blinking on and off, or it might have been a dragonfly or a beetle. All I saw was the blur of its flight. The insect zigzagged past me a couple of times then circled Skinner several times, first clockwise and then anticlockwise.
“It’s watching us,” I said. “Everything here is part of its body. It suffuses every living thing here. It’s waking up, putting out its feelers, and sniffing at us.”
I heard a soft “thunk.” Skinner had unclasped his knife and stuck it in the log next to him.
“I hope that isn’t a sensitive part of its anatomy, then,” he said, looking about.
“It’s not in the dead wood, only the living vegetation and the insects.”
“Hello,” said Skinner, and we turned at a disturbance by the base of the oak.
The damp leaf mould, more organic humus than dirt, parted as something forced its way to the surface. I anticipated a nocturnal creature and braced myself for a monster to match the one in Everett’s freak show, watching in spite of myself. Still, I could not see what it was. A formless head, perhaps rabbit sized but with no eyes or ears that I could make out, pushed loose and waved in the air. A second one broke the earth two feet away and rose up like a snake.
After a moment of confusion, I recognised it from the fingers. It was not a head but a hand on the end of an arm, and no sooner had I understood than the earth heaved, and the buried figure hauled itself out from a shallow grave of leaf mould.
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 18