Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  He only drove past the entrance gate to the estate once, in order not to attract attention, but Mark was in no doubt that they’d come to the right place.

  There was no notice on the gate, but it was tall and made from wrought iron, with spikes running along the top. There was a mailbox to one side of it, and an intercom system built into a brick post, while from the high branches of a nearby larch, a security camera kept silent surveillance. Such protection of privacy was never a trait of his mother’s in her old life. Even at the height of her popularity, she’d lived openly at the vicarage and had been more than willing to sign books for anyone who turned up at the front door. But then, he supposed, if she’d drawn a line under that existence and started something new, it was possible that everything else had altered.

  They continued along a country road that was little better than a cart track. High embankments rose to either side, covered in gorse and bracken, so the only view was directly ahead, though that was now obscured by heavy rain, which had been drumming on the car’s windshield for the last ten minutes.

  “Just out of interest,” Terri asked, “where are we going now?”

  “Making a recon,” he replied.

  He did his best to make it sound as though this was part of a plan, but the truth was that he was winging it again. He had no idea of the geographic layout of the Bethany’s Wood estate. He hoped they were skirting around its edges, and would soon come upon an access point, but it was equally likely they were actually driving away from it. It could only be a matter of time before Terri began to get exasperated.

  He glanced sidelong at her. His wife-to-be was exceptionally pretty: pert-nosed, brown-eyed, with glittering brunette tresses falling well past her shoulders. Even in baggy outdoors clothes—a shapeless sweater and surplus Army trousers with pockets down the sides—her trim figure was unmistakeable. Not surprising considering that she was a fashion model by trade. He’d been going out with her for three years, and in that brief time he’d seen her progress from a youthful, coltish wannabe to a princess of the London and Paris catwalks. She was only twenty, but this last six months alone, the job offers and the cash had come pouring in. Thankfully, other less savory aspects of the fashion-world lifestyle hadn’t yet afflicted her. She didn’t do drugs, for instance, her drinking activities were confined to the odd glass of wine, and she had no time for the sort of tantrums that certain older members of her profession excelled at.

  She now put another pertinent point to him: “I never knew your mum, Mark. But from what I’ve heard of her, she was a good mother and a devoted wife.”

  “She was,” he replied. “I used to think she was, at least.”

  “Come on. You were thirteen when she died. That’s long enough to form a very accurate impression of what someone’s like.”

  Mark said nothing. He knew what she was getting at.

  “Why would she deceive you in such a heartless way? Why put you through the agony of thinking she’d died? And not just you, your whole family and all her friends, of which I understand she had a lot?”

  “She had a lot ’til Zoe Wroxeter came on the scene.”

  “Let’s not change the subject. Look, stop the car.”

  Mark slowed to a halt and applied the handbrake. “Think this through,” Terri said. “Do you believe that your mother loved you?”

  Mark remembered blissful childhood evenings spent in the rosy glow of the hearth, seated on his mother’s knee as she read him fairy tales or nursery rhymes. For a moment it was difficult for him to keep the tears from his eyes. Rather curtly, he nodded.

  “So I ask the question again,” Terri said. “How can you square that with her staging her death and abandoning you all, and not only that, abandoning her responsibilities and all the other things that were going on in her life? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She was a dyke.”

  “Oh, Mark …”

  “Look, just because Mum loved us all, that didn’t mean she wasn’t confused about her sexuality.”

  “I’m not saying she wasn’t,” Terri retorted, “but she was a mature woman when she finally realized the truth about herself. I find it highly doubtful she’d have been so blown away with lust for this Zoe Wroxeter, who from what you say was a plain, bland little creature …”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “It’s highly doubtful she’d have chucked her entire life away just because she was bicurious. Not if she loved you all, Mark.”

  “It’s because she loved us all.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “What do you mean?” Terri finally asked.

  Mark tried to explain: “When Mum married Dad, she didn’t know she was going to become a successful author. She went into that marriage with a strong sense of duty. Even later on, when she was topping the best-sellers list, she was by his side at church fêtes, at bring-and-buy sales, visiting the orphans and the OAPs.”

  “Doesn’t that underline what I’ve just been saying?”

  “No, it doesn’t. She knew that copping off with this little gay vixen would be unforgivable, would tarnish everything. Don’t you get it? My dad would never have lived it down. It would have been bad enough if she was seeing another bloke, but another woman!” He let his words hang, then added: “In pretending that she’d died, she was actually protecting us.”

  “And you hate her for that?”

  “Yes. Because she was protecting us from something she could still have turned her back on. Something that, if she’d been strong, she could have ignored.”

  Terri didn’t reply, and Mark knew why. It was because this was the part of the conversation where he and she had been certain to disagree. Though she might be a hometown kind of girl rather than a ball-breaking party animal, Terri was still part of the metropolitan set, still a progressive thinker. Perhaps to Terri’s mind, the fact that Mark’s mum had finally found fulfillment was justification enough for her turning her back on her original family, especially as they’d by then reached an age when they could fend for themselves. Maybe he ought to feel that way, too, but he didn’t. No matter how hard he tried, the very thought of what he suspected his mother had done aggrieved him, hurt him so deeply that the pain of it too easily transformed into anger. And then he stared past Terri, across the road, and spotted a gap in the embankment, and on the other side of that, a low net fence, and the anger flared again.

  He snatched the keys from the ignition, pocketed them, and climbed from the car. He stood beside the vehicle. The rain had eased off, but the air was dank and chill. Wind hissed on the saturated hillsides.

  “What are we doing now?” he heard Terri ask from inside.

  “Let’s walk from here,” he said gruffly.

  “What if someone comes along and needs to get past?”

  “Who’s likely to on a Saturday evening?” He glanced at his watch—it was now well after six. “Even farmhands don’t work Saturday evenings, and I doubt anyone else ever comes along this road. Come on, it’s stopped raining.”

  Terri climbed from the car as well, but reluctantly, as though expecting to get drenched. The moment she was out, Mark locked the vehicle, then sidled around it to the break in the embankment. The trackside grass was deep and lush, and filled with nettles, and it soaked his jeans as he waded into it.

  “Do we even know that this is part of the estate?” Terri asked.

  She looked concerned. One of the things she’d insisted on when they’d first set out from London, was Mark’s guarantee that he wasn’t coming here for revenge, that there wouldn’t be trouble if he found that Ariadne Jones was his mother. He’d promised there wouldn’t be, advised her that, despite being so cruelly betrayed, he wasn’t a killer.

  “It never actually entered my head that you might kill her,” Terri had said worriedly. “I just don’t think it would help anyone if you caused a scene.”

  “Well, there are scenes and scenes,” he’d replied enigmatically.

  “Mark!”
she’d snapped. “We’re not going if all you’re planning to do is start a fight.”

  Eventually, he’d assured her that he wouldn’t start a fight, that all he wanted was some answers. But even then he knew that she was uncertain of his intentions. And as he climbed the raised ground toward the low fence, he did it heavily, stomping with his thick-soled hiking boots, finding secret pleasure in the knowledge that he was reawakening Terri’s earlier concerns.

  The fence only came as high as his chest, and it was old and flimsy; so flimsy in fact that it could easily be pushed down to allow them to climb over it. Beyond it, meadowland, glistening with rain, sloped downwards for about fifty yards before terminating in a wall of conifers. Without any doubt, that was the outer bulwark of Bethany’s Wood. The trees ran north-south for as far as Mark could see, and were closely ranked together. This had to be the place. From what he’d learned, Bethany’s Wood had been carefully managed and was composed exclusively of evergreens. It was also relatively young, as none of this wood’s trees appeared to have grown over fifteen feet. He stared, trying to penetrate the trackless gloom behind the narrow trunks, and wondered how far into it the house actually was. In normal circumstances, perhaps if he’d been less driven, he wouldn’t have fancied venturing in there, especially when he considered the newspaper report about the “horrible figures” prowling about, the “mobile works of art”—whatever the hell that meant.

  Terri clearly shared the feeling. She hugged herself against the chill and watched the wall of woodland uncomfortably.

  “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to,” Mark said.

  “I said I’d come with you, didn’t I,” she replied. “Though I’m not sure who’s the bigger maniac, you or me.” She glanced up at the clouds. “I’ll get my waterproof, yeah?”

  “Sure,” he said, handing her the car key.

  As she turned back to the vehicle, he vaulted over the fence and landed in the meadow. He strode forward a few yards, all the time staring at the wood. At middle school he’d once gone on a field trip to North Wales, and spent most of that day orienteering in one such purpose-grown pine forest. It had been far more difficult than he and his friends had expected: there’d been no paths in there, no streams, hardly any landmarks at all apart from the occasional firebreak; only file after regimented file of identical pines, their foliage so dense and prickly and meshed together that it was a struggle to make headway in any direction. On that occasion, of course, he’d had a map and compass, so any difficulties he’d encountered then would be magnified tenfold this time.

  Mark thought about telling Terri again that there was no need for her to go farther. But he knew she wasn’t accompanying him solely to provide support; she wanted to ensure that he didn’t do anything stupid.

  Then he saw movement.

  At first it was only a flicker on the edge of his vision. He turned his head left, gazing hard, trying to focus on the black spaces amid the matted, emerald boughs. And yes, for a fleeting second, a human figure was visible, but moving away into the dimness, rapidly vanishing, the way a sinking body descends into the murk of the ocean.

  Instinctively, without really thinking, Mark started forward across the grass.

  It was the first real surprise Terri had had since the start of her relationship with Mark: she’d got back to the fence and found no sign of him.

  She pulled down the hood of her waterproof and stared across the meadow. Surely he hadn’t gone on ahead without her? She reached for the mobile phone in her pocket. That was what she’d do if they ever became separated in a shopping mall or something. But now she remembered that when she’d been getting her coat from the car, she’d seen his mobile in the glove box.

  Irritated, she climbed over the fence, and started forward toward the wood. The ground was so soggy that it squelched with each step, and as Terri only had trainers on, her feet were soon wringing wet. At last she reached the trees, but still there was no sign of him. She paused, peering as far into the depths of the wood as she could. Thanks to the way it had been grown, there was little ground cover, only a smooth carpet of needles. The downside, however, was that there was no light either. True, there were narrow passages between the rows of firs, and these led away from her in straight lines, but many soon became lost in dense brush and opaque shadow. Slowly, the enormity of what she was going to have to do sank in. It went against all logic for her to wander into a silent stretch of unknown woodland, even if her boyfriend was somewhere close by.

  She listened in the hope that she’d hear him, but the only sound was that constant hiss of wind on the distant hilltops. Even birdsong was notable by its absence. Terri stood there for several minutes, then finally zipped her cagoule up and strode forward. This was a private estate; who was likely to be here who would offer danger? A gamekeeper would merely show her to the exit. Poachers, certainly in England, were better known for cutting and running when confronted than for attacking. A few minutes later, though, such easy rationalization seemed misplaced. Once she was inside the wood, its shadows closed around her; she pressed on, but soon was having to turn sideways just to make progress. The air itself changed. Outside, it was fresh, invigorating. Here, it was strongly scented—with sap from the young trees, and mold from the layer of mulch under her feet. Strands of cobweb were soon crisscrossing her path, glistening with raindrops; clusters of unhealthy-looking toadstools sprouted among the more exposed roots. As the wind couldn’t penetrate very far in, the silence became sepulchral. There was a stillness too: it was heavy, ominous, as though it forbade you to disturb it; the stillness you got in church, she thought.

  Then a figure crossed her path.

  Terri stopped dead. Chills ran up her spine like electric currents.

  A rather unpleasant figure.

  To begin with, it hadn’t been walking. Whoever had reported that they’d seen figures walking in this wood was way off the mark. This thing had been sliding, or perhaps “gliding” would be a better term. It had crossed the path ahead of her in a single smooth movement, without any of the jerking, perambulating motions one normally associates with a legged animal. Not that she was convinced this figure even had legs. She thought it was wearing a ragged, shiftlike garment, almost a toga, with one section thrown over the left shoulder, as a result of which only the upper torso had been visible. If you could call it a torso. Because it was ghoulishly skeletal: a narrow, upright cage constructed of tubular metal and painted deathly white. Terri wondered if it was painted luminous white, if it would glow in the dark as it patroled these deep and silent groves. Despite that almost too eerie thought, she blundered forward to the point where she’d seen the thing.

  She spotted it again, watching it for several moments before coniferous curtains sprang back into place to block it from sight. Terri stayed where she was, thinking quickly. It definitely had a humanoid shape. Its left arm was hanging by its side, and had looked visibly prosthetic—molded from pale plastic, jointed at the elbow with a screw—the sort of thing you’d find in a hospital skip. The right arm, however, projected out in front, and was narrower, longer, and char black, almost like a bar of burnt or badly corroded iron. There was a glove on the end of it, a leather gauntlet. The iron bar had been inserted as far into this gauntlet as the index finger; the impression created was that the figure was pointing ahead as it moved.

  Terri thrust her way through the brush. There was nothing to be frightened of here. The object was a work of art, a sculpture, nothing more. She fought her way into open space, and looked around her. What kind of head did it have? She thought it was smooth and oval, egglike, with a see-through bag pulled down over it, tied at the neck. At the front there was a photograph of some sort, or perhaps an illustration.

  “Hello?” she said aloud, only belatedly realizing how absurd she was being. Artworks didn’t respond to human contact.

  Then she glimpsed it again. Or, at least, its back—thirty yards distant, once again receding through the green arches of the
wood. It had apparently turned right, and as Terri started to follow, it turned again. This time it veered to the left, quite sharply, catching her by surprise. Though it wasn’t too far ahead, this new maneuver threw her completely off-track. She spun around, confused. Branches obstructed her; pine needles prickled her cheeks. She scrambled on, but her quarry was no longer in view. She halted to listen, but could hear nothing except her own hurried breathing. She wasn’t even sure now which direction she was facing in. If she decided to go back to the car, she wouldn’t be able to find it easily.

  “Mark!” she called out.

  All of a sudden, she got angry. She was drenched, and not just her legs and feet, but her body as well: the inside of her waterproof now ran with sweat.

  “Mark, where the hell are you?” she shouted. “God damn it, this is ridiculous!”

  She entered another straight-line avenue. Following one of these passages would eventually bring her back to the outside world, though at which part of the wood’s circumference she couldn’t imagine.

  “This is ludicrous,” she said, checking her watch: it was almost seven o’clock.

  She glanced overhead. The clouds—the few she could see through the interlacing branches—had broken a little. In fact, they were streaked with blue, were mackerel-like; it was more like an August evening than a September one. The difference was that it was now getting distinctly colder, and dusk was shortly due to fall. There was nothing for it; she was going to have to follow this particular passage to its end. The question was whether to go forward or to go back. She looked over her shoulder.

  And saw a figure that had clearly been encroaching on her for the last half-minute.