The Festering

by Guy N Smith

  He swung, gyrating first one way then the other. No veins swelled, no eyes bulged out of the dark sockets, just pus pouring from his orifices. The gathering smelled the vile odour and moved back. Even the Witchfinder pulled his mount away.

  There was no way of telling whether Tabor was still alive or dead. Arms and feet hung limply, no muscles twitched. The peasants had grouped and were awaiting a sign that they had permission to leave – and praying God that the crows and hawks did a good job before the burying tomorrow!

  ‘Cut him down!’

  Heads jerked round at the command, and there were muttered grunts of horrified surprise. No, please, not yet!

  It might have been an optical illusion, but the Witchfinder’s lips appeared to tremble as he spoke. ‘I said cut him down and bury him. The evil in that body lives on and nothing will destroy it. When it has devoured every morsel of diseased flesh on those bones it will move on in search of another body. The only way to be sure is to bury the corpse so deep that the undying plague cannot find a way out.’

  A rippled gasp of terror greeted his words.

  ‘You heard me.’ The black-clad man was already wheeling his mount and there was no mistaking his urgency to leave. ‘Tabor has a plague the likes of which I have only heard whispered, one that devours body and soul, and then, still hungering, goes in search of further prey. There is still time, there is still flesh left on his body, but do not delay. Inter him as deep as the well from which you draw your water, for your own safety. And may the good Lord protect you from that which they call the Festering!’

  He wheeled his horse, dug his heels into its flanks, and within minutes the Witchfinder was swallowed up by the late afternoon fog as it began to roll back towards the village.

  A dozen frightened men went to fetch spades and buckets and ropes with which to haul the surplus soil out of the deep shaft. There was still a couple of hours of foggy daylight left, and they wasted no time in setting to work. Earth was thrown to one side, causing miniature avalanches as the mound grew. The hole was deepening; now two men were waist deep in it, shovelling frantically, then up to their necks; soon a ladder would be necessary.

  The womenfolk stood back, watching; there was nothing they could do to help, but they were afraid to return to their empty houses. The Witchfinder’s warning still echoed in their ears. The Festering.

  Tabor’s body hung from the bough, and those brave enough to look saw how that stinking dribble still oozed and dried on the wasted frame, an entity that lived even though the flesh was dead, seeping out as if it already hungered for another. They would leave it there until they were ready for it; let the scavenging birds enjoy a diseased repast.

  Only darkness halted their progress and sent them back to their hovels, where they skulked fearfully throughout a sleepless night. Soon after first light they returned to their work. Tabor still dangled from his gallows, now unrecognizable beneath a layer of caked cancerous matter, a waxen figure awaiting its burial patiently. Another day’s work, and still the diggers were not finished; another night of terror, but by midday on the third day the shaft was mutually agreed to be deep enough. In frantic haste, the corpse was cut down and dragged by its rope to the top of the hole, where a long pole was used to topple it over the edge.

  In silence they listened; if they had been other than uneducated peasants they would have counted the seconds. As it was they just waited; time seemed to have stopped. Then they sighed their relief as they heard a muffled thud from far below.

  Even the women joined their men in a frenzy to shovel back the excavated soil, working with their hands because there were not enough shovels. They were finished just as darkness closed in like a God-sent mantle to hide this time of terror. And afterwards they knelt and prayed that they had been in time.

  That the Festering was destroyed for ever.

  1

  ‘I could live here forever.’ There was a note of ecstasy in Holly Mannion’s voice as she gazed back from the overgrown garden at the small stone cottage with ivy and Virginia creeper competing for space over the crumbling stonework. Window sills had rotted over the last couple of decades, some slates were missing from the roof, a downspout was clinging on by a single bracket; dereliction, but right now in the warm summer sunlight Garth Cottage was the most beautiful place on earth.

  There was a smile on Holly’s soft lips, her dark eyes shone and her slim fingers brushed away a strand of long black hair which the warm breeze had wafted over her finely cut features. Shorts and a bikini top showed off her shapely figure to perfection. Feeling carefree, she spoke her thoughts aloud. Because it felt good being out here, miles away from the town and the nine-to-five routine which had dominated their lives for the last six years. She knew now what ‘getting away from it all’ felt like: it was a sense of freedom. You didn’t give a damn so long as you had something to eat and a roof over your head, even if there were slates missing, the rafters had warped and on wet nights rain dripped through into the only bedroom. Right now it was hot and the sun shone and nothing else mattered.

  ‘It won’t be so good in winter.’ The tall bearded man did not glance up from where he stood endeavouring to point up a wide crack between the stones in the wall, pursing his lips as he filled the uneven narrow gully with cement which was drying out too fast in the warmth. He tried not to think about the half-finished landscape which rested on the easel in his improvised lean-to studio. The trouble with this new lifestyle, he concluded, was that there were too many distractions. If he remained indoors working on his painting, then he felt he ought to be outside making the most of this unprecedented heatwave; and when he succumbed to that temptation and struggled to master the art of pointing, he felt guilty because he should be working. Whichever way he looked at it, he couldn’t win. A chunk of half-dried cement crumbled and fell out of the hole. Mike Mannion grunted his annoyance, dropped his trowel and turned round.

  ‘Grumpy!’ his wife taunted him. ‘Just because you can’t get the cement to stay in place doesn’t mean that life is going to be all drudgery here, Mike. We’ll get by, one way or another. After all, I can’t expect to have a husband who’s a brickie as well as a talented artist, can I?’

  ‘No,’ A half-smile touched his bearded lips. ‘But you knew that before you married me. Damn it, I can’t even knock a nail in straight, so how the hell can we expect to renovate this place without either the know-how or the money? We don’t have either. At the moment we’re just breaking even, and I just hope to God I sell that picture which I should be finishing instead of wasting my time on a patching up job that won’t be any good when I’ve finished it, anyway. You might well change your mind about living out here when winter comes.’

  It had been Holly’s idea to pack up and leave their home in the Midlands. Mike had been quite content living in a terraced house, where he had his small studio in the second bedroom. There was little gardening required of him, gas central heating which was reasonably economic and few other overheads. And when his pictures weren’t selling, there was always Holly’s monthly secretarial salary to fall back upon. All an artist asked of life was the tools of his trade and somewhere to work. But Holly had been bitten by this get-out-of-the-rat-race bug, just as their friends Dave and Moira had been. Mike reckoned that they had influenced his wife, brainwashed her into the idea. Dave had been a bank clerk with reasonable prospects, but he had thrown them all overboard for a five-acre smallholding that was mostly Welsh mountain scrubland and would just about support a few sheep and some hens. Back to the good life, and to hell with it if they faced near poverty. ‘Freedom’ was the word they had used; nobody to tell you what you had to do as your stomach rumbled and you consulted that book about food from the hedgerows.

  Mike had resisted the idea, but once Holly’s mind was made up, he knew he might as well save his breath. Their town house had sold miraculously quickly – he had hoped secretly that there would be no takers and in due course Holly would abandon her wild scheme. They had made
fifteen hundred pounds profit after they had bought Garth Cottage and its one and a half acres of wilderness, but that money had been swallowed up on the basic improvements needed to make it habitable and the addition of his studio. He still wondered if they should have obtained planning permission for it, but the farmer who had sold them the cottage assured them that it wasn’t necessary and, in any case, out here the planning people didn’t give a cuss what you did. Mike hoped that nobody from the council would come out to check.

  Anyway, what was done was done. They were living right out in the sticks in a tumbledown stone dwelling, which the estate agent had assured them had ‘potential’, and it was no good moaning. If Mike’s agent managed to sell his latest picture, then at least they would have a little cash in hand. Otherwise … he grimaced. Life out here could be a lot tougher than in the town if the dice were loaded against you.

  ‘I’ll go and make a cup of tea.’ Holly sensed his mood but she wasn’t relenting. ‘Comfrey or raspberry leaf? Or chamomile?’

  ‘Just a plain old ordinary tea bag, thanks,’ he retorted.

  ‘Please yourself.’ She began to walk towards the cottage, biting back the remark on the tip of her tongue that if the picture didn’t sell, then it was going to be herb tea fresh from the hedgerows from then on, whether he liked it or not. This was not the time to remind him of that; maybe tomorrow he would go back to his painting and then she would take over the pointing; DIY was more her line than her husband’s. Much more.

  Mike scooped up another lump of cement on his trowel and studied it pensively. The mix was too dry, that was why it was falling out all the time. Make it too sloppy, and it just trickled out of the crack. There had to be a happy medium; he would try just one more time. He reached out for the watering can, but knew by its lightness even as he lifted it up that it was empty. Damn it, everything was against him today, he sighed. He would go into the kitchen and fill it at the sink, and stop for a cup of tea, herb or conventional brew, whilst he was there. And afterwards …

  ‘Mike!’ There was consternation on Holly’s face as she met him at the door, the same expression as when she had discovered that the floorboards in the bedroom had dry rot, and again when she first became aware of the rising damp in the kitchen. He groaned inwardly.

  ‘Let’s have that cup of tea before you tell me.’ Somehow he managed to grin.

  ‘We can’t.’ Now there was genuine despair in her voice, a tone of helplessness. ‘Mike, there’s nothing coming out of the taps. We’re out of water!’

  His initial reaction was to exclaim in relieved tones, ‘Well, that puts paid to my pointing. Now I can go and finish that picture.’ Slowly the implications of a waterless existence filtered through to him; his mouth was suddenly dry and it was difficult to swallow. No tea, for a start; nothing to drink at all unless they carried water from the brook a quarter of a mile away and boiled it; no flushing the loo, washing up, bathing, or a dozen things that you took for granted in the town. He leaned up against the doorpost, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Let me have a try.’ His words lacked conviction as he crossed to the old stone sink.

  He was hoping that by some miracle water would gush out of the taps if he turned them on hard enough. Aware of his wife’s scathing expression, he wrenched at the taps and eventually managed a few drips into the washing-up bowl. That was all; and after a few moments even the dripping stopped.

  ‘Mike, whatever are we going to do?’

  He did not reply. Instead his impracticable mind was trying to recall the mechanics of their water system, which the taciturn Hughes had shown them the day they had looked over Garth Cottage. A botch-up of a system, a Heath Robinson effort devised by the old farmer primarily to run water to the old cottage at minimum expense so that it could be put on the open market. A hydraulic ram was situated in a bricked-up well somewhere in the stream about three-quarters of a mile away, a complicated-looking contraption that worked on pressure and did so many thumps to the minute, and pumped up one gallon of water for every ten that it let swirl on downstream. The thing was roofed with a piece of rusted corrugated tin sheeting with holes in it. Somehow the water went uphill through some PVC piping that was buried in an old forestry furrow, all the way to the top, where it crossed the lane through a council land drain. It went on another two hundred yards, serving a couple of sheep drinking troughs, until it finally flowed weakly into a small five-hundred-gallon reservoir, which it filled up to the outlet pipe, and trickled on down to supply the cottage.

  ‘ ’E kept goin’ all through that summer of seventy-six,’ Hughes had commented slyly, refraining from mentioning that at the time of that historic drought nobody had been living at Garth Cottage; in all probability the reservoir had not been built then, and all the ram had to supply was a couple of troughs to satisfy a few thirsty hill sheep.

  ‘We’d better go and have a look in the reservoir.’ Mike slipped an arm around Holly’s slim waist. One step at a time he thought. Of course, the reservoir would be empty – that was a foregone conclusion – but it seemed a positive move. Then they would trek down to the lower forest and wade up the stream until they came to the ram, and see if it was working. It probably wasn’t. In which case the buck had to be passed to Elwyn Hughes. His enthusiasm towards the Mannions seemed to have waned somewhat since the completion of the sale. All the same, there was a clause in the deeds that he had to supply them with domestic water. Mike’s lips tightened; he’d damned well make that miserly old hill farmer get the water flowing again. If you did not have the know-how yourself, you had to resort to other means. He clenched his fists until his knuckles whitened.

  The reservoir was empty, as Mike had anticipated. He knew by the hollow sound which the heavy concrete hatch made when he dropped it as he struggled to lift it up, a booming echo from within like a controlled underground explosion. They stared into the gloomy tomb-like depths and saw the half-inch or so of water on the floor below. Some water beetles were swimming in it, and there was a spider’s web halfway down the far wall, the water had not been flowing in here for a week at least.

  ‘So much for that.’ Mike let the heavy cover drop back, detonating another miniature earthquake beneath them, and felt the vibrations escalating his sense of futility. The ram wasn’t working, for sure, but they would go and look, all the same.

  The forest was cool and shady after the heat of the slope above – forbidding, in a way, Holly thought, like those dark woods in childhood fairy tale books that harboured ogres and evil dwarfs. Trees with twisted holes became leering faces if you looked at them long enough. She clasped Mike’s hand tightly and told herself not to be so stupid; their worry was their water supply, not imagined bogeymen.

  In places, they had to duck down beneath low branches and fight their way through bramble bushes and clumps of pink wild willow herb. She was sweating, but felt relieved when at last they reached the narrow sluggish stream. There was only an inch or so of water in it; it had narrowed to a channel barely six inches wide, and the mud on either side was caked and cracking. Her hopes were falling fast, and she was reminded of that tiny terraced house where there was always water in the taps, even if it was laced with chlorine and fluoride and any other nasties which the bureaucratic water board chose to contaminate it with. At least it was wet and plentiful, even if it made the strongest cup of tea taste of chemicals. No, that was no way to be thinking. Sod the water authorities, she would prefer to collect her own unpalatable drinking water out of the stream with a bucket than be subjected to their unthinkable harmful additives. She had her principles, which was why she and Mike had moved out to the Garth.

  A square of chipped and crumbling brickwork rose up out of the shallow watercourse up ahead of them like some gremlin’s dwelling place. She tensed as Mike stopped, aware of his breathing in the still atmosphere. A moment of fleeting panic, then she knew that he had only stopped to listen, straining his ears to catch the thump-thump-thump of the ram like some mechanical heartbeat buildin
g up to a crescendo. Hoping, they desperately willed their ears to pick up the rhythmic vibrations. But there was only silence.

  They did not speak as they moved forward, Mike dropping to a crouch as he struggled to lift off the rusted cover weighed down with stones, which he sent splashing into the feeble current.

  They both stared at the ugly cast-iron monstrosity that stood lifeless in its brick prison, the deformed dwarf of Holly’s imagined fears earlier, sombre black streaked with red rust, a statuette condemned to a watery grave, a victim of Man’s mechanical ingenuity that had died and still stood upright. Half an inch of water swirled around its base then went its way unmolested.

  ‘The ram’s stopped: that’s why we’ve got no water.’ Mike voiced the obvious because one of them had to say something about the confirmation of their fears. They stared, foolishly praying that suddenly this lifeless piece of mechanism would start to pump again. But it wouldn’t.

  ‘I wonder how it works.’ Mike Mannion leaned forward, touched it and felt the icy coldness of a dead thing, an iron corpse.

  ‘However it works, you won’t get it going again!’ There was sarcasm in Holly’s voice, a tone she immediately regretted. She was being unfair to her husband. Unless you understood hydraulic water machines you didn’t stand an earthly of maintaining them. She was being unfair to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and squeezed his arm. She wasn’t going to ask him what he was going to do next. They had both run out of ideas, and right now she felt an urge to burst into tears. She wondered if she would feel better if she did, releasing her pent-up frustrations.