by Adam Nevill
And now something is moving out there, through the vague and dark spaces behind the treeline. Wood cracks and splinters as it moves, just out of sight.
Pacing the weed-fringed clearing it begins to announce itself more readily with a yipping sound that occasionally breaks into a bark, and soars up to the icy clarity of indigo-black sky. A cry this place has known for a long time before you stood here, shivering and alone.
It’s trying to tell you something.
It is letting you know that you can wait for it here and watch it come fast from the trees, or you can try to run on slow and strengthless legs. Flee out there, through the spikes and snares of ungroomed woodland. Into the heaving army that will not let you pass easily through its rows and ranks.
It must be tall, because the branches so far from the ground begin to move straight ahead of you. Some are bent aside and allowed to whip back into place, where they settle and shudder. And through the silvery leaves come the deep guttural grunts. Almost a voice, but not something you can understand. Thick with doggish whines, bull coughs and jackal cries. Its breath turns to fog among the leaves and now you can see no more than the suggestion of something long and black moving swiftly between bush and trunk.
Sinking lower to the ground, it makes ready to appear.
Then the air is filled with screams, but not the cold air here, Luke realizes. But in the air of the world outside his nightmare something even worse was now occurring.
TWENTY-NINE
At first Luke heard the screams from a distance, inside his dream. And then someone’s terror was all around him as he lay with his eyes open, staring at the dark roof of the tent he shared with Phil.
Heavy with the thick fugue he had been jerked from, his first thought was to lie still in the dark and to wait for the cries to stop. Only the screams of hysteria, of mindlessness, did not cease. The awful sound of a man shaken apart by panic and fear to the point of extinction, turned the very air into a turbulence in which no clear thought could form or settle within earshot of it.
In the sightless cold he had awoken into, Luke then comprehended, both with shock and a sudden relief, that the noisy commotion was coming from the adjoining tent. It was Dom.
The loose fabric on the ceiling of his own tent rippled from the commotion in the neighbouring tent, from where the screams were issuing. It all brought to his mind the sense of someone being violently yanked from their berth, accompanied by sounds of cloth torn into long strips and a thrashing of bushes.
Luke sat bolt upright and fumbled for the zipper of his sleeping bag. Then snatched about for his torch in the darkness, but his hands could not find it. By the time he gave up on the torch and pawed his shaky fingers across his damp trousers, needing to find the shape of the Swiss Army knife in the front pocket, Phil sat up beside him.
‘What is it? What is it? What is it?’ Phil repeated in a daze, but within his tone was also an underlying note of acceptance, as if he had been expecting the disturbance and now it had arrived he only wanted to know specific details.
And then their movements and their words stopped, as did Dom’s wailing. All was frozen into silence by the sudden roar of pain unleashed by Hutch. A short expulsion of noise from an agony so great it made the listeners feel sick. It was followed by a childlike whimper, and nothing more.
Away from their camp tunnelled the noise of a heavy weight at ground level, rushing into the forest, snapping aside and crushing flat all woody impediments as it retreated at speed into the returning silence that was once again only dimpled with gentle rainfall upon the leaves and the fabric of their half-collapsed tents. Then into this vacuum came several strange bird and animal cries, as if these creatures had also shared the terror of the rout of the camp, out there in their own darkness, and were now calling out nervously to survivors buried in rubble.
Phil’s torch clicked alight. Coloured entrails of clothing spilled from his rucksack. Two damp waterproof coats lay dishevelled by the sagging entrance. No inch of groundsheet was free of the clutter Phil had littered about the tent. In the mess, Luke saw his own torch, snatched it up.
Beside them, through the thin material that pressed against Luke’s body as he scrambled to his hands and knees, they heard Dom’s rhythmic panting in the next tent. He sounded like a man suffocating, or suffering some kind of fit.
Luke kicked free of his sleeping bag. He trod on his cold waterproof trousers, still damp with yesterday’s rain, and shivered when the naked parts of his body touched the clammy groundsheet and the interior of the tent’s moist fabric. Bent double, shuffling to the entrance, he looked about for his boots. They were still wet inside. He discarded them. Behind him, Phil clutched at his own clothes.
Knife extended, Luke ducked through the unzipped flap. Lost his balance, swore, then righted himself and rose into the night air. It punished his cheeks. Around his startled senses a thousand things dripped into the darkness. Through small apertures in the forest canopy the sky was a black void that quickly swallowed his torch’s feeble beam. He could not move his body out of the tent’s porch.
When the white light of his torch came down to earth it found the second tent.
There were several things terribly wrong with it.
Luke heaved in his breath and tried not to sob: the tent had completely collapsed into a lumpy mess of nylon and guy ropes and much of one side had been torn away; the ripped white netting of the inner compartment had been revealed, its incongruous appearance utterly shocking against the wet black earth; around the jagged edges of the rent in the outer skin of the tent, a liquid glistened in a series of long streaks and clots, and even pools. Shaking from his hand that held the torch, the beam of weak white light trembled about the heavy stains on the torn nylon. They were bright red in colour: oxygenated blood.
Luke’s mind could not be whole, or steady. There was a rushing of incomplete thoughts and notions, some utterly petty, in and out of the space inside him where his mind needed to define itself and focus. He could not move; just stood upright in his underwear and shuddered from the cold, from the emotion, from the sudden surge and ebb of adrenaline in his own blood.
Somewhere inside the punctured rag that was once a two-man tent, Dom lay gasping. Luke did not want to look under the wet green and yellow nylon. Guy ropes lay slack as if the tent cloth was a sail collapsed upon a yacht’s deck at night in some black godless sea, with a crew member trapped beneath it.
The articulated fibreglass poles of the dome frame had been pulled apart in some places, and protruded in the disorderly display of fabric. The tent now reminded him of a great kite that had smashed to earth. Inside the crumpled mess was pain and bleeding. Something Luke wanted to run from without seeing.
He turned about where he stood and flashed his torch across the uneven and encroaching perimeter of the clearing. Mossy bark, blackened tree branches, dark sopping leaves, shadows between. Inside himself he cringed and thought of what Phil thought he had seen in the cemetery. He expected to see the limbs of trees suddenly animate and draw his stare to a terrible shape taking form. But nothing moved.
He swallowed noisily, blinked his wide dry eyes. ‘Dom! Dom!’ he suddenly called at the lumpy remnants beside his own half-collapsed tent. Flashed his torch over the ruin again. ‘Are you hurt, mate?’ His voice seemed to die before two words were out of his mouth. His chest shuddered like it had just endured a great sob or an intake of icy air.
Got to keep it together.
‘Where’s Hutch?’ Phil said from the ground level beside Luke’s naked legs. He had come pushing, clumsily, through the doorway into the porch of their tent on his hands and knees. His torch beam clashed with Luke’s, tried to move it aside while it flicked and probed at the heap beside them.
Luke stepped out of the tent’s porch in his underwear. The shock of the cold earth against his pale bare feet punched his breath back inside his chest. Disorientated, he trod on the end of a tent peg, then tripped over one of their tent’s few taut guy r
opes and fell sideways into the trees. A sudden slap of wet verdure against his soft face, and the poke and snap of a small branch under his weight, forced him to right his position, to get fully to his feet, to gather his bearings. Wakefulness came fully and coldly and shivering right then.
‘Domja!’ Luke called, resorting to the nickname he used in better times. It drew a reaction. A punching out, a raking of fingers from inside the deflated green and yellow tent.
‘Easy. Easy,’ Luke said, but then stepped back as Dom came through the rent on his hands and knees. Dom was wearing a purple fleece, boxer shorts and thick grey socks. His sleeping bag followed him through the tear, caught on one foot. He kicked it away and stood up as best he could. The leg with the grubby bandaged knee was hopelessly bent. His dirty streaky face looked like it had just emerged from a coal mine; it shuddered in the light from the two torch beams. He eyes were red and wild.
Phil was on his feet now too, his legs bare, boots unlaced, hair sticking upright in a fan across one side of his head.
‘Where the fuck is H?’ Dom demanded of them, breathless. He looked at Luke, then at Phil, then Luke again. ‘Where the fuck is he?’
THIRTY
They returned to the campsite two hours after waking. Above the forest, where they could see it, the sky was now a dark indigo.
No one spoke from the shock of it all. They were numb with fright and sick at the colossal thought they each tried to comprehend, then accept. Something that would keep rearing up in their minds and hearts when they were too tired to suppress it and were caught off guard. Something impossible, something consuming, something choking.
They had called his name a hundred times; hobbling and shuffling in a nervous pack, torch beams flashing all about them at the dripping impenetrability of the forest; heads whipping back and forth at every meagre sound or far-off screech of a bird in the cold air, until they were dizzy and aching and exhausted by their own skittish fears. No one answered their calls; calls that were strident at first, then desperate, and finally just hoarse and not penetrating much beyond the immediate thickets.
‘Hutch!’
‘Mate!’
‘Hutch!’
‘H!’
It had been too dark to see the evidence of his departure. But Hutch was gone and now they were left alone with his blood that was dark and thickening all about the broken-down tent.
‘Can you take the other tent down?’ Luke asked them, breaking a long silence with a voice that was flat and distant to his own ears. ‘And pack it up. Plus your gear. We need to move the minute the light improves.’
Mystified, Dom and Phil just stared at Luke. Shocked and angry with him too, but also listless and apathetic, they just stared, and stared. He tried to explain himself. ‘I’m packed. The map. I need to look at it.’ He glanced at the destroyed tent. ‘Maybe sort Hutch’s things as well.’
It was four in the morning; they had been woken at two. But at least they were all inside their sleeping bags by eleven the night before, so a few hours’ sleep were behind them. Not enough to recover from the previous day’s exertions, Luke calculated, but enough to give them a few hours of strength this coming morning. The most important hours of the entire trip so far. Luke knew the edge of the forest must be reached in the coming morning, by noon latest. Dom’s knee would slow him to a weak shuffle soon after. Once that happened, they would not progress more than a mile or two before nightfall.
‘What?’ Dom finally said, stupefied.
‘His torch. Knife. Stuff we can use. He had energy bars in his bag.’
Dom looked at Phil. Then raised both arms, before clapping them at his sides. ‘We’re not going anywhere ’til we find him.’
Luke looked at the ground and released a long and tired sigh.
‘What are you suggesting? We just take off? Cherry-pick his gear?’ Dom barked, his words trembling with emotion.
Phil looked at the ruined tent and the blood that had gone viscous and oily in the thin light of a stray torch’s light, idle and unfortunate in its placement. And there was so much of it to be seen, if you angled your torch through the hole as Phil then did.
‘Oh God, H.’ Phil suddenly crouched down and covered his face with both hands. Now he understood.
But at the sound of Phil’s distress, a huge lump came into Luke’s throat. He stopped listening to Dom, closed his eyes. H, H, H is gone; an idiot rhyme chanted through his head. He felt like a child. The urgency of his purpose to get them occupied and then moving dissipated.
Phil was crying. Dom’s face crumpled. A long syrup of saliva drooped from his bottom lip. His eyes welled with water. One hand across his brow, as if shielding his face from the sun, his shoulders moved with each sob. Luke felt his jaw loosen. Salt scalded his throat down to his sternum. Hutch’s smiling face came into his mind. He almost heard a cackle. The idea he no longer existed was so preposterous it made him lightheaded. Then it was as if he had heartburn and indigestion at the same time.
Luke dropped to his buttocks and groaned through a cage of fingers wrapped about his face. For once he was oblivious to the stinging scratches on his calves and those hot lines etched across his cheeks and ears, was immune to the tugging aches inside his thighs. Beyond his own clasping hands, the other two wept into the darkness.
At one point Luke stood up and immediately bumped into Phil, who seized him, his head down, and he squeezed Luke’s biceps so hard Luke thought Phil’s long dirty nails had drawn blood inside his waterproof. He had to prise Phil’s fingers off his arms. Then hold Dom’s shoulders as he too shook from terror or grief or a panic attack; Luke didn’t know. And for a long time they were all disorientated and incapable in the darkness and the cold. They blundered. They cried. Until they all sat and stared in silence, shivering in the cold that drew their warmth from out of their fragile bodies and into the dense black earth.
THIRTY-ONE
‘You can’t stay here.’ Luke spoke quietly to Dom, who sat on his pack beside the demolished tent. ‘You’ve a few hours in that knee this morning to make another concerted effort to get out of here. We’ll keep going south. We have to. Now. In as straight a line as possible.’
Dom hung his head between his knees. He’d grieved himself to silent exhaustion before they had even taken a step.
Luke took a deep drag on his cigarette and then spoke through the veil of bluish smoke hanging before his face. ‘Your knee is shot. It’ll seize up before midday. Me and Hutch …’ he paused and swallowed, ‘we talked last night. We were hoping you two would be able to rest up for a day or two here, while I carried on to find a way out and get us help. He wanted you off your knee for a bit. And to give Phil time to get his wind back. There is enough water for a couple of days, and we know where to get more if help is more than two days away. But everything has changed now. We cannot … we cannot spend another night in this place. End of story.’
‘Don’t,’ was all Dom said, elbows on his knees, lifting his bruised and puffy face and looking at Luke in such a way as to prevent any reminder of what happened at night out here.
Luke waved a hand as if to knock something away. ‘I’ve just been looking for …’ He cleared his throat. ‘He was taken through there.’ Luke pointed at the faint aperture in the wall of scrub on his right side. ‘The way it’s all been broken down stops about twenty feet in. And the blood.’
‘You’re not leaving us here. We stick together from now on,’ Phil suddenly blurted out from where he was standing at the side of the clearing, looking into the wet darkness.
Luke nodded. ‘Of course. Goes without saying.’
Dom looked at him. ‘You don’t know where the fuck we are, do you?’
‘Vaguely.’
Dom laughed mirthlessly. ‘Vaguely. Vaguely. Haven’t we had enough of vaguely? I mean vaguely is the reason we are sitting here now around a tent full of blood. Any more vague ideas of which way we should be heading are going to get the rest of us killed.’
Phil sucked
in his breath.
Luke studied the outline of Dom’s face, again suppressing the urge, which came up his throat like panic, to just take off on his own. He took a moment to place his thoughts in a careful row. ‘The chance to retrace our steps back out of here is long gone. So we have no choice but to keep going south. We’ve got to hope we can break out through the closest edge of the forest. What Hutch was aiming for.’
Phil looked at Dom. ‘We have to. I’m not staying here, waiting for help.’
Luke looked at his watch. ‘Today we should have reached Porjus. Tomorrow night we’re supposed to head back to Stockholm. Day after that we’re supposed to be back home early.’ He looked at the other two and heard a note of hope lighten his tone of voice. ‘How long before someone realizes something’s gone wrong for us and raises the alarm? Your folks expecting you guys to call home tonight? Tomorrow?’
Neither Phil nor Dom would meet his eye. Both looked down in a new kind of discomfort that had nothing to do with exhaustion, cold, or a lack of sleep. It was as if they had suddenly realized the consequences of some unfortunate news.
Hutch said they were both separated, but Luke wondered what that really meant. Would they still be in daily contact with their wives because of the kids? Would they be expected to physically reappear and perform fatherly duties at a prescribed time? Because no one was expecting him to call. He’d only been seeing Charlotte, casually, for a month. His supervisor at work would call his mobile if he didn’t show up on Monday. But that was still four days away. And being absent from work and out of reach for a few days would not result in his colleagues putting in a call to the authorities. He doubted his boss would do anything other than hire someone else to take his job after a week of him not checking in. His parents might be concerned after a couple of months of silence. And his handful of friends in London might wonder why he had gone to ground for a while, but he couldn’t imagine them making a prompt and determined effort to track him down either. He often went months these days without seeing any of them. They were all busy with their own lives and lived in different parts of the city. And he was just not that close to anyone any more, if he was really honest with himself. His best bet was his flatmate; they had little in common, and she’d only lived in the flat for six months, but she was looking after his dog while he was away in Sweden. Surely, she’d be the first to try and work out where he was; maybe a week after he failed to show. But who would she call? Who did she know of to call? She’d leave messages on his mobile and then maybe check in with the record shop, if she could even remember the name of it. And that would only probably be because she was sick of walking the dog twice a day.