by R. H. Dixon
Smiler wellied a stone of his own into the woods and grunted. ‘Apparently not,’ he said. ‘The media had their fill of me before I went missing. My fans, sorry ex fans, probably think I’m rotting in jail somewhere and the authorities, well, they’ll most likely think I’m living in some subway or dosshouse, doped up to the eyeballs, lamenting my guilt. Or fwapping off to the memory of what they think I got away with, more like.’
Callie stopped walking and gawped at him. ‘And that would be the memory of what exactly? Why would people think you’re in jail?’
He stopped too. ‘You mean, you don’t know?’
‘Er, I don’t believe so.’
‘Seriously?’
‘I’m sure I’d be sure if I did.’
Smiler closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sky. ‘I should have known!’
‘I feel like I should too.’ Callie waited to be filled in.
‘I thought you were being nice to me because you didn’t believe the vicious slander.’ When he opened his eyes again they were glossy with tears. Of frustration, not sadness. ‘But that’s not true. You’re being nice to me because you don’t frigging know. You have no idea!’
‘So you and Pollyanna keep telling me,’ Callie said, with an unappreciative scowl.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Well, aren’t you going to give me an idea?’ She began to feel more than a little uneasy. The fog had crept a little bit closer while she hadn’t been paying attention to it and Smiler was right in her face. Too close. She edged away.
‘I’d rather not talk about it right now if that’s okay,’ he said, beginning to walk again, his shoulders hunched. ‘It kills me every time it gets dredged up.’
‘Well, as long as it doesn’t kill me to not know.’ Callie could barely find the will to move her feet to go after him. Who was he? What had he done? It was the fog and the trees breathing down her neck that got her walking again. But she lagged behind by a few paces.
‘I was acquitted, just so you know.’ He stopped and waited so she had to catch up. ‘And I’ll carry on professing my innocence till the day I die. The whole thing makes me feel sick. Sick! I swear to God, Callie, I didn’t do anything.’
‘Well, if you say.’ Callie cringed at her own words. Was it too weak a response? Condescending even? Was he about to flip his lid and go berserk? She was stranded in the woods with some bloke she didn’t know who had apparently stood trial for something which, if she was a betting person, sounded pretty bad.
Come on life, give me a fucking break!
‘I don’t speak to either of my parents,’ Smiler said, as though offering voluntary information about his personal life might smooth over everything he’d said before. ‘They won’t know or care that I’m missing.’
‘Oh?’ Callie tried to look interested, but really her mind was still on the acquittal and what might have preceded it.
‘Yeah, they tried to leech all of my money before I turned eighteen. They were always more interested in my career than they were in me. I was like some cash cow. And I don’t have any brothers or sisters.’
‘How about a girlfriend? Surely teen eye-candy of the decade must have a girlfriend.’ Callie tried smiling to ease the tension that was as thick as the fog.
‘No.’ Smiler kicked another stone. It bounced twice on the road then disappeared amongst weeds on the grass verge. ‘We broke up. She said she couldn’t stand the fact I was so famous. She’d started to accuse me of sleeping with every fangirl I met. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t interact with any other female without her busting my balls over it.’
‘Some people just can’t get past their own insecurities, I suppose.’
‘I told her I’d be going on an Only Me tour around the UK. That’s when she gave me an ultimatum: her or my career.’
‘Ouch. It’s a shame it didn’t work out,’ Callie said, immediately not liking the way his eyes had darkened. ‘But hey there’s always Pollyanna, ey?’
‘What?’ The darkness in his eyes multiplied tenfold and Smiler no longer resembled the indecisive man-child she’d thought she’d struck a rapport with earlier.
‘Bloody hell, calm down,’ she said, trying to laugh off her remark but sounding entirely too nervous. She upped the effort and lightly punched his arm. ‘It was a joke!’
He looked down at his arm, not in the least bit amused.
‘It’s just, the way she looks at you,’ Callie explained. ‘I know a crush when I see one. I bet she has Joey Chaplin posters all over her bedroom wall.’
‘I hardly think so,’ he said. ‘She’s just a kid.’ He flushed so profusely his ears turned red. Callie would have preferred to think he was embarrassed, but she could see plainly that he was furious.
14
The village at the edge of Whispering Woods was unkempt in a forgotten-about, overgrown kind of way, as though its residents had evacuated long ago, never to return. There was no sign of structural damage to suggest some natural disaster had occurred, nor any kind of damage or vandalism indicative of mass panic or rioting. It seemed as though everyone had just got up for work and school one day, left home after breakfast and not bothered coming back again.
A light fuzzy mist hung around the outskirts of the village like a spectral gathering. The place was both quiet and eerie, reminding Callie of the setting of some zombie apocalypse video game. She imagined for a moment that she and Smiler were survivors of an airborne virus that had wiped out civilisation, leaving nothing but walking corpses and mutant dogs in its wake, all of which had a taste for fresh meat and were hiding around the next corner.
Now you’re being silly!
Dull green moss fur coated stone surfaces and hardy weeds grew through the cracks in pavements. Dead leaves had accumulated in gutters, creating mounded strips of mushy brown gunk. A busy stream divided the village in half, but a stone bridge linked the gap like an Elastoplast of cobblestones, healing some age-old rift. The blatant lack of people and traffic noise unsettled Callie. There wasn’t even any birdsong. The only sounds were the steady rush of stream water and the creak of a metal sign, which swung back and forth outside a pub called The Whispering Maid at the other side of the bridge. The Whispering Maid was a traditional looking public house with whitewashed walls and black Tudor beams. Its downstairs windows were grids made up of small bullseye squares and its door, presumably once black, had turned a graduation of mossy green from the bottom upwards. The swinging sign showed a painting of a young woman with blonde hair who looked remarkably like Callie. She was cupping a hand around her mouth as if to impart a secret. Hanging baskets to either side of the sign had most likely over-spilled with vibrant colour at one point; fuchsias and petunias to buffer the maid’s secret amongst the buzzing of bees. Now the aged baskets held nothing but decrepit brown tangles of dead stalks, the flowers killed by autumn or knowledge. Callie thought it was hard to say in a place such as this. She looked at Smiler. He was gravely serious. She expected he was still mulling over his own past.
‘I’m beginning to notice a theme,’ she said. She started across the bridge, expecting him to follow. He did. ‘There’s a fascination with whispering. Even the local had something to whisper about.’
Smiler trudged along beside her, rubbing his arms as though he felt a chill. ‘Everywhere has secrets. And a place called Whispering Woods was bound to have its fair share.’
‘Hmmm.’
At the other side of the bridge, directly in front of them, was a post office with a massive sun-bleached poster in the window that showed a smiley brunette holding a suitcase: an advertisement for discounted travel insurance.
Looks like the whole fucking village jumped all over that deal.
Callie cupped her hands against the window, to one side of the poster, to peek inside. The shop’s interior was dirty-white, like the poster model’s teeth and eye whites. It was deserted. Nothing at all remained except d
ead flies that littered the inner sill.
On the pavement, a freestanding post box had turned washed-out red in the same sun that had faded Smiler’s eyes. Further down the street, right next to the village butcher’s shop, Callie saw a telephone box of the same colour. The sight of it made her heart speed up.
‘Doesn’t work,’ Smiler said, adopting a deadbeat tone to thwart all hope she might have.
Not dissuaded, already she was hurrying towards the booth. ‘Maybe today it does.’
‘It won’t,’ he insisted.
‘It might.’ She pulled open the door. Its hinges were stiff, making her entry cumbersome. Then a dry dustiness of age and disuse caught at the back of her throat, making her cough. She picked up the phone receiver and held it to her ear. A loud and impenetrable silence filled her head. She spoke into the mouthpiece, ‘Hello? Hello!’ just to be sure. But all she got in return were her own words coming back at her through the earpiece.
Shit!
Smiler was waiting for her outside, leaning against an empty bicycle rail with a thoughtful look on his face.
‘Where is everyone?’ she said, letting the door of the telephone booth slam shut behind her. Each small glass pane rattled harshly in its metal frame. She looked about in case the noise had roused anyone’s attention. But if it had, nobody showed any interest. The street was still dead. Smiler didn’t answer, but she hadn’t really expected him to. So instead she asked, ‘What’s in all the houses?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing of interest? Or nothing nothing?’
‘See for yourself.’ He led the way to the nearest house – a small mid-terraced cottage – and opened its door without knocking. Callie followed him inside, into the cottage’s reception room. There was no furniture or décor and the walls, ceiling and floor were painted white.
‘Are all the rooms the same?’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ Smiler spoke quietly, yet his voice boomed in the emptiness. ‘It’s the same story in all the other buildings too. None of them escaped the whiteout, as I call it.’
A tight ball of panic, grapefruit-sour, rose up from Callie’s stomach, reaching her throat in an acidic chokehold. She felt like she needed to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit except the floor so she remained standing. ‘You’re absolutely certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve checked every single one?’
‘Yes!’ He looked more than a little impatient about her insistence. ‘More than once. But we can do the rounds if you like. You can see for yourself.’
So they did. They went inside every house, shop and public building, including the post office, Delia’s Flowers, Wayburn’s Family Bakery, Stephenson’s Butchers, David Rosenthorn’s Funeral Home, Tea Time Café and The Village Fishery. Inside all of them there was just whiteness. Every room in the village little more than a white cell, even The Whispering Maid. There were no bar stools or beer mats or optics hanging on the wall. Not even a bar itself. It was an empty, rectangular room that echoed loudly with every footstep, highlighting their aloneness. There was nothingness all around them and Callie found herself despising white. Back out on the street the everyday drab colours of concrete and stone were refreshing and characterful in their variety, so many shades of browns and greys that weren’t white. Weren’t mocking them with some inferred sterility.
A narrow pavement on the bankside across the road followed the course of the stream, disappearing behind a cluster of sycamore trees which were rendered faded by a blurring of fog.
‘What’s that way?’ Callie asked, pointing.
‘An old church.’ The mention of which gave Smiler no amount of enthusiasm.
‘Did the person with the white paint fetish get in there too?’
‘I dunno,’ Smiler said. He fingered his chin worriedly and looked at the sycamores as though they were a group of antisocial thugs waiting to lynch them. ‘The door’s always locked. But we can take a look if you really want.’
Callie was almost out of optimism but her curiosity wasn’t yet sated, so they set off along the path towards the church. The sky was fuller and darker now and the wind had more bite. She wondered if they’d need to shelter in one of the village buildings if the sky unloaded more rain like the previous evening. She hoped not. Where the cabin had a menacing perceptive air about it, the village was utterly dead and soulless. If they were forced to stay in one of the white rooms for any considerable amount of time, Callie feared that she and Smiler would fade to white and be lost forever.
Her thoughts turned to Thurston. How was he holding up? What if she couldn’t find help? What then? Would they all have to stay at the cabin till help found them? If at all. And would Pollyanna drive them all crazy with talk of Uncle Dean? Callie’s fingers brushed the shirt fabric on her arm. Is this yours Dean? If so, who and where the hell are you? There were too many questions filling her head; questions with no easily identifiable answers. She thought about bouncing some of them off Smiler, but decided it would be pointless. He wouldn’t know the answers any more than she did.
The church’s tower poked above the tops of balding trees; a black conical spire with a crucifix balanced on top. It was an architectural parody of sorts, because you couldn’t possibly look at it without seeing the resemblance to a witch’s hat: a ginormous pagan accessory misplaced in the countryside and dressed up as Christian. Callie and Smiler left the path and picked their way through the churchyard. A cold breeze swept across the open, grave-marked stretch, bringing with it a fine mizzle from the fog. Callie shivered. The grass slid across her ankles like strands of wet corpse hair. It was an overgrown mess and tall clumps of it formed tangles around gravestones. Gravestones that looked like they were dissolving with age. Callie read some of the inscriptions as they walked. Most were indecipherable, lost to the past, while others bore names but no dates or epitaphs. The brooding quiet of the village was extended to the churchyard, but it was broken by the hoarse cry of a raven. Callie could see two of them perched on neighbouring gravestones at the far side of the churchyard. Immediately she felt tense.
‘I don’t remember seeing those before,’ Smiler said, looking decidedly paler.
‘Creepy little shits have probably been following us.’
‘I meant the gravestones they’re sitting on. They’re new. They weren’t there last time I was here.’
‘When was that?’
‘Last week maybe,’ he said. ‘Or the week before that.’
‘Shall we go and take a look?’
His eyes widened. ‘Must we?’
‘Are you scared of the birds? Do you think they might attack us?’
Smiler clapped his upper arms and turned his back to the graveyard so he was facing the church instead. ‘The birds don’t bother me as such. It’s just, something feels off. I mean, who put those gravestones there? And why has their appearance coincided with yours and Thurston’s arrival?’
Callie gave an impromptu hiccup of laughter, which betrayed her own feelings of unease. ‘Do you think if we go over there we’ll find they’re marked out for me and Thurston?’
Smiler rolled his eyes, but his intended derision was overridden by a total lack of confidence. ‘No. I don’t know. It’s just, the more I think about this the more I don’t think it can end well.’
‘Hey don’t go all pessimistic on me, Golden,’ Callie said. She then turned her back to the gravestones, afraid that if they did go and look it would seal some terrible preordained fate. That her name would be there in gold serif font simply because she’d had the audacity to look. ‘Let’s go and check the church, then get the hell out of here.’
Smiler didn’t argue. They made towards the squat, stone building that was sleeping beneath the witch’s hat. The two ravens took to the sky and circled overhead, cawing as if in protest that they were heading the wrong way.
‘Ever get the feeling this place is run by ravens?’ Callie said, looking up.
�
��I get lots of irregular feelings about this place and that’s just one of them.’
When they had passed the church earlier it was small and compact. Now it appeared to have doubled in length. It looked to have been constructed in a time when buildings were made to withstand the elements, to last a millennium or longer. In a time so far removed from modern society it was structurally charismatic in a mystical way. Its stone walls were mossy and emitted a cold dampness that Callie could feel without even touching them. She shivered. She felt almost afraid of the building itself. Every stained glass window they passed was unremarkable because there wasn’t enough light to showcase colours and patterns with any real clarity. A dark figure on the front-most window might well be Jesus rising up, Callie thought. Or a tree reaching for the sky. The figure’s limbs were outlined black and spindly, but the inner colours were too dark to determine just what was going on.
At the front of the church Callie climbed two shallow steps to a heavy wooden door. She gripped its iron handle fully expecting it to be cold and was taken aback by just how cold it was. It was a deep coldness that bit into her bones. She turned to Smiler for some reassurance. When he gave none she said, ‘Shall I give it a go?’ knowing full well that she would anyway. He shrugged his despondency so she pushed the handle down. Its mechanism clunked and the door cracked open an inch. She gave it a firm shove, swinging the door fully open. Then her breath caught. She saw no white, only blackness. Not a bleak congregation of sunless shadows, but a vast black that contained swirling colours. Bands of silver specks and clusters of purple and blue lights pulsated.
A rapturous happiness washed over Callie in cold but not unpleasant waves and she wanted nothing more than to give herself up to this magical display of glittering black. She felt like she was standing on the doorstep to the entire universe. But when she tried to step forward she felt something restraining her. Smiler was clutching her arm, pulling her backwards. She groaned and tried to shrug him off with vigorous backward elbow thrusts. ‘Callie!’ she heard him say. But he sounded distant, like he was nothing more substantial than a dream. Yet still he was tugging at her arm.