by Will Maclean
The church was in a curious condition. The windows were boarded shut, but from each one rose a black scar which covered the flint walls and climbed to the roof; the roof itself was covered with a tarpaulin which hummed quietly with the incessant downpour. Did someone set fire to the church, in the not-too distant past? Did it accidentally burn? It hardly mattered. The church had been burned, and its roof was missing. The only prospect of shelter was the roofed lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard. I made my way over to it and sat down on the large slate slab that formed the threshold between the rest of the world and what was presumably holy ground. I didn’t think I needed to rest, but the second I sat, my body shook and trembled with relief.
I sat for a while, no longer hearing the rain, staring up at the bluish flint skin of the church, the scars of smoke along its flanks giving it a factory-like air, as if it were a place that made or destroyed things by burning and smelting. Eventually, the cold seeped into my wet clothes, and I staggered to my feet once more. My head swam.
From the corner of my vision, I saw movement. Somewhere in the black, sodden wilderness of the graveyard, the weight of something shifted and tensed. An animal? Would any animal be out in this? I peered into the unclean darkness under the yew tree, but nothing could be seen. Had I seen anything? Nothing moved now. I turned my back on the graveyard and walked through the lychgate, into the rain.
Outside the walls of the graveyard, the overgrown road was little more than a cart track of sticky clay and gravel, the branches of the trees stretching above me like the arms of blind men, feeling their way across the pathway to find each other. About fifty yards from the church, the cart track turned sharply to the right, winding its way through some more woods and disappearing into blackness, but there was also a kissing gate, leading into another field.
I didn’t want to take another footpath, but neither did I much fancy traipsing along this dismal cart track through yet more dark woods. Make a decision, I thought. The field beyond the gate looked like grazing land; rough terrain, but better lit than the woodland track, which vanished fairly quickly into absolute blackness.
I looked back along the cart track, the way I had come. And I saw.
A dark shape detached itself with careful slowness from the mouthful of darkness held by the lychgate.
There was someone standing by the lychgate, unmoving. Impossibly, someone else was out in this weather. I had been right – they had been watching me in the churchyard, and they were watching me now. I couldn’t discern any detail at this distance, but I knew – as surely as I knew anything – that they were looking at me, scrutinising me. And still, they didn’t move, staring right at me. The flesh on my arms prickled in waves.
Were they closer now? No. They didn’t move. My mind immediately started to dissuade me of what my eyes had seen. Maybe there had been some unseen gatepost back there, some forgotten standing stone, tall, weather-roughened, marking the boundary of a long-vanished estate, or a grand house that was now just foundations. My vision swam as I stared at it, trying to work out what it was, where its outline began and ended. No, I had been tricked. The night and the rain and the awful surroundings and my near-death by speeding train had addled my senses, sharpening some, dulling others. And yet, the feeling that I was being watched was very strong, and remained strong. But all of that was just me, surely? I was manufacturing threats, reasons to keep walking, to keep going. The feeling of being assessed, as if someone were staring straight through me. I knew the feeling wasn’t real, but I was equally unable to make it subside.
I glanced back to the kissing gate, then back to the woods, reviewing my options. I still had no idea which way to go next. I was tempted to cut across the field. Although the ground looked rough, grass would be easier to navigate than whatever had become of the track through the woods in this storm. I might even be able to see some landmarks from the brow of the hill. The field it was, then.
Idly, I turned back to glance at the road behind me. I swore in shock, startling myself with the sound of my own voice.
The dark shape had peeled away entirely from the lychgate. It was out in the cart track now, frozen, unmoving.
After a second or two, it moved, and there could be no doubt any more. Somebody was following me. I froze, staring stupidly at the figure. Who would be out on a night like this? Who could be here, in this place? A poacher, or a local lunatic, some barely tolerated village flasher or child molester or alcoholic. The echo of my spoken curse rang in my ears, proof that my shock was genuine, that this was really happening.
The figure advanced, calmly, towards me. I glanced to my left again, down the woodland track, assessing its viability as an escape route, then turned back to look at the figure. I gasped. It seemed to have covered half the distance between us, and yet it still moved with the same measured pace.
I stared and stared at the black figure, until finally my resolve broke and I ran, hurtling down the cart track into the dark woods. What was I doing? If it was a local, they would surely know the woods, the fields, the pathways and cut-throughs. I would not be able to hide from them, not on their home terrain. I stopped to glance back and saw, at the place where the road turned, where I had been frozen merely seconds before, the black figure, outlined in the pale storm-light like a dark monolith, the shape of a man. I got an impression of height, of awkward thinness, of purpose. I saw very clearly that its feet were turned inward.
And then I was running, as fast as I could, along the overgrown track, my heart hammering as the branches and briars clawed at me and the darkness thickened. I ran without thought or intention, faster than I ever thought possible, and I didn’t stop until the branches of the trees cleared overhead and the woods fell back behind me. I stopped and turned, fear racing through me, howling for breath. The trees held the darkness like cobwebs as I stared defiantly back at them. My skin crawled again, and I slapped my forearms.
Wriggling and bursting out of the trees like a maggot from rotten flesh, the dark outline came, and I was running again. Terror swept through me in waves.
Ahead of me, a hillock-dotted field of waist-high grass, criss-crossed by fox paths. Something white and man-sized stood sentry-like to one side and I noticed as I fled past it that it was a rusting electric cooker. Soon afterwards, I stumbled around a pile of rotting wooden pallets, and bounced off the crumbling chassis of a car. I skirted the dead car and made for a line of oil drums. Crouching behind them, I could see that my tormentor still advanced, crashing noiselessly through the undergrowth in a straight line towards the piles of rubbish, towards me. I realised I was crying.
Deeper into the maze of paths and fox trails. The weeds were shoulder height now, and although parts of machinery and other debris lay waiting to trip me, terror sharpened my vision. The rain seemed to have subsided a little, and visibility was better. I ran as fast as I dared, terrified that I might twist an ankle, or stumble and fall, and that I might be forced to see, to understand, and what was currently only terrible suspicion might be forced to collapse into horrible reality.
A line of tall silver birch loomed up ahead, trunks bone-white against the darkness beyond. Instinctively, I made for them. I reached a line of ragged stones delineating the edge of the rubbish tip and clutched the papery trunk of the nearest tree. From behind it, I looked out into the haze of weeds that formed a sea between the islands of scrap.
And there it stood, silent and unmoving, staring back at me. It was still some distance away. It simply stood now, like a chess piece, and once again I was convinced that I was being looked at, stared at, assessed, with an intensity that was unbearable. The rain began to pick up again, but still the figure didn’t move, although undoubtedly they saw me. Something told me they would go no further.
‘What do you want?’ I could almost mistake it for a stone pillar again.
Keeping my eyes on the figure, I retreated into the trees. I took one step back, then another.
And then the ground gave way beneath me,
and I was falling.
I was plummeting, at speed, down a steep, tree-lined slope, flailing for a handhold. I bounced off my back and onto my front; then fell again, crashing backwards through a curtain of ivy and, for a terrifying second, was in free fall, before a bank of damp river sand broke my fall, knocking the breath from me.
I sat up. The palms of both hands were warm and raw and I knew they had sustained cuts, but the light down here was so bad I couldn’t tell if what covered my hands was mud or blood. I wiped them on my jacket and sat up. Miraculously, I seemed to be unharmed. My trousers were torn at both knees and my upper lip tasted of blood, but there was no other damage. I had been incredibly lucky. If my head had hit a rock on the way down, I might easily have died. And who would have ever found me, down here? I shuddered and was quietly and politely sick on the ground, then looked at my surroundings.
I was on a broad, flat bank of dark sand and pebbles at the edge of a fast-flowing stream. Looking up I could see what I had fallen through: the stream had, over the years, carved out this hollow under the roots of an oak tree, and the ivy had grown over the network of exposed roots. It was this canopy I had fallen through. I saw again how lucky I had been, though luck is always relative. I got to my feet and looked up, squinting through the rain, staring up at the slope, expecting again to see that terrible shape peering silently over the lip of the precipice, and though I waited expectantly for minutes on end, I was alone.
Follow the stream. What else was there to do? My eyes had adjusted to the darkness now, and it proved relatively easy to follow the babbling line of silver as it snaked its way through the trees and roots, shadowed as it was by a miniature shoreline of black sand. The occasional car tyre or beer bottle stuck out of the glistening ooze, but even these last traces of the rubbish tip fell away, and then there was just me and the rain-swollen stream.
I reasoned that it would be virtually impossible for anybody to follow me down here, but nonetheless, I kept looking back, over my shoulder, where my tracks showed deep black in the mud. But there was nothing. No one followed me.
I staggered along the stream bed for half an hour or so. My legs were weak. I struggled on, looking in earnest now for a place where I might stop, and rest. The stream twisted and turned through rank weeds and rotting stumps, but eventually, mercifully, obliged. The floor of the valley carved by the stream widened and flattened, the shore became broader, and there were large, smooth stones I could sit on. I sank down onto one, gratefully.
My head bobbed onto my chest and when my neck jerked up again, the woods were much lighter. The air was blue, paling and whitening as night became day. I had been out all night. My teeth chattered and my wet clothes clung to me. I ran a hand through my damp hair, smoothing it back over my head. The little glade was quiet save for the sound of the stream, chattering over the rocks. Looking up, out of the gully, to the sky where the day was struggling to arrive, I saw a giant diagonal cross standing sentinel, and eventually recognised it as the sails of a windmill.
On hands and knees, I knelt at the water’s edge and cupped my hands, drinking the numbingly cold liquid. It tasted fresh and earthy, not quite like anything I’d ever drunk before. I stood up.
Twenty feet or so away, tied to the trunk of a dead elder, was a scrap of cloth. It had been very deliberately tied there, very neatly, secured with a series of tight knots. Coming closer, I saw that it was, of all things, a tie. The light was weak, but I could make out the colours, blue and red, blue and red. I approached it with a sense of something important happening, and I was suddenly terrified I would miss it, fail to grasp its significance.
Some way away, hanging from a tree, a rotting green satchel turned and turned, as it had surely turned for a long time, hanging from the tree by a single frayed strap.
Over the small ridge where the elder grew lay another patch of dirty silt, which time and the stream had formed into a round island, almost circular, a miniature oxbow lake of black mud. The sand here was undisturbed, perfectly smooth. In the centre of this disc, trapped within, the bare remnants of a figure lay half-buried, as if frozen for ever in the act of burying itself. It was nothing but bones now, clad in the filthy remains of a white shirt and a grey skirt, but once, it had been a person. What had been the head lay on one side, empty eye sockets staring with burning black intensity at absolutely nothing, the bottom quarter of the face buried in the sand, the lower jaw at an impossible angle, gaping wide-open in an enormous, crooked laugh.
I became aware that somebody was laughing. Very loudly, but hollowly, without reason or purpose, as if the part of their brain that was supposed to find things funny was simply being stimulated with electric current, or merely jabbed with a pencil, so that everything was funny. I was scared by the laughter, somehow; it sounded so strange, no voice I recognised. The more scared I grew, the stronger the laughter became, getting louder and louder, each successive guffaw becoming less and less meaningful, but more and more powerful, until it filled all the space there was, both inside and outside my head, rolling across the sky and all the land, licking at the world I knew like flame and scouring it away, away, until there was nothing left.
Epilogue
There was no going back now.
When I first thumbed the postcode into Waze, sitting at a table in a Caffè Nero, nursing a flat white, I experienced a feeling of daring, of betting myself I wouldn’t do something, only to prove to myself that I would. Some weirdness with postcodes or parish boundaries had occurred since then, and the string of letters and numbers that signified a destination was not familiar to me. Or maybe I had never known the postcode to begin with. Either way, we were leaving. There was no going back now.
In the passenger seat, Dad embarked on another spectacular series of coughs, and asked me to turn up Radio 4, as the news was coming up. I informed him that it was already loud enough, but his complaints became incessant, and I pushed the volume up so far the bodywork of the car shook. The CEO of a British tech startup that had developed a piece of software for predicting user purchases based on personal data was being interviewed about the news that his company had just been acquired by Google for something in the billions. The CEO sounded neither interested nor bored; merely present, as if the acquisition of many billions of pounds was not really a serious matter for serious people. The pips sounded at midday and the news began.
There was very little traffic on a Thursday lunchtime. The grey road shone dully, spotted with pools of oily rainwater where trapped rainbows curled like ferns. We passed a series of retail parks and business estates, huge corrugated metal hangars, silently shouting their names at the aluminium sky. Sports Direct. Argos. Homebase. Amazon click and collect. Above us, an enormous steel mast supported an advert for a new Hugo Boss fragrance. A man flanked by two identical women descended a glass staircase. The three figures laughed feral laughs in each other’s faces, forever, and then the lights changed.
‘Where are we?’ asked Dad. I ignored him. It was a hard question to answer, anyway. Where were we? A crazy golf course by the slip road, with a Mayan theme. A vast pagoda that was a Chinese food wholesaler. A southern ranch-style BBQ diner. A burger restaurant with life-size fibreglass dinosaurs baring their teeth over empty plastic garden furniture. All blurring past at the side of a main road which was, and could only ever be, in suburban England. The sun flared coldly for a few seconds, like a bare bulb of low wattage, and the sky and the road were suddenly and spectacularly made of gleaming mercury. Then the thick clouds clotted and the vision was over.
‘This bloke again,’ said Dad, talking about a pundit the host was interviewing. ‘All he ever does is these programmes where he says his opinion. I swear he just says the same thing over and over again.’
‘You said this earlier,’ I said.
‘Did I?’ Dad looked grumpily out of the window. After a few minutes, he offered again the only other thing he’d been saying since the journey began.
‘Can we get something to eat?’
>
‘When we get on the motorway,’ I said. Do all children and parents eventually swap roles? Is that their fate? Ahead of us, a semi-circular block of newly built luxury flats loomed, six storeys of blue brick, with balconies of orange and yellow and green, with a Tesco Metro and three vacant shop premises set into the ground floor.
Dad snorted. ‘Hang on, I know this place! I swear I used to come out here birdwatching when it was a marsh. Now look at it.’
I snorted too. ‘There hasn’t been a marsh round here since the 1800s. You’re not that old.’
‘It was somewhere round here. You used to get reed warblers. Kingfishers. All kinds of things. Now look at it.’
The lights were red, so I looked. RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES, a sign said. Another said SHOWROOM OPEN, and a third said LAST FEW UNITS: URBAN – FUNKY – STYLISH. It was virtually impossible to have an opinion about anything I was looking at, whether it was the small, overlit supermarket, or the empty, expensive block that housed it, or the cashpoint, or the complete lack of any people.
‘It’s a depressing part of town,’ I said. ‘But it’s the way out to the motorway. It’s not the Appian Way, Dad.’
He was silent. The lights turned to green.
‘This is the price you pay for convenience.’
I looked over at him. He had nodded off.
We stopped at another Caffè Nero at a motorway services, to get a sandwich for Dad and more coffee for me.
‘Weren’t we just here?’ said Dad, looking around him.
‘No, Dad. That was on the way out of town. You’ve been asleep for an hour.’
‘Hmm,’ said Dad, as if this information was not to be trusted. He looked around, chewing the air. With the sudden unguarded openness of an infant, he placed his hand tenderly on mine.