The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  “I’m sure it is,” he half said, and half panted whilst feeling inwardly ashamed for being so out of shape.

  “Is everything alright at The Old Chapel?”

  “The place is fine. Look, have you seen the kids this morning?”

  Lucinda’s face switched to a frown that creased her brow, wrinkling her alabaster-like skin. “No, it was a late night, the last of our guests didn’t leave until gone three. We were still in bed. What time is it?”

  “Just gone ten.”

  “Oh wow, I really did sleep in. I hate getting up so late, almost feels like you’ve wasted half the day,” she said looking out across her forecourt as if expecting to see them. “If they went walking in the woods, then there is a good chance they’ve lost their bearings. The woodland is thick and runs for a good few miles behind the village. Goodness knows when I was a girl, I used to get lost on the trail ways all the time. Used to worry my mother sick, but after enough wandering about I always came out somewhere.

  “That’s what I told Carol, but she is prone to panic and you know how that can be.”

  “Spreads like the plague,” she agreed nodding. A strand of her deep, red hair freed itself from behind her left ear and fell across her face and she quickly tucked it back in place.

  “I told her I would get the car and have a drive around, but if they went into the woods that won’t be much help.”

  “When did you last see them?”

  “Last night, at bedtime when we got home. Hen slept in with Ellie, you know how kids are in a strange place.” She nodded. “But this morning there’s no sign of them, not even a note. Carol wants to call the police.”

  “If they are in there and as long as they don’t walk circles, they will come out at one of the cottages or at the back of Culdon, that’s the next village. It's a good six-mile walk from Culdon though if you take the road. I’d imagine that they would walk along the road against heading back into the woods.”

  “Yeah, makes sense,” Rob agreed, feeling the need to get moving. He’d not been away long yet, but it didn’t feel that way. “I’ll drive to Culdon and see if I can find them heading back this way.”

  “Probably your best bet,” she agreed. “Look, I will call the other villagers and let them know to keep an eye out. I am sure they will pop up somewhere. Worst comes to it I will get a search party together and a few of us will cover the woods, we all know them pretty well.”

  “You’d really do that?” he asked surprised.

  “Of course,” Lucinda replied, a smile lighting her face. “I told you this is a close community; we all help each other if help is needed. While you and your family are here you’re a part of our community. Look, it will take me an hour or so to divvy them up, but if you want to call the police in the meantime it might not be a bad idea. The nearest station is in Liskeard, I think. That’s a good half an hour away. We don’t get much crime out in the sticks and I think the last time we had any police here was after the fire.”

  "Okay, thanks. I'll take the car and have a drive to Culdon. If I don't find them, I will call you when I get back."

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” she consoled, reaching out and placing a hand on his shoulder in much the same way he had to his wife. “I’ve only met your daughter twice, but she seems like a sensible kid.”

  “She is, which is why this is out of character for her. Look, I need to get going, Carol is going out of her mind with worry, and I don’t want her on her own any longer than necessary. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem, let me know. I will go wake Seth up now and rally the troops if needed.”

  “Thanks again,” Rob watched as she closed the door, then headed to the car.

  By the time he reached the road the Peugeot’s inbuilt navigation system had found enough satellites to pinpoint his remote spot on the planet. He could see Culdon, they’d driven through it on the way to Trellen on the day they’d arrived. The large expanse of green shown in a graphic on the basic display was obviously the woodland that engulfed Trellen. He traced the route with his finger and got moving, scanning both sides of the road as he went.

  About ten minutes later, and on the outskirts of Culdon, Rob passed his first car. He followed the road as best he could through the village, which wasn't much bigger than Trellen, but did have a quaint looking pub called The Goose. Eventually, he got to the point where it looked as if he’d drawn level with the boundary of the wood. With no trace of Henry and Ellie, or thankfully the accident that he’d feared so much, he turned around in a pothole infested layby and drove the same route back, feeling sure that by the time he pulled to a stop back at The Old Chapel he’d find Carol waiting for him outside with both kids and the panic would be over.

  Less than ten minutes later he found that the panic wasn’t over. As he swung the Peugeot into the drive, he could see his wife sat on the stone stoop, the front door sitting open behind her. When she saw the car she stood, and he could tell she was looking to see if he carried any passengers. That sight alone made his guts drop and dread swept a very cold hand across his flesh. It was half-past ten, forty-five minutes had now passed since Carol had awoken to find them gone, and he had no clue what time they’d left. His head kept going back to just how they'd gotten out in the first place. There had to be something he'd missed, believing they'd vanished into thin air was preposterous, but it was a question to which the police would want an answer if God forbid, they'd not turned up by the time an officer arrived from Liskeard.

  “Please, no,” Carol said as he got out of the car. Her hands were up at her mouth and he could see her nails had been fully chewed down to the quick in the half an hour he’d been away. All the colour of the summer had also drained from her skin and her face looked pale as if it were that of a person suffering a critical illness.

  Rob took her by the arms and looked into her eyes which seemed sunken and dark, “I’ve spoken to Lucinda, she hasn’t seen them, but she said the woods are easy to get lost in. I have to call her, let her know I’ve not found them and she will organise a search party. She is sure that’s where they must be.”

  “It’s easy for her to say,” Carol spat a little scornfully. “They’re not her kids.” Her darkened eyes pleaded for direction and made him feel useless. “What do we do now, Rob?”

  “Now we call the police,” he replied.

  Chapter 18

  The white and blue single-engine Cessna bounced and bobbed its way to the end of the grass runway where it swung tightly around in an arc before coming to a stop. From the glass-fronted restaurant where diners could enjoy a home-cooked style meal whilst watching the eclectic mix of light aircraft come and go, Tara heard the pilot throttle up, the monotone drone of the engine building to a crescendo that sounded like a thousand angry hornets erupting from a disturbed nest. Transfixed as she always had been by the miracle of flight, she watched as the pilot released the brake and sent the small aircraft speeding back along the grass almost looking haphazard as it progressed to a velocity where physics would take over and lift it skyward. As it drew level with the spot where she and Mike were sat enjoying a late afternoon lunch, it almost seemed to leap into the air, it climbed a little then dipped a few feet as if it had changed its mind about leaving the safety of terra-firma before the pilot smoothed out the take-off and it climbed steadily and smoothly into the perfectly blue sky. The aircraft vanished quickly from her view but after a few seconds, it reappeared, now a fast diminishing spec as it banked around and headed toward Salisbury.

  “So, is this like, our first date?” she asked, her attention now back on her lunch. She forked a mouthful of her tuna and cheese jacket potato into her mouth. The food was still the hot side of nuclear and she felt it burn the roof of her mouth. She’d worried that after their impromptu session of passion, things the next day would be weird, but thankfully they hadn’t been. After they’d both fulfilled a desire that had been building since the day they’d met they had both fallen asleep cuddled-up o
n her large sofa, waking later that morning at around nine. Before Mike had even bid her a good morning he'd kissed her, and with that kiss went all her fears of potential awkwardness. Following the kiss, they quenched their physical needs once again. It wasn’t going to be awkward and there was a good chance it could be the start of something special. “Romantic lunch for two at the local airfield?” she concluded with a coy smile.

  “More of a working lunch,” he replied smiling back whilst pushing chunks of chicken korma around his plate with the back of his fork. “You tend to have the first date before you sleep with someone.”

  “Mike Cross are you implying I’m some kind of hussy?” She kicked his shin under the table, not hard, but hard enough to make him flinch.

  “If the cap fits,” he winked, and she kicked him again. “And anyway, this place was your idea, I’d have been happy with a good bistro pub.”

  “Hey, don’t you dare diss Compton Abbas,” she chided, cutting at her food with the side of her fork and causing fresh steam to rise from the baking hot potato. “My dad used to bring me here for hot chocolate so I could watch the planes. I was always a bit of a tomboy like that as a kid. Back then they used to load the hot chocolate up with that nasty but oh-so-tasty canned squirty cream and then throw on a handful of those mini marshmallows. I wonder if they still do it?”

  “Sounds calorific!”

  Tara laughed, “Are you saying I’m fat?

  “Only a woman could draw that inference from such a comment,” he said with a wry smile. He took a mouthful of the curry and grinned at her as he chewed. “So, this is how it's going to be with you?"

  “How do you mean?”

  “Difficult!”

  “You’d not have me any other way,” she said with a grin. She was enjoying the flirtatious banter and despite this being a supposed working lunch the subject of their up and coming investigation for Sue and Tom Reed hadn’t even featured. Last night it had, heavily, but that was before Jason’s visit. She still couldn’t believe that the catalyst that had finally brought her and Mike together had been her drunken arsehole ex. Life worked in mysterious ways for sure. Jason, who had made her life a living hell, Jason who had beat her so hard she’d ended up in Salisbury Hospital. Jason, who through his own fuckwhittery had made her feel more excited about her romantic future than she could ever remember. She never thought she’d have been happy to see Jason the other side of prison bars and she’d been scared shitless when he’d awoken her thumping and kicking at her door in the early hours of the morning like the maniac he was, but now she’d not have swapped his drunken visit for anything. She almost hoped that one day she’d get the chance to tell him just what had happened after he’d come to exact some revenge on her, revenge that in his fucked-up head he’d justified as deserved. That was the problem with people like Jason, and the world was full of them. Sure, they weren’t all abusers of women but they all thought everyone else was the problem, that it was everyone else’s fault for the situation they found themselves in when the truth was, it was nearly always theirs. People like Jason never saw that they were the problem.

  This was early days though, and during the morning, and whilst feeling like a foolish and giddy sixteen-year-old who’d just been asked to prom by the one boy in the year that all the popular girls lusted after, she’d had to reel in and put a leash on her thoughts a few times. Telling herself not to get too hopeful and not to expect too much. She couldn’t help it, though. She’d had one arsehole of a boyfriend after the other, Mike had always been the kind of guy she knew she should have gone for, but now being damaged goods, she never thought she’d get. But then he was damaged goods, too. Sure, he didn’t look it on the surface, but neither did she. However, scratch just below the surface and you’d see it, see the hurt and pain that he’d been through, that they’d both been through. Hell, it could even be a positive that they were both damaged goods, fucked up by life in different ways. Maybe, just maybe that’s why they fit so well. She watched as he smiled back at her, his eyes seemed to sparkle at her in the sunlight that filtered through the large observation windows and his face looked both handsomely hard and kind all at the same time, hard and kind in a way that made her feel safe.

  “I spoke to Scotty earlier,” he said, and she felt a tinge of disappointment that he was steering the conversation toward work.

  “And?.”

  “He is chomping at the bit to come over, I think he feels a bit out of the loop and isolated.”

  “Serves him right for living on that stupid island,” she said before taking a mouthful of food.

  “I told him we couldn’t head down until next week, but he wants to head to the village, check the place out and do some local research.”

  “You did tell him that the Reeds don’t want us talking to the other villagers, that Lucinda woman in particular?”

  Mike shifted his weight on his seat, took a sip of his beer and said, “I did. I also told him that we have plenty of time to get our teeth into the case when we get there.”

  “Ha, so has he been doing his own bit of research?”

  “Yeah, after we spoke to him last night. I think he was up late he sounded pretty knackered this morning.”

  “And did he manage to find anything that I missed?” Tara raised her eyebrows expectantly.

  “Let’s just say he’s drawn as many blanks you did, and as we both did last night.”

  The previous night, before Jason’s drunken visit and whilst they’d worked on an Indian Takeaway that would have been more suited to a party of four, Mike had Skype called Scotty and brought him up to date with what they knew so far about The Old Chapel, which wasn’t much. He’d also been abridged of the meeting with the Reeds, where they’d proclaimed that the seemingly tortured cries of infants were a nightly occurrence within the walls of their holiday home, and that little girls spoke to the boogie-man whilst having tea parties, and former guests seemed prone to suicide and infantile murder after a luxurious stay. Scotty had listened with interest, his facial expressing forming an ever-changing and fluid mixture of scepticism, intrigue, and excitement and a little horror. All expressions that would never have come across on a traditional voice call.

  “You believe them?” he'd asked when Mike had been done telling all there was to tell, aided with some playback from Tara's voice recorder.

  Mike had told him that he believed something was going on there, but it was just too early to say. Although, the deaths were a cause for concern and maybe a little too common to put down to nothing more than some horrific coincidence. But then what was the alternative? That the building made them do it, that something inside that place had planted a worm inside their heads, one that whispered and burrowed into their brains until they snapped.

  “This could be the one!” Scotty had replied, not hiding his excitement.

  “I’ve hoped that with every investigation,” Mike had told him, leaning in toward the small camera on his Lenovo. “Least we forget the Sleaford case. That seemed like the real deal to start with and look how that turned out!”

  “I know, I know,” Scotty had said, letting a little disappointment show. “But these guys, the Reeds, they ain’t got nothing to gain – nothing. That’s what tells me this is the real deal.”

  The rest of the conversation had been Scotty pushing to come over and head to Cornwall four days before they could even get into the place, then looking like a petulant child denied his own way when Mike had reigned him in.

  “So,” Tara said, taking her mind away from the previous evening’s Skype call. “After four or five hours’ of research all we know is the place was occupied by a guy named Deviss, that it was a chapel, although for some reason not registered, and that it burned down in two-thousand and eight and no one really knows how or why. She paused and took a swing from her half a pint of cider and looked at the amber liquid for a few seconds as if pondering an important question, then continued. “One of Tom’s builders left the site then later hung him
self. The estate agent who closed the deal died in a car crash the day he sold it to them. They completed the renovations and in the few months it's been open only one client stayed the length of time they’d booked for. One gassed himself in his car, and another drowned her baby in the tub then took her own life with sleeping tablets.”

  Mike chewed the last of his curry thoughtfully and washed it back with the last of his half pint. He wiped a hand over the back of his mouth and said, "That about sums it up, quite the riddle we have to solve isn’t it?” He put his knife and fork together neatly on the plate. They clinked against the basic white china before he pushed it aside. “Not too bad, not too bad at all,” he said referring to the food.

  “I told you it was good, this ain’t no airport departure lounge, this is a proper restaurant.” She reached a hand over the table and he willingly took it, squeezing it lightly as he played with her fingers. As he began to run his thumb over the soft skin of the back of her hand, his phone rang.

  “It’s Sue,” he said picking the device up from the table and looking at the caller ID. “Maybe the Harrisons have checked out and Scotty will get his wish,” he chuckled and stood up. “I’ll take this out the front, the reception in here is a bit shit.” Tara watched him weave his way through the tables and chairs. He answered the call as he passed the bar, she just about heard him say, “Hi Sue, what can I do for you?” then his voice faded, and she was left to the last of her baked potato.

  Five minutes later Mike strode back in, his face looked troubled and the sparkle in his eyes was gone. He didn’t come directly to the table; he first stopped at the bar and settled the bill with a young dark-haired girl who Tara guessed was peddling a summer job before uni.

  “Hey, I was about to have a nostalgic hot chocolate,” she said as he reached their table. “Or do you want to get me out of here before I pile the pounds on?”