Four British Mysteries Read online

  He was reminded of a recent dream, in which he found himself in his classroom. Mrs. Morecroft stood at the front but it was his classmates who held his attention; each of them perched upright at their desks, backs straight, their faces those of famished dogs. Saliva dripped in ropes from their sly smiles, the sort that all dogs can’t help but display, and pink tongues lolled from parted jaws. For the longest time it seemed that no one moved, as if waiting some unspoken direction. The air grew moist and rank with the foetid breath of the children.

  Then a great horn sounded, reverberating the windows, the walls, the very particles of his blood until it boiled with anticipation and with an unspoken signal burst. He threw himself to the floor and raced from the classroom, his schoolmates hot on his heels. At first he thought he fled from them; the feral light in their eyes, their rancid breath, the yellow rot of their teeth. Then one raced past him, and another, and another, their human hands slapping the linoleum, and he chanced upon his reflection in one of the windows. He too bore the guise of a hound, his ears pricked, mouth dripping with the promise of the hunt...

  Shivering, he dismissed the dream, returning his attentions to the classroom. Outside, the rain fell harder, striking the windows at a slant. There was a sub-terranean sluice as the heating behind him kicked into life. Four rows away to the front, Mrs. Welham continued talking.

  “Page thirteen, everyone. Reason and Religion. Are there enough copies? Christopher, stop playing with that pen, please. Now, all together...”

  A couple of children mumbled dutifully after Mrs. Welham. Most remained silent. From somewhere outside they could hear Mr. Jones, their haggard, grey-haired PE teacher, his instructive bellows echoing across the playing fields. George stared openly at the rain-flecked windows, losing himself to the bleak, watery sky. The chairs, tables and teacher of the classroom faded into a fugue of nothingness.

  He thought about Hell as it was described to him. He imagined a dark place, lit with bursts of flame and shadows. Across this rocky landscape, filled with ruinous monoliths and charred, broken trees, he saw the Damned; the lost souls of the Godless; those same men and women who lied, cheated and killed in his favourite detective dramas on television. They screamed under the black sky, condemned by a higher justice; some pitiful wails, others younger, fresher, more savage sounds.

  All things considered, it was strangely disaffecting. Flames weren’t frightening. Neither were screams. It all seemed so made-up, so fabricated, so detached from the village he knew.

  Something struck his face and he started, as if shocked. He looked around, to the right, and found himself staring into the face of Stewart Foxley. The boy’s bright eyes bore into his own and George looked quickly away. His chest ached, his forehead burning from where the paper had struck, as if remembering the pain of heavier missiles; sharper, rougher, or the hot wetness of his blood.

  He glanced back as Stewart mouthed something. It might have been “I love you.” Or “I’ll have you.” He concentrated instead on Mrs. Welham.

  “The Bible describes a variety of demons, monsters of metaphor used to illustrate sin. Specifically, there were seven lords of Hell. Can anyone remember them? Or find them on the page?”

  He knew all about the Sins and their namesakes. He could still remember the first time his mother had explained the concept; of Heaven and Hell, right and wrong, good and bad. He knew she wasn’t religious. She had made it very clear to him that their Sunday service was a different tradition. She didn’t keep The Bible or The Book of Sin side by side on the mantel like Jessica Morley’s parents. But she had done well to explain the concept and he thought he had understood, at least partly.

  “The seven demons, anyone? Or their Sins? It’s all there, on page thirteen. The first, somebody?”

  As before, nobody spoke. Mrs. Welham stared expectantly across the class and George hid his face with his sleeves. The school bell filled the silence and the classroom flew into movement; the scrape of chair legs, slamming books, animated chatter as everyone rose to leave. Chris’s biro struck George on the chin, to laughter. He twitched, his face burning, and shrank inside his jumper.

  “See you later, Georgie,” said Chris as he sauntered behind his chair. He kicked the table, which shuddered on its legs.

  “Don’t forget your homework, you shit,” said Andy. Then Stewart himself strode past. He smacked George on the head.

  “Better run, Georgie, your mum’ll be waiting at home for you.”

  The three of them left, surrounded by a crowd of other students, and then George was alone in the classroom. As he finished packing away his things, he realised The Bible knew nothing of Hell. Snatching his rucksack, he ran from the classroom. The school grounds swallowed him up.

  * * *

  Nobody remembered seeing the three boys beyond the high street, so they couldn’t have known that on the day they vanished they had turned off at the disused station, or that they followed a fourth boy as he moved alone along the tracks towards the Forest. Freya only knew these things because George had told her. There were no other witnesses, except the trees themselves.

  The rain had churned the grassy embankment into a mound of mud. It continued to fall, dashing grass and soil like pebbles. Winter was upon them and the nights were drawing in. It would not be long, George suspected, before his mother wouldn’t let him here at all, for fear of accidents in the dark. He moved quickly, with scientific fervour, studying the gaps between the sleepers for snails and earthworms.

  The three boys interrupted George just as he had sat down by the tunnel. He remembered it as though detached from his own body; staring down over the boys as they converged on him. They rushed through the rain, three dark shapes, wet and wild.

  He saw himself, rising as they approached, head turned, alarmed by their whooping. His trousers were soaked through with rain and mud. He felt very cold. They were shouting things but their voices reached him distorted, as though travelling through water, or drowned beneath another sound, which was quiet at first but grew very quickly into an ancient roar, droning in his ears like a swarm of bees, except coming from the cave behind him...

  He remembered pain as they pushed him back to the ground. He remembered their faces, long and pale and filled with something much older than their physical selves; a sharp disdain for rules and restraint. He remembered burning with heat, blood pounding in his ears beneath that terrible roaring, and another heat against his legs as he wet himself.

  The figure emerged from the tunnel, loping across the grass like an ape. He saw pale skin, a childlike face and long arms, which snatched the three boys and broke them. Even as its fingers curled around their flesh and that deafening roaring was cut short by snapping bones, the boys’ expressions were those of ecstatic terror. Their lips twisted, their eyes shone with rainwater, wide and unknowing, and then they shone no more.

  Silence sank over the clearing. George stared, unmoving, as the figure examined the bodies with its nose. Like a spider it scuttled from boy to boy, back arched, head low. Then it dragged them, one by one, backwards into the tunnel, leaving him alone beneath the empty sky.

  * * *

  A scream shatters the silence that has settled over the village. Nib still pressed into the paper, she pauses. Drawing a deep, tremulous breath, she stands from her note-making and moves to the window. The floor feels cold, almost icy, against her bare feet.

  Two birds pick at something in the garden, beside the Griffin sculpture Robert and she had bought together in Lyndhurst. They are crows; great, black birds with marble eyes and shining beaks. Their talons bury into the thing beneath them, puncturing soft flesh, sliding past skin to the wet muscle beneath. She glances at their prey only briefly, before returning her eyes to the birds. It is recently dead, much like the rest of Lynnwood. She notes the steam, which pours from its ravaged stomach into the cold outside. Moments ago it had been one of Catherine’s cats. The animals had been the first to go missing. Before Mr. Shepherd, before the boys, even befo
re Ms. Andrews. Of course, no one had noticed at the time.

  The crows make short work of the cat until it is unrecognisable. Their talons reduce it to flesh and fur and ropes of intestinal meat. Her stomach’s screams join those of the frenzied birds...

  She drags herself back to the dining table. Her fingers find furrows in the wood, where her pen has pressed through the paper. She follows the shallow grooves, like a blind woman reading with her fingertips. Blood brail. It is the greatest irony, that she is reduced to reading like the sightless when she sees clearly now for the first time, when words themselves mean so little anymore.

  She finds the pen again. It feels strange in her hand; a relic from a different time. Somehow she resumes writing. In her mind’s eye she sees only the crows; two broad, black silhouettes. She hears them even as she writes, their hungry cries ringing in her ears...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Freya knew there were no monsters, no figures in the trees, but still she felt the need to hold George tight. He trembled in her arms, his breath soft against the curve of her neck. She ran her hands down the back of his jumper, as though stroking his story away; his words wiped clean beneath the palm of her hand. At some point she closed her eyes and they stood in silence. She became aware of other things in the absence of sight; the artificial texture of his jumper against her fingertips, the boniness of his slight frame, the warmth of her own breath, over his shoulder.

  Then he did a rare thing, his own arms reaching out to hug her back. They joined behind her, his hands locking, and she felt the terror of the unknown in that grasp. A child, young to the world, he was still capable of marvelling at the enormity of the sky, of fearing its emptiness, of feeling the trees and the grass and the swift-footed animals of the Forest in his blood, but was expected to ignore all these things, or deny them, for order and conscience and proper conduct. There was nothing proper, nothing natural about it. That, she thought, was the greatest contradiction of all, the truest irony in this modern world of masked, proper predators.

  * * *

  For Freya’s sixth birthday her parents threw a small garden party. All of the children from her class were invited; her mother and she had spent a whole day making invitations, using paper and glitter and the colouring crayons from the drawer in her bedroom. And what invitations they had been! The colours, the magnificence, the fierce pride she had felt, handing them out to her friends!

  She spent the afternoon making a nest from the fresh grass cuttings. The smell of the recently-mowed lawn was intoxicating, as was the sodden feel of it in her hands, the press of the summer sun against her face. Laughter filled the garden as her parents entertained the other grown-ups around the patio table.

  The summer sun flashed in Freya’s eyes. She began to feel hot and thirsty as she patted the mounds of grass into the nest-shape. She considered getting up to fetch some squash from the table.

  A silhouette fell over her, blocking the sun from her eyes. She looked up at a girl who was making a similar grass nest across the lawn. A moment passed while they studied each other.

  She remembered the shriek of the adults as their parents drank and ate and laughed into the sky, and the stillness that accompanied Catherine as she stood silently over Freya, as she reached for grass from Freya’s nest, the grass that Freya had so carefully amassed for herself. She remembered standing up and pushing Catherine and kicking her; this girl, who sought to steal from her grass nest, where her imagined young would sleep and grow and writhe amid the cuttings. She had shouted and scratched Catherine with her fingers and Catherine had cried and their parents had come running to split them apart, placate them, as all children are meant to be placated. She realised this might be the earliest memory she had of Catherine. The earliest memory of her oldest friend; a memory of damp grass and drawn blood and wild faces.

  * * *

  Evening soon fell on Lynnwood. Lizzie returned home from Rachel’s house in the fading light. Freya cooked them a mighty meal: sausages, smooth mash, mixed vegetables and dense, dark gravy. The hot, rich food would do them good, she decided. Mostly, she needed it herself; the fat, juicy sausages, sweetened with apple, the creamy potato, the crunch of the carrots – still slightly hard – between her teeth.

  George and she cleared their plates. Lizzie picked at her food before scattering from the table. Freya finished the leftovers herself. There was never enough.

  Alone again with her son, she forbade him from returning to the tunnel. She told him the figure was not his friend, that he was dangerous and might hurt him, if given the chance.

  “But he saved me,” said George.

  “He didn’t save you, darling. Those poor boys were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “They hurt me,” he said, “and then they couldn’t hurt me anymore.”

  She strained inside, chest tight, unable to explain the wrongness of what had happened. Perhaps it was because she almost doubted that wrongness herself. He was her baby, after all, and they had struck him...

  “They were being very cruel, George, but they needed telling off. What happened to them isn’t right...”

  He told her he didn’t understand but that he would stay away from the tunnel, if it was what she wanted. Then he said he was tired and that he was going to bed. She excused him from the kitchen and resumed her household ritual; clearing the table, hand washing the dishes, losing herself to those chemical suds, anything but contented.

  * * *

  After that day, George spoke of many dreams. He shared them openly with Freya, having learned the merits of honesty, the relief of unburdening his thoughts with another. She took solace from this realisation. Deception was another artifice. Her son, at least, seemed to have recognised this.

  He dreamt first of a copse within the Forest. She knew the place well; recognisable by the Hanging Tree, of local and historical fame. Back in the forties, a village witch – Margaret Roach – had made the tree her haunt. Though she was never charged with witchcraft, it was a well-known fact about the village. Certainly, there was much conflict recorded between her goings-on and those of Ms. Andrews’s parents. Allerwood parish, it seemed, did not take kindly to pagans and devil-worshippers. Many were the mornings she could be seen, walking from her cottage in the direction of the tree, a cape around her shoulders, a necklace of animal bones in one hand. She made the grotesque artefact from the remains of her dog, after it was crushed beneath the wheels of a cart, or so the guidebooks said.

  Those same guidebooks recounted how Margaret hung herself in the winter of ’49. Her body was left to swing from the old oak branches for three days before one resident found her and took pity. It wasn’t difficult for Freya to imagine the villagers’ relief at the death of the woman and her unwholesome taint on their village – the hypocrisy!

  In George’s dream there were three figures: the tree, a woman and a solitary magpie. In this dream the figures, which seemed to have been waiting, began to turn on one another as he approached. The magpie moved first, plucking ravenously at the Hanging Tree, drawing strips of bark, like pale flesh, from its trunk. Sap oozed from the wounds, glazing the bird’s beak.

  Even as the bird’s beak grew more frenzied, the woman, tall and thin but glowing so brightly George couldn’t see her features, fixed her shining face on the magpie. Moving towards it, like a ghost above the grass, she snatched her struggling prey in one singular motion and stuffed it into her face. There was no eating, no movement of the mouth – there was no mouth – but this didn’t save the bird. It was absorbed entirely, with a muffled croak, one glistening green feather falling in its wake.

  Then the Hanging Tree, wounded though it was, fixed its hungry eyes on the woman, and the sound that echoed from its broken lips rang with the enormous appetite of the Forest itself. Groaning into the dusk, which grew darker with every moment that passed, it drew the woman into its mouth; that gaping chasm of empty blackness, from which no things escaped...

  Another time George dreamt o
f night and a snowstorm falling over the village. At first he ran outside into the path of the snow, relishing the delicate kiss of each flake against his skin. It built up on the ground and crunched beneath his feet, a cold carpet of pure white. He opened his mouth, tasting the flakes on his tongue.

  Other figures began emerging from their homes; thin silhouettes, illuminated in the doorways of their cottages. They too moved amid the snow, faceless and laughing, swaying like dead branches in the wind.

  The snow continued to fall, thicker and faster, until it seemed to move against his face and, looking up, he realised the flakes were tiny insects; flies, made entirely from frost. They fell frantically from the night, moving in vast, swirling clouds, swarms of droning ice. They crawled across flesh, their feet scratching skin, and where they landed the villagers grew gaunt until the white street was filled with white bodies; the last dance of the snow dead, grinning under the yellow light of the moon.

  He dreamt of the dog-children again, and the wild hunt through the corridors, and often of that afternoon by the tunnel, when the three boys had been taken. Freya tried to console her son, running her hand through his hair and holding him in her arms, but he hadn’t finished talking. As though she had unstopped something inside of him, he continued to speak, his lips spilling ever darker dreams.

  And each time, he said, no matter the nature of the dream, he would find himself back in his bedroom, in the dark and the cold, with the imagined movement of a figure at his window; a streak of white, glimpsed then gone from where it had pressed up against the glass. His friend from the tunnel, watching over him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It was still light when Freya left for Catherine’s house. The sun shone salmon pink above the tree line. She moved quickly through the twilight towards the cottage, her boots against the snow the only sound down the street. This time no curtains twitched. The houses stared back at her, somehow older, less cared-for. She wasn’t sure that she preferred the stillness.