Four British Mysteries Page 14

  She glanced over a dozen such intimate moments, until she felt sick from sentimentality and could read no more. Then she placed the diary back where she had found it on the shelf, and she left the Vicarage and didn’t return again.

  * * *

  With night came hunger and the dream that had afflicted her for so long. It began as always; with her running through the trees. Her feet dashed icy puddles. The light glittered in the branches overhead, then flashed and was gone. Shadows rushed from the spaces between the trees, stretching across the floor, reaching for her and the elf rings she knew were there but couldn’t see for the snow. Footsteps crunched behind her, as the second figure gained ground.

  The brook appeared ahead, frozen but lively with the current underneath. She moved across the bank, to where ice met soil, and knelt, as always, to drink. When her hands encountered the sheet of ice they paused, fingers pressing curiously. She knew without looking that the Bauchan across the brook was doing similarly. She had seen it a dozen nights already; its cold, red fingers testing the dark ice.

  She looked anyway. She was helpless not to in this place, this dream, which was nothing compared to the real brook and yet felt so real all the same. Her eyes rose slowly to the figure opposite, expecting whiteness to expand her vision, breaking from the brook or the snow, as it had always done before she could see properly. Only this time, no whiteness came. She looked up, seeing those hands still pressed to the ice, following slender arms, a familiar blouse and then the face, her face, staring back at her across the Forest. She looked drawn, bloodless, as though the cold had numbed her entire body. It was all she could do to stare at herself, crouched like an animal beside the brook, fingers scratching at the ice. She was the figure. She was the Bauchan!

  The sound of running feet slowed to a walk. Then the figure, who she had once mistakenly thought her father, strode up behind her and slipped his hands around her waist. She felt those hands, so warm against her stomach, even as she watched them on the opposite bank and she saw that they weren’t her father’s but Robert’s, and it was he who stood behind her.

  Fear and uncertainty took hold of her. She couldn’t remember this, even as it played out before her. She remembered the blouse though, which she had worn on their last night together, and her bare feet, and the way in which she crouched beside the brook like a thirsty dog. Then she heard him talking in her ear.

  “Freya,” he said, “Freya. It’s me, Robert. It’s your Robert.”

  She squirmed, tried to spin round, wriggling in his grasp, but his arms became something more, a fierce grip on her stomach.

  “Freya, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to look after you. You can fight this. You can fight this!”

  She kicked harder now, pushing off from the bank with her feet. They scrunched up against the snow and the hard soil beneath, then lashed out. Through unknowing eyes, she watched as the couple across the brook tumbled to the floor. She snarled, spat, at the mercy of the Midwinter Frenzy all those years ago. It had claimed her once already! Her mind raced with fear. She must have fled the house after the meal. Her hunger must have drawn her to the trees. He must have followed her.

  He wouldn’t give up on her. His arms said that much, as they continued to grip her tightly. She could hardly breathe in the stranglehold, the figure opposite writhing horribly, and yet she knew he was trying to help. He was trying to contain her, to save her from herself and the others who stalked the trees on this night alone.

  Her head flew back and knocked into his face. His grip loosened. She thrust forward, her toes finding purchase on the ground, and struggled to her feet. One foot stepped onto the ice, which cracked beneath her weight.

  The man on the ground scrabbled towards her.

  “Freya, listen to me. Listen to my voice. This isn’t you!”

  She heard him and the words that spilled from his mouth, but they meant little to her like this. She had only eyes for the black wetness beneath his nose, the stink of his sweat, the ragged breaths that came from his throat. Looking into her eyes he seemed to sense this. He staggered to his feet, his hands raised in front of him.

  “Freya,” he said. “Stay with me. I want to help. I’m here to help you. I love you. You know I love you.”

  She rushed at him through the night, one part remembering, the other reliving. He turned and ran. Every second stretched out as she chased him through the trees. She felt the snow between her toes, the flakes that had begun to fall against her face. Her chest ached with longing; to have him in her hands and her mouth, to feel his skin against hers, his heat, his taste on her tongue. The Forest was a blur of black and white.

  She caught him near Mawley Bog, beneath an alder tree. Moonlight reflected off the frozen water, bringing his face to stark relief. She glanced at it only once and then it was forgotten, in favour of hands and teeth and the inescapability of her hunger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Just as that first taste of meat had driven her to Allerwood Church, so Freya found herself once more among the headstones. Statues rose around her; some weeping angels, others Sin in its various guises. She moved between the angels and the demons, knowing full-well that neither were honest depictions. There were no divine forces, no hellish creatures, only beasts of the earth, with their feelings and their drives, however base or noble. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The church was another lie, founded to keep the residents of Lynnwood happy in their lives, to keep them placid, when underneath they seethed with instinct.

  She left the statues behind and moved across the churchyard. There, on the very outskirts, just off the gravel path, one headstone stood, no higher than a boy. A bouquet rested at its base, withered with frost. Engraved into the modest stone, just above the hard flower heads, there was a single name, and below that an epitaph. She read both slowly, as though for the first time, though she was sure she had seen them a hundred times before and not remembered:

  HERE LIES ROBERT RANKIN

  “A MAN SEES IN THE WORLD

  WHAT HE CARRIES IN HIS HEART”

  She thought for a long time about the wording of the inscription. She supposed she had chosen it herself. She must have felt something, even then; a stirring of uneasiness at the idyllic village. Guilt might have played a part in its choice. She might just have liked the statement. Either way, it resonated now more than ever before.

  Her eyes fell to the bouquet of flowers at the headstone’s base. Frost had done terrible damage to them, but it still roused her to see something there. She wondered who might have brought them, who continued to replace them, year after year. Ms. Andrews has been responsible for this place once. Freya hoped that, faced with the question, she might have remembered if it was her. There was still much she could not recall, or ever would. She was almost free...

  Many were the times George had stood before the headstone. Perhaps he had sensed something, the bond of blood between father and son; an ancestral connection, drawing him back to the grave when he passed it. Robert had passed on the hunger, as his father before him, and his father before that. It was not so hard to think an instinctual love coursed through the same blood.

  She lingered a moment longer, then turned from the grave and left. It was all superfluous now. She visited the spot with the detached nostalgia of someone who has moved on. There was no other way for it. She didn’t even know if there was anything left to bury after that night. The ritual of mourning was just that; another needless ceremony. So she said her goodbyes and walked from the churchyard for the last time.

  * * *

  A restlessness filled the empty village, as a clutch of insect eggs eager to hatch. She sensed that tonight was Midwinter. Time and dates were reduced to night and day now, but the wind and trees and the empty houses spoke to her as she moved through them and they told her that tonight was the night when instincts raged and Lynnwood filled with howls.

  When she arrived home Lizzie had gone. She could only imagine where the girl ran
, now that she was freed. The village had driven Lizzie half to death, but in the end her hunger had saved her. The hunger, which was so normal in their insane world of rules and regulations, laws and limitations, schools and streets and manners...

  The soft pink of fading afternoon crept into the sky, and she realised this was her last day as Freya. So much of her had gone already, lost the night she had chased Robert through the trees, then covered up; replaced with propriety and false smiles and a lifetime of habits designed to keep her satisfied. But there was no satisfying that hunger for life, no sating that appetite. It lived always, under her skin, growing stronger with each passing year.

  She found herself food, which she ate ravenously. Seated at the dining table, she stared out of the window. The cottage opposite was still. Empty. Nothing stirred – there was no one left to stir, except hungry ghosts, and they would come soon enough. She knew she would forget soon. It did not seem to matter now that everyone was gone, and their mild manners, their modesty, with them. The village was full of these things before. To forget them would be bliss. She was so close to forgetting, and to the freedom forgetting brings.

  But others might come, one day in the future. They would come when the village was silent, its occupants missed. So she must write, before she forgets. She must write this for them. She had never written anything before, beyond schoolgirl diaries, and those seemed so long ago now.

  * * *

  She no longer remembers things, but lives them. She moves through the shadows of the undergrowth. Branches scratch her, each nick, each flare of pain real and sensuous. Her blood, so hot, cools rapidly against her skin. She can smell it, coppery and rich on the night air. She moves quickly through the Forest.

  Her nose fills with other scents. This low to the ground, she can smell the soil, even beneath the layer of snow. It is earthy, regenerating. She smells the cold air, the frozen Forest, the salty sweat of other animals. They are invigorating aromas. They bear no traces of town life, the vagaries of village existence. This is home now. It always has been. She has returned to the dark beneath the trees, where all things hunt or are hunted.

  She thinks of very little but the wind in her face and the pull of the moon, high above. It does not illuminate the Forest – there is no piercing that darkness! – but it glances from the branches, throwing them into black relief. She pushes through these thickets, past tall trunks, and slinks through the hollows of trees, faster, faster, her eyes wide and watering.

  The Forest feels endless. She cannot see past the trees, only vaguely aware of other things; muddied water, frozen into a swathe of ice, the crunch of the snow beneath her hands and feet, spotted brown where she has bled. Her wild eyes scour the undergrowth. Her breath is ragged in her throat. Her fingers scrabble through the snow, grow numb and become red. The feeling that drives her seems to swell inside. It gnaws, growing desperate, pushing at her chest, turning her stomach with sickness. She might have had a name for this feeling once. Now it is beyond names. She knows it only as a part of her, pressing against her skin, filling her heart, her eyes, her mouth, until she collapses beneath a tree and it erupts from her, a singular shriek...

  The sound fills the Forest, then is swallowed by it. She sinks to the base of the tree, where she lies amid snowdrops. Her hurried breathing becomes slow, shallow, as though stolen by the snow. Her bright eyes dim and something stirs in the depths of her mind. Memories of former times: shapes skipping through Forest paths, green wellies, laughter lighting up a child’s face. Headstones, warm wine the colour of blood, the insect hum of the refrigerator. Muddy fur against her fingertips, a smiling man’s face, the Forest, cut and stuck and pasted with poignancy against a blank piece of paper...

  Another sound slips past her lips. Low and forlorn, it seems to last forever, before finally trailing off.

  Then she hears something, which causes her head to rise, her eyes to widen, her breath to catch. An answering howl, off through the trees. It echoes into the night, followed moments later by a second. Her heart is racing now, as though clawing to escape her chest. She pushes from the tree and begins to run again.

  The Forest slides past. She moves quickly through the trees, looking but not seeing. Her senses are tuned elsewhere. She listens for the howls, which rise erratically into the night. Sometimes they sound nearer, other times further off. The cold air fills her nostrils and for one brief moment she loses herself completely to the Forest. It is transcendental. She feels the cold, sees the night, hears the trees and the pulsing of her blood in her head, and she is complete...

  Two shadows slink from either side of her, running at her heels. They are smaller, thinner, but no less wild, filled with the ecstasy of the hunt. Together, mother and offspring race between the trees, hungry and alive.

  A Taste For Blood

  David Stuart Davies

  David Stuart Davies

  David Stuart Davies is the author of five novels featuring private detective hero, Johnny Hawke, and another five novels featuring Sherlock Holmes as well as several non-fiction books about the Baker Street detective including the movie volume Starring Sherlock Holmes.

  As well as being a committee member of the Crime Writers’ Association, and editing their monthly magazine, Red Herrings, David is the general contributing editor for Wordsworth Editions Mystery & Supernatural series and a major contributor of introductions to the Collectors’ Library classic editions.

  Also by David Stuart Davies

  Johnny (One Eye) Hawke Detective:

  Forests of the Night

  Comes the Dark

  Without Conscience

  Requiem for a Dummy

  The Darkness of Death

  The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

  Sherlock Holmes & The Hentzau Affair

  The Scroll of the Dead

  The Shadow of the Rat

  The Tangled Skein

  The Veiled Detective

  Sherlock Holmes & The Devil’s Promise

  and many other titles

  To Alanna Knight

  A lovely lady who is both a good friend and an inspiration

  PROLOGUE

  He would never forget the blood. It wasn’t just the quantity – although there was a great deal of it collected in dark, shining, sticky pools on the stone floor with errant rivulets escaping down the grooves between the flagstones. It wasn’t just that sweet sickly smell either, which assailed his nostrils with pungent ferocity and etched itself forever on his memory, or the crimson stains splattered on the walls and floor that had remained with him, to return at the midnight hour to haunt his dreams. Most of all it was that face, that crazed visage with mad bulbous eyes and chomping teeth. Revisiting the scene in his nightmares, these images seem to shift and spread like a living organism coagulating into one great patch of red and then from the crimson mist the giant mouth would appear ready to swallow him up.

  At this juncture, he would jerk himself awake with a brief tortured sigh, his body drenched in sweat. ‘Just a silly nightmare,’ he would murmur to placate his concerned wife Sheila and pat her shoulder reassuringly. ‘Just a silly nightmare.’

  Almost ten years later, the nightmares still came. Not as often but the images were still as vibrant, as threatening, as horrific as ever. He never talked about them to anyone, not even Sheila. They were his personal burdens and he was determined that they should remain so. He certainly didn’t want to reveal his secret to his colleagues and have some brain doctor try to analyse his disturbed psyche. Besides if it got out that Detective Inspector David Llewellyn was being scared witless by bad dreams it would hardly do much for his police career. So, with typical stoical reserve, his ‘silly nightmares’ remained private and self contained.

  Until…

  ONE

  1935

  The night was bitterly cold and the frosty lawn shimmered like a silver carpet in the bright moonlight. Concealed in the shrubbery, Detective Sergeant David Llewellyn gazed at the dark and silent house s
ome fifty yards away. His body was stiff with apprehension and fear while his bowels churned with nervous tension. He knew he shouldn’t be here. He knew he was taking a risk. He knew he was following his heart rather than his head. But he also knew that sometimes one had to take risks to achieve the right result.

  The house, Hawthorn Lodge, gothic and imposing, appeared as a black threatening silhouette against the lighter star-studded sky. It rose out of the earth like a giant claw, its gables and chimneys scratching the sky, while its windows glistened darkly in the moonlight. There was no observable sign of life or occupancy and yet Llewellyn knew that there was some one in there: Doctor Ralph Northcote.

  No doubt he was in his basement, a section of the house that the doctor had successfully kept secret from the officers when they had searched the premises. What he was doing there? Llewellyn preferred not to think about it at that moment. His boss, Inspector Sharples, a whisker off retirement, was a tired and sloppy officer and had not been thorough or dogged enough in his investigations. Llewellyn had been sure that a house as large as Hawthorn Lodge would have quarters below ground – a wine and keeping cellar at least – but Sharples wasn’t interested. He was convinced that the arrogant and smarmy Dr Ralph Northcote was in no way associated with the terrible crimes he was investigating. How could a man of such intelligence, refinement and breeding perpetrate such horrible murders? The fiend who slaughtered those women was an animal, a beast, a creature of the gutter, not a respectable and respected medical man. Or so the blinkered, forelock tugging Inspector believed.