Four British Mysteries Page 8

  “Yes,” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “He comes into my bedroom, through the window. How else do you think he left the brooch?”

  * * *

  It was mid-October when George first found his friend in the tunnel. Even autumn could not rob the Forest of its beauty. The trees aged gracefully, turning a hundred shades of brown and red and egg yolk yellow. Clouds gathered overhead, streaky in the dark blue sky, but rain was not unwelcome. Little egrets took to the swollen waters and earthworms turned in the soil. The village transformed into a vivid collage, one of those few places of quiet refuge, which were so rare.

  Alone with his thoughts he marched down the tracks. He worked his way methodically from sleeper to sleeper, blissfully oblivious to their history as children are blissfully oblivious to so much of the world. His favourite trainers – the white pair, with light-up soles – found mud again, and a visible weight lifted from his shoulders. He liked to visit this place after school, he told Freya, when she asked him about that day and what drew him to that place on the outskirts of the Forest.

  The grass had parted beneath his trainers, their dewy wetness licking the stains from his footwear with every step. He scanned the undergrowth for signs of his quarry; amphibious skin, yellow eyes, or the pink of earthworm flesh. It was perfect weather for hunting, he knew; the rain this morning had been torrential, an endless patter against the school windows, matching the excited beat inside of him as he watched it from inside.

  “The streets, overflowin’ with filth…” he mimicked, in a depth of voice still many years away.

  Climbing the slippery embankment, he followed the tracks. When he was roughly halfway along he sat himself down and began to unpack things from his rucksack. The magpie watched him while he worked, from where it perched on the rotten remains of a tree.

  A number of items appeared on the tracks beside him. There was a magnifying glass, two of the Allwood’s jam jars – one clean, one still sporting the seeded remnants of preserve – a polythene bag filled with crumbs and, last to be retrieved, his pencil case. He set these things down carefully before proceeding to examine the underside of the metal slats and the surrounding mud. When he thought he might have found something he scrutinised it more closely with the magnifying glass. Mostly he uncovered earthworms, brought to the surface by the rain, or drowning woodlice.

  The insects understood him. These weren’t people with complex emotions. They didn’t lie or hide things from each other and they didn’t need fathers or school to raise them properly. They simply were. They existed to eat, to breed and, protected by their hard, chitinous skin, they did it very well. The other children found them disgusting. They threw them at each other, stepped on them in the corridors, shivered and squealed whenever anyone spoke about them. He remembered the case of desiccated butterflies, which Freya had hung on the wall in the sitting room; specimens of Papua New Guinea, a gift from an old family friend. Their faded, dusty wings retained an elegant beauty long after death, even skewered inside a display cabinet.

  No, there was nothing wrong with insects. Simple creatures with natural drives, unencumbered by morality or conscience, they were respected. Admirable, even.

  He stayed like this for nearly ten minutes, working his way slowly down the length of tarnished track, pausing to examine his findings. Only when he reached the very end of the track did he hear it; a slow, scraping sound. It was a harmless enough noise and yet something about it snagged his attention. He looked up slowly from the mud, the plants, the crumbling remains of rotten timbers, and found himself standing before a tunnel. It stared back at him, empty and vast and dark from the side of the hill.

  He fell quiet as he recalled the entrance; a yawning chasm into the earth, where sunlight never reached. He remembered a smell; the moist, metallic tang of minerals. His face had tingled with unspoken fervour.

  Standing before the tunnel he heard the sound again; like skin on stone or the scrape of his trainers against the playground tarmac. Except this time he felt it as much as he heard it; an echo in his blood, rhythmic as the drumming of hooves across heathland. He struggled to express the intensity of the feeling, lacking the language or experience to do so, but Freya guessed these things because she too had felt it, when staring down at the pig in the field that morning. It was the stirring of race memories, of those primal sparks long since suppressed beneath the skin; urges that even George, still wild of soul and untamed by adolescence, was unfamiliar with. She could only guess at the thrill he must have experienced; the terror of the unknown.

  Though he could not see into the dark he felt a watchful presence inside; a silhouette, almost distinguished from the surrounding gloom. His heart raced, his blood pumped, his hands shook by his sides, but that same terror held him fast.

  He never went inside the tunnel. Even before that day he never ventured into the cold, empty place. Freya had warned him often enough how unstable it was, that ‘nobody maintains it, George; not since the station closed down.’ He had heeded those warnings, it seemed, and for this at least she felt some pride in her son’s judgement, even if his own reasoning stung her eyes with tears. He didn’t much fancy a rock to the head, he had said quite unashamedly, not if he could help it. He knew that pain well enough already.

  For one moment he stood there, surrounded by the damp air, the cold breath of autumn, the streaks of grey cloud overhead. Then he broke and ran. If he possessed the spirit of the lone hunter then it was also true that, faced with the hollow enormity of the tunnel mouth, his resolve broke. Instinct took over and he fled from that wild place to the village and Haven House.

  * * *

  In the days that followed Freya visited the tunnel herself. It marked the first time she had wandered from the village since learning its dark nature, but for all her apprehension she needed to witness the place herself. She needed to see what George had seen, to feel something of what he had felt.

  Still, the tree line watched her as she drew nearer. Though she need not have crossed its borders to reach the tunnel, she felt too close to the Forest already; a shiver racking her nerves as its ancient breath, icy and deep, stung her face. Sounds filled her ears at her approach; long, drawn-out creaks, of wood put under stress, and the rare crack of ice, which echoed through the Forest. The tracks represented a middle-ground into which she had wandered; a halfway place between the village and the vast, verdant sprawl that surrounded it. Not a dozen miles away in Southampton, men and women would be waking and worrying; about morning traffic on the Itchen Bridge, the clothes they were going to wear, or wanted to buy, the bass drone of the cruise ships as they pulled into the city and regurgitated streams of tourists, hot and rank with their own meagre concerns, while in as many steps she would be swallowed by the boughs, lost to Lynnwood and society forever...

  She found the tunnel empty. She stared into its mouth for several minutes, trying to replicate George’s experience, but could discern nothing in the darkness; no movement, no sense of watchfulness, save that of the trees, in the corners of her eyes. Both relieved and troubled by the imaginary nature of her son’s friend, she turned from the tunnel and headed home, following the path of the tracks into the village.

  * * *

  As a piece of fruit left too long uneaten, Lynnwood began to darken and turn soft; an apple, its brown flesh seething with movement. Once again McCready was woken by a screaming, which he followed this time to the hen house. The birds rushed madly in the moonlit pen, the cold air alive with frantic clucking. And at the centre of the enclosure, birds swarming around its calves, knelt the skeletal figure of before with that same long grin, a hen hanging limply from each hand. Nor was McCready alone in his night-time visitations. Weaker, or perhaps wilder, the children of Lynnwood stirred restless in their beds and dreamt of pale, hungry faces at their windows. And on abandoning his brooch at Ms. Andrews’s graveside, Mr. Shepherd found himself unable to sleep. Night after night he tossed and turned, but rest would not com
e, his body filled instead with a hunger the likes of which he had never known, or could seem to sate with food.

  A cry on his lips, McCready chased the figure from the hen house, which slunk like a fox into the blanket of birds and vanished. He woke the next morning with blood in his teeth, feathers stuck to his hands and a vile, coppery taste no amount of whiskey could remove. If the children complained of nightmares they were humoured, or comforted. Most did not, and though they might have seemed more tired than usual, their eyes brighter, their smiles sharper, their dreams went otherwise unnoticed. Mr. Shepherd, distraught at the absence of his brooch, fell upon his workbench with the ferocity of a feeding dog. He hammered iron strips into roughly-hewn pins, twisted metal in his vice, or held it in fire until it was soft enough to shape with his hot fingers. And each time his creations were the same; lips and teeth and lolling tongues. Mouth after mouth filled his workroom, until he couldn’t move from his bench for the hunger he had wrought.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Freya returned many times to the study in the Vicarage. How could she not, knowing what was written within? The honesty that she found in those pages, however horrid, was nourishing. Mostly, it seemed to satisfy her hunger, or distract her from it, where it might otherwise have consumed her.

  Some diaries, as Ms. Andrews’s, were confessional. She read tear-stained accounts of feeding frenzies beneath the trees; residents racing through the Forest, converging like a pack of hounds on their human quarry. She read of panicked breaths, of lingering tastes in the mouth and the winter of ’42, when the hunger claimed an entire train as it pulled into the village station. After that year the line fell into disuse. The carriages themselves were dissembled. Melted down. The metal, she read, was shipped off to the front line. It seemed an appropriate use for the blood iron, though the residents wouldn’t have known this, to ask them.

  Other books were more fanciful, their authors seemingly oblivious, poetry spilling like saliva from their lips. On this day in particular she stumbled on a written account of an old village legend. She found it moving for the memories it instilled; the warm security of her father’s lap, his hands around her waist, his clear voice in her ears as he recounted the very same folk tale to a young Freya.

  * * *

  Once, it was said, when the woods were young and the winters long, there lived a man in Lynnwood. This man had a wife, and together they had two sons, and each year when the autumn came and the trees turned red he filled their pantry with food. The winter months were vicious. Frost froze the earth, the trees fell bare and all but the strongest forest creatures sickened, grew thin and died. There was no fruit, there were no roots to dig, except for graves, and so the man worked hard to save supplies and make their larder large before autumn ran its course.

  Then one year when the winter came and the snow and ice alongside it, the man’s pantry was bare. His wife shook as she asked him what had happened. “Where is our food?” she said, still trembling from fear and the cold. “Why is the larder empty?”

  And the man wept – he was an old man now, for the seasons had turned many times since he had first come to Lynnwood – and he admitted that he had eaten the larder’s contents for himself. “This winter above all has been so very cold, and I so very hungry, and I had hunted much before the first snow so I thought there would be enough to last.”

  But there had not been enough to last. The wife shook her head and cursed that human creature, then grew thin and hard and fell stone dead across the floor. And the husband wept at what he had done.

  It was not long before his two sons came, attracted by the sounds of his tears. They saw their mother’s figure on the floor and they too wept. They asked their father what had happened.

  “I have done a terrible thing in eating our supplies,” he said. “Everything that we stockpiled is now gone.”

  “Then, like our mother, we will starve because of you,” replied his sons.

  He continued to shake his head. “I will find more food. You will not starve like your mother. I will be back for you.” And so saying he climbed astride his shivering horse and called his world-weary hound and he set off from Lynnwood in search of food.

  It was a pale, shining place beneath the frosty boughs. Ice cracked across the forest. His horse’s hooves broke the glassy sheets beneath their tread. But there was no food to be found in the New Forest. Day stretched into night and the old man grew colder but he would not return until he could feed his sons. He had given them his word, after all, and they were his children.

  Then, in that last moment, he saw it: a smooth-flanked stag, white as snow, with antlers twisting branchlike from its brow.

  And so he kicked his horse’s flanks and they gave chase, a cry of exultation on his old lips. They raced through the icy undergrowth: beneath the oak, the birch, the aller. They passed the shards of Mawley Bog and then the Hanging Tree. But no matter how fast his horse ran or how close they grew to the stag, it was always just out of reach.

  The tale had changed through the telling, but Freya knew that to be the nature of stories, as it is the nature of winter to be cold, or the human creature to glut. Some claimed the old man’s name was Cernunnos of the Wildwood. Others said he went by Herne, the Hunter. Others still say there was no stag at all; that the old man chased himself through the thin, grey trees and that he continues to do so forever more, a wintry spectre with his hound, his horse and his guilt.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They felt the change in the air; a subtle shift in the wind and rain that swept through the village. It danced across their skin like the scattered steps of a hundred crawling flies; an interminable itch growing stronger and more irritant with each passing day, until one morning when winter broke and with it the news that three boys had been reported missing.

  The village embraced the hunt. Neighbours, not carollers, knocked from door to door and the skies filled with the baying of hounds, a full month before Midwinter, as residents followed their struggling dogs over the heathland. The village resonated with dread feeling, visible in the haunted eyes of the residents, if only they knew what they were seeing.

  The boys’ names were Andrew Stone, Stewart Foxley and Christopher Savage. The Stones and the Savages were relatively new to the village, having moved here in Freya’s lifetime. The Foxleys, by contrast, had lived here for many generations and were an established presence. They were wealthy and owned one of the oldest cottages, near the dairy. A loud, exuberant sort, they frequently hosted parties no less loud or exuberant, though Freya had never been invited to one herself. She had Catherine for those kinds of evenings.

  The boys had gone missing on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Sandford’s son said he saw them walking down the high street, after school. Catherine, shopping in the village for spices, confirmed this. Mrs. Morecroft had been emptying the upper corridor of the Vicarage of Ms. Andrews’s belongings, although she didn’t notice them pass outside. It appeared they had turned off somewhere along the high street, through the fields that stretched behind it and crossed over into the Forest.

  In the days that followed, Freya’s motherly concern reached new depths. If three boys from George’s school could go missing in the middle of the afternoon, who was to say the same could not happen to her son? She grew hot with anxiety, unspoken fears burning in her blood and pressing at her skin. She couldn’t sleep but was woken each night, and found the tension infinitely worse in the darkness. The walls of her bedroom, the borders of the Forest and the night sky were all canvases against which she painted her worries; Boschian landscapes filled with skeletal figures she knew but could not name, and children, fleeing from them, from the vast blackness of the woods. Nor were these dreams but waking thoughts. Lynnwood seemed taut; as though every scrape of the branches from the ash tree outside her window might snap the tension and bring the Forest crashing down around her bed.

  But it did not come. The branches continued to scratch the glass. Each night the tension pulled tighter, echoing
the knot in her stomach. There was no relief, no matter how chaotic it would have been. In many ways, she thought, this was worse. She turned to Prozac, not to help her sleep – it was no good for that – but to deal with the places her mind began wandering. She had more than enough of the tablets left over from the months following Robert’s absence.

  She helped in the hunt for the boys, finding herself in the Forest, where she had sworn not to walk again. How could she not help, a mother herself? Everywhere she hoped to see the three boys, huddled and cold inside a dead tree, tucked into a hollow, or beneath the splayed roots of the felled oak by the bog. They were in none of these places. She doubted they were still of this world, swallowed by the Forest, like so many beforehand.

  She had read much folklore in the Vicarage. Stories had existed for hundreds of years, purporting the presence of figures in the Forest; otherworldly creatures, slender and fickle, which made their home beneath mounds of earth or inside fungal elf rings. Superstition said they snatched children who wandered into the Forest unaware; her Bauchan of the trees and the earth.

  She knew such creatures were fancy. There were no spirits, no demons, only people with famished features and the insatiable cold. Still she scoured the Forest. In her wakening world, of half-chewed magpies and enduring frost and long, sleepless nights, it was all she could do.

  * * *

  In light of the missing boys, Lynnwood became a different place. It wasn’t an obvious change – there was nothing wrong with the village in any physical sense – but it felt different. Frost lingered longer on the ground in the mornings. The birds in the trees seemed quieter, as if they too sensed that something was subtly amiss. Trees, which she passed every day, looked taller and thinner; the Forest’s bones picked clean by the season. The village transformed into a harsh, pointed place, full of sharp edges and sheer surfaces; the starving shadow of the Lynnwood she knew. And there were so many shadows, as though the shade beneath the trees had grown too great and was spilling out, encroaching ever closer on the unsettled soul of their village.