Four British Mysteries Page 9

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The mystery of George’s friend in the tunnel didn’t stop with his fleeing from the vast magnitude of the opening that morning.

  Amid the pangs of the starving season, Freya remembered other traditions: the devotion to family, to friends, good food and good company. Afraid for her son and his detachment from the village she spent as much time as she could with him. They watched films together; festive and fantastic and ringing with Christmas spirit. They took Eaton for long walks, touring Lynnwood’s cobbled streets, illuminated with strings of tasteful lights. And she cooked him hearty meals, the likes of which every growing boy needed; dripping meats, crisp, golden skins, thick gravies and sweet sauces, all washed down with carbonated drinks, which sparkled sharp and refreshing in his face and down his throat. After these meals, when she was briefly sated, her mouth coated with the lingering glaze of dinner, she would sit with him and talk. They spoke of many things, which he might not otherwise have disclosed to her. And while some of these things saddened her, or made her hot and anxious, she wasn’t upset because through speaking they grew closer.

  He still returned to the old Brockenhurst line each afternoon. They often talked about the place, which seemed so special to him. The tunnel frightened him, as the dark frightened all children, but there was a part of him that recognised the darkness and was excited by it.

  * * *

  One late October afternoon, while visiting the tracks, George had heard shouts behind him. The unwelcome voices startled him, his heart racing in his chest. Still on his hands and knees, where he had been inspecting the sleepers for beetles, he looked around. Three boys were moving towards him from the trees.

  “What the hell?” said the closest. He thought it might have been Andy.

  “What’s he doing up there?”

  “He’s playing with dirt –”

  “No, worms! He’s eating worms!”

  He lost track of who was speaking because he had turned back around to pack away his things, and then it didn’t matter because they started to chant, their ugly voices joined in childish ritual. They reached him just as he was refilling his rucksack. Chris snatched the bag from beneath him while Andy interposed himself between the two. Stewart took the bag from Chris and emptied it onto the grass. His equipment tumbled out.

  “So this is where you go after school every day,” said Andy.

  “You said we should follow him,” added Chris. “Look at all this stuff.”

  “Looks like shit to me.” Stewart picked up the polythene bag and emptied the crumbs across the ground. He retrieved one of the jam jars – the clean one – and stared at him through the glass. It did strange things to his eye, making it appear larger than it actually was, multifaceted and sharp. “What d’you use this stuff for?”

  When he didn’t speak, Stewart hurled the jar against the tracks. The glass shattered against the metal so that only the jagged base remained. “I said what do you use this stuff for?”

  Still he didn’t answer. His mouth felt dry, powdery, like the wings of those butterflies in the display cabinet at home. This was his place. His private place. And the others had followed him here.

  “You’re an idiot, Georgie,” said Stewart flatly. “Can’t speak to save your life, eh?”

  “Mouth full of worms, probably,” said Chris.

  “Mouth full of shit more like.”

  They taunted him like this for some minutes. He stopped listening after the first, retreating into himself. He wished he were an insect, with glistening black skin hard enough to withstand their words, three pairs of legs, sharp mandibles with which to nip the limbs neatly from the other children, until they were armless, legless stumps, flailing, moaning by the old tracks –

  He wasn’t sure which one of them pushed him over. He slipped and rolled down the embankment, only stopping when he reached the base. Mud streaked down his back and across his face. His belongings followed after him: some schoolbooks, the second jam jar, his pencil case. His neck ached, his chest constricted. He didn’t cry.

  “See you tomorrow, Georgie,” shouted Stewart. “Don’t be late.”

  He struggled to his feet in time to see Michael hurl his magnifying glass into the tunnel. Then the three of them ran off through the trees.

  For a long time he didn’t move. A fresh wind played through the orange leaves. Autumn was in full sway, the Forest appearing rich, almost golden, beneath the drab sky, but he saw through that. His was a different Lynnwood, far removed from the village other people seemed to see. Of that much he assured Freya, when they spoke about it.

  Eventually he moved, climbing the embankment to the tracks. He found his rucksack and some of his books, which he carefully retrieved from the grass, and was about to leave when he heard it again, as he had before: a scraping sound, of something being dragged against loose rock. He turned to the mouth of the tunnel. The darkness made it near impossible to see and yet he thought he could discern something within: a shape, gaunt and grey in the shadows.

  He leant in, his eyes squinting, just as it emerged from the tunnel mouth. Not all of it, but an arm, long and thin. The limb stretched out from the darkness, hurled something through the air, then withdrew in a flash. George stared down at the grass by his feet and at his magnifying glass, lens cracked, which had landed there.

  He approached the tunnel slowly. It was darker than he remembered. Colder. It towered over him. There was no more movement, no sign of anything within, except the distant echo of dislodged stones. He stared a moment longer, then spared a backwards glance to make sure he was unwatched. Only the magpie witnessed his actions.

  He turned back to the tunnel. His pockets bulged with the collected detritus of the afternoon’s efforts: a handful of dead woodlice, a shrivelled earthworm, caught above ground for too long, a small Tupperware box that he had placed two large snails inside. Each of these things he took slowly from his pockets and arranged on the ground before the tunnel. He wasn’t so close that the figure inside could reach him; of that he was certain. Friendship was still a strange thing, whatever form it took, and he treated it accordingly.

  Seated on the ground, surrounded by his menagerie of insects, living and dead, he opened his mouth and began to talk. He talked about arthropods and habitats and how lonely he felt in a village where no one understood him. He spoke of other things too; the beating inside him, a soft, insistent pulsing, like a pupa pressing at its cocoon.

  It didn’t matter that the figure in the cave remained anonymous. In fact, he thought, it was better that way. He talked to it, the figure who had watched him when he came to the tracks each day, the figure who had returned his magnifying glass to him. He talked and, though he didn’t smile, he was happy because he heard the scattering of tiny stones and he knew it was listening. There were other sounds too; sometimes the sharp, hollow crack of distressed bone, as when Eaton gnawed a chew-treat, and he realised it must be feeding in there, or had fed recently. This didn’t bother him unduly, he told Freya, for all things must eat, and he wasn’t so alone in Lynnwood anymore.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The brooch’s artistic merit was undeniable and Freya was certain it would have stood out among Mr. Shepherd’s other wares: the crosses, shield-emblems and burnished crow-shaped pendants displayed each week at market. He was a true craftsman, renowned throughout the village for his Celtic-themed work. She had once commissioned him to make their wedding rings: modest gold bands each sporting a single diamond.

  But she had glimpsed the hungry horror inside them all and instead felt only revulsion for the beautiful object in her pocket, which seemed intent on nurturing that nascent wildness. So she sought to return the borrowed brooch to its rightful owner, because it was both the right thing to do and because she wouldn’t have it in her house a moment longer.

  Stepping out into the village that day, she found the sky white, an uninterrupted stretch of snowy cloud. The village seemed greyer by comparison, a collection of low buildi
ngs with dim windows, roofed with dowdy straw. The trees, which surrounded Lynnwood on all sides, had never looked so dense, so dark. And below the blanket of clouds, plumes of smoke, rising from behind the Old Barn...

  She hurried down the street in the direction of the Forge. The title was fitting, given the converted cottage’s original function. John Shepherd’s family, he could often be heard to claim over a pint at the Hollybush, had lived in the cottage for several generations. The parish records confirmed as much, when curiosity led her to inspect the village documents one day: there had always been a metalsmith at the Forge. She still doubted the true ancestry of the Shepherds, knowing what she did about the nature of family names, but that didn’t detract from John’s claim to the cottage, or the skill of his hand when he turned it to his craft.

  She moved through the village, her boots knocking against the icy cobbles. Lizzie was working on her art at a friend’s house, so she had asked Catherine to watch George for the afternoon. Catherine had looked after both of her children many times during their infancy. When Lizzie was first born she had made Catherine godmother; the result of a schoolgirl pact beneath the ash tree in her garden.

  * * *

  The smell of blossom and motor oil filled the garden. It was the first day of spring. The afternoon growled with sound as Freya’s father dragged his lawnmower back and forth, reducing the grass to short, bristly clumps, chewed and spat in the machine’s wake. Freya thought the lawn looked worse afterwards, but then grass never grew well in Lynnwood. Her father had explained it to her once; something to do with the Forest roots absorbing all the nutrients, leaving none for the lesser plants. She hadn’t wholly understood, at the time.

  Catherine and she sat beneath the ash tree as dusk descended. They had been sitting there since school finished for the day and were both still dressed in their uniforms. The year was ’78 and they were eleven. They should have long outgrown fairy tales and fancy dreams, though neither of them seemed to have realised this. Having mown the lawn, David returned inside. The girls busied themselves with plucking the yellow grass from the soil.

  They swore many things that day. Always to play. To laugh. To live together in Haven House with their dogs and their cats and the sounds of the Forest through the open cottage windows. When Catherine realised they might one day have to marry boys she grew sad, then excited, then thrilled at the prospect of motherhood in the way only young girls could.

  “I’m going to have two babies!” she said.

  “I’m going to have three!”

  Catherine scrunched up her face at Freya’s declaration. “You can’t have three, there’s not enough room in the house.”

  “I’ll have as many babies as I want, thank you very much. And you’ll have to help me look after them.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Catherine. “I mean, it’s a lovely thought, but I’ll be far too busy with my own to look after yours. And you’ll have a husband for that, anyway.”

  “I still want you to be there,” said Freya coyly. Her cheeks grew hot and she plucked a little faster at the grass.

  “I suppose I could be their godmother, if you really wanted.”

  “Yes!” said Freya. “I mean, I’d like that very much.”

  At that tender age, words still seemed fleeting. Freya remembered the sharp, sudden pain as she pricked her thumb on a piece of bark from the tree behind her, and the splash of red that had fallen from her thumb to the soil below. The bare earth around the tree grew wet with sisterly blood.

  It wasn’t until her thirties that Catherine learned she was infertile; that she always had been, and would never have children of her own. They were sitting in the same garden when she broke the news to Freya. Merlot of both kinds – cat and grape – had swiftly followed.

  * * *

  Though Catherine was godmother to both Freya’s children, it was George with whom she got on better. Far removed from the shrill, wine-toting woman Freya had grown up with, Catherine was patient and accommodating with her son. When Freya and Robert used to return home from dinner, on those occasions when they treated themselves to meals out, they would often be greeted by the sleeping pair in the front room. Catherine’s strong arms would be wrapped around George, his eyes closed, legs dangling from the sofa, or either side of her knee. Asked about this friendship one day, if it could be called such, George had said simply that Catherine was nice, and that she listened when he spoke.

  Freya encountered few people along the way to the Forge. Most, she knew, were still scouring the Forest for the missing schoolboys. It might have reflected well on the village that they had rushed so quickly into the dark places beneath the trees. Once, she could remember, not so long ago, she thought men feared those dark places, or the dogs that raced alongside them through the thickets. Now she knew it ran deeper than that, deeper even than blood memories. If they feared these things at all, it was because they craved them; the darkness, in which to hide and hunt, one part of a bestial pack...

  They couldn’t speak of it, of course. Speech was a different construct; civil and societal. There were no words to express this ancient exuberance or the primal rush of blood and heat and beating heart that accompanied it. Still the village searched, as Freya had searched until she could go no further for fear of losing herself in the gaps between those haunted trees...

  Turning down a gravel path, with a little gate and a low brick wall, she watched as the converted cottage emerged from behind the trees. The yard at the front was white with frost and wild snowdrops. Dark windows with lattice bars lined the ground floor of the cottage and, though the first floor was mostly brick, she remembered from previous visits a small window on the other side, above the workshop. Just to the right of the door emerged a weathered pole, from which hung the smithy’s sign of old. It creaked painfully on her approach.

  For several minutes she waited patiently, her knocking at the door unanswered. She might have waited longer, too, except that the ornament in her pocket seemed to grow heavier, hungrier, as though sensing its return to the one who had made it. Besides, she knew Mr. Shepherd was at home. By all accounts, he hadn’t been seen about the village for over a week now.

  Even as she moved back from the doorstep and around to his workshop, consternation gnawed at her. She began to fill with dread. Mr. Shepherd was known to lock himself away, sometimes for several days if working hard at his bench, but to miss the village market, and so close to Christmas, was most unusual. Never mind the search for the missing children, which should have taken priority over anything he was working on.

  She moved to the back of the Forge. The gravel crunched beneath her feet. The yard continued around the house, leading to a garden. Though stripped by winter there was still some vegetation to be found; nettles clung stubbornly to life and snowdrops seemed to be flourishing, a bed of pristine petals on delicate green stalks. And behind the garden, joining the side of the house, sat the workshop.

  She saw these things in a second. Then she noticed the mouths and her stomach clenched fiercely. Some hung from bird houses; pendants on thin, silvery chains, the shining slip of their tongues extending past their lips. Others were larger; iron emblems hammered into the dusty stone of the residence, teeth like animals’ fangs. Still more covered the entrances to those bird houses or littered the leafless bushes and these, she realised with growing horror, were not ornaments but cunning traps; open jaws, spring-loaded and sharp with cruel lips and iron teeth strong enough to break birds or small animals –

  Her throat had grown tight, her breaths short, her head light. She noticed strange details in those lasting moments; the grain of the wood used to make the bird houses, hammered and sawed and nailed into a thing of artifice. The aroma of the garden filled her nostrils, fresh and crisp, almost as though she could smell the coldness on the air. She saw the rust-brown stains along the metal teeth of the traps, heard the imagined crash of their jaws as they snapped shut with brutal force –

  Then she saw the figure
in the window of the workshop. It leant in close, palms pressed outwards, breath steaming the inside of the glass. She had no doubt it was Mr. Shepherd and yet its face was covered by a mask, beaten into the beautiful shape of a beast. Ridges of iron framed its eyes. Ears jutted from either side of the temple, pointed like those of a hound, and its mouth was locked in a horrid howl, which put the meagre brooch in her pocket to shame. The shape of that mouth would not leave her for many days, or the shape of the real mouth beneath, Mr. Shepherd’s lips echoing that voiceless howl.

  For almost a minute she stared unmoving at the figure in the window, which still pressed, poised, against the glass. Then quite suddenly it lunged, vanishing from visibility like a dog that had grown anxious waiting for its owner to return home, and Freya fled from the garden of mouths. She didn’t stop running until she reached the village proper and even then she hurried straight home, not once turning back, not daring, in case that monstrous, magnificent mask dogged her steps, and the man beneath it.

  Only once she was safely indoors and tentatively drinking tea did she realise the brooch had fallen from her pocket somewhere when running. Too frightened to be happy, or care that it was lost, she could do nothing but place her lips against the smooth china cup and drink.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The diaries in the Vicarage were more than just informative. Like speech they represented a higher form of communication; structured language, however fragile, amid the hot, chaotic flush of bestial urges. They couldn’t hope to tame the hunger that filled Lynnwood; that much was obvious from the volume of literature shelved in the study, the steady accumulation of centuries of guilt. Nor could they explain how or why these urges surfaced beyond Lynnwood’s starving origins, and those were mere suppositions. Freya found solace in their pages nonetheless. They reminded her that she wasn’t alone. Not now or ever. Hundreds had felt the stirrings of that same hunger; an innate dissatisfaction with the strictures of Lynnwood, of life, where they couldn’t run, or pant, or gorge themselves on grease and juice and hot, spitting fat, but were forced to walk and smile and proffer manners and civility as though it was the most natural thing in the world.