Guy Smith - The Lurkers

Janie Fogg had the feeling that there was something out there. A kind of intuition that sent a tingling feeling up and down her spine and made her constantly glance out of the grimy latticed windows towards the dark fir woods that lined the horizon.

Another half-hour and it would be dark. That wouldn't help, because if there was anything lurking outside, whatever or whoever it was would be able to creep right up to this tumbledown cottage. She shuddered, felt the urge to flee now whilst it was still light, whilst there was time. Before . . .

She closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them again she would find herself back in the modern characterless semi-detached house that looked across on dozens of identical dwellings. The Perrycroft Estate, mundane—but safe. It didn't happen that way, though. Oh God, the desolation, the fear was still here. And as if to increase her uneasiness the dusk was turning the distant mountains into a grey unfriendly land mass that seemed to hem her in.

Janie carried on drying the dishes. A cup and saucer rattled in her trembling hand as she carried it from the table. She was forced to look out of the window again, searching the rough grass fields that led up to the forest, endeavouring to spot the object of her mounting terror. But there was nothing, just a few sheep and a smaller creature that could have been either a hare or a rabbit by the furthermost hedgerow.

All this was sheer madness, coming to a place like this at this time of the year. In summer it would not have been so bad; she might even have enjoyed it for a week. But it was November and the desolate landscape was shrouded in low cloud for most of the time, a perpetual atmosphere of damp and cold. Hodre was a typical dilapidated Welsh country cottage, the kind of place unscrupulous owners could charge a hundred pounds a week for in the holiday season simply because escapist urban dwellers thought they were 'getting away from it all'. That was fine when the sun shone and bees worked diligently gathering pollen amongst the masses of wild flowers; now the flowers and the bees were gone and she faced stark reality.

At thirty-six life had settled to a nice even pattern for Janie: a husband who went out to work at eight in the morning and came home at six, a mortgage within their means because they hadn't tried to keep up with the Jones's and moved to a detached house. A car on HP and a few pounds left over for a ride out at the weekends. Now that Gavin was at school Janie could have got a job, but it would have spoiled it all because she would not have had time to do her household chores as meticulously as she liked. Life wasn't boring because this was the kind of existence she had dreamed of for years, conventionally perfect in every aspect.

And then Peter had gone and ruined it all by writing that damned book, working on it two or three evenings a week for over a year. She had actually encouraged him at the time because it kept him in the house instead of out in his garage workshop until eleven o'clock at night. But she would never in her wildest fantasies have thought that it would have been the springboard for all this. Thousands of people wrote books that were never published. Only exceptionally lucky ones received royalties. And certainly only a meagre handful made it really big on a first book.

It was an experience that left Janie dazed and still waking up each morning in the beginning thinking that maybe she had dreamed it all. Who in their right minds would pay an advance of fifteen thousand pounds for a few hundred typewritten pages of a novel when they did not even know whether or not it would sell? Janie didn't know the details of this apparent madness but there had been talk of some kind of auction—publishers trying to outbid one another for Peter's book.

Peter should have been satisfied once he'd banked his cheque, a nest egg which would allow them to live comfortably for many years without worrying about recessions and inflation and all that sort of gloom which came out of the TV screen at nine o'clock every night. But he wasn't satisfied; it had changed him almost overnight, in her opinion anyway. He was greedy, he wanted to do it all over again: another book and another fifteen grand. That was why they had moved to Hodre for a year. A year! She'd go mad. The nearest village was three miles away, and their closest neighbours, the Ruskins at the big Hill farm on the other side of the forest, weren't exactly the friendliest people you could meet. They seemed resentful that the Foggs had moved in. Driving by in their Land Rover or tractor, father and sons glared down at the small stone cottage. Peter said it was because they desperately wanted Hodre and its meagre three or four acres to complete their monopoly of an upland sheep empire, but Clive Blackstone, Hodre's owner who lived somewhere much more civilised down on the south coast, was rich enough and stubborn enough to resist tempting offers. So in a way having the Ruskins as neighbours was worse than having no neighbours at all.

Janie's lips tightened. Peter was selfish as well as greedy. He had uprooted both herself and Gavin, heedless of the fact that their nine-year-old son had just settled into the big middle school. Now Gavin had to pick up the threads all over again, and try and hold his own in an out-of-the-way village school where in all probability they used outdated teaching methods.

Janie sighed her relief audibly and almost forgave her husband for everything as she spied the blue Saab estate car winding its way down the narrow lane between the low pleached hedges. Her fears seemed to lessen with the realisation that Peter had returned from collecting Gavin from school in the village. But it would be like this every day: a regular period of loneliness and terror. She tried to tell herself that she would get used to it but she knew she wouldn't.

The Saab's headlights were on. Dusk had deepened considerably during the last ten minutes or so whilst she had been looking out of the window. Even with Peter back, night still held a thousand terrors for Janie; things she couldn't explain, couldn't talk to Peter about.

Away to the left, only three hundred yards from the cottage and just visible from the small lead-framed windows, a rough circle of twisted and stunted pines were silhouetted against the deep grey of a darkening western sky, set on an elevated hillock so that they would be visible from almost any angle in this barren rocky hill country. Janie shivered; that place was something else that unnerved her, making her want to lock the doors and windows before it got properly dark. An ancient druid stone circle lay beneath those warped pines. So the locals said, anyway, and you could take most of what they said with a pinch of salt, Janie sneered to herself. The villagers didn't like having strangers in their midst, so the story could have been invented for the sole purpose of discouraging outsiders. But there was no getting away from the fact that there was a rough circle of large stones up there and the place was also listed on the large scale ordnance survey map of the district.

Peter had shown a considerable interest in the circle and had even taken Gavin up there (all part of the boy's education, he had said), and the boy had been fascinated by a huge flat stone which Peter claimed had to be the sacrificial stone. Ugh, it was horrible, best forgotten. There were enough killings in the twentieth century without digging up gory reminders from a bygone age, Janie had insisted. History always seemed to be about bloodshed and maybe that was why life was so cheap nowadays. Nobody was safe anywhere. That feeling of uneasiness came back. There was something dangerous about Hodre.

'Hi.' Peter was standing inside the small hallway, seemingly oblivious of the draught from the door, which hadn't latched properly. Short and stocky, his features had a squareness about them, a ruggedness that Janie had once described as a bulldog-look. But now his appearance was spoiled by the long sandy hair that curled around the collar of his open-necked shirt and the worn and faded jeans. She wore jeans, too, but had always prided herself in being immaculate, even out here. Not a strand of her long golden hair was out of place, (its natural colour was dark brown but Peter had a preference for blondes), and the matching denim jacket showed no traces of the household chores she had done throughout the day. She had put on make-up because she felt undressed without it. That was the difference between the two of them, the formal and the informal, a blend of oppo-sites that had somehow worked out. Until now.