Guy Smith - The Wood

He smelled the marshes and the sea shortly before the weird trees petered out, the fog not so dark now. They were out in the open, heading directly towards the sea. Andy paused, doubted the wisdom of following, yet Carol might be out there. He prayed to God that she wasn't but he could not chance it. Moving cautiously, stooping low even though the fog hid him, following the progress of the others by ear. Some urgent calling had brought them out on to Droy marshes, some terrible purpose to be fulfilled which he was about to witness.

Suddenly he almost blundered into them, checked just in time, ducked back into the fog. There were half a dozen of them crouched behind boulders on the narrow rocky shore, their backs to him, their attention focused seawards, otherwise they would almost certainly have seen him. Lurking, waiting. For what?

Andy Dark dropped on to his haunches. The fog seemed to thicken as though to screen something from him which he had no right to witness, blanking out even those creatures purporting to be men in a land of mist. They were no longer communicating with each other in those guttural grunts, kneeling silently amid the stinking heaps of seaweed. Watching.

Then his ears picked up a sound, the soft rhythmic splashing of water, one which he instantly recognised as that of oars being pulled, heading inshore. Beyond Andy Dark's vision a rowing boat was steadily coming inshore from the open sea.

'Your part in the reconstruction of events leading up to the disappearance of Miss Embleton and Mr Dark must be entirely voluntary, Miss Brown. I want you to understand that.' Detective-Sergeant Jim Fillery regarded the girl seated in his temporary headquarters at Droy police station. He didn't want any repercussions, any flak from the media if anything went wrong. Not that it was likely to but he could just as easily have got a plain-clothes WPC to take the role. This girl would be better, though, the locals would take a greater interest, it might jog a memory somewhere along the fast-cooling trail which had begun at the disco. In all probability it wouldn't throw anything up but at least you were seen to be doing something. And, frankly, at the moment Jim Fillery could not think of anything else. Three people who should have been found in Droy Wood, and the search had been a very thorough one, had literally vanished into thin air.

'I want to do it,' Thelma Brown smiled. 'Carol was my best friend and after all I was one of the last people to see her.'

'Fair enough,' Fillery nodded. 'You'll be under supervision the whole time so you don't need to worry. We'll start tonight, the same disco, the same sequence of records, and hopefully everybody who was there last time will come again. Then you'll leave at 11.30, walk the same route, and one of our officers will pick you up in a blue Mini and drive you to the edge of Droy Wood. That'll be the end of the reconstruction.' Christ, we can't have you running off into the wood.

All the same, Thelma Brown was nervous. Suddenly she was playing a leading role in the recent events which had shocked the whole of Droy village. Yet she felt a duty towards Carol, the need to do something positive.

'You're mad,' her mother had retorted angrily when she heard of the proposed reconstruction. 'No good can come of this. And it's making your father ill.'

Emotional blackmail; Thelma had been subjected to it all her life. 'Now don't you get stopping out late at nights because your father can't go to sleep until you're safely in, and getting overtired at his age isn't good for him.'

John, her boyfriend, was furious too. 'I won't let you do it!' He confronted her angrily, his flushed cheeks matching his red hair, fists clenched, 'You're not bloody well going, d'you hear?'

'I'll do as I please.' Thelma Brown retorted, 'and neither you nor anybody else will stop me.'

'It's crazy, it's dangerous and it won't do any good.' He was beginning to raise his voice now. 'These reconstructions never work out, they're just a waste of everybody's time. Like these identikit pictures the police are always issuing, an artist's impression of the killer taken from scraps of information they get from unreliable witnesses, and when they finally catch the guy he looks nothing like his picture. They set all these things up to convince the public they're doing something because otherwise they wouldn't have a bloody clue.'

'I'm going,' she said stubbornly, 'whether you like it or not and if you don't, you know what you can do!'

So the following night Thelma Brown walked nervously into that crowded disco in the village half, a loner who was going to jive on her own all night. Rocking all over the world.

Trying to pick up the mood. My name is Carol Emble-ton. Carol Embleton. John's over there, can't take his eyes off you. John? Oh yes, Thelma Brown's boyfriend. Can't see Thelma but there's so many people here it's difficult to be sure; could be they've had another tiff and he's come on his own. It's none of my business anyway because I'm engaged to Andy Dark. A little ripple started to goosepimple her skin. It was an exciting fantasy. Another record, an even faster beat, the lights dimmed so that those flashing coloured bulbs dazzled you, transported you into a world of cavorting shadows and ear-bursting music. Like it had been the other night; exactly the same. You've got to go at 11.30 because you're walking home tonight. On your own. Where's Andy? Gone filming something or other. You're walking the long way round tonight, along by Droy Wood. Her pulses were hammering faster than that double bass now. She hadn't thought it would be quite so real as this. Sounded fine in the cold sober light of an October morning; but now it was dark outside, probably raining too. She shivered. It wasn't such a good idea after all.

The clothes she was wearing, they were all Carol's, the ones they had found in that Mini: jeans, blouse-top, the sheepskin hanging up in the ladies… the clothes that had been torn from Carol's body before… Oh God!

No, they can't be because you're Carol and nothing has happened to you and it isn't likely to. Just a long walk home in the dark, you'll have done your bit then, Turning so that her back was to that psychedelic fighting, having to wait for her eyes to stop flashing blue, green and yellow before she could make out the hands of the clock on the wall. 11.25. Thelma Brown's stomach seemed to flip then consolidated into a hard ball, brought with it a fleeting sensation of dizziness. This is it, you're on your way, girl!

The calves of her legs felt spongy as she pushed her way through the jiving mass of bodies, heading towards the door marked 'ladies'. A sickening smell of strong mixed perfumes and urine as she scraped the door back, shut it again. That sheepskin coat, the real McCoy, one that Andy Dark had bought her for… for an engagement present.

Just a shade too big across the shoulders but that didn't matter. Some graffiti on the wall, an almost illegible scribble in pencil by some dirty slut, probably one of those motorbike guys' girls — 'do you masturbate?'

Thelma found herself blushing, swallowing, a direct question that seemed to leap off the peeling emulsion at her. Mind your own bloody business. She felt a forest of eyes on her as she made her way towards the exit. Everybody's watching you. So what? They're probably wondering why Andy isn't here, wondering if they can make some gossip out of it. Outside the sky was beginning to cloud over, the moon fast becoming buried but fighting hard to shine through the gathering formation. For a second or two it was clear and if you looked at it hard enough there was a face up there just like they used to tell you when you were a kid. Frowning. You shouldn't be walking home on your own tonight, Thelma Brown (sorry, Carol Embleton), But if you must, don't go by Droy Wood. Strange things happen to people who get caught up when the mists roll across.