Stephen Jones - Dark Terrors 3 - The Gollancz Book of Horror

‘It just seems like that because you’re hungry.’

‘And thirsty.’

Daniel decided not to admit that he was too.

An elderly man was coming slowly towards them: the first pedestrian they had seen for some time.

‘Ask that bloke the way back to the car,’ Marc urged.

They stopped and waited for the man to reach them. His movements were circumspect and indecisive. At the last moment, when he was about six feet away, he must have sensed their presence, and he looked up. His face shocked them both. He was very old, bent and tiny: his features seemed half obliterated by time. His nose was almost flat, like a partly raised flap in the centre of his face, but had huge nostrils; his lips were so thin and withdrawn as to be virtually absent, and his round, creamy eyes looked blank. He was screwing up his eyes to get the two figures in front of him in focus. His contorted expression would have been comical if it had not also indicated that he was confused and alarmed. Assuming the man felt threatened, and aware that Marc looked intimidating, like the archetypal hooligan, Daniel made his face look friendly.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find our car. I left it near a pub down by the river.’

The old man shook his head as though Daniel’s words were outrageous, incredible.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. Off you go. Carry on.’

Marc moved a couple of steps towards him. ‘We’re lost, mister,’ he explained. ‘We don’t know where we are. We just want to get out of here.’

‘I can’t help you.’

‘But you live here, don’t you?’ Daniel said. ‘You’re a resident?’

The man made no answer to this. ‘Go up to the church,’ he said. ‘You’ll find someone there who’ll show you where to go.’

Daniel was becoming annoyed. ‘All we need is directions to our car. Which way is the river?’

‘You don’t understand,’ the man said. ‘The river runs all around.’

Marc was about to speak again, but Daniel waved a hand to stop him. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ll go to the church. We’ll ask there. Where is it?’

‘Keep walking the way you were going,’ the old man said, as though it was obvious. ‘You’ll see it.’

Repressing his anger at the old fool’s discourtesy, Daniel pushed Marc ahead of him. The man cowered away as they passed. Daniel looked back after they had gone a little way and saw he was feebly fiddling with the latch of a gate. ‘I knew he was a local. Ignorant old bugger.’

They trudged on uphill for five minutes before they heard people talking nearby. It was a relief to have the vast, seemingly solid silence broken by something other than the sounds of their own feet. The voices called to each other quietly but urgently, as though instructions were being transmitted over small distances. There were also various tappings and frutterings: work, of some kind, was in progress.

A short footpath leading off the road to the right pointed towards the apparent source of these sounds. A high, thick hedge concealed this place, but a lych-gate, very similar to the one Daniel and his son had climbed over earlier, offered ingress to whatever lay beyond.

Marc, panting and sweating from the uphill climb, dropped down on a grass verge and stretched out on his back. ‘I need a rest, Dad,’ he said.

Daniel saw the boy’s damp, swollen face and worried again about his physical state. At that age, he was sure, he could have walked all day and thought nothing of it. He hoped Marc’s flabby, flaccid condition, and resentful, peevish attitude were things he would grow out of soon. He said, ‘Take it easy for a while, then. I’ll go and see what’s happening over there, and try and find someone with enough sense to tell us how to find the car.’

‘Okay.’ Marc clasped his hands behind his head and shut his eyes.

This second gate was half open. As Daniel pushed it wider and passed through, a little old lady, sitting next to it at a green baize-covered card-table, rose out of the chair beneath her as if to welcome him. Daniel returned her polite smile, but came to a halt when she held up a hand to restrain him.

‘You are just a little early,’ she said, speaking slowly and precisely. She gazed along the length of some shadows stretching across the ground towards her, thoughtfully, as though she were making some calculation. ‘We are not quite ready for you yet. We don’t start until ten past two.’

That seemed a peculiar time to start anything. Automatically, Daniel glanced at his watch and saw it was one fifty-six. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t realize. Some kind of event is about to take place, is that it?’

‘Of course.’ The woman turned and indicated the area behind her. ‘As you can see,’ she added.

Daniel looked beyond her and found he had entered a large private garden. The design was basic, with a long rectangular stretch of sloping lawn, surrounded on all sides by hedged beds of the usual domestic flowers, leading away towards an unattractive two-storied modern red-brick house. A row of trees formed a curtain behind this dwelling, through which could be seen sections of what was probably an even uglier, off-white, and apparently featureless building beyond. A thin tower attached to this edifice rose a good way above the trees that surrounded it.

On the lawn, at various points, there was orderly activity. A number of stalls had been set out and a group of men were putting the finishing touches to the erection of a big sun-faded green canvas tent; stretching the final guy-ropes and hammering home tent pegs to secure them. Members of a small brass band were emerging from a side door of the red house and forming a cluster at the far end of the garden, blowing gently into their instruments and resting sheets of music on flimsy metal stands. The musicians, male and female, were buttoned tight into old-fashioned, cheerful-looking, but probably uncomfortably hot jackets with wide, vertical red and green stripes. Each one wore a red cap.

‘There’s going to be some kind of fête or bazaar,’ Daniel observed. ‘Good! I hadn’t realized.’

Feeling quite pleased with the way things were turning out, because, at such an event, there were bound to be stalls where he and Marc could buy cakes, sandwiches and tea or maybe even, in the tent, beer to drink, Daniel said, ‘I’ll wait then, since it’s only a few minutes. My son’s over there,’ he explained, unnecessarily.

‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘I know. We saw you both from a long way off.’

‘Did you?’ Daniel wondered about the ‘we’ since the woman was alone and none of the other people assembled in the garden could have seen his approach up the hill through the gate in the tall hedge.

The woman gave him another tranquil smile.

‘We have been observing your progress,’ she said, giving her quizzical expression another twist, and Daniel remembered the peculiarly dressed figure Marc and he had seen, that had called to them when they had climbed the ‘monument’. Presumably, word of their presence had spread that way. It must be a very lonely village indeed, he reflected, where news of such a non-event was instantly turned into hot gossip.

Daniel went back to where he had left Marc, who seemed to be asleep. The sun shone full on his face, but he’d only been there a few minutes, so Daniel knew he was unlikely to come to harm. The child was rarely in the open air, and strong sunlight might even help clear up his acned complexion.

Daniel sat down himself, leaned back against a tree, and enjoyed, for the first time that day, some contentment.

Back in the garden, very softly, the band began to play. They experimented with the first few bars of some jaunty, folky tune then fell silent again.