Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

Maurice got awkwardly up off the steps, turned, and looked back into the trees. He realized the scolding sounds had stopped. The trees swayed gently, normally, in the wind. As far as he could see, nothing moved among them that should not. The mud lane leading to the road was empty.

“What have you got?” a voice asked from inside the cabin. It was a tired, old man’s voice.

He turned and looked at the skinhead, who shrugged, and gestured back over his shoulder.

Halfway into the cabin, on a pile of filthy mattresses, lay an elderly, whiskery man, also in overalls. He was on his side, with his head propped in his hand.

“Is it household? Garden? That sort of thing?” the old man demanded.

“I’m sorry . . . ?” said Maurice, uncomprehendingly.

“Yer rubbish,” said the young man irritably. “What is it?” He sneered at the muddy, frightened man in front of him, who could only press his hand against his brow and shake his head.

“Bloody Hell!” the skinhead said, “what we got here?” and held the tattered book up to his face in a contemptuous, dismissive gesture.

The old man turned and sat up. “You got any rubbish to deposit at this tip, or haven’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, I see what you mean! No, I haven’t.”

“Then why are you here? What can we do for you? This is Council land, you know. Private.”

“Well, to tell the truth, my car had a bump on the road back there. Nothing serious. I’m a bit shaken. Thought I’d get some fresh air to clear my head. Is that okay?”

“No harm in that,” the old man conceded. “As long as you don’t hang about. Trouble is, we get people in scavenging. Can’t have that, for health reasons. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do,” said Maurice vaguely. “I won’t be long.”

He stumbled as he walked away towards the tip.

Behind him, the skinhead said, “Pissed!”

“As a rat,” the old man agreed.

Maurice didn’t want to go back past the trees. He didn’t feel ready for that. Perhaps he could find another way out onto the road? He looked around. The whole area was enclosed by wire fences, as far as he could see, and he was in no mood to climb over them. He was barely able to walk, to keep upright, as it was.

He wandered into a mangled landscape of many levels. The earth rose and fell away in strange, half-related planes, like a cubist composition. Rough roads of cinders swooped up to sudden edges that led nowhere, or down and around to pools of oily, glinting rainwater and randomly dumped heaps of soil or refuse. It seemed that whole buildings had been dropped from the sky. Piles of bricks, toys, carpets, plaster, furniture, in violent juxtaposition, were dotted everywhere, and mounds the size of small hills, the remnants of unimaginable ruins, formed miniature alpine chains down into the old, unused quarries. All was covered by a dust-crested crust of varying thickness that split under him as he walked. His footprints behind him oozed fleshy mud.

Paper and plastic scraps drifted endlessly across the site in the wind. Occasionally, larger segments of light-weight litter broke loose from the clotted mass and carved into the air, scaring up flocks of shrieking gulls and starlings. Smoke, or steam, puffed up mysteriously from various points, as though a huge engine was building up pressure deep under the earth. A machine made a pumping, clunking sound somewhere out of sight, and the strident alarm of a reversing earth-moving vehicle called out every few minutes from some hidden excavation.

He almost tumbled into a deep hole, about two feet wide. It reached diagonally down, like a giant rabbit’s burrow, into the compacted garbage. At first he thought that someone had been tunnelling, for some unimaginable reason, but noticed that loose matter from underground had been pushed up around the lip of the hole, as though it had been dug out from under. He found other similar holes. He knelt beside one, and peered down into it. Buried wires, wooden laths, and plastic pipes had been torn apart by some powerful, or desperate, digging. He couldn’t even guess at why the holes were there.

He wandered aimlessly amid the desolation, stumbling like a blind man searching for his lost stick, until he came to the edge of one of the so far unused quarries. Down inside it there was a small lake of pure, shining water reflecting the scudding clouds and the vivid blue of the sky. The sides of the quarry were steep, bare cliffs, or slopes of tumbled stone covered with blossoming shrubs and rich grass. To Maurice, it glowed and beckoned like the Promised Land. He looked for a way down into this pleasant place, but saw that he would have to walk a long way round to gain access. Too tired and depressed to make the effort, he sat down on a chunk of creamy marble, part of an old fireplace, to review his situation.

He still felt wretched. His body ached. Obviously, he needed to get to a doctor. He hoped that, when he got back to his car, he would be able to drive. It was only three miles into Buxton, but somehow, that sounded like a long way. He dreaded the thought of the journey.

He sat for a while, still as a stone, trying to read his own mind, to make sense of his recent experiences.

He seemed to be gazing out from some painful place deep within his skull.

The landscape in front of him, beyond the quarry, had a hectic look. Cars passing on the A6 chased each other viciously, the sound of their passage an angry, waspish buzz. Sheep, grazing in the long sweep of fields that climbed up the side of Combs Moss to the rough crest of crags called Black Edge and Hob Tor, looked like fat, lazy maggots browsing on a green corpse. The hurtling clouds cast swooping shadows, like dark searchlights, across the pastures. He felt that he had slipped into another reality, similar to, but alarmingly unlike, the one he had previously inhabited.

Disgusted with the increasingly morbid turns his mind was taking, he got to his feet and looked back the way he had come. In spite of the indications of activity suggested by the various, continual mechanical noises, he had seen nobody since he had left the two men in the porta-cabin. Now his eye caught the movement of five long-shadowed shapes moving slowly towards him across an area strewn with household waste. The figures stooped from time to time to lift objects from the ground, and stood still, heads down, as though inspecting their finds. Then, they would either drop whatever they had discovered, or walk over to one of their number who was awkwardly hauling a little cart of some kind, and carefully place their discoveries inside it. Their movements were even-paced, and languid to the point of listlessness.

With the low sun behind them, it was impossible to make out details of their features. He thought that two of them, including the smallest, who was tugging the cart in some sort of harness, were female. He got the impression they were dressed rather quaintly. As they got nearer, he could hear their voices, quiet and even-toned, like people at prayer. Presumably, they were discussing the treasures they were finding. They gave no indication that they were aware Maurice was there until the tip of the hugely extended shadow of the most forward of them touched his feet. Then that figure stopped, raised his right hand to his shoulder, and the others behind him ceased all movement, as though they had become unplugged from their energy source. The man at the front raised his hand even higher, with his index finger close to his brow, and tapped a battered cap lodged above his ear, in an antiquated gesture of respect.

Maurice, embarrassed and irritated by the subservient gesture, which he automatically assumed was one of mock humility, found himself lost for a suitable response. He said, “Hello there!” in the tone he would use to greet one of his colleagues, met by chance on the streets of Manchester.