The Tooth Fairy (26 page)

The plan had been that the boys would recover the body and drag it to the edge of the woods in the tarpaulin. They would throw the corpse over the horse’s back and take it to the pond. There they had already assembled ropes and a collection of heavy weights to lodge the thing on the bottom of the pond. Meanwhile the horse tossed its head, its breath steaming in the night air. The boys dithered, looking for leadership.

‘Get going!’ Alice hissed.

The three stepped inside the woods. Moonlight probed as far as the second or third depth of trees, silver on the vulnerable clusters of bluebells at the edge of the woods, but beyond that it dimmed, leaving barely enough light to pick out the winding pathway through the trees. It had been nightfall when they were last in the woods together, on the evening of the Wide Games. Sam led the way; Clive and Terry followed closely in single file.

An owl screeched somewhere in the depths of the woods. Sam stopped to listen. Within the darkness of the trees, slender silver birches reached above the treetops to act like conduits, slender tubes of faint luminescence channelling dull blue moonlight down into the blackness. The exhalation of the trees was everywhere, a watchful presence, attentive, waiting. He continued, and the other two followed.

‘We’re going the wrong way,’ Clive said after a while.

‘No.’ Sam was confident he knew where the hollow stump stood. He quickened his pace, sure that the others would follow.

At the junction of two pathways Sam was surprised by a sudden whiff of something familiar, a smell with such a precise character that it caused him to stumble from the path in the dark. Ferns whispered under his feet.

‘You’re taking us the wrong way!’ Clive tried again. ‘It’s way over there!’

‘This way!’ Sam insisted.

‘I think Clive’s right,’ Terry cut in. ‘I don’t remember any of this.’

‘That’s because we’re in the wrong neck of the woods!’ Now that he’d recruited Terry to his opinion, Clive was furious with Sam. ‘It’s nowhere near here!’

‘How would you know? You were tied down with your arse in the air when it happened.’

‘Look,’ said Terry reasonably. ‘If you were about to have Tooley’s fat, diseased, swollen dick shoved up your arse, you’d probably remember exactly where it happened, wouldn’t you?’

‘That’s just it. If I was about to have Tooley’s fat, diseased, swollen dick up my arse, I wouldn’t be making a note of the exact compass co-ordinates, now would I?’

‘Fuck off, both of you!’ Clive bellowed, not happy at being reminded of the experience which he’d narrowly been spared. ‘Follow me.’

Terry shrugged and waved Sam along with a gesture. They marched behind Clive for ten minutes or so, Sam growing more convinced with each step that his first instincts were correct. The screech owl sounded closer. ‘It’s around here somewhere,’ Clive murmured.

Sam caught a whiff again of something close, of something dangerous in the dark. He looked back down the path. Each
tree offered a cloak of blackness behind which anyone could hide. ‘Someone’s following us,’ he hissed.

Clive and Terry stopped and looked back. They strained to listen. ‘Alice?’ said Terry.

‘No, not Alice.’

‘Are you sure?’ Clive said.

‘Yes. I think so. Maybe. I mean, I’m sure it’s not Alice.’

‘You’re spooking us,’ Terry said.

The screech owl called, loud and shrill, only yards away. Sam saw it sitting on a high branch, looking down at them.

Clive pressed on. They came to a small clearing. ‘This is it,’ Clive announced. ‘That’s the tree where the Scout was hanging. I was tied up over there. We dumped Tooley’s body in that hollow stump.’

Sam felt sure Clive was mistaken. But Terry was nodding, sizing up the boughs of the tree. Together they shuffled across to the hollow designated by Clive. It was half filled with dead leaves, rotting branches and other woodland debris. No one was ready to lift any of it clear. ‘Right,’ said Clive.

Terry was first, and the other two joined in. Slowly at first, and then with mounting hysteria, they flung the debris clear of the hollow, until their fingernails dug into the soft, organic matter beneath.

‘Ugh!’ said Terry.

Clive pulled up a handful of the stuff. Sam too.

‘It’s just earth,’ said Sam. ‘Leaf mould. There’s nothing here.’

‘It’s been moved,’ Clive breathed.

‘No. This isn’t the place. You’ve brought us to the wrong place! Look at that tree! You couldn’t hang the skinniest Scout from that tree! And where were Terry and me supposed to be hiding? This just isn’t the place, you dumb bastard!’

Terry was scratching his head, looking round. ‘Sam’s right,’ he conceded.

‘I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it!’

Sam got a blast of that overpowering smell again. Bird shit; rain-mashed leaves; tree lichen; fungus; rotting hay; wild bulbs waiting to flower. He knew they were in the presence of a power. The hair bristled on his neck. ‘Never mind, Clive. We were led here. We were tricked.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sam looked up. The screech owl left its branch and flew overhead, going north. He knew they wouldn’t find anything that night. When he looked back, the other two were staring at him with appalled fascination.

‘Tell him to shut his fucking mouth,’ said Clive.

‘Yes,’ said Terry. ‘You’d better button it, Sam.’

Sam led them in silence back to the place where he’d first intended they should go, to the clearing where he’d seen the fox in the winter snow. Its features were similar to those of Clive’s venue: but the tree was a more likely candidate, the cover was better, the hollow stump was much deeper. It was also artificially piled with uprooted bushes and broken sticks. After they’d uncovered it in a second frenzy, the results were no different from their initial endeavours.

Clive sank to the earth, his face blackened with dirt and sweat. He wept with frustration. Then he stopped suddenly, simply staring ahead of him.

Sam helped him to his feet. ‘Come on. Alice will be going out of her mind.’

They trooped dispiritedly to the edge of the woods, Terry and Sam dragging the useless tarpaulin. Alice was crouched on the ground, hugging herself for warmth, smoking a cigarette down to its filter. There was no need for anyone to explain. The failure of the enterprise was apparent.

They led the horse across the field and over the road. Alice jumped the gate again, and they climbed into the field behind her. ‘I’ll see you back at my house in about fifteen minutes. Sam, can you ride bareback? Jump up behind me.’

But Sam was distracted. Over Terry’s shoulder, sitting on the gate, was the Tooth Fairy, watching them. The moon reflected balefully on its white face. It smiled at him with evil satisfaction.

‘You wouldn’t allow us to find it, would you?’ Sam murmured, so softly that the others, standing a few yards off, did not hear him. ‘You wouldn’t want that, would you?’

Terry dropped his end of the tarpaulin and pushed past Sam. ‘I’ll come if Sam won’t!’ He was up on the horse behind Alice in a second. Sam spun round. He saw Terry’s arms fold around Alice’s waist. Alice dug her heels into the horse’s flanks, and they were away, cantering across fields streaming with mist and flooded with moonlight.

‘What a good thing,’ said Alice.

Alice and the three boys studied a planning-application notice posted on the football-field gate. Redstone Football Club, having purchased the land outright, was proposing to level the ground to construct a second pitch. The enterprise would require infilling half of the pond.

‘I mean, what a good thing you three never found anything that night in the woods. They might dredge the pond.’

Over a year had passed since the disastrous project to recover the body of the dead Scout from Wistman’s Woods, and this was the first time the abortive effort had been mentioned. There had been sleepless nights immediately afterwards, and dreams of bodies composed entirely of leaf-mould rising from the paths through the trees; but the police had made their threatened renewed search of the woods with no more success than the boys’. Now, as they read the planning application pasted on a wooden board, the implications of what might have happened had they been successful that night were dawning on all of them. None of them knew whether the infilling of a pond would cause a submerged body to surface or seal the matter for ever.

‘Anyway,’ said Sam, and the word ‘anyway’ temporarily infilled the gaping nightmare for all of them, ‘anyway, they
can’t
just come and fill in half of what’s left of the pond!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s
our
pond! It’s It’s been our pond since we were little kids. They can’t do it!’

‘They can and they will.’

‘Well, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’ Sam looked across the water, a distance from bank to bank of about seventy or eighty yards. ‘They’re going to reduce it to the size of a mere puddle.’

‘A
mere
spit,’ said Clive.

‘A
mere
flob,’ said Terry.

This was the current delight among the Redstone Moodies: anyone foolish enough to try out a word drawn from beyond their immediate range of vocabulary would have it gleefully and mercilessly bounced back at them.

‘Someone ought to bomb the football club off the face of the earth,’ said Sam.

‘Easily done,’ said Clive. ‘What sort of bomb do you want?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I could serve you up a nice Molotov Cocktail in under a minute; a more cultured device might take me a full day.’ Clive’s garden-shed chemistry set was capable of anything.

‘Cultured,’
Sam said in a thin, reedy voice.

‘Hmmm, I say,
cultured
,’ Terry echoed.

‘Or I could knock up a pipe bomb in ten minutes.’

They turned from the notice on the gate and made towards the pond. ‘Really? Would it blow up the football club?’ Sam wanted to know.

‘Not exactly. But it would blow a decent hole in the door.’

Terry scratched his head. Football had stopped for the summer, but he was hoping to get a regular first-team place with Redstone FC for the new season. ‘I don’t think you should do that.’

‘All you need,’ Clive chirped happily, ‘is a length of pipe, a couple of rags, sugar and sodium chlorate. Weed-killer to you.’

‘Gosh.’

‘No,’ said Terry. ‘Do the gymkhana instead.’

‘Keep your hands off the gymkhana,’ Alice said fiercely.

‘Hey! What’s happened here?’ Sam shouted when they reached their usual hideaway in the bushes alongside the pond. The leather Morris Minor seat had been slashed; an old stool had been thrown in the pond; their tarpaulin shelter had been pulled down; and some empty cider bottles had been smashed on the ground.

‘Kids from the estate!’ said Terry.

‘Little bastards!’ said Alice.

‘Wish I could get my hands on them,’ said Clive. ‘I’d make ’em into pulp.’

‘This is ingenious! Damned ingenious!’ Skelton, his large, hairy hands pressed against his thighs, sat on one side of his polished mahogany desk while Sam perched on the chair opposite. The psychiatrist’s sleeves were rolled to his elbows. His window stood open to the warm June air. Between them, in the centre of the desk, stood the Nightmare Interceptor. Sam had finally conceded to Skelton’s requests to bring it in, partly because of Skelton’s scepticism about whether the thing actually existed and partly because he wanted someone in authority to assess its value.

Skelton’s teeth were like a row of weathered clothes pegs left on a washing line, and he bared them proudly in a huge grin. He put his eyes close to the device, poring over its working parts as if it were too fragile and precious to touch, not merely an old alarm clock attached by wire to a thermostatic switch and a crocodile clip. ‘And you’re certain it works?’

‘For all ordinary nightmares, yes. For what you call Tooth Fairy nightmares, no.’

Skelton waved away the distinction. ‘Do you realize, lad, how many people in this country suffer – I mean, really
suffer
– from the terror of nightmare? About eight million. Not just bad dreams but sweating, weeping, screaming, paralysing, terrifying nightmares. People who are afraid to go to bed at night. This could help them. Really help them. With a few refinements, of course. And it’s so accursedly
simple
!’

‘It hurts your nose a bit.’

‘May I?’ Skelton jabbed a finger at the crocodile clip. Sam shrugged. Skelton delicately plucked it up, opened the spring and let it snap on to his nose. ‘Ow! You’re right.’

‘You have to put bits of cotton wool between the clip and your nose. Otherwise you can’t get to sleep to have a nightmare in the first place.’

‘I see. I see. So the sensor is here on the clip, is it? Right. Now then. Let’s have a go.’ Skelton proceeded to hyperventilate through his nose. In a few moments the alarm triggered. He tore the clip from his nose and shouted, ‘Hallelujah!’ He got up. With his hands clasped behind his back, he proceeded to walk around and around his desk, chuckling to himself. ‘What we need is someone who can develop this thing. Develop and refine, eh? Develop and refine. I’m going to get in touch with one or two people. We’ll get it patented.’