Unhallowed Ground (36 page)

Where is the safety she’s craved and sought after most of her life? What the hell is happening here? And why can’t she ride out the rest of the storm safe and secure in Oliver’s strong arms with her eyes tightly closed.

Why not?

Why not?

T
HEY OPT FOR FOUR
in the afternoon, the time of the Buckpits’ milking, a ritual so deeply ingrained that even a hurricane is unlikely to change it.

Hopefully Lot will be out of the way.

Oliver’s plan is now inevitable. They can no longer stay here like terrified rats. Georgie’s brain races like an engine. She tries to still her heart by telling herself that nothing, no matter how evil, could be waiting out there in all this mayhem, in the loneliest spot in the world. She glances around the familiar room, probably for the last time. ‘So. This is it.’

‘Don’t go, Georgie. You were right. We should stay here…’

‘What crap. We both know that’s crap.’

‘But to lose you now would be…’

She bites her lip hard. ‘Oh, come on, be fair, don’t make this any harder, Oliver.’

‘You know how I feel…’

‘Yes, I think I do.’ Abruptly, and with a shiver, Georgie says, ‘I must go.’

Oliver kisses Georgie goodbye, a gesture so normal, so infinitely tender, so alien in this hellish chaos that, for the seconds it takes, it brings with it all the warmth in the world, and all the safety. And she, noting his grey, drawn face, brings her hand gently down it as if to keep the memory there.

The storm outside enfolds her in a swirling haze of white sound. Her feet alone are commanding her movements in this infinite waste. Only once, in a blinding flash, does Georgie allow herself to think of the terrible nature of her unknown adversary, the fear of his watching eyes, his face pressed on glass, distorted, hideous, but she instantly cuts it off. She thinks instead about Dave and his anguish, his needs.

All the muscles of her face tauten with the pain of the cold, and her head is a wooden block that aches. Grimly Georgie trudges on, dimly aware that the Horsefield’s warm living room will mark the end of this riot and disorder. The cottage lights have long disappeared, along with the smell of woodsmoke. Over her stream she goes and up to the field that leads round the back of the Horsefields’ house.

Dimly and palely Georgie sees that there has been a violent alteration in the pattern of her life, and if she can change to meet this pattern she might find harmony again. Could she start to love again? But this time as someone better, stronger? The day before yesterday she had been a poor and desolate thing, only wanting to fly from the world, but look at her now, alone and going out to face the demon against all the fears of a lifetime.

Hell,
how long will this take?
Has she lost all sense of direction? She used to be able to see old Nancy pottering about in her garden from the edge of her own fence. It’s no good, she can’t see, her eyes are blinded by the absolute whiteness all around her.

Although the carving knife rests in her pocket, stuck through the lining, she begins to wonder, what does it matter? What does she care for the world and its wiles? How lovely to reverse her tracks and stumble back into Oliver’s waiting arms…

A sob like a child’s storms up in in her and then sinks, perishes and gives place to a sigh.

Dear God.
He is here.

He has always been here in Georgie’s head.

It is over.
He is covered with snow, like the abominable snowman, and vast, he could be a gorilla with his small unlaughing eyes. Strangely, he is welcome. Wait long enough for the blow and you will want it to come, and when it comes relief will mingle with the pain.

Georgie remains quite still. There is nothing else to do. Somewhere in her terror the thought emerges that this is all very different from what she has imagined. She’d imagined he would attack from behind.

The indrawing of breath is an agony, the cold makes it painful to gasp. Weakly, she stares at her nightmare. His clothes form the bulk of him, but the height she’d imagined is correct. He wears a balaclava helmet so only his eyes show, but she’s seen one of them before, close up, closer than this, and she knows what his pudgy face looks like. The collar of his donkey jacket is pulled up so there is no discernible neck. His trousers, a thick brown corduroy, are tucked into fur-lined, zipped-up boots, and the axe hangs loose in his right hand, the metal edge resting in the snow. The leather biker’s gloves make his hands seem huge, inhuman.

But then everything about him is huge, and he has been standing here, watching her coming, and whistling. Horrible. Horrible. She cannot hear the whistle, but the bulge of his lips under the wool makes the shape of a mouth blowing air.

Slowly she starts to back down the slope. If she doesn’t take care she is likely to toboggan down and end up in her stream at the bottom. After the first mind-blowing shock it’s extraordinary how little fear there is, nothing so bad as the foot in the shower, but Georgie’s brain has gone numb, frozen, just like her hands and her feet.

In a voice incredibly normal she asks very carefully, ‘What are you doing?’

At this he inclines his furry head like a bear, pretending to listen. Her words do not reach him, of course, the wind just whips them over her shoulder. She fights for balance. He is higher up the slope than she, in the stronger position, towering above her, and his thick legs are set apart.

‘What do you want?’

Jesus.
Is he about to come nearer? Can he reach her from there if he swings his axe full circle?

‘Tell me what you want me to do. I’ll go back if that’s what you want.’ She must not panic or fall, she wants to prepare him for her flight. This fiendish savage is mad, a psychopath on the rampage, quite lethal, and any sudden movement will be likely to trigger him off.

With immense care and courage, weakened by cold and terror, Georgie takes one step backwards, feels her foot slide, and fights for balance. He comes one step towards her and she stays stock-still. He doesn’t like that. ‘OK. OK.’ She moves her hand towards her pocket, nearer the handle of the knife, she can feel the point of the cardboard sheath where it rests against her leg.

‘It’s so cold,’ she might be chatting at a bus stop. ‘I’ve seen you standing out here before.’ Well, they advise you to talk to them, don’t they? Keep calm, engage them in conversation, make them see you as a person, cauterize a leg when the foot has gone, hang on to your pride, honour your father and mother, do your best, work hard, say your prayers.
They say they say they say.
She knows the maniac cannot hear her, he can only watch her moving lips, and they are probably contorted by fear and cold. If she screams from here Oliver won’t hear her. Perhaps she can somehow lure this living abomination nearer to the cottage—if he’ll give her time, if he’ll stay the axe.

He didn’t give Dave much time. He didn’t give Dave five minutes. He chopped off Dave’s foot and he slaughtered Georgie’s pretty brown hens.

Her horrified eyes stare straight into those of the demon. There is nothing human about them, nothing with which to answer her pleas, nothing with which to recognize her fear. Her own bleary eyes, rimmed with snow and exhaustion, meet his implacable gaze, the mindless gaze of a shark, set deep in his head, quick and restless and cruel. Staring through the slits in the black balaclava. But some sense drives him.
What sense?
Is he mute? Is he insensitive to the cold? It would seem so. But, dear God, even a mammoth would suffer from cold if it stayed motionless much longer. Georgie herself will freeze to death.

Time. Be gentle and slow, take your time. He won’t allow her to step backwards, so what if she tries stepping forwards? But time holds no reality, it could be seconds, it could be hours that go by while she makes her rapid calculations, exploring every option minutely for this, the most dangerous, the most complicated manoeuvre she has ever undertaken in her life. What if she attempts to go forwards, what if she makes it clear she’s not interested remotely in him, that she merely wants to complete her journey? But oh, it is hard to take a step further away from home when she yearns to run back like a fox to its layer in this most murderous hunt.

Sweat soaks her body and freezes it as she holds her breath for this fatal step. My God. It is done. But no response. Just watching.

Georgie doesn’t think any more, or hesitate before making a second brave move, then another. Right. So this direction’s OK by him? But then the ogre sways slightly before raising one boot to the side, leaving a dark-black hole in the snow. The axe slices the snow as he goes, dragging a trail behind its own weight like the thin, meandering tracks of a bird. Sweet Jesus, will he allow her to pass? Helpless as Georgie is, the hope that she feels now is cruel, it’s this hope that brings tears to her eyes so that she almost flounders. What she needs is despair, no hope whatsoever, the fear of this is what drives her.

Oh God oh God oh God help me.

With the same bursting lungs and dreamlike sensation of moving underwater, she continues along this passage of hell, aware of his impossible strength and her own abysmal weakness. She will soon be beside him, with him several paces to her right, eight paces to be precise because now he has moved eight times, there are eight deep holes in the snow just to the right of her pathway.

‘It’s all right. I’m going past you. I swear to God I won’t look at you, only please let me get past.’

He lunges.
With no warning he raises the axe and lunges at Georgie. The wind and the snow whip together in one concentrated fury as she goes down beneath him, buried alive. Struggling for air, for light. Clawing for breath. Her lungs searing with pain, she gasps for breath in this dark underworld of snow and inhuman pressure. She is facing upwards, but she cannot tell because his awful weight and the overflowing mattress of white is in her mouth and nose and eyes, and is suffocating. He must have slipped because
where is the axe
, her fingernails scrape at the all engulfing vileness of his coat. He will have to get up to use the axe, unless he decides to stay here like this, lying on top of her, squeezing the life from her this way.

And the rank smell that comes off him can only be the stench of the grave, dark old soil, a crumbly coffin-brown and the wet stems of churchyard flowers, scummy green water and mildewed urns, tarnished, rotten. The decay of the soul into madness.

Then—a flash on metal, as he raises himself slightly and Georgie can grip the knife’s handle in the split second she has to cut herself out of her silver coffin. She wrenches it free. She lunges upwards; the mistake she makes is in using one hand, not enough strength to force the knife through the padding, and her hand slips down the ivory handle onto the steel of her own blade. There’s a lick of scarlet flame from wrist to fingers, pulsing steadily, seeping life.

Unharmed, the monstrosity regains its balance and stands above her in the storm, gazing at her like a zombie through those impenetrable slits of eyes. He raises his axe using both hands, and the killing edge disappears into the gun-metal sky. Georgie senses the blade’s descent, whistling on one screaming note. In the delicate manner of the dying, she crosses her arms across her chest. But his stance was always precarious, the wind tears against his great body, the snow is deep and drifting just here, and she watches him slowly lose control. A century passes while she watches and braces herself for his weight once again. His total weight. She has split seconds to raise the knife. This time she grips with both hands, the handle braced against her chest. This time she aims at the creature’s throat. The face of black wool comes hurtling towards her, no surprise in his eyes even now, neither pain nor anger as the axe falls helplessly by his side and his weight crashes down on the tip of her blade.

It pierces the base of his throat. But, Jesus, it’s rammed a hole in her chest.

The slain colossus lies still while she waits. They lie there silently, connected by Georgie’s kitchen knife, and still they wait, and she thinks that he breathes…

Weary, so terribly weary, her right hand pulsing with fiery pain, she edges him off her and struggles slowly to her knees. Kneeling, she pushes him over so he lies in the snow on his back. His torn throat is a terrible sight, blood foams out like pink froth on the sea, the white edges of the skin are pulled back to make way for the steel of the blade, which disappears neatly up to the handle. Garrotted. Repelled, she’s hardly able to touch him, yet she has to see the giant’s face. Individual fingers fail to respond, so it is with a frozen wedge of hand that Georgie slides the balaclava clumsily over the chin and up.

By now she is crying, her red-hot tears freeze to her face but she cannot stop, she cannot stop crying.

Bubbles frothing at his lips, frothing like that hot-chocolate machine she had seen at the motorway services, but this froth is of pink scum.

There is no doubt that he is a woman and her hair is long and black like an American Indian’s, but to Georgina Jefferson this revelation is not so shocking. The monsters are often the women. Her mother was a woman. She knows her victim is female long before she runs her hands over the front of the donkey jacket to discover if there are breasts. There are. Braless breasts, uncared for breasts that no-one has ever touched with love, breasts, like Georgie’s own, which have never suckled a child.

She kneels by the devil of Wooton-Coney and knows that they walk in many valleys, over shippen and stable, stone wall and stile, up stairs and along ordinary landings. They go disguised as men, clicking along in high heels and lipstick smeared on their faces and purple slanting eyes. They rarely get themselves into the news. They carry green raffia bags with green bottles inside them, which chink beside dining room chairs.

And she hears herself screaming, ‘
No, Mummy, no!
’

A
ND SHE MIGHT WELL
stay here for ever, until the snow covers her, resting there with her hands on the breasts of the slobbering devil. Georgie has forgotten there might be a new reason for living. Her spirit moves in a desolate waste. For a long time, for hours it seems, she can only sit there and moan, ‘
Oh God, help me.
’ But now a man’s voice calls through the void, and she thinks it might be Oliver but, oddly, it comes from above, not below.