Wake Wood (6 page)

He stepped outside and stowed her bag in the boot of the car. Louise sat in the passenger seat. One look at the expression on her face killed any thoughts he’d had of trying to persuade her to stay. There really didn’t seem to be anything more that he could say that would make her change her mind.

He climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition.

Patrick and Louise drove in silence along the road that led out of town. Once they left the houses behind them and entered the unlit roads of the countryside, shadows took on monstrous, terrifying shapes that leapt out in front of the car at every corner. Louise found herself shrinking deeper and deeper into her car seat, desperately trying to make herself as small as she could. She was afraid, but she didn’t know of what. The winter trees towered black, skeletal and menacing above the car. In the ditches and hedgerows, numerous twin pinpoints of light glowed, as nocturnal animals froze, mesmerised and blinded by their headlights.

Patrick glanced occasionally at Louise but she remained withdrawn, silent, as still as a bronze statue. Eventually the silence became unbearable but he didn’t dare look at her as he spoke.

‘The people in Wake Wood are nice, friendly. I like them, Louise. Maybe if you gave them more time, made a few friends—’

‘They just feel sorry for us,’ she interrupted bitterly.
‘They
probably refer to us as “that couple that suffered such a tragedy, losing their only child to a feral dog”.’

‘No one in Wake Wood knows about Alice,’ Patrick countered.

‘Men can be so stupid.’ She finally looked across at him. ‘Of course they all know.’

He waited for her to continue but she retreated back into silence.

‘I can’t get the colour of her eyes quite right,’ Patrick mused, voicing his thoughts, speaking more to himself than to her. ‘I can picture her exactly.’ He didn’t have to explain who ‘her’ was. ‘Her height, her figure, her hair, her mouth, her ears, her nose. But not her eyes. I can recall the expression in them when she was happy and excited. I can even picture them when she was sad – which wasn’t often – but not the colour. It’s as if I’ve lost it.’

‘That’s funny,’ Louise murmured. ‘I see the exact shade all the time. It’s everywhere.’

‘I know you’re not trying to be cruel,’ Patrick began tentatively.

‘I didn’t mean what I said, Patrick.’

It wasn’t much of an apology, but Patrick grasped it.

‘That’s OK.’ He turned the corner and drove around a sharp bend. When the road straightened he reached for her hand. To his astonishment she didn’t pull it away. He squeezed it lightly.

The car engine stuttered and cut. Patrick turned the ignition. The engine didn’t fire.

‘What’s the matter?’ Louise asked urgently.

‘I don’t know.’ Patrick coasted the car on to the grass
verge
that bordered the road and jammed on the hand brake. He turned the ignition key again and again. The engine was dead. He pulled the lever that released the bonnet catch.

‘Have you run out of petrol?’ Louise suggested.

‘No. The tank’s almost full.’ He took a torch from the back seat, opened the door to get out. Walking around to the front of the car, he lifted the bonnet and looked down at the engine.

Louise opened her door, pulled her jacket closer to her shivering body and joined him.

‘I can’t see anything wrong.’ Patrick shone the torch downwards. ‘But then, you know me and mechanics. I don’t know what I’m looking at.’

Louise started nervously and drew closer to him.

‘What is it?’ He peered into the darkness that shrouded the road.

‘Didn’t you hear it? Listen – it’s there when the wind dies,’ she whispered.

They both stood stock still. Then he heard it: a weird, unearthly wail. He too shivered. Icicles of fear crawled down his spine.

She saw him tremble. ‘Patrick …’

‘It’s an animal,’ he declared, trying but failing to sound casual.

‘That’s like no animal I’ve ever heard.’ She kept her voice low although she had no idea why. As far as she could see into the darkness, they were completely alone.

‘Some can make peculiar sounds,’ he declared.

‘Like what?’

‘None I recognise.’ Feeling the need to make a noise
in
the hope that it would deter the unseen, unknown creature, he slammed the bonnet shut. ‘We’re not too far from Arthur’s place. We’ll walk there and get help. He’ll know where we can get hold of a mechanic.’ He locked the car. She continued to stand frozen beside it as another ghostly, ghastly wail rent the night air.

Feigning a confidence he was far from feeling, he gripped the torch tightly. It was large, solid and would make a reasonable club in the absence of any other weapon. ‘We’ve no choice but to walk, Louise,’ he said firmly. He shone the beam ahead of them and set off.

She followed him along the road and up a bank. He shone the torch around in a circle, taking his bearings. ‘There’s a short cut here, across the fields.’ He pulled down a strand of barbed wire and stepped over it. When he was in the field, he continued to hold the wire down with one hand and helped Louise over it.

Their feet sank into the soft ground. Somewhere up ahead of them they heard the raucous noise of a diesel engine. Patrick stopped and looked around again. The lights of a large machine were moving about in a field at the base of a hill about half a mile away.

‘Why would anyone be working at this hour at this time of year?’ Louise questioned. ‘It’s not as though they need to get a harvest in. Not in winter.’

‘Beats me.’ Patrick eyed an old drystone wall topped with barbed wire. ‘We can go around that if you like.’

‘It’ll take too long.’ Louise wasn’t certain if it was her imagination or not, but the wails seemed to be drawing closer. She stuck her toe in a crack in the stones and levered herself upwards, although it didn’t prove as
easy
as it looked because the wall crumbled beneath her weight. When Patrick followed her, he sent a shower of earth and rocks tumbling in his wake.

Desperately trying to ignore the cries, they left the wall behind them and walked close to one another through a patch of woodland. As they drew nearer to the field they saw an enormous yellow JCB working, its lights blazing as it filled in a hole in the ground.

‘That pit looks enormous. What on earth are they burying?’ Louise whispered, her voice barely audible above the noise of the engine.

‘Could be dead livestock,’ Patrick suggested.

‘Diseased, you mean? You haven’t mentioned anything.’

‘There’ve been none that I’ve come across.’ Patrick deliberately set a course away from the machine – and the direction the wailing seemed to be coming from. They entered another copse of trees. The centre had been cleared and there was a circle of tall, narrow, pointed standing stones.

‘I didn’t know there were any ancient monuments around here.’

‘I read something about one in a history of the area,’ he revealed.

‘What did it say?’

‘Not much, other than it’s impossible to gauge the age of these rings of standing stones. Someone once told me that the Victorians were fond of erecting them, so it could be a sort of folly.’ Patrick shone the torchlight on them. Offerings of ornaments on leather thongs had been tied to the top of the stone in the centre of the circle.

‘They look like grave markers,’ Louise observed.

Patrick had thought the same thing but he’d kept his opinion to himself. Anxious to leave the spot, he walked on swiftly.

He scrambled up a steep hillside and tumbled down the other side, falling into a ditch filled with thorn bushes that tore his clothes and hands. He lay, too stunned for a moment to cry out or move.

‘Are you all right?’ she called urgently.

Hurt, terrified, as another wail echoed through the darkness, he fought the urge to scream. He had to keep strong for Louise. ‘Stay where you are,’ he ordered when he sensed her drawing near to the edge of the ditch.

‘You need a hand.’

‘I need you in one piece, not on top of me. It’s lethal down here.’ He clambered awkwardly from the ditch only for his feet to sink into a quagmire.

‘Patrick …’

‘We’ll be fine,’ he assured her. He only wished he could believe his own words. ‘Take my hand.’ He offered it to Louise, who’d remained perched above the ditch on the hill. ‘And tread carefully, the ground here is treacherous.’

He shone the torch ahead of her but before she’d walked a step the light dimmed and flickered out.

‘Brilliant!’ he exclaimed bitterly. ‘That’s all we need.’ His voice rose high, bordering on hysteria.

‘Give it a moment for our eyes to adjust and we’ll see a little more clearly.’ Louise forced herself to concentrate on the practical.

He did as she suggested. The moment she joined him on the other side of the ditch he moved on, setting a brisk pace.

Night had never held any terrors for him before. But the rumble of the JCB working in the distant field, and, above it, the eerie high-pitched wails, had unnerved him as much as they had Louise. The longer they went on, the more ominous they sounded.

Louise was soon breathless from the effort it took to keep up with Patrick. Her sheepskin coat was sodden with the rain it had absorbed and her boots were even worse, soaking wet and caked with mud that squelched with every step she took. Terrified, shivering, she jumped every time the weird cries pierced the air. There were scurries and scuttles in the undergrowth she imagined to be giant rats – or worse. But apparently oblivious to her fears, Patrick plodded determinedly onwards.

After what seemed like hours of walking, they saw a faint glow shining through the trees ahead.

‘That’s the outside light to Arthur’s house. We’re nearly there.’ Patrick helped her over another barbed-wire fence and they walked up the tarmacked drive. He stood on the doorstep, lifted the metal knocker and brought it down sharply. The sound resounded, echoing and clanging through the house. He waited a minute before knocking again. When there was still no answer, he stepped back and looked around the garden. ‘Arthur has to be here. Look, his car is parked in front of the garage.’ He reached for his mobile phone. ‘I’ll try ringing him.’

Feeling distinctly uneasy, Louise couldn’t wait to leave. While Patrick dialled, she said, ‘I’ll check around the back.’

She walked quickly, head down, around the side of Arthur’s old stone house. Just before turning the corner, she heard the sound of people chanting. She ducked low behind a wooden fence.

An enormous giant wooden tripod had been erected behind the house. It stood tall and proud, higher than the roof. Ropes had been tied to the top and a long coffin-shaped cage dangled down in the centre between the struts. Inside the cage was a cigar-shaped object that reminded Louise of a cocoon. But it was large enough to take a full-grown adult.

Behind the tripod a bonfire blazed, illuminating a gathering of a hundred people or more crowded into the yard. Louise recognised most of them as townsfolk from Wake Wood. There were so many present she doubted that anyone had been excluded – except herself and Patrick.

As she watched, Arthur picked up bottles of liquid and poured them over the cigar shape inside the cage. He moved back, took an ember from the bonfire and touched the saturated casing.

Flames flared instantly; rising high, they roared into the air. Buckets were passed down a human chain that ended with Arthur. One by one he emptied them over the cocoon, quenching the flames on the dangling burning artefact.

Clouds of white steam rose, obscuring the faces of the crowd, but not before Louise spotted Mary Brogan.
Although
she looked through the throng, she couldn’t see anyone who resembled Mary’s painfully thin niece Deirdre.

Arthur dropped the last bucket. The cage was lowered and the object inside was lifted out and placed on trestles. Arthur picked up an axe. He swung it two-handed high in the air before bringing it crashing down on the cocoon. Blood spurted out in a fountain, drenching the ground, Arthur and those of the crowd standing closest to him.

Louise shuddered. She stuck her fist in her mouth to stop herself from screaming. The blood – the violence brought back memories. Images that floated never far from the surface of her mind rose in heart-rending agony. Alice’s face, white in death … her eyes closed … her small, slim throat torn out, the ugly gaping wound below her chin dark with blood clots …

The crowd chanted in deep, low voices. The music they made pounded with a primitive, sonorous rhythm that entered Louise’s bloodstream, keeping time with her heartbeat.

An attractive young blonde woman stepped forward. She held out a white towelling bathrobe. The cocoon broke, shattering from the force of an internal pressure.

A hand emerged, fingers waving. It was red, drenched and dripping with blood. Arthur placed his hands either side of the gap in the object, forcing it wide open. Someone came to help him. A minute later a naked man slid out like a fully grown embryo. There was even an umbilical cord that Arthur sliced through with a flash of steel.

Like his arm, the man’s entire body was blood-soaked, as though he’d bathed at an abattoir. Working together, Arthur and the blonde woman helped the man to his feet. The woman wrapped the robe around him tenderly, as if dressing a baby. After wiping his face with a cloth, she kissed him.

The crowd gave a collective sigh before applauding. The man and woman turned and faced the witnesses to the strange ceremony. Arthur stood behind them like a priest – or proud father.

The man who’d emerged from the cocoon drifted away with the blonde woman. Two men tipped buckets of water on to the bonfire, adding to the steam in the atmosphere. Another brought a shovel and scraped the mess of the shell the man had emerged from into a pile.

Sensing she was being watched, Louise scanned the crowd. Then she saw Arthur standing slightly to one side of the others, staring right back at her.

She backed into the shadows. When she couldn’t see Arthur any longer she turned and fled. Head down, she charged around the side of Arthur’s house and ran right into a soft, pliant, warm body.