UNTIL SHE SLEEPS

by Tim Lebbon

This eBook edition published 2011

by Generation Next Publications

www.GenerationNextPublications.com

Originally published by Cemetery Dance, 2002

© Tim Lebbon 2002, 2011

Cover and eBook Creation by Stephen James Price

LICENSING

The publisher and the author have agreed to release this eBook without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection, but all rights are still in effect. This volume may not be resold or given away. Please show your support for this author by purchasing all additional copies through a reputable vendor.

Nightmare

“Do you know the curse of Tutankhamon?”

Norris shook his head, scratched the back of his neck and hefted the sledgehammer. It was mid-morning already and all they’d done is fanny around in the basement – crypt, he supposed, but that sounded just a little too spooky – without actually getting any work done. And now James was wasting time coming out with this crap again. And although Norris could only ever admit it to himself, his colleague’s knowledge shamed him. James was twenty years his junior and barely out of school, but he knew an awful lot of stuff.

Most of it bollocks.

“Tootan-fucking-who?”

“Tutankhamon. An Egyptian king, buried with full honours. His tomb was excavated early this century and before long everyone—“

“Jimmy,” Norris said, knowing he hated being called ‘Jimmy’, “where do you get all this shit from?”

“A book I read once.” James shrugged, sort of embarrassed but secretly pleased as well. He read. He watched documentaries. And he had a good memory. Labouring was not destined to be his lot in life, he swore that to himself every night; yet but every morning he got up and went out to dig holes or shift bricks for another measly fifty quid. Perhaps it was because he really rather enjoyed blinding Norris with information. The old fart didn’t know his arse from his elbow.

“Well close your book, take your finger out of your arse and grab that pick-axe. This wall’s got to be down by lunchtime.”

James stood back and looked the wall over. For the tenth time that morning he had some doubt about what they’d been asked to do. “What if it’s holding the church floor up?”

“It isn’t.”

“But what if—“

“Vicar says the church has been here almost five hundred years. This wall’s less than three hundred years old. Says so in the church records.”

“Which are undoubtedly accurate and exact,” James mumbled, but Norris either did not hear or chose to ignore him.

The older man looked at the tall youth he’d been working with for a year and wondered – for the last time in his life, so it turned out – just what James was doing here. He was bright, he had ambitions, prospects, yet he barely earned his keep by digging in muck and sweeping up and knocking down old walls in damp, dark basements. Norris had used to think to himself that there was more to life than this. He’d not thought it for a long time now, because he was getting on and he feared he knew the truth of the answer, but for James … well, there was still time to make that statement come true.

What could be wrong in trying?

“Okay you lazy bastard, I’ll start.” Norris swung the hammer at the stone wall. Whoever built this all those years ago had evidently done so in a hurry – the stones weren’t well fitted together and the pointing in between, although thick and well compressed, was sloppy in the extreme. How the hell it had stood for three hundred years, God only knew.

The first blow punched a hole straight through.

They felt the old air gushing out, James thought as he watched Norris tug the sledge hammer from the hole it had made. And with it came the curse. The string of lights they’d hung from the old ceiling beams threw strange shadows at the hole, shifting slightly as if the whole wall had let out a startled gasp.

“Piece of piss,” Norris said. He hefted the sledge again and paused – only for a second, but long enough to be surprised – when he saw movement through the hole. What’s behind the wall? he’d asked the vicar. Space, the old goat had replied. Norris wondered exactly what he had meant; there seemed to be small lights floating in the blackness, stars swimming in a night sky distorted by heat, the blackness of the cosmos seen through the flames of a burning—

But where the hell did that come from?

“Been working with you for too long,” Norris mumbled as he swung the hammer again.

“What?” James hadn’t quite caught what his colleague had said. Something abusive, no doubt, a friendly dig hiding a subtle bitterness. He liked Norris but sometimes James thought the old git resented him his youth.

Norris aimed the hammer slightly to the left of the hole. A lump of stone shattered and shards flew, some of them pattering to his feet, others disappearing behind the wall and falling on something unseen. He swung again, knocked out the remainder of the broken stone. Again and a whole block came out, thumping to the ground behind the wall so that he felt its impact through his feet.

And then something else. The floor was vibrating, shivering as if a generator had started up somewhere or a million similar stones were hitting the ground a long way away.

“What’s that?” Norris asked. But he would never hear James’s voice again.

He looked at the hole and saw something strange. It was filled with water, its plane vertical as if it was the surface of a small pool viewed from above. He thought briefly of a fishing hole punched in the ice by Eskimos, but the depths beneath those holes disturbed him so he tried to purge the image.

The water cleared it for him. It cleared everything in a matter of seconds, because suddenly Norris was drowning. There was no surge or gush, he was not swept from his feet as the water poured into the crypt … it was simply there. And he was bobbing in it, sinking because he still held the sledgehammer, and whatever orders he sent his hand to open were lost along the way. He could not for the life of him let go. And it was for his life … he smoked, he ate badly, his lung capacity was not what it should have been … he opened his mouth to scream and breathed in the waters instead.

Hands held him down, although he could not see them.

As panic gave way to something worse, Norris managed to turn and look for James, see if the lad had managed to save himself, drag himself away to survive and live the life he should have been leading before.

But all around him was water. Above, below, left and right … and like a sea without a shore, he could see no walls.

“Norris!” James shouted. The old git was having a heart attack here underneath a church, banging holes in a wall built hundreds of years ago when none of them knew exactly what was behind it, what it held up, what it held back … he was having a bloody heart attack. “Norris! Fuck’s sake, mate!” He tried to reach out for the older man but found his hands slowing down on their way to him, slowing until he could almost not move them at all.

He pulled back and tried again. It was all wrong.

His movements slowed the nearer he got to the struggling Norris. It was as if he was trying to run through water. “Norris!” No water here, only the thick, dank air made thicker by fear. Real fear, because now there was something strange happening which James had no inkling of, all the books he’d read did no good down here, down here was real.

They felt the old air gushing out, and with it came the curse. There were no old Pharaohs in Whitgrove, he knew. But every country has its dark, nasty secrets.

James couldn’t reach Norris so there was only one thing left to do: run for help. He turned, then glanced back at the hole in the wall … something had grabbed his attention in there. A smell, a sound, a shadow seen in darkness. And then, just as in all the worst nightmares and dreams, the impossible began to come true.

Horses ran through the small hole in the old stone wall. They galloped in a blind stampede, all of them wild-looking, unshod, eyes wide and mouths foaming as if they were fleeing something unmentionable. Six of them came through, eight, ten, and although the hole was only a few feet away they ran towards James, their hooves kicking up shards of broken stone. Their manes danced, waving slowly and softly like kelp in a gentle current, but their nostrils streamed snot and blood and he saw the muscles flexing beneath their hides as their legs pummelled down …

Impossible, unreasonable, James should turn and run but he could not move. It was a nightmare, a waking nightmare, he’d wake up soon and it would all be back to normal again, Norris would be shouting and James would smile and think of what could be—

The first horse knocked him flying. He would have hit the wall of the small basement had it not vanished. He kept skidding and bouncing along the ground, feeling his clothes ripping and stones slashing into his skin, pain breaking through the disbelief and making it all too real.

James opened his mouth to scream, but then the rest of the galloping herd bore down upon him, and their hooves crushed the cry as it rose in his throat.

At last the crypt was silent again. A silence so profound that, surely, it could never have been disturbed in the first place.

One

“Last one to the shop’s a pussy!”

“Or a cunt.”

“Yeah, a cunt!” Andy pushed down on the pedals, grinning as the breeze swept hair back from his forehead, and inside he laughed because he felt so good. He was way ahead of Stig – his friend’s real name was David, but Stig had been his nickname for so long that most people had forgotten it – and he would beat him to the shop, and he would be able to call him a pussy, and whatever they did that afternoon would be Andy’s choice.

He passed the apple orchard to his right and stood on the pedals, cycling up the small slope to the village shop. It stood at the T-junction of two roads, opposite the old cider factory. Time, financial constraints and giant international drinks conglomerates had closed the factory down three years before, but its associated storage sheds, offices and car parks still dominated the village and provided a dangerous playground for anyone foolhardy enough to force an entry. Andy and Stig had been in there a few times, but they preferred to make use of what the dead factory had left behind – the living orchards. With no cider presses to swallow the apples and no employees left to pick them, autumn had become a fun and profitable time for kids unafraid of a bit of hard work. Mr Howards at the local shop paid a fiver for each sack of apples delivered to his door, and last year Andy and Stig had gathered over sixty for him. One hundred and fifty quid each had bought a new bike and a load of books for Andy, and a couple of pairs of oversized trainers for Stig. For very differing reasons, the boys were already looking forward to this autumn. Andy needed some more books. Stig needed new footwear.

Andy’s new bike meant that he always beat Stig in a race, and always got to call him a pussy.

He reached the shop, skidded in the gravelled parking lot and sat astride his bike, watching Stig struggle up the slight hill. He closed his eyes for a moment and enjoyed the hot July sun on his face, wondering if they’d be doing this sort of thing next year – hoping they would – but fearing that maybe fourteen would be a little too old to go scrumping and riding bikes aimlessly and spending a long time, busy day doing nothing at all. Fourteen sounded a big step closer to all grown up.

“Pussy,” Andy muttered as Stig braked to a halt, panting and sweating and smiling.

“Could be worse.”

They both laughed. As always it felt good.

“How much have you got?” Stig asked. He held out his own offering toward the lunchtime feast. “I’ve got about three quid.”

Andy dug into his pocket and counted the change. “About four.” He tried to put on a posh voice but it came out as a bad impression of Prince Charles. “With seven pounds, my good friend Stig, we can purchase a veritable banquet.”

“A banquet to eat on the village green where Mrs Hopkins lets her dog crap,” Stig said. “Yeah, lovely.”

“All adds to the flavour, my young friend.”

“Flavour my arse!” Stig said, leaning over and shoving Andy from his bike.

Andy wheeled his arms and sent money flying across the gravel, but Stig was strong and he could not recover from the shove. He went sprawling. The bike scraped his bare legs, his elbows found particularly sharp splinters of gravel to smack down into, but he was still laughing when he scrambled to his feet. Perhaps in anticipation of the sweet revenge that would be his later, or maybe just from the fun of it all. Summer holidays were endless, and there was still five weeks to go.

Stig had already dropped his bike and was running for the shop.

Andy followed slowly, dabbing at the dribble of blood on his left arm. He smudged it across the skin and decided to let it dry there – it looked cool. Maybe if Rachel saw him later she’d notice the blood and think he’d hurt himself exploring the old air-raid shelter, and maybe she’d want to ask him about it and he’d get into a conversation with her and, well, take her to show it. He’d never actually been inside, but he enjoyed telling stories about it, like how the King of Bones lived down there now, his clothing made from the deconstructed skeletons of unfortunate kids who’d fallen in and never been found. The fact that there were no substantiated cases of missing children in Whitgrove detracted from his tale, but only when he let it.

Lunch purchased – pasties, chocolate, crisps, several cool cans of fizzy pear drink, an apple to throw at each other later – the two boys mounted their bikes and freewheeled down to the village square. There was a little green there –

spotted with Mrs Hopkins’s dog’s shit, true, but pleasant enough if it could be avoided – and a stream, and a few benches. A good place for lunch, because lots of the other village kids often congregated there.

And that meant girls.

Specifically for Andy, that meant Rachel Francis.

They whispered past the church, its grey stone walls still cold in the blazing sun, graves shunning the heat. Andy, trailing behind Stig now, let out a throaty growl.

“Piss off!” Stig said.

“I’ll swallow your soul, I’ll swallow your soul!”

“Oohh, really scary.”

“I’ll tear ours souls apart!” Another growl and Stig pedalled quickly into the square. Andy knew that his friend hated this sort of thing. Whenever they watched horror films together Andy would be surprised and shocked, but Stig was often downright terrified

As they braked to a halt by the green the automated church bell began ringing midday.

The square was all but deserted. Andy was a little disappointed – the blood was still dripping from his arm and splashing intermittent rosettes on the road – but maybe Rachel would turn up later.

Stig dropped his bike and stood staring up at the church clock. The bell was still ringing.

Andy dismounted, scanned the area they’d chosen for dog crap or ant nests, then dropped the carrier bag of food to the ground. After sitting he picked up a handful of small stones from the roadside and flung them at Stig’s head.

His friend turned, brushing grit from his hair, frowning. “Thirteen,” he said.

“Huh?!”

“Thirteen o’clock. The bell went thirteen times.”

Andy checked his watch. Midday. “What time you got?”

“Twelve.”

“Me too. Bell must be on the Fritz, it’s electronic, now. My mum always said the worst thing the vicar did was fire the bell-ringers.”

“Still …” Stig said, leaving the sentence hanging in the hot midday air.

They sat on the green and ate lunch. The grass had been cut that morning and the fresh tang hung in the air with no breeze to disperse it. Andy felt his arms and face burning but he welcomed it. He had sun cream on, but his parents would tell him off later for not wearing a hat. This was the feeling of summer. Later, when the cooler evening came down, his skin would tingle and he’d be able to remember that day, and he’d know that there were weeks left – an eternity – of this school holiday. Five weeks. Thirty-five days. He wouldn’t start counting them down until there were only ten days left, when every morning because an important time-span in which to cram as much as possible. And that last weekend was always the longest and the shortest of times: long because from waking up to settling down to sleep, he was doing stuff; short, because there was only two days left until school started back. And then one day. Then none. Just a suntan and a scarred elbow to show for six weeks of fun. And maybe a kiss from Rachel.

This year, things were moving on. He was getting older and his priorities were changing.

Andy and Stig wolfed their lunch. The pasties went first, then the crisps and then the chocolate, already soft and melted even though they’d taken it from Mr Howard’s fridge. They’d been busy climbing trees that morning, and Stig’s little electronic speed-gizmo on his bike told him they’d cycled eleven miles; they were ravenous. They chattered as they ate, inconsequential stuff that means so much to just-teenaged boys, like whether Darth Maul could have taken Darth Vader in a scrap, or how big Jenny Begbie’s tits would grow this year, or whether Blur would ever really make a comeback and piss on Oasis’s chips.

A few cars and vans trundled through the square, one or two of them stopping outside the post office for a couple of minutes, but mostly the village was quiet. Many of the adults were in work, and those at home were either having lunch or resting inside from the fierce midday sun.

The boys finished their food, and they were just about to head off again on their bikes – Stig had suggested a ride up into the woods for a bit of scrambling – when the vicar pulled up in front of the church. It always made Andy laugh when Father Norman got into or out of his two-litre Mazda looking like a Reservoir Dog; he’d always thought vicars were supposed to drive boring Fords, but as his father said, one car is as un-Godly as the next. The vicar was wearing only trousers and shirt today, he hadn’t even put on his dog collar. He evidently did not see the boys sitting on the green, because Andy was certain he heard a mumbled curse as Father Norman dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. His armpits and back were soaked through, blacker than black.

“Your bell’s knackered!” Stig shouted.

The vicar turned, startled, and waved to the boys. He offered them a jaded smile. “Hot day today, boys.”

“Your bell struck thirteen o’clock!” Stig shouted again, pointing up at the belfry as if to illustrate his point.

“Maybe he’s on a twenty-four hour clock now,” Andy mused.

The vicar waved again and entered the churchyard. If he had heard, he obviously thought he was being taken for a ride.

“You shouldn’t take the piss out of him,” Andy said. “Poor sod is probably melting in that get-up.” And besides, he thought, Mum believes in God and it just feels a little bit odd winding up a vicar.

“I’m not taking the piss,” Stig said, all wide-eyed and innocent.

Andy could not quite figure out how honest his friend was being. Stig was clumsy and childish at times, but on occasion he frightened Andy with sudden bouts of extremely adult behaviour. It didn’t intimidate him, but it did make him feel as if he might just get left behind.

“Bet it’s nice and cool in the church.” Andy picked at the collar of his T-shirt, wafting it in an effort to air his sweaty skin. All it did was to allow access for more hot air.

“Don’t like churches.”

“Why?”

“Spooky.” Stig picked at the grass, letting the dried blades drop onto his knees. There was no breeze to take them away. It was unbelievably hot and still, as if the sun had scorched the breeze to nothing.

“You’re weird,” Andy muttered.

There were three packets of crisps and a couple of decidedly limp chocolate bars left, but neither boy wanted another scrap to eat. Andy bagged them up, lifted his bike from the heat-cracked ground and slung the bag on the handlebars. “Ready?”

Stig nodded, stood and turned to glance at the church. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

Stig did not reply, but stood there with his head cocked like an inquisitive dog.

“What’s up? Hearing ghosts?” Andy was getting impatient with his mate, standing there like a girl, pretending to listen to some far-off music as if only he could hear it because it was music for the wise, or something. That’s what he’d say, anyway. Sometimes Stig was weird.

“Vicar trouble,” Stig muttered. Father Norman hurried from the church, a black flash in the white-hot midday, and even though he was silent as he jogged across the square he seemed to bring the place to life. Each footfall sounded louder than it should have, bouncing from the hot building facades and following the vicar with echoes.

The boys watched him open the door to the post office and Andy heard the beginnings of a panicked outburst: “Dave, quick, I need to use your phone, there’s been—“ before the door swung shut behind him.

“So now do we go scrambling, or wait here and see what’s going on?”

Andy shrugged. “Nothing ever goes on here, usually. Let’s see. Maybe the heat’s got to him.”

“But it’s cool in the church,” Stig said. Andy saw he had chocolate smeared across his bottom lip, and he was glad. It made him look like a kid.

“Well then, maybe something else has got to him.” Andy felt a small puff of satisfaction as he saw the corners of Stig’s mouth twitch down. “Something … cold.” He’d spooked him. Hah! Easily spooked, was Stig, and it was so much fun!

Andy glanced at the church, empty now with the vicar in the post office using the phone because there’d been … whatever. Empty, maybe, it still but seemed occupied. Maybe God’s home, he thought, but then maybe not. God didn’t raise a flag when he was in residence, not like the Queen. He thought there was a breeze then because he shivered. He glanced at Stig and wondered just how he’d managed to spook himself as well.

The vicar left the post office followed closely by Dave, the postmaster, who locked the door behind them and hurried across the square after Father Norman.

“What’s wrong?” Stig asked. The two men glanced over at the boys but their expressions said it all: this is adult stuff, boys, you’re too young to have to worry about this. They disappeared into the church and closed the heavy doors behind them.

That made up the boys’ minds for them. They’d stay, of course. Watch the drama unfold.

“You want to go around back, see if we can see in the windows?” Andy’s curiosity was urging him to move. They couldn’t do much out here apart from – as his dad would say – sit in the sun and play with themselves (which was something he’d only been doing for a while, and it certainly wasn’t something he’d do in front of anyone else).

“What, into the graveyard?”

Andy nodded. “Yeah. Why, what’s wrong? You scared?”

“’Course not.”

“Scared the decomposing corpses are going to struggle out of the ground and get you? You think Bub might be back there, ready to eat your brains? Brainzzz …” Andy did a zombie-walk across the grass towards Stig, who backed away until he was standing at the edge of the little stream. It was barely a trickle now – sometimes not even that – but it was still a bit of a fall down to the stream bed.

Stig looked angry and scared at the same time. “Fuck off!” he shouted.

Andy dropped his hands and wiped the zombie drool from his chin. “Big pussy.”

“Yeah, well, at least I’ve actually seen one.”

Andy turned away and kicked at a dried-out snail shell. That stung, he thought. Stig always kept that in reserve: the fact that he’d seen a real pussy, had actually touched it and, he swore that if there hadn’t been a load of other kids there with him, she’d have let him taste it as well.

It was last Christmas at a Saturday afternoon party thrown by Samantha Begbie. Andy hadn’t been able to go because he’d had chicken pox, but Stig and a load of others had piled into the Begbie residence and heartily set about dismantling the food spread which Samantha’s mum had spent all morning preparing. The girls’ parents had taken the opportunity to go into town to finish their Christmas shopping, content in the knowledge that her older sister Jenny – sixteen, and an object of youthful lust for many of the village boys – was in charge of the shindig.

What they had not banked upon was Jenny finding a half-finished bottle of cooking sherry in the pantry.

The games had changed rapidly from a daring round of truth and dare, to a spate of brave insults and suggestions, to Jenny standing shakily and beginning a slow, stumbling strip. Samantha had begged her, so Stig said, tried to drag her upstairs, cried and screamed, and then she and her girlfriends left the house to the boys and the ever-more-naked Jenny.

Andy hated hearing about it. He’d managed to convince himself that Stig had been lying until Pete White had told him too, a frantically relayed story over the phone, the details so similar to Stig’s tale that Andy could do nothing but admit it as the truth.

He’d missed the party.

Jenny – sixteen and gorgeous – had stripped and shown the boys her bits.

And for the rest of his life, Andy knew, he’d look back on this as a missed opportunity, and sometimes perhaps he’d lean over his empty glass in a pub – because that’s what pissed off men were supposed to do – and slowly fill it with regretful tears.

She let us touch it! Stig had gasped, and it was soft and the fur was smooth, not wiry like it looks in the magazines. And it felt … sort of warm. And Pete White swears his finger went in. But he’s talking bullshit, of course. At least, Andy thought, there’s a part of the story that Stig tried to deny as well.

“Well I’m going around back,” Andy said sulkily. “If there’s a dead body or someone hanging from the beams, or if someone’s shat in a pew, I want to see it before it’s all cleared up.”

“Andy …” Stig was genuinely worried, Andy saw. It was one thing to frighten his mate, but seeing that expression on his face was just plain unsettling.

“Come on,” Andy said. “It’s midday, the sun’s out, the earth’s cooked hard. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Well, isn’t it … trespassing?”

“It’s the house of God,” Andy said. “Mum reckons it’s always open. To anyone.”

“That’s not what it says on the gate.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just Father Norman. But if God says it should always be open I don’t see how a vicar can change that.”

Stig frowned, looked up at the belfry – the clock read twelve-twenty, it had missed it’s quarterly chime – and nodded. “There must be something weird. Did you see their faces?”

Andy remembered the quick glances the two men had thrown their way. Adult stuff, their faces had said. They may as well have been painted warning-red. Stay away. Danger here. Nothing for you boys here. To Andy, it was obvious that Father Norman and Dave the postmaster had forgotten a lot about what it was to be a young lad.

“Come on,” he said. He didn’t wait for his mate. If Stig came, he came. If not ... well, he’d be left standing in the square, playing with himself in the sun. The choice was his.

As Andy approached the gate into the churchyard he heard Stig’s footsteps behind him. He smiled; he was relieved, although he wasn’t sure why. He would not admit to being nervous, even to himself.

Then he heard more footsteps, someone running along the road between the post office and church. A big someone, running fast.

“Who’s that?” Stig said. A man ran into the square, dressed in tatty shorts, trainers and nothing else. Andy had seen him around the village a few times but he wasn’t sure of his name, and they’d never exchanged more than a quick hello. He thought he worked on one of the farms. Now, the man passed them by without a glance. He looked straight ahead, with an occasional look back over his shoulder, but he seemed to ignore the boys entirely. He was sweating profusely. The stench hung around after he’d passed as if the air itself was perspiring. His flesh jiggled – he wasn’t fat, exactly, just not very toned – and his face …at first Andy thought he looked like that because of the exertion. But as the man exited the square down a lane that led out between two huge orchards, glanced over his shoulder and put on a spurt of speed, Andy realised that he looked scared.

Terrified.

“Fucking hell,” Stig said.

“Yeah. Bit hot for a jog.”

“Did you see his tits going?”

“Stig …”

“But they were. And he’s sunburned, his shoulders and back are all red.”

Andy had noticed that, yes, but it was only when Stig pointed it out that it really registered. “Must have been running for a while.”

Stig was looking back along the road at the post office.

“What?” Andy said.

“Waiting to see what he was running from.”

That sent a chill through Andy, a feeling emphasised here and now because of the scorcher the day was fast becoming. The two boys stood there by the church gate looking along the side of the square at the post office, waiting to see whatever it was that had scared the man into sprinting through like that.

It could have been anything.

“Dog?” Stig whispered, but there was no clatter of claws on concrete.

They waited. The passing of time eased their tension.

“Beast of Bodmin?” Andy said after a few more seconds, and they both chuckled … but quietly.

Then a cloud passed briefly across the sun and the boys turned back to the church.

“Must have been out for a jog after all. Hey, let’s go!” Andy punched Stig softly on the bare shoulder, and they crept through the gate and up the stone steps to the level of the church.

The graveyard was well-tended – in a village of this size there was always someone looking for casual work – and the grass had recently been cut. Andy thought they probably watered the lawns at night in contravention of the hosepipe ban, such was their lushness compared to the rest of the village. There were nightly pictures on TV of reservoirs dried up and their beds baked hard, and somewhere up in mid-Wales a whole drowned village had been revealed, the first time it had breathed air for thirty years. The thought of all those uninhabited houses, all that space left to the ghosts of people long-since moved out ... it had spooked Andy, but excited him as well.

Of course, there was another explanation as to why the grass was so green and healthy, one that Andy’s macabre side much preferred. It was a graveyard, after all. The ground must be good.

“Which way?” Stig said.

Andy indicated the path leading around to the rear of the church. The largest spread of graves lay there, their occupants in their loamy beds unaware of the scorching day it had become. He shook his head, wondering why he was thinking such morbid thoughts … but really he knew where they came from. His mum liked him reading, she always said that, and she was pretty open-minded when it came to letting him choose his next book. He was old enough to make his own choices and opinions, she said. Of course, that hadn’t stopped her trying to hide a copy of The Perfumed Garden when he brought it home from a school fete. Andy was amazed by the text, and ‘after the fashion of the ram’ fuelled many a steamy dream. But lately she had voiced some displeasure when he’d started bringing tatty, well-thumbed horror novels home from the second-hand shop in town. Their covers displayed grinning skeletons, skulls dripping with insects, scantily-clad women clasped in the claws of giant crabs or covered in flesh-eating slugs (although Andy had always wondered why the people in that book hadn’t just run). She said she was afraid they would give him nightmares. And sometimes they did. But he liked them anyway.

Lying in their loamy beds, he thought, staring at the gravestones in varying states of disrepair. There were some monuments at the rear of the churchyard, which were almost destroyed by the actions of frost, their inscriptions long-since worn away by time, their occupants mysterious and forgotten except by God. And surely even He couldn’t remember everyone?

“It’s quiet in here,” Stig said.

“It was quiet in the square. It’s the sun. My dad says when it heats the air it stops sounds from travelling so far.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really,” Andy said, but he couldn’t keep from giggling. Stig gave him a poke in the ribs and he gasped, falling against the outside wall of the church.

Which was vibrating.

“Jesus!” he said, pushing himself away from the cool stone and staring up at the belfry towering above them.

“What?” Stig asked, wide-eyed.

“I felt the wall moving.”

“Andy, don’t—“

“Really, Stig. It was vibrating, like there’s an engine revving up behind it, or something.” He thought of the Morlocks but tried to shove them straight from his mind. Now they really did scare him.

“Maybe we should go,” Stig said. He turned his back on the church and looked out over the graves; Andy could see them reflected in his eyes. “I really don’t like it here, and what if someone comes to visit a grave and we’re pissing about? It’s disrespectful.”

Andy should have laughed at that, but he could not conjure it up. He was still feeling that cold stone moving – twisting – against his bare, sunburned arm. “I want to see what’s going on,” he said. “Give me a foot up.” He stood on one foot and raised the other, inviting Stig to cup his hands.

“Just once,” Stig said, and relented.

Andy stepped into his friends knotted hands, held onto his shoulders and heaved himself up. He had to hold onto the window sill and lift up just a little bit to be able to see in – at least it didn’t feel like it was moving anymore, must have been his sun-frazzled imagination – and he heard Stig grunting down below. He wouldn’t have long to take a look, and he had a feeling that Stig had meant what he’d said. Once Andy’s feet were back on terra firma they would both be leaving the churchyard.

Of course, they could have just walked to the closed front doors and knocked … but Andy liked an adventure. Today it was hot and sunny and he and his best friend had the whole of time to themselves. They wouldn’t be kids for much longer. Andy was pretty sure it all got more complicated from now on.

He just didn’t know how soon that would begin.

It was one of the very old stained glass windows he’d chosen to look through, no real colour to the design, just old lead peeling outward and threatening to drop a riot of glass at any time. A couple of the lower pieces were too distorted to see through clearly, but he found a large triangular pane that offered him a good view of the interior of the church. Stig grunted again down below and shifted slightly, and Andy had to grasp onto the sill to prevent himself from tumbling.

“One minute!” he hissed. His biceps were burning, and he guessed Stig’s must be too, but he had to see what was going on. The Vicar’s face … the fact that he’d run to the post office to use their telephone … the men’s worried expressions as they’d hurried back into the church. There was a mystery here, and although it would probably be chatted about throughout the village by this time tomorrow, Andy wanted to know now. He wanted to know while it was still a mystery.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected to see when he looked into the church. Slaughtered bodies sprawled across the pews, perhaps, their blood soaking into those weird little cushions meant for kneeling on but which nobody ever used. Or naked female witches slaughtering chickens on the altar and indulging in a little ‘after the fashion of the ram’ with some satyr.

The one thing he had most definitely not expected to see was nothing.

The two men, Vicar and postmaster, sat on a pew at the front of the church, obviously deep in conversation. The centuries-old glass made the vicar’s face look very white.

“What’s going on?” Stig asked.

“An orgy!” Andy whispered down. “Mrs Hopkins is being bonked by Rachel’s dad!”

“What? Really? Quick, let me have a look.”

“I’m only joking, dick features. Not much going on. The two oldies are sitting there talking. Jesus is still watching them.”

“So what were they so worried about?”

Andy rubbed the glass to see if he could get a clearer look. “Dunno. Hang on a minute.” Father Norman had turned away from Dave, and at first Andy thought they were having some sort of disagreement. But then he saw that both men were staring at a door in the far corner of the church, just to the right of the altar and all but hidden down several steps. The door was open, Andy was certain, otherwise it could not have looked so dark. The men weren’t talking, at least not so he could see. They were only looking. As if they were expecting something to come up out of the darkness any moment. Suddenly, Andy didn’t want to look any more.

“Let me down!” he said. As Stig unhooked his hands and Andy dropped, the last thing he saw was Father Norman leaning forward, holding his head in his hands. He thought it very unlikely that it was from the heat.

Besides, it would be nice and cool in the church.

“So what was it?” Stig asked, his chubby, burned cheeks puffing in excitement. He looked like a little boy now for sure, a frightened boy who wanted his mum and regretted ever having come in here.

“They were just chatting, but something’s happened alright. There’s a door they were looking at. They didn’t seem scared, just … upset.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Stig said, trying to act nonchalant as he kicked at a pebble on the path. “ I want to go scrambling. Cooler in the woods.”

“Cooler in the church,” Andy said, not really sure why.

“The woods,” Stig said. And obviously not taking ‘no’ for an answer, he headed off around the corner of the church towards the gate.

That was when they heard sirens in the distance.

“Someone’s dead in there,” Andy said, and as the words came out he knew them to be true.

Somehow, he knew.

Nightmare

He ran, because it was all there was for him to do. He had a target in mind – somewhere in mind, somewhere buried beneath the panic and agony, and the disbelief that his Wednesday could possibly have turned into this – but for now he could only run, and if his flight took him anywhere near his target, his plan, so be it. He could not slow down enough to think, nor lessen his pace to allow his brain time to plan his route. All sense of where and when had vanished when the fire-dogs chased him from the field.

He enjoyed physical labour, even on days like today. It was extremely hot, true, but what always kept him going was the promise of a cool evening sitting outside the village pub, getting slowly drunk with his girlfriend, maybe picking up some fish and chips from the takeaway on the way home, then sleeping with the windows open and letting the cool night air soothe his burned skin and aching muscles. The same the next day, true, and the day after that, but he rarely looked farther forward than the evening. No great ambitions stole his time, no real aims to get anywhere other than where he was now today. He liked his life.

Which made it worse knowing that he was about to lose it.

The dogs had come just after his mid-morning break. He’d already dug out most of the soakaway, and the rest of the day would be spent lining it and filling it in with pea gravel. Then the growls had come from the trees, accompanied by a sound like fire eating at old, dried leaves. He’d gone to investigate, of course, because a fire out here could be devastating. It had been a long hot summer already, with plenty more dry weather to come.

Another growl as he approached. And still that crackling sound of fire.

No smell. No heat. Just the sound.

And then they had come. Three of them, flaming visions leaping between the trees, and through the trees, not touching an inch of bark with their fire, leaving nothing behind but a dissipating heat-haze in the air. They came straight at him. Fire dogs, he thought, not knowing exactly what they were, nor where that idea had come from. He turned and ran.

Snarling, spluttering, their claws spitting contact with the already melting Tarmac, the roar of flames their growls, their barks explosions as pockets of air erupted around him. He’d felt the skin on his back stretching as the heat came closer, and he’d put on a spurt of speed. The fire dogs dropped back for a bit then, but not for long, because however much manual labour he did during the day he ate and drank far too much at night. He could feel his love-handles jiggling as he ran, and his stomach and tits, and even though he was running for his life—

--for his fucking life, from fire dogs, and just what the fuck were fire dogs when they were at home, and why him?—

--still he felt vaguely embarrassed.

He’d aimed for the village. He needed help, and if people saw what was chasing him maybe they could do something. With a drought and a hosepipe ban? he thought, and maybe the heat had got to him, he’d been working out in the fields for too long, the sun had cooked the skin of his neck and shoulders and arms, there were no fire dogs, he should have been wearing a hat because his brain had cooked and now he was witnessing what carbonised skull contents spewed out.

Through the streets. People had seen him and offered a smiled greeting, but he’d run on, looking back over his shoulder now and then to see the flaming red, orange, yellow hounds chasing him. Sometimes they passed the people, sometimes they went straight through them, but they seemed to do no damage. Two kids in the square watched him and one of them glanced up as the fire dogs passed by, as if sniffing something in the air or seeing something high up in the clear blue sky.

Then he was in the lanes again, alone, and he finally realised just where he had to go. The pond. The lake, it was called by the villagers, but it was little more than a puddle fed from an underground trickle, somewhere for young kids to gather frog-spawn and older kids to skinny-dip and fool around afterwards.

Help me, help me, he thought, and suddenly his plea for help flew on ahead ... because he hadn’t even seen the pond for a good few weeks, and it was just possible that it had dried up.

He ran. They chased. He dove over low hedges and dodged between apple trees, hoping that fleeing through one of the big orchards would slow them down more than him. The craziness of the situation barely even occurred to him, because escape and survival was at the front of his mind. Later, when he was sitting in the cooling evening outside the pub, he would look back and wonder just what the hell had happened to him today. He’d sit there with his fifth pint of Old Bastard, his girlfriend would gently touch the singed hairs on his arm, and he’d try to remember what the sun had done to him, what it had sent his way. Phantom fire hounds to chase him through the village and into the pond.

It could be dried up, like all those reservoirs on TV.

He was panting now, his chest hurt and his skin was slick with sweat. That made it cool at least; sweat being swept from his body as he ran kept some of the heat at bay, but every now and then the spitting and crackling would come that bit closer and he’d feel a shoulder blade or the back of a thigh heat up and blister.

And then the pond was there, and thank God for underground springs because it was over half full.

He launched himself straight in without pause. The water closed shockingly around him, winding him it was so cold, and he had sudden images of someone finding him floating here dead from heart attack. But he recovered quickly and held himself under the surface, hands wrapped in the weeds growing from the pond bed to prevent himself rising and offering his skin to the fire dogs.

Dogs, he thought, made of fire. He almost smiled. Almost. Because right then the sky above the pond lit up yellow, flames dancing in his eyes because the water blurred his vision so much. And any brief sense of victory or escape fled as the fire dogs came down into the water after him.

The coolness vanished, the heat came again, and it was suddenly hotter than it had ever been before.

He opened his mouth and screamed steam.

Two

The two boys sat on the village green and watched the peace destroyed.

An ambulance arrived first, just after the boys exited the churchyard and ran back to their bikes. Its siren wound down as it pulled into the square but the flashers still blinked, the blue lights looking cool in the hot air. Father Norman hurried out to meet the paramedics as Dave stood in the church doorway, but try as they might the boys could not make out what was being said. The two paramedics rushed past the vicar and into the church, carrying their little bags of tricks with them. The door swung shut closed and the square was silent once more.

“Let’s go and let the siren off,” Stig said, but Andy knew he was joking.

A few more people had noticed the disturbance now, and several village folk stood in open doorways or shadowed front gardens watching and waiting for developments. Few of them ventured out into the sun. Andy knew it would take something majorly exciting to lure them from the shadows; only kids enjoyed baking in weather like this. And mad dogs and Englishmen, if his nan’s wise words were to be believed.

Another ambulance flashed into the square, followed by a lone police car.

“Murder!” Andy whispered. “Bloody hell!”

“Just because there’s a police car it doesn’t mean there’s a murder.”

“’Course it does! If it was an accident the police wouldn’t need to be here. There’ll be fingerprint guys soon, and the forensics team to find out the time of death, and they’ll set up one of those tents so we can’t see in.” Andy’s mind flashed through all the police procedural TV shows he’d seen. “Hey … maybe we’ll see the deceased.”

Stig pushed Andy so that he rolled towards the dried stream. “What deceased, thickasshit? We don’t know that anyone’s dead.”

“Bet they are!” Andy spat on his hand and held it out, but Stig didn’t take the bet. Probably because he wishes I was right, Andy thought. He didn’t actually want anyone to be dead, of course – neither of them did – but if they were dead anyway then it didn’t count. And it would be so exciting! Enough excitement to last them the summer, at least. And he’d be able to tell everyone about how he’d looked into the church before anyone else arrived, and what he’d seen. The story, he knew, would grow. Perhaps not quite as far as Mrs Hopkins doing it after the fashion of the ram, but the scope was endless. Blood, he could say, I saw the blood! And the next day perhaps he’d recall the brains he’d seen splashed across the feet of the crucified Christ … although he’d have to be careful about that one because his mum was religious. Never went to church but prayed every night. Her own faith, she said.

The police were in shirtsleeves, and they didn’t bother wearing their hats. They both looked tired and hot and pissed off.

“Who’s been murdered?” Stig called. One of them glanced over and smiled briefly, the other did not even acknowledge the two boys.

The second team of paramedics stood beside their ambulance, preparing a bag of equipment but not going into the church. The policemen wandered over to chat to them, and then headed for the church gate as the heavy oak door opened.

One of the first paramedics hurried out and came down the steps ... and Andy saw that look on his face, too. The worried look, the adult look, the look Father Norman and Dave had aimed their way as they’d dashed into the church half an hour ago. “See?” he whispered to Stig. “Must be murder.”

The paramedic reached the policemen and shook his head. “Weird,” Andy and Stig heard him mutter, because the square was silent and the church was holding its breath. “Some guy’s been drowned in the crypt.”

“Drowned?”

The medic nodded, held his hands up, shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me. Lungs are still full of water. And it’s as dry as a bone down there.”

“No pun intended, of course,” the second policeman drawled. He looked over at the two boys watching raptly from the green and motioned his colleague in closer.

The boys did not hear any more – the men began conversing in whispers – but they’d heard enough.

“How the hell can someone drown in a church crypt when there’s no water and it’s as dry as a bone?” Stig asked.

Andy shook his head. “Dunno. Hey, you think they’ll bring the body out soon?”

“They’ll have to investigate first,” Stig said wisely. “The body may be there for four, five days until the examine the area fully.”

“It’ll smell!”

Stig nodded slowly. “Yes, but these guys are used to it. They put black cream under their noses to stop the smell. I saw it in Silence of the Lambs.”

“Yeah, but …” Andy trailed off. Much as he knew Stig was talking bollocks, it did seem unlikely that they’d bring the body out this soon. And he knew it was for the best, because he didn’t really want to see a dead guy. Yet still, he felt a pang of disappointment.

One of the policemen walked across to them, wiping at the beaded sweat on his brow. . “You lads been here long?”

“Only half an hour!” Stig said quickly.

“Has someone drowned?” Andy asked.

The policeman’s face remained impassive. “There’s been a little accident with the workmen in the church, that’s all. You can run along now, lads. And don’t let me see you riding on the main roads without your helmets on!”

“We’re just going up to the woods, Officer,” Stig said, obviously pleased with his use of the word. “We wouldn’t want to get stung with a murder rap.”

“Well I’m glad to see you’re out in the fresh air instead of inside playing computer games,” the man said. He wiped at his forehead again and Andy realised that saw that he was really, truly disconcerted. His hand was shaking and his eyes kept flickering back to the church, as if the open belfry louvres were eyes glaring out over the village.

“How many workmen?” Andy asked, suddenly realising what the policeman had said.

“Now off you go, lads, no business for you hanging around here anymore. Take care in the woods. Don’t talk to strangers.”

“You said workmen,” Andy said again, but the policeman presented them with his sweat-soaked back and walked away.

“Multiple murder!” Stig said. “Cool!”

They left the square slowly, stopping every few feet to fiddle with their tyre pumps, test the tyres, tighten the chains. They had to stand in close to a garden wall to make way for a second police car, and when they looked back they were waved away again by the sweating policeman.

“Come on,” Stig said at last, “it’s cooler in the woods. We can come back for a look later.”

“But how does someone drown in a church?”

Stig was already pedalling away from him, and Andy only heard a muttered ‘dunno’. He caught up with his friend and they made their way slowly out of the village.

After arriving in the woods, they very soon discovered that their hearts were not really in it. They spent an hour kicking through bushes, climbing an old dead tree and scrambling along a dried-up stream bed, and then the boys decided to make tracks for home.

It was hotter than ever when they left the woods and free-wheeled back down to the village. Hotter than hell, Andy’s nan would say. Colder than a witch’s tit in winter. Daft as a brush. Perhaps sayings like that were something you collected as you grew older. Andy tried to think one up to start his own collection, but he could only come up with ‘frightening as fire’. It was quite good, he supposed, but he hoped he’d never have cause to use it.

Just as they passed the first thatched cottage squatting at the edge of the village, the screaming began.

Seconds later, somehow worse, it stopped.

Nightmare

Sometimes she can remember them. Their nightmares provide intermissions in her own, oases of mere dread in a desert of utter horror. She welcomes these memories when they come along, although it seems that they are appearing less and less lately, as if time itself is wearing them away like pebbles in a stream. The stream is her own nightmare, the pebbles those horrors she has taken. Soon they will be sand, and then nothing, and then she will be left in her own awful limbo, alone forever.

They always came in the mornings. Their expressions were always the same: eyes wide and empty; faces drawn and tired; shoulders drooping in dejection. To visit her was always their last resort because they knew what she was, and so she always saw them at their worst. Some were proud, some bitter. Many were as scared of her as of their own nightmares … but they were all, every single one of them, utterly desperate.

She had always known that they would destroy her in the end.

The one with water was an old woman, someone who had spent her years raising children and working in the fields, and her body was small but wiry, her face haggard but strong. Until the fluid nightmares took her … coming with neither rhyme nor reason, because the most water she had ever seen was the village pond. “Mengezah, I need your help,” she said.

Mengezah knew that already – no other reason for the old woman to visit her – but she sat and nodded and let the woman tell her story.

“I dream of water. For months now, months, every time I slip into sleep my mouth fills and I’m being held down.” She looked away from Mengezah and stared off into some liquid distance, her eyes widening, her face stretching as disbelief and fear took hold. Fear, perhaps, of where she was now. “I struggle, I thrash, but I can’t reach far enough to touch whatever’s holding me. It has no face, it has no body. Just arms, around my neck and on my chest and down between my legs, holding me down until the water fills me and I … become the water.”

“Every night?” Mengezah asked.

The old woman looked back at her and this time held her gaze. Not many people could do that, or would, and the woman rose in Mengezah’s estimations. She’d obviously had a hard life, and it had made her hard. So sad that dreams could be her undoing.

“And you wake every morning fine and untouched. So live with it.”

“I can’t live with it!” the old woman shouted, and in Mengezah’s neatly tended garden a crow was startled from some sticky wet meal. “It hurts! I die every night and it hurts!”

Mengezah had given the same option she always did. Live with it, she said to them, and not one had ever turned around to leave. By the time they came to her it was always too bad, and if they did accept that alternative they would be dead come morning. They knew that and so did she. But what they then asked her to do she did out of goodness, pure and simple.

Most never even paid her.

“Then I will help you,” she said.

The old woman began to cry. The tears flowed down her wrinkled cheeks, as if she was shedding some of her nightmare already.

“Lie down.”

The woman lay on the straw floor of Mengezah’s one-room home, arms stretched out by her side, feet pointing south.

“It won’t take long.” It never did. The nightmares were always simmering just below the surface, fed on fear and dread, aggravated by their victim’s thoughts of Mengezah and what she could do. She dribbled a line of thick juice onto the old woman’s lips to calm her. The woman grimaced and licked her lips – taste was never Mengezah’s prime concern when she mixed – but she swallowed, resting immediately, her eyes drooping shut … and her body stiffened as—

--Mengezah touched her head and the nightmare opened up for her. She was immersed, sinking, unable to struggle because hands held her down. Not relishing the pain she submitted, and drowned.

Hours later the old woman woke up. She saw Mengezah huddled in a corner, still, not breathing, and she fled the magic woman’s house.

Mengezah remembers. She feels the water filling her and herself becoming the water, but it is an old, old memory by now, dry, and it holds little fear for her anymore.

Besides, her own worst nightmare is a heavy, looming shadow. Waiting to be born again.

Three

Andy and Stig tried to ride past the scream. It came again as they cycled further into the village, then yet again just as they drew level with the old railway station. The building had been converted into three expensive apartments for rich commuters, and it was now obviously a place of pain for one of them. The scream was fluid, gargled, as if the screamer was trying to talk and run and sing at the same time. It was a desperate exhalation of terror with no calculation, no motive other than the exercising of a primal human trait.

“What in the name of fuck was that?” Andy said. He and Stig were cycling neck and neck, finding an unspoken comfort in being able to see each other. The first scream heard from a distance had been bad. This close the sound was much more violent in nature, almost enough to knock them from their bikes and pummel their skulls.

“We should call the police,” Stig said. “Someone’s getting murdered in there. Or raped.”

“Or both,” Andy said, sickly fascinated.

Their brakes squealed as they coasted to a stop. The boys looked along the short road to the station buildings, both of them searching for signs of what could have provoked such a sound.

“Yeah, both,” Stig said. “Shall we go have a look?”

It came again, louder than ever, and a shadow passed behind a window.

“No fucking way, Jose!” Andy said. “And we don’t need to call the cops, there are enough of them at the church!”

“Yeah!” Stig said. “Let’s go. Maybe we’ll get an award, or something.”

The boys pedalled gratefully away from the station and its shadowy, screaming occupant, passing by the deserted cider factory and revelling in the breeze in their hair and the whispering of wheels on Tarmac. Andy pulled slightly ahead, as usual, and he heard Stig panting behind him as he struggled to keep up. Panting, and whining very slightly because he was scared. That scream … it had been horrible.

Andy glanced back and slowed down so that Stig could catch up.

When they reached the square they found at least two dozen villagers standing there, in groups and alone, looking on as policemen and people in white boiler-suits slipped in and out of the church. What had been a couple of police cars and ambulances had grown to a parking-lot of white cars and vans, some of them with lights still flashing blue. Three policemen were chatting with the villagers, nodding and smiling and telling them nothing at all. Andy thought they looked ready to hold back a tide of curious locals if the need arose.

The boys screeched to a halt just past the post office, leaned against a stone garden wall and nodded a greeting to a couple of villagers standing nearby.

“What do we do?” Stig whispered.

“Talk to one of the coppers. There’s someone in trouble back there.” Andy dismounted and hurried along the road towards the nearest policeman, a short tubby man talking to Mrs Bright, a teacher from the village primary school. He heard Stig scurrying along behind him.

“Hello,” Andy said when he reached the two adults, “I think there’s someone being murdered in the station buildings.”

“Very funny, son,” the policeman said. Mrs Bright merely turned and stared down her nose at him, as if he was a specimen laid out in a biology class. From her expression, Andy could hardly believe she’d taught him for a whole year. She seemed not to recognise him at all.

“Honest!” Andy said. “Stig, tell them.”

“It’s true! Murdered and raped!”

“Well … we don’t know that for sure, but they’re screaming like anything. Listen!” Andy cocked his head and looked up into the clear blue sky, but all he heard was the village mumbling around him. His mum sometimes said he picked up on things, and he sometimes found the place slightly worrying and disturbing. But now, infuriatingly, nothing stuttered from the norm.

“Son, we really don’t need your games right now,” the fat policeman said.

“Because of the murders?” Andy said. Mrs Bright’s expression changed at that, natural curiosity overriding the teacher’s superior disapproval. Andy realised that news had not yet leaked out.

“No murders here,” the policeman said, and he went to walk away without saying any more.

“Don’t cause trouble boys!” Mrs Bright hissed. Then she followed the policeman, hanging slightly back like some predator waiting to pounce.

“What do we do?” Stig asked. He was standing astride his bike, his arms and face and chest slowly turning red. He was topless and never wore sun cream. He said it was for poofs. Andy always loved watching his friend scratch and peel at his blistered, burned skin, and soon he would be able to gloat.

Maybe. Or perhaps something would happen before then … something that would mean that Stig’s skin didn’t blister, or Andy never got to see it … and he wondered whether these thoughts were exactly what his mother meant. Picking up on something, like that time he’d known that Dave Price was lying unconscious in a ditch after tumbling from his sister’s push-bike, and he hadn’t told anyone because – even though he was certain it was true – there was no way he could know.

He tried not to think about it too much.

“Let’s go back,” Andy said.

“What?”

“Let’s go back and see if it’s still happening.”

They jumped on their bikes and cycled out of the square, away from the centre of attention and out into the village streets that seemed even quieter than usual. They knew every twist and turn of this place, each path held a story and every garden or lane echoed with memories of their summers here, times spent running and hiding and laughing and crying. Winters too, warm memories of cold times, snow piled against rotten timber fencing, mysterious tracks and footprints in the fresh falls followed for a whole afternoon before circling back on themselves and starting again. Andy and Stig were the map-makers of this place, the charters of its geographical history, whereas adults really only had time to go to work, come home and sleep. And adults’ imaginations did not take them to the same places. The boys knew that there were two worlds here: the grown-up village where roads led to other roads and paths and lanes only existed because of what they led to; and their world  the kid’s world  where roads and paths were merely the arteries. The networks of smaller adventures overlaid the town like the myriad smaller veins in a human body. The village had a heart and brain; they only had to find it.

They pedalled hard because to travel slowly was a waste of time.

When they reached the short road leading to the old railway station they stopped, panting and sweating and staring at the buildings. Andy imagined a door flying open and something running out, dripping blood and stuff, bubbling a shout  not actually screaming, because their throat would have been ripped out  dashing down the road towards the two boys …

All was silent. The buildings looked so peaceful that he could not imagine the scream having ever existed here. A few birds hopped about on the roof of the old station, carefree and unaware of being watched. Sun reflected from the windows, hiding the building’s insides and shimmering the air between the boys and the station. Andy wondered how long it would take light to reach his eyes from there, how something could be happening nano-seconds before he actually saw it.

“What if light slows down?” he said. “We’ll never know what happened.”

“Huh?”

“I said …” He glanced at Stig, then shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, freako. Just talking bollocks.”

“What’s new.”

They stood there for a few seconds more, neither boy wanting to verbalise what they actually saw: normality. The screams had been awful, but they had been exciting. They had been something happening in this little, sleepy village. It meant pain for someone, agony and fear and maybe death, but it also meant adventure. Neither boy would ever admit it, even to themselves, but that is what they craved. They were still really kids, and some things were just too important to ignore.

“Let’s go,” Andy said.

“You sure?”

“It’s too quiet. Like …”

“Like it never happened,” Stig said.

Andy looked at him and nodded. “Yeah.” He glanced back at the buildings and for a moment, brief but intense, he thought something was tickling his eardrums, a sound so high-pitched that it could be felt more than heard. He shook his head and a fly buzzed at his ear. “Come on.”

They pedalled slowly along the road, waiting at any minute for the scream to erupt once again, all the while knowing it would not. It was too hot, it was too summer for anything to really be wrong.

What about the drowned guy in the church? Andy thought. What about the scream? He’d seen people screwing on TV, they made noises but nothing like that. That cry could only have been one of pain. And perhaps beyond pain; perhaps madness.

Yes, maybe madness.

They stopped their bikes a few yards from the front door of the middle apartment.

“Quiet,” Stig said.

“Yeah.” Andy looked left and right to the adjacent apartments, wishing for all the world that a curtain would twitch or the pale blob of a nosy face would appear at one of the windows. But they were alone, and the only sounds were the natural noises which faded into the background through familiarity: bird-song; the whisper of breeze in the highest branches of trees; the hum of summer heat in their heads.

And then suddenly Andy knew that something was wrong. You pick up on things his mum had said, and he forever wished she hadn’t, but right then he knew that she was right. Nothing had apparently changed but he knew that something was amiss, he knew that it was the crowd in the village square missing out on things right now, not them, because right here and now was where something major was happening. Not had happened, but was happening.

Now.

“Round back!” Andy said, and he dropped his bike and ran to the far end of the building. He heard Stig following, cursing both with fear and excitement.

As he skirted the corner of the building he felt a change in himself, a sinking sensation, because he knew he was about to see something bad. If badness and fear had a smell, he could sense it now. It may hide under the hint of bramble, the oily ghost of diesel from decades ago and the tang of melting Tarmac … but he knew that his life would never be the same again.

At first, he thought the guy was jumping up and down in his back garden. But then Andy realised he was stuck there. Up in the air. Swimming.

Behind him Stig skidded to a stop, turned around and puked.

Not that bad, Andy thought, but he instantly re-evaluated the reaction, because it was that bad. There was no blood and guts and gore, but what they were seeing was so wrong that to turn away and puke was an understandable response. More than understandable, it was necessary. Stig had torn his eyes from the sight to vomit and now Andy wished he could, too. But something held him there. A sick fascination demanded his attention and shocked him to the core.

The guy was suspended in mid-air a few feet above the ground, mouth opening and closing like that of a fish, hands waving and grasping handfuls of air, throwing them behind him as if that could move him towards something solid. His legs kicked too, but he was not moving anywhere. His loose trousers and shirt flowed around his limbs in total disregard for their actual movements, caught in a subtle, invisible current that set them swaying slowly to and fro. Andy had seen the man around the village; he was one of those commuters who’d moved in a few years back when village life became fashionable once more. Now … he was no longer there.

The boys could see him waving around in mid-air, but they could barely hear him. Just a hint, Andy thought, like a voice heard through several walls but echoing only in memory. The guy was shouting, screaming, but the sound went elsewhere. And he seemed so distant, as if they were actually viewing him through a powerful telescope. Only a few steps … if Andy had moved forward and reached out he could have touched the man in seconds … and yet he was so far away that the distance was frightening.

Like space, Andy thought. A trillion trillion miles is just … terrifying.

“Something’s wrong with him,” Stig said over his shoulder, gasping out the sweet smell of puke and fear.

“I know,” Andy whispered, and both boys knew what the other meant. It was obvious that the man was in distress, but there was something much more disturbed with this picture.

The man turned to look in their direction then, and although his eyes did not focus his mouth opened wide. The only indication that he screamed was the subtle twitching of muscles in his throat and wet movement at the back of his mouth. The sun was shining into his face, it lit it up in there, and Andy wondered exactly which sun was shedding its light upon him.

Andy turned and ran, stumbling into Stig as his friend had the same idea. They held each other up and scrambled back around the building to their bikes, leaving the man swimming in mid air a billion miles away, trying to shrug off the feeling that whatever he was trapped inside was spreading out to them, stretching invisible, impossible fingers to tap them on the shoulders and hold them tight.

Wonder if anyone will hear us screaming, Andy thought. Perhaps only for a moment.

He grabbed up his bike and pushed off as he jumped on, swinging his leg over and landing on the pedal, almost toppling himself over the opposite way. Stig was panting and swearing behind him, and Andy heard the scrape of gravel as a brake locked up. He turned and saw his friend sprawled across the road, knees bloodied and his bike twisted around his legs.

“Come on!” he hissed.

Stig sat up slowly and looked at his knees. “I’ve got veins,” he said, watching the blood dribble onto the hot road and mix with the melted pitch.

Andy could see his fried turning pale even under the sunburn. “Stig, get a fucking move on!” he said. He used the swear-word not because it made him feel big or brave or rebellious, but because he felt the need to, actually using it for the first time as an adult there and then. Something was behind the old station and it had a man in its grasp, and his friend was worried about bloodied knees.

Andy almost laughed, but then he saw Stig’s face – terrified and upset – and he realised that this was all for real. His mum always told him that most things can be laughed about at some point, but Andy knew it would take a long time for that to be the case here.

The boys pedalled away furiously, sweat soaking Andy’s T-shirt, blood dripping down Stig’s legs. The purr of their tyres against the hot Tarmac was a comforting sound, because it meant that they were moving further away.

Andy reached the end of the road first and turned right. Out of the village. He didn’t know why, he was unsure of what they would do once they passed the last house, but something inside drove him that way.

Something weird at the church, in the village. Something horrible at the old station … in the village. Get out of the village and find time, find sense, then everything would be okay.

These thoughts flashed by in moments, almost subconscious, creating their own logical coherence as they led him along the road towards the woods.

“Where we going?” Stig panted.

“Out of the village.”

“But I want my mum,” Stig said, and Andy thought he heard the beginnings of tears in his mate’s voice.

They pedalled on, Stig following Andy because that was normally the way of things, and within a couple of minutes they passed the last thatched cottage before the countryside opened up and offered its parched self for inspection.

And then they were pedalling back past the cottage and into the village.

Andy braked. Stig skidded to a stop beside him. The boys looked at each other, pale, even more scared than seconds before, if that were possible.

“So,” Stig said, “why did we turn around?”

Andy shook his head, but he could not speak. We didn’t, he thought.

“You skidded a turn and I followed and we’re going back now, right?” Stig said, staring at Andy, trying to catch his eye and make sure what he was saying was right.

Perhaps if Andy agreed that would make it right, but he couldn’t find it in himself to do that. No … he hadn’t braked, skidded and turned.

“No,” Andy said, turning to look back over his shoulder at the way they’d been going. The road headed out of the village as usual, disappearing around a bend that led eventually up the small hill into the woods. He pedalled off again, aware that Stig was not following. He did not blink, but kept his eyes on the road ahead of him and the trees and shrubs forming the hedge, knowing from instant to instant just how that view was going to change—

And then he was cycling towards Stig and the cottage. He had not blinked, he was certain. And he’d felt nothing; no sense of being stopped and turned around. He had simply reversed direction instantaneously with no sense of movement.

Then he saw Stig’s face. His friend’s mouth was actually hanging open, his whole face slack, pure disbelief and shock made flesh. It was so funny that Andy almost laughed. Almost.

“How did you do that?” Stig asked.

“I didn’t do anything.” Andy pulled up next to the stunned boy and looked at him, staring into Stig’s eyes. He was amazed to find something there he didn’t like: mistrust. “Hey … I didn’t do anything! One second I was going that way, the next, this.”

“But I didn’t blink. You just turned around without me even seeing it.”

Andy shook his head. “This is a nightmare.”

Maybe.

“I’ll try,” Stig said.

“No!”

“What the hell are you all of a sudden, my big brother?” Stig pedalled away.

Andy turned to watch over his shoulder, careful not to blink, concentrating on every lift and fall of Stig’s feet, every sway of his arse as he powered along the road, and he was just about to call his friend back when he realised that he was returning anyway.

He had not seen him turn, change direction or stop pedalling. Faster than a blink – faster than a moment between moments – Stig was on his way back.

“Something’s happening,” Stig said. “Something weird, something bad, I want to go home. I need my mum and dad, Andy. I want to go home.” The threatened tears came then, and Andy began crying as well. He pretended it was in sympathy with his friend, but deep inside he knew the real truth: that he was more scared than he had ever thought possible, and there was a voice whispering in his head that he’d never heard before.

Nightmare, it kept saying.

Yes, maybe.

Nightmare

Her own terrible nightmare reminds her of one of the last ones she took away.

The man was young and proud, and he’d been approaching her home for weeks. Each time he came nearer and she pretended not to see, but she knew that he would come all the way when he was ready, and she left him to his own pace. No need to rush him. And in truth, she had no desire to bring on another excursion into somebody else’s nightmare.

So she tended her chickens and goat and vegetable garden – contrary to some of the idle village gossip, the animals were there merely for her to eat – and watched day by day as he approached. For the last couple of days he made no pretence at hiding, and his doubt manifested as abuse towards her.

“I don’t need you!” he spat, standing at the edge of her garden.

“Then why have you been standing there for over an hour? You’ll root soon, if you’re not careful. I already have enough vegetables to tend.”

“You’re comparing me to a vegetable?”

“No,” Mengezah said, unable to ever miss a chance at ridiculing the villagers’ paranoia over her, “man-meat doesn’t taste as good.” She chuckled as she carried a basket of weed to a heap at the corner of her patch.

She’d taken a quick look at the man when she spoke, using the opportunity to examine him. She saw straight away that he was terrified and in awe of her – and he didn’t believe some of the more scurrilous rumours about her witchery – and that’s why he was offering abusing. Fear came out as proud bluster. It so often did.

More than anything, he’d looked tired. They all did, always, by the time they reached her, but this one’s eyes were … distant. They held power because they seemed to stare from so far away.

For a few hours that night Mengezah considered turning him away when he finally came to her.

But the next day he made the full journey, and sat by her side, and gratefully accepted her hand on his shoulder as he gushed out his nightmare, laying himself bare for her inspection, probably telling her more in an hour than he’d said to his wife in a year.

“She thinks I’m mad,” he said. “She thinks I’m possessed, and she’s even considered taking me to the church—“

“No,” Mengezah said. “You’re not mad, or possessed, and that will merely make it worse. “But …” She trailed off, let go of his shoulder. His muscles there were so tightly bunched that she thought they would explode into violence at any moment, voluntary or not.

“Can you help?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

She gave him a dose of the foul-tasting relaxant and touched his head, and she was instantly nowhere. She tried to scream but could not. She could see everything surrounding her but knew that it was forever beyond her reach. The joy of release in the man’s eyes as he scrambled from her house gave her no satisfaction. Neither did the knowledge that she would sleep and absorb this nightmare, swallow it instead of allowing it to swallow her.

She stayed that way for a long time before waking up. That was one of the worst.

But nothing compared to this. Her own personal phantasm outstrips that one a million times, because it is so much older … and much more real. During those occasions when she can think and feel, less and less frequent as time goes on, her whole world is a sense of cloying claustrophobia more pressing than death. She feels as though she is contained in a mass of solid stone, hiding in a pocket at its core while a million miles in any direction consists merely of rock, its gravity crushing her and tearing her apart simultaneously, no chance of escape, nothing there other than her. Utter confinement. Nobody and nothing to ask for help.

Mengezah wishes she can sigh. She craves the darkness of limbo, the certainty of death. But something keeps her from both.

Something she does not quite understand, but which she thinks of as unfinished business.

Four

As they pedalled quickly past Station Road they glanced at the buildings, afraid of what they would see yet finding it impossible not to look.

They saw only a normal summer day, baking white paint on the old buildings heat-haze shimmering the windows. The air above the building seemed to vibrate too, perhaps from whatever was still happening at its rear.

How far away? thought Andy, and he pedalled harder and faster. Sweat pointed salty fingers into his eyes, trying to blind him. He took one hand from the handle-bars and wiped his arm across his face, but seeing clearer did not make matters any better. He was still cycling through his village that had suddenly taken on an atmosphere of danger and dread. He felt like crying; it was as if the person he trusted the most had suddenly turned on him, threatening him with fates he could barely understand, let alone face.

“Slow down!” Stig panted behind him.

Andy heard his friend’s loose chain rattling on its cogs as he struggled to keep up. He eased down slightly and Stig drew level with him at the village shop.

Mr Howards was standing outside, hands on hips, staring along the road that lead to the town square. “Hey boys,” he said as they passed by, “lots of commotion down there. What’s up? Fire, or something?”

“Something,” Andy hissed as he pedalled by, thinking of drowning and screams and floating men.

Stig said nothing.

Andy heard Mr Howards mumbling to himself and instantly felt guilty for his own lack of manners. But there was no going back now. Going back would be to move closer to the station buildings, closer to whatever had turned them around, not further away. And further away was much, much better.

Going home was better still. That’s where Andy wanted to be right now, and he was pleased as hell that Stig lived so close by. Pleased and grateful and suddenly, for no apparent reason, he was full of an intense joy and an enthusiasm for the day which could not be explained by anything he had seen or felt so far. What he had seen was gruesome; and all he felt now was fear.

Nevertheless the feeling held, a rapturous eruption of optimism that set him standing on his pedals and yelling at the sky.

“Yeeeaahhh!” he yelled. “Stig, yeahhhh!”

“What?” They were free-wheeling down the incline towards the small clutch of houses where they lived, and every second took them further away from the strangeness they’d been forced to face. “Andy, what’re you on about?”

Andy ignored his friend, pretending that the breeze whipping past his ears had stolen the words away. Perhaps it had. Perhaps Stig had said something more, but Andy simply stood on his pedals and leaned forward, teeth bared, eyes squinting almost shut against the heat, revelling in the speed and subtle dangers.

And fear?

Nightmare, a voice said, laying cadences Andy did not understand across his thoughts and quenching his excitement like a bucket of water dousing a candle. He slumped back into the saddle and let the bike coast.

Someone had ruined it for him, he thought. But then he realised how foolish that idea was. They’d seen that lost man up in the air, after all, and someone had drowned in the church, drowned! This was no time to be anything other than terrified.

Still … for a moment there he’d felt … involved. As if he was the very centre of things.

“Have to see my mum,” Stig said, drawing into the lead and steering left into his driveway. “Need to see her, Andy. Need to tell her about …” He braked and looked over his shoulder as Andy drifted to a stop by the roadside. “Catch you later?”

Andy nodded. “You bet. This’ll be all sorted out by then and we can pile down the square and tell everyone what we saw. Hey, maybe Rachel will be there! You tell her I saw the murderers, right, when we looked in the church? You tell her … she’ll believe it then, if I say it she’ll think I’m trying to impress her.”

“You are.”

Andy glanced skyward. “’Course I am, but she mustn’t know that otherwise it won’t work! Don’t you know anything about girls?”

Stig shrugged and smiled. “More than you, wanker.” It was a standing joke between the two of them … neither had ever had a real girlfriend.

“What about boys?” Andy said, playing their old game, realising even as he spoke just how weird it seemed trying to sound normal after what they’d seen.

Stig merely stared at him for a few seconds, and Andy could see the memory of the floating man reflected in his gaze. “I need to see my mum,” Stig said. “I’ll give you a buzz later.” Then he dropped his bike and ran around to the rear of the bungalow.

Andy watched his friend’s sunburned back as he went, then he cycled the two hundred yards further to his own house. On the way he muttered one word over and over again: “Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.” He said it twenty times before he reached his driveway. He and Stig used the word to describe something vaguely bad, like missing the last bus into town before their film started at the cinema.

Now, though, its connotations were all too real. “Nightmare,” Andy said, and it sounded chill, felt like a dark weight in his mind. A weight waiting to shed its skin and reveal the truth beneath the dressing.

Nightmare

She was on her way home when she sensed something going wrong.

Rachel had been swimming with Mandy and Becky, and Mandy’s mum had driven them back to the village. She’d offered to take Rachel home, but the girl had politely declined. It was a nice day for a walk, she loved the village, she would make her own way. Besides, Mandy had started getting on her nerves with all her whispered comments about boys’ dicks and how she couldn’t believe the other girls had never even seen one, all the while smiling at her mother in the rearview mirror and acting all sweetness and light. It was unfair on Mandy’s mum, Rachel thought. Nasty. And really, when it came right down to it, Rachel felt jealous and insecure in Mandy’s presence.

She thought Andy might show her his dick, if she asked. But she was far too scared for that.

Andy. She wondered where he was today. Probably off somewhere with that awful fat freak Stig, doing whatever it was boys did on hot summer days when night seemed a lifetime away. In the woods building dams, maybe. Hunting rabbits with Stig’s dad’s ferret and whippet. Climbing trees at the end of the cricket field and swinging from rope swings.

Sometimes Rachel wished she could join them – especially if Andy was there, because she liked him – but she was just a girl, and girls went swimming and horse riding, they never hung around with boys getting grubby in the fields and orchards, oh no, that just wasn’t done ...

Well bollocks to that, she thought, giggling as she imagined her mum’s reaction to that word. She’d get home quickly now, change and go out looking for Andy. Ask around the village. Someone must have seen him.

An ambulance approached from the direction of the village square. Its siren and light were off, but the driver steered with purpose, and the passenger – paramedic, Rachel knew, like on Casualty – sat staring straight ahead. Neither of them glanced at her as they drove by, as if she wasn’t there at all. She stared after the ambulance and wondered just who was in there, feeling that twinge of fear she’d started experiencing more and more over the past few months: maybe it was her mum or dad. Because a year ago Becky’s dad had died, and Rachel’s first reaction had been an instinctive and shaming at least my parents are still alive. Such selfishness had driven her into deep musings on her own and her family’s mortality, and every time she heard a siren or saw an ambulance or a fire engine she thought the worst.

She decided to take a short-cut home.

The footpath led between two cottages, an unsurfaced mud trail that was all but impassable in the winter, but which now was baked dry and cracked in the heat. Plants grew in profusion along its shadowed length, barely trodden down because so few people came this way. It connected the road to the stream and the path that followed it, and as there was access to this path at several other points, this was a route that effectively led from nowhere to nowhere. Cats, dogs and kids were the only ones to bother with it, and sometimes not even them.

Plant stems tickled Rachel’s bare legs, a hidden clumps of nettles stung her shin and set her cursing and searching for dock leaves. As she passed a house on the left the path fell into shadow, and the ground became spongy and moist. She was staring down as she walked, looking out for dock leaves and dog shit, dodging another clot of nettles that seemed to settle out across the path as she approached. One of them touched her knee and she swore again, breaking into a clumsy trot that took her quickly down to the stream.

In the winter it would be full, a gushing torrent that was rumoured to have swept away unwary drunks in the past. The fact that it was drunks that came up with these closing-time fables only gave them a hazier tinge, but come morning they were passed on and eventually they found their place in village mythology. Now, in the height of a long hot summer, the stream was barely a trickle. Weeds had taken the opportunity the take roots in its fertile bed, and now it was more a stream of greenery than anything else, with a sad trickle of water visible here and there when the sun found its occasional way through the green canopy overhanging the gully. Trees lined the garden boundaries, hiding them from the footpath and providing some sort of privacy, throwing the stream into almost constant shadow. Some of them had grown and enveloped the wire fences bounding the gardens, giving them the appearance of having been garrotted. Yet still they lived, thrived, their roots nudging under the stream and drinking of it winter and summer, spring and autumn. However hot the summers were – and this was the hottest in years – the plants and trees flourished.

Today, Rachel could hear something above the whisper of the reduced waters. It was another whisper altogether, a humming, a secret noise uttered by so many people that it became a background murmur to the afternoon. Rachel stopped and cocked her head, looking along the path towards where it emerged into the village square. There were a couple of corners to turn before then where the stream snaked around rocky outcrops in the land, several garden gates to pass by, most of them overgrown or nailed shut by their owners who wanted no access onto a little-used, sometimes dark and dangerous public footway. Dangerous only because it was unlit, Rachel knew. In the dark, with no stars or moon to guide them, it was only the warning gurgle of the stream that prevented a stroller from falling in.

She shook her head as if to dislodge the sound. It could have been someone humming to themselves around the next corner, or a field full of chattering people a mile away. Perhaps there was a fete she didn’t know about. Maybe the local church hall club was meeting to sell their home-made jams and cakes.

She was hot and sweaty and uncomfortable, and her legs stung where the nettles had touched. She wished she was back in the pool.

As Rachel rounded the next corner the sound seemed to shift. It didn’t move, exactly, or grow louder or change pitch, but something about it changed. She stopped and a shiver brought goosebumps out on her arms. Yet she was still hot. Sweat beaded her top lip, and her back felt cold. That was how the sound had altered.

It had become unsettling.

Engines in the square, she thought, engines and voices, something’s happened and the square is full of people. Maybe Andy was there.

She ran. And then something else changed – another subtle shift in things, nothing obvious, but strong enough for one or all of her senses to alert her to it – and she looked down at the stream.

It had changed direction. She stopped, backed away a little, retraced her steps so that she could see past a huge spread of Japanese knotweed that had taken root. And the stream was flowing the opposite way. Uphill, she thought, but she glanced back the way she had come and began to wonder. It didn’t look uphill, not from here at least, although that was how she always remembered it to be.

Looking back down at the stream, Rachel leaned to one side until the sun to struck the water. It glittered and gurgled, flowing happily from left to right … and even now some of the weeds on its bed were still shifting around, twisting and tangling, changing their direction of flow.

“No,” Rachel muttered, her voice much louder than the background hum, startling her. Maybe there’s been an earthquake, or something? Maybe some kids were damming the stream and it was backing up …

Maybe the village was having a nightmare.

“Who said that?” Rachel glanced about nervously, the silent words a warm breath in her ear. There was no one there, no company except for a magpie pecking at the path she’d just walked along, smashing something against the ground and pulling out a wet thing from inside.

Rachel turned and ran. She really wished she’d accepted that lift home. That way these things would have remained unseen and unheard, and perhaps her day could have been normal. But she’d be in the square soon and there were people there, she could hear them muttering above the sound of her pounding feet, and they would provide comfort. Looking back she saw that the magpie had gone, but there was something on the path where it had been, glinting wetly where it steamed in the sun. Much, much too big to be a snail or a baby bird.

What was that? Rachel wondered, and although her mind threw up some options she chose to ignore them.

She rounded a bend in the path and the stream was still flowing the wrong way.

The bushes and shrubs and brambles growing from the bank seemed wilder here, uncut and untended, even though it was the height of a drought summer and the stream path was well-used. Something snagged at her cheek and she felt the skin rip. She cried out, stopped and put her hand to her face. There was blood on her palm. When she looked back she saw the offending branch, a fist of thorns at its end. The bush grew from a high bank, one of many thorny branches reaching across the path to dip in the water of the stream, drawing moisture where they could.

There was a house here. Where this tall bank stood now there was a house … or had been a house. Rachel was certain she was in the right place: the square was around the next corner; a fence across the other side of the stream bounded a few bare allotments; a handrail had been built alongside the stream here, perhaps in honour of those mythical drunkenly drowned men. Yes, she knew where she was, and there was a house here. It was an old cottage, a listed building that retained its original windows, doors and internal staircases, and the vicar lived there, it came with the parish and there were rumours of a tunnel between it and the church, stretching out beneath the square. The vicar only smiled and shook his head when kids asked him about it, but he never gave them a rigid denial. Most of them thought it was because he was lying, but Rachel thought he just liked them believing the mystery. Mysteries were important, that’s what her parents told her, and she knew that mostly they were right …

But mysteries were frightening as well.

Like why was the stream flowing the wrong way?

And just where had the vicar’s house gone?

She climbed the bank a little way, grabbing hold of a stem of clematis. It was almost as thick as her wrist and must have been growing for decades. The humming was still there in the background, its distance and direction fogged by the twists and turns of the path and the overgrown banks of the stream.

Rachel moved several feet up the bank and peered into the chaos of stems and trunks and foliage, certain that she’d see the whitewash of the cottage wall, bitterly disappointed that she did not. The undergrowth stretched way back until its profusion prevented her from seeing any further in. She loved mysterious places – paths that led in unknown directions, glades in the woods that felt untouched and untainted – and she wished she could force her way into this hedge to see what lay beyond. Maybe there was a clearing somewhere in there, an old hidden garden overgrown decades ago and forgotten as the village grew up around it. Perhaps she would find a penny-farthing bicycle leaning against a crumbled stone wall, rusted solid now, more a fossil than anything else …

But this is where the vicar’s house should have been.

Rachel tried to jump backwards down to the path but she’d forgotten just how high she’d climbed. Her feet met the bank and she slipped, twisting her right ankle, reaching out to grab hold of something and missing. She landed heavily on her side in the middle of the path. Stones and thorns drove into her palms, elbows and bare legs, and she would have cried out if she hadn’t been badly winded.

She twisted on the path, staring down at its heat-cracked surface. There were yellow ants there, marching to and fro carrying tiny, wrinkled white grubs, taking them somewhere or disposing of them. Maybe her breath would never come back. She seemed to be watching the ants forever. She’d been winded before and she knew it was only a matter of seconds, but maybe she’d cracked her ribs and driven them into her lungs, and fresh air would elude her until her vision blanked and her hearing faded, until a cold dark night came to claim her.

If only, someone said, and Rachel drew in a huge shuddering breath. She sat up and scurried away from the ants, gasping in several huge breaths and feeling the dizziness pass. In her pain and shock, she forgot the voice.

She examined her hands and legs, crying a little when she saw the dribbles of blood and the muddied scrapes on her palms and knees. She should get home and let her mum bathe them, apply plasters where necessary and use tweezers to remove the tiny bits of grit ground into her skin. She’s done it before. She called Rachel a Tom-Boy, but in reality she was just a country girl who enjoyed the place she lived in, and sometimes found pain because of that. Usually she didn’t even care, but now …

She knew that she should never have fallen from that overgrown bank, because it should not be there.

Rachel stood and ran, heading for the next corner that would take her into the square.

“Mum,” she gasped. And then she came to the end of the path. She wanted to call for her mum again, plead with her for help, a natural exhortation from a scared young girl. But her voice betrayed her, and all that came from her mouth was a disbelieving hiss.

The square had gone. The path opened out into a small courtyard surrounded by several buildings. There was a tall, grey house on her left, windows spotting its wall seemingly at random, a thatched roof looking ragged and untended. To her right lay an open shed where rolls of hay rotted and steamed slowly in the summer sun. Movement caught her eye and she saw a big rat scurrying around in there. Straight ahead, a building that could only have been the old slaughterhouse. She knew it was not used any more – Andy and his mates sometimes went in there to do things, they never told her what, but she guessed they were looking at dirty magazines and stuff – but now the stone drain running in front of its sliding entrance door was clogged with filthy blood. Leaves and scraps of hide were floating on its surface, and the doors stood wide open.

Above the slaughterhouse, much further away than it should have been, she saw the church spire. She smiled in relief ... but the feeling was short-lived. Apart from her not actually recognising it, the whole place looked strange, off-kilter, and it took Rachel a while to figure out why: the buildings were old, but they all looked new.

She turned back confused, looked again, wondered where the Tarmac road had gone. This one was merely compacted mud, and there were mounds here and there that could only have been horse shit.

“Mum!” she said, and her voice invaded the place.

She walked forward. It must be a farm, she’d taken a wrong turning somewhere and come out into a farm at the edge of the village—

--but there was no farm this close to the village—

--and if she headed through the farmyard she’d emerge onto the main road that lead into the square, the one she’d have travelled if she’d accepted that bloody lift from Mandy’s mum.

The frightened girl ran across the courtyard, fully expecting to emerge into the square when she rounded the corner of the tall building. The humming seemed louder here, she was nearing its source, and she never thought she’d be so keen to see her fellow villagers. She passed the slaughterhouse and tried to ignore the stench that came from within, held her breath, but breathing in again a few seconds later she found the rank odours clinging to her clothes and hair.

She looked up and the church spire had vanished.

Rachel rounded the corner but the square was not there. There was something else instead, another place she’d never seen before even though she’d lived here all her life, and she felt everything closing in.

The looming walls, the bright blue sky, the humming torturing her with its insistent beat, the fear that she’d stepped off the path into part of the village that she’d never visited, and the greater fear that this could not possibly be the case. Reality was crushing her with impossibilities. She wanted to stop and scream but, if she did, she thought it would have her.

So she screamed as she ran, crying her fear into open doorways she did not recognise and gardens she had never seen, shouting up at birds which she was sure must live somewhere other than her village, and the only response to her cries was the constant humming. It shook inside her skull as she tried to make sense of it.

She ran faster, willing the distracting stitch in her side and the burning in her knees, because she felt sure that making sense would not be a good idea.

Five

Andy burst through the back door into the kitchen. His mum was sitting at the table reading the newspaper and she jumped, dropping her cigarette and splashing ash across the pine surface. She went to scold him … but then her expression changed when she saw his face.

“Andy, what’s wrong?”

He thought he was all right. He thought Stig would be crying in his mother’s arms by now, snotty and shuddering like a little kid, and Andy would be able to take the piss out of him later. He thought he was all grown up and that what he had seen would have a grown up explanation, so he should not let it get to him.

But as his mother stood at the table, hands shaking by her sides as she approached, reaching out for him, reaching for her little boy … Andy felt his lips start to quiver. His eyes stung, his face felt numb, and when the tears came he could do nothing to hold them back. He hadn’t cried for a while, now – the last time he remembered was hunkered down under his bedcovers as his parents rowed in the next room, and that had been months ago – and certainly not where someone could see him.

“Andy.” Her voice was soothing but questioning, a lot of meaning conveyed in one word: calm down, cry it out, tell me what’s wrong.

He grabbed his mum, holding her around the middle and tucking his face under her chin. She smelled of perfume and boiling ham and cigarettes; she smelled of safety. He only wished his dad were not in work … he needed them both. As he cried and bawled, he realised just how much he needed them both.

“Saw a man,” he gasped, amazed at how much his voice shook. Kids cried like this, babies, not thirteen year old lads. She stroked his hair and said nothing, waiting for him to continue. No one else could see this, this was his mum, so he let the comfort wash through him without fighting it. “A man,” he said again, “in .. in the air … and…”

His mother started rocking slowly from side to side, an unconscious gesture from a decade ago, perhaps, but still so comforting now. Andy felt tears cooling his sunburned face and he closed his eyes, but that brought back the memories. Instead he stared at the bubbling saucepan on the cooker as he told his mum what he had seen.

“He was up in the air behind the station buildings—“

“What were you doing back there? That’s somebody’s garden, Andrew.”

“Mum, we heard screaming!” Andy pulled away so that he could look into her face. He needed that eye contact now, had to show her how honest he was being, how genuine. He was not a liar, he knew that she knew that, but he had to communicate this as it was. “We heard someone screaming, really screaming, and we went to the square to get a policeman, he ignored us so we went back to see. The screaming had stopped but it all felt ... too quiet. Like a scene in a movie, a murder scene, where nothing’s moving and the camera goes around a corner to see the body … and he was there, in the air, moving but not going anywhere. And Mum … he was a million miles away!”

“I don’t understand, Andy. Son, you haven’t been taking anything? Please Andy, tell me…” And, unbelievably, his mother started to cry. Her face screwed up and tears squeezed out, and Andy could not believe what he was doing.

“Mum! Of course I’m not taking anything. I promise!”

She sat back at the kitchen table and wiped the tears away. “It just worries me so much,” she said.

“There’s something else weird,” Andy said, ignoring his mother’s fears because he knew them to be wrong. “We tried to cycle out of the village. We were scared and it seemed the way to go, but we couldn’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“Something wouldn’t let us.”

His mother frowned. “You wanted to come home? Andy, you’re safe here, you always will be, however old you are.”

“No, something stopped us. Something turned us around.” He knew how crazy it sounded. Here and now it sounded unbelievable to him, so that even though the memory was hazed by disbelief he could picture as clearly as day himself and Stig deciding to turn back and come home. The image was there, even the false memory of doing it, and if he was someone else he may have been happy with that. But he knew that was not the way it had been. And he wasn’t someone else, he was his parents’ son, and they always took delight in telling him how he was as stubborn as them.

He could only believe the truth, however unbelievable that may be.

His mother lit another cigarette and frowned through the smoke. Andy exhaled through his mouth to blow it away from him, trying not to let her see. He hated her smoking, but he never wanted her to know that.

He began to shake and had to sit down opposite his mum, putting his hands flat on the table so that they did not twitch in his lap. “It’s a lovely day, Mum, but something really bloody weird—”

“Why was the policeman in the square?” she said.

“Oh fuck! The church, the body—“

“Language Andy!” She started as if whipped by his words, and Andy could barely believe her concern at his swearing when he was telling her all of this. But she hadn’t seen any of it, hadn’t felt just how far away that guy was, even though he was there behind his house in their village he was as distant as anyone had ever been from anywhere …

“Sorry, he said. “But Mum, there was a body in the church. Someone drowned while they were working in the crypt.”

“Drowned? Andy …” She breathed out slowly, took another drag on her cigarette and closed her eyes for a couple of seconds. Andy could see the veins at her temples, a sure sign that she was losing her temper. “A man in the air, a village that won’t let you escape and a man drowned in a church. You, my son, have had a very interesting morning. Now … swear to me that you and Stig haven’t been eating any of those damn mushrooms that grow up near the woods.”

Andy almost shouted, but he knew that would go against him. This all felt so unreal, more so because even he was doubting most of what he was saying. The church thing was true, yes, they’d seen all those people there, but maybe the heat and excitement had affected them. Perhaps he and Stig had wound each other up to such an extent that—

The telephone rang and his mother went out into the hallway to answer it. Andy looked at her packet of cigarettes. He’d only smoked a few times, coughed his guts up, but for some strange reason he wanted to light one up now. Then he looked down at the paper and read the headline to what his mum had been reading upside down. Dreaming Awake: a new study in Narcolepsy.

“Yes, he’s here,” he heard his mother say. “Yes … yes, very agitated. I know, I can hear him in the background.” Her voice lowered and Andy knew straight away who was on the phone. “No,” he heard, “no, I’m certain he hasn’t taken anything. I’m positive, he’s not a liar. Something in the square, he said. Oh … who told you?” A pause. Andy tapped his fingers against the cigarette packet, picked up the cheap lighter and flicked the wheel. Sparks danced before him. “Really? Two?” Another pause, longer this time. “Well that’s the same thing Andy told me. Okay … yes, you’re welcome, I’ll put the kettle on. Bye.”

“That was Stig’s mum,” Andy said as his mother came back into the kitchen.

She nodded as she filled the kettle. “She’s worried to death about him. I heard him crying in the background, he was frantic.” She glanced at Andy as she plugged in the kettle, then looked away again. “She’s heard that two workmen were killed in an accident in the church.” His mum trailed off then, leaned against the sink and looked out into their garden.

“Someone should check on that guy behind the old station, too,” Andy said.

His mother did not answer. She continued staring, seemingly lost somewhere, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She did this when she was deep in thought. It drove Andy’s dad mad when she was working on a crossword puzzle. Like a bloody metronome, he’d told Andy one day in the garden. Puts me to sleep.

“Mum?”

“Huh?” She turned back and smiled. “Oh. Stig and his mum are coming over. We can chat about this, then maybe go down to the square.”

“Why?”

“To see what’s going on. You want this explained, don’t you?”

Andy nodded, but suddenly the prospect of going back to the square filled him with dread. One guy drowned … wonder how the other one died.

“I’ll just nip in and change,” his mum said, and Andy knew straight away that she was lying. He hated that. The idea that she had to hide things from him was detestable, more so now. “Only be a minute.”

He sat at the kitchen table and heard her walk across the timber-floored hallway. She pushed the bedroom door almost shut and he was left alone, with only the growing rumble and hiss of the kettle to keep him company. Outside he could almost hear the blazing sun baking the ground, the trees gasping in the heat, grasses withering their last . He loved the summer and he loved the summer holidays even more, but now there was a blight on his enjoyment. The idea that today’s events could spoil the rest of the summer was unbearable. What if Stig was too upset or scared to come out again? What if they found that guy dead behind the old station, and his own parents decided he shouldn’t be wandering the village on his own? He didn’t want an adult’s holiday, he wanted a kid’s holiday, he was thirteen and he knew just what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go and with whom. The village was his for the summer. Being cosseted by his parents would be as good as being imprisoned.

They did not know the village like he did. They viewed it with grown-up eyes and jaded adult perceptions, and deep inside he knew that he would too, and all too soon. He wanted to be grown up, allowed to drink and drive and screw, but already he was mourning the passing of childhood preoccupations. He wondered if he’d ever dam a stream at eighteen, or scrape his knees falling from a bike, or collect frog spawn and overrun his mum and dad’s garden with baby frogs.

There were new and greater adventures facing him, he knew that. But for now he loved the old ones best.

He heard his mother rummaging around in her wardrobe and wondered just what she was looking for. She was never too concerned about what she looked like  she was careful about her appearance, but never vain  and Andy wondered why she needed to change out of her shorts and blouse just to walk down to the square.

He heard her curse, the actual words hidden behind a whisper.

Stig and his mum passed the kitchen window, and that gave Andy the chance he’d subconsciously been seeking. He waved to them but did not call out, ducking instead into the hallway and tiptoeing across the floor. They’d be at the back door soon, knocking and entering, and his mum would hear them and stop whatever it was she was doing.

Andy wondered where all this suspicion was suddenly coming from. You pick up on things, his mum had told him.

He had to be fast.

The knock came just as he pressed his face to the crack between bedroom door and frame. He saw his mother hurriedly jam a handful of clothes and old magazines back into the top part of the wardrobe, dust herself down and drop from the chair she’d been standing on. She glanced guiltily over her shoulder  Andy didn’t like the look on her face, he hated the idea of her doing something she had to feel guilty about, it meant she was fallible  and then turned and came for the door.

“Hello?” Stig’s mum called from the kitchen.

Andy slipped quietly into the bathroom and pushed the door to behind him, flushing the toilet and opening the door again straight away. “Thought you were getting changed?” he asked his mum as he met her in the hallway. It felt bad covering up his spying on her with an allusion to her own lie.

She shrugged. “Nice day, may as well leave my shorts on. Get a tan on these old lady’s legs, eh?”

“Mum,” Andy droned, and then Stig and his mother appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“There’s something in the ditch,” Stig’s mum said. She was a short, squat woman, her cheeks always ready to wobble, her hair as messy as a bird’s nest no matter how much she brushed. She had a big nose and big ears, and Andy always thought of The Lord of the Rings when he saw her.

“Hi Ruth. What did you say?”

“Something back along the road, in the ditch.” Andy heard the quaver in her voice and watched her cheeks and chin take it on board. He looked at Stig. His friend was staring at him, red eyes wide, and he gave Andy a slight nod.

What was that? Andy thought. But then he thought he knew. He knew that Stig meant, Now they’ll believe us.

Only minutes later, Andy would wish that their adult disbelief was catching.

Nightmare

Kurt Howards had seen frightened kids before  God knows most of his own childhood seemed to have been spent looking at himself in the mirror, wondering just what the hell it was all about  and he knew that these two were as scared as could be. They were riding their bikes like bats out of hell, the tubby one lagging behind looked like he’d been crying, and as he watched them freewheeling down the slope toward their homes he knew what he should do.

They were teenagers. Teenagers didn’t react like that or flee so quickly unless they’d done something wrong, or something had scared them badly. Kurt knew Andy, knew his mother and father too, and he would willingly have sworn in court that he was a good kid.

That just left scared.

He had to go and see that they were all right. Business was slow today, anyway, and it being lunchtime he could justifiably lock the shop for half an hour while he strolled down the to the kid’s houses, had a chat with their mothers … Andy’s mother at least. Because Andy’s mother did things for Kurt. True, only in his dreams and imagination, but wondrous things nonetheless. It had taken him a while to come to terms with having such a crush when he was pushing seventy, but now he simply smiled at her, dreamed his dreams, revelled in the adolescent innocence of it all.

He had lived alone since his wife died. It would harm no one.

It was certainly a hot one today, yet though the village sat quiet and simmering in the heat, there was expectant air about the place. As Kurt walked down the road he could not quite place exactly what was happening: he expected a flock of birds to take flight at any minute; a dog to come charging from someone’s front gate; a tree to topple in the orchard to his left. The promise of movement, of occasion, imbued everything. Yet all was still.

He walked a little faster.

When he came to the tubby one’s house he paused for a few seconds, leaning against the orchard fence opposite whilst deciding what to do. He thought he heard a cry from the house, but the heat seemed to melt it into a memory. He looked around, wiped the sweat from his brow and then continued onward. Andy’s house was only a couple of minutes’ walk from here, around the next corner. Kurt would see his mother, she would perhaps fetch him a cool drink while they discussed what was wrong with her boy, and Kurt’s dreams would be given fuel for a few more days and nights.

Then he saw something in the ditch.

Something moving.

He stopped and leaned forward. The ditch was dry at this time of year, overgrown with bushes and weeds that found sustenance in its rich bed, any water left now hiding just beneath the surface of the ground and awaiting the rains to fill the ditch once more.

There was a pale shape down there beneath the rampant knotweed. It flipped back and forth, reminding Kurt of a fish landed on a riverbank.

“Now what the hell is that?” There could be no fish down there, he knew, even when flooded the ditch was home only to frogs and the tiniest minnows. He leaned closer, then knelt so that he could bend down and get closer still. Road-grit stung his knees and bit into his palms as he rested his whole weight on them.

He could reach out to pull some of the undergrowth aside. It would maybe make his perch right on the edge of the ditch even more precarious, but at least then he’d be able to see. That paleness, flipping around down there in the dank dark, hidden from the world yet just barely visible to him.

Kurt yawned, his eyes screwing shut as if night had come. And suddenly everything came into focus and he knew what he was looking at. It was a baby, hidden at the bottom of the ditch. At that same moment he brought one hand to his mouth to stifle the yawn and lost his balance.

He tumbled headlong into the ditch.

It was only three feet deep but he seemed to fall forever, spinning in the air, rolling over and over, but whichever way he turned his eyes were locked with those of the baby. Its black eyes.

Kurt tried to cry out but he was still yawning. And falling. The baby looked at him and as he neared it – his short fall impossibly endless – he nudged aside bushes and fronds and gained a clearer view. The child’s skin was split around the joints: knees; elbows; shoulders; neck. It looked as if a larger person had been shoved and forced into this infant’s body.

And its eyes … black as sleep, dark as a the starless night at the end of time.

Just as Kurt struck the baby and kept falling, he saw its mouth open wide in a terrible scream. He recognised that voice and added to it.

He screamed.

It was weak and pitiful, because his pain was so great and paralysing. He lay along the bottom of the ditch, kicking his arms and legs in an effort to haul himself out, but something held him down. There was a weight on him and he realised as he spied his legs and arms that the weight was him. He was too heavy for his muscles to move, too large for anything other than sprawling and crawling, because his hands had gone small and chubby, his legs shrunk back into his trousers, and he could feel his skull beginning to creak as his scalp tightened. His body was being hauled down and in, compressed and regressed, and yet none of it could keep pace. His thighs and shins cracked and arced through his skin under the pressure, raw ends grinding together and crumbling wet bone-dust across the stream bed.

Still the scream was trapped. His throat was closing.

He felt his ribs drawing inwards, plucking at his organs as they shrank too slowly, and then he could scream, his voice was back and he let out a weak, plaintive baby’s cry into the hot blue sky.

Beneath him, the baby had gone. And yet, Kurt knew, it was still there.

That was when he felt his skin splitting at elbow, knee and neck.

Six

The boys’ mothers went first. The two boys trailed behind, walking close together but remaining silent. Andy was desperate to ask Stig just what he’d seen, why it had scared his mother so, but somehow it seemed only right not to ask. Like in a church, Andy thought. It feels respectful.

“There,” said Stig’s mum. The boys stopped, while the two mothers went to look in the ditch.

Andy was terrified. He could see Stig shaking next to him, could almost feel the heat of fear radiating from him in waves. His friend was still topless, his skin thoroughly reddened by the sun, but Andy could still see goosebumps on his arms and across his stomach and sides.

He had to see what had terrified his friend so much.

“What is it?” Andy heard his mum mutter as he paused just behind her. He stared between the women and down into the ditch, breathing quietly so that they could not hear him and tell him to move away. He shouldn’t see this, they’d say, this wasn’t for him, not for kids. But he was thirteen for God’s sake, he was almost a man, was a man if jerking off was one of the provisos. Anything they could see he should be able to see …

It was bloodied and shapeless and twitching, a mass of something once alive but now almost dead, giving off a terrible stench that Andy did not recognise. Cloying but clean, meaty but disgusting. The smell of insides, Andy thought, that’s what it is. Insides out.

“Oh fuck,” he whispered, and both women turned as one to look at him.

“Maybe it’s a dog been hit by a car,” his mum said, too shocked to tell him to stop swearing or move away. They looked back down at the dead thing in the ditch … and it moved.

It mewled.

They backed away to where Stig stood on the other side of the road.

“It said help me,” Andy said.

“No,” his mum said.

“It did.” Andy jumped as Stig grasped his arm, looked at his friend and saw fresh tears streaking his cheeks. He wondered if tears ever ran out.

“What the hell is it?” Stig whimpered. “I heard it too.”

“It’s someone,” Andy said. “Mum, it’s someone and they’re hurt. We have to help them.” He ran forward, knowing right away that he was wrong, certain in the knowledge that helping whatever it was down there was the very last thing he should be doing. Not because it didn’t need help – whoever or whatever it was, they were opened up and dying – but because to try could be fatal. To all of them.

Mercy killing, his dad had once told him as he crushed a rabbit’s head beneath his heel. They’d run it over on the way back from town one day. The thing’s feet had been kicking and scraping at the Tarmac as its insides leaked out. Mercy killing.

“Andy!” someone said, but the voice was so stunted by shock that he couldn’t know who called him.

For a second he merely stood beside the ditch, staring down at the thing, watching it shifting slightly in the heat, steaming, making wet popping sounds as what must have been a mouth opened and closed. Smaller, he thought, it’s smaller than it was just now.

A hand fell on his shoulder and tried to pull him back, but sometimes his mum forgot just how old he was. She forgot that he was a teenager now. He stood his ground, strength of body band mind demanding that he see.

“It’s getting smaller,” he said.

It shrunk before his eyes. The sounds ceased. The vocal sounds at least, because something was crackling and popping as the thing seemed to fold in upon itself. Blood soaked into the ditch bed and the plants seemed to quiver in anticipation of a fresh, unique meal.

“Smaller still,” his mum said.

“What’s happening?” Stig and his mum were standing together behind them, holding onto each other for comfort.

“Smaller,” Andy said. “It’s shrinking. Maybe it’s a weird plant bloom, or something …” He trailed off because he knew how wrong he was. Plant bloom, yeah, right, well if that’s the case then it’s straight out of a fucking John Carpenter movie.

The thing vanished beneath the undergrowth. It may still have been there, Andy knew, getting smaller and smaller still, and maybe at some point it would vanish altogether. Or perhaps it would just go on shrinking forever; halving its size again and again but never arriving at nothing.

“Can we go to the square now, Mum?” he asked, still looking down into the ditch. “Can we go and talk to the police?”

“I think so,” his mother said. And under her voice she muttered: “This is a nightmare.”

A nightmare.

“What was that thing?” Stig whispered as they trailed behind their mothers. “Andy, what was it?”

“Whatever, it’s gone now.”

Stig was silent for a few seconds before he replied. “That just makes it more frightening.” And he said no more.

They passed by the corner shop and Andy noticed that it was closed. Back in ten minutes, the sign on the door said. He could do with a drink now. The early afternoon sun was merciless, making his already burnt neck and arms tingle even more. He should have smeared on more sun cream when he was at home. Maybe when his mother had been was searching her bedroom for some guilty secret, something that hadn’t been looked at or thought about for quite some time because it was hidden in the top of her wardrobe, still there now, still undiscovered.

Their walk to the square was punctuated by several unusual occurrences. None of them were too disturbing or serious on their own, but combined they went to prove that something was very wrong in their little village that afternoon. The place was always quiet on a weekday; many folks were in work, either on the farms surrounding the village or further away in town. Kids made some noise, especially now during the summer holidays, but it was early afternoon and they were normally having lunch around now. Either that or they were off hiding somewhere, exploring, playing, making memories.

Today, the place was silent. Things were … off kilter.

Andy thought it may have been the things he and Stig had seen this morning conspiring to drive the day mad.

Whatever … his mother could no longer deny what was going on.

The school was closed for the summer, but they saw a cleaner in one of the demountable classrooms. It appeared that she could not see them. She was standing on a chair by the windows, naked, reaching up to the top panes and scrubbing, wiping, scrubbing, wiping again, swapping an old cloth in her right hand for a fresh one in her left. Always the same window. The glass was sparkling clean, yet still she worked. Her huge veined breasts pressed against the lower panes, threatening to cracks them and send spears of highly-polished glass into her flesh. They could not see her face, but the sweat running down her sides was obvious.

Nobody said anything, the mothers or the boys. Andy felt Stig glance at him, but he did not return his friend’s look. He was sure that none of them felt like laughing.

They passed by the stream. At first glance it appeared to be flowing uphill, but Andy shook his head. He’d forgotten the way it ran, that was all. There was barely a trickle down there beneath the bushes and rushes, a gurgling flow that caught the sun and lit up the grey things bobbing on its surface. Barely a trickle, and yet the fish were at least six inches long, all of them. And all of them were dead.

Andy had never seen fish that big in the stream, even in the autumn when it ran full and fast and local kids fished with crab-hooks and earthworms and even adults chanced their luck, further down near the main road where the stream widened out.

“Dead fish,” Stig’s mum said blandly, and Andy heard his mother grunt in acknowledgement. Neither of the women turned to look at their sons. They walked with a purpose in their step, and yet they were cautious as well. Andy realised with mixed feelings of shame, pride and fear, that his mother was guarding him.

A minute later they came to the railway bridge that passed over the road. The brick arch was high and old, many of the bricks had crumbled and weeds sprouted from the ever-widening cracks. And there was something else up under the arch, hiding from the sun in dankness and hanging there, waiting for something, patiently waiting like a troll under a bridge with a taste for trains.

None of them could see it, but Andy was sure they all felt it. He scanned the old brickwork, not sure exactly what he was looking for but certain that there was something there … and that he was being watched. Some of the weeds hung by nothing more than a root where they had been pulled out, and on the road a sprinkling of damp earthy dust lay drying in the sun.

Birds?

Something else?

A shower of crumbled brick pattered onto his face as he stared up. He cried out and darted forward, running from beneath the bridge and blinking the grit from his eyes, spitting it from his mouth, rubbing it from his hair. It felt warm, as if it was actually the shed skin of some hot-blooded creature. He ran farther than he needed to in order to clear the bridge. No one asked him what was wrong, because they had all run with him.

“Not going back through there,” Andy said. “No way.”

“I can hear them in the square!” Stig said, his own eagerness to leave the bridge behind him apparent in his voice.

Andy looked back. There was nothing there. Nothing. Blank dank air beneath the old arch, that was all. He heard a rumble in the distance and started walking quickly towards the square, the others following. He didn’t want to wait and see what the train shook loose from beneath the bridge.

He remembered a time when he was young, barely past toddler-age. There had been a huge spider lurking in their bungalow just outside the bathroom door. It had a fat black body with long, spindly legs, and every now and then it would scurry quickly into a slightly different position on the wall. Andy was sure it was on guard, changing positions to make sure it got a full field of view. He was also certain that it could see him. He’d been too afraid to go anywhere near the spider and had peed in the garden several times that day, always darting back in to see if the monster was still there, watching from a distance but always, always watching.

Then, after one of his visits behind the bushes at the bottom of the garden, he had returned to find the spider gone. That was when Andy learned one of his first lessons in fear: that sometimes, things unseen are far more frightening than out in the open. The spider was still in the house but he had no idea where.

He spent that night shouting and crying, huddled between his parents, sure that if he slept the spider would find him, take vengeance upon him for spying by crawling into his mouth and laying eggs in his brain.

He forgot about the spider by bedtime the next day. Other more pressing matters took priority in his little kid’s head, like how much ice cream he could eat in one sitting, or when his friend Stig would stop peeing himself with a big grin on his chubby face.

Even now, Andy was not entirely sure that it had happened. The memories had taken on the tint of an old dream: clear and rich and precise, yet slightly skewed, as if they contained some small details which just could not have happened, not in real life.

He glanced back once more as the train approached, but there was nothing to see beneath the old brick arch. And already the dust that had fallen on his face felt like a dream.

“There’s a police car,” his mum said as they drew level with the post office.

Stig’s mother was breathing heavily, and not only because they had taken a fast walk in the hot sun. She kept uncomfortably close to Andy’s mum, their bare arms brushing with each step, and her fingers seemed to be grasping for his mother’s hand like the legs of a frantic spider.

Andy wondered whether his mate’s mum even knew what she was doing. Then he looked at his own mum’s face and saw that she probably didn’t even notice. Her gaze was … distant. And she was staring at the church as if the thick stone walls could cool the fever of the past few minutes, its insides as cold as ever, age hanging around the rafters along with the mice and bats and spiders.

“That’s the copper we saw earlier,” Stig said, nudging Andy to get his attention. “Look, the one who wouldn’t believe us about … you know, that guy.”

Of course Andy knew, but he did not want to think about it. “Yeah, maybe he’ll listen now our mums are here.”

They stopped just past the post office. There were still two police cars in the square and one of the white vans, although both ambulances had gone, and a few villagers milled around dead-heading their hanging baskets or just blatantly staring. The men in white boiler-suits must be inside the church now, Andy thought, doing their tests and taking photographs of the bodies. Father Norman was standing at the top of the steps leading into the church yard, chatting with one policeman while another wandered between the graves, his shirt showing pink where sweat hugged it to his skin. The policeman seemed to be overly interested in the headstones. Or perhaps he was just searching for clues.

“Mum, we should talk to that one there,” Andy said, pointing out the policeman who’d dismissed their story in front of Mrs Bright. He was sitting on the bonnet of his car sucking at a carton of orange juice. “He didn’t believe us before, but now you’re here…”

“Believe you about what?”

“The guy behind station, of course!”

Andy’s mum smiled at him, and for a terrible moment Andy saw so much more behind that smile. He’d watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers recently, the one with Mr Spock in it, and it had terrified the solid shit out of him. It was the faces of those who’d been reborn that did it, their blank expressions and the meagre flicker of life in their eyes … and their total, unutterable peace with what they had become.

For a second, his mum was one of them.

But the smile fell from her face when she looked back at the church – not at Father Norman, or the policemen, or the ambulance that came screeching back into the square at that exact moment – but up at the church itself.

And yet again Andy wondered just what she’d been searching for in her wardrobe.

“We can’t get out,” the ambulance driver said as he jumped from the cab. The second ambulance pulled up beside the first, engine idling, heat haze turning the windscreen liquid.

The policeman talking to Father Norman glanced around. “You were supposed to get those bodies out of here,” he said quietly, glancing at the villagers milling around the edge of the square.

“But we can’t get out!” the driver said, and he was not whispering. His overalls were askew, buttons opened, and he was sweating and shaking as he leaned against a car. “We almost reached the main road, then we were coming back into the village.”

“So what did you forget?”

“Huh?”

“Why come back? What did you forget to pick up, you want an ice cream or something?”

The driver looked at the policeman as if he’d suddenly turned green and sprouted horns. “What are you …? You don’t understand, we were turned around. We tried five times, both of us, and we can’t get out. There’s something … a mirror, or something...” The driver looked down at the road, frowning, trying to find a truth hidden in the heat-bubbled pitch. Either that, or solace.

Andy noticed Rachel’s mother at the far side of the square, moving from one person to the next, her face a mask of concern, tears pointing eyeliner-fingers at the ground.

Rachel …?

“What’s he on about?” the policeman called to the ambulance, but the second paramedic remained in the cab and seemed not to hear.

That was when the policeman in the church yard began to scream.

Andy had heard his mother scream like that, but only once and only for a second. They’d been having a bar-b-que and she’d picked up a burning coal. No reason, no explanation, she’d thought it was a sausage, she said … and for a second it had melted into her skin. Her scream had been total, pure agony, unsullied by conscious thought.

Rachel’s mum moved closer, looked over, saw Andy. She tried to smile but it seemed to hurt her face. It certainly hurt him to see it.

The policeman’s scream went on, and on, and on.

“What’s happening?” Andy heard someone shout, and he realised it was himself. Stig was clasping onto his mother in terror, the embrace apparently going both ways. Andy’s mum put her hand on his shoulder and stepped back, trying to take him with her. But Rachel’s mother, Mrs Francis, was coming for him now.

Rachel, she mouthed, but Andy could not hear her above the screaming man.

The man was standing in the churchyard, his arms pointing Heavenward, sucking in breath after breath to feed the scream. The graveyard was raised from the square, so Andy couldn’t be certain of what was happening … but it appeared that the man was sinking.

Sinking into the graveyard.

Screaming.

And surely those grey things Andy saw waving and clawing at the man’s legs were nothing more than shadows thrown there by the tree beside the church?

He looked closer, trying to see past the scream – it was so loud and pain-filled that it seemed to dull every sense but hearing – but the shapes he’d seen had vanished. Still the man went down, and now someone was trying to help him, rescue him from whatever it was that had him in its grasp.

“Have you seen Rachel?” Mrs Francis called out.

Andy shook his head.

The woman seemed to crumple before him, but the sight of the sinking man was more gripping. Father Norman had a hold of him under the armpits, but still the man sank, the vicar slowly bending down behind him.

“Rachel!” the woman said, clawing tears from her eyes. “She’s gone, I know she’s gone.”

Andy moved to the woman’s side without taking his eyes from the scene in the churchyard. The man was still screaming and the square was still stunned into stillness, but somehow Rachel’s mother’s tears began to sound worse. They sounded more real.

“It’s my nightmare come true,” the woman groaned, letting Andy put his arm around her shoulder and leaning into him. “She’s gone.”

“Mrs Francis, where is she?”

The woman looked at him, all tears and snot and with a face so broken by dread that began to sting Andy’s eyes. “You like my daughter, don’t you?”

He should deny it, he knew, because liking girls was embarrassing. But right then he felt so adult holding onto crying woman

(while something terrible happened in the churchyard, while someone was dying in there, being hauled into the ground by shadow-shapes that he’d seen but could see no more)

that he simply smiled and nodded.

“She likes you too, son,” Mrs Francis said, and then her tears came afresh.

The screaming had ceased. While Andy had been talking with the crying woman, whatever was happening up amongst the graves had ended. Father Norman stood with his arms dangling loosely by his sides, looking down at the ground at his feet, sweat dripping from his face and muddying the turned earth.

The square was silent now, silent but charged, throbbing with a restrained energy, a potential for more screaming and chaos. Andy felt the hairs on his neck and arms sticking up, his scalp tightening and tingling. He gently released Rachel’s mother and took a step forward, but movement felt all wrong. He glanced around at the other villagers and saw that they were all watching him. It was as if everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Anything will just push it over the edge, now, Andy thought, any one little thing, like another man in the air or another shrinking thing in the ditch. Someone in the graveyard, being dragged under …

Anything will push it over the edge.

He looked back at his mum, his friend Stig and his mother, and he was shamefully pleased that they looked as terrified as he felt.

A sound finally brought the square back to life. A distant rumbling at first, approaching quickly and expanding out to echo from the church spire, the row of houses by the stream, the old slaughterhouse. Heads turned, knots of people grew in several places as folks gathered together for comfort.

“It’s the army,” Stig said. For some reason his idea did not seem as ridiculous as it first sounded.

Martial law, Andy thought ….

But it was not the army that ran into the square from the road by the slaughterhouse. It was a man, running wildly, eyes wide and foam speckling his lips in sympathy with the dozen horses chasing him. No, not horses … unicorns. And their horns were blood-red.

They pelted after the man, every one of them pure white, nostrils and eyes wide, pelts steaming, muscles rippling, manes flying …. And yet they gained very slowly, as if they could be seen here but were actually running somewhere else, their pounding hooves striking some other earth.

The chase had been a long one. The man was exhausted. He ignored everyone and everything as he staggered through the square, leading the sprinting unicorns around the edge of the corner of the church and out of sight. The rumble of hooves vanished very quickly, but they could still hear the tired slap, slap, slap of the man’s shoes hitting the road as he ran towards the railway bridge.

When they caught him, Andy thought, the trampling would be very slow.

“Mum,” he said, because he could think of nothing else.

“Rachel!” Mrs Francis cried.

Andy’s mum grabbed his arm. “Home!” she said.

“But Mum—“

“We’re going home!”

That was it. And although Mrs Francis stood alone now, crying and shrinking as grief took her, Andy knew that it was the right place to be. Home was always safe, a haven from the unknown and the threatening, a place where his parents would protect him.

“Dad’s in work,” Andy said, and he saw the look in his mother’s eyes. I hope he can make it home, that look said, and Andy realised instantly and very clearly that his mother believed him.

And more shockingly, she had believed him all along.

They took the long walk home.

Nightmare

Rachel was lost. She had stumbled into a place she had never been to or seen and now she could not find her way out. Several times she turned back and retraced her steps, but when she rounded corners she had just come around, everything was different again.

The whole village was changing. The only thing that remained the same was her.

Tears burned her eyes and dried rapidly in the baking sun. She didn’t stop moving because that would give her time to think. The smells and sounds were different too, she realised, and even the air felt somehow rougher, thicker, oozing disquiet and planting it inside her with every breath she took.

And she was breathing hard. The running and the fear brought out pearls of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. She thought that if she kept breathing this heavily it would drown out the humming sound, the nearby whispering or the distant shouting, that had not let up for one second.

Not one second. It was a background to this place, a theme tune to her distress, thrumming inside her skull and shaking her eardrums so consistently that she wondered if she was imagining it. Maybe she had water in her ear from her swim.

She paused, put her head to one side and tapped her ear with the palm of her hand. Each tap changed the pitch of the hum, turning it into a voice trying so hard to communicate – a cry for help past a gag, or a threat past a laugh – so she stopped.

“I’m lost,” she said, and she thought: yes, lost in a place I know so well. No … not lost, missing. And Mum will be worried by now, she’ll ring Dad in work and he’s worry too, and I just have to find my way to the square! She looked around as she ran, searching for a landmark or building or tree that she recognised.

Nothing.

Nothing but strange alleys and unknown paths that led nowhere, overgrown gardens which had lost their fences, windows containing misty and distorted glass, as if it had been there for five hundred years, doors hanging closed—a lways closed—in frames with rusted hinges and old cast-iron handles, thatched roofs shedding a layer of sick straw across the ground, a pond standing silent and stagnant in the middle of a small courtyard, a dead duck floating tail-up on its surface, stomach bloated and distended by the heat….

And suddenly Rachel knew what she had to do. She would ask someone where she was.

She slowed from a run to a walk, looked around and decided which house to approach. She’d strayed onto another footpath, this one following the line of a shallow gully, and to her right a low, wide house backed onto the path. Its garden was overgrown and crawling with a wild weed, bright green shoots wrapping themselves around every other plant and strangling it brown. She wondered who in the village was lazy or ill or old enough to have let their garden get into such a state.

The humming continued, a constant background noise like birdsong or the purr of distant traffic … except that now, thinking about it, she realised that she could hear no traffic at all. Not even the rumble of lorries riding the main road into town.

She approached the back door, thinking to knock and wait for a reply and trying not to imagine who would answer.

Who or what, she thought, trying to banish the idea instantly because it was straight out of a trashy horror movie. But wouldn’t the trashiest movie be the scariest if it was real?

She’d be polite, even through her fear. They’d see that she was upset and had been crying—

(Who or what?)

—and maybe invite her in while they phoned her mum and asked her to drive over and collect her daughter.

She looked up. No telephone wires.

Underground, she thought.

(Who or what?)

She moved to a window instead. She had to push through a clutch of plants along the wall of the cottage, barely holding in a scream when something small and hairy brushed past her leg and scurried away beneath the foliage. The window was grimy, the glass distorted by time, and she had to lean close and shield her eyes with her hands before she could see.

A barely furnished room. Dark walls, the floor tiled with stone flags, a table in the corner supporting a candelabra and an empty glass bowl. And in the seat at the end of the table, a corpse.

A corpse that moved its head to see who was watching.

The humming grew louder as Rachel fell away from the window. Her feet tangled in the undergrowth and she fell over backwards, holding out her hands to ward off the ground and feeling thorns pierce her palms and wrists. Maybe the jarring knocked her head, or perhaps the humming really did change in pitch for an instant, a change that took it much closer to laughter than anything else. Either way, Rachel did not want to see that thing again.

That person with no mouth or eyes or nose, throat muscles tensing and bending as it tried to speak or scream, sitting at the table and waiting for nothing.

Buffy would kick its ass, she thought, but she was no Buffy, and in reality she knew that her favourite heroine would be just as scared as her.

She scrambled to her feet, pulling herself out of the brambles and receiving more cuts and thorns in the process, not caring, wanting only to be away from this window, this house and the thing that sat within. Unreality grabbed her as she lost a trainer to the bramble bush. She giggled, a high-pitched titter that felt good and bad at the same time; good because it cheered her, bad because she shouldn’t be cheered. She was more lost than she had ever thought possible, somehow she had wondered from there to here, and she had no idea how she was going to get back.

She ran again. Her trainerless foot soon began to hurt and bleed. The buildings pressed in around her, and when she was crossing an open space or following a path between trees the air pressed in as well, the sunlight, the bushes and trees and grasses, all of them unkempt and unkept, closing in and giving the sense that they would envelop her at any second.

Once she thought she heard someone calling her name, but when she stopped and held her breath all she could hear was the humming and her beating heart.

How many people, she wondered, how many things to make such a noise?

As she ran past the houses, tears and sweat mingled on her cheeks. Blood smeared her hot skin from the cuts and scrapes she’d received. And he bare foot soon began to hurt her very badly indeed. Misery soon joined the terror.

And she tried not to see in any windows.

Seven

They arrived home without seeing any more weird stuff, but with the sense that things were happening all over. The scenery looked different, the air was altered, even the sunlight had taken on a mysterious hue, as if the subtle tints of morning, noon and night had combined into a bland monotone. The village felt like the whole world now, and the world was changing.

Stig and his mum disappeared back to their own house. His father was in work and Stig started crying when his mother mentioned him. Andy knew that his friend had an intense fear of his father dying, he had dreams and nightmares and he talked about it a lot. So today, when death had visited the village and decided to stay for a while, Stig’s fears were coming to the fore once again.

As he and his mum entered their own bungalow, Andy started thinking about his own dad.

He worked in the city managing a second-hand bookshop. The money was good only because of the long hours and dedication he put in, and also because of the antiquarian book sideline he ran from the shop; his own business, his own risks. He called it new money for old dreams, and he seemed to have an uncanny knack of homing in on rare and valuable books, like a sparrow-hawk zeroing on a mouse from five hundred feet. He could steer his way through a roomful of books in minutes and pull out a treasure, something that would buy them a much-needed new refrigerator or pay for a weekend away. Those Friday’s when his father came home and dropped a roll of notes onto the kitchen table were always the best.

But today was Wednesday, and it was still only mid-afternoon, and his dad wouldn’t be home for another three or four hours. In the meantime there were dead people in their village, things were that should not be, and a feeling that everything was askew pervaded every thought. Andy’s hackles had been up since leaving the square. It felt as if a huge electrical storm was coming. The skies were clear, the sun merciless.

“We should call Dad,” Andy said. His mother had moved to the sink to fill two glasses with cold water. “Mum?”

“Huh?” She really hadn’t heard, Andy saw. She’d been so far away, so absorbed …

“I said we should call Dad. Tell him what’s going on and to be careful ...”

“When he comes home,” his mum finished for him.

Andy nodded. “Honest Mum, Stig and I were just turned around. And those ambulances. Dad may be too, except coming from the other way.”

“Hmm.” His mother took a gulp of water, spilling some of it down her neck. It spotted her T-shirt, turning grey to black like blood at twilight. She didn’t seem to notice. She looked at the bare wall over Andy’s shoulder, seemed to find that uncomfortable, turned and stared out at the back garden instead.

“What’s happening?” he said almost to himself, hardly expecting an answer. He was not disappointed. His mother leaned against the sink and looked out at the rose bushes in the corner of the garden, the greenhouse hunkered against the wall, the water-butts holding precious rainwater, the vegetable patch that was slowly but surely wilting in the sun, the patchy lawn that begged for a drink, not realising that it held the lowest priority in the triage of drought … and yet she seemed to see none of it. Andy watched her from the side. Her eyes did not move. They were staring but taking nothing in, seeing something far different from what lay beyond the window.

For a terrible moment he thought that there was something wrong with her, something to do with all this. Then she moved, smiled tightly at him – the expression hurt him almost as much as it appeared to pain her – and went across the hall and into her bedroom.

This time the door clicked shut behind her.

“Mum …” Andy felt instantly alone, deserted and terrified. The kitchen was much emptier without his mother there, even though she’d been virtually ignoring him for the last couple of minutes anyway. The knowledge that she was in her bedroom did not help – Andy felt as spooked and isolated as when his parents left him alone. It never happened for too long – a few minutes while they inspected their neighbour’s new patio, an hour or two when they drove into town to shop – but he always felt an instant sense of panic, something he hated to admit to but which he knew came from the crazy idea that once gone, they may never return.

He knew that his mum would come out of her bedroom, because there was nowhere else to go. But when he heard her rustling about in her wardrobe the feeling of dread intensified. He was not only pushed to the back of her mind … he was out of it.

He only hoped that she wasn’t as well.

Andy wandered into the hallway and stood outside his parents’ bedroom. His mum had closed the door without saying anything, a sure sign that she didn’t want him to follow her in, but what could be so important now? Today, when such awful stuff was happening, what could be so urgent?

He almost knocked the door but decided not to. Something kept him away, guiding him into the living room and the telephone on the table by his dad’s armchair. You pick up on things, his mum had said, but as he picked up the receiver and dialled he knew that is was a simple need to talk to his father that was guiding him now. To speak to him, feel the strength in his voice, ask him to come home and protect them. Ask him for help.

That’s what fathers did: they protected and helped. Like that time when they’d been walking in one of the orchards at the far end of the village. Andy had wandered on ahead of his parents. They were holding hands and kissing, it was gross, and besides, with them behind him and open countryside in front it made him feel alone. He’d been eight then, and the notion of hiking through fields on his own was an exciting one. But an eight year old, his mum said, never thinks about nasty men who like to take little kids away. They never think about holes in the ground, rotten branches on trees that look good enough to climb all day, rusty farm equipment just waiting to impale some unfortunate, cars destine to run over …

And, Andy discovered, they never thought about sows out to protect their litter.

The old pig was black and pink and huge, its teats swollen, haunches rolling, head dipping and raising at it charged him. He’d never even seen the sty as he wandered between trees. He’d never been this close to a pig, either, and her size paralysed him. Her eyes twinkled in the sun, and it felt as if he was frozen in the dazzle of an approaching car’s headlights.

He’d heard two sets of footfalls and his mother swept him into her arms. His dad stood his ground before the charging sow, arms out wide, legs braced against the impact. The sow had been bluffing. It slowed down, stopped turned and sauntered back to the corrugated iron sty, piglets darting around its feet like fireflies in the long grass.

It had been bluffing. But his dad hadn’t known that.

“Dad?”

“Andy? Hi son, thought you’d be out in the woods or building dams in the stream, or something.” His father always sounded more enthusiastic about these things than Andy felt, as if he mourned for his own youth and tried to relive it through Andy.

“Well, I was Dad …” He was going to cry. Hearing his father’s voice, knowing he wasn’t here, made his eyes sting and his throat tighten. A muttered curse from his parents’ bedroom didn’t help, making him wish more than ever that they could be all together as a family.

“But?” The phone hissed in his ear. It may have been static, or perhaps his dad was packing a book while he spoke.

Andy closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He thought of Stig, crying and dripping snot from his nose, and he didn’t want to be like that. He wanted to impress his dad, show him how brave he was, how adult. He couldn’t be a kid forever.

“But,” he said, and then the tears came. He shoulders shook, his breath hitched in and out as if changing gear. He felt his face screwing up and tears pattered onto the table as his father buzzed in his ear.

“Andy? Andy, what’s wrong son? Where’s your mother?”

“She’s here,” he managed to say between sobs. “Dad, she’s here.” He was trying to convince himself. He could still hear movement in the bedroom and an occasional mutter or curse, but it felt as if much of his mother had been left back there in the square. She’d changed from the second she’d set eyes on the church, become colder, as if its old stone could leech a warm soul to its hungry self. It’s always cold in a church, someone had said. He wondered if those two dead men had gone cold straight away.

“What’s wrong then son? Stop crying now, tell me what’s wrong.”

Andy sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. A streak of snot silvered his knuckles, reminding him of Stig. Wish you were here now, Stig, he thought.

“Everything’s gone weird, Dad,” he said, and once he could talk without crying he spurted it all out, telling his father everything. It only took a couple of minutes, and that surprised Andy. Could something that could be told so quickly really be so frightening?

It was his dad’s turn to pause.

“Dad? Can you come home, Dad?”

“I’ve seen nothing on the news,” his dad said, and Andy knew he’d been accessing the news service on his mobile phone as they’d been talking on the land line.

“That’s because no one can get out,” Andy said. For the first time he realised just how frightening that was. If nobody could get out, something must be causing it. Keeping them in. “No one can tell the news people because they can’t leave.”

“You’re phoning me, want me to tell the news folks?”

He heard the challenge in his dad’s voice. “Oh yeah …”

“Can I speak to your mum?”

“She’s in the bedroom.” Andy glanced across the hallway and saw the bedroom door still shut.

“Can you call her?”

Andy listened. There was still an occasional shuffling and a few indecipherable mumblings from his mother.

“Dad, can you come home? I’m scared. There are dead people in the village, Dad, maybe there’s someone here going around killing them.”

“Let me speak with your mother, Andy.” Whatever his dad had been doing whilst talking – wrapping a book, searching the web – he’d stopped now. His voice had gone serious, all playful tones vanquished. Andy only hoped it was concern for his family rather than anger at him for making up stupid stories.

“Mum!” Andy called, but not too loudly. Tears were still flowing, though quietly now. “Dad, I think she’s—“

The bedroom door opened and his mother stepped out. “Who are you talking to?” she asked, concern stretching the last word as she saw his tears.

“It’s Dad,” Andy said, proffering the receiver. “He wants to talk to you. Tell him, Mum, tell him what’s happening. Tell him he has to come home.”

She took the receiver and Andy stood close by as she sat on the arm of the chair, talked to her husband, told him that someone had been killed in the churchyard as they watched. “Crushed,” she said, “I suppose.”

A buzz from the receiver.

“I don’t know, honestly. But then someone was chased by … by unicorns ... and there was something in the ditch …”

She trailed off as there was another buzz from the phone, a softer one, as if a fly was trapped in there. Andy’s mum glanced at him, smiled softly. “I think so,” she said into the receiver. “Will be when you come home, anyway. And Jack… be careful. Andy and Stig say they couldn’t get out of the village, there may be … .well, be careful. And bring help.”

Andy left the room and headed to the toilet. His mother’s final words made him pause, eyes wide, fists clenching as her tone bit in: serious; dreadful; terrified.

“Jack,” she said, almost whispering. “Just be very fucking careful.” Then she hung up the receiver and sighed shakily. Andy did not want to know if she was crying.

He didn’t want to know what she’d seen when she looked at the church, either, nor as she stood at the kitchen sink, staring out at their ordered garden and seeing something else.

He didn’t want to know, and yet he had to

Stepping quickly to the bathroom door he opened it slightly and slammed it shut, back-treading very softly, nudging open his parents’ bedroom door with his elbow, all the time keeping one eye on the living-room door in case his mother’s shadow came through. He couldn’t hear her moving and that was good, but it was also bad as well. It meant that she was sitting in there staring at nothing instead of coming out to see if her son was all right, after all the things he’d seen today, really, surely, she should be making sure he was all right.

He pushed the door almost shut and turned around to survey the room.

It was an alien landscape in here, something he never saw without one of his parents present. Occasionally at the weekend he’d bring his dad a cup of tea after he’d had a lie-in, but now he was here on his own. He could smell his mother and father, their aromas imbued in the carpets, the bed, the curtains, talc stains by the dressing table and aftershave bottles on the windowsill. The bed was still rumpled and unmade from last night, and Andy viewed it with a mixture of suspicion, fascination and disgust. That’s where they did it, where they fucked, and the thought of his parents …

He looked at the dressing table. The slew of photographs tucked into the mirror edges seemed to chart his entire life from left to right, birth to now. Here’s where his mother spent her private moments preparing for the day, putting on her face, finding new wrinkles and grey hairs, and still she surrounded herself with Andy. He stared out from two dozen pictures, and every one of them must watch her as she sat there. That made him feel weird. It made him think about how disrespectful he was being, invading his parents’ privacy like this, and he suddenly had a very bad taste in his mouth.

He turned to leave, hoping and praying that his mum wouldn’t see him coming out. And then he glanced inside the open wardrobe, looked up at the shelf where his mum had been rooting around earlier, and he saw a book. It had been thrown back in a hurry. Its tattered front cover was open so that it lay across an untidy heap of old curtains and blankets like a dead bird.

Andy stretched up, snagged the thick cover between two fingers, pulled the book and caught it before it could hit the floor.

He was young. He’d just become a teenager, but for now people still treated him like a kid. He forever dreamed of moving on, growing older, reaching an age where he was not only his own person, but was perceived to be his own person by others.

Andy wanted all of this, but he wanted it under his own conditions. He didn’t want adulthood forced upon him. That would be unfair.

He opened the book

His life would never be the same again.

Nightmare

Jack had to get home. Every mile made it more imperative that he did so, each bend in the country lanes reminded him of Andy’s distress like a punch in the face. His son’s voice on the phone, his tears and his strength and the desperation as he’d called his mother – maybe he’d wanted her to hear, maybe not—had driven Jack into something of a panic. Upon closing the bookshop, ejecting the few customers who’d been browsing and stuffing the day’s takings into a brown envelope, Jack had strolled slowly to the car park. Every stride had brought back memories of that call. The sparse conversation replayed in his mind, Andy’s tears interspersed with his most adult mutterings. And step by step Jack’s pace had increased.

By the time he reached the car park he was running.

It was a half-hour drive home. Twenty minutes after leaving the car park Jack realised that he was minutes from the village, and he wondered at just how he hadn’t ended up wrapped around a tree or buried head-first in a lorry’s grille. He often seemed to arrive home with very little memory of the journey. Frightening enough, but when the bulk of that auto-pilot journey was spent travelling at thirty miles per hour above the speed limit, it did not bear thinking about.

He loved his son dearly, and yet sometimes he found it difficult to see him as anything older than his true age. He was thirteen years old and however much Andy liked to give the impression that he was older than his years, he’d always be Jack’s little boy. Perhaps it was a parent’s curse – or, more likely, a son’s – that youth could ostensibly be regained through one’s offspring. If Andy grew up, Jack grew old. An easy equation that held a billion lifetimes in its balance.

Andy made things up. Jack’s wife often commented that he was sensitive to things, but Jack always took this the wrong way. He knew what she meant. But that worried him, scared him sometimes, and he preferred not to think on it. He’d rather believe that Andy told fibs, made up stories, than acknowledge that he saw truths hidden from others.

Like the time when Jack’s own mother had passed away in her sleep. Andy had known about it hours before the phonecall came. Crying in his sleep, crying more when he woke up, he was unable to tell his parents what was wrong. But Jack had seen his son’s eyes as he sat him down to tell him that Nan was dead … seen the understanding there already.

And now, today, he was making this up. He had to be. Craziness like that didn’t really happen, not really,

(so why am I rushing home?)

and maybe it was just a bit of fun Andy was having at the start of his summer holiday, a childish game created by him and Stig to wind up their parents with little or no thought as to the consequences of their lies.

Maybe there’s someone here going around killing them, Andy had said, and Jack had known that he was lying. That’s not what he really believed, not at all. The rest of it …. Maybe he believed the rest of it.

But that didn’t make it true. Even after what his wife had told him.

It couldn’t.

The first apple trees appeared beside the car, flashing by in sweeps of green. He’d be home in two minutes.

Forever putting my own life on hold for Andy, he thought, hating himself but hating the truth in the statement as well. He remembered Andy as a baby, a toddler and now as he approached manhood, and he felt a mixture of pride and sadness. He liked to tell himself that the sadness came from his son growing up and losing his own childhood innocence … but in reality, he knew it derived from how he knew his own life to be trickling away.

Forever …

Jack shivered, so violently that the wheel jumped in his hands and bushes whispered and hissed along the side of the car. His eyes closed and he clenched his teeth, feeling his jaw muscles freeze, his back arch, belt pressing into his shoulder and stomach, legs stiffening and pressing the accelerator to the floor. He felt sick. Cold. Muscles locked and cramped, his balls shrivelled into his body, his hair stood on end as if he’d just passed between two house-sized conductors.

The car engine screamed, angry at his inattention.

A stone wall plucked a hubcap from the offside front wheel, sending it arcing into the air to disappear into the sun.

For seconds, minutes, hours he was like this, every instant taking him closer to disaster. Images of the car smashed and burning with him inside did nothing to ease the seizure.

The car hit a ridge in the road and bounced, jolting Jack up against the seatbelt so hard that he felt the skin on his shoulder bruise and break.

And then it passed.

He opened his eyes, lifted his foot from the accelerator and stood on the brake. The car’s nose dipped from seventy to forty, then down to twenty, drifting around the final bend and then into his driveway. The engine hissed and ticked, ticked off. He heard birds singing in the trees, leaves hushing against each other in the slight breeze that had arrived with mid-afternoon … even though sweat remained budded on his skin.

“Mum, Dad’s home!” he heard Andy shout. Jack sat there shaking, wondering just what had happened, feeling his heart racing in his chest and dreading another fit, certain he’d had a heart attack, equally sure that his heartbeat beat was steady and strong.

“Andy,” he said, but it was nothing past a whisper.

He heard footsteps approaching from around the side of the house. His son. Andy had called him home because he was scared, and now here he sat, shaking and sweating and trying to find a reason for his attack instead of a cure. Still shaking. Still sweating.

The footsteps came faster. And faster still. Andy must be sprinting.

Jack looked up at the trees. The breeze didn’t feel that strong, yet the branches were flipping back and forth, the leaves mere smears in the air instead of singular patterns. His son appeared at the car window, reached out to touch him and fled again.

Andy, he went to say, but now it was not ever a whimper.

The birds were becoming frantic. Their songs combined, an aural battle fought across baked lawns and thirsty flower-beds, increasing in pitch and tone until one song was the next, and all songs became one, a long, high whistling in his ears. It faded to a hum, then nothing. The trees moved faster still until they too became only a smudge, one wall of pale green foliage.

Jack tried to blink but his eyes were frozen open.

Something happened, something momentous, and then it was night. The stars spun above him like a Katherine wheel, their trails across the heavens clearly visible like a time-lapse photograph, dozens of aircraft trails playing cosmic join-the-dots but telling him nothing.

The house before him crumbled quickly, to be replaced by something taller and brighter. Then that too disappeared, his vision now filled with something black and white which may have been ash.

Oh God, he thought, and continued to think, Oh God, oh God, oh God, even though he did not believe.

His mind screamed out as time passed him by, dragging his blood, his heart, his life along with it.

Soon, only too soon, everything would be over.

Eight

He heard the car pull into the driveway.

Somehow he dragged himself from what he was reading, closed the book, tucked it under his arm, tiptoed from the bedroom and made it into the kitchen.

Nightmares.

“Mum, Dad’s home!” Andy shouted. He opened the back door without waiting for her response and ran around the side of the bungalow.

Nightmares. The book was a book of Nightmares Asleep, that’s what it said on the first page, although some of the letters were strange and the script was meticulously hand-written, not printed as it should have been. It looked very old.

Nightmares.

It watched him from high up, one of the pages had read, always high up, never down at his level. He ran and screamed but could never rid himself of the watcher, even out in the open air, because the watcher was invisible. He paid well and said I could have his first lamb come springtime.

It was worth it. Later when I looked, the watcher was scared of me. The things these folk call nightmares …

Andy thought of the railway bridge and the terrible sense of foreboding they’d all experienced walking beneath it.

The book was heavy under his arm, loaded with terrible truths and awful promises, perhaps made true themselves by time …

Nightmares …..

Andy rounded the corner and saw his father sitting in the car on the driveway. He was dead. Andy opened his mouth to scream but his body needed every breath he could spare to run. He whined, eyes wide, footsteps pounding and shaking his vision, rattling something in his ear, the tic that had always been there when he ran and which he’d once thought was his brain coming loose …

A bird called out behind him, a cheerful warble that belied the truth of what Andy saw here. His dad was dead. He must be to look like that, no one could be that still and yet remain awake, alive, eyes open, mouth hanging slack as if about to complete an unfinished sentence. About to say my name, Andy thought. And he wondered which nightmare had come to take his father.

He felt stupidly, awfully responsible. Not because he’d phoned his dad and begged him to come home, but because of what he had read, the book he carried now and what it contained. Because Andy was, as far as he could make out, a witch.

“Dad!” he called at last, skidding to a halt beside the car. The engine was ticking and hissing as if it had been pushed hard. The air above the bonnet shimmered, trying to find which reality to settle into. “Oh Dad, wake up, wake up Dad!” Tears blurred his vision and he was glad, but he wiped them away anyway. He didn’t want his dad to see him crying.

His father stared. His skin was almost completely white, as if something had come and taken his blood, eyes wide and dry, no glimmer there at all, no moisture protecting them from summer dust and the heat of the nightmares unleashed, running rampant, raging ….

“Dad, I’m one of them! I’m sorry!” he shouted. “I’m a witch!”

“Andy?” He heard his mother calling, and in her voice was a terrible admission. She’d heard what he’d said. She knew he’d seen the book, knew what he had read. She was not only calling him but instructing him, commanding him, admitting the truth in one word. It was the first time she’d ever truly spoken to him like an adult.

Andy reached out to touch his father. His skin was cold and hard. Not just hard but as solid as rock, immovable, so there that it just could not have been. He pushed but his father did not move. There was no give in his flesh. It was like touching a statue that was firmly, irrevocably rooted to the spot.

Caught in time.

“Fuck off!” Andy shouted, because he didn’t know where the idea had sprung from. You pick up on things, his mother had told him again and again, and now that he knew why he hated her for it, for not telling him everything right at the start.

The fact that he believed what he had read and its implications, every single word of it, merely added to the proof. The book was there, solid and real, beyond denial.

“Jack!” His mother stood at the corner of the bungalow, hands held to her face in the cliched scream-queen pose. Her eyes flickered across from her husband to Andy, down to the book, back up to her son’s face. “Andy ...”

Andy held out the book and opened it. “Pick a nightmare, any nightmare.” He’d always loved magic.

“Oh Andy, it’s … all a load of rubbish.”

Andy started to cry then, knowing that he should feel angry but unable to. She was his mum, and things were weird, and he was only thirteen years old. Thirteen fucking years old! He was still a kid and he wanted to stay like that for as long as he could, because in their darkest, most uninhibited moments his parents showed him just what it was like to be an adult. Sometimes it just didn’t look that hot.

“What’s wrong with Dad?” Andy cried. “Look at him, I phoned him and he came and what’s wrong with him, Mum?” He backed away from the car and into his mother’s embrace, clasping the book to his chest behind folded arms. Caught in time, he thought again, and this time he tried to accept it.

“Come inside with me,” his mum said. He could feel her tears dropping onto his scalp as she turned them both away from their father, leading him back to the house, hunkered down as if to avoid rain. “I never really believed….” she muttered, and although Andy knew he was meant to hear, he did not reply.

Not now. Because even before she told him anything, he believed it all.

Nightmare

In life, Mengezah had courted death. In death, her hopes would be given life.

Now, somewhere in between, her dreams and nightmares are one and the same. Release for some, pain for others. No balance. No real way to grieve or celebrate, rejoice or repent, because limbo is no sane place.

For all that, she feels things happening. Fresh air kissing a corpse that has not been her for three centuries. A soft tongue of odours tickling senses long-since rotted away: the tang of cut grass; a breath of running water; something else, grimy and unclean. And voices … so many voices calling out in surprise or pain, often both, and behind them another voice, one too young to be true and yet it is speaking the Life, knowing it and feeling it and sensing that it is right.

Mengezah would have been proud, were she still alive.

But in here, in her own nightmare and hell, is someone and something else. Trapped with her, running in circles that shrink and shrink until the body risks tearing itself apart from chasing itself, a person with a name she once knew. It feels like her Nemesis. And although in limbo there is no memory still she feels a connection, some common truth that links them … and at last, after so long, she feels that release may soon be hers.

Mengezah is crushed, contained, imprisoned.

The new person is free and yet lost, coming closer, bearing a name she should know.

She should know ….

Unfinished business.

Nine

Andy listened for an hour and then ran.

She bled nightmares, his mum had told him. Apparently.

He couldn’t stay at home, not after what he’d heard, not with his father staring at the bungalow with no life in his eyes, just waiting ….

She was accepted because she helped. Magician … witch … counsellor. She’d shaken her head. My mother told me about it, and her mother before her, and hers, and hers, and I never really believed. I’ve kept the book because it’s an heirloom, and sometimes I’ve thought it quite glamorous having a witch in the family. And I know things sometimes, and you pick upon things too, but … I’ve never really believed …

And then a name, and a dreadful crime, and what was happening had started to make some sort of sense. To a thirteen year old boy, more sense than was possible to an adult. Because magic and wonder were still possible to a boy of Andy’s age, and he had grasped the truth and taken to it, claimed it for himself. His acceptance was nothing to do with what he seen, nothing to do with his father. It was not even because he was a descendant of Mengezah. A witch in the family held little power compared to a boy’s imagination and his willingness to believe.

Sometimes, when he saw the worst side of his parents, he knew that it was because they had stopped believing.

The last nightmare she couldn’t take, his mum had said, or so it’s said. A man called Francis. His affliction was too great even for Mengezah. It drove her into a trance and killed him. His family were furious. They demanded a witch’s trial, and even though the villagers had accepted her for so long – and lots of them had been treated by her, bled of their nightmares – their blood was up. There was no trial, no tests, no pricking or dipping in the pond, because they all knew the truth already. She never felt the need to hide what she was. She’d looked up at Andy and he’d seen tears in her eyes, as if it was her own wronged mother she was talking about. Even back then, discrimination was a way of life.

How did they kill her? Andy had asked, childish fascination painting a dozen gruesome tableaus in his mind’s eye. The stake? Torture? Did they pin her to the ground, Mum?

Francis, Francis, he should have caught the name straight away. Not Francis something, but something Francis, a surname, and Andy knew someone else with that name, someone who had gone missing.

His mum had shrugged and shaken her head. It’s all legend, hearsay. The book’s Mengezah’s, but her last entry is the day before she was … killed. It’s said that they carried her in her trance and bricked her into the church crypt.

Andy had remembered his mother’s expression as she’d stared at the church.

And the dead workmen.

They say she never woke up.

Andy had taken the book from his mother and flipped the pages, each one containing a few lines in careful, beautiful script, the beauty belying the nightmarish horrors they described. A catalogue of bad dreams, each one swallowed by Mengezah simply because she could.

She was only trying to help.

Maybe she’s woken up now, Andy had said. And then the name had hit home – Francis – and he’d run from of the house.

Andy ran. And because it was the height of summer and he was having an adventure he crashed through Stig’s gate and hammered at the front door, not stopping until he heard footsteps inside and saw Stig press his face against the frosted glass viewing panel.

“I’ve got so much to tell you,” Andy shouted, “and we’ve got to find Rachel.”

Stig opened the door. His eyes were red and swollen but the glint was still there, the childish twinkle that time and age would soon extinguish. “Rachel?”

“Come with me, I’ll explain.”

Stig noticed the old book he clasped under his arm. “Cool book,” he said. “Looks old.”

Andy shook his head and smiled. “Just wait till I tell you.”

Stig stood on the threshold for a few indecisive seconds. Behind him his mother sat in the living room, grown up and crying and certain that the world would return to its old order soon. Before him Andy held a book written by a witch, about to launch himself headlong into a village plagued by resurrected nightmares of old. And as Stig stood there, time battled with him. Andy could see it in his friend’s eyes; good sense telling him to stay at home, excitement drawing him out, logic dictating that this was someone else’s problem, childish naiveté and a sense of wonder convincing him that he could and should make it his own.

“Mum, I’m going out!” Stig shouted, slamming the door on her voice and running up the road with Andy.

“What’s your worst nightmare?” Andy called over his shoulder.

“Everyone turning to strawberry jam and I haven’t got any bread.”

“Stupid pussy!”

“Cock face!”

“Eat my dick!”

“Eat it yourself!”

Shouting, laughing, caution banished by excitement, the two boys ran into the village.

Bad dreams watched them go.

Nightmare

The humming had stopped, but she didn’t for a moment believe that she had escaped.

Rachel guessed that she’d left the stream path in the village – the last place she’d actually recognised – over an hour ago. That made it mid-afternoon by her reckoning, the middle of a hot, sun-baked July day … and yet it was growing dark.

She could still see the sun beaming down through a constant cloud haze, but even though it had barely moved its light was becoming weaker. It wasn’t that it had been obscured, just that it no longer seemed concerned with coming this far.

Shadows crouched thick and heavy around the bases of walls, beneath bushes and trees and in dips in the ground, slopping like hot tar. She thought that if she slipped and fell into one of these shadows she would pollute herself. Perhaps she could haul herself out but by then she would have become a person of shadows, someone whose skin cannot be touched by sunlight, bright healthy pink turned monochrome in life, ready for death. She wondered what it would feel like to be turned into a negative of who she really was.

She had finally stopped running because that was not getting her nowhere. In this strange afternoon twilight the village looked even stranger. Sometimes she thought she had slipped into the past: a ramshackle hay barn stood slanted by the road; the road itself was muddied and bubbled here and there with dung; the houses were uneven, all unique, the glass in their windows distorted, thatch ragged and shedding in clumps. But then she saw an old car, rusted away to little more than a shell, tyres flattened into the ground. It was almost subsumed beneath a wild growth of bramble and nettle, as if nature wished to keep it hidden. She found a stick and used it to haul some of the stinging things aside. It had once been a blue car and the ariel was still there, and protruding from a slot in the heat-cracked dashboard was something silver, home now to a spider and its extended web. It was a compact disc. Rachel thought that if she could get in closer she may be able to see the disc’s label, but she suddenly didn’t want to.

What if she did not recognise the name? What would that mean?

She dropped the stick and backed away, and for the next couple of minutes as she walked along the road she expected to hear the ghostly roar of an engine behind her, or speakers spewing forth an unknown song.

The streets were closing in and becoming narrower. Houses loomed on either side, taller now, their crowns leaning over above Rachel as if trying to kiss eaves. Thick shadows sometimes filled the road entirely and Rachel had to wade through them, eyes turned up to the weakening sun, the fine hairs on her legs feeling nothing different even though her mind told her the shadows had substance, were much more than a simple absence of light.

Once in the light again she would look down to make sure there were no dregs hanging on.

Around every corner she hoped that she would see something familiar. A few minutes back she’d passed a church, but it had been much smaller than the one in the village, its stained glass windows long since given over to the branches and roots of dark green things growing inside. The leaves were lush, the red-centred flowers hanging heavy as if eager to reach the ground. Rachel wondered what the plants fed on. She tried not to think of the dead.

The sense of space closing in around her was becoming worse, and it was not only the narrower streets that caused it. It felt as if she’d been walking downhill for an hour and now stood in the foot of a valley, the whole sky above her and the hillsides pressing down from all around. The air was heavier, thick and soupy, even though it seemed to be cooling as the sun faded up in the sky.

Every few minutes she surprised herself by realising that she was no longer crying. Tears felt good and proper, but when she stopped and concentrated on her search for a way back, they stopped.

“Mum,” she said quietly. “Dad. Daddy?” Her voice sounded flat and quiet; it was not echoed back from any of the buildings. She wondered if these walls could swallow sound waves. She stamped her feet to test the idea and felt rather than heard their impact, her bones jarring and flesh shaking. The air felt thick yet sound was fading. The sun was high and the day was growing dark.

Rachel knew that she was lost, somewhere far removed from the village and everything familiar, and yet as things moved on there were some blessings: the humming had stopped, thank God, and if those faceless people were still in their homes they could do nothing to her out here. Maybe they were still sitting there, grotesque faces all turned to feel the fading sun on their skin, hands clasping the rotting arms of chairs or feeling along walls as they sought escape … but they were saying nothing.

She did not approach any doors or windows to check.

Instead she turned the way she had come, yet again, and found once more that the landscape had changed behind her back. The buildings had vanished and an orchard stood in their place. Its trees were high and wide, trunks close together, the foliage blotting out what little light remained from the fading sun. Rachel stepped forward onto the short grass of the orchard floor, passing small mouldy mounds that may have been windfalls. She tried not to look too closely, because one or two of them seemed to be oddly shaped. No point in looking. No need upsetting herself.

Home, she thought, pleased that she’d found an orchard. The village was surrounded by them after all, and if she walked straight through this one she was certain that she’d leave this lost place behind, emerge somewhere she recognised ...

She started to cry again, barely even registering the fresh tears as she walked between the trees, watching her steps but trying not to see the broken fruit on the ground. For a second each fallen apple was a hand, clawed up out of the ground and holding a handful of earth, ready to haul down and drag its owner up out of the dank earth and into the dull light of this lost place.

Rachel screamed, rubbed her eyes as she stumbled. Her heel landed on something and she heard it crunch, and she had to look down. Had to. Whatever fears held her were nothing compared to childhood fascination, the need to know and explore, however awful the truth was going to be.

It was only a crushed apple. It looked quite succulent and juicy, actually, and she realised how parched she was. She bent down to pick up the broken fruit before she saw what it contained. Where the core should be lay a tiny, wriggling thing. It had limbs, of sorts, but two of them were squashed. It had a head, perhaps, but that was ruptured and bleeding.

It had a voice, for sure. It was crying.

Rachel ran. She bounded into a tree and smashed her face into the harsh bark, opening a gash across the bridge of her nose. Blood ran down her face like the very best tears. She cried out again as she ran, striking more trees because they were growing in closer now, their canopies entwined like lovers’ arms, branches coiled around each other, leaves kissing. Whenever she thought she was heading for a space between trees she hit another trunk, her hand sometimes warding it off, other times her chin or stomach or nose meeting it first.

She knew what the thing had been thinking and that was worse than anything. It had wanted out, but once released from its prison by her unwary foot it had wanted back in again. Trapped and imprisoned was better than the spaces, the wide open spaces, never again did it want to see those big wide open spaces …

Some of the tree trunks were touching, now. Rachel was barely walking, shoving her way through the space between trees, crying tears of blood and salt. They pattered to the grass and sank in, turning the dried blades red, sowing a path she should be able to follow back … but upon turning around, she realised that she was trapped. Hardly any light made it down here. The canopies above, three or four layers thick, were heavy with summer leaves and unripened fruits.

What does ripeness bring? Rachel thought. Where’s my mum?

“Mum!” she called, “Dad, help me!”

Rachel tried to sit down but the trees would not let her. They held her up, pressed rough trunks against her back and sides and front, and she cried out one last time, not know or caring why she called for him.

“Andy!”

She began finding it difficult to breathe.

Ten

As they ran, Andy told Stig everything he knew. Stig, panting and gasping with the exertion, asked no questions until the end.

“So what do we do when we find her?” he said at last.

Andy slowed, stopped at the corner shop. Mr Howards was nowhere to be seen, and the ‘Back in ten minutes’ sign was still pinned to the front door. The sun had already curled its edges and Andy had a sudden vision of it being there for months, until the heat had bleached the ink away.

“I ask her forgiveness,” Andy said.

“Huh?” Stig stood with hands on hips, panting, glancing down at the book then back up at Andy’s face, down and up. He still hadn’t bothered wearing his T-shirt.

“There’s no one around,” Andy said. “It’s dead quiet.”

Stig nodded and looked along the road in both directions, then back down the hill towards their homes. “Maybe everyone’s inside like our mums.”

“My dad’s frozen solid in our car,” Andy said. “He came home from work because I phoned him. Because I was scared. And now he’s …” He felt tears coming on again and he welcomed them, because they made him feel normal. Ever since he’d picked up the book and read some of the entries, things had been making more sense; but he hadn’t liked it. He didn’t want to come to terms with people dying in churchyards or hanging in the air, or being frozen as hard as diamond in their cars. He didn’t want to know what was happening. Making sense was a bad idea.

For a while, the tears might camouflage his understanding of things.

“Christ,” Stig said quietly. He glanced back the way they’d come. “Can we go and see him!”

“Stig!”

Stig shrugged and glanced down at his feet. “Sorry.” He looked up again and grabbed Andy’s shoulders. “But how cool! A fucking witch, Andy, your great-great-great-great-grandmother, or something, was a witch!”

“Well, no, maybe not, not necessarily—“

“So why are we looking for Rachel again? I forget. What’s that all about? And why was that bloke up in the air?”

It’s like a film, Andy thought. Stig was watching a film, acting in it and reacting to it, and for a while it had been on pause. For an hour back there, when he was in his house with his crying and terrified mother, events had been put on hold for an intermission. Now Stig was acting the part again, and he wanted to be brought up to speed on the plot. Well, if that’s how he was going to handle it …

“The bloke was in the air because a nightmare had a hold of him. And he was living it awake.”

Stig frowned and waited for Andy to continue.

“An old nightmare. Centuries old. Mengezah – my relative from a long time ago – bled them from people for money. But she … well, she can’t have got rid of them properly.”

“Like toxic waste!” Stig said enthusiastically.

“What?”

“Toxic waste! Buried in leaking oil drums and then new estates are built on the dumping ground and all the female children under eight turn green and start using sharp instruments to slice their sleeping families’ throats. Or something.”

“Well …” Andy wondered whether that had happened somewhere in the village today.

“So why are we looking for Rachel?”

“I told you,” Andy said, turning and starting off towards the village square. “Forgiveness.”

Stig jogged to catch up and fell in pace beside him. “Oh. Right.”

The book felt moist and heavy under Andy’s arm. He was sweating, his T-shirt soaked through, but it was more that heat. It was nerves as well. Terror at what he had learned and fear at how easily he was accepting it.

(you pick up on things)

And above all, a simmering disquiet at the responsibility that had been laid before him.

Of course, he knew he hadn’t been forced to grab the problem and make it his own. But as Stig had said to him … A fucking witch!

“So these nightmares,” Stig said, “how do they …” He trailed off. There was a noise to their left, hidden behind the bulk of the factory. It sounded like a rug being flipped at the air. “What’s that?”

Andy shook his head as he felt his friend move up close to him. Could be anything, he thought, but decided not to say nothing. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get to Rachel’s house. If she still isn’t there we’ve got to start looking. We have to start looking.”

The boys set off along the road, both glancing warily at the factory and wondering what was going on behind it. Andy did not want to know. He could stop and open the book, browse through his ancestor’s writings – those he could read – and there was a chance that he would discover whatever was making the noise in there. But there was no time. For the last three hundred years, perhaps, there had been plenty of time, a thousand opportunities for his mother – and her mother’s mother, and so on back – to scour the book at their leisure, believing or disbelieving, laughing or frowning. But not now. Now, when Andy had one of the coolest, most exciting and terrifying things he’d ever imagined in his hands … he had no chance to look at it.

He discovered very soon that nightmares seek out their own victims.

The boys were looking up into the sun when the shadow came out of it. The crack, crack they’d heard was the thing’s wings beating at the air, not just flapping but whipping, as if angry at the heat the sun was giving the day, the brightness, the promise of more fine days to come.

As they both tumbled back onto the road, screaming and scrabbling backwards across the Tarmac like beetles before a magpie, Andy knew at last what real nightmares were. If anything can damage the air itself, he thought, this is it.

Some things belie description. Andy had never seen beauty adequately described in words, nor pain, nor the fear of a parent’s passing, nor the joy-laden release of an orgasm. And though he read a lot – children’s books, adult books, comics, newspapers, non-fiction volumes on the war and natural history and science – he knew that the thing coming at them now could never find itself within the pages of a book. A loose nightmare, perhaps. Undreamed up to now, and undreamable.

Even now, seeing and smelling and hearing it, it was indistinct.

It emerged from the sun aflame, as if travelling those cold depths of space instantaneously. Feathers of fire wavered behind and around it as it called out, the voice similar to nothing Andy had ever heard before, language unknown and unknowable. Great wings beat at the air and drove it down at the ground, each flap issuing a sonic boom that cracked windows, drove rose-bushes flat, exploded slates on the factory office’s roof. A stench was driven before it, fire and rot and the sweet perfume of a summer garden, mint and boiled apple and shit, all of these and more combined. Smoke curled into agitated shapes in its wake, giving a hieroglyphic warning that Andy was too terrified to understand.

Each time he blinked the thing coming at them changed. He flickered his eyelids quickly, trying to make it less bad.

“It’s everything!” Stig shouted. Andy felt his friends grabbing for him, and he had a choice: drop the book and hold Stig’s hands? Be together to face whatever was to happen to them?

He looked up. The impossible thing was bearing down upon them rapidly, but it could be ten feet or ten miles away.

“Everything, Andy!” Stig shouted, his eyes wide, nose running, one side of his face and chest apparently sunburned even more from the boiling apparition screaming down to them from above. He grabbed for Andy again, his fingers searching for their friendship that would never end, they’d sworn it, they’d made themselves spit-brothers and, only a week ago, blood brothers when both of them tumbled from their bikes and opened the skin on their hands. Blood brothers, they’d vowed, holding their bleeding hands together and letting the blood merge and flow, swapping each other’s life force and feeling so proud.

Andy held the book tightly under his arm.

And an instant later Stig was swept along the road for twenty feet, the thing’s huge talons rolling him and leaving a morse of blood behind, before being lifted clear into the sky.

“Andy!” Stig screeched, blood spraying through tattered lips. It drifted on the disturbed air, a red mist that coolly kissed Andy’s upturned face. “Andy!”

“Oh God ….” Andy could say little else. He could barely think. His knuckles were white where they grasped the book, his face spotted with freckles of his best friend’s blood. He could only watch as the nightmare stole Stig away across the rooftops.

It left behind charred air and a crying, terrified little boy.

And when Andy looked up and saw Bully Bradfield and his gang, he knew that his own nightmare had come true at last.

Forever Nightmares

As the afternoon drew to a close, and the sun dipped thankfully towards the wooded hills in the west, and the melted pitch on the roads began to harden again, and a soft breeze picked up screams and shouts and blew them against the walls of the church, the village could no longer ignore the nightmares it played host to.

In houses, basements, fields, gardens, outside on the road and inside in the minds of the terrified, disbelieving villagers, realities were slaughtered. Security was knocked down like so many bolted front doors. Safety was taken outside and gutted.

Whatever tomorrow may bring, for many life would never be the same again. How can it when nightmares live?

In the graveyard, the dead were walking.

Darren James – town drunk, petty burglar, car thief and all-round arsehole – was trying to press himself into the stone wall of the church yard. He was hidden beneath an ancient rose bush, its stems thick the business end of a baseball bat, but still he thought the things may see him if they turned his way. His gallon-container of White Lightning lay upturned on the gravestone where he’d been sitting sunning himself, letting the toxic brew burn into his stomach and press at his bladder while he considered his evening’s options. Fuck Debbie, or nick her old man’s shotgun? he’d been musing. Now there was a choice he liked. Brain addled by the nuclear-strength cider, he had briefly considered combining the two in all manner of ways.

Then the gravestone had shifted. Long, black nails had preceded the skeletal hand that came out from beneath it, and the processed remains of that White Lightning had streamed down his legs and soaked his trousers.

Huddled up against the wall, at least it was keeping him cool.

There were five of them now, all virtual skeletons apart from the fat, burst corpse of that bastard Howards’ wife. She’d never liked him in her shop, always refused to sell him booze, forcing him to steal it and take continued abuse from the local pigs. Now here she was, two years dead and still as fat as when she’d been alive, stuffing her cream-cake stock into her disgusting mouth before it could be sold—

And, as if she could hear his thoughts, she turned to look at him.

James pressed back, willing the wall to crumble behind him and let him through, out into the square. He’d already looked up and figured that his initial hiding place had also turned into his prison; the rose was thick and dense above him, no way through there, the only way out was out, past those stumbling things. … those things …

“Just what the fuck!” he shouted, because he didn’t care if they heard him anymore. The fat bitch was coming for him anyway, not as if he could give himself away, and “What the fuck! Eh? What the fucking fuck!”

The dead woman bent down and stared into the shadows at Darren James. Her eyes were darker than where he hid, damper than his soaked trousers, because she had no eyes, only holes in her ragged face where many-legged things crept.

“The fucking fuck indeed,” Mrs Howard's said, running a hand down over its crotch. For a corpse, its enunciation was remarkable.

Lesley Jones was running through a field. She loved the countryside, relished and revelled living in Whitgrove, and she often took long walks up to the woods and back. This field was usually on her route, because the clump of trees on the raised knoll at its centre was an ideal halfway resting place.

But she was running now, not walking, and at seventy years of age running was not a wise thing to do. Not for a mile, and certainly not in this heat. She could feel her heart struggling to keep up with her, muscles aching and cramping through lack of oxygen, joints rubbing and scraping, and she knew that she would kill herself if she continued.

But there was nothing else to do.

How else could she keep ahead of the Zipper Man?

He followed her, walking and admiring the scenery, laughing and singing like all the best jokers and jesters … and just as in all the worst movies, he kept pace even though she was running.

And slowly but surely, he was gaining on her.

His hand moved up and down his front. Down, unzip, and his skin fell away to reveal a slightly different him underneath. Up, zip, he closed himself, shrugged his shoulders into his new being and walked on a few paces. Then after a pause … unzip, off came his latest skin. He never reduced, like Chinese dolls. He never looked the same twice. His smile was always there, calm and whimsical and yet full of an insidious threat that Lesley had never really been able to identify. He can’t hurt you, her mother had used to coo all those years ago, even if he does catch you, which he never will. Because it’s just a dream, Lesley. And dreams can never hurt you … they just melt away.

Lesley was old and her hair was grey and sometimes she forgot where she left her glasses, but she was not stupid. She knew that she was awake right now. She could feel the sun on her face and the grass whipping at her ankles, and whenever she glanced back she could see the Zipper Man closing the distance between them, shedding his skin, hand down, up, that smile aimed at her whenever she looked—

She was awake, and the Zipper Man was still chasing her.

Gaining.

Slowly, certainly, as if he had all the time in the world …. gaining.

Wurzel couldn’t believe his luck.

Here he was laying low in an orchard with Debbie Worthington, his dick in her hand, her tit in his, and the best thing was he should have been in work! He’d made the final delivery of the day an hour ago, dropping a load of parts to Heggesy’s garage, but instead of going back to the yard he’d offered Debbie a lift. She was a pretty girl, eighteen next birthday, and he’d often caught her glancing at him in the pub or strutting her stuff if she walked by his parents’ house. But he’d never done anything about it, and that’s because he was scared. Scared of her boyfriend Darren James, an idiot of the worst kind because he could fight anyone who called him such. He was a criminal as well, a thief, trouble, and Wurzel knew that everyone hated him living in the village.

Even, it now seemed, Debbie.

“Why do they call you Wurzel?” she asked, her smile surprisingly sweet and coy considering what she was doing with her hand.

“My second name’s Strawbridge.”

“Oh.” And she bent down to start sucking him off.

He’d felt brave. Driving towards her as she walked along the lane, no other traffic around, he’d admired her long brown legs and bare back, just a shade too red with the effort of gaining a tan. He’d often wondered why she never appeared to go to work, but not today. Today, he was only glad that she didn’t.

“Want a lift?” he’d asked, leaning across the van’s front seat and opening the door without waiting for an answer. His voice was shaking but she hadn’t seemed to notice.

She’d hopped in. Seconds later her top had been off, she was complaining that it was sooooo hot, and the gate to the orchard was the first place he could stop the van.

Her head bobbed. Her teeth scraped him now and then, but the last thing he wanted to do was complain. The very last thing. He thought briefly of Darren, how all his mates maintained that Debbie was committed to him, even if she was a little flirtatious. And feeling her hair tickling his thighs, he smiled. Weird.

He’d have thought it weirder still had he known what Debbie was doing at that precise moment. Far from sucking on his cock, she was actually splayed out on her bedroom floor, arms and legs pulled taught and tight by the little grey creatures which had come out of her light fitting. They were busy snapping the bones of her wrists and ankles and using them to nail her to the floor. One of the things – it had a face like Christopher Walken and kept saying I haven’t killed anyone … I haven’t killed anyone … -- sat on her face so that she could not scream.

“Debbie, that’s good,” Wurzel said, leaning back against the apple tree so that he could look down and watch. He’d return the favour in a minute, oh yes, have a mouthful of her and smile with every lick as he thought of that bastard Darren, how cool he thought he was, how so very cool.

Debbie bit. Wurzel screamed. Then she was up, sitting astride his stomach and it wasn't Debbie any more, it was that Thing, that awful Thing he’d used to dream of when he was ill as a kid, naked and wrinkled and ugly and stinking of stale milk and raw bacon.

He hadn’t though of the Thing for a very long time.

“Debbie?” he muttered, because he couldn’t think of what else to say.

“You never really forgot me, did you?” it said. And then it kissed him.

For a second, as it ripped at him with the long hooked claws on its hands and feet, sucking his tongue into his mouth and pressing his head against the tree to keep him in place, he thought he’d parked up and fallen asleep in the sun. Sunstroke, he thought, fell asleep leaning out of the van window and now I’m burned and—

But when the pain kicked in and he still didn’t wake up, there was only one other possibility to consider.

Elsewhere in the village other nightmares descended upon their victims, instilling dreads old or new, from Mengezah or, more and more frequently, from the minds and memories of the victims themselves.

A sunbathing woman saw a giant fleshy ball approaching from the bottom of her garden, so she ran, pounding along streets in her bare feet and bikini, glancing back every few steps at the ball that followed her, always followed her, whichever way she turned and however fast she ran.

A man confronted his dead brother from thirty years ago and tried to convince him it had all been an accident.

The village pub’ erupted in flames when the landlord tried to fight off a swarm of ice-flies, their mandibles dripping cool death onto his skin, wings creaking at the air. He used an aerosol lit with a cigarette, swept it around the kitchen, shouting, searing his cook’s hair from her head and bubbling her skin as he was blinded by two flies that burrowed at his eyes. It only took a kiss of the flame on the gas canisters he kept beneath the table …

Stig’s mother, still locked in tearful indecision inside her home, found herself sitting on a toilet, knickers and shorts around her ankles, dozens of people milling around … and as soon as she stood to wipe they all turned to stare.

Nightmares everywhere.

Eleven

For Andy, the worst of nightmares.

When he was nine, Andy had been beaten up by a boy from the neighbouring village. There was no rhyme or reason behind the attack other than the fact that their schools were in competition in the local schools’ football league. Andy was walking home one afternoon when the boy jumped him, beat him to the ground and commenced kicking him in the head.

Bully Bradfield had saved him.

Bradfield was the last person Andy had expected to help. He had a reputation for beating on kids for no reason; one day you were his mate, the next his victim. He was the worst type of bully; one who liked to call you his friend. But Bradfield was only nine and the fights rarely ended with more than a bloody nose and dented pride, so the adults seemed to pass it on as a childhood phase. Even Andy’s dad had once told him: If he picks on you, just punch him back. Stand up to him and he won’t do it again. Andy could not believe how childishly simple a solution an adult could offer for such a nightmarish situation. Simple, and false, because someone who fought back was exactly what Bradfield craved. He liked to fight.

But this time he had fought off Andy’s attacker, helped Andy up and dusted him down, perhaps wallowing for a moment in some misplaced camaraderie with his school-mate. He put his arm around Andy’s shoulder and led him out of the village towards the woods, telling him it wasn’t safe, the boy could be waiting to pounce for him on the way home, he should come out here for an hour or two and let the danger pass.

Andy – nose bleeding, elbows scraped and sore – had let Bully Bradfield lead him away from the village, and his home. Every step he took made him more uneasy; he wanted his mum, he was bleeding and she’d kiss him better and douse the flame of his cuts with a damp flannel. But Bradfield may have been right … the boy might have been waiting …

Just outside the village Bradfield had steered him into an overgrown orchard, wild hedgerows shielding it from the road, abandoned pigsties islands in the green sea of grass. Waiting there for them, Bradfield’s gang. Six of them, all school-mates of Andy’s, some of them even his friends … but not that day. That day they’d had pain and violence in their eyes, because for a while Bradfield was their leader.

And how had Andy ever, ever believed that Bully Bradfield could ever change?

He’d run. The certainty that those boys were there to cause pain gave him speed. He’d seen their eyes; scared and excited as they looked from him, to Bradfield, back again, waiting for their leader’s word before they attacked this random victim. He’d noticed the sticks some of them had been holding. They were really going to hurt him.

He ran flat out for five minutes. Footsteps pursued him to begin with, shouts and whoops and the sounds of animal violence their accompaniment. They soon fell behind, but Andy kept on running.

Somehow he escaped the gang and the fate they had in store for him, and his escape had been permanent. Physically, at least. They never caught him and it was never mentioned again. He saw those boys in school, even became friendly with one or two of them over the next couple of years, and in his nightmares events had turned out differently. They’d caught him, beaten him, whipped him, cut him with rusted nails and bashed him against an old pig sty until its ragged edges started to gash flesh from bones …

Now they were here again.

“Hello pig-shit-breath,” Bully Bradfield said. He’d left the village with his family two years ago to emigrate to America. “Bet you can’t run faster than me now.” Nobody had heard from any of them since. “Want to try?”

Andy stood his ground for a few seconds, looking into the eyes of each and every one of the boys. Damien Cooper was there; he’d died a year ago from meningitis. Pete White, too, one of his best friends who’d just moved away to live in the city. In their eyes Andy saw none of the hesitation, the need to belong, the guilty fear that had been apparent four years earlier. Now, they were simply there to hurt him.

So he turned and ran. And like all nightmares, they wouldn’t let him go.

He stayed on the road. He could have taken one of the twisting paths that led between houses and gardens, disappearing around corners and reappearing on other streets, or in the square, or perhaps today nowhere at all. But the road looked safe, untouched, and here he could run faster. He thought ahead: past the school, under the bridge, around the corner by the post office and into the square. Maybe the police were still there. Or maybe not. If not, he would take the path by the stream. From there he could duck into any garden he wished, or dart along the side-paths that led back to the road. He could, if he ran fast enough and thought logically enough, lose them again.

But he was thinking of the boys as real. It all fell down, he knew, because as nightmares … as his worst nightmare … they would never be left behind.

Their footsteps pounded behind him, echoing from the school walls where it bounded the road. He could distinguish Bradfield’s footsteps from the others; they were harder, heavier, full of a darker intent. And they seemed more determined. He wondered whether Bradfield could actually reach him through a nightmare, satisfying a cruel desire he’d been denied four years ago in that overgrown orchard.

The book was becoming heavier. Should be shedding its nightmares and becoming lighter, Andy thought, not heavier. But perhaps exhaustion was settling in already. He could never discard the book to make the going easier. It was slowing him down, those steps behind him were louder – faster, if anything – and they were going to catch him.

The bridge. Andy looked ahead and saw the high railway bridge, the one he’d felt that awful presence beneath mere hours ago. He looked desperately to his left and right, seeking an alternate route that wouldn’t slow him down too much. The book slipped and he hugged it tighter, feeling its old leather corners digging into his ribs and armpit. He relished the sensation. It was real.

He risked a glance over his shoulder and instantly wished he hadn’t. They were closer than he’d thought, arms pumping at the air, feet kicking up puffs of strange black dust as if each footfall smashed the road surface into fragments. And at their fore was Bully Bradfield, his smile so wide that it looked as if he’d been struck with a scimitar across the mouth. At that thought thick black blood pumped down over Bradfield’s chin, dripping onto his white muscle T-shirt.

Andy darted left without thinking, vaulted the low wire fence and scrambled up the slope to the railway track. The climb would slow him for a few seconds, but if he could make it to the track before his pursuers it would slow them down too. In the meantime he could run left or right along the track, or go straight over and down the other side. This way, at least he’s miss the unseen thing under the bridge.

There was a train coming. Andy could hear it as he pulled himself up the steep bank with one hand, pushing with his feet, kicking himself up, kicking fast so that he didn’t give himself a chance to slide back down.

The wire fence sang as its tines were plucked by the gang behind him.

The train grew louder, its approach expanding out from a dull roar to a click-clack, click-clack, and as Andy reached the brow of the embankment he could sense the tracks vibrating with the promise of its imminent arrival. He looked left and saw the train coming through the old station. It was a local sprinter, a three-carriage affair that stopped at every station along the route, taking an hour to travel thirty miles between the coast and the local town. Full of shoppers and day-trippers today, Andy guessed, and he wondered just what would happen to them on their brief journey through the village?

He wondered also whether this was the train they’d heard hours ago, just after they’d passed under the bridge.

His questions were answered when he saw the driver. As the train bore down on him Andy could see the whites of the man’s eyes, the fillings in his teeth, his jaw tendons working as his chin struggled to touch his chest and his hands clasped at his hair in disbelief at something he had seen, or was still seeing.

Behind Andy the sounds of pursuit, and heavy breathing as Bradfield mounted the rise.

Without a second thought Andy leaped forward. He didn’t judge the distance and time, nor the possibility of escape. He jumped out of a blind, terrified instinct for survival, untouched by logic or even hope.

But hope bore out. If anything, the wall of air pushed before the train shoved Andy the vital few inches he needed to avoid being struck. He rolled across the gravel on the other side of the track and let the roll continue, slipping over the far edge of the embankment and sliding and bouncing down towards the garden at its base.

He still clasped the book, using both hands now, trying to roll with his shoulders and prevent his head from being struck. When he reached the foot of the bank he stood shakily and looked up. The train had just passed and there, standing in the centre of the track, Bully Bradfield glared down at him.

“Just fuck off!” Andy gasped. He launched himself over the privet hedge that marked a garden boundary, saw that the back door was open and ran. The house was dark inside and peculiar buzzing sounds came from the living room, accompanied by the stench of shit and rot and the sweet smell of decomposition. He looked at his hands as he fumbled with the front door handle and threw it open.

The buzzing house spewed Andy back onto the road three houses along from the post office. He slammed the door and ran along the road, wondering where everyone was. “Help!” he called, giggling as the desperate echo came back to him from the church. I’ve got family in there, he thought, and he laughed again, a mad cackle that only made him laugh some more. He sounded like a witch.

The train crossed the bridge behind him going in the opposite direction. It had been turned around.

“Andy!”

That was Rachel! The shout seemed to come from a long way off and Andy immediately thought of the guy he and Stig had seen floating in the air, behind the station and a billion miles away. He stopped, eyes wide and breath held, waiting for her to call again.

She did not. Instead the door of the house behind him smashed open, bounced across the street and shattered to shards against the churchyard wall. Bradfield sprinted out as if he’d never even broken step.

Andy ran around the corner, saw that the square was filled with abandoned emergency vehicles but no people, and darted up the small path that led next to the stream. The book no longer felt heavy. In fact it seemed to lead him on, its gravity hauling him forward as he held it against his chest. He emerged between buildings and saw the stream to his left, gurgling happily away as if nothing in the world was wrong, throwing up sparks of sunlight as it dipped down towards the hills in the west, and—

--and it was flowing the wrong way. Earlier he had not believed it; now it was undeniable. He was running with the flow, when normally the stream flowed down into the square and out the other side, next to the old slaughterhouse.

He would have stopped and stared were it not for the psycho nightmare chasing him.

Andy watched the ground before him, dodging rocks protruding to trip him, mounds of dog shit to slip him up, and he tried to concentrate on escape rather than worry and wonder about how his surroundings were changing.

That cry ... it was Rachel.

Rachel! her mother had said. She’s gone, I know she’s gone. It’s my nightmare come true.

He’d been running for three or four minutes, yet he was exhausted. Adrenaline kept his muscles loose and his breathing strong, but his mind was weakening. Acceptance had come far too easily, he knew that, but it could not prevent images of his father and Stig bombarding him: his father frozen into one moment on their driveway; Stig being carried away by that thing, bleeding, screaming, and perhaps it was perched on the church spire even now, Stig’s remains clasped in its impossible talons and slipping down the steep slates on the spire, collecting in the old holed gutters, a ran of sacrificial blood.

“No,” he hissed, gasping the word out. “No, no, no!” He’d left home ten minutes ago on an adventure. Now he was in hell.

The book turned him right. He approached a path leading off perpendicular to the stream and he spun into it, under no apparent motivation of his own. To pause even for a second was to be caught, so he followed through with the movement and pelted along the path. Brambles reached out to tangle in his shoelaces and trip him. Rose bushes overhung a garden wall, their flowers fat and stinking, smelling rich and sweet rather than subtle and perfumed.

Bad hearts on stalks, Andy thought. Sounded like a good book title.

The footsteps behind him were fading, and yet he could still feel Bradfield’s breath on the back of his neck.

One more corner and then the road, he knew, but he turned the corner and there was only more path. Stitch stuck a dagger in his side but he ignored it. The path undulated before him, the mounds not staying still but actually moving, flowing towards him as if some humped creature was swimming just below ground level, the path cracking and settling again. Andy leapt the mounds and landed in between, leaping again, again, hearing a scream from somewhere to his left as a wall cracked open and glass shattered. He wondered whose nightmare he was intruding upon.

The pursuing footsteps were fading, as was the light. The walls were high here, but not high enough to keep out the sun. It should still be bright but looking up Andy saw that the sky had turned a deep evening blue, as if he was escaping the day.

He risked another look behind him and saw no one. He slowed, stopped, leaned down and rested his free hand on his knee, trying to hold his breath so that he could listen properly.

Gone. The path was deserted, the air was clear of the sounds of pursuit, and that feeling of dread which had clasped him to its bosom since he’d seen Bradfield waiting for him .. it had vanished completely.

Perhaps because room was required for the new dread seeping into his heart.

The place was changing. And he didn’t think that this was a nightmare of his, or even one for him. It was a definite change, a slewing of things to the side, a darkening. The sky was a rich, deep blue now, like bottomless water or the Royal blue a small kid would use for the sky in a painting.

Andy walked on and the path ended.

It should be the main road here, but it was not. He thought he recognised one of the houses, but its roof pitch was steeper, its windows older and more decrepit. There was no road, only a rough courtyard, one side of which was taken up with a massive wall of roses, striving skyward like the bushes covering Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Andy searched for a sight of stone through there, but he could see none.

All changed, he thought. He glanced down at the book in his hands, perhaps expecting some change there as well. It was the same as ever.

“Andy!”

Rachel again!

“Rachel! Where are you?” No answer. Perhaps she was still shouting from too far away. He would have to go further into this strange place, accept more change, because he had to find her. Not because it was Rachel and he fancied her. Not only because he was a kid turning into a man; he noticed how Rachel was changing too, and sometimes he jerked off. And not simply because he was a good, friendly boy who could not face letting another one of his friends get stolen away.

He had to find her.

He had to talk with her and seek forgiveness, and give the same. It was what Mengezah wanted and needed. It was her unfinished business. And as in all the best adventure stories he read or watched on television, the future of the village – and his friends and family – depended upon it.

“Soon you’ll rest in peace,” he whispered into the darkening sky, and he hoped she heard. “Soon you’ll sleep.”

Nightmare

She hears.

Not in any sensory way, because her senses are long since given out to time. She feels the truth behind the words – the long awaited possibility of eventual, eternal release – and yet they come from further away than she had expected. They’re fainter, more remote, more removed than the person approaching her now. Their speaker is young and strong, young and known, and now there are three … herself, the one trapped so close, and the talker coming nearer. He has a way to travel yet but he’s on the right track and Mengezah has no reason to doubt his abilities. No reason at all. Because once they had been her own.

Three.

At last it begins to make sense.

Twelve

“Rachel!” Andy called, running along unknown streets and shouting into unseen corners. “Rachel!” The place felt cold and dead. If this is a nightmare, he thought, it’s not so bad. But what if there are nightmares within nightmares?

Anything could come at him at any time.

The darkness felt dirty and imposed rather than natural. He could see the sun hanging low down in the sky, and it should still be light. At this time of year, it should still be light. But something seemed to be draped over the sun, a gauzy film that withheld light and heat and let through only a cursory glare, a glance of itself to merely touch the roofs of these buildings and cast wide, deep shadows where there should be none. Andy avoided these dark places where he could, but on occasion something stroked his leg as he ran by, pulling hairs and grazing his skin. He tried not to look because he did not wish to see.

The road forked. Left led away between leaning houses, the road formed from dried, compacted mud, rampant weeds poking up from where it was cracked. To the right the path turned quickly, seeming to meld in with the trees and overgrown shrubs bordering the road. Again it was hard earth that formed its surface, but no weeds grew. The plants on either side – wild, thorny, harsh-looking – must steal all the moisture away.

Right looked more threatening, so Andy went that way.

He could not reconcile this logic with his fears, did not know why he’d chosen the worst way to go, but it felt right. The path was narrower than it had seemed and before very long he was walking sideways, trying not to let his bare arms brush against the foliage in case it stung or grabbed him. The barbed thorns looked vicious. In between stems and leaves and fronds he could see fat green pods at the base of some shrubs, most of them open and wet, one or two of them closed around struggling things, throbbing and flexing as if the pods themselves were breathing. He thought he would fit into the largest of those quite well.

It stank. A smell had never actually hurt him but in here his nostrils stung from the odours, toxicity smoothed his skin with invisible fingers and drew it tight, drying and splitting his lips, inspiring a huge headache and an instant panic. He had to get out! He was trapped, and if he stayed any longer the plants would grab him, hold him tight and draw him down into one of those waiting pods, eat him up just as a Venus fly-trap consumes a fly. Maybe he’d be digested over the space of a week, until only his trainers and the metal clasp on his belt remained. And maybe he’d be awake for the whole time.

Andy pushed through, shoulders and hips brushing the hedgerows on either side, and now his head was being stroked by errant fronds and scratched by thorns. He looked up and saw that the plant canopy had closed over him plunging him into a sickly green-tinged twilight. He gasped with the exertion, his throat stung with the heavy intake of breath, and it felt as if there were a hundred tiny things in there puncturing his skin and holding open the wounds, letting hot air hit exposed nerves. It could have been pollen or seeds or barbed offshoots, set free from the plants and breathed in to do their work, weakening him so that his eventual struggles when he was caught would be less damaging to the lucky growth that trapped him …

Andy held the book in front of his face to ward off the branches and thorns reaching down for him. He heard its worn covers being struck and felt his fingers scraped and cut, but he kept on pushing through. To stop would be to give in. A moving target was a harder one to catch.

But they were all around his feet now, trailing stems and bulging roots, not actually moving but given the impression of motion by his own struggling, each impact of his feet on the ground jarring his vision and jumping the plants an inch closer to his ankles. He kicked out as if wading through snow, pushing with his arms to keep the book out in front of him, thrusting out his elbows to deflect any sharp plants that might puncture his eyes. The surroundings had a sound now, a secretive rustling like a breath through autumn leaves. He could stop and listen, but perhaps it was a ploy, a way to make him pause so that the plants could grab him. He kept running and wondering. He was beyond breathless, overly conscious of his heart pummelling in his chest. For the first time in his life Andy imagined it stopping and dropping him dead, but the fear was not enough to give him pause. Nothing was enough to stop him. If he stopped he may not start again, and Rachel was in here somewhere, he’d heard her, and she had to forgive him, forgive what his family had done, because

she was only trying to help!

The voice was loud, unexpected, but it was his.

You pick up on things, his mum had told him.

Rose petals raised down as he bounced from a thick stem. He looked up into the weak light and saw the flowers disintegrating above him, heart-shaped petals fluttering to touch his cheeks like dead butterflies. In school he’d read about monarch butterflies and how their migration lasted two or three generations, and he wondered whether these rose petals knew their true purpose. Raining on me like blood, he thought, wiping at his face, fingers coming away tinged with pollen. Burying me. If I stay here they’ll keep pouring down and bury me, and I’ll drown in roses. The image held an unbearable romanticism.

Stig would have laughed.

Andy ran again, shaking petals from his hair. Some of them stuck to his sweaty skin, slipping down his face to cover his eyes. He panicked, closed his eyes, held the book out and continued running …

… and then everything changed. The air brushing his face felt cooler, sounds expanded out from him and the cloying, sweet-rotten smell of roses vanished.

He stopped and opened his eyes.

Andy had never felt so alone, so exposed and ironically so claustrophobic as at that moment. The initial impression that hit him was one of space: the horizon was as distant as he’d ever seen it, and it ran straight; the sky was wide, dark, endless; even the gentle hills to his left and right seemed ten miles high and a hundred wide. He was tiny, unknown and unknowing, and in that place where size was everything he was totally imprisoned by scale.

He sank to his knees and curled up, crying and grasping the old book to his chest as if it would save him. He glanced back over his shoulder at the wall of undergrowth he’d just burst through; there was no path, no way he could have come out of there without hacking down the branches and stems. “Mum,” he whispered, resting his forehead on the ground and trying to haul in his senses. He could not bear to see the distance, hear the wind howling in from a million miles away, smell scents that had been travelling forever. “Mummy!” Tears fell, starring the dry earth, and he wondered what new plants they may propagate.

“Andy!”

It was Rachel again, from much nearer this time. Andy looked up at the distance surrounding him. He had no idea where she could be calling from.

“Andy!”

“Rachel!” he called back, taking strength from her voice. She sounded as trapped and fearful as he felt.

“Andy?” Her voice was quieter, full of doubt and hope in equal measures.

“Rachel, it’s me, where are you? Keep shouting and I’ll come for you!”

“Over here, Andy, in the trees …. mind the trees … they move…”

They move, she’d said, but Andy could not see any trees. He ran in the direction he thought he’d heard Rachel’s voice coming from, slowly climbing an incline but seeming to travel nowhere. Perspective did not change at all as he covered distance. He wondered if he was truly moving, looked down, saw stones and cracked mud passing beneath his feet …

And when he looked up again he was at the edge of an orchard. He did not know this place – the sky was still a dark blue, the trees looked much older and more gnarled than any in the village, and the shiny apples stank of rot – but at least it was a point of reference.

He almost cried with relief.

“Rachel, I’m at the edge of an orchard, where are you?”

“In the middle!” she shouted. “Andy, I’m scared, what’s happening?”

“Are you sorry?” he called, but he knew that it would mean nothing to her.

“What?”

He did not answer. Instead he climbed onto the dilapidated timber fence, let its rotten post give out and dip him slowly down into the orchard. The grasses were long and could hide anything. The trunks were wide and the branches laden with fruit, but it all looked tainted. One bad apple affects the whole bowl, his nan had said, though she was rarely talking about real fruit.

Fear only gave him pause for a few seconds. And then Rachel called again, and her voice was further away and weaker, so Andy ran.

It felt like he’d been running all day.

Soon his pace was slowed down as the trees began to grow closer together. From a distance they looked evenly spaced, following the usual lines and ranks of artificial planting, but the further he moved into the orchard the less order it possessed and the less room there was between trunks. Branches merged overhead as if offering each other’s fruit. Roots curled out of the ground and entwined with their neighbour. He leapt roots and ducked branches, slipping more than once on a windfall and trying not to see what he thought he saw down there in the grasses.

“Are you sorry, Rachel?” he called again, hoping against hope that somehow she already knew who she was, what she had to do.

“Andy, I’m scared, don’t scare me more.”

“I really like you, Rachel,” he called ahead of him, hoping that truth would take him to her.

There was silence for a moment, save for his pounding feet and the impatient swish of grass reluctantly parting for him.

“I like you too,” she said, and she didn’t need to shout at all. Andy stopped, looked around and saw a knot of trees just off to his left. They had grown so close together that their trunks were combined in places, weird Siamese trees whose branches were so tangled as to be indistinguishable from each other. It may as well have been one tree with many boles … and, in the centre, a space just large enough to trap a little girl.

He walked up to the growth slowly, looking around for dangers. It held her close to its bosom, so likely it wanted to protect her. It may have slings or traps or sharpened branches to thrust his way … and he almost laughed at how seriously he was taking this. He was in the village, somewhere, yet in a place and world he did not know. He was worried about trees trying to kill him. And he wanted Rachel, a girl he fancied and could hardly bring himself to speak to without blushing, to forgive him for something one of his ancient ancestors had done to one of hers.

“Hello,” he said. “Nice day, isn’t it?”

She laughed and cried at the same time, scared and yet evidently relieved to see him. That made him feel good. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said, and that made him feel better.

“Why?” He could barely see her between the tree-trunks, but he caught a movement that could have been a shrug.

“I thought maybe you could get me out of here.” She pointed at the trees, up at the canopy, past it into the dark-blue sky, and Andy noticed how her voice was now balanced and precise. A very good camouflage for the terror she must be feeling.

“If I tell you something, you have to believe me,” Andy said. “Really. If you don’t believe me then … I don’t think I can help you. I don’t think I can help any of us.”

“Any of who?”

“You’re not the only one who’s lost,” he said, thinking of his father and Stig and welcoming the tears that smeared the dirt on his face. A day ago he’d have never cried in front of Rachel. Perhaps he’d grown up.

“I’ll believe you, Andy,” she said.

“Well, it’s a bit wacky—“

“I’ll tell you what I’ve seen today, maybe you can let me know exactly what wacky is.”

Andy smiled, leaned to the side slightly so that he could maintain eye contact. She was swaying from left to right, and he wondered whether she needed to pee. “If it’s anything like I’ve seen,” he said, voice hitching, “wacky isn’t the word.”

“I’ll believe you, Andy, I told you. Now give me the chance to prove it.”

“Right,” Andy said, looking down at the book clasped in his folded arms. “Right.”

And he told her.

This is a nightmare, but not yours or mine. It’s an old one, and one of many. My ancestor was a witch, a white witch, she helped people and maybe she wasn’t really a witch at all, maybe she was just the first psychiatrist. Whatever, she took bad dreams out of people and somehow swallowed them up herself.

“I believe you,” Rachel said when he paused. They both heard a wet grinding sound as the trees started to pull away from each other.

Something’s happened. The dreams she took are out, they’re … stalking the village. And they’re catching.

“I knew it was real, but couldn’t be,” Rachel said. One of the confining trees peeled back, bending from root to head as if grasped by an invisible hand and hauled, twisted, until it snapped. The sound was like a cannon-shot, and Rachel cowered down as low as she could to avoid the spike-ridden, moist mouth the tree’s trunk had turned into.

Stig and my father, and lots of others … they’ve gone, somewhere … and there are dead people in the village, Rachel. And my mother knew about it all along, knew what was in our past, but she said she didn’t believe it. I think she did, really. I think she did, but she was too scared, too grown up to let herself accept it as the truth. She kept Mengezah’s book – she’s the dead witch – and I’ve got it here with me now.

“I believe you, Andy.” The trees parted enough for Rachel to scramble out, grasp Andy’s hand and let him haul her across a tangle of roots to safety. They kept holding hands even as they stood together, panting, staring into each other’s faces. The sky, it appeared, was brightening. “What’s in the book?”

“Here,” Andy said, handing the book to the girl he had rescued. He could see just how beautiful she was now and he realised, in a very adult way, how drop-dead gorgeous she’d be in a few year’s time.

Rachel took the book and opened it gently, flipping through the pages. Andy could see a look of wonder on her face as the thick paper whispered at the air, and he was glad. It meant that she knew what she held in her hands.

“It’s difficult to read,” she said. “What’s this? Hounded by fire dogs. What’s that? What are they?”

Andy shrugged, the description sending a shiver down his spine and into his balls ... one of several strange feelings down there right now. “Hopefully something that hasn’t happened yet.”

“My mum?” she asked, suddenly a frightened little girl again.

Andy wondered how she saw him. A scared teenaged boy? A rescuer? A hero?

“I saw her a while back in the square and she was alright then. Worried about you.”

“Mum…” Rachel said, lost for a moment. Then she looked back at Andy. “So what do we do?” She glanced over his shoulder towards the edge of the orchard. “You came that way? Is the square that way?”

“Are you sorry?” he asked again, thinking he knew what he meant but suddenly discovering a terrible vagueness to his thoughts. Could it really, truly be this simple?

“For what?”

“For what your family did to Mengezah. She tried to help them, and she failed, and they had her bricked into the church crypt. Alive. Asleep. Are you sorry?”

Rachel looked around, scared, tears glittering like diamonds in her eyes and on her cheeks. “Andy ... how can I be sorry for something I didn’t do?”

“It’s important!” he shouted, and instantly regretted it. It was important. He couldn’t mess this up; even if it wasn’t the way to solve things it was a start, a statement, and he just did not want to mess it up. It was important.

She wasn’t frightened by him, though. She didn’t step back or turn to run. He guessed she’d seen far, far worse things today. “I saw people with no faces,” she said, confirming his suspicions. “Will it make them go? Will it help them if I say I’m sorry?”

Andy shrugged. “It might.”

“Well of course I’m sorry then.”

Nothing changed. The trees had pulled back and the skies were brightening, but the woods were still unknown and the windfalls stank meaty in their rot. Andy had not been expecting an instant flip back to how things had been – even his thirteen-year-old mind, relatively untainted by cynicism and fresh with naiveté – knew that this was not how things ever were. But surely something must happen now?

Unless he’d got it all wrong.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Which way?”

“I don’t think it matters, really.” He turned his back on the girl and started out the way he had come, searching above and through the trees for any sign of a landmark he’d recognise. He paused, turned back, smiled. Rachel was following him. She was scared and as confused as he, he could see that, and she was concerned for her mother. And, even though she had said sorry but not thank you, he knew how grateful she was.

“Why were you calling my name?” he asked.

“I thought you’d be the most likely person to rescue me,” she said simply, and she slipped her hand into his.

Together they walked from the strange orchard and out into the unknown streets and courtyards.

Sweet Dream

I’m sorry, she hears and feels, and things begin to change.

Forgiven by the kin of those she tried to help, Mengezah draws away from the limbo she inhabits. The drain on her mind and memory ceases. The nightmares no longer leak to the world but are slowly drawn back inside. She never meant to let them go but they were surprised out of her, exposed and sucked away by the promise of light and the certainty of the coveted death to come. Now she holds them to herself once more, even tighter than she did before, because she knows that she is the only one who truly has nothing to fear from them.

She cannot drown or be crushed, she cannot burn or be trampled, she will not remain in time because time has no meaning here. Space and distance do not concern her, neither do enemies from the past. She holds on – tight – until she feels the change she has been awaiting so long.

Her own dreadful nightmare starts to draw away, expanding like an explosion of gas, opening up like a flower revealing its soft insides. She would smile and shout if she had a mouth, but she is more than content knowing that her half-death is nearing an end.

She holds her nightmares in and awaits final release.

She waits to rest in peace.

Thirteen

“Look,” Rachel said. “The sky.” They looked up and saw clouds appear out of the even blankness of the dark blue sky. It was brightening and lightening, the clouds giving depth instead of weight, and Andy smiled. He suddenly wanted to run home and see his dad, but they are not back in the village quite yet. He thought they would be soon – he could smell the occasional waft of apples on the air, proper apples – and when they were, he prayed that normality would have found a home there once more.

Whatever normal was.

“What’s normal?” he asked.

“Well, the trees don’t look so weird anymore.”

“No,” Andy said, “ I mean in general. You know? What’s normal?”

“You’re still weird, however.” She was still holding his hand, and she gave a slight, reassuring squeeze.

“Do you think we’ll know normal when we’re a bit older?” They walked in silence for a moment, and Andy started to notice scraps of landscape that looked familiar. A stretch of wall here, a tree there, and in the distance he could hear a stream. He only hoped it was flowing the proper way.

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “I think adults make up ‘normal’ as an excuse for not being kids any more.”

Andy thought about that as they walked. It made him sad.

It was only as they both saw the stream, felt an overwhelming relief that it was flowing the right way, started off on the path that led down into the square and realised that the village was their village again, that Andy realised he’d left the book back in the orchard. Rachel has been looking at it and the next thing he remembered was seeing it on the ground, already seeming to rot into the earth. At the time it had seemed only right.

“I hope I never see that again,” he said. Rachel murmured her agreement, but Andy wondered if she really knew what he meant. In a way, he hoped Mengezah had taken it back.

They heard a noise as they approached the final corner which hopefully led into the square. It sounded like a drill, its tone changing constantly as it buried itself into concrete marred by air pockets. For a second Andy thought that they’d arrive back in the square to see two workmen labouring in the churchyard, carrying out the jobs which Father Norman had assigned them, and that everything would be as it should have been. They might see his dad drive by on the way home from work, or perhaps Stig would be waiting on his bike, itching to go up to the woods with Andy for one last ride before twilight settled over the landscape.

But then he thought of what Rachel had said about ‘normal’, and they rounded the corner and saw the screaming woman.

Her voice was high-pitched and loud, and she seemed to scream without drawing breath. Andy saw why and felt sick. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear, and the red dress she wore was once yellow, and blood bubbled at her throat and misted the air before her. Her cheeks and forehead were very pale. Her eyes were showing their whites.

“Ohmygod!” Rachel gasped. “Andy, Andy, oh my God!”

“Come on,” he said, grabbing her arm and trying to steer her towards the church. There was one more thing he thought he should do. It came from nowhere, this idea, a final act that felt only right. He didn’t know if it would have any more effect, or whether it could undo more of what had already been done … but it felt like a way of showing the honesty in everything that had been said, by Rachel as well as himself. Mengezah was family, after all.

“Mum!” Rachel said, and for one awful moment Andy thought the dying woman was her mother. But Rachel slipped from his grasp, ran around the corner and back out of the square, glancing back once more at the bleeding woman and once more at him, the expression on her face exactly the same both times.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said, wondering what for.

The woman reached the grass verge where he and Stig had sat eating melted chocolate earlier that day. She dropped to her knees so quickly that Andy heard one of them pop, then she keeled forward and landed face down on the dried grass. The screaming stopped and she was still.

Elsewhere in the village, as if the end of the screaming was a signal, more shouting began. Someone cried far away, a high pitched wail as they found a dead loved-one or something worse. Someone else was nattering nearby, trying to talk sense into the senseless, perhaps …which made Andy think of his father.

Was he still in the car in their driveway?

Was he still alive?

“I hope so,” Andy said as he ran for the church. He filled up, a lump rose in his throat as he thought of his dad building him a set of cricket stumps, taking him for a bike ride in the woods, still recommending kid’s books to him even though he’d read The Rats by James Herbert more than a year ago now. All good memories, ones he cherished and would cherish forever, whatever the end of this day may bring. “I hope so.”

The church door was open, blocked only by some hastily arranged police tape. ‘Do Not Enter - Dead Witch’ Andy thought, laughing nervously. He wondered where the policemen and ambulance men were now that they were really needed, but there would be time for that later. He ducked under the tape and entered the dark church. It was cool inside.

The sun, dipping low in the west now, shone through one of the stained glass window, flooding the pews with colour. Andy was astounded. His mother was religious, so she claimed, but she had never brought Andy in here. He was amazed that he’d spent his whole life in the village, but the only time he’d ever seen inside the church was this morning, standing in Stig’s entwined hands and trying to see whether there were any bodies or orgies.

There weren’t, not now. He was alone in here with the splash of colour from the window and Jesus staring sadly down at him. Andy wondered if Jesus would object to what he was about to do, but he found that he did not care.

The door beside the altar led down into the crypt. There were lights strung along the small tunnel that led to the stone wall. The centre of the wall had been knocked out by the workmen, and the lights were still lit up. Tools were discarded across the floor, and it didn’t take long for Andy to smash out a few more stones, being careful to loosen them and then pull them out with the pick. He didn’t want them to drop inside in case they fell on whatever was in there.

He’d always wondered what a grave would smell like. He and Stig would talk about digging up one of the older graves, the ones that nobody tended anymore, just to see what was inside. He’d imagine a skeletal frame with skin dried on like old leather, hair long and flowing where it had continued growing for a few months or years after burial, broken nails and scratches on the inside of the coffin lid where the unfortunate had been buried alive, bony fingers dripping in family jewellery … and he guessed he watched too many films.

The smell down here was one of age, but not rot. Dampness, mould, an earthy aroma like freshly turned soil, not unpleasant but rich. It had been a long time.

He prepared to enter the hole, stood back and took deep breaths, but he really didn’t need to. He was not scared. He was about to enter the tomb underneath a church where a witch had been bricked in alive three centuries ago and where her nightmares had lain in wait for that long for release … and he was not scared. She’s family, he thought, but it wasn’t even that. Maybe he’d seen too much today and was in a state of shock. Or perhaps it was simply that doing the right thing offered some sort of protection.

He wormed through the hole and stood to one side to allow light to shine in. He saw her then, Mengezah, a bundle of rags and bones huddled in the corner of the small space, her skull hugged down against her chest as if she’d covered her head with her arms, not wanting to be seen should discovery ever come. Her hair was long. Her bones were rough, chewed in places. There was no evidence of a pointed hat or a broomstick.

He picked her up and she was very light.

Andy found a quiet corner of the churchyard to bury his ancestor in. He used the dead workmen’s tools to dig a hole, his palms blistered, he began to sweat and he lost track of time. All his concerns left him for that hour – his fears for his father and Stig, Rachel and her mother, the rest of the village – and he simply swung the pick, moved earth, swung, shifted, hauling out rocks the size of his fist and scraping away the dried, crumbling mud with his bare hands. It was not a proper grave by any stretch of the imagination, but then Mengezah had been gone for a long time, and the hole he needed was small.

“I’ll always remember you,” he said as he patted the last clod of turf back down over her remains. He thought of her book and wondered where it was now. He tried to disguise her resting place, hoping with all his heart that they would leave her alone. He sought some words but could think of nothing to say.

As twilight fell and Andy walked home, he heard the first sirens in the distance. A background song to the concerto of loss that played the village into night.

Andy learned a lot that year.

He learned that sometimes it’s the kids who are the hardy ones. Stig wandered back into the village three months after Andy had buried Mengezah, coming down from the woods, walking home and asking his mum for some cheese on toast. He wore the same shorts and trainers, and his bare torso was goosebumped in the autumn cool. His parents – convinced that he was lost, certain that someone had taken him away and killed him – screamed and shouted until he hugged them, told them that he was alright, just tired and hungry. It had been, he said, a long walk.

Andy saw him a couple of days later. Stig came over, knocked at the front door, stared Andy in the eye and said: “One day I’ll tell you.” Then he shoved past Andy and started flicking through his new comic books, catching up. Andy took that trust as one of the greatest signs of friendship, and he honoured it.

Andy’s father surfaced from his trance, barely, and he spent most of the rest of that year staring off into space. “I’ve seen forever,” he would say. He would or could not elaborate, and Andy and his mother simply accepted the condition, hoping, praying that he would improve. Perhaps one day he would. Maybe, Andy thought, his dad was like this because somewhere inside he was busy trying to redefine normal.

He learned also that relationships do not always go entirely as planned or desired. Rachel’s mother thanked him profusely for finding her daughter. Rachel did her best to avoid him. He would never hold her hand again.

Most of all, he came to realise that nightmares never really go away. The villagers shared haunted looks now, avoiding questions from the press about that long hot Wednesday. Sixteen bodies had been found scattered around the village, and eighteen more people had disappeared never to be seen again. A house had gone too, and one of the ambulances. The pub had been burned to the ground and a train had been derailed, two of its carriages inexplicably pointing in the opposite direction to travel. The curious came, money was offered, and still the villagers did not tell their stories. Children talked about all sorts of weirdness, but the adults, those who could not accept that weirdness so easily, remained quiet. That summer, the children were in charge.

Sometimes, Andy thought he saw Bully Bradfield waiting for him in the distance.

He supposed that in a way, nightmares were needed. He guessed that as he grew up, and as adult concerns changed or wiped out his childish sense of wonder, the nightmares would help define his norm.

He hoped that his memory was long.

Other Titles

from Generation Next Publications

MOSTLY HUMAN

by William Meikle, Steven Savile,

Scott Nicholson & Steve Lockley

The English Lake District is a haven of tranquility, a place for hill walkers, mountain climbers and those in search of solitude. But when the rains arrive it becomes a desolate landscape where malevolence rises up from the depths and death is not far behind. It has struck before and this time it has to be stopped.

From the imaginations of four authors working as one comes a menace that is Mostly Human.

THE INVASION (Extended Version)

by William Meikle

It started during a winter storm on the North Eastern Seaboard which brought with it a strange green rain. Where it fell, everything withered, dies and was consumed. The residents of remote outposts in Maritime Canada escaped the worst of the early damage, but that was a blessing in disguise, for they were left to watch as first North America, then the world was subsumed in the creeping green carpet of terror.

THE ROADHOLE BUNKER MYSTERY

by William Meikle

It is a routine case for Scottish private investigator John Royle-until a body turns up in the Road Hole Bunker at the 17th on the Old Course at St Andrews. Soon he's up to his ears in bodies and red herrings as the trail takes him through the social strata of town and gown, and the case grows to encompass the history, and the very future, of the old course itself.

Scottish writer William Meikle is author of more than 200 works of mystery, horror, and fantasy. Look for more Meikle books from Ghostwriter Publications.

THE ICE MAIDEN

by Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis

“a young girl disappears, a teacher dreams, a killer waits…”

Nominated for a British Fantasy Award.

ISLAND LIFE

by William Meikle

An archaeological expedition is intent on opening an old barrow on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides despite the reservations of the locals, who all know and fear the old stories. The scientists unleash a colony of murderous monsters from deep under the earth. As the released creatures swamp the island, slaughtering livestock and people alike, the humans must band together to combat it with few resources save their courage and wits.

GODS AND MONSTERS

by Steven Savile

Steven Savile shocks us with three tales of gods, ghosts and golems. He expertly guides us down the path man will take—or perhaps has already taken—in his quest to breathe life into his own soulless creations. But this can only be accomplished by committing the ultimate sin… murder;

The murder of God.