Puzzled, he leant down and pressed the b.u.t.ton that was preset to Cla.s.sic FM. Mallory liked cla.s.sical music. Maybe there would be a concert. But there was no music. Once again, all he could hear was the strange whispering. They were definitely the same voices. He could even make out some of the words they were saying.
"EMANY ... NEVAEH ... NITRA ... OH ... WREHTAF..."
What the h.e.l.l was going on? Frantically Mallory pressed b.u.t.ton after b.u.t.ton, his eyes never leaving the road. It was impossible. The same voices were being transmitted on every station, louder now, more insistent. He turned the radio off. But the whispering continued. It seemed to be everywhere, all around him in the car.
The cold was more intense. It was like sitting in a fridge a or a deep freeze. Mallory decided to pull over on to the hard shoulder and stop. The rain was coming down harder. He could barely see out of the windscreen. Red lights zoomed past. Blinding white lights sped towards him.
He pressed his foot on the brake and signalled left. But the indicator had failed and the car wouldn"t slow down. Mallory was beginning to panic. He had never been afraid in his life. It wasn"t in his nature. But he was afraid now, knowing that the car was out of control. He stamped his foot down more urgently on the brake. Nothing happened. The car was picking up speed.
And then it was as if he had hit some sort of invisible ramp. He felt the tyres leave the road and the whole car rocketed into the air. His vision twisted three hundred and sixty degrees. The whispering had somehow become a great clamour that filled his consciousness.
Mallory screamed.
His car, travelling at ninety miles an hour, somersaulted over the crash barrier. The last thing Mallory saw, upside down, was a petrol tanker hurtling towards him, the driver"s face frozen in horror. The Honda hit it and disintegrated. There was a screech of tyres. An explosion. A single blare from the loudest horn in the world. Then silence.
Matt was sound asleep when the covers were torn off him and he woke up in the chill of the morning to find Mrs Deverill in a black dressing gown, looming over his bed. He looked at his watch. It was ten past six. Outside, the sky was still grey. Rain pattered against the windows. The trees bent in the wind.
"What is it?" he demanded.
"I just heard it on the radio," Mrs Deverill said. "I thought you ought to know. I"m afraid it"s bad news, Matthew. It seems there was a multiple pile-up on the motorway last night. Six people were killed. Detective Superintendent Mallory was one of them. It"s a terrible shame. Really terrible. But it looks as if you won"t be leaving after all."
OUT OF THE FIRE.
The next few days were the worst Matt had experienced since he had arrived in Yorkshire.
Mrs Deverill worked him harder than ever and Noah never left his side. The hours pa.s.sed in a tedious procession of cleaning, painting, chopping, mending and carrying. Matt was close to despair. He had tried to escape to London and he had failed. He had gone looking for clues in the wood but had found almost nothing. Two people had tried to help him and they had both died. n.o.body else cared. A sort of fog had descended on his mind. He had given in. He would remain at Hive Hall until Mrs Deverill had finished with him. Maybe she planned to keep him there all his life and he would end up hollowed out and empty, like Noah, a dribbling slave.
Then, one evening a Matt thought it was a Sat.u.r.day, although all days had become very much the same a Mrs Deverill"s sister Claire came to dinner. He hadn"t seen the teacher since his encounter with her in Lesser Malling. Sitting next to her at the kitchen table, he found it hard to keep his eyes off her birthmark, the discolouration that covered most of her face. He was both drawn to it and repulsed at the same time.
"Jayne tells me that you have been missing school," she remarked in her strange, high-pitched voice.
"I haven"t been to school because she won"t let me go," Matt replied. "I have to work here."
"And yet when you were at school, you regularly missed cla.s.s. You played truant. You preferred shoplifting and loitering on motorway bridges, smoking. That"s what I heard."
"I never smoked," Matt growled.
"Modern children have no real education," Jayne Deverill remarked. She was serving some sort of stew out of a pot. The meat was thick and fatty, and came in a rich, blood-coloured gravy. Road kill in a primeval swamp. "You see them in the street in their shapeless clothes, listening to what they call music but what you or I would call a horrible noise. They have no respect, no intelligence, no taste. And they think the world belongs to them!"
"They"ll soon find out..." Claire Deverill muttered.
There was a knock at the door and Noah appeared, dressed in what might have pa.s.sed for a suit except that it was about fifty years old, faded and shapeless. He wore a shirt b.u.t.toned to the neck, but no tie. He looked to Matt like an out-of-work funeral director.
"The car"s ready," he announced.
"We"re still eating, Noah." Jayne Deverill scowled. "Wait for us outside."
"It"s raining." Noah sniffed the food hopefully.
"Then wait in the car. We"ll be out soon."
Matt waited until Noah had gone. "Are you going out?" he asked.
"We might be."
"Where?"
"When I was young, a child never asked questions of his elders," Claire Deverill said.
"Was that before or after the First World War?" Matt asked.
"Pardon?"
"Forget it..."
Matt fell silent and finished his meal. Jayne Deverill stood up and went over to the kettle. "I"m making you a cup of herbal tea," she explained. "I want you to drink it all, Matthew. It has a restorative quality and it seems to me that you"ve been rather on edge since the death of that poor detective."
"Are you going to arrange for him to phone me tomorrow?"
"Oh no. Mr Mallory won"t be coming back." She poured steaming water into a squat black teapot, stirred it and then poured out a cup for Matthew. "Now you get that down you. It"ll help you relax."
"It"ll help you relax."
Maybe it was the way she spoke the words. Or maybe it was the fact that Mrs Deverill had never made tea like this before, but suddenly Matt was determined not to touch the liquid he was being offered. He cupped it in his hands and sniffed. It was green and smelled bitter.
"What"s in it?" he asked.
"Leaves."
"What sort of leaves?"
"Dandelion. Full of Vitamin A."
"Not for me, thanks," Matt said. He tried to sound casual. "I"ve never been that crazy about dandelions."
"Nonetheless, you will try it. You"re not leaving the table until you do."
Claire Deverill was watching him too carefully. Matt was certain now: if he drank the tea, the next thing he knew it would be the morning of the next day.
"All right." Matt lifted the cup. "If you insist."
"I do."
The question was a how to get rid of it?
Finally, it was Asmodeus who helped him out. The cat must have crept into the kitchen while they were eating. It jumped up on to the sideboard and caught a jug of milk with its tail, causing it to topple and break. Both sisters turned round, their attention momentarily diverted. Instantly Matt reached down and up-ended his cup under the table. When the two women turned back again, he was cradling the cup in his hand as if nothing had happened. He just hoped they wouldn"t notice the steam rising out of the damp carpet.
He pretended to drink until the cup was empty, then set it down on the table. Something stirred in Jayne Deverill"s eyes and he knew she was pleased. Now to see if his theory was right. He yawned and stretched his arms.
"Tired, Matthew?" She spoke the words too quickly.
"Yes."
"No need to help with the dishes tonight then. Why don"t you go up to bed?"
"Yes. I"ll do that."
He stood up and went to the stairs, making his movements deliberately slow and heavy. He didn"t turn on the light in his room. Instead he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, wondering what would happen next.
He didn"t have long to wait. The door opened and light spilled into the room.
"Is he asleep?" It was Claire Deverill"s voice.
"Of course. He"ll sleep twelve hours and wake up with a chainsaw of a headache. Are you ready?"
"Yes."
"Then let"s go."
Matt heard the women leave. He listened to their footsteps on the stairs. The front door opened and closed. The engine of the Land Rover started and the headlights swung round as it turned in the yard and then set off up the drive. Only when he was sure they weren"t coming back did he sit up on the bed. Everything had happened just as he had antic.i.p.ated. He was alone at Hive Hall.
Half an hour later the lights came back on at Omega One. Matt had been expecting that too.
Dressed in black jeans and a dark shirt, he grabbed the bike and pedalled away from the farm.
It was time to go back into the wood.
It didn"t take Matt long to find the entrance. The little flag he had made from his T-shirt was still there, tied round a branch. Grateful for the pine needles underfoot, he made his way along the corridor of trees, making sure he didn"t stray off the tarmac strip that Tom Burgess had shown him the last time he was here. The moon was behind the clouds but he used the glow from the power station to guide him. When he looked back, the wood was pitch-black. An owl cried out. There was a scurry of leaves as some night creature batted its way up towards the sky.
Matt heard the villagers before he saw them. There was the sound of crackling and a murmur of voices. They were very close. He pulled aside a pair of low branches and realized that he was back at the fence that surrounded the power station. He knelt down and looked through the wire. An incredible sight met his eyes.
The flat circle of land surrounding the power station was bustling with activity. A huge fire blazed outside the sphere, throwing out vivid snakes" tongues of flames. Thick black smoke curled into the air. Four or five people were throwing armfuls of twigs and shrubbery on to the fire, the damp wood hissing and snapping as it was consumed. Overhead, a line of arc lamps cast a brilliant glare over the field. It was a strange mixture: the building, with its electric lights, was modern, industrial; the bonfire, with the shadowy figures of people grouped around, reminded him of a scene from primitive times.
There was a car parked between the fire and the fence a Matt thought it might be a Saab or a Jaguar. A man got out but he was silhouetted against the light and Matt couldn"t make out who he was. The man raised a hand and the gold signet ring he was wearing momentarily flashed red, reflecting the light of the fire.
He had given a signal. A lorry that was parked on the other side of the clearing immediately began to reverse right up to the corridor that joined the giant sphere of Omega One to the rest of the building. As Matt watched, the doors of the lorry were thrown open and several men emerged, dressed in strange, c.u.mbersome clothes. They congregated together, then lifted something: a large silver box about five metres long. It was obviously heavy. They took a lot of time lowering it to the ground.
Matt couldn"t quite see what was going on. He had to get closer. He followed the fence back to the gap he"d discovered the last time he was here and waited, making sure n.o.body was looking in his direction. But all the villagers were concentrating on the lorry. Matt chose his moment, then dived forward, head first. He felt the jagged edge of the wire tear his shirt and sc.r.a.pe his back, but he was lucky. He hadn"t drawn blood. He landed face down on the gra.s.s and lay still.
A large, bearded man walked across the clearing, heading towards the lorry. It was the butcher from Lesser Malling. The ginger-haired chemist was there too. And Matt also recognized Joanna Creevy, the woman who had been at Glendale Farm when he returned with the police. She was talking to Jayne Deverill. Matt looked back at the bonfire. The village children were standing round, poking sticks into the flames, making the sparks leap up. There were forty or fifty people at Omega One and suddenly Matt knew that he was spying on the entire village. Young or old, every one of them had made the journey into the forest. They were all in on it.
All his instincts screamed at him to slip away before he was spotted. But at the same time he knew that what he was seeing was important. He just had to work out what these people were doing, why they were here. And what was inside the silver box? The men had disappeared inside. The villagers were queuing up, about to follow them. The man with the signet ring began talking to Mrs Deverill. Matt was desperate to hear what they were saying.
He crawled over the ground, keeping low, hardly daring to raise his head. The closer he got, the greater the chance of his being seen. He hoped the long gra.s.s would provide some sort of cover, but the light of the flames seemed to be reaching out to him, eager to show that he was there. He could even feel the warmth of the fire on his shoulders and head. He heard laughter. The man with the ring had cracked a joke. Matt wriggled further forward. His hand caught something and pulled it away. Too late he saw the thin plastic wire that ran along the ground. Too late he realized that he should never have touched it.
The stillness of the night was shattered by a siren. The villagers spun round, staring out over the field. Three men ran forward, shotguns appearing in their hands. The children dropped their sticks into the fire and ran over to the lorry. The man with the signet ring slowly pa.s.sed through the crowd, his eyes scanning the ground. Matt clutched the earth, burying his face in the gra.s.s. But there was no use trying to hide.
Mrs Deverill was standing beside the bonfire. She shouted a brief sentence in a strange language and took something out of her pocket. Then she waved her hand over the flames. It was trailing a cloud of white powder, which hung for a moment in the air before falling.
The flames exploded, leaping almost as high as the power station itself, bright red light flooding the field. Something black began to take shape within them, moulding itself out of the shadows. In seconds the blackness had solidified and now it sprang a seemingly in slow motion a out of the fire and on to the ground beyond. It was some sort of animal and, moments later, a second one appeared, bounding forward to join it. Behind them the bonfire shrank back to its normal size. The wail of the alarm stopped abruptly.
They were dogs, but like no dogs Matt had ever seen.
They were huge, two or three times bigger than Rottweilers a and more savage too. The flames of the fire that had given birth to them still flickered in their black, shark-like eyes. Their mouths hung open, with teeth like two lines of kitchen knives jutting out beyond their lips. Their heads were high and uneven, their bulging skulls topped by two tiny ears, like horns. Slowly, one of them turned its ugly snout up to the sky and uttered a ghastly howl. Then, as one, they padded forward, their heads slanting unnaturally to one side as if listening to the ground.
Matt had no choice. He had to get away. If the dogs found him, they would tear him apart. No longer caring if he was seen or not, he stumbled to his feet and began to run. His legs were as heavy as lead but desperately he forced them to carry him. The fence was still about ten metres away. Arms outstretched, he raced towards it, not wanting to look behind him. But he couldn"t stop himself. He had to know. Where were the dogs? How near were they? With a grimace, he looked back over his shoulder. And regretted it.
The first of the creatures had already halved the distance between itself and Matt, yet it didn"t seem to be moving fast. It hovered in the air between each bound, barely touching the gra.s.s before jumping up again. There was something hideous about the way it ran. A panther or a leopard closing in for the kill has a certain majesty. But the dog was deformed, lopsided, ghastly. The flesh on one of its flanks had rotted and a glistening ribcage jutted out. As if to avoid the stench of the wound, the animal had turned away, its head hanging close to its front paws. Strings of saliva trailed from its mouth. And every time its feet hit the ground, its whole body quivered, threatening to collapse in on itself.
Matt reached the fence and clawed at it with his hands, crashing his fingers against the wire. He thought he had run in a straight line, following the way he had come, but he seemed to have got it wrong. He couldn"t find the gap. He looked behind him. Two more bounds and the dogs would reach him. There was no doubt that they would tear him apart. He could almost feel their teeth tearing into him, ripping the flesh away from his bones. He had never seen anything so ferocious ... not in a zoo, not in a film, not anywhere in the real world.
Where was the gap? In blind panic he threw his whole weight against the fence, almost crying with relief as the edge buckled, revealing the jagged hole. Without hesitating he dived forward. His head and shoulders went through but this time the wire hooked into his trousers. Thrashing out with his arms, expecting to feel the jaws of the dog close on his leg at any moment, he struggled like a fish in a net. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a huge black shape plummeting towards him. He gave a last frantic heave. His jeans ripped and he fell through, rolling into a ball on the other side.
Blood oozed out of a gash in his leg, but he was safe ... at least for the moment. He struggled to his feet, then staggered back as one of the dogs lunged at the fence, its mouth foaming, its teeth gnashing at the wire. The two creatures were trapped. The hole had barely been big enough for Matt to pa.s.s through and they were bigger and more awkwardly built than him. But then, even as he watched, the dogs began pounding at the earth, raking the soft soil with their claws. They weren"t going to allow the fence to stop them. They were going to burrow their way under it.
Matt fled into the wood. Low-lying branches whipped into his body. Pine needles cascaded on to his hair and into his face. He blinked, trying to keep them out of his eyes. There was nowhere to hide, no way of knowing if he had taken the right path. He was trapped in a vast grid system where every direction looked exactly the same. But the dogs had the advantage. They didn"t need to see him. They would smell him out.
Matt didn"t care where he was going. His only thought was to get away, to put as much s.p.a.ce as he could between himself and the two dogs. How long did he have? Thirty seconds? A minute or two at the most. Then they would emerge from the ground on the other side of the fence as if rising out of a grave. They would stalk him through the wood, outrun him and rip him to shreds.
He crashed into the trunk of a tree and reeled away, spinning round. The lights from the power station were already a long way behind him, barely visible through the branches. Matt was exhausted but he couldn"t let himself rest. He needed to find a stretch of water, a river or a stream. Maybe he could throw the dogs off his scent. But there was no such thing in this artificial wood. It stretched on endlessly, with not a glimpse of water in sight.
He paused to catch his breath, his chest and throat rasping, his head pounding. At that moment a terrible baying broke through the air. It was a howl of triumph. The dogs were through the fence. Matt almost gave up. He felt a shiver of despair travel through his body. It was all-consuming. He would just stand here and wait for them to come. All he could do was hope his death would be quick.
No. He forced himself to snap out of it. He wasn"t dead yet. Gathering up his last reserves of strength, he forced himself on, desperately twisting between the trees.
Only the sudden stamping of his feet on hard concrete after the soft silence of the pine needles told him that he was out of the wood. Incredibly, he had broken out on to a road a but it wasn"t the road to Lesser Malling. It was wider and there were white markings down the centre. For a moment Matt felt relief. He was back in the modern world a a car might come. He looked left and right. Nothing. And suddenly he knew that this was the worst place for him to be. He was out in the open, with no cover, nowhere to hide from the dogs.
Where could he go? The strip of concrete divided two worlds. Behind him was the wood. Ahead was some sort of moorland, wild and open. He remembered what he had been thinking. A river or a stream. Matt crossed the road and plunged into the wild gra.s.s. He could tell at once that the ground was damp. He could feel it, soft and sticky under his feet. He ran on and as he ran he became aware that the ground was getting wetter. Cold water slid over his trainers and on to his feet.
He was only conscious of the danger when it was too late. He staggered to a halt and at that same moment the ground gave way altogether and he found himself being sucked down, unable to move.
A bog. He had blundered right into it.
Matt screamed. He was being pulled under incredibly fast. He felt mud and slime rising up over his knees and thighs, then his waist. He flailed about but the effort only speeded things up. The bog gripped him around his stomach and he could already imagine what was about to happen next, during the last, horrific moments of his life. The bog would rise over his face and he would give one last scream. But there would be no sound. He would be silenced for ever as stinking mud rushed into his mouth and down his throat.
Matt forced himself to stay calm. He knew that struggling would only make the end come faster. He almost smiled. At least he had cheated the dogs. He had found the one place where they could never reach him. And if he had to die, perhaps it would be better to go this way.
He relaxed and in that instant he thought he could smell something ... very close and yet distant. The smell of burning. The bonfire? No, that was too far away. Could there be someone else out there on the moor? His hopes were raised, only to be dashed again. There was no one there. The smell disappeared. It had been just his imagination.