Don’t go any further, he urges himself. Stay and wait. Stay near the water, where they can see you. Stay where there’s still the chance of light.
He removes his gloves and plunges his hand into the pocket of his coat. His hands close on metal. He grips the Zippo lighter. Pulls it free and spins the wheel. There is a tiny spark but the flame is swallowed by the wind. He curse and cups the lighter with his hand, trying to shield it from the gusts that seem to be growing stronger, whisking the detritus of the night. The flame catches but disappears again when he takes his hand away.
He flips the wheel on the Zippo and there is an explosion of light and power as his world is turned red, orange and vermillion.
It feels as though a cold, bony hand has reached inside his chest and squeezed his heart.
This is happening, he realises. This is when it all comes to an end. This is when he comes for you…
“Please!” he shouts, looking back, desperately, at the great lumpen mass of the mountains. The clouds are purple and silver; roiling and twisting like skulls in a sack. He lights the Zippo again, desperate not just for light but for some kind of warmth.
There is a shape to the darkness – an outline of flesh and bone. A creature. Pale skin and a vile, twisted pig-mask where their head should be. His guts twist and it is all he can do not to clutch at his heart like the feeble old man he tries so hard not to become.
His senses are suddenly alive as the tumblers of understanding start to fall into place.
“No,” he says, and his voice is snatched away by the window. “No, it wasn’t like you think. I helped you. Healed you! Your father …,”
The figure steps forward, and suddenly Sixpence understands. Suddenly, he knows how very wrong he has been, and how very bad the things he has done. He turns, trying to run. He does not take more than a step.
Legs and arms entangle.
Hot breath, chaos and confusion and a hand pushing against a face.
Tumbling now, rolling in the dirt, enmeshed in one another. Then a flash of face, like a sliver of moon, flits by close to his own: a glimmer of snarling white, and there is fist in his gut and he is on his back again, pinned under meat and bone, gazing up. His hands scrabble in the mud and dirt. Rake through wet leaves as the pressure builds in his throat. His eyes feel like they might pop.
He reaches up, and even through the leather of his gloves he recoils at the tough of the wrinkled porcine skin; the yellowed teeth and rucked, rancid snout.
He tries to form the word ‘please’.
He opens his mouth just enough for a single syllable to escape, and then something cold and hard and utterly unyielding is pushing through the soft skin beneath his jaw, crunching upwards to skewer his tongue to the roof of his mouth and fill the hot wet cavern of his face with cloying, iron-scented blood.
He’s still alive when his attacker starts to drag him towards the hole in the earth; the small, hidden space beneath the roots of the big, bone-white yew.
He will wish, in his final hours, that he had not fought so hard for life. That he had not spent so much of his life seeking the spirit world. Soon, it is true and endless death that he will crave above all else.
12
Bing
Bing
Bing
“Fucking bong,” mutters Rowan, silencing his phone and returning his attention to the laptop on his knee. There’s cigarette ash on the keys; on the back of his bandaged left hand and smudged into the tartan blanket around his shoulders. He’s been concentrating hard. He can sense a story lurking in the words on the screen.
A small, sly thought slinks around inside his head like a cat in a locked room. What if this is it? What if this is the story? What if Violet is about to hand him a second chance? There could be something to this, couldn’t there? Three girls from an apparently posh school, wondering off to God knew where. And Pickle had said only two came back – that rumours persisted about the third girl ending up at the bottom of the lake. Written well, it could even carry a whiff of the occult, couldn’t it? A small rural community closing ranks? He can almost see it. Can see the accompanying documentary and the mornings spent on breakfast TV with one of his grateful interviewees, spewing superlatives about how he exposed the truth, and helped a troubled soul find peace.
“Don’t get carried away, son, don’t get carried away,” he mutters, raising his glass like a toddler with a beaker and taking a decent slurp of red. “Pickle said Violet had being trying to track her down, which kind of kills off the idea that she and her schoolmate did her in.” He scowls into his glass, wondering. “Suppressed memory,” he mumbles, and it’s as much a proposition as a query. He closes an eye. “Don’t think it, don’t you dare …,”
He doesn’t want to look directly at the thought as it slinks, catlike, around the skirting boards of his mind.
It would be a better story if she were missing.
It would be a better story if she were dead.
Outside, the rain hits the windows like handfuls of grit; the wind testing the old building for gaps in the masonry, the roof joists, the hearth. Soot and ash keep swirling out from the fireplace with each fresh gust of wind. He could very happily sit here and get drunk until bedtime, but he can’t help but feel that he’s somehow trodden on the tail of something big.
Rowan is currently neck-deep in the digital archive of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Gazette: a database of words and images so old-fashioned that Rowan confidently expects to see actual footage from the thawing of the last ice age. He’s typed any amount of keywords and dates into the tiny little search facility but it’s still a mixed bag of offerings. He’s found the original article printed on the Saturday after the girls went missing: early November, 1991. They aren’t named in the article and the Detective Sergeant quoted as being concerned for their welfare is an Evelyn Cater of Whitehaven CID. There’s no byline on the story. The next piece is from three days later. It’s accompanied by an image of a small, wiry man with thick black hair, small eyes and an impeccably smart suit. His name is given as Derrick Millward. The still vastness of Wast Water takes up the background: divers in dinghies emerging, golem-like, from the thick mud of the water’s edge. Rowan scans the text and smiles, gratefully, as he recognises the name of the writer. Chris Gardner was working as a sub-editor at the North West Evening Mail when Rowan started out. He was a quiet, diligent chap who’d eschewed the lure of London in favour of a quiet life, a steady job and a nice house just outside Millom, which he planned to share with his wife and their then baby daughter. Last time he saw him was at the funeral of an old editor they had in common. Chris’s wife had died of breast cancer three years before, he’d been made redundant from the Mail, and the house had halved in value due to a subsidence problem and the rumour of Japanese knotweed in the back garden. Chris was bearing up under the strain of it all. He believed there were people who had it worse. Rowan wasn’t sure who.
Rowan performs a quick Google search for Chris Gardner, alongside a few words that might narrow it down. Millom. Journalist. Sub-editor. Unlucky bastard. He finds him listed as a page designer for a glossy lifestyle magazine based in Kendal. Rowan follows the link. The front page is given over to a pretty middle-aged woman staring wistfully at a tree, all yard-boots and Barbour and expensively bleached hair. The accompanying banner promises an exclusive interview with a landowner determined to build a natural burial ground on land in the Wasdale Valley. Rowan rolls his eyes. Gives an unkind tut of disapproval and mutters darkly about provincialism. Calls the number and wonders if Chris is in the mood to help an old friend.