In the windless night, it seemed as if the smell was all over the tump. A raw essence of decay, of corrupted flesh, sharp and hideously sweet. Stephen Price and Pedr Morgan had secretly buried a new corpse here, which by now would indeed be in a ripe condition, but… buried.
Under the moon’s lamp, I rounded the tump to where they’d dug and was driven back, as if struck, by a reek so insidiously putrid that I felt as if my own body were rotting in its blast. Was sent reeling away, a hand cupped over my nose, my feet slithering and…
Christ…
A blow – a battlefield blow. A bright, ripping pain in the back of my head had me tumbling, flung around and thrown down, my stricken head jouncing from the bole of the tree behind me, legs slithering into a bed of twiggery and stony soil.
I lay for long moments, benumbed, the night in spasm around me. I must simply have backed hard into a tree with a low and knobbled branch which had scored my skull and put me down. But it had felt like an act of violence.
Reaching up a hand, I hissed in pain on finding a flap of peeled flesh, warm blood flooding through my fingers, my hair already thick with it.
Embedded in tree roots, I stared through the pain into a blackness, as if into the cave where the children of Mat met – entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. And the devil. The hole gaped at me like an open mouth, and its breath was foul. No escape from the stench of bloating flesh from… not a cave…
…but it was an orifice in the tump’s flank, where none had been when I was here before. When I opened my mouth to call out for Thomas Jones and Vaughan, something at once rushed in, foul as returning vomit.
How can I tell you this? How can I describe the horror of closing my mouth on a mess of putrid flesh? Trying to retch, but finding no breath for it. Beginning to choke, the panic throwing me on my back amidst bone-hard roots, knowing full well that, although my throat and gut were tight with revulsion, there was nothing in my mouth.
Nothing anywhere. No air. The moon gone, darkness absolute.
Know that I like darkness. Nights when I can lie on my back, and planets and stars are laid out for me in strings and clusters like an intricate garden whose patterns I know with an intimacy as if I’d cultivated them myself.
This was a solid darkness, like stilled smoke. Should I have formed a prayer, holding it inside me, or inscribed a protective pentagram on the air? We don’t think, even those of us who’ve pored for years over the Cabala and ascended, if only in our minds, the angelic stairways. In cold life, magic has a tendency to shrink back into the books. In the struggle against hungry death, we fall back on the physical.
With the running blood pooling on my face, I pushed against the roots, dug my boots into soft earth, coming up very slowly, my back against the tree. But my body felt too heavy, and I was aware of something pulling me back.
Fighting it, cold sweat welling from my skin to join the blood, but it was too much for me and I slid back into the gleefully crackling leaves, and felt a presence, a nearness, an active resentment fast hardening into hatred as I realised I must needs go into the hole.
XLVIII
Not in a Goodly Way
A LOG THE size of a side of mutton was in slumber in the ingle at Nant-y-groes. I bent over the meagre glow from its underside, needing bodily heat more than ever I could remember. But Stephen Price was a farmer and wouldn’t even think to awaken his fire before morning.
‘Not that I sleep much these nights,’ he said. ‘Three or four hours, then I’ll awake and get dressed, have a bite to eat, and then mabbe doze till dawn, if I can. And tonight, with this Gethin let loose…’
‘You know about this?’
‘The whole country knows of it by now.’
I looked around. The moon was a wavering lamp in the poor, blued glass of a deep-hewn window. I could hear Clarys the housekeeper clattering somewhere. In the brightness of pain, my thoughts were voiced, fast as arrows.
‘Where’s your wife? Why do I never see your wife?’
Price shuffled uncomfortably on his stool.
‘Gone.’
‘I’m… very sorry to hear that.’
‘To Monaughty farm. To stay with my brother’s family.’
I’d thought he’d meant dead. A quiet woman, Anna Ceddol had said. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Well, I was glad she wasn’t dead, but why had she gone to stay at another farm, not even two miles away?
Stephen Price was asking me if I wanted to lie down. I shook my head… but slowly, the pain scraping ceaselessly at my head like a wind-driven bough against a window. I’d bathed it in the holy well and again with well-water in the yard at Nant-y-groes. The good housekeeper, Clarys, had applied a nettle balm, but it had begun to bleed again.
‘I’ll recover,’ I said.
Looked like you were rehearsing alone for some Christmas play, Thomas Jones had said, shaken. Pretending the other actors were there all around. Frit the hell out of me, boy.
‘I did not mean for this to happen,’ Price said. ‘I didn’t think it would happen to you.’
He hadn’t even asked why I, accompanied by two others, had come this night to Brynglas, seeming only grateful that I was attempting, in my way, to uncover what was wrong here. And if he hadn’t thought that anything would happen to me he seemed not unhappy that something had.
‘Didn’t think such things could happen to me either,’ I said dully.
And had once been foolish enough to think that if they ever did I’d feel… favoured? Maybe one day I’d be far enough removed from it to consider the science, but not now, when I felt as if my very soul had been snatched out and left to go cold.
Could not smother another spasm of shivering, and at last Stephen Price pulled down an iron poker from the wall and raised the log until a flame came tonguing through.
‘I… was not as forthright with you,’ he said stiffly, as I might’ve been. Never told you nothing wrong, but could’ve told you more.’
There was a clopping of hooves from the yard outside. The horses still were edgy, frit and sweating. I’d asked if we might leave all three at Nant-y-groes for a while, to calm down while we considered our situation. And so Vaughan and Thomas Jones had followed Price’s sons to the stables. Leaving us alone, Price and me.
We’d moved on, widely skirting the tump and the marshy ground. Leading the horses, at last, through the oak wood and up to Pilleth church.
Jones and I had waited in the trees while Vaughan crept up alone to the church, where it took him not long to establish that the building and surrounds were deserted. He said later that he’d stifled a cry when, on peering around the wall of the tower, he’d encountered the stone virgin on her plinth, her face so tainted that she seemed to sneer into his eyes. I think he meant to pray to her and could not.
But at least the cold virgin was alone, so we came down from the hill the more direct way, veering from the path only once, so that I might be sure that the door and shutters of the Bryn were closed tight against invasion.
At first despondent over our failure to find Dudley, I was briefly lit by a small hope that we’d been wildly wrong and that he was back in Presteigne in some other whore’s bed.
But that light soon went out.