'I'd forget the salt if I was you.' Eli gripped the edge of the bar, his wizened knuckles showing white. 'Them two aren't fanciful. Far from it. Matter o' fact boys like you'll go a long way to find the likes of them agin'. Don't take 'em as rumours, mister. Take my advice and heed 'em as—warnings.'
Peter felt as though somebody had thrown the door wide and let in a gust of Arctic wind. 'We'll see you again, landlord.'
'That's as it maybe, sir.' He picked up his cloth again. 'But as I said, not with the boy. I'm afraid you'll have to leave him at home. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.'
'What a horrible depressing place.' They were back in the car before Janie spoke again. She was sitting in the back with Gavin, the boy leaning up against her and clutching her hand. 'We're not going there again. If you're desperate for a pint, Peter, I'm afraid you'll have to find somewhere else or go on your own. Every one of those men in there gave me the creeps.'
'Typical country folk.' Peter seemed engrossed in negotiating the steep winding lane which led back up to Hodre. 'When you've lived in a remote village all your life and never gone anywhere else it becomes your own little world and you resent any intrusion, however harmless. It was just a not very clever way of trying to get us to pack up and go.'
Janie sighed. She found herself wincing as she followed the glare of the powerful headlights, apprehensive of what they might reveal in their twin beams. Questions to which she had no answer hammered into her brain. What did that pair of ghouls, Bostock and Peters, find to do on moonlight nights? Were there really screams to be heard coming from the Hodre stone circle?
Warnings.
Oh God, she had to persuade Peter to leave. Those two had been right, she'd sensed it all week; there was definitely something inexplicably sinister about Hodre!
4
When Janie looked in Gavin's bedroom later that evening she knew that he was faking sleep again; his eyes were closed too tightly so that the lids trembled and his body was too taut, too tense for slumber. Gently she stepped back out on to the landing and closed the door. She must not let him see that she was afraid too. She had to keep her courage for a day or two and in the meantime persuade Peter to leave. And pray that they would be safe until then. Oh God, every minute was hell!
She could hear the typewriter clacking in the front room as she came down the stairs. The sound made her angry; he didn't have any need to work on Sunday evening. It was as though he was doing it deliberately to shut himself off from herself and Gavin, a kind of subtle separation.
Angrily she threw the door open. Her husband was sitting at his ancient Imperial 66 pounding at the keys, one hand half-raised, as if to silence her before she spoke.
Peter!' She almost stamped her foot. 'Do you realise just how terrified Gavin is?'
Annoyingly he finished a paragraph and read it through before slowly turning to face her. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'Maybe about the Wilsons but I'm going to have a discreet word with Hughes about that in the morning, anyway.'
'I don't mean about the Wilsons.' She kicked the door closed behind her, stood with arms akimbo. 'I mean about tonight?
That was all poppycock.' He grinned. Tm surprised at an intelligent girl like you taking any notice of it.'
'You don't understand.' Her cheeks were becoming red. 'Because you're too immersed in this damned book of yours to realise what's going on around you.'
'And what is going on around me?'
She had to get herself under control before she spoke. 'I don't know. All I know is that there is something here, something that has me looking over my shoulder most of the time, wanting to hide in the house, to lock the doors so that it can't get me. But you wouldn't notice because you're all wrapped up in this book of yours. If a bomb went off you wouldn't hear it.'
'It's all in the mind.' He picked up the typewriter cover and draped it untidily over the machine, deciding to struggle with the chapter ending in the morning. 'The change from town to country We, the remoteness. The silence. It'll pass off and in a few weeks you'll feel as if you've never lived anywhere else/
'In a few weeks!' Her voice rose to a pitch. 'Peter, for God's sake I can't stand it here any longer and neither can Gavin. He could've been killed yesterday. He's frightened out of his wits.'
'He's just worried about the Wilsons.' Peter thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans as he stood up. 'We'll get that settled. Look, if there was anything here to be frightened of, d'you think I'd let you stay?'
'You're stubborn enough to blind yourself to everything except your writing,' she sighed, 'and I can see I'm wasting my time with you. Another thing, that cat hasn't turned up. I last saw it on Friday morning.'
'Cats often go off for days on end. Probably he's found himself an attractive she-cat somewhere.'
And talking of sex, he thought, that's one commodity that's in very short supply at Hodre. Maybe Janie was brewing up for a period and that was the cause of her tenseness. He tried to work out the date, and realised then just how much he had cut himself off from Janie lately.
Janie had abandoned all hope of sleep. Her mind, her body simply refused to relax so that slumber could take over. Tomorrow she would get to work on those new curtains for the bedroom window; at least it would shut out the moonlight. A full moon was almost as bright as daylight. She'd never really noticed it at Perrycroft; she had become accustomed to the all-night orange radiance of street-lighting filling the bedroom. Moonlight was more beautiful, certainly. But it was also more sinister.
She found herself holding her breath so that she could listen, though she didn't want to listen, just close her eyes and go to sleep, to get away from this awful place for a few hours. It was like some compelling force; she had to look and listen in case something stole upon her. Like what? She didn't know. That was the trouble.
Peter was asleep, breathing rhythmically. Damn him, he was so insensitive.
Now she was listening for Gavin, afraid that he might get up and go outside again. No, he wouldn't do anything like that at night.
A dog was barking somewhere. Probably a sheep dog from the Ruskin farm on the other side of the big forest. Somehow it didn't sound like a dog; son of—wild! A long mournful howl that seemed to echo across the hills. She wondered if by any chance a wild animal could be loose. It wasn't out of the question. Only a year or so ago there had been some kind of huge feline creature on the loose (oh God, that was somewhere in Wales, too!), and a number of sheep had been killed by it. Like that puma in Surrey which was still supposed to be at large according to the press.
There was something in those hills all right.
Janie slipped into a fitful doze, still listening subconsciously.
Then, suddenly, she heard a harsh long-drawn-out scream that jarred her brain with the force of an electric shock, juddering every nerve in her body and bringing her up to a sitting position before she was full awake. Her hands covered her ears in a futile attempt to shut it out. Waking, she tried to tell herself that it had been a dream, that the events and fears of this past week had combined and exploded in one mind-shattering nightmare.
Trembling. Listening. The room seemed to vibrate with the hellish animal-like cry, and the moonlight dimmed as though even the silvery orb in the heavens feared to cast its ethereal glow upon whatever lurked in the wooded hills.
For a few seconds she seemed—to be paralysed. She was unable to shout or to shake her sleeping husband, imprisoned by that same inexplicable force which had taunted her and terrified her ever since their arrival at Hodre.