'It's the sea,' Andy Dark replied, 'I know for a fact that this week there are the highest tides of the year. Sometimes, according to the locals, the wood has been flooded right up to the road.' The road, oh what wouldn't we give just to set foot on that hard flat tarmac. 'I've never witnessed the autumn tides myself and you can't always believe what the villagers tell you, but that sea sounds bloody angry to me. I'd've thought there would have been a raging gale in that case, one to blow this damned fog away. Hey, it's starting to get light!'
The fog was turning a lighter shade of grey, they could make out the shapes of the trees around them, boles that became faces again. Expressions. If you stared at them long enough you read something that transcended malevolence. Fear! It was as though Droy Wood itself was afraid, engendering an atmosphere of impending doom, hell awaiting its own collapse. The light was coming fast, the vapour now taking on a faint rosy hue as though the sun was trying to break through, a battle of the elements with a raging sea providing eerie background music. But still there was no wind, just a deadly unnatural calm.
Andy tensed, thought he heard a scream somewhere but he could not be sure. A single yell of pain and terror like Bertie Hass had made when the wolves bunched and rushed him.
'Well, we can't stay here.' The conservation officer finally put into words his thoughts of the past half-hour.
'We're not. going down there? Carol gripped his arm. 'We can't, Andy. The wolves.!'
The wolves have gone.' At least I bloody well hope so. 'I don't think we'll have any more trouble from them but if we hear them we'll just have to shin up the nearest tree. If we stay up here much longer we'll get so cramped we'll fall anyway.'
'I suppose you're right.' She was staring into the mist, making out shapes that could have been wolves but probably were not. In this wood anything might be just anything, or, on the other hand, nothing at all. You never found out until it was too late.
'I've been thinking,' she wasn't going to like this very much, 'if we just go on blindly like this we'll end up even more lost than we already are.'
'So?'
'Our best plan is to head back to Droy House.'
'No!' Carol pulled away from him. 'Anywhere but there. You're mad.'
'Just listen will you?' Andy grabbed her wrist, thought for a moment that she was going to make a run for it. 'There's a flat roof to the house,' unless it's bloody well altered shape again, 'and if we could find a way up there we'd be above the level of the treetops.'
'It might just clear,' — a vain hope — 'but I reckon we could probably attract attention from there. They've got to be searching the wood by now. We can holler, scream, make one helluva din.'
Carol bit her lip, shuddered visibly. What Andy said made sense. The German was gone but those awful dungeons were still there. 'All right, I guess we've got nothing to lose now.'
The moment they reached the ground their legs buckled under them, the numbness beginning to tingle, discomfort escalating into pain. Sheer agony, rubbing at their limbs in an attempt to speed up the circulation. And then shakily they were retracing their steps down that muddy waterlogged track, their feet sinking in at every step.
'There's a lot of water lying,' Andy muttered, ' more than there was last night… as though the sea is steadily creeping into the wood.' He had to shout now to make himself heard above the pounding of waves. 'I think the tide's going to cover the wood!' A disconcerting thought, remembering that time when he had gone out with the coastguard because a man gathering mussels had been trapped on the mudflats, a wide creek filling up between him and the shore, cutting off his retreat. They had just been in time. Now they had another reason for returning to Droy House, an island in the midst of the flooding; being driven there.
'Look!' Carol stopped, pointed. Ahead of them on the path lay a mud covered pistol, one that they both recognised instantly. Bertie Mass's Luger. Beside it was the holster belt and leather ammunition pouch. Nothing else; no body, no remnants of a Luftwaffe uniform torn to shreds by vicious fangs, 'It's the German's al! right.' Andy picked it up, examined it, ejected the spent shells, smelled burned cordite. 'And at least it's real enough. I wonder
. '
He lifted up the belt, unclipped the flap of the pouch, poured the shiny brass cartridges into his hand. Live ones, as good as the day they left the factory. He loaded the weapon, dropped the belt back on to the ground and put the spare cartridges in his pocket. 'Well, at least we're armed.' He tried to sound confident for Carol's benefit. There certainly weren't any dead wolves lying around, not even a trace of blood. Not that he expected to find any.
'Come on,' he said pushing on ahead, 'the sooner we get back to the house, the better. There's water seeping up everywhere, this place is getting like a bath sponge.' He was concerned, had that awful feeling that they were never going to get out of the wood.
Once the sunlight broke through the fog but the vapour instantly closed in, shut it out again. Droy Wood was fighting desperately to preserve its evil secrets, determined that those who entered should not leave. Andy peered ahead. The house could not be far away now. He experienced a sinking feeling; suppose the powers that controlled this domain of evil had snatched it away like they had removed the German. Here, anything was possible. His mouth was dry and if the path had not been a veritable quagmire he would have broken into a run.
There was something on the track ahead of them. At first he thought it was a sapling and then it moved, stepped out to bar their way. Instinctively the Luger came up, his finger resting on the trigger. It was a human being, a female, even in the dim outline in the fog, sensuous, naked like Carol Embleton had been.
'Thelma!' Carol gave a cry, but even then she could not be sure, the wisps of grey mist almost obliterating the features although it could not destroy the overall picture of a girl she had grown up with. Her instinct was to rush forward but for some reason she held back. Something wasn't quite right. Ten yards separated them, it might as well have been a hundred. Thelma Brown's eyes flickered behind the opaqueness, a dim torch-bulb that was faulty, threatening to go out.
'Do not go on.' Her voice was a scarcely audible whisper as though it required a tremendous effort to speak; hoarse and straining, trying to say more but the words would not come. 'Go back… go back… go back., ' The mist thickened, covered her, and when it swirled again she was gone.
'Where is she?' Carol Embleton asked in a hushed whisper. But Andy Dark was not listening; he was running forward, ploughing his way through mud and pools of water that splashed up, saturating his already damp trousers. He did not expect to catch a glimpse of Thelma, no more than he had expected to find the body of Bertie Hass lying back there where the wolves had ravaged him. He stooped down, examined the ground, saw the remnants of their own footmarks from the previous night, his own criss-crossed Wellington imprints, Carol's bare feet. But neither the German's nor Thelma Brown's!
'Why did she run away?' Carol sensed the stupidity of her own question, half-guessed the answer that hammered in her brain. Because she's already dead like the others here. And they snatched her away because she tried to warn us.
'It was some kind of hallucination.' Andy could not think of a better reply on the spur of the moment. 'It wasn't really her at all.' Not a deliberate lie, just a guess.
'She warned us,' Carol whispered, 'We can't go back to the house.'
'Then where else are we going to go, you tell me?'
'I. don't know.'
'And neither do I. We can't stop out here another night. I doubt if the house is any more dangerous than the wood. And, anyway, they should be looking for us soon. If we can only let them know where we are.'