On Deadly Ground

  I moved in a slow, reflective stride. Thoughts moved by as though on a conveyor belt in front of my mind’s eye. Sometimes it was images of the old folk lying dead in the retirement home; or the mother and daughter offering to become my sex-slaves; or newer ones of a middle-aged couple stoning a black Labrador to death, a greedy gleam in their eye: they’d eat well tonight.

  But the truth of the matter was I wasn’t sleeping well at night. When I did manage to sleep I was plagued by a recurring dream. I dreamt I was being visited each night by… by what?

  I didn’t know what. I hadn’t a clue. Mostly I saw nothing. But I’d wake, choking with terror, my head lathered with sweat…

  I dreamed I’d wake to feel the weight of something…no, someone on top of me. As if a heavyweight wrestler squatted on my chest, his big hand flat over my face, pressing my head back into the pillow.

  Other times I’d wake to see…no, again that isn’t right. But it was hard to describe. Rather than see, I’d sense that there was someone in the room with me. Leaning with their back against the wall; or at other times closer; maybe leaning right over me, looking down into my face. I’d sense a huge figure, I could sense its sheer brute strength. And its menace. As it stood there in silence, without moving.

  And I sensed, also, that it found me fascinating. As if it was a bug hunter who had found a new species of butterfly to pin to his board.

  And I knew it would return each night to study me, or to squat on me, its bare grey feet planted squarely on my chest. Unable to move, unable to scream even though the terror blazed through me like lightning, I’d lie there; paralyzed by fear.

  It would gaze down at me, its grey face as close to my face as your face is to this page; then it would reach forward and grasp my—

  (Bare grey feet? Where did I get that from? Bare grey feet, bigger than an ape’s, only with stubby, square-ended toes, with toenails that were cracked and misshapen and blackened looking)

  Where had I pulled that image from?

  I’d seen nothing. I’d only dreamed it. A stupid nightmare.

  As I walked along the path I shook the grey-man image out of my head, and—

  Grey man?

  Shocked by the suddenness of the words cracking through my mind, I stopped dead. Why had I thought that?

  Until a minute ago I wouldn’t have even claimed I’d dreamed about a grey man. Only now the description came to me, as if I was beginning to remember an event I’d forgotten.

  My heartbeat began to thud harder in my chest; my skin chilled; fear squirmed in my stomach. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this at all. Why did I feel so…so shit-scared about a few scraps of remembered dream? Because that’s all it was—wasn’t it?

  Above me the sky darkened. Fear seemed to hang over me like a living creature; something dark and terrible with huge wings that beat with all the ghastly slowness of the heartbeat of a dying man.

  I reached out and gripped on to a fence post. I held it so tight I felt its splintered surface prick the palms of my hands. I shivered…shivered again. For all the world it felt as if I was being lowered centimetre by centimetre into a vat of ice-cold water.

  ‘Listen to me, Rick, you moron,’ I snarled to myself. They’re dreams, they aren’t real. I am not remembering something that has actually happened. It’s only a damned dream, OK?’

  ‘What d’you mean? Not like that thing in the wood the night of Ben Cavellero’s party, that reached out and—’

  Crack! Crack!

  Gunshots snapped along the valley. There was unrest in the camps now. Sometimes the only way soldiers guarding food depots could keep order was to fire warning shots into the air.

  I climbed over the fence and sat on the steeply sloping hillside, looking down over the woods, over the carp pond that mirrored the deep blue of the sky and across to where Leeds stood in the distance. Now fires burned constantly there. They looked like little blobs of flickering yellow. Still, it was strangely peaceful. Any noises from the camp that reached me were softened by distance.

  And as I sat there the ground moved. It was nothing dramatic. For all the world it felt as if I was sitting in a rowing boat on a still pond. Then along came a small ripple. Smoothly I lifted up a centimetre or so, then smoothly dropped down.

  That was all. No sound. No vibration. Just a smooth lifting and falling sensation. As I sat there it happened again. Then again.

  I stood up and looked around me. Nothing looked out of place.

  As I looked out in the direction of Leeds I saw the flashes of light. They might have been lightning flashes but there was no cloud. They came in long, slow pulsing flashes of brilliance. I must have counted fifteen of them before they stopped. Minutes later the ground ripples started again, these more noticeable than the first ones. Still there was no sound. The night was otherwise peaceful.

  After a while, I began to make out palls of cloud rising into the air above Leeds. Although it was nearly dark they showed like snowy mountains against the sky. They reminded me of the clouds you’d see streaming from power station cooling towers. But these were a hell of a lot bigger.

  Behind me I heard shouting. A group of men, I guess in their late teens, early twenties, were running down the hill towards me. They were shouting and laughing; even from this distance I could see that the expression on their faces mated excitement with greed at the same time.

  They carried a woman at shoulder height. She was screaming; there was blood on her thighs. She was naked.

  I think it was the woman who had stopped me a few days earlier in the street. Caroline — that was her name. Caroline Lucas and her daughter, Portia.

  The mob ran towards me but swerved at the last minute because the fence blocked their way. Then they headed away towards a clump of trees. I caught a glimpse of the woman’s eyes. The brown eyes that had looked so hopeful and trustfully at me were now seared with pain and terror. Just for a second they locked onto mine. A desperate hope flashed. She was about to shout something to me, then the gang began to chant:

  ‘SHE’S GOING TO GET HER BLOODY CUNT FUCKED IN!

  SHE’S GOING TO GET HER BLOODY CUNT FUCKED IN!

  SHE’S GOING TO GET HER…’

  It went on and on, like a football chant, raw and wild and hungry.

  I sat there on the hillside watching Leeds burn. Five minutes later and the chant had vanished into the distance. I stood up and walked down the hill.

  For some reason my skin prickled all over. The palms of my hands and my eyelids felt unnaturally sensitive. I couldn’t shift the conviction that I was covered in dirt; and it was the grime working into my skin that pricked and itched at my neck and my arms and stomach.

  I walked faster. Seconds later I found myself on the banks of the carp pond. The water, covering an area little bigger than a football field, twinkled in the starlight.

  Without pausing, I pulled off my shoes and walked straight into the water. Ten steps in the water reached my waist. Another five and it lapped against my chest. The water felt fresh, and oh-so-cool as it soaked through my clothes. In my mind’s eye I saw those fat lazy carp circling my bare feet as they foraged across the muddy lake bottom.

  In the last few days I’d seen more than my dumb brain could handle. My senses were overwhelmed. I’d just seen huge explosions tear through the distant city. I could do nothing to prevent it. I’d seen a woman carried away by a gang of men who, within a matter of days, had reverted to savagery. I could do nothing to prevent it. It was as if my mind had said: Enough. And because it could no longer process all that colossal influx of raw data it had shut down, leaving me to run on a kind of instinctual autopilot. Anyone watching me that night would have seen a man moving like a zombie through the water—face expressionless, eyes deadened, responsive to nothing: not even if the stars chose to explode above his head.

  I moved deeper into the lake, feet stirring the silt bed; water rippled musically. When it reached my shoulders I turned and lay back, slowly kicked my feet and flo
ated out across the lake.

  As I went swimming out across the lake, my mind, unable to cope with the present, went swimming back into the past. Back through the years to the time I’d first gone night swimming. It had been a night much like this. Warm. The stars sparkling diamond-hard in the sky. With me were Howard Sparkman, Dean Skilton and Jim Keller. We’d have been around nine years old. We splashed each other and promised we’d come night swimming again. This time coax some girls along.

  But that night there were just the four of us, night swimming, talking about the first things that came into our heads. Dean had swum towards me, cheeks puffed tight, before squirting out a stream of water from his mouth. ‘Will we still be doing this when we’re grown up?’

  ‘God knows,’ I said and splashed him.

  ‘I’ll be in another part of the world,’ Jim said. ‘I’m joining the air force…I’ll be a pilot out in Africa or somewhere like that.’

  ‘You won’t be a pilot.’ Howard grinned. ‘You can’t even ride a skateboard yet.’

  ‘I’ll learn.’

  ‘What are you going to do in the future, Rick?’

  ‘Dunno. Kids think the future’s going to be great and they’ll do great jobs…most end up working in banks, shops, offices and stuff like that. Hey, Deanie-boy, see how high you can squirt.’

  ‘Well, I am going to learn how to fly,’ Jim said firmly as he trod water in the middle of the pond.

  ‘You’ll have no need to.’

  ‘How comes that, Dean?’

  ‘In the future computers will fly planes. They won’t need pilots.’

  ‘How do you know what will be in the future?’ I said, lying back and churning the water with my feet. ‘No one can see what’s going to happen in thirty seconds’ time.’

  Howard splashed me, chuckling, ‘Yeah, a shark might come along and chew you in two, right?’

  Jim said seriously. ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen to you, though, do you? You don’t know what you’ll be doing this time next week, never mind what you’ll be doing ten years from today.’

  ‘I’ll be nineteen in ten years,’ I said.

  ‘And I’ll be twenty,’ Jim said firmly. ‘And I’ll be a pilot.’

  I floated on my back and looked up at the stars, the cool water rippling against my face.

  No. You never know what the future holds for you.

  A week after that first experience of night swimming, Jim Keller’s father had stormed out of the house after a blazing row with Mrs Keller. He ordered Jim into the car, then drove out of the village, intending to drive to London.

  Little more than a kilometre from this very carp lake the car had run into the back of a tractor. Both Jim and his father had died there on the road. The one hard detail of the accident that went round the school was that when ten-year-old Jim had been thrown clean through the windscreen the glass had shaved off both thumbs.

  The thumbs were never found. Soon it became a dare for the other kids to go and hunt for Jim Keller’s thumbs along the grass verge.

  No, you couldn’t see into the future. For me this was the future. One I couldn’t have imagined as that nine-year-old. And as I floated there, still as death in the water, I imagined I saw Jim Keller’s ghost swimming alongside me. He had no thumbs. But maybe, if there was a God, he would have got his wings after all. And now he’d have an entire universe to glide through.

  I held my breath, closed my eyes and glided down through the waters beneath the surface of the lake. When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but darkness. Then I touched bottom. And I stayed there for as long as I could.

  Chapter 18

  I don’t think anyone could say with any degree of certainty when, precisely, the transformation took place. But as I woke up the morning after I’d seen the woman being carried away into the wood I realized that the refugees from Leeds had become an army of occupation. Now they just took what they wanted from us.

  Of course, it must still have been a minority who had turned to anarchy. Thousands were still law-abiding citizens. They camped out in the fields and, at the appointed time, patiently queued in line for their bowl of stew that grew more watery by the day. But by then that minority (who wouldn’t hesitate to crack your skull for the apple in your pocket) vastly outnumbered the original population of Fairburn. And that minority was growing.

  Stephen handed me a black coffee as I walked into the kitchen. He’d hidden a tin of Nescafe beneath a loose floorboard in his bedroom. The same hiding place where he’d stored his Playboy magazines ten years ago.

  The kitchen was gloomy. We’d boarded the windows and doors with planks to try and stop the house being looted every time we walked out the door. Not that it did much good. We knew the door would be kicked in the next time we left the house. Come to that, soon they’d not bother waiting for us to leave.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ Stephen said, blowing on his coffee, ‘that it wasn’t the criminal element who started looting first? It’s the businessmen and the professional go-getters. They’re the ones who are most ruthless in going out and ransacking someone’s home.’

  I tried making conversation but the truth of the matter was that my knowledge of what was going to happen to that woman the night before was preying on my mind. Maybe I could have helped? Maybe if I had taken her and the daughter in she might still have been safe. And what had happened to the daughter? She couldn’t have been much more than fourteen, surely they wouldn’t have—

  A pounding on the door startled me so much the coffee jumped from my mug to scald my hand.

  Stephen looked at me. ‘It sounds as if they’re back again.’

  ‘Looters?’

  He picked up a baseball bat he kept by the back door, ‘Look,’ he shouted, ‘You’re wasting your time. We’ve been picked clean already. D’ya hear? There’s no food left in here. It’s all gone.’

  The sound of fist pounding wood came again.

  I took a meat cleaver from the drawer. The bastards wouldn’t walk all over us this time.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Stephen called. ‘You can forget this house. There’s no food, no blankets here. Nothing—it’s all—’

  ‘Stephen?’ came a muffled voice. ‘That you?’

  I let out a sigh. ‘It’s OK. It’s Dean.’

  ‘Stephen. Rick. Let me in. I’ve got an important message from Ben Cavellero.’

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ Stephen started sliding back bolts. ‘Sorry, we’ve had to turn the place into Fort Knox. For what good that’ll do us.’ He opened the door.

  Dean walked in. He was panting and the agitated expression on his face was enough make my scalp prickle. ‘What is it, Dean? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Hell, everything’s wrong.’ He wiped at the sweat on his forehead. ‘Look, can you get up to Ben’s house for ten o’clock? He’s holding a meeting.’

  ‘Sure, what’s it all—’

  ‘Sorry. Can’t stop. I’ve got to get down to the village to tell some of the others.’

  ‘Some of the others?’

  ‘Yeah, the meeting’s by invitation only. I’ve got a list of names he wants up there.’

  ‘Can’t you tell us what’s it about?’

  ‘Yeah, Dean,’ I shook my head bemused. ‘Why all the mystery?’

  ‘Look…I don’t know any details yet. But, believe me, he’s got something to show us. And it’s important…no, it’s vital you’re there.’

  ‘You make it sound like it’s a matter of—’

  ‘Yeah, it is.’ Dean wasn’t smiling. ‘It is a matter of life and death.’

  As we walked out onto Trueman Way Stephen asked me, ‘Where are you taking the guitar?’ My cheeks pinked. I felt self-conscious and hoped, somehow, he wouldn’t have noticed the big black case clutched by its handle in my left fist. ‘The only safe place to keep it is Ben’s house. He mentioned I could store it there until this is all over.’

  Stephen gave a smile that said he understood and approved. ‘Why not? I’ll bet you my las
t dollar someone’s breaking open the back door of the house right now.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll find Mum’s jewellery?’

  ‘I hope not. We buried it deep enough in the back garden. Anyway, what they’ll be looking for is food, cutlery and clothes. Not that there’s much of that left to take now.’

  We left the road and headed into the shade of the woods, taking the short cut to Ben Cavellero’s house. Automatically, you found yourself trying to hold your breath. The woods were being used as a mass toilet by thousands of people. The communal latrines were already overloaded to the point of uselessness. And after more than a week the shit was piling high beneath the bushes. Flies buzzed hungrily to and fro.

  ‘Well then, old buddy,’ Stephen said, automatically putting a handkerchief over his mouth. ‘Any guesses what Mr Cavellero wants to tell us?’

  ‘Search me. It sounds serious.’

  ‘But why only invite a select few?’

  ‘From the look of the names I saw on Dean’s list it’s mainly people he’s known for a long time.’

  Stephen started to speculate about something Ben Cavellero had mentioned earlier about the gas dispersing over Leeds. Maybe the forty thousand on our doorstep would soon be on their way home. But I wasn’t listening. Because I’d seen her.

  She didn’t look the same. But I knew it was her.

  Stephen kept on talking. I couldn’t take my eyes from her as we passed by.

  She was sitting on the bare soil beneath the trees. The birds sang sweetly in the branches. Here and there a little light filtered through the leaves to dapple the ground around her.

  I gripped the handle of the guitar case tightly as a wave of self-disgust rose through me.

  It was that same woman again. Caroline Lucas, mother of shy and pretty Portia.

  She sat on the ground with a pink candlewick bedspread round her shoulders. Her hair was flattened to her head on one side and stuck out messily on the other. Her face was puffed and plastered in dirt and shit. Her two eyes gleamed out of the shit mask. She was lost in a world of her own. You could have kicked her and she wouldn’t have so much as grunted.