The girl from the farm found the dead cyclist on a single lane road to Rickney on the Pevensey Levels. He lay awkwardly, arms buckled beneath his torso, head twisted, eyes in a frozen stare across the tarmac. The girl was certain that he was a cyclist because he wore a luminescent yellow vest and Lycra shorts, but she could see no bike.
She first called 999, and then her dad, who kept vigil with her until the police arrived. A tall, fierce woman introduced herself as Inspector Ramsden. She paced around the dead cyclist, tutting loudly, as her officers scoured the hedgerows 90for the missing bicycle. It was a curious scene. Ramsden presumed this dead cyclist on the roadside was the result of a hit-and-run, but he was soaking wet, his fingers wrinkled, face bloated. As she crouched beside him, a bead of water seeped from the corner of his mouth. It was a hot July day and there had been no rain for over two weeks. A drought, they said on the news. But they said that every year, as if a drought was a freak event and not just what the normal weather was now.
What was she missing here?
Ramsden removed her shoes and clambered onto the bonnet of the police car to get a look at the bigger picture.
‘Ma’am,’ protested the driver.
‘Pipe down.’ Ramsden gazed north across fields striated with drainage ditches, towards an escarpment where the domes of the old Royal Greenwich Observatory pushed above the trees. She swivelled slowly, taking in the vast green lowland, scattered with sheep, telegraph poles and farmhouses, out towards Pevensey Castle and the sea.
She knew this place well. As a teenager, she and her best mate would sometimes cycle out here on a Saturday in summer to while away the hours with a packet of ten Marlboros and a bottle of Coke laced with vodka. They would tramp across the fields, jeering at sheep, then spy on farm boys for a while, choosing which one they’d do. But when winter came, the Levels became too soggy and waterlogged to bother with. Floods were common. This happened more often in recent years, as rising seas and storm tides battered the East Sussex coastline, threatening to revert the lowland to the tidal bay it had been in Roman times. But this month the Levels were as dry as she’d ever 91known them. There was no watery ditch nearby into which the cyclist could have pitched. They weren’t even in a particularly low-lying area. The field behind the body was one of several elevations dotted across the Levels, formerly islands in a lagoon at high tide. Anglo-Saxons built dwellings on them when they began to reclaim the marsh for crops and salt panning. Later, they became medieval villages. You could tell which ones they were from the –eye or –ey at the end of the name: Chilley, Southeye, Northeye. Where she now stood was at the foot of the abandoned village of Horse Eye, a stepped green hillock in the flatland, demarked by ridges and undulations where there had been houses and tracks.
Ramsden slid from the bonnet and put on her shoes. The girl from the farm was with Constable Hasan, explaining that she was driving her mum’s car to Hailsham when she spotted the body. A dark stain on the road surface, which she assumed to be spilled blood, turned out to be water. This had quickly evaporated in the sunshine, indicating that the girl had arrived soon after the incident. It could have been from the cyclist’s water bottle bursting on impact, except there was no water bottle here, only a body that bore all the signs of a drowning.
Nothing sensible sprang to Ramsden’s mind. There was the sliver of a possibility that someone had knocked the cyclist off his bike, murdered him by forcing litres of liquid down his throat, then ridden away at ten a.m. on a Saturday. But it was a ludicrous notion.
The scenario reminded her of a peculiar incident, years ago, back when she was a desk sergeant. Ramblers stumbled upon the body of twenty-year-old Tyler Carney in Chapel 92Field, at the eastern side of the Levels, near the site of the Anglo-Saxon islet of Northeye. Officers found a smoking, burned-out BMW on a track leading to the field, probably stolen by Carney, who they’d collared previously for petty larceny and vandalism. There were bruises on his shoulders but no signs of strangulation or blunt force trauma. The pathologist said he’d drowned. His body wasn’t far from the Waller Haven, so it was feasible that someone had dragged him from the water channel after an accident. Trouble was, the liquid in his lungs was briny, which cancelled out the possibility that he had drowned in fresh water. It was the sea that killed him.
The case grew more baffling when a dog walker reported a body in the Pevensey Haven on the same day, a separate channel almost two miles to the west. It was Tyler Carney’s girlfriend, Natasha Logan, lain on the riverbank in a fake fur coat, also drowned. The couple were spotted on a train to Eastbourne the previous evening. So what on earth had caused their night to end in tragedy?
One theory was that they went to the Levels to take drugs and became disorientated. Toxicology found small traces of marijuana in their systems, but no class As or alcohol. It was highly unlikely that Tyler and Natasha would go out onto a pitch-black field on a cloudy night just for a few spliffs that they could as easily smoke on the beach, but nobody could piece together a coherent alternative hypothesis. There were no witnesses and no suspects. The case remained unsolved.
‘Ma’am!’ there was a shout, ‘Ma’am!’ Sergeant Allsop rounded the corner, huffing and puffing. ‘We found the bike.’
‘Where?’ 93
‘Up a bloody tree about half a mile down the way.’
This brought to Ramsden’s mind a peculiar memory from her youth, when she and her best friend stumbled across an upright piano in a field on the Pevensey Levels. It was perfectly intact. A little out of tune, but playable, as if it had been placed there, ready for Elton John to turn up and launch into ‘Candle in the Wind’. They bashed out a dodgy version of ‘Chopsticks’ and fell about laughing. When they returned the following week, the piano had been smashed to tiny pieces in a frenzied attack.
The Levels were so weird.
Another time, they came across a Bible stuck in a hedge. Half the pages had been torn out while every page that remained had been scored with a swastika in what looked like blood.
But this – well, this was something else.
Ramsden looked up at a crow flapping across the wide blue sky. She kept watching until it shrank to a black dot over the Levels. Then she said:
‘Okay, so what the hell is going on here, then?’
It was a friend of their old maths teacher who asked them to steal his car. Up to his eyeballs in debt, he was desperate for a speedy operation on his haemorrhoids. An insurance payout on the theft and destruction of his vintage BMW 2000 would allow him to go private. He reasoned that his teacher friend would know some hooligan who’d nick it for 94cash, which is how Tyler and Natasha came to be recruited as car thieves.
Tyler had left his wayward teenage ways behind him but couldn’t turn down the money. A grand in cash would help them rent a flat in Bexhill. Get them out of their rut and on the way somewhere. The only risky bit was stealing the car from the old codger’s house without being noticed. Once they drove onto the Levels, it would be a cinch. There was nobody out there late at night, and by the time anybody spotted the flames, he and Tash would be legging it across the fields, concealed by darkness.
On the train to Eastbourne they kept a low profile, talking quietly. On the way to the house where the BMW was parked they shared a single-skin reefer. Nothing heavy. A mild skunk. They had a car key so they didn’t need to smash glass or hot wire the vehicle, though they had instructions to do that when they reached the Levels, to make it look legit.
Natasha was the driver. Tyler’s job was to set the thing alight. Trash it good and proper. Besides, Tash was one of those butter-wouldn’t-melt types who wouldn’t look too suspicious at the wheel of a posh car. She’d even put on one of her mum’s fur coats and a ton of makeup to get the right look.
A well crafty move.
The plan was all sorted, they thought, driving out of Eastbourne, through Pevensey, onto the A259, then off the road near Middle Barn Farm. Natasha had already checked it out on Google Maps. There was a convenient dirt track that would take them into a field with some raised ground. They could burn the car on one side and hotfoot it to the nearest lane on the other. 95
As the car crawled over the mud and stones, they turned off the headlights to stay discreet. Tyler opened the window and leaned out, shining a torch to show Natasha the way ahead. Cold air rushed in, smelling of salt and rotting fish, making them shiver. An uneasy murk enveloped the car, which bucked and swayed on hidden swells and riptides in the mud, like they were being washed downstream. It was hard to tell land from sky, the visible world reduced to an amorphous interplay of densities, shifting and warping as they advanced.
They’d chosen a cloudy night for the theft, but occasionally the moon broke through, shimmering light on flooded ditches and drainage channels, boggy indents and trackways, the imprint of a community long lost. Natasha remembered a geography lesson at school about Nazca lines in Peru. They reminded her of those, and how she thought that the people who left them must have been magicians or aliens. As the clouds reconverged, all traces of light were extinguished but for the beam from Tyler’s torch, glancing off the muddy ooze, which swirled and bubbled as if in a deluge, and yet there was no rain.
A trick of the light, Tyler told himself, gritting his teeth. They had to stay focused.
As they turned a bend, his torchlight caught something protruding from a knoll. A human figure, the white of its face caught momentarily in the beam. Eyes like diamonds.
Tyler gasped and shrank back into the vehicle. Natasha slammed the brakes.
‘What? What is it, Tyler?’
‘I thought I saw someone.’
‘You’re shitting me.’ 96
‘I dunno… I think… it was over there.’ Tyler aimed the light at the knoll, but it was just grass and mud, like pretty much everything around here. ‘Gone now.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, sorry. Maybe shouldn’t have had that smoke earlier.’
‘Don’t freak me out, Tyler.’ Natasha pushed on the accelerator and the car lurched towards the elevation at the end of the track, a deeper black against the wider blackness, expanding to fill the world as they approached.
They stopped the car and hurried into action. Natasha moved away from the vehicle, while Tyler smashed up the ignition, broke the window and poured a can of petrol over the interior. It was so dark she couldn’t see much, but for Tyler’s lighter dancing like a will-o’-the-wisp as he removed a twist of rolled-up newspaper and held the flame to it.
‘Get further back than that,’ said Tyler, ‘it’s gonna blow.’
Natasha backed off, hugging herself anxiously. Moments later, there was a whoosh and shattering glass as flames shot from all sides of the car and the land lit up around them, Tyler a silhouette against the brightness, stumbling to his knees in the aftershock. The hillock behind the burning BMW was now bathed in a red glow. At its crest there was a group of people – maybe five, six or more – in strange woollen clothes, huddled together, looking down at the fire, wide-eyed. Natasha cried out as soon as she saw them. Tyler could see them too. He tried to clamber to his feet, swaying from side to side, as if paralytically drunk.
‘Tyler, look out!’ cried Natasha as one of the figures began to stride down the hill – a burly, bearded man with tied-back hair and a sheepskin around his shoulders. 97
Tyler turned to Natasha with a panicked look, but instead of running towards her, he remained rooted to the spot. Confused, he looked down, as if searching for something beneath him. Then he tried to walk towards her, outstretched arms paddling the air, but it was like he was wading through treacle.
He was too slow. Soon, the man was upon him. He span Tyler around, clamped both hands on his shoulders and forced him back down to his knees. Tyler clawed frantically at the man’s face, his mouth open in a silent scream, while his attacker glared into his eyes, muttering words that Natasha couldn’t make out. For a moment it looked like the two men were locked into an unholy communion rite. A diabolical baptism.
Natasha desperately wanted to run towards them, to stop what was happening, but she felt an invisible liquid force pooling around her. She screamed Tyler’s name as a powerful surge tugged her backwards, hoisting her almost completely off the ground, the tips of her toes dragging against the earth as she was swept around the back of the hill, now a rugged black mound framed by fire, growing smaller and fainter as she was pulled and rolled, struggling for breath, turning, turning, turning, until all was darkness.
They were a community of seven adults and five children, eking out a living on the borderland between earth and water. When the tide went out, they descended the hill with lead pans to extract salt from the briny pools that remained. 98It was slow work, but salt was much in demand over in Hoh, that spur of land to the north of their Eyot, where the folk made iron. The rest of their provisions came from strips of reclaimed marshland in which they grew cabbages for the cooking pot and grass for their goats. When the sea rushed in again the surrounding land became a glistening lagoon and they were alone with the warblers and skylarks.
It seemed a peaceful place, but Tedmund lived in fear. Since his grandfather’s time, and his grandfather’s grandfather’s time, the seas encroached with more force each year, taking back much of what they’d claimed. Something had broken down in their discourse with the gods, and the harmony between land and sea was awry. The only way to rebalance the two was to please those gods, which was why Tedmund and his family refused to embrace the Christ cult that had swept into Suth Seaxe. This alien religion might have bent the will of weak-minded folk in Hoh, but not their community. They remained loyal to the old ways, and to Woden, their most powerful god. To abandon him would lead only to destruction.
On clear days, Tedmund could see the ruined fort of Andredceaster in the distance, built by a civilisation long fled from this land, whom his own people had replaced. He was not going to let theirs fall to ruin like that. Tedmund was determined to establish a legacy in this frontier land but he could not understand why the tides were pushing back so vigorously against him. Perhaps it was a message to warn them against conversion to the ways of Christ, or punishment for their acts of reclamation. Tedmund had long feared that their walling and draining innovations had made an enemy of the water dragon they knew as the Knucker. It lived in 99holes all around Suth Seaxe. If provoked, it could snatch a child in its jaws, lay waste to crops and raze homes to the ground with its fiery breath. Here, it was particularly to be feared, for it could move seamlessly between land and sea, circling their Eyot, hungry for flesh.
Tedmund was certain that the Knucker was lurking out there. Sometimes, when the tide was high, he’d hear an unearthly growl and see wisps of smoke rise from darkening swells, as if a living entity moved beneath the surface.
Should it ever emerge, they would have no choice but to fight and kill it or be killed themselves. The membrane between worlds was thinner out here than the inland-dwelling peoples could ever realise, so Tedmund expected no help with their struggles. It was up to them to stand their ground against malevolent spirits, of which there were many. They’d heard tell that on the Eyot of Horse, on the north-western region of their inland sea, the folk had encountered a ‘yellow man’, who rode the skeleton of a hunting dog down their hill at terrifying speed. They hurled stones that knocked him headfirst into the waters, where he disappeared beneath the surface as his broken steed span away on the current. Whether an agent of the Knucker or another disturbed spirit, Tedmund knew not, but these were worrying times and they had to remain vigilant.
His wife Bree was wise in the old ways. She made a circle of stones around the Eyot to offer them protection. In a nocturnal high tide, when the spirits were most active, and they were most isolated, she recited her rhymes of banishment. On nights such as those, one of their number was posted as a lookout on a knoll by the lagoon’s edge.
As fate would have it, Sigeweard stood on guard when the Knucker finally came. 100
Hours after sunset, a freakishly rapid tide sent water shooting through channels and pooling in syrupy whirls around their Eyot. Sigeweard was an elder of the community and used to the vagaries of the sea, but he knew instantly that something was amiss. A rasping sound emanated from the south, and two eyes, bright as moons, pierced the night. He whistled to alert Tedmund and the others, then stood his ground as a black shape cut through the water, a solitary eye flashing. He could hear its belly rumble and a deep growling noise as it grew closer. When its glowering eye lit upon his face, he fell backwards in surprise, scrabbling away from the knoll on hands and knees.
It was the Knucker for sure. Sigeweard prayed to Woden that Tedmund had raised the adults from their slumber, for the beast was coming.
Tedmund was indeed awake. He stood outside his hut with Bree, Oswine, Tata, Aedelstan and Hildred, their children safely inside. Even in the darkness, they could see the flashing eye of the Knucker and its hard black skin glimmer in shards of moonlight. They watched in horror as it proceeded, slowly but surely, towards their Eyot, water swelling around its bulk. Then it stopped, suddenly, and its growling fell silent, as if it was waiting to pounce. Bree gripped Tedmund’s arm.
‘I shall defend you,’ he said, as best he could, for his heart thumped with terror. They were lowly folk, without weapons and with only their gods to protect them. That is, if they hadn’t been forsaken.
Without warning, the dragon blasted fire across the water, lighting up their Eyot, exposing them on the slope. In the glare they saw a human form, an emissary of the beast, 101rise up from the water until he was waist deep, his arms paddling against the current.
Tedmund knew he must act while the enemy was vulnerable. He strode down the hill, gripped the spirit’s shoulders, and forced him downward until his bony white head was beneath the surface, bubbles streaming from his open mouth. The Knucker roared with angry flame but Tedmund persisted, pledging oaths to Woden should he die in this moment.
A shrieking voice assailed him across the lagoon with a cry of ‘Tyler!’ and he could see in the distance a furry beast, part human, part animal, rising from the surf. But he did not let it sway him. He held that spirit down and kept on holding until there was no more resistance.
Eventually, the Knucker’s flame was extinguished and the night fell silent around Tedmund, but for the lapping of water as it kissed the land he called home.
Greg was making good time and felt fit, but damn it was hot. He’d started his cycle ride at eight a.m. to beat this infernal sun. To no avail. The sky was cloudless, air still, and by the time he reached the Pevensey Levels, the land was hard-baked.
Sweat soaked Greg’s yellow Lycra top as he rode at speed down the twisting B-road from Herstmonceux, huffing and puffing, the hedgerows blurring either side of him, his ears alert for the sound of approaching cars. But it was a quiet 102Saturday morning. The roads were empty and the world felt like his domain.
At Horse Eye his legs worked harder, adjusting to the incline that lifted him up over the Levels. At its crest he marvelled at the mirage before him, for it seemed as if the fields as far as Pevensey Castle had been submerged by the sea, with treetops protruding from the waves. Water, water everywhere. But that simply could not be.
As Greg’s bicycle dipped into the downward slope he was surprised by an outburst of commotion in the adjacent field. A group of people in strange woollen clothes ran towards him, clutching rocks, angry and shouting.