Words could hardly hope to convey Freya’s primitive urges, yet somehow George managed; her little boy reducing these bold, burgeoning feelings to structured sentences. To hear him speak of them, to see them shaped by the same mouth that kissed her goodnight before bed, was the most monstrous thing...
“Lunch, darling?” she said that afternoon, moving to the refrigerator. Lizzie leafed through a magazine at the dinner table. “I’m happy to cook. Shepherd’s pie? Some pork belly? I bought some spices from the market, just last week.”
Without looking up from her magazine, Lizzie shrugged. “Don’t worry about lunch. I’m going out.”
“You’re going out?”
“I’m meeting with Rachel, remember? To discuss my art project. School might be shut but the deadline’s still looming.”
She thought about Lizzie and Rachel. The pair often worked on their art together. Their pieces last year had been selected for an exhibition; complementary collages using media cut-outs, displaying the Forest in summer and winter. Rachel had created the summer piece, although it was Lizzie’s that had struck her as the stronger; the tall, silver trees, made from newspaper headlines, stripped of their leaves, their lives, by winter’s bite. They had titled the two pieces ‘The Forest’. There were still some photographs from the exhibition on the school’s website.
“Are you eating with Rachel?” she said.
Her daughter nodded. “I need to leave actually, or I’ll be late.”
“Stay in the village,” Freya said, as her daughter slipped from the kitchen. “Love you.” The front door closed on her words and she returned her attentions to the refrigerator.
She felt George before she heard him; the tug of his hand on her sleeve. This in itself drew her attention. She could not remember the last time he had grabbed for her.
“I feel different,” he said.
Turning to her son, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “Different how, darling? Is it your stomach? Your sister wasn’t very well last week; I hope you haven’t caught something from her...”
“No, I mean different inside,” he said. “I feel bad.”
She knelt to his level, taking his face in her hands. “It’s all right to feel bad, George. People feel bad all the time, for lots of different reasons. It doesn’t make you any less of a man, to be honest with yourself. Remember what I said before, about honesty?”
He spoke quietly into her ear. “Honesty is good?”
“Yes, honesty is good.”
There was a moment’s silence, in which neither of them spoke. A car roared past the kitchen window – the third that day – its engine audible long after the vehicle had vanished. The noise was jarring, out of place, belonging to the city, not their little village. Lynnwood’s sounds were altogether more penetrating, the high-pitched squeal of burning swine singing again in Freya’s ears. She realised George was trembling.
“It’s okay, darling. It’s okay, I’m here.”
“I’m not scared,” he said.
“Of course you’re not.”
“I’m not scared, really. I just feel bad, because of Andrew and the others.”
“What’s happened is awful, George, but it’s not your fault. You must remember that. You can’t blame yourself.”
“But I know,” he said. “I know what’s happened to them, and I haven’t told anyone.”
He looked up at her, his wide eyes revealing many things. She saw every ache, every shining fear, every wild gleam. She saw other things too, revealed for an instant. Then he spoke, and his words were like cold hands on the back of her neck.
* * *
George remembered the afternoon well, recounting many details Freya might have thought insignificant. Was anything significant anymore except the hurried thumping of her heart, the eager wetness of her mouth, her two children?
Mrs. Welham, the woman at the head of the classroom, was a well-fed, well-to-do creature, with broad shoulders and a frame below to match. Like so many in Lynnwood she was partial to McCready’s produce: bacon, pressed between slices of thick white bread each morning. In the afternoons she spread the Allwood’s jam generously over warm fruit scones and when evening came her kitchen filled with the joyous glugging of Catherine’s reds as it sloshed into glasses still warm from the dishwasher. Freya knew these things about the teacher not because she had seen them with her own eyes but because she hadn’t; the private, impatient habits of the people of Lynnwood, revealed only through stray seeds caught between teeth, the jagged slash of red wine lips, the quivering light in their eyes.
The subject of the lesson that afternoon was Sin. George told her how animated the woman had been, her fat arms flourishing, her mouth quick. He told her about the mud that was trawled across the carpet from the wet outdoors, the smears of rain against the windowpane. As he said these things, she thought about Sin and her own lessons in the subject. She remembered Ms. Andrews’s face as she preached the predatory nature of man at Sunday service, the stained-glass monsters in the windows, the churchyard of twisted statues; human figures bent low and bestial.
In the brightly-lit classroom, with the dreary rain pressing at the windows, they discussed what happened to sinners. They had been taught about Heaven and its fiery opposite lots of times before, never mind from TV and films. It didn’t mean they were going to answer. To raise their hands, speak out, act know-it-all. George had long since learned the names for those people: teacher’s pet, mummy’s boy, tosser. Stooped in their chairs, heads held low, the class stared at Mrs. Welham. Christopher Savage dropped his biro. From the back row, somebody laughed. It was a thoughtless sound.
“You mean prison, Miss? Like that old perve in Southampton?”
“Andrew, I don’t think that’s appropriate –”
“My dad said he got ten years, ’cause of those photos they found –”
“Stop, Andrew –”
“He said they were all –”
“Stop.”
The outspoken boy shrugged, loosened his tie, hunched further over his desk. Shaken, the teacher picked up her textbook. She flicked to a page and began reading aloud, scripture concerning Hell.
George knew the way they treated Mrs. Welham wasn’t fair. She was much nicer than most of the other teachers. He supposed that was why they got away with it; the rest of the class, with their behaviour. The talking, the swearing, the sheer contempt. She was sensitive and they had a second sense for such things. Pack mentality, like newly-hatched spiders to their struggling prey, or the wild dogs he had watched on the Discovery Channel last week. They could sniff out the weak and the vulnerable like so much rotting flesh, smell the rank, intestinal tang of their fear. Playground scavengers.
He was reminded of a recent dream, in which he found himself in his classroom. Mrs. Morecroft stood at the front but it was his classmates who held his attention; each of them perched upright at their desks, backs straight, their faces those of famished dogs. Saliva dripped in ropes from their sly smiles, the sort that all dogs can’t help but display, and pink tongues lolled from parted jaws. For the longest time it seemed that no one moved, as if waiting some unspoken direction. The air grew moist and rank with the foetid breath of the children.
Then a great horn sounded, reverberating the windows, the walls, the very particles of his blood until it boiled with anticipation and with an unspoken signal burst. He threw himself to the floor and raced from the classroom, his schoolmates hot on his heels. At first he thought he fled from them; the feral light in their eyes, their rancid breath, the yellow rot of their teeth. Then one raced past him, and another, and another, their human hands slapping the linoleum, and he chanced upon his reflection in one of the windows. He too bore the guise of a hound, his ears pricked, mouth dripping with the promise of the hunt...
Shivering, he dismissed the dream, returning his attentions to the classroom. Outside, the rain fell harder, striking the windows at a slant. There was a sub-terranean sluice as the heating behind him kicked into life. Four rows away to the front, Mrs. Welham continued talking.
“Page thirteen, everyone. Reason and Religion. Are there enough copies? Christopher, stop playing with that pen, please. Now, all together...”
A couple of children mumbled dutifully after Mrs. Welham. Most remained silent. From somewhere outside they could hear Mr. Jones, their haggard, grey-haired PE teacher, his instructive bellows echoing across the playing fields. George stared openly at the rain-flecked windows, losing himself to the bleak, watery sky. The chairs, tables and teacher of the classroom faded into a fugue of nothingness.
He thought about Hell as it was described to him. He imagined a dark place, lit with bursts of flame and shadows. Across this rocky landscape, filled with ruinous monoliths and charred, broken trees, he saw the Damned; the lost souls of the Godless; those same men and women who lied, cheated and killed in his favourite detective dramas on television. They screamed under the black sky, condemned by a higher justice; some pitiful wails, others younger, fresher, more savage sounds.
All things considered, it was strangely disaffecting. Flames weren’t frightening. Neither were screams. It all seemed so made-up, so fabricated, so detached from the village he knew.
Something struck his face and he started, as if shocked. He looked around, to the right, and found himself staring into the face of Stewart Foxley. The boy’s bright eyes bore into his own and George looked quickly away. His chest ached, his forehead burning from where the paper had struck, as if remembering the pain of heavier missiles; sharper, rougher, or the hot wetness of his blood.
He glanced back as Stewart mouthed something. It might have been “I love you.” Or “I’ll have you.” He concentrated instead on Mrs. Welham.
“The Bible describes a variety of demons, monsters of metaphor used to illustrate sin. Specifically, there were seven lords of Hell. Can anyone remember them? Or find them on the page?”
He knew all about the Sins and their namesakes. He could still remember the first time his mother had explained the concept; of Heaven and Hell, right and wrong, good and bad. He knew she wasn’t religious. She had made it very clear to him that their Sunday service was a different tradition. She didn’t keep The Bible or The Book of Sin side by side on the mantel like Jessica Morley’s parents. But she had done well to explain the concept and he thought he had understood, at least partly.
“The seven demons, anyone? Or their Sins? It’s all there, on page thirteen. The first, somebody?”
As before, nobody spoke. Mrs. Welham stared expectantly across the class and George hid his face with his sleeves. The school bell filled the silence and the classroom flew into movement; the scrape of chair legs, slamming books, animated chatter as everyone rose to leave. Chris’s biro struck George on the chin, to laughter. He twitched, his face burning, and shrank inside his jumper.
“See you later, Georgie,” said Chris as he sauntered behind his chair. He kicked the table, which shuddered on its legs.
“Don’t forget your homework, you shit,” said Andy. Then Stewart himself strode past. He smacked George on the head.
“Better run, Georgie, your mum’ll be waiting at home for you.”
The three of them left, surrounded by a crowd of other students, and then George was alone in the classroom. As he finished packing away his things, he realised The Bible knew nothing of Hell. Snatching his rucksack, he ran from the classroom. The school grounds swallowed him up.
* * *
Nobody remembered seeing the three boys beyond the high street, so they couldn’t have known that on the day they vanished they had turned off at the disused station, or that they followed a fourth boy as he moved alone along the tracks towards the Forest. Freya only knew these things because George had told her. There were no other witnesses, except the trees themselves.
The rain had churned the grassy embankment into a mound of mud. It continued to fall, dashing grass and soil like pebbles. Winter was upon them and the nights were drawing in. It would not be long, George suspected, before his mother wouldn’t let him here at all, for fear of accidents in the dark. He moved quickly, with scientific fervour, studying the gaps between the sleepers for snails and earthworms.
The three boys interrupted George just as he had sat down by the tunnel. He remembered it as though detached from his own body; staring down over the boys as they converged on him. They rushed through the rain, three dark shapes, wet and wild.
He saw himself, rising as they approached, head turned, alarmed by their whooping. His trousers were soaked through with rain and mud. He felt very cold. They were shouting things but their voices reached him distorted, as though travelling through water, or drowned beneath another sound, which was quiet at first but grew very quickly into an ancient roar, droning in his ears like a swarm of bees, except coming from the cave behind him...
He remembered pain as they pushed him back to the ground. He remembered their faces, long and pale and filled with something much older than their physical selves; a sharp disdain for rules and restraint. He remembered burning with heat, blood pounding in his ears beneath that terrible roaring, and another heat against his legs as he wet himself.
The figure emerged from the tunnel, loping across the grass like an ape. He saw pale skin, a childlike face and long arms, which snatched the three boys and broke them. Even as its fingers curled around their flesh and that deafening roaring was cut short by snapping bones, the boys’ expressions were those of ecstatic terror. Their lips twisted, their eyes shone with rainwater, wide and unknowing, and then they shone no more.
Silence sank over the clearing. George stared, unmoving, as the figure examined the bodies with its nose. Like a spider it scuttled from boy to boy, back arched, head low. Then it dragged them, one by one, backwards into the tunnel, leaving him alone beneath the empty sky.
* * *
A scream shatters the silence that has settled over the village. Nib still pressed into the paper, she pauses. Drawing a deep, tremulous breath, she stands from her note-making and moves to the window. The floor feels cold, almost icy, against her bare feet.
Two birds pick at something in the garden, beside the Griffin sculpture Robert and she had bought together in Lyndhurst. They are crows; great, black birds with marble eyes and shining beaks. Their talons bury into the thing beneath them, puncturing soft flesh, sliding past skin to the wet muscle beneath. She glances at their prey only briefly, before returning her eyes to the birds. It is recently dead, much like the rest of Lynnwood. She notes the steam, which pours from its ravaged stomach into the cold outside. Moments ago it had been one of Catherine’s cats. The animals had been the first to go missing. Before Mr. Shepherd, before the boys, even before Ms. Andrews. Of course, no one had noticed at the time.
The crows make short work of the cat until it is unrecognisable. Their talons reduce it to flesh and fur and ropes of intestinal meat. Her stomach’s screams join those of the frenzied birds...
She drags herself back to the dining table. Her fingers find furrows in the wood, where her pen has pressed through the paper. She follows the shallow grooves, like a blind woman reading with her fingertips. Blood brail. It is the greatest irony, that she is reduced to reading like the sightless when she sees clearly now for the first time, when words themselves mean so little anymore.
She finds the pen again. It feels strange in her hand; a relic from a different time. Somehow she resumes writing. In her mind’s eye she sees only the crows; two broad, black silhouettes. She hears them even as she writes, their hungry cries ringing in her ears...