Chapter Seven

The Ogre

 

 

28th October 2016

 

ODDLY ENOUGH, SOME of Alice’s fear went away at this point. Yes, the house had disappeared, but so had the children. Nor was there any sign of the madman who had flung the spear. Wherever she was now, it seemed – so far – quiet and without any threat to her.

In the long run, of course, she needed the world she knew – the world she came from, of brick walls and streetlights, cars and streets half-cobbled and half-tarmacked. And, yes, the world of her dead daughter, too; that was reality, and she could do nothing but engage with it and face it on its own terms. How tempting the prospect of some other realm that her desires could readily shape; how tempting, and how illusory.

She must use her reason, must be logical. Rational. She was a scientist, or had been. She might be again. She must review her experiences. Monstrous children had appeared from nowhere and attacked her, trying to force her into a fatal accident. One reality outside the front door; another, completely different, out back. And neither resembled the one that should exist.

Logic offered only two possible conclusions: either her perceptions were accurate, and the normal laws of space and time had ceased to function in her specific case, or her perception was faulty. She was seeing things that weren’t there. And hearing them.

Not to mention feeling them. The gravel crunched underfoot; she reached down and touched it again, felt it between her fingers.

The most likely explanation was that in reality she was wandering around inside the house or in her backyard, while the wild garden was in her heard. But there wasn’t any gravel in the backyard, so where was she? Had she gone further afield without realising it? How awry had her perceptions gone?

These were questions without an answer, at least until she had more information. If this was a psychotic episode, it would end eventually. She’d find herself back at 378 Collarmill Road, Higher Crawbeck, and she could talk to her doctor about adjusting her dosage.

She liked the sound of that, even if she wasn’t sure she believed it. In the meantime, the problem was deciding what to do. For the moment, she’d have to cope with the episode, and the best way of doing that was to find a safe place to wait until it passed. If she wasn’t in an ornamental garden, she must be somewhere else, which could be anywhere from her bedroom to Browton Vale or the middle of Radcliffe New Road.

The safest thing to do, she knew, would be to stay still and wait it out, make sure she didn’t step out in front of a car or off the top of a staircase thinking she was on a straight path. But somehow she kept moving. There was a sense of threat, of urgency, that kept her going.

It could be dangerous to listen to her instincts at a time like this; it could be just as dangerous to ignore them. She kept going. The path wound into a tunnel of trees and bushes, where overhanging branches interwove and meshed. Alice clenched her fists as she walked; it was dark all around her, except for the archway full of moonlight up ahead.

When she stepped out into it she breathed out in relief, then breathed in. The air was cool and clean, scented by unfamiliar plants, no hint of petrol fumes. The moon shone in the sky, turning rags of cloud into silhouettes beyond which lay the cobalt-blue night and the scattered dust of the stars. Normally you’d never see this many in a built-up area; light pollution rendered all but the brightest invisible. But here there were stars beyond counting, ranged by distance in layer upon layer. Alice couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a night sky like this; the holiday she’d taken with John in the Lake District, after they’d graduated, maybe. They’d gone out in some woods near Coniston one night, sipped beer and smoked a joint, but she hadn’t really needed the spliff. Just the sight of that sky – and her realisation of its sheer vastness – had been intoxicating enough.

And it had also been about twenty years ago. Alice shook her head. All the same – she stole another glance at that unspoilt sky – as hallucinations went, it was extraordinarily detailed.

She looked down again, took stock of her surroundings. She was in a clearing of some kind – but not a natural one, she realised. No, this was a paved, circular space carved out of the garden, and in its centre there stood a statue; a noble, knightly figure with a broken sword, chin upraised, its posture defiant. Carved into the base was an inscription. Alice bent to make it out:

 

Their name liveth forevermore

 

She straightened up and looked at one of the paths that led away from the clearing. It angled steeply downward – this place, too, was on a hillside – stretching out across overgrown lawns before vanished into thick black foliage far below. Something in Alice shied away from there; it was too like a path in a fairytale wood, the kind the big bad wolf would be waiting down.

But then, she didn’t have to go anywhere. She’d been looking for a place to wait out the episode, and the clearing seemed as good as any. There was even a seat, she realised, set into the low walls that marked out the clearing’s boundaries. Alice sank into it with a deep sense of gratitude. Her feet were starting to ache, and so was the rest of her, as the adrenaline drained away. She was shaking a little.

She curled up on the stone seat as best she could, trying to warm herself. She looked up at the stars, and listened. It was quiet: none of the usual urban night-time sounds, no traffic or revving bike motors, no voices, no chatter of rotor blades as a police helicopter passed overhead. Only the gentle trickle of a nearby stream. Between that and the view, Alice thought she could put up with the hallucination a while yet.

When she heard the rumbling noise, Alice’s first thought was of a roll of thunder, but then she remembered that the sky was clear. When the rumble became a rattling growl, she realised it wasn’t coming from above her, but below. When it sounded again, she turned slowly until she was looking down the hillside at the path that vanished into the thick woods below.

The second growl was followed by another sound, one she knew from somewhere; a sort of medley of crashing and rustling and snapping. Undergrowth, leaves and twigs, she realised, as something big stormed through them. When she felt the stone seat vibrate under her, she recognised it; she’d felt it the other day – back in reality, or the reality she knew – out on Browton Vale. Something had been coming for her then, but had been stopped. Tonight, though, there was nothing to oppose it.

The woods below began to ripple and heave as whatever moved through it reached the perimeter. The moonlight gleamed on vast, feral eyes that saw and pinned her. And then there was another growl, and the thing burst free of the woods, rising and expanding as it lumbered towards her.

Its outline was vague at first, but grew clearer as it advanced. It was roughly – very roughly – man-shaped, but much larger than a man; hunched, and bristling with hair. Something of a man, something of a beast. And it was coming for her. Its eyes’ unwavering glare told her that.

She had to run. She must get up, run down one of the other paths – but it was like one of those dreams where you feel someone sit on the bed but can’t move, can’t turn to face them. Sleep paralysis; she’d had that once or twice, especially after Emily’s death. It came with certain dreams. So maybe this was a dream after all, in which case it didn’t matter if she ran or not. She’d wake up at any moment.

Except what if she didn’t? What did happen to you if you died in your dreams? She had no doubt that she would if the thing laid hands upon her. Another part of her cried out that this was no dream, couldn’t be, was too real to be, but she ignored it. That part was surely impossible.

Whatever the truth, when the moonlight fell on the thing from the woods, her paralysis abruptly broke. It was nearly twenty feet tall and naked, with piebald skin. Its scalp and back were covered by black, bristly hair that stuck up in sharp spines like porcupine quills. The same hair sprouted across its chest, in a thick thatch around its groin and in random tufts dotted across its body. It gave the creature a dirty, matted beard that covered the lower part of its face. Its forehead was low, almost nonexistent, with a brutal ledge of a brow. Its eyes, in contrast, were a pale, almost delicate blue, with a cat’s slitted pupils stretched wide by the dark. They looked out of place on that body, that face: they were poised above a wet, pig-like snout of a nose and a mouth that looked swollen and misshaped.

In fact the whole lower half of the face – what she could see of it beneath the beard – had a lumpy, malformed look, but when its mouth finally yawned open she understood. The lumpiness came from jawbones that had grown thicker and heavier than any normal human’s should, and the knotted clumps of muscles that had thickened and swelled in order to work them. And the mouth was crammed with teeth too large even for itself: an array of canines and incisors like knives and chisels, and molars like the heads of club-hammers.

The sight was accompanied by the stench of its breath, which almost made her retch. The part of her that had screamed this was too detailed, too real, to be an hallucination no longer seemed so irrational. Whatever the case, her paralysis broke; she swung her legs from the seat and stood.

The thing had almost reached the clearing; saliva trickled from the gaping mouth, hung in wet, yellowish ropes from the beard. It reached out and parted the vegetation at the clearing’s entrance. Its hands were dirty, its thick nails sharpened to points and clogged with filth and dried blood.

Fee, fi, fo, fum...

As it stepped towards her, Alice turned and ran. The path shuddered underfoot as the ogre gave chase. She came to turning after turning, path after path, taking each on instinct. Where she was going didn’t matter, only that she kept moving, ahead of her pursuer.

A small, calm part of her – the part, perhaps, that had simply accepted what was around her as reality – told her she couldn’t hope to escape the ogre. It was too close behind her; it was bigger and faster, and had her scent. As if to underline the point, the ogre roared, and she felt her innards shake from the thunder of it.

Something made her glance round. She screamed, or would have if she’d had breath: the ogre was almost on top of her, lunging at her with one enormous hand.

Alice dived forward, rolling on the ground, and the ogre’s grip closed on empty air. But before she could rise, a huge foot slammed down ahead of her on the path, and another behind. The ogre loomed above her. The stench of it threatened to make her vomit: old blood and spoiled meat, stale piss, excrement and semen. Its hands reached for her and its jaws stretched wide as it bent forward.

And then there was a sound, and the ogre was still, a dazed look on its dull face.

She knew she’d heard the sound before, even as it slithered away from her. Her memory wouldn’t hold onto it – but then, that was why. It had done the same on Browton Vale just after she’d arrived, leaving only a confused, jumbled impression of song, chant, horn, gong. But whatever it was, it stopped the ogre – just as, on Browton Vale, it had stilled the approach of another huge shape through the trees.

Feet crunched in gravel. She turned and saw them: they were long and white and bare beneath the hem of a red robe. She looked up; the robe flapped around a thin, spare body. The walker pointed with a pale hand. A tight red cowl clung to his head, framing a long, lean, masklike face. His lips moved and the sound came again.

The ogre moaned; she looked at it in time to see it flinch and recoil from the sound – whatever the sound exactly was. It stumbled away from her – or rather, from the figure in red – before turning to rush headlong down the path back towards the woods.

Bare feet crunched in gravel again. Alice looked up to see the Red Man standing over her, gazing after the fleeing ogre. He stayed like that until its grunting, and the crash and rustle and snapping sounds of its passage, had died away. Only then did he turn his head and look down on her.