Exhausted but as mentally alert as a soldier in a foxhole amidst a continuing battle, Tom smoothes another sticking plaster over one of many scratches lining his calf. Emerging from a short dreamless rest, he was sickened at the sight of his own blood staining the sleeping bag. The fabric was stuck to his skin in three places and needed peeling off. Cotton wool balls, sodden with iodine, orbit the first-aid box on a kitchen table turned field hospital. Stitches? Six sticking plasters patchwork one shin alone. Another three stripe a forearm. One cheek and his hairline are scraped raw. He can’t even remember incurring some of the wounds. Some lacerations probably need bandages – do we have any? They’ve bled down his leg for the two hours of the sleep he crashed into.
At the hollow boom of Gracey’s feet coming down the wooden stairs, he tries to hide the stained debris he’s been dabbing at the cuts.
His daughter capers into the room, dressed for school. ‘Oh, Daddy! What you done?’
Desperate for Fiona to come down so he can tell her about his traumatic night, he hasn’t thought of what to say to Gracey. In the glare of the morning, his experience in the woods already feels unreal. Too shocking and chaotic to process, or compare to anything else in his life, or the lives of anyone he knows. And yet, between midnight and dawn, he knows for certain that he witnessed the deranged capability of next door . When he awoke, a horrid anticipation of some fresh terror was the worst feeling of all.
‘Accident. Gardening,’ he says, as Gracey picks through the first-aid kit, hoping to help.
She frowns, tries to understand why her father was gardening so early. ‘There’s a scratch here.’ She taps her eyebrow.
Tom nods, his smile too pitiful to live more than a moment before it twists to a wince.
Fiona, dressed for work and looking sufficiently stern to make Tom’s spirits plummet even further, is not long in following her daughter into the room. Her tipped heels ricochet against the floor. ‘Self-harming now? Getting close myself. State of you.’
Gracey folds into Tom’s arms for a snuggle. He squeezes his daughter, kisses the top of her head. ‘Cut myself on some wood, Peanut. Not to worry.’
‘Daddy, you have to be careful.’ This is what they say to her after her mishaps. Hearing it echoed is endearing but vaguely insulting.
Fiona snatches a lunchbox from the fridge. Stuffs the plastic container into Gracey’s schoolbag. Grabs a second packed lunch. Slips it inside her handbag. She shakes the sleeve of her navy blue jacket from her watch. Angles her head to the door. ‘Gracey.’
Tom stands and kisses the top of Gracey’s head again. He doesn’t want to release her. He wants to cry into her hair.
Running late and clearly still furious about his performance with the chainsaw, his wife dashes from the room. You don’t even know the half of it , he thinks. But how can such a tale be told, or subject broached? Like a normal person, his wife was asleep in the middle of the night. Not face-down in the dirt of the woods while a freak-show danced the glade backwards, grunting and squealing, a dead animal dripping upon their altar stone.
Tom calls after her. ‘Fi’. About last night.’
She ignores him and unlocks the front door.
Tom follows the girls onto the drive but soon stops to gape at the caravan parked directly outside their house. A dirty obelisk casting a shadow over the unruly lawn. They’ve moved it from outside their house to his. Grubby side panels now wall off the far side of the road, where empty fields hem green hills, reaching out of sight.
Gracey prances to the caravan to investigate, her rucksack dwarfing her back. Fiona unlocks her car without giving the caravan a glance.
Tom breaks from his appalled gazing at the abandoned vehicle and shuffles down the weedy drive. Uneven slabs and loose gravel jab his bare soles. Tom reaches for Fiona’s elbow to prevent her ducking inside the car. ‘Fi’.’
She looks up. A pretty face blanched beneath the blush of cosmetics, suppressing white rage.
‘Fi’, this place.’
‘What about it?’
‘Ain’t safe. Last night …’
Tom looks at Gracey to make sure she can’t overhear. She’s standing on her tiptoes, peering at a grubby window. A tatty, faded orange curtain conceals most of the glass. ‘There’s people inside,’ she says.
Tom turns to Fiona. ‘Something happened.’
‘You can say that again. What were you bloody thinking?’
Across the hedge, the neighbours’ garage door grinds along metal runners. Stricken hot then icily cold by the thought of what might come leaping from that space, Tom swivels to look in the direction of the Moots’ house. He hears muffled voices.
‘Gracey! Come to Daddy.’ The edge in his tone alarms Gracey, who sullenly obeys as if unfairly reprimanded.
Out the side of his mouth, Tom whispers at his wife, ‘Not that. Afterwards. In the middle of the night. I can hardly believe it myself. They…’
His wife’s lovely eyes search his but there is no warmth in her expression, which somehow increases her attractiveness to him, as if he is losing her and only now realising just how special she is. Her scrutiny seeks something in his expression she suspects he’s hiding. Dishonesty, perhaps, or signs of madness.
‘I’m not kidding, Fi’. They were doing this … ceremony. In the woods. Fi’, they killed another animal.’
Fiona slips her elbow from his hand. Tucks herself carefully inside the car, slips off her heels. Locates her driving shoes. Thrusts her silky feet inside them.
Tom glances fearfully at the neighbours’ house again. Only the upper storey is visible, the curtains closed. A mix of voices creep over the hedge, overlapping. Three, he thinks. Someone laughs. Is that a good sign?
Gracey climbs into her child seat and Tom rushes around the car to secure her seatbelt through the array of plastic slots. Soon as he shuts the passenger door, Fiona starts the car, releases the handbrake and rolls the car down the drive’s incline. Tom follows the car, unwilling to let them go and be left on his own. ‘Love you, Peanut,’ he directs at Gracey.
Only at the end of the drive does he stop. At the sight of the police patrol car, parked outside the Moots’ house, where the caravan was yesterday, he feels as bloodless and stiff as he knows he appears. ‘Fuck.’
Fiona’s window lowers with a robotic whir. ‘I’ll leave you to deal with the law. Criminal damage, I’m guessing.’
Before he can think of an adequate reply, her car pulls away and he’s truly on his own. The realisation breaks him out in a nervous sweat. He’s returned to the state that consumed him mere hours before, inside the wood: sickened and weakened by a fear that he can smell.