I had this from Tenley, which is important to note from the beginning because Tenley had no interest in tall tales, being almost entirely lacking in imagination. He never read a book unless it contained numbers or tables and always began The Times at the financial pages. He wasn’t a dull man, exactly, but he was a passionless one, and a little of his company went a long way. Tenley was, though, an enthusiastic if solitary hiker, and each autumn would take a week’s holiday to go traipsing through some desolate part of the British landscape with a pack on his back and a walking staff in his right hand. He had a special fondness for moors—Marsden, Bodmin, Kinder, Denbigh—and stayed at the remotest inns he could find in their vicinity, where he dined alone and spoke to no one, unless it was to order a drink or ask for the salt. I suspect he was never more contented than during those excursions.
It was with some surprise, therefore, that I encountered Tenley one evening at the Bodega Wine House, or the Marble Halls as it was more colloquially known, which had a reputation for conviviality. I was keeping an eye on Ewer in those days. Ewer was fond of the Halls, and I had made a point of becoming a regular there, whether he was present or not. By then, we were convinced that Ewer, as well as writing for the Daily Herald, was passing information to the Soviets, even if it would be another six months before we caught him in the act.
On this particular evening Ewer was nowhere to be seen, but Tenley was occupying a corner table. The Bodega was very quiet, but Tenley had still contrived to find himself a spot as far removed as possible from the rest of the clientele. I nodded to him, he nodded back, and—mirabile dictu—indicated that I should join him if I wished. With alternatives for company, I might have declined, but I didn’t want to appear rude. Also, it would strengthen my claim as a habitué, thus aiding me in the Ewer business. So I made a point of informing the barman that I would sit with a friend, and ordered a refill for Tenley and a glass of the same for myself.
Tenley and I were at school together, and his mother and mine were distant cousins. He knew that I was something or other in military intelligence, but no more than that, and had never pressed me on the matter, as much out of a general lack of curiosity as any innate discretion. It had been about six months since last we’d met, and it struck me that he’d put on some weight—not a great deal, but enough to suggest that perhaps he was not hiking as much as he once did. I saw, too, that a cane with a heavy brass head stood in the corner beside our table. Tenley caught me looking at it.
“I’ve been carrying an injury,” he said. “It’s made walking difficult.”
I told him I was sorry to hear it and hoped it was only a temporary setback. “After all,” I added, “you must miss your moors.”
“Not as much as you might think,” and I could have sworn that he shuddered as he spoke. “I’m less sure of the world now.”
It was an odd statement, and I said so.
“Are you minded to listen to a story?” he asked.
These were words I never expected to hear from Tenley’s lips, but what’s seldom is wonderful, or so we hope.
“Of course,” I replied.
Here, then, is the tale Tenley told me.
Tenley had decided that his annual hike should take in some of Fox Tor, hundreds of acres of bogland on Dartmoor in Devon, said to have inspired Grimpen Mire in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Not that Tenley had ever read the book; what attracted him to Fox Tor was its wildness and the difficulty of negotiating a safe path through it. Fox Tor had claimed several lives, and not all who went missing were found. It offered a challenge, and one unlikely to be shared with many others, Fox Tor discouraging all but the most determined of hikers. What marker posts there were would sometimes be hidden by rising waters or lost altogether to the mud, and it was best to cross it only after extended periods of dry weather.
The preceding summer had been somewhat mixed, but after some consultation with locals by letter, Tenley felt confident that his experience would see him through. He had planned a route that would take him to Fox Tor itself before continuing to Childe’s Tomb at the southeast extreme, after which he would proceed to his lodgings for the night. The tomb was said to mark the spot where a wealthy hunter perished during a blizzard in the eleventh century, his body subsequently being retrieved and buried by the monks of Tavistock Abbey. It was, apparently, not much to see—a reconstruction of the original, according to Tenley, which had been plundered to build a house—but if one were walking the moor, visiting the tomb was one of the things one did. I suppose it broke up the monotony.
While he was an experienced hiker, Tenley had underestimated the rigors of Fox Tor. The going was hard, the mud sucking so insistently at his boots that, after only a few hours, his thighs ached, and he grew short of breath. Visibility was poor, not that there was much to see, not even Childe’s Tomb; despite all his preparations and the use of a compass, Tenley had somehow missed the landmark entirely. Having stopped to assess his situation, he concluded that the tomb must be within a mile of his present position, but whether north or south of it, he could not be sure, for he had strayed badly from the path. He began to wonder if there might not be a taint to the air of the mire that had caused him to become disoriented, because his sense of direction was usually as unfailing as his compass needle. Something certainly smelled unpleasant, and not in a vegetal way. Tenley guessed that a sheep or goat had become trapped in the mud and died there, its slow decay contaminating the environment.
It was then that Tenley heard a voice calling out from nearby. It sounded like a child in distress, an impression confirmed when, moments later, Tenley saw a muddied boy stagger from the mire onto firmer ground. The boy was perhaps five or six, and wore shorts and a tattered sweater over an open-collared shirt. He had a sock only on his left foot, the other being bare, though it took Tenley a little while to realize this, so begrimed were the new arrival’s legs from the knees down. He had clearly been crying, the tears cutting channels through the dirt on his face.
“Help us,” he said. “Please.”
“Us?”
Tenley squatted before the boy and gripped him by the shoulders. The sweater was damp, indicating the boy had been out there for some time, long enough for the mist to have penetrated his clothing. If he didn’t get warm soon, he’d catch his death.
“We were walking across the mire when Mummy fell in the water,” said the boy. “Now she can’t get out.”
“Where?” asked Tenley. “Show me, quickly.”
The boy took Tenley’s hand, and it was all the man could do not to yank it back instinctively. Tenley did not relish intimate contact with strangers, and could not recall the last time a child’s hand had touched his own; probably not since his school days, he decided. Still, he let the boy’s cold fingers clasp his own and walked with him farther into the mire. The boy, anxious for his mother, tried to hurry Tenley along, hauling so hard that he traveled with his body at an angle to the ground, his shoeless feet vanishing up to the ankles in the mud, to be released only reluctantly. But Tenley, unwilling to end up in the same situation as the boy’s mother, kept them to a slower pace, testing the way as he went.
“How much longer?” he asked the boy, but received no answer. It struck Tenley that, were the boy as disoriented as he himself had been, they might have no luck finding his mother. She could already be dead; while the boy’s cries had carried clearly enough, Tenley had heard nothing that sounded like a woman. Of course, she was possibly so weak that it was all she could do to keep herself from sinking. Tenley hoped this was the case. He did not know whether he was capable of consoling a distraught child who had just lost his mother.
Also, the day was waning, and soon the dark would come. Tenley had sufficient food and water in his pack for two days, even three at a push, and matches to light a fire, but nevertheless, he did not fancy spending a night on Fox Tor. Doring, a colleague and fellow hiker, had broken his ankle on the North York Moors late one February afternoon and was forced to shelter as best he could until a farmer came by early the following morning. The cold had got into Doring’s bones and he had never been the same after.
“I said,” Tenley repeated, “how much farther?”
The boy stopped walking, and his hand slipped free from Tenley’s.
“We’re here,” said the boy. “This is where she fell in.”
Tenley saw that they were standing between two small pools of dark, peaty water, separated by a narrow ridge upon which Tenley was now standing. He might almost have missed the pools had the boy not alerted him, so thick was the moss and greenery around them and so poor the fading light. There was no sign of a woman clinging to the bank of either, and Tenley felt any optimism die.
“Which one was it?” he asked, and the boy pointed to the pool on the right. Tenley knelt to peer into the water, but could see nothing. He had no idea how deep it might be and no intention of wading in to find out. He looked around for a long branch; the woman, if she was down there, might somehow, with the final flickers of consciousness, be capable of grabbing hold of it. At worst, if the branch hit something fleshy, Tenley would at least know where she was.
“Find a stick,” he told the boy. “We need to—”
But the boy had retreated and was now watching Tenley from a distance, his hands in his pockets—and he was humming, as though what was unfolding was of no more than passing interest. It might have been a trick of the light, but to Tenley, he seemed paler than before, and older too: his hair thinner, his skin wrinkled, his eyes more knowing.
“What’s wrong with you?” Tenley asked. “Your mother is somewhere down there.”
“Actually, she’s not,” said the boy. “She’s behind you.”
Which was when a hand emerged from the second pool and gripped Tenley’s right ankle. Tenley cried out in pain as much as shock, for the nails on the hand were very long and dug deep into his flesh. A second hand appeared, clawing at his left boot. Tenley felt a strong tug, and suddenly, he was lying flat on his belly. He tried to gain a handhold, but the grass came away in his fingers as he was dragged toward the pool. He managed to roll onto his back, dig in his elbows, and lean back, but while this slowed his progress, it failed to arrest it. By now, his calves were hanging over the edge of the ridge, and the heels of his boots were touching water. One female hand was entangled in the laces of his left boot, and the other was gouging at his right calf, having torn through the sock and the wool trousers tucked inside.
Tenley could now see into the pool itself and thought he could make out the lineaments of a woman’s face in the murk, her hair undulating, garlanded with weeds. Tenley believed the boy’s mother to be panicking in her efforts to save herself from drowning, and if he could just find his grip, he could yet rescue her. But if he ended up in that pool with her, she might well do for them both.
Then Tenley’s laces broke, freeing his left leg. At the same moment, his right hand, which had been scrabbling at the mud, discovered the roots of a bush. He held on tight and hauled hard with his right foot, hoping to drag the woman from the pool and have done with her, because the pain in his calf was becoming unbearable.
The woman came up all right, her entire upper body emerging from the pool—which was when Tenley realized his mistake. He couldn’t have said how long she’d been down there, but it wasn’t a matter of minutes, or even hours. Her eye sockets were empty, and her skin was gray-green. Holes had been nibbled in her face and chest, and in places the flesh was worn away to the bone. As Tenley stared, her mouth opened wide, and a black eel wriggled from the maw only to fall into the water and swim off.
Tenley drew back his left leg and sent the full force of his boot into her face. He thought he felt her nose break, though she made no sound. He struck again. This time, the impact was enough to cause her to let go of him. She dropped below the water as Tenley clambered onto the ridge and remained there on all fours, his body trembling. He could still see the woman, though. She was staring up at him from just below the surface, if an eyeless entity could be said to stare. Blind or not, she knew where he was, and he thought she might be readying herself for another attempt at him.
A small bare, rotting foot entered his field of vision. Tenley looked up to find the boy glaring at him, now barely less ruined than his mother, but unlike her, still capable of speech.
“That was my mummy,” he said.
Tenley rose as quickly as his injured leg would allow. He’d had enough. He was cold and wet, his calf was lacerated, and he’d ruined a perfectly good pair of wool trousers. Strangely, he was angrier with the boy than with the woman. Without him, she would have been forced to hunt for herself or, more probably, go without, which Tenley concluded might be best for all concerned. The boy was her facilitator, confirming Tenley’s long-held suspicion that, while you knew where you stood with adults, you really couldn’t trust a child.
Tenley grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck.
“Then join her, damn you.”
With considerable venom, Tenley swept the boy into the pool, and the two, mother and son, sank together until they became twin glimmers in the gloom, and then were lost to sight. Tenley remained by the bank until he was certain that they weren’t about to surface again soon, before picking up his pack and slowly, painfully, making his way from Fox Tor.
In the Marble Halls, Tenley finished his glass of wine.
“I can see you don’t believe me,” he said.
“Not a word of it,” I replied, “though I admit it’s quite the tale. To be honest, I didn’t know you had such a story in you. Were you to write it down, Smith might consider it for the Strand.”
Tenley didn’t take offense, only stood, located his cane, and prepared to leave. He took his wallet from his pocket, but I told him I was happy to pay. The story had helped pass some of what might otherwise have been an entirely dull evening. Tenley nodded his thanks.
“What if I showed you the marks left by the woman’s nails?” he asked.
“That wouldn’t help. They might have been caused by something else: a misstep through rotten wood, for example, or a broken bottle discarded on the moor.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Tenley. “You always were of a skeptical bent.”
“Have you shared this story with anyone else?” I asked. “I should be careful about claiming it was true, you know. You’ll get yourself a reputation.”
“I informed the landlord of the Forest Inn at Hexworthy, since it was he who had to summon a doctor to treat my wounds. They were deep, you see, and already showed signs of infection. I told the doctor, too.”
“And how did they take it?”
Tenley put on his hat. “They were incredulous—at first.”
“At first? What caused them to reconsider?”
From his wallet, Tenley produced a single long, greenish fingernail, which he laid on the table. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t care to. It looked old and lethal, more like the talon of some extinct predatory bird that anything human, yet human it was; I knew enough of anatomy to make that judgment. I couldn’t imagine how a man like Tenley could have come by it, unless what he’d related contained some measure of truth.
Tenley picked up the fingernail and restored it to his wallet, while I took a strengthening mouthful of wine. There was something about that fingernail: the color, the jaggedness, even the smell—because it did smell, of stagnancy and decay, so much so that I immediately spat my wine back in the glass. It now tasted foul, though it had been fine before. I wanted Tenley to be gone, and his blasted fingernail with him.
“I suppose,” I said, as a prelude to farewell, “that the whole experience has rather put you off hiking.”
Tenley buttoned his coat and tapped his cane to his hat in salute.
“Not at all,” he said, “but it’s put me off children for life.”