Warmed by jeans, jumper and work boots and gripping a torch he keeps switched off, Tom returns quietly and with purpose to his garden.
He quickly moves to the thick darkness of the bordering wood.
There are voices. Far off. A murmur becoming an intonation of raised voices far away among the silent trees. A sequence of barked cries in rhythm that comes and goes.
Wariness intensifying to fear, Tom hesitates at the gate.
The Moots. It’s his neighbours he can hear; people transformed into these grotesque ‘whitey’ things. What Gracey saw. They’re mad. As mad as pale serpents that wait in the undergrowth, seeking opportunities to bite and poison.
Tom looks back to his house, drawn by the thought of Gracey and Fiona sleeping. A yearning holds him still until he returns his attention to the forbidding treeline, a pitch-black and rustling wall.
Instinct warns him to never confront the neighbours again, in any circumstances. To never risk another encounter with their sinister craziness. But he has a more compelling need: to convince himself that what he has just witnessed is nothing more than grotesque rural eccentricity. He knows that he will not rest until he knows who the Moots really are. What they are. What he has moved his family to live beside.
He should never have cut down their trees.
Regret feels like a breastplate made of lead. The shadow of terrible consequences that he’s introduced into his life, their lives , seems to have exposed his nerves to a new kind of static. The opportunity to turn a blind eye, as his wife sagely advised, is long gone. This dispute has passed far beyond weathering a neighbour’s petty torments.
Angling the torch beam at where he places his feet, he moves as stealthily as he is able, his sight and hearing a low-powered radar, directed towards the distant chatter: two voices now, if that’s what they could possibly be, calling to each other.
Along the mud path he slips and slides, head down. Attempts to smother his rapid, nervous panting only shorten his breath. An arrhythmic heartbeat disorientates him as much as the oppressive darkness; a void crowding the frail torchlight, as if the very trees are issuing the impenetrable darkness in protest at any dilution his watery beam attempts.
A few hundred metres inside and the voices are less obscured by the acres of trunk, foliage and scrub. At the limit of his hearing, the speakers’ mouths might now be crammed with food, or their chattering concealed by cloth. But from what is decipherable, despite the lower registers they contrive with their vocal cords, he still recognises the speakers.
Mrs Moot, who growls as much as she speaks. ‘Under the earth… The sow.’
Answered by Magi. ‘Blessed bitch… The earth.’
Oh Christ. His hair feels as if it’s attached to his scalp with pins.
Just preposterous. The things that people get up to .
Whitey things.
Tom kills the torch. Crouching, he waits for his eyes to accustom to the darkness.
At the perimeter of a clearing he slows until he’s merely inching forward. There, bent over with one hand impressed into cold soil, he finds a gap sufficient for a frightened face to peer through. And within a circular arrangement of saplings, a woodland glade opens to his eyes.
A circular space, flickering amber. A place he has not seen by day, or twilight, because he’s never reached this far when hunting for Gracey’s penguins.
Gracey’s woodland house? Where the lady spoke to her?
A sooty light clings to these trees, as if a dirty vestige of the day became trapped when night fell. But the smeared and swaying illumination is not residual: it oscillates from lit tapers, flames upon poles planted about the foliage bearding the glade.
The grassy mound is manmade. An earthwork. Spherical, as if cupped and smoothed by a potter’s wet hands.
A pampered, grassy moat rings the hill like another fussed-over lawn. Such perfection strikes him as immediately incongruous amidst the tangle and leaning boughs of the wood. This place is maintained, the site is curated as if sacred, the grove groomed as precisely as the Moots’ gardens. Their mania and obsession extends here.
The neighbours’ warnings about the woods and their aversion to trespassers suddenly makes sense. This is a place they don’t want investigated. And for good reason. Because of this, this horrible thing that they do here.
Movement stirs the glade. From out of an infernal tiger-stripe of shadow, Mrs Moot appears. Naked and lithe, she moves backwards. Her strut is ridiculous but horribly compelling. A drawn-out walk. A mime artist mimicking a world set to reverse.
The bristly, tusked pig mask still conceals her entire head, the bone spurs thrusting from her crude mouth. The flesh of her exposed body remains plastered and ashen but as she orbits the grassy mound, black streaks become visible. They stain her shoulders, breasts and belly.
As she passes a taper, mounted high upon an iron stave, the drying tributaries that mark her flesh gleam crimson. Glittering ruby splashes of fresh blood.
No longer the rude, imperious oddball he confronted in her garden and porch, this persona is other , something else. A woman transformed. She has thirty or more years on Tom but the supple power she wields in every limb excites and revolts him. Aghast, and unintentionally bowing, Tom lowers himself to the mulch of soil and leaf-fall, his jeans sodden in an instant.
Daring to raise his face, but only once she is concealed again behind the mound, he stills his jumping eyes to better survey as much of the visible glade as he can.
Four thick tapers on iron stands impose four markers into the grove: north, south, east, west. A crude stone dolmen serves for an altar, positioned before the flames marking north. Upon its summit a black animal is splayed, butchered. A goat or lamb, he thinks, from what he can see of the lolling head.
Closing his eyes on the tortured statement, though it cannot be unseen, he thinks of gambolling Archie, that snuffler of chins. His disbelief is usurped by his revulsion. Nor does his growing familiarity with this lunacy lessen a terror he’s not encountered since infancy. And has he not seen something like this grove before? In the dream! Though this version of the altar is rusted by animal blood; in his nightmare, a similar stone plinth was garlanded by red flowers.
Last seen suckling betwixt the ghastly legs of his pig-wife, and still wearing the hare headpiece, a naked Magi Moot soon prances into view and draws Tom’s eyes.
Light upon those bony toes, he moves the counter-clockwise route the boar trod. While still stained white and made bloodless like the dead, his narrow chest is similarly streaked crimson and black as if a recent and messy guzzling produced spills. Maddeningly white and wide, his excited eyes glimmer inside the sockets of the lumpy, oversized face that he has transplanted onto his human visage. The whiskered muzzle bobs as he moves, the tatty ears spear vertical.
When the figure dances across the spy-hole, Tom presses himself earthward as if genuflecting before this terrible sect, priesting its hideous ritual.
Mad fuckers.
Beast-headed Mrs Moot lopes out again from behind the mound and heads to the altar.
Repelled but unable to not look, Tom raises his head a fraction to better see the north of the glade, where the pig comes to a standstill and positions itself behind the stained rock.
Hands raised, palms facing the sky, the boar stands upon one leg and holds the same awful pose Mrs Moot assumed in the garden, before the stone imp of the ornamental pond. She faces the grassy mound, her petite and mired breasts rising and falling from the exertion of the backwards dance. And from the open mouth of the swinish head, a breathless but elated voice incants, ‘In the room beneath the earth I saw the sow.’
Shifting in the soil, Tom glances south and locates the chalky hare. It too has stopped striding backwards and stands at the opposite side of the grove, its long feet set in the first position of ballet. Hands raised at either side, palms facing the sky as if commanding an audience to rise, Magi answers the pig’s call. ‘We fed the sow. Blessed bitch. Blessed virgin. Our mother of the soil.’
The pig. ‘Above the room beneath the earth we are exulted.’
Call and answer, tossed across the glade between the Moots. And immediately, as if some infernal sluice has opened, a sound of running water covers the earth.
So loud and clear is the gush that Tom wouldn’t be surprised to find himself lying face-down in a swiftly running stream. Desperately, he looks about himself but there is no stream here. And yet the silvery, bubbling song of a brook flows without cease, about his face and through the darkness that suffocates the ground that he can barely see.
Again, remembrance serves as curse and intensifies his fear to panic. This is the soundscape of the dream he so recently suffered. So has he transported the music of subterranean water from a sleeping vision to these woods? Or has this fountain, or spring, been startled into a cascade by the loathsome activities of the dreadful Moots? Maybe speakers are concealed out here to stream the tumult of moving water through the air of the wood.
Yes. They must have a recording that they activate when … doing all this. They must.
The pig’s voice deepens to a register that Tom suspects is subhuman. Her words crumble to grunts. ‘In the room beneath the earth I see the sow.’
The hare’s voice strikes a falsetto, an animal screech. ‘We fed the sow!’
Each figure then crouches to the earth in perfect synchronicity, as if enacting some grotesque performance art.
How? How did two gardening-obsessed oddballs become so deranged?
In flickers of half-light, to complement the vocal effects, the nuances of the Moots’ physical bearings change again. Impossibly, the posture of his neighbours assumes an even more bestial character. The patchy form of Magi, smudged and inked by shadow, reposes upon stringy yet powerful haunches like an upright hare. Mimicking bony forelegs, his arms dangle before a torso contriving a length that it didn’t possess before. His nose even sniffs at the air, as if pausing in the clopping of a crop after catching scent of a circling fox.
A swinish grunt yanks Tom’s horrified scrutiny to the pig-like Mrs Moot. She, or it, now roots face-down in the soil. Before the altar she snuffles loathsomely at the leavings that have dripped from the carcase above. And, surely, too quickly for any human being that was not a trained dancer, and one that was much younger than Mrs Moot too, the pig-thing then scurries forward. Moving upon closed fists and the balls of its feet, the grotesque figure scampers, grunting, to the mound. Where the hare now sits, upon the summit, with a mangy head raised to the sky, the forelegs hanging limp.
Impossible. An illusion that the hare could move so quickly, from the ground to the mound. Equally incredible for its belly to now wisp with hair. Mere moments before, there had been no bristly disruption of the chalky daub; Magi’s torso had been smooth.
The hare angles its head further back and issues a fresh scream, one that withers the parts of Tom that he’s barely holding together. And it is a cry unlike any sound that human vocal cords should be capable of producing. Lonesome yet wretched with spite. A screech of malevolent woe.
Tom scuffles backwards more noisily than he’d have chosen before his wits fled. Feet catching the undergrowth, he loses balance, then rights himself and glances at the grove.
Verdure obscures the ring, the altar, the fire, yet he still sees far more than he wants to.
The ragged silhouettes of the pig and hare are both now upright, standing side by side, upon the summit of the mound. Their posture is awkward and unnatural as if they are four-legged animals trained to stand upon their hind legs to mimic people.
They’re too far away for him to be certain what the eyes of the hare have picked out. But the maw of the pig mask that Mrs Moot must use as a visor confronts the scrub in which he presently flounders. Feeling no stronger nor more capable than a lost child, Tom dithers long enough to observe the hare and the pig sink to all fours.
Simultaneously and soundlessly, they crawl forward. Descending the slope of the mound, the two whitish forms slide from view. But their direction of travel throttles Tom’s mind into a wordless scream of alarm.
Scrabbling to locate the torch’s switch with shaky hands, his balance is shot to staggers, then a drunken wheeling. His boots may as well have trampled bubble-wrap.
At the edge of his meagre sight there is a darting motion of a long form, as the hare leaps vertically, its ears streaming like rags strung on internal wires. And as if capable of flight, the dark streak vanishes inside the canopy of this unreal night. Among the upper tiers of black boughs, the spindly form is collected with a rustle.
At ground level, the thump and scrape of determined feet soon follows. Unseen and low to the ground, the pig-thing barrels to the grove’s border. A swinish bleat shatters the night’s held breath, dispersing the last vestige of Tom’s composure. Then a squeal, that is almost a word, precedes a hungry grunting mere feet from his position. From the scrub before his shins, the beast burrows.
Tom bolts.
Along the track. Left, right, straight ahead, the torch’s frail strobe washes twists of stick and foliage charred jagged. Whispering wells of darkness sunk between limbs, stout trunks, vortexing vines, all conspire to swallow the light.
Crashing at the side of the path, the swine bellows and squeals and issues ravenous grunts. Tom falls in response to its hungry call. Regaining his feet, he staggers off the track. Then leaps onto the narrow groove heading out.
No sooner does he regain the path than the hare screams from directly above his head. His own scream promptly answers as if he is already its prey, swooped upon from above and soon to flop from a tatty black muzzle, his neck broken and loose.
Upon a tree limb bridging the path, a murky silhouette stains the skeletal canopy. The long-eared hare, perched a considerable distance from the ground, watches him.
Tom’s appalled gaping is only severed when the boar crashes the undergrowth at his ankles. And he is sure that he hears a set of yellow teeth snap together.
He drops the torch as if it is ballast that slows him. His stagger turns to a sprint that seems to place no distance between himself and the deafening screams and grunts of his pursuers. Swamped by fear, he briefly considers lying in the soil and begging for a swift dispatch. But hunted by the pack and reduced to an animal himself, his urge to flee blind is greater than his instinct to submit and he reaches a speed he’s not known since a distant adolescence.
Smashing through scrub and bramble, clawing the air with raking hands, he careens along the unlit path leading to his garden. As if he’s running through a crowd with its legs thrust out to trip, and many sharp fingernails raking to drag him down, his face is whipped, his chest spiked, his legs sliced. But on he goes, stumbling and leaping. His breath and heartbeats seem to lag behind his exertions as if his organs belong to another fleeing body at his heels. And when Tom hits the garden fence, he retains no sense of how long it took him to reach his property.
The palisade stands firm. His body snaps in half and gambols over the barrier. His head and shoulders strike a mess of weeds.
Like a badger run to ground by hounds, he crawls the sopping verdure of his holed lawn that stretches to the distant shape of his burrow. The faraway patio doors gape blackly and about him yawns the open grave of the garden.
Above his face, a depth of frigid air oppresses. A profound silence falls from the sky. And a colder, heavier gravity presses him down against the earth. Spent and wounded, he is an animal paralysed with shock after the hunt has passed, or relented. But so loud was the crescendo of his desperate exit from the woods, he cannot guess when the pursuit ceased.
He’s not even sure that he’s escaped. Not sure if the Moots had merely played with the equivalent of a harried mouse on a woodland floor; perhaps to shape a promise of what comes next to those who defy them.