His hands seem to belong to someone else. Disembodied, they jerk as if operating seconds before his mind can understand their difficulty in securing the windows and doors.
He’s also hurting all over from where the wood tore and ensnared him. A dew of lymph and speckles of blood ink his hands. Inside his jeans and hoodie, stings sing out in a chorus of small screams. Shooting blue pains streak his back and one hip from his upending over the fence.
With the door bolted, Tom slumps amidst his bedding on the sofa. Enfeebled currents in his mind fail to stir his thoughts from stasis. He can do no more than stare into space, eyes locked by horror. Only the sight of his torn jeans returns him to the room, the present, to an even greater astonishment at what he’s just witnessed. What you are living next door to.
He longs for curtains to draw and further shut out the sense of all that has entered their airspace from next door.
Memory returns piecemeal, out of sync. Each recollection more sickening than the last. The slowed backward striding of the counter-clockwise dance. That drapery of limp, glistening fur, the blood seeping from an animal and marbling the stone altar. Magi Moot’s maniacal eyes glimmering inside the sockets of the ragged headpiece. It, the hare, sitting like that … The blare of the pig’s grunt. Echoes too horrid to allow within memory. A pasty devil upon one thin leg … pointing at this fucking house …
Tom breathes unevenly. A wet rattle in one lung. What air is sucked in, slips out a wheeze. What, what, what are they? What, what, what do I say to … the police?
He recovers his phone from the floor. The police must be called. An animal was slaughtered. Two, if he counts the fox. Three, if he counts their dog, because they poisoned him!
This is intimidation. Some kind of … witchcraft ?
That , he really can’t accept, even now. Because … that doesn’t exist.
But all he has endured from day one is part of the Moots’ design to harass and frighten their neighbours. That he’ll put money on.
Why? What is the purpose of it?
To drive you out.
The neighbours are mad. Vindictive. Twisted. They have mastered some kind of … he doesn’t know what. Acting? Performance trick to mimic wild animals? However they do it, they’re lunatics who have somehow bypassed the criminal justice system, social services, the world, living here for decades.
Tom punches the keypad of the screen and jams the phone against his ear.
Sure, he cut down their trees but they smashed his fence.
What did that scruffy guy in the knackered car say: that they will make sure he moves out, or will wish that he did? Something to that effect.
How many people know about this? Them? In the village?
He doesn’t know the village, or anyone there. There are no shops, nothing for them down that hill. They’ve only walked through it once and they never saw a soul.
Their predecessor? Poor bastard must have been gas-lit into hanging himself by those … by … He cannot find the words required to report his neighbours to the police. How can he reasonably and accurately describe people that daub themselves white by night and emulate pigs and hares?
How it leapt into the bloody trees! An illusion?
And the pig?
Mrs Moot. A horrible sense of her authority freezes his thoughts. The commanding will beneath the beastliness. He’s seen people, women, bow before her upon a front lawn. They kissed her hand!
‘Police,’ he says at the prompt from the operator.
‘Please wait while I connect you.’
Another woman of the night soon appears, on duty at the nearest police station. ‘Hello. How can I help you?’ she asks, firmly, distractedly.
Tom stammers, his voice immediately suppressed by embarrassment before the first word is uttered. ‘Neighbours. My neighbours. They’re…’
‘Sir?’
‘Not right. They’re doing a ritual. In the woods. They…’
A long pause as the police officer waits for him to finish his nonsense. He can’t finish. The heat and expansion of the blood behind his face, the torrent inside his ears, derails his thoughts. Numb tongue. Throat squeezed.
‘Sir, are you in danger?’
‘Yes. No. Not now. Maybe. I don’t know. They were … doing something. Mound. Round this hill in the woods at the back of our house. We just moved here. Are new here. They. Next door—’
‘Sir, what is the nature of the complaint? Is it a nuisance you’re reporting? If it’s noise then disputes with neighbours are usually a council matter.’
‘No. Worse than that. They killed an animal! And our dog. I know they did. A fox the other day. They tied it to a tree to frighten my little girl. They’re savage. Sadistic. Cruel people. We’re not safe here.’
‘Sir, are you saying you saw your neighbours kill an animal? Your dog was it?’
Tom stares in exasperation at the phone. ‘Fuck.’
‘Sir? Can I remind you—’
‘Sorry. I’m sorry. But … we don’t get on. With them. Haven’t been here long but there’s a dispute. About the fence, woods, noise. Back and forth. And … our dog is now dead. They told us we can’t go into the woods. In there, this … like a witchcraft thing was going on. They were dancing .’ The last syllable is a puff of breath; a weak and hopeless final note in a stream of gibberish.
‘Sir, I’m not sure I understand. Can I ask if you’ve been drinking?’
Tom hangs up. Tosses his phone onto the sofa before the urge to smash the handset against the floor overrides his circuits. Face in hands, his scratched fingers clutch and claw his scalp. He stares into space. He rocks back and forth. And stares some more.