Arnos Vale

Opening
They mapped the universe the day Carl Hastings died. Some boffin in a
white lab coat showing the world a three-dimensional blob on a computer
screen. This was it. This was the universe. The Great Mystery explained
by something that looked like an ejaculation caught and frozen the
second before impact. That was the way I thought of it.
Excuse the warp on my perceptions.
They, the world, are happy now they have charted the borders. Now they
feel they know where they are. But I have to laugh. I have to try
really hard not to fall on the floor and just laugh out loud, so very
loud. They have only created another question..... what lies beyond
that fluid boundary?
Philosophers will philosophize and the Thinkers will think. Only the
unfortunate or the mad will ever know.
Carl Hastings knew.
The knowledge was forced upon him. He didn't ask for it and he didn't
keep it. He gouged the memory out with a powerdrill. There's nothing
left of the man I knew for eighteen years as a friend.
Just an empty vessel that reminds me of everything he used to
be.

Recounting the Tale
I write books. Horror stories. Not very well but I try and to some
degree I have been successful. Carl and I were friends since the day I
moved into the house next door to his parents. I was ten. He was the
same age. I was into fantasy. He was into electronics. I bummed around
the world and evolved into a writer. He pursued a goal and created his
own company, electronic surveillance and counter surveillance. Maybe
some of my imaginative flair rubbed off on him. Then again, Carl had
always been a sucker for Bond films.
Whatever, he did well by it. Had money, status in London, a beautiful
wife, a summer home in Sicily, connections in government and an old
friend in Bristol who was always up for a favour. Me.
Carl was in Bristol on business and was in need of help. He had two
'jobs' on the go and needed someone to baby-sit one of them whilst he
took care of the other which had become more serious than
anticipated.
The babysitting job was familiar to me because it involved a story the
media had been piping on about for the previous two weeks. A series of
bizarre vandalisations in a cemetery not far from my flat.
Carl had been contacted by Richard Morgan, the secretary for the
company that owned the cemetery. Morgan was also friends with Carl's
wife and was frustrated by the police's inability to catch the vandals
and prevent further damage to the property. Morgan wanted surveillance.
Carl was there to provide it.
It was more serious than simple vandalism.
As reported in the local newspapers, the previous two weeks had seen a
number graves dug up and opened. Robbery was not the motive; nothing
had been taken. It seemed to be a sick joke left to run on far too
long.
Carl needed me to be the surveillance and wait for the vandals to make
their next visit: then call the police on my mobile phone. Richard
Morgan had already made arrangements with the caretaker for me to do
so.
I was to begin that night.

House on the hill
We drove into town to grab some lunch; there's a smashing greasy spoon
on Gloucester Road, just by the Zetland Road junction that serves up
the best fry up in the universe.
As we ate, Carl filled me in on a few more details, although in all
honesty there was very little to tell. During the past two weeks twelve
graves had been dug up, the caskets opened and left for the caretaker
to find in the morning. Nothing taken, nothing done to the rotting
cadavers, no clues left other than two sets of boot prints left in the
mud, the same boot prints for each desecrated grave.
Carl settled the bill then drove me to the Arnos Vale Cemetery.
As we pulled into the rudimentary car park just past the stone gate
posts, a young couple was helping an elderly relative back into their
car; two children chased each other round the vehicle, laughing and
screaming, filling the air with the sounds of life.
I stood watching the old woman whilst Carl sat half-out of his car
talking into his mobile phone. The woman looked ill. I wondered 'How
did she feel being here, so close to the dead, so close to her own
end?'
Abruptly the children were packed away and the car drove off, leaving
a heavy silence to fill the space where their laughter had been. Carl
was still talking on the phone, something about a murder, so I was left
to stand there, taking in the vast impression that Arnos Vale makes
upon the mind. A scary place. Where the fears of the subconscious are
invoked, inspirational to the lover of the morbid, the purveyor of the
obscene. Acres of dense woodland cluttered with cramped headstones and
crumbling vaults, a place left to rot in the increasing urban sprawl.
Sanctuary and terror dwelled here side by side.
I suddenly felt naked, standing there with the oppressive heat of the
afternoon baking my brain, the slope of Arnos Vale rising before me;
there was something haunted about the shadows between the trees up
there, almost as if each patch of darkness was an individual soul,
watching me, grasping on to the secret the place concealed.
The nature of Carl's work often took him into murky waters. When Carl
switched off his mobile phone I could see from looking at his face he
was disturbed by the conversation just held: about the murder, his
other job here in the city. I didn't ask further.
In silence we walked through the golden light of the afternoon, along
winding pathways that snaked through the trees, gentle inclines and
drops to both sides of us, the sun barely touching the mausoleums
hidden by the wild undergrowth, left forgotten; slabs of pale marble
abandoned to the virid embrace of nature.
The caretaker no longer lived on the sight. However, a house built for
that purpose remained. It was a small, bleak two-storey structure, red
brick and dark grey granite situated in a level clearing part of the
way up the slope of Arnos Vale.
Without the screening of the trees the sheer profusion of gravestones
was very noticeable: they were literally everywhere, even on the
overgrown patch of grass that served as a small front garden for the
house.
Carl joked about how glad he was not to be spending the night there; I
smiled but remember feeling an acute sense of dread as we stepped
through the front door into a short, dark hallway. There was something
horribly oppressive about the whole place; the building mirrored the
claustrophobic feel of the cemetery, this sole island of life
surrounded by an ocean of death; dark wood floorboards, low ceiling,
thick shadows, enclosing me as I walked through the passage to the
kitchen. There were only three rooms to the ground floor and on either
side of the passage we passed the open doorways of a lounge and a
dinning room, both bare of furniture.
The kitchen was no different, though a small wooden table had been
folded out from beneath the bench and a cardboard box of food, a
saucepan and toilet rolls dumped there. A small note told they were
left by the caretaker, courtesy of Richard Morgan.
Carl and I investigated the rest of the house; upstairs were two
bedrooms and a combined bathroom and toilet, again bare of furniture
but surprisingly clean. A lady goes up there once a month to give it a
dusting. From the single window in the rear bedroom I was able to see a
large portion of the cemetery; I could even see the main road, the high
stone wall acting as the boundary marker; the fact that there were
people so close didn't dispel the sense of impending isolation, being
there. I was loathe to admit it but I wanted Carl to stay with me.
However, he was already explaining how he would be meeting a man that
night who knew the murder victim. Leaving me a torch he'd brought from
the car, Carl promised to pick me up the next morning.
The sun was starting its fiery descent and I was alone.
I boiled up some water in the saucepan and made a cup of Nescafe left
for me by the caretaker; there was even a bag of sugar! Plonking myself
down on the wooden stool by the bench and table, I sipped coffee and
tried to put down a few notes to paper. My primary reason for agreeing
to help Carl was because I believed I would gain some great ideas for a
new story.
I have that urge to laugh again.
It was dark before I knew it, suddenly finding it hard to see what I
was writing. The sun had just slipped beneath the trees at the back of
the house, plunging the small kitchen into shadow.
Again, I felt that sensation of dread, sat there all alone with the
dark passageway behind me, surrounded by empty and soulless rooms,
facing beyond the glass a silent majority of cold gravestones. I
thought about my flat only five, ten minutes walk away and wanted
desperately to be there, snug within its familiar walls and decorations
and the sounds of my music. But I was here, in what could have been a
different universe...and I had a whole night to go through!
At least the evening was warm. I turned on some lights and made
another coffee.
My imagination was swelling with ideas and I was possessed to get them
down on paper. In the end I resolved to split my time, rewarding forty
minutes of watching the cemetery with the kitchen lights turned off
with a subsequent forty minutes of writing, and so forth.
When I first turned the lights off I was startled to discover a ground
mist had sprang up out of nowhere; I watched mesmerized by the illusion
of a white gaseous lake illuminated by the moon from which these grave
stones jutted askew.
This new phenomenon intrigued me: I wondered what the whole cemetery
would look like from a higher vantagepoint. The best view would be from
the top of the vale.
Armed with Carl's flashlight I strolled out into the heavy night air;
although the body of the mist lay at knee level I found myself
submerged in an eerie haze through which the vague shapes of the
mausoleums and carved stone figures slowly and silently emerged.
Out there in the dark, hemmed in by the ancient trees and encroaching
shrubbery to either side of the path, with my visibility filtered into
a base spectrum of ghostly shadows, passing only the silent faces of
weathered headstones, I felt more alone than I had ever done before in
my life.
I wanted to leave this place.
The torch was no help. Every now and again I became aware of a
rustling sound to one side of the path, as if something was moving
cautiously, even creeping, alongside my route. Whenever I lifted the
torch from my feet and swung it into the dense foliage off the path,
the mist diffused the light into every other direction. As a result I
could catch no sign of what was causing the noise. More than once I
considered the possibility the vandals were stalking me, but the noise
happened so infrequently, or rather I noticed it beyond my
dreaming-strolling-state so few times, that I put it down to one of the
rats I had seen earlier, feasting on the mounds of rotting flowers by
the main gates.
Now I know differently.
I don't recall how long the walk took me. My mind became pre-occupied
with fighting off the depression that kept threatening to force me to
leave and go home. But I refused to be defeated by emotion, or
fear.
When I reached the top of the Vale, the dense wall of trees up there
created a veil of inky darkness through which a few city lights
twinkled, sullenly. As for the view I had come up here to see, the
visibility was so poor I might have well as been at the bottom of a
sump. Surrounding me, however, was the stage set for a Gothic ballet;
ready for grey fleshed dancers to come sweeping in from the wings for
death's nightly performance. Stone figures stood waiting in frozen
relief, pulling around them nebulous shrouds of mist....
The mist, it was everywhere, clinging to every surface, seeping up
from the earth like the chilled breath of the dead.
It would have been beautiful if it had not been so unsettling.
I tried to formulate reasons, other than sheer vandalism, for why
someone would go through the bother of digging up twelve graves!
I could think of none.
There seemed to be no point to it. No pattern!
It was whilst I was standing there that I became aware of being
watched, or at least, that's what I felt. It was an awareness different
to the noise in the undergrowth because this time I could actually feel
the presence of another out there in the dark. I knew I was not
alone.
I turned and swung the torch beam behind me but saw nothing. The mist
had become thicker and risen higher as if aware of my intrusive
noctural presence, as if it wished to protect the sanctity of the
cemetery. Visibility became almost zero, the torch beam could do little
more than pick out the smudged outlines of the nearest
gravestones.
I could literally see nothing.
My mind began to play tricks on me.
What was out there?
I took two paces back the way I had come then stopped, fighting it,
refusing to succumb to the fear.
Then movement to my right.
I span and froze, nearly dropping the torch because of the insane
faces glaring back at me. I began to scream, my lungs barely able to
force the air through the terror-constricted chords of my throat. But
the sound slipped into hysterical laugher, an embarrassed admission of
my own foolishness. They were only stone! I shook my head and swung a
fist through the mist-clogged air.
When I looked back, to confirm my stupidity, the faces were
gone.
Perhaps it was the mist and the dark, acting in concert to confuse my
senses, but whatever the truth the pure terror I felt at that point was
undeniable and unassailable.
I began to back away, taking slow, cautious steps, retreating from the
area with all my senses fired-up on adrenalin.
Something was out there and whatever it was, it was toying with
me.
I kept telling myself it was the vandals. It was the only trick I
could use to keep myself sane. There were parts of my brain working
here that had not squeezed out a signal for millennia. The fear I was
feeling was primal. And, instinctively, I knew it. It belonged to a
Dark Age when the monsters of myth and legend, pushed out beyond the
industrial veil of human civilization, where not so hidden.
The supernatural? I don't believe in the dialectic of that term any
more. Some things have always been with us. Some things are far older
than we are. If anything, you could argue they are the natural order of
existence and it is we, humankind, who are the aberrations.
Something moved in silence, right in front of me. I had been looking
to my left and down behind me, checking I was not about to trip over
any graves as I stepped backwards; the edge of my vision saw it, a man,
or so I thought at first but then the after image replayed itself and
no man ever moved like that. Nothing natural moved like that. I cannot
describe the way it glided yet jerked, sweeping through the air as if
jumping from one headstone to another.
I turned then and ran.
The fear overwhelmed any sense of curiosity or notions of controlling
my primitave emotions with intellectual rigor.
I ran, blind through the mist which opened to recieved me with every
new wild stride, and closed behind me to smother me in its cold and
deathly embrace.
I ran and I was pursued, by all the imaginary conjurations of any
waking nightmare. I didn't stop until I reached the unwelcoming
sanctuary of the caretaker's house where the fear was replaced by
exhaustion.
Stumbling inside I locked every door and window and then like an
idiot, flopped down on the bare mattress in the upstairs bedroom. Like
an idiot because I went to sleep. Like an idiot because when Carl
banging on the front door waked me, I discovered another grave had been
opened!

Carl's Story
We left the police with the caretaker and drove to the greasy spoon on
Gloucester Road. Over bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, mushrooms
and grilled tomatoes we talked about what had happened. Carl looked
haggard and worn out; he put it down to the fact he hadn't slept since
leaving me at the house the day before, but I could see there was
something else troubling him. He looked like a man under terrible
mental strain; he fidgeted constantly and noticed his gaze constantly
straying over my shoulder into the street.
I expressed my feelings of failure, especially when the police had
questioned me. Carl told me not to worry and asked if I wanted to quit.
I said no but I wish I'd told the truth.
Eventually, Carl admitted to the strain he was bearing. He needed to
talk about the murder case, about what his meeting the previous night
had brought to light.
He explained how a journalist from one of the large national
newspapers had contacted his agency; I'm not going to say whom, but for
this story I'll call him John.
John was convinced that local officials were concealing aspects
relating to the recent murder of his colleague, Jackie Solomein. The
official inquiry into her death had been suspended due to lack of
information, but John knew that wasn't the real reason why.
Jackie Solomein was murdered whilst investigating a possible link
between a criminal called Peter Todd and a London Judge. Her lead was
that the Judge was pulling strings for a criminal gang in return for
cash and reciprocal favours. Hard drugs came into the equation
somewhere but John only knew the bones of what Jackie Solomein had been
digging into.
John wanted Carl to use his contacts to cut through the red tape that
had been wrapped around the police inquiry. He was the right man for
the job: within two days he managed to procure Jackie Solomein's
notepads, held as evidence with the rest of the contents of her car,
found outside the murder scene.
However, in the process of doing so, Carl uncovered some disturbing
facts. High-ranking MI5 personnel were involved in the cover up; and
that it was a cover up.
The notepads contained shorthand transcripts of conversations held by
Jackie Solomein with a London gangster willing to trade information for
money.
Peter Todd had broken into the big-time after pulling off an armed
robbery on a security van. He and his cohorts made away with a large
cash haul that looked as though it was about to find its way into the
metropolitan judiciary, and then up some kid's nose or vein.
Jackie Solomein tracked Peter Todd to a rented house here in Bristol,
just off Bath Road. She believed the money was being held there until a
transaction could be made. The day before her murder, she told John she
would be watching the house for a few days hoping she might photograph
a connection between Peter Todd and the Judge.
John got a phone call from a friend telling him that Jackie had been
found dead along with Peter Todd; this friend had been unable to say
how they'd been killed. This was the other disturbing fact. Both bodies
had been hastily cremated after a vague autopsy that loosely stated the
cause of death as `brain hemorrhage' and `massive blood loss caused by
severance of the subclavian artery...'.
Carl was not convinced by the official veneer and dug deeper. What he
found was a mesh of tight-lipped contacts. Nobody wanted to talk about
what was found in that house.
When John got the phone call he drove straight over to the house and
found it completely sealed by police, with officers on guard at the
front and back. A special incident unit was parked outside for almost
thirty-six hours and its white-suited occupants were the only people
allowed inside the property.
This convinced Carl there was more to be found than had been so far.
Then he met the man he'd been talking to on his mobile the day I was at
the cemetery. I never found out who he was but seemed to be able to
work small miracles. The night Carl met him, he handed across copies of
photographs taken at the scene, plus a roughly written down copy of a
pathologist's report.
Carl had them with him, showed them to me....Christ, I could
understand why he hadn't been able to get any sleep! The report stated
that the body of Peter Todd had been found in the bedroom; numerous
pictures delineated the whole scene section by section: evidence of a
violent struggle, then those that showed the body itself. Slumped in
the corner of the room like some grotesque parody of a puppet without
strings, head bowed forward, face rigid in some final scream of
agony...or fear, a gaping hole where the top of his skull had been torn
open, brain matter spattering his cheeks and the nearby walls.
The wounds inflicted upon Jackie Solomein were far worse. The
photographs showed everything in sickening detail, the report adding a
horrible weight to the impact of the images. Her naked body lay on the
landing outside the bedroom where Peter Todd was found. Her clothes had
been torn off, literally ripped in the process. Nothing remained of her
chest; various organs and entrails hung from the savagely opened
cavity; ribs pulled back or snapped away like they were nothing more
than twigs. Her face had been completely chewed away; several close-ups
reveal the bizarre teeth marks ingrained into the skull, marks which
the report identified as `similar to canine' and which appeared on the
remaining rib cage and sternum. Apparently a large quantity of bone and
muscle tissue was missing, possibly eaten.
Eaten by what? The report seemed intent on finding a rational
explanation. Of course parts had been missed out by whomever copied it
down, but I could see their theory: an animal disturbed the bodies
shortly after death. A hungry dog.
Oh my God, if I saw those words now...
Carl was convinced the authorities suspected who killed them, but for
some reason all this red tape had come down from the echelons of MI5.
Case suspended. It was ridiculous, and almost smacked of conspiracy,
but Carl sensed the reason was fear.
The other question to ask was `why were they killed?' The most obvious
answer would have been the deal between the Judge and Peter Todd's
cohorts went sour; perhaps they decided to cut Todd out of the picture
and Jackie Solomein just had the horrible misfortune of being caught up
in the killing.
Her notebooks detailed her stakeout of the house. The only visitors
were Peter Todd himself, and two men, both well built, but one a lot
shorter than the other, carrying three large suitcases. Jackie
suspected the suitcases contained the money stolen from the security
van. It was her last entries that shocked both of us. At eleven P.M. on
the night before she was found dead, she recorded Peter Todd leaving
the house with one suitcase, walking to the junction of a side street
then pulling up a man-hole cover and quickly descending through it. The
two other men had left earlier in the day. Over an hour later Todd
returned from the manhole in what she described as a state of extreme
distress, covered in filth and without the suitcase. She noted he
appeared terrified by something, backing away from manhole before
turning and sprinting back to the house. Her last words were `going
inside'.

Money for the Dead
We spent the rest of the day trying to relax in the city's numerous
cafes, talking about old times, old stories, old jobs, but the
photographs haunted both of us both. Late in the afternoon Carl dropped
me off at my flat; I told him I'd make my own way to the cemetery that
night.
I never saw him in a sane state of mind again.
What I'm going to tell you now comes partly from conjecture, but
largely it comes from what Carl told me before his mind fully
comprehended what had happened to him, and snapped completely.
As I understand it, after leaving me at my flat he drove down to the
house where the murders had taken place. Rather than trying to gain
entry he walked to the side street, found the manhole used by Peter
Todd and decided to venture down into the sewers to try and find where
he'd left the suitcase.
He didn't have to go far before discovering a hole in the brickwork of
the sewer wall, large enough for a man to squeeze through, and
revealing a small crawl space leading into the earth. I think Carl must
have lost some of his sanity already to do what he did next.
With the aid of a torch he crawled into that slimy passageway.
Apparently there were more tunnels, branching off in every direction,
but it was what lay in some of the tunnels that made him realize where
he was.
Beneath Arnos Vale. Beneath the cemetery. The rotting, dismembered
remains of numerous corpses lay strewn along Carl's progress, all
showing signs of having been.... eaten: various body parts, arms, legs,
whole torsos, all putrescent flesh, left with great bite marks. There
were far too many tunnels for Peter Todd and his crooks to have been
responsible, and besides, why would they? No, something else dug those
tunnels, something that lurks under the very streets we walk, under the
floorboards we sit on, in the basements we hear noises from...something
that feeds from what we bury in the ground.
Carl pressed on, somehow able to suppress the fear that must have been
with him; curiosity, determination getting the better part of him. He
followed the main passage, crawling through only God knows what before
finally encountering a steep upward gradient. To his horror Carl found
the upward passage entered through the floor of an ancient crypt.
There on the floor was the suitcase left by Peter Todd.
Inside was packed with ?50 notes. It was probably now that his dazed
mind began linking certain pieces of information together, so that he
felt a danger not only for himself but for me.
He knew the reason for the graves being dug open yet left untouched.
Peter Todd had told his two accomplices he was going to hide the money
in the cemetery, but perhaps not how and certainly not where. Todd had
been killed and now the two men were searching for the lost loot.
But it was the thought of what might have killed Jackie Solomein and
Peter Todd that caused Carl to worry most; what must have disturbed
Todd as he hid the money, what followed him out from the sewers and
into the house, just behind Jackie Solomein.
Carl tried to escape from the crypt but found its heavy stone door
immovable. With great reluctance he re-entered the subterranean tunnels
and made his way back into the sewers, desperate to get back to Arnos
Vale to warn me.
I was probably sat in the kitchen of the caretaker's house at that
moment, drinking coffee and watching the last fiery rays of the sun on
the tips of the trees. Night fell quickly again. The moon was up,
almost full and beaming down its silvery light though this was
diminished by thick mist that came seeping out from that rotten earth,
swirling up to caress the crumbing headstones.
I moved upstairs, feeling instinctively safer there, further away from
the ground. Then I saw the movement: vague, hunched outlines, moving
swiftly between the cover of the stones.
I wanted to catch them. The vandals. I wanted to see them properly, so
I didn't phone the police straight away. Instead I picked up the torch
and the metal bar I'd brought along in case I needed to defend myself,
and hurried out into that alien landscape.
So I was not there when Carl came stumbling into the house, exhausted
from running, sick with fear. Finding me gone he spent a little time
waiting me, but worry took hold of him and he ran back out into the
cemetery in the hope of finding me.
Peter Todd's two cohorts were waiting for him. They must have seen
Carl run inside. They managed to catch him on the back of the head with
a shovel. He was knocked out cold.
As for me, I had walked out into a nightmare. As I moved deeper into
the cemetery the darkness and the mist only got thicker. My torch beam
merely reflected off the ethereal mass, which had now become a living,
seething thing. At the sides of my vision, figures emerged then
retreated and I cannot say they were just statues, I cannot simply
dismiss them as an illusion of the mind, because some of them danced;
leaping from headstone to headstone, pausing to leer, jutting forward
dog-like faces with viscous smiles to mock me, the man alone.
It all must have affected me, because they began to merge, melted into
a chaotic whirling madness that enveloped and smothered and -
I tumbled to the ground and lay there stunned, clutching damp earth
between my trembling fingers. I wanted to lie there forever, with my
eyes tightly closed, praying for the sun to rise and vaporize this
nocturnal derangement.
I dreamed of sunlight.
I pictured steam gushing from the opened graves.
I visualised all evil being driven from the place.
I imagined I was safe.
Then I heard a noise. The sound of wood grating against stone. I rose
to my feet, dizzy and nauseous...no sign of any dog-faced things: had I
just been turning round in panicked circles and simply fallen
down?
But then it came again - wood against stone.
I flicked off the torch and moved cautiously through the mist and the
dark toward the continuing sounds.
Illuminated by the light of the moon were two men, one tall, one
short, pulling a coffin from a grave. As I watched, the taller man
jumped down into the now empty aperture. The vandals! For a second I
forgot the horror. I became electrified by the thought of bagging the
bad guys. I remember my hand had closed around the mobile phone, my
intention being to follow Carl's instructions and call the police, but
that is the point where my absolute recollection of the events that
occurred, end.
The man within the grave yelled in shock. The smaller man yelled too,
looking down into the grave he saw the same thing, before he turned and
ran.
I could only stare, stupefied as the man in the grave frantically
tried to scrabble out, yet even as his powerful arms pulled his huge
torso over the edge, something else grabbed a hold on him and began to
literally drag him back.
The man shrieked, twisting from side to side, clawing the earth,
kicking his legs at whatever was behind him, but all his effort had no
effect. He disappeared, back beyond the rim of the grave.
Then came the screaming, oh God, the screaming, it shook me to my
knees, left me shuddering, clutching my hands to my ears against the
endless cries of terror &;#8230;.. the cries of terror at the thing
that was killing him.
The sounds ceased abruptly, leaving behind it a silence that was
tangible for the purest sensation of fear I have ever known.
I was alone.
A second scream came. The other man, and wherever he was `they' were
too. I had to claw at my mouth to stifle my own cries of terror and
risk attracting the attention of those awful moving shadows.
From out of the mist they came, several of them, loping into the hazy
moonlight, humanoid forms with long, sinuous limbs and grotesquely
misshapen faces, smiling with dog-like jaws.
From over the dark lip of the grave came another, this one dragging
the limp figure of the man, his head almost detached from his body, the
tattered remains of his neck hanging like black ribbons.
Those other figures joined it, but it seemed this `union' was
unwelcome as an unholy uproar of gibbering and meeping began.
I wish that I'd kept my hands to my ears because next came sounds of
ripping flesh and snapping bones as they tore the dead man apart.
Barely satisfied with their individual gains the four creatures moved
off, melting into the mist. I thanked God then, on my knees on the damp
grass for sparing me the full sight of what they must have looked
like.
But Carl was not so lucky.
I found him when I walked across to the freshly opened grave, where
the men had left him bound and gagged. He lay writhing in the throes of
deep shock, face slicked with sweat, eyes gleaming in the cold light of
the moon, eyes that had seen it all, seen....them...so very
clearly.
I can remember bending down to remove the rag they'd used to gag his
mouth; I think he still recognized me then, or at least I think I saw
recognition flicker across his face before he started sobbing.
It was like hearing some mortally wounded animal, not a man, not Carl
Hastings. I was terrified those things would hear him and come back,
but nothing I said, hunched down beside him, whispering, pleading, had
any effect. I untied him but he wouldn't move; just curled up in that
position you'll find him in now.
I'll be out of here in a couple of days and I'll never come back.
Somewhere high up would be good; somewhere where the dead don't lie in
the ground. Even railway tunnels make my flesh turn cold and I can't
stand to be underground.
Why those creatures left him alive I will never know, but they took
his mind, and I think that that was worse than killing him....don't
you?
- The End -