The Mammoth Book of Terror (29 page)

He wandered down the path, thinking he would take advantage of the shelter of the trees to relieve his bladder.

It was not easy going. The mud was scored with the tyre-marks of huge machines, which had to be stepped in and out of with care. The rain of the previous weeks had sunk deep, turning the mangled
soil oleaginous, but the mix of sunshine and strong wind of the last three days had formed a crust overall that looked solid, but gave way under his feet, precipitating him awkwardly into the mire
below. His light town shoes became heavily caked with clumps of dirt, like thick black paste, and his progress was marked by an uneven sequence of gross squelching sounds that complemented the
sensations he was experiencing in his belly.

He grabbed at a half-broken branch and pulled himself along it into a space between two trees. He noticed that their trunks on the pathward side had been hacked and wounded by passing vehicles.
Great scabs of bark were missing, revealing the plants’ fibrous flesh. Crosses, in faded orange paint, had been daubed on the trees, presumably to indicate that they were to be preserved.
Stumps of others, less fortunate, remained here and there, like the broken pillars on tombs.

Immediately at the rear of the trees, shrubs and flowers grew in the shaded dimness. He stepped a little way in among them, relieved himself, and stopped to wipe the mud from his shoes with a
clump of grass.

Above him, something moved heavily among the branches. For moments there was silence, then the bird, or whatever it was, shifted clumsily again. It made a sudden, rattling, cackling sound that
made him start. “Like the noise a toy machine gun would make if it laughed!” he thought, and wondered at his own wild simile. But it was reasonably accurate. There was something
taunting and mechanical in the creature’s call that unnerved him in his weakened, jittery state. He looked up in the direction of the sound, but the sun was shining directly through the
leaves above him, punching blinding slivers of light through an otherwise featureless silhouette. It was impossible to distinguish anything in particular.

There was movement above again. A shower of twigs descended around him, and something else fell, that hit the ground by his feet. After the briefest hesitation, when he felt a stab of regret
that he had ever stepped in among the trees, he bent down and picked it up. It was a purple-brown, egg-shaped object, a little more than three inches long. Surprisingly heavy, and icy cold, it
looked more like some kind of fruit, but not, he thought, edible. There was something distinctly unappetising about it. It looked old; dry; preserved.

After rolling it on his palm, Maurice went back onto the path again to get a better look at it.

Both ends were quite smooth, with no indication that they had ever been joined to any plant.

“Not a seed,” he thought. “And not an egg; far too heavy and too hard. Anyway, an egg would have smashed on its fall from the tree.” He pressed harder and harder, and it
seemed to give a bit. He closed both hands over it, to obtain more pressure, and gripped them together.

The thing burst and his hands slammed shut on what was left.

He felt something moving in his two-handed fist. He opened his hands and saw what seemed to be a myriad of tiny, dark creatures running out onto his fingers and up his wrists. He held his hands
up to his eyes. He was not sure if what he could see was a multitude of tiny entities moving together, as though with one mind, or a single creature made up of almost microscopic sections. Both his
hands were covered, as though by thin gloves. He became aware of a slightly painful sensation in the affected areas, and brushed his hands together. After a few moments of vigorous washing motions
the “gloves”, and the pain, began to subside. Whatever had come out of the egg turned to dust that blew away in the wind as it fell.

A mottled, bruise-like stain remained to mark where the contents of the object had spread. He tried rubbing his hands in the grass, but without effect. The stain seemed indelible.

His skin itched. His hands and wrists looked horrible, as though his skin was diseased. Rubbing them fretfully against each other, he peered up into the trees again.

He saw a branch sway down, as though something was walking along it.

He picked a large stone out of the mud and threw it at where he judged the source of the movement to be.

There was a commotion among the leaves and the harsh, cackling sound recommenced with a vengeance. Nearby, all along the line of trees, other, presumably similar creatures, took up the call.
Their combined din became a terrible cacophony. Large sections of all the trees began to heave agitatedly. In his almost-hysterical state of confusion Maurice thought he could see thin arms waving
and gesticulating among the branches.

He turned and ran, but in the wrong direction, away from his car. He realized his mistake almost at once, but dared not stop.

Once, he glanced to the left. Behind the trees, in among the shrubs and bushes, spidery shapes seemed to be scuttling up out from between the roots buried there. He got the impression that they
were moving along parallel to him. Their movements were slow, but so were his, hampered as he was by the deep tyre tracks and the clinging mud.

He reached the porta-cabin. A shuttered window was open on the side. He ran to the far end, where he could see the edge of the lowest of a set of wooden steps protruding. The door above the
steps was open, held back against the wind with a twist of wire. He collapsed on his knees on the steps and looked into the cabin. A young skinhead with a tattooed scalp, in overalls and a black
donkey-jacket, sat at an improvized desk, stirring the contents of a mug with one hand and clutching a coverless paperback in the other. The young man regarded him inquisitively over the book,
which he lowered a couple of inches.

Maurice got awkwardly up off the steps, turned, and looked back into the trees. He realized the scolding sounds had stopped. The trees swayed gently, normally, in the wind. As far as he could
see, nothing moved among them that should not. The mud lane leading to the road was empty.

“What have you got?” a voice asked from inside the cabin. It was a tired, old man’s voice.

He turned and looked at the skinhead, who shrugged, and gestured back over his shoulder.

Halfway into the cabin, on a pile of filthy mattresses, lay an elderly, whiskery man, also in overalls. He was on his side, with his head propped in his hand.

“Is it household? Garden? That sort of thing?” the old man demanded.

“I’m sorry . . . ?” said Maurice, uncomprehendingly.

“Yer rubbish,” said the young man irritably. “What is it?” He sneered at the muddy, frightened man in front of him, who could only press his hand against his brow and
shake his head.

“Bloody Hell!” the skinhead said, “what we got here?” and held the tattered book up to his face in a contemptuous, dismissive gesture.

The old man turned and sat up. “You got any rubbish to deposit at this tip, or haven’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, I see what you mean! No, I haven’t.”

“Then why are you here? What can we do for you? This is Council land, you know. Private.”

“Well, to tell the truth, my car had a bump on the road back there. Nothing serious. I’m a bit shaken. Thought I’d get some fresh air to clear my head. Is that okay?”

“No harm in that,” the old man conceded. “As long as you don’t hang about. Trouble is, we get people in scavenging. Can’t have that, for health reasons. Know what I
mean?”

“Yes, I do,” said Maurice vaguely. “I won’t be long.”

He stumbled as he walked away towards the tip.

Behind him, the skinhead said, “Pissed!”

“As a rat,” the old man agreed.

He wandered into a mangled landscape of many levels. The earth rose and fell away in strange, half-related planes, like a cubist composition. Rough roads of cinders swooped up to sudden edges
that led nowhere, or down and around to pools of oily, glinting rainwater and randomly dumped heaps of soil or refuse. It seemed that whole buildings had been dropped from the sky. Piles of bricks,
toys, carpets, plaster, furniture, in violent juxtaposition, were dotted everywhere, and mounds the size of small hills, the remnants of unimaginable ruins, formed miniature alpine chains down into
the old, unused quarries. All was covered by a dust-crested crust of varying thickness that split under him as he walked. His footprints behind him oozed fleshy mud.

Paper and plastic scraps drifted endlessly across the site in the wind. Occasionally, larger segments of light-weight litter broke loose from the clotted mass and carved into the air, scaring up
flocks of shrieking gulls and starlings. Smoke, or steam, puffed up mysteriously from various points, as though a huge engine was building up pressure deep under the earth. A machine made a
pumping, clunking sound somewhere out of sight, and the strident alarm of a reversing earth-moving vehicle called out every few minutes from some hidden excavation.

He almost tumbled into a deep hole, about two feet wide. It reached diagonally down, like a giant rabbit’s burrow, into the compacted garbage. At first he thought that someone had been
tunnelling, for some unimaginable reason, but noticed that loose matter from underground had been pushed up around the lip of the hole, as though it had been dug out from under. He found other
similar holes. He knelt beside one, and peered down into it. Buried wires, wooden laths, and plastic pipes had been torn apart by some powerful, or desperate, digging. He couldn’t even guess
at why the holes were there.

He wandered aimlessly amid the desolation, stumbling like a blind man searching for his lost stick, until he came to the edge of one of the so far unused quarries. Down inside it there was a
small lake of pure, shining water reflecting the scudding clouds and the vivid blue of the sky. The sides of the quarry were steep, bare cliffs, or slopes of tumbled stone covered with blossoming
shrubs and rich grass. To Maurice, it glowed and beckoned like the Promised Land. He looked for a way down into this pleasant place, but saw that he would have to walk a long way round to gain
access. Too tired and depressed to make the effort, he sat down on a chunk of creamy marble, part of an old fireplace, to review his situation.

He still felt wretched. His body ached. Obviously, he needed to get to a doctor. He hoped that, when he got back to his car, he would be able to drive. It was only three miles into Buxton, but
somehow, that sounded like a long way. He dreaded the thought of the journey.

He sat for a while, still as a stone, trying to read his own mind, to make sense of his recent experiences.

He seemed to be gazing out from some painful place deep within his skull.

The landscape in front of him, beyond the quarry, had a hectic look. Cars passing on the A6 chased each other viciously, the sound of their passage an angry, waspish buzz. Sheep, grazing in the
long sweep of fields that climbed up the side of Combs Moss to the rough crest of crags called Black Edge and Hob Tor, looked like fat, lazy maggots browsing on a green corpse. The hurtling clouds
cast swooping shadows, like dark searchlights, across the pastures. He felt that he had slipped into another reality, similar to, but alarmingly unlike, the one he had previously inhabited.

Disgusted with the increasingly morbid turns his mind was taking, he got to his feet and looked back the way he had come. In spite of the indications of activity suggested by the various,
continual mechanical noises, he had seen nobody since he had left the two men in the porta-cabin. Now his eye caught the movement of five long-shadowed shapes moving slowly towards him across an
area strewn with household waste. The figures stooped from time to time to lift objects from the ground, and stood still, heads down, as though inspecting their finds. Then, they would either drop
whatever they had discovered, or walk over to one of their number who was awkwardly hauling a little cart of some kind, and carefully place their discoveries inside it. Their movements were
even-paced, and languid to the point of listlessness.

With the low sun behind them, it was impossible to make out details of their features. He thought that two of them, including the smallest, who was tugging the cart in some sort of harness, were
female. He got the impression they were dressed rather quaintly. As they got nearer, he could hear their voices, quiet and even-toned, like people at prayer. Presumably, they were discussing the
treasures they were finding. They gave no indication that they were aware Maurice was there until the tip of the hugely extended shadow of the most forward of them touched his feet. Then that
figure stopped, raised his right hand to his shoulder, and the others behind him ceased all movement, as though they had become unplugged from their energy source. The man at the front raised his
hand even higher, with his index finger close to his brow, and tapped a battered cap lodged above his ear, in an antiquated gesture of respect.

Maurice, embarrassed and irritated by the subservient gesture, which he automatically assumed was one of mock humility, found himself lost for a suitable response. He said, “Hello
there!” in the tone he would use to greet one of his colleagues, met by chance on the streets of Manchester.

“I wish you a good day,” said the man who had touched his cap, then, after the slightest pause, he added, “Sir.” His voice was strangely accented, but there was no note
of mockery in his unassuming tone.

Maurice looked hard at him, trying to read his expression, but the man’s face was in shadow, and he was too far away. There was a similarity in the posture of the five people, and Maurice
was sure that they were a family. They all had a similar shape and stance. The woman pulling the cart was older than the other female, and he guessed she was the wife of the man who had addressed
him, who had the air of a paterfamilias. The other three appeared to be in their late teens.