Chapter 3 #3
And after all, what was it, really? If she hadn’t been with the others, and if they hadn’t been so rattled by it, maybe she’d have taken it as ‘just one of those things British people have.’ Like Stonehenge or the Wicker Man.
She wished she hadn’t thought of the Wicker Man.
A clearing, and she reckoned it had been intentionally made, and then routinely recleared, but not that often.
There was a growth of new fern and flower that the relatively bare floor beneath the trees had been lacking, and they could all see where it had been trampled down.
Other people coming off the path. The scuff of solid boots. Drag marks.
There were seven stakes and they’d obviously been there a long time. Big wooden posts, almost black with a creosote-like preservative. The ropes were the same colour, absolutely crusted with tar and as thick as Elena’s wrist.
“What the fuck is this?” Melissa demanded.
The others were silent.
“I mean, what the fuck?” she said. Her voice, harsh and loud, was the only sound, and the trees ate the echo.
“Did you know about this?” she asked of Ross, and “Did you?” of Will. Both shook their heads.
“We don’t even know… what this is,” said Will, weakly. He looked very much like he wished he hadn’t come. “I mean it could have been here for… decades. Folkways, you know. Maypoles…”
Nobody said the obvious, about how recently someone—some several persons—had been tramping about here. Elena was right up against Ross, virtually in his armpit, and he looked very glad of it—to have someone there he could pretend to be unflappable for, when he was very obviously flapped.
“I mean it’s weird,” Will rambled on. “But it doesn’t have to mean… it doesn’t have to have anything to do with… I mean, we’ve not seen a bird.”
Elena glanced up at the trees. They all did. The branches were bare, though. No ill-omened thing was roosting there.
Because they’ve already been fed. Another thing Elena wasn’t going to say.
It was Ross who reached out and touched one of the posts.
In the end he was the only one with the stomach for it.
And she’d have liked to believe the reddish stickiness that came off on his fingertips was just the preservative.
But she didn’t believe that, and nor would the others.
Although Will was still talking, almost to himself, saying it needn’t be this, it didn’t have to be that…
And no more, and they tried to follow the tracks of whoever had been there, but lost themselves in the trees; not good enough outdoors types to do it.
And in the end, with the afternoon drawing on, they hurried back.
None of them wanting to be seen where they shouldn’t be.
None of them wanting to be where nobody should be.
“Patrick,” Elena said, as they crossed to the same side door.
“Uncle Patrick,” Ross confirmed. “Great-Uncle, actually. What about him?”
“I was thinking that he… I think he was trying to help me. It’s like Melissa said.
They’d decided I wasn’t leaving. He was offering me a chance to get out.
” Unless something was going to happen to me once I was away from the house.
But if that had been the game, she’d had no sense of it from the old man.
“I think… he obviously knows what’s going on. ”
It had been hard to sit at dinner, having seen what they’d seen, minds full of what they thought they knew.
A couple of the other youngsters who’d been playing games or lounging or trying to get phone reception all day wondered where they’d been.
They put on a magnificent united front of vagueness and handwaving.
From the middle table, Elena felt eyes on them.
When she glanced up, Gil and Uncle Jas and the formidably scowling Jeffrey de la Pole just seemed to be making desultory conversation, their offspring and unwanted guest the furthest thing from their mind.
When Elena looked to her plate again, their unseen regard settled on her like a claw-fingered grip.
When she glanced up next, Neera was staring straight at her, cool and assessing, and Elena looked away hurriedly.
A lab, on the grounds, she thought, and applied herself to her dessert.
It had been agreed she should go to Patrick alone.
Whatever sympathy he might harbour for her might evaporate in the face of other family members.
He hadn’t been offering to bring up a car for Ross or the injured Will, after all.
He hadn’t been there at dinner, but the elder’s table had been almost empty anyway, only a couple of husky grandmas debating something about the stock exchange in overloud voices.
Instead, Ross had drawn her a map to Patrick’s room, in a whole different wing of the house, because when he’d tried verbal directions she’d lost the thread almost at once.
So here she was, creeping through the house after dark.
From below came a bellow of raucous laughter.
Gil and a couple of his peers were playing cards down there, and drinking.
She’d looked in on them. It hadn’t felt like rich old cousins cutting loose, but like soldiers in the trenches or police on a stake-out.
The money, the cards, the play, all of it giving the impression that their minds were absolutely elsewhere and drawn taut as wires.
And she turned a corner, consulting her map by the light of her phone.
There was a stuffed deer’s head on the wall that was a landmark Ross had given her.
So far so good. Ahead was a chill breeze.
A sash window open to its utmost. She paused, obscurely terrified by it.
The night was far too cold for someone to want a breath of fresh air.
What if it got in? The thing, the bird thing that had attacked Will. That had… something to do with the stakes. She was sure of it. Images of harpies, furies, of fierce avian things descending on bound captives. The eagle with Prometheus’s liver.
She heard it. A weird, high sound drifting from the massed darkness of the woods.
And it wasn’t as though she could see the trees now, after nightfall, but somehow she felt them, the vastness of them for all that it was a tiny patch of woodland compared to the great wilds of America.
The oldness of them. And now they were singing to her.
Just as Melissa and Will had said. A keen, shrill sound, and not from a single throat.
A wordless chorus that ebbed and flowed, ghostly and graceful, about an insistent, repeating rhythm.
As though it was the tide calling to her.
As though it was the sky, the music of the spheres.
The world around her was growing numb and distant and her eyes unfocused.
The part of her brain that understood miracles and believed in God spread a warmth through her head. She felt her jaw go slack.
Then there was a clatter from nearby, harsh and artificial and shockingly familiar.
Hollow aluminium tubes slotting together.
Tents, stretchers, hospital beds. The same piece of convenience for anything that was light and needed to be assembled quickly.
She jolted awake, aware that something had been happening to her, and that it wasn’t anymore.
Before it could happen again, she slammed the window closed.
Something was going on, around the corner. Patrick’s room. She hadn’t thought she was that close. Turns out she’d gotten ahead of herself and it wasn’t even the right deer’s head. And she saw.
Neera was there, and Melissa’s dad, Jeffrey, and one of the elders, an angular man with a scar under one eye.
And they were looking at her. They’d heard the window.
They had a wheeled stretcher up, just as she’d pictured in her mind’s eye.
And when she appeared, Neera lunged to cover what was on it, but too late this time. Now she really had seen too much.
Patrick Enderbough wouldn’t be telling her any family secrets.
What had been done to the body seemed almost too on the nose, if someone—something—had been trying to silence him.
His throat had been ripped out, but more than that.
His lower jaw entire was gone, and the upper bars of his ribcage were snapped and bent, jabbing upwards so that she knew exactly what had so deformed the sheet the other night.
They stared and she stared and redness bloomed like poppies over the drape Neera had thrown over the body.
The half-dozen statuettes he’d decided to decorate his room with were—probably the words were ‘highly stylised,’ though Elena would also have accepted ‘creepy as fuck.’ Long-legged, hunch-backed, the small head well below the great round curve of the shoulders.
The V carved into the chest was a sharp nose, looking down, she realised