BLACKDOWN (a thriller and murder mystery)
Read BLACKDOWN (a thriller and murder mystery) Online
Authors: D. M. Mitchell
BLACKDOWN
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A novel by D. M. Mitchell
BLACKDOWN
Copyright © D. M. Mitchell 2013
The right of Daniel M. Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, organisations, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Agamemnon Independent Publishing
By D. M. Mitchell
Novels:
Max
Silent
Mouse
Blackdown
After the Fall
The Soul Fixer
Flinder’s Field
Pressure Cooker
Latimer’s Demon
The Domino Boys
The King of Terrors
Armageddon Heights
Archangel Hawthorne
The Ashenby Incident
The House of the Wicked
The Woman from the Blue Lias
The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double Bill
Short Stories:
Rabbits
Mulligan’s Map
The Pen of Manderby Pincher
Visit the official D. M. Mitchell website at
www.dm-mitchell.com
for more information on books, blogs and author biographies
You can also join D. M. Mitchell on Facebook, and on Twitter at D M Mitchell @dmtheauthor for details of his latest releases and free book offers
His terror had reached such a pitch that he would have screamed out loud; screamed till his lungs burst with the effort. But he could not. They had cut out his tongue.
All that issued from his fiery throat was a muffled, helpless groan.
He stopped, breathless, his lungs afire, his legs beginning to buckle beneath him. He grasped at the gnarled trunk of a tree, his head bowed as he sucked in painful breaths over a severed tongue that still bled into his throat and threatened to choke him. He tried to control his breathing, slow it down, to create as little noise as possible.
The moonlight filtered down through the lofty trees. Ancient trees that appeared to look down from their great height with sorrow, the breeze shifting their dying leaves sounding like mournful sighs. He had lost all sense of direction a while ago, had no idea if he had gone back on himself, was blundering into the path of…
He dare not think about it. It was too terrifying for the human brain to comprehend. For to think about what lay out there in the dense undergrowth, to dwell upon the creature from hell that stalked him, caused his entire frame to fill with the numbing, clouding poison of abject terror.
Fear. He swore he could smell it.
He had often heard it said that dogs, wild animals, could detect fear in a man. As a child he remembered finding himself confronted by a savage, barking hound. His father chastised him sternly – do not show fear to the beast, for the animal would turn on him, sensing his weakness; but he remembered growing even more afraid lest the hound saw him for the coward that he felt he was. But that was in childhood, and children believe all they are told. When he grew older he dismissed the notion, thought it an old wives’ tale, because as an adult we are able to peel back the veil of mystery to see such a thing for what it really is – an ironic absurdity intended to instil the very fear in the child that the animals are purported to detect. Life’s early lessons, he thought, are mostly built upon fear. Fear of falling, fear of illness, fear of strangers, fear of choking, fear of drowning. So many more stacked up behind them waiting to terrify the child.
But the story of the animal that can smell and taste fear…
Now, as he raced for his life, he knew his father’s words to be true, for fear came off his sweat-drenched body in nauseous waves, sat in his mouth like the foul aftertaste of blood. In his flight he had himself become little more than an animal fighting to survive, and with that transformation those deep-rooted primitive senses, honed to detect something as intangible as a base emotion, surged up from within him, senses that behave like a prism splitting light into its basic colors.
He didn’t want the beast to smell his fear too. If it did then he knew he was a dead man.
So in spite of the pain engulfing his body like he was in the midst of a blazing inferno, in spite of the agony of his barbed thoughts, he forced himself to keep calm, ignored the shame of his tears which streamed uncontrollably down his cheeks, or the humiliation at the loosening of his bowels that had caused him to soil his breeches. His brain was a bubbling pot of prayer and hope, desperation and horror, and he felt he had lost control over it a long time ago. Now he was determined to retrieve it, for the sake of his sanity.
His dirtied face steeled, his eyes narrowing, searching, searching, searching; his mind racing. The leaves of the thick undergrowth shimmered under the light of the Moon. The barbs from a bramble tugged at his sleeve. All was quiet in the wood. Disturbingly so.
At his feet, he saw a thick branch, and he slowly bent down to pick it up. The rustle as it came away from its bindings of weed and grass inordinately loud to him. He put it protectively across his chest, his fingers digging into the soft wood of the branch and revealing to him it was rotten and no use as a weapon. But he held onto it just the same.
The sound of his beating heart, the rush of blood pounding like a regular bass drum in his ears, now filled the silence of the wood. So loud he swore the beast would be able to hear it, and his fear began to rise again, along with the acid burning of bile in his throat and mouth. He bent his head and was desperately sick on the ground, the vomit passing over the wound of his severed tongue and causing it to sting.
He attempted to stifle the sounds, but he could not do so entirely and groaned at his own body’s treachery as the involuntary heaving of his stomach abated. He was relieved when it was over and he could hold his breath again, listening to the humming silence all around him. All was still, not a single sound out of the ordinary, no soft cracking of stems, no screech of a disturbed night creature. Perhaps he had managed to shake it off. Perhaps he had reached safety, eluded the nightmarish creature that stalked him.
With renewed confidence he set off at a crouch, moving as stealthily as he could through the undergrowth. But his heart sank when he parted the bushes in front of him and came upon the clearing lit by a single lantern.
He felt the hot sting of tears glaze his eyes as he stared upon the distressing scene, his sudden infusion of hope having drained away like water through fingers.
In the centre of the clearing – the cold night sky above stripped of cloud, a bloated full moon sitting in a peppering of bright stars that, together with the solitary lantern hanging from a wooden pole, bathed the clearing in a lurid, ghostly light – was a round, black pool of still water. He moaned at seeing it. He had gone round in a circle. He’d come across it once before, had stared at the long silk neckerchief that hung enticingly from the branch, and now he was back to stare at it again, looking upon the mocking marble-like surface of the water and the gently swinging finger of silk. He could dash into the clearing and snatch the silk, for that’s what was expected of him, but he knew that to do so would be inviting death. He preferred the dubious confines and shelter of the dark.
A fresh wave of terror engulfed him, and he tore away from the place as fast as he could, caring not whether he made a noise. He had to get away from there. He had to escape the light, escape the silken neckerchief, escape the beast.
But the growl brought him up short.
It was low, deep, guttural. It was the sound of a nightmare given voice.
And he did not know from which direction it had come.
He didn’t know which way to run. Was it in front, behind, to the side?
The sound of bushes being parted. Something moving swiftly through the undergrowth to his left.
He ran headlong in the opposite direction, his mouth so dry he could hardly croak, his legs so weak as to threaten to topple him.
A roar, up ahead.
How had it gotten in front so fast? He turned and ran back again, but the sound of something keeping pace with him caused him to turn around to glance over his shoulder, and he hit the unseen trailing root of a tree and fell to the soft earth. He rolled over twice, crashing his shoulder painfully against a trunk before scrabbling wildly to his feet, his breathing pumping out in short, sharp blasts. His eyes glared, disorientated. But the fear would not let him stop and it compelled him to leap forward.
Straight into a monstrous face from hell.
He did not have time to even attempt a scream, for claws slashed at his cheeks and opened them up, blood gushing hot and sticky, sending his head darting sideways with the impact. Before the pain hit him the creature lunged forward, sinking its teeth into his neck and driving him down under its huge bulk, till he was covered entirely by its muscular, furry bulk.
The man’s arms flailed uselessly for a second or two, fingers scraping at the matted hair of his attacker, but they quickly fell limp as his life was ripped violently from him and the beast tore into his exposed flesh.