The Monster Man of Horror House (27 page)

I
crashed over pews, knocked into stone pillars and slipped on carrots as howls
of alien derision rang out all around me but I didn’t stop. Not for a moment.
Not for a second. Somewhere far behind me Pongo was going out with a few lines
from
“The Lord is my shepherd”
which
was his prerogative but I wasn’t about to lie down in green pastures for
anyone, let alone the bungling lookout who’d let this many wolves into the paddock,
so I entrusted my soul to my own two feet and thrashed through the darkness
until I clattered into the front doors. There was no time to think, barely
enough time to act, so I yanked back the bolt and pushed open the doors, only
to be dazzled by the first few blistering rays of dawn. The sun was only just
poking up through the trees behind the smoking shell of the pub, but it was
enough to obliterate the shadows at my elbow and flood the nave with light.

Brian
battled his way through the spectres and towards me but Pongo was all out of
fight and consumed before he could lie to himself that he would
“fear no evil”,
leaving just me and Brian
to discover what the new day had brought.

“We
made it! Buggered if I know how but we made it, by fuckery!” Brian puffed, clutching
his sides and looking back at the inky hobgoblins as they hissed their
indignation at us from inside Long Fenton’s God forsaken house of worship. “We bloody
done made it.”

We
stayed on the church steps for another hour basking in the sun’s early glow and
watching the shadows recede all across the village. I had hoped the new day
might’ve banished the shadows entirely but they lingered in the trees, under
bushes and in the chapel behind us, watching us from the murk and biding their
time for when they next had the run of the streets. Well I wasn’t about to hang
around that long. I had eighteen or so hours of daylight to figure out what Alex
had been getting at and I planned to use every last one of them to escape this
accursed place or at the very least die trying. There had to be a way. I just
had to find it.

“We’ll
take my truck, head out on the Ullerton road and then hike up to Tom’s old
windmill. It be the highest point around and looks out across the whole
country. If there’s a way out, we’ll see it from up there,” Brian reasoned,
rising to his feet and offering me his hand.

“Okay,”
I agreed, “let’s go.”

We
walked through the charred grounds of the churchyard and flashed Brian’s torch under
the wheel arches of his battered old truck until we were satisfied we weren’t
carrying any unwanted passengers, then set off.

The
route looked different in this early light and I dared get my hopes up that something
might have changed in the night. It had – but in a way neither me nor
Brian could’ve foreseen. Not even in our worst nightmares.

Just
beyond the village the road was blocked by a staggered queue of traffic. It
looked as if the entire population had tried fleeing, only to be stopped in
their tracks some unseen obstacle. What’s more, the ground was littered with
dead. They laid in the road, filled the ditches or sat behind their steering
wheels, stone dead with their feet on the pedals of their stalled vehicles.

We
got out of the truck and stared at the decaying tailback, horrified and
confused at the grim gridlock ahead. What’s more, we knew the dead on sight

“There’s
Dicky Deekings,” Brian pointed. “And his missus. And Arthur, and Ronnie, and
Colin. What the hell’s going on here?”

We
walked the length of the devastation, feeling pulses and checking each body,
but they were not only dead, they were cold and dead. Whatever had happened here
had happened some time ago.

“But
they were taken by the shadows, we saw ’em,” Brian said. “Why did they bring
’em here? Like this?”

None
of the dead looked as if they’d been savaged by beasts or burned in any way,
other than having the life snuffed out of them. Their lips were pale and their
eyes glassy, and a couple had sick down their chins, suggesting some kind of
poison was responsible, but nothing like this had happened the previous
evening. It didn’t make sense.
 

Brian
gave a short howl when he found Mary, lifeless as all the others, in a tangle
of thorns opposite her car. It looked like she’d fallen into them while trying
to flee and died caught up and terrified amongst the barbs. Brian cut his face
and shredded his hands pulling her free, but he seemed oblivious to the pain.
He just cradled his one-time intended in his arms and rocked back and forth
saying sorry over and over again as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Brian,
she’s dead. We have to leave her,” I said, adding, “she won’t mind,” when he balked
at the suggestion.

“She
was my baby,” Brian explained, and it was clear that he dearly loved her;
despite knowing the whole village child-minded for him whenever he was in the
fields.

“We’ve
got to go,” I just said again, holding out my hand for him just as he had for
me back at the church.

Brian
insisted on finding a blanket to cover Mary over with, but settled for a
tarpaulin when he couldn’t find any blankets. He plucked a couple of wild
flowers for her hair, kissed her on her cold dead lips and said a sad farewell.
Then he got to his feet.

“That
be done then,” he said with a renewed grit between his teeth. “Now let’s get
out of here.”

We
walked to the head of the line of cars and found Pongo’s old Morris Ten wrapped
around a sycamore tree, with Pongo himself wrapped around the steering wheel
inside. He’d clogged the road for everyone else, but from the looks on their faces,
they wouldn’t have got far anyway.

Thirty
yards away in the treeline the shadows were stalking us, matching us step for
step, happy just to watch as we made our discoveries.

“Rebmemer! Rebmemer! Rebmemer!”
they chattered from all sides, and I suddenly
realised what they were saying.
“Remember,”
so I wracked my brains tried to remember what it was I had forgotten –
the crash? The old stone marker? The dirt track into the village? The Black Fox?
– but it wasn’t until we got to the fertiliser plant that I realised they
weren’t speaking to me at all. They were speaking to Brian.

Another
body lay in the grass. Another corpse. He lay by a hole in the perimeter fence,
clutching wire cutters and a pick-axe and even though he was face down away
from us, we both recognised him immediately.

It
was Brian.

“What
be going on?”

He
looked at his own lifeless body and then at the plant where a column of yellow
steam was rising into the morning’s air and then he looked at the phantoms
taunting him from the shadows.

“Rebmemer! Rebmemer! Rebmemer!”
they chuckled.
“Rebmemer!”

“I
remember,” Brian finally said. “Yes. I remember now.”

Brian
turned to me and told me to go, to get back to my car and go. This was not the
place for me.

“What
is it? Brian, what happened here?”

“I
did this,” was all he would say, almost concussed with shock. “I did all of
this.”

Way
off down the road Alex stood in the sunshine and stared at us. He’d come to see
Brian remember, and now that he had, he turned and walked back to Long Fenton,
satisfied that he wouldn’t be the only one to burn there forever after past
misdeeds.

“You
have to go,” Brian now insisted. “I can’t come with you. You have to go. Go on,
go now!”

I
still didn’t understand any of this, or why Brian couldn’t come with me.
Perhaps he was stuck here by some kind of black magic or perhaps he just wanted
to stay to decorate his own hair with daisies, either way I was now on my own
and I didn’t like it.

“Where?
Where do I go? How do I get out of here?” I asked.

“Back
to Long Fenton. Back the way you came in. When the time comes, you too will remember,”
Brian told me before taking a step towards the trees.

“Wait,
wait, what the hell are you doing?” I said, grabbing him by the elbows to drag
him back.

“I
have to go with them. It be my fate,” he replied, before holding out a hand for
me one last time. “God be with you for yours, John.”

I
knew his mind was set and that there was no dissuading him. Never before had I
met such a headstrong young butterball so I let him go. He crossed the road,
jumped the ditch and walked up the short embankment to the line of trees. He
turned, just briefly, one last time to wave goodbye and then stepped into the
trees.

The
shadows surrounded him instantly and welcomed him back to their fold, moving
around him in ever decreasing circles but in no rush to snatch him away. Brian
didn’t look scared, he just looked sad, and as they caressed his face with their
willowy fingers, he shut his eyes and resigned himself to his fate.

“I
be ready,” he said and they dived into him, swamping him with their darkness
and snatching him through the very fabric of existence to a place of eternal
night.

Which
left just me.

xi

I did as Brian said and took the road back into the village. All was now quiet.
The shadows were still with me but their vicious babbling had stopped. They merely
bided their time, watching me from the thick undergrowth as the sun inched its
way across the warm summer’s sky.

I
tried to remember what Brian and Alex had said, that when the time came I would
know how to leave and it would be by the same way I’d come in, but this seemed
impossible. The dirt track back to the main road was lined by trees and
overhung by a thick canopy of foliage, allowing the spectres to move freely about
these shadows. To set one foot on that path would’ve been to hand myself up to
these fiends and I didn’t trust Brian or Alex’s vague assurances enough for
that.

Yet
this was the way I’d come into Long Fenton and both of them had told me it was
my way out. But I just couldn’t see how.

I
lingered in the village centre next to the stone cross outside the church and
tried to formulate a plan in case inspiration didn’t strike before nightfall.
The Black Fox was burnt out, the church was already bubbling with evil and
every cottage and barn looked like certain death. There was simply no shelter
to be had.

There
was also no food. If I’d been able to get into one of the houses I might’ve found
some bread or ham or something but as it was I had nothing. An apple tree stood
nearby in the ruins of The Black Fox, but the apples were withered and rotten
on the branch. The same went for the plums on the plum tree behind the church.
Nothing lived in this village. Only me.

Every
now and then I saw Alex skipping amongst the graves. I tried to approach him
but he would just run away, only to reappear half an hour later in the trees or
amongst the wreckage of The Black Fox, dancing, skipping and singing to himself
as if I wasn’t there. In the end I let him be and just watched him play, but
each time he appeared, he would remind me that the day was passing so that by
the time the church’s shadow stretched clean across the street, I knew my course
was almost run.

The
spectres once again began taunting me as their hour approached. It was the same
old backwards gobbledegook and although I didn’t fully understand exactly what
they were saying, I got the general gist.

“Ruoy luos si srou Nhoj Laoc. Ew lliw
evah uoy!”
and so on.

“Go
fuck yourselves!” I responded, figuring I couldn’t do myself any more harm than
they had in store for me. At least I’d figured that until they started
replying:

“Og kcuf flesruoy!”

“Og kcuf flesruoy!”

“Og kcuf flesruoy! Og kcuf flesruoy! Og
kcuf flesruoy!”

They
shouted this at me, over and over again, from all sides, non-stop, laughing and
cackling their derision until I had to cover my ears.

This
had to be hell. It was the only explanation. My wrong doings had finally caught
up with me. All that was missing was my father stepping out of the ground to
tell me how proud he was of me.

Oh
God, what had I done with my life?

Little
by little my persecutors began to leave the trees, stepping out into the open,
off the grass and into the road as the lengthening shadows stretched out towards
me. Only now did I see them in their full glory. As I said, they were human in
form, with arms, legs and a head, but nothing else, no other obvious signs of
humanity, save for the odd indentation where a normal soul might have kept their
eyes or mouth. They were smooth all over and as black as tar, only they didn’t
reflect the light as tarred surfaces might, they sucked it in so that they were
less solid beings, more holes in the shadows where the souls of long departed
sinners had once existed.

They
reached and swarmed over the church’s stone marker and were soon within smiting
distance of me as dusk settled across the village. The sun was behind the trees
to the west and only a few shrinking pockets of light remained between me and
eternal damnation. I tried to meet my destiny head on as Brian had done with
dignity and strength, but my cowardly default setting kicked in every time to
spoil the moment.