Then the aerial whipped out of his reach like a rod that had caught a fish. The hands were pulling him down into their contempt, but they weren't entitled to condemn him: he hadn't done anything they weren't about to do. "I'm you," he screamed, and felt the shoulders on which he'd perched move apart farther than his legs could stretch. He whirled his arms, but this wasn't a dream in which he could fly away from everything he was. Too late he saw why the woman had called the ambulance for him. He might have screamed his thanks to her, but he could make no words out of the sounds which countless hands were dragging from his mouth.
The Horror Under Warrendown (1995)
You ask me at least to hint why I refuse ever to open a children’s book. Once I made my living from such material. While the imitations of reality hawked by my colleagues in the trade grew grubbier, and the fantasies more shameful, I carried innocence from shop to shop, or so I was proud to think. Now the sight of a children’s classic in a bookshop window sends me fleeing. The more apparently innocent the book, the more unspeakable the truth it may conceal, and there are books the mere thought of which revives memories I had prayed were buried for ever.
It was when I worked from Birmingham, and Warrendown was only a name on a signpost on a road to Brichester - a road I avoided, not least because it contained no bookshops. Nor did I care for the route it followed a few miles beyond the Warrendown sign through Clotton, a small settlement which appeared to be largely abandoned, its few occupied houses huddling together on each side of a river, beside which stood a concrete monument whose carvings were blurred by moss and weather. I had never been fond of the countryside, regarding it at best as a way of getting from town to town, and now the stagnant almost reptilian smell and chilly haze which surrounded Clotton seemed to attach itself to my car. This unwelcome presence helped to render the Cotswold landscape yet more forbidding to me, the farmland and green fields a disguise for the ancient stone of the hills, and I resolved to drive south of Brichester on the motorway in future and double back, even though this added half an hour to my journey. Had it not been for Graham Crawley I would never again have gone near the Warrendown road.
In those days I drank to be sociable, not to attempt to forget or to sleep. Once or twice a month I met colleagues in the trade, some of whom I fancied would have preferred to represent a children’s publisher too, for a balti and as many lagers as we could stay seated for. Saturdays would find me in my local pub, the Sutton Arms in Kings Heath. Ending my week among people who didn’t need to be persuaded of the excellence of my latest batch of titles was enough to set me up for the next week. But it was in the Sutton Arms that Crawley made himself, I suppose, something like a friend.
I don’t recall the early stages of the process, in his case or with any of the folk I used to know. I grew used to looking for him in the small bare taproom, where the stools and tables and low ceiling were the colour of ash mixed with ale. He would raise his broad round stubbled face from his tankard, twitching his nose and upper lip in greeting, and as I joined him he would duck as though he expected me either to pat him on the head or hit him when he’d emitted his inevitable quip. ‘What was she up to in the woods with seven little men, eh?’ he would mutter, or ‘There’s only one kind of horn you’d blow up that I know of. No wonder he was going after sheep,’ or some other reference to the kind of book in which I travelled. There was a constant undercurrent of ingratiating nervousness in his voice, an apology for whatever he said as he said it, which was one reason I was never at my ease with him. While we talked about our week, mine on the road and his behind the counter of a local greengrocer’s, I was bracing myself for his latest sexual bulletin. I never knew what so many women could see in him, and hardly any of them lasted for more than an encounter. My curiosity about the kind of girl who could find him attractive may have left me open to doing him the favour he asked of me.
At first he only asked which route I took to Brichester, and then which one I would follow if the motorway was closed, by which point I’d had enough of the way he skulked around a subject as if he was ready to dart into hiding at the first hint of trouble. ‘Are you after a lift?’ I demanded.
He ducked his head so that his long hair hid even more of his ears and peered up at me. ‘Well, a lift, you know, I suppose, really, yes.’
‘Where to?’
‘You won’t know it, cos it’s not much of a place. Only it’s not far, not much out of your way, I mean, if you happened to be going that way anyway sometime.’
When at last he released the name of Warrendown like a question he didn’t expect to be answered, his irritating tentativeness provoked me to retort ‘I’ll be in that square of the map next week.’
‘Next week, that’s next week, you mean.’ His face twitched so hard it exposed his teeth. ‘I wasn’t thinking quite that soon . . .’
‘I’ll forgive you if you’ve given up on the idea.’
‘Given up - no, you’re right. I’m going, cos I should go,’ he said, fiercely for him.
Nevertheless I arrived at his flat the next day not really expecting to collect him. When I rang his bell, however, he poked his nose under the drawn curtains and said he would be down in five minutes; which, to my continuing surprise, he was, nibbling the last of his presumably raw breakfast and dressed in the only suit I’d ever seen him wear. He sat clutching a small case which smelled of vegetables while I concentrated on driving through the rush hour and into the tangle of motorways, and so we were irrevocably on our way before I observed that he was gripping his luggage with all the determination I’d heard in his voice in the pub. ‘Are you expecting some kind of trouble?’ I said.
‘Trouble.’ He added a grunt which bared his teeth and which seemed to be saying I’d understood so much that no further questions were necessary, and I nearly lost my temper. ‘Care to tell me what kind?’ I suggested.
‘What would you expect?’
‘Not a woman.’
‘See, you knew. Be tricks. The trouble’s what I got her into, as if you hadn’t guessed. Cos she got me going so fast I hadn’t time to wear anything. Can’t beat a hairy woman.’
This was a great deal more intimate than I welcomed. ‘When did you last see her?’ I said as curtly as I could.
‘Last year. She was having it then. Should have gone down after, but I, you know. You know me.’
He was hugging his baggage so hard he appeared to be squeezing out the senseless vegetable smell. ‘Afraid of her family?’ I said with very little sympathy.
He pressed his chin against his chest, but I managed to distinguish what he muttered. ‘Afraid of the whole bloody place.’
That was clearly worth pursuing, and an excuse for me to stay on my usual route, except that ahead I saw all three lanes of traffic halted as far as the horizon, and police cars racing along the hard shoulder towards the problem. I left the motorway at the exit which immediately presented itself.
Framilode, Saul, Fretherne, Whitminster . . . Old names announced themselves on signposts, and then a narrow devious road enclosed the car with hedges, blotting out the motorway at once. Beneath a sky clogged with dark clouds the gloomy foliage appeared to smoulder; the humped backs of the hills glowed a lurid green. When I opened my window to let out the vegetable smell, it admitted a breeze, unexpectedly chill for September, which felt like my passenger’s nervousness rendered palpable. He was crouching over his luggage and blinking at the high spiky hedges as if they were a trap into which I’d led him. ‘Can I ask what your plans are?’ I said to break the silence which was growing as relentless as the ancient landscape.