Chapter Five: Tuesday night
“During 1964, the Surrey puma was heard but not seen. There were numerous reports of strange, howling noises at night, and a cow, discovered dead in a field, exhibited bite marks considered by a local vet ‘not to be made by any animal to be found native to this country’.”
“Where have you been?” Vince flicked his pocket lighter into action so that the flame illuminated the faces of the two new arrivals. Graham looked suitably shame-faced. Zoe looked defiant. Vince could see that she was chewing gum, her jaw in continual silent motion. “Sunday was Candlemas. I expected you to be here.”
“It was raining,” said Graham quietly, realizing now that it sounded a feeble excuse.
“The dark forces do not stop just because it is raining,” countered Vince. “What about last night then?”
“It was still raining.” This time it was Zoe. “You must be mad if you think we are going to sit out in the park in the middle of the night when it is pouring down. My mum was furious with me last time because I got my clothes all so damp.”
“Eight o’clock. It is hardly the middle of the night,” said Vince.
“Feels like it though,” said Zoe with a shudder. The earlier sun had vanished some three hours previous and it was bitterly cold once again on the exposed slope of grass. “What have you been doing out here then, all by yourself?” she asked, interested despite herself.
“You won’t have heard. It has been a momentous couple of days. I have heard the call of Cthulhu.”
“No,” Graham gasped, the reference having instant meaning for him.
“What?” said Zoe. “Cuth... What are you talking about?”
“Actually you heard it yourself. You remember last Saturday night, that unearthly scream.”
“Yes,” said Graham eager to hear more.
“It was repeated on Sunday night. I was here. I heard it again. Only clearer this time. There can be only one explanation.” Vince was silent for a moment, delaying his account, before suddenly breaking into what was seemingly gibberish, “Cthulhu fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn.”
“You heard that?” Graham was breathless with excitement.
“As clear as day.”
“Will one of you explain to me what nonsense you are speaking,” Zoe asked.
“It is the second coming,” said Vince.
“The Dunwich Horror,” said Graham.
“Here in our own woods. I knew. Don’t tell me that I didn’t know. I have always felt that there was something special here,” said Vince. “Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it too.” He reached out to take Zoe’s hand. To his surprise she did not pull away. His eyes well adjusted to the moonlight, he could make out the slightly mystified, dreamy expression on her face, utterly different to the look of confrontational belligerence when she had first arrived. She looked like someone experiencing a reverie; momentarily escaped into a world of her own. One-handed, he flicked his lighter again, wanting to see her expression more clearly, but with the burning flame so the moment was lost.
Zoe pulled her hand away, “I still don’t know what the fuck you are talking about,” she said angrily.
“It’s H. P. Lovecraft,” Graham explained. “The Cthulhu cult.”
“You mean fiction,” said Zoe, exasperated.
“It’s not fiction,” Graham continued, “That’s right isn’t it, Vince?” He looked at his friend for confirmation. Vince waiting to see which way Zoe jumped, maintained his silence, forcing Graham to continue, “People think it is fiction, but it’s not. Lovecraft was just protecting himself, not wanting to reveal that he had discovered an ultimate truth. You now, stumbled upon a secret that could have singled him out, made him a possible victim. So he wrote what he knew, as a warning, but disguised them as stories. That’s what you said, wasn’t it, Vince?”
“Something like that,” said Vince, hesitantly.
Zoe was more assertive, “Oh, what rubbish.”
It was left to Graham to defend his beliefs, “No, it’s true. Honest it is. There are papers. You know, old papers.”
“Where?”
“Actually, I think most of them were destroyed. But Lovecraft writes about them. They did exist.”
Vince decided it was time to wade in on the side of Cthulhu: if any more explanations were left to Graham, Zoe would be forever lost to the Mythos. Like all good teachers, he started with a question, “What is reality? Answer me that.”
Graham started to open his mouth, the literal machinations of his mind about to be expressed in hesitant oratory, but was silenced by Vince’s upheld hand, the meaning of which was only too apparent even in the evening half-light. “Perhaps I can be allowed to continue.
“Lovecraft invented a reality. A personal cosmology. Who can say whether it is any more right, any more real, than the one that you and I take to be the norm.”
When he chose to, Vince could be an accomplished speaker: he had a charisma of a sort, and he sensed, in the darkness, that he had succeeded in grabbing his two companions’ silent attention. It made him feel powerful. He could not help smiling to himself. It was a nice feeling. Almost as nice as the soft touch of Zoe’s palm when it had momentarily encircled his own. “He talks about ancient civilizations, long lost to our own history and to our own records, buried beneath the waves, and of primordial cults and sacrificial rituals and creatures that rise up to enslave and tyrannize the human race.”
“And what do these creatures look like?” asked Zoe.
“Indescribable. Grotesque. Shapeless.”
“Try describing,” Zoe insisted, adding sarcastically, “Just so I’ll know when I bump into one.”
It was Graham that elucidated, “Half man, half octopus, half...”
Vince interrupted him, “The ancients take on many forms. Some are totally alien to our comprehension, others may look superficially human with only minor characteristics which belie their aquatic origins, webbed feet perhaps, or small gills on their neck.”
“Gills?”
“Or long talons.”
“And what would one of these creatures be doing in Watford?” Zoe had listened to Vince’s explanation, but was far from being transformed into a believer in the Cthulhu Mythos. The scream, though, went some way to convincing her. The three teenagers froze rigid, as the same cry that they had heard a few evenings before rent the air once again.
“Cthulhu fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn.” Vince had risen to his feet and with arms held aloft was calling out the bizarre phrases. “R’yleh, R’yleh, let me join you. Come on.” He beckoned for Zoe and Graham to join him in his evocation.
Graham started to stand, ready to follow his leader, but Zoe clasped him by the wrist, shouting, “What do you think you are doing? Have you both gone mad? Whatever it is in those woods, and I don’t for a minute believe it is any of this ancient civilization rubbish you’ve been spouting, but whatever it is I don’t think we should be drawing attention to ourselves. It sounded... wild.”
“Dangerous too,” said Vince with relish.
“Dangerous?” Graham gulped, his voice practically a whisper.
“You haven’t heard about the dog that was attacked then?”
“No, when was this?”
“Last weekend. The last time we heard the call.”
“What happened?”
“It had had its throat cut and all of its blood drained.”
“How did you hear...?” Graham started to ask.
“I’m leaving.” Zoe jumped to her feet, but Vince managed to detain her. He encircled an arm around her waist as she made to move. She pushed him off with both hands but she didn’t attempt to run. “Get off me.”
Without realising, the three had formed a makeshift circle and now all fell silent, listening, waiting to see if the cry from the darkness would be repeated. It was Graham who finally spoke, “Should we all hold hands?”
“Whatever for?” asked Zoe.
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“I don’t know. I just thought that was the sort of thing you were supposed to do. You know, when you are raising... you know, demons.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous.”
Vince was more sympathetic to his co-conspirator, “No, Graham is right. You asked, why the creature should turn up here, Zoe. Well, isn’t it obvious? We are the reason. Our night-time meetings. Isn’t it how I described it would happen? The creature has come to our summons.” Vince once again took the opportunity of taking Zoe’s hand, at the same time feeling Graham’s fingers extended, searching for his other hand, in order to complete the circle. “Our prayers have been answered.”
•••
Rob knew that she would not be coming by nine o’clock but he waited an extra quarter of an hour just in case. He had nothing else to do. The evening was already wasted. He lit a cigarette and sucked upon it angrily, the smoldering tip a furious glow amidst the black trees.
It had happened like this before; she couldn’t get away. He had suggested that he buy her a mobile phone so that she could at least warn him, but she had said that her father would find it and take it away. Or more crucially, want to know where she had got it from. Discovery would mean the end of their relationship. In the meantime, it was the very clandestine nature of their nocturnal couplings that was the greatest attraction. Perhaps the only attraction, Rob wondered.
He had a privileged background compared to Janet, he realized. It was not something he had ever had to think about before, such had been the closeted nature of growing up in ‘the village’, as it was known. Middle class families going to middle class schools playing in middle class streets; little opportunity there to meet a Janet. She had lived her life in an equivalent isolation, so she had told him, but to twenty-year old Rob the nomadic existence of a longboat family sounded infinitely more romantic than his own stultifying home-life. It also sounded far, far tougher, if the stories Janet had told him about her parents were to be believed. The one hand he had buried deep inside the pocket of his coat for warmth he clenched instinctively, at the memory of her account.
“They are always drunk,” she had said, “that’s when they are at their worst. Dad, he just loses it completely sometimes. Neither of us know what to do then. I lock myself in my own cabin, but mum, she has nowhere...” Janet had broken down in tears at that point. Rob remembered trying to comfort her, putting his arm around her shoulders and holding her tightly to him. He wanted to help her but, realistically, what could he do? He liked Janet, liked her a lot, but he was under no illusion that he also liked the fact that the circumstances of their relationship meant that he could also keep her at arm’s length when he chose: he had never introduced her to any of his friends, never intended to, and certainly not to his parents. They would be shocked. On second thoughts, perhaps he would introduce her to his parents. Janet was his rebellion, and it would be toothless if it passed by unnoticed by the very people he was most determined to kick against. Beyond that, though? There was no future in it. He had no wish to save his girlfriend from a violent household only to end up being saddled with the responsibility for her himself. Household? It wasn’t really a term you could use when talking about a barge, was it? Rob had occasionally watched the barge community from a distance, both when he had been with Janet, but also sometimes on his own: they were a queer bunch, he had decided.
He took a final puff on his cigarette and flicked the still burning stub into the darkness. On a warmer, dryer evening he would have been conscious of the potential danger of starting a fire, but under the canopy of the branches the weak daytime sun from earlier on had had no opportunity to penetrate and the ground had had little chance to dry out, the earth still feeling soggy and yielding beneath his feet. Cold too. He stamped his feet up and down in an attempt to get a bit of feeling back in his toes. He illuminated the dial on his watch: nine-twenty, it was still early. The temptation was strong to sneak down to the vessels moored along the towpath and attempt to see if he could snatch a glimpse of Janet. He had tried this once before, several weeks ago when he had been similarly stood up, on that occasion without success, the curtains having been pulled firmly shut across the window to which he knew was her cabin. Still, it was worth a try again. There was something about the longboats that he found compulsively fascinating.
It was hard not to make a noise in the dark woods; there was much plant debris on the ground and his vision was not sufficiently attuned to the limited light to be able to avoid the worst pitfalls. As if to illustrate the fact, at that moment, he felt his foot catch on a protruding root and he took a headlong tumble in the darkness.
“Shit!” He pulled himself awkwardly up to a crouching position, his coat snagging on a sharp twig that required him to shake it loose, and rubbed his hands together attempting to remove some of their acquired dirt. He cursed himself for not having put his gloves back on after he finished his cigarette. His fall had sounded loud to him, but he was still some distance away from the canal and the towpath, and he felt confident that there was no one around to hear him. Does a falling acorn make a sound if there is no one there to hear? Enough cod philosophy. He laughed to himself at the thought, stood up, and immediately cracked his head on a low branch immediately above him. “Shit!” He would have to be more careful, both if he was not to be discovered as he approached the boats, and also for the self-preservation of his increasingly bruised body.
The fall had slightly disorientated him and, where before he had thought that he had been following something like a forest trail, he now came up against what seemed like an almost impenetrable barricade of sharp, prickly undergrowth and stunted, spiky trees. He felt in no danger of actually getting lost, the camber of the ground sloped away unmistakably, and he only had to keep going downhill and he would eventually reach the canal at some point. It was just a question of how far out of his way he would have to go in order to find a path through the trees in the direction that he required. Perhaps this night-time jaunt wasn’t proving to be such a good idea, after all?
It felt like fighting against an enemy that was never exhausted of resources; no sooner had he battled past one arboreal obstacle, another one reared up to challenge his progress. Effectively blind in the evening gloom, he was prodded and poked on all sides by invisible branches, snagged and restrained by unresisting boughs. His face was scratched where a pliant twig had whipped him like an invisible cat-o’-nine-tails, and he was sure that his coat was torn. Despite the cold weather, he could feel a bead of sweat running down his back at his exertions. It was no good, he would have to stop for a moment and try to get his bearings again; this endless struggle against an interminable foe seemed increasingly fruitless.
It was just as well for Rob that he did pause at that moment. If he had not he never would have heard the footsteps and, perhaps more importantly, would undoubtedly have been heard himself. As it was, he was able to crouch down in the dense undergrowth and listen to the sound of heavy breathing and soft steps padding by, uncomfortably close at hand. It was not Janet, he was sure of that. She would not have been so conspicuous. The breathing too, it had sounded like a man, and an elderly man at that, struggling to catch his breath; a harsh rattle deep down in the lungs somehow intrinsically interwoven into the normal rhythmic noise of aspiration. Perhaps another member of the barge community? Whoever it was, Rob had no desire to bump into him. His own mission was purely covert: see and not be seen. The one aspect of the encounter that did hearten Rob was the fact that this deep-breathing noctambulist had been moving at significant speed; nothing like a run of course, but given the darkness and the nature of the terrain a steady walking pace was impressive. There must be a path close at hand. Perhaps his days of battling trees were almost at an end.
The woods were silent again and Rob judged that it was safe to move on. In the daytime, with the cacophony of conflicting noises, it is often difficult to determi
ne in which direction a particular sound has come from. At night, it is sometimes easier. You have fewer senses to rely upon. The ones that are of use have to be functioning accurately. Rob was sure that the sounds that he had heard from the wood’s other inhabitant had come almost directly to the right of him and so, for once abandoning the downhill route, he struck out sideways, hopeful of encountering a clearer path. Luck was with him. He had only to circumvent a large, uprooted tree stump and negotiate his way through a particularly thick clump of - judging by their sharp thorns - brambles, and he found himself in a wide clearing, from where he could even glimpse the tell-tale lights of the houseboats at the end of a straight avenue beneath him. He quickened his speed. He was no longer too bothered if he did encounter someone on the path now: it might not be an altogether normal pursuit - to be strolling the woodland pathways by moonlight - but it was a good deal more understandable than to be discovered crouching in an obscure thicket, obviously with the intention of concealment in mind. As it was, Rob’s luck still held. He reached the towpath unseen, only to discover that he was within a matter of a few yards of his intended objective: Janet’s barge. He could see from where he stood, at the edge of the trees, that the curtains were once again closed across the window which he knew to be Janet’s, but a light was shining brightly through the next window along: a small round porthole, high up in the superstructure of the vessel, more consistent with the typical fenestral architecture of a boat, but perhaps too insignificant to warrant a night-time blind. It was an opportunity too good to miss. Although he had studied the bargees by day, a glimpse into their after-dark world was almost irresistible.
The loose gravel on the towpath crunched noisily beneath his feet, but he had already decided that it was safer to approach the longboat openly and attempt to casually glance through the porthole, rather than opt for stealth and surreptitiousness, which would be hard to explain should he be noticed. The chances were that there would be no one about to either see or care. He drew level with Janet’s window. There were no sounds from within and no chink of light showing through where the curtains were not quite precisely drawn across. She was either out or fast asleep. Rob was already aware of a noise from the neighbouring cabin; voices - it sounded like two men - raised in apparent argument. The longboat was pulled up very tight to the side of the canal, the ropes that secured it fore and aft wound numerous times around their mooring poles allowing no slack for the vessel to drift, and so with no gap between the path and the sides of the boat Rob was able to silently edge himself along the barge’s flank, hand-over-hand like a mime artist imitating coming up against a brick wall, until he was able to peer in the corner of the small porthole. The room he saw beyond was brightly lit and from the absolute darkness outside, Rob was confident that as long as he made no sudden noise or movement, he could observe without any fear of being seen himself.
There were two men, both in their fifties, so Rob guessed. One he recognized as Janet’s father - she had pointed him out on several occasions - the other man was a stranger to him, although judging from the superficial similarity, Rob wondered if it might not be her father’s brother. Strange that Janet had never mentioned him, though. Both men had white hair, Janet’s father’s long, lank and discoloured with grease, the other man’s cut short, almost in a crew-cut style. They both had deeply lined faces, making them appear perhaps older than they actually were and Janet’s father’s sun-burnished skin was blotchy and pricked with red maculae, florid like a football manager, a sign of the habitual drinker. It was the stranger, though, that was currently speaking, his voice now more conciliatory, the tone lower so that Rob had to strain to catch the words he said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have it any longer.”
Janet’s father was still angry. “What!” He swayed unsteadily on his feet as he lurched across the room, attempting to grasp the other man’s coat, to pull him closer towards him so that he could not escape the confrontation, but his alcohol-addled balance caused him to cling to a wooden chair for support, before that too tipped over, depositing both man and seat on the floor of the cabin. The tumble knocked some of the fight out of the man. He allowed his companion to help him back to his feet and guide him into the righted chair.
Now it was Janet’s father who seemed more defeated. He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying, “Just go, will you. Just go.”
“You haven’t told me when they will be ready.”
“I don’t know. I need to speak to someone first. These things take time.”
The short-haired man seemed to stifle a laugh, or was it more a snort of derision, “Time! You talk to me about time?”
“I’m sorry. It was a figure of speech. I’ll get them. Okay?”
“I need some food too.”
The long-haired man waved his hand towards what Rob presumed was the galley area of the boat, saying, “Take whatever you want,” adding as the other man turned to leave, “When will you be back?”
“Soon. Same signal as usual, okay?”
From his viewing post, Rob realized that to delay any longer would be to risk bumping into the shaven-headed man when he left the boat. Even to be discovered on the towpath would now appear rather suspicious. As quickly and as quietly as possible, Rob shrank away from the boat’s cover and found for himself a place of concealment just off the path, behind the trunk of a large beech tree, from where he could still see the moored vessel. He held his breath, trying not to make a sound, but he only had a few seconds to wait before a figure emerged from the door at the front of the barge, the wooden portal swinging back behind him with a bang that sounded unnaturally loud in the near darkness, and then hurried directly past the unseen Rob along the towpath, before turning left and disappearing into the woods heading, as far as Rob could judge, along the same path that Rob had followed earlier.
Rob mentally counted to twenty and, not hearing any sound of footsteps on the path or any other indication that the man he had seen was returning through the trees, he stepped out from his place of hiding and, with brisk strides, began his own homeward journey along the towpath. The darkness was all-enveloping as soon as he was away from the longboats’ lights, but he knew that the distance to the canal bridge was not far, and from there it was only a short way through the park and across the estate to his own house. He was ready for a warm bath and something to eat. It had been a rather cold and fruitless evening.
Unbeknown to Rob, one pair of eyes was watching his retreating form. They had studied him with interest from the moment that he crept up to the barge, had lost sight of him while he had been occupied peering through the porthole, but had followed him again as he hid behind the tree and subsequently reappeared. Tal Turner lay on his back on top of the blue tarpaulin that covered the front of his own barge, moored on the opposite bank, directly across from the longboat owned by Janet’s family. He took a final drink from the bottle of beer that he held, upending the glass container to make sure that every last drop was drained before propelling it in a wide orbit, hearing it land with a satisfying splash in the water some distance away. He recognized Rob. He was the bloke that was seeing that Janet. He knew Janet too. Only too well. From the top of his barge he could see directly into the window of her cabin. She might modestly draw the curtains on the landward side of her quarters, but Tal knew from nightly experience, that she must assume - incorrectly - that she could not be seen from the opposite bank of the canal, when she undressed every evening. He smiled to himself in the darkness. People were always surprised at his simple life; at the lack of mod cons in his humble floating abode, but who needs a T.V. or a fancy video recorder when the entertainment is laid on.
Tal put his hands behind his head and lay back so that he could look directly up at the night sky. He smiled again. As well as recognizing Rob, he recognized Rob’s type. A college boy. Someone with a few paper qualifications, perhaps even letters after his name; someone who
had regularly attended school and was a credit to the education system. Tal might not have been able to quote quite so many academic references or fall back upon such a solid background in schooling if he had to write his own personal curriculum vitae, but one thing that Tal knew was that knowledge is power.