Ash (82 page)

Stumbling onwards, tripping over exposed tree roots every so often, he was determined to make his way back to the one place he’d feel safe. His breathing was shallow and sharp, barely filling his laboured lungs. His limbs trembled in a worrying way. Not far now. He’d soon be home. Must remember to get his tools of the trade down from the loft and bury everything in the woods. Dig a nice deep hole. Certainly wouldn’t do for them to be found and the cottage was bound to be thoroughly searched. He didn’t plan to spend however long he had left in some stinking prison cell.

His nose twitched. Cat’s piss? No, more than that. Whatever it was, it was coming from the direction in which he was walking.

Twigg had to stretch out an arm and rest his aching body against a solid old cedar. He tried to steady his breathing, drawing in great wheezing breaths that hurt his throat on their way to his lungs. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he wondered how much further he had to go. Shouldn’t be far now, should be quite near. Unless he’d been walking round in circles.
Don’t be so bloody daft!
He knew these woods like the back of his hand.

There! There was the bloody path. Not four yards away and he hadn’t noticed it until now. It was the excitement of it all. Blowing up the bloody castle! How he wished he could go back and watch it fall in on itself. What fun that would be! Too dangerous though. Might get caught. Best be getting back to the cottage.

He staggered onwards.

And glory be, there it was, just waiting for him to come home to it. Nice little white house, nice little path leading to the stable-style front door . . . the
open
stable-style front door.

Hadn’t he locked it when he left earlier with his holdall of goodies? He always locked up when he went out, surely? Perhaps the thrill of the day had got to him, causing him to forget his usual routine. It was this bloody illness, that’s what it was. Taking over his body. Medicine and pills were inside the cottage – they’d soon calm him down.

But was that a light shining from the windows? And the bloody windows were open! He can’t have missed that. This wasn’t like him at all.

Warily, the assassin approached his charming little woodland home.

The smell of cats grew stronger the closer he got. He wished he’d taken a pistol with him. He tried to step lightly when he reached the crazy-paving path up to the front door, but his legs were clumsy, his balance a bit askew. Slowly, not because of his Parkinson’s but because he was beginning to feel some kind of dread, he walked – shuffled – cautiously up to the open door.

He paused on the doorstep.

And peered inside.

Lit by just one inadequate oil lamp, the interior was cast in gloom and shadows.

As Twigg squinted into the shadowy room, with moonlight shining through the tops of trees behind him, he began to make out shapes. For some reason, his tremors became a constant trembling as the shapes became more evident.

Now Cedric Twigg was not a cowardly man – his profession did not allow for that – but this night he suddenly knew true fear and it weakened his bladder. The shapes occupied the top of his small square table, while more squatted on the stairs leading up to the first floor. Two sat on a hard straight-backed kitchen chair, and more lay sprawled before the hearth of the unlit fire. From each one there came a contended purring which sounded more like a pleasurable snarling. One or two of the big cats prowled the room, their thick bushy tails waving in the air.

All watched him with evil yellow eyes.

He took one reluctant step into the feline-crowded room to see something even more strange. Someone – or some
thing
– occupied the lumpy old armchair by the hearth. And it was watching him. Watching him with only one eye.

A sane person might have turned swiftly and headed off back into the woods as fast as their legs would carry them. But an assassin, by definition, had to be somewhat insane even if it was their own dark secret.

Twigg took two further steps into the room for a closer look, because he could not quite understand what his eyes were telling him.

For, sitting in his lumpy, threadbare armchair, was someone who couldn’t possibly be there.

What hair Twigg possessed prickled and suddenly it was as if his body had forgotten to tremble any more. In his shabby old raincoat, he stood stock-still as his beady, bulbous eyes took in the . . . the
person
? . . . in his own favourite seat.

Eddy Nelson, his apprentice, his
dead
apprentice, looked up at Twigg through the one eye the wildcats had left in his face. Holding up his dislodged jaw with one slashed hand to what was left of the upper part of his face he said, ‘Ayo, Ce-dic.’

Twigg staggered back a step. The dead man’s expensive blue suit hung in tatters, smeared with quicklime and dirt from his freshly dug woodland grave.

‘Sh . . . shudna dunnit, Ce-dic,’ the mutated rasp of a voice complained, Nelson working the gore-dried mandible as a ventriloquist would move the jaw of a dummy.

Twigg found he’d nothing to say in response. Instead, his gaze roamed down to the corpse’s open belly, where entrails and intestines were hanging out of a great gash of a wound. Nelson was trying to hold back all he could of those silvery tubes and strings of meat which glistened dully under the poor light from the oil lamp by the dead man’s . . . feet?

They were shoeless and sockless and toeless as well. Just lumps of mouldering meat, which made the speechless Twigg wonder how this man, now slightly shrivelled and withered, had got himself to the cottage. Had he dragged himself across the woodland floor? Or walked awkwardly on the stumps? And had he dug himself out of the shallow grave, or had the wildcats returned to exhume him?

At the thought of the wildcats, Twigg became more aware of them. They were prowling around him now; one of the biggest, with mangy, dirty, bristling hair, was on the table nearby, ready to launch itself at him.

‘Mu . . . my . . . frens,’ Nelson announced with what might have been pride.

The stench of corruption and cats’ piss was almost overwhelming, making the assassin feel faint. And the trembling had returned, although it was more like shuddering now.

His big mistake was turning around and trying to make it back through the door. Not that he had any other choice, of course.

The wildcat leapt at his half-turned figure and landed squarely on Twigg’s head, its long claws digging into his cheek for purchase. Twigg cried out, which proved to be the signal for every cat in the room to pounce.

The form in the armchair started to laugh, a peculiar grating, jarring, empty sound that paused only when the ragged corpse of Eddy Nelson, real name Nelson Eddy, clumsily dropped his jaw onto the floor, as the frenzied wildcats pulled Twigg down and rapaciously tore him to pieces.

The last thing Twigg saw was the lime-stained jaw streaked with dried blood, for it had landed just a few inches from his beady staring eyes.

And the last thing he heard over the sounds of the screeching, squealing cats was Nelson’s hoarse guffaw of a laugh as the dead man tried but failed to keep the rest of his guts inside his open stomach.

Prince Philip, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II’s royal consort, impatiently paced up and down the lush carpet in what was commonly known as the Balcony Room of Buckingham Palace. It was where numerous royals had stood happily, if a little stiffly, waving to the crowds who always turned up in their thousands for every important celebration or state occasion.

In his pacing, the prince paused for a moment to look down the Mall. He always stood back a little from the tall, draped windows, because he knew that with the Union Jack flying, signifying the Queen was at home, the forever optimistic crowds from all over the world invariably gathered at the palace gates, yearning to catch a glimpse of any member of the royal family, never thinking they were sometimes watched in return. The mere shadow of a figure would send the tourists into a frenzy.

He looked back across to where his wife sat in a small gilt chair reading through a leather-bound report, the cover impressed with the royal crest in a gold motif. Queen Elizabeth favoured being closer to the people she served whenever there was trouble on the horizon, for the public’s faith and adoration always imbued her with strength.

The prince continued his pacing, hands held loosely behind his back, worried by the anxious frown on the monarch’s usually unflappable countenance. He wouldn’t disturb her while she was reading.

The report contained a necessarily shortened version of events that had recently taken place at Comraich Castle. It seemed that it now lay in ruins, razed almost to the ground. The report also apparently included some previously unknown details of that bloody mysterious Inner Court, the bane of so many royals and dignitaries over the decades. What was to be done? What was to be done about
them
? Prince Philip frowned in angered frustration.

At last, his wife raised her eyes from the report and removed her reading glasses. She sighed as he approached and handed it to him. Now it was her turn to wait patiently and silently while he quickly scanned the pages.

In his early nineties, she thought her husband still cut a fine figure of a man. His back was once ramrod straight, but these days, his shoulders were a little rounded as if the years of high office weighed upon them mightily.

Queen Elizabeth said not a word while he skimmed through the report from the Home Office.

Finally, he closed the leather-bound primary transcript and dropped it contemptuously onto a nearby table. He looked across at his wife, who could only respond with a resigned expression.

Prince Philip walked back to stand by the long glass-panelled door that overlooked the Mall.

‘Fuck them,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck them all.’

Also by James Herbert

The Rats

The Fog

The Survivor

Fluke

The Spear

The Dark

Lair

The Jonah

Shrine

Domain

Moon

The Magic Cottage

Sepulchre

Haunted

Creed

Portent

The Ghosts of Sleath

’48

Others

Once

Nobody True

The Secret of Crickley Hall

Graphic Novels

The City

(Illustrated by Ian Miller)

Non-fiction

By Horror Haunted

(Edited by Stephen Jones)

James Herbert’s Dark Places

(Photographs by Paul Barkshire)

First published 2012 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan
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ISBN 978-0-230-76487-3 EPUB

Copyright © James Herbert 2012

The right of James Herbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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