Lurker (2 page)

The boulder clay, rich in nutrients and moisture, boasted lush vegetation, such as sycamore. The exposed shale, unstable and acidic, supported only sparser growths like heather and bracken. At the bottom, where conditions were damp, marsh-loving plants like birch and willow scrub grew in dense profusion.

This was an astonishing, even awe-inspiring place, and Meg could only pity the fact that Harry took little interest in such matters. He’d always preferred gaudy Hollywood films to TV documentaries, as if manmade spectacles could ever match up to those decreed by the natural world. For some unfathomable reason, her husband liked horror movies, especially those involving hideous creatures. In Meg’s opinion, however, few could challenge the kind of marine life often filmed for fascinating shows. She’d observed giant squid and other tentacled monstrosities, prowling waters with alien sentience. Some crackled with life, as if their bodies were infused with electricity. There was certainly something distasteful about such slimy beings, many of which could achieve the size of human-serving transport.

Meg believed the scent of the sea, crashing unseen against the cliff to her right, had brought these thoughts to her attention, and so she switched her gaze back to the mainland, where less unpleasant wildlife lurked.

In front of her was a pond, in which frogs and newts croaked. She saw at least one of each amphibian lurking in mud along the banking. Meg’s guidebook claimed that in summer, dragonflies could be spotted here, and she made a mental note to look out for them the following year, giving her something to look forward to. Elsewhere in the disused quarry was more wood- and grassland, occupied by butterflies, birds and small mammals. Tits and warblers flitted from tree to tree, while a stoat searched for prey amid variegated fronds. Meg thought she spotted a goldfinch seeking greater open spaces, but couldn’t be certain she’d seen an oystercatcher pecking the ground nearby; they’d more likely be found beneath the cliff, cracking open mussel shells or dislodging limpets from rocks.

At that moment, she heard a frantic rustle of something moving in the undergrowth. If this was too loud to belong to anything as small as a rabbit or hare, she could reassure herself that deer had occasionally been sighted in this area. At any rate, she switched her gaze elsewhere, at a sky presently occupied by freewheeling herring gulls. The way they fled as if in sudden fright could also be explained by the guidebook: the cliff tops, where sandstone lay, was an ideal roosting place for kestrels, a mighty bird of prey that provided the gulls with imperious competition for mice, voles and insects.

If none of this could make her feel good to be alive, she had no idea what would. But she’d now reached part of the trail that evoked less positive aspects of the place’s history. Where alum shale constituted the ground, no plant life grew at all. A great barren plane led all the way to the cliff’s edge, resembling recorded footage of moon landings. This thought, coupled with earlier images of revolting sea creatures and the noise she’d detected in the woodland, made Meg feel uneasy. But it was surely her knowledge—again, derived from the guidebook—of working conditions once suffered by miners in the area that caused her the greatest discomfort.

In the 1730s, approximately 150 workers had worked here, using shovels, picks and wheelbarrows for a daily wage of about five pence in today’s money. The task had been onerous, gouging out tons of shale containing aluminium sulphate, which was processed to produce alum, an important chemical used for dyeing cloth and making leather supple and more durable. The alum was produced by piling shale up to thirty meters and using brushwood underneath to burn it. These immense stacks could smoulder for up to a year, with more being added to their vast bulks as it was excavated. The burnt shale was then placed in water-filled tanks to generate a mineral-rich liquid.

Noticing a vast mound of exposed shale to her left, Meg tried to imagine how demanding this task had been for the miners, grafting hard for such negligible pay. One thing Meg disliked about her husband was his dismissive attitude to junior colleagues, people under his managerial stewardship. Harry worked for an insurance company, and recently its CEO had taken a slash-and-burn strategy to unwanted personnel. Mass redundancies were about to follow, with Harry tasked with deciding who and when. This was a role he’d seemed to take a little too much pleasure in accepting, though Meg had kept her disapproval to herself. She knew what the alternative was, after all: another pious lecture about how her husband was now the main breadwinner and how she should have considered her rights to complain before quitting her own job and ceasing to bring in money herself.

She looked ahead, struggling to tell herself that her unhappiness during the months since
it
had happened was only that, and nothing else.

And that was when she spotted the entrance to a railway tunnel.

Suppressing subterranean material she didn’t wish to explore right now, she paced forward, along the leaf-strewn path for the shadowy mouth of the tunnel, most of which had been bricked up. A gap at the top, above head height, gave onto a darkness that resounded with nascent sounds. Meg, curiosity making her wonder why only part of the entrance had been sealed, went up on tiptoe, trying to see above the makeshift wall’s crown. But all she could do was reach one hand over the brim. She felt dead things lying there, but these were surely just cold stones dislodged and sent skittering down the other side with a flurry of whispering echoes. The image of something behind the wall snatching its own hand away was fanciful, and in any case, even if the dweller had been a child standing on a pal’s shoulders, his or her flesh had felt too cold to be alive…

Meg stepped backward, telling herself that a renewed shifting of debris beyond the bricked-up archway was just reverberations induced by her movement, even though it had possessed such a moist tone. For some reason, she pictured in her head the centipede she’d observed that morning, while tending her garden. This was immediately cross-fertilized by fickle imagination with a squidlike creature she could recall from TV documentaries. And moments later, her mind let loose on all this suggestive reality,
that
was what stood behind the wall for her: a giant insect made of pulsing jelly, writhing with electricity, and bearing countless limbs. Indeed, here came one of these appendages now, poking through the gap at the top of the tunnel’s mouth…

Meg snatched away her glance before she could observe any such thing. To the right was a zigzagging staircase, leading up and above the tunnel. But she refused to leave even her peripheral vision exposed to anything lolling over that incomplete wall. She quickly retraced her route back along the pathway, using the guidebook to select her next destination. Turning right up ahead would take her to two cement-stone mines, now sealed up by fans of shale. Farther on stood the site of the Alum House, a property in which liquid alum had been converted into its final crystal form…But by this time, Meg was tired and felt as if she’d seen enough for one day. She had the rest of her life to explore this area, after all, and with little else to distract her.

Walking back the way she’d come, she tried telling herself the almost imperceptible rumbling she detected underfoot was just her stirred emotions at work, and not any aspect of the elements out here, in such a vast, beguiling realm.

3

She spent most of the evening watching television—a documentary about sea life and then another about the banking collapse—before turning into bed at around ten p.m. Being alone here was vastly different from her experience in the city whenever her husband had been away traveling. There were fewer sounds outside, which of course drew her attention more insidiously to those she was able to hear. No passing people reassured her, nor cranky transport, nor surveillance helicopters, nor distant police and ambulance sirens. This was a place in which nothing much happened…and so why did her imagination now believe
anything
could?

She changed into nightwear and brushed her teeth, trying to suppress reflections on her walk today. It had been a pleasant, promising venture, and she hoped to explore more of the area soon. Nevertheless, something about it had crawled under her skin, like a pernicious insect, invisible to unassisted eyes, digging deeper, mining to the bone…Slapping her toothbrush back into its wall-mounted holster, she switched out the bathroom light and retreated to the bedroom, where the double bed awaited her, cold to the point of feeling moist.

She’d gone around the cottage and closed all its curtains hours earlier, just after it had grown dark. She’d seen enough movies, almost all selected by Harry, to realize psychopathic killers or merciless monsters always picked such moments to leap out from the night at unwary protagonists. It was silly, she knew—she was forty-two years old—but she hadn’t wanted to look outside while drawing the thick material along their solid brass runners.

After closing her bedroom door to prevent drafts overnight from making it creep like the stealthy approach of something with unfriendly motivations, Meg settled down beneath the sheets and eventually flicked out her bedside lamp.

Troubling thoughts came the moment she closed her eyes. Harry had called earlier, at about eight p.m., claiming to be tied up again at the office. It was a demanding time for the business, he’d been saying for a long time now, and he must put in extra hours to meet his obligations. That had sounded to Meg like the most clichéd reason to remain at work, but she knew she was being paranoid, not a state of mind she wanted to entertain willfully ever again. After all, if he’d called from his city center hotel, would that have made her less suspicious? Probably more so, she reflected, understanding that such places were full of people like him, itinerant employees with nothing better to do than prowl establishments’ bars…

But she was being ridiculous. Her husband might have suffered frustration as she’d emerged from her depression—she knew he had, even though he’d never admit it—but he was surely faithful. In her worst moments, shortly after the
event
had occurred, she’d made artful inquiries at his office, and there was no doubt he’d traveled to the likes of Madrid, Rome and Berlin unaccompanied, with no foxy new recruit in her twenties who was eminently pregnable…

But again Meg was being stupid. Harry hadn’t even wanted a child, had he? Which was not to say he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a father once the situation had been thrust upon him. But that wasn’t the same thing at all. If he strayed, it would be for other reasons, and not his partner’s lack of fertility. For him, this would surely be an issue of status, the need to hang a glistening bauble on one arm. Meg was fortunate to have good genes—her mother had been a natural beauty, her father tall and handsome—and even though she thought so herself, she’d retained the good looks that had once attracted Harry and held him at her side through arduous circumstances…No, she mustn’t worry about her husband; whatever suspicions existed deep inside her were erroneous, and she was foolish to try to excavate them.

At that moment, something shuffled at the cottage’s rear, beneath the bedroom window looking on to that part of the property. But Meg was too drowsy to pay this moist, heavy tread much attention. It was probably just a hedge stirring in the quiet wind tonight…and that was as much as she remembered, because seconds later, she was asleep.

She dreamed of walking again, back along the path for the abandoned railway tunnel. The Sandsend Trail looked different, the borders flanked by piles of bones rather than alum…or to be precise,
human
bones. Skulls and tibia and femur and many others were piled up in haphazard profusion, as if the creature that fed in this area was immortal and had been dining for centuries.

Dining…mining…dining…mining…

Meg’s psyche now felt ungovernable, speculating automatically on material buried so deep she could barely even sense it, let alone dig it up. Then she’d reached that impromptu wall plugging the entrance to the tunnel. Something was definitely moving behind it, unseen in the cloying dark. Instead of merely listening, however, Meg grew more proactive on this occasion, looking around for a huge rock, finding one, dragging it across the ground toward the middle of the wall, and then standing on it. Now she could comfortably get her arms over the top, pulling herself up the way she had as a child, when she’d lacked the intrusive breasts of an adult. After getting her center of gravity above the crown, she swung one leg over, and then the other, before dropping at once onto the other side.

Inside it was pitch-black, like life inside another’s body was supposed to be. A chill draft assaulted her frame, tiny fingers feeling for warmth. There was a fetid odor, the scent an animal exudes in mating season or when hungry for more than food.

And that was when she heard the unsettling sounds.

Something was approaching from up ahead, along the length of the tunnel. Even though this was a dream, and at some level Meg knew that, she found herself scrabbling in one dream-pocket for her dream-phone. Then, as those rustling noises grew closer, she held the gadget and flipped open its lid, letting the tiny screen emit a light that brought her cramped surroundings to life. The passageway was full of rubble, chunks of stone, broken wood, even a rotting bicycle. The final item confirmed the thoughts she’d had while visiting this place earlier—that children had shambled over the wall and used it as a den or a hiding place—but then such reasoning was demolished by what appeared in front of her.