Road of the Dead (4 page)

Cole and Abbie were talking seriously now—talking about the things they really wanted to talk about. I listened as Abbie asked Cole what we were doing here, and Cole carefully avoided telling her. I listened as she asked him how Mum was doing, and he replied with a few mumbled nothings. I listened as he asked her about Rachel, and she told him how devastated she was, how sickened, how hurt. How heartbroken.

She wasn’t lying. I could feel her pain. I could hear it in
her voice and see it in her eyes. Her feelings for Rachel were genuine. No, she wasn’t lying. But she wasn’t telling the truth, either.

“Could you tell us what happened?” Cole asked her.

She looked at him. “Didn’t the police tell you?”

“Yeah, but you were here, weren’t you? You know how it was.”

Her eyes blinked hesitantly.

Cole said, “It’d really help us to hear it from you. I know it’s difficult…”

“I wasn’t actually there,” she said. “Not when it happened.”

“Where were you?”

“I was at my mother-in-law’s house.” She paused, thinking about it, then she took a deep breath and began to explain. “Earlier that evening, I’d walked down to the village with Rachel and we’d had a quick drink in the pub. She was getting the last bus back to Plymouth. It leaves at eight-thirty.”

“What time did you leave your house?” Cole asked her.

“About quarter to seven. The village isn’t far away…about twenty minutes’ walk. Maybe half an hour. It was just starting to rain when we got there. I remember stopping outside the pub and looking up at the sky and seeing these huge black rain clouds rolling toward us across the moor. I tried telling Rach then that she should stay another night and go back in the morning, but she wouldn’t listen.
When I told her there was a really bad storm coming, she just shrugged and said, ‘Let it come.’”

I looked at Cole. He didn’t show anything, but I knew what he was thinking. “Let it come” is something that Dad often says. Whenever there’s something bad on the horizon, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Let it come. Just let it come.”

“Anyway,” Abbie continued, “we went into the pub and had a couple of drinks, and while we were in there the storm started to break.” She shook her head. “God, it was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. The skies just opened up and the rain came down in buckets. It was like a monsoon or something.” She looked out the bus window. “All this was flooded. The road, the moor, everything. Look…” She pointed to the side of the road. “You can still see all the stuff that got washed down from the moor.”

I looked out the window. The edge of the road was littered with flood debris—dried mud, leaves, twigs.

Abbie shook her head again. “I told Rachel she couldn’t go back in the storm. I
told
her. I said I’d call Vince and get him to pick us up before it got too bad, but she just wouldn’t have it. She said she wanted to go home.” Abbie looked at Cole, then at me. “She said she missed her family.”

Cole closed his eyes for a moment. I didn’t close mine, because I knew if I did I’d start crying.

Cole said, “Who’s Vince?”

“My husband.”

Cole nodded. “But Rachel wouldn’t let you call him?”

“No. She wouldn’t even let me walk with her to the bus stop. ‘There’s no point in both of us getting soaked, is there?’ she said.”

“What time did she leave the pub?” Cole asked.

“About eight.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I stayed in the pub for a while, then I went around to visit my mother-in-law. She lives in the street behind the pub.”

“And that was the last time you saw Rachel—when she left the pub?”

Abbie nodded. “I found out later that the bus was about an hour late because of the storm, but she definitely got on it. The driver remembers her. But the bus never got to Plymouth. It had to stop…” She leaned to one side and pointed through the windscreen at the road up ahead. “It was just over there. See that steep little bank at the end of the road?”

We both looked out the window. About half a mile ahead, the road dipped down and veered off to the right under a steep bank of trees. As we got closer, we could see where the bank had collapsed. Piles of red earth and fallen trees had been bulldozed off the road.

“The road was blocked,” Abbie said. “Nothing could get through. The bus had to turn around and come back. It was getting pretty late by then, and the road was getting
really bad, so by the time the bus got back to Lychcombe it was gone eleven o’clock. The driver remembers Rachel getting off. He asked her if she was going to be all right. She told him not to worry, she had some friends in the village and she’d stay the night with them.”

“But she never showed up,” said Cole.

“No…we just assumed she’d caught the train and gone home. We didn’t know anything was wrong until the next day.”

“Why didn’t she call you?”

“The phone box by the bus stop was out of order.”

“She had her cell.”

Abbie shook her head. “You can’t get a signal around here. The police think she probably tried calling us from the phone box, then when she couldn’t get through she decided to walk to our house…”

Her voice trailed off and she lowered her eyes, unwilling to go any further. But Cole didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or he just didn’t care.

“So that’s when it happened,” he said. “Somewhere between the bus stop and your place…someone took her.”

Abbie nodded silently.

“Where were you then?” asked Cole.

Abbie looked up suddenly. “What?”

“Where were you when Rachel was walking back to your place?”

“I just told you—”

“Were you still at your mother-in-law’s?”

Her eyes were getting angry now. “Why are you asking me—?”

“What time did you leave?”

She glared at Cole in disbelief. “You don’t have any right to
question
me.”

“Why not?”

“I was her
friend
, for God’s sake. If you think—”

“I don’t think anything,” Cole said calmly. “I just want to know what happened to Rachel. The more you tell me the more I’ll know.”

Abbie continued staring at him for a while, but I could see her anger fading.

“Yeah, well…” she muttered eventually. “I can’t tell you any more, can I? I don’t
know
any more. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

Cole was about to ask her something else, but before he could speak I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I think we’re nearly there.”

He looked at me, then looked out the window. Boundless acres of empty moorland stretched out into the distance. “Nearly where?” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

“We just passed a sign,” I told him.

“What sign?”

“Lychcombe.”

“He’s right,” Abbie said, getting to her feet. “It’s the next stop. Just around the corner.”

As she walked off down to the front of the bus, Cole
continued looking out the window. His eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonely gray road winding its way into the fading hills, and I could feel him thinking to himself—
This is no place to die
.

We got off the bus and watched it pull away, and then we just stood there for a while, mesmerized by the unworldly silence of the moor. I’d never heard anything like it before. It wasn’t a soundless silence—there was the soft rush of wind in the grass, the lonely bleating of distant sheep, the call of crows in a nearby forest…but somehow that made it all the more quiet. There were no
human
noises. No traffic. No voices.

It was the silence of another age.

Another time.

Another bus stop. Another day. Another night. I could feel it—the sky black with rain, Rachel getting off the bus, trying her cell, then hurrying across the road to the telephone box, trying to call Abbie. But the phone’s out of order. Broken, busted, jammed. No signal. No answer. She can’t hear me. She’s hundreds of miles away. She’s all alone. She’s cold and wet and it’s dark and windy and there’s something out there, something that shouldn’t be there…

“Don’t think about it.”

Cole was standing beside me, his hand on my shoulder.

“I can’t help it,” I told him.

“I know.”

He gave my shoulder a squeeze, then looked over at Abbie. She was waiting for us at the side of the road.

“Don’t push her too hard,” I said quietly to Cole. “She’s frightened of something. If you try to force it out of her, she’ll just clam up. Go easy for a while—OK?”

Cole nodded. Still looking at Abbie, he said, “Do you really think she looks like Rachel?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Other times I’m not so sure. Her face keeps shifting. Sometimes she looks like an
anti
-Rachel.”

Cole looked at me.

I shrugged.

We walked over to Abbie and she led us across the road to a V-shaped junction where a hillside lane branched off the main road and headed down into a valley.

“This is the road to Lychcombe,” she told us. “The village is just down there.”

I looked down the narrow road and saw a scattering of dull gray buildings at the bottom of the valley. Apart from a lone twist of smoke coiling from a cottage chimney, there was no movement at all. The village lay mute and still in the early evening light.

We set off toward it.

The road led steeply all the way down to a small granite bridge that crossed a shallow river into the village. We could see for miles all around us. On either side of the road, the open moor was broken up with jutting stones and clumps of stricken oak trees, and away to our right I could
see fat little ponies standing motionless in fields of dry grass. I could smell their horse-sweet breath in the air. I could smell other smells, too: earth, heather, gorse. A faint breeze of gasoline was wafting up from an old-fashioned filling station halfway down the hill, and on the right-hand side of the road, opposite the gas station, wood smoke was drifting over a stretch of spindly woods.

The road led down through it all—down the hill, over the bridge, into the village, and out the other side. A large stone house stood at the far end of the village, and it was here that the road turned sharply to the left before wandering up through the densely packed gloom of a pine forest and away into the hills beyond.

I was lagging behind Cole and Abbie now. They were about ten meters ahead of me, walking side by side. I could see they’d started talking again but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. So I picked up my pace and caught up with them.

As I walked up behind them, Abbie was just explaining something to Cole, pointing down at the village, and Cole was nodding his head.

“So where do you live, then?” he asked her.

“Just over there.” She moved her hand to the left, pointing beyond the village. “You can’t see it from here. It’s about half a mile from the edge of the forest.”

Cole nodded again. “Are you walking all the way back?”

She shook her head. “Vince is coming to pick me up.”
She looked at Cole. “Do you want a lift anywhere? He’ll be happy to drive you—”

“No, that’s all right. We’ll walk, thanks.”

Abbie nodded. “What are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “Not much.”

“The last bus leaves at eight-thirty. You’re not going to have much time. You could probably get a taxi back—”

“We might stay over.”

“What—here? In Lychcombe?”

“Maybe. We’ll see how it goes. Is there anywhere to stay? What about that pub you mentioned?”

Abbie looked at him. The fear in her eyes had resurfaced. “The pub?”

“Yeah,” said Cole. “Or a B-and-B, something like that.”

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. “I suppose the Bridge might have a room…”

“The Bridge?”

“The Bridge Hotel. It’s the village pub. It’s not really a hotel anymore—”

“We just need a room.”

Abbie seemed about to say something, but then she changed her mind and just shrugged, and we continued walking in silence for a while.

The lane was bounded on either side by low stone walls topped with stunted shrubs. The stones were encrusted with scabs of lichen, and when I looked closer I could see little white stalks with bloodred tips growing
among the scabs—Devil’s Matchsticks. I left them alone and gazed down at the village. It was directly below us now, about 200 meters away. It still didn’t look like much, but now that we weren’t so far away I could see there was more to it than just a scattering of buildings. There was a main street, a couple of side streets…cars and shops and people, bits of movement.

There was movement over at the gas station, too. It was a run-down old place that looked as if it was closing down. The two ancient gas pumps were sealed off with tape, and the forecourt buildings were all boarded up. It was far from deserted, though. A grubby white gasoline tanker was parked by the pumps, and across the forecourt a group of men were hanging around an old green Land Rover. In the background I could see a couple of motorbikes and a Toyota pickup truck. A man in blue overalls was lowering a heavy hose from the tanker into a fuel tank in front of the pumps, and the men at the Land Rover were watching him. At the back of the tanker, a generator was quietly chugging away.

“There’s Vince,” said Abbie, looking over at the group of men.

I didn’t know which one she meant, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like him.

They all looked as bad as each other.

“What are they doing here?” Cole said.

I thought he was asking Abbie about the men at the gas station, but when I glanced over at him I realized he wasn’t
even looking at them. He was looking instead at a gathering of trailers in a wasteground field near the spindly woods on the other side of the road.

“They’re gypsies,” said Abbie.

Cole glanced at her. “I kind of guessed that.”

“Oh, right,” she said, slightly embarrassed, “of course. Sorry.” She looked over at the camp. “I don’t really know anything about them. They’ve been living there for about six months now.”

Cole just nodded, staring at the camp. It was set back from the road, away to our right, at the end of a rutted track. There were eight trailers in all, parked in a ragged semicircle, and the rest of the field was dotted with cars and trucks—BMWs, Shoguns, pickups, vans. The camp was quietly busy. There was a little kid playing with a dog, a bonfire smoking in the wind, a piebald pony tethered by a trough…