Wake Wood (27 page)

‘Thank you for being nice to my parents, Mary.’ Alice drew closer and closer to Mary, wrapped her arms around her waist and hugged her tight. ‘You’ve been very kind to them.’

Alice began to convulse and, almost immediately, so
did
Mary. The torch Mary was holding fell to the ground and she cried out as her shaking became more and more violent.

‘I’m not going back, Mary.’ Alice unbuttoned Mary’s coat and slipped her hand inside. Mary sank down on to her knees.

Louise shouted her daughter’s name to no avail. All she and Patrick could do was listen in horror as the ominous squelch of soft tissue being invaded filled the air. Mary didn’t utter a sound but Louise watched Mary’s eyes darken and glaze in agony in the pool of upturned light from the torch. Within seconds, rivulets of bright crimson blood began to stream down Mary’s face from her eyelids, ears and mouth.

Louise thought that Alice would never end her lethal embrace but eventually she did step away from Mary, exposing a ghastly open wound in Mary’s stomach. Triumphant, Alice smiled, turned to Louise and held up her hand. It was covered in blood and gore to the elbow.

Mary stared at Alice, swayed on her knees and finally fell, slumping sideways on to the leaf-covered dirt path.

Louise crawled to Mary and crouched beside her. She didn’t need to feel for Mary’s pulse. No one could survive the injury Alice had inflicted on her. Louise looked up at her daughter in horror and screamed, ‘Alice!’

Alice stepped aside and for the first time Louise noticed Patrick’s prostrate figure illuminated at the edge of the beam from Mary’s discarded torch. His eyes were closed. Louise looked for signs of breathing but
saw
none obvious. Patrick was unable to help her because he was unconscious … or …

Louise closed her mind, unwilling to think of the alternative. Patrick couldn’t be dead … not Patrick. Alice couldn’t – wouldn’t – kill her own father … But then this thing … this monster that looked, spoke and appeared to be Alice couldn’t possibly be the daughter they had brought up and loved. The child they’d nurtured such hopes and dreams for.

Alice turned to Louise and said, ‘Mum?’ in a normal, conversational tone.

Terrified, Louise shrank back as Alice advanced on her. She felt herself beginning to tremble. The same violent convulsions that had held Mary and Alice in thrall were now beginning to take an insidious hold on her.

Alice lowered her head and hunched over. When she next raised her face, the expression in her eyes was cold, pure evil. ‘Mum … why don’t you answer me when I talk to you?’

Louise staggered back, away from Alice. Leaving the path, she turned and retreated, fleeing into the woods.

‘Mum …’

Louise ignored Alice’s cry and ran … and ran … and ran … She didn’t know where she was running to. She only knew she had to get away from Alice and put as much distance as possible between her and the thing that was occupying her daughter’s body, before she ended up dead and mutilated, like Mary.

Because she wanted to live. For the sake of the child she was carrying – she wanted to live.

Louise didn’t stop until she was incapable of taking another step. She collapsed, weak and breathless, praying that she’d put enough ground between herself and Alice for her daughter not to find her. She crawled under a thicket of bushes and lay low, wishing she could momentarily disappear by dissolving into the earth.

Far below her on the fringes of the woods she could see car headlights travelling along the country road that wound past Wake Wood. Evidence that a world existed beyond the town; a normal world where people lived boring conventional lives; one where children went to school, adults worked in offices and stores, and in between they shopped, went to cinemas and visited friends and relatives – a world she was no longer a part of.

All around at a distance, faint beams of torchlight danced between the trees, twigs snapped and boots hit the ground as the stragglers among her neighbours made their way between the shadowy rows of tree trunks and headed for the gathering at the lip of the ravine.

‘Mum …’ Alice’s voice carried sweet and low, heartbreakingly familiar as it echoed through the woods. ‘Mum … where are you?’

Louise didn’t move. She lay as flat to the earth as she could and waited for the black spots to stop wavering in front of her eyes while she struggled to catch her breath.

She froze when she saw Alice drift slowly past her hiding place. Her daughter was so close, if she’d
reached
out she could have touched her foot. Louise closed her eyes, too frightened to breathe any longer lest she alert Alice to her presence.

Alice called out, ‘Mum? Ready or not, I’m coming … Where are you, Mum?’ as though they were playing a game of hide-and-seek.

Louise continued to lie still. The earth was cold, damp. It smelled of winter’s rotting leaves; death and decay assailed her nostrils. Yet Alice had to return there.

She recalled Arthur’s words that night at the cottage when he’d told her and Patrick that he could bring Alice back to them.

Alice’s heart will beat, her lungs will breathe. She’ll remember you and the life she had with you. Some of it … but she’ll also be deceased – although that’s something she won’t be aware of. You’ll need to bear that in mind the entire time you’re with her
.

Even after everything that had happened – all that Alice had done – when the time came, would she be able to return her daughter’s body back to the earth with its foul stench of putrefaction and the grave?

Louise finally breathed out when everything around her had fallen quiet. She counted to one hundred in her head, then rose cautiously. Alice had gone. The woods around her were still, unnaturally so, after the earlier movement and sounds. She looked around indecisively, uncertain which direction to take.

‘Where are you, Mum?’

Alice’s voice, light, disembodied by the night, floated towards her, eerie and threatening.

Louise took off again at speed. She wasn’t even sure which direction she was heading. She only knew that she had to put as much ground as she could between her and Alice.

‘I’m going to find you,’ Alice shouted after her. ‘Ready or not … I’m coming, Mum …’

Louise didn’t falter, didn’t hesitate for a moment. Head down, she continued to charge ahead into the pitch darkness beneath the trees.

PATRICK OPENED HIS
eyes. He was surrounded by deep black shadows that shut out all shades of light. He could hear crashes, bangs, dead wood snapping and the low murmur of distant conversation. Sticks and stones dug uncomfortably into his flesh. He breathed in deeply and then remembered. He was in the woods. They’d been walking to the place where Arthur would hold the ceremony of the return. Him, Louise, Mary and Alice …

He raised his head and cried out, ‘Louise …’ then he saw Mary outlined in the faint glow of a torch. Her body was bloodied, wounded, broken just like Howie, the bull … the pony … and Peggy O’Shea.

He closed his eyes, unable to bear the pain of what his daughter had done.

‘Patrick?’

He opened his eyes again and looked up. Arthur was standing over him, stony-faced.

‘Arthur …’

‘Help him to his feet,’ Arthur ordered someone behind him.

Tommy and Martin came into view and hauled Patrick upright. They forced his wrists into a clutch that proved as effective as handcuffs. Patrick struggled, but
once
Martin twirled the sticks until the ropes cut deeply into the flesh, his arms were bound as securely as if he’d been manacled with chains.

Arthur drew close to Patrick and whispered low in his ear, ‘Eleven months, two weeks and two days. You can’t lie about these things and get away with it, Patrick. But I admit you had me fooled.’

‘We wanted to see Alice again,’ Patrick cried out, desperate to explain to Arthur why he’d lied. ‘And you wanted to keep us here,’ he reminded him.

‘How long had Alice really been dead?’ Arthur demanded.

‘A year, a month and a few days. Let me go, Arthur,’ Patrick pleaded with his partner. ‘I can help you …’

Arthur shook his head. ‘The clutch will release you, Patrick, but only when Alice is back in the ground. Not one minute before.’

‘Release him?’ Tommy queried in disgust.

‘Only when Alice is back in the ground,’ Arthur reiterated calmly.

Patrick lashed out with his bound hands, struggling to free himself. ‘Arthur,’ he shouted. ‘She’ll kill my wife.’

‘I hope not,’ Arthur said quietly. He walked away.

Martin and Tommy took advantage of Arthur’s departure to beat, kick and punch Patrick. They forced him back down on to his knees. Thinking of Peggy and the O’Shea livestock, Patrick couldn’t even blame Martin. But he was bemused when he heard Tommy mutter, ‘That’s for Ben.’

Had Alice hurt or killed Tommy’s brother too?

‘Arthur …’ Faint, barely conscious, Patrick shouted a last appeal. But he was too late. Arthur was no longer even in sight.

Louise crouched low in a thicket of close-growing bushes beneath a copse of silver birch trees. Their trunks gleamed tall, straight and fairy-like in the gloom. Alice’s voice, ethereal and ghost-like, reverberated, echoing around her.

‘Mum, where are you? Ready or not, I’m coming …’

Louise looked up to see a black crow hanging in the branches of one of the trees above her. She couldn’t be certain, but it looked like the very same bird that Alice had found so fascinating on her first day in Wake Wood.

‘Mum … you’d better come out now …’

At the sound of Alice’s voice the bird burst into life. Its wings started fluttering as if it were trying to fly, which was impossible given that its legs were still tied firmly together.

Terror-stricken, wanting to get away from the creature whether it was dead or not, Louise sprinted out of the undergrowth and crashed out of the bushes. Alice’s voice wailed around her, eerie and unsettling.

‘Mum … Mum … come out, wherever you are!’

Louise ran blindly, speeding downhill, lurching past trees and bushes. She fell, painfully skinning her hands. She clambered back on to her feet right away and continued hurtling downwards through the woods and away from Alice, charging headlong … until she slammed hard into a wire fence.

Pain ricocheted through her body as the breath was
knocked
from her lungs. She winced, gasped and doubled over, too shocked and injured to move.

Ahead of her on the other side of the wire fence was pasture. Thick grass stretched to the horizon in the moonlight, totally devoid of trees. Could she climb the fence? Was it strong enough to bear her weight?

She tested the wire mesh with her foot – it sagged but held. Still hurting from the impact of her collision, she clambered awkwardly over it and jumped down the other side into the field.

Looming high above her a short distance ahead were the unmistakeable towers of the wind turbines that had been erected above a railway bridge. Below them she could see the square outline of the sign that marked the town boundary of Wake Wood.

‘Mum … where are you? … Ready or not, I’m coming to find you …’ Alice’s voice drifted on the night wind, faint, distant, muted by the trees and yet clear and audible.

Louise walked on deeper into the field until she’d passed both the wind turbines and the
WELCOME
sign. Only then did she turn and cup her hands around her mouth to amplify the sound. As loud as she could, she called out, ‘Alice … A-l-ice … where are you? I’m here, waiting for you. Come and find me.’

Above her the blades of the wind turbines whirled, grating and swishing in a rough, unmelodious, mechanical din that polluted the night atmosphere.

Louise walked on for a few more paces, increasing the expanse of clear open field between her and the woods. She stopped again, turned and shouted, ‘Alice! A-l-ice!
Where
are you? I’m here, waiting for you,’ towards the woods.

The blades of the tallest turbine swept on.

‘Alice … it’s me … Where are you?’

Something small flashed on the edge of the woods. It moved from tree to tree, hiding behind them, before coming to rest on the very edge of the field next to an old oak on the wooded side of the fence.

‘Hi, Mum. I’m here.’ Alice waved to Louise.

Louise waved back. ‘Hello, sweetie.’ She couldn’t conceal the sadness in her voice.

‘Why did you run away from me, Mum?’ Alice whined.

‘Because I was scared,’ Louise answered truthfully.

‘Are you still scared?’

‘No, not really, not any more.’

‘I bet you are,’ Alice goaded.

‘Well, maybe just a little, sweetie,’ Louise admitted.

‘That’s probably why you didn’t answer me when I called you. You did know that I’ve been calling you? And calling you?’

‘Yes, I know. I heard you. You’ve found me out,’ Louise conceded.

‘You could come to me now though, Mum.’ Alice held out her hand in readiness to take hold of Louise’s.

‘I know I could, sweetie, but I’m tired. I’ve been walking a lot. I have no breath left. And I hurt myself running into that fence.’

‘Well.’ Alice stared at Louise, a menacing glint in her eyes. ‘I’ll come to you, then.’

‘That would be nice of you, sweetie. Be careful when
you
climb over the fence. It’s not that high but it’s not very stable.’

Alice put her foot on the mesh and hauled herself upwards. She climbed steadily, reached the top, hooked her legs over, and then suddenly stopped and looked at Louise. ‘Mum?’

‘What is it, sweetie?’ Louise waited for Alice to reply.

‘Can I have a hug?’ Alice asked plaintively.

‘Of course you can. But not there. Just get down and come to me, sweetie.’ Louise brushed a tear from her eye before opening her arms wide to her daughter. Alice launched herself from the fence, landed and began to approach Louise.

As she watched Alice walk towards her, more tears poured down Louise’s face. She knew what was about to happen, but knowing didn’t make it any easier or prepare her for the full force of the impact when it came. She subdued a tide of panic, crouched and waited.