Part 6 (1/2)

and into the earth, her pet.i.te b.r.e.a.s.t.s, with their tiny engorged tips rising and falling with the joyful exhaustion that follows perfect o.r.g.a.s.m.

Soft murmurs came from her as her excitement calmed, her body relaxed. One knee was raised at an angle, her other leg straight before her, her fine slim hands remaining at her centre as if for comfort and certainly not for modesty. Her eyes were closed once more as she raised her face to the sun and her breathing gradually slowed, became less laboured.

Thom was silent and he tried to keep perfectly still, although his heart continued to race and blood seemed to roar in his ears. He had no idea of what to do next. Skulk away? Wait until she left? Now he did begin to feel the shame. He was trembling.

And then the girl lowered her chin and lazily opened her eyes as she turned her head to look towards his hiding-place. He saw that they were, indeed, almond-shaped, saw that they glittered silver...

... as they looked directly into his...

A CHASE.

THE GUILT flooded over him. He felt something else, too, something he could not define.

It was in her eyes, those startling glittering eyes. Those wonderfully oblique eyes.

He saw something in them - sensed something in them - that alarmed him ... yet drew him in. He felt a frisson of emotion that had nothing to do with her allure or his desire. It was ... a connection. Thom thought it might even be a recognition. But that would be impossible: he had never seen this beautiful girl in his life before.

If he thought he might detect some sense of shame also in their expression, or even embarra.s.sment at having been caught in such privately intimate circ.u.mstances, he was wrong. The naked girl merely returned his stare, while a slow smile filtered through to her lips. Now she looked at him from beneath her lashes, chin tilted downwards, neither coy, nor coquettish, just a little shy.

Thom could only remain open-mouthed, not sure what

he should do, what he should say. If he should say anything at all. The hand that held back the leaves before him was shaking fiercely by then.

The girl, this lovely abandoned, apparently shameless, creature began to laugh, a small, delicious sound that contained no mockery or derision, only delight, and he felt his heart lift, his senses spin in a different, happier way. His body had calmed, erection already waning, yet there was a yearning in him, a different and purer kind of desire replacing the previous l.u.s.t. Thom wanted to speak to her but, for the moment, he was speechless.

And then it was too late.

The girl's companions, those strange, ethereal satellites of light, were settling around her, some drifting lethargically as others lay on her body or found leaves to fall upon; but almost immediately they began to stir again as if alerted to his presence. Their odd but sweet whistlings took on a new tone that was not unlike the sound made by agitated insects. Their inner lights brightened again but the colours were somehow fiercer than before, no longer l.u.s.trous, flas.h.i.+ng violently instead. Thom began to fear rather than wonder.

They rose as one into the air, das.h.i.+ng to and fro, several sweeping towards him, but retreating after a few feet in the way that certain animals might to warn off their foe. His ears began to ring with the sound and his heart seemed to take on a fresh beat, one that was less regular than before.

Something he could not see crashed into the other side of the bush he was hiding behind and Thom staggered backwards, surprised and not a little dismayed. His heel caught a root or b.u.mp in the ground and he fell awkwardly, the cane dropping from his hand. He floundered on his back and the angry soundrose in volume, drew closer. He felt a sting on his cheek as a light whipped across his face and he held up a hand to ward it off. But others arrived and flew around his head, their excited buzzing becoming hard to bear, the noise increasing his panic.

'What...?' was all he managed to cry out.

There was more movement around him, but this came from the debris of the woodland floor itself, a lifting of dead leaves and soil as though things underneath were pus.h.i.+ng through.

Impossible, he told himself. Just impossible. The disturbance wasn't only in one location but in several scattered moving mounds, brittle leaves slithering off them. 'What...?' He murmured the question this time.

It was like one of those late-night horror movies on TV where rotting arms and fleshless fingers burst through the soil and the observer can only watch in frozen horror: too b.l.o.o.d.y daft to show earlier in the evening and only good after a few pints in the pub beforehand and you are ready for a good laugh. Only this wasn't funny. This was for real.

He twisted round, got a knee under him. Crouched ...

A brown, grimy b.u.mp emerged from the earth nearby, clots of dirt crumbling away from it. And then - oh, dear G.o.d, and then - a pair of eyes.

A nose followed the eyes - the glaring, malevolent slitted eyes - and it was a nose that started high on the forehead, and was large and pointed, the nostrils swelling to fill half the creature's face. The head tossed and wriggled, the thin neck stretched and strained, as the thing worked its way out of the earth like a small beast struggling to escape a tight womb, and all the while its yellow glare was fastened on Thom.

Thom yelped when the claws of a minuscule, scaly hand - a monkey's paw of a hand - dug into his own, which was flat against the ground, fingers splayed to support himself as he knelt. So fixed were his eyes on the emerging thing a few feet away that he had failed to notice another creature rising beside him.

In astonishment, he watched as beads of blood seeped through the skin where the nails had scratched him. Instantly, in a reaction that required no further thought, he was on his feet, and when he saw other pygmy heads with

baleful eyes focused solely on him, mounds of earth - ten, a dozen, Christ - twenty, twenty at least! - rising from the ground around him, he broke into a run, but came to a halt almost immediately when a brown head mounted on narrow scrawny shoulders blocked his way. He took a different direction, but stopped again as yet another thing rose in front of him, the creature's mouth downturned, almost mournful, its teeth like needles, its expression wicked.

As he hesitated, the lights attacked him, diving and swooping, tearing across his path, stinging his face and raised hands, their drone piercing, the noise itself seeming to cut into his head, confusing him, increasing his panic. He headed in another direction, this time leaping over the next minikin creature, whose skinny arms and claws reached out to scratch at him, the rest of its runty little body still trapped in the earth. Thom ran and kept running, without looking back, without realizing his limp had gone, sheer fright and the desire to leave this bad dream far behind driving him onwards. But the nightmare followed. Indeed, it even preceded him, for he began to see things ahead and around him in his beloved woodland never before encountered, nor imagined.

A tangle of spiky brambles and intertwined branches appeared to be a shadowy tumble of limbs and faces, entwined bodies, from which evil-looking eyes peered out at him. An old oak that had fascinated him as a child, with its rough and rutted trunk, its gnarled b.u.mps and whorls that invoked myriad images of faces, now seemed sinister. Its great branches contorted to reach down for him, perhaps to grab him as he ran by and crush him in a cruel embrace. The faces he had once imagined were really there now, features p.r.o.nounced and mouths grinning at him, calling silently, eyes of wrinkled bark blind but somehow seeing him. Little figures that sat in the gra.s.s beside the trail turned doll-sized heads to watch his flight and although he did not return their stares - he was concentrating too hard on the

way ahead - he caught impressions of narrow faces with mouths too wide, long pointed ears that resembled wings, mean sloping eyes and noses that were too large, or too small, or no noses at all but slitty apertures that must have been nostrils. Most appeared to be naked, their flesh pale, coloured green or muddy, some even blue. Others had bodies so misshapen, limbs so tortured, and countenances so wickedly cunning, they could only be described as grotesques.

Although startling, it was fleeting, for Thom had no wish to slow his pace, no desire to linger in this terrible place that once had been so wonderful for him.

Shapes with wings - these were not the s.h.i.+ny little creatures of earlier, for they were larger and with no incandescence - fluttered against his face like attacking bats, and their touch was harsh, sharp, like razorblades. He swiped them away with frantic hands, expecting his flesh to be cut to ribbons but, although the skin stung where he made contact, there were no wounds or blood. The a.s.sailants quickly fell away and he thought he heard - perhaps he imagined - fading laughter.

He staggered onwards, stumbling occasionally over the uneven ground or tree roots, creeping trailers across the path or fallen branches, and he had the crazy notion that these things were deliberately trying to trip him. That ridiculous thought led him to wonder if the haemorrhage to his brain had not done even more damage than was originally thought; had the damage created all sorts of post-chemical malfunctions inside his head, disruptions that created hallucinations? Maybe it was something to do with the drugs they had fed him in the aftermath of the stroke. Maybe he was just going crazy.

He kept moving, hobbling now, left foot already turned inwards, left arm, bent at the elbow, hand dangling, held to his side. His gait had become ungainly, a clumsy lope.

Thom tried to focus on the uncertain path, ignoring sly

movements in the undergrowth on either side and the low whispering and giggling that seemed to be following him, just as he had decided to ignore his own nagging questions. It matters not at all if all this was mere illusion: the fear was genuine, as was the desperate need to get back to Little Bracken where he had always been safe, where Bethan had promised him nothing nasty could ever enter...

But it was a long way home, an awful long way. And he was already beginning to flag.

As he pa.s.sed beneath a low-hanging tree branch, something grabbed at his hair. He uttered a single cryas steely fingers curled into the roots, and a shout of pain followed the cry as he pulled away and stumbled on, sure that hair had been yanked from his scalp. Thom thought he heard someone snicker, a coa.r.s.e, throaty kind of closed cackle that terrorized him even more, because it contained so much threat.

Panic, haste, pumping adrenaline, made his vision almost kaleidoscopic, a jumbled medley of colours and movement and his breathing was difficult, the exertion spoiling its rhythm. Glancing behind him did not help his confusion and he had to look again because, even though his sight was muddied, there were no pursuers, the trail behind was empty.

The surprise sent him veering off the path, cras.h.i.+ng into undergrowth and nearly smacking into the thick trunk of an elm. His flailing hand caught something attached to a low bough as he went down. He rested there on hands and knees, shocked and winded, shoulders heaving as he sucked in air, and something flashed across his downturned face. He heard a sharp buzzing sound that was different from before and another tiny flying thing - although it could have been the same one - skimmed across his cheek.

Suddenly there were more than one or two, suddenly there was a swarm of them and he quickly understood that these were not the same as the creatures that had chased him from the

lake, these were far less exotic, and certainly not hallucinatory. They were bees - no, they were wasps - and he realized that the earthy mound that his hand had clipped on the low-hanging bough was the hardened pulp of a wasps' nest. He had frightened them into believing they were under attack and now they were reacting instinctively, they were counter-ing-attacking, defending their queens and their home.