Crossing through the woods on the edge of the waste ground she heard it screaming in the night and at first she thought it a child or a young woman, in extremis: wordless, chopped-up glossolalia of pain, somehow finding breath to start another shriek even before the preceding had finished tearing its way free of the larynx. She took out her phone and watched its weak light pushing over scraggly grass, nettles rank and thick; her breath huffed in the damp air and she made her way towards the screams.
The night smelled of a distant bonfire—something acrid and poisonous—and of coming rain, and a sough of the wind through the stand of birch around her rattled it like dice in a cup. The terrible shriek came again, louder, more insistent. She lost her footing for a moment on the discarded car tyres looming out of ill-looking ferns, stumbled around a thick stand of holly and bracken and found herself, all at once, in a clearing, perhaps forty feet across, verdant thorn bushes and scraggly trees dark outlines against the light pollution leaking in from the housing estate on the other side of the woods, the human world that might still exist outside this moment.
She wondered, then, just what she thought she was fucking doing.
Her phone’s light was too feeble to see all the way across clearing. The rank wet grass was all churned, furrows and ruts, like something with terrible claws had sought to rake a great mandala into the ground. In the centre of the clearing was a forked dead tree.
She saw, in her phone’s torchlight, the thing tied to the tree. It appeared at first glance to be hugging the dead trunk, the way a young animal might cling to the back of its mother. It ignored her and continued screaming.
“Easy, easy,” she said; then she had the good grace to feel stupid for saying it.
She came closer, free hand out in front of her, palm flat to the ground.
The thing stopped screaming as if surprised that someone had answered its summons, eyes huge circles of stolen light. She could see that the thing’s slim front legs were broken and then had been somehow folded over each other and used to tie it in the fork of the tree; a small, distant part of herself was reminded of the way a rich man throws the arms of his jumper across his shoulders and knots them loosely in front.
She might think: Who would do such a thing?
She might think: Who would be able to do such a thing?
—And maybe that didn’t happen at all, or if it did it might just have been the chorus of ghosts that formed her consciousness bubbling away under the present surface of her being, stray evanescent sparks flaring across the darkness of whatever events might be happening—here—what events might be happening—now—outside of her skull, events that demanded her full attention; maybe those were just whispers she clothed, at a later date, in the full-throated flesh of opinions and rationalisations—
Maybe she might think: What the fuck is that?
It reared back at her approach. Its now-useless front legs flapped like a pair of empty socks, its surprisingly dainty hooves knocked uselessly against the tree. This movement shifted its weight, wedged as it was against the fork, put its mass fully back on its shattered front limbs. It forgot about her in the midst of its anguish, and shrieked again: high, agonised, unbearable.
She could smell it now; the expected musk, rotten notes of it: rank where it’d pissed itself. Over and under this was the sweetest smell, a sickening that she thought at first must surely be artificial, a chemical factory’s approximation of Manuka honey all flavonoids and phenols, yet overlaid with a thick and overpowering layer of blossom, impossibly strong; the apprehension of this hit her with an almost sexual force. Saliva flooded her mouth. She stopped in her tracks and wiped with her phone at the drool escaping from her lips.
The creature took the opportunity to lunge at her other—still-outstretched—hand, snapping madly like a dog at a wasp. Tiny flecks of its saliva flew up, turned over quicksilver-flicker in her phone’s steady unnatural light. Its jaws snap-trapped shut on her, its many, many needle teeth sinking into her hand, and beyond the pain, in the aforementioned recesses of what she might like to think of as her mind, she gazed at the thing and wondered:
Seriously, what the fuck is that?
It might’ve been furred; it might’ve been (on closer inspection, now she saw it more clearly, in the wobbling light of her torch) feathered, the way a bumblebee is feathered. Its broad head narrowed to a long muzzle, not-quite canid, not-quite feline; something suggestive of a sloth or a hyena about the slope and heft of its shoulders. Something about it that made her think snake, if only in the shape of the head, the lack of external ears. But this was dispelled by the paws—the front ones now shattered bags of bone—and by its comically small hooves: displaced by its powerful jaws, locked around her hand. It looks, she thought—forming somewhere beyond the pain, some bright edge of cognition far away behind the agony of teeth worrying down through ligaments to grate against bone—like something from a mediaeval bestiary, the sort of thing drawn by someone who did not understand the nature of the beast they were illustrating. Why, after all, might such a creature have such a powerful, camelid neck? Why might its strange head be studded by rugose eruptions, ridges and knots of bone, like some serrated crown bursting through the silvery fur-feathers?
She breathed in its thick scent and felt, despite the very real pain from her chewed-up hand, all at once drugged, a heaviness in her limbs and head. Then she heard the staccato hammer of small motorbike engines growing louder, the yammering rise and fall like the offspring of a chainsaw and a machine-gun. Under this came the snapping and churning of undergrowth.
The shadows queered and twisted in the broken light from a headlamp as the first bike burst through and suddenly the shadow of herself and the thing and the tree—melded together into some vast impossible chimera—flung itself down the length of the clearing.
The bike tore by her with the overpowering caustic heat of two-stroke running too lean, the exhaust stinging her eyes and the tang of the valves burning out coating her throat with metal. There seemed to be no exhaust on it and this close it split the night and her ears with its clattery roar, blinded her then left her blinking in after-images from the headlight, spattered her and the animal with mud and torn up grass as it slewed around her then thrashed away, crashing back into the night and the undergrowth.
She blinked, wondering if this apparition was some after-effect of the creature’s heady musk, that almost intolerable sweetness clogging her sinuses.
A second bike—running too rich so that she could taste underneath the sweetness the oily mineral burn of petrol upon her tongue—came at her from the opposite direction, veered by close enough that she leaned for shelter into the dead tree and the poor animal still tied to it. The creature gulped and hiccuped around its mouthful of sinew and flesh and bone.
The other bike came on again out of the night, tearing by so close that she flinched, regretted it as the creature gnawed and worried at her hand, the pain like a rose opening in her.
The riders were illuminated in slashes as they described gyring arcs across the clearing. As they passed through each other’s headlamps she could see they might’ve been twins: rail-thin, filthy tracksuits hanging off of pipe-cleaner limbs, bandanas with alarmingly exact skull motifs printed on them folded over and pulled up over cheekbones so that the bottom half of their faces seemed stripped to the grinning bone. Above, grubby baseball caps pulled down tight over narrow pinched features.
She found her voice as the second dirtbike slowed to slew past her, rocking in a gust of fumes and unburnt fuel:
“Oi, cunt!”
—This screamed at the top of her lungs, so that something parted and gave low in her throat—
The creature, perhaps feeling a little left out, gave its head a playful waggle, just to remind her that it still had the upper hand. She ground her teeth at this new agony, her other hand opening reflexively, and dropped her phone into the wet grass at her feet.
A rider leaned his bike in and started slewing doughnuts around her, one trailing foot down as they gunned and backed off the throttle, fighting the bike’s front wheel around. The other dropped a knee a touch dramatically as they brought their bike sideways to a halt.
A patter of dirt and rank grass on her tongue; she turned and spat.
The one who’d pulled up dropped his kick-stand, killed the engine. He seemed to catch a gust of the thing that had hold of her arm, over the smell of the bikes; she saw his nose twitch under the bandanna, and he shook his head as if to clear it.
The one doing doughnuts slowed in his circuits, dropped the bike into neutral then revved the bollocks off of it, let it drop to a burble then revved it again.
The first biker walked over to her, snorting through the skull-cloth, phone held out ahead of him. The other headlight streamed past all of them and his huge scarecrow silhouette joined the incomprehensible multi-part one of the woman and the thing and the tree.
His voice was limned by utter disbelief:
“Yo . . . What the fuck, what the fuck is that thing?”
Here the madness and the terror and the horror and the pain finally hit her, and her voice at first quavered and hitched then broke into a warble:
“Please can you please help get it off of me?”
She flinched at this, thoughts flitting across her mind about how she’s not just someone to be saved, she’s a real functioning person with goals and an inner wellspring of resourcefulness, and at this jolt she cast about, finally able to see properly in the steady cold glare of the headlamp, and saw a half-brick nestling in the torn-up grass, its broken end jutting out of the rut.
“What did you fucking do to it . . . ?” the biker said, broad West Country vowels rolled with something like awe. “Can you smell it? What the fuck . . . ”
She loosened her knees, trying not to pull too much against the grip of the thing, winced at the gristle-y crunch of something giving way inside her hand. She saw blood start to run out the sides of the thing’s broad snout and she this gave her the impetus to turn away, stretch with her free hand, pulling as hard as she dared against the thing’s grip: the brick still, tantalisingly, out of her grasp.
“I didn’t do anything to it, please just—”
Another crescendo of revving, loud enough that it threatened the integrity of her ears, then the one on his bike released the throttle.
“Fuck’s sake, get back on your bike man—”
The shrill whininess made her think Just how young are they?, but she was reaching, reaching still, full stretch, teeth sawing against tendons and ligaments, then something went softly pop somewhere in her hips and she wished she’d kept up with those yoga classes and still there was dead cold air between her outstretched fingers and the brick.
The thing tied to the tree, sensing that the situation was getting away from it, took this opportunity to drag her forwards a little with a twist of its thickly muscled neck. This was pain on a whole new plateau, electric buzz she felt down to her toes; it vibrated in her tailbone and made her arsehole twitch. She cried out, and sweat pouring down her face met the damp chill of the night.
“Leave her, mate, fucking just come on and leave her . . . ”
The one filming reached up with his free hand and whispered his long thin fingers across the death’s-head covering the lower portion of his face. As he turned to clamber back on the bike he leaned out with one long flapping leg and swung a Reebok and chipped the half-brick into her outstretched fingers.
Despite her surprise, she caught it. The weight as it thunked into her hand felt delicious.
The first rider pulled away in a fresh shower of clods and torn-up earth and she turned and stared down at the animal, at the bloody lips drawn back from its teeth, at the incomprehensible, impossible knot of its forelegs. She raised the brick and as the headlight of the departing biker played across them the thing’s eyes were blank with greenish light, a stronger paler glow just off-centre; then the light flicked away and yet the animal’s eyes continued to glow, phosphorescent as if lit somehow from within.
She gasped and dropped the brick. The circling biker peeled off into the woods, revving hard then down on the clutch as he tore into the bracken.
The thing let go of her hand.
She stumbled backwards, clutching tightly at her wrist, the pain throbbing and pulsing, feeling the warm blood dripping down over her fingers, a wash of relief foaming over the surging panic in her chest.
“Fuck me,” came the voice of the second biker from behind her, straddled across the fuel tank of his dirtbike as he tapped at his phone, the forks angled so the headlight washed across the wet woods, stark xenon illumination throwing deeper shadows where its beam could not reach: then she saw that within each shadow, from under spindly boughs and leafless clawed shrubs, from beneath evergreen vine and holly, from dripping thorn and dying fern, lined atop every single branch of every single poisoned stunted tree a hundred pairs of eyes glowed back, too-bright, actinic, each the same unearthly green that seeped from the light-filled sockets of the creature tied to itself in the midst of the clearing.
A shudder seemed to go through the air then out from the mud beneath a tangled thorn bush a fox walked upon its hindlegs, its forepaws fencing out like a playful dog dancing for a treat, dainty and unsteady in its biped gait, the glow in its eyes too bright to be contained in the sockets and seeming to brim like liquid fire that trailed in crackling heatless flames up the sides of the vulpine head, ears flattened along its skull, the thick brush of its tail swishing behind. A young roebuck tottered after it on its aft-hooves, head bobbing on its long neck, the same soft greenish fire overflowing the pits of its eyes, front hooves sparring the air.
She screamed then, high and wordless, but the broken part of her throat gave it out as a surprised sort of squawk. Still the animals came—here: the snakey length of a mustelid bobbing its head atop its long body; there: a family of fat brown rats skittering forwards, bumping each other back upright as they wobbled through the wet grass—all upright, all with crème-de-menthe fire burning out of their eyes. A crowd of pigeons followed, rooks and owls strutting too, then the bulk of a boar-badger, streaked with filth, waddling behind on its stumpy legs like a drunk, tiny shrews and mice and a waddling hedgehog, all on two legs, all eyes afire, all coming out of the ruined wood into the clearing.
She fell to her knees, still clutching her mangled hand at the wrist. The biker slumped backwards off the seat of his bike.
The animals converged in a sweeping tide on the thing hanging by its paws. The fire in its eyes flared brighter, incandescent cold flame burning in the shadows cast by the headlamp still fixed on the emptied woods, licking tongues icy up the sides of its impossible head, pale motes eddying up and into the air as if caught in a draught. The animals teetered and tottered forwards, then the mass of them broke like a tide around the base of the forked dead tree: as she watched the largest of them crowded forwards and the smaller clambered awkwardly up them, until a weird pyramid of fur and feathers rose writhing like an earthwork or a ramp building itself.
She watched the thing tied to the fork and despite the strangeness of its snout she thought madly for a second she could divine an expression on its inhuman face, something like beatitude, something like contempt; then the rising animals reached it and closed over it, bodies churning. She watched the dark moil, muscles clamped across her sternum so tightly she could barely draw breath, fear and wonder surging in a strange rush through her heart.
Then it was done. One by one, the animals dropped down to the grass, landing awkwardly on all fours or flapping their wings as if stunned. They shook themselves, pushed themselves along ungainly as if unused to quadrupedal locomotion before wobbling in their accustomed gaits like newborns back into the dark of the woods on the far side of the clearing, their shapes now that of the wild things she thought she knew, suggestive outlines you glimpse at the edge of a light, stealthy things afraid of humans, no lambent fire burning in their sockets.
Last of all the strange creature—hooved limbs now whole—strode stiffly after them, its heavy head low to the ground as if following a scent. She watched as it paused on the edge of the clearing and it turned its great queer skull about to face her and for a brief second its eyes were green fire once again, so bright she blinked; when she opened them, it was gone.
The kiddie stirred on the grass near his bike, mumbling and gurning like a sedated sleeper woken too soon, limbs struggling across the ground as if he was unsure how to employ them. She looked down in a stupor at the hand clutched in her lap, lifted it before her, turned it over to examine fingers and palm. It was whole, streaked here and there with dirt and dead leaves, which she idly picked at to find her own pink flesh beneath. She took a great steadying inhalation of breath through her nose and realised that she could no longer smell the creature, that the overpowering rank sweetness was gone. She sat there, a sudden inconsolable weight of loss settling upon her, and she began to weep.
