The Ghosts of Sleath (15 page)

Buckler used the Mag-lite to find a suitable path through the woods, always taking care to keep the beam low to the ground. The path he found would have been missed by anyone else, but it was clear enough to him.

‘Come on then, Gaffer old boy, let’s find ’em before they do too much damage.’

The dog obediently trotted ahead, quickly disappearing into the overgrown path its master’s torch had found for them, but keeping well within whispering distance, alert for any further instructions. It sniffed earth and air as it went.

Buckler followed as noiselessly as the dog itself, using the swift-moving animal as a guide. Many keepers preferred Alsatians, Dobermans, or even Rottweilers - in the old days, Mastiffs were favourite - but he preferred the Airedale above all others.
Gaffer was both powerful and intelligent, and most of all it was reliable. It was a good ‘sniffer’ too, and would seek out injured game without harming a hair or feather on its head. Nor would it ever back down: on more than one occasion a poacher had threatened Gaffer with gun or club, but the dog had never retreated, stalking its man until the villain had either run for his life or handed his weapon over to Buckler. Such an animal would be hard to replace and he dreaded the day when Gaffer would be too old for the job. Oh, a young dog could be trained right enough, but it took time and a great deal of patience and somehow the new always seemed a little less than the old. Still, when that time came Gaffer would live out the rest of its days lolling about the house and going on short runs that wouldn’t tire its creaky old bones too much. But that was a long stretch off, wasn’t it, boy? Plenny of life left in you.

As if sensing its master’s thoughts, Gaffer looked over its shoulder and waited for the keeper to catch up.

Buckler knelt beside the dog and laid a hand against its thick neck. ‘Can you smell ’em yet, Gaffer?’ he whispered. ‘We on the right patch? There’s one or two spinneys we can try later if we’re wrong, but I’ve a hunch we’re on the right track. What say you, boy?’

A low rumble in its throat was the Airedale’s answer. Buckler felt Gaffer stiffen, and its head locked as if it were listening to something far off.

‘Okay, Gaffer, let’s get on. I think their luck’s run out tonight.’

The dog sprung forward and Buckler lumbered to his feet, although only to a crouch. He kept the torch beam even lower and aimed no more than two feet ahead of him. At the slightest sound the Mag-lite would instantly be switched off.

He trod through the dark woodland at a steady speed, his dog just ahead of him, it, too, moving silently and easily.

Lenny Grover took a back-handed swipe at Mickey Dunn, his fingers making hard enough contact with the younger man’s shoulders to draw a sharp yelp.

‘Jus’ keep off me bloody arse with that stupid thing,’
Grover hissed.

‘Weren’t nowhere near you,’ Mickey protested, almost tripping over a hidden tree root in his effort to keep clear of Grover’s reach. He held the crossbow behind him as if afraid it would be snatched away.

‘Keep it quiet, you two,’
the third man whispered fiercely from the front.
‘If Buckler’s around we’ll be forrit.’

Grover pulled down the peak of his baseball cap in agitation. ‘That bloody old fool ‘asn’t got a clue. He’ll be somewhere on the other side of the estate tonight.’

‘Whadya mean?’ said Dennis Crick. ‘He’s bound to know we was ’ere las’ night.’

‘’Xactly so,’ agreed Grover, grinning in the darkness. ‘An’ he’ll think we won’t come back to the same place twice.’ His voice became scornful. ‘But thanks to that prat behind us there’s plenny more to be bagged ’ereabouts.’

Mickey Dunn opened his mouth to protest again, but thought better of it when the other two moved off once more. Weren’t his fault he couldn’t afford one of them guns and besides, he was a crack shot with the crossbow. Well, in daylight. When the target kept still. Best to say nothing though - Grover got twitchy on night raids and a bit too bloody free with his fists.

Realizing he was alone, Mickey hurried after his companions, bent almost double and holding his weapon before him as if he were on wargames.

Even though he was poacher-apprentice to the other two, he’d managed to strike a fair number of roosting pheasants the night before as Crick had frozen the birds in the wide beam of his powerful flashlight. The only problem was, most of them had thrashed off into the undergrowth with arrows embedded in them, shrieking like banshees. All three men had chased after them, Grover and Crick ignoring for the moment the ones
they managed to shoot, and Mickey Dunn had felt like puking when he saw Grover catch a wounded bird and bite it by the side of its mouth to crush its skull. He
had
puked after Grover made him do the same thing to another pheasant they’d caught. And then he’d been in more trouble when they discovered he’d brought along hessian sacks to put the dead birds in instead of carrying strings, because they said the sacks were too clumsy to lug through the woods and the carcasses would be too bloody and horrible by the time they got home - the local butchers and restaurateurs (or restraunters, as he called them) preferred their game clean and appetizing.

Something snagged on his cheap leather jacket, pulling him back so that he was almost thrown off balance. At first, and with immense dread, he thought the gamekeeper had reached out from behind a tree to grab him, but he quickly realized - and just as he was about to scream for help - that Grover had whipped back a low tree branch, no doubt with the intention of striking the man behind. He heard Grover chuckle and he cursed him under his breath. He also raised a clenched fist towards his companion’s back, although he made sure he didn’t make contact. You’ll get yours one day, Lenny Grover, he told the other man without voicing the opinion, an’ when you do I’ll be there to spit in your eye. In a mood, he stomped after the two in front.

‘Must be gettin near to the spinney,’ said Crick after a while. He stopped, waiting for Grover to come up beside him.

‘Nan, we’re a long way off yet,’ Grover replied.

‘You sure? We’ve come a long way from the truck.’

Grover lifted his baseball cap and swept back his lank black hair. ‘We should come to a dip first, climb up a bit, go round a pond, then we’re there -
get off me, will ya, Mickey!’

Mickey, who had bumped into Grover yet again in the dark, quickly stepped back to avoid a flailing fist. He lost his balance when his heel caught a trailer and he toppled backwards into a bush, hessian sacks and crossbow crashing among the leaves as he fell.

The other two men winced at the noise. ‘Let’s leave him here, Len,’ Crick grumbled in a low voice. ‘He’s a bloody menace.’

‘He’d only get himself lost and make more of a nuisance of himself,’ Grover groaned. He hauled the struggling figure to his feet, then pushed his face close to the youth’s so that their noses were only inches apart, and hissed,
‘Shut up, you fuckin little git!’

Mickey became still. ‘Lenny, I -’

‘Shut it!’

‘All right, all right.’ At least his whine was quiet. ‘But you shouldn’t have -’

‘Shut IT!’
This time it was nearly a shout.

‘Lenny,’ Crick moaned in dismay. ‘Bloody Christ,
you’re
at it now. If Buckler’s around he’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks.’

Grover thrust Mickey away. ‘I told you, if Buckler’s out tonight he’ll be miles away. Right, let’s get goin an’ no more stops till we reach the spinney. You hear me, Mickey?’

There was a grumbled response and then they proceeded through the woods once more, this time Grover pushing Dunn ahead so that he was between himself and Crick. In revenge for having the crossbow sticking into his backside for the first part of the journey, he occasionally prodded the youth with the barrel of his shotgun. He sniggered at Mickey’s muffled complaints.

After a while, however, the pleasure of this small torture began to wane, for the deeper into the woods they went, the more uneasy he began to feel. There was something wrong and he didn’t know what. The woods were quiet enough and there were no lights twinkling between the trees in the distance, a dead giveaway for approaching keepers. It was only after they’d gone some distance further that he became aware of exactly what it was bothering him. He gave a whispered command to the others to stop.

They did so and turned round to see what the problem was.

‘Listen,’ Grover told them.

They did. They heard nothing.

‘What you on about, Lenny?’ grouched Crick. ‘I can’t ’ear nothin.’

‘That’s it,’ said Grover. ‘There’s nothin to ’ear.’

They stood in silence, listening more intently. Crick realized his partner was right. Even in the dead of night there were sounds in the forest - small nocturnal animals shuffling through the undergrowth, the odd bird shifting in its nest, the screech of a mouse as an owl swooped from the darkness. But tonight there were no such sounds. None at all.

Yet it wasn’t just the quietness that worried the three men: it was the stillness, too.

‘I don’t like this, Len,’ Crick murmured. ‘D’you think old Buckler’s set a trap for us?’

‘I dunno. But’s there’s somethin funny about this place.’

‘Yer bloody daft, the pair of ya,’ scoffed Mickey. ‘What d’ya expect in the middle of the bleedin night?’

The other two men ignored him. ‘Whadya think - get out while the goin’s good?’ said Crick.

‘Might be the thing to do,’ answered Grover.

‘Oh come on,’ moaned Mickey. ‘We’re close to the spinney now.’ They heard him fit a quarrel into the crossbow.

‘What you doin?’ asked Grover with more patience than he actually felt.

‘Gettin ready before you two frighten everything off with yer muskets.’

‘I just told you we’re gettin out.’

‘No way. The boss told me he’d ’ave all the pheasants I could get for the weekend.’ His boss was the town butcher he worked for on Saturdays.

Once more Grover grabbed the younger man by the lapels, lifting him onto his toes. ‘I won’t say it -’

He froze, holding Mickey there on tiptoe, as a low noise came through the trees towards them.

Slowly all three turned their heads towards the source.

Gaffer was like a statue. And then gradually, starting with its haunches, it began to tremble. Soon every part of the dog, from its long narrow head to its short erect tail, was quivering. A peculiar whining-mewling came from the back of its jaws.

Jack Buckler turned the light on the dog. ‘What is it, Gaffer?’ he urged quietly. ‘What’s it yer hearing?’

The dog continued to stare directly ahead, its small black eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance.

‘Nearby, are they, Gaffer?’ The keeper straightened, his face set in grim lines. ‘Well, we got ’em this time.’

The Airedale managed a growl, a long, drawn-out sound, before the whining-mewling resumed. But this time it became more urgent, more of a cry.

‘Steady there, old son.’ Buckler was perplexed: he’d never known Gaffer to act in this way before. Normally the dog was fearless, always ready to leap in and mix it no matter what they faced, be it poachers, cornered foxes, or even crazed badgers (and did
they
get crazed sometimes). But never had it reacted like this in all the years it had served him. What in God’s name could be spooking the dog so?

He heard the other noise then, the noise that seemed to come from the very air itself. It was a moaning, an eerie lamentation that stiffened the hairs on the back of his neck. He suddenly felt uncommonly cold, as if the temperature had abruptly dropped into the zero regions, and now it was not only the hair on his neck that stiffened, but the hair on his arms and legs and scalp also.

Coming through the trees was a piteous ululation of deep and terrible distress, the unbroken cry of those in utter despair. He narrowed his eyes, peering into the night’s gloomy substance, searching for the source of such misery, of such pain. He saw nothing but shadow.

He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out the telescope-like object he’d slipped in there earlier, clicking a switch as he held it up to one eye. The image intensifier weighed no more than .6kg and was operated by a single battery; it was an
instrument often used by gamekeepers when they did not want to give away their position in the darkness by using flashlights. He pointed it slowly from left to right, aiming it in the general direction of where he thought the noise might be coming from, and drew in a sharp breath when tiny floating objects appeared on the small phosphorescent screen. It was like viewing greentinted flotsam floating in disturbed water.

He took the night-sight away from his eye and stared without it at the spot where he’d located movement. Now he detected a slight greyness there in the gloom.

‘Come on, Gaffer,’ he said softly but resolutely, ‘let’s find out what’s goin on.’

But the dog was no longer at his side. He heard the rustle of undergrowth behind him as Gaffer fled. Astonished at his dog’s cowardice, he almost called out its name, but stopped himself just in time: no sense in alerting whoever it was up there among the trees. More mystified than angry with Gaffer, he turned back towards the greyish light and began to creep forward, stopping every once in a while to raise the night-sight and see if he could discern any of those dancing shapes. It was odd - it was damned
peculiar
- but each time he looked with his naked eye all he could see was that shapeless grey, almost like a mist without the wispy edges, and no inner, moving shapes whatsoever.

Something told him to get away from there, to follow Gaffer back the way they had come, back to the Land-Rover; something else, though - the earthy, practical gamekeeper side of him, the man who protected the animals and the land in his charge with love as much as professionalism - told him something was amiss here and it was his job to find out what it was. He went on.

When he had halved the distance between himself and the mist, he paused to take stock. The unearthly sounds still came to him, but they were no louder than before. Raising the night-sight again, he looked through it and saw that the images, those greenish pieces of dancing flotsam, were sharper but no more
discernible. Differing in shape and size, they weaved and whirled in no set pattern and with no overall form.