shifted as I passed as though each cottage was turning its idiot head towards me. Though every window was empty and dark, I felt observed, increasingly so as the car followed its wobbling beams along the deserted lane, until I found it hard to breathe. I seemed to hear a faint irregular thumping — surely my own unsteady pulse, not a drumming under the earth. I came abreast of the church and the school, and thought the thumping quickened and then ceased. Now I was out of Warrendown, but the knowledge that I would be returning to the main road whichever direction I chose persuaded me to make a last search. I turned the car, almost backing it into one of the overgrown blocks of the fallen tower, and sounded my horn twice.
The second blare followed the first into the silent dark. Nothing moved, not a single strand of thatch on the cottages within the congealed splash of light cast by my headlamps, but I was suddenly nervous of what response I might have invited. I eased the car away from the ruins of the tower and began to drive once more through Warrendown, my foot trembling on the accelerator as I made myself restrain my speed. I was past the school when a dim shape lurched into my mirror and in pursuit of the car.
Only my feeling relatively secure inside the vehicle allowed me to brake long enough to see the face. The figure flared red as though it was being skinned from head to foot, and in the moment before its hands jerked up to paw at its eyes I saw it was Crawley. Had his eyes always been so sensitive to sudden light? I released the brake pedal and fumbled the gears into neutral, and saw him let his hands fall but otherwise not move. It took some determination on my part to lower the window in order to call to him. ‘Come on if you’re coming.’
I barely heard his answer; his voice was indistinct — clogged. ‘I can’t.’
I would have reversed alongside him, except there wasn’t room to pass him if he stayed put in the middle of the road. I flung myself out of the car in a rage and slammed the door furiously, a sound that seemed to provoke a renewed outbreak of muffled drumming, which I might have remarked had I not been intent on trying to wave away the suffocating vegetable smell. ‘Why not?’ I demanded, staying by the car.
‘Come and see.’
I wasn’t anxious to see more of Warrendown, or indeed of him. In the backwash of the car’s lights his face appeared swollen with more stubble than an ordinary day could produce, and his eyes seemed dismayingly enlarged, soaking up the dimness. ‘See what?’ I said. ‘Is it your young lady?’
‘My what?’
I couldn’t judge whether his tone was of hysterical amusement or panic or both. ‘Beatrix,’ I said, more loudly than I liked to in the abnormal silence and darkness. ‘Is it your child?’
‘There isn’t one.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured, uncertain whether I should be. ‘You mean Beatrix. ’
I was loath to put into words what I assumed she must have done, but he shook his blurred head and took an uncertain step towards me. I had the impression, which disturbed me so much I was distracted from the word he’d inched closer to mutter, that he couldn’t quite remember how to walk. ‘What are you saying?’ I shouted before my voice flinched from the silence. ‘What’s absurd? Never mind. Tell me when you’re in the car.’
He’d halted, hands dangling in front of his chest. His protruding teeth glinted, and I saw that he was chewing — seemed to glimpse a greenishness about his mouth and fattened cheeks. ‘Can’t do that,’ he mumbled.
Did he mean neither of us would be able to return to the car? ‘Why not?’ I cried.
‘Come and see.’
At that moment no prospect appealed to me less — but before I could refuse he turned his back and leapt into the dark. Two strides, or at least two convulsive movements, carried him to the doorless entrance to the church. The next moment he vanished into the lightless interior, and I heard a rapid padding over whatever served for a floor; then, so far as the throbbing of my ears allowed me to distinguish, there was silence.
I ran to the church doorway, which was as far as the faintest glow from my headlights reached. ‘Crawley,’ I called with an urgency meant to warn him I had no intention of lingering, but the only response from the dark was a feeble echo of my call, followed by a surge of the omnipresent vegetable stench. I called once more and then, enraged almost beyond the ability to think, I dashed to my car. If I had still been rational — if the influence of Warrendown had not already fastened on my mind — I would surely have left my acquaintance to his chosen fate and driven for my life. Instead I fetched my flashlight from under the dashboard and having switched off the headlamps and locked the car, returned to the rotting church.
As the flashlight beam wavered through the doorway I saw that the place was worse than abandoned. The dozen or so pews on either side of the aisle, each pew broad enough to accommodate a large family, were only bloated green with moss and weeds; but the altar before them had been levered up, leaning its back against the rear wall of the church and exposing the underside of its stone. I swung the beam through the desecrated interior and glimpsed crude drawings on the mottled greenish walls as shadows of pews pranced across them. There was no trace of Crawley, and nowhere for him to hide unless he was crouching behind the altar. I stalked along the aisle to look, and almost fell headlong into a blackness that was more than dark. Just in time the flashlight beam plunged into the tunnel which had been dug where the altar ought to have stood.
The passage sloped quite gently into the earth, further than my light could reach. It was as wide as a burly man, but not as tall as I. Now I realized what my mind had been reluctant to accept as I’d heard Crawley disappear into the church — that his footfalls had seemed to recede to a greater distance than the building could contain. I let the beam stray across the pews in a last desperate search for him, and was unable to avoid glimpsing the images scrawled on the walls, an impious dance of clownish figures with ears and feet so disproportionately large they must surely be false. Then Crawley spoke from the tunnel beyond the curve which my light barely touched. ‘Come down. Come and see.’
A wave of the stench like a huge vegetable breath rose from the tunnel and enveloped me. I staggered and almost dropped the flashlight — and then I lowered myself into the earth and stumbled in a crouch towards the summons. The somnolence audible in Crawley’s voice had overtaken me too, and there seemed no reason why I should not obey, nor anything untoward about my behaviour or my surroundings. Even the vegetable stench was to my taste, because I had inhaled so much of it since venturing back to Warrendown. Indeed, I was beginning to want nothing more than to be led to its source.
I stooped as far as the bend in the tunnel, just in time to see Crawley’s heels vanishing around a curve perhaps fifty yards ahead. I saw now, as I had resisted hearing, that his feet were unshod — bare, at any rate, though the glimpse I had of them seemed hairier than any man’s feet should be. He was muttering to me or to himself, and phrases drifted back: ‘. the revelations of the leaf. the food twice consumed…the paws in the dark.. the womb that eats. ’ I thought only my unsteady light was making the passage gulp narrower, but before I gained the second bend I had to drop to all fours. Far ahead down the increasingly steep tunnel the drumming I’d heard earlier had recommenced, and I imagined that the models for the figures depicted on the church walls were producing the sound, drumming their malformed feet as they danced in some vast subterranean cavern. That prospect gave me cause to falter, but another vegetable exhalation from below coaxed me onwards, to the further bend around which Crawley’s heels had withdrawn. I was crawling now, content as a worm in the earth, the flashlight in my outstretched hands making the tunnel swallow in anticipation of me each time my knees bumped forward. The drumming of feet on earth filled my ears, and I saw Crawley’s furred soles disappear a last time at the limit of the flashlight beam, not around a curve but into an underground darkness too large for my light to begin to define. His muttering had ceased as though silenced by whatever had met him, but I heard at last the answer he had given me when I’d enquired after the child: not ‘absurd’ at all. He’d told me that the child had been
The flashlight beam sprawled out ahead of me, doing its best to illuminate a vast space beneath a ceiling too high even to glimpse. At first the dimness, together with shock or the torpor which had overcome my brain, allowed me to avoid seeing too much: only a horde of unclothed figures hopping and leaping and twisting in the air around an idol which towered from the moist earth, an idol not unlike a greenish Easter Island statue overgrown almost to featurelessness, its apex lost in the darkness overhead. Then I saw that one of the worshipping horde was Crawley, and began to make out faces less able to pass for human than his, their great eyes bulging in the dimness, their bestial teeth gleaming in misshapen mouths. The graffiti on the church walls had not exaggerated their shapes, I saw, nor were they in costume. The earth around the idol swarmed with their young, a scuttling mass of countless bodies which nothing human could have acknowledged as offspring. I gazed numbly down on the ancient rite, which no sunlight could have tolerated — and then the idol moved.
It unfurled part of itself towards me, a glimmering green appendage which might have been a gigantic wing
