Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

The Windmill CONRAD WILLIAMS

As they drove past the gutted skeleton of the Escort, Claire tensed.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jonathan, easing off the accelerator.

‘There was someone in that,’ she said, twisting against her seat belt to look out of the back window. ‘Stop. Go back.’

He shook his head. ‘Will you stop messing about, Claire? I can never tell when you’re being truthful. You should have been an actress.’

The car diminished. It was standing on its hubs — the tyres having melted — in a pool of oil. Claire squinted at the driver’s side: a black shape was bolt upright in what remained of the seat.

She turned around.

Jonathan was fiddling with the tuner, trying to find some music. The only station that cropped up on the automatic search was a thin, scratchy hiss, punctuated by a slow whump…whump sound.

‘Welcome to Radio Norfolk,’ said Claire, trying to purge her mind of the images with which it was now taunting her. Imagine: No lips. Just a gritted sheet of white. His fat oozing through the black shell of his skin to hang in yellowish loops, like cheap pizza cheese.

The Fens reached out beyond the hedgerows muscling against the car, green fields splashed with red poppies and sprigs of purple lavender. Claire wound down the window and breathed deeply, trying to unwind. This was meant to be a relaxing weekend but already she felt that she had made errors. And that riled her.

‘Norfolk? Why are you going to Norfolk?’ they had asked her back at the office. She had felt the need to defend the place, even though the nearest she had ever been to the county was a day trip to Mablethorpe as a child.

‘There’s lots of unspoilt coastline,’ she said. ‘I want long, windswept beaches to walk along. And there’s a stack of wildlife. Apparently.’

‘You should try Suffolk instead,’ a colleague, Gill, had said, almost desperately, while her deputy looked at her with an expression approaching pity.

Jonathan had suggested they go to Paris but she quashed that idea because she did not want to spend too much money. And anyway, what was the point of going away for a weekend to another busy, polluted city? But that was not strictly true. Her negativity had more to do with the fact that the break was Claire’s baby: she wanted to come up with the plan. Now, as they swept through mile after mile of flat, sunbleached land, she was beginning to wish that she had thought of Paris first. And she was also thinking of Jonathan’s disappointment and the ‘told you so’ triumphs of her workmates once she got back.

Jonathan was aware of her frustration. He rubbed her leg. ‘We’ll stop for a drink, hey?’ he said. ‘Next pub we come to. We’ll try some good old local brew.’

‘There was someone in that fucking car,’ she snapped, although she was already starting to doubt it herself.

‘Fine,’ he said, braking hard. ‘Get out and go and save him.’

They sat in silence, the heat building. Claire strained for some sound to massage the barrier loose between them but none was forthcoming. They had not seen a car, a moving car, for an hour or so. The occasional, isolated buildings they had passed were gutted and crippled, the life seemingly sucked from their stone into the dun pastures that supported them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just — it’s work, you know? It’s been getting me down. I just want this weekend to be perfect. I need this break and maybe…maybe I’ve not realized that you need it just as much. You’ve driven all the way from London and.. ’ she trailed off, lamely. Work excuses were crap, she knew that and so did he.

Jonathan did not say anything. He started the car and moved off.

‘Put a tape on,’ he said. ‘Anything. I’m getting jumpy with all this bloody quiet.’

She dug for a cassette from the pile on the back seat. Most were hers, although there were one or two tapes from his past, recorded on blanks by ex-girlfriends and scribbled over with red kisses. Alexander O’Neal. Luther Vandross. He had some new stuff, Fugees and Skunk Anansie, but she could not get the irritation out of her where those older albums were concerned. It was not so much the music — it was shite, that went without saying — it was thoughts, while she listened to it, of what he had been up to. Why would you play Luther Vandross if you were not doing what he was singing about?

Her fingers settled on a Pavement album they both liked. The tension between them relaxed a little but Claire was glad to be able to point out a pub — it would be good to get out of the car and make the distance between them an optional matter.

‘Where are we, navigator?’Jonathan asked, parking the car in the gravel forecourt. Behind them, a stone building with no discernible purpose was the only other sign of life around.

‘Urn, Cockley Cley. Just south of Swaffham.’

‘Right. Let’s get refuelled. Hungry?’

A man wearing sunglasses and a padded Parka uncoiled from the corner of a bench outside the pub, where he had been sunning himself. He snaked out a hand to the adjoining picnic table and withdrew a pallid sandwich from a paper bag. His flask was attached to a sling around his shoulder. Jonathan nodded as they walked by, but if the man reacted, Claire did not see it.

Inside, three men were hunched over their meals, whispering conspiratorially. A cold meat buffet under hotlights reminded Claire of a Pantone chart of greys. To their left, the lounge was empty: two men were sitting at the bar, exchanging lowing, long-vowelled words. Claire wanted to leave.

‘Jonathan—’

The man facing her wore a shirt opened to his navel. His gut lolled there, a strip of sweat banding his sternum. His nose was a sickening chunk of discoloured flesh, bulbous and misshapen, hanging down almost to his top lip. She watched, fascinated and repulsed, as he dragged a handkerchief across it, threatening to smear it even further. It looked as though it was melting. His companion was dressed in a cheap suit with a purple shirt. His hair was greased back, one blade of it swung menacingly in front of his eyes. His grin was loose and slick with spit. She could see his dentures, behind the pitted white flaps of his lips, clacking loosely around his mouth.

She edged towards her boyfriend as the landlord appeared from behind a gingham curtain. She was conscious of movement behind his arm: a swift descent of something silver, a hacking noise. She backed into a chair and sat down.

‘Pint of Flowers. And, er—’ Jonathan looked at her and she saw a little boy lost. The men eating their lunch had looked up at his softly blunted northern tones. They looked confused, as if they ought to act upon this invasion but did not know what course to take.

‘Glass of fresh orange,’ she said, her voice too loud.

The landlord poured their drinks and took Jonathan’s money. He had the look of a pathologically strict sergeant-major. His moustache and his accent were violently clipped. His eyes were an unpleasant blue.

They took their drinks outside and sat on the bench adjacent to the man with the flask. He was still eating. He gave them a cursory once-over and zipped his Parka closer to his throat.

‘Jesus,’ whispered Jonathan, downing half of his drink, ‘Jesusing Christing piss.’

‘Did you see that man’s nose?’ hissed Claire, fidgety with nervous excitement. She was close to guffawing. ‘What do you think it was? Syphilis? Cancer?’

Jonathan polished off his pint. ‘Demonic possession,’ he said, standing. ‘Drink that, bring it or leave it. We’ve been here seven minutes too long.’

They spewed gravel getting out of the car park. Claire looked back and saw the sergeant-major step out of the door, his hand raised, a stricken look on his face.

Neither of them said anything until they hit the relative bustle of Swaffham. Even then, their relief could only manifest itself in gusts of laughter.

‘I love you,’ she said, surprising herself. It seemed easy to say after the minor trauma of the pub. It was a