that the swamp was going to destroy, the clearing waterlogged with this stinking slime. Jim Fillery got his hunch again, more positive than before, almost like the scent the dogs were supposedly searching for, a fox earth which the hounds knew was inhabited.
'I'm going to check the house,' he called out to the man on his right who was just visible in the gloom. Tell the others to form a cordon around it, just in case.' His words sounded strangely muffled but the other raised a hand to show that he had understood. Check the house, then we'll call it a day. But we will anyway because the feeling's strong, very strong. Fillery slipped his hand in his pocket, felt the comforting hard metallic coldness of his gun. He would not hesitate to use it if he had to, maybe he would anyway. A policeman was missing, probably dead, and that was one time when emotions ruled. The door was open a foot or so, hanging by a single rusty hinge. He squeezed through the gap, drew his pistol from his pocket, his keen eyes taking in the hallway. That trap door was closed but thick muddy water was lifting it so that it virtually floated. The cellar was flooded, overflowing. Foster wouldn't be down there. If he was then the State had been spared a lot of expense.
He glanced towards the stairs and that was when he knew, realisation hitting him like the backhanders his mother used to lash out with when he was a boy. He saw the footmarks, muddy imprints that were still wet, telling their own story. Heavy criss-cross bars of rubber Wellington soles, smaller naked ones following in their wake. A man and a woman.
Fillery's brain was already working on permutations:
(1) PC Lee and Thelma Brown.
(2) James Foster and Carol Embleton.
(3) Andy Dark and.?
His keen brain was instantly processing the information it had been given. One of the girls, certainly, because both had fled naked into Droy Wood. It was impossible at a glance to tell which but at least one of them was still alive (or had been a very short time ago). Lee and Foster had both left their clothes behind in their respective Minis.
Fillery pulled a wry face, felt a surge of disappointment. That only left Dark, Unless of course Foster had murdered either or both men, taken Dark's boots. Or the constable had come upon the nature conservation officer's body, helped himself to his footwear.
But the detective was wasting time surmising; there was only one way to find out. He moved forward, gun at the ready. Somebody was upstairs and he was going up after them.
The staircase creaked, threatened to collapse under his weight, boards rotted and missing. A slow ascent, hating himself for the faint glimmering of fear that smouldered in his stomach, threatened to knot his guts into a hard ball. He remembered that time only a few weeks after he had been promoted to the CID. Some crackpot with a grudge against society had held a 14-year-old girl hostage in a high-rise block of flats. The guy had a shotgun, had fired at the police down below, threatened to kill himself and the kid if his demands for freedom and a pardon weren't met. The same kind of mentality as Foster, he had a string of convictions for assaulting young children. Time was running out. Fillery and another detective had gone up in the elevator while those down below attempted to distract the maniac's attention.
Fillery had been in the lead, his companion only too happy to follow behind. They had both been scared as hell. Somebody was going to get killed in the next few minutes, it might be all of them. Suddenly you faced death; it was more of a certainty than a probability. You knew also that you had to kill somebody.
Jim Fillery had wanted to vomit, to run back down those stairs, tell the super he wasn't going to die for anybody. But something pushed him forward, transcended his terror. He didn't know what it was, never really found out. But he'd gone on, kicked the door down, and inside that tiny flat the man had just been sitting propped up in the corner. The girl hadn't even gone hysterical and that was when the anti-climax had struck him. In a way it was a let-down because he had never had to push himself past that final barrier, test himself.
Until now. He had to go through it all again.
Along the landing, up on to the second floor. And then he saw the balcony with three people standing on it, a stone ledge that might decide to crumble at any second. His stomach flipped, began to tighten, churning his bowels. Dark and Carol Embleton. The former was holding a pistol in his hand, dangling at arm's length as though he had forgotten that he had it, the girl clutching his other arm, both of them staring transfixed at the man who faced them. That was when Fillery's terror threatened to erupt inside him. That bloated jowled face, the flesh resembling that of a fish that was beginning to decompose, eyes receding so that the puffy sockets were closing over them. Lips curled into an expression of hate and gloating, ragged clothing that seemed to rot even as you ran your eye over it, a once colourful apparel that moths and time had shredded.
Everything had stopped, a confrontation that had been frozen like a movie still. The three of them might have been dead, rigor mortis somehow holding them erect against a background of swirling mist and the roaring of an angry sea that sounded a lot closer than it had when Fillery had heard it down below.
He watched them closely, knew that they were alive, that he was witnessing some dreadful final act in a drama that had gone on here for a very long time. Noises; it sounded like distant gunfire, explosions, but it could have been the waves pounding on the shoreline. Shouts, probably from the search party down below but they were gone before you could be sure. And somehow you got the feeling that that repulsive figure out there was the focal point of all this, his bearing that of a master rather than a servant. And then the actors began to move on their precarious stage, the huge man shuffling towards the stone balustrade, pointing and waving a hand, laughing. Andy Dark turned, watched, seemed to nod.
'The sea is reclaiming Droy Wood,' the man shrieked. 'See and hear it, the way it swallows up the lands of my forefathers but we shall go with it, all of us who have known it. A fitting end and we shall still have our pride. Our enemies have not taken the wood from us,' his shrill tone rising to a crescendo, 'for in the end we shall triumph over them.'
Fillery's mind flicked back to that day when he had burst into the fiat, had primed himself to take human life but had been denied. The barrier he had never had to breach, the anti-climax that had deflected his terror, hauled him back from the brink, left a lot of doubts in his mind. And now he had been pushed to that brink again.
His policeman's training screamed at him to stop, tried to jerk the gunhand back. You're a police officer, you can't! I can and I will. I've got to, there isn't any other way.
Firing, his target closer and easier than those life-sized dummies on the practice range, the reports vibrating his whole body. Hearing the heavy slugs finding their mark, cutting into that revolting body with a noise as if ripping into thick soggy cardboard. Tearing, lacerating, mutilating. The body swayed but did not fall. A mass of gashes, ragged open wounds that should have spouted thick red blood. The eye holes deep craters, the lips torn and twisted into the ultimate in malevolent expressions. And Jim Fillery knew then that he was at the final barrier, the one that separated bravery from cowardice, sanity from madness. So narrow, he almost screamed and ran but at the last second he stayed and watched, conquered his inner self.
Ross Droy, or whatever this manifestation was, sagged back against the stonework and those terrible wounds began to ooze thick fluid, not scarlet blood but revolting grey slime, sludge that dripped in heavy splodges like cow-dung, a substance that had its own life and stank of a putrescence that spanned centuries. Death that lived and spread into pools and gave off vile vapours.
All three of them were fleeing back down those stairs, heedless of the way the structure creaked and shuddered, rotted pieces of woodwork snapping off and splashing down on to the slime-covered floor of the hallway below them. Fog wisped in through the partly open door, seeming to take on malicious shapes, threatened to impede their progress.
'Keep going.' It was Andy Dark who was in the lead now, elbowing his way ahead of the detective, dragging Carol with him. 'Don't stop, ignore them, whatever they are.'
Whatever they are! He didn't want to think about it. The German, Ross Droy. some kind of astral projection that had taken on a solid substance, the evil in this foul marsh mud breathing life into bodies that were long dead. Don't think about it.
'Which way?' Fillery pulled up, glanced about him. A grey frightening moving world hemmed them in, whilst underfoot the stinking slime swilled and grew deeper, an incoming tide of putrefaction. There was no sign of the men he had instructed to surround the house; he had known deep down they would not be here.
Which way, oh Jesus God which way? We've been trying to get out of this place for days! Andy Dark felt himself starting to panic.
'Look!' Andy pointed to where a rivulet of thick slush was oozing its way into the clearing like a giant slug
