He turned and sat heavily on a fallen log. He took his compass out and checked it again, glad to see that he had been walking in a straight line. He put it back in his pocket.
A furtive noise, a rustle of leaves and a crunch of snow, caused him to glance up, and he saw a flash of burnt orange as a fox raced past him and disappeared in the underbrush. Day smiled despite himself and looked at the break in the trees where the fox had come from.
Standing in the trees there, nearly invisible back in the gloom, was a man.
Day scrambled to his feet. The man tipped his hat and faded back into the shadows. Day rushed forward and plunged into the trees. He looked about frantically, but there was no sign of the other man. Had he hallucinated someone else out here in the forest?
Day crouched and examined the ground where he thought the man must have been standing. There, at the edge of a clump of brown leaves, was the outer rim of a boot print. Someone was out there, someone was watching. Day stood up and looked all around without seeing any sign of another living soul. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.
“Hullo!”
He held his breath and listened, alert for the slightest sound, but heard only the echo of his own voice.
“Hullo! I saw you! Help me!”
Again he listened. He heard something, some slight noise behind him, and he turned and stared into the darkness. Two yellow pinpricks of light stared out at him from under a bush. He stepped toward them and they vanished. An instant later, he saw the blur of the fox’s tail disappearing deeper into the bushes.
He made his way back into the clearing and sat again on the fallen log. He found his handkerchief in one of the inside pockets of his vest and wiped his face. He was certain the man had been no trick of the light or figment of his imagination. But the man’s appearance had been hideous, and Day was struck by the notion that he had not seen a man at all, but rather some spirit, an apparition conjured by the forest. How else to explain what he had seen?
The man had been dressed all in grey, from his hat to the hem of his trousers. Even the man’s eyes seemed to be grey, though it was hard to be sure. The most disturbing detail of the man’s appearance was that, through the flesh of his jaw, Day had clearly seen a portion of the man’s skull, his exposed teeth bared in a wicked grin.
He felt suddenly sure he had seen the local children’s nightmares come to life.
Rawhead and Bloody Bones.
15
Hammersmith followed the broad back of Constable Grimes through the forest. He moved his lantern up and down, watching for branches and roots, ice and slippery leaves. Hammersmith wasn’t comfortable in the trees. He had been raised in coal mines and mountains, and more recently he had spent his time in London and its sprawling suburbs.
But there was a child missing somewhere in the vicinity of Blackhampton, and so he put aside his discomfort and watched for signs of the boy and his parents. It was difficult because the lantern light didn’t penetrate far into the gloom, but the two men walked slowly and carefully, alert for the slightest anomaly in the underbrush.
They had traveled this way in silence for perhaps an hour when Hammersmith made up his mind to clear the air.
“Constable,” he said.
“Have you seen something?”
“No, I haven’t. But I may owe you an apology of some sort.”
“Whatever for?”
“It was brought to my attention that I may be oversensitive on the subject of child labor and the mines.”
“Oh. Parents putting their children to work, you mean?”
“Actually, you said that. I implied that the village itself encouraged that sort of thing.”
“The village itself?”
“When I was a child-”
“Ah, you worked the mines yourself? But it was a different time then, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“The entire world’s changed since you and I were children.”
“Child labor still exists.”
“That it does, Sergeant, but it’s no longer the prevailing way of things, is it?”
“I wouldn’t think it is.”
“Then we agree. Of course, putting children to work in the mines is no longer legal. Some parents do still bring their children with them, but those children have nothing to do with hard labor. They perform menial tasks, such as a woman might.”
Hammersmith didn’t respond. It was clear that he and Grimes were very different people who happened to wear the same uniform. Still, Hammersmith’s attempt at an apology, no matter how clumsy and unsatisfying, appeared to have worked. Grimes seemed a bit more relaxed. The men from Scotland Yard might have another two days to spend in Blackhampton, and having Grimes on their side would go a long way toward a productive investigation.
Hammersmith opened his lantern’s shutter wider. A more focused light was useful, but he felt hemmed in by the winter woods. He listened for signs of life, but heard nothing that didn’t sound like a small animal. He assumed a lost little boy would cry out for help at the sight of a lantern bobbing through the trees. He didn’t want to think about the alternative, that the boy was dead.
He stopped every few feet and shuffled through the leaves at the side of the narrow trail with the toe of his boot. He doubted he would find any footprints so long after the family had disappeared, but he held out hope that he might discover a dropped handkerchief, a paper pastry wrapper, anything at all. Grimes tramped on, though, without looking around, without waiting to let Hammersmith catch up. Hammersmith was conscious of the fact that he might get lost, and by the time the sun rose there would be new search parties out in these woods, looking for the London policeman and diverting time and attention from the missing Price family. He kept the back of the constable’s blue jacket in sight and never stopped moving for long.
They had been searching for quite some time when Hammersmith spotted an odd shape deeper in the brush.
“Over here,” Hammersmith said. “What’s that?”
Grimes turned and came back to where Hammersmith stood on the path. The glow from their lanterns spread out in a wobbly circle across the ground.
“What’ve you found?”
“I’m not sure. Does that look strange to you?” Hammersmith pointed into the trees. The ground cover grew thick here, and it was hard to spot anything amongst the dead grey branches and wet black leaves. Grimes held his lantern up and peered into the dark. He stifled a yawn with his free hand.
“I don’t see nuffin’.”
“There. Right there. Do you see it?”
“Right in there?”
“That’s it.”
“Dead animal, I’d say. Doesn’t look like a person, no ways.”
“I’m going to take a closer look.”
Hammersmith handed his lantern to Constable Grimes and crouched down. He pushed aside a handful of thin low-hanging branches and shuffled forward until he had to kneel. The knees of his thin uniform trousers were immediately soaked through. He realized that he hadn’t felt any sensation in his feet for some time. They were numb. Unlike Inspector Day, Hammersmith had not packed any boots but the standard black Wellingtons he was accustomed to wearing. They were excellent for walking a beat, but they weren’t at all suited for tramping about
