II
The Gibbet
Oliver and Moira both had umbrellas. Oliver insisted that Shadow carry his umbrella, pointing out that Shadow towered over him, and thus was ideally suited to keep the rain off both of them.
The couple also carried little flashlights, which they called torches. The word put Shadow in mind of villagers in a horror movie storming the castle on the hill, and the lightning and thunder added to the vision. Tonight, my creature, he thought, I will give you life! It should have been hokey but instead it was disturbing. The dead cat had put him into a strange set of mind.
The narrow roads between fields were running with rainwater.
‘On a nice night,’ said Moira, raising her voice to be heard over the rain, ‘we would just walk over the fields. But they’ll be all soggy and boggy, so we’re going down by Shuck’s Lane. Now, that tree was a gibbet tree, once upon a time.’ She pointed to a massive-trunked sycamore at the crossroads. It had only a few branches left, sticking up into the night like afterthoughts.
‘Moira’s lived here since she was in her twenties,’ said Oliver. ‘I came up from London, about eight years ago. From Turnham Green. I’d come up here on holiday originally when I was fourteen and I never forgot it. You don’t.’
‘The land gets into your blood,’ said Moira. ‘Sort of.’
‘And the blood gets into the land,’ said Oliver. ‘One way or another. You take that gibbet tree, for example. They would leave people in the gibbet until there was nothing left. Hair gone to make bird’s nests, flesh all eaten by ravens, bones picked clean. Or until they had another corpse to display anyway.’
Shadow was fairly sure he knew what a gibbet was, but he asked anyway. There was never any harm in asking, and Oliver was definitely the kind of person who took pleasure in knowing peculiar things and in passing his knowledge on.
‘Like a huge iron birdcage. They used them to display the bodies of executed criminals, after justice had been served. The gibbets were locked, so the family and friends couldn’t steal the body back and give it a good Christian burial. Keeping passersby on the straight and the narrow, although I doubt it actually deterred anyone from anything.’
‘Who were they executing?’
‘Anyone who got unlucky. Three hundred years ago, there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death. Including travelling with Gypsies for more than a month, stealing sheep – and, for that matter, anything over twelve pence in value – and writing a threatening letter.’
He might have been about to begin a lengthy list, but Moira broke in. ‘Oliver’s right about the death sentence, but they only gibbeted murderers, up these parts. And they’d leave corpses in the gibbet for twenty years, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of murders.’ And then, as if trying to change the subject to something lighter, she said, ‘We are now walking down Shuck’s Lane. The locals say that on a clear night, which tonight certainly is not, you can find yourself being followed by Black Shuck. He’s a sort of a fairy dog.’
‘We’ve never seen him, not even on clear nights,’ said Oliver.
‘Which is a very good thing,’ said Moira. ‘Because if you see him – you die.’
‘Except Sandra Wilberforce said she saw him, and she’s healthy as a horse.’
Shadow smiled. ‘What does Black Shuck do?’
‘He doesn’t do anything,’ said Oliver.
‘He does. He follows you home,’ corrected Moira. ‘And then, a bit later, you die.’
‘Doesn’t sound very scary,’ said Shadow. ‘Except for the dying bit.’
They reached the bottom of the road. Rainwater was running like a stream over Shadow’s thick hiking boots.
Shadow said, ‘So how did you two meet?’ It was normally a safe question, when you were with couples.
Oliver said, ‘In the pub. I was up here on holiday, really.’
Moira said, ‘I was with someone when I met Oliver. We had a very brief, torrid affair, then we ran off together. Most unlike both of us.’
They did not seem like the kind of people who ran off together, thought Shadow. But then, all people were strange. He knew he should say something.
‘I was married. My wife was killed in a car crash.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Moira.
‘It happened,’ said Shadow.
‘When we get home,’ said Moira, ‘I’m making us all whisky macs. That’s whisky and ginger wine and hot water. And I’m having a hot bath. Otherwise I’ll catch my death.’
Shadow imagined reaching out his hand and catching death in it, like a baseball, and he shivered.
The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every grey rock in the drystone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving afterimages on Shadow’s night-blinded eyes.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Oliver. ‘Damnedest thing.’ The thunder rolled and rumbled, and Shadow waited until it was done before he tried to speak.
‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Shadow. Another flash, less bright, and Shadow thought he saw something moving away from them in a distant field. ‘That?’ he asked.
‘It’s a donkey,’ said Moira. ‘Only a donkey.’
Oliver stopped. He said, ‘This was the wrong way to come home. We should have got a taxi. This was a mistake.’
‘Ollie,’ said Moira. ‘It’s not far now. And it’s just a spot of rain. You aren’t made of sugar, darling.’
Another flash of lightning, so bright as to be almost blinding. There was nothing to be seen in the fields. Darkness. Shadow turned back to Oliver, but the little man was no longer standing beside him. Oliver’s flashlight was on the ground. Shadow blinked his eyes, hoping to force his night vision to return. The man had collapsed, crumpled onto the wet grass on the side of the lane.
‘Ollie?’ Moira crouched beside him, her umbrella by her side. She shone her flashlight onto his face. Then she looked at Shadow. ‘He can’t just sit here,’ she said, sounding confused and concerned. ‘It’s pouring.’
Shadow pocketed Oliver’s flashlight, handed his umbrella to Moira, then picked Oliver up. The man did not seem to weigh much, and Shadow was a big man.
‘Is it far?’
‘Not far,’ she said. ‘Not really. We’re almost home.’
They walked in silence, across a churchyard on the edge of a village green, and into a village. Shadow could see lights on in the grey stone houses that edged the one street. Moira turned off, into a house set back from the road, and Shadow followed her. She held the back door open for him.
The kitchen was large and warm, and there was a sofa, half-covered with magazines, against one wall. There were low beams in the kitchen, and Shadow needed to duck his head. Shadow removed Oliver’s raincoat and dropped it. It puddled on the wooden floor. Then he put the man down on the sofa.
Moira filled the kettle.
‘Do we call an ambulance?’
She shook her head.
‘This is just something that happens? He falls down and passes out?’
Moira busied herself getting mugs from a shelf. ‘It’s happened before. Just not for a long time. He’s narcoleptic, and if something surprises or scares him he can just go down like that. He’ll come round soon. He’ll want tea. No whisky mac tonight, not for him. Sometimes he’s a bit dazed and doesn’t know where he is, sometimes he’s been following everything that happened while he was out. And he hates it if you make a fuss. Put your backpack down by the Aga.’
The kettle boiled. Moira poured the steaming water into a teapot. ‘He’ll have a cup of real tea. I’ll have chamomile, I think, or I won’t sleep tonight. Calm my nerves. You?’
‘I’ll drink tea, sure,’ said Shadow. He had walked more than twenty miles that day, and sleep would be easy in the finding. He wondered at Moira. She appeared perfectly self-possessed in the face of her partner’s incapacity, and he wondered how much of it was not wanting to show weakness in front of a stranger. He admired her, although he found it peculiar. The English were strange. But he understood hating ‘making a fuss’. Yes.
Oliver stirred on the couch. Moira was at his side with a cup of tea, helped him into a sitting position. He sipped the tea, in a slightly dazed fashion.
‘It followed me home,’ he said, conversationally.
‘What followed you, Ollie, darling?’ Her voice was steady, but there was concern in it.
‘The dog,’ said the man on the sofa, and he took another sip of his tea. ‘The black dog.’