He wondered what luck Diane Fry might have had with the bird-watcher, and wished that he had her alongside him now. A fox barked somewhere ahead. Perhaps even the same fox that had sunk its teeth into the cooling flesh of Laura Vernon's thigh.
A couple of minutes passed as Cooper walked as fast as he dared, squinting ahead into the gloom, hoping he hadn't lost the two men. But eventually, as he rounded a bend by the disintegrated remains of a stone building, he came to a sudden halt at a glimpse of movement up ahead. He stood into the side of the path, under an overhanging elder bough, and watched the old men. They were standing at a point where the path diverged. Again they were very close together, merging into one dark, indistinct figure, as if they were holding each other, embracing like lovers. Then they turned, striding down the right-hand path without looking back. The path dipped in a gentle slope into a patch of denser trees and then towards ground that grew rocky and steep and was broken into deep ravines.
Cooper had to go more slowly as he found himself walking over the rocks. By the time he reached the first ravine, the old men had vanished into the night as if they had been erased out of existence.
He stood back off the path in the trees and waited. There was nothing else he could do. He wondered what Diane Fry would have done when she found him gone. Surely she would have the sense this time to call in and get some support. She wouldn't make the same mistake again. No way. She wouldn't make the mistake of following him into trouble.
*
As soon as she entered the woods, Fry knew that it would happen again. Though she had brought a torch this time, the narrow pool of light it cast at her feet seemed only to emphasize the blackness outside its reach, to make her isolation total and threatening. From among the trees, the eager darkness had begun to sidle in towards her, oozing round her body in swift, oily movements, and pressing in close with its nauseous and suffocating familiarity.
The night was full of tiny, whispering movements. They were like the soft seething on the surface of a bowl of maggots. They made her want to scratch her skin, where the small hairs were tense and moving. Then the invisible ants began to swarm across her body, nipping and biting as they went, their thousands of tiny insect feet scuttling over her arms and legs, itching her skin and burrowing under her breasts and into the moist warmth between her thighs, until she wanted to scream with revulsion.
She needed desperately to reach out and touch something solid for reassurance, yet could not move her hand for fear of what her fingers might encounter. Somehow she managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, automatically, like a robot programmed for a single action. Every step she took made her afraid. Every movement was like a leap into a void, a step into the midst of unseen horrors.
She knew that she wouldn't be able to stop the shadows bringing back the memories that she had pushed deep into the recesses of her mind. They were memories that were too powerful and greedy to be buried completely, too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.
As she walked, she turned her head from side to side, watching the dimly seen trees for movement. They were like rows of solid bodies standing threateningly around, surrounding her and closing in. She was alone among a dozen of them, two dozen, maybe more. Other bodies could be sensed, further back in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. 'It's a copper,' the voices said. 'She's a copper.’
The memories churned and bubbled. There were movements that crept and rustled closer; there were brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into severed segments by the streetlights; the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear that one particular voice — that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. 'How do you like this, copper?' The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, menacing shapes all around, whichever way she turned. A hand in the small of her back, and a leg outstretched to trip. Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling and slapping. Her arms trapped by unseen fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence. Her own voice, unnaturally high-pitched and stained with terror, was trying to cry out, but failing.
Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. The smell of a sweat-soaked palm over her mouth, her head banging on the ground as she thrashed helplessly from side to side. Her clothes pulled and torn, the shock of feeling parts of her body exposed to the cruel air. 'How do you like this, copper?' And then came the groping and the prodding and the squeezing, and the hot, intruding fingers. And, perfectly clear on the night air, the sound of a zip. Another laugh, a mumble, an excited gasp. And finally the penetration. The ripping agony, and the scream that was smothered by the hand over her face, and the desperate fighting to force breath into her lungs. 'How do you like this, copper? How do you like this, copper?' Animal noises and more laughter, and a warm wetness spurting and trickling inside her before the final withdrawal. The relief of the lifting of a weight from her body, as one dark shape moved away and she thought it was over.
But then it happened again.
And again.
*
Blindly, she continued walking, insensible to her surroundings, all her efforts directed towards controlling the reactions of her body. She tried to focus her thoughts on Ben Cooper, somewhere ahead in the woods, unaware of the danger he was in. 'Are you going to let me down?' he'd said.
Finally, she found herself stepping out into a clearing, immediately feeling the difference in the ground underfoot. She became aware of a sound – a real sound, belonging to here and now, a sound that needed explanation.
Her memory was still forcing unwanted pictures in front of her eyes as she turned to identify the noise, seeking its source among the menacing shadows. She found that a large tree stood near her shoulder, tall and thickly shrouded in foliage, its crown dimly visible against the pale sky. Its leaves whispered and rustled like a vast colony of small creatures roosting directly above her head. She thought of thousands of tiny bats, scraping their thin, papery wings against their bodies as they prepared to drop in fluttering swarms on to her shoulders. There was nothing worse than something you could only hear, but not see.
There was a sudden loud creaking as the wind caught the weight of a branch, and a louder crackling among the leaves. She caught the unmistakable smell of urine and faeces, drifting closer. And then there was a heavier movement among the branches as something swung towards her, lumbering out of the dark.
*
Three hundred yards away, Ben Cooper had picked up the trail again as one of the old men re-appeared on the path. He heard the man coming before he saw him, could sense his breathing and hear a barely audible muttering.
After switching to the left-hand fork, the figure walked on for several hundred yards before suddenly striking off the path into the depths of the trees. Cooper found it difficult even to locate the exact spot where he had disappeared. Once in among the trees, he was lost. There was no hope of seeing anyone who might be lurking among the straggling clumps of brambles and the trunks of the old oaks and beeches that grew thickly here. Faintly, on the air, he caught a familiar tang of pipe smoke. But he finally had to admit that he had lost the old man he had been following.