LESSER MALLING

LESSER MALLING

There were two hundred miles of dreary motorway between London and York, and the journey took more than four hours. The coach stopped twice at service stations but neither Matt nor Mrs Deverill left their seats. She had brought sandwiches with her. They were in her handbag, wrapped in brown paper. She took them out and offered one to Matt.

“Are you hungry, Matthew?”

“No, thank you.”

“In Yorkshire I’ll expect you to eat what you’re given. We don’t waste food in my house.”

She unwrapped one of the bundles and Matt saw two slabs of white bread filled with cold liver. He was glad he hadn’t accepted her offer.

“I expect you’re wondering about me,” Mrs Deverill said, as she began her lunch. She took small mouthfuls and chewed the food with care. When she swallowed, her throat twisted painfully, as if she had difficulty getting the food down. “I am now your legal guardian,” she went on. “You are a thief and a delinquent, and the government has given you to me. But I’m willing to forget your past, Matthew. I can assure you it is your future that is of much more concern to me. If you do as you’re told, we’ll get on. If you disobey me, if you try to defy me, let me assure you that you will be more miserable than you can imagine. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Matt said.

Her eyes slid over him and he shivered.“You have to remember that nobody cares about you. You have no parents. No family. You have little education and no prospects. I don’t want to be cruel to you, my dear, but I’m really all you have left.”

She turned away from him and continued eating her sandwiches. After that, she took out a farming magazine and began to read. It was as if she had completely forgotten him.

The motorway stretched on. There was nothing to look at out of the window and Matt found himself hypnotized by the white lines and the crash barrier endlessly flashing past. Almost without knowing it he found himself drifting away, neither awake nor asleep but somewhere in between.

He was back in the terraced house in Dulwich, a leafy, friendly suburb of London. This was where he had lived with his mother and father. It had been six years since he had seen them but, staring out of the window, he saw them now.

There was his mother, rushing around the kitchen that was always in a mess, even when it had just been cleaned. She was wearing the clothes she had worn that last day: a pink dress with a white linen jacket. Whenever he remembered her, this was how he saw her. It was a brand new dress that she had bought especially for the wedding. And there was his father, looking uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Mark Freeman was a doctor and he normally went to work in whatever he could find– jeans, a sweater… He didn’t like dressing up. But one of the other doctors at his surgery was getting married and it was going to be a smart affair. First the service, then an expensive hotel. His father was sitting at the table, eating his breakfast, and he turned round, tossing his dark hair in the way he always did, and asked, “Where’s Matthew?”

And then Matthew came in. Of course, he was still Matthew then. Now, six years later, sitting on a coach heading towards a place he had never heard of, Matt saw himself as he had been at that time: a short, slightly plump, dark-haired boy coming into the bright, yellow kitchen. His father at the table. His mother holding a teapot shaped like a teddy bear. And he heard it all again.

“Come on, Matthew. We’re going to be late.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Matthew…?”

“I don’t feel well. I don’t want to go.”

Now, on the coach, Matt put a hand over his eyes. He didn’t want to remember any more. Remembering only hurt him… every time.

“What do you mean, you don’t want to go?”

“Please, Dad. Please don’t make me…”

They had argued, but not very much. His parents had only one child and they spoiled him. They had thought he would enjoy the wedding because they had been told there would be other children there and a special marquee with a magician and balloons. And now this! His father made a quick phone call. It wasn’t really a big problem. Rosemary Green – their friendly, always helpful neighbour – agreed to take him for the rest of the day. His parents left without him.

And that was why he hadn’t been in the car when they had their accident. That was why they had died and he had lived.

Matt lowered his hand and looked out again. The coach had slowed down. He wasn’t feeling very well. He was hot and cold, and there was a dull pounding in his head.

“We’re here,” Mrs Deverill said.

They had arrived at another coach station, this one more modern and smaller than Victoria. The coach stopped and they jostled forward with the other passengers. It was colder outside than it had been in London but at least it had stopped raining. Matt collected his case, then followed Mrs Deverill across the concourse.

A man was waiting for them, standing next to a beaten-up old Land Rover that only seemed to be held together by the mud that covered it. The man was short and very fat with yellow, greasy hair, watery eyes and a face that seemed to be slowly slipping off his head. He was wearing dirty jeans and a shirt that was too small for him. Matt could see the buttons straining. The man was about forty. He had flabby lips that parted in a wet, unpleasant smile.

“Good afternoon, Mrs Deverill,” he said.

Mrs Deverill ignored him. She turned to Matt.“This is Noah.”

Matt said nothing. Noah was examining him in a way that made him feel uneasy.“Welcome to Yorkshire,” Noah said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” He held out a hand. The fingers were fat and stubby, the nails encrusted with mud. Matt didn’t take it.

“Noah works for me on the farm,” Mrs Deverill explained. “He has very little conversation, so I wouldn’t bother talking to him.”

The farmhand was still staring at him. His mouth was open and there was saliva on his chin. Matt turned away.

“Get in the car,” Mrs Deverill said. “It’s time you saw your new home.”

They drove for an hour; first on a dual carriageway, then on a B-road, then on a twisting country lane. The further they went, the bleaker the landscape became. Lesser Malling seemed to be hidden somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, but Matt didn’t see a single sign. He was feeling even sicker than before and he wondered if it was Noah’s driving or some sort of virus that he had picked up.

They came to a crossroads– a meeting of five roads, all of them identical. There were trees on every side. Matt hadn’t noticed them enter the wood but now it surrounded them, totally enclosed them. The wood had obviously been planted recently. All the trees were the same – some sort of pine. They were the same height, the same colour and they had been set in dead straight lines with an identical amount of space between them. No matter which direction Matt looked, the view was exactly the same. He remembered what his social worker in London had told him. The LEAF Project wanted to keep him out of urban areas, away from temptation. They certainly couldn’t have chosen anywhere more remote than here.

A single signpost stood at the intersection but the top had been broken off. A splintered pole was all that remained.

“Lesser Malling is ten minutes up the road,” Mrs Deverill said, gesturing to the left. “I’ll show it to you when you’ve settled in a little more. But we live the other way.”

Noah twisted the steering wheel and they turned left, following one of the other lanes for about fifty metres until they came to a gateway. Matt just had time to see a name, written in dull brown paint: Hive Hall. Then they were following a gravel drive between two barbed-wire fences that ran down to a courtyard and a complex of barns and buildings. The car stopped. They had arrived.

Matt got out.

It was a miserable place. The bad weather didn’t help but even in the sunshine there would have been little to recommend Hive Hall. The main farmhouse was made out of great stone slabs, with a slate roof that was buckling under the weight of a single, large chimney. The barns had been built with wooden planks that were so old and sodden, they were rotting where they stood, with dark green moss spreading across them like a disease. The farmyard itself was an irregular square of land that was as much water as earth and gravel. Chickens limped to and fro; they had scarcely moved to avoid the wheels of the Land Rover. Six pigs stood in themud, shivering.

“This is it,” Mrs Deverill announced as she got out of the car and stretched her legs. “It may not look much but it’s my home and it does well enough for me. Of course, there are no computer games here. There’s no television. But once you start working, you’ll find you’re too tired for these things. We go to bed early in the country. You’ll get used to our ways in time.”

They went into the farmhouse. The front door opened into a long kitchen with a flagstone floor. There was an Aga stove at one end, with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, and dozens of jars and bottles on wooden shelves. From here, Mrs Deverill led Matt into a living room with old and battered furniture, shelves full of books and, above a massive fireplace, what looked like a portrait of herself, though it must have been painted hundreds of years ago. It had the same cruel eyes, the same sunken cheeks. Only the hair was different, running loose as if caught in the wind.

“My ancestor,” Mrs Deverill explained.

Matt looked past the figure in the canvas. She was standing in front of a village. He could see a few desolate buildings behind her. He looked back at the face. And shivered. Nothing had moved, but he could have sworn she had been looking towards the frame, over to the left. Now her eyes were fixed on him. He swallowed hard. His imagination was playing tricks on him. Turning round he saw that Mrs Deverill was staring at him too. He was trapped between the two of them.

Mrs Deverill smiled thinly.“She looks like me, doesn’t she? She was also a Deverill. There have been Deverills in this part of Yorkshire for three hundred years. Her name was Jayne, like mine. She burned to death. They say that when the wind blows in the right direction, you can still hear the screams. Let me show you upstairs…”

Matt followed Mrs Deverill up a twisting staircase to the first floor and into a room at the end of the corridor. This was to be his bedroom… and it was the one room he most wanted to see. His headache had got worse. He wondered if he was going to be sick.

The room had a low ceiling, exposed beams and a bare, wooden floor with a small rug in the centre. It looked over the back of the farm, across a field to the wood. The windows were small, set in walls which were at least a metre thick. There was a sagging bed, made up not with a duvet but with blankets and sheets. Opposite the bed was a washbasin and a chest of drawers with a vase of dried flowers. The pictures on the walls showed views of Lesser Malling, painted in watercolours.

“They made me decorate for you,” Mrs Deverill remarked sourly. Of course the LEAF Project would have visited the farm. They would have insisted that the room was clean and comfortable. “I dried the flowers myself. Belladonna, oleander and mistletoe. Three of my favourites. All of them poisonous… but such lovely colours.”

Matt put his case on the bed. At the same time he noticed something sitting between the pillows.

“And this is Asmodeus,” Mrs Deverill said. “My cat.”

It was a huge black cat with yellow eyes. Its stomach was bulging, as if it had recently eaten, and Matt noticed a patch of grey, where some of the fur had worn away. It was purring lazily. Matt reached out his hand to stroke it. The cat purred more loudly. Slowly, it turned its head and looked Matt in the eyes. Then it sank its teeth into his flesh.

With a cry, Matt pulled his hand back. Bright red blood welled out of a jagged bite in his thumb. A drop fell on to the floor. Mrs Deverill took a step back. Matt saw that her eyes had widened and now, for the first time, she was smiling. All her attention was fixed on the blood on the floor.

It was too much for him.

The room turned. Matt swayed on his feet. He tried to say something but the words refused to come. The walls were spinning. He heard a door boom open. He looked through it and saw– or thought he saw – a circle of huge granite stones. Someone was holding a knife. He could see it hovering over his head, the pointed blade curving towards his eye. The floor seemed to shake and then, one after another, the wooden planks cracked open, splinters exploding all around. Brilliantlight streamed through and in the light he thought he saw something like a giant, inhuman hand.

A voice echoed in his ears.

“One of the Five!” it whispered.

The light engulfed him. He felt it sweeping through him, burning the inside of his head. He slammed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to block it out. Then he was falling backwards, but he was unconscious long before he hit the floor.

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