SIXTY-NINE

He never heard it cough again, or bark, or yip like a black-muzzled jackal. But he was not alone in those woods that arched over him, cut out the weak greyish sunlight, and dripped heavy fragrant raindrops onto him like the branches and limbs of the trees were the ceiling of a limestone cave, glittery, timeless, and dreadful.

No, he never heard it or saw it again. But other things kept pace with him.

He swallowed and swallowed to ease the terrible thirst in a throat scorched by cordite. He would be cold, then hot and sweaty; he saw things and heard the voices of people that were not there; he passed in and out of worlds. He walked. And he walked.

Out of sight, the white people scurried. They chattered like little monkeys. They leapt up at the corner of his heavy eyes; they were small and pale like naked children.

Twice in his delirium, he turned and knelt and fired the rifle into the trees at where he thought he had seen something small and pallid land on tiny feet and begin chittering. And then there would be silence. An awful silence loaded with anticipation and vague hopes. Before it began again: the prancing of little feet on the wet forest floor just out of sight, and the crying out of small mouths in the distant undergrowth.

She had quite a brood; so many young. Moder was hurt and her young were angry. If he fell and passed out with exhaustion, he knew they would take him from his own dreams and from the wet mud his feet slid about in. So he walked and he walked and he talked to himself to keep them from taking him.

It must have been early evening when he came to the end of the track and saw the sky in what felt like the first time in years. The track simply ended and when he turned and looked back at the great wall of trees, it was like he stood in a coastal cove, peninsulas on either side, and had passed out of a crack in the cliff face, or a well-hidden cave. He could no longer see the end of the track he had just walked for the best part of a day and evening, nor any break in the thickets of undergrowth, rising tangled to the height of a man.

He had come on to a rocky plane, windswept and misty with rain. Grey, moss green, and whitish stone, forever. Besides a scattering of small birch trees it was arid, desolate like the bottom of some great ocean that had been drained.

A great suffocating feeling of solitude came over him in the bleak stillness; he felt lonelier than he had ever been before in his memory, but also suffered a mad urge to wander farther, forever amongst the massive boulders. It looked uncannily familiar too, like he was back where he had started from, all that time ago. So long ago, with his three best friends all around him.

When he put some distance between himself and the edge of the forest, he sat down and rested, yanking his head up whenever it dropped and he fell into a dark red sleep for seconds, or minutes, or even hours; he couldn’t be sure. Eventually his shivering became too intense, so he staggered back onto his feet, shouldered the rifle and started walking even further away from the trees.

Beyond one of the great reaching crests of the forest, where the mighty trees thrust out together like a sweeping arm, he found another track: narrow, stony, overgrown, but offering the suggestion that someone with purpose had worn this thin line into the landscape of stone and grey reindeer moss. Someone that had also once walked away from the dreadful forest.

He didn’t know which way was north or south, or where the track went, but the very sight of it made him weep and shudder down to his toes.

So into the darkness he shivered violently and he walked on legs like stumps and on feet he could not feel. Thin traces of moon and luminous cloud lit themselves up. He often stared at his hand before his eyes but could see nothing. The oblivion didn’t last for long and the sky faded indigo, then dark blue, then pink, then white-grey.

For brief moments, his mind went clear and he felt warm. And he recalled things with so great a clarity, it took a conscious force of will to assure himself that he was not back at work, or in London, or talking to Hutch in a bar in Stockholm about books.

But in the repetitive, tedious delirium, in the tramp tramp tramping of his numb feet, in some incongruous moment of clarity, he decided that earning £863 a month after tax at the age of thirty-six did not matter any more. Nor did owing NatWest Bank twenty-five grand in a loan for a business that had failed so long ago. It was irrelevant. The fact he disliked his job, and hated two of his colleagues, and was as poor as the poorest migrants around him at home in Finsbury Park, and that he dreaded Christmas because there were fewer and fewer places for him to go, and that he only owned three pairs of shoes, did not matter. And all of this fell from him. His eyes now looked at something that was beyond the horizon and so deeply inside himself at the same time. And he knew that what he now felt could never be truly revisited again. But that also did not matter. Enough of it would survive inside him, and live. And he knew the things that held him in place, and reflected an image of who he had once been back to himself, and that marshalled everyone else around him, and that those things a man should strive for and achieve in the old world were all now unimportant.

Even though he was crippled and caked in dross and stained with blood and his head was still crowned by the dead flowers, like they were holding irreparably damaged parts of his skull together, he felt light and giddy and unburdened. He was naked, and his head was bright with a whitish light even though the sky was grey and the rain fell upon him.

Nothing mattered at all but being here. Himself. There was still some life in him. His heart beat. Air passed in and out of his lungs. One foot followed another. Knowing how quickly and suddenly and unexpectedly life could end, how irrelevant life was anyway to this universe of earth and sky and age, how indifferent it was to all of the people still in it, those who would come to it and those who had already left it, he felt freed. Alone, but free. Freed of it all. Free of them, free of everything. At least for a while. And that’s all anyone really had, he decided, a little while.

Acknowledgements

Tired, bedraggled and wretched is the writer who walks alone. So many thanks to Hugh ‘Hershey’ Simmons for not only reading this book so thoroughly (and more than once at that), but for the expeditions he has led; especially the one that gave birth to this idea, that saw us forced to make camp in the snow, shortly after finding two dead sheep hanging from trees. I’ve carried the recollection for nineteen years until it found a home in this story.

The deepest affection to Anne for her love, support, patience and advice, and to my dad for his careful readings again.

National Parks in Sweden: Europe’s Last Wilderness by Claes Grundsten; The Dolmens and Early Passage Graves of Sweden by Christopher Tilley; Early Norrland 10: Lapps and Scandinavians: Archeological Finds from Northern Sweden by Ingrar Zachrissan; The Land of the Midnight Sun by Paul Belloni Du Chailu, were all essential to my research. And I owe much to that insightful and fascinating book, Lords of Chaos: The Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Didrik Soderland and Michael Moynihan, without which Blood Frenzy would never have formed. I have taken a liberty with the concept of ‘a fist in the face of God’ created in the lyrics of Darkthrone’s ‘To Walk the Infernal Fields’, and amended the idea into a notion of ‘spitting in the face of God’ on page 349, to affect Blood Frenzy’s emulation of early Black Metal revolutionary ideas. The chilling true stories of John Krakauer, Simon Yates, Joe Simpson and Nick Heil, and the fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Scott Smith, Cormac McCarthy and James Dickey all made me want to write about life and death in the wilderness.

Very special thanks to my agent John Jarrold and my editor Julie Crisp for their support and advice. Much gratitude also goes out to Chloe Healy, Amy Lines and Liz Johnson, and the team at Pan Macmillan for giving me a chance, and then spreading the word.

Cheers to Steve Saville and his wife for checking my Swedish incantation. And I want to raise my claws in tribute to the bloggers, reviewers and readers of Apartment 16, who really opened the door for that book and for its author. A final long salute to Horror Reanimated, Mathew Riley, Joseph Delacey, Peter Tennant, Andrew Cox, and Black Static for their continued interest and support.

* * *

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Also by Adam Nevill

Apartment 16

Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of two other novels of supernatural horror: Banquet for the Damned and Apartment 16. He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com