The Creeper, page 11
Mornings made Ben physically nauseous. His body always revolted when called to crawl out of bed. It made working a nine-to-five job feel like a five-day working hell. This morning was no different – the denial, the rage, the sad acceptance. He had to shake off the sleep like an addict sweating out his poison.
‘Chloe,’ he whispered.
She buried her face out of sight and muttered what sounded like, ‘Five more minutes.’
Ben’s worries had interlaced overnight and now they tightened at the thought of returning home empty-handed. The villagers had given him nothing to work with. Their ignorance was calculated and their answers succinct. It was never a promising sign when the questions occupied more reel than the answers. He needed more, anything to bulk up his side of Sparling’s report. Otherwise, the whole trip could have been for nothing. Ben would have to strap himself in for another year of retail-themed perdition. He imagined black mornings, black coffees, and a big black space where his hopes and dreams used to be.
They had set up camp east of where they entered the village. The church couldn’t have been far, and it wasn’t quite yet dawn. Ben had time. He hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he would do when he got there, but he knew he had time to do it.
‘I’m going to pop out for a moment,’ he said. ‘Will you be okay here by yourself?’
Chloe let out a little groan.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he added.
Ben raised the zip with slow, steady care so as to not disturb her. He would be back before she even realised he was gone. His face was met with the lightest spray of rain, as if a wave had crashed against the field’s wall. Given the hour, the air was still cold as night, and so he looped his scarf tight around his neck and buried his chin.
Daylight was gradually diluting the dark in the east. The surrounding lands were dissimilar to Ben’s memories – those colourless flashes of torchlight. All had been black, or white as bone. The trees, once so monstrous, were now fragile and weather-beaten. Tins were scattered around their campfire, its stone rink a flooded pool of ash and twigs. Their field was smaller than he remembered. The night had confused him. And now, so too had the day.
With Chloe sealed inside the tent, Ben scanned the outlying fields. Their grasses were grey as stone, almost merging with the misty sky. All that mattered was that they were empty. He stood for a moment, reluctant to leave her alone, but she was perfectly safe. He wouldn’t be gone long.
‘Okay,’ he whispered, stuffing both hands into his pockets and stealing one last glance back at their tent, ‘time for church.’
Chloe had already identified the building’s features and peculiarities, dissecting it with an educated eye. Ben’s gut just told him that there was something else. There had to be. Or maybe he was still half asleep and this hope was but a dream he hadn’t snapped out of yet.
The lane was an uneven gully of puddles. Runnels of rainwater trickled through its ditches, by every dip and rise. The mud was thick, as if some deranged villager had taken a whisk to it overnight. Sunrise would hopefully cheer the world up when it came, though judging by the sky their trek back to the car was going to be a wet one. The church’s triangular tip eventually rose above the treetops as Ben neared the crest of a hill.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Thought you could hide from Benny Boy, did you?’
A small gate sagged from its hinges like a dislocated limb. An archway of vine had grown over it, offering some shelter from the rain that clung to Ben’s face like a light sweat. No tool had tamed back the grounds for years. It was abound with briars and weeds, leaving only the narrowest pathway to reach the church. As Ben approached its doorway, he could hear the wind whistling within.
A flagstone floor led to the altar, where a fine rain misted the air, wheeling through skinny window frames and blowing leaves into every crook and corner. More weeds lined its cracks, clawing up to the light, only to die in a church that felt more like a tomb. A section of the northern wall had collapsed outward, leaving an opening that Chloe could probably fit through at a squeeze.
At the altar steps, Ben found what remained of the stone cross. Its stem was wider than he had expected. To shatter it in such way, as to leave only its base, must have taken great time and effort, and good reason for investing both. The area around it had been cleared. Chloe was right: the church wasn’t as abandoned as the villagers had led him to believe. Someone had removed the debris from when the ceiling collapsed. There were white tracks like chalk where it had been dragged across the floor. Too cumbersome for the arms of a single man, this was a group effort, and hard work at that.
Ben found the angels protruding from the walls on either side, their faces disfigured. No features remained, merely a cavity, like a gunshot wound at point-blank range. He ran a finger over their injuries, trying to imagine that childish innocence before it was brutalised. A chisel or similar tool had mutilated them but left their torsos intact instead of removing the carvings outright. The act wasn’t enough. They left just enough evidence to memorialise why they had done it – the very question that played on Ben’s mind.
It was such a desolate place; broken, cold, and dark. A house of worship should inspire hope. The skeletal remains of Tír Mallacht’s church served only to drain it.
‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ he muttered as he turned to leave.
He flinched back when his eyes raised to the door.
Someone had followed him.
Through the restless haze, Ben watched as the figure approached the church – like the last believer of a forgotten faith. It couldn’t have been Chloe. Whoever it was didn’t have a furry collar sprouting from their shoulders. They looked to be wearing a hood. A flurry of rain spun through the church, howling through cracks and breathing life into all those dead leaves. Ben shielded his face and when his eyes reopened, Nu was standing there, framed by the door’s arched stone, shawl pulled tight over her skull. Ben could see where its damp wool had fallen in the folds of her skull. Bare legs and feet were tarred in mud, trembling in the morning air.
‘Nu, are you okay?’
Her golden eyes were drawn by the raindrops rolling overhead like a ghostly murmuration.
‘Would you like me to take you back to the village?’ he asked.
Nu stared at him, so sadly that the rain could have passed for tears on her cheeks. ‘She told you, didn’t she? You should have left here when I asked you to. I’ve told her before not to talk about him, but she doesn’t listen to me. I don’t think she listens to anyone. She’s bold.’
‘Were you around our campsite last night, Nu?’
‘No,’ she replied, looking down at the muck lodged between her toes. ‘She’s so bold.’
‘Someone was,’ Ben said. ‘Do you know why they followed us?’
‘I’m not allowed to talk about him.’
Here we go again. This was abuse; plain and simple. Nu didn’t have the capacity to extract the horror stories that the others had drilled into her head. She would always retain that childish innocence, no matter how many years she collected.
‘Are you talking about the creeper, Nu?’ he asked. ‘It’s a fairy tale, okay? You need to understand that. You’ve no reason to be afraid. He’s just a man.’
‘He was a long time ago,’ she replied, retreating out the door. ‘I’m sorry that she told you about him.’
Ben watched as she paced down the path, fading into the grey as though they were one.
‘See you later,’ he whispered, pitying her like all the others; he couldn’t help it.
The villagers were obviously early risers. Hopefully they hadn’t gone for a family stroll and happened upon Chloe in their tent. Her nerves were fraught enough without meeting their faces first thing in the morning.
Ben had one place left to check before returning to her. Sparling’s map had tagged a cemetery a few paces north of the church. He couldn’t recall if it fell within the grounds but it was close by. He never thought to ask Chloe about it. But the fact that she hadn’t brought it into the conversation didn’t heighten his optimism.
After retracing his steps through the church’s doorway, Ben sidled in close to its wall where the brambles dragged across his jacket, soaking what was already wet. The stone path that lined the building offered just enough space to reach the northern side of the churchyard. But without the memory of Sparling’s map, he would never have found it.
The tombstones varied in size and shape, with some no larger than a shoebox. Most had sunken at odd angles as though the dead had pulled them down from beneath. Engravings were no longer legible; smoothed out of existence by too many hard winters. Decomposed leaves layered the earth like old skin and everywhere the land was unkempt.
In the cemetery’s farthest corner, there was a low mound of earth, recently patted down; it was more a pit than a grave. Ben didn’t like to look at it. He was ambling by its perimeter – gleaning what shelter he could from the surrounding trees, admiring the bleakness of it all – when his boot crunched on something. Had it not been so hauntingly quiet he might not have heard it.
‘And what have we got here?’ Ben said, pinching the sunglasses from the black soil and, still kneeling, examining them before the brightening sky.
Aviators; Ben used to have a pair just like them. A lens had cracked under his weight but other than that they were in surprisingly good condition. He had found what he didn’t know he was looking for, and in the most unlikely of places.
Ben brushed past the briars and left the church behind him. Its walls sank below the trees as he broke into a light jog down the hill, all the while toying with the why. Why was the church left to fall into ruin? Why were its carvings disfeatured? Why pretend as though it never existed? And now a new question presented itself. Why, if others had been to Tír Mallacht before them, did no record of the place survive?
Dawn had broken when Ben reached the field. He rested on its wall for a moment to catch his breath, waiting for the shapeless colours to fade from his vision. Something gluey had leeched onto his eyelid. He smeared it away only to realise that his jacket was polka-dotted in that same slime he had splashed through like a clumsy foal. He looked to their campsite. The tent was still up. He’d hoped that Chloe would have been ready to go.
The sun was lost to the muddied sky, but its light signalled their departure. They were already behind time thanks to his little solo outing. He felt bad for having left Chloe alone, especially considering how freaked out she’d been the night before.
He stopped dead when he rounded the side of their tent. One of its sides had been slashed open. Ben crept over to where its nylon flapped like a flag in the breeze and peered inside. Their rucksacks were in its corner. But there was no Chloe. The sleeping bags had been rolled and packed. Their belongings had been tidied away, awaiting his return, but he had been too late.
Nu hadn’t walked alone. The villagers must have returned. They had crawled – stooped and twisted – from their hovels, in search of those that didn’t belong, and they had found Chloe.
Had she heard their approach? Did her dawning consciousness expect Ben to zip open the tent, only to watch in horror – trapped on all sides – as their silhouettes darkened the maiden light of day.
Ben knew they had followed them to the campsite. And still he had left her. A ball of worry rose in the back of his throat, like some gristle he couldn’t keep down.
He needed to get help.
Ben kneaded his fingers into his temples, trying to think, but ultimately he just found himself staring into space. He had no clue how to get home. And his phone battery wouldn’t last long enough to guide him back as far as the bells. That is to assume its GPS still worked. Without Chloe, he wasn’t just alone, Ben was utterly and hopelessly lost.
‘Morning, Benny Boy,’ Chloe said, approaching him from the trees. ‘Where’d you go to?’
The sudden sight of her startled him more than her absence. His legs felt weak.
‘Where did you go?’ he gasped, the panic venting out of him like a balloon deflating.
‘I was taking a pee over in the trees.’
She looked spent. Her eyes were at half rest and she carried herself as though still cold.
‘What happened to our tent?’ he asked.
‘I’m not taking that thing down in the rain,’ she replied, fixing her parka’s hood tight around her head. ‘I haven’t the energy. And there’s no chance I’m leaving an expensive piece of gear like that behind for the Tír Mallachts. I’d burn it if it weren’t pissing down.’
Ben just stared at her. You don’t even realise the fright you gave me.
‘So, where’d you go?’ she repeated.
He produced the sunglasses from his pocket and held them out to her.
‘I found these in the graveyard.’
She examined them in both hands, drawing them right up to her eyes as if searching for some clue he had overlooked. Ben watched those smooth lips pout in deep but inconclusive thought. Eventually, her head lifted, and that wicked smile was back where it belonged.
‘This,’ she said, holding the sunglasses up, ‘is huge.’
‘I know, right? It means that we’re not the first to come here.’
‘It means,’ she replied, handing them back, ‘that everyone has been lying to us. And you found them in the graveyard?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘just on the ground, as if somebody dropped them by accident.’
‘There’s only one type of person who would hang out in a graveyard.’
‘And who’s that?’
‘Archaeologists,’ she replied with a wink. ‘I told you I wasn’t the first one.’
10
The rucksack was back on Ben’s shoulders. It was a part of him now, like the pain and the cold, and that second skin of mud that seemed to grow back whenever he wiped himself clean. Another blast of rain rendered him blind, like wet splinters against his face. The once crisp leaves were as mulch, all mixed into a gritty quicksand that never settled. The rainwater had soaked the earth overnight, fattening it to its brim. Now it flooded in unseen pools hidden beneath the tall grasses.
When they reached the treeline, Chloe grabbed the tripwire and wrenched it back and forth. Even amidst the wind and the rain, the bells’ toll was ear-splitting. A few of them fell like coconuts amidst the droplets; their rusty shells silenced on impact. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look back at Ben. It was an act of catharsis – a clamorous declaration to the world that they were leaving and they sure as hell wouldn’t be coming back.
There was no banter between them. No smiles. No excitement to bolster their spirits. Not this time.
Ben could see Chloe’s backpack bobbing in the distance, swaying as the wind whipped around her. They had set out before either one of them could speak of the prior night. No pedestal was given to common sense. Ben wondered if she’d drawn parallels to the little girl’s story. It was all superstitious nonsense, of course, probably invented to keep their children indoors after dark. Folk tales were a cruel breed, always relying on fear to hammer home their message. But Ben knew how easily they were believed, even by those who should have known better. People yearned for the impossible. They would sooner trust their lives to magic than face the ennui of reality.
Ben had an aunt once, Patricia. A self-professed clairvoyant with a keen eye for future happenings. Hers was the classic Nostradamus style of premonition – spinning riddles so loose that hindsight could wrap them around any event and say they fit. She was his father’s only sibling and a black leaf on the family tree that always looked out of place. Patricia had cameoed in Ben’s childhood; a handful of encounters, each one tinged with crystals and vague, poetic ramblings. And yet if memories were sand slipping through Ben’s fingers, then Aunt Patricia was the rock that sank into his palm. He could still feel its weight, even after all those years.
Patricia had lived and died in black. Ben recalled those long, floor-sweeping skirts swishing around him like a hundred whispered voices. Whenever he did see her feet, they were always bare, even when it rained, when kids knew to wear shoes. Her lipstick was the darkest he’d ever seen, and her mouth so slender that its colour always bled onto the skin. The woman’s hair had prematurely greyed. It draped down to her waist in lifeless, silver strands, and framed her face like a cowl. She wasn’t old then, and she wasn’t old when she passed away.
Both parents regarded Patricia as a nuisance. Ben remembered hearing his mother refer to “that woman” in the days prior to his aunt’s arrival on their doorstep. He had innocently wondered why they kept on forgetting her name. Whenever she was visiting, every window in the house was left ajar, even in winter. And so Ben learned to relocate his toys to the fireplace, where his fingers didn’t ache from the cold. It was as though instead of washing her clothes, Aunt Patricia simply hung them over some smoking sage to purify the stains. No room escaped her odour and it would hang in the air for days after.
Being an only child with too few friends, Ben was scared of most things. He’d crept downstairs after his bedtime one night and caught a glance of Jaws on television. Quint was coughing up blood, staring down at where his legs should have been. Of course, it had to be that scene. Ben’s parents became aware of his nocturnal movements some hours later, when they were called to his room to cleanse its shadows of sharks.
Aunt Patricia didn’t inspire the same terror as Jaws. Not initially. She was just different to what Ben was used to, and so he was more wary than he was afraid. It was as though the woman chose to accentuate her eccentricities whenever he was watching. She would glide across the floor with arms aloft by her sides like some wind-up ballerina. Her right hand habitually held something that she would rub with her thumb, usually a stone or a piece of jewellery. Ben had once seen her clutching one of his toys – a Transformer, its body half-humanoid and half-tank, stolen away before it could fully commit to either form. He hadn’t the courage to rescue it.
