Last Stand in Lychford Page 2

  So it was all going to come down to just the two of them, wasn’t it? And it didn’t help that Lizzie was acting all weird since Autumn had told her about Luke. It had been a mistake to mention the sex. Still, she hadn’t anticipated this level of . . . whatever it was.

  No. She had to concentrate. The weeks of waiting were ticking away toward . . . what? When would “they” come? To be something solid that she could fight?

  Weeks ago, Autumn had put the . . . pieces of Finn . . . in several bags and carried them to her shop. They were now in a cupboard in the work room. She had tried to research the problem, had tried some divinations, but she hadn’t found any answers.

  Luke, since he’d gained extra senses like the rest of the town had, had spent hours with her in that work room. He’d been delighted with immersing himself in the details of her world. She’d been in turns pleased about that and then perversely irritated by the strength of his interest. This was her thing. In the end, it was her responsibility. And he’d been neglecting his own work. Almost uniquely, in this stupid town.

  The doorbell rang. Again. And it still wasn’t opening time. Autumn tiredly looked over, but saw Sunil Mehra, the pensioner who ran the town’s Indian restaurant. He was carrying a shopping bag. He had on his face a look of sadness and anger that he was just about containing.

  Oh God. Sunil hadn’t been here for Judith’s funeral, hadn’t been here for the rain.

  Autumn quickly got to her feet, unlocked the door, and let him in. “Sunil, I’m so sorry, we tried to find you.”

  “I’m sure you did. This is what I get for going on holiday with no phone. I knew she was old. I knew . . . please, what happened to Judith? And what are my staff telling me about this . . . rain? Why has everyone lost their marbles?”

  Autumn closed the shop again and led him into the back room. This was going to be a difficult conversation.

  * * *

  Her name was Zoya Boyko, and she was desperate. She was desperate as she walked her daughter, Jas, to school that morning, through the lovely streets of the market town, past the lovely fields of the Cotswolds, holding her daughter’s hand, repeating all the things she liked to repeat. “Go Jetters go, go go go. We need to go to school. Go Jetters go, Mummy!”

  “Go Jetters go,” Zoya said, keeping her voice upbeat. Jas couldn’t pick up on how a lot of other people felt, but she usually could tell, immediately and deeply, when Mummy was showing signs of worry, of weakness. The little girl would fret about it, maybe melt down, might not even get to school, and today Zoya really needed Jas to get to school. They walked through riches, every morning, past houses with gates and driveways. They weren’t part of what they walked through. Zoya and Jas lived in “the backs” of Lychford, in a room in a flat, rented out by Mitch, who was nice enough, but who had troubles of his own. If Zoya couldn’t find the money to pay his rent this month, as he’d told her when she’d been a week late last time, he’d straight away have to find someone to take her place. He had a mortgage to pay.

  The job at the shop wouldn’t get her enough, not after the days off she’d had to take for her daughter. She wasn’t on the sort of contract where they’d pay her for time off, and nor would she ever be, not with Jas. This month she’d be about fifty pounds short. What could she sell that’d be worth fifty pounds? But she couldn’t sell something every month. She’d already started looking for a cheaper place, but there was nowhere that cheap, not around here, where Jas’s dad had brought them and left them. And Jas was so settled in the school here, actually making progress, changing for the better for the first time, thanks to her wonderful teaching assistant, Charlie. They couldn’t lose that. Zoya wouldn’t let her lose that.

  She made herself think about lunch. Lunch was when Zoya had an hour to herself and could read her books. She didn’t like to buy them, not even from charity shops, so she was making her way through everything Mum had left her. She wasn’t sure if some of them were stories or meant to be real, but they made her head spin, took her away from here. On some mornings when she walked the complicated way in to school that Jas insisted on, she ended up thinking about what she read, and for a while she could ignore the money sitting all around her and felt instead the world tipped at an angle, like people were watching, good people, from places above her and under her, from horizons she couldn’t see. It was as if part of her was being kept from her, kept in safety, just over there. Just beyond her reach. Some days it felt like a specific place, like she could turn her head until she was facing it and walk there, somewhere just to the north. It was like the feeling when she’d been at university and a new term was starting, that feeling of being about to learn, about to grow, about to see that new horizon.

  She liked all these feelings, they were the only comfort she had, but they also scared her, because they were yet another sign of how apart she was from these townsfolk. How weird was the pressure making her, how much was she losing it because of how things were around here? In the last few weeks, a collective insanity seemed to have gripped this weird, privileged, English place. Everyone was talking about magic. Everyone was saying there had been a rain, a rain which had somehow penetrated through roofs and windows, that had given everyone the power to feel something they had not previously felt. These people were all boasting about it, and all nervous about it at the same time. It was like they’d gained yet another special level of privilege. Like they’d all been given a new leaf blower or something. But they seemed to expect it to be taken from them, or expected to have to pay for it, for once in their lives, and that thought scared them, so they didn’t accept it, they moved swiftly on.

  Many of them talked about seeing weird or wonderful things. They’d suddenly point, look, on the hillside over there! But there was never anything to be seen. And then they’d say no, there couldn’t have been anything, not to worry.

  These English were crazy.

  But also it was all like a fairy tale from the town where Zoya had been born, from Odessa in the Ukraine. It was the sort of nonsense her grandma would have come out with, that her mother had told Zoya was all right in its place, but not to talk to other children about, because it might make them laugh at her family. But here, now, the school had even been talking about it in assembly. They had scared Jas for nothing, for this collective power trip. But, no, she mustn’t think badly of them, even that couldn’t take away how much they’d done for the little girl.

  Oh God, they were both stuck between so many things.

  Zoya had been in town when this rain was supposed to have come. She had been getting Jas ready for school as usual that morning. She had put her hand out, felt the drops, decided on a hooded coat for her daughter. It had taken her a while to even remember these everyday events when people had started spouting this bullshit. There had been no great revelation for her, no feeling of being able to see new things. Perhaps this was a Brexit thing, magic only for the real British! Zoya wondered as she got to the school gates if perhaps there was something concrete behind it all, pesticides in the air or something, a mass delusion, and the wind had just been in the wrong direction for her house. But the first she’d heard about any of this had been from her neighbours, so the wind seemed to have been pretty selective. And now she thought of that, she was worrying about Jas having breathed it in. On top of everything else. Her daughter’s lack of communication was such that it would be hard to tell if she had. It wasn’t like Zoya was going to start asking her about something that could scare her so much.

  “Please take one.” That was Mrs. Cotton, the deputy head, who was standing at the gate, giving out sheets of paper to all the parents.

  Zoya took the piece of paper as she ushered Jas into the playground and read it as her daughter dutifully went to stand in line, ahead of all the other children, who were still playing. The paper was a list of forthcoming meetings about “the new situation.”

  She felt so angry. All the time. This delusion again. When she couldn’t afford her rent. Could she maybe mak
e some money by telling a newspaper about this? It didn’t seem likely. It was all too odd. She could hear herself saying the words: “These bloody English seem to believe . . .” But how many of these newspapers would listen to her after she’d started like that, even? The stupidity, the dividing nonsense that had driven her from where she’d grown up, had followed her here. It had stuck her here. There was no learning to be had, not like she dreamed about. There was instead a lack of it, a turning away from it. And there seemed to be nothing she could do to make a better life for herself and her daughter, no way to get away from it. Something, surely, had to change.

  She glared at the teacher, crumpled up the paper, and went to join Jas at the line.

  * * *

  Lizzie had just got up from her desk at the Vicarage after having a hack at her ridiculously mundane email backlog and was on her way to get a strong cup of flavoured coffee, when her phone rang. “Listen, it’s err . . . nobody wanted to bother you, but . . . I think there might be, I mean I know you’ve been saying something might be going to happen and, sorry, trying to speak around my new false teeth . . .”

  Lizzie recognised the voice of Lydia Bates, one of her congregation, but just as she was about to ask what was going on, she heard the phone on the other end being taken, perhaps forcibly, by another hand.

  “We can’t get out of town,” said Carrie Anne Christopher, the chair of the Lychford Festival.

  “What?” said Lizzie, feeling a sudden awful chill in her stomach.

  “It’s just started, just this last few minutes. I wanted to go to the garage to get a few bits, but there’s this . . . something. I can’t explain it. We’re on the hill at the top of London Road. I’m going to try to get a bit closer. There are lots of people here. Oh. Oh God. It’s horrible. You have to come. Sorry, I have to deal with things here.” And she rang off.

  Lizzie tried Autumn, left a voicemail message, then called Shaun, Judith’s police officer son. “I’m already heading over,” he said, his voice sounding like he was running, “but I can’t get any backup. I can’t seem to get reception for any calls outside the town. Meet you there, Reverend.”

  Lizzie grabbed her coat and ran out of the house.

  London Road was a one-way route out of town that had been the best Lychford could do in terms of traffic calming. It was wooded on both sides, forested inclines leading down to the road as it made its way uphill. As she approached, she could see cars backed up all along the road. The drivers had mostly got out to talk to each other.

  “Shaun jogged through here a few minutes ago,” called a young man Lizzie recognised as Chris the builder, who was still in the cab of his van. “He said he’d told the ones at the back to turn around and go home, but nothing’s changing, so maybe more have joined them. And listen to this.” He switched on his cab radio and turned up the volume so Lizzie could hear. It was just static, wherever he went on the dial. “Nothing on the digital either,” he said. “So, this is probably nothing to worry, right?”

  “No,” said Lizzie, unable to stop herself from letting her pent-up irritation show, “no, it probably is something to worry about.”

  Chris’s dad, Paul, stepped out of the other door of the van and came around to see her, a look of urgent concern on his face. She was aware that a crowd was gathering, looking to her. “Is this it, then?” said Paul. “Is this them?”

  “It could well be,” said Lizzie. “I won’t know until I get to the front.”

  She marched off before they could start offering everyday alternatives for what it might be. She was distantly pleased to sense a number of them follow her.

  Some of the drivers the crowd passed, mostly the ones who’d stayed with their vehicles, were laughing or just annoyed, carefree compared to the more complicated, anxious verging on guilty reactions of the locals. These were the ones who’d been caught in the jam when they were just passing through town, she guessed. There was quite a division between the locals and those from outside.

  Finally, they got to the front of the traffic jam, near the top of the hill, where Carrie Anne and Mrs. Caversham-Thoroughgood of the Women’s Institute were trying to hold back a growing crowd of people who were variously annoyed, disputing, starting to get scared. Most of them stepped back to let Lizzie pass, leaving a few, the nonlocals, to stare in puzzlement at what a vicar might be bringing to this situation. “Let her through,” called Mrs. Caversham-Thoroughgood, her voice commanding with the volume required of a hundred junior gymkhanas.

  “Thank God you’re here,” said Carrie Anne. “I think this might be it.”

  Lizzie was grateful to find one of the few people who’d taken her warnings to heart right at the centre of this. “Thank you,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “A lot of weirdness,” said Carrie Anne. “Your department. Shaun’s on top of it as much as anyone is.”

  Lizzie saw that Shaun, in uniform but as always looking slightly out of his depth, was laying out cones across the road. Up ahead, in front of the line he’d already put down, a small car was steaming in the middle of the tarmac. It seemed to have been cut in two just back from its bonnet. The front half, which lay several feet down the road, seemed to have a small electrical fire going on. But what immediately stood out was the person inside. Half of him was lying forward against the steering wheel in the front half of the car, a mass of blood. She could see through the back window of the rear half that the rest of the man was slumped back against his seat. There was just enough of a human shape left to ascertain that he’d been cut in half along with his vehicle.

  Lizzie crossed herself and muttered a prayer for the man and for all their protection. The crowd shouldn’t be seeing this. But maybe it was what they needed. “What did this?” she asked.

  “No idea,” said Shaun, coming over. “But whatever it is, it’s still there. Look.” He picked up a branch from the road and threw it. It cracked backward toward him when it hit a point near the bisection of the car and driver. It landed back at his feet, smashed into pieces.

  The crowd cried out. The noise children make when they’re suddenly, genuinely scared. Behind that sound, immediately drowning it out, there were angry shouts too. A lack of understanding from the out of towners. Someone had started to sob.

  “Looks deliberate,” said Matty from the yard, who was sitting on the front bumper of his concrete mixer lorry. There was a distant, empty look on his face. “I mean, I were right behind him. I saw something I couldn’t really see but that I could, you know, feel, come down from above him, straight through. Like an axe coming down. I slammed on the brakes, or I’d have been right into it. Fuck of a coincidence—sorry, Vicar—if he’d just happened to be there when it zapped down, like. For it to start up or appear or whatever just as he went through. When he were just on that line.” He shook his head. “This one behind me nearly ran into me.”

  “But I didn’t,” said a lorry driver with a Dutch accent. “What is this? Why the vicar?” Lizzie pushed back the silly annoyance she always felt about people apologising for swearing when she was around. And she mustn’t be all high and mighty about these people being forced to deal with what they’d refused to acknowledge before. They were going to need to pull together, and quickly.

  “What can you see here?” she pointed to the road and listened as the Dutch driver described the scene pretty much as they could see it. Except what he’d seen of the accident itself had made him think a tree had fallen. He was, however, puzzled about where that tree was now. He couldn’t feel anything in the air in front of him, like Lizzie could now that she’d been told something was there, but yes, he had seen the branch fly backward and smash. He now thought this was probably some sort of secret weapon test. He had many ideas about how this connected to various conspiracy theories he’d heard about.

  Lizzie recognised a non-rained-on mind struggling to deal with the realities of life in Lychford. That was to be expected. At least he and the others like him weren’t likely to try to walk thro
ugh this invisible wall. She looked back to the crowd. “Did anyone know the victim?”

  “It’s Lacey Beresford’s lad,” said Paul, quietly. “He’d have been off to work at Mott’s farm.”

  There was a general murmur of grief. Lizzie had to put that aside for the moment. “We should see how far this wall goes,” she said.

  Several of them went with her, and several more headed off the other pavement, so they went up into the woods on both sides. The locals were talking and talking, still trying to deflect the reality of this, some of them even starting to agree with that truck driver, despite what they knew, despite what they could feel. Lizzie discovered that this cutting line was marked in the woods by sliced rows of trees, some of them bisected, each half of them having fallen in a different direction. At least it was pretty easy to see where the wall was. “Just as well,” said Shaun when she shared that thought aloud, “I don’t have enough cones.”

  They kept walking, a hundred metres or so. The wall continued all the way along. The smell of cut timber was everywhere on the wind. A text from Carrie Anne in the other party confirmed that it kept going in the other direction too. Lizzie brought up Google Maps to check her suspicions. Only the saved version was available, nothing from the server outside the town, but it was enough to confirm that the wall was an arc, part of a circle.

  She and those with her jogged back to the crowd at the traffic jam. The locals and outsiders were arguing now, fear turning into anger. She shouted for them to listen. They all turned to look at her, the locals telling those from outside to shut up. “This is enemy action,” she said. “This is what we’ve been telling you about. They’ve locked us in.”

  * * *

  It had taken an hour and three cups of tea, and Autumn had purposefully ignored all the urgent noises coming from her phone while the conversation was going on, but at the end of it, Sunil seemed to understand what she was trying to tell him. He let out a long breath. “This explains a lot,” he said. “This is definitely what my staff now believe every word of. I suppose I believe it too. What choice do I have? It’s everything Judith always talked about, all of which I assumed was metaphor, or old age. I just wish . . .” He put a hand to his brow and took a moment to control himself. “I wish I had been here for her funeral. I wish I could have said goodbye.”