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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Geoff Duck

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189 pages

English

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What would you do if you lost your wife and kids and somebody took away your job in the company you'd started? If there was nothing left of your old life and your new one held only solitude and isolation? And you shut yourself away. You became a pariah. People hated and despised you, and they feared you with good reason. And then you found something that shouldn't have been there, that you couldn't explain. An ancient relic from a forgotten age of witchcraft and superstition, but ultimately from a time when the natural world was a part of the way we lived. And you thought that someone should know about it because it just might change everything. For ever. What would you do? Geoff Duck's protagonist is that failed Tech entrepreneur who retreats to the family's holiday home in rural North Devon when things go pear-shaped; who endures breakdown and seclusion for twenty years until he chances upon the mysterious artefact that he realises has lain untouched for half a millennium.This novel explores what happens when you have too much time on your hands for your own good. It looks at disconnects with society, with nature, with traditional ways and perhaps with sanity as the protagonist attempts to unravel the true meaning of what he has found and reconcile it with the modern world.

Sujets

Thriller

Psychological thriller

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	11 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838598587
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Geoff Duck

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

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Contents
How dark is dark?

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty one
twenty two
twenty three
twenty four
twenty five
twenty six
twenty seven
twenty eight
twenty nine
thirty
thirty one
thirty two
thirty three
thirty four
thirty five

epilogue
author’s note
How dark is dark?
On this June night there are pinprick stars showing in the west; a tenuous moon skulks behind a grumbling, crawling cloud. There are no lights in the landscape. No lamps behind cottage shutters to give even a flicker of flame. No comforting trail to home. No harbinger of dawn in these early hours.
To eyes that have become accustomed to the deep blackness there are milky silhouettes of distant moors on the horizon and outlines of hedgerow thickets in nearby fields, but under woodland trees with their serried canopies of lush leaves there is barely any penetration, only occasional lonely, mottled moonbeams. If you concentrated and you were patient, you could discern your hand in front of you, follow its movement and just about count your fingers. Perhaps you couldn’t see around you, but you would be instinctively aware of the branches and the thorns and the brambles and the nettles closing in, their perilous presence pressed on you by a sort of ephemeral and elusive tension you can feel on your skin, and through your skin, that you could not properly describe to a stranger to these parts in words he would understand.
Deep countryside, indeed.
This night is still and warm and a brittle dryness in the air has coated the dead leaves of last year and has given them a satisfyingly delicate crispness that whispers when disturbed by paw or hoof or claw or shoe.
When there is no wind to warp the boughs of the trees there are sounds that reach your ears from far, far away and from under your foot in equal measure. Some miles distant on the other side of the valley a farm dog is barking at a shadow, a little closer a tawny owl is calling plaintively to its mate in a melancholy aria. A toad gurgles and throbs in a muddy ditch and a harried shrew runs for its life.
In this English woodland on this particular summer night there is a faint but distinct shuffling that to the experienced ear suggests the unsteady trudge of two adult human males. They are coming closer to a rocky clearing in the trees where the straining moonlight bathes the scrub with an insipid grey mask. They are trying to be silent, these men, but it’s not really working. Every step they take breaks another fragile stick or shifts around the desiccated leaves. The red deer that were grazing on young shoots just a moment before are long gone and there are countless pairs of eyes, all shapes, sizes and colours, fixated on the two shadows from the safety of the darkness. Everything in the wood knows they are coming. They’ve known since the first warning call. The foxes and the badgers and the rest. They have things under control.
The men are stooped and drawn. It’s obvious they don’t want to be there. And they have their heads covered on this stifling night. They are not happy bunnies. They aren’t speaking. If it were daylight, an observer would notice that the men’s expressions tell of apprehension and foreboding and of a sort of primal terror. A visceral dread that is gnawing at the bowels of their souls. But it’s not daylight, and the men are keeping their thoughts safely wrapped up in their own minds in the inky murk of the night. Their torments are their own.
Then more silhouettes. They appear from nowhere. There are no words of greeting or acknowledgement. They settle on a fallen tree and wait. They know the time is almost upon them.
Even the owl is cowed.
It is as if the animals and the birds and the insects and all the slithering things, even the trees and the creepers and the fungi, in fact all living things in the wood and some things that were once living, are holding their breath, waiting for … what? The moon comes and goes and the woodland scents, pungent and fragrant and rank, they waft and mingle with the reek of sweat and the mineral tang of anxiety and fear.
There is lurching and reeling among the sitters, hesitant and uncertain as the inevitable looms near.
Abruptly and without warning, bodies collapse untidily on the mossy floor of the wood and others crouch and bend and double up, foetus-like where they sit. There is no calling out or moaning. No theatricals. These guys are practiced. They knew it was coming. The ones who are left on the bough are swaying gently as if taken by a breeze. It is eerily quiet. Nothing stirs, only a faint burble of water trickling somewhere close.
There is a rustling in the undergrowth behind the tree and something is coming through in a clumsy paroxysm of commotion. Whatever it is, it isn’t trying to be quiet. And just as it breaks cover from the brush, another cloud shrouds the moon and the thing becomes indistinct and unfathomable but it’s like the forest has come alive and although there is now a vacant stillness in the air, there are branches that are moving when they shouldn’t be and the ivy and the honeysuckle and the old man’s beard that coils around the limbs of the trees is creeping towards the figures like it does in nightmares and it’s twisting and curling around the men’s arms and legs and engulfing them. It’s all going in their mouths and coming out their noses and they are cloaked in the woodland and have become part of it, and the wood has become part of them. They are the same thing. And now they have become one, there is a quietness again. An immense quietness. It is like the quiet at the beginning of the Earth, before there were things to disturb the tranquillity and the hope. It is another world for a moment. A forgotten world. A natural world. A world at ease, but it feels elusive and vulnerable. It is a fragile thing.
And eventually, there is a stirring from one of the prone figures and a deep guttural sighing and a writhing of unruly limbs and the something that had caused the quietness of the other world and become part of the men is suddenly gone, as if it had never existed at all. It was there, and now it isn’t.
The night noises return. The owl and the dog, and a vixen is screaming at her defiler. A startled pheasant bursts from its roost. The cloying air begins to tremble again and branches in the treetops sway unsteadily and as the moon suddenly frees itself from a passing cloud, it glints menacingly on bright metal and the sickly stench of fresh blood fills the piquant air.

Excerpt from the North Devon Weekly Gazette, dated 19th April, 2119.
Thatch fire destroys historic building.
A fire ripped through the thatched roof of a listed cottage in the village of Crow’s Nymet on Tuesday evening, completely gutting the cob and stone property. Fire crews from nearby Chulmleigh and Barnstaple were called to the scene at around midnight but were unable to save the building which was already well ablaze.
No one was hurt in the fire. A police spokesman told the Gazette that the cottage was used as a holiday let and there was nobody staying there at the time. The cause of the fire is not yet known. Forensic experts have been sifting the ruins for clues as to the source of the blaze, and foul play has not been ruled out.
The owner, Mr Nigel Mills, who lives in The Old Church, told our reporter Mike Brown that he feared it was an arson attack. ‘Church House has had a volatile history’, he said, ‘and tends to be given a wide berth by villagers. Nobody has lived there for a long time’.
In an extraordinary twist, on Thursday morning police investigators took away evidence in a sealed bag that may help to solve a hundred year old mystery that has dogged the house and village for as long as anyone can remember.
Mr Mills said, ‘After the forensic team had left on Wednesday, I was wandering around the charred site looking for clues myself. I found a tin box that had obviously been hidden but was poking through dislodged flags near the fallen chimney breast, and when I opened it, there was a large bundle of papers inside with handwriting on them. There must have been about four hundred sheets. I took the box back to the church and looked through some of the pages. The bits I read didn’t make a lot of sense, but I think it’s incendiary. It’s going to shed some light on a lot of things that have given Crow’s Nymet