Darkwoode (Prologue)
It was Timmy Weston’s turn to knock on the door. He didn’t want to - but Sam insisted. When your best friend is three inches taller, twenty pounds heavier and dressed in a pirate costume that includes a sword that looks suspiciously realistic, it’s best not to argue. And Timmy didn’t want to appear churlish. After all, this might well be the last time he and his three friends went trick-or-treating. They were in Year 6: Sam had already turned eleven, and Elliot and Timmy weren’t far behind. By this time next year, they would be in Templeton High School - and, in all likelihood, dismissing these Halloween japes as beneath them. Why dress up as zombies, vampires, cut-throats and mummies when you could sit at home, play D&D, stuff yourself with as much pizza, coke and popcorn as you liked, and top it off by watching some violent slasher-horror than you’d persuaded your older brother to get for you from the DVD bargain basement bin at Dicky Jenkins, the town’s one and only supermarket? Well - that was the hope - though only Peter Pugh had a brother old enough to pull this stunt; and, unfortunately, Sean Pugh was currently rather more interested in pursuing girls that acceding to the artful demands, however carefully presented, of his younger brother and his nerdy friends.
But for now, it was cold, foggy and damp, and the four friends were standing at the bottom of the drive of Templeton Vicarage.
In the old black-and-white films, with their rather quaint takes on ‘horror’ that Timmy had actually seen, vicarages occasionally featured, alongside Gothic cathedrals in their gargoyled splendour, mist-enshrouded churchyards watched over by gravely-hooting owls, and draughty country churches filled with the sight of guttering candles and the sound of forbidding organ-tones. Set against all those tropes of ecclesiastical terror, Templeton Vicarage was disappointing, to say the least. An architect with a penchant for neoClassicism would perhaps have dismissed it as a hideous monstrosity: but to Timmy there was nothing the least bit monstrous about it - if only! He wouldn’t even have called it ugly. It was just - boring. A fair bit bigger, admittedly, than the pokey council estate house he shared with his mother and two sisters - but otherwise, remarkably similar. He decided to make one last attempt to get out of knocking at this particular residence.
‘I was the one who banged on Vicar Ed’s door last year,’ complained Timmy. ‘Why does it have to be me again?’
‘Cos it’s your turn,’ said Sam. ‘This is the eighth one we’ve done tonight. The rest of us have knocked on two doors each - you’ve only done one. Don’t matter if you knocked it last year. It’s your turn now. Besides,’ he smirked, ‘You like Vicar Ed, don’t you? You’re one of his choir boys, ain’t you?’ He started laughing, and Elliot and Peter joined in.
Timmy’s face flushed, and started to resemble the large pumpkin glowing on the Vicarage doorstep. Quite an accomplishment, considering the skin lightening cream he’d applied to his face to make his vampire costume look more convincing.
‘Piss off!’
He was the only one of the four boys to attend church. He’d actually been thinking about quitting the choir for some time. Nothing to do with anything untoward on the part of Vicar Ed, as Sam was hinting at. He was okay - even if he tried a bit too hard to ‘get with it’ - as he would say. Far too many ‘embarrassing Dad jokes’ - not that Timmy had much idea of what a non-embarrassing Dad, or any kind of father, would actually be like. The only really creepy guy in church was Ernie Hutton - there was something really odd about him, and the way he sat in the choir stalls, wearing his creased, perpetually-lopsided surplice, with a dreamy, faraway expression on his face throughout the service. He used to wander around the town late at night - owl-watching, he would say. Peeping-Ernie, more like. No - the reason Timmy wanted to leave was the fact that choir-practice was held on a Tuesday, at 5 o’clock. This suited the choirmaster and organist, Mr Meeks, perfectly. It did not suit Timmy. Not now that Byker Grove was back on television. It was intolerable.
‘So - you going to do it, shithead? Or what?’ asked Elliot. He tried to look threatening, but without much success. That was Elliot Halliday all over - always talking tough, swearing liberally, trying to show himself as capable and as devil-may-care as Sam Wentworth - yet somehow, always failing. Take his zombie costume, for instance. He had tried to make it as gruesome in appearance as possible: ripped shirt and jeans, fake blood aplenty, carefully-applied makeup suggestive of scarring and rotting flesh. Yet he’d spent most of their evening out thus far complaining about his broken-down trainers, that he’d deliberately wrecked for the occasion, only to find them ridiculously impractical to wear, especially in the rain. That was Elliot in a nutshell.
It was nothing like as absurd as Peter’s. Poor Peter’s choices were always very poor. Last year he had decided to dress up as a ghost - but put the eye-holes in the wrong place, meaning that the back of him was insufficiently covered up, whilst his feet kept tripping up over the dangling front side of the sheet. It never seemed to occur to him to make a new pair of eye-holes. This year’s selection had been worse still. He’d wound himself meticulously in reams and reams of toilet paper, carefully tied together around his ankles, abdomen and forearms. Three minutes of contact with even the light on-off mizzly rain that evening had been sufficient to reduce his costume to an unwearable mulch. He’d discarded it in stages, until only a single sodden sash was left around his waist. It wasn’t just that he was the youngest of them, by a good six months. No, there was something not quite there about Peter. God knows how he was going to survive High School.
‘Course I am,’ scowled Timmy. ‘Just saying - that’s all. Right - here goes.’ He marched straight up to the door. The beckoning pumpkin gave assurance to Halloween callers that they would be welcome. That wasn’t the case everywhere, of course. Many of the older folk in Templeton would complain bitterly about these ‘unwanted American customs’ creeping in. The kind of women who would never kit out their younger children in new clothes if ready-made hand-me-downs were available from older siblings. And the same kind of men who objected to buying their wives a Valentines card - or flowers for the mantelpiece, come to that. Mean-spirited, penny-pinching. There were plenty of that sort in Templeton.
Some of the very worst were the religious types, of course. Especially with Halloween. ‘Revelling in the works of the Devil, that is!’ they would cry. Vicar Ed would have none of it.
‘There’s no point getting worked up about kids-play,’ he had said in a sermon earlier that year about Beltane, and the revelries of the May. ‘Leaping at every shadow - that’s superstitious nonsense in itself. Templeton is not Summerisle, and we have no fear of Wicker Men here - only foolish minds, and limited imaginations.’
Timmy had asked Sam afterwards what a Wicker Man was. ‘A cool horror film,’ was his reply.
Regardless of the disapproval of his parishioners, on every Halloween Vicar Ed would be waiting behind the front door, with a bucket full of sweets. Sometimes his wife Sarah would be there too, chiding him about the perils of rotting teeth, and gorged stomachs. ‘One handful is quite enough!’ she would say sternly, whilst her husband would chuckle, shaking his head, looking for all the world like a misplaced Santa - dressed from head to toe in black, not scarlet, with a bushy beard that was tinged with only the slightest hint of white.
‘Nonsense, woman,’ he would bellow. ‘There’s plenty more where they came from.’ And then he would start asking the children after the health of their parents, and what their brothers or sisters were up to, and did they have anything else planned for the half-term holiday, and had Great-aunt Mabel had her hip operation yet. Whoever rang the doorbell would get the fiercest interrogation, of course: that was the real reason why Timmy had wanted to avoid the embarrassment of being in pole position for the over-enthusiastic cleric. And always he would end by saying: ‘All Saint’s Day, tomorrow. Our patronal festival. There’s a service in the evening. Hope to see you there. Happy Halloween!’ Except this year, Halloween was on a Saturday, so All Saints would be on a Sunday - and would be celebrated, with extra ceremony, on the Sunday morning. Timmy knew this because the past week’s choir practice had been especially long. Mr Meeks had been trying out a new, and rather difficult anthem, with results that could not, in all charity, be described as anything other than ‘mixed’. Timmy was dreading the next day. At least his friends would not be there to witness another disastrous patronal festival - the third since Timmy had joined the choir.
Curious. There was no answer at the front door. Timmy reached up and rang the doorbell again. Still, nothing.
‘Why don’t they answer?’ asked Peter.
‘Perhaps they’re hiding,’ said Elliot. ‘Pretending they’re not at home.’
‘Then why are all the lights on?’ reasoned Timmy. ‘Anyway, Vicar Ed wouldn’t do that. He likes Halloween - even if most of the Church people don’t.’
Elliot shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whatever. Fuck it. They’re not answering, so it’s got to be a trick.’ He turned to their leader. ‘You got the eggs and flour, Sam?’ He pointed at the backpack flung over the eldest boy’s shoulder.
‘No,’ declared Sam firmly. ‘Timmy’s right. This ain’t like the Vicar. And even if he’s out, what about his wife? Anyway, their car’s still here. Look!’
Without warning, a piercing scream filled the air. The boys froze momentarily in alarm, then looked at one another in turn, wide-eyed. Sam’s right hand instinctively went to the hilt of his sword, and half drew it from its sheath.
‘What the f-?’ cried Elliot; but before he could finish, a second scream rang out, even louder than the first. It was clear now where the shrieks were coming from. Across the road, from the Vicarage, was All Saint’s Church. But even against the backdrop of the now steadily-increasing patter of raindrops, the boys could tell that those harrowing sounds had come not from the Church, from the graveyard that surrounded it.
‘Come on!’ shouted Sam. ‘We gotta help whoever’s in trouble.’ Without even looking to see if the others were following, he charged across the road, drawing his cutlass as he did so. Impetuous, foolhardy, yes - but utterly fearless too - that was Sam Wentworth. That was why he was Timmy’s best friend. Why he - he gulped as the thought entered his head, unbidden - why he loved him. Though Sam would laugh at him, and call him a poofter if he had ever said as much, in so many words. Where Sam led, Timmy would always follow. He hurried across the road, trying to catch up to the older boy. Elliot followed just behind, cursing as he did so, limping along in his ill-considered footwear. Bringing up the rear, only following out of fear of being left alone, came Peter.
By the time Timmy caught up with Sam, he was standing by the notice board advertising the next day’s patronal festival service. The boy had sheathed his sword - for despite appearances, it really was just a bit of plastic, and of little practical use in an emergency. Instead he had fished a torch out of his backpack, and was shining it first down the church path, then across to the right where the garden of remembrance filled with cremated remains lay; then finally to the left, scanning the oldest part of the graveyard, filled with leaning lichen-encrusted graves with barely-decipherable lettering, overgrown with weeds, and tangled thickets of ivy, brambles, and unkempt shrubbery. Also scattered around this part of the graveyard were a number of gnarled old trees; elders and oaks, rowans and hawthorns, an enormous and venerable yew tree. And then there was the great horse chestnut tree, which only a few weeks ago Timmy and his friends had been foraging beneath, searching for the best conkers for their schoolyard contests.
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree
It wasn’t anything that might have been lying in the decaying litter of autumn leaves beneath the chestnut tree that was held now in the shaky spotlight of Sam Wentworth’s torch; nor was it the figure of the sobbing woman standing nearby. The boys stood and looked, in disbelief, at the nightmarish sight before them. This was no video nasty, though Timmy. This was real.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the last bit of Peter’s mummy outfit finally come adrift, and fall to the ground. He fancied - though he was probably imagining it - that he could hear the soft sound of the trickle of urine as poor Peter Pugh pissed his pants. He could certainly hear the voice of Elliot whispering, under his breath: ‘No, fuck - no, fuck - no…’ repeating that same pointless phrase, over and over again. And then Timothy Weston felt the strong, strangely father-like - or what he imagined a father would feel like - grip of his wisest of friends; resting his right arm across his shoulder, reassuringly, whilst with his outstretched left arm, now no longer trembling, he held his torch steady. The focus of its light remained firmly fixed upon that which was hanging by a thick rope from one of the outspread arms of that chestnut tree.
There, suspended from one of the thickest and firmest boughs, no doubt specially selected for this task, was the lifeless body of the Revd Edgar Dyson, Vicar of Templeton with Morrington with Llanfihangel Gilfach.