Cunning Folk: A Folk Horror Thriller from the Author of No One Gets Out Alive and The Ritual Read online

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  Cunning Folk

  by Adam L. G. Nevill

  Ritual Limited

  Devon, England

  MMXXI

  Cunning Folk

  by Adam L. G. Nevill

  Published by Ritual Limited

  Devon, England

  MMXXI

  [email protected]

  www.adamlgnevill.com

  Cunning Folk © Adam L. G. Nevill

  This Edition © Ritual Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email addresses above.

  Cover artwork by Samuel Araya

  Cover design by Simon Nevill

  eBook formatting and conversion by Formatted Books

  ISBN 978-1-8383789-2-9 [Mobi]

  ISBN 978-1-8383789-3-6 [ePub]

  Cunning Folk / Adam L. G. Nevill. —1st ed.

  ‘Certain it is that the Pagan divinities lasted much longer than we suspect … Who knows whether they do not exist to this day?’ Vernon Lee (‘Dionea’)

  For Will, Ash and Elisa.

  Contents

  Before the Beginning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Story Notes: About This Horror

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Before the Beginning

  A motionless man stands alone in the hall, the foundations of his thick legs sunk into dusty boots. Bleak electric light illumines a galaxy of emulsion, pebble-dashing the grey overalls that are stretched taut over the barrel of his middle. His fingers, stained as if by a baker’s flour, droop from the weight of the tools they barely hold. A hammer within the unclenching left fist. Suspended from the idle digits of the right hand, a small axe.

  Below eyes stricken wide with terror, a tear of cream paint dries upon a cheekbone. Enlarged to voids, his pupils absorb the sight of what hangs from the ceiling of the hall.

  A noose.

  Beneath the newly painted ceiling, below the rope’s end, his own collapsible aluminium steps have also been repositioned to create a scaffold for the condemned. Folded white dust-sheets fashion a path from the kitchen door to the ladder.

  DIY gallows.

  Tools and the scattered detritus of plaster dust, timber offcuts and tongues of dirty wallpaper litter floorboards blackened by age. One half of the hallway is pristine and issues the sheen of fresh paint. The other half hasn’t heard the whisk of a paintbrush, or felt the slop of a paper-hanger’s paste, in decades. A house of halves. The present and past huddled together.

  The loop and knot of the noose are fashioned from the white electrician’s cable of the light fitting – his cable that he threaded yesterday . But this man did not tie the end of this wire into a noose. Nor does he know when it was fashioned. He lives alone. But other hands made certain that the cable intended to bring light into this reception area now serves to usher a terrible darkness into the space. And in the house he’d hoped to call home, before the threshold he’s secured with crossed planks of wood, the slack loop of wire beckons him to bow for a fitting.

  An urge to blink the sight away, or close his eyes, is overcome by the same compulsion that bid him leave the kitchen, walk in here and behold this . One foot simply followed the other before caution and restraint fired the first warning shots.

  With growing difficulty, the man’s lips move to ask a question of himself, or the house, or the gods. ‘Inside? How…’ And then, as if to his invisible executioners, a simple, piteous entreaty dies inches from his tongue. ‘Please.’

  A brief struggle commences within his frantic thoughts before his body jolts rigid. And like a man who finds himself upon ice, spider-webbing beneath his heels, he stumbles forward.

  One grubby hand twitches, drops the hammer. Bang. From the second hand, the axe handle slips. Clump. And inexorably, against their own volition, his feet scuff the white path of linen and carry his heavy body onwards.

  Towards the metal steps that climb to the noose, he goes unwillingly. Face bulging the purple of kidneys, he is a prisoner who strains desperately to free himself. His own will is bound by a knot of iced rope that ratchets yet tighter to tug him forward. To the noose.

  Begrudgingly, he mounts the metal stairs. All three unto the summit.

  Tinker-creak. Tinker-creak.

  No louder than the sound of air squeezed from a valve in a rubber tube, his voice wheezes, ‘Not this… I’ll go… Promise.’

  Under duress from his shifting weight, as he assumes the required position upon the platform, the gallows moan. And his hands, which might as well belong to another man, carefully collar his neck with the noose. They tuck the pebble of the knot under his jaw. Then tighten the cord about his bristly throat and nape.

  As he powerlessly watches his first foot venture out and hover in thin air, the ladder’s protests subside as if the steps themselves are holding their breath.

  With one foot on and one foot off the trapdoor, a whimper escapes the man’s thin lips. His first boot prods out further and plants its weight upon empty space, pulling the second boot into the very last stride these legs will ever take.

  A vegetable sound of twisting fibres obliterates the silence of the h
all. A trickle of plaster-dust sugar coats the scalp of the hanged man.

  Screened upon the pale wall he painted expertly, his shadow kicks a jig. Steel toecaps rake the air, rubber soles run across nothing. A foot then sweeps in a half-circle and knocks the steps. And as he turns upon his throttling tether of sealed, waterproof cable, his engorged face drifts. Within what remains of his eyesight, now darkening from the pressure of the blood that cannot escape his skull, a pale smudge disinters itself from the wall near the kitchen door.

  Within the shadows, inking the waters of the dangling man’s vision, most of the intruder’s form remains indistinct. But what can be seen steps birdlike and probing. Then stops. A thing girlishly thin and chalky in half-light. Only the head is dark. And tatty and showing too many teeth.

  Standing upon one leg, the intruder points at the hanged man.

  The momentum of his soundlessly stamping boots turns the hanged man about-face until he confronts the threshold once more, so recently barricaded to keep them out. His final kick disperses a shower of urine across the bare floor and jerks him around a second time. But this time, what’s left of his sight only glides over bare walls and an empty kitchen. There is no one there. Nothing at all to see before his own light goes out.

  1

  Six months later

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Your turn!’

  Gracey’s head hovers, a pale orb radiating impatience at the edge of Tom’s vision. Behind the tiny features of his daughter’s face, a four-year-old mind is committed to this game of I Spy. A distraction initiated by his wife to counter Gracey’s fidgeting.

  It’s Tom’s turn. Again. Part of being Dad. Taking it for the team. But Tom can’t think of a clue because of a preoccupation with other matters. His wife and daughter are present inside the van, sitting alongside him. But they are akin to passengers standing on a station platform, blurred into the background by a train of fast-moving thoughts, divided into multiple carriages. His attention is split between driving the unfamiliar van, glancing at the satnav to avoid missing the turning to the village, and a mental squall of memories. Recollections threaded with imagined disasters and joyous scenarios of his family’s future in their new home; all blooming, racing, fading, blooming.

  Nor can he explain his distraction to Gracey. His disbelief. His failure to acknowledge the enormity of this moment in their new life that is soon to start in their own home. One they own. Theirs. Home. The word has not carried such power since his own childhood.

  Tom doesn’t feel like himself today and imagines a new persona is required to match his newly acquired status of home-owner. Only he doesn’t know what the role demands.

  Now he has the keys and deeds to the house, he feels as if he has stepped out of a murky room, in which his anxiety obscured every feature and detail. A room he was waiting to leave for a long time. A confined space he’d rented that belonged to someone else. A landlord who might tell him to leave at any time, or charge him even more for occupying the room’s dismal confines. And yet the restless, impatient feeling of waiting to leave that room has also continued into this morning, as if he has only succeeded in stepping into another similar room, in which his anxiety will obscure every feature and detail. All over again.

  Surely, he’ll adjust in time. But, right now, the title of home-owner is incongruous. Comparisons with other life-changing experiences of his past are a poor fit but are all he has to go on. Like meeting Fiona, his wife, whom he’d desired for so long, from afar, before they courted. After he’d finally summoned the courage to ask her out, there had been a long wait for her to contact him and he’d ached with a ghost of abdominal pain. During their first date, when her hand folded into his unselfconsciously, he’d recognised that they were together. She’d charted a new course in his life; one much better than the route he’d floundered upon alone.

  Gracey. A miracle preceded by two years of futile attempts to create a child. Almost giving up and then, nine months later, she was swaddled in white towels and nestled within his arms, blinking milky eyes at him for the first time. He’d never entirely believed he’d ever be a father.

  Dreams coming true. Longing requited.

  But this…

  Somehow, owning a home and no longer renting from the negligent and unscrupulous while living in a state of perpetual compromise and dissatisfaction, had been the hardest thing of all to achieve. Because, money .

  ‘Daddeee! Come! On! Your! Go!’

  ‘How about I go.’ Conciliatory, from Fiona.

  ‘No. It’s Daddy’s go!’

  There was an order to things, rules. Many not written down but existing. Even a four-year-old could tell you that. And in the order of things, he was never destined to be a home-owner. What he’d been through to become one had made him older and more tired than he imagined he could ever be. Just to get here, maybe he’d burned through wires that can never be replaced.

  Now, with the keys in his pocket, so hot and uncomfortable against his thigh, he obsesses about what he must earn to pay tradesmen; and earn to cover the repairs and improvements that he needs to fashion with his own hands to make their home habitable. And he suspects that more of his fusebox is destined to blacken in the year ahead.

  One thing at a time, mate. We’re in.

  Tom distracts himself from himself to make a half-hearted attempt at giving Gracey a clue. ‘Something beginning with…’ He has nothing. His eyes dart behind the windscreen, side window, searching. ‘Beginning with…’

  Gracey tenses, gripped by the desperate importance of guessing before her mum.

  Outside the van a vast, open spread of farmland glides by. But there’s little to provide reasonable clues for his daughter to swipe at. Grass . Fence . Cow . House . Tree . Gate . Road . All of it has already been suggested and guessed. There is nothing else.

  I’ve never seen a soul here. No one shows themselves in the dismal wet fields, patchworked into sections by wire fences. No one toils behind the tufted vestiges of hedgerow. Few birds mark the sky beside the desultory spectre of a crow. As for trees, only spindly copses sprout on higher ground, shorn or shattered into piteous last stands; the woods have been whittled skeletal behind the wire of internment camps, to make room for more empty fields. And cement barns. Telegraph poles. Litter in the roadside ditches. Burst animals on tarmac, smeared, further compressed. Denatured land. Denuded. Scrub grubbed out, scraped away. Ugly and too neat. Empty. Industrial even. Blasted. Nowhere for anything to nest, take root, hide. Green but made desolate by the impact of the nearest settlement’s conquest. These are factory-farmed lowlands orbiting a city. A ring of ice encircling a blackened planet.

  ‘Daddy! Your go!’

  And then they cross the border. To their bit.

  Exactly when they pass from the bleak to the fecund isn’t clear. The B road narrows and some oak branches drape the road for a stretch, darkening the interior of the cab. The route then dips, veers west. A turn, a steep ascent later and the outlook changes. Even Gracey is distracted by the carousel of shadow and sunlight upon a wilder earth and upon the windscreen.

  Not so flat here either. Hills ruffle the skyline and contour the land with smooth undulations. Patches of trees extend into actual woods that you can’t see the far side of from the nearest edge. A buzzard hovers. Then another. Wood pigeons flap for cover beneath them. Tonal shifts emerge. Varieties of cereal crops occult the liverish earth, combed by giants. Odd hay meadows are pebble-dashed with pastel. Hedgerows thicken to spike outwards and suggest internal hoppings and buzzings of minute life. Ancient trees instil repose, austere sentinels drowsing in the corner of fields. Below their muscular branches mooch caramel cows patched with chocolate. Above the vista, the dusty sheets of ashen cloud break apart into cumulus, plump like white cotton.

  The distinction between back there and here startles Tom. As it did when he came here for the viewings. The last of his preoccupation seeps away on a cloud shadow retreating over a steep hill. And look over there! A village’s church
spire needling between ash trees, spiking the blue heavens, evoking a sense of fire-lit interiors, citrusy hops, roast pork, smoke-cured beams, owls, bats, leaping deer, chattering streams, green paths, mill wheels, rope swings and bluebells. That must be the village of Eadric.

  This is practically another country and he’s an immigrant, gazing over the railings of a big white ship; his mind one big eye sucking at the light, the dreamy details picked out and cherished.

  ‘Here we are,’ Fiona says, wearily, breaking her husband’s reverie. ‘End of the line, folks.’

  Beyond the dirt-speckled glass of the windscreen, an old house darkens a narrow lane. Home.

  The pale blur of Gracey’s face closes and she pushes at Tom’s shoulder to return her father to her need.

  ‘Something beginning with H,’ Tom finally says.

  An inhalation from Gracey, a breathless pause. Her head swivels about. ‘Hair? Hedge!’

  ‘Haunted house?’ Fiona offers.

  Since leaving the flat they’ve rented for eight years, and all that Gracey has ever known as home, Fiona has said little beyond attending to her daughter’s needs; snacks, amusements, distractions. Taking their daughter on a journey longer than thirty minutes requires a steeling of the nerves, deep breaths and moments alone with closed eyes. But Tom’s wife is smiling now. Sort of.

  The van slows. Tom laughs. ‘Home!’

  Gracey’s outraged. ‘Didn’t gimme no clues!’

  ‘Dufuses!’ Tom rolls the van across the end of the drive and their front garden is unveiled. A rectangle of spiky weeds and unruly grasses with unkempt borders, mopping broken tarmac.

  Blotched by verdigris and speckled with moss, the roof might be a moth-eaten hat atop the head of a vagrant. Its dimensions score uneven lines against the sky, as if drawn by a child as the ruler slipped. The spine of the roof is further serrated like the teeth of an old saw and corrodes into the pillar of an oddly solid chimney.

  Below, two storeys of exterior wall are coated in greening stucco, holed in places to reveal the reddish bricks of the building’s muscle. Windowpanes, smeared by cataracts of dust, appear indifferent to the afternoon light. Not even the sun can pierce the glass and relieve an interior of perpetual night. Bristling the ground and only parting at the porch, an ungroomed beard of shrubs extends wildly for the sun.