‘And you remember all that?’
‘I’m a star witness,’ he said bravely, and she just had to laugh. Lonnie had a way of making things seem better.
There was a map of the Crouch End area on the wall of the police station lobby, one considerably more detailed than the one in the London Streetfinder. Farnham approached it and studied it with his hands stuffed into his pockets. The station seemed very quiet now. Vetter was still outside — clearing some of the witchmoss from his brains, one hoped — and Raymond had long since finished with the woman who’d had her purse nicked.
Farnham put his finger on the spot where the cabby had most likely let them off (if anything about the woman’s story was to be believed, that was). The route to their friend’s house looked pretty straightforward. Crouch Hill Road to Hillfield Avenue, and then a left onto Vickers Lane followed by a left onto Petrie Street. Brass End, which stuck off from Petrie Street like somebody’s afterthought, was no more than six or eight houses long. About a mile, all told. Even Americans should have been able to walk that far without getting lost.
‘Raymond!’ he called. ‘You still here?’
Sergeant Raymond came in. He had changed into streets and was putting on a light poplin windcheater. ‘Only just, my beardless darling.’
‘Cut it,’ Farnham said, smiling all the same. Raymond frightened him a little. One look at the spooky sod was enough to tell you he was standing a little too close to the fence that ran between the yard of the good guys and that of the villains. There was a twisted white line of scar running like a fat string from the left corner of his mouth almost all the way to his Adam’s apple. He claimed a pickpocket had once nearly cut his throat with a jagged bit of bottle. Claimed that’s why he broke their fingers. Farnham thought that was the shit. He thought Raymond broke their fingers because he liked the sound they made, especially when they popped at the knuckles.
‘Got a fag?’ Raymond asked.
Farnham sighed and gave him one. As he lit it he asked, ‘Is there a curry shop on Crouch Hill Road?’
‘Not to my knowledge, my dearest darling,’ Raymond said.
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Got a problem, dear?’
‘No,’ Farnham said, a little too sharply, remembering Doris Freeman’s clotted hair and staring eyes.
Near the top of Crouch Hill Road, Doris and Lonnie Freeman turned onto Hillfield Avenue, which was lined with imposing and gracious-looking homes — nothing but shells, she thought, probably cut up with surgical precision into apartments and bed-sitters inside.
‘So far so good,’ Lonnie said.
‘Yes, it’s — ‘ she began, and that was when the low moaning arose.
They both stopped. The moaning was coming almost directly from their right, where a high hedge ran around a small yard. Lonnie started toward the sound, and she grasped his arm.
‘Lonnie, no!’
‘What do you mean, no?’ he asked. ‘Someone’s hurt.’
She stepped after him nervously. The hedge was high but thin. He was able to brush it aside and reveal a small square of lawn outlined with flowers. The lawn was very green. In the center of it was a black, smoking patch — or at least that was her first impression. When she peered around Lonnie’s shoulder again — his shoulder was too high for her to peer over it — she saw it was a hole, vaguely man-shaped. The tendrils of smoke were emanating from it.
SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR, she thought abruptly.
The moaning was coming from the hole, and Lonnie began to force himself through the hedge toward it.
‘Lonnie,’ she said, ‘please, don’t.’
‘Someone’s hurt,’ he repeated, and pushed himself the rest of the way through with a bristly tearing sound. She saw him going toward the hole, and then the hedge snapped back, leaving her nothing but a vague impression of his shape as he moved forward. She tried to push through after him and was scratched by the short, stiff branches of the hedge for her trouble. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse.
‘Lonnie!’ she called, suddenly very afraid. ‘Lonnie, come back!’
‘Just a minute, hon!’
The house looked at her impassively over the top of the hedge.
The moaning sounds continued, but now they sounded lower — guttural, somehow gleeful.
Couldn’t Lonnie hear that?
‘Hey, is somebody down there?’ she heard Lonnie ask. ‘Is there — oh! Hey! Jesus!’ And suddenly Lonnie screamed. She had never heard him scream before, and her legs seemed to turn to waterbags at the sound. She looked wildly for a break in the hedge, a path, and couldn’t see one anywhere. Images swirled before her eyes — the bikers who had looked like rats for a moment, the cat with the pink chewed face, the boy with the claw-hand.
Lonnie! she tried to scream, but no words came out.
Now there were sounds of a struggle. The moaning had stopped. But there were wet, sloshing sounds from the other side of the hedge. Then, suddenly, Lonnie came flying back through the stiff dusty-green bristles as if he had been given a tremendous push. The left arm of his suit-coat
was torn, and it was splattered with runnels of black stuff that seemed to be smoking, as the pit in the lawn had been smoking.
‘Doris, run!’
‘Lonnie, what — ‘
‘Run!’ His face pale as cheese.
Doris looked around wildly for a cop. For anyone. But Hillfield Avenue might have been a part of some great deserted city for all the life or movement she saw. Then she glanced back at the hedge and saw something else was moving behind there, something that was more than black; it seemed ebony, the antithesis of light.
And it was sloshing.
A moment later, the short, stiff branches of the hedge began to rustle. She stared, hypnotized.
She might have stood there forever (so she told Vetter and Farnham) if Lonnie hadn’t grabbed her arm roughly and shrieked at her — yes, Lonnie, who never even raised his voice at the kids, had shrieked — she might- have been standing there yet. Standing there, or . . .
But they ran.
Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn’t know. Lonnie was totally undone, in a hysteria of panic and revulsion — that was all she really knew. He clamped his fingers over her wrist like a handcuff and they ran from the house looming over the hedge, and from the smoking hole in the lawn. She knew those things for sure; all the rest was only a chain of vague impressions.
At first it had been hard to run, and then it got easier because they were going downhill. They turned, and then turned again. Gray houses with high stoops and drawn green shades seemed to stare at them like blind pensioners. She remembered Lonnie pulling off his jacket, which had been splattered with that black goo, and throwing it away. At last they came to a wider street.
‘Stop,’ she panted. ‘Stop, I can’t keep up!’ Her free hand was pressed to her side, where a red-hot spike seemed to have been planted.
And he did stop. They had come out of the residential area and were standing at the corner of Crouch Lane and Morris Road. A sign on the far side of Morris Road proclaimed that they were but one mile from Slaughter Towen.
Town? Vetter suggested.
No, Doris Freeman said. Slaughter Towen, with an ‘e.’
Raymond crushed out the cigarette he had cadged from Farnham. ‘I’m off,’ he announced, and then looked more closely at Farnham. ‘My poppet should take better care of himself. He’s got big dark circles under his eyes. Any hair on your palms to go with it, my pet?’ He laughed uproariously.
‘Ever hear of a Crouch Lane?’ Farnham asked.
‘Crouch Hill Road, you mean.’
‘No, I mean Crouch Lane.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘What about Norris Road?’
‘There’s the one cuts off from the high street in Basing-stoke — ‘
‘No, here.’
‘No — not here, poppet.’
For some reason he couldn’t understand — the woman was obviously buzzed — Farnham persisted. ‘What about Slaughter Towen?’
‘Towen, you said? Not Town?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Never heard of it, but if I do, I believe I’ll steer clear.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because in the old Druid lingo, a touen or towen was a place of ritual sacrifice — where they abstracted your liver and lights, in other words.’ And zipping up his windcheater, Raymond glided out.
Farnham looked after him uneasily. He made that last up, he told himself. What a hard copper like Sid Raymond knows about the Druids you could carve on the head of a pin and still have room for the Lord’s Prayer.
Right. And even if he had picked up a piece of information like that, it didn’t change the fact that the woman was . . .