The Walking Dead (Sucking Pit Series) Read online

  ‘They can't … not here … don't they remember?’

  ‘It's no good going on about it, mate.’ The man turned back towards his machine. ‘Everything's been said that's gotta be said. Me, I don't agree with it because if they go on building at this rate there very soon won't be any countryside left. However, it's work for me and I'm not grumbling. Now, if you'll just get out of the way I'll make a start.’

  Some strange instinct was screaming at Latimer to stop this violation of an age-old Romany burial site. Lie down in the path of that machine, he won't dare run over you. But he didn't because his logic told him it would be futile, just a temporary inconvenience. The police would be fetched, Latimer would be arrested and hauled away, brought before magistrates and bound over to keep the peace. And if he told them the truth he might be sent for psychiatric treatment. There was no way he could win where hundreds of others had failed.

  ‘Tell me one thing before I go,’ he shouted up at the cab.

  ‘What's that, then?’

  ‘The house, the big house over there beyond the tall pines, does it still stand?’

  ‘It sure does,’ the other yelled back as the motor kicked and shuddered into life. ‘Grafton lives there now and who can blame him, bastard that he is?’

  Latimer jumped to one side, stared at the huge, hateful machine as it lumbered by him. He wanted to shout and ask who the hell Grafton was but the other was in no mood to linger any longer. He was on piece work and time was money.

  Tender birch saplings were uprooted, flattened instantly, the JCB taking a diagonal course, turning, coming back again. Ten years of growth were destroyed in as many minutes, as once more the site of the Sucking Pit was desecrated.

  Chris Latimer turned away. He could not stay here. Much as he hated the pit this was the ultimate in degradation, the end of an ancient culture. The Romany death rites were gone for ever, just as Hopwas Wood was.

  He found himself wandering away from the Lady Walk, suddenly became aware that he was heading in the direction of the big house. Something else he had to see once more before he left here for ever. Crazy, but that's how it was.

  Miniature canyons and mountains created solely for the excavation of sand and gravel so that Man might create more eyesores, destroy the habitats of the creatures of the wild in his quest for supremacy, and eventually destroy Nature herself. God, they were all mad.

  A sudden sense of guilt. This fellow Grafton, presumably the owner of the woods, could suddenly emerge, tell him to get the hell out of here. Latimer would have no option but to go; humiliating, particularly so when he had once owned these acres. Uneasy, but just one peep at the old house and then he would go. For good.

  A steep rise, powdery sand that had been dried by the hot sun; two paces forward, slipping back one, scrambling the last few yards on his hands and knees. The summit, almost afraid to look over.

  Shock, one that was illogical, because the big house looked exactly the same as it had always done, a huge rambling place in need of repair and decoration. He ought to have renovated it during the time he and Pat had lived there; he didn't know why he hadn't. Or maybe he did. Somehow it had seemed a sacrilege to interfere with the past. The house was a tradition, it had always been like that. The same could be said for the Sucking Pit except that he hadn't ordered it to be filled in. That had been done on police orders, which let him out. All the same he had ended up a victim of the gypsy curse.

  He knelt there and his sweat ran cold again as he remembered that terrible night when he had discharged both barrels of a twelve bore shotgun into Cornelius. Self-defence, he didn't have any choice. Oh God, the memory would haunt him for the rest of his days. He had taken human life. One and a quarter ounces of number six shot had lacerated the Romany giant at a range of no more than fifteen yards and the giant had even withstood the second blast, brains and splinters of bone flying into the air. A faceless giant streaming with blood. Reloading, firing again, and only then had Cornelius toppled and fallen into the pit, the mire sucking him down.

  The house seemed to scowl at him as though it remembered. Dirt-stained windows, a couple of cracked panes. It saw and knew him. It had the appearance of being deserted. Perhaps that JCB driver was mistaken and this fellow Grafton did not live here, maybe hadn't moved in yet.

  He found himself trying to imagine what the interior looked like. That couldn't be the same because he and Pat had taken all their furniture with them. Maybe it was empty, a hollow shell in which windows rattled on a windy night, inexplicable noises, hollow footfalls and sounds like mocking whispers. He shuddered, again experienced that urgency to be away from here.

  A sudden gust of wind whipped up the sand off the mounds, hurled it at him venomously. He turned away, pawed at his eyes in an attempt to wipe them free of the gritty particles.

  The wind was getting up with a sound like a host of invisible demons shrieking at him. Begone, Latimer, before it is too late, for the Sucking Pit is not dead!

  He slid down the excavation, oblivious of the sand which filled his shoes, shielding his face from the swirling gusts. Again he might have been in a remote desert far from civilisation. A moment of illogical panic; suppose he could not find his way back to the Lady Walk, wandered around in circles in this blinding miniature sandstorm. And when night came …

  Ridiculous, but it lent an urgency to his step, almost running in places where the ground was firmer, taking a diagonal course that must eventually bring him out on the Lady Walk. The wind was almost gale force and he had to fight his way through it, head down, unable to look up.

  Relief! That lone rhododendron on the sandy track. He reached out, squeezed its firm green leaves just to make sure that it wasn't a mirage. So still now, hardly a breath of wind, the sun beating down with full force. Had his clothing not been smothered in sand then he would have put it down to some kind of hallucination triggered off by his imaginary fears. All the same, his nerves were getting the better of him. Nostalgia gone wrong, a culmination of those awful nights ten years ago and his recent heartbreak.

  He stood there listening, heard the faint drone of that JCB in the distance, a sound like avalanching rocks. Then silence. Perhaps the final destruction was complete, the site of the old Romany burial ground a flat and featureless strip of land awaiting the erection of modern box-like dwelling places. Ignominy.

  But it was none of Chris Latimer's business. It was foolish to have come here and revived all those awful memories, stirred up the fear within himself again. Now it would take even longer to forget.

  Exhausted, and with a sense of sheer relief, he spied the Subaru in the lay-by, almost welcomed the rush of unending traffic. There was a lot to be said for an everyday mundane world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mick Treadman had long ago got over the thrill of driving a JCB. In his boyhood years it had been the epitome of his ambitions, in much the same way as other boys fantasised about driving trains. He had spent hours on a building site close to his home, even played truant to go there, just to watch and listen to the noise of those mighty machines that sent the blood coursing through his veins. One day, he promised himself, he would be like his heroes out there, handling one of those invincible machines, tearing soil and rocks out by the bucketful, depositing his load in a cloud of thick dust. He didn't want to do anything else. Money didn't enter into it; he'd offer to do it for free if they would just give him a JCB to drive. Power, that was what it was.

  But life didn't work out like that, as Mick Treadman discovered in due course. Whilst most of his friends had forgotten their train-driving dreams he still had his obsession with JCBs. Academically at school he had been a failure but he wanted it that way. If he had come out with a stack of ‘O’ levels his parents would have destined him for some stuffy white-collar job, but when you were made out to be thick all that was left was labouring jobs. But he had had to start on the very bottom rung of the ladder, making the tea and being a fetch-and-carry boy for the brickies on the new Caledonian
Estate, the victim of ceaseless leg-pull and practical jokes.

  ‘Hey, Mick, ever seen anythin' like this?’ Ribald laughter as the full-colour centre spread of a much crumpled sex magazine was displayed for his attention, had him slopping hot tea all over his fingers, wincing with pain. Tell us, Mick. ‘ave you ever 'ad it off with a bird like that? Or, for that matter. ‘ave you ever 'ad it off at all?’ More laughing all round.

  Mick hadn't had it off but the constant question was a double-edged one. If you said you hadn't then they teased you mercilessly and called you a wanker. If you lied and said you had, then you were plied with all kinds of intimate questions in an attempt to prove you a liar. So you laughed with them and remained non-committal. It was the only way. But it seemed that JCB drivers were always getting the best birds if you listened to them. Strong he-men that women fell over themselves for.

  And that was where Mick Treadman made his first big mistake in life, just after his twentieth birthday. There were always girls hanging round the sites exchanging banter with the labourers, getting chatted up and sometimes doing much less innocuous things in the sheds or amongst the piles of stacked materials.

  Mick Treadman reflected, as he levelled that patch of ground beneath which lay the devilish Sucking Pit that hot afternoon, that he had not really wanted to go out with Joy in the first place; he just dated her because it seemed that digger men went with women. For him it was a kind of ego trip.

  Joy was fast, too fast for Mick. And in the pub he'd had two pints more than he usually did, a combination of needing Dutch courage and showing off. After that he was easy prey.

  They had gone on to the old school playing fields where a lot of courting couples went who weren't fortunate enough to have cars at their disposal. It was a warm night with a hint of thunder in the atmosphere and a three-quarter moon giving just enough light to add romantic setting to the otherwise very ordinary suburban surroundings.

  Mick's whole body tingled as she began to kiss him, her tongue pushing into his mouth, her hands smoothing over his thighs and threatening to go places any second. Christ, she got him so worked up that he almost orgasmed before she began to rub his hardness through his tight jeans.

  ‘I like you,’ she giggled; after three gins she giggled for the rest of the evening. ‘You and me ought to go steady, Mick.’

  ‘I'm going to be a digger driver one day,’ he announced proudly and would have gone into more details had her groping sensuous fingers not interrupted a detailed analysis of his ambitions.

  Somehow she had got them both half-undressed, deftly removing any obstructing garments; a crash course in advanced foreplay, guiding his hands where she wanted them, showing him just where and how she liked to be stimulated. Her kisses became hotter and wetter, her body convulsing and tensing as though she was on the verge of some kind of fit. Then she hoisted herself up on top of him, put him where she wanted him.

  Fears crowded Mick Treadman's mind, threatened to spoil the sheer bliss of his first mating. ‘Hey … hadn't I ought to be … wearing something?’

  ‘You leave that … to me,’ she grunted, and he had done just that, taking her at her word and fully believing that she was on the pill. Christ, a bird had to be careful for her own sake.

  It hadn't lasted long, a minute or two at the most. Joy had really gone over the top, pressing herself down on him as though she couldn't get enough, clutching at him and scratching him with her long fingernails. He wished he could have made it a second time for her but that was impossible. Eventually his thoughts returned to JCBs and the rugged glory of the men who made building houses possible. Once you had achieved that status the birds would flock round you.

  A few weeks later Joy delivered her bombshell. They had gone down to the pub, maybe afterwards they would have walked across to the playing field. ‘I'm pregnant,’ she said, just like that.

  ‘You can't be!’ He gasped in shock disbelief.

  ‘Why can't I be? You got me pregnant, I know, cause I haven't done it with anybody else.’

  In those first awful moments of realisation he had wanted to strangle her, punch her face until it was unrecognisable. But he didn't. Instead he trembled, almost burst into tears, thought about running away and possibly would have done if he had had somewhere to go and some money. But he had neither. He was trapped and he knew it.

  ‘We'll have to get married,’ there was smug satisfaction in her tone. ‘but we would've done anyway, wouldn't we, Mick, so it comes to the same thing.’

  Marriage to Joy was debatable, Mick decided - until now. A good-looking bird to boast about at tea break, almost a status symbol in that gathering of labourers on the building site. Once she was his wife that all came to an end. ‘'Ow's the missus, Mick? When's that baby of yours due?’

  Joy had had a miscarriage and after that life had become exceedingly monotonous. Mick only went to the pub on Saturday nights and then she came with him, all part of the marriage trap. The rest of the week he tried to work overtime, not for the money but so that he didn't have to stop in the house.

  Then the company had folded and he had spent a year on the dole. They had had to move up to the Midlands to find work, a brickie's mate, still eyeing the diggers with envy. And when that firm went bust Mick had gambled, bought a clapped out old JCB and started up on his own. Moonlighting at first but he made out. And now that he had got what he wanted he wasn't sure he wanted it after all. The initial thrill of digging and demolishing had faded into an irksome task and all he had left in life was Joy bitching and whining when he returned home. And she was desperately trying to get herself pregnant again. It was all she had left in life.

  That was the irony of life, Treadman laughed aloud in his cab, you fought to get something and when you got it you didn't want it. Maybe Joy would be the same if she had her baby and then life would be sheer bloody hell.

  He brought the machine to a standstill, surveyed the area he had just levelled. Not bad, but it could do with another going over; he always took a pride in his work.

  He reversed, decided to traverse the area crossways, make it really even. Maybe when the building inspectors saw it they would find him some more work. Jobs were becoming scarce these days, there were too many at it.

  He thought he felt the JCB sink a fraction; it could have been his imagination. The engine stuttered, picked up again and he checked the fuel gauge. Low, but enough to finish the job. Another half hour at the most.

  A lurch and a tilt; decidedly not his imagination this time. A fleeting memory of that time when he was moonlighting and he had offered to plough a steep field for a farmer. Hair-raising if you looked down. Then, when he was right at the steepest point, the half shaft had broken. He had screamed his fear as he had felt the four-wheel drive tractor start to go, knowing that there was no way he could stop it. Bumping from side to side, gathering speed, miraculously not overturning. Cut and bruised he had resigned himself to death when suddenly the tractor embedded itself in a heap of gorse bushes which he had ploughed up at the bottom. It had bounced once, still remained upright and then come to rest. Gently, an anticlimax. In those few minutes following Mick Treadman had almost become religious.

  But the JCB couldn't go anywhere here, the ground was flat, not even a gradual slope.

  It tilted back the other way, seemed to sink into the surface, the clutch roaring, the wheels somehow failing to secure a grip. Mick leaned forward, looked down. Jesus Christ Alive!

  It was as though the ground below him was opening up, a crack that was widening even as he stared down into its black depths, the JCB slipping a foot or so at a time, steel scraping painfully on rock, buckling in places. The JCB dropped another foot, vibrated and screeched its protest, an elevator going down in stages because somebody was clowning with the control button!

  Treadman's first instinct was to try and open the cab door, jump out, but that was impossible because the bottom of the door was below ground level, wedged against tons of rubble that was already beginning t
o shift again. Another fall; his stomach churned the way it used to when his uncle took him for car rides when he was a boy and went over humpback bridges too fast.

  Panicking, looking around for something with which to smash the heavy-duty glass windows, crawl out through a jagged hole whilst there was still time. His searching fingers located a fifteen-inch spanner, grabbed it, swung it. Another jerk and a fall, at least three feet this time, throwing him across the cab, his weapon spinning from his grasp.

  Oh God, the pain in his back, he'd damaged his spine for sure. He tried to move, screamed in agony. The interior of the cab was becoming progressively darker the further the JCB slipped into the ground.

  It had to be an earthquake, Treadman's crazed brain told him; a massive one, sudden and undetected by all the experts and their sophisticated gadgets. Maybe it would stop now, it couldn't last for ever. But even if it did he would not be able to escape from his steel prison wedged in this fissure.

  He made a determined attempt to move, a few inches that brought indescribable pain to the base of his spine and he fell back sweating, writhing. Yelling for help but all he got were the echoes coming back at him in the confined space, taunting him. You'll die in here, Mick Treadman, because nobody will come to look for you until it's too late. In this heat you'll suffocate in a couple of hours. They won't start looking for you until tonight. Your wife's used to you working overtime. She won't even begin to get anxious until after dark.

  He lay there on his back staring up at the last remaining oblong of light, had to turn his head away because he was looking directly into the sun's rays. A blaze of kaleidoscopic patterns before his eyes that speared right into his brain, reminded him of the one and only time when he had had a migraine. It sapped your strength and willpower, you found yourself surrendering, giving up. No, he had to fight; keep calm or else you're done for.