Three Mile Drove

By Brian Cross

A washed-up pop musician inherits a run-down smallholding in the English fens. Anything is better than his current situation ... this is what he believes, until he makes the transition only to encounter the horrifying creatures who exist there. Three Mile Drove is Darren Goldwater's gateway to a nightmare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Cross
• Release date: Sep 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9780955855962

Brian Cross

I am a writer from Peterborough, United Kingdom, originally from Ealing, West London. I have written several novels, 'Snowbird,' 'The Scarlet Web,' 'Stormfly,' 'Castle in the Clouds,' The Strand-on-the-Green Strongwoman,' 'Passion and Power,' 'The Long Gallery,' and 'Clementine and her Stalker.'I have written numerous short stories and a string of series featuring 'Betty McCloud.' Two compilations of these are available on this site. My website is [e-mail]

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Three Mile Drove

By Brian Cross

Copyright Brian Cross 31/8/11

Smashwords edition ISBN 978-0-9-9558559 – 6 - 2

Three Mile Drove

Prologue

The washing machine was grinding through its task with a tumult more akin to a pneumatic drill, driving mental rivets into Lisa Brown’s besieged head as she struggled with the assortment of pots and pans that cluttered the sink.

Somewhere outside, on a cool October day, her daughter Emma was playing. Lisa had wrapped her up well and warned her not to stray, because when she’d finally ended her never-ending chores she would make Sunday lunch.

She turned in annoyance to the washing machine. The bloody noise seemed to be getting even louder. There was no doubt that the age-old machine was going to blow soon, and how would she find the money to replace it?

A surge of anger took her back in time, cursing the day she’d met Bob Freeman, her common law husband. It was ironic now, because she couldn’t understand what she’d first seen in him. He had been an overweight, work-shy slob, had been and always would be. It was a year to this very day that he’d walked out and she’d discovered he’d left her with a mountain of bills that resembled a scale model of Snowdon, with no prospect of getting back on her feet.

Oh the bloody machine was so noisy she felt she could physically demolish it!

She should have been able to see her daughter playing on the flat area of dark soil that seemed to unfold like a drab, black carpet from the kitchen window; she might perhaps have heard her footsteps on the makeshift gravel path that bordered it.

She might even have heard the brief, pathetic scream that broke the air for a second before dying wretchedly away, and if she had been outside she would certainly have smelled the nauseating, acrid stench that swept across the isolated yard in permeating waves.

That she experienced none of these things was due to the gathering variety of problems that enclosed her like a mental straitjacket.

Only later, when she wearily called Emma in for lunch, did Lisa Brown realise that something was very wrong.

***

Detective Sergeant Tim McPherson had been about to leave his office, on one of his all too rare half days when a fax message was placed on his desk. He muttered beneath his breath as he quickly read through it.

Several weeks ago, a girl aged seven years had disappeared, presumably abducted. Despite widespread investigations and enquiries so far nothing had sprung to light, but without fail, at least twice a week a report like this would come in. A girl fitting the missing child’s description had been seen, this time apparently on a remote fenland road known as Three Mile Drove. McPherson was certain he was embarking on another wild goose chase. It seemed to him that these reported sightings were derived solely to intrude into his limited free time.After all, how many seven year old girls sporting a brown pony tail and wearing white ankle socks were there?

But each new sighting required investigation, and apparently by him. Not for the first time McPherson wondered what the rest of the crew were up to. He rose from his desk and left Ely police station, his mood matching the rapidly deteriorating weather.

The rain was splashing across his windscreen in angry waves by the time McPherson entered the drove. At its best, he reflected, this area was desolate. At its worst, as of now, it became a living nightmare, like an untimely introduction to an alien planet.

Some distance along the drove he stopped, pulling into a boggy recess in the rain swamped road, the kind constructed to allow approaching vehicles to pass.

One single, bare willow stood out like a forlorn and reluctant Lone Ranger, vainly shielding a nineteenth-century farmhouse which looked as though it might be better served as a storehouse.

But this location matched the reported sighting, and it was to the run-down, red brick house that he was headed.

McPherson left his car and hurried through the clotted dirt and gravel that filtered like treacle across his ankles, cursing that he’d not thought to bring his Wellington boots.

Reaching the boundary his feet sank into the unploughed field that served as a front garden, and he wondered for the umpteenth time why he’d chosen to be a detective rather than the career in journalism that had been his teenage aim.

McPherson sighed as he approached the house, wondering why he’d even considered trying to find a bell. There wasn’t one, but why should there be? After all, you wouldn’t expect to find a red carpet at the entrance to a pigsty.

He received no answer despite several heavy thumps on the door, then, losing patience, he trudged through muck and slime round to the side, where a disintegrating wooden door stood ajar.

He hesitated for a moment before rocking back, his hand suddenly clamped tightly over his face. Already he could smell a stench, a stench that defied positive description. He could only define it as a nauseating mixture of vomit, urine, stale faeces and dried blood blended into one stomach ripping concoction.

McPherson gathered and held what little breath he could and then lunged blindly into the house, loosely termed as he soon found out. His stomach wrenched and heaved, his eyes watered so severely he could hardly see as he struggled to cast his eyes around the room. There, by the sink of what served as a kitchen, amidst rotting waste that might consist of countless ingredients lay a scattering of bones, beside which stood four of the most grotesque children McPherson had ever laid eyes upon.

Chapter One

Darren Goldwater leapt into his Cherokee Jeep and headed for home, the last guitar chords of Sultans of Swing still ringing in his head. It was as if he had a private stereo system installed in the backwaters of his mind, blasting out music that he couldn’t switch off, and it seemed to be getting louder by the gig.

He wondered why his band never played their own music anymore, and then cursed himself for raising a question to which he already knew the answer.

Nobody wanted to hear it anymore.

The heady days of refugee were long gone, if they could ever have been called heady that was. A few moderate hits in the mid eighties, struggling to impress amidst the lower regions of the charts and that was about it. By the time the decade had ended they had all but slid into obscurity, redeemed only by their re-workings of old classics, dependent on instrumental virtuosos such as Hotel California and Sultans of Swing.

But it was a competitive field, and along with the increasing number of bands doing the same thing, age was beginning to extend its withered fingers like worn frets on a fingerboard. It was a gruelling six nights a week, bottle of vodka a day string of gigs that sent them up and down the country like chickens in a run.

Internal squabbles hadn’t helped either. The five-member band had suffered more downs than ups of late, degenerating into petty disputes and casting clouds which threatened its very existence.

And to cap it all, he wasn’t immune on that score. His turbulent, long running affair with Goldie Dixon was probably the most disruptive influence of all, though now it was drawing to its inevitable conclusion. Perhaps that wasn’t an apt description, because hurtling into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour seemed more apt.

Darren glanced in his mirror and slid the Cherokee out of the slip road and onto the motorway, heading home to Leicester. Shaking his mind free from the final chords of Sultans of Swing he found himself considering his ten-year roller-coaster relationship with the group’s vocalist.

She was vehement, vindictive, violent, a living three-pronged V sign in fact, though her outrageous antics had been a turn on in their earlier years. Their love making might have taken place within the volcano that seemed to encompass her, and the explosion of life and vigour, of power and hate that surged within her had seemed to suck him in like a speck of dust in a vacuum. He could put up with her turbulence in those days, seeming to draw on the very strength that was her life force.

But a decade of self-abuse had take toll of her, extracting piece by piece that which attracted him to her. Goldie’s body, once strong and shapely was now thin and puny, she seemed to have a lost a couple of inches in height and her stature was pathetic. Her spine now seemed to curve in an arc and the voice he’d once so admired had lost all its raunchiness.

Her explosions of temper were now little more than pathetic, childish tantrums and there was no longer any force behind the blows when she lashed out. He could meet them with derisive laughter, which just about summed up their shambles of an affair. In fact the whole sorry group was in a shambles. He felt with complete certainty that the death knell was about to sound.

Thirty minutes ago he’d left her cursing him after a performance that had been every inch a flop. She’d picked on him of course; his guitar work had been sloppy, off key and downright lousy.

It hadn’t been, at least not in his book, even if he couldn’t be sure of a disgruntled band’s backing on that, because he knew if nobody else did, that Goldie’s voice had been weak and slurred, and as thin as her stature had become. In trying to strain it she’d wandered off key. But try telling her that.

It had begun to rain as he turned the Cherokee into his street, tiny droplets at first but in the short time it took him to pull up outside his house they had increased in size and intensity. As he hopped out Darren believed they might be forerunners of an unwelcome storm.

He had a reasonably sized four bedroomed house and a reasonably sized driveway leading into it, which he never used, preferring to leave the Jeep out on the narrow tree-lined street where it often caused obstruction, much to the chagrin of his neighbours.

His house had been paid for not by the meagre earnings of the band, but by courtesy of a successful investment on a horse he’d been persuaded to back by a tipster who claimed to be in the know. Probably out of his head through dope or booze, possibly both, Darren couldn’t remember now, he’d forked out a hundred quid on a no-hoper called Ragged Runner and laughed all the way to the bookies. A fifty-to-one shot and it had romped home, providing him with a small fortune, which had bolstered him these past few years.

The phone was ringing when he entered the house, tripping over the hallway mat and disregarding a formal looking white envelope, which lay upon it. Unbalanced by his encounter with the mat he stumbled across the rectangular hall, before snatching the receiver from its housing by the door of the main reception room.

‘Darren it’s Jeff; I’m calling to tell you that Craig and me have had enough of the antics, the band’s sinking like the Titanic and we’re not going down with it. We’re pulling out here and now.’

Darren felt Jeff Foreman’s words lodge sharply in the pit of his stomach. So that was it, just like that. A ten-year association split, and by way of a bloody phone call. Well he didn’t really mind, he’d known it was coming in any case. What really riled him was that they hadn’t had the guts to tell him face to face.

He felt his anger rising like acid from his gut. ‘So why tell me now, Jeff, why didn’t you tell me up front, after the show? Guess you didn’t have the nerve eh?’

‘You were too quickly off the mark Darren,’ Jeff Foreman said with quiet sarcasm. ‘Running away from Goldie I suppose.’

‘Go to hell!’ Darren slammed the receiver into its cradle with a force that rocket the wall socket. Was that what they really thought – that he was scared of her, was that what they had been thinking all these years?

Well it was total crap; he just needed space, that was all. He needed eternal space from her ranting and raving.

Darren stormed into the lounge and yanked a bottle from the mahogany drinks cabinet. They could all go to hell if they thought the split was going to bother him. The writing had been on the wall longer than the graffiti in Gladstone Street subway. He would be glad to be free of the lot of them. He could find a job as a lead guitarist with any band he chose, they would be glad to have him; he’d been holding this motley little crew together for too long. He’d earn more than enough money to keep himself and his place ticking over.

Except that he couldn’t. He knew it with all the bitterness he tried to hide; bitterness that threatened to erupt from the core of his head like discharge from a crater.

His fingers were too shaky, too slow on the fingerboard these days no matter how much he tried to hide it; sometimes he felt himself struggling to hold a G-chord. Why, even at this moment he was struggling to remove the top from the whisky bottle. The top eventually fell to the floor, he didn’t bother retrieving it. His mind felt like a network of lines, none of which met. Face facts old friend, one and only self-effacing friend, you’re finished, fucking washed up, a has-been at thirty nine, a potential vagrant in a smart, four bedroomed house.

Darren took a big swig from the bottle, clasped his hand around its neck and crossed to the gilt edged mirror, which dominated the room. He examined his black curly hair, matted with sweat from the performance, saw his blood rimmed blue eyes and ran his fingers around the hollows beneath them. He could swear that the normally thin lines had doubled into folds since the last time he’d looked.

He turned away in disgust, switched the stereo on full blast, and then headed through the hall towards the downstairs toilet.

Then he remembered the envelope lying on the mat.

Chapter Two

Tim McPherson saw the sign of the Fox and Hounds pub glimmering in the gathering darkness and felt a surge of relief, on days such as this it offered an inviting prospect, a proverbial port in a storm.

He pulled into the car park, then jumped out of his car and secured it, before playing hopscotch around the puddles that had formed on the tarmac surface. He grimaced as the wind lashed needles of rain across his face like scores of tiny stinging insects. For a day and a half now, the elements had besieged the fenland, turning the dykes into furious free flowing rivers, threatening to burst out of their channels and flood the already sodden roads and fields.

Perhaps it was pure coincidence that the heavens had opened just as he’d begun his journey to Three Mile Drove yesterday, and that they hadn’t abated since, but that they should precede the foulest discovery of his life seemed to his superstitious mind to have been a portent of worse things to come.

McPherson, though of Scottish descent was none the less a fen man through and through. His ancestors had settled in the area as long ago as the mid-eighteenth century, and despite the benefit of a good formal education he was as superstitious as the rest of them.

He bent his lean frame into the wind and headed for the shelter and hospitality of the lounge bar, shaking the rain from his coat as he reached the porch. The pub stood on an isolated stretch of road between Ely and Littleport, from where, if you turned right at the crossroads which lay just beyond it, you would see the village of Bramble Dyke, not so far from where he’d made his grisly find the previous day.

It was the time of day that dubiously divided late afternoon from early evening, and the floral carpeted, crescent shaped lounge contained only a few customers. He suspected they had been driven to sanctuary by the depressive conditions; let’s face it, they were enough to drive anybody to drink. These kind of conditions seemed to give the area all the charm of a frontier wilderness in deepest winter, an outpost where only the oppressed were flung to pay for their trivial sins.

But McPherson's visit to the pub wasn’t dictated by a spur of the moment whim or by the prospect of seeking an alcoholic remedial, even though he needed to pass it on his journey home. Now, as he wiped his brow, McPherson’s eyes swept across the bar to the far side, where at the furthest part of the curve a dark haired young woman dressed in denims sat on a stool, engaged in casual conversation with the young barman.

Her broad face opened into a wide mouthed smile as she saw McPherson approach. She slapped a hand invitingly on the vacant wooden stool beside her and laid her scotch on the bar. ‘Tim, sit down and reveal all. What mystery can I help you to solve?’

McPherson smiled, but already he felt himself reddening. He could blame it on the effects of the elements if she wasn’t so damned perceptive. Sometimes he could almost feel that attractive shrewd face reading his mind and it made him feel more than a little uncomfortable. But then, he sought her help when he needed it and she didn’t need her unusual gifts to discern that much.

She smiled again in the face of his silence and glanced at the barman. ‘Come on Tim, what will you have? I can see you’re in no mood for your normal half.’

‘It’ll have to be, I can’t afford to get caught out, you know that.’ He flicked his eyes across the counter, watching as the barman moved away and levered the hand pump, then turned his face fully towards her, his voice low and concerned. ‘I was called out to a reported sighting of a missing child yesterday lunchtime, as usual it was a false alarm, but what I found in its place shocked me to the core.’ He sighed, more of a groan really, his eyes returning to the barman as he topped up the glass and brought it to him.

‘Thanks.’ With a quick nod of the head he took his drink, guiding her away from the stool to a seat by a bay window, pulling the curtains across as if seeking comfort. ‘I can only try to describe what I saw; it was like something out of a nineteenth century horror film, but it was right here, just outside Bramble Dyke.’

McPherson began his account of the incident and thought he saw her face drop at the outset. Great, she wasn’t going to believe him. She wasn’t going to believe how he had encountered the wretched, ugly, deformed children who could hardly speak a recognisable word, who spoke in their own language of squeals and whimpers and inhuman cries and lived amongst discarded garbage, rotten flesh and bones, and who when his back was turned and his stomach erupted, had fled the place so silently he hadn’t heard them go. The bones hadn’t been human; he knew that. They were the decaying carcasses of pigs and goats, the skeletons of hares and rabbits, all contributing to the obnoxious smell, the stifling odour that had caused him to vomit while the children, or whatever they were, had escaped. To where, he hadn’t a clue.

His mobile phone wouldn’t function, perhaps it was the conditions. He’d been forced to search out the nearest phone box and that meant a drive to the village, through pools of water that had partly submerged the uneven drove in places, through the waterlogged lane which connected to the main street, before finally placing his call requesting a back-up team with forensic capability to assess the full implications of what he’d found.

Only, when they joined him at the phone