4. Spying at Night

THE HIDDEN FOREST - 4

Once reunited with his taxi, Davey Frost decided that it was too late in the day for him to go back to the point where he’d been arrested by the callow young constable and poke around where he thought a driveway might once upon a time have been constructed. He was a taxi driver (for his sins) and his most lucrative trade was in the evening when customers needed to escape the possibility of being caught drunk in charge of their cars and took a taxi to the pub instead. So he returned home intent on sulking for an hour.

He sulked mostly about the humiliation of being dragged to the police station by a foetus in uniform. But most of all he sulked that it seemed that the fattest man in the neighbourhood had inherited something that just might be worth inheriting.

Before his first customer he used his spare hour or so and a laptop when he decided sulking was getting him nowhere. The time had come for him to do some serious research rather than waste his time worrying about a police constable who ought still be in short pants, and he started by downloading an up-to-date map of the road that led from Brumpton to Drainport.

And that map was most revealing, largely because of what it didn’t reveal. It was one of those modern maps based on aerial photography which ought to show every detail of just about everywhere, but when he moved his pointer along the road the land to the right of the road seemed to be blotted out by something. There was, it seemed, nothing there. Not even a picture of a house or a plan of a lane, absolutely nothing. And then he realised what had happened. When the experts at silicon valley in the good old U.S of A had created the map they hadn’t taken into account that there might be quite low clouds about, and there were.

On the map of where he wanted to see what was what there was just a splodge of white cloud that obscured everything.

“Well, bugger me,” he muttered, and made himself a cocoa.

Then he got his first customer on the phone, a woman who sounded sweet and young but who turned out to be about ninety, and she wanted to go to the bingo in Brumpton. Following her was a grumpy vicar who swore (yes, he really swore even though he was a clerical gentleman) and moaned that that the end of the world was nigh because there was too much sex about, a subject that he frequently got overheated about. He wanted to go to the Virgin’s Arms, a night spot on the Swanspottle road famous in the area as a meeting place for ladies of easy virtue and oversized bosoms. And so the evening wore on with a microcosm of humanity needing the use of Davey’s taxi, none of it proving to be as fascinating as the grumpy vicar.

His last customer was a pair of teenage lads who boasted that they’d had eight pints apiece even though they could both manage to pronounce the word ‘apiece’ and that they’d take anyone on, just watch them, until he mentioned that he was a retired policemen with influence, and that shut them up. By eleven o’clock his phone stopped ringing and he was free to go home (from wherever he was) and get some sleep. But his skeletal body didn’t seem to need as much sleep as those with stomachs, and he decided that he had enough time to take another peek along the Drainport road. There could be no doubt about it: he was more curious than a cat with two tails.

He might have invited his obese neighbour along with him, but his was the mindset that liked him being prepared for any possibility that might occur and checking things out in advance was, to him, a necessity.

So he aimed his taxi down the road to Drainport and because he had the kind of mentality that remembered every blade of grass on a long, long road (or so it seemed to those who knew him) he soon found that place where he had spied what he thought might be the remnants of a long disused driveway.

He had a powerful torch with him seeing as night had long descended on the world, or at least on his portion of it. Taxi drivers probably need to carry them on the off chance of needing to either see whilst changing a wheel at night or threatening to bash a non-paying punter over the head until he did pay. And so he set out.

This particular main road was never particularly busy, though it had been in days of yore when Drainport had actually been a port. But those days were long buried in the past, and the quietness played into Davey’s hands in that he didn’t fancy a second meeting with a police foetus while he was poking about in the undergrowth.

He couldn’t go far, the area he thought likely to have been a drive being extremely overgrown with unpleasant prickly things as well as a repository for litter of cans of the soft drink or beer sort, some of which had corroded to the point of having sharp and rather unpleasant edges.

But he did see something that made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle most unpleasantly. Ahead of him was a narrow region where there were fewer trees obscuring the view, and amongst them, picked out by the beam of his torch, he saw what could only have been a witch, and not a child at hallowe’en dressed as what he or she though a witch ought to look like. No, what he saw was a full blown witch with a magnificent pointed black hat and the kind of nose he thought must be able to detect the result of someone farting at the other end of the county, but most terrifying of all was the broomstick.

It was not any old broom, and certainly not the sort his mother might have used in the yard during the autumn when a surplus of dead leaves got on her nerves and stirred her into action, but a proper besom monstrosity complete with long twigs, and it glowed, even when he switched his torch off, a sort of radioactive green. At least, that’s how he saw it, and he put the glimmer down to the reflection of the intense glow from her piercing eyes.

“Well well,” the elevated hag screeched at him. At least, that’s what he thought he heard, but didn’t wait for the Wiccan to say any more.

He yelped in a most un-ex-police detective way and ran back to his car, narrowly escaping being turned into cold meat by a passing tractor.

“I wouldn’t be hanging about there,” cackled the elderly tractor driver, “them’s a bad lot in there, them is, and best left to their own devices!”

That decided Davey Frost. He climbed into his car, turned it round and put his foot down. He wanted to get away from there as quickly as he could. He had never been a believer in the supernatural and was still convinced that what he had seen had a rational explanation, but, he shuddered, a full grown hook-nosed woman riding on an old fashioned besom broom at least ten feet off the ground took some working out.

And he would work it out: he knew that much, but not at night because everything looks that much more frightening at night, and he had been frightened. But tomorrow was another day, and other days were kind of special because they hadn’t happened yet, and neither had their tears and torments.

© Peter Rogerson 05.11.20