Crouch End

‘Lo

‘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.

‘Lo

‘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 Lo

‘Hey, is somebody down there?’ she heard Lo

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, Lo

‘Doris, run!’

‘Lo

‘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 Lo

Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn’t know. Lo

‘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 a

‘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…

‘Must be going crazy,’ Lo

Doris had looked at her watch earlier and saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarter of eight. The light had changed; from a clear orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off the windows of the shops in Norris Road and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon.

‘What happened back there?’ Doris asked. ‘What was it, Lo

‘Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note.’

‘You didn’t lose it, you took it off. It was covered with…’

‘Don’t be a fool!’ he snapped at her. But his eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, wandering. ‘I lost it, that’s all.’

‘Lo

‘Nothing. Let’s not talk about it. Where are we?’

‘Lo

‘I can’t remember,’ he said more softly. ‘It’s all a blank. We were there… we heard a sound… then I was ru

‘Let’s get a cab. I want to go home.’

‘But John…’ he began.

‘Never mind John!’ she cried. ‘It’s wrong, everything here is wrong, and I want to get a cab and go home!’

‘Yes, all right. Okay.’ Lo

There was, in fact, no traffic at all on Norris Road, which was wide and cobbled. Directly down the center of it ran a set of old tram tracks. On the other side, in front of a flower shop, an ancient three-wheeled D-car was parked. Farther down on their own side, a Yamaha motorbike stood aslant on its kickstand. That was all. They could hear cars, but the sound was faraway, diffuse.

‘Maybe the street’s closed for repairs,’ Lo

‘Anywhere. Away from Crouch End. We can get a taxi if we get away from here.’ She was suddenly positive of that, if of nothing else.

‘All right.’ Now he seemed perfectly willing to entrust the leadership of the whole matter to her.

They began walking along Norris Road toward the setting sun. The faraway hum of the traffic remained constant, not seeming to diminish, not seeming to grow any, either. It was like the constant push of the wind. The desertion was begi