Screaming Science Fiction by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online

brick- and wooden-bridged streams; the whole background forms a pattern of peace and tranquility rarely disturbed over the centuries.
    By night, though, the place takes on a different aspect. An almost miasmal aura of timelessness, of antiquity, hangs over the brooding woods and dark hamlets. The moon silvers winding hedgerows and ancient thatched roofs, and when the pubs close and the last lights blink out in farm and cottage windows, then it is as if Night had thrown her blackest cloak over the land, when even the most powerful headlight’s beam penetrates the resultant darkness only with difficulty. Enough to allow you to drive on the narrower roads, if you drive slowly and carefully.
    Strangers motoring through this region—even in daylight hours—are known occasionally to lose their way, to drive the same labyrinthine lanes for hours on end in meaningless circles. The contours of the countryside often seem to defy even the most accurate sense of direction, and the roads and tracks never quite seem to tally with printed maps of the area. There are rumors almost as old as the area itself that persons have been known to pass into oblivion here—like gray smoke from cottage chimneystacks disappearing into air—never to come out again.
    Not that George Benson was a stranger. True, he had not been home to England for many years—since running off as a youth, later to marry and settle in Germany—but as a boy he had known this place well and must have cycled for thousands of miles along dusty summer roads, lanes and tracks, even bridle-paths through the heart of this very region.
    And that was why he was so perturbed now: not because of a pack of lies and fairy stories and old wives’ tales heard as a boy, but because this was his home territory, where he’d been born and reared. Indeed, he felt more than perturbed, stupid almost. A fellow drives all the way north through Germany from Dortmund, catches the car ferry from Bremerhaven into Harwich, rolls on up-country having made the transition from right- to left-of-the-road driving with only a very small effort…. and then hopelessly loses himself within only a fistful of miles from home!
    Anger at his own supposed stupidity turned to bitter memories of his wife, then to an even greater anger. And a hurt….
    It didn’t hurt half so much now, though, not now that it was all over. But the anger was still there. And the memories of the milk of marriage gone sour. Greta had just upped and left home one day. George, employing the services of a detective agency, had traced his wife to Hamburg, where he’d found her in the bed of a nightclub crooner, an old boyfriend who finally had made it good.
    “Damn all Krauts!” George cursed now as he checked the speed of his car to read out the legend on a village signpost. His headlights picked the letters out starkly in the surrounding darkness. “Middle Hamborough?—Never bloody heard of it!” Again he cursed as, making a quick decision, he spun the steering wheel to turn his big car about on the narrow road. He would have to start back-tracking, something he hated doing because it seemed so inefficient, so wasteful. “And blast and damn all Kraut cars!” he added as his front wheels bounced jarringly on to and back off the high stone roadside curb.
    “Greta!” he quietly growled to himself as he drove back down the road away from the outskirts of Middle Hamborough. “What a bitch !” For of course she had blamed him for their troubles, saying that she couldn’t stand his meanness. Him , George Benson, mean! She simply hadn’t appreciated money. She’d thought that Deutschmarks grew on trees, that pfennigs gathered like dew on the grass in the night. George, on the other hand, had inherited many of the pecuniary instincts of his father, a Yorkshireman of the Old School—and of Scottish stock to boot—who really understood the value of “brass.” His old man had used to say: “Thee tak’ care o’ the pennies,