False Witness (Part 1)

Danny couldn’t figure why the woman at the departure gate was so familiar. He didn’t know her through work or school days or university. But soon as she’d caught his eye, snuggled down in a bucket seat reading a paperback, 747s taxiing in the window behind her, something snagged in his brain. 

He guessed she was in her early thirties, fashionably dressed, hair styled in a knowing retro perm, fingers adorned in rings. If he was 10 years younger, he told himself, he might’ve struck up a conversation, tried to find out more. He shook his head. Truth was, even in his youth, he’d lacked that kind of confidence.   

But I have seen you before, he thought. Where?

A man with a British Airways badge approached the front desk and started calling out seat numbers for boarding. Judging by the amount of people at the gate, flight BA1516 to JFK would be half full, a welcome change from Danny’s usual experience. 

His seat number was included in the third group to be called, and the woman opposite raised herself too. He joined the queue directly behind her.  This close, edging forwards as passports and boarding passes were checked at the front, his disquiet grew.

Her hair, her stature, the way she moved all combined to give Danny a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, a feeling he’d not encountered in some thirty years. 

Danny, 1996

He bundled through the exit doors, past the bouncers, into the crisp November air. 

There was no dawdling on the steps, not at chucking out time. They pushed from behind, hundreds of them -  teenagers, twenty-somethings, a few old enough to know better - transported from the warm beer-soaked insides of the Wildmoor into a gravel car park surrounded by fields, hedges and darkness. 

Danny swayed on his feet, stepped uneasily onto a grass verge, smiling to himself. A hand clapped on his shoulder.

“Danny boy!”

Chris, his friend of some 15 years, a mop-haired bear of a man would’ve looked more at home on a Californian beach than in a Warwickshire field. 

“Enjoyed it.” Danny said, smiling and Chris put an arm around his shoulder. 

“Mikey is getting the car. Roland and Stavos are with him.” 
 
“I need a piss.” Danny said, and it was true. He wouldn’t make it all the way back to Shipston. “I’ll do it in the bushes over there.

“I’ll come with.” Chris said. 

The two young men marched off to the edge of the field, escaping the glow of the club and the noise of the exiting crowd. Soon, they were at the brambles which separated the grounds from a neighbouring field. 

Chris stood a good distance away, unzipping and draining his bladder. Danny did the same, a thick stream splashing noisily into the mud beneath the hedge. He looked up to the horizon and saw the lights of Stratford winking in the distance.  Silence and relief.

This had been his first time at the Wildmoor, a big step forward from lonely weekend nights stuck in his room while his parents watched telly downstairs. He’d been impatient for this, no longer wanting to be the straight-laced kid who always handed homework in on time and blushed when Danielle Lewis caught him staring at her. 

A quick movement below and he flinched back, piss landing on his shoes. “Fuck.” he said. 

Rats, mice? They were everywhere out here. He finished, zipped up and turned back towards the car park. Chris was ahead of him, already nearing Mike’s Volvo which was half full and pulled up on the grass, waiting.

Before Danny could go further, another sound came from behind, in the bushes. Not movement this time, but (somehow, impossibly) a voice.

“Danny.”

He froze and went back to the hedge. 

The voice came again, a scratchy edge to it, like stepping on dry autumn leaves, “Danny Cuthbert. Come talk to me.”

The sound of his name broadcasting from the brambles made Danny dizzy. He bent over, hands on his knees and suppressed the instinct to vomit. 

“Need a chat, young man. ‘Bout your plans for the night.”

“What the hell are you doing in a bush? And who is that?” Danny’s voice was high-pitched, incredulous. 

“Come over, closer. Where you was doing your business.”

Years later, on the rare occasions he recalled this moment, Danny wondered why he didn’t just walk away, jog on back to his friends waiting in Mikey’s car, put it all down to the booze mixing with the cold night air. 

But he did what the voice told him to do and stepped closer to the hedge.

“Why you down there?” Danny repeated.

Shuffling again and this time he caught a glimpse of it down in the ditch. All the irritation filling up inside Danny drained away, like a plug pulled from a bath.

He had seen a part of it, the thing in the hedge, poking out of the brambles in the meagre half-light. A bony human forearm linked to something… wrong, animal.

“You need to listen.” It said, the voice softer now, but still with that edge, like someone with a really terrible sore throat. 

Danny shook his head. “How do you know my name?”

“I know everybody’s name,” it rasped. “Priests and paupers, shepherds and kings.”

“I’m going.” Danny said, convinced that, whatever the thing in the hedge had to say to him, it couldn’t be good. 

“I know your secret heart, boy. Young Danielle. A goodly-girl from a goodly family. What did she ever do to deserve being inside your nasty little brain?”

Danny halted on the half-turn, astonished at the vile accuracy of what he’d just heard..

“You come back here, RIGHT NOW!” The pitch of its voice broke into a grim, weighty baritone, as if another, much larger entity had swallowed it up and belched out the end of the sentence. 

Danny shuddered, frozen to the spot, convinced any movement might make it say more. 

But when it spoke again, the creature’s snip-snap edge was back, it’s bigger nastier sibling no longer speaking for it. Squinting, Danny could make out something akin to a face staring out from the gloom. No eyes, not yet, but the approximation of a mouth forming words. 

“Do not get in that car.” It said. 

“I …”

It cut him off, “They’ll be mangled and wrangled. Twisted up in the metal and burned to pieces. You don’t want to end up like that, do you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s hurts, dying.” The thing said.

The situation was so bizarre, talking to some creature in a hedge, that it took a few seconds for the gravity of its message to settle in. 

Shouting came from behind him, in the direction of the car park. “Come on, Danny! Time to go, pal.” He could hear the irritation in Stavos’ voice. The car horn blared. 

Panicked now, he addressed the thing directly, “You think they’re going to crash?”

“Your friend Mike, he wants the others to like him. He wants to be part of your group. Yes?”

 “Yes,” Danny replied, whispering, as if talking to this thing were a betrayal to be kept from the others.

“He thinks it will impress them, to drive fast, very, fast. And they will all like it, for a while, screaming and laughing as he goes round the corners on the Shipston Road. Right up until they reach Atherstone.”

“Okay, stop. Don’t say anymore.”

“He goes around a corner too fast and and flips into the air.”  The thing laughs, a nasty, horrid cackle. “Round and round they go. Spinning in the air.”

“No.”

“And when they land, they all die, in bad bad pain.” The laugh came again, loud this time. Danny couldn’t understand why people weren’t running across from the Wildmoor, trying to find out what was making such a terrible sound. 

He ran then, desperate to get to the car, to explain, to tell them all to get  out.  He’d get the taxi, take them to the cash machine, get money from his savings account.  He’d pay for everything, and they would all be safe. 

But a few steps into his sprint, he lifted his head to call to them and found it was already too late. 

The car was gone, red taillights disappearing down the Wildmoor lane. 

***

Close to her now, in the queue for boarding, Danny’s memories returned in pieces, jagged with sharp edges. 

In the months after the crash, he’d experienced vivid and disturbing dreams in which he stood by the side of the road in Atherstone, watching the car pass him by, the car he should have been riding in. The Volvo hit the kerb and flipped into the air, just like the thing in the hedge told him it would.  In the dream, he could feel the cold night air on his skin, the freezing rain on his face and then finally, the heat of the explosion as Mikey’s car was engulfed in flames. 

Of course, his counsellor told him the dreams were survivor’s guilt, that they would pass in time as he recovered from the trauma of losing his friends. And, after a while, she was proved right. The dreams stopped. Danny mourned Chris, Mikey, Stavos and Roland, became the kid who’d had the lucky escape, a walking, talking cautionary tale for parents to point at. 

Danny Cuthbert refused to get in a car with a drunk driver. Danny Cuthbert is still alive and all his friends are dead.

Eventually, he moved away from Warwickshire, went to university in London and began his career in the City, trading on futures, then shifting to bond markets at precisely the right time. 

Around 2003 (or was it 2004?) he had a strange relapse. The dream came back. For the first time in years, he found himself on the side of that road again, watching Mikey’s beat-up Volvo race past, flip, then explode.  

But this time, there was someone stood next to him on the roadside. He tried to turn his head to see who it was, but at first, it was too hard.  It took a tremendous effort to move his line of sight away from the road and the path of the car. Eventually, perhaps the twentieth night after the return of the dream, he managed to twist far enough to see who was standing there. 

It was a stranger, a woman he’d never seen before, looking at him, smiling. She was in her early thirties, hair permed with rings on her fingers. He wanted her to explain who she was, why she was here, watching his friends die. But time after time, the woman said the same thing. 

“Please.” she said, “Leave them alone.”

End of part 1 of 3. Part 2 is here: https://www.abctales.com/story/charlie77/false-witness-part-2