Prologue | Novel

Hide

‘I am a Norfolk man, and glory in being so.'
Horatio Nelson
‘Satan on the road to hell, ruined Norfolk as he fell’
Anon, 12th century.

The stairs had been taken away the month before. An elderly woman fell right through the sixth rung and threatened to sue the estate unless they acted quickly. For most of May, Jordan Hide was inaccessible. The hikers tackling the coastal path, local dog walkers, and bird watchers that did stumble upon it saw only a moss-covered door twenty feet in the air with no way up to meet it.

The new stairs were installed with little ceremony on the 20th of May. Their freshness looked very out of place next to the rest of the ancient birdwatcher’s shelter. So much so that upon installation the head groundskeeper, Wallace Brood, before even setting foot upon them, ordered them to be stained a less offensive shade.

“It’s called a ‘hide’ for heaven’s sake, not a ‘seen’,” he told the estate’s chief carpenter in charge of the project.

They were painted over the course of a weekend by the carpenter’s apprentice. Every evening when he returned to the workshop he complained about the awful smell that stuck to that area of the pine woods – a smell strong enough to overpower his drying varnish. It took him two days to finish the job, finally admitting it was because he had been reluctant to stay on after sunset. He said that the whole area ‘felt spooky’. Not one of the staff took him seriously. The consensus was that he was young and whinging, as young people are prone to do when there is work to be done.

On the 21st of May, which was a Monday, Brood returned to inspect the work. It was decent. He walked up the stairs; they were sturdy. But through the lingering smell of vanish still soaking into the wood, he smelt something else. Wallace recognised it instantly. He sighed – the smell of putrefaction. An animal must have died nearby and wasn’t going back to the earth unwillingly.

Upon the last step, twenty feet up in the air, he placed his key in the lock. The smell, however, had intensified. Nothing could have got in, could it? He thought back to when he had locked this exact door a month ago. He had checked every inch of the wooden cube, including under the benches and behind the door, before securing the shutters. He was a meticulous person and wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The door snagged on uneven floorboards and he had to put his shoulder to it to open it fully. The smell was indeed coming from inside the hide. It wafted over him and he held his breath. Wallace had smelt carcasses a thousand times before – hazards of living and working on a countryside estate – but never had he experienced a smell quite like this. Something about it was wrong, inconsistent, somehow malevolent. This wasn’t just nature colliding with other nature; this was unnatural. It stunk to highest heaven.

Flinging open the nearest shutter open light spilt across the floor like dropped paint. He put his lips through the frame and gulped in fresh air, trying not to spew onto the open field below. Through his frantic breaths he heard a noise. The room hummed. Not the serene hum of a jolly gardener, nor that of a happy bee pollenating early summer flowers. This was the hum of a swarm that had come across a kill; a feast was in progress.

Brood steadied himself. With a reassuring voice in his head, telling him this was one of many of the heroic acts that belonged to a professional groundskeeper, he turned and confronted it.

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