Sacrifice (6 page)

As always, Todd arrived at Cheryl’s parents’ house bang on time, looking spick and span in his dark jeans, his bold striped sport shirt and well-pressed blazer. His gleaming, newly-washed Polo waited at the end of the drive – her chariot. That was one thing Cheryl’s parents really liked about Todd. He nearly always drove, so he rarely drank, which was a good thing in itself and in addition meant their lovely daughter was always assured of getting home safely.

It was Cheryl’s mum, Marlene, who answered the door. She was a bit of a looker herself, and she too was going out somewhere that evening, so she looked sexy, her voluptuous curves wrapped in chiffon and black lace, her blood-red toenails peeking out of patent black stilettos. But it was Cheryl who was the star of the show in a metallic-blue sequin dress with gloss tights and sky-high heels. Presenting Cheryl with ten red Valentine’s roses, Todd didn’t know what to say, except what he always said, which was that he was the luckiest man alive.

By seven-thirty they’d hit the road. After stopping for a bite to eat at their favourite pizzeria, they drove to a pub they knew, where they met up with two other couples they were friendly with. After a few drinks, the girls already getting tipsy on the landlady’s special Valentine’s cocktail, they headed off to Manchester together to hit one of the expensive, glitzy nightclubs.

It was a cracking event.

City centre clubs could get a bit crowded, a bit sweaty, a bit noisy – but the atmosphere in this one was just right. The music was ultra schmaltzy, but Cheryl really didn’t care because tonight was all about love, and she had Todd. There was lots of dancing and lots and lots of kissing. Subsequently, by two o’clock in the morning, their intense affection for each other had become unmanageably passionate. So they said their goodbyes and hurried outside hand-in-hand, giggling.

It was another very cold night, their breath steaming, and the light sweat on their foreheads prickling like ice. As they made their way down the back alley to the car park, its cobblestones were rimed with frost.

The moment they got into the car and closed the doors, Todd put a hungry hand on Cheryl’s nylon-clad thigh.

‘Not here,’ she said, pouting.

Todd glanced around. She was probably right. People would be coming and going for a little while yet. ‘Usual place?’ he asked with an impish grin.

‘It’s a lot quieter there,’ she said.

So Todd drove them back out of Manchester along the M61 motorway. Their home town, Bolton, was only about eight or nine miles away, but before they reached it, they diverted along the A675 onto the West Pennine Moors. En route, Cheryl lifted the hem of her dress to reveal that she wasn’t wearing shiny tights at all, but shiny stockings fastened to pretty white suspender straps. She wiggled her bottom as she drew a pair of panties down her shapely legs.

‘Watch the road,’ she said sternly as Todd kept glancing down, his eyes popping.

There were few other cars around at this time of night, especially here on the West Pennine Moors, though these weren’t wild moors as such – more like open countryside alternating with reservoirs and dense tracts of woodland. But only one or two main roads led through this area, with few streetlamps.

Todd eventually decided he couldn’t wait any longer and pulled up in a lay-by – only for Cheryl to glance around, discomforted. ‘Here?’ she said. ‘We’re still on the road.’

‘There’s no one out at this hour,’ he replied, loosening his seatbelt.

‘I thought we were going to the usual place?’

‘That’s another five minutes off …’

‘Yeah, but it’s more sheltered than this.’ She pouted. ‘Please.’

Sighing, he switched the engine back on. Two miles further along, they swung left down a short access way and into a small car park, which was used during the day by walkers and picnickers but at night was nearly always deserted. At present it was pitch-black, huddled beneath a roof of branches so interlaced that only faint beams of frosty moonlight penetrated. Even so, Todd drove down to its farthest end, about a hundred yards from the entrance. He pulled up, applied the handbrake and switched off his headlights.

Beside them stood a wall of leafless thickets, but these were only vaguely distinguishable in the gloom. Beyond those lay a blackness in which nothing stirred, at least nothing they could see. At normal times they might have been a little oppressed by this sense of isolation, but now the twosome were hot for each other, breathless with anticipation.

At first only Cheryl reacted to the brief, shrill cry, which sounded from somewhere close by.

‘What was that?’ she said, sitting bolt upright.

‘Does it matter?’ Todd fumbled eagerly with the button of his jeans.

‘No Todd, seriously … what was it?’

‘I don’t know … a bird probably.’

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘Mating call. How appropriate.’ He leaned over, planted his mouth on Cheryl’s perfumed neck and tried to worm a mischievous hand between her thighs – but she kept them clamped together and pushed him away.

‘Stop it … that didn’t sound like a bird to me.’

Realising that she wasn’t just being coy, Todd straightened up. ‘What’s the matter now?’

Cheryl stared through the windows, beyond which tendrils of icy mist ebbed amid meshed, naked twigs. ‘What … what if it’s someone messing around?’

‘All the way out here?’

She pondered that, inwardly agreeing that it seemed unlikely, but still discomforted. ‘Look, I definitely heard something …’

‘There
are
night birds, you know.’

‘In February?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Hey … if someone’s here, and … I dunno, if they want to watch us, would they give themselves away by making daft noises?’

‘Watch us?’ She looked dismayed by the mere thought. ‘You mean like doggers?’

‘Well … yeah. But what are the chances of that at this hour?’

Even as he said this Cheryl thought she glimpsed movement: a black shadow flitting out of sight behind the even blacker pillar of a tree-trunk. She squealed and grabbed Todd’s hand. ‘There’s someone out there, I know it!’

‘Cheryl, there’s no one. It’s three in the morning!’

She peered into the encircling darkness, and he could tell that she was genuinely frightened.

‘What did you think you saw?’ he asked quietly.

‘I don’t know. It could have been a trick of the light …’

‘There is no light.’

Todd opened the car door and jumped out, his smoky breath wreathed around him as he scanned the nearby trees. Fleetingly, he too felt vulnerable. In darkness this opaque someone could be very near and he wouldn’t necessarily see them. But it was ridiculous, surely? No one would be all the way …

Something flickered at the corner of his vision. He spun in that direction; a low bough on the car park’s edge was quivering, as if someone had just brushed past it.

‘Hey!’ he called, striding quickly over there. ‘Hey, you fucking pervert!’

‘Todd, don’t!’ Cheryl hissed.

‘Why don’t you go back to the internet and knock a quick one off over some underagers, eh?’

‘Todd!’

He halted at the edge of the undergrowth, right next to the quivering bough. ‘There’s nothing here for you tonight … you got it?’ His eyes slowly attuned as he peered into the foliage, though it diminished quickly into a foggy gloom.

In truth, he’d only half heard the keening cry that had distracted Cheryl. But now that he pondered it, there
had
been something vaguely fake about it, as if – how had Cheryl put it? – someone was messing around. Again, Todd scanned the murky woodland, his ears pricked. It was so still, so quiet, as though the roots, the branches, the bark were listening back to him. He hung on there for several more seconds, defying someone to respond.

‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ Cheryl said, coming up behind, heels clattering the tarmac.

He shrugged. ‘Just a precaution.’

‘You’ll make them angry.’

‘Cheryl, there’s no one here, okay? I shouted on the off chance, but it’s a bit late at night for someone to be creeping around.’

She took his arm in a tight grip. ‘Right, fine … enough showing off, alright?’

‘I’m not showing off.’

She led him back to the car. ‘You don’t have to do stuff like that to impress me …’

Her words tailed off as they stumbled to a standstill.

An electric light was visible about seventy yards away, in the farthest corner of the car park. It was a single, feebly glowing bulb, only just managing to illuminate the narrow doorway underneath it, which they knew gave access to a small public lavatory. But this was the first time either of them had noticed it.

‘When did that get switched on?’ Cheryl asked quietly.

Todd mused. ‘Must’ve been on all the time.’

‘I didn’t see it when we first arrived.’

‘Were you looking?’

‘No, but surely we’d have spotted it?’

Todd started towards it, slowly at first but then with purpose.

‘What are we doing now?’ Cheryl asked, following, still clutching his arm.

‘Just seeing if there’s anyone there.’

‘Er … why?’

‘Because like you say, we don’t want spectators!’

‘But you said there’d be no one here at this hour.’

Todd had no immediate answer to that. It was possible they’d simply driven in here and hadn’t observed that the lavatory’s exterior light was on, but he doubted it. The clicking of their footfalls echoed eerily as they approached the tiny structure, its simple square dimensions slowly coming into view. They were about thirty yards away when its light winked off – they froze mid-stride – and then winked on again.

‘Not working properly,’ Todd stated. The exterior light flickered several times more, finally went off again, and then stayed off. ‘Just wait here … I’ll go and check.’

Cheryl remained where she was while Todd ventured forward over the last few yards, one eye on the lavatory’s half-open door behind which lay dank blackness, the other on the deep, dim undergrowth at the building’s rear. That too lay thick, motionless and impenetrable.

The lavatory was little more in size than a suburban outhouse. It was built from red brick and when seen in daylight, written all over with obscene slogans. Inside, it comprised a single narrow passage with a broken washbasin at the far end, and two cubicles that, when he’d gone in there once before to take a leak, were as dirty and smelly as animal stalls. Todd poked his head around the door first and fumbled along the jamb for a switch. He encountered two, and when he threw the first the interior bulb flickered to life, revealing an unwashed tile floor and damp plaster walls. He glanced into both cubicles. The first was empty and the toilet lid closed, but in the second the lid was open and someone had daubed the bowl’s fecal contents all over the surrounding woodwork in broad smears, at one point attempting to write something with it. Not surprisingly, the stench in there was appalling, and Todd was grateful to beat a hasty retreat. As he exited, the internal light also began flickering and buzzing loudly.

‘Loose connections,’ he said, rejoining Cheryl outside. ‘Probably been going on and off all day.’

‘But why would it be on in the first place?’ she asked as he walked her back across the car park.

‘Someone left it on … it’s no big deal.’

‘Listen, Todd …’ She glanced again at the encircling woodland, clotted with night-mist. ‘I think we should just go home.’

They’d now reached the Polo, and he gazed at her across its roof, hugely disappointed. ‘Oh … come on, Cheryl!’

She regarded him carefully. Todd was every inch the gentleman – he’d been so quick to protect her honour then, even against foes that were possibly imaginary – but he was a man too, and they hadn’t got frisky with each other for over a week. No wonder he looked so dejected.

‘Well at least get close to the road,’ she said, ‘so we can make a quick getaway if we need to.’

‘Whatever you say.’

They climbed in together. Todd twisted the key, put the Polo back in gear, and nosed it around in a three-point turn. Finger-like twigs groped at the windscreen and then at the side windows as the vehicle manoeuvred. As they drove back across the car park, Cheryl glanced towards the lavatory block. Both its internal and external lights had now gone off.

‘Even if there is someone around,’ Todd said cheerfully, ‘they won’t see much in this darkness.’

‘Dirty old men,’ she replied with disgust.

‘Dogging’s a popular sport these days. You get codgers, you get husky athletic types. All sorts.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it?’

‘Hey, I’m a man of the world.’ Todd was making light of the situation, though he couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder again, eyes roving the empty, moon-dappled tarmac behind them. It was funny how once you’d told yourself you weren’t alone in a dark and lonely place, it was difficult to get the idea out of your head. Not that it was easy to be distracted by this for long, the way Cheryl was now moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue.

‘I hope you’re going to show me how much of a man you are in a minute,’ she said.

He grinned as he drove.

This time they parked at the foot of the access lane, about thirty yards from the car park entrance. Even though a slice of grey, moonlit ribbon was visible where the main road passed by, deep, skeletal thickets blotted out the rest. Todd hurriedly unzipped his flies and pulled his trousers to his knees, pushing his underpants down after them. As his engorged penis sprang to life, Cheryl climbed over the gearstick to face him, straddling his lap. He entered her easily and quickly.

She grunted gently as she rode him, wrapping her arms around his neck, bending her head down to greedily kiss at his lips, their tongues lashing. Cheryl screwed her eyes shut to suffer no other distractions, to maximise every millisecond of bliss. And then, for some reason unknown to her, she opened them again.

Only briefly, fleetingly – but that was when she realised they had company.

At first she thought the tall figure with the glowing green eyes was standing in the car park directly behind them – only to realise that this was a reflection on the inside of the rear window. The figure was actually standing in front of the car.