DEAD BRANCHES BY BENJAMIN LANGLEY -  BOOK EXCERPT

Today at Ginger Nuts of Horror is Benjamin Langley Day, we have a brilliant interview with Benjamin, the chance to win a copy of his new book, and this excerpt from his latest novel Dead Branches.  (Details on how to win a copy of the book can be found at the end of this excerpt and at the end of our interview with Benjamin comments and shares on both articles  and the pinned tweet count as multiple entries in the prize draw) 

Benjamin Langley has been writing since he could hold a pen and has always been drawn to dark tales. His debut novel, Dead Branches, was released by Bloodshot Books in June. He has had short stories published in over a dozen publications including Crescendo of Darkness, Deadman’s Tome, and The Manchester Review. He has also written Sherlock Holmes adventures that have featured in Adventures in the Realm of H.G. Wells, Adventures Beyond the Canon, and Adventures in the Realm of Steampunk. Benjamin has also written comedy sketches that have been performed on stage, radio and television.
He lives, writes, and teaches in Cambridgeshire, UK.
 

Normally, you could hear the chickens clucking from a mile off. I don’t remember if that struck me as odd right away, but then I saw the flurry of feathers, small, soft, white under-feathers, stained red, and sitting in the mud and I knew that something was wrong. Chicken wire jutted out of the coop at an ugly angle, twisted and torn away from the wood and there was a strong pissy smell like a well-soiled cat litter tray left to fester in the sun.
Reaching to open the door, I was most disturbed to find it cold. Heat used to radiate from the coop, but now it felt lifeless. I didn’t have to open the door far before what was left of one of the chickens fell onto my foot. It was mostly still intact: head, wings, legs, but its side was a bloody chasm. I could see bits of bone inside and pinky-purplish flesh, still wet, glistening in the early morning sun.
Inside, the wooden panels were streaked with blood, and the straw was almost entirely lost beneath a layer of feathers. It wasn’t until I saw a broken shell and hardening yolk smeared on a nest box that I started to panic. What if I went back without an egg? I could see Dad’s face, puffy and red, and I could already hear the words “Useless boy”, and then he’d pull on his boots and go stamping off, swearing about me under his breath. I had to find an egg. I pushed aside some of the straw, looking in the corner where they normally laid. The straw was sticky, and shards of eggshell clung to it, glued with half-set egg. In the other corner was another dead chicken, this one with a wing torn off, but behind that I was sure there was something egg shaped. I pulled a mangled chicken aside by a cold, hard leg and in the corner, there was a speckled egg. Proudly I gathered it and hurried back to the house where the smell of melting lard made my stomach turn over.
“You got some?” asked Mum.
“Something’s happened,” I said.
Dad was already glaring at me. “One egg? What good is one fucking egg?” He sneered, and then he looked me up and down, no doubt looking for something else to criticise, and as always, he found something. “What’s that slarred all up the side of your top?”
I looked at one arm, saw nothing, and then at the other and saw the streaks of red on my white, school shirt.
“You’ve ruined your shirt. You must think I farm money. You must think I can just pull it out of the earth.”
“Something’s happened,” I said again, but it was as if I had no voice.
Mum dipped a tea towel in the sink and came over to me. She started to scrub at the blood, but only succeeded in smudging it, spreading it further along the sleeve. “Whatever is it?” she asked.
“They’re dead,” I said, shaking my arm away from Mum. As I did so the egg shot out of my hand and smashed onto the floor.
“What the hell are you playing at, boy?” Dad said. He was rising out of his chair.
“They’re all dead!” I said again, and this time he seemed to hear me.
“Who are?” he said, his brow furrowing, his eyebrows forming into one long hairy caterpillar.
“The chickens! Something’s been in there. They’re all dead.”
As expected, Dad went over to the door and pulled his boots on. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“Go up and get a fresh shirt,” Mum said. “I’ll clean this mess up.”
We both looked down at the egg. The sight of the orange yolk, broken and diluting with the transparent white made me think of the stiff egg yolk in the hen hut and the gored bodies of the hens, so I dashed through the door.
My older brother Will was standing on the stairs. “What have you done now?” he asked, knowing it would wind me up.
I rushed past him, jutting my elbow out, trying to catch him in the guts on the way by, but I missed. I was in no mood for his games.
#
 
The chickens had been on my mind all day at school. I couldn’t concentrate and thinking about them had made me short tempered. After school, my concentration wasn’t much better. I’d just started my go on Super Mario Bros. when a knock on the door distracted me. I mistimed my jump and Mario landed in the open mouth of a piranha plant. Will laughed as Mario’s death tune played and he reached for the joypad but then seven rapid bangs on the door drew us out of our bedroom. As we were halfway down the stairs, Mum called my name.
The door at the bottom of the stairs opened into the kitchen. Dad was sitting at the table chasing gravy around his plate with a piece of Yorkshire pudding. As usual, he had a smear of mud on his left cheek. Mum stood by the door, and outside was my friend John’s mum. She always insisted that I call her Barbara, rather than Mrs Glover, but it felt weird calling adults by their first names. Mum urged her in. She looked out of place in our kitchen in her red and white supermarket uniform.
She came over to me. “Tom,” she said, and put her hand on my shoulder. The knuckles were red. “Have you seen John?” A string of saliva hung between her lips.
“Not since school.”
“Did he have any plans?” said Barbara.
I shrugged. Had John said anything? With the mood I’d been in all day, I couldn’t remember. I’d gone home with my cousin, Liam, who had practically dragged me out of the classroom at the end of the day and was impatiently hopping around outside his brother Andy’s classroom. We had a gang, the Crusaders. It was me, Will, Liam and Andy. We were originally called The Muskehounds, but we argued over who was Dogtanian, so we changed it. John had been hanging around with us so much that we’d had a secret meeting about whether he should be allowed to be a full-time part of the gang. We’d decided that he could, but we hadn’t told him yet.
“Did he leave on his own?” said Barbara. The saliva string broke.
“I don’t know. Sometimes he walks with Chris Jackson.”
“I’ve been there,” said Barbara. She took a huge gasp of air, as if she’d forgotten to breathe.
“Did he get home and go out again?” asked Dad, looking up from his dinner plate. Before waiting for a response, he picked up a knife and cut himself a slab of bread.
Barbara looked down at the tiles. She was never home when John got in. She worked in the new supermarket in Ely and John had the house to himself for a couple of hours. That was why he was always asking one of us over to play, so that he wouldn’t be on his own.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Mum said. She placed a hand on Barbara’s shoulder. “You know what boys are like.”
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that Mum was thinking about because there had been so many evenings when we’d been out all day, reinforcing one of our hideouts or trying to get a raft to float on the river, and then wandered home when it was already dark, but we’d never dare do it on a school night.
Mum was looking at Barbara with a sad look on her face, her hand still resting on her shoulder. I could never imagine the two of them as friends. Everything about them was different. Mum looked like a proper mum should, but John’s mum looked more like one of those TV mums, with red lipstick and hair that didn’t move, and they lived in one of Little Mosswick’s new housing estates that Dad had sworn so much about when they were built.
“I should go,” said Barbara. She stepped out of the door then turned to look back at me.
“Does he have any other friends I could check with?”
John didn’t have many friends. The trouble was that he was smart, and he knew it, and people didn’t like that. I shook my head and she turned away, her shoulders slung low. As Mum put her hand on the door, I said, “Wait,” and Barbara turned around. “Maybe Daniel Richardson? They hang out together sometimes.”
Daniel and John were friends, but they’d fallen out when John had lent his imported Nintendo Gameboy to me and not him. But perhaps they’d made up. Perhaps John was over at Daniel’s house trading Panini World Cup stickers. Maybe John was swapping his sticker of the World Cup trophy with Daniel, the sticker that I needed so badly to complete the first page. More than anything I wanted Daniel to have that shiny world cup sticker, even if it meant that I never completed my collection.
“Want us to have a bit of a look around? See if he turns up?” Dad said without looking up from his plate.
“No, I couldn’t possibly ask you to…”
“It’s no trouble. We’ll send him straight home if we find him.” Dad was already halfway out of his seat. He wiped his hands on his jumper and I wondered how he could even be wearing one in that heat.
“If you don’t mind… Thank you.” She looked at me, “And this other boy, Daniel?”
I told Barbara where Daniel lived, and she smiled before she hurried out of the door, catching her heel on the ridge, but not letting it slow her down on her way to her car.
“It’s not right leaving kids that age home on their own,” Dad said, after pushing another piece of bread into his mouth which distorted his voice. “Mothers should be home with their children.”
He swallowed noisily then reached for his boots and sunk back into the seat to pull them on. “Couldn’t very well leave her in that state though. Had to do something.”
He stood up and called out, “Will!”
Will thudded down the stairs and peered around the door-frame.
“Come take a walk with me up along the drove, and down to the riverbank.”
“Okay,” Will said and went to fetch his shoes.
“You, boy,” he said, glaring at me. “Take a wander around the back field. Take Chappie with you. He could do with the exercise.”
We named our dog after the brand of food we fed him. We thought we were being original by not calling him Spot or Patch or Rover or Shep.
He was a border collie, black with a ring of white around his neck and over his shoulders, and a patch of white around his left eye. We got him from the animal shelter. He’d been abandoned, so we had no idea of how old he was, but in the last year he’d slowed down. He didn’t show any excitement when I fetched the lead, and he struggled to get to his feet.
“Come on, Chappie,” I said, trying to muster some enthusiasm from him.
He shook after he stood, then looked at me with watery eyes, and put up no fight as I put him on the lead.
Our house was a couple of hundred metres from the main road which ran through Little Mosswick and was connected to the various fields that made up our farm by a series of droves. It had been so dry that the stiff grey mud had cracked and looked like the skin of an ancient dinosaur. Granddad Norman knew all of the names of the droves, but I only knew them by where they led to, or the streets in the village they crossed. I looked up along the drove that led up to the river, the one that Dad and Will were on, but I could see no sign of them. They’d already disappeared behind the row of elderberry bushes.
I gave Chappie’s lead a tug. “It’s me and you again.”
He stopped to sniff the gatepost.
“How come it’s always Dad and Will, hey Chappie?” I was almost dragging him along as I gazed down into the ditches on either side of the drove that separated the field of oilseed rape, which was alive with yellow flowers swaying in the breeze, from the potato field. “I’d rather be with you anyway.”
I didn’t know what I was looking into the ditches for. There wouldn’t be anything down there. Those on the left were all bone-dry and had a bit of brown grass and a few bulrushes withering away in them. The other side was thick with nettles, with a few dock leaves sprouting at the very edges. At least if anyone fell in, they’d be able to ease the sting right away. I heard a rustling and pictured the horrible toad-like creature from the cover of the Deathtrap Dungeon Fighting Fantasy book that I’d been playing through. If anything was going to strike, it would have been when I was on my own. But John was strong, and he was smart; he wouldn’t have been taken by a beast like that.
I wasn’t scared, but I didn’t want to walk along the ditches anymore, so a little way down the track, when we reached the entrance to the potato field, I decided to cut across it.
Chappie was immediately lost under the large green leaves, and I could only tell where he was by seeing where his lead disappeared, and from the odd quivering of the plants. I headed towards the back section of the field which was never planted up. It was home to a rusting Ford tractor that hadn’t moved as long as I was alive. John was into old machinery, and liked to tinker with things, so I thought it was worth a look in case he’d wandered over there.
I kept my eyes on the tractor to avoid looking at the twisted old oak tree in the back corner. It was dead, and at some point, it had been struck by lightning, perhaps more than once, which had almost split the tree in two. There was also a scorch mark on its trunk like a gaping mouth, and the wild branches above were like the hair of some ancient creature, or the snakes of Medusa, and where some low branches had been cut short years ago it looked like it had stumpy limbs. In recent years ivy had started to grow around its base, giving the impression that it had returned to life like some kind of foul, brain-thirsty zombie.
I’d been scared of the tree ever since Granddad Norman put one of his glass eyes into a knot on the tree’s trunk the day after he told us the story of how he lost his eye. It was not long after they bought the land, which hadn’t been farmed since the Miller boys (whoever they were) had all been killed during the First World War, when Granddad Norman was still only a boy. My great-granddad wanted that land in use, so he gaveGranddad Norman, and his older brother, Arthur, one day to clear it.
Once, there were sheds there, but they’d long since collapsed and the beams were half-buried in the ground. The best method Arthur and Granddad Norman could think of was to drag them out using chains attached to the tractor. They were all set to have the entire field clear, but then they set their sights on the old oak tree, and even though it was before the lightning strike, it already looked dead. They thought that it would come out of the ground as easily as those beams that had only been sunk a year or two. They didn’t reckon on the ancient evil that was holding the cursed oak in place. They tied their chain around the tree, and Arthur started in the tractor. The engine roared and the chain dug into the trunk, and Granddad swears it was on the lean and it looked like it was about to go when he heard something ping. The last thing he saw with his left eye was the broken chain flying towards him.
It was all for the best, claimed Granddad, because if the tree hadn’t taken his eye, then he would have had to fight in the war and, like Arthur, he might never have come home.
Putting his glass eye in the tree, the day after he told us that story, was his worst prank yet. He was spying on us from behind the old Ford tractor and he slapped the side of his legs and made a “Hoo-hoo,” sound, as Andy ran off across the field screaming, and he kept laughing until he had to dab at his good eye with a handkerchief.
I couldn’t look at the tree in case it was looking back and who knows what would have happened if I got caught in its evil glare, so I looked over to the new bypass. John wouldn’t have been playing there. Not while they were working on it. We used to, when it was a huge pile of sand and rubble and it would be left unattended for days at a time, but he was more sensible than to play in the path of a steamroller.
Chappie sniffed at the tractor wheels and cocked his leg up at it and whined. There was a thin film of dust and dirt on the seat, and it was clear no one had been on it for a while. I lifted a sheet of corrugated iron, and flipped it over, watching the worms wriggle underneath. There was a strong earthy smell, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. We walked close enough to the oak tree to see that there were no footprints in the soft earth around it, but I wasn’t getting any closer than that. We walked to the other side of the field and then I jumped the ditch while Chappie ran down and scrambled back up the other side. We had one of our old dens just off the path that led back to the farmhouse. This one we’d called Narnia, because, when we built it, I was obsessed with the TV series of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe which had been on TV a few months earlier. It was watching that which made me want to read all of the books. Our current base was across the other side of the oil seed rape field, and we called that one Moon Base One (Liam named it) and we had a smaller one, up by the school, which was The Broom Cupboard. Narnia was built where the dyke came to an end a couple of elderberry bushes met and formed a natural shelter. We used to climb down the dyke and hide under the bushes. All that was left in there was some sticks Will had sharpened with his penknife back in the days when we were still Muskehounds. When it rained hard the dyke would get wet at the bottom and Mum told us off for getting our school trousers muddy, so we gave it up. John didn’t even know about this base though, and there was no sign of anyone having been there, so we wandered back home, passing the chicken coop on the way. Something bad had happened there. I saw those mutilated chickens in my head again, and then John’s face. What if the same thing that had gotten the chickens had gotten John too?
Dad’s boots were by the door. I walked in and he was sitting at the table. His face was red, and his hair was standing up, as if he’d been running his hands through it. He broke off his conversation with Mum when he saw me and stared until I looked away.
“He’ll be all right,” Mum said. She patted me on the back, and I slipped off my shoes.
“Can I give his house a call? To see if he’s home?”
Mum turned away and picked up a tea-towel to wipe a cup which was already dry. “Better leave them alone,” she said, looking down at the cup. “I’m sure he’ll be at home, but his Mum and Dad will be having words with him.”
Having words. That was adult speak for telling him off.
With that I filled a beaker with orange squash, ran in some water, and took it up to my room. It was the room at the top of the stairs, with the spare room on the left (piled high with boxes) and the bathroom on the right. Mum and Dad’s room was on the other side of that, but we weren’t allowed in there.
In our room, my bed was nearest the door and Will’s was on the other side of the room which meant that he had to cross into my side to get to his, so he claimed that he had the better side of the room as it had more privacy. As the older brother, he deserved that.
On top of our shared set of drawers (top two for Will, bottom two for me) was our TV. We shared that too. It was a 21-inch Philips colour TV with Teletext and a remote control. Attached to that was our Nintendo Entertainment System, a joint Christmas present six months earlier. Will had already started playing again.
I walked over to the window and looked out. I was glad our bedroom didn’t look out to the rest of the village; I didn’t want to see the school and the estate John lived on. But looking out over the field brought me no comfort either as my eyes always came to rest on the oak tree. I pulled the curtains closed.