Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Amy Rae Durreson

  By the time we got to the front of Vainguard, I was jumping at shadows. Everything was dark and quiet, but as I reached out to unlock the front doors, something rustled behind me. I twitched, swinging the torch round, but there was nothing there.

  “Mac?” Doug said, his voice cracking. “Is that you?”

  “Just the wind or a mouse,” I told him.

  “I heard my name. Someone said my name.”

  I hadn’t heard that, but that didn’t mean much. I pointed the torch at the barn, and the square doorway seemed to swallow the light. “Want to check there first or inside the house?”

  “Someone was in there.”

  So we checked the barn, one empty stall at a time. We found nothing, but every time I swung the torch to point into a corner, I felt like someone was watching me from the shadows. By the time we were at the far end, I half thought I could see the flicker of shadows behind me, hopping out of the beam whenever I shifted the light.

  “This place is weird,” Doug said. “Creepy.”

  “Creepy enough to persuade you to go home?” I asked.

  “Home’s, like, a million miles away, and we—what if it’s time to go back and we still haven’t found Mac?”

  I steered him out of the barn. “Your parents will work something out.”

  “But what about Mac?”

  Behind us, the echo whispered, “Mac? Mac? Mac!”

  Doug took a step closer to me, and we continued into Vainguard. Despite my best efforts, my breathing quickened as I pushed open the door to the barmkin and we stepped inside. I couldn’t help glancing up at the empty window frames. Was there any glass still left in them? Might the last shards come slicing down at us like it had at Jeannie and her friends?

  Nothing happened. To my relief, the place felt empty—the chapel door was still closed, and there was no glimmer of light in that corner. We continued into the main hall, and I reached out for the light switch inside the front door.

  The lights didn’t come on.

  “Maybe it’s just a dodgy fuse,” I said hopefully. “The wiring in this place must be ancient.”

  Doug let out a huffy sigh of exasperation, and somewhere further down the hall, someone giggled.

  It wasn’t the malicious laugh I’d heard before, but a lighter—younger—sound.

  “Mac?” Doug called again, pulling away. “Is that you?”

  The torch wouldn’t switch on. In the hallway, with no windows to let in even that faint glimmer of moonlight, I was blind. I heard footsteps, though, quick and light, but couldn’t work out which way he was going.

  “Doug!” I snapped. “Get back here! Now!”

  A small hand closed on my sleeve, pulling me further into the dark, and from the far end of the hall, Doug said, “Chill, man. I’m just looking for a light switch.”

  There was no way he could have reached my sleeve from there. I looked down, squinting through the darkness, but all I could see was the barest hint of someone standing by my side, someone no taller than my upper arm. For a moment, I froze, my heart in my throat.

  But the hand that brushed my arm was warm and solid, and of all the things I had ever feared, I had never feared a child. I swallowed my qualms and said, keeping my voice soft, “And who are you then?”

  Doug said, “Mr Kwarteng?”

  “Stay over there,” I told him and, as I had done with him in the road, I crouched down. No frightened kid wants an adult looming over them, so I put myself on their level, even though I still couldn’t see who was beside me. I said again, “Hey. Going to talk to me?”

  There was a moment of silence; then a voice sounded, a whispery, indistinct sound like the echo in the barn. I couldn’t understand it.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Can you try again?”

  But Doug said, his own voice thin, “She says you know her dad.”

  “Katie!” I asked, and her hand squeezed my sleeve again, compulsively tight.

  Oh shit. Niall had ridden away with the hunt, and she’d been here all the time.

  She’d been here all the time. Katie Forster hadn’t passed into some peaceful afterlife. She wasn’t sleeping under that tiny grave in the cemetery in Carlisle. She was still here, in Vainguard, in the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  AGAIN, SHE spoke in that weird, echoey whisper. Again, Doug understood what I could not.

  “She says the hunt is chasing old Redcap to the castle, and if we get there before he goes to ground, we might get to his hiding place. How do you know that?” His voice was rising.

  I said, choosing my words carefully, “Doug, this is Katie. She used to live in the lodge.”

  “Used to? What’s she doing back here—oh, crap. Is she dead?”

  I might not have been able to pick out Katie’s words, but I recognised the huff of annoyance she let out. I said to her, “Don’t make that face at Doug.”

  She giggled at me, then said something scornful in Doug’s direction.

  He said, “Hey! Not all of us grew up in freaky ghost land!”

  Another whispery set of comments and she tugged hard on my sleeve, back towards the entrance. Her hand slipped from my sleeve, and I heard the faint echo of her footsteps rushing ahead—not running, but striding purposefully. Doug and I followed her outside into the rough wind and thin moonlight. Somewhere in the transition from darkness to light, I lost track of her footsteps, and when we came outside, there was no sign of her.

  “Where’s your car?” Doug demanded, bouncing by my side.

  “Slow down,” I said, trying to keep my wits about me. “It may still be a trap.”

  He ignored me, pelting down the drive. “Quick! Quick!”

  I’d left the courtesy car parked behind the lodge rather than risk another one to the malice in the main house. Doug was standing between it and the van, looking between them urgently. The sky was almost cloudless now, and the moon and the light from the lodge gave him a double shadow, rising up against the side of the van, one bold and one so soft as to be almost intangible.

  When I went to the car, he hopped into the front seat quickly and huffed as I fumbled for the ignition—I’d only driven this car a few times and wasn’t confident with it yet.

  “Come on. I could drive it faster than this.”

  A soft derisive noise came from the back seat, and we both froze.

  “Glad you could join us, Katie,” I said, keeping my voice dry as Doug’s eyes went wide again.

  Driving by night out here was unnerving in a whole new way. The headlights cancelled out the effect of the moonlight, and the darkness suddenly pressed in on us. There were no streetlights, and only the occasional gleam of windows to show where houses sat. I drove slowly and tossed Doug the satnav when he complained.

  “I should drop you back at the guesthouse,” I said to him.

  “No!”

  I felt a little of the same urgency. Everything had changed tonight, and I wasn’t sure yet whether it was for the better or the worse. Niall had broken open the loop we were in. Now all bets were off.

  My lights caught something in the road ahead of us—a sheep, asleep in the middle of the lane. I leaned on the horn and it blinked slowly before lumbering out of the road.

  “This place is so weird,” Doug muttered. “Now can we speed up?”

  “No,” I said shortly. Too many people had already died on this road, though I wasn’t going to voice that thought in front of one of the victims.

  It seemed to take hours to get to Hermitage Castle, though I knew it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes at most. The night was utterly quiet, with the only sign that we weren’t the last living souls in the world the occasional glimmer from an upstairs window. The wind still moved the trees that clung to the banks of the streams that slipped below and alongside our road, but the sky was clear and ablaze with great sweeps of stars, pale and impossibly distant.

  After the first few miles, Doug went quiet, and Katie made no more sound, not even
a breath.

  When we took the turning for Hermitage, though, she sighed.

  The cottage opposite the castle was dark when we pulled up, and I wasn’t sure if that was good or not. I didn’t want anybody challenging our right to be here, but it had occurred to me that I had nothing with me that would help me fend off a demon—nothing save Niall’s trusty torch.

  Doug darted ahead before I could stop him. “Come on. Mac! Mac!”

  I left the car in the little lay-by and followed him over the bridge. Below us, the steep banks of the river slanted down towards dark water. I called sharply, “Doug! Don’t run off!”

  He waited for me on the path. “I won’t go far.”

  “I want you to stay close. I don’t want him grabbing you as well as Mac.”

  Doug shivered suddenly. “Do you think he would?”

  “I think you’re in a lot more danger than anyone else here. So you can stay close, or you can get back in the car.”

  He didn’t argue but came back to walk with me. The ferns and heather grew high between the track and the river, but on the other side, the moor rose up, grasses high and whispering. To our right, the castle crouched against the night sky, a block of darkness looming in the quiet land. In daylight, shared with other tourists, it had been eerie, but now it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I set my shoulders and turned towards it.

  Behind us, Katie said something peremptory.

  “Wrong way,” Doug translated.

  I turned again, putting my back to the dark castle, and saw her.

  She was far less solid than the riders had been—the palest scrap of mist above the path, like that steam that rose from the damp hillsides under the morning sun. I found myself trying to make sense of the shape in much the same way one imagines faces onto mossy stumps and thought I caught the hint of a high ponytail and shoulders set stubbornly. As I stared, she drifted away from the castle, along the other branch of the track.

  I hadn’t been this way last time I was here, but Doug said, his voice a little too wobbly for bravado. “Oh great, we’re going to the creepy old graveyard instead. Yay.”

  “There’s a creepy old graveyard? Didn’t do things by half, did they?”

  He let out a little hiccup of laughter, to my relief. “Next holiday, I want to go to Disneyland.”

  I laughed. Good for him. “Start a petition, mate. I’ll sign it for you.”

  Katie added something, and Doug yelped, “Oh, shut up. There are not ghosts at Disneyland too!”

  I did my best impression of a Niallish glare in her direction. She wasn’t helping.

  There was indeed a creepy graveyard—one with a handful of stones illuminated by moonlight and a low dip between ruined walls. A few more stones were fenced off in the corner, but Katie led us straight to the back wall. She vanished for a second and reappeared on the other side.

  Doug and I had to scramble over. Beyond the wall was a mass of ferns and a stretch of tussocky grass, made all the more uneven with low mounds and rises—the earthworks of something which had not survived the touch of time. We pushed through it but stopped at Katie’s quick command.

  “Now what?” I whispered.

  “She says we have to wait,” Doug said and sat on the ground. He leaned against the wall. In front of us, Katie went skittering across the field, wandering back and forth between the tussocks. I sat next to Doug, the damp earth sinking slightly below my weight.

  An owl cried in the distance. The trees that crouched over the river shifted under the wind, sighing softly. Something went scuttling through the heather behind us.

  The wind was rising again, buffeting past my ears and filling the night with rustles and low sighs.

  Doug said, so quietly I barely heard him, “What if we don’t find him? What if we have to go home without him? What am I going to do if he’s gone?”

  I hesitated, then said, because I could answer this, “Honestly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It will be awful, but you’ll survive it. In the end you’ll pick up the pieces and find a way to live your life, even though it’s not the same as your old life. You’ll have your parents, and they’ll have you, and you’ll work out what that new life looks like together.”

  “And, what, just give up? Pretend Mac never—” His voice cracked.

  “No pretending. Living your life isn’t giving up.”

  “How would you know?”

  I looked out at the empty hills under the moon, and at Katie’s ghost, alone but still in motion. “My mum and dad died when I was a few years younger than you are. I wasn’t very good at living my life after that, not for a long time, but in the end, you don’t have any choice. You can give up and stay still and never feel anything as much ever again, or you can keep going, carry your memories with you, and build something new.”

  “I don’t want to. I want my brother back.”

  “I know,” I said, still watching Katie. Over the last few weeks I’d seen Niall reach that point where he was building something new without her. Would all that fall apart again when I told him about this—if I got the chance? I looked away from her to where Doug was still huddled up beside me, his arms around his knees. “I really hope we get Mac back. But if we don’t, I want you to remember this. You won’t be ready for it at first, but when you are, when it’s time to make that choice, it’s better to keep going. Take it from someone who learnt that lesson the hard way.”

  He shrugged and turned his face into his knees.

  I hesitated, unsure whether to say more. I suspected he was the kind of kid who would feel worse if I made a fuss over him now, but I searched my pockets for a tissue to slide to him. I didn’t have any, but I did discover half a packet of polo mints. I offered them to Doug. He took one with a mutter of thanks.

  All the rustling in the undergrowth stopped. I looked up and saw Katie speeding towards us. She flung herself down beside me, and although I could still only see frail mist, I could feel her shaking against my shoulder as she huddled into the shelter of the wall.

  Then, in the distance, I heard a horn sound, long and low. Once, twice, again, and now I could hear the horses too, the thunder of their hooves growing louder by the second. The horn sounded again, so loud it blotted out even the sound of hooves, and the ground shook underneath us. I just had time to pull both kids close and duck my head before something came flying over the wall.

  It was the old man—the demon Robin Redcap—and now I saw him run, it was obvious he wasn’t human at all, but something else, something that lurched with every step, something fast and wild. He hurtled across the field, and the shadows shuddered out of place, as if every hummock had shifted ever so slightly sideways. And in the midst of that movement was a space—a small, dark space clawed out of the damp earth.

  There was a boy in it, pushing himself up.

  “Mac!” Doug screamed, pulling away from me.

  In the same moment, the hunt came over the wall.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I GRABBED Doug, pushing him under me as I tried to make myself as small as I could. In the air above my back, I could feel the lash and shudder of hooves, but none touched me, although their passing made my hair stand on end.

  Then they were past, and Doug was squirming out to run after them. I went for him, grabbing his arm before he hurled himself into the whirling tangle of shadow horses that filled the ruins in front of us.

  “Mac!” he hollered, his voice shaking. “Mac!”

  Even right next to him, I could barely hear him. The air was full of noise—the thud-thud-thud of hooves as the horses circled the shadow space, a tumult of shouting in a long-dead dialect, and in the midst of it all, a high, shrill yelping.

  I pushed Doug behind me and threw my arms over my head before ducking into the centre of the ring. Beside me, moonlight shimmered on mist as Katie reappeared, darting as straight as an arrow towards the dark space where Mac lay still.

  I followed her, my heart thundering
in my throat.

  A horse reared. A spear flashed. I ducked and kept going, the wet ground sinking beneath every step, making me slide and stagger. Katie came flitting back to me, and her small hand closed around mine, pulling me forward.

  For a moment, I feared she was dragging me into the darkness not to save Mac, but to join her and all the other lost children, the ones Martyn Armstrong hadn’t been able to save.

  Another screech, and as I flinched I saw the redcap, beset on all sides and lashing out at the wheeling horses with clawed hands, too wickedly fast to be mortal. But the horsemen kept coming, and every ghostly horse he wounded was replaced by another, and the spears came at him from all sides. He was bloodied now, dripping with gore. Then, as I stumbled past, he broke through a gap between the horses and bolted for the shadowy hole.

  “Leon!” a familiar voice roared. “Run!”

  And I did, hurling myself across the ground, ignoring the tumult around me. I got a glancing blow from a spear, which sent me staggering off balance, but then a horse thumped past me and another spear slashed down, forcing the redcap to turn and claw it off. I found my balance and ran, Katie a blur at my side, until I was close enough to dive to my knees, reach into the darkness, and fasten my hands around Mac’s wrists.

  They were warm, and there was a pulse there, fast but true.

  Blood splattered my face and claws sunk into my side, making me loosen one hand, and the redcap went screeching past me, diving into the shadows. At once, the ground began to shift again, the scar in it starting to seal.

  But I still had my hands round Mac, and I wasn’t letting go. I pulled hard, and he came towards me, out of the ground that was closing around him like blood clotting.

  It was like pulling someone fully dressed out of water. I had to put my back into it, and still he came slowly, as if the very weight of the shadows was pulling him back. Beside me, Katie leaned forward too, her misty hands small and desperate on his shoulders. Then Doug was there, wrapping his hands in his brother’s sleeve and pulling, but neither of them had enough strength to make much difference.