He went very still, shielding himself behind his lifted ice cream. It should have been ludicrous, but there was something gathering in the air around us that stole any humour out of it. I set my shoulders and met his gaze, glaring back with all my willpower, and said, “I’m sure he’d love to meet you too.”
His gaze fell. He said, his voice all tearful child, “Mom, I want to go home now.”
“Sure,” Michelle said, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at me, her expression quavering between worry, anger, and hope. She glanced down at his bowed head and back at me, and said, her voice ringing out a little, “I hope your brother enjoys his tour. I know I’d love to see the place again.”
I hadn’t actually been planning to take Peter into Vainguard, but now there was no avoiding it. I said, my voice flat despite my best efforts at jollity, “Well, if we don’t see you again, enjoy the rest of your holiday.”
I rejoined Peter by the car with my heart beating fast. He took one look at me and said, “What happened?”
“Does your deliverance ministry happen to believe in possession?” I asked, and he buried his face in his hands for a moment.
WE GOT to Blacklynefoot ten minutes later, and I braced myself to fill time until Michelle could slip away to talk to us.
I wasn’t expecting to find a strange car parked outside the lodge. My heart went tight again. Had someone brought Niall home? Was he sitting inside right now, making surly conversation over a cup of tea? Maybe a mortal man could only ride with a ghostly hunt so long before he was left, confused and exhausted, by the side of the road.
Peter drew in behind the red Mini and whistled through his teeth. “Is that Vainguard? Has Dad lost his mind? I’ve never seen a place that looks less suitable for a school.”
I started to tell him it wasn’t that bad but stopped myself before I uttered the automatic lie. “I need to see who that is.”
Peter stayed close behind me as I approached the door, letting me take the lead even though I could almost feel the weight of his concern against the back of my neck. It wasn’t a bad feeling, just strange.
But despite my racing heart, it wasn’t Niall who opened the door. It was a woman of Felix’s age, one with a familiar stubborn set to her shoulders, wild grey hair, and a glower which would have made me take two steps back if I wasn’t used to another version of it.
“You’re Niall’s mum?” I blurted out.
“You must be Leon.” She glared at me and, over my shoulder, at Peter. “Now where the devil is my son? And don’t give me the same line of crap the police did.”
Niall had said she heard the riders and hated Blacklynefoot because of it. But here she was, so I took a breath and said, “The old reivers who ride on the storm. He went with them.”
For a moment, her shoulders shook. Then she lifted her chin, muttered, “For fuck’s sake, Niall,” and waved us inside.
The cat mug from the back of Niall’s cupboard was on the kitchen table, full of steaming coffee. A suitcase had been left against the side of the sofa, and the kitchen smelt faintly of burnt toast. Niall’s mum—Anita—marched us onto the sofa, eliciting introductions as we went, then hammered me with questions. I was honest with her, though there were times when both our voices shook, and I was glad when Peter got up to make more tea.
When she finally ran out of questions, I bowed my head and said, “I’m sorry. I should have stopped him.”
She smiled, though it was a weak effort. “I’ve known my son a damn sight longer than you have, Leon. The last time I managed to stop him from doing something he had set his heart on, he was twelve.”
“All the same.”
“Are you going to help me get him back?”
“Yes.” I had the very start of an idea now—one that scared me.
“Well, in that case, and considering you’re the first person in a year to make my son smile, you’re forgiven.”
Was I really? My cheeks grew hot, and I reminded myself firmly that, true or not, it hadn’t been enough to keep Niall with me. It might give me the courage to get him back, though.
I needed to talk to Michelle. Was she coming by the road or the river path, by foot or by car? Had I misread that hint after all, or had the redcap intervened to stop her from reaching us?
The wind was rising again, sending shivers through the forested slopes. I thought it might be cold out there on the road tonight, summer starting its slow fade into autumn. The skies were heavy and the light poor enough for us to switch the lights on although it was still early afternoon.
Someone rapped lightly at the door, and I sighed in relief.
Doug came bursting in as soon as Peter answered it. “Hey, Mr Kwarteng! Mom’s supposedly walking me to the village to make me less hyper, but we came here instead, and I gotta talk to you about Mac because that’s totally not Mac and—”
“Doug,” Michelle said gently, and he stopped for breath. She gave me a wry smile and added, “He’s supposed to be faking it, but he’s gotten himself wound up. We saw the lights were on, so we came here instead of going straight to Vainguard. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise—”
I made quick introductions, but Doug burst over the top of them. “Are you Katie’s granny? Katie’s cool.”
Anita swallowed hard but said, her voice surprisingly steady. “I am.”
I must have a grandmother or two of my own somewhere. My parents were both only children—I knew that much. Did I have an extended family, though? Were there aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents in Ghana somewhere still mourning my absence in their lives? By the time I’d been old enough to go looking, I had grown accustomed to sealing my early life away in a box I didn’t like to open. Perhaps, when all this was done, I could investigate all the good things which had survived when my parents hadn’t.
Michelle took the cup of tea Peter made her thankfully and sat down. She took a moment to find her words but said at last, “My boy’s not right, and given what Doug’s told me…. Maybe I’m just a silly woman jumping at shadows—”
“Never apologise for trusting your intuition!” Anita barked at her.
Michelle held her hand up. “It goes against reason to look into my son’s eyes and see something else look back, but I know what I saw.”
The sudden passion in her voice cut across the room, and we all went still. She nodded sharply. “Doug tells me something has been stalking my boys for weeks. And yet, despite all the people who knew it was out there, no one warned us. And now it is sitting inside my son, and I deserve to know what we’re facing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was an unforgiveable oversight. We thought it was hunting me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Doug says it goes after children.”
“I was a child, the first time.”
And for the third time, I told the story. It was easier this time, coming to my lips without hesitation. I’d just got to Niall riding off with the hunt when Doug said, “Mom. Mr Kwarteng. Look!”
He was by the back window, pointing up at Vainguard.
The lights were on again.
THERE WERE no flickering lights or strange shadows this time, just every room in Vainguard illuminated against the grey afternoon. The others didn’t seem to feel the same sense of dread as I did as we walked up the drive, but I couldn’t help fearing what new horror lay ahead of us. The only thing that distracted me was the awkward tugging of my jacket as we walked.
It was the heavy iron link we had dug up from the Rathstone Ring. It was cool and heavy, and I slipped my hand through it, relieving the strain it was putting on my pocket. It was big enough to go around my wrist, and something about the rough weight of it was comforting. It had been part of the defence against Redcap for centuries—proof that it was possible to end this.
The bungalow was quiet, and for once nothing about the barn put my hackles up. Cautiously, I led the others inside.
The chapel door was open, as was the door into the main hall. Light washe
d through both of them.
“Where first?” Michelle asked. Peter was gazing around, shaking his head slightly.
“The chapel is the worst place,” I told her.
“A school here? Really?” Peter muttered. “My father is clearly going senile.”
I ignored him and headed into the chapel.
There was nothing there. The lights burnt steady. The pews were undisturbed. The door stayed where it was, and no disorientating darkness descended upon me. It was just a cold, airless little room.
“The photo,” Michelle said, walking towards the altar.
“I left it in the other room.”
But here it was, face down now, where it had always stood upright before. When she picked it up, it looked the same as it always had—row upon row of scribbled-out faces. Michelle spotted the change first, touching the top row lightly. “There.”
Someone had scribbled out Martyn Armstrong’s face too.
“Keeping a tally,” I said. I’d assumed it was Martyn who had marked off all the rest, but now I wasn’t so sure.
Michelle, Doug, and I went up the tower, leaving the others to keep the door from slamming behind us. There was nothing in the upstairs rooms, so I turned the lights off and came back down. It was good to have help, and I wondered how different all of this would have been if I’d come up here with someone else—Felix, or someone from work.
It wasn’t until we got into the main house that the whispering began. With nothing obviously supernatural happening, we had decided to turn all the lights off, lock up, and go back to planning how to save Mac and stop the redcap from hurting anyone else.
“Maybe it was just the photo they wanted us to see,” Michelle said, as we climbed up through Vainguard.
“A pretty cryptic message if it was one,” Anita said sourly.
Somewhere down the corridor, someone giggled.
We all swung to look, but there was no one there.
We all heard the patter of feet racing away, though.
“Katie?” Doug asked.
Another laugh, from behind us this time.
“She went with the riders,” I reminded him.
Downstairs, a door creaked. Above us, there was a faint thud-thud-thud, as if someone was jumping on the floorboards.
Anita, who had been looking more and more strained, smiled, lifting her head. “While the cat’s away,” she said.
I remembered my first, gruesomely optimistic idea of what the orphanage had been like, full of children’s laughter and energy. Maybe not then, but the Vainguard orphans had the run of the place now.
We split up again—Michelle, Doug, and Anita to the second-floor dorms while Peter and I headed for the attics. The whispered mischief of invisible children continued around us as we climbed the cobwebby stairway, and when we reached the attic, someone was waiting for us.
A boy was sitting on the windowsill, his feet swinging against the wall. He wasn’t quite there—no more or less substantial than a cobweb glittering with frost, but I could see him far more clearly than I had seen Katie. He had fair hair, with a cowlick at the back, and was dressed in shorts and an old-fashioned pullover. I recognised him at once.
Frank Armstrong was back at Vainguard.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
PETER SAID, “Place keeps getting creepier, doesn’t it? Lights out, then.”
“Wait,” I said, but he had already flipped the switch, and the room had descended into gloom. Frank disappeared.
“What?” Peter said, as a board halfway across the room creaked.
“Frank,” I said. “Frank Armstrong! I saw you!”
The atmosphere in the room changed, as if someone was poised on one foot, waiting for a chance to sneak past.
“If you have something to say, tell us!” I said. “There’s another kid in trouble, and we need your help.”
Peter was standing very still. He breathed, “Do you want the light again?”
“I want answers,” I said, keeping my voice level. “Frank, playtime’s over, and we need your help. I need you to talk to me.”
The silence was heavy. Then I heard footsteps again, not running away this time, but slow and careful. I followed them downstairs into a murmur of rustling voices and excitement. Michelle and the other two were standing in a tight knot in the middle of the landing, and all around them I could glimpse movement—pale and unfocused but definitely there. And out of the murmur of overlapping voices came one word.
“Schoolroom, schoolroom, schoolroom!”
“The schoolroom?” I echoed.
Anita blinked at me. “You can tell what they’re saying?”
“You can’t? Can… can any of you see them?”
They all shook their heads, but Doug said, “I can hear them!”
“Where’s the schoolroom?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” Anita said. “It’s the big downstairs room looking over the river. My ex-father-in-law pointed it out to me once, and it stuck with me, the idea of the poor little kids looking out at that when they were used to seeing the docks and all the life of the city.”
“My study,” I said.
“Once a teacher,” Peter murmured, nudging me in the shoulder, and we headed downstairs through a tumult of rushing feet and flickering light that no one else could see, every ghostly child in the house rushing to beat us there.
Michelle was shaking by the time we got there, and I think the only reason Anita wasn’t was sheer willpower. Peter was casting uneasy glances over his shoulder.
As we stepped inside, every remaining light in Vainguard went off. Someone—I think it was Peter—bit off a swear word, and Doug said, “Whoa!”
The children of Vainguard were gathered before us, all Robin Redcap’s victims crammed into one room. They were all as frail and insubstantial as Frank, but I could see their faces—the girls crammed onto the dustcoat-covered settee, a sturdy boy who reminded me of Niall leaning against the empty bookshelf, an older girl in the desk chair—the runaway from Hawick, perhaps—with a much younger boy in a ThunderCats T-shirt on her lap, and others crammed into the shadows around the edge of the room. Three boys in clothes as old-fashioned as Frank’s sat on the table between us and my abandoned tablet and papers, and I thought one of them looked a little like Jeannie Duffy—they had the same eyes and same fierce glare.
“Those lights,” Michelle breathed. “Are they the children?”
“Can’t you see them?” I asked.
Around the room, the children turned to each other, whispering at first, then their voices growing louder.
“Margaret’s band…”
“Margaret…”
“The circle…”
“Margaret’s name…”
I’m not going to lie. They frightened me, the crowded dead. But they were children too, and I had never been afraid of talking to a room full of children. I lifted up my wrist, where I still wore the iron link we had taken from the circle, and asked, “Is this why I can see you?”
Hisses, whispers, nods, then to my surprise, a warm hand on my wrist. Michelle had reached out to touch the band too. I could feel her shaking, but when she spoke, her voice was controlled—warm and calm and gentle—and I remembered her talking of singing for an audience.
“My dears,” she said. “My dear children. I am Mac’s mother, and I need your help to save him and stop this monster from killing any more of you.”
“Mother?”
“A mother!”
“Mother mother mothermothermother!”
I said automatically, “Folks, we can’t hear you if you all talk at once,” and Peter made a little choking noise.
“I wish your mothers could have helped you, darlings,” Michelle said. “I know they must have wanted to. Can you help us? Can you tell us how to help my boy?”
There was a long silence, and I saw them exchanging looks and bending to sigh into each other’s ears. Then a little voice in the corner said, gruff in
the way some small children are gruff, “Robin’s in him.”
“And he’s still hungry,” a little girl in the shadows added.
Their voices overlapped, each one going quiet after they shared their piece, and I wondered if a few words was all they could do. Katie had spoken more to Doug, but Katie was not long dead, and some of these kids had been gone for a very long time.
“Can’t touch us while he’s bound in flesh.”
“Can’t leave here if he’s not.”
“Leave?”
A girl whispered, “There’s so few children left in the village.”
“Michelle? How big is Mac’s school?”
“We live on the edge of the city.”
Oh shit. I looked around the room at those wary faces. All too many of these kids knew better than to trust an adult, but I had to try. “How do we stop that? How do we keep Robin from hurting anyone else?”
Frank said, his voice crackling and faint, “Kill Mac.”
I said, “No.” Michelle’s hand was digging into my arm.
Beside Frank, Ronnie Parfitt, his voice softer, said, “No one hurts you when you’re dead.”
“No one can comfort you either. No one can help you be happy. No one can grow old with you.” It was like talking to a ghost of myself, to that lost, hurting kid who had curled up on the doorstep of Eilbeck House and wondered if it was worth fighting anymore. I hadn’t given up then, though, and I wasn’t giving up now. “Tell your sister Jeannie, who has spent seventy years trying to save children from what happened to you, that it was better to be dead.”
“Jeannie?” Ronnie asked, his voice fading into static.
“Still alive and still fighting.”
Away from the table, the oldest girl said, “Get yon priest to cast him out.”
“In the ring,” another child added, and it went around the room like an echo. “The ring! The ring!”
“Rathstone Ring?”
“Ring of iron.”
“Ring of names.”
“Ring of hands.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes Page 29