Guardians Of The Haunted Moor

by Harper Fox

  “I don’t know. Perhaps we should—”

  “My truck’s at the end of the lane. Come on!”

  They reached the Rover together, stride for stride. To Gideon’s disbelief, Zeke blocked his track to the driver’s door. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Tell me you’re fit to drive.”

  Gideon couldn’t. Shame rushed over him. Not once in his career had he let his emotions incapacitate him. But Lee hadn’t picked up either of the speed-dialled calls he’d punched in on his way from the field. “It’s three streets away,” he said faintly. “I’ll run.”

  “Shut up and get in. He’ll be all right, Gideon—Dev Bowe’s insane.”

  “I don’t know.” Gideon scrambled into the passenger seat. His limbs were heavy and awkward, and he wasn’t used to this side of his truck—felt trapped in a mirror world, everything in the wrong place. He gasped as Zeke tramped the gas and stalled. “For God’s sake. Are you fit to drive?”

  “Perfectly. Forgive my natural concern about my brother-in-law.” He tried again, found a biting point and sent the truck roaring out into the road. “Doesn’t this thing have a siren?”

  Gideon reached across and switched it on. Snapped on the lights for good measure, trying not to remember a rainy December night when Lee had taken a moment out of crisis to light up with mischief himself at the broken rule. Bill Prowse’s street flashed by, then Sarah Kemp’s... And then Zeke was tearing down Moor Lane, and between one blink and the next Darren Prowse was in the middle of the road. “Zeke, stop!”

  Zeke stamped on the brakes. The truck gave a squeal and laid a year’s worth of rubber onto the tarmac, her rear end slewing through ninety degrees. By the time she came to a stop Darren’s hands were planted on her bonnet, Gideon braced to the dash, staring down into his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “Gideon!”

  “Sorry.” He snapped out of the belt he’d somehow remembered to fasten and half-fell out into the road. “Darren, this is the absolute limit. What the bloody hell are you—”

  “You can’t go in there!”

  The boy’s voice was an octave up out of its usual range. He was sheet white. He transferred his grip from the grille of the truck to Gideon’s chest, the exact same gesture of hopeless warding-off. Gideon detached him blindly. “Go in where?”

  “Your house. I saw him coming out of it—that nutcase from up at the farm.”

  “Dev Bowe?”

  “Yes! And I didn’t mean to—but he’d already broken in, so I—”

  Gideon picked him up bodily and dumped him into his brother’s arms. “I don’t care what you’ve done. Zeke, keep him out of my way.” He began to run. He could see his own front door now, not twenty yards off, locked tight and intact with his whole world behind it. He didn’t believe for a second that Dev Bowe could have harmed Lee. Lee’s gifts didn’t always work to order, but he’d have seen a danger like that on its way from a mile off, even in half-drugged dreams, surely...

  Rufus Pendower was on the doorstep. This was bloody surreal. He caught sight of Gideon and dashed back down the garden path and into the road, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “Stop!”

  “Pendower!” Gideon met him halfway, barely avoiding a collision. “What’s going on here?”

  “I came to find you. But no-one’s answering the door, and I could smell—”

  Gideon shoved him aside. He could smell it too, pungent and high. Gas. Too strong for a leaking pipe under the pavement. A huge concentration close at hand. Pendower caught his arm, and he swung round to punch him out of the way.

  Something did it for him. The air turned into a fist. Pendower flew backwards. The same force plucked Gideon off his feet: swapped heaven for earth, street for sky, and dropped him and everything neatly into the pit.

  Chapter Ten

  His brother said, “Gideon, hush.”

  There was no need. It was a lovely afternoon. Sun beat down strongly on the cliff track at Drift. The hush was over everything, and Gideon was part of it. This was where Lee drew his imagery from when he opened up his mind. This was the borderland: if Gideon just kept walking, he’d find the Mên-an-Tol Stargate, slip through it and be home, and once there he need never come back.

  Imperative that he never came back. He fixed his gaze on the church so that he wouldn’t slide into the yawning void on his left. Jago Tyack was standing in the churchyard beside Lee’s father’s grave. He held out one hand, pointing. “It’s a corpse path, you know. If you see someone on it, they’ll be gone within a year.”

  That was bollocks, of course. Gideon dealt with bigger local legends than that all the time. He’d grown very fond of Jago, though, after a bumpy start, and he only smiled at him in passing. Lee was on the corpse road, with Tamsyn in his arms. It was only a trail of flattened grass through a meadow. Gideon felt suddenly sick and weak, the skin stinging oddly on his face and hands. He sat down on the coffin-shaped stone to wait.

  Elowen stepped out of the hedgerow. She took the baby from Lee’s arms. Gideon lurched to his feet. Don’t, he wanted to shout. Don’t just give her away like that! But Lee hadn’t, had he? He’d had his reasons, just as the dog had hers for multiplying herself into four and guarding the cradle, warning him against the masked lamb. Gideon had to trust and believe. The hardest thing he’d ever had to do, against all of his instincts as a copper and a man. His reward was the ability to move. The baby was gone but Lee was at home. Gideon stretched out his limbs and covered the distance between Drift and Dark in a dozen long strides. He ran down Moor Lane once again, and his house exploded, knocking him flat in a rain of masonry and grit.

  “Hush, Gid. It’s all right.”

  It fucking wasn’t. His brother was kneeling in front of him, trying to wipe his face with a handkerchief. Gideon knocked his arm aside. He made a seismic effort to get up, but someone was holding him tight from behind. He was making a dreadful arse of himself, yelling and fighting like a downed bull. He couldn’t seem to stop. “Lee! Oh, God, let me go. Lee’s in there. Lee!”

  “I’m not in there, you moron! Now calm the fuck down and keep still.”

  Gideon’s throat closed. It was scoured and full of dust. He sucked in a truncated gasp and broke into anguished coughing, painful as sandpaper in his gullet, but at least it shut him up. In his own sudden silence, he replayed the last voice he’d heard. Recognised at last the grip around his ribs, the warm body propping his spine. He twisted round as far as he could. Lee tried to stop him then surrendered, submitting to his frantic embrace. “Gideon, sweetheart...”

  “What happened? Where were you?” He could barely get the words out for sobs. Lee’s response was just as incoherent, and he couldn’t give it his attention anyway—was too lost in the living scent of him as he laid his face to Lee’s shoulder. He wrapped his arms around Lee’s waist, clenched his hands hard enough to leave bruises on beloved skin for a week.

  A sound began to penetrate the fizzing rumble in his ears. At first he put it down to the damage done to his eardrums by the blast. A staccato chatter—da-da-da-da-da, like a tractor-engine trying to start. Familiar to him from a hundred homecomings—his daughter’s first efforts to get out a word that meant him and him alone, because she’d greet her other father with a skull-piercing single-note eee! that might or might not one day turn into Lee. Both of them got the wild, arm-waving semaphore of joy, but da-da-da-da-da....

  He jolted upright. Lee aided his indecorous lurch round onto his backside. His mother was standing in the road in front of him, dust blowing around her. She was clean and obviously unhurt, but her face was a mask of shock, and the paramedic propping her up had wrapped a blanket round her anyway. She was holding Tamsyn in her arms.

  Gideon got to his feet. He couldn’t have done it for any other cause—every muscle in his body complained, and Zeke had to reach in and hoist him from behind. Gideon planted a kiss to the old lady’s cheek. “Ma. You brought her home.”

  “Lee and I did,” she
said weakly. “Lee and I.”

  “Can I take her?”

  “Yes, my dear. Of course.”

  It was more like a catch. Tamsyn, having worked out that this bloodstained apparition really was her father, launched herself out to grab him. He seized her: held her little body fast between his hands for a moment, staring into her face. Her machine-gun sounds blended into one huge shriek of delight, and he wrapped her in his arms. “Lee,” he managed after a moment. “Where’s Pendower? Is anybody hurt?”

  “Apart from you, you mean? Pendower took a flying brick to the back of his head. He’ll be all right. He’s on his way to hospital now.”

  “That man has no luck.”

  “I doubt he’ll volunteer to investigate weird shit in Dark again any time soon. All our other neighbours were out at work, thank God.” Lee grabbed his arm as he swayed. “What do you want?”

  “Five minutes with you and our kid. Please.”

  Lee led him away, parrying protests from Zeke and the ambulance crew. He parted the gathering crowd of their neighbours and friends, guided him up the pavement to a low wall sheltered by rose bushes and a patrol car parked by the kerb. “Sit down.”

  Clouds were dispersing in Gideon’s mind. He subsided onto the wall, still clutching his daughter, who promptly grabbed a fistful of rose petals and shoved them into his face. “You weren’t in the flat. You weren’t there.”

  “That’s right, Sherlock.” Lee sat down beside him. “I had a text from your mum this morning. She said Elowen had contacted her. She was the only one of us Elowen dared speak to.”

  “My ma can text?”

  “Pretty well, though the autocorrect still foxes her a bit.”

  “When did you get it? This text?”

  “It was on my phone when I woke up this morning.”

  Time rolled back effortlessly inside Gideon’s head. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, not this wall opposite the gap where his house had used to be. Lee was checking his mobile—to see what time it was, Gideon had assumed. Then he’d asked Gideon to fetch his meds. “You bloody lied to me.”

  “Yes, I did,” Lee said firmly. “And get this through your thick head—I’d lie to you again, without batting an eyelid, if I had the time over. I didn’t know what Elowen wanted and nor did your ma. If she’d just been coming to talk, to mess around with us some more, I didn’t want her anywhere near you, breaking your heart again. But she was coming to bring back Tamsyn.”

  “Christ. Why didn’t you phone me?”

  “I had to be sure.” Lee too focussed on the burning ruin across the road, and his voice cracked. “Elowen met us just down the road in Liskeard. And once I had Tamsyn, all I could think about was bringing her home. Having her waiting there for you. We’d just made the turn into the street when—”

  “That’s just it. You would have been at home with her—if we’d done what I wanted, if we’d gone charging over to France and grabbed her back by main force. This is her nap-time. You’d both have been at home.”

  Lee closed his arms around both of them, completing the sacred circuit of touch. The baby quieted and clutched Gideon by his collar, Lee by his silver chain. The wail of the arriving fire engine faded out, and all Gideon could hear was his lover’s breathing and the rush of the wind among the roses. “We weren’t home,” Lee said, kissing him. “We’re here. We’re right here.”

  Typically, it was Darren Prowse who broke the moment. He ducked away from the police officer holding him and darted over the road. From somewhere he’d retrieved Gideon’s cap. He came to a panting halt in front of him and thrust it out in a propitiatory gesture. “Here!”

  Gideon handed Tamsyn to Lee and reached out to take the cap. “You’ve missed something, Daz,” he said grimly. “The badge is still attached.”

  “It wasn’t me! I never did it. I never—”

  His arresting constable caught up with him. “Come back here, you.” She grabbed him by the scruff. “Oh, Gideon! Are you all right?”

  Gideon smiled. Jenny Spargo seemed to have a knack for witnessing all his worst moments. “Fine, somehow or other. It’s all right—let him talk.”

  Darren promptly fell as silent as a clam. Jenny gave him a shake. “You’d better explain yourself, young man, if Sergeant Frayne is prepared to listen to you.”

  “I never blew the house up! It were that nutter from the farm.” Darren choked with the effort of telling the truth. “I saw him go over your garden wall at the back. He broke a pane in your kitchen door and he went in. So I waited—to see, you know, if...”

  “If he came out carrying anything worth blackmailing him for,” Gideon supplied. “Do go on.”

  “He didn’t take nothing, as far as I could see. He just ran off and started shouting at the minister in the street. But there was still that broken pane, and I thought...”

  “You thought it was a shame to leave a perfectly good house un-robbed, when someone had already broken into it for you.”

  Darren nodded fervently. “’Zackly.” He was clearly relieved to be understood. “Then that old busybody in the upstairs flat opposite yours got her eye on me, so I started pretending to be doing a bit of gardening, like you asked. She must’ve sat there for nigh on half an hour! Then she finally buggered off, and I went in the same way, and I nearly fucking choked to death. All the hobs on your gas cooker were turned up full. And I heard your crappy old boiler start its ignition, and I thought, if there’s a spark...”

  “My God, Daz. You tried to stop me going in.”

  “Well, I thought about it, didn’t I? I remembered stuff. Like when you came to our house that time, and you were the only one who believed me about the Beast. And when I lost my gloves in the snow, and how you always look after people around here even if they don’t deserve it. Even if that does make you a bloody fool.”

  Gideon regarded him seriously. Beside him, Lee was trying desperately hard not to laugh. “You probably saved my life,” he said. “Having said that, you really are a little shit, Darren Prowse.”

  ***

  The big farmhouse kitchen at Drift was utterly peaceful. The back door was propped open, Isolde trotting in and out as the fancy took her. Jago and Mrs Ivey were sunning themselves in matching striped deckchairs on the lawn. Gideon set down the last of the carrier bags from the car. It had taken a week, but he and Lee had finally gathered together the basics for family life. Some things they’d bought, a very few they’d salvaged from the ruins of the flat, and Jago had made room for it all with delighted welcome, proud of his ability to offer a temporary home. He’d thrown the whole farmhouse open to them, but his shellshocked guests had been only too happy to move into Lee’s old room, with the bathroom over the corridor and a little dressing room—whose door stood open all the time—for Tamsyn’s cot.

  Gideon’s insurers were still wrangling over the wreckage in Moor Lane. A rebuild wasn’t yet off the cards, but a demolition more likely, given the structural damage. Either way, he knew they would move back to Dark. That was his place in the world, guarding and protecting and forgiving. Even if that did make him a bloody fool.

  He leaned on the counter top and took in the wholly satisfactory sight of Lee pacing the kitchen with the baby against his shoulder. “How has she been?”

  Lee stopped and beamed at him. “She just had the biggest feed of her life. I thought she was never gonna stop. Tell me you’ve got more of her goop in that bag.”

  “Cheesy veg, beef-and-liver, giblets in jelly with tripe. A bit preoccupied now, is she?”

  “That’s why you didn’t get your usual rapturous greeting.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll just keep walking and patting. I’m certain the blockage will clear.”

  “You know what? I think I should record one of these for posterity.”

  “Hurry up and get your camera running, then. She’s about to blow.”

  Chuckling, Gideon got his phone out and started a new video. He fell into step behind L
ee. His daughter watched him gravely over Lee’s shoulder. Lee had a towel ready in case of accidents, but she liked her food too much to let go of it easily. It was just the sound effects. She opened her rosy mouth, rode out another couple of Lee’s gently jiggling strides, and unleashed a deep, stately burp.

  Gideon creased up. “Oh, my God. That is phenomenal.”

  “The windows rattled, I swear. How does she do it?”

  “Takes after her dad, I reckon.”

  “Oh, charming. That’ll be the dad who likes raw red onions with his curry, right?” Relieved of her digestive problems, the baby caught their laughter like a dose of measles and began to crow in her turn, and like them fell suddenly silent when the doorbell rang. Lee, who’d failed to repress a nervous twitch, held her close. “Who’s that?”

  “It’s a bit soon for our dinner guests. I’ll go and have a look.”

  Gideon ran up the kitchen steps. The hall’s inner doorway was open. Beyond the stained glass of the porch, he could make out a pale, solemn face. “Deep breath, Mr Tiger. It’s Elowen.”

  “Why is she ringing the bell of her own home?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t feel like it is anymore. There’s a guy with her—not Michel. Jago’s going round to let her in.”

  “Tell me she’s carrying a big fat envelope.”

  “I can’t see from here. But the guy’s got a briefcase, and he looks like a lawyer. This might be it.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  Gideon went back to him. “Do you want to see her? Mrs Ivey will look after Tamsyn.”

  “It probably sounds horrible of me, but—no, I don’t want to see her yet. She’s my sister, and I’m scared of saying something unforgivable to her. I let your ma handle all the negotiations in Liskeard. I just grabbed Tamsyn out of her carrycot and ran back to the car with her.”

  Gideon could imagine the scene. He kissed Lee’s eyelids and the corners of his mouth. “All right. Why don’t you put her down for her nap and go join the others in the sun?”