The Pendle Curse
Page 4
The usual porter sat behind his desk.
I waved at him. “Hello, Nigel.”
“Evening, Mrs. Phillips. Any spooks been bothering you?” He laughed.
He asked me the same question every time I saw him, and, as always, I smiled and shook my head. I gave him my usual answer as I pressed the button to summon the elevator. “No. I think they know I don’t believe in them so they leave me alone.” The only difference was that, this time, I wasn’t sure I was telling the whole truth.
Today, though, Nigel had a juicy morsel of gossip to share. “Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Mrs. Steele in number 7 was skeptical, and she ran out of here screaming this morning. Said someone had come up behind her in the shower.”
“I should be so lucky!” My first wisecrack for over six months. Progress indeed.
Nigel laughed and a melodic ping announced the elevator’s arrival. Its steel doors slid open smoothly and shut behind me as I pressed number three.
Home. Sunlight must have streamed through the large windows of my living room for three hours. I opened them wide. The familiar noise of the street life below drifted up. I stood for a moment, looking out and down at the street, inhaling the fume-laden air. No matter; in a few days, I would swap the city for the rural landscape and clean air of Lancashire.
I kicked off my sandals and relished the relative coolness of the laminate floor. I grabbed a bottle of Perrier from the fridge and took a deep swig. Then I sat at my laptop to check my emails. The first time in days, weeks probably, judging by the dates on some of them. I scanned the page quickly, then deleted all but a handful that would need my attention.
They included a confirmation of yesterday’s telephone booking by the guesthouse, along with directions. This would be the first time for years I’d undertaken a journey like this on my own. Rich used to do most of the longer distance driving. It would only take a couple of hours, but I felt rusty. I would need to have those directions next to me on the passenger seat—or I could buy a satnav. Rich didn’t like satnavs. Wouldn’t have one in the car. But even if I bought one, I had no idea how to fit it. I sighed. Rich had always been the practical one in our relationship.
“Leave it to me,” he’d say whenever I got stuck fitting together flatpack furniture or sorting out the satellite TV on one of its periodic wobbles.
But he would rarely be the one to initiate any DIY. Rich liked to gallop in to the rescue. “My very own Sir Galahad,” I said now, out loud. “Do you remember, Rich? I always used to call you that.”
I yawned, and suddenly felt sleepy. Maybe the heat. A short nap would set me right again.
In the wind-ravaged field, the long grass whipped my bare ankles and I wished I had a coat. Above me loomed Pendle Hill. Chilled to the bone, I shivered uncontrollably as I searched the mournful landscape for shelter.
Then I saw him. Just as before. Tall, striding towards me, but still too far away to make out his features. The noise of the wind should have made it impossible to hear him, but somehow his voice echoed in my ears as if from far away.
“I have found you.”
His tone—difficult to determine. Assertive, with a sense of achievement. Triumph even. But tender? Or threatening?
I opened my eyes and found myself back in bed. Someone was standing there, staring down at me. A man. I cried out and switched on the bedside lamp. No one there. I sat bolt upright and listened. My heart thumped. I hardly dared breathe. But I heard nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway, only the distant sound of cars moving up the street. I must have slept for hours, and the sunny, hot afternoon had given way to a sultry, airless night. Sweat trickled down between my breasts. At least my heart didn’t thump so painfully, but I couldn’t shift the odd feeling of not being alone.
I decided a long, cold glass of water might help cool and calm me. Besides, I really didn’t want to stay in the oppressively hot bedroom any longer. I could hardly breathe. And that feeling of being watched…
For goodness sake!
The tap water ran tepid and I turned it off, deciding instead on another bottle of Perrier, which I took into the living room. No point in going back to bed yet. Sleep wouldn’t come even if I tried. The moonlight shone so brightly I didn’t bother with the light. I just sat in the silvery glow and turned on the TV. I flicked the remote. Seventy-plus channels had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but who could honestly say that little more than rubbish churned out on almost all of them?
It seemed the TV producers believed that anyone awake at two in the morning craved nothing more than endless shopping for purchases they would regret the minute they’d paid for them, along with a diet of roulette wheels, casinos and poker. Apparently they’d decided that if you were nocturnal, you were also a fool with your money.
I despaired of being entertained, switched the TV off and tossed the remote aside.
Something stirred on the far side of the room. I froze. Too scared to move.
Nothing happened.
But I knew I’d seen it.
Seconds ticked away. Still nothing. No movement. No noise except the hum of traffic outside the open window. Not a flicker from the wide-open curtains.
In the stillness, the sound of my own nervous breathing almost deafened me. I concentrated my gaze on that one corner of the room. I dared not even move my head. My muscles tightened and my joints locked.
Still nothing.
I must have imagined it. Nothing could stay still like that. But then, why not? How much had I moved in the past few minutes?
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” In one swift movement, I dived off the sofa, over to the wall switch, and flooded the room with light. In the offending corner, I could see nothing to worry about and inched towards it, wondering why my heart still pounded.
“For heaven’s sake.” I bent down and retrieved a small, white table tennis ball. Rich and I had loved to play. Quite often, in an evening after a hard day at work, we would go off to the local sports center for an hour or so and unwind with a couple of games. Rich had even made the team for a short time until work commitments forced him to quit.
I rolled the ball between thumb and forefinger. It must have lain under the desk all these months and maybe a breath of wind disturbed it, sending it rolling. That movement must have caught my eye, and my imagination had done the rest.
I need to get away from here. Even if it is only for three days.
I opened the middle drawer of the desk and then shut it again. Really, table tennis balls didn’t belong in desk drawers. So how had it got under the desk in the first place? Rich and I had always carried our kit in his bag.
Sleep overtook me yet again. At least it seemed to be cooling down a little. In fact, as I moved over to the breakfast bar, I shivered.
I took a tumbler out of the cupboard and dropped the ball into it, where it clattered to a halt. “Try and roll your way out of that.”
Once again, I climbed into the double bed I had shared with Rich and wished I could cuddle up to him. Instead, my hand stroked a cool, empty pillow and a space where his warm body should have lain. I felt the familiar lump of grief, filling my throat and making it hard to swallow. I shivered again and pulled the duvet over my shoulders.
My alarm woke me at eight thirty. As soon as I switched it off, sat up and rubbed my eyes, I remembered last night. So stupid. All that fuss over a silly ball that had lain under that desk for months!
Except, of course, it couldn’t have lain there. Not all that time anyway.
The memory flooded back. One day, a few weeks after Rich died, I’d had a sudden, brief burst of nervous energy. An irresistible desire to change things. I cleaned out kitchen cupboards, sorted all the spices alphabetically, moved ornaments around. For eight hours straight, I shifted, scrubbed, polished and tidied.
And, in the living room, I moved the furniture around. No
thing had stood in that corner five months ago. Its empty space couldn’t have concealed anything. So how had the ball got there last night? Where had it come from?
I dashed to the kitchen.
There stood the tumbler, precisely where I left it.
Empty.
Chapter Four
Moonlight shone down on the damp earth, illuminating his grisly work, as James kicked the last clods of soil back over the ancient coffin he had forced open earlier. He wiped a hand across his face and wrinkled his nose. The reek of death cloaked him, but Grandmother would be pleased with his efforts this night.
He glanced over at the skull, blanched white by the activities of all those tiny, burrowing insects over the many years of its incarceration. The broken jaw still held a goodly number of teeth and, once they were removed, he would rebury the rest of the skull somewhere. It mattered not where. As long as he laid it down deep enough so that the dogs wouldn’t dig it up.
He picked up his spade and beat the earth back down. He had no way of concealing the disturbance, but he had chosen wisely. A long-forgotten grave, tucked away at the far end of the churchyard under the overhanging branches of the massive yew. Its headstone illegible.
James heard a noise behind him, stopped, turned and peered into the darkness. Another rustle sounded a little distance away. Something emerged from the undergrowth. He held his breath as he saw the crouched body, silhouetted in the moonlight. He breathed again. Only a fox.
Overhead, an owl hooted a warning. It had seen the fellow nocturnal predator. James smiled. Out here, with these creatures, he felt nurtured by his own kind. Creatures of the dark.
He picked up the skull and turned it back and forth. “Who were you in life, my friend? Did you wear fancy clothes or plain wool? Not a skirt, I’ll be bound. There wasn’t enough cloth in your coffin for that.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the fox slink off, its magnificent brush low to the ground. He addressed it. “And you, Master Fox—or is it Mistress? Are you away home to your children? Or looking for a companion to warm your bed?”
He laughed. Behind him the ancient yew rustled, its branches creaking in the gathering breeze. The chill decided him. Time to leave with his spoils before someone discovered him. He would be in serious trouble if caught robbing a grave. Besides, Grandmother would be waiting. She had a potion to make to cure Master Thomas’s sick cow.
“We all have to make our sacrifices to earn a crust,” he said to the skull. “Grandmother with her potions and I with Mistress Towneley.”
He retrieved his spade and left the graveyard, taking care to keep alert for any sound or movement that could indicate someone was watching him. Of course, there should be no one up at this hour. At midnight, his hardworking neighbors would all be in their beds. The promise of an early rise and a day’s heavy burden sent most of them scurrying under their sheets as night fell.
He knew the rough lanes and undulating fields well, knew where the potholes lay, even in the dark. But tonight the clear sky and full moon made it as light as one of Pendle’s habitual dull days. No likelihood of him tripping and falling this time.
Now and then as he hurried past the silent, dark dwellings, a dog would bark. Sometimes he heard a curse as the offending animal woke its owner. James quickened his pace past those mean little hovels. Smoke wove through holes in their roofs and wound upward into the night sky.
He hid the skull from sight, under his cape—another present from his mistress. He had managed to hide the spade too, but anyone confronting him head-on would easily guess he had something concealed. The risk he always took, but part of the thrill too. The ever-present danger of discovery.
A faint light shone through a small, glassless window in the distance. A cottage and medieval malt kiln fused together to form Malkin Tower— the home of Elizabeth Sothernes, James’s grandmother. She would be there, sitting by her fire, waiting, the ingredients she needed laid out in front of her, lacking just one element that James had with him now.
He turned in to the muddy yard and strode up to the door, knowing he would not need a key. Her eyesight had deteriorated so much these days that she kept it unlocked when she knew one of her family would be visiting. James would lock it behind him when he left.
As he entered, she looked over to him, her wrinkled face managing a smile. At nearly eighty, almost blind and hunchbacked, the old woman’s legs were bent, her hands twisted with arthritis. She had once stood at least six inches taller than her present diminutive height. Now she barely reached his elbow.
“I have brought it, Grandmother.”
“And is it a good one? Many teeth?”
James examined the skull properly for the first time in the stronger light of the three candles burning on the scrubbed table. He counted. “Ten.”
“Let me hold the skull, boy. I need to feel its power.”
James handed it to her. His grandmother ran her hands over its contours, penetrated the eye sockets and closed her eyes. She always did this. When James had asked why he couldn’t simply remove the teeth at the gravesite, she had said, “I need to feel the spirit of the skull. The spell will not work else.”
She nodded. “Good, good, my boy. You’ve done well this night. Now pull them for me that I might cure our neighbor’s cow for him.”
James nodded and set about his task. Villagers knew his grandmother as a wise woman. A healer, able to cure all manner of ills from colds to the pox. It brought her a meager income, mainly of food rather than money. Only the rich, like the Towneleys and the magistrate Master Nowell had money to spare. Everyone else traded what they had or could produce.
James tugged at the first incisor, which fell away quite easily in his hand. “Why do you do such a kindness for Master Thomas, Grandmother? He hasn’t a kind word for you.”
The old woman mixed herbs, ash and water in a bowl and handed James a mortar and pestle. “Master Thomas pays me well enough, and should he go too far, it will be the worse for him. He knows I can do it too. His petty insults mean nothing to me.”
James extracted the final molar. “All the teeth are pulled, Grandmother.”
“Good. Take one and grind it to a powder. It must be fine now.”
“Of course.” He had done this same job many times before, ever since his grandmother’s sight had become so bad she couldn’t do it for herself. He dropped a molar into the mortar and began to grind with the pestle.
His grandmother continued to bind the other ingredients together as she sat in her usual chair by the fire, her black woolen shawl fastened close around her bony shoulders. “You are still working for Master Towneley.”
She had issued a statement rather than a question, but James replied anyway. “Yes.”
“And bedding his wife.”
James inhaled deeply. “It provides for us all.”
“She will make trouble for you, boy. That one is vain and spoiled.”
He laughed. “She is old and ugly.”
“Old and ugly she may be, but in her eyes, she is fair and attractive enough to win herself a young, handsome man.”
“I let her think that. It suits me.”
“Then take care she does not ruin you. Tibb came to me. He spoke to me.”
James stopped grinding the tooth. Tibb. His grandmother’s familiar. A spirit he had never seen, but one who appeared usually as a brown dog. “When was this, Grandmother?”
“This morning. He asked me if I wanted him to kill her. He said she would be the end of you.”
James’s heart pounded. “And what did you tell him?”
His grandmother sighed. “I said I would think on it.”
“If anyone is to end Mistress Towneley, it shall be me, but I see no reason for it. Although pleasuring her is more difficult as time goes by.”
“Not as pleasurable as bedding your own sister?”
And it had been foretold. James was certain of it.
“I love Alizon with my heart, soul and being,” he said.
“Yet you whore around with Mistress Towneley, and other girls from the villages.”
Now he couldn’t mistake the reproach in his grandmother’s voice.
“What of it, Grandmother? I am young and strong. I can have any woman I wish, but I will always come back to Alizon.”
His grandmother laid her hand on his arm. Her fingers clenched and dug into the flesh under his shirt. “And when you discard those other women, what do you think they do? Do you think they just go home to their husbands? Many were maidens before you bedded them. They will find it hard to get a man to marry them when they are soiled goods.”
“There are ways and you know of them. Ways to turn a woman back into a maid.”
She shook her head. “No. Never back into a maid, but there are ways to fool a man into thinking he has a maid. That is what I do for them—your cast-offs. And with these girls you are building up more trouble. Not only for you but for all of us. Take care that you do not drag us all to the gallows with you.”
James stared at her, then handed her the mortar and pestle. “The tooth is ground fine.”
“Look at me. Am I not as desirable as when you first bedded me?”
James leaned up in bed on one elbow and forced himself to look at the naked, flaccid body of Mistress Towneley.
“Yes, Mistress. Of course you are.”
“Then why do you not want to play with me today?” She stroked his unwilling cock, which shrank still further at her touch.