by Sarah Rayne
‘You promise it’s safe?’ said Beth, her eyes huge.
‘I promise it is. Double treble promise.’
As Nell led Beth to the dark landing, her mind was racing ahead. She always put the car keys in the side pocket of her handbag, but had she left the bag in the sitting room where she had been working, or looped over the banister at the foot of the stairs when they came in earlier? Let it be on the banister, she thought.
‘Beth, I’ll snatch up my bag from the stairs and we’ll go out through the front door. If the bag’s not there it’ll be in the little sitting room, and that’ll mean a quick sprint down the hall and out through the garden door. All right?’
Halfway down the stairs Nell saw that the music room door was partly open, and her heart leapt with fear. I left it shut, she thought. She’s come out of that room. She’s somewhere in the house.
The foot of the stairs was in shadow, and for a moment she thought her bag with the keys was on the banister after all, but as they neared the stairs she saw it was only a scarf. She tightened her hold on Beth’s hand, and pointed to the hall. Beth nodded, understanding, and they went towards the back of the house. Please don’t let her be here, Nell was thinking. Please let us get out of the house and to the car.
It was like one of the old children’s games, where you had to cross a piece of land without being caught or seen. The hall seemed to stretch out and out, like the distortion in a nightmare, and there was the strong feeling that she and Beth were not alone. It’s the stranger at the fireside, thought Nell. The guest who wasn’t invited, but who’s here anyway . . .
Here was the sitting room at last, and there was her bag on the fireside shelf. She picked it up, and turned to indicate to Beth that they would go out through the scullery.
There was a whisper of sound from the dark hall and a blurred movement, then the woman was in the doorway, her face in shadow, black rain clinging to her. For several dreadful seconds Nell froze, then Beth gave a sob of panic and her mind snapped back into place. She thrust Beth behind her, then bounded forward and slammed the door hard. There was no lock, but she was already seizing the edge of a small settle, and dragging it across the door to form a barricade. Blessedly Beth seemed to understand, and threw her own small weight behind the task.
‘That cupboard as well,’ gasped Nell. ‘Push it hard against the door. Good girl. We’re safe now.’ She took a deep breath, then, as calmly as she could, said, ‘And get my phone from my bag, will you? There might just be a signal.’
‘There isn’t,’ said Beth, having found the phone and tried it. ‘It says “Out of reach of signal”. Mum, what are we going to do? Will she go away—’ She broke off and in a terrified whisper, said, ‘The door handle’s moving. She’s trying to get at us.’
But Nell, who was still leaning hard against the makeshift barricade, had already felt the slight shift of the cupboard, and she turned to stare in horror at the door. The handle was twisting back and forth and a thin line of black was appearing around the frame. Nell grabbed her bag from Beth and slung it over her shoulder. In a low voice she said, ‘We’re going to get out through that window, and run to the car, and drive to the village. You can climb through the window, can’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good girl. Quick as we can.’
The window was quite a small one, criss-crossed with leaded lights, but Nell thought that pushed open to its full extent they could both get through.
‘It’s stuck,’ said Beth in panic, as Nell wrestled with the catch.
‘No, it’s just a bit warped.’ As Nell renewed her attempt to force the latch, the settle was pushed even further away from the door, and the gap around the frame widened again. Fear lent Nell strength; she thumped the window catch with her fist, and it gave way. Cool night air, with rain inside it, came in.
‘You first,’ she said, lifting Beth onto the narrow sill. Beth swung her legs over, and jumped onto the grass four feet below. ‘Easy,’ she said. ‘Come on, mum.’
Nell followed, landing on the soft grass. Rain blew into their faces, but it was a good feeling. We’re out of her reach, she thought. We’ll get away.
The window was on the side furthest from the drive, but they only had to go along the path and through a wrought-iron gate and they would be at the front of the house and within sprinting distance of the drive.
‘Move slowly and quietly,’ said Nell in a whisper. ‘Then she won’t hear where we are.’
It was not quite dark, but the rainstorm had brought a dull uncertain twilight that hung over Stilter House, turning the trees into grotesque figures waiting to reach down to scoop up unwary humans. Beth cast a scared glance at these and clung tightly to her mother’s hand and Nell hated Stilter House with fierce intensity.
The rain had stopped, but moisture dripped from the trees in an eerie rhythm. Nell opened the side gate slowly so the hinges would not squeak, and closed it behind them. Once clear of the house the dripping leaves seemed to take on a different pattern – the pattern of soft footsteps following them. She shot a quick look back, but nothing moved, and every step took them nearer to the car and its safety. Here was the shrubbery – in the smeary half-light it was a dark mass of lumpen shapes. Could the woman have crept around the other side of the house and be hiding there?
She said, very softly, ‘Beth, we’re almost there. There’s the car, just beyond the bushes. I’ve got the keys ready – we’ll simply dive straight in and drive away. Everything’s going to be fine.’
As if to mock these words, a thin high sound sliced through the night. It might have been the sonic screech of a bat, or the squeal of some small vulnerable creature resisting a predator, but Nell knew it was not. It was the sound of the iron gate being opened. The woman was in the dark, dripping garden with them. As Nell half-turned, the figure was there, silhouetted against the night, lifting up her hands – hands that held something black and ancient, something that was made of twisted iron, and brutal spikes. She began to walk through the trees, holding the dreadful thing out before her, as if she was displaying it for Nell, as if she was saying, ‘Look at it, look at it, because this is what’s waiting for you . . .’
Nell felt, rather than heard, Beth’s gasp of fear, then they were both running towards the car, no longer caring about being heard. Once Beth skidded on the wet grass, but Nell pulled her upright. She risked a glance over her shoulder, and for a split-second there was nothing to be seen, then between one heartbeat and the next she was coming towards them through the trees. The rain clung to her outline, gleaming coldly, and Nell pulled Beth over the last few yards to the car. Her hand was shaking, but she pressed the key tab, and the car’s lights blinked as the auto-locks released the doors. They tumbled inside and Nell fired the engine and revved it, cursing that the car was parked facing the house. Was there room to turn without reversing? No, the drive was too narrow, and she might hit the rockery or one of the trees and puncture a tyre or do something to put the car out of action.
The woman was advancing and there was no time to execute a precise three-point turn. Nell threw the car into reverse and backed down the narrow drive towards the lane as fast as possible. The exhaust made clouds of smoky vapour on the damp air, and the reversing lights glowed. Into this smoky, red-tinted glow, came the wild-haired figure, indistinct through the rain-spattered rear window, but black and forbidding, still holding out the lump of spiked iron.
There was a moment when Nell thought the woman was not going to move and that she would either have to stop or reverse into her. She touched the brakes warningly, and as the brake lights glowed, quite suddenly the woman was no longer there. Nell’s heart jumped. Had she hit her after all? No, she could not possible have done; she would have felt even the smallest impact, and the woman had been several feet away.
‘She’s run away,’ Nell said, forcing her voice to sound calm. ‘It’s all right, Beth – we’re absolutely safe.’
In a frightened whisper, Beth said, ‘She
had something in her hands. She was sort of lifting it towards you. What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ Nell manoeuvred the car the rest of the way to the lane, then drove away from Stilter House at top speed, swerving around the sharp bends, praying not to meet another vehicle, constantly looking in the driving mirror to see if they were being followed. This last was the height of madness, of course, because unless the woman had a car of her own, which surely they would have seen, she could not be following them. But Nell kept looking.
‘Where are we going?’ said Beth. Her voice sounded tight, as if she was determined not to cry.
The main thought in Nell’s mind had been to get away from Stilter House, and for a moment her mind was blank. Then from nowhere came the obvious answer. ‘We’ll go to The Pheasant,’ she said, and with the words came the image of the low-fronted old pub and its feeling of warm security. She felt instantly better. They would be safe at The Pheasant.
Beth seemed to pick this up, because in an almost normal voice, she said, ‘That’d be brilliant. Because even if that woman did try to get in there, she’d never get past that man who served our lunch.’
EIGHT
Joe Poulson at The Pheasant would certainly not allow any menacing or burglarious people through his doors, and was shocked to his toes to think of Mrs West and her small daughter enduring such an ordeal.
‘Out there on your own, and there’s nothing worse than a deserted old house for attracting odd people.’ He reached for a pot of freshly percolated coffee and poured out two cups, adding a generous measure of brandy to Nell’s. ‘For the shock,’ he said, firmly. ‘I’ll phone Sergeant Howe at the police station at once. He’ll go out there and take a look round, but it’s my bet it’ll have been nothing worse than some nasty tramp.’
Nell, drinking the coffee gratefully, thought, Could it have been something so relatively innocent as that?
‘Whoever she was, she’d have thought the house was empty,’ said Poulson. ‘And she’d think to herself, Aha, this will do me nicely for a night’s kip.’
Nell said, ‘I’m hesitant to go back – tonight, at any rate. Your sign outside says you do bed and breakfast. Is it possible we could have a room?’
‘Indeed you can,’ said Poulson, beaming. ‘There’s one double and one very small single, so maybe you’d prefer to share the double. There’s twin beds in it, and my wife can have clean sheets on in ten minutes.’
Nell, thankful she had been able to snatch up her bag containing her wallet with cash and bank cards, said that would do very well indeed.
The room turned out to be whitewashed and chintz-furnished, with oak ceiling beams and a huge fireplace with a copper jug filled with dried flowers. Poulson’s wife, who seemed to be a lady of few words but serenely plump disposition, unlocked the room, indicated the bathroom next door, and murmured that there could be a bite of supper in half an hour if that would suit.
‘We don’t have to go back to the house, do we?’ said Beth, after Poulson’s wife had gone. ‘That’d be double-bad.’
‘We’re definitely not going back,’ said Nell.
‘Good. Will the police catch that – um – woman?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Nell, at once. ‘They’ll know the area – they might very well know who she is. You don’t have to worry about any of it. There are some peculiar people in the world, and we happened to meet one.’
‘I don’t mind so long as we don’t have to go back,’ said Beth, bouncing on one of the beds. ‘I like it here. What will we do for pyjamas and toothbrushes and things?’
‘It won’t hurt you to sleep in your vest for one night, and we’ll ask if we can have an apple each after supper instead of brushing our teeth. Tomorrow I can go back to the house myself and collect our things. It’ll be all right, though,’ she said, seeing Beth’s expression. ‘I shan’t go on my own.’
‘You’re phoning Michael,’ said Beth, as Nell reached for her bag and felt inside for the phone.
‘Yes.’ Nell was slightly annoyed to find herself behaving like the classic wimpish heroine seeking masculine comfort, but she suddenly wanted very much to hear Michael’s voice.
But Michael’s direct line at Oriel College was switched to voicemail, and when Nell dialled his mobile number that, too, went to voicemail. She left a brief message on both numbers to say they had removed to The Pheasant in Caudle Village for tonight, and added the number.
It had been unreasonable to expect Michael to be on hand at the exact minute she wanted him. She was perfectly able to cope with this situation, in any case; she did not need a knight in shining armour dashing up to her rescue, and there was also the point that Michael would most likely get lost on the road between Oxford and Caudle, because he had the worst sense of direction Nell had ever come across.
Michael knew his judgement might have been affected by sloshing down the Music Director’s sherry during the afternoon. But he reread Beth’s email, and then he reread Emily West’s letter and Brad’s essay, and although individually the contents of the letters were not particularly sinister, put together they seemed to him to take on very menacing shapes.
He considered Brad’s essay. Brad had written that Esmond always waited for him in the music room. ‘He doesn’t speak,’ Brad had written. ‘We have a private sign language.’ This was not particularly strange or unusual. Children did make holiday friendships and have private languages, although nowadays those languages tended to be spattered across social websites.
So far so good as far as Brad West was concerned. But then more than twenty-five years later, Brad’s daughter had sent an email in which she talked about Esmond in exactly the same way. ‘He walked into the music room,’ Beth had said. ‘He didn’t speak but I understand what he means without having to speak.’
It could still be coincidence. Just about. Beth was a modern child, but she had a rather endearing liking for the worlds of long-ago children; she loved Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass¸ and she adored C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and Pamela Brown’s Blue Door Theatre series. But Michael did not think Beth would have dreamed up a ghost-companion, at least not in the space of twelve hours, and even if she had, she would not have given it the same name as her father’s long-ago friend.
What about Great Aunt Charlotte? She had seemed to know about Esmond, and Emily West, repository of Charlotte’s slightly fey stories, had sounded genuinely fearful that Esmond might come back for Beth. And according to Beth, Esmond, that elusive silent child, seen by three different people at three different time spans, was indeed coming back to Stilter House.
It’s too many coincidences, thought Michael. I can’t ignore them. He wondered if he could track down a local police station and ask if they would check on the temporary residents of Stilter House. But when he tried out a possible dialogue for this, it sounded so nonsensical, he abandoned the idea, and instead dialled Emily West’s number again. There was still no reply, so he searched for a number for the other aunt – Margery, in Edinburgh. But he had no address and there were so many Wests listed for the area, it would take hours to work through them, by which time it might be too late to do anything else.
I’m building this up into something absurd, he thought. It’s gothic fiction – the ghost-child who appears at intervals. But this is Nell, said his mind. And Beth. And if there’s even a tiny possibility that they’re in some kind of danger . . .
To go mad-rabbiting up to Derbyshire because of an elderly lady’s imagination and a long-ago schoolboy’s essay was the height of madness. But by half-past six Michael knew that unless he could reach Nell by phone, he would have to do just that.
This fact finally faced, he hunted out road maps to see exactly where, and how far, Caudle was. He found it with difficulty – a tiny place on the southern edge of the Peak District. Nell had said the journey was just over a couple of hours and when Michael checked with an online route planner, this was confirmed. But route planners never seemed to allow for mundane thi
ngs such as diversions or traffic hold-ups, so he would add an extra half an hour for that, and he had better add a further half hour for taking a wrong road, because it was remarkable how often roads and road signs could be misleading. He zoomed into the directions as far as possible and was gratified to see that Stilter House was shown, and that it was in Gorsty Lane.
What about all the sherry he had drunk with the Music Director? How far over the limit was he for driving? He tried to calculate times and quantities, and thought he might be borderline. Would a train journey be more sensible? More to the point, would it be possible? He wrestled with rail helplines and websites for fifteen minutes, before concluding that Caudle was simply too far off the beaten tracks and that it was completely off any National Rail tracks as well.
Was there anyone he could ask to drive him? Most of the dons were either immersed in end-of-term tidying-up or interviews or had already left College, and Michael was not keen on involving any of them in this peculiar business anyway. The majority would probably smile rather pityingly and later tell one another that Dr Flint was off on another of his peculiar exploits again, and before Michael knew it, he would be summoned to the Dean’s study to be told College was a hotbed of gossip about his ghost-hunting activities and had he considered the effect on his students.
Surely if he ate a substantial meal in Hall and set off just after half past seven the sherry should have dissipated, and with reasonable luck he would reach Caudle by eleven. He might be able to raise Nell by phone before then anyway and not need to make the whole journey.
He emailed his editor to say he would send the chapter on Wilberforce’s visit to Great Aunt Tabitha by the end of the week, and, to indicate he was working diligently away, added that he was, in fact, visiting the real Egg-nog Village for a day or so.
Oriel turned out to be serving a very substantial chicken casserole with accompanying vegetables that evening, so Michael had a large helping, followed it with some fruit salad, hoped this was blotting up most of the sherry, and went off to ask the porter to put out Wilberforce’s food for the next twenty-four hours.