Monica Dickens
The Haunting of
Bellamy 4
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
A Note on the Author
Chapter One
Rose was in a train, flying through the night. Dark woods swept past her, sleeping fields, car headlights on a road, the yellow windows of houses far apart. The lights and empty streets of a tiny town came and went quickly. The station passed in a flash. When she turned her head to the left, the reflection of a staring face that must be hers stared back, riding with her across the countryside.
Beside her, someone stirred and yawned. Just ahead, the steam whistle on the engine shrieked into the night: one – one two – a long blast as the carriage began to jar and shudder.
The brakes screeched. Rose was thrown to the floor with her arms on the opposite seat. The lights went out. A woman began to scream, but her voice was lost in the noise of the crash, and the terrible sounds of grinding and tearing. The carriage tilted sideways, then forward and down, and Rose was flung on her back as it rolled over, and pinned by the legs when the roof crashed in and the carriage jolted and was still.
Above her, she saw a jagged hole of black sky. The brutal noise had stopped. There was an unearthly silence for a moment, and then the hiss of steam and people’s cries and groans, like the voices of despair rising from the pit of hell.
‘My legs!’
Rose woke in terror, and could not believe her bed, her room, her window full of moonlight. This seemed like the dream. The train was the reality. Her legs were leaden and aching, as if she were pinned down to the bed.
The door opened and her mother was there in her nightdress.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I – oh, it was – ’ Rose’s heart was thumping. She could still feel the tilting and lurching, hear the whole orchestra of crashing and tearing and smashing, and then the dead silence and the voices rising.
‘You had a nightmare.’ Mollie sat down in a patch of moonlight on the bed. ‘What was it?’
Rose shook her head on the pillow. She felt sick and giddy, as if her bed had really tilted and rolled.
‘As bad as that?’
‘Worst I ever had.’ She shuddered. Her heart was still racing.
‘Poor Rose.’ Her mother took her hand. ‘Look, don’t be afraid. Quiet down. It’s all right. I’m here.’
‘The train – it was a train accident. It was rushing along and then it crashed. There was all that noise, and then silence.’
‘How horrible. But nothing like that’s going to happen to you. It was only a dream.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re thirteen. That’s a funny age for dreams, and you’ve got a specially vivid imagination. Perhaps you’ve been working too hard, at school and in the hotel. Perhaps I shouldn’t let you—’
‘Yes you should.’ Rose loved helping her mother to run Wood Briar Hotel. No one was going to take that away from her.
‘Go back to sleep then.’
‘I’m afraid.’
‘No, it won’t come again. It’s over now. Look, I’ll leave the door open. You sleep.’
But Rose lay for a long time staring at the bright window, and if she fell asleep, she didn’t know it.
Next morning her legs were still a bit shaky, and she felt tired, starting out on her bike to school. When her friend Hazel Riggs joined her at the crossroads in Newcome Hollow village, she said, ‘Don’t ride too fast, Hay. My legs ache.’
‘Touch of flu? It’s going about. You’d better ask the nurse for an asprin.’
‘I’m OK. I just had a rotten night.’
‘Huh?’ Hazel turned to inspect Rose as a curiosity. She never had sleepless nights.
‘Had a terrible nightmare. You know how they can stay with you.’
‘I never dream.’
‘Good or bad?’
‘Nope.’
‘If you don’t dream, they say, and exercise your brain while you’re asleep, you go insane.’
‘Oh dear, then I’m insane.’
Rose was glad that Hazel pushed on ahead, thick legs in bright blue tights working hard, bottom broad on the bike saddle. She needed to think. The dream was still very vivid. The night speeding by, the white face reflected in the carriage window, the whistle, the jolting, the grinding screech of brakes, all the terrible sounds. She didn’t want to think about it, yet she had to keep pulling it into her mind, like torturing yourself with the memory of a mistake or an insult.
Where did it come from, and why to her? Was it anything to do with the Great Grey Horse?
On her thirteenth birthday, Rose had become a messenger of the splendid grey horse Favour, who had been coming and going on the earth for centuries, using human messengers who were this magic age to carry out his eternal crusade to rescue the victims of evil and unhappiness. Rose had already been sent twice by the horse into a tremendous adventure. His call to a new challenge might come at any time.
‘Do you suppose this was it?’
That afternoon, when Mr Vingo came ambling back from a walk in the rain, Rose told him about the nightmare, or what she could remember of it, since it was already disappearing. He was the only person she could talk to about her secret life with the horse, because he himself had been a messenger once, long ago.
‘Do you?’ He went on stabbing a thick finger at single notes on the piano in his room and marking them down on long sheets of manuscript music paper.
Mr R.V. Vingo lived in the round turret bedroom over the side verandah of Wood Briar. He was a composer. He was setting to music an old legend about the Great Grey Horse who had long ago galloped to save the valley people from rising flood waters.
‘I don’t know. Sometimes being a messenger seems so clear. Sometimes it’s all so difficult and confused.’
‘If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Because—’ plink in the treble – ‘it’s true.’ Plonk down in the bass of the little marmalade-coloured piano that leaned away from the wall on the uneven floor of the turret room.
‘Ro-o-ose!’ Mrs Ardis the chambermaid, in a carolling mood, was calling from the corridor below the spiral turret staircase, wanting her to help fold laundry.
‘I’d better go,’ Rose said, ‘since you don’t seem to care about my nightmare.’
He humped his massive shoulders up into his rather long black hair that seemed to hang round his big head, rather than grow on it. Sometimes he was helpful. Sometimes he wasn’t. For a large, slow-moving man, he could be very elusive.
‘I’ll just forget it then. Boy, this winter is going to be dull if nothing’s going to happen.’
‘Dull!’ Mr Vingo crashed a chord and spun round on the stool, which was much too small for his bulk. ‘Don’t ever let me hear you say that about your life, Rose of all roses. Don’t get arrogant, because you have been chosen by the horse to do his work. If you do, he’ll humble you.’
‘By scaring me with nightmares?’
‘Worse than that. By not calling you to him any more. By not taking you on those journeys through time and space, to discover where the wrongs are, and how you can right them. Perhaps he sent the dream. Perhaps he didn’t. But I’d keep it in mind if I were you.’
The dream faded, and Rose had other things on her mind.
At school, a group of actors called Here Today had come to give a performance. It was a mixture of song
s and dances and sketches, with some serious slashes of drama and some really funny jokes – what the programme described as ‘Essential Trivia’. There was a tap-dancing girl called Ilona with a round face and very short hair and outrageous earrings. She pulled people out of the audience and somehow taught them a few steps, until she had half a dozen giggling people – boys as well as girls, and even a teacher, Mr Scott with his dusty beard – tapping and hopping in a line with her, while the banjo kept time with them, rather than they with it.
There was a spry older man, quite bald, who did small parts and carried the props in and out and played the drums and nipped forward at the side of the stage to tell you what was going on. There were two other women who played the piano and guitar and banjo as well as dancing and acting, and good-looking Christopher who was the hero or the villain, and sometimes both in one sketch, switching from side to side of the stage and from chair to chair.
There was also Toby, a loose-jointed young man with a flop of sandy hair, who wandered in and out of all the acts and was always lost or out of step or off key, his long, rubbery face folding into lines of despair, then transforming itself into joy when he thought he’d got it at last, only to find everyone else was now doing something else. In the sketches, the characters he played, pulling his face into a different shape for each one, always got cheated, or pushed around, or said the wrong thing, or didn’t get the girl. Downcast, his gangling body flopped about like a marionette with loose strings, but he often ended up getting the best of the others by luck or innocent cunning, and radiated joy again.
Rose’s American friend Abigail thought Christopher was a knock-out. Hazel, who was sitting with them, giving music, comedy or tragedy the same stodgy reception, said it was better than Current Affairs. Rose was fascinated by Toby, who made her want to cry for him at one moment and laugh with him the next.
At the end, anyone was allowed up on the stage to talk to the actors and look at the props and bits of costume with which they did quick changes – moustaches and glasses and wrap-around skirts and cloaks and feather boas and a collection of hats for Christopher’s instant switches. Abigail, who was learning the flute, went up to talk to Tina who played the guitar. Hazel pulled Rose to leave the hall with her – she had an irritating habit of pulling and poking and nudging you – but Rose shook her off and went unobtrusively through the crowd to the stage.
Her natural shyness had become less painful since the splendid grey horse Favour had shown his confidence in her as a faithful messenger, but she was too timid to go up on the stage. She stood under it and looked up at Toby, who was chatting enthusiastically with a lot of people and scrawling autographs and clowning about and demonstrating how he did his fall like a felled tree. ‘Timber!’ He ended up with his face on the floor quite near Rose.
‘Hullo,’ he said politely, as if they had met standing up.
‘Hullo.’ He didn’t get up. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He sat up and leaned on one long arm, his untidy hair half over his face. ‘One day I will be. Everyone thinks I’ve got the perfect technique, but actually, each time I do it I take my life in my hands.’
‘Why do you, then?’
‘Oh, showing off, I suppose.’ He smiled at Rose. She leaned her elbows on the edge of the stage and they chatted together about the show as if there were no one else in the crowded hall.
Here Today was doing several performances in the town of Newcome and round about – ‘If we can survive the horrible guest house we’re staying at.’ Toby manufactured a belch. ‘The mattress hurts me more than stage falls.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Batesby Hall.’ He made a face.
So did Rose. ‘Beastly Hole, we call it.’ As good businesswomen, Rose and Mollie knew everything about all the local hotels and guest houses. ‘You ought to stay at our place,’ she said boldly, before she could stop herself. ‘There’s room at the moment, and we’re starting winter rates.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Wood Briar Hotel. By the sea. The other side of Newcome Hollow. Not far. I bike in here every day.’
‘By the sea?…’ Toby’s heavy-lidded eyes opened wide and his eyebrows went up. ‘How much?’
When Rose told him, he looked suddenly sad, as he could in an instant, but it only meant he was thinking. ‘That’s a bit more – Marge!’ He reached up to grab the hand of the red-haired woman who had played the banjo and sung the song about the girl who couldn’t leave home and the girl who couldn’t go back. ‘Can we afford to get out of Beastly Hole?’
‘Excuse me.’ Annette Prior flopped on her knees beside him with a note book. ‘I’m doing interviews for the school paper. How long have you been on the stage?’
‘All my life, seems like. When you say on the stage, do you mean actually on it, or trying to find someone who’ll pay me to be on it?’
Annette giggled and scribbled in her notebook. Toby looked at Rose and winked, and she told him and Marge, ‘I’m sure my mother will give you group rates,’ and was in agony on the way home for having promised something that wasn’t her business.
On the last stretch of straight road that ran between the dunes of Long Beach and the houses and cottages, some of which were already shuttered against the coming winter storms from the sea, Rose began to be aware that someone – something was moving with her. When she turned her head to the right into the sea wind, it wasn’t there. When she looked ahead, she knew that Favour was there, cantering beside her on the sandy edge of the road. She could not hear his hoofs or his breathing, but she could feel the thrust of his powerful shoulder through the air and the fluid muscle movements, and as he drew ahead and left her, the bicycle swayed as a small car does when a big lorry sweeps past it.
The Great Grey Horse. He was near to her again, reminding her: I am a part of your life. It would not be long now. He would call her, and she would have to go.
The familiar road suddenly seemed bleak and strange, and the wind from the sea grew colder, as Rose’s heart was gripped with dread of what might lie before her.
Chapter Two
At home, Rose’s mother and father were having tea by the fire in the hall. Places in Newcome like the Excelsior Hotel and Beastly Hole didn’t start fires until the middle of October, but at Wood Briar the fires were lit in the hall and upstairs lounge whenever they were needed, even in the middle of summer.
A salesman was working on his papers in the corner by the big plant that thrived without much light, because Mrs Ardis dusted its leaves and talked to it. The elderly twin Miss Mumfords were at ‘their’ table, where they hated anyone else to sit. Rose had just said to her parents breathlessly, ‘Guess what?’, when the twin with the shaky head snapped her fingers at her before she had even taken off her blazer, and told her to bring more hot water. The Mumfords never asked for what they wanted. They told you.
Rose turned and went into the kitchen.
‘Who’s supposed to be doing teas?’
‘I am.’ Dilys, the college student who worked here part-time, was reading at the table, both hands cradling a mug of strong tea.
‘Angela and Audrey want more hot water.’ Rose had found out their first names, but the twins didn’t know that.
‘They’ve had enough for a bath already,’ Dilys grumbled, still reading. ‘You know what they do with it?’
‘Yes. Dip a napkin in it and wipe all the china and cutlery. Go on, Dil.’
‘You do it, Rose, I’m studying.’
Rose didn’t say, ‘I’m not on duty.’ That was the sort of thing Dilys and some of the other helpers said. She filled a hot water jug from the huge kettle that whispered permanently on the back of the stove, left it on the Mumfords’ table without breaking stride and hung over her mother’s chair to repeat, ‘Guess what?’
Mollie reached up to pull her head down and kiss her. Philip Wood said, ‘I refuse to guess. Until I know what it is, I don’t know whether I want to know it, so why should I
guess?’
‘Guess what?’ Rose said excitedly to her mother. ‘We had a play at school and the actors in it hate the place where they’re staying, so I said perhaps they’d like to come here.’
‘Actors?’ Her mother’s bright, youthful face glowed. ‘Oh, what fun. Do you think they’ll come?’
Rose had to confess. ‘I told them we were starting winter rates.’
‘Not till November,’ her father said sternly.
‘Well, but actors, Phil.’ Mollie’s mind often ran on the same tracks as Rose’s. ‘They never have much money.’
‘You’re asking for trouble.’ Philip had his own outside job, testing new products for a consumer magazine that told people what to buy and what to avoid. He didn’t have much to do with running the hotel, but he was always critical. ‘People take advantage of you right and left.’
Mollie said, ‘Yes, dear.’ Rose leaned forward to take a piece of cake.
‘Who are these people?’
‘Here Today,’ Rose told him hopefully, because she liked the name. ‘That’s the name of the group.’
‘Here Today, gone tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They can’t be much good.’
‘They were wonderful.’ Rose could still hear the songs in her head and the cheerful beat of Ilona’s tap shoes. ‘I don’t know why the school let us see anything that was so much fun. Usually it’s something like Julius Caesar.’
The telephone rang. Mollie went into the office behind the reception desk to answer it, and the Mumfords suspended the motion of their jaws to listen.
‘When you’re my age—’ Rose didn’t believe she would ever be her father’s age – ‘you’ll be glad to have seen Julius Caesar. You can bore your children telling them about it, as I bore you.’
‘You don’t bore me, Philip.’ Rose was fond of him, although he could be sarcastic and negative and she could kill him at times.
‘Don’t call me Philip.’
‘That’s your name, isn’t it?’
Mollie came back in time to head off one of the fights that sprang up like mushrooms this year.
The Haunting of Bellamy 4 Page 1