The Haunting of Bellamy 4

by Monica Dickens

  Rose stumbled backwards, and knocked into something – somebody who laughed at her and tried to grab her clothes. She flung away. The soldiers were all around. She would never escape. She was doomed. The horse had enticed her into this pit of evil and abandoned her. She screamed for him: ‘Favour!’, and the mist threw back her voice into her mouth and choked her.

  ‘I detetht you.’ A vicious chuckle that froze her blood. ‘I have a methenger who’ll be the end of you!’

  The spiteful voice whispered close to her ear. She struck out at it, hit nothing, lost her balance, lurched forward and was suddenly, miraculously out of the mist and into the blinding sunlight where the river sparkled and foamed under the bridge and the Great Grey Horse waited for her on the rock above, striking out with his hoof and tossing his head in angry impatience.

  She had taken too long to reach him. She had despaired, and thought herself abandoned. As she struggled up to him over the rocks, she saw him gather his muscles to take off without her. She flung herself on to his back as he sprang, an enormous leap away from her into the air, and she grabbed at his mane just in time to save herself from falling off.

  Limp and exhausted, she lay forward on his high arched neck as they flew, and thought about what it would be like to fall off. What would happen? Where would she fall? She tried to imagine what lay beneath. When she flew with the horse, she didn’t see the earth below, or the sea, or clouds, because they were flying through time as well as space. If she fell, she would just drop, spinning forever into the wastes of endless space, into an eternal nothingness of infinite time.

  ‘And about time too. I thought he’d never get to the point.’ The voice was a harsh whisper. A woman talking behind her hand.

  Rose was in church. A wedding was about to start. There were flowers everywhere, and a congregation in best clothes and fancy hats with feathers and veils that looked like the fashions of fifty or sixty years ago. Rose was a young guest in a bronze taffeta dress and a hat with a swooping brim that hid one eye. Her name was Peggy.

  ‘I still think that hat’s, too old for you, Peggy.’ Her mother turned round from her whispered conversation with a woman friend in the pew, to bestow one of her unhelpful little remarks.

  Peggy thought the hat was romantic. She tugged the side of the brim down even farther, to blot out her mother and most of the church. On her other side, her father was peacefully reading the hymn book. Her mother, sharp-nosed and sharp-eyed was looking all round the church, whispering to her friend and behind her hand, criticizing the flowers, the hats, the guests on the bridegroom’s side of the aisle.

  Peggy sat with her head bent and her hands clenched tightly in her lap, wishing she would shut up and not make herself conspicuous, as she always did. This was a church, not a gossip factory. Peggy seemed to be quite religious, in a rather sentimental way. The soppier hymn tunes were running through her head as thy waited for the bride, and when the organist glided into ‘O Perfect Love’, her eyes filled with swoony tears. To her mother and the friend, this was a social affair, but a wedding was a very solemn occasion. You were giving yourself for ever to the man you loved, a beautiful sacrifice.

  Rose didn’t see it like that. When she imagined herself getting married, it was more like going into a partnership. In her wildest, silliest dreams when she allowed herself to think that one day Ben might want to marry her, she knew that she would give up nothing, but gain everything.

  The mother’s friend turned to look down the aisle, then nudged Peggy’s mother.

  ‘There she is. What an outfit to wear to your sister’s wedding. She might as well be in mourning.’

  Peggy’s mother looked round, then quickly to the front, as ‘she’, whoever she was, walked past them up the aisle: a ramrod straight back, narrow shoulders as stiff as if the coat hanger was still inside the dark blue dress with a high collar, and a plain dark hat with a flat sharp brim. She sat in the front pew on the left, the harsh hat standing out unsuitably among the other women’s decorative headgear.

  ‘I’m surprised she even came.’

  ‘Dorothy! Her own sister’s wedding?’

  ‘Well, you know as well as I do,’ Peggy’s mother whispered, ‘she wanted him for herself. Ssh!’ Although she was the one doing the talking. ‘There he is.’

  The bridegroom had come out of the vestry with the best man to stand by the top of the aisle, a slight, pale young man with glasses and a nervous mouth.

  ‘Though why she bothered … ’

  ‘Desperate,’ Peggy’s mother snapped, and kept her busy lips closed.

  A clergyman came out beaming in a cassock and stole, and faced the aisle. The organ pranced into ‘Here Comes the Bride’. Everyone stood up. The bridegroom, pale as pastry, turned to see his bride approach. ‘She’, – the sister in the plain hat – turned round to look the same way, and, ‘Oh – look at her face!’ Peggy’s mother hissed.

  Rose couldn’t see the face, because of Peggy’s swooping hat brim, but the friend whispered, ‘If looks could kill … ’ so it must be pretty bad.

  Then the two women turned with toothy, insincere smiles as the bride came slowly past their pew, all in radiant white like a sacrificial virgin, her tiny hand, gloved to the elbow like a second white skin, resting on her father’s arm.

  Peggy began to cry soundlessly, sneaking up a finger under her hat to catch tears. The groom stepped beside his bride. Peggy’s mother muttered, ‘She looks a bit fat from the back.’ Peggy’s head swam with tears at the beauty and drama of it all, and she swayed forward and had to clutch the back of the pew in front to steady herself.

  But Rose kept on falling, leaving Peggy far behind. She clutched for the pew, but it wasn’t there. She was falling away from the organ music, the church, the congregation, and the drone of the clergyman: ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together in the sight of God …’

  She woke standing on the moor, her hands leaning against the side of the cold grey rock.

  ‘Dearly beloved …’

  Rose opened her eyes and shook her head, to clear it of the clergyman’s voice, the organ music, the whispers, the funny hats, the bride in white, her small gloved hand trembling on her father’s arm – the whole scene that had seemed so real.

  Because she was there. It had all really happened. Peggy was there, fifty – sixty years ago. It had all happened, and yet it had never stopped happening, because it was still there for Rose to go back to on one of the magical journeys that obliterated the barriers of time.

  Peggy, her mother, the friend, the bride’s sister in the sharp-brimmed hat – they might be dead now, but they had all actually lived through that scene that was frozen in time, for the horse to show to Rose. What did it have to do with Bellamy 4 and the spider-haunted radiator? ‘I hate this room,’ the girl with the bandaged pigtails had said. The bride’s sister hated the bride, as the evil Lord of the. Moor hated the messengers of the Great Grey Horse.

  Hatred and evil. Rose pushed herself upright, nodded to the rock, which was part of the whole fantastic enterprise, and went wearily home.

  If looks could kill … She hadn’t seen the jealous sister’s face, but she had seen the malevolent face of the Lord through the shifting veils of mist, and she guessed that this hatred was at the heart of the journey. ‘Things are going to be hard for you,’ Mr Vingo had said, ‘and very strange indeed.’

  Dragging her feet through the tangled dead summer grasses of the slope down to the wood where her bike leaned against a tree, Rose sent out appeals to Mr Vingo and all the other messengers down through time, for the strength to be equal to it.

  Ben’s boarding school was not far from Newcome, so when he had a free weekend, he often came to Wood Briar with his parents and his younger brother Harry. They loved the annexe house next to the hotel, which had a small kitchen for guests to make their own breakfasts and snacks, and a lounge with a fireplace, looking out on to an orchard of gnarled old fruit trees.

  Rose was picking up the last
of the Granny Smith apples when the Kellys arrived on Saturday morning. She saw Ben’s cheerful face behind the French windows, then he pushed them open and took a leap down on to the grass, without touching the steps.

  When Ben was coming, Rose was happy and excited, but when he was actually here, she didn’t know how to greet him. She went on bending to pick up apples and throw them in a basket, until Ben’s hand plunged in and took an apple and grabbed a huge bite, and Rose stood up and they both laughed, bits of juicy apple spewing out of Ben’s mouth.

  ‘Hey – you look great,’ Ben said. ‘Just the same. I’m always afraid you’ll suddenly grow up.’

  Rose frowned, but he was teasing her, since he knew she hated him to call her a child because he was two years older. So she threw an apple at him and he ducked, and they went through the gate in the fence and into the hotel, with a lot to tell each other. Ben told her about school, and a long distance race he’d won, and another in which he’d made an idiot of himself. Rose told him about Here Today, and how the actors had livened up the hotel, and what Mrs Ardis and the Miss Mumfords thought of it all.

  The twin Miss Mumfords didn’t think much of it. They stayed at Wood Briar in the winter, because their own house was cold and draughty, and then spent most of the time complaining about draughts at the hotel. In the cosy upstairs lounge, they claimed the armchairs nearest to the fire. If unsuspecting guests sat there, they would be frozen out by stares and little clicks of the teeth, or one of the elderly twins would start to rummage round them for a lost knitting needle, dropped between the chair and the cushion.

  In the dining-room, it didn’t matter where you sat them. They could detect a draught that no one had ever noticed. Philip Wood had once tried holding up a strip of paper to prove them scientifically wrong, and Gloria, bending to serve spaghetti, had sworn afterwards that she saw Miss Audrey Mumford puff out her cheeks to make the paper move, so they could change tables.

  At lunch, they decided that the table where the Kellys always sat was the only one at which they could possibly eat roast chicken, even wearing their fur jackets.

  ‘But at breakfast, you sat in that corner,’ Rose said hopefully. ‘I’ve laid you there. Look, there’s your vitamin pills and the mineral water.’

  ‘Which could be moved,’ stated the twin with the head that shook all the time from side to side, as if she were saying no to the whole world.

  ‘Of course they could.’ Ben’s mother jumped up and started to gather up her glass and napkin. ‘We don’t mind a bit do we everyone come along Ben and Harry up you get for the ladies what’s the matter with you?’ She talked non-stop, without pauses for breath or punctuation.

  ‘We haven’t finished our soup,’ Mr Kelly said. He was large and slow of movement and speech, to counteract his wife.

  ‘We wouldn’t dream of disturbing you,’ the other twin said coldly. ‘We’ll make do with that table over there, Rose. At least it’s near the serving hatch, so we might get the food warm for once.’

  Oh Lord. ‘That’s laid for six, Miss Mumford. That’s where the theatre group—’

  ‘Ah, the stage people.’ The twins nodded their round heads of thin hair at each other, as if they might have known it. They edged stuffily into the chairs that Rose had pulled out at the corner table, and started to inspect the silver.

  Rose went fuming out to the kitchen, where her mother was carving chickens and Hilda was dishing up vegetables, and Mrs Ardis, off duty, was sitting in the corner with her swollen legs on a box of soup tins, eating a bacon sandwich.

  ‘I warned you,’ Mrs Ardis said. ‘I saw funny-coloured auras round their heads the first time I laid eyes on them. Troublemakers, I said.’

  ‘You know you didn’t.’ Mollie severed a thigh and drumstick neatly. ‘You weren’t involved in all that psychic stuff two years ago.’

  Rose dropped two glasses, and broke one, a not uncommon occurrence.

  ‘I thank the Good Man above that I wasn’t,’ Mrs Ardis said in her throaty, religious voice. ‘I was spared these shocks and tricks, at least. Get away, you nasty thing.’ She jerked her sandwich up as if an invisible dog had snatched at it.

  ‘What thing?’ Rose was picking up the broken glass.

  ‘Who do you think broke that?’

  ‘Not that poltergeist of yours?’ Mollie looked up, laughing, and Hilda turned her good eye round from the saucepans to say, ‘Don’t encourage her in that rubbish,’ and caught the edge of the potholder on fire from the burner.

  ‘You see.’ Mrs Ardis nodded her head of wild grey hair in a satisfied way. ‘He’ll always get you.’

  The actors, who had been giving a performance at a nursing home that morning, straggled in late for the lunch that Mollie had kept warm for them. The afternoon came down in sheets of grey rain, so Christopher and Ilona put up the ping pong table on the verandah and organized a tournament. Rose played with Ben, and they beat Marge and Frank, and then Tina and a jolly travelling salesman who kept calling her Teeny, and a Dutch tourist playing with Toby, whose disorganized arms were a greater threat to the light bulbs than the ball. They were beaten at last by Christopher and Ilona, who always won whatever game the group played. They all liked Ben and he liked them, especially Ilona, who was so alive and funny and full of bounce, and promised to teach him to tap dance that evening.

  ‘Dressed to kill, huh?’

  Abigail, who loved working at the hotel, had come over to help Rose and Gloria and Dilys to serve the Saturday night dinners, which were usually busy with outside people as well as the guests, since Mollie’s cooking was getting quite a name locally.

  ‘It’s the only thing I could find,’ Rose lied to explain why she was wearing under her apron the new skirt that was longer and swoopier than her others, and patterned like a multicoloured tapestry. Ilona came down to dinner in one of Christopher’s shirts and a pair of faded blue jeans hacked off above the ankle and frayed, so Rose need not have bothered.

  And Ben didn’t notice anyway.

  After dinner, they moved into the downstairs lounge for Ilona’s tap class. As with anything new he tackled, Ben was enthralled by the dance steps, moving his long legs easily to the plink, plonk of the guitar and the broken rhythm of the piano.

  ‘Shuffle, ball change, flap! Shuffle, ball change, flap!’ Ilona danced beside him, her gold hoop earrings so huge they bounced on her shoulders. ‘Shuffle, hop, step – shuffle, hop, step – loosen up, Abigail – you’re good; Ben – shuffle, ball change, flap!’

  ‘Yeah!’ They all finished at the same time, and Abigail, with her thick chestnut plait swung over one shoulder, lunged forward on a bent knee with her arms spread out to Rose. ‘Come on, give it a go, pal. You’ll love it.’

  ‘I’m tired.’ Rose was the world’s worst dancer.

  ‘Ben’s got to learn something more difficult.’ Ilona took him to the side to teach him what she called a five beat cramp roll. Abigail, her sparkling eyes pulled back by her tightly braided hair, had the nerve to pull her idol Christopher out of the chair where he was lounging with his feet over the arm, to try the steps with her. Rose was left standing rather awkwardly, watching her two best friends absorbed in something she couldn’t do.

  It was Toby, who never danced on stage, who put an arm round her waist from behind and drew her out on to the floor and said, ‘Come on, Rosebud. You and I are going to dance if it kills us.’

  So Ilona put them all in a line and took them through the first routine. ‘Shuffle, ball change, flap – shuffle, ball change, flap – pick it up, Toby, head up Rose – shuffle, hop, step – shuffle, hop step – no, no, no, no, no!’ She clutched her earrings as if she were going to pull her head off. ‘You step, not stamp as if you were squashing a beetle. OK, pick it up again, folks – shuffle, hop, step – shuffle, hop, step – now your shuffle, ball change, flap – pick up the speed – let’s go!’

  Frank pulled Marge off the piano stool and joined in. Ben and Abigail looked as if they had been tap dancing for years
. Toby and Rose were the duffers together, which meant they could laugh, which Rose couldn’t have done if she had had to be a duffer all by herself.

  Her father looked in to tell her to put out the lights when they were done, and her mother came in to tell her to make tea for everyone when they wanted it.

  ‘Which is now.’ Toby went with Rose to the kitchen, where the big kettle was simmering on the back of the stove, and helped her to put things on to a tray. ‘First hotel kitchen I’ve ever been in where they don’t lock everything up at night,’ he said, getting the milk out of the refrigerator.

  ‘Mrs Ardis is always on at my mother about it. Never trust a guest, is her motto.’

  ‘She’s probably right. Where do you keep the sugar?’

  Rose didn’t answer. She was looking at the half open door between the kitchen and the dark scullery. The door had moved slightly.

  ‘Where’s the sugar, Rosebud?’

  ‘Who’s there?’ she asked, her voice shrill with fear.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the scullery.’

  ‘Nobody.’ Toby opened the door wide, to show the sinks and the dishwasher and the tidy shelves of pans and jugs and jars.

  Rose sighed with relief. ‘If Mrs Ardis was here—’ she put the sugar bowl on the tray – ‘she’d pretend it was the poltergeist.’

  Toby laughed. ‘Or my tiny little old grandmother in black.’

  He flexed his long arms, bent at the knees in the exaggerated way he moved, picked up the tray with a groan and staggered out. As the lounge door opened, music and laughter and happy friendly voices swept out. Rose went towards them, but when she glanced sideways at the open scullery door she almost dropped the teapot. There was something in the scullery. Something small. As it moved, light from the kitchen flicked briefly off large spectacles. Then it was gone, and the scullery was just – the scullery. But Rose slammed the door shut as if the devils of hell were in there.