The Haunting of Bellamy 4

by Monica Dickens

  ‘It’s all the bombing.’

  ‘It’s Eric,’ Rose thought.

  Now she began to see what Mrs Ardis was always going on about – a mischievous spirit, who could actually cause solid things to move. But Mrs Ardis’s poltergeist existed only in her imagination. This was real. This was Eric, and it wasn’t mischievous, but dangerous and evil.

  ‘How is our little Johnny, then?’ Ruby ruffled his hair on her way to the floor under the basin where all the mess was.

  Johnny winced, and the nurse said, ‘Don’t touch him. His skin’s very sensitive. He’s not feeling too well at all, are you, lamb?’ Johnny shook his head on the pillow.

  ‘The doctors will be here soon. They’ll find out what’s wrong.’ Johnny shook his head again, and the nurse mouthed at Ruby, ‘I hope.’

  On her knees, or rather on Ruby’s knees by the basin, Rose was suddenly aware of danger.

  ‘Look out!’ she yelled silently, but the large picture book that flew from a shelf through the air hit Ruby on the side of the head.

  Ruby dropped the dustpan with a squawk and fled from the room, wailing.

  ‘What on earth is all this noise?’ Sister Maddox came out of the ward with Staff Nurse Bates.

  ‘They hit me on the head, Sister.’

  ‘They, they, who is they? What nonsense is the stupid girl telling us now?’

  ‘A book fell off the shelf as she was bending down.’ The nurse came out of the room, where Johnny was screaming. ‘Poor Johnny is in a terrible way.’

  ‘He can have a pill. So can Ruby.’ Sister Maddox laid a cool, firm hand on Ruby’s head, which Rose could feel was aching and swelling up to a lump.

  Sister and Nurse Bates went into the office where the drug cupboard was. Holding her head, Ruby leaned against the wall and heard Sister say, ‘It’s all hysteria, and it’s getting to be too much of a good thing. It’s getting on my nerves.’

  ‘It’s strange – the children don’t seem to be doing well in that room,’ the staff nurse said. ‘Johnny’s not responding to treatment, and remember that Dixon baby? “Failure to thrive”, they called it, but he was all right when he came in.’

  ‘It’s all imagination and hysteria,’ Sister maintained. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Nurse, I’ll not put up with it. I’ve asked for a transfer to another ward.’

  When they came out, Nurse Bates was smiling, and Ruby would have smiled too, if her head wasn’t hurting. If Sister Maddox was really going, life was looking up.

  ‘Sit down and swallow these, Ruby.’ Sister gave her two large pink pills and a glass of water. ‘You can rest from work for—’ she consulted the watch pinned to the front of her apron – ‘exactly five minutes.’

  Thanks for nothing, Ruby thought. Her head throbbed. The pills began to make her a little muzzy.

  Muzzily, Rose woke sitting with her jodhpur boots in the damp gravel at the edge of the lake. The pain at the side of her head had left her when she left Ruby, but her knees hurt, and when she looked at the palms of her hands, there were grazes on them, as if she had fallen on stones.

  Proof that she had been there, in the valley. The Lord was there. Well, she knew that. It was true, not a dream, but it was strengthening to have visible confirmation of the truth.

  She gave up trying to get Moonlight to go to Ramsdyke church and turned him back to the stable. The grazes had faded by the time her mother came to fetch her, but Mollie said, ‘Your sleeve’s torn at the shoulder.’

  ‘So it is.’ Rose pulled it round to see more visible confirmation of her ordeal. ‘I went under a low branch.’

  ‘I’ll mend it for you.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll do it.’ Rose wanted to keep the torn sleeve to amaze Mr Vingo.

  When she showed him her ripped sleeve, he winced, as if he felt the tearing of the jacket. ‘Poor Rose. I wish I could have been there with you.’

  ‘You’re too old now,’ she said, not rudely, but sadly.

  ‘And you’re too young.’

  ‘I’m thirteen. You know that’s just the age. Anything is possible now, you said, and it’s got to be possible for me to find out what I’ve got to do about Eric and Aunt Maddox. I’ve discovered that he more or less drove her to leave Bellamy ward during the war, so why didn’t that satisfy him?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ Mr Vingo looked very worried. ‘What dreadful thing was still to come that made them close up Bellamy 4?’

  ‘I wish they hadn’t opened it again. I wish I could exorcise that rotten Eric, say a spell or something, and, poof – he’s gone!’

  She was leaving Mr Vingo, but he called her back. ‘Listen to me, Rose. Don’t joke about things like that. Don’t play about with those ideas. Keep clear of spells and shibboleths. Trying to dabble in the occult – it’s dangerous, and it doesn’t work.’

  All the same, thought Rose, there had to be something she could do.

  Chapter Nine

  Mrs Ardis turned out to be genuinely ill after all. She had bronchitis, and Rose and Mollie felt bad for not having taken her seriously, so Rose said she would stop in after school and see if she needed anything.

  Mrs Ardis, who always made it clear that being a chambermaid was several rungs down on the ladder of her life, lived alone in a tiny flat over the garage of a big house on the edge of the village of Newcome Hollow. She liked it to be thought that she had once lived in the big house, which wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter.

  The little flat was cosy enough, with a small fire going, and views of a garden and trees all round. Mrs Ardis said she could peck a bit – just to please Rose – so Rose opened a tin of rice pudding in the kitchen alcove off the bed-sitting room, and put some in a bowl.

  ‘Where are you going to eat it?’ The small round table was covered with books and loose sheets of notes.

  ‘I always eat on my lap.’ Mrs Ardis was in her armchair with a man’s cardigan over her nightdress and her grey canvas shoes on her bare feet. ‘Sitting up to the table by yourself is no fun.’

  Rose was glad to think of the huge meals Mrs Ardis ate at the kitchen table at Wood Briar.

  ‘Are these about poltergeists?’ She had picked up one of the books on the table. It looked very dry and didn’t seem to be about anything much.

  ‘Yes, don’t touch.’ Mrs Ardis looked up from the rice pudding she was eating with a dob of jam on it. Her flat, slate blue eyes looked strange. Was she very ill? Or perhaps she really was mystical.

  ‘Do they tell you how to exorcise a spirit?’ Rose asked casually, and was surprised when Mrs Ardis answered firmly, ‘Of course. There are rituals.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Garlic, of course. That’s been traditional for fiends since the heyday of the vampires. Dandelions, don’t ask me why. The skull of a dead – of a dead—’ she pulled up the front of the grey cardigan to cough into it – ‘a dead weasel.’

  Oh my God, did she know about the Lord and his ghastly pet? No, she couldn’t possibly. No one knew, except Rose and Mr Vingo. She was just inventing, in one of her droning, doom-laden voices: ‘A dish of innards, and of course a silver dagger to cut the ties that bind the spirit to a place where it can know no rest.’

  But her eyes were strange – like flat wet pebbles found at the tide mark. Rose took an empty piece of paper and wrote down what she said, in case there was something in it.

  She still wanted to go to the graveyard, since she had been sidetracked from going there yesterday. Perhaps she would try the ritual, just for the hell of it, but now she didn’t want to go alone.

  Abigail? They did everything together, but Rose knew she couldn’t involve her in this. Hazel would be safer. She would think it was a joke, and not ask penetrating questions.

  Toby was taking the van to get a new spare tyre not far from Ramsdyke, so Rose asked him to drop them off at the church of St Aubrey, and come back for them.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We’ve got to look for someone’s grave,’ Rose said.

  ‘
To exercise them,’ Hazel explained, before Rose could stop her. ‘What a giggle.’

  ‘More fun than a barrel of monkeys,’ Toby said indifferently. He had other things on his mind. Here Today was leaving soon, alas, and there were new acts to rehearse, and Tina still hadn’t decided if she’d go with them, and he wasn’t sure he could find the right tyre for the van.

  ‘When will you come back for us?’ Hazel stepped clumsily down from the high van and looked uncertainly at the little church on the lonely road.

  ‘How long are the exercises?’ Toby looked down at them with an eyebrow raised.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ Rose said shortly. ‘We’ve just got to find the grave, that’s all.’

  The gargoyles kept spiteful watch from the arch over the church door. The graveyard looked much the same as at the funeral of Eric’s parents, except that there were more graves now. One of the cypress trees had grown taller. The other had been cut down.

  ‘This is it.’ Rose found Eric’s short grave easily, next to the wide headstone that had the names of both his parents. Feeling rather foolish, she took various items from her book bag. A knob of garlic from the string in the vegetable bin. The ancient narrow skull of a seagull she had found on the beach, which would have to do instead of a weasel. A plastic bag of giblets from inside one of the chickens that were going to be roasted for dinner. Hilda’s aluminium pie slicer, next best thing to a silver dagger, and, because it was the wrong time of year for dandelion flowers, a bunch of goldenrod, which made Hazel sneeze.

  ‘This is fun,’ Hazel said, without enthusiasm.

  ‘We lay the flowers at the head of the grave, and slash through the earth with the sword,’ Rose told her. ‘First we bury the garlic and the skull and the innards.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘The pie slicer, I suppose.’

  It was quite difficult to dig up enough turf with the flexible slicer, so Rose and Hazel tore up lumps with their hands and pressed the skull and garlic into the earth, and the damp, slimy bag of giblets, and Rose stamped the grass back in place, since Hazel didn’t fancy stamping on a grave. Then they walked seven times round the graves and the cypress tree, and finally stabbed the pie slicer point down into the ground in two small slashes like a cross.

  ‘Is that all?’ Hazel was still sneezing.

  ‘Oh – er, Rest in Peace,’ Rose said lamely to the headstone that said, ‘ … beloved only son of … died November 9th, 1933, aged 9 years.’

  ‘That was fun,’ Hazel said hopefully.

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Rose put the pie slicer back in the bag. ‘It was silly.’

  ‘Why did we come then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She had thought she could resolve something by coming to the church, and even though she hadn’t really expected Mrs Ardis’ rituals to work, she had somehow felt compelled to find the place where Eric lay. She felt empty and disappointed. Now what? Unless Favour could help her, there was nothing she could do.

  Hazel went to the road to watch for the van. Rose wandered further away from the cypress tree and stopped dead at the word ‘MADDOX’, carved in marble. They had buried the aunt here, near to the people she hated. She had died about twenty years after the war, more than thirty years after Eric was killed in Room 4.

  Did Eric’s spirit know, or was he still trying to destroy her?

  ‘I told you!’ Rose had never seen Mr Vingo angry, but he was furious now, because she had gone to the graveyard with Hazel. ‘I told you not to mess about with the occult, even in such a ham-fisted way. Garlic and a pie slicer!’ He suddenly exploded in a loud snort of laughter that blew away his anger.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Forget it. You’re going to London to the horse show with Ben and dear Abigail. Have a marvellous time, and forget everything else while you’re there, except horses. “Where in this wide world,” he quoted, “can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy or beauty without vanity?” Do they still read that marvellous poem at the Horse of the Year Show?

  ‘On the last night, they do. “Here, where grace is laced with muscle, and strength by gentleness confined.” Abigail taught me it. I remember when you first quoted it to me. It’s about Favour, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s about all horses.’

  ‘And he is all horses. But it sounds like Favour, and what you’ve taught me about the legend. Perhaps the man who wrote it was once a messenger too.’

  ‘Perhaps. A lot of people may have been, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them. They seem quite ordinary. I wonder if they ever forget.’

  ‘I’ll never forget. Life will never go back to being ordinary.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Mr Vingo said. ‘Once you’ve been a messenger of the Great Grey Horse, your life can never be ordinary again.’

  Mr and Mrs Kelly dropped Rose and Abigail and Ben off at the stadium where the Horse of the Year Show was held, and then went on to a dinner party.

  ‘Wait for us where we agreed don’t get clever and go looking for the car that’s always disaster,’ Mrs Kelly shouted from the window, while horns behind urged her to get out of the way.

  ‘It’ll be a miracle if they ever find us again,’ Ben said, as they joined the throngs going through the turnstiles.

  ‘I don’t care.’ Rose had been in bliss ever since she had seen the huge posters of jumping horses, and a car park full of horse boxes. ‘I’ll stay here with all the horses.’

  There were hundreds of them. Mrs Kelly had bought Rover tickets, so that as well as having a good seat in the stadium, Rose and the others could stand down by the barrier rail at the end of the arena, and see and hear and smell the horses very close up. They could also go behind the scenes to the collecting ring, where the horses waiting to perform were being walked, and the immaculate riders stood about and chatted as if they were ordinary men and women, not the gods they seemed to Rose.

  Ben wanted to be one of those top men riders in scarlet coats and gorgeous boots. ‘But without having to start by shovelling manure and taking years of riding lessons from people like Joyce.’

  Abigail was desperate to be the woman who had won the European championship: cool, confident, her blonde hair smoothed into a chignon under her hat, white breeches fitting like an elastic skin, her horse a tall bright chestnut with a blaze, two or three dashing men hanging round her admiringly and laughing at her clipped little jokes.

  Rose just wanted to be one of the girl grooms who looked after the famous horses, and took the reins as the rider came back out from the lights and music and applause of the arena, and slapped the horse’s neck possessively and threw a rug over it. That would be glory enough for her.

  She would also settle for being one of the people in red jump suits who ran about the ring between events, carrying potted plants to decorate the jumps and replacing knocked-down rails and hollow bricks.

  In the Pony Club Mounted Games, where the ponies – mostly grey Welsh, with flying manes and tails – raced madly up and down to shouts and shrieks from all the children in the audience, Abigail saw herself as that thin, muscular rider who was either a boy or a girl with very short hair, galloping bareback in and out of bending poles with the reins in one hand, and stopping short with the other hand behind the waist to haul a team-mate up effortlessly for the tandem gallop back. But Rose, who would never be able to stay on one of those quicksilver ponies for five minutes, would be quite happy being the girl who came out between races to mark the centre line with chalk sprinkled along a length of string.

  It was a magic evening. Forget everything, Mr Vingo had said, except the horses; and Rose did. All three of them did. Even Ben, who usually made fun of Rose and Abigail when they got too horsey, was swamped in the general celebration of horses that was everywhere. It was in the crowd of all ages, from old people with skins like saddle leather to young eager children who knew all the horses and riders. It was in the perfection of the champion hack, who floated around the ring, barely tou
ching the ground at the trot. In the heavy horse teams, decorated like Christmas trees, leaning against each other as they pulled a harrow to grand marching music. In the driving pony pairs, racing the clock round an obstacle course. In the incredible power and control of the jumpers. In the grace and skill of the four top riders who competed for the champion horseman trophy, each riding four completely strange horses over eight huge jumps.

  In this competition, the horses waited at one end of the ring, quietly as if the crowd and the tension of excitement meant nothing. A big brown nervy horse came back from a rushing, difficult round. His rider, who had just ridden him for the first time, jumped off, made a face, and slapped him on the neck, not in friendship. His groom threw a rug over his quarters, and he immediately put his head down and rested one hind leg, like any old nag dozing in the shade of a favourite tree.

  After the prizes were presented, the four riders cantered slowly round the ring, the long rosette ribbons streaming, while the band played Speed, bonny boat, and the audience picked up the slow beat and clapped their hands in time.

  ‘Neat, huh, the way all the horses keep time with the band.’ Abigail stood behind the barrier, clapping.

  ‘They don’t,’ Ben said. ‘The band keeps time with the horses.’

  ‘They do so,’ Abigail argued. Rose jabbed her with an elbow, because the red curtains at this end had parted, and three of the riders cantered out to the collecting ring. The lights went out and the winner cantered alone in a moving spotlight down the middle of the ring while the crowd went wild – the supreme emotional moment.

  This year, the Parade of Personalities was Famous Horses of the Past. A champion jumper, a two-time Grand National winner, a celebrated stallion, a horse who’d been in dozens of Western films, a pit pony who had been years underground, a canal barge horse, a five times champion heavy horse. Rose’s favourite was an old iron-grey police horse who had been keeping the peace on the London streets for twenty-five years, and still carried a hairless scar on his shoulder where a broken bottle had been hurled at him as he faced an angry crowd.