As they were led round behind the mounted drummer and trumpeters of the Household Cavalry, Rose’s eyes followed old Trooper. He was ancient and swaybacked and a little lame, but the crowd and the brave music and the other horses kindled his spirit, and he showed that he still knew how to handle himself on parade.
These Famous Personalities came in again at the closing Cavalcade with all the winners and champions and all the Pony Club teams, including a very small dun pony who went berserk and wouldn’t stand still, and had to have a ring steward to hold him, which mortified his young rider.
Rose watched everything closely to be able to tell Mr Vingo what it had looked like, with the masses of horses and ponies in the ring, while his favourite poem was read over the loudspeakers.
Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy or beauty without vanity?
Here, where grace is laced with muscle, and strength by gentleness confined.
He serves without servility; he has fought without enmity. There is nothing so powerful, nothing less violent; there is nothing so quick, nothing more patient.
England’s past has been born on his back. All our history is his industry; we are his heirs, he our inheritance.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
THE HORSE.
The praise was for all the horses, but Rose’s eyes were drawn to the old grey police horse, standing with amiable patience among the impressive crowd of horses and riders, as he had stood in so many crowds, all his working years.
When it was over and the ring was clearing, the Famous Horses of the Past were led out down the side of the ring, where Rose stood with her chin and arms on the top of the barrier. As he came opposite her, old Trooper’s ears flicked forward and his dark grey head suddenly went up. The years fell away from him as he pranced sideways towards her, and she saw that he was Favour!
Rose pulled herself up, got a foot on top of the barrier and pushed herself on to his back, and they were away over the milling throng of horses, over the roof of the stadium, over the lighted city, whose reflection glowed up into the arc of the night sky towards which she flew.
Rose had never been very ill in her life, but now, in bed in Bellamy 4, propped up against hard pillows, feverish, shaking, she knew that she was someone who was very ill indeed.
Her head was floating and her eyes were losing focus, so that things in the room came close, and then receded far away at the end of a diminishing tunnel. Her whole body ached, so that she couldn’t lie still, yet it felt so heavy that she couldn’t move. Her heart raced. She could see it bumping at the front of a hospital nightdress.
‘You’ve got pneumonia,’ they had told her. ‘Just lie still and breathe easy.’ But her chest was struggling to get enough air. She gasped for breath, fast and shallow. She was going to – going to suffocate, if someone didn’t help!
The door of the room, which the nurse had left open while she went to get something, shut with a bang. She groped for the bell cord, but it twitched away from her hand. Something was happening in the room. There was someone there she couldn’t see. She was fiery hot, and then, in a moment, she was shivering with cold as the blankets were pulled on to the floor.
Looking around in terror, she saw the window latch turn by itself. The window flew open and a gust of snow whirled greedily in, like an invader.
She was freezing. She tried to get up to shut the window, but she was pinned to the bed by her own weakness, or by some deadly force that was choking her, draining away her breath. Through her delirium and terror, she thought she heard a whisper, more like a movement of air than a voice, poisoned with the evil of hate.
‘I’ll kill you!’
‘Help me!’
Coughing and gasping, close to death, a supreme effort of Rose’s will forced air from the struggling lungs to give power to a desperate shout that brought nurses running, a doctor in a white coat, syringes, oxygen cylinders – the whole mobilization of hospital crisis that came almost too late.
With an oxygen mask over nose and mouth, Rose saw through the sick girl’s eyes the imposing dark blue figure of Matron, ordering people about.
‘Nothing but bad luck in this room,’ she was saying. ‘Everything goes wrong. I’m going to take out the bed, and use the place as a storeroom.’
Presently there was a jerk, and the girl opened her eyes again as the bed began to move on wheels out of the door. Matron walked beside it, bending over to ask, ‘Are you all right?’
Down the corridor, they passed an open door beyond which a patient’s radio was playing big band music. It merged into the brass and drums and cymbals of the Horse of the Year Show band as Rose came to in her own healthy body, on her back, coughing, her shoulders propped up.
Not by hard pillows. She was propped against the legs of someone who was kneeling. Ben’s legs, and it wasn’t Matron leaning over her, it was Abigail.
‘You OK, kid?’
‘Bit too enthusiastic, this one.’ Someone spoke from the little group standing round her. ‘Must have been sitting on the rail of the barrier. She toppled off it, almost on top of poor old Trooper.’
Chapter Ten
This, then, was the climax. This was what all the journeys and their clues had led up to.
The re-opening of Room 4 on Bellamy ward was going to bring a new outbreak of malicious attacks – even perhaps the danger of death.
‘No ethcape!’ the Lord had taunted Rose. He was mixed up with all the evil, and knew that the boy’s tormented spirit was still in the room.
But didn’t Eric know that Sister Maddox wasn’t there any more? Didn’t he know now that his aunt was dead?
Mrs Ardis struggled back to work on Monday. It was half term, so Rose helped her with the beds.
They tugged and patted at the bottom sheets of the Mumfords’ twin beds, which had to be pulled as tight as drums, with no wrinkles to disturb the delicate sleepers. An elastic fitted corner of Miss Angela’s sheet slipped off the mattress and sprang back to the middle of the bed.
‘None of that,’ Mrs Ardis told it harshly. ‘The old ladies aren’t here, so save your energy. Stupid thing, a poltergeist is,’ she said patronizingly. ‘Once it picks a place, it just goes on haunting blindly, for no particular reason.’
‘For ever?’
‘Unless it’s stopped by a spirit stronger than itself. Don’t stand there staring. Get on with the job.’
‘That’s got to be me,’ Rose told Mr Vingo in a brief, breathless conversation on the stairs, as she went down and he plodded up. ‘A stronger spirit. I understand now. I’ve got to get to Eric in that room, and beat him at his own game.’
‘Not his own game,’ Mr Vingo warned her again. ‘Your game. Remember what I told you before. No tricks or shibboleths. Not spite. Just your own weapons of strength and courage.’
She knew what she was going to do. She rode Moonlight over to Abigail’s that afternoon, and they played Horse of the Year Show, jumping and doing Pony Club races and pretending to be exquisite champion riders in the Cavalcade.
Half way round a tiny jumping course, Rose made herself fall off Moonlight. Falling off from natural causes was easy. Making yourself fall off was difficult. She had to screw up her courage and let go everything and fall helplessly.
‘Get up!’ Abigail shouted.
Rose lay still. Moonlight walked away and began to eat grass.
‘Get up, you jerk!’ Abigail started to laugh, then she was frightened. Rose opened an eye just far enough to see her turn Crackers back to where Rose lay and jump off.
‘Rose? Hey, Rose, open your eyes. Are you fooling? Oh God – Rose! First she falls into the show ring, and now she knocks herself out. Wake up. It’s me, old pal.’ She shook Rose’s shoulder gently. Rose let her head roll. ‘Dad!’ Abigail jumped up and ran towards the house, dragging her pony. ‘Dad – c’mere! Rose is knocked out!’
‘How long was she out for?’ The doctor in Casualty shone a torch into Rose’s left eye, then the right, the
n back to the left.
‘About two or three minutes, I guess.’ Mr Drew was standing by the high bed with Abigail, who was holding Rose’s hand.
‘She blacked out,’ Abigail said. ‘She was coming around by the time I got my father out to her, and then when the rescue squad came, she faded on us again.’
‘They found her conscious though,’ the doctor said.
Rose had pretended to pass out again for the benefit of the ambulance men, but obviously she hadn’t fooled them.
When the doctor tested her reflexes by hitting her joints with a little rubber hammer, she tried not to let her limbs jump, but they did.
‘Not too bad.’ He poked the sole of her foot with the blunt end of the hammer, and her big toe curled under. He didn’t say anything, so Rose didn’t know if it was supposed to curl or not.
‘I’m going to be sick.’ She knew that was a symptom of concussion.
Abigail and her father went outside the curtains, and a nurse brought a bowl and stroked Rose’s hair while she heaved and heaved, to no purpose.
‘Feel dizzy?’ the nurse asked.
‘Oh, yes.’ Rose sighed and lay back down again. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them for a familiar beloved voice, her mother was there, trying to smile through the worry on her face.
‘It’s all-right, Rose’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’
Rose didn’t want it to be all right. She wanted it to be bad enough to get her admitted to Bellamy 4, but the doctor was saying, ‘No harm done, I think, but we’ll do a routine skull X-ray.’
‘Then can she come home?’
‘Well …’ He looked down at Rose and she closed her eyes again and willed him to say No. ‘Her friend says she was out for two or three minutes ‘ – God bless you, Ab –’ so I think we’ll keep her for a night or two and watch her, just to be sure.’
From her first visit to Bellamy ward with Here Today, Rose knew that teenagers were put into the side rooms outside the children’s ward. To her great disgust, when she came up from X-ray and they laid her on a bed in a room that was darkened because they thought she had concussion, she opened her eyes to find herself not in Room 4, but in Room 5, across the corridor. She had to get in to Room 4. There had to be some reason for her to be moved.
Lying in the morning twilight, she thought back through the history of Bellamy 4 as she had known it, right back to when George Mollis had sat on the floor at Hazel’s and talked about the old cast iron coil radiator. ‘Real old marvel.’
The radiator. He had to fix it before the room could be used for patients. If the radiator in Room 5 didn’t work, that couldn’t be used for patients either.
Everything seemed quiet in the corridor, so Rose nipped out of bed and turned off the radiator. She turned the knob so hard and roughly that it came off in her hand. Better still. She dropped it into the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, and hopped back to bed and lay still, making herself shiver.
When the room grew cold and they couldn’t adjust the radiator, the ward sister, who was as soft and gentle as Sister Maddox had been hard and fierce, told the nurses to move Rose into Room 4 until they could get the maintenance man up.
They wheeled Rose, bed and all, across the corridor, because she wasn’t supposed to walk, and at last she was in Room 4 again. Its decor was very different from the dingy, old-fashioned look Rose had seen on her journeys into the past. It was just as she remembered it from when the discontented girl with bandaged pigtails was here: clean yellow and white paint, flowered curtains, the cheerful picture of a boy in a red jersey running with the leaping spaniel through a field of wild flowers.
When Mollie came in she looked very anxious.
‘Why have they moved you?’
‘The other room was too cold.’
‘Oh, thank God. I was worried that you were worse, or something.’
‘I’m fine.’ Rose smiled up at her mother and put out a hand.
‘No, you’re not. You’re just being brave. I know the X-rays, show nothing, but concussion’s a tricky thing. The nurse told me you’ve still got a headache, and you look awful, Rose. It breaks my heart.’
Her sweet mouth trembled, and Rose was pierced with pain because she couldn’t tell her she was faking. She could never tell her.
‘You – er, do you suppose you ought to give up riding?’ Mollie asked.
‘Nope.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to anyway. I’ll just go on being a horse mother and suffering all these shocks and dramas.’
You needn’t be suffering now, Rose longed to say, but couldn’t. She could only say, ‘Tell me about the hotel, who came, who left, and has Frank found his watch?’ and get her mother talking and laughing, as if she were the patient needing to be cheered up.
When Mollie had to leave to help Hilda with the dinners, promising to come back next day, Rose felt guilty and frightened and dreadfully alone. She had no idea if Eric would come, or when he would come. Would she have to stay here for days, inventing symptoms? She wanted to challenge him, calling him, daring him, but Mr Vingo’s warning was strong in her mind: no games or tricks.
When the nurse brought her supper, a fork slid off the tray, just missing Rose’s arm. Eric?
‘Sorry.’ The nurse brought another one. ‘Are you all right? Want me to stay and help you?’
‘No thanks, I’ll manage.’ If Eric was here, she had to be alone.
The nurse propped her up a little, swung the bed table across, and left.
Listening and watching, her eyes moving all round the room, Rose put a spoon into the jelly and ate a little, because she had said she would. She put the spoon down on the tray, and the tray flipped up, and the jelly and soup and cup of milk landed on the floor.
‘That’s silly,’ Rose said aloud, trying to make her voice tough. ‘Who’s afraid of that?’
The window and door were shut. There was no wind or draught, but the air in the room began to move. Rose couldn’t see it or feel it. She was just aware of it. The hair prickled on her head. The sweet lemon jelly tasted sour in her mouth. Her stomach was clasped in a fist of fear. Something was in the room, but it was keeping its distance. It wasn’t an onslaught, like when she was the girl with pneumonia. Eric wasn’t attacking her – yet.
She waited, holding her breath, then the nurse came in and exclaimed noisily about the overturned tray. It was incredible that she couldn’t feel the atmosphere in Room 4. But she switched on the overhead light and cleared up the mess and laughed and chatted to Rose as if there was nothing wrong – while Eric waited.
And Rose waited. After the evening nurse had gone and the night nurse had looked in to settle her to sleep, she propped the pillow behind her and sat up, staring watchfully into the shadows. Two squares of light were on the wall from a car park lamp outside. The door was ajar, and a wide slit of light came from the corridor. In the corner beyond that shaft of light, she knew that Eric watched her. She couldn’t see him, but he was there. The nurse had given Rose a pill to help her sleep, but she had held it under her tongue and poured the water down past it, and spat it out when she was alone.
She strained her eyes wide open. She must be completely awake and alert for this, the final battle.
Strength and courage. That was what she had to fight with. But the room was full of some movement she couldn’t see. She stared round the walls. The light from the lamp fell on the picture of the boy with the dog. But it wasn’t a picture of a boy in a red sweater with a brown spaniel any more. It had changed to a boy in round glasses and a green and white diamond patterned sweater, and the dog was black and curly, not leaping up in play, but in fear and pain, snarling and snapping as the boy struck at it with a stick.
Eric.
The door to the corridor slammed shut, cutting off the shaft of light. The picture tilted and fell to the floor. As if Eric spilled out of it, his hatred and misery seeped through the room and engulfed Rose. She was pressed back against the pillow, suffocating, overwhelmed b
y his black hatred. She struggled for breath and sat up gasping, flailing her arms in front of her, as if the spirit she fought was a solid thing.
Things. There were noises, creaks, faint whistling sounds from all about the room. Trailing fingers brushed close to her, barely touching her cheek. Her hair moved. ‘Kill..! the whisper echoed round the walls.
She thought her bed moved, and jumped out of it in terror, holding her arms across herself, looking all round at nothing, turning, switching her head from side to side, not knowing where the enemy was.
The room was alive with evil. Vague shadows like cobwebs weaved across the patch of light where the picture had hung. There was the door. She could have run out, and left this fearful place for ever. Strength and courage. She stood her ground in her pyjamas, bare feet planted firmly apart. The room waited.
‘Eric,’ she said. It took a lot of effort, because speaking his name acknowledged his presence. ‘Eric – listen.’
She stood tensely, her arms stiff at her sides, her teeth and muscles clenched, as if she were engaged in a tremendous physical struggle. She was breathing hard. So was he. She could hear him, and through the roaring in her ears that was his breathing, she heard his hoarse gasp, ‘Kill her!’
‘No!’ She made no sound, but she was crying out to him. ‘No! You don’t have to! She’s not here – you can’t reach her!’
‘I’ll kill her!’ he sobbed, and the walls of the room seemed to advance and recede, changing angles in the shadows. The floor tilted under her bare feet and she fell down. As she lay sprawled, face down, she heard the scrape of something dragging across the floor towards her, and saw through the darkness a glimmer of white, like the bloodstained bandage that had been on Eric’s head when he tried to crawl, dying, towards the door where Mavis had stood transfixed.
Rose tried to get up, but her hands and feet slipped on the floor, which was suddenly slimy and treacherous. She knew that Eric was coming closer. She felt the sour heat of his breath on her skin, and flung out a hand to smash at his face. Her hand hit nothing, and she fell forward again.
The Haunting of Bellamy 4 Page 11