Just as I turn to look back to the head of the stairs, I see the lamplight from the hall below flickering, then dying out altogether. I blink for a moment in the darkness.
Then I hear the bell, its lonely distant note tolling against the wailing of the wind as it speeds across the trees and the reeds, the mud and the water between the church and Guerdon Hall. In my head, I see the church in the gloom of night, the bell rope rising and falling in the empty tower.
By the next flash of lightning, I make out three wooden steps opposite the window, leading up towards the front of the house.
I could easily go back. My bedroom door is still ajar, just at the top of the staircase. It would take only seconds to run to it and bury myself in the warm blankets.
Or I could find Old Peter.
I turn and place my foot on the first step.
A narrow passage goes off to the right. I feel my way along the wall. Moist plaster crumbles under my fingers. The air is filled with the strong smell of damp. I rattle a door to my left, but it will not open. Just after it, the passage turns again.
Suddenly the floor disappears beneath me. I stumble and fall with a dreadful clatter down some steps, banging my elbow on the wall.
For a few seconds, I remain on the floor, rubbing my sore knees, then get up gingerly and move on. The floorboards give slightly under my feet. Treading carefully, I feel for spongy holes or loose splinters of wood and, with my fingers, fumble for doors. This one is locked; this scrapes open only three inches before sticking; another is nailed shut with a wooden bar. Just before the passage ends, my right hand brushes against the latch of another door. The thumbpiece lowers. It opens.
A cold draught lifts the hairs on my arms. After the thick darkness of the passage, a little light comes through the window from the raging sky outside. The room seems to breathe as cobwebs ripple in the moving air.
Footprints, and beside them a wide line, as if something has been dragged across the dusty floor, lead to an open doorway in the corner, a doorway to another room. From this other, shadowy room comes the sound of water dripping into more water.
I follow the footprints and walk slowly towards the far doorway. When I look into the place beyond, every hair root on my head begins to rise.
A large metal bucket stands on the floor, almost full with the water that falls drop by drop from the beamed ceiling, breaking up the webs into wet strings. At first, in the darkness, I think there is an old chair next to the bucket, a chair covered with a sheet. But then it moves. What I see is not a chair.
It is a woman, bent over, kneeling, with her back to me. It isn’t Auntie Ida.
My legs begin to tremble.
The woman holds each side of her head with thin white hands and rocks backwards and forwards on heels hidden by the folds of a long brown skirt crumpled up around her. A thick single plait of fair hair curves down the line of her back.
My heart hammers.
The woman stops rocking and slowly, very slowly, kneels up straight. She takes her hands down from her head, then lifts her right hand and points up to the roof with her finger.
She sits back on her heels, pointing upwards, still facing away from me, not moving.
Suddenly an explosion of thunder and a mighty crackle of lightning shatter the room. I jump, then realize I can see only the bucket. The woman is no longer there. The roar of the pouring rain almost drowns out the steady drip, drip, drip of the water coming down from the roof.
I can’t tear my eyes away from the empty space where she was. My breath comes in shudders. I force my legs to move back across the floor to the door I left open. I pull it shut quickly and settle the latch with shaking hands. The thunder roars again. I press myself against the wall and wait there, panting, until the rumble dies away.
Closing my eyes, I take a long, shivering breath, then recall something I saw on the edge of my vision, to the side of the kneeling woman. It was the picture, leaning against the wall under the window, covered with a blanket.
I wait — Is it two minutes? Is it five? — trying to push her image away from the eye in my mind. She was nothing more than a movement of the air, a trick of the storm light, a spectre I conjured up out of bad weather.
If she meant to do me harm, she could have done it already — come up behind me in the dark.
I swallow, pull myself away from the wall, stretch out my hand, and lift the latch again. I can hear my heart thudding in my chest and am barely able to place one foot in front of the other as I move towards the doorway in the corner once more. When I reach it, I hold my breath and slowly peer around the frame.
A lightning bolt cracks, and the room flashes with light. There is nobody there.
As the thunder booms in a long dreadful roll, I move into the room, towards the picture, sit back on my heels in front of it, and, with a swift glance over my shoulder, pull down the blanket.
Old Peter glares at me with wide, wild eyes. His tangled hair hangs around his sharp cheekbones. His right hand grabs at the air, and his left clutches a plain wooden cross as it rests on a block of stone. On this stone are the words CAVE BESTIAM. I know — I am absolutely sure — that he is the man Mimi and I saw by the gate in the churchyard. His skin is smooth and faintly lined, not blistered, but it is the same man.
The rain-streaked windows are drumming in their frames. I think anything is possible now. I saw this man in the painting standing by the gate in the churchyard. I saw an unknown woman kneeling in this empty room. It is as if the world I have known is somewhere else, and I don’t know how to be in this one. There is no light but the light of the storm, and the house is alive in the night all around me.
I begin to notice other things in the room — a stone fireplace, beside it a chest of drawers with the handles missing. In the dust on the top is a rusty black box, about a foot square, and next to that a pile of little clothes, neatly folded. I stretch out my hand and pick up a small hand-knitted cardigan. I hold it close to my face and make out the letter E, embroidered in blue on the front. The buttons are tiny blue rocking horses. Beside the pile is a grimy basket that may once have been white. Inside are knitted socks and mittens with ribbons, speckled with dirt and crumbs of old plaster.
In the next flare of lightning, I see a beautiful wooden cot painted with marching guardsmen. The folded blankets inside are grey with dust. In that same flash, as I hold the little cardigan in my hands, I become aware of the quiver of a candle flame and hear a voice from the doorway, as hard and as cold as glass:
“What in the name of hell are you doing here?”
They didn’t come and they didn’t come.
Pete was fed up with waiting and had gone over to Mum’s friend, Auntie Barbara’s, to see her cat Flossy’s new kittens. Dennis and Terry were squabbling upstairs.
I hung around the house.
Dad was sitting there with his cup of tea, trying to read the Express and have a ciggie. Sometimes he had to go to work on a Saturday morning, but not today, and he was irritated with me.
“Do you have to be under my feet like this?” he said. “Look, it’s a lovely day. The storm’s cleared the air. Why don’t you just go out and play in the woods or something?”
“I’m waiting for Cora and Mimi,” I said crossly.
“Crikey. They sound like a pair of glamour girls with names like that,” he said with a laugh.
“Shut up, Rex,” said Mum, coming in. “They’re the girls I told you about, down at Mrs. Eastfield’s.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Well, why don’t you just go over there and call for them?”
“Mum won’t let me,” I said grumpily.
“You know I don’t like the boys going down there, Rex,” she said, a bit flustered. “Anyway, the thing is, Mrs. Eastfield agreed for Cora to leave the little girl, Mimi, here so the older ones could go off and play on their own. Cora was going to drop her off, but they haven’t turned up.”
“Well, maybe they just don’t fancy it. Maybe she’s just gone
off you, Roger, me old chum,” said Dad, snapping back his paper. My ears burned.
“Make me a cup of tea, will you?” said Mum. “There’s a good chap.”
I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove.
“I’ll have another one, too,” called Dad, “but not so much sugar this time. I could stand my spoon up in the last one.”
I listened to them talking over the noise of the kettle rattling on the gas ring. I couldn’t quite make out everything Mum said because of her quiet way of speaking, but I heard enough. “There’s something not right …” and “Mrs. Eastfield … bruises … Roger shouldn’t go down on his own… .”
Dad’s loud voice boomed through the wall. “Why should I ruddy go? I work bloody hard all week. I expect a bit of time to myself at the weekend. It’s not too much to ask, is it? Why don’t you stick Pamela in the pram and go down yourself? I don’t even know the bloody kids. That bloody church! You’re all living in the bloody Dark Ages round here. As soon as I get old Clark’s job, we’re moving to Chelmsford, where there’s a bit of civilization.”
When I went back in with the tray, Mum said, “Look, Roger, your dad’s agreed to take you down to Guerdon Hall and you can pick up Cora and Mimi, if everything is all right. They probably just got up late. You may even meet them on the way. Dad won’t take the car because there’ll be a lot of mud after the storm and he might not be able to get it back up the hill. He can bring Mimi back here to play with Dennis and Terry.”
I mumbled, “Thanks, Dad,” but knew he didn’t really want to do it.
He huffed and puffed all the way down Fieldpath Road, but by the time we got to Ottery Lane, he’d cheered up a bit and even took me into Mrs. Wickerby’s and bought some aniseed balls and a Beezer for later.
“I’ve hardly been down here,” he said as we went down the hill of Old Glebe Lane, the thick mud clogging our boots. “Your mother’s always going on about her and Uncle Bill being told the church was spooky when they were kids. That sort of thing doesn’t scare me, you know. I fought Hitler.”
“Do you know why they thought it was spooky?” I asked.
“No, I don’t ask,” he said. “I know people don’t like their kids coming down here. Of course, I was born in Great Sawdon, where Granny and Grandpa Jotman live. There was nothing odd in Great Sawdon, unless you count Percy Wheedon, who wore a fez and lived in a shed. I met your mum during the war when she was working in the NAAFI at Colchester — made a great cup of tea, your mum. Let’s have a look at this old church, then.”
We walked past the end of the Chase and carried on down between the trees. I didn’t really like Dad being down here. It was our special place.
“Oh, look at that,” he said, going up to the old gate and rattling the chains. “You know what this is, don’t you?”
“A gate?”
“Of course it’s a gate — it’s a lychgate.”
“What’s that when it’s at home, then?”
“A corpse gate,” he said. “I wonder why it’s all chained up. Lych is an old word for a corpse. It’s where they’d put the coffin down on its way to be buried. The priest would come and bless it and say some prayers, then he’d let them take it into the churchyard.”
I wasn’t too surprised at Dad for knowing stuff like that because he was always coming out with all sorts of funny things and knew everything on Brain of Britain on the wireless. He read a lot of books, and if he’d been born into a richer family, he’d probably have gone to university.
“Interesting, old lychgates,” he continued as we wandered down to the metal gate farther along. “They’re like doorways between the holy ground of the churchyard and the unholy ground outside.”
“Why’s that special, then?” I asked, unlatching it.
“Well, let me tell you,” he said. “If you’d died by your own hand — you know, a suicide — or were a murderer, or a lunatic, you’d never have been buried in here, not for anything. You weren’t allowed to go to heaven.”
“Where would they put you, then?”
“More often than not, they’d bury you at a crossroads, at night, sometimes facedown.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked, popping an aniseed ball in my mouth.
We strolled up the path towards the church.
“To confuse your spirit, if it decided to rise again and cause mischief,” said Dad, ruffling my hair. “Little unbaptized babies couldn’t be buried in here, either.”
“That’s really sad. It wasn’t their fault.”
Dad bent over a grave and picked up one of the wreaths, now brown and soggy, that we’d made with Cora and Mimi. “What’s this old thing doing here?” he said, and chucked it in the bushes.
“In Yorkshire, they used to sing a creepy song called ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge,’” he went on as we tramped through the grass around the back of the church. “Same word, you see, lych and lyke. The neighbours would keep a watch, or wake, over the corpse on the night before it was buried, to protect it from being taken over by evil spirits before it could be tucked up safely in consecrated ground. A newly dead body was thought to be very vulnerable, you see, with the spirit being not quite in this world yet not quite in the next, either.”
As we walked back along the path and out onto the road, Dad started singing the song. I joined in, stamping in and out of the puddles on our way up the Chase to Guerdon Hall.
“This aye neet, this aye neet, every neet and all,
Fire and fleet and candle leet, may God receive thy soul… .”
I looked in the small mirror on our bedroom wall. My right eye had half closed up and was black and swollen. Down the middle of my bottom lip was a line of dark dried blood. Mimi had cried when she woke up and saw me.
When I went out of our bedroom to go to the bathroom, I saw there was an enamel bowl on the floor, full of white water smelling of Dettol and, next to it, a sponge in an old saucer. Auntie Ida must have left it there. I took the bowl to the bathroom and dabbed as best I could, but it stung. I was so sore and miserable, but my eyes couldn’t make any more tears. In the morning, my pillow was soaking, tears mixed with pink watery blood from my mouth.
I went back to my bedroom and just sat on the bed and stared out of the window. It was a lovely sunny day, and the heavy rain had washed all the trees and grass so they looked bright and clean.
Mimi brought me up a boiled egg and soldiers, and then just stood and cried quietly when I said I didn’t want it. She climbed on the bed and put her arms round my shoulders and her cheek against mine, but I felt like a stone. After a while, she left and I went over to the mirror, brushed my hair, and tried to put my own plaits in.
I heard banging on the big front door, voices, then Mimi running back up the stairs.
“Cora, Cora, it’s Roger! Come and play, come on — oh, please, Cora, come on,” she pleaded, pulling my arm. “Auntie Ida says you can.”
I didn’t want to go anywhere.
Mimi ran back downstairs. After a while, I heard someone coming up. They knocked on the door. I knew it had to be Auntie Ida. I didn’t want to see her.
“Cora, Cora, it’s me.” It was Roger’s voice. “What’s the matter? Why won’t you come and play? Dad’s bought us some aniseed balls from Mrs. Wickerby’s. Come and have some.”
I opened the door a crack, and when he saw me, he gave a long, low whistle.
“Tell you later,” I mumbled.
“Here, have a sweet,” he said quietly, holding out the paper bag.
“I don’t think I can.”
He fiddled around in his back pocket and got out a liquorice pipe, wiped off the fluff, and held it out. “Try this — it’s softer,” he said. When I smiled, my lip split.
We went downstairs. I heard Auntie Ida going off into the kitchen. Standing just inside the front door with Mimi was a tall man I didn’t know. Finn was sniffing around the man’s feet, and he patted the dog on the head.
“It’s all right — it’s Dad,” said Roger.
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“Crikey! Hello, Cyclops,” said Mr. Jotman. “You’ve been in the wars.”
“She tripped down the stairs,” muttered Roger.
“Has Mrs. Eastfield seen it?”
“I’m all right — honest, Mr. Jotman.”
“It could do with a warm flannel on it,” said Mr. Jotman. “Mrs. Jotman will sort you out.”
There came the loud clatter of washing-up from the kitchen. We left the house but Auntie didn’t come to say good-bye.
Mr. Jotman sang Mimi silly songs all the way along the Chase and up Old Glebe Lane. I hadn’t seen her giggle so much in a long while.
We crossed the main road in front of the Thin Man.
“Look, Dad, can you leave us here?” Roger said. “Cora can’t keep up. Could you take Mimi down and we’ll see you later?”
“Aye aye, Cap’n,” said Mr. Jotman, saluting, then, to Mimi, “Are you ready there, shipmate?”
Mimi laughed and saluted back, and they went off together towards Ottery Lane.
Roger and I sat down on the bench under the swinging sign.
I said I had found Old Peter and that Cave bestiam was written on the picture. I even told Roger about the little clothes and the cot, but for some reason I couldn’t even explain to myself, I didn’t mention the woman in the room.
“Dad told me about that old gate,” said Roger, and he explained about lychgates, burials, and wakes. Then he added, “We’ve got to find out what that Cave bestiam means. We’ll have to try Father Mansell.”
I’ve no idea how old Glebe House is, but it’s not as old as Mrs. Eastfield’s. Mum says the whole house used to be the rectory, but it’s so enormous, it’s now divided into two. Father Mansell, the rector, and his wife live in one half, the bit round the back, and the grand bit at the front with the great big shiny black door is where Mr. Treasure and his family live.
Mr. Treasure’s the headmaster of Lokswood School on the other side of Daneflete. Mum says the boys’ parents pay a lot of money for them to go there — that’s why the Treasures can live in that big house and have a gardener with a petrol lawn mower you can ride on.
Long Lankin Page 9