Underhill

by Harper Fox

But the soles of Gideon’s feet were tingling. He drew a deep breath. He’d worked every day since midsummer to counteract the injuries he’d sustained in Falmouth, and had no regrets about his decision to steer clear of CID. He was only the village bobby of Dark, but his inspectors included him on teams and sent him to investigations beyond his official remit. His experience, running in tandem now with Lee’s gifts, made him a force to be reckoned with. He knew how to walk through a crime scene.

  That was the one thing he hadn’t yet done. He’d entered the house as a casual, unobservant lover, a bit concerned that the place was in darkness, but still expecting to find Lee any second, packing up his kit and coming to meet him with a smiling, ferocious end-of-day hug. Ezekiel had done better than he had. Deliberately he set aside his growing fear. “Zeke, have we touched or disturbed anything since we came in?”

  “Other than the loft hatch? No, I don’t think so. There’s nothing else in here to move.”

  “Can you put all the overhead lights on for me, then? And once you’ve done that, stand clear?”

  For a moment he thought Zeke would protest. Then his brow contracted. “You’re worried, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sure there’s no need. But... yeah.”

  “All right. Do what you need to do.”

  Neon tube lights everywhere, as if someone had been determined to throw the ugliness of the house into the harshest possible relief. The glare made Gideon’s eyes ache, but it was what he needed, a dead blaze that allowed for no concealment. In the living room, Zeke was waiting, pressed obediently back against the wall. Gideon came to a halt just inside the door. “He was wearing the sweater Ma knitted for him for Halloween.”

  “The day-glo orange one with the pumpkin head? She was thrilled that he was going to wear it on the show. Does he, er... does he love it as much as he told her he did?”

  “Hates it, poor bugger. Brought him right out in a rash. I can see a couple of fibres from it on the floor.”

  “Well, that’s normal, isn’t it? He must’ve been back and forth through here all day.”

  “Yes, but...” Gideon scanned the room once more. Then he strode across to the far wall and crouched beside it. “It is not fucking normal,” he went on, voice tight, “for a fibre to be caught between the floor and the wall.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I. It’s set into the concrete.”

  Chapter Five

  Resplendent in her silver fur, the transformed author leapt into the tunnel in pursuit of Bill Prowse, whose body shape had no bearing on his character but did inevitably influence the unfolding of plot, since he wasn’t going to be able to outrun her for long. Deeper and deeper into the tunnels they ran, Prowse shrieking and sobbing, the monster—free at last in her beautiful new skin—majestically silent.

  From a great distance, Lee wondered how she was managing to type with the combine-harvester claws. Then, if the lack of a typewriter hadn’t been holding her back, let alone the fact that she’d been dead for half a century, in some way murdered by bloody Bill Prowse... The A4 sheet in his hands ceased its clicking vibration and lay still.

  Lee hadn’t noticed the tunnel. He wasn’t overly keen on them, just as Gideon had recently lost his casual enjoyment of werewolf movies. There’d been a few long hours, in the caverns beneath the Cheesewring rocks, when he’d thought he would never see daylight again. Of course, he hadn’t known Gideon then. Had met and fallen in love with him, but didn’t know him, not with the pores of his skin and the very follicles of his hair, which were stirring and making his scalp tingle now with the conviction of his lover’s presence. Gideon was near him, somewhere up above. He’d come to find him all that time ago. He would find him now.

  Bill’s shrieks had stopped. Instead there came a single lonely cry, pitiful and afraid. There was no reason on earth why Lee should go to him. The man had brought nothing but misery into the lives of all those who’d known him.

  “Oh, God, Tyack, help me! Please!”

  He got up from his packing crate. He waited to see if Ruth Cadwallader might offer some instructions, but the page remained motionless. The hole in the opposite wall, nothing more than a shadow within shadows, gaped at him in silence. He folded the paper, slid it into the pocket of his jeans and set off.

  The gifted young clairvoyant entered the tunnels and immediately became hopelessly lost. That was Lee’s assessment, not Ruth’s, although just now he felt anything but psychic. Not even all that bright. He had no idea how he’d done it. Even down in the Cheesewring caves with Joe Kemp’s gun to his head, he’d managed to keep his wits about him, to drop his silver chain for Gideon to find. Here, he’d taken one turn right and one turn left—or was it the other way round?—and lost his bearings completely.

  Something was badly wrong here. His few faltering steps seemed to have taken him depthlessly far into the earth, not just off track. He had nightmares like this, where he followed the twists of narrowing tunnels until they were pressing on his shoulders, the back of his neck and his head, pushing him onto his belly and squeezing him tighter still, until he realised he’d passed the point where he could turn around. Birth trauma, his counsellor in London had suggested, but Lee thought it was simply that Cornwall abounded with caves, tunnels and fogous, and he’d been in more than his fair share of them, at the hands of villains and in the course of his career. Either way, the dreams scared him sick. Left him shuddering with gratitude when he woke up in Gideon’s arms.

  He was more than ready now to wake up. He buried his face in his hands. The walls of the tunnel began to tighten around him, even though he was standing still...

  “Come on through here, Lee. Everything’s all right.”

  He looked up, letting go of the breath that would have been a howl of pure fear. The entrance to the crypt was directly ahead of him. The room was still pulsating with strange red light, but that was sunshine, shiny disco balls, by contrast with the darkness in Lee’s head. There were the three packing crates. Ruth Cadwallader was sitting on one of them, safely back in her pyjamas and dressing gown. “Come on,” she said again, beckoning and smiling. “I don’t know, Bill. You must have done something right in your life, for a fine man like this to face his worst fears and come after you.”

  “That’s just it,” Lee said tentatively, coming to stand beside her. “I honestly don’t think he has. I don’t know why I followed him.”

  “Because you always will. It’s very strange—I seem to know all kinds of things I didn’t know before. I wish I had—I’d have put them in Hideous Hauntings.” She reached out, pulled the second packing crate towards her and patted it companionably. “You’ll always come, no matter how unworthy the cause. That’s why you have to let Gideon stop you. It’s very important, Lee. Your sanity will depend on it one day.”

  “Okay, but... if my sanity’s the issue, I think it’s too late. Is there a circular route through that tunnel, out of here and back again?”

  “It’s circular for the moment. Until Bill and I get sorted out.”

  “You and Bill?”

  “That’s right. Haven’t you worked out yet that I’m in the spirit world?”

  “Yes, I... I’ve worked that out. The shapeshifting and the magical typing were a bit of a giveaway. But the thing is, this house isn’t haunted, is it? I mean... you don’t generally haunt here.”

  “No. Why on earth should I? Horrible little place.”

  “Why tonight, then?”

  She patted the crate again, and looked across at poor cringing, shivering Bill. “Sit down, Lee. Why do you think?”

  “Well, if you’re in the spirit world, and he can see you and interact with you...” The penny dropped. “Oh, Bill. I think you’d better sit down. I’ve got some bad news for you.”

  “What?” Bill demanded. He was at the far end of whatever rope nature had provided for him, beginning to look insubstantial with terror and stress. “Fuck almighty, what? What could possibly be worse than being st
uck down here with you two nutcases?”

  “What were you doing before? Can you remember?”

  “I told you. I was minding my business, asleep in my armchair in front of the telly. I’d had my burgers and I’d smoked a few fags, and I’d polished off some beers and the end of that bottle of Bells my old woman left behind, because it’s Halloween, isn’t it, and that makes me think of my Daz, little... little shit though he is.” He suddenly lifted his fingers to his face. “What the fuck’s this?”

  “Tears, I think,” Lee said, equally astonished. “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t see what business it is of yours, but I got a kind of a tight, sick feeling in my chest. Just a touch of heartburn, that’s all. But it went down my arm, and up into my neck, and then... and then...” He swallowed, and sat down hard at last on the crate. “Oh, fuck.”

  Lee picked up the second crate. He carried it over to Bill, set it down and sat beside him. He put an arm around Bill’s shoulders, and after a reflexive sneer of surprise and disgust, the old sod leaned against him and buried his face against his shoulder. “It’s all right,” Lee said, patting his ragged crop, which he’d been razor-clipping himself since Mrs Prowse had left, taking her pudding basin with her. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Don’t be afraid?! I’m dead! I’m fucking dead, I am!”

  “I know, and it must be a shock. But...” Lee glanced across at Ruth, who was benignly observing. “But you’re not alone. Is he, Mrs Cadwallader?”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.”

  “Okay. What does he have to do?”

  “Well, he has to tell the story of why he’s not alone. Specifically, why he’s not alone with me.” She settled more comfortably, tucking her hands—quiet now, all their work done—into the sleeves of her dressing gown. “And he has to tell it to you, the only human link who could possibly bring about such a telling between him and me—the only true medium. It’s a good thing you happened along here tonight, Lee Tyack. Because left to my own devices, I’d have just eaten his soul.”

  Bill sobbed. He closed a meaty fist in Lee’s jumper, crushing the grinning pumpkin head. “Keep her away from me!”

  “I can’t, Bill. You know that. You’re going to have to talk.”

  “What good will that do me?” Bill sat up, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I don’t bloody understand it. Of all the things I’ve done, this is nothing. She was nothing.”

  “Careful, mate. Nobody’s nothing. And maybe she minded very particularly, whatever it was you did to her.”

  “Wouldn’t anybody mind?”

  “Yes, absolutely. I don’t know why it’s different with her.”

  “Don’t you really?” she broke in, leaning forward. “Perhaps you both fail to take into account the power of a writer’s imagination.”

  After watching it chase Bill Prowse around a crypt in terrifying werewolf form, Lee was all too keenly aware of it. But it wasn’t his problem. “Maybe that’s the thing, Bill. Maybe it’s because she was a writer.”

  Was it his use of the past tense that made Bill focus, and lean forward too, as if to meet her on even ground at last? “I remember,” Bill said. “She’d come here to do her writing. A book about the Nancarrows, it were going to be—one of our best Cornish tales. She weren’t even from Cornwall.”

  “That’s right,” she said brightly. “I was from Hastings.”

  “Posh, Hastings is. So here she comes, and she rents this house. Imagine that, being able to rent a house for a whole winter, when she’s already got a posh paid-for house of her own! I couldn’t pay a bloody week’s rent at a time on my flat in Scorrier.”

  “That’s because you drank away your benefit money before you even had it, Bill,” Ruth reminded him, nodding kindly. “For what it’s worth, I don’t hold with people having second homes, especially in places like Cornwall where the people who live here can’t afford to buy. I had to find a tenant for my flat—which was very nice, certainly, if not exactly posh—before I could come down for my research trip here.”

  “Well... we had no clue about all that, did we?”

  “You didn’t bother to find out.”

  Lee ran his hands over his hair. He didn’t really want to know, but... “Who’s we, Bill?”

  “Me and a gang of my mates. This was bloody years ago. We were just kids. We heard that this old bird had rented the house to write a ghost story, and as far as we were concerned, she was just another rich emmet come to take away what should be ours.”

  “Jesus, Bill. When are you gonna stop blaming foreigners because you’re unemployable?”

  “What?”

  “Well, that’s how it all starts, isn’t it—all this Kernow Glan bollocks. Ideas about purity, and Britain being full up, and—”

  “Oh, put a sock in it, Lee,” Ruth broke in amiably. “Bill Prowse was an arse, and KG will never get a following again, not with your Gideon to make ’em toe the line, and eat them all up if they won’t. But Cornwall’s a land under pressure nonetheless. Right-wing groups don’t thrive where equal rights truly exist—only where there’s deprivation, discontent and a fight for dwindling resources.”

  Lee took this in. Since summer, he and Gideon had been so focussed on the effects of the KG group that he’d seldom paused to consider causes. “That’s a fair point. I’ll bear it in mind.”

  “Oh, my God. Stop it!”

  Ruth turned to him. “Stop what, Bill? Reasoned debate? Feels a bit alien, does it?”

  “Stop saying was about me. Bill Prowse was an arse. I still am one. I’m right bloody here!”

  “Oh, all right. And I interrupted your story, too. There was I, the rich emmet, alone in my rented house. So...”

  “So me and my mates decided we’d give you something to bloody well write about. If you wanted ghosts, you could have ’em. It were only meant to be a prank, for God’s sake. I’ve done way worse than this in my time...” He ploughed on with a kind of desperate courage. “We all got pissed one night, and Jerry and Mark got some sheets and made eyeholes in them. I had an old rubber mask left over from the Halloween before—fucking horrible thing, it was, hairy and stinking. But I reckoned she’d have heard the legend of the Bodmin Beast, so the lads took their sheets and I took that. And Mark picked the lock on her front door, and we all put our costumes on, and we went to stand around her bed.”

  Lee stared. “Bloody hell, Bill.”

  “I know, I know. Look, I’m not sure we’d even have gone through with it, except the damn mask made me sneeze, and she woke up. She must’ve had a weak heart or something. She just sat up, looked round at us all, and then she flopped back down on the bed.”

  Lee whistled softly. To his shame, he was taken aback by the mildness of this crime of Bill’s. “All right. That is horrendous. But... I’ve known this man a long time, Mrs Cadwallader. He really has done much worse.”

  “Yes!” Bill cried, as if Lee had offered a shining testimonial to his character. “It were an accident!”

  “I wasn’t any the less dead because of that. I had things to do, Bill. I had a niece, grandchildren I’d like to have seen grow up. More importantly, though I’m sure it shouldn’t have been, I had books to write. Hideous Hauntings volume two, for example! Do you think I’d have managed to rustle up another hundred ghosts, Lee?”

  “If you’d stayed in Cornwall long enough, I’m sure.”

  “I could make it an autobiography now. It’s Bill’s own fault that I turned into a monstrous wolf to chase him—that mask was the last thing I ever saw.”

  A short silence fell in the crypt, which felt ready to settle down for a very long one. The strange red light was fading to dusk. Then, out of nowhere, Bill began to chortle. He sat up, rubbing his hands together, and twisted round on his crate to face Lee. “Bad news, eh?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Bad news, you said. Ooh, sit down, Bill, you says. Put your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye, Bill. Eh?”

 
“Not exactly, but okay. What about it?”

  “I’ve got news for you too, then, haven’t I, you smart-arsed bloody table-turner! You always did piss me off, living in your big house as if queers like you had more right than normal folks to a decent life. Think about it, sonny Jim. If me and the old girl over there are in the spirit world, and we can see you and interact with you...!”

  Lee recoiled from him. The movement, barely more than a flinch, somehow threw him violently off-balance: the crate rocked, then smashed beneath him as if it had been nothing more than rotten matchwood in the first place. He crashed to his backside amongst the shards.

  An undignified sprawl. Gideon would have roared with laughter before coming to pick him up. Before dusting him down, tenderly as he’d have done with Tamsyn, and checking him over for splinters.

  He seemed to have landed in a pile of slippery metal. Pieces of it shot out from under this hands as he tried to push himself up. Bill Prowse gaped, eyes widening. “Well, bugger me!”

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” the old lady said, watching Bill carefully. “I’m glad he found it. Glitter like that can’t touch us, though, Bill, not now. So many things are different. When you say these foul and stupid things to Mr Tyack—about queers and decent folk and things like that—do you really feel as though you still mean them?”

  “Course I do,” Bill returned, with a pale effort at bluster. “Wouldn’t say ’em otherwise, would I? Me and my mates down the pub, we’d laugh for hours about him and his kind. I suppose... I suppose it made the lights inside seem brighter—that business about them and us, I mean. I suppose it made the night outside seem a little bit less dark.”

  She stood up and held out an arm, as if inviting Bill to the dance. To Lee’s astonishment, Bill clambered to his feet and fearlessly went to her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did we come to meet here? Have you been waiting all this time?”

  “No, of course not.” She looked like a doll beside him, but she tucked his arm through hers. “As Lee says, the house isn’t usually haunted—and after tonight, it never will be again. It’s just that you died, so my spirit could meet at last with yours.”