Soul Stealer

by Martin Booth

  Pip screamed and followed him. Cockroaches beat into her face, landing on her hair, scrabbling down it, seeking a way to squirm and scratch themselves into her clothing. Their legs were sharp with spines. She could feel them scratching and itching on her back, down her chest and, scraping lower, towards her stomach. Her mouth closed against them, she thrashed her hands across in front of her eyes to try to get through the obscene tempest.

  The corridor filled with a sibilant blizzard of cockroaches. Tim stumbled towards the vague outline of the front door and the square of daylight shining through the glass panel, sepia-colored from the fog of cockroaches.

  Sebastian followed Pip, lashing the air with his arms, his hands spread like paddles with which to bat the cockroaches down.

  At last they reached the front door. Tim fumbled with the latch and finally tripped it, tugging the door inward. Behind it, a wedge of trapped cockroaches battered themselves against the glass and, landing on the wall, scurried across it, making for the cover of the back of a mirror hanging over an umbrella stand.

  Tim stumbled out into the front garden, staggering towards the gate. Behind him came Pip and Sebastian, their clothing smeared with cockroach entrails. Pip’s hair was festooned with brown wing-cases and sections of polished brown thorax. The live cockroaches clinging to them dropped to the ground and scuttled back into the bungalow.

  “Somebody’s going to have to close the front door,” said Pip, looking over her shoulder.

  “I’ll do it,” Tim volunteered.

  He walked tentatively back down the short path and reached in cautiously for the door handle. Inside, everything looked undisturbed. There was not a sign of even one squashed cockroach although, by the kitchen door, one was squeezing itself into a crack in the wall, carrying a section of a dead comrade.

  Tim closed the door, walked to the holly bush, picked up his bag, grinned and said, “Piece of cake!”

  “Mum’s not going to be happy,” Pip rejoined. What’re we going to tell her?”

  “Cooking class. Pot boiled over,” Tim replied.

  “We don’t take cooking until after vacation.”

  “And she knows?”

  “I don’t like lying to Mum,” Pip said.

  “In that case,” Tim answered, “tell her you broke into a teacher’s house and got attacked by his pet roaches. Sometimes, a white lie’s better than a black truth.”

  Eight

  Lines of Power

  Around the chemistry laboratory were arrayed a dozen labeled Pyrex beakers and test tubes containing liquid and accompanied by books of litmus papers or dropper bottles of indicator reagent. The pupils, wearing protective goggles, tested each sample for its degree of alkalinity or acidity. This done, they wrote up the results in their exercise books and then showed them to Yoland.

  Pip watched as, one by one, the pupils approached the demonstration bench to hand in their work. Yoland quickly ran through it with a red ballpoint pen, entering a grade in his book and handing the exercise back.

  As each pupil returned to their place, Pip noticed that, for the first few steps they took from the demonstration bench, they had a glazed stare in their eyes.

  “He’s looking into everyone’s soul,” she whispered to Tim.

  He nodded and, picking up his book, gave his work a final check over.

  “Take care!” Pip quietly urged as her brother left his stool. “Have you got your clicker…?”

  Tim felt in his pocket and nodded.

  “So, Ledger,” Yoland inquired as Tim approached him, “any problems?”

  “None, sir,” Tim said, making sure to keep his eyes averted from Yoland’s and his hand on the clicker in his pocket.

  “And what do you understand by the meaning of pH?”

  “It’s a scale of zero to fourteen measuring how acidic a liquid is,” Tim replied.

  “And if something has a pH of seven, what is it?” Yoland continued. “Acidic or otherwise?”

  “Seven means…” Tim began, but Yoland interrupted him.

  “It is polite, young man,” the teacher said sharply, “to look someone in the eye when speaking to them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tim answered then, looking directly into Yoland’s face, he went on, “Seven is neutral.”

  “And a pH of thirteen?”

  Tim sensed the master’s eyes boring into his own. Something told him the man was buying time in order to complete a probing of his mind. For a moment, Tim wondered if this was how a rabbit might be hypnotized by a stoat or a snake by a mongoose. It took an effort to concentrate on the answer.

  “Very alkaline, sir.”

  “And what color does litmus paper go in an acidic liquid?”

  By now, Tim was struggling to hold Yoland at bay. It was as if his eyes could not move from those of the teacher. He tried to direct his thoughts towards something that might allow him to block the stare, prevent Yoland from digging any deeper into him.

  The best tactic, he knew from his junior school experience, was to think of vomit. Not just a little splatter on the floor but a plateful of it before him on the table, made up of half-digested baked beans, masticated crinkle-cut fries, chewed-up mushrooms, egg yolk and tomato skins. On the side of the plate was a dollop of chutney and a splodge of brown sauce. With that picture in mind, Tim believed, nothing could get in. He had diverted many a telling-off with such a tactic, turning white enough at the vomity vision to scare the admonishing teacher into sympathy.

  Yet despite this, Yoland continued, bit by bit, to edge into his soul. He could feel it. It was like the time he and Pip had secretly sampled the contents of their father’s liquor cabinet, the warm rum seeping into their veins, the light-headed feeling creeping over them.

  “Red,” Tim replied vaguely.

  He had to break Yoland’s grip over him. It was growing stronger the longer he stood there. There was nothing he could do. Feeling for the clicker in his pocket, Tim held it between finger and thumb and squeezed.

  Silence.

  His handkerchief was snagged on the steel strip.

  “Good,” Yoland praised him. “And a pH of three?”

  Fumbling in his pocket, Tim struggled to get the clicker free.

  “Very acidic indeed, sir,” he answered, regaining a little control over himself and hoping this might be the end of it.

  It was not. Yoland continued to look into Tim’s eyes.

  “Do you feel all right, boy?” the master inquired, still looking hard at Tim. “What are you fiddling about in your pocket for?”

  “Hankie, sir,” Tim replied. “I was feeling a bit queasy. I feel a bit better now.”

  Still the clicker would not separate from the handkerchief. Tim was feeling desperate. Yoland was peering at him all the harder.

  From somewhere in the classroom came an audible click. Yoland immediately looked away from Tim. The hypnotic hold instantaneously faded.

  “Who was that?” Yoland asked.

  Pip’s face appeared over the rim of her workbench as she stood up.

  “I dropped my pencil, sir,” she replied, holding it so Yoland could see it.

  The master made no reply but glanced at Tim’s work, pushed his exercise book across the desk and ordered, “Return to your seat and start reading the chapter on the properties of acids.” He looked over Tim’s head. “Who’s next?”

  “Thanks, sis,” Tim said softly as he reached his seat. “Close call, that one.”

  “But…?” Pip quietly asked.

  “Don’t go up. Pretend to keep on working. He tried it on with me,” Tim admitted.

  “Why didn’t you click?” Pip asked.

  “I couldn’t,” Tim whispered back. “Got snared up in my pocket.”

  “You did not allow him to…” Sebastian began.

  “No way!” Tim replied. “I concentrated on something else.”

  “The usual?” Pip inquired.

  Tim smirked and, nodding, said, “Up-chuckery. I hope he enjoyed the sight of the tec
hnicolor yawn I was imagining.”

  “Up-chuckery?” Sebastian wondered aloud. “Technicolor yawn?”

  “Modern speak,” Pip whispered.

  “Tell you later,” Tim answered. “When we’re having our sandwiches.”

  “How do you breathe down here?” Tim inquired as Sebastian closed the door to his subterranean chamber. “Look at the candles. They don’t even flicker so there’s no draft, but the air doesn’t smell musty. What’s more, the candles must use up a lot of oxygen. And,” he added, “when they burn down, where do you get replacements from? You can hardly nip down the supermarket…”

  Sebastian said nothing but smiled knowingly.

  “Sebastian,” Pip said tentatively. “There is something I want to know. What is it about Rawne Barton, about this area, that attracts such…?” She was not quite sure how to put it. “Well, Malodor and Yoland and… well, you.”

  At this, Sebastian went to the bookshelves and, bringing a leather folder to the table, opened it to produce a map drawn on vellum which crackled as he spread it out.

  “This map is of an area of perhaps five leagues’ radius from this house,” Sebastian explained. “You will observe how certain buildings and locations are indicated but no place names are given.”

  “Not much use then,” Tim said.

  “On the contrary,” Sebastian replied, “this map is unique.”

  He took a glass ruler out of a drawer beneath the table top. At least a meter long, it was etched with a strange scale delineated in Arabic and Greek numerals. He laid it across the map.

  “Note,” Sebastian went on, “how along the line of this measure there are a number of specific places — three churches, an ancient hilltop settlement from before the time of Our Lord, the junction of three ancient ways, a pointed hill, a large house…”

  “So they’re in a line,” Tim said.

  “They are not in a line,” Sebastian retorted. “They are on a line. It is known as a ley line, along which travels the power of nature.” Turning to Tim, he asked, “Do you have a modern map of this region?”

  In a few minutes, they were squatting on Pip’s bedroom floor, an Ordnance Survey map spread out before them, the glass ruler beside it.

  “See here,” Sebastian pointed out. “Even today these lines remain. The churches are ancient structures and, like many churches in the countryside, were probably built on pre-Christian religious sites, the settlement is marked as an Iron Age hill fort, one of the roads is designated a Roman road and the house…”

  “That’s Rawne Barton!” Pip exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Sebastian confirmed.

  “And,” Tim went on, “that’s why the Romans dug a holy well here…”

  “… and,” Pip presumed, “why your father built…”

  “Precisely,” Sebastian said. “There is more.”

  He put the glass ruler across the modern map and, taking a pencil from Pip’s desk, started to draw other lines. When he was done, eleven ley lines were shown to converge and end on Rawne Barton, many others passing through it.

  “We’re at the center of the whole shooting match!” Tim exclaimed.

  “How far do they go?” Pip asked.

  “Some,” Sebastian answered, “are but some miles in length. Others may be up to one hundred miles long.”

  “So this natural power runs along these lines like electricity down a power cable?” Tim asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Sebastian answered.

  “And I suppose it’s at its most powerful where the lines intersect,” Pip said.

  “Yes,” Sebastian said bluntly.

  “You two still up?” Mr. Ledger called through Pip’s bedroom door. “It’s past eleven. The witching hour is nigh.”

  “Little does he know,” Pip whispered.

  “Just finishing off some geography homework, Dad,” Tim called back.

  “Five minutes,” their father replied. “Then hit the sack. It’s a school day tomorrow.”

  Nine

  The Atom Club

  Over the weekend, Pip and Tim were obliged to go away with their parents to stay with their great-aunt Joan who, Tim pointed out to Pip, was definitely not a candidate for the English throne but could still possibly be accused of witchcraft. She owned a sly-faced Persian cat with yellow eyes and her Irish stew tasted as if the recipe — Tim was sure — included larks’ toes, snails’ ears, and foxes’ snouts.

  To bolster her brother’s suspicion, Pip found a volume among their aunt’s cookbooks entitled Courtly Meals from Courtly Days, which included instructions for the making of such dishes as jellie of pyke, conyngys in graueye or with siryppe of honeye, sparwes in aspic and trype de motoun. To kill time until they left, Tim tentatively translated the titles into pike jelly, rabbits in gravy or honey syrup, sparrows in solidified beef stock and the stomach lining of a sheep. Only one, whyte wortys, defeated even his wildest guess.

  “Bet this little lot would have Sebastian’s mouth watering,” he declared.

  They did not return to Rawne Barton until Sunday evening. When, on entering the kitchen, Mr. Ledger went to the alarm panel to deactivate the system, he was met by a blinking diode beeping on the control box.

  “Something’s triggered the alarm while we’ve been away,” he said. “Probably a mouse or a spider on a sensor or something. I’ll give the security firm a ring although, if there had been a problem, they’d have called me on my mobile phone.” He studied the electronic display. “It was in the sitting room.”

  “I’ll check it,” Tim offered, yet no sooner had he done so than he regretted it. His parents always shut or locked all the internal doors before going away. The intruder — or whatever it was — could still be in there, hunched in a corner, undetected by the sensors, motionless, waiting…

  With trepidation, Tim put his hand on the door handle and gingerly opened it a few centimeters. Through the crack, all seemed in order. He opened it wider.

  The sitting room was undisturbed. Even a car magazine he had dropped on the floor by the armchair just before they had left on Saturday remained open at the page he had been reading. He inspected the windows. They had been neither forced nor opened but, on the outside sill of one of them, was a small clod of dried mud with a beech leaf embedded in it.

  “Mouse or spider,” he confirmed, returning to the kitchen where his mother was beginning to prepare supper.

  “Any homework to do?” Mrs. Ledger inquired.

  “Did it on Friday,” Pip and Tim chorused.

  “In that case,” she responded as Mr. Ledger went into the sitting room to switch on the television, “supper in fifteen minutes.”

  Pip and Tim went upstairs. Sebastian was sitting on Pip’s bed. He looked drained. His face was pale and his body hunched.

  “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously.

  Sebastian did not reply. Tim appeared at the door.

  “Sis…” he began, then he saw Sebastian. “What’s happened?”

  “I have spent most of your absence defending this house,” Sebastian said in a weak voice.

  “From what?” Pip asked uneasily

  “From the wodwo,” Sebastian answered.

  “The wodwo!” Tim exclaimed. “You mean Scrotton’s been here?”

  “Yes,” Sebastian replied. “He spent some hours attempting an entry last night. He was unsuccessful but, while endeavoring to open a window, he caused the alarm to operate.”

  “Do you think Yoland sent him?” Pip asked.

  “It is possible,” Sebastian said. “To Yoland, this house has a certain reputation. However, I think his intention was for Scrotton to ascertain if anything out of the ordinary was occurring here. All he saw was a normal family domicile.”

  “If he had got in,” Tim mused aloud, “he would have found my printout of his master’s Internet Favorites list…”

  “How did you keep him out?” Pip asked.

  Sebastian smiled knowingly and replied, “There is more to Frère d
’Aurillac’s book than Scrotton has discovered. Eventually, some men in uniforms with powerful lights and two large dogs arrived and Scrotton fled.”

  The sound of footsteps approached Pip’s door along the corridor.

  “That’s our mother,” Tim warned. “You’d best hide or she’ll want to know how you come to be here only a few minutes after we’ve got back.”

  No sooner had he spoken than Mrs. Ledger knocked on the door and inquired, “Can I come in, Pip?”

  Pip was about to stall her, but Sebastian had vanished into thin air.

  As their mother came in, Tim squeezed by her in the doorway and went to his room to boot up his computer. It was as he waited for it to get up and running that he noticed the window and his spine crept. On the outside, the glass was smeared with dried streaks of mud. It was plain they had been made by hands scrambling to get in.

  It was Sebastian who first saw the announcement. Written in Yoland’s immaculate handwriting, it was pinned to the science department noticeboard and read:

  The Atom Club

  Starting on Monday, the Atom Club will meet every week

  at lunchtime in Chemistry Lab One.

  Membership restricted to Years Seven and Eight.

  Keen on Science?

  Come and join!

  More wonders of Science than you’ll ever see in lessons.

  “What do you make of that?” Tim pondered.

  Sebastian considered the notice before replying, “I cannot say, yet I sense it is ill-omened.”

  “Whatever the case,” Pip said, “we’ve no option but to join.”

  And so it was that, the following Monday, the twelve founding members of the Atom Club, including Pip, Tim and Sebastian — and Scrotton — sat on stools in a semicircle in front of the demonstration bench. Behind it stood Yoland, a complex molecular model made of large colored beads and rods at his side.