by Susan Cooper
“It needn’t have been human. It might have been one of those special sort of ghosts that throws things about just for fun. A polter—polt—”
“Poltergeist,” said Father absently. He was opening all the silver cupboards to see if anything had gone.
“There you are. One of those.”
“Well, Mrs. Palk says the house is supposed to be haunted,” Jane said. “Oh dear.”
They all looked at one another round-eyed, and suddenly shivered.
Mother said, appearing suddenly in the doorway and making them all jump: “Well, it’s the first ghost I’ve ever heard of who wore crêpe-soled shoes. Dick, come and have a look out here.”
Father straightened up and followed her out into the kitchen, with the children close at his heels. Mother pointed, without a word.
Two kitchen windows were open, the big one over the sink and a small one above it; and so was the door. And on the flat white tiles of the table-top beside the sink there was the faint but unmistakable outline of a footprint. A large footprint, with bar markings across the sole; and traces of the same markings on the window-sill above.
“Gosh!”
“There’s your ghost,” Father said cheerfully, though he did not look cheerful at all.
Then he turned on them briskly. “Now come on, all of you, off upstairs and get dressed. You’ve seen all there is to see. No”—he waved his hands as all three children began to protest vigorously. “This isn’t a game, it’s extremely serious. We shall have to call the police, and I don’t want anything touched before they arrive. Off!”
Father had one voice which stopped all argument, and this was it. Simon, Jane and Barney trailed reluctantly out of the kitchen door and along the hall, and then stopped still at the foot of the stairs, looking up. Great-Uncle Merry was heavily descending the stairs towards them, clad in a pair of brilliant red pyjamas and with his white hair all standing up on end.
He was yawning prodigiously and rubbing his eyes in a puzzled kind of way. “Won’t do,” he was muttering to himself. “Can’t make it out . . . heavy sleep . . . most unusual . . .” Then he caught sight of the children. “Good morning,” he said with dignity, as if he were fully and impeccably dressed. “Befuddled though I am this morning, a great clamour has been penetrating up the stairs from down here. Is anything wrong?”
“We’ve had burglars . . . !” Simon began, but Father came striding out after them from the kitchen and clapped his hands. “Come on, come on, I told you to go and get dressed. . . . Oh good, there you are, Merry. The most extraordinary thing has happened—” He glared at the children, and they hastily ran upstairs.
After breakfast the police arrived from St Austell: a solid, red-faced sergeant and a very young constable following him like a mute shadow. Simon was looking forward to eager questions about his discovery of the crime. At the very least, he thought vaguely, he would have to make a statement. He was not quite sure what this meant, but it sounded familiar and important.
But the sergeant only said to him, his warm Cornish accent stroking the words: “Came down first, did ’ee?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Touch anythin’?”
“No, not a thing. Well, I did straighten the barometer. It was crooked.” Looking round at the chaos, Simon thought how silly this sounded.
“Ah. Hear anythin’?”
“No.”
“All quite as usual, eh, apart from the mess?”
“Yes, it was really.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant. He grinned at Simon sitting eagerly on the edge of his chair. “All right, I’ll let ’ee off this time.”
“Oh,” said Simon, deflated. “Is that all?”
“I reckon so,” the sergeant said placidly, tugging his jacket down over his stout middle. “Now, sir,” he said to Father, “if we might take a look at this footprint you say you found . . .”
“Yes, of course.” Father led them out to the kitchen. The children, drifting behind, peeped through the door. The sergeant gazed impassively at the footprint for some moments, said to his speechless constable, “Now take good note o’ that, young George,” and moved ponderously out to the disorder of the living-room.
“You say there seems to be nothin’ gone, sir?”
“Well, it’s difficult to tell, of course, since it’s a rented house,” Father said. “But certainly nothing valuable seems to be missing. The silver’s all intact, not that there’s much of it anyway. That cup, as you see, wasn’t touched. But they seemed to go for the books, and I can’t vouch for those. There may well be some missing that we don’t know about.”
“’Tis a proper mess, surely.” The sergeant bent down, with some effort, and picked up a book. A small deflated black cobweb lay along the top of its pages. “Very old, these—valuable, maybe. Quite well off, the captain is, I believe.”
“If I might suggest, sergeant—” Great-Uncle Merry said diffidently, from the edge of the group.
“What is it, Professor?” The sergeant beamed at him all over his rosy countryman’s face; even he seemed to know Great-Uncle Merry inexplicably well.
“I had no chance to look very thoroughly, since most of the bookcases were locked. But I should have said that very few of the books in this house were valuable, to a dealer at any rate. None of them was worth more than a few pounds, at the outside.”
“Funny. They seem to have been looking for something . . . hey, look here.” The sergeant shifted aside some of the papers whitening the floor, and they saw a pile of empty picture-frames.
“Those are from the hall,” Simon said at once. “That bumpy gold frame had a map in it at the top of the stairs.”
“Hmm. No map in it now. All of ’em been ripped out. Still, I dare say we’ll find them somewhere in all this clutter.” The sergeant rocked to and fro on his heels, gazing with an expression of mild regret at the battered bookcases and piles of books. He rubbed one of his shiny silver buttons thoughtfully, and finally turned to Father with an air of decision. “Sheer hooliganism, I reckon, sir. Can’t be no other explanation. Seldom is round these parts, anyway.”
“Ah,” said the young constable regretfully, and immediately turned crimson and looked down at his feet.
The sergeant beamed at him. “Someone with a grudge against the captain, I dare say, havin’ a go at his belongings. Might well be one or two people hereabouts don’t like him, he’s a funny old bird. Wouldn’t ’ee say so, Professor?”
“You might call him that,” Great-Uncle Merry said abstractly. He was standing looking about him with a puzzled frown.
“Breakin’ in idn’ difficult in a place the size of Trewissick,” the sergeant said. “People don’t expect it, they leave their windows open . . . did ’ee lock up last night, Dr. Drew?”
“Yes, I always do, back and front.” Father scratched his head. “I could swear there weren’t any windows open downstairs, but I must admit I didn’t go round trying them all.”
“Well no, you wouldn’t expect this sort of thing . . . beats me why anyone should want to take the risk, just to rough the place up and not pinch anything. Now if I could have one more look at that print—” He led the way out of the room.
Simon beckoned Jane and Barney to stay behind. “Hooligans,” he said thoughtfully. He picked up a book that lay sprawled open face downwards on the carpet, and shut its covers gently.
“It doesn’t sound right somehow,” Jane said. “It’s all so thorough. Every drawer opened, and almost every book taken down.”
“And every map taken out of its frame,” said Barney. “It’s just the maps, have you noticed? None of the pictures.”
“The burglars must have been looking for something.”
“And they went on all through the house because they couldn’t find it.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t down here,” Simon said slowly.
“Well, it couldn’t have been upstairs.”
“How d’you know?”
“Don’t be
silly, there just isn’t anything upstairs. Except us.”
“Isn’t there?”
“Well—” Jane said, and then suddenly they were all three looking at one another in horror. They turned and dashed out of the room and up the stairs, to the second-floor bedroom where the great square wardrobe stood between Simon’s and Barney’s beds.
Simon hastily dragged a chair forward and jumped up on it to feel round on top of the wardrobe. His face went blank with alarm. “It’s gone!”
There was a fearful moment of silence. Then Jane sat down with a bump on Barney’s bed and began to giggle hysterically.
“Stop it!” Simon said sharply, sounding for a moment as authoritative as his father.
“Sorry . . . it’s all right, it hasn’t gone,” Jane said weakly. “It’s in my bed.”
“In your bed?”
“Yes, I’ve got it. It’s still there. I clean forgot,” Jane babbled, then pulled herself together. “When I went to see the vicar I didn’t want to take it with me, and I had to hide it somewhere in my room. So I shoved it right down under the bed-clothes. It was the nearest place. Then last night I forgot it was there, and I must have gone to sleep without feeling it. Come on.”
The front bedroom was full of sunlight, and through the window the sea sparkled as merrily as if nothing could ever disturb the world. Jane hauled back the sheet of her rumpled bed and there, tucked in a corner at the bottom, was the telescope case.
They perched in a row on the edge of the bed, and Jane opened the case on her lap. They stared in silent relief at the familiar hollow cylinder of the old manuscript inside.
“Do you realize,” Simon said gravely, “this was the safest place it could possibly have been? They could have looked anywhere else, but not in your bed without waking you up.”
“You don’t think they came up and looked in our rooms?” Barney turned pale.
“They might have looked anywhere.”
“Oh, but this is silly.” Jane swung her pony-tail as if she were trying to clear her head. “How on earth could they have known anything about the manuscript at all? We found it in the attic, all hidden away, and it had obviously been there for years and years. And no one can even have been up in the attic for ages—think of all that dust on the stairs.”
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “There’s a lot of things I don’t understand. I only know I’ve been feeling funny about the manuscript ever since you said that vicar of yours got all excited about the copy of the map.”
Jane shrugged. “I don’t see how a vicar could be bad. Anyway he didn’t know about the manuscript. He asked a few questions, but I think he was just being nosy.”
“Wait a minute,” Barney said slowly. “I’ve remembered something. There was someone else asking questions. It was Mr. Withers, on the boat yesterday, when I was down in the cabin with him getting lunch. He started saying a lot of peculiar things about the Grey House, and to tell him if we saw anything that looked very old . . . any”—he swallowed—“any old books or maps or papers. . . .”
“Oh no,” Simon said. “It couldn’t have been him.”
“But whoever it was,” said Barney in a small clear voice, “they were looking for the manuscript—weren’t they?”
Sitting there in the silence of the Grey House they all three knew that it was the truth.
“They must want it awfully badly.” Simon looked down at the manuscript. “It’s that map part, that’s what it is. Somehow someone knows it’s in the house. Oh, I wish we knew what it said.”
“Look here,” Jane said, making up her mind, “we’ve got to tell Mother and Father about finding it.”
Simon stuck his chin out. “It wouldn’t do any good. Mother would be worried stiff. Anyway, don’t you see, we shouldn’t have a chance to work it out ourselves then. And suppose it does lead to buried treasure?”
“I don’t want to find any beastly treasure. Something horrible’s bound to happen if we do.”
Barney forgot his fright in outraged ownership. “We can’t tell anyone about it now. We found it. I found it, it’s my quest.”
“You’re too young to understand,” Jane said pompously. “We shall have to tell someone about it—Father, or the policeman. Oh do see,” she added plaintively. “We’ve got to do something, after last night.”
“Children!” Mother’s voice came from the stairs outside, very close. They jumped guiltily to their feet at once, and Simon held the manuscript case behind his back.
“Hallo?”
“Oh there you are.” Mother appeared in the doorway; she looked preoccupied. “Look, the house is going to be chaotic all this morning—would you like to go off swimming and come home for a late lunch—about one thirty? Then this afternoon Great-Uncle Merry wants to take you all out.”
“Fine,” Simon said, and she vanished again.
“That’s it!” Barney thumped the pillow in excitement and relief. “That’s it, of course, why didn’t we think of it before? We can tell someone and still have things all right. We can tell Great-Uncle Merry!”
• Chapter Six •
“Now then,” said Great-Uncle Merry as they strode down the hill to the harbour. “It’s a splendid afternoon for a walk. Which way d’you want to go?”
“Somewhere lonely.”
“Somewhere miles from anywhere.”
“Somewhere where we can talk.”
Great-Uncle Merry looked down at them, from one strained face to the next. His bleak, impassive expression did not change and he simply said, “Very well,” and lengthened his stride so that they had to trot to keep up. He asked no questions, but walked in silence. They climbed the winding little street on the side of the harbour opposite Kemare Head and the Grey House, and followed the cliff path past the last straggling houses of the village, until the great purple-green sweep of the opposite headland rose before them.
Up the slope they toiled, through heather and prickling gorse, past rough outcroppings of grey rock patched yellow with lichen and weathered by the wind. There had been no breath of a breeze down in the harbour, but here the wind was loud in their ears.
“Gosh,” Barney said, pausing and turning outwards to look down. “Look!” They turned with him, and saw the harbour far below and the Grey House tiny on the threading road. Already they were higher than their own headland, and still the rock-scarred slope stretched above them to meet the sky.
They turned again and scrambled up the slope, and at last they were at the top of the headland, with the line of the surf laid out like a slow-moving map below them on either side, and beyond it the great blue sweep of the sea. One big slanting boulder of granite stood higher than any they had passed on the way up, and Great-Uncle Merry sat down with his back against it, his legs arched up before him long and knobbly, in their flapping brown corduroys. The children stood together, looking down. The land before them was unfamiliar, a silent, secret world of mounded peaks and invisible valleys, all its colours merging in a haze of summer heat.
“Hic incipit regnum Logri . . .” Great-Uncle Merry said, looking out with them across it all, as if he were reading out an inscription.
“What does that mean?”
“Here begins the realm of Logres. . . . Now come on, the three of you, and sit down.”
They squatted down beside him, in a semi-circle before the big rock. Great-Uncle Merry surveyed them as if he were enthroned. “Well,” he said gently, “who tells me what’s wrong?”
In the quiet with only the sound of the wind stirring the air Jane and Barney looked at Simon. “Well, it was the burglar,” he said haltingly. “We were worried . . .” and then the three of them were all tumbling out the words.
“When Miss Withers came the other night she was asking questions about the Grey House, and whether we’d found anything.”
“And so did Mr. Withers on their yacht, he asked me about old books.”
“And whoever it was last night, they only touched the books and all the old maps . . .
”
“. . . they were looking for it, they must have been . . .”
“. . . only they didn’t know where to look, and they didn’t know we already had it.”
“Suppose they know we’ve got it, they might come after us . . .”
Great-Uncle Merry raised one hand, though he did not move. His chin was up. He looked as if he were waiting for something. “Gently now,” he said, “If you have found something in the Grey House, what is it you have found?”
Simon felt inside the rucksack. He drew out the case and handed the parchment to Great-Uncle Merry. “We found this.”
Great-Uncle Merry took the parchment without a word, and gently unrolled it on his knees. He gazed at it in silence for a long while, and they could see his eyes moving over the words.
The wind on the headland whined softly round them, and although, as they watched, Great-Uncle Merry’s expression did not change, they suddenly knew that some enormous emotion was flooding through him. Like an electric current it tingled in the air, exciting and frightening at the same time; though they could not understand what it was. And then he raised his head at last and looked out across the hills of Cornwall rolling far into the distance; and he breathed a great sigh of relief that was like a release from all the worry of the whole world.
“Where did you find it?” he said, and the three children jumped at the quiet, ordinary tone of his voice as if it brought them out of a spell.
“In the attic.”
“There’s a great big attic, all full of dust and junk, we found a door behind our wardrobe, and a staircase leading up.”
“I found it,” Barney said. “I threw my apple core away, and I went to get it back because of the rats, and I found the manuscript by accident in a comer under the floor.”
“What is it, Gumerry?”
“What does it say?”
“It’s terribly old, isn’t it?”
“Is it important? Is it about buried treasure?”
“In a way,” Great-Uncle Merry said. His eyes seemed dazed, unable to focus anywhere, but there was a twitching at the corners of his mouth. Somehow, without smiling, he looked happier than they had ever seen him look before. Jane thought, watching: it is a sad face usually, and that’s why there is such a difference.