‘I will be maister in my own house.’
‘Sit down, you old fool. You are maister. What you going on about?’
‘I’m not maister. Starkey’s maister now. Where is he? I’ll mark him. I’ll mark him and I’ll mark thee too, see if I don’t!’
‘Let me go, you old fool.’ Then there was a storm of voices, blurring and booming and fading, as if the air was full of rags. And the female voice, yelling, ‘Starkey, Starkey, come quick!’
All getting nearer. Along the narrow upstairs corridor; down the dark stairs. Everywhere.
Simon could not move. He was paralysed by the smell of the strange man; only there were two smells of two strange men now; and the air was full of a struggling gasping and straining.
Then he sensed Tris slide past him in the dark; heard Tris slam the dining-room door and lock it. The voices faded, but did not stop; the whole house was full of them, except the dining room. It was like being in a little hut with a great gale blowing outside.
‘Well, you’ve done it,’ said Tris calmly.
‘Yes,’ said Simon. Only now he could think of nothing but that Mum was out there somewhere. Or what was left of her. She seemed agonisingly precious, now that she was gone.
What were they doing to Mum . . . ?
‘It may not be too late,’ said Tris.
‘It is too late.’ Simon was feeling horrible; horrified yet fascinated, like when he’d watched a spider trap and kill a fly.
‘They’ve come for you too,’ said Tris. ‘You made four balls of bread . . .’
‘The fourth one was you.’
‘Oh no it wasn’t. What have I got to do with all this? I belong to a mum and dad in Jersey, and miles and miles of tomato plants. What you’re doing is all yours. Those murders . . . the son died too – broke his neck riding a horse two months later . . . I read it up in the back-files at the Knutsford Guardian office. They tricked you, Simon.’
‘Oh, God, what can I do?’
‘Only you know. You made all this. You can break it. You may still be in time. I don’t think They’ve finished yet . . .’
‘How?’
‘Window.’
Tris flung the curtains back, and opened the window.
‘Run, Simon, run!’
Run, Simon, run. Like on the rugby-field. All the kids, all the masters shouting, and the ball in his hands.
He ran. Smashed through the hedge as if it was a rugby-pack. Felt the branches clutch at his shirt and tear away despairingly.
He darted between the figures of the scarecrows. Starkey was still lurking at the back. He almost ran into him, into the filthy smell of rotting straw; but swerved just in time. The turnip-leaves, full of rain, lashed his ankles like whips and threw wet up his trousers. He trampled on the rounded bodies of the turnips as if he was in a black room full of hard solid rugby-balls.
He didn’t run for help to the village. He had the ball; nobody else could carry it now. He was alone. Nobody backing-up. This was how it felt to be alone. Not terrible, but marvellous. This was how Father must have felt, driving his jeep at the Flossies . . . Father hadn’t really been lonely. He’d simply been alone. He felt one with his father at last. Head straight for what you’re scared of, Simon. It’ll usually run away, if you do. If not, you’re no worse off . . . With Father there, he no longer cared if he lived or died.
He was panting now; great gouts of breath. Panting in total darkness, but still running, running for the mill. And somehow he knew, in all that turnip-filled darkness, just exactly where the mill was. If he was tied beyond hope to the mill, the mill was also tied beyond hope to him. It couldn’t escape him, no more than he could escape it.
Run straight at your enemy. And, in running, gasping, falling and getting up, he became aware of some kind of power in himself. When he got to the mill, he would know what to do. He knew that; and somehow the mill knew it too. Somehow, he sensed the mill was afraid; and that made his legs strong.
He was running head-down. Something – maybe the end of the turnips – made him look up. Just in time. He teetered on the very brink of the mill-dam. One more step and he would have been into the mill pool, where the sides were too high to climb out, and he would have sunk down through the sooty depths, into the grey scummy arms of the weed.
Hard luck! He flung the thought at the mill, wolfishly. Turned left and ran along the dam-wall. The smell of the pool came up to his nostrils. But the pool was too late to catch him now.
Down the steps past the mill-race. It gaped at his feet in the dark, waiting for him. It was as if his feet were running on a knife-edge.
But he ran true. The door smashed open as he hit it. Splintered more easily than he expected it to.
Wood splintering . . . smash, smash, smash.
He ran through the living room, sending table and chair crashing in the dark.
Smash, smash. SMASH. Smash wood.
He fought his way upstairs. Ropes snatched at his face, strong, thick and hairy. He ran into the hanging sack, dangling heavy over its trapdoor. He felt his feet teetering on sharp stair-edges, over pits of dark. For a dreadful second he thought he was going to run round and round forever, like a rat in a maze, a hamster in a cage.
And then he was on the top landing, and there was enough pale moonlight now, coming through the slatted window, for him to see the starting-lever that controlled the sluice.
There is moonlight, he thought, far away. There is moonlight. And he grabbed the handle and heaved.
He was too weak. His hands were too slippery. It would never move.
He gathered his body for a last rush; hit the lever with shoulder behind hand and body behind shoulder and legs behind body. The wooden lever bit into him like a death-blow with a sword. He felt his flesh crushed, his bone bitten.
It did not move.
He threw himself again; and again. Each time the wooden sword entered him and he died a little.
There was not enough of him left for a fourth blow. He was beaten. But all about him was a rushing, and sluicing, a thumping. A grinding of cogs, like a boy rattling an iron bar along iron railings. A pounding like a great heart; like two great hearts, three. Another boy began to rattle a bar along another railing. Everywhere around him, the mill woke to life.
But it must wake to death. The hearts must pound to death; the boys with iron bars must run till they died.
He pushed the handle of the sluice down as far as it would go. It moved easily now. The noise increased. But he waited until every sound said danger and destruction.
Only then did he run. Only then did he seek to save himself. The mill was full of blue moonlight now. Great cogs swung out at him. Rows of gallows in stark, never-ending succession. All building up the screaming in the wood, the torture in the ill-greased axles. He had never heard such a noise. A hundred drums were reverberating up through the soles of his feet, the palms of his hands on the handrails. And all the time the thrumming climbed in intensity, like the thrumming in a taut-drawn crossbow, or a rope just before it snaps. A harp of tension.
The soles of his feet told him he had reached cold, solid ground. As always, his body told him which way to run. He went through the living room again, as if it, too, were a rugby-scrum. Not that he couldn’t see the scattered furniture now, in the moonlight, but he knew from the crescendoing noise behind him that he had no time to run round it. His foot caught in the rungs of the overturned chair. The wood was dry, light, rotten. He kicked his foot as he might kick a ball, and the chair flew into the whitewashed wall and fell in worm-eaten fragments.
He crashed into the table and drove it right across the room with his thighs; the edge bit into his muscles like another wooden blade.
And then he was through the door and only the long dead grass was sifting gently round him, as if it loved him.
There came a crack that made him turn. Then a series of sounds like sheet lightning. A whole snapped beam of timber, sharp as a lance, speared upwards through the roof, sending
a patch of tiles up into the air like birds. The windows burst out in hails of shining silver like snowflakes.
And then the roof fell in. For a moment the gable ends towered clean against the sky like bishops’ mitres, and then nothing in the world but turnips, and home.
And then he saw three figures coming at him through the mist. They approached very slowly; edges vague and blurred.
The one in front was a big, big man. The second, smaller, moved like a woman. And the third, a fair way behind, was a smaller man . . .
A moan broke from him.
He had not destroyed them after all. Once called, they had become indestructible. He put his face in his hands and waited for the unthinkable end.
And then there was a noise; an old familiar noise.
‘Wait for me. Please, Joe, wait for me. I’m tired. I’m all wet.’
He raised his eyes, scarcely daring to hope. A fourth, tiny figure was emerging out of the mist behind the other three.
‘Simon?’ said Joe.
‘Simon. We’ve been worried sick. We’ve been searching for you everywhere,’ said Mum.
‘Hallo, you great turnip,’ said Tris la Chard.
About the Author
Robert Westall was born in 1929 on Tyneside, where he grew up during the Second World War. He went to the local Grammar School and then studied Fine Art at Durham University, and Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He worked as an art teacher in Cheshire and for the Samaritans.
His first novel for children, The Machine Gunners, published in 1975, was an instant success and was awarded the Carnegie Medal. His books have been translated into ten languages and dramatized for television. He won the Carnegie Medal again in 1982 for The Scarecrows, the Smarties Prize in 1989 for Blitzcat and the Guardian Award in 1991 for The Kingdom by the Sea. Between 1986 and his death in 1993, he devoted himself to his writing.
Also by Robert Westall
BREAK OF DARK
GHOST ABBEY
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 1981
This ebook published 2011
Text copyright © The Estate of Robert Westall, 1981
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN: 9781446495032
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Scarecrows Page 16