Time and again they spent their fevered passion until, exhausted and gratified, they lay in each other’s arms, in awe of what they had done and a little afraid because of it. In his strong warm arms, Scarlet was bathed in happiness. There was no wrong in their taking of each other, nothing shameful: it was always meant to be. She felt that instinctively, and she told him so. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ Suddenly she was afraid. For a long time he gave no answer, and she prayed that he would not put up that awful barrier of silence between them again. Not now. Not when everything had changed. At length he spoke, hesitant and vibrant, like music to her ears.
‘You must know I love you,’ he said. But then he raised himself to look into her face, and what she saw in those incredible violet eyes caused her heart to miss a beat. ‘I have to go. Trust me, Scarlet, but I have to leave this place… I have to find an identity, to find myself. I must, if I’m ever to know peace of mind. I’ll come back for you, I promise.’
Every word was like a knife through Scarlet’s heart. ‘No!’ She threw her arms round his neck and clung to him. ‘You can’t leave… not now.’ He shook his head and lowered his gaze. Scornfully she recoiled from him, raking her clothes together and fighting them on. ‘Then damn you!’ The words spat out. ‘Damn your black heart. Go then!… But remember this. If you go, don’t ever come back. D’you hear?’ The tears ran unheeded down her face.
Suddenly he was on his feet, grabbing her to him, fighting her resistance. ‘Don’t you see… things have to change for us? The time isn’t right for you and me, Scarlet. But it will be, one day. On that day, I’ll come for you. Nothing will keep me away, I swear!’ His voice was low and controlled, designed to placate her.
Pulling away, Scarlet fell back against the studded wall, her coal-black eyes made magnificent by the incoming moonlight. ‘Go to Hell!’ she hissed, spitting on the ground with contempt. ‘You’re no different, are you?… No different from any of them.’ Suddenly her eyes were wicked. ‘Oh, but maybe you are different after all.’ The urge to torment him rose in her like a devil. ‘All my life I’ve been warned against you… even my mammy’s afraid of you. Are you evil, Silas?’ She was beyond reason now but, even in her insane desire to hurt him, she was hurting herself more. ‘Were you in the cellar, Silas?… what was it you did that so terrified my mammy?’ Horrified, she saw that she had gone too far. She saw his face darken and all the old nightmares took hold of her. When he stepped forward to take her by the wrists, she was shocked to find that she was quivering with fright.
‘Your mammy’s right.’ Scarlet’s accusations had only fuelled the very reasons why he must flee from Greystone House. He also had nightmares to erase and fiendish images to lay to rest. ‘She has every right to be afraid.’ His violet eyes were brilliant as stones, yet scarred with pain. ‘I am evil!’ he snarled, bearing down on her. Suddenly he looked into Scarlet’s wide frightened eyes and he sensed her deeper horror of him. It cut him to the core. ‘Get out,’ he moaned, roughly thrusting her aside. ‘Get out of my sight!’
Blinded by her tears, Scarlet ran from the barn. Besieged by terrible feelings of confusion, shame and horror, she wanted only to escape. In the comparative safety of her room, Scarlet knelt by the window, watching and waiting. After a while, she saw him leave, disappearing into the night like a shadow. With a cold heart she climbed into bed and gave herself up to the monsters that had long haunted her sleep. She felt cheated and lonely. But, for some strange reason she could not fully understand, she felt something else, something she had not experienced in a long long time. She felt safe!
From deep in the shadows, there was another who had watched Silas disappear into the night. The eyes that followed his departure were cruel and quietly smiling. The voice that softly permeated the night air was uniquely sinister. ‘May the devil prevent you from ever returning,’ it whispered, ‘for only you might have stopped me. Now, there is no one to stand in my way!’
The dawn was beginning to struggle through a greyish sky when Silas came upon the cottage. The events of the night had sent him fleeing from Greystone House with desperate urgency. He had stumbled away, his heart and mind bursting with thoughts of Scarlet but, however much he adored her, he could not stay. The past would not let him stay, and it was the past that dictated his future with Scarlet. There was too much unresolved, too many questions, too much fear. He had to put a distance between himself and all of that. Or go slowly mad!
In his blind haste, Silas had missed his footing at the top of a dangerously steep incline. In the darkness he had tumbled some short way down the stony slope, slipping and sliding until his fall was broken by a gorse bush whose wickedly sharp thorns had ripped and clawed at his leg. Now, bleeding and exhausted, he hobbled towards the cottage, his eyes peeled for a water trough or a pump where he might wash off the dirt and blood that was caked to the ugly gash below his knee. The awful experience had left him bruised and aching in every bone.
He could find no pump or trough. But situated by the outhouse door was a partly filled rain butt. There was no sign of life in the immediate vicinity of the cottage, and Silas assumed that whoever lived there was still slumbering. He washed his leg as best he could, then after some deliberation Silas decided to make himself comfortable in a corner of the outhouse, where the sharpening breeze wouldn’t chill his bones, and where he might avail himself of a few hours sleep before resuming his long journey to Barnstaple. He suspected there was a route many miles over the moors, going through the tiny isolated hamlets and trekking across hostile land with which he was not immediately familiar, but he had chosen to follow an established route, by way of Lyn-mouth. Once in Barnstaple, he would seek out work of the kind he knew… blacksmith’s work. But his ambition was to eventually acquire his own smithy, when he would be free at last, independent of anyone, and in a position to return for Scarlet. It never crossed his mind that she might refuse him, because he himself could never envisage a life without her by his side. For now, though, he had to prove himself; he had to find himself. He thought he had never done a harder thing than to thrust Scarlet away, even while the memory of her in his arms still warmed his heart. But it would all come right one day, he knew it must. He prayed it would, for there was no other reason to live.
Opening the outhouse door, he peered inside. It was dark. A strange sweet smell clogged his nostrils. But it was dry here, and out of the wind; he would settle down for a while, rest until daylight. Then he would be on his way. The thought cheered him as he ventured inside, closing the door behind him. That smell! Dry, rancid, offensive smell. It turned his stomach. But, no matter, he had lived in a barn these many years, shared his abode with horses and other creatures that found shelter alongside him. They all carried their own smells. He had grown used to them. But this smell was somehow different. It was sickening to his senses, and stuck in his throat like a bad taste.
Silas felt his way along the wall to the farthest comer, away from the door and window where the increasing cold wind might force a way in. Putting down the small bundle of belongings, which had been safely tied to his belt, he made a pillow of it and, after comfortably positioning his torn leg, he curled up against the wall, and fell into a light uneasy sleep.
It was the scream that woke Silas. The muffled scream that was his own, and the pain that seared through him with a vengeance. With a start, he sat bolt upright, staring about with wild frightened eyes and an inexplicable sensation of terror causing him to tremble violently. The beads of sweat on his back broke out to trickle furiously down his spine and, for what seemed the longest moment of his life, he was held in a grip of terror that paralysed him. It was still dark, but the dawn light was already invading the sky and probing its way through the tiny window. Inside the outhouse little pockets of light began to spread, illuminating the gloomy interior. Suddenly the penetrating pain that had woken him caused him to cry out loud. His hand went involuntarily to grasp the wound on his leg; instead his fingers closed round a scurrying shape, warm
and alive, staring at him with glittering beady eyes, its long sharp teeth bared and stained with blood. His blood! With a cry of terror, Silas scrambled to his feet, his one frantic thought was to flee. In his blind panic, he fell headlong onto what he at first thought was an old grey blanket, but beneath his weight it was split asunder, its thousand brilliant eyes all turned in his direction. Rats! Countless numbers of them, and all crazed by the smell of blood! Quickly the rats were on him, swarming over him and pressing him down. Down, down, he stretched out his arms and then he saw the bones! Human bones, stripped of their flesh by razor-sharp teeth and relentless ripping claws. All of Silas’s senses were assailed by the horror of what was before his eyes: the two skulls stared at him, the smaller one picked clean until it shone, the other ungainly, strangely deformed, still ragged with blood and sinew, and its one remaining incredibly beautiful eye looking right through him, pleading, damning! He heard the unearthly scream. Was that really him? He felt the sharp incisors cut into his neck. He cried out, violently shivering as he scrambled to his feet, shaking them off, hitting out like a demented thing. He was both horrified and astonished at the tenacious way in which they clung to him. At last he was free, and then he ran, his mind reeling with shock, oblivious to everything but that he must escape, escape, escape! But he could not escape those skulls and that uniquely beautiful eye that seemed so alive. And familiar! He had seen such eyes before, but where?
A new and even more terrible sense of horror took hold of Silas. He was a small boy in a darkened cellar. The eye stared in his mind; it was in the cellar with him. No! He must not go on torturing himself. It was all too real. Too damning!
Behind him, he could hear a door being whipped back and forth by the howling wind. But he did not look back. He dared not.
‘We’re warning everyone in the area.’ Constable Stewart was a portly fellow with a perfect set of teeth and a black moustache that drooped to his jowls. He had a habit of constantly fidgeting with the chin-strap of his helmet, as though he was fending off a horrible choking death. ‘It’s a terrible thing, Mr Pengally.’ He addressed himself to the master of the house but, seeing as his errand to Greystone House had necessitated calling together all who lived and worked here, he shifted his stern expression from one to the other. ‘Rest assured we’ll leave no stone unturned in pursuit of whoever’s responsible. Meanwhile… I suggest you all keep your wits about you, should any strangers happen this way. Everyone in the village will be alerted… I don’t like to say this, sir… but, with you and your family living so close to the edge of the moors, you need to be extra vigilant. Lock all doors and windows securely at night.’
‘I don’t think I need you to tell me how to keep my house safe from intruders,’ Vincent Pengally remarked in a surly tone. ‘You’ve done your duty. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve a smithy to run.’ He came from the fireplace where he had been standing, legs astride and obviously resentful of the constable’s errand. ‘Instead of wandering about from house to house, I should have thought you’d be better employed combing the moors. If I’d murdered somebody, that’s where I’d make for. While you’re standing here talking to us, your quarry’s long gone!’ He snorted and laughed, shaking his head as he brushed by. At the door, he turned. ‘No doubt you’ll be on your way any minute now?’ When the constable remarked that he was just about to leave, the blacksmith briskly departed. Outside, though, he paused and leaned up against the wall, his colour drained and his breathing erratic. His nerves were frayed. The constable’s visit had further unnerved him, more than he would ever admit. ‘Murdered they were,’ he had said, ‘we don’t know for sure how it was done… being as there was little left to examine after the rats were finished with them. But one of the skeletons was crushed to a pulp… very strange.’ He hadn’t wanted to hear any more, especially when the constable had pointed out, ‘it’s not likely the murders are connected in any way to the disturbing incidents that took place here some time ago. But it is something we need to bear in mind.’ Fearful that he might be seen at any minute, the blacksmith hurried to his forge, but the constable’s words wouldn’t leave him. They haunted him… just as Evelyn’s warning had haunted him since the day she died: ‘If you harm him, I swear I’ll come back.’ ‘I fed him, and gave him a place to sleep,’ he muttered, the sweat running down his back and his every limb trembling. ‘He went of his own accord. I can’t hurt him now… so leave me be!’
‘So, you’ll remember what I said?’ Constable Stewart prepared to leave. ‘Oh, by the way, Miss Williams, thank you kindly for the tea and biscuits… much appreciated.’
‘You’re very welcome,’ Shelagh Williams smiled warmly, collecting up the soiled crockery, ‘and I do hope you catch whoever did such a dreadful thing.’ She shivered, and the tea cup rattled in her hand. Giving a little cry, she hurried away into the kitchen, where she proceeded to wash the constable’s tea cup vigorously.
‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ the constable addressed himself now to John and Scarlet, ‘it won’t be easy, I dare say, but we’ll no doubt track him down.’
‘And you’ve no idea at all what happened?’ John was afraid for his wife and baby Trent.
‘Well now, I’m not at liberty to say too much, you understand… but, well… we do have our suspicions, of course. There’s the fact that one of them… we assume the old woman known as the herb-gatherer… had most of her bones broken.’ He shook his head, ‘Terrible… terrible! We haven’t established the identity of the other, a young lad… horribly crippled it seems. A relative, perhaps. When we contact the old woman’s estranged husband, he’ll no doubt be able to throw some light on that. Another thing… we discovered the old woman’s collection of plants and herbs… potions, that sort of thing. Curious thing, though. The jars were all neatly labelled on a shelf in the pantry, all mostly full… with the exception of two that had been ransacked. Both of these jars had been emptied and flung aside. They were marked “poison”.’ He looked from Scarlet to John and back again to Scarlet’s white face. Touching his fingertips against the brim of his helmet, he told her in a kindly voice. ‘Sorry to have been the bearer of such unwelcome news, but do remember, miss… secure the doors and windows at night, and don’t wander outside in the dark.’ He bade them good-day, hurrying away and cursing himself for blurting out privileged information. But then again, he reminded himself, the old tinker who found the bodies knew about the missing poison, because in fact he was right there when the matter was pointed out. The constable smiled to himself. That poor tinker, now there was an unfortunate soul if ever he saw one. What a terrible fright the old man had experienced. And all he had in the world was a little tied-up bundle, containing a bone-handled knife and a few surprisingly attractive carvings.
10
‘What’s ailing you, young ’un… has the cat got your tongue?’ John Blackwood dug his fork into the decaying vegetable matter which he then pitched up onto the wooden handbarrow. His words were jovial, but laced with real concern for Scarlet. ‘I thought you’d be over the moon… now that you’ve got that nice Miss Williams to share the workload.’ He paused in his labours. ‘She seems a pleasant enough soul… and from what you tell me your mammy’s taken a real liking to her.’ He pressed his own hands on the small of his back and stretched with a groan. He was not fond of hot weather, and this month of June, in the year of our Lord 1920, was one of the hottest he could remember.
Scarlet was also glad of a short rest, and not only because of the sun blazing down on them. There was another, more disturbing reason, but her ready smile betrayed nothing of the trauma in her mind. ‘Shelagh coming to Greystone House was the best thing that’s ever happened,’ she said, momentarily glancing towards the smithy, ‘but how she puts up with my father’s black moods I’ll never know. It has been wonderful… the way Mammy has come to trust and like her. She’s so good for me, too. I can never thank you and Mrs Blackwood enough… if it hadn’t been for your persuasion, Shelagh would never have been taken on.’
/> ‘Then what’s ailing you?’ he insisted. But then a thought struck him and he called himself all kinds of a fool. Using his fork as a crutch to lean on, he drew closer to Scarlet, and in softer voice he asked, ‘It’s Silas, ain’t it?… you’re missing him real bad?’ He had thought it unusual that Scarlet had not once mentioned his name these past three months, though he suspected the young man was never far from her secret thoughts. Vincent Pengally had made it clear to them all that Silas’s name was never again to be uttered, but John thought it strange that Scarlet had not confided in him, in spite of her father. ‘Happen he’ll turn up again one of these days.’
‘It does seem peculiar not to have him around,’ she confessed, ‘but perhaps it’s all for the best. I don’t think of him much,’ she lied, ‘and I don’t care if he never comes back.’ Contrary to what she had told John, Scarlet thought of Silas often, and there were times when she loved him more fiercely than ever. But she could not rid herself of the horror she felt whenever he invaded her most secret thoughts. Somewhere, deep inside her, she truly believed that he was every bit as evil and harmful as her father had always insisted. Even now, long after Silas had left Greystone House, her poor mammy would constantly ask after ‘that boy in the barn’, and she would work herself up into such a sorry state that only Scarlet could soothe her fears.
But there was no one to soothe Scarlet’s own fears. In the week following Silas’s departure, she had confided in the kindly Shelagh, but that dear soul could offer no real comfort; in fact, the comment she did make only seemed to heighten Scarlet’s inherent suspicions, for what she said was, ‘Nobody knows who he is, or where he came from, and why did he choose to remain silent all those years? That alone is strange. I only know of Silas what little you’ve told me, but I think you should be guided by your father who loves you… and by your mammy’s instincts. After all, Scarlet, it seems to me that the young man was never like other young men; though of course I can only judge by what you and John Blackwood have confided in me. I do know this though… your mammy is driven beyond endurance by the very mention of him!’
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