by Joan Aiken
‘Old girl in black?’ Cosmo gaped at Moley. ‘What old girl? You don’t mean Mrs Tydings?’
‘No, no, the other one. The old girl in black,’ Moley repeated patiently. ‘I thought she might be your grandmother because she’s a bit like you. She came swanning in with a shawl over her head while we were playing chess, and looked over your shoulder. Didn’t you notice her?’ he said, observing Cosmo’s blank expression. ‘I didn’t take much of a shine to her, I must say. She looked just the type to think that locking somebody up and starving them to death would be a real laugh-riot.’
‘No, I didn’t notice her,’ Cosmo said. ‘But I’ll keep a lookout. Thanks for mentioning it.’
8. Osmond
‘I liked your friend Molesworth,’ Eunice said, when the father and son had left. ‘He’s got a witty tongue.’
‘He’s really more my enemy than my friend,’ Cosmo said absently. He was thinking, and not my only enemy, by any means.
He felt extremely uneasy.
Eunice was troubled too. She said, ‘Cosmo, I’m wondering if we’d better find somewhere else where you could stay for a bit.’
He was horrified. ‘Go away from here? Oh, no!’
‘You like it here?’
‘Yes!’ His reply was heartfelt.
‘We do have a problem, though! Professor Molesworth and I were discussing it. You see – please don’t take this wrong, but these occurrences, wardrobes and beds going on the rampage, have only begun happening since you came to the mill house.’
Cosmo was embarrassed. ‘You mean, I’m making them happen?’
‘Oh, not on purpose, of course,’ she said quickly. ‘But things like that do happen sometimes with boys – people of your age.’
‘But in that case, don’t you suppose it might happen wherever I went?’ Cosmo said, trying to be detached about it, though in fact he found the idea quite foul – it was like having some disgusting disease, fits or something. ‘Besides – if I left the mill, where would I go?’
‘Well, for instance, Professor Molesworth said you were welcome to go and stay at their house in Headington.’
‘Oh, no – thank you.’ He thought of the biting things Moley had said about his stepmother and her children. ‘Besides – suppose wardrobes started falling about there?’
‘I have an idea they wouldn’t. I think these – these phenomena are brought on by a combination of this place and your presence in it.’
‘Well, then,’ Cosmo said craftily, ‘don’t you think it would be rather a shame not to – to make a scientific observation of what happens? It seems such a good opportunity.’
Should he tell Eunice about Con and Sim? But he would really prefer to wait until he had his own ideas a bit more sorted out.
‘Well – yes,’ she said, in a dubious manner. ‘But not at the cost of some awful accident. After all, we haven’t only you to consider. I daresay you’d be able to take anything that came in a spirit of scientific curiosity and detachment.’ Cosmo wasn’t quite so sure about that, he hadn’t felt in the least detached when he was swinging twenty feet up by one hand. ‘But there’s also your father to consider, and old Emma. She’s in her seventies, we wouldn’t want her bashed by a clock falling on her or anything of the kind.’
‘No, I do see.’ He was very cast down. ‘I do see it isn’t fair.’
‘Perhaps we’d better wait two or three days and see how it goes.’ Eunice was obviously swayed quite a bit by his horror at the thought of going away. ‘We’ll do a lot of careful observation. If you try to study poltergeists they tend to lay off their activities. Only do be careful, will you? Stay away from danger points, and – and hold on to the banisters when you go downstairs.’
Cosmo promised to do this, and went away to his own room – which looked remarkably bare now, bereft of bed and wardrobe. It did seem as if something – somebody? – were trying to show him that he was not welcome in the mill house. He very much wished that he, too, had seen the skinny old girl mentioned by Moley. Who could she possibly be? And how dared she try to get him out of the mill house, where he had a perfect right to be? He’d like to give her a sock on the jaw, interfering old witch. Could she be connected with Con or Sim – one of their mothers, perhaps? It would be hard, he supposed, if you knew your son was going to be killed in battle, to see one of the younger brothers who didn’t come under the curse. But Sim and Con had not been hostile. Well, Con had been a bit surly at first, but that had worn off as soon as he saw that Cosmo intended to help him. Con and Sim had needed his help, of course – that was the difference. Perhaps this old girl only needed some kind of reassurance. It was hard, though, to reassure somebody you could not see. Strange that Moley had seen her and he had not: a reversal of the situation with Con and Sim, who had been visible to him but not to Eunice, Emma or Mr Marvell. What did that mean? That the old girl didn’t want him to see her – that she was hanging around now, invisible to him? The thought was very disagreeable. He glanced round the room. There was nothing to be seen, and he settled down to write to Meredith. Poor girl, he could really sympathize with her now; the pang he had felt when Eunice suggested his going away brought back her passionate cry – ‘Only one week in my own home.’
‘Dear Meredith,’ he wrote, ‘We have been having rather a peculiar time here. And in case you don’t believe me, Moley can tell you that some of it really happened, as he and his father were here today and saw two of the happenings …’
How could a perfectly solid piece of timber turn so rotten, in the course of a week – less than a week – that it crumbled to powder in one’s hand? Perhaps a thing like that could happen in a tropical land where they had termites – but in cool, orderly England?
He would have to go over every inch of his lookout platform before he felt safe venturing up there again; and even then he would not feel safe. In fact – with a sigh – he saw that was the kind of thing Eunice had in mind when she said ‘Stay away from danger points.’ But in that case where could he go? Near the horses? Across the footbridge? Along the riverbank?
‘I’m not going to be driven out,’ he said angrily, aloud. ‘So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.’
Silence answered his words. He finished the letter to Meredith, opened his diary, and wrote, ‘Trouble with wardrobe. Went to Oxford with Eunice. Moley & his father to tea. Bed came downstairs.’ About to close the diary, he paused, noticing that at the end of the week was another full moon; how quickly that moon had shot round from change to change. Perhaps Eunice was right and time did go at different speeds.
During the next six days there were no more upsetting incidents – perhaps because of Cosmo’s cautiousness and the extreme watchfulness of Eunice. As she had said, poltergeists are disinclined to perform if they are expected to; and whoever or whatever it was in the mill house that had thrown down the bed and wardrobe either did not want to be studied, or had decided to bide its time until the inmates were off their guard. In the meantime Cosmo tried to keep away from heights, and from heavy objects that could conceivably fall on him. He slept at night in Emma’s little bedroom with its view over the meadow; this was going to be a great advantage at the end of the week, he reflected, on the night of the full moon; he would then have a grandstand view of the coach-and-six if it passed by.
On Friday night he took his alarm with him and set it for 3 a.m. Then he climbed into Emma’s spare bed (which was even more hammocky and saggy than his own) and fell asleep.
He dreamed that Mark was holding his head in the washbasin and had the taps full on. The gushing of the water woke him; then he realized that it was the buzz of the alarm. He had put it under his pillow so as not to rouse Emma in the next room; even so, through the thin matchboard partition he heard her grunt and murmur in her sleep. Old people sleep lightly.
Cosmo had not undressed, except for taking off his shoes. He got out of bed, moved the chair over to the window, and curled up on it, watching and waiting. The little yard down below him was
quiet and dark, wrapped in shadow; but the long pale stretch of the water meadow looked like a lagoon breathing up silvery drifts of mist, and, beyond, he could catch a gleam of the river itself. At the far right-hand corner the black wedge of wood came down like the tip of a nutcracker, where the old road sliced round the curve between hillside and river. And over it all the high, pale moon sailed, in a sky that seemed scrubbed bare by wind; there were very few stars to be seen.
I wonder if the coach makes a noise, Cosmo thought. The luminous hands of the clock told him that he still had five minutes to wait; supposing the coach arrived on time, that was to say. Were phantom coaches always punctual? And how long do they go on running? For ever? And if they cease running, do they stop abruptly, like axed trains, or fade away, every month a little paler, until they are quite gone? Or is it not the passing of time that controls their lifespan, but the number of people who see them? Perhaps, thought Cosmo, if nobody sees the coach, then it isn’t there, like the tree in the quad. He felt very wide awake; all kinds of ideas were whirling through his head. About the old girl in black: could she make an appearance both inside and outside of the mill house, as Con had been able to do? Or did she always stay inside? About Moley – why had he been able to see her? Could it have something to do with his weak heart – the fact that he was a rather delicate boy, sensitive to all kinds of things besides ordinary sounds and sights, perhaps?
Whoooo, whoooo, called a big barn owl, and floated past the window on pale wings that glistened as they caught the moonlight. A fox barked, up in the wood, and a pheasant chickered. In the distance the sound of the weir was like sandpaper continuously rubbing on very smooth wood.
Suddenly the coach was there. He could see it across the meadow, over to his left, travelling along under the black slope of wood, outlined in dim light. It faintly sparkled; like cobwebs with dew on them. So did the horses, three pairs, spanking along at a silent canter. The whole equipage moved without a sound at all, skimming around the perimeter of the meadow.
Gosh! thought Cosmo. What a sight to see – what an extraordinary sight! He watched with held breath. He could hardly believe in his own luck. To think that this happened month after month, and nobody knew or cared, nobody looked at it – except Emma, if she happened to get up for a digestive tablet. Why, you’d think people from all over the world would be coming to look at a turnout like that. You’d think travel companies would be running nightly tours and film companies would be trying to film it. He wondered if it would be possible to catch it with a camera. Another time he must try; but probably, because of the dark, a special exposure would be needed, and that would be a problem with the coach going so fast.
Then something struck him. ‘It’s never been known to stop,’ Emma had said very positively. But now – it was slowing down. And, at the corner of the wood, it came to a total standstill. Cosmo thought he could even see faint puffs of steam from the horses’ nostrils.
The door of the coach opened. And a passenger got out.
As soon as the black figure had stepped down, the door closed again, the horses tossed their heads, and the coach moved off, almost instantly disappearing round the curve of the wooded hillside.
But the passenger who had descended – a black figure in a long cloak, impossible to say whether it were man or woman – began to walk purposefully, at a brisk pace, along the riverbank, and vanished, almost at once, out of Cosmo’s line of vision.
Cosmo did hesitate, then, for a moment.
But he told himself firmly, ‘If I don’t go out now, if I don’t try to discover where that person has gone, I shall never, ever, be able to forgive myself. For the rest of my life I shall know that I am an utter coward. Also – which will be far worse – I’ll know that I let a discovery go by that I might have made.’
He grabbed his torch in one hand, his shoes in the other, and crept down the tiny steep stairs as fast as he dared. Even so he heard Emma mutter and call out as she turned over in her sleep. He replied with a mild, reassuring noise, slipped softly across her brick-floored kitchen, and out through the back door, which was always kept on the latch, never locked. Now – if he ran fast round the cart shed, he ought still to get a sight of the black-cloaked figure on the river-bank before he or she reached the footbridge and either crossed it, or turned in the other direction towards the house …
At this point Cosmo reached the corner of the cart shed. For one moment of mixed relief and disappointment, he thought that the figure had vanished entirely. Then he saw it, motionless, in the middle of the footbridge, looking down at the river. Just like me, thought Cosmo, beginning to lope across the dewy lawn. As though the figure had heard his thought it lifted its head, swung round, and continued on over the bridge to the island.
It seemed to be carrying something.
By the time Cosmo had reached the bridge, his quarry was out of sight, somewhere on the island.
Dared he call out? He was not sure that he dared, because he simply couldn’t imagine what kind of an answer might come back. His scalp crept a little; cold spasms ran through all his fibres; his skin felt icy.
Walking gingerly, feeling with each foot before he put it down, he reached the middle of the bridge.
‘Come along, boy,’ said a cold voice. ‘I am waiting for you.’
Ahead of him, close to the mill building, Cosmo saw the figure in the black cloak. Now he was certain that it was a man; he could not have said exactly why. The arrogant, thin shape of the head and face, perhaps; or the height and build. Though, in fact, the man was not so very tall; nor as large-framed as Mr Marvell. But he moved with a swift, springy stride, walking on rapidly towards the mill. When he reached the high tangled growth of nettle and burdock by the entrance he pulled out a blade and slashed, sharply, right – left – right – the shadowy green stuff toppled away on each side of him like cobwebs.
‘Who are you?’ called Cosmo shakily. Something frightened him about this character – a kind of suppressed rage, visible in his movements – but that kind of fright was a lot easier to bear than the absolute fear of the unknown which had filled Cosmo as he crossed the meadow. Even the sharp, rank smell of the cut nettles had something reassuring about it. With great caution he stepped over the stone threshold and into the mill.
‘Who am I? That’s none of your business. What does it matter to you who I am?’
‘It does matter,’ Cosmo said obstinately. ‘Who are you? Where have you come from in that coach?’
‘Where have I come from? I don’t mind obliging you there.’ Cosmo thought he heard a short, mirthless laugh. ‘I’ve come from Medmenham, if that means anything to you.’
It meant nothing.
‘Medmenham?’
‘The Hellfire Club, you young fool. Why do you suppose I know about you? Why do you suppose I have come here to meet you?’
‘Do you know about me?’ Startled, Cosmo added, ‘What do you know?’
‘Oh, I know. More than you reckon.’
All this time, the other had been moving on and away, through black-velvet dark, and Cosmo, feeling warily ahead of him with hands, feet and a kind of extra sense, had been slowly following. The dark was complete. But now, suddenly, there came a splintering crash of wood falling on stone as something gave way; a great rotting double door had been thrust aside, and a white flood of moonlight poured into the big empty place, revealing high stone walls, a ceiling almost out of sight overhead, a dusty board floor, and, outside the door-hole, a section of huge weed-grown millwheel. The sound and smell of water was all around them.
Cosmo still found it hard to distinguish any features of the cloaked man, who stood with his back to the light. He was visible simply as a black shape, with a fuzz of pale hair. He set down his bag, or whatever it was he carried, and dropped his cloak on the floor. Now he appeared to be dressed in dark, close-fitting clothes, with a gleam of white at the neck.
‘How do you know about me?’ persisted Cosmo, stepping sideways in the hope of obliging
the other to turn his face into the moonlight. When he did so, it was a shock, for his face was familiar, though Cosmo could not have told why, or where he had seen it before. Light-coloured locks falling over the brow; a long, sharp nose; thin, angry lips and thin cheeks which seemed to be overspread with blemishes – scars? pock-marks? The eyes were in shadow, nothing could be seen of them, but the general impression was of a younger person than Cosmo had thought at first – eighteen, nineteen, perhaps? An ugly, unfriendly, unlikeable face, but at least he was a real person, not a monster; as real as Con, real as Sim.
‘How do I know about you? Because of what we do at Medmenham.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Things you wouldn’t understand, little boy! Necromancy, thaumaturgy, divination. We have clever people there, learned people; their studies go so dark and so deep that they can tell the future, yes, to the last grain of sand that will fall as the last pyramid crumbles away into nothing –’
‘Why have you come here, then? Who are you?’ Cosmo demanded again.
‘I am Osmond Curtoys, boy. Does that name make you tremble?’
‘No! Why should it?’
‘Because I am the last of my kind that you will meet. Oh, I know you think you are something remarkable because you met those two stupid children –’
‘You aren’t so very old yourself,’ Cosmo said boldly.
‘Old enough to settle your hash, my young gamecock. Come then, if you are so full of spirit – choose a sword.’
‘What?’
‘Choose a sword!’ Arrogantly, Osmond Curtoys pointed to the bag he had brought with him – it was rather like a golf bag, Cosmo saw, which, unstrapped, proved to contain several swords. It must have been heavy to carry, he thought, almost mechanically selecting one, an épée with a long slender whippy blade and a French handle.
‘En garde!’