‘Come on, now, kiffy man, let’s be having my feet free! If I’m not walking the moors again before ten minutes is up, I’ll be carving a curvy whistle out of thy rib, I promise thee that. The Kiffy Man’s Lament, that’s what I’ll be after playing thee, except that thou’ll be naught but bones and natlins by then, and deaf to even the prettiest tune.’
Rob wrenched the iron hoops from around Esus’s bucket boots. Then, half-stifled, he pushed the heavy tarpaulin aside and struggled his way out of the tent. He realised then that the vibration that had been shaking the house had abruptly stopped.
‘There,’ he told Esus. ‘You can go now. You can leave this house and never come back.’
Esus slowly eased his legs off the trestle. He sat there for a while, tugging on his gauntlets again and staring at Rob with his silvery eyes.
‘Tell me, kiffy man, what is the world like now?’
‘I don’t think you’ll recognise it, although the moors haven’t changed that much. Not nearly so many trees.’
‘One hundred and twenty thousand and sixteen days have passed, and I have aged not. I’ll need thee to stay with me, to be my servant and my guide.’
‘I’ve set you free. I’m not doing any more.’
‘Thou believest that thou hast a choice, thou bag of whistles?’
‘The moors are out there. There’s plenty of places where you can hide yourself.’
‘I will need hounds! Thou willst have to acquire hounds for me.’
‘Esus, those days are gone – long gone. You can’t go hunting for babies any more.’
‘There must still be chrisemores. Don’t tell me that the world has become more devotional to that skyfool.’
Rob held up the pickaxe in his left hand, and shook it, to show that he meant business. His chest was heaving and his throat was so constricted with stress that he could barely speak. ‘Listen – I’ve released you so that my son and all the other people trapped in this house can go free. But that’s all I’m doing for you. I’m going now, and you can get yourself out of here as soon as you like.’
He backed away from the tent, still holding up the pickaxe, and kicking aside some of the bones on the floor with his heels. Esus stood up, and he was so tall that his fraying white hair touched the joist above his head. He took one unsteady step towards Rob, and then another, but it was obvious that centuries of being shackled to that trestle had atrophied his muscles and tightened his tendons. He was a supernatural creature, but he still needed a physical presence so that he could walk the earth. As Rob’s divinity teacher had once told him, ‘Even Satan has to have a heart.’
Rob reached the cellar steps. Esus was still coming towards him, but very slowly, his bucket boots shuffling through the bones and the slimy rags.
‘I’ll leave the front door open for you,’ Rob told him. ‘Once you’re gone, though, I never want to see your face again.’
Esus didn’t answer him. He kept on coming, stiffly and painfully, but relentlessly, gritting his sharp crowded teeth with every step that he took. Rob mounted the steps and climbed up to the top, stepping out through the broken hole in the wall and back into the hallway.
Because the vibration had stopped, Vicky opened the drawing-room door and looked out.
‘Rob? Rob! You’re all right! Have you done it? Has it gone?’
‘Don’t come out yet, Vicks. He’s still down there.’
Rob went across to the front door and opened it wide. Although the courtyard outside was wet and puddly, it had stopped raining now. Please let it be wet enough to weaken him, even if it doesn’t do for him completely.
He stood at the foot of the staircase, holding up the pickaxe in both hands now, breathing hard, waiting for Esus to appear in the cellar doorway. He could hear Esus groaning and his boots scraping with every step that he took, but he couldn’t yet see him in the darkness.
He was still waiting when he heard whispering coming from upstairs. To begin with, only two or three whisperers, but then more. Soon it sounded as if the landing was crowded with whisperers, all speaking quickly and excitedly. He looked up, and saw five tough-looking men peering over the balustrade. Four of them were shaven-headed, but one had black hair greased up like a shark’s fin. These men were whispering to each other, too, with great intensity.
‘Hey – you!’ Rob called up to them. ‘Who are you?’
They carried on whispering to each other, but didn’t answer him. The one with the shark’s-fin hair turned away, though, and Rob saw him beckoning, and after a few moments a thin-faced priest appeared, wearing a dog collar. He made the sign of the cross, and said, ‘Is it you, my brother, who has released the malevolence that has been holding us here?’
‘Esus. Yes. He’s coming out of the cellar right now.’
‘We are whole again, may God bless you. All of us are whole again.’
‘Is my son there? Little Timmy?’
‘We dare not come down until the malevolence has quit this house completely.’
‘I said, is my son there? Timmy? He’s only five. Timmy! Are you up there? Timmy! It’s Daddy! Can you hear me? Martin – are you there?’
The priest turned away, and Rob started to climb the stairs. At that moment, though, Esus stepped out from the cellar doorway, so tall that he had to stoop down under the header, his white hair wild, dusty cobwebs flying from his shoulders. He saw Rob on the opposite side of the hallway and screamed, ‘Here! ’Tis thee I want with me now!’
He came hobbling across to the staircase, but Rob swung the pickaxe at him, right and left, and although he didn’t hit him, Esus took a staggering step back, and then another.
Rob ran for the open front door. If he could get Esus out of the house, maybe Timmy and all the rest of the whisperers would be free of his curse at last. He crossed the courtyard, splashing in the puddles. When he reached the gateway, he looked over his shoulder and saw that Esus was already out of the front door and coming after him – limping, as if one knee had seized up, but so long-legged that he was gaining on him fast.
He pushed his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out his car keys. Running towards his Honda, he pressed the key fob and tugged open the driver’s door. He was about to climb in when he realised that Esus had almost caught up with him, so he turned around and slung the pickaxe at him as hard as he could. It hit Esus on his upraised arm, and he stumbled down onto the shingle on one knee, which gave Rob just enough time to scramble into the driver’s seat, jab the key into the ignition and start the engine. The door was still half open, though, and Esus picked himself up and made a grab for the handle.
‘Thou cans’t escape Esus!’ he screamed. ‘No man can’t never escape Esus!’
Rob jammed his foot on the accelerator pedal and the Honda’s rear wheels showered up shingle before it slewed along the driveway towards the road. Esus was still hanging on to the handle and his boots were dragging along the ground, so Rob opened the door wider and then slammed it.
He looked quickly in his mirror, expecting to see Esus lying on the ground behind him, but instead he heard a loud thumping and a scrambling sound on the Honda’s roof. Then he heard something scrabbling at his side window, and when he glanced to his right he saw that Esus’s curved fingernails were clawing at the glass. Somehow he had managed to climb on top of the car and was clinging on to the window frames.
Rob felt a sickening surge of helplessness. Esus had the body of a man, or a body that resembled a man, but he was a malevolent spirit, not a man, with powers that could only be guessed at. If he had been able to kill Francis and Father Salter so easily, he must be able to kill him, too – drag the skeleton out of his body like boning a turkey. He could only guess that he hadn’t killed him already because he wanted him to be his servant and to familiarise him with a world he hadn’t seen since the late seventeenth century.
Esus drummed his fist on the roof. ‘Stop!’ he roared. ‘Stop or I shall kill thee!’
Rob swerved the Honda from one side of t
he lane to the other, trying to shake Esus off. He could see the toes of his bucket boots in the top of the back window, so he must be spread-eagled on the roof. He swerved again, and again, and deliberately drove up the grassy bank on either side, so that the car jolted and bounced, but Esus clung on as tightly as if he were magnetic.
Water, Rob thought. I need to find water. A leat, a river. A ford.
He sped south on the Dousland Road at over seventy miles an hour, through Yelverton, swerving as violently as he could. Several other drivers blew their horns at him and as he weaved his way through the middle of the town he came close to colliding with a bus. Still Esus held on, and started hammering even harder on the roof. As Rob turned down Meavy Lane, with the Honda’s tyres shrieking operatically, Esus smashed his windscreen into a milky jigsaw, and suddenly he was blinded.
He hit the high banking on the side of the road and there was a loud crunch as his nearside mudguard struck a tree stump. He managed to steer back into the middle of the lane and then he punched at the windscreen with his fist. His first punch only made the shattered glass bulge outwards, but then he punched it again, even harder, and he succeeded in knocking a jagged hole in it that allowed him to see enough of the lane up ahead.
‘Stop! I give thee but one more chance!’ roared Esus. But Rob was surging with adrenaline now and his confidence was beginning to grow. He needs me, he thought: he really needs me, or else he would have killed me already. He’s found himself in a world that he doesn’t understand at all, speeding along unfamiliar roads, desperately clinging on to a vehicle that can travel faster than anything he has ever seen, a vehicle without any horses.
After he had driven through Hoo Meavy, he saw that he was approaching the Dewerstone car park. Water, he thought. The River Plym. He slewed into the car park in a shower of grit, and as he did so an attendant in a high-vis jerkin strode forward, waving at him frantically to slow down and stop.
‘Hi! Stop, there! You’ve someone on your roof!’
Rob ignored him and circled around the parked cars until he reached the wooden footbridge at the far side of the car park. The bridge rattled loudly as he drove over it, and onto the rough granite track that had once been a tramway for iron miners. He knew where he was going: the tramway wound a steep and tortuous path up through the woods, all the way to the summit known as the Devil’s Rock, two hundred metres above sea level. The Honda lurched and bumped and its suspension clonked but Rob kept his foot down. One of Esus’s talon-like hands appeared in the hole that he had punched in the windscreen and started to tear away the broken glass, piece by piece, furiously pulling it free from its polyvinyl interlayer.
Rob drove higher and higher through the woods. The sun had come out and the light flickered through the trees like a stroboscope. He scattered a group of hikers, who shouted obscenities at him and shook their fists, and as he spun the wheel to avoid another elderly walker with a backpack he struck a glancing blow against a fir tree, denting his offside wing and cracking his headlight.
‘Stop!’ screamed Esus. He had now torn away so much of the windscreen that he was able to lean over from the roof and stare in at Rob, his face upside down, his white hair flailing wildly and his silver eyes even more wolf-like with anger. ‘Stop, or I will pull thy raymes out now!’
He reached into the car with one hand and seized the top of the steering wheel, twisting it violently from side to side. The Honda collided with one tree after another, with a series of loud, hollow bangs, but Rob slammed his foot down even harder on the accelerator, half-lifting himself off the seat so that he was pressing down on the pedal with his full weight.
With its tyres squittering on the granite, the car shot forward, straight towards the brink of the Dewerstone. Beyond that was nothing but a two-hundred-foot drop to the River Plym below. At the last moment, Rob kicked down on the brake pedal and yanked up the handbrake. The car tilted, nose down, and for a split second he was sure that he was too late, and that the car was going to go flying off the precipice and into the air.
In that same split second, a picture flashed into his mind of Vicky bringing up Timmy without him, but he thought, At least I’ve saved Timmy from Allhallows Hall.
The Honda’s front wheels went over the edge, but then it lurched to an abrupt stop, its back wheels jammed into a deep crevice in the rocks. At the same time, Esus lost his grip on the roof and slid forward, head first, and fell. As he plummeted down, he let out a scream like no scream that Rob had ever heard before. It sounded like a choir of demons, twenty demons rather than one, each voice shrieking louder than the other. It grew fainter and fainter and then, except for the softly fluffing wind, there was silence.
Rob gingerly eased open his door and stepped out onto the rocks. Several people were running towards him, but he went to the very edge and looked over.
He was in time to see that, far below him, Esus had plunged into the river, which was fast-flowing with foaming rapids. At first it looked as if he had miraculously survived the fall from the top of the Dewerstone, because he was thrashing his arms and legs. But then Rob saw that a dark streak was bleeding away from him and flowing away downstream. The streak grew darker and blacker and wider, and after a minute Rob realised what he was looking at.
‘Here, bloody hell – did I just see what I thought I just saw?’ said a grey-haired hiker, hurrying up to stand beside him.
‘No,’ said Rob, without looking at him. ‘You didn’t.’
‘I saw a fellow falling right off of the top of your motor there, I’m sure of it.’
‘No,’ said Rob. ‘There was nobody.’
‘Well, my eyes must have deceived me, then, because I swear blind that’s what I saw.’
‘Yes,’ said Rob. ‘They must. Deceived you, I mean.’
The black streak in the River Plym gradually thinned out, like an oil slick, and soon it had slithered off between the rocks altogether. So John Kipling had been right that Esus was afraid of water, and now Rob had seen why. It could dissolve him.
Esus, sometimes known as the Bonebiter, or the Fluter, the demon mistaken by Dartmoor folk for the Devil, or Old Dewer as they called him, had melted away in the water that he had always dreaded.
A woman in a woolly hat and a bulky red sweater came up to Rob and said, ‘Are you all right, love?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ he said. ‘It’s still too early to say. But thank you for asking.’
40
It was three hours before he could return to Allhallows Hall. Two police officers came from Crownhill to question him and give him a breathalyser test, and a tow truck had to be called in from Tavistock to haul his damaged Honda down off the Dewerstone.
‘There’s witnesses here that say they saw a man hanging on to the roof of your car as it come up through the woods, and that he went toppling off when you come to a sudden stop at the edge here.’
Rob shook his head. ‘No. It wasn’t a man. It was only a black rubbish bag full of old clothes that I was taking to the Cancer Research charity shop in Plymouth.’
‘Those two climbers over there, they’re dead sure that it was a man.’
‘You haven’t found a body in the river, have you?’
‘No, we haven’t. But we haven’t found no rubbish sack full of old clothes, neither.’
‘Maybe the bag burst open and they just got washed away.’
The police officers looked at each other and shrugged. Without a body they had to accept what Rob had told them, and even though he had taken a glass of his father’s whiskey, he was well under the limit for alcohol. They cautioned him and said that they would be considering a charge of dangerous driving, but that he was free to go. In fact, they would give him a lift back to Sampford Spiney.
While he waited for the police officers to make notes and take photographs, he borrowed a phone from one of them so that he could call Vicky to tell her he was safe. He didn’t mention Esus because the police were in earshot.
All he said was, ‘It’s all
over, Vicks. He’s gone, and he’s never coming back. Is Timmy there? And Martin?’
‘I don’t know, Rob. I just don’t know. The whisperers won’t come downstairs and they won’t let any of us go up. One of them’s a priest and he says they’re still afraid. “Mortally fearful”, that’s what he said.’
‘What are they afraid of? He’s gone.’
‘They say they need proof that he’s never coming back. They still think he’s going to take his revenge on them because they were the only reason he was kept shut up in the cellar for so many hundreds of years. They’re absolutely terrified that he’s going to trap them in time all over again, or else he’s going to kill them.’
‘Have you asked this priest if Timmy’s there?’
‘Yes, but he wouldn’t say.’
‘Listen, darling. Try to stay calm. I’ll be back as soon as I can. But you can tell that priest, you can tell all those whisperers, they’re free now.’
He looked across at his dented and damaged Honda, and saw that one of Esus’s gauntlets was still caught in the handle of the driver’s door.
‘Tell them I can bring them proof.’
The police drove him back to Allhallows Hall. Both officers were friendly and chatty, although one of them kept shaking his head and laughing and saying, ‘I’ve seen motocross before, but I’ve never yet seen nobody try to drive up to the top of the Dewerstone. I can’t think for the life of me what must have been going through your head to do that.’
Rob smiled tightly but didn’t answer. He couldn’t stop thinking of Esus staring through the shattered windscreen at him, upside down, his silver eyes shining with hatred.
When they turned into the driveway of Allhallows Hall, he saw that there were two other police cars there already, as well as DI Holley’s car, and John Kipling’s, too.
The House of a Hundred Whispers Page 29