by Joan Aiken
So I clung for dear life on to Claud’s ankles while, in about three minutes flat, Father got the ladder from the garage and leant it up against the wall by Claud’s window. Between us – Mother was in the room too, by now, helping me to hold Claud – we got him undone from a thick tangle of coiled and twisted plant tendrils that was wrapped all over him. Judging by the mass of stuff, you would have thought he’d hung there for days, for weeks. I got out my penknife and was cutting through the stems; Mother sawed away with a kitchen carver. Then she ran down to the garden and helped Dad lower my brother gingerly to the ground, among all the leaves and entwined stalks and squashed white flowers.
The plant had grown up the side of the house in a huge matted mass, like ivy.
“It’s bindweed,” said Father, in a tone of total disbelief.
“But poor, poor Claud!” Mother was crying. “Is he alive?”
“His heart’s still beating,” said Father, feeling it.
We carried him indoors and, while we waited for the doctor’s arrival, gave Claud artificial respiration, and pulled armfuls of bindweed loose from him. His face was dark and congested, but he was still breathing – just.
Another five minutes in that position, said the doctor, and he wouldn’t have been – and how, in heaven’s name, had he got into that position?
Needless to say, the doctor wouldn’t accept any of our accounts of what had happened. Or, at least, he wouldn’t have, he said, if he hadn’t been acquainted with old Aunt Lily; but he could believe anything, he admitted, of that old harridan. And he gave Claud a massive injection, to put him to sleep for twelve hours, and recommended that somebody should sleep in his room with him.
“Just in case the bindweed climbs in through the window.”
But it didn’t. It seemed that Aunt Lily had shot her bolt.
Next day Father went out with a set face and a big can of Slaughterweed and painted the poison over every bindweed stem in the garden. Very soon they began to shrivel up and turn black.
“The birds must take their chance,” said Father.
Claud remained thin, white, and silent for weeks after. Months. He said he couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened, except he had a notion he’d heard Aunt Lily grumbling about something.
By and by he went off to university, and now seems quite a changed character; but, personally, I doubt if the change will last.
I asked Sandy, when he brought back my jeans, why he had left our house so fast.
“Because I saw the old girl,” he said. “From the kitchen. I thought I must be going off my chump. I saw her come in the front door and go up the stairs.”
“She must have gone into Claud’s room and tipped him out of the window. Maybe that was what she did to her old man.”
“Maybe he gave her soggy toast too,” said Sandy.
The Road from Rushout Wood
On a frosty Christmas Eve in the early years of this century, it was the misfortune of Hugh Tregear, a young gentleman making his way across country on a bicycle, to knock his front wheel against a rock that lay in the road with such force as to render the bicycle temporarily unfit for further travel. The rim of the wheel was bent out of shape, and a blacksmith would be required, or at least a handyman with better tools at his disposal than our young traveller had about him.
Hugh, a student at the University of Cambridge, was planning to spend the Christmas holiday with his sister. Recently married to a clergyman, she had taken up residence in a small village lying some fifty miles to the east, in a part of the country unfamiliar to our young friend, who had accordingly plotted out his itinerary on a map. Consulting this in the fading light, he now found that his nearest hope of assistance appeared to lie in the village of Goose Acre, some two miles ahead of him.
Kicking aside the rock that had done the mischief, and muttering a few uncomplimentary comments about the elders of a parish who permitted their byways to remain in such a state of disuse and neglect, Hugh began lugging his bicycle as best he could along the rutted and stony lane. This task was rendered even more difficult because the forewheel refused to turn at all, and so the whole front portion of the bicycle had to be hoisted into the air. Our traveller was further burdened with a pack on his back, which contained Christmas presents as well as his toilet articles and change of clothes, so that his progress along the lane was necessarily very slow.
Many times he stopped and mopped his brow, despite the white frost that furred the leaves and thorns in the hedgerows. Many times he was tempted to leave his machine behind the hedge, in hopes of discovering some accommodating person at the next village who might be prepared to come back for it with a horse and cart. But then he recollected that it was, after all, Christmas Eve, and that most of the villagers would, by now, have left their work for the day. He guessed therefore that they might be reluctant to set out again on such a chill, gloomy, and foggy evening. Indeed, he began to wonder if there would be any chance at all of getting his machine repaired at such an hour, on such a day. The prospect of reaching his sister’s house in time for any Christmas celebrations began to recede farther and farther into the doubtful distance.
Fortunately for Hugh, this part of the country was at least very flat, and he had no troublesome slopes to contend with. In fact, after traversing a mile or so of scrubby woodland (he recalled that, on the map, this coppice had been named Rushout Wood) the lane began to descend very gradually into a gentle dip, while its banks on either hand rose higher. Our traveller now thought he began to detect the vague outlines of buildings which stood back at some distance on either side of the road ahead, though in the dusk, which was now thickening fast, it was hard to be sure of this.
“It can’t be a village,” he thought. “Goose Acre must be still at least a mile ahead. But perhaps it may be a large farm with buildings on both sides of the track. And at a farm – especially one of such a size as this seems to be – it is certain they will have tools for mending farm machinery, and perhaps they may be able to help me straighten out my wheel. Though it is odd that I don’t remember seeing a farm marked at this point on the map, I suppose I must have missed it in the dim light.”
“Phew! I certainly shall be glad when I can stop dragging this heavy bike along.”
Before the mishap, he had already been riding for a couple of hours. The encounter with the rock had thrown him to the ground and jarred his shoulder. He began to find himself very weary.
“If the farm people can’t mend the wheel for me,” he thought hopefully, “at least they might offer to put me up for the night.”
And his fancy began to play with agreeable visions of a huge open farm fireplace, thick clusters of glistening berried holly over the mantel, leaping flames, mugs of hot sweet punch, and the cheerful rumble of friendly rustic conversation.
Greatly to his dismay and discouragement, what he now began to hear instead was the distant, angry barking of dogs; more than one dog, Hugh thought – two or three at the very least. Perhaps more. The baying, interspersed with howls and snarls, had a decided note of menace about it. This was not simply the straightforward watchdog alarm signal which warns the householder that a stranger’s step is approaching his boundary; these sounds contained a rasping, raging, rattling reverberation which suggested, rather, a savage longing to get at the invader and tear him to pieces.
He stood still, set down the front wheel of the bicycle, and considered, looking about him in the frosty gloom.
The barking ahead of him intensified in volume. There began to be something positively hysterical, frenzied, in its tone.
How many dogs could they have at this farm, for Heaven’s sake? And on which side of the road was their territory? And were they tied up or loose?
At this juncture Hugh began to debate in his mind whether it would not be better to turn back. He was no coward, and could have dealt well enough, he told himself, with one dog, even if it came at him with hostile intent – but if there were two, or three, or four...? Hi
s tweed jacket and thin flannel trousers would be wholly insufficient protection against their fangs (and now he could not repress a sharp shudder at the prospect of sharp, dirty teeth gouging into his neck and arms and legs), and he had no weapon with which to defend himself.
Hesitating, he glanced back along the lane, which ran straight as a rule, sloping gently upwards out of the little dell. He tried to recall how great a distance lay between the last village he had passed and the point where his accident had taken place. A mile? Two miles? And he had pushed the bike for at least a mile through the wood. That meant probably three miles before he got back to the village – a grubby, depressed little hamlet called Cropham, where he had briefly considered trying to obtain a cup of tea at one of the cottages before deciding that they all looked too dirty and unpromising. No, there was little to be hoped for from Cropham. And yet, Hugh thought, he had really better turn back.
The baying of the dogs ahead of him was now positively bloodcurdling. But when Hugh looked more carefully along the lane towards Rushout Wood, what he saw there changed his attitude so completely that, regardless of what peril lay ahead, nothing in the world would have made him return along the way that he had come. Any danger from the dogs suddenly seemed a minor consideration.
Rushout Wood itself was now no more than a black mass of furry trees that spread out like a wolf’s pelt across the horizon.
Out of the trees, and along the narrow straight road, something was coming at a most unnaturally fast and ungainly pace – something shapeless, oblong, and whitish.
“It is a tree,” Hugh thought confusedly at first. “It is the stump of a silver birch that has been shattered in a gale. With patches of white on its broken trunk, and patches of dark.”
And then he thought: “No, it is not a tree. It is a person.”
And then he thought: “It is putting itself together as it comes towards me.”
At this point Hugh let go of his bicycle, which fell on the track, and glanced desperately about him for a stick or stake or some other weapon to fight off the dogs. Go back and confront that whitish, patched-together thing with its long thin arms extended in front of it – that he would not do, though Cerberus and all the hounds of hell were lying in wait for him at the farm entrance. In fact he could not even bear to look behind him again and see how close the – whatever it was – had come. Snatching up a crooked piece of oak branch, with a few leaves adhering to it, that had fallen from the hedge, he ran on down the road, stumbling in his terrified haste.
There was no chance of climbing the banks – they were now well above his head, and crowned with dark hedges of thorn or holly.
He could not hear any footsteps of the thing behind him – if it had feet – because of the yelling clamour of the dogs ahead.
Now Hugh came to a kind of crossroads where, on either side, gated entrances led to the farm and its outbuildings. The gates hung wide open. To the left, some way back, stood the house – a long, low, shadowy building with numerous dark windows and doors, none of them illuminated. The whole place was shrouded in dimness and a garden-patch with rows of cabbages and a large well-head lay in front of it. To the right was a spacious farm yard with cart sheds and haystacks, a tumbril, vaguely seen in the twilight, loaded with something that looked like roots, a path of frosted nettles, and a rusty harrow.
What he did see were two men.
They stood on either side of the road, looking at him and at one another, each of them in an open gateway. Their faces were not distinguishable to Hugh in the intense gloom. Here, at the deepest point of the lane, the banks were topped with trees and were twice the height of a man.
Both men stood perfectly still. They did not move. But Hugh received from them such a powerful impression of rage – hate – deadly intent – that it made him tremble. The chill of it was like a knife in his breast.
Words from the Bible came to him: “Their faces shall gather blackness”.
“I have got to get out of this place, I have got to,” he thought, “or I’m done for. Either from them, or from what is behind me. And where is that? And do they know it is there?”
He felt himself frozen to the stony ground with terror, and with the fury and malevolence that seemed to be all around him. It seemed to him as if the two men had laid a barricade across the road – a barrier of hate and ill will.
“But they can’t do that,” thought Hugh confusedly. “The road is not theirs. The road is the King’s Highway. Nobody is allowed to block it. No body.”
No spirit?
He knew himself to be in deadly danger – a danger that he could not understand, that surrounded him like a thick and poisonous smoke.
“If I don’t leave this place,” he thought, “I shall be shrivelled up like a leaf in a fire. I shall be lost. I am very nearly lost already...”
“I shall fly into fragments like that thing on the road behind me.”
He tried to gather himself into a single whole. “I am Hugh Tregear, from Church College Cambridge, on my way to visit my sister Fanny. I have a lace shawl for her gift, and coral teething-rings with silver bells for the twin babies. I have a book for Tom, my brother-in-law – a book of poems.”
“If I could – if I could think of a line from one of the poems...”
Then he thought of a line:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall...
Hold the high road...
He began to struggle forward, panting, pushing his way with straining muscles and bursting heart through invisible bands of opposition. “They can’t block the road, they cannot, it is the public highway. It is the right of every citizen to walk it unimpeded. Unopposed.”
Step by step he forced himself to go forward, with the yelling of the dogs in his ears to right and left. He tried not to look at the two men.
But he was obliged to, for their faces burst into flame. “Their faces shall be as flames,” thought Hugh, “all faces shall be burnt therein.”
He heard two appalling screams, of hate, rage, despair. But they were behind him.
Then at last Hugh was free and able to run. Sobbing, gasping, crying out, with his heart rattling against his ribs, he pounded onward.
How far he had run or at what point he fell, he did not know, but there came a moment when exhaustion and terror folded over him and he collapsed into a blank and blessed pit of sleep or fainting, which held him numb and close for many hours.
When he next woke he found, to his amazement, that he was in a bed in a small and sunny bedroom. Not far away he could hear the clamour of church bells.
He pushed himself up, exclaiming confusedly, “Where am I? Oh, my heavens, I must hurry –”
“Now don’t ’ee fret, my dear, don’t ’ee!” soothed a kindly voice. “Reverind Musson, he be over in the church, acelebrating the joyful day, and you being safely preserved; but he’ll be back pressingly. Do’ee lie down, now, and take a nice drop of tea, that’ll do ’e famous good.”
The aproned old lady who spoke now limped out of the room, but returned after a moment, bearing the nice cup of tea and a slice of thin bread-and-butter, which did indeed taste like manna and nectar to our young traveller.
“Where am I?” he asked again.
“Why, you’re in the Rectory at Goose Acre, my dear, and Rector hisself he’ll tell ye, by and by, all ye want to know. Now just bide ye quiet till he comes.”
This Hugh was glad to do. He lay passive in the lumpy hammock-like bed, watching the mild play of flames in the small hearth, and the rooks circling the stone church tower which he could see through the window. And presently the bells, which had gone silent, rang again in a joyful hurricane of final celebration.
Then there came a step on the stair, and a thin, black-haired man with an intelligent, penetrating face, came into the room.
“Mr Tregear?” said this person. “We are so very glad to see you better.”
Hugh was astonished. “How did you know my name?”
“Why
,” he said, smiling, “I took the liberty of examining the papers in your pocket and found the letter from your sister. So then I took the additional liberty of sending her a telegram to inform her that you had suffered a minor accident but were in good hands here, and would be able to join her later on.”
“Oh, sir! Thank you!” exclaimed Hugh, immensely relieved. “She will have been so worried. I do feel in good hands – indeed I do! But what happened to me? Where did you find me?”
“You were lucky,” said the Rector gravely. “You were wonderfully lucky. We gather that you had suffered a mishap to your bicycle? And so were pushing it, walking along the lane from Cropham, that runs through Rushout Wood and passes the ruin of Oldhouse Farm?”
“Yes – yes – that is what happened.” Hugh was puzzled. “The ruin? But surely – ? In any case, how do you know these things?”
“I had been visiting a sick parishioner last night. I was driving back in my motor car. I saw you lying in a heap at Cropham crossroads. So I brought you home, guessing what might have occurred. And this morning Sam Walsingham, one of my farmer parishioners, went out with a haycart and recovered your bicycle. (We deduced the bicycle from the fact that you were wearing trouser clips.) And of course,” ended the Rector obscurely, “there is no danger at Oldhouse in daylight.”
“Danger? Then –”
“My dear young friend, are you better? Do you find yourself restored enough to rise and share my Christmas meal? I shall be glad to give you the whole explanation, but I believe that you may sustain it better after some solid food. If what my excellent Mrs Rutter has prepared may be so designated.”
Hugh exclaimed that he was well, quite well enough to get up, and would be very happy indeed to get up and share the Rector’s Christmas lunch.
Eyeing himself in the wash-stand mirror, though, as he shaved, he was quite astonished at the thin, haggard face that looked back at him. It seemed to have aged by seven years since yesterday.
“Now, draw up a chair to the fire,” said the Rector, when the festive meal had been despatched, “and I will tell you about the Hernshaw family who lived at Oldhouse Farm a hundred years ago.”