Long Lankin (27 page)

Suddenly I realized Roger was holding me up. My knees had given way. I had sunk down halfway to the floor.

“It’s gone! It’s gone!” croaked Roger.

“Pete! Where’s Pete?” I panted. We roused ourselves and rushed out through the doorway.

Pete was crashing through the bushes on the other side of the ditch, then he jumped over it and landed on the bank.

“We going home now?” he chirped.

“Yeah,” said Roger weakly. “Yeah, mate.”

“Blimey, what’s the matter with you two? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

As Pete leaped through the wheat on his way to the gap in the hedge, Roger and I stood and stared at the flattened trails through the field. One track, ours, curved towards the lane. In the other track something large and heavy was moving, on all fours, towards the edge of the graveyard beyond the hedgerow at the bottom. Where the wheat had been crushed, the channel ran blood-red with the scattered petals of broken poppies.

We put together some matchbox boats for Dennis and Terry, like the ones Dad had made in the flood, a little twig pushed through a square of paper for a sail stuck on with a small ball of Plasticine. The Plasticine has to be placed just right or the boat will keel over.

We pushed them round the pond with garden canes and had quite a nice little fleet going, until Dennis picked an argument with Terry, went crazy, chucked handfuls of stones in the water, and sank half of the boats. When Terry wailed, Dennis hit him with his cane and made a huge red mark. Mum came running out of the house and walloped him.

Dinner was toad-in-the-hole and mash, but I hadn’t much of an appetite. Mum felt my forehead and asked if I was coming down with something. After dinner we turned on the hose. Dennis and Terry loved it, whooping up and down the garden in their pants, shrieking, while Cora and I chased after them, spraying their legs with jets of cold water, but with no heart for laughing.

Cora became more and more quiet as the afternoon wore on.

“I’d better get back,” she said as we hid behind the shed to avoid the washing-up. “Auntie Ida and Mimi’ll be home by now.”

I walked with her up Ottery Lane. The shadows of the trees were long on the road.

“I’m going to try and find that tin box,” she said. “It’s got a load of Mr. Scaplehorn’s things in it. I bet there’s stuff in there we should know.”

“You’re going to have to be careful, though,” I said, “or you’ll end up with another black eye.”

Cora looked down at the ground. “I should have said before,” she said. “Maybe I’m going mad, but last time I went in that room, I heard this woman, singing. . . .”

“Was it your auntie Ida?”

“No, she’d gone outside in the rain, to the chickens.”

“Maybe somebody else is living in the house. Have you asked her?”

“Roger, there ain’t nobody else living in that flaming house, I’m telling you!”

“They could be hiding.”

“Why would anybody be flippin’ well hiding? Use your blinking common sense.”

“Are you saying it’s a ghost, then?”

“How the flaming hell would I know? I — I asked her who she was.”

“Flippin’ heck! Did she say anything?”

“
‘Kittie.’
She said,
‘I am Kittie.’
”

“We’ve — we’ve seen some queer things, Cora.”

“Forget it. I’m most probably just going bonkers. That flippin’ house’d drive anybody up the wall.”

“Shall I call for you tomorrow?”

“No, don’t worry. I’ll bring Mimi up. Cheerio.”

Cora crossed over the main road by herself.

I knew it wasn’t Roger, or Pete, or me it was hunting. It wanted smaller children than we were. That’s why it left us alone in the pillbox. It took little ones like Anne and — and Mimi, like the small souls in the graveyard.

I reached the brow of the hill. As I stood and listened to the trickling of the stream running underneath the lane, an evening blackbird warbled its loud, clear song from the hedgerow. I took a few paces forward and shivered. Crossing over the hidden water, I felt I was moving from somewhere that was safe and comforting to another place altogether, a place that was uncertain and dangerous.

I gazed across the marshes. Among the soft grey reed beds, the warm light was glimmering golden on the water in the pools. Perhaps there are places people should never live in, never even go to, no matter how beautiful they seem to be.

Auntie Ida and Mimi weren’t back yet. I knew it even before I reached Guerdon Hall. As I drew near, I could hear Finn howling. I imagined his claws had been clattering aimlessly over the floorboards all day long.

I was too scared to go round to the back of the house on my own. I didn’t even want to go over the bridge.

Instead, I picked my way through the old farm machinery to the big barn with its door half hanging off. The walls were dark brown wooden boards, the roof tiled like the house. A rusty old gent’s bike lay half-hidden in the dirty straw, its tyres flat as pancakes. It looked as if the barn hadn’t been cleaned out since cows were there. I pulled some of the straw over to the doorway and made myself a cushion, then sat down to watch for anything coming along the Chase.

Tears began to spill out of my eyes. I didn’t want to be here with that great dog howling like nobody was going to let it out ever again, and no one near me, just all that sky, and the trees rustling and the dried mud in the road. I wanted to be far away from that big old sinking house and the skeleton cottages opposite, with their weeds and broken windows like empty blind eyes. What were all these things that were happening here, and that had happened before — horrible things that I couldn’t understand?

I wanted to be back in Limehouse — Dad with his feet stuck up on the mantelpiece reading the
Eagle
and Mum in the kitchen making scrambled egg on toast.

I should have known Hugh Mansell would let us down. Even the best of clergymen have their weaknesses, just like the rest of us. Father Mansell’s is his fondness for whisky. A couple of glasses of Buchanan’s with Edgar Selwyn in Daneflete and the last thing on his mind would have been the six-forty train.

I only hope he and the Wolseley got home in one piece. I waited for him too long, then carried Mimi over two miles before a bus came.

Where is Cora? If she’s at the Jotmans’, how will I get her home? Surely she won’t be down here on her own.

I trudge down the darkening Chase. Mimi is heavy in my arms. In her sleep, she still clings to Sid and the coloured windmill on a stick from the seaside. Her pretty smocked dress is smeared with chocolate sauce.

In the house, Finn is howling like a wolf. As a single star begins to twinkle low in the sky beside the rising moon, a small dark figure moves towards me from the barn.

After slipping off Mimi’s grubby dress and tucking her up in bed, I went down and made Auntie Ida a cup of tea. She was flaked out in the kitchen, rubbing her feet through her stockings. We ate some cold sausages left over from the evening before, then cleared up the bloody mess by the front door where Finn had helped himself to the rabbit and scattered and squashed the tomatoes.

I only vaguely remember dragging myself back upstairs for the night, too exhausted to think about searching for the box.

I expected to sleep long into the morning, and for Auntie to be so weary that she would let me be, but I was woken by a bark, followed by the sound of the back door opening then shutting. In the quiet of the early morning I heard the big iron key turning in the back-door lock, its loud distinctive click echoing down the stone passage leading to the kitchen. Finn barked again.

Gripped by both bewilderment and fear, I jumped out of bed and dashed to the window. I pulled aside the curtains a little and peeped out. Hearing footsteps and looking down, I saw, in the half-light of dawn, Auntie Ida, wearing her coat and scarf, walking along the path under my window. She continued round the corner of the house and out of sight. Where was she going? It was far too early to get the milk. Why would she leave the two of us alone?

I was too alert to return to bed, so decided that now Auntie had gone out, I would look for Jasper Scaplehorn’s box. I’d heard Auntie locking us in. Finn was downstairs. If anything happened, I would hear him bark.

I picked up Mimi’s windmill from where it had dropped on the floor and put it next to her on the pillow, then I opened the door and set off along the landing. I passed Auntie’s empty bedroom, then paused where the passage turns to the left, just before the three steps, and looked out of the window to check she wasn’t coming back. In the garden, pale sunlight was spreading itself across the grass until each moist blade glittered in its own coat of dew. There was no sign of her.

I ran up the three steps, along the passage, down the other side, and through the musty corridor, then stopped outside the door at the end and lifted the latch.

The room and the far room beyond were dark as night, the windows obscured by some heaving, humming mass, shutting out the light of the coming day.

I moved forward across the floorboards, leaned in towards the window, then reeled back in shock.

It was thickly covered with huge flies, crawling over the diamond panes, their fat black-and-white bodies packed tightly together. Flesh flies — flies that don’t bother to lay eggs, just maggots. Nan told me about them once.