The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  ‘Ready to do this, Tobes?’

  ‘No.’ He wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea anymore. That stone looked extremely hard. Shouldn’t he be wearing some kind of harness? What if they dropped him on his head? He might get brain damage.

  ‘Good. And a-one and a-two and a…’

  On three they lifted him with strong arms, holding him by his arms, legs, shoulders and hips, and turning him upside down. Gently they lowered him so that his head just touched the stone – it wasn’t even a bump – three times, to tumultuous cheering from the procession, and even though his mind was racing with this is stupid this is so unbelievably stupid I look like an absolute tit God I hope Maya isn’t watching, by the time they set him upright his heart was thumping and he was grinning like a loon.

  ‘That was actually pretty cool,’ he said.

  ‘Loser!’ shouted Krish from the crowd.

  Which left only Stone Cottage.

  There obviously wasn’t enough space in the garden to admit the hundreds of people in the procession, so numbers had been limited to the church congregation, including the Trustees, and a few specially selected friends. The Gorić family had been very surprised to find themselves on the guest list, but not half as surprised as Toby’s mum when he had suggested it.

  ‘What?’ he’d said. ‘I’m just returning the favour. She asked me to tea, I’m asking her to… whatever this is. I’m just being polite. It doesn’t mean anything.’ But the knowing look in his mum’s eye suggested that it did mean something.

  The Reverend Dobson blessed the garden stone: ‘Dearest Lord, we ask Thee to bless this stone which has stood guard over the lives that have dwelt in this house for generations. Bless this family – Patricia, Peter, and Toby – and bless all the families of Haleswell that shelter in its protection. May they find support and joy and love in one another. Keep them and watch over them, and defend them from the evil that lies within and the evil that lies without.’

  Toby’s dad was leaning on the garden rake as if it was no big thing, but his knuckles were white where he gripped the handle and his eyes were scanning the shrubbery rather than watching the reverend.

  If Hester was there, She remained in hiding.

  The procession continued in its roughly circular route until it came full circle at the holy font in the church, where Rev. Dobson poured the remainder of the water back into the stone basin, and the ritual was complete. The members of the procession drifted apart to enjoy the festival while the Trustees and guests returned to Stone Cottage for drinks.

  * * *

  ‘See?’ said Nash, clapping Peter on the shoulder. ‘Nothing to worry about. You’ve got more to worry about with that lot coming in.’ He nodded at the Gorićs – Maya, her mother, father, and two brothers, the older one scowling around as if looking to pick a fight. ‘Lock up the family silver, eh?’ he chuckled, and poured himself a beer.

  25

  GARDEN PARTY

  ‘SO WHAT’S THE BIG FUSS OVER ALL THESE OLD stones?’ asked Maya, prodding the garden stone with a toe. Toby wanted to tell her not to, but couldn’t possibly begin to explain what he was afraid might happen if she somehow damaged it. Plus, the other half of his attention was taken up with keeping an eye on the side passage to the front of the house where the guests were, in case his mum or dad had noticed that he and Maya had sneaked away.

  ‘It’s like a village tradition. Bit stupid really,’ he said, glancing around.

  Nobody came into the back garden much these days. Although his parents had made it presentable for the Beating, the curtains on that side of the house were permanently closed and the washing line was bare. His mum hung the laundry on radiators around the house, making it smell damp and claustrophobic. No way were they going to entertain guests back here, and he knew he’d get a bollocking if he was found. Dad’s temper in particular was frayed and unpredictable, and Mum’s wasn’t much better.

  And he couldn’t even tell Maya that they were sneaking away at all, because then she’d want to know why his own back yard was off-limits, but she’d asked to see the stone closer up, without all the other people crowding around, and he couldn’t refuse because that too would have been weird.

  ‘What are these markings?’ she murmured, bending close and tracing them with her fingers. ‘They look really old.’

  Ancient sigils of protection carved by the villagers centuries ago to ward off a vengeful undead peasant girl, he thought. ‘Dunno,’ he muttered. ‘Hey, I found something out the other day. Did you know that the name of your road, Pestle, actually comes from the words “pest hole”? Pest as in pestilence as in disease?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So I think that somewhere near your home is the site of an old plague pit – you know like a mass grave?’

  ‘Well that’s reassuring. Where did you find out this particularly delightful piece of information?’

  ‘Oh, just, you know, online stuff,’ he said airily. He was slowly amassing a small library of dead Mrs Drummond’s books on her old bureau in his room, but telling Maya that would have invited more awkward questions. He felt like he was having to second-guess everything he said and did these days.

  * * *

  ‘Maya!’ yelled her little brother Antony. The Ant was standing at the side passage, whacking the bushes with a stick. ‘Maya, there’s cake! Come on!’ And he disappeared again.

  ‘God, he’s such a pain,’ Maya muttered.

  ‘Must be pretty noisy in your house, huh,’ said Toby.

  ‘Oh I don’t really mind,’ she replied, her mood brightening as quickly as it had darkened. ‘It’s kind of nice being surrounded by people.’

  ‘Yeah, must be.’

  As they returned in the direction of the party she said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I think it’s sad that you don’t have any brothers or sisters to share this with.’

  He didn’t know how to respond to that. The issue of his only-child status was something that had never been discussed openly, at least not between him and his parents. He was dimly aware that it was tied in to his mother’s feelings about religion, but it had always hovered, unspoken and accusatory, like the smell of cigarette smoke on clothes. Maya stating it so baldly left him utterly at a loss for how to respond. She left and he followed her, glancing back briefly over his shoulder, expecting to see Hester’s mocking grin but seeing nothing except the stone. Her absence should have made him relieved, but instead it simply made him more worried about where She was and what She was up to.

  Back at the party there were plenty of people to be surrounded by. The Trustees, each with their small number of invited friends and relatives, were chatting in groups on the lawn, his dad was deep in conversation with Mr Gorić about Serbia’s fortunes in the UEFA Nations League, and Mrs Gorić was exclaiming over the beauty of Stone Cottage’s flower beds. Rajko was leaning against one of the front gateposts as if eager to leave, glowering at his phone.

  Also, as the Ant had said, there was cake.

  His mum, determined to throw herself with both feet into the customs of village life, had looked up an old recipe for an Ascension cake and added a few touches of her own. It was basically a large ring-shaped fruit cake decorated with walnuts and glacé cherries that shone like green and red jewels. There was probably more rum in it than was strictly traditional, and she’d even bought a genuine old sixpence from the Thursday flea market to bake into it as a lucky charm. It was Donna Russell, Director of Financial Services, who found it, which prompted a round of good-natured jeers about her rigging the finances. Then Nash nudged her suggestively and said that if she played her cards right she could get lucky with him later. She looked obviously uncomfortable at this and Toby watched his mum take Donna aside later to ask her if she was okay.

  ‘That man is a misogynistic dungheap,’ Russell growled.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Shall I get my man to beat him up for you?’ She thumped a fist into her palm and scowled.

  ‘Hah. Don’t
tempt me. If it comes to that I’ll do it myself.’

  But when the fight came, it was from an entirely predictable direction. Rajko left his post as gate sentinel and strolled over to Toby and Maya. ‘Nice estate you’ve got here, little landlord.’

  ‘Raj,’ Maya warned. ‘Don’t call him that. We’re guests. Be nice.’

  Rajko looked wounded. ‘I am being nice! We’re having a nice conversation, aren’t we? With tea and cakes on the lawn! This is about as nice as it gets! So,’ he turned back to Toby. ‘Have you asked your mum yet about looking into our boiler situation?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  Raj laughed in his face. ‘Bullshit you have.’

  ‘Raj!’ Maya protested, trying not to shout. She took him by the arm and tried to drag him away. ‘Don’t make me get Papa.’

  ‘No, go and get Papa,’ said Raj, his eyes still locked on Toby’s. ‘Maybe then we can have a conversation about something that actually matters instead of all this nice bullshit. Go on, get him!’ He shoved against Maya’s grip and sent her sprawling.

  Without warning, the Green Skull filled Toby’s vision, along with a ringing in his ears that became a roaring, and gradually he became aware that the roaring was his own voice, and he was punching something, kneeling half on the ground and half on somebody’s chest, and he was punching Rajko in the face over and over again with his rat-bitten hand, screaming all the while, and Raj’s lips were split open and bleeding and then adult voices were yelling at him and strong hands were pulling him away and a shocked silence descended over the garden.

  ‘There we go,’ said Nash with quiet satisfaction. ‘There’s the Feenan in him.’

  ‘Shut up, Richard,’ snapped the reverend, and went to see if she could help.

  * * *

  ‘He was your guest!’ shouted Trish. ‘It doesn’t matter what he did!’

  Peter had dragged their son upstairs to his room and then gone back to apologise to their guests, but by then Toby had gone limp, submitting to his mum washing his hands and putting sticking plasters over where his knuckles had split on Rajko’s teeth. He was lying on his bed, arms tightly crossed, and furious, as if he had any right to be.

  ‘Oh, right, so are we all supposed to suddenly start turning the other cheek now that you’ve got religion?’ he retorted. ‘You’re such a hypocrite, Mum!’

  ‘Why? Why am I a hypocrite?’

  ‘Because you’re just doing it to get in the good books with the Trustees, obviously. You’re baking cakes and working at food banks and it’s not you! It’s bullshit!’

  ‘It’s not me?’ She laughed. ‘Toby, you’re fourteen! You haven’t got the faintest idea of what’s me!’

  ‘Well why don’t you tell me, then?’ he yelled. ‘There’s all this shit happening around me and I don’t know what’s going on and why the fuck won’t someone just tell me?!’

  He was crying by the end of it, the heels of his hands pressed deep into his eye sockets as if in an attempt to dam the flow of his tears.

  ‘Oh, Toby, Toby, Toby,’ she moaned, moving to sit beside him and stroking his head. He flinched away but she persisted, and eventually he sagged in towards her side, and she pulled him tight to her – her son, her baby.

  ‘Toby,’ she said, stroking his head, ‘after you were born, things were difficult for me. You don’t need to know the how and the why of it, just that I was so angry and upset that I pushed away something that had once been very important to me. Now, for lots of different reasons – some good, some bad – I’ve decided to let it come back into my life, and it’s making me happy. That’s all. It doesn’t mean I love you or your father any the less, and it’s not about everybody in the household suddenly having to get religion. You’re not going to be made to go to church on Sunday and say grace at dinner times. But I might, and I hope that you’ll respect that even if you don’t share it. Do you think you can do that?’

  He sniffed and nodded.

  ‘And I promise I’ll get better at making bread,’ she added.

  He gave a wet laugh, and they just sat that way for a while together.

  * * *

  Reverend Dobson addressed the Trustees after their guests had all left.

  ‘There is one last service, just for the Trustees and their families. Hester will now test our defences, attempting to profane the blessing and undermine the Beating. Part of what makes it so powerful is the depth of tradition and the willing participation of all the people in the carnival and procession, all those thousands of souls in our community, but we must never forget that first and foremost we are Her targets and must fortify our souls accordingly.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Trish. ‘We’ll be there.’

  ‘Hey, wait up,’ replied Peter. ‘Will we?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Or are you not convinced that there’s something supernatural trying to hurt our family?’

  ‘Oh, I’m convinced. I’m just not so sure that throwing ourselves into the deep end of the happy-clappy pool is necessarily the answer to our problems.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you think the alternative is,’ put in Rev. Dobson. ‘Surely once you accept that the powers of the Devil are real, you must accept that the power of the Holy Spirit is real too.’

  Peter shook his head. ‘See, it’s that either/or thing where it falls down. I’ve seen something I can’t explain – doesn’t mean that I’ve seen the Devil, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean that I’m about to start trusting you people any more than I absolutely have to.’ To Trish, he said, ‘You and Toby go to the service if you want. I have no problem with that. I’ll look after things here. Take care of the tidying.’

  ‘This is a bit more important than the washing-up,’ the reverend objected.

  ‘Come on now, Joyce,’ said Alan Pankowicz. ‘You’ve gained one more convert – why not quit while you’re ahead?’

  She rounded on him. ‘Are you seriously accusing me of exploiting this situation just to get another notch on the altar?’

  ‘No, of course not. Just that you don’t have to hector the pair of them about it. They’ll come to us in their own time.’

  The reverend walked away, shaking her head. ‘This is exactly the sort of gap She likes to exploit,’ she warned.

  ‘Maybe you all should have thought of that before you lied to get us here!’ his father shot after her.

  Pankowicz placed a hand on Peter’s chest. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You won this one. Stand down, mate.’ Mild-mannered though he was, the landlord of the White Hart was also half a head taller and a physical presence not to be ignored. Peter stood down.

  * * *

  After the sideshows had gone and the streets been swept, the glasses washed and the bunting packed away, night fell on the last of the Rogation Sunday festivities, and the dead came out to beat their own bounds.

  26

  THE PARADE OF THE DEAD

  BANISHED TO HIS ROOM IN DISGRACE, AND WITH HIS phone confiscated, Toby fell back on going through Mrs Drummond’s notes. They were cryptic at best, tangential reminders and references to a body of knowledge built up over a long lifetime which he was having to acquire from scratch by going back through her books, and even then he had to find online explanations for most of what he read. Slowly, like teasing the loosening strands out of an intricate knot, isolated insights would fall out of the tangle:

  Hester’s family had lived in the medieval village of Clegeham, which was mentioned in Domesday records but was never in the manorial rolls after 1350. Nor did it appear on any of her old maps.

  Richard Attlowe had been reeve of the village – a sort of combined head man and tax collector.

  Hauntings could often be dispelled by finding the physical remains of the unquiet spirit and giving them a proper burial.

  The problem was that he didn’t know how any of these loose ends fit together and he felt that he was simply amassing a collection of Quite Interesting facts without any idea of how to use them to inform a course of action.
He sat up late into the night, long after both parents had gone to bed, with books spread out around him on the floor of his room, feeling like he was reading around and around in circles.

  And then, just like that, he knew She was in the garden below his window.

  If asked, he couldn’t have said how he knew – maybe repeated exposure to Her presence was knocking loose or waking up some part of his brain that controlled senses people didn’t normally use, like the way birds could migrate for thousands of miles using the earth’s magnetic fields, or sharks could sense a molecule of blood in a million gallons of ocean. She was just suddenly there, and he felt it like he could feel the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  Leaving the books, he crept to his window and peered through the crack between the curtains.

  She had brought Her people again. They crowded as closely as they could to the Beating Stone on the other side of the intangible boundary that it marked, but for once they didn’t seem interested in the house. Neither did She. She didn’t even glance at his window. Instead, She raised in Her fist a stick which was carved down one side with many notches, and struck the stone hard, three times. He distinctly heard each clack! and then the collective clatter as Her followers each hit the stone with the farming tools that they carried.

  Then, still without paying the slightest attention to the house upon which She had been so fixated every other time, She led Her people out of the garden, through the shadows at the side.

  Toby scrambled to get his jeans on. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he told himself as he shrugged on a hoodie. ‘She’ll fuck you up if She gets the chance.’ Socks, trainers. ‘Going out on your own like this is literally the dumbest thing you can do.’ He knew all this. And yet She hadn’t been bothered with the house. Maybe She wasn’t interested; maybe for once She was distracted or too busy conducting Her own beating ceremony. She would be doing a circuit of all the stones, and by the way She’d left it hadn’t seemed that She was finished. He could follow Her, staying on the safe side of the boundary, and maybe learn something that he could use. If She saw him and disappeared then he’d have lost nothing.