S. J. Bolton

by Blood Harvest

She stopped again. ‘You’re going to have to explain.’

  ‘Well, it’s another Heptonclough tradition. They have a lot of them up here. This one dates back to the Middle Ages, when there was a charnel house adjoining the church. Every thirty years or so, graves would be opened, the bones dug up and placed in the charnel house. When it was full, they were burned. On a bone fire, which later became known as a bonfire. I had the full history the other day from my churchwarden’s father, whom I’d like to describe as a delightful old man, but that would be pushing it. So I can tell you as much as you want to know about our friends over there, and probably more. For example, they’re all made following the same pattern that old Mr Tobias devised himself fifty years ago.’

  ‘This is all rather gross. What sort of bones. Surely not hu—’

  ‘Well, let’s hope not. Although I wouldn’t be entirely surprised. They’re fashioned mainly from natural materials. Most of the framework is willow and they’re stuffed with straw, hay, corn, old vegetables. Each family in the village provides at least one. It’s their way of getting rid of the year’s rubbish – old clothes, paper, bits of wood, anything organic, especially bones. Which they have rather a lot of at this time of year because they’ve just finished slaughtering livestock for the winter. They freeze, dry and salt the meat, boil up the bones for soup and jelly, and then, well I guess they just don’t have enough dogs. If you’d phoned me when you got here like you promised I could have met you and spared you the shock.’

  Evi was still looking round the ruin. ‘It must be one hell of a bonfire,’ she said.

  ‘I think they are the bonfire. Must be quite a sight, although I think I might give it a miss. And don’t worry about saying “hell” on sacred ground. I’m becoming surprisingly open-minded.’

  Was she imagining it or was that a glimpse of the old Harry? ‘I’ll bet you are,’ she said. ‘Is the fire here? On church property?’

  ‘Over my dead … although maybe I should be careful what I say. No, it’s in a field not too far away. You’d have ridden past it the day we met. It’s where they held a sort of harvest ceremony a few weeks ago.’ He stopped.

  ‘The one you asked me to?’ she said softly.

  ‘Yes, the night of our aborted first date.’

  She had nothing to say. She had to start walking again. She had to get in the car and drive off. Before …

  ‘You look lovely, by the way,’ he said.

  … before he said something like that.

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed, letting her eyes fall to his feet and then rise back up to his face. ‘You look like a vicar.’

  He laughed briefly and seemed to pull away from her. ‘Well, what you see is what you get, I suppose,’ he said. He set off walking again, a little ahead of her this time. Then he stopped and turned back. ‘Was that the problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Problem?’ she stalled. No, Harry, that hadn’t been the problem.

  ‘Is that why you changed your mind?’ he said.

  She hadn’t changed her mind. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said. What could she possibly tell him? ‘I can’t even explain.’

  The smile that had been dancing around at the corners of his mouth faded. ‘There’s really no need,’ he said. He was holding his arm out again. She took it. ‘If you change it back again, you know where I am.’

  She really hadn’t changed it in the first place. They were almost at the churchyard entrance. Two or three minutes away from saying goodbye. The sudden appearance of the woman took them both by surprise.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, glaring at Evi.

  Harry was startled. He’d been engrossed with the woman at his side. He hadn’t noticed the other one standing just beyond the church wall.

  ‘Hello, Gillian,’ he said, cursing his luck. He’d wanted to take his time saying goodbye to Evi, to see if maybe … ‘Did you need to see me?’ he went on. ‘The vestry’s open. Actually, it shouldn’t be. I’m supposed to be locking it up every time I leave the building. I guess I was distracted.’ He smiled down at Evi. She wasn’t looking at him any more. Her eyes were fixed on Gillian. He felt the pressure of her hand on his arm lighten. He pressed his own arm closer to his ribcage and laid his free hand on top of hers.

  ‘Why are you here?’ demanded Gillian again, taking her eyes off Evi’s face only to glare at her hand, now trapped on Harry’s arm. ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘Gillian, why don’t you wait …’ he began.

  Gillian’s head jerked up. ‘What was she saying? She’s not supposed to—’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ interrupted Evi. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about my patients – ever – without their permission. So I don’t do it. I came here to see Reverend Laycock about something else entirely.’

  ‘We weren’t talking about you,’ said Harry, feeling the need to be perfectly clear. He looked from Gillian to Evi. The younger woman looked angry and bewildered. Evi just looked sad. A sudden thought struck him. Oh good grief.

  ‘Actually, Gillian, I have a meeting at one of my other churches in fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Sorry, clean forgot. If you need to talk, you could phone me at home this afternoon. Excuse us now. I have to see Dr Oliver to her car.’

  Gillian walked up the path away from them and stopped, just out of earshot. Harry walked Evi out of the churchyard and the few yards to her car. ‘This problem we have,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘You know, the one that’s getting in the way of our first date.’

  Evi was fumbling in her bag. She didn’t answer him.

  ‘Did we just encounter it?’ he asked.

  She’d found her keys. She pressed the remote control and the car unlocked. He released her arm and moved in front of her to open the car door. She still wasn’t looking at him but had turned back to the abbey ruins.

  ‘It’s not really any of my business, I know,’ she said, folding up her stick and dropping it on the passenger seat. ‘But is it not odd, to have all these figures on church property?’ Her briefcase went in the car too. She seemed determined not to look at him. ‘I’m just thinking about the Fletcher boys,’ she went on. ‘I imagine this is a pretty scary sight when it’s dark.’

  ‘Oh, trust me on that one,’ said Harry. Well, if she was refusing to look at him, he could stare all he liked. There was a tiny freckle just below her right ear.

  She’d turned – and caught him. ‘So can’t you …’ She left the question hanging.

  ‘Evi, I’ve only been here a few weeks. If I start throwing my weight around now it could be disastrous for my tenure here.’

  She opened her mouth, but he stopped her. ‘Yes, I know. I’m putting my career before the welfare of two young children and I really feel quite bad about that, but the fact is I am not solely in charge of this property. I can talk to my churchwardens, see if the figures can’t be taken down sooner than planned. I can speak to my archdeacon. If he supports me I can probably stop it happening next year.’

  The fingers of her right hand had closed on top of his on the driver door. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to give you a hard time. But they’ll be here for another seven days.’

  ‘No. They’ll be here for four.’ Did she realize she was touching him?

  ‘Bonfire Night’s on—’

  ‘The good folks round here don’t light their bone fire on November the fifth,’ he answered. ‘Apparently they don’t set much store by defeating the Catholic plot to blow up parliament. They party on the second of November.’

  ‘All Souls’ Day?’ she asked him.

  ‘I thought you weren’t a churchgoer? But you’re right. November the second is All Souls’ Day, when we pray for the departed who may not yet have reached God’s kingdom. Only up here they call it something else. They call it Day of the Dead.’

  41

  31 October

  THERE OUGHT TO BE A BIG MOON ON HALLOWE’EN.IT FELT right somehow. The moon Tom was looking at now, rising so quickly he could almost see the tra
il of silver light it left behind, wasn’t quite full but looked huge in the sky all the same. It was the ghostly galleon of poems, gleaming down at him from just above the tallest archway in the abbey ruin.

  Hallowe’en was usually a pretty big thing in the Fletcher house, probably due to Tom’s mother being American. Not this year, though. Nobody celebrated Hallowe’en in Heptonclough; everyone was too busy getting ready for the Day of the Dead celebrations on the second of November. So the Fletcher children had one solitary jack-o-lantern sitting on the sitting-room window ledge, facing the garden where no one but them could see it.

  Tom was sitting at the window in his room, hidden behind the curtain. When he did that, nobody could see him. Just lately, it was proving a useful way of finding out all sorts of things he wasn’t supposed to know.

  Like, for instance, that his mother had been trying hard to get all the bone men taken down from the ruins. Joe and he had counted twenty-four of them that morning, five more than when they first appeared. His mother absolutely hated them and had been on the phone to Harry just ten minutes ago. She’d come very close to falling out with him.

  Twenty-six. He’d just counted twenty-six bone men around the abbey ruins. There’d only been twenty-four this morning. Sometime during the day two more had been added. Excellent!

  That morning, at breakfast, Joe had asked if they could make one of their own. Their mother had said a very firm no, glancing at Tom nervously, but he honestly wouldn’t have minded. He thought they were quite cool, even funny in their way. There was one with jodhpurs, a pair of old wellies and a riding hat. One of its hands held a stick that was supposed to be a riding crop and it had a kid’s stuffed fox, like Basil Brush, under one arm.

  Oh shit. Oh Jesus. One of them just moved. Tom blinked, rubbed his eyes, looked harder. One of the bone men – made up of nothing but clothes and old rubbish – was crawling along one of the walls. He got ready to jump down, to run and fetch his parents. Then stopped. It was gone. Had he imagined it?

  If he had, he was still doing it, because there was another one, climbing through the lowest window of the tower. It was the one Joe thought was the funniest, the one wearing a lady’s flowered dress and a big straw hat. Tom could see the hat, almost as clear as daylight, wobble on the figure’s head. Then it jumped into the shadows and disappeared.

  What the hell was going on? Were they all going to get up and move? Tom was kneeling upright now, not caring if someone saw him, actually hoping they would. Another movement, over by the outside wall. Then two of them, moving together – or was one carrying the other?

  ‘Dad!’ he called, as loudly as he dared, knowing Millie was asleep across the hall. ‘Dad, come here.’

  Then a hand touched him and he almost leaped through the glass. Thank God, someone was here, someone else could see. He tugged the curtain aside to see who had come into his room.

  Joe. Tom reached down a hand, pulled Joe up beside him and tugged the curtain round them both again. ‘Look at the abbey,’ he told his brother. ‘The bone men are alive.’

  Joe pressed his face to the glass and looked. The two boys watched one of the bone men run across the grassed area that used to be the nave. It disappeared behind a pile of stones. Tom turned to Joe. Who didn’t look in the least bit surprised. Tom felt the excitement in his ribcage plummet.

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ he said in a low voice. ‘The bone men aren’t moving by themselves. She’s moving them.’

  Joe turned away from his brother, getting ready to climb down from the ledge. Tom stopped him, holding so tightly to his arm he knew it had to hurt. Joe muttered something his older brother didn’t catch. Tom didn’t think. He just shoved him hard. Joe’s head cracked against the glass and then he fell on to the carpet.

  Later, when Joe had been declared out of danger of dying, more’s the pity, and was tucked up in bed with hot chocolate and stories and a huge great fuss on the part of his mother, and Tom had been told to stay in his room for the rest of the decade, he finally worked out what Joe had said, just before he’d been clobbered.

  ‘Not posed tell,’ he’d muttered. Which in Joe-speak meant: not supposed to tell.

  Part Three

  Day of the Dead

  42

  2 November

  ‘GO IN PEACE TO LOVE AND SERVE THE LORD,’ SAID Harry. The organ began to play the recessional and Harry stepped down from the chancel. The Renshaws, as always, were first to leave church. As Christiana stood to follow her father and grandfather out of the pew, she appeared to be clutching something in her right fist.

  Harry went into the vestry, crossed the room and unbolted the outside door. Stepping outside, he walked quickly to the rear of the church, just in time to shake Sinclair’s hand as he left the building. Christiana held out her hand without looking at him. Nothing in it now. Next came Mike and Jenny Pickup. Jenny’s eyes were damp and she carried a small bouquet of pink roses. A week earlier Harry had put a blank book by the church door, inviting parishioners to write the names of people they wanted remembered during the service. Lucy’s name had been at the top. ‘Thank you,’ Jenny said. ‘That was lovely.’

  The rest of the congregation followed, each needing to take the vicar by the hand, thank him and tell him something of their lost loved ones. Almost at the back came Gillian, who never seemed to miss a service these days, which he supposed he should be glad about, one more Christian soldier and all that. Hayley, too, had been remembered during the service. Harry shook Gillian’s hand and, knowing she had no grave to honour, almost bent to kiss her cheek. Except the last time he’d done that she’d turned her head at the last second and their lips had met. It had been an awkward moment, which his hastily muttered apology had done little to smooth over.

  A middle-aged, red-haired woman followed Gillian out, and she was the last. Harry walked back into the church. Checking that the nave was empty, he set off up the aisle. Someone had scattered rose petals.

  He glanced up. They could almost have been dropped from the balcony. They lay at the exact spot where little Lucy Pickup had died, where Millie Fletcher had almost fallen. Harry remembered Christiana’s clenched fist as she left the building. Leaving the petals where they were, he walked quickly up the aisle and into the vestry once more. He checked that the outside door was locked and started to undress. Three minutes later, he was stepping out on to the path again, bracing himself against the cold and locking the vestry door behind him.

  ‘And tha’s a quick-change artist as well, lad.’ One of his parishioners, a man in his seventies, was walking towards him. His wife, his parents and two brothers were buried in the churchyard, he’d told Harry earlier.

  ‘I’m a man of many talents, Mr Hargreaves,’ replied Harry, leaning against the church wall to stretch out his hamstrings.

  ‘Tha’s not goin’ up ont’ moor, is thee, lad? Tha’ll take off in this wind.’

  ‘Ah never knew vicars ’ad legs,’ chortled a woman, hobbling her way up behind Stanley Hargreaves.

  ‘Healthy body, healthy soul, Mrs Hawthorn,’ replied Harry. ‘Sorry I can’t show you a better pair.’

  Harry jogged slowly past the two elderly people. As he left the churchyard, he saw Alice taking Millie to their car. He should really have a word with her. He jogged down the hill a few paces and saw that Alice was now talking to the woman with dyed red hair who’d followed Gillian from church.

  ‘So beautiful,’ the woman was saying, reaching out to touch Millie’s curls. ‘I had one just like her. Breaks my heart to see her.’

  Millie squirmed away from the woman, hiding her face against her mother’s shoulder, just as Alice spotted Harry. He approached slowly, not wanting to interrupt, unsure how welcome he was going to be.

  ‘They grow up so quickly,’ Alice said.

  ‘Mine never grew up,’ the woman replied. Unable to reach Millie’s face any more, she patted the child’s shoulder. ‘You take good care of this little one. You never know how precious they are till
you’ve lost them.’

  Alice gave up the effort to smile. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Well, there’s the vicar. I must just say hello. It was nice to meet you.’ The woman nodded at Alice and then, with one last stroke of Millie’s head, set off down the hill.

  ‘Don’t know who that cheery soul was,’ said Alice in a low voice, as Harry approached. He glanced at the woman’s retreating form and shook his head. ‘She was in church just now,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never met her before. Listen, about last night …’

  Alice held up her hand. ‘No, I’m sorry. I do understand how difficult it is for you. It’s just …’ She stopped. ‘I can’t help thinking there’s something seriously wrong with Tom.’

  She bent into the car and put Millie into her child’s seat before buckling the strap round her daughter. Harry leaned closer to the car in the hope that it might offer some shelter. The perishing wind was getting up his shorts. ‘I really doubt that,’ he said. ‘And getting yourself worked up won’t help him.’

  ‘That’s exactly what Evi said,’ replied Alice.

  Harry couldn’t stop. His legs were starting to shake and he had a pain in his chest, but the minute he stopped running the sweat on his body would start to chill down.

  He was two miles above the village. Ten minutes after setting off, he’d found an old bridle path and followed it to the road. He’d gone up, climbing higher and higher, until the wind was almost lifting him off his feet. Now he was heading for home.

  The walls and hedges offered some shelter, but when the wind hit him full on he almost felt as if he’d stopped moving. His wristbands were soaked through and the cold air was hurting his lungs. This was insane. Even the view was wasted – his eyes were watering so much he could barely see the ground beneath his feet.

  High above the trees to the east soared the massive Morrell Tor, a huge collection of gritstone boulders balanced precariously on top of each other. Formed naturally, but once believed to be man-made, tors were particularly common in the Pennines. Morrell Tor, Harry had learned, was notorious locally. Legend had it that in days gone by, unwanted and illegitimate babies would be tossed from its heights, to shatter on the rocks below and be carried off by wolves and wild dogs. Today, it presented a serious problem for sheep farmers, who went to great lengths to keep their livestock away from it. On nights with strong winds, it was said, a singing among the rocks would lure a dozen or more to their death.