The Castle of the Demon

by Reginald Hill

  When she finally came ashore she knew at once where she was, and didn’t like it. She was somewhere on Skinburness salt marsh, several acres of desolate turf-land cut through with tidal ditches and creeks which could swallow a man effortlessly. She had come here once on an unsuccessful early-morning mushrooming trip. In the grey light of morning the place had seemed uninviting enough. Now, almost invisible, it seemed doubly so.

  She shivered violently and felt her muscles beginning to stiffen. Uninviting or not, the marsh had to be crossed. From what she recalled, the surface was firm enough, pleasant, springy Solway turf much of it, greatly in demand for lawns and football pitches. What needed care were the steep-sided creeks and inlets. Even the greatest swimming ability was little use when you had ten feet of sheer, slippery mud to traverse to get back to the surface. And at the moment she felt her own swimming potential much diminished. She was going to move very carefully.

  Five minutes later she was splashing in a dead panic at the bottom of a very narrow, very steep ditch. Her eyes were no longer to be trusted, it seemed. The ground ahead had seemed as firm and trustworthy as that on which she stood. Only there hadn’t been any ground there, just a hole.

  The water was only about five feet deep, but it was impossible to stand in it. The bottom seemed to consist of voracious oily mud which sucked at her feet and seemed to her overwrought imagination ready and able to pull her completely under. But getting out proved as difficult as she had foreseen. Twice she nearly made it when the rim of the ditch crumbled away under her weight and she slithered back down. The third time she utilised the ditch’s narrowness which before had seemed a positive hindrance, and forced herself up like a climber in a chimney, her feet pressing against one side, her back against the other.

  She almost succeeded. She seemed to be lying across the ditch at ground level when the wall behind her back just seemed to cave in and her head and shoulders began a downward slither.

  Worse, her feet had somehow been thrust so deep into the mud of the other side that she could not free them and for a ghastly second she feared she was going to be suspended upside down in the murky waters below.

  ‘Help! Help me!’ she cried for the first time since this evening had all begun. Even as she shouted the thought crossed her mind that she was less likely to be heard here than almost anywhere else she had been that night, not even excepting the Solway.

  Then her arms were caught from above and she was lifted bodily out of the ditch. She turned, still fearing Inwit or Plowman, turned and looked and almost wished it was one of those two.

  She was being held up by a green man. Her knees buckled beneath her, his face became hazy. But her mind absurdly, ridiculously, refused to lose its hold on consciousness despite all the encouragement it received, not even when he lifted her up into his arms and began to move swiftly, efficiently over the marsh.

  To his lair, she thought. We’re going to his lair. He wants to share me with the rest of the family.

  There was something macabrely amusing in the thought, like a vulture making a good mother.

  He stopped and began to lower her into a hole in the ground.

  She looked down.

  In the hole looking up, and reaching up to receive her, were half a dozen more green men.

  At last she could faint.

  8

  The next few hours reminded her strongly of her attempts to evade Plowman in the sea. Long periods in the still, dark world beneath the water interspersed by brief moments above the surface where anything, or nothing, could happen.

  She broke the surface lightly for a second to realise she was still out in the open air and the men were undressing her. Quickly she submerged again. Next in a strange room by a bed. She was dressed now, or rather wrapped, in a strange green-coloured garment; she was being undressed again, by a woman this time.

  Better, she thought. Or perhaps worse? as she slipped under again.

  Someone fiddling with her nose dragged her protesting upwards once more. The woman was still there. It was Nurse Simpson, she decided without interest or surprise.

  Down again.

  It was nice down there this time. There was a beautifully sensuous dream in which she lay in bed with six green men. She wasn’t afraid of them any more. They were marvellous. She felt she had to tell them and touched one on the shoulder. He winced with pain. Her hand was tacky with blood. She looked at his face. Sad, despairing, almost lifeless, it was Michael Scott.

  She broke the surface with a great splash this time, left the depths clear behind, and sat up in bed determined to plunge no more.

  Nurse Simpson came through the door as though on command.

  ‘I want to get up,’ said Emily, trying to be firm, but sounding to her own ears only like a petulant child in a sick-bed.

  ‘Put this on,’ said Simpson without showing any emotion. She might have been Inwit’s sister.

  Perhaps she is, thought Emily.

  The woman took a dress from a wall cupboard. It was grey, high-necked, with a white bow at the breast. Quite hideous.

  Emily stepped out of bed and found she was wearing a cotton night-dress. She had half expected to find herself weak and dizzy, but except for a certain amount of stiffness she felt surprisingly strong.

  ‘Your underclothes are dry,’ said Simpson. ‘They are hanging over the chair. There’s a bathroom through that door.’

  On that, she turned and left the room.

  Emily dressed as fast as she could. The only footgear she could find was a pair of slippers a size too large for her. The dress proved to be as hideous as she had first thought, tight around the bust, floppy round the waist, and hideously long. She went through into the bathroom in search of a mirror. Her hair felt a mess.

  But when she looked into the small mirror fixed on to the door of the bathroom cabinet it wasn’t her hair that held her attention, it was her nose.

  A wedge of pink lint was folded over it, held in place by three strips of plaster running from cheek to cheek. She could not understand how she had not noticed this before. Once observed in the mirror, the whole assembly began to itch and tickle abominably. With the itch there also came a surge of the curiosity tinged with fear which had been oddly lacking since she awoke.

  I suppose, she thought, after last night, anything vaguely resembling normality is going to seem too attractive to be questioned.

  But now she went to the window and tried to look out. It was frosted glass and when she tried to open it she found the catch was stuck.

  She set off back into the bedroom to open the curtains, but stopped short in the bathroom doorway.

  Standing at the foot of the bed was a young man.

  He smiled approvingly at her. She was sure she had not met him before, yet he looked strangely familiar.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs. Follett,’ he said. ‘I hope I’m not intruding.’

  ‘As I don’t know the house rules here, I can’t say,’ answered Emily.

  ‘You seem to have made a good recovery,’ he said happily. ‘I have come to take you down to breakfast if you are ready.’

  ‘Well, I’m certainly hungry, if that’s what you mean.’

  She moved casually over to the curtained window, but he stepped in front of her and offered his arm.

  ‘Shall we go, then?’

  She shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Outside the door she found herself in a long, rather dark corridor which ran between pairs of anonymous doors at about four-yard intervals. She thought that one or two of these were opened just fractionally, enough to permit anyone inside to peer out. She thought of stumbling against one to test her theory when the corridor broadened out into quite a roomy landing and they turned left down a flight of stairs. After turning at a couple of half-landings she found herself descending into a mosaically tiled hallway utterly devoid of ornament or furniture. Only the fine oak doors which opened off it prevented it from looking too like a public lavatory.

  And even those just nee
ded a penny-in-the-slot lock to fit the picture, thought Emily with a giggle which must have been almost audible as her young escort gave her a curious glance.

  The click of his leather-soled shoes on the tiled floor reminded her of her own footwear.

  ‘I hope we’re not expecting too many guests at breakfast,’ she murmured.

  Again that curious glance. He did not reply, however, but went over to one of the doors, knocked gently, opened it (whether or not at an invitation from inside, Emily was not sure) and looked in.

  ‘Mrs. Follett, sir,’ he said.

  Then he stood aside, motioned Emily to go in, and closed the door behind her.

  It was a beautiful room, high-ceilinged, papered in exquisite taste, with a large richly curtained window looking out on a small lawn and rose garden, while in the wall opposite was set a finely proportioned Adam, or pseudo-Adam, fireplace, beside which stood a man.

  In the centre of the room was a large table set for breakfast. On the sideboard against the wall to the left of the window was a variety of silver tureens from which another man was filling a plate. There were two others seated at the table, already eating.

  But Emily had little eye for the beauties of the room or the breakfasting men. Her gaze was fixed steadily on the man by the fireplace and his was returned just as steadily.

  It was the man she had run away from (the old-fashioned phrase came easily to her mind) some three weeks earlier. Her husband, Sterne Follett.

  ‘Ah. Emily,’ he said, as though she had just come into a drawing room where he was coping alone with early guests. Just a touch of reproof, audible only to the tuned-in ear.

  He moved and came across to her and kissed her lightly on the cheek near the ends of the plaster strips. He was unchanged. Not that there was any reason why he should have changed. It was less than a month since she had left him. But it seemed years ago and she felt herself so completely altered that it seemed anachronistic to see him standing before her, smiling courteously as ever; his thick brown hair exquisitely groomed, with just sufficient of grey over the temple to display modestly the defeat of age; his intelligent, handsome face showing all the lines of maturity, but none of the flabbiness; his clear brown eyes scrutinising her point by point; his clothing as ever immaculate in cut, muted in colour, with just a hint of flamboyance in the small yellow rose he affected in his buttonhole. All this was so familiar to Emily in her past and so strange and out of place in the future she had planned for herself that her head began spinning and she felt herself as dizzy and unready as the naive eighteen-year-old girl who a decade earlier had stood dazzled in front of the same man for the first time.

  He took her unresisting arm and led her gently towards the others.

  ‘My dear,’ he said. ‘Let me present my friends to you. Gentlemen, I would like you to meet my wife.’

  The ‘gentleman’ by the sideboard was ungentlemanly enough to raise his eyebrows in surprise, though whether at her presence or her appearance Emily wasn’t sure. The other two stood up and Sterne led her slowly round the table, for all the world, thought Emily, beginning to recover slightly, like the Queen at a Royal Command Performance.

  ‘Colonel Petard,’ said Sterne, pausing before the first.

  ‘How do you do, Colonel,’ said Emily, finding herself, despite everything, beginning to enter into the ridiculous charade. This always happened with Sterne. This was his great strength. Negotiations were conducted under his terms, games played to his rules. It was easier that way. In the past it had usually seemed impossible any other way. Colonel Petard, a small, rather exaggeratedly military man with a horrid moustache and a poker-straight bearing, obviously played to the rules, as did the next, Major Glover, younger, handsomer, more relaxed. He might have been at a hunt ball. They both took her hand, inclined their heads over it, and murmured the ritual exchanges of meeting and greeting.

  The third man, standing by the sideboard, was obviously built on other lines. Long, rangy, thin-faced, with a sharp nose and narrow shrewd eyes, he was introduced as Mr. Conn. He made no attempt to take her hand, but continued to help himself to bacon.

  ‘Hello, Mrs. Follett,’ he said with a sharp New York accent. His eyes ran openly from her plastered nose via the hideous dress down to her overlarge fluffy slippers.

  He’s not going to play, thought Emily, and the thought delighted her. She tightened her lips against a grin, but his quick glance caught it and a slow smile began to spread over his face.

  ‘You must give me the name of your dressmaker,’ he said, and started to laugh.

  She found herself laughing with him, almost doubled up with merriment. At the same time she carefully listened for any telltale note of hysteria, but was delighted to detect only a stream of pure, unadulterated mirth.

  As it died away, Sterne spoke, mildly, politely.

  ‘Will you join us for breakfast, my dear?’

  Back to the game.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said gaily. ‘I’m starving.’

  She seized a plate, piled it up quickly, efficiently, and took a seat at the table. She began to eat with gusto, pausing only to say to her husband, ‘Pour me a cup of coffee, there’s a love.’

  The others continued their breakfasts in a polite silence. Once she caught Mr, Conn’s eye and half choked on a kidney. She felt gay, almost drunk, ready to carry the attack to her husband.

  Her plate empty, she tore a slice of bread in half, carefully wiped the remnants of egg, fat, and sauce from her plate with it, ate it and gently licked her fingers.

  ‘I’m glad we bumped into each other like this, love,’ she said, pushing the plate from her with a satisfied sigh, feeling absolutely ready for attack. ‘I began to get worried when I didn’t hear from your solicitor.’

  He looked quite unperturbed, gave a slight nod, but didn’t speak, so she had to go on without a cue. He might at least have said ‘my solicitor’ in a surprised voice.

  ‘About the divorce,’ she said. ‘I thought I would have heard something by now.’

  ‘You’re getting a divorce?’ said Conn with a perceptible note of disbelief, looking at Sterne.

  He knows my boy, thought Emily. Let’s see which way you jump now.

  ‘My dear,’ said Sterne quietly, the note of reproof back just a little nearer the surface now, ‘I’m surprised you wish to discuss personal matters in the circumstances. I thought you might have been more concerned with the fate of Mr. Scott.’

  Suddenly the sense of gaiety and strength left Emily. Sterne had turned everything upside down once more. She wanted to scream violent abuse at him, but at herself also. The reproof was well administered.

  ‘What about him?’ she asked anxiously. ‘I had almost forgotten. I’m sorry. How is he?’

  Sterne shrugged.

  ‘We hoped you might tell us, my dear. Last night you talked incoherently a great deal before the sedative administered to you took effect. Among other things, you said Scott had been wounded. Men have been out searching all night. His horse has been found, its neck badly grazed with shot, wandering by the edge of the sea. Of its rider there is no sign.’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Emily.

  ‘How badly hurt was he, Mrs. Follett?’ asked Petard abruptly.

  ‘I don’t know. In the shoulder, here.’ She touched her left shoulder and looked at her hand, remembering her dream.

  ‘He may have fallen off in the shallows,’ said Major Glover musingly. ‘Then as the tide came in, he’d just, well, disappear.’

  Emily swayed slightly in her seat. Conn shot Glover an angry glance.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m the outsider here, O.K. But I reckon we should first of all get Mrs. Follett to tell us exactly what happened last night instead of just relying on what she said when she was brought in.’

  ‘If you wish,’ said Sterne, as if it was a matter of no interest at all to him. He moved back to his former position by the fireplace.

  Rapidly, economically, Emily described what had happened th
e night before, starting at her expedition in search of the grave of Fenimore Castell.

  ‘Then,’ she concluded, ‘I was picked up by a … by a green man. God, I’d almost forgotten about him, them, and brought here, I presume. Why, though? Who or what are they? And what is this place, anyway?’

  ‘Later, later,’ said Conn impatiently. ‘Listen, Emily, what happened before all this? There must be more. Why did you come to Skinburness in the first place?’

  Emily looked steadily at Sterne, who once again steadily returned her gaze. What did he want her to say? she wondered.

  ‘Escape,’ she said. ‘I had left Sterne. I wanted to hide somewhere for a while.’

  Strange, it did not seem incongruous or embarrassing to be sitting here in front of strangers talking about her private life, her desires, fears, hopes.

  ‘No,’ said Conn, patiently. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘What we want to know,’ barked Petard suddenly, as if he had decided it was time for a display of military efficiency, ‘is why Skinburness? Didn’t you know of your husband’s connection with the college?’

  ‘No,’ said Emily firmly, glad to be able to speak the absolute truth.

  Petard and Glover exchanged a glance of disbelief.

  ‘Had I known,’ added Emily, ‘it would have been the last place on earth I would have chosen.’

  This wasn’t absolute truth, perhaps, but enough to be going on with.

  Conn nodded as if this made sense, the other two looked hard at her as if they would have liked to open up her mind and peer in.

  ‘You do admit you knew your husband knew of Skinburness as a place?’ Glover asked politely.

  ‘Yes. Of course. I mentioned it to him as a place I’d like to revisit. I used to come here as a child. He seemed a little surprised when I mentioned the name. Almost startled. Then amused. He said he didn’t think it was such a good idea to revisit the scenes of youthful pleasure. He said Skinburness meant the headland near the castle of the demon. Some demons didn’t hurt children, but let them fatten into adults before they took them. It was better to let sleeping demons die.’