by Neil Spring
I was expecting to hear Price and Hartwell fighting in the nursery, but the only sound nearby was behind me: Sidewinder agreeing he would do as Hartwell had asked, he would go out and order his men to allow the protestors onto the range. To allow innocent civilians into the buildings that had not been made safe.
Dimly, I envisioned what would happen: protesters swarming into the village, oblivious that they were walking to their doom.
An explosion.
Women or children blown to smithereens.
Quickly, silently, I struggled to my feet. Price lay unconscious on the nursery floor, beside the shattered desk. There was a large gash above his right eye and blood streaming down his face. Hartwell stood over him, going through his pockets; and in the space created by the fallen brick wall, Sidewinder had his back to me.
Take him by surprise.
My heart had never beaten as hard or as fast as it did in that moment, but I had to act now. And that meant swallowing my fear.
I drew in a breath and charged at him.
Sidewinder spun round just as I threw the punch. An explosion of hot pain burst through me as my fist connected with the right side of his face.
‘Argh!’ he yelled, snaring my collar. Then, with a furious cry, he elbowed me in the face. Crack! As hot blood gushed from my nose, the shock of the blow sent me stumbling back into the room. I closed my eyes, only for a second, but when I opened them again I saw to my horror that Sidewinder was holding the blacksmith’s hammer.
‘Stay away,’ I croaked, tasting blood on my lips, smelling once again the sickly, earthy odour that pervaded this room so heavily.
But Sidewinder raised the hammer and lunged. I dodged it. He went for me with his free hand, grabbing me roughly by the throat. We fell back in a gasping struggle, crashing into the pile of bedclothes and soft toys and strange Victorian dolls.
Hartwell spun round, appalled, as if we had desecrated a family memorial.
‘Harry!’ I screamed. ‘Help me!’
But on the other side of the room, Price lay unmoving on the floor.
‘Get off the bed!’ Hartwell yelled, but Sidewinder was oblivious, a raging madman. He was on top of me, yelling, his face thrust into mine, so close I could smell his hot, nicotine breath.
‘Your father let me down – disobeyed a direct order. I’ve lived all these years with what he forced me to do. You do see it was your father’s fault, don’t you? DON’T YOU?’
With a shriek of fury, I clawed at his face. Gouged him. Crying out, he dropped the hammer. Frantically, I reached for it – amid the dolls – but then he was on top of me again, pinning my arms to the bed with both legs.
‘Get off me, get OFF—’
A hand clamped over my mouth. Another around my throat. Tightening. Squeezing . . .
Oh God, oh no – please, no.
Now both hands – strong, large hands – were on my neck, struggling to throttle the life from me. My knees came up; I tried to kick him in the back. But I was weakening quickly. My lungs burned. My vision darkened . . .
Then, unexpectedly, Sidewinder released my throat and I sucked in an enormous gulp of air. And a part of me – a naive part – prayed he had changed his mind. But his eyes remained lit with the same manic, murderous intention. He had only decided on a different way to do it.
‘Please . . .’ I began, but he was already groping on the filthy bed for the hammer.
Get up, I thought. Run!
But all my energy was depleted. I felt just as lifeless as one of the discarded china dolls.
Sidewinder had the hammer in his hand, was holding it so tightly his knuckles had turned white. ‘Give my regards to your father,’ he said in a flat voice, raising the hammer high. And I knew this was the end.
A hot white pain exploded in my hand – the lantern slide. All this time, I had been holding on to it, just like Price said.
As Sidewinder brought the hammer down I made myself roll – and the hammer missed my face by a hair’s breadth.
I was in such a state of shock, and so disorientated, I barely noticed the shattering sound that came suddenly from my left, the sort of sound a china cup might make if you dropped it on a stone floor.
At the other side of the room, Hartwell’s head snapped up. ‘What have you done?’ he demanded of Sidewinder, staring over at us. He had been keeping a restrained distance from the bed and from us during Sidewinder’s attack. ‘What the hell have you done?’
Sidewinder wasn’t looking at me any more. I should have been relieved he wasn’t trying to kill me at that instant, but my overriding emotion was one of confusion. Because now the warden’s face was ghostly white, his entire body rigid, as though someone had drawn a steel wire through his spine and tightened it.
‘Oscar?’ Disbelief in his voice. He dropped the hammer, and it hit the floor with a heavy clunk. ‘What is . . . what is this?’
No reply from Hartwell. For a few seconds the only sound was of the rally down in the village. The drum beats kept rhythm with my heart as I watched Sidewinder stoop to examine something on the bed behind me.
He leapt back. ‘What the FUCK?’ he screamed. ‘Oh God! Oh God, no!’
A sound like shattering china . . . Only one thing in the room would make a sound like that.
That smell again. An awful smell.
A sharp chemical cocktail.
Steeling myself, I slowly turned my head. The largest doll – the one with the white dress whose black hair had been tied up in a green ribbon – was no longer propped up on the iron bedstead. In the mad scuffle, she had been displaced and lay just inches away. Her glass eyes were gone, her porcelain face nothing but a jagged hole of broken china.
I felt the stab of alarm as I realised what had been nagging at me when I first laid eyes on the dolls: one of them was very large.
A little too large.
And the more I studied them, the more they looked like . . .
Rolling from the bed, I leapt to my feet, struggling to breathe.
How long did I stand there, staring? It could have been seconds or minutes. All I knew was that we had finally been confronted with Imber’s horror – a secret so horrific it diminished the importance of anything else, made talk of hauntings and ghosts sound positively pathetic.
Not just a china doll, a child inside the doll.
A dead child’s blackened face.
I doubled over, gagging, closing my eyes – as if that would banish the horrible truth. ‘Oh God,’ I cried. ‘Say it’s not so. Please tell me they’re not—’
Hartwell’s voice was flat and emotionless. ‘My three little girls.’
I retched, stole another look at the largest doll. The girl’s features, previously hidden beneath the china, were a wasted decay of blackened bone. Once more, my stomach heaved. ‘What have you DONE?’
Stepping carefully over Price’s unconscious body, Hartwell approached with menacing purpose. I was incapable of thinking clearly, but I clenched the lantern slide ever tighter and a memory flashed through me. I was picturing the empty grave Sergeant Edwards had uncovered with me in Imber’s churchyard; picturing the commander’s face as he told me the other Hartwell graves had shown signs of disturbance.
Then, as if seeing the scene on a movie screen, I saw Hartwell outside this room, trespassing under the cover of night in the Imber churchyard.
I saw him taking ragged, frosted breaths as he dug them up.
I don’t know how I knew that, but I did know it. A voice in my head told me so; it was the voice of someone no longer alive. Someone who had wanted me to find these girls, and who – I now felt sure – had drawn me here.
‘You exhumed the bodies of your own children?’ I said, hearing the repulsion in my voice. As I spoke, tears came to my eyes.
‘It was simple,’ said Hartwell, his eyes widening with the
memory. But there was something in his self-confident exterior that faltered then, only for a moment, revealing a look of raw, wounded grief. Some small part of this man’s rotten mind still possessed a kernel of sanity, and it had just glimpsed the abject horror of his actions. The impression was fleeting, though. Within seconds, the calm, insanely matter-of-fact tone was back in his voice. ‘Sidewinder here gave me access to the range whenever I needed it. So, I dug down, cut the holes in the caskets and pulled them out.’
Sidewinder was staring at the madman, dumbstruck.
Wiping my eyes, I dared to glance once more at the pathetic remains. I took in how carefully they had been dressed, even down to their stockings and boots. What I didn’t yet know, and what the police would later confirm, was that Hartwell had attempted to embalm these long dead bodies, used lipstick and make-up on their china faces and put music boxes inside their rib cages.
I turned to Sidewinder. ‘Did you know?’
He shook his head, mouth agape. ‘No, upon my soul, I didn’t.’
Then, gazing at the corpses, Hartwell said something that turned my blood to ice.
‘Oh, my babies. They were so cold out there in the churchyard and I felt guilty. You see, Miss Grey? I had to bring them home and warm them up.’
Sidewinder’s face contorted in revulsion as this revelation sunk in. His expression in that moment has never left me, even after all these years: How did it come to this? Then Hartwell said, in a voice so calm it was unnerving, ‘My father and his father before him also engaged in the practice, whenever it was necessary.’
‘What practice?’
‘Strangulation, suffocation.’ He nodded at the horrid simplicity of these acts and I wondered whether the cumulative effect of the Devil’s Snare burning in the upstairs corridor was making him tell us fantasies or delusions, or if this was the unspeakable truth. I decided it was the latter, the drug forcing the awful confession from his lips. ‘It really is as easy as placing your finger in the child’s mouth and choking them.’
An image of my own baby, swaddled in blankets, ripped through my mind.
A parent who murdered their children? The idea was abhorrent, incomprehensible. Why would he do it? If there was a path to understanding an act of savagery so terrible, I honestly couldn’t see it.
‘But why?’ I cried, numb from shock. ‘Why on earth would you do such a thing?’
Hartwell gave me a look of withering condescension, as if he knew about my own child, my own guilt.
‘When I blamed the deaths on disease, most of the villagers believed it,’ said Hartwell, his words coming slowly, cautiously. Stepping over Price, who was still lying unconscious on the floor, he went to the boarded-up window and stood very near to it, gazing at the wood with a look of admiration, as though he could see right through it and out over the village. ‘Well, why wouldn’t they believe it? My family has owned this land for generations.’
His words took me back to my earlier vision. His dead wife, Marie, in this very room, cradling a child – a dead child. Beatrice?
Had Marie known? Surely not. If she had known, she would have run with her children to keep them safe or informed the police. Or, more likely, murdered Hartwell in his sleep.
Had she suspected? Perhaps, but even then, her capacity to act, to protect, would have depended on her mental state. Had the deaths driven her desperate, mad? Or had Hartwell plied her with drugs? Warped her mind too? Anything seemed possible.
In quiet terror, I looked at the three corpses on the bed and a horrible question occurred to me. ‘Why murder one child as a baby and allow the others to live for longer?’
I felt a roll of nausea when Hartwell said, ‘With every death, Marie longed for another child. I couldn’t take them all as newborns – too suspicious. Better to wait a little while. In any case, we kept trying for a son. That was the point. Because it was a son I needed, a son to ensure the continuation of the family name. My own father impressed that upon me from my earliest days.’
I looked guardedly at him, then at the bed, remembering the young boy from my vision. Taking dark orders from an old man, decades ago, in this very room.
I thought of the funeral I had witnessed as a child, the fear, suspicion and loathing on some of the villagers’ faces. Oscar Hartwell not crying.
I thought of Marie Hartwell’s suicide – her screaming at the congregation in Imber church that Hartwell had blood on his hands.
I thought of the graves in the churchyard, the names on the Hartwell gravestones: Lillian, Beatrice, Rosalie.
He killed his daughters until he got a son. Recorded the births and murdered them, merely because they weren’t useful to him. An inconvenience.
As if reading my horrified, questioning expression, Hartwell said, ‘I don’t expect you to understand, Sarah, but a great deal of money and land was at stake. When the community was ripped from us, I used my son, my dear Pierre, to get it back.’
A flash of memory: Rosalie’s funeral. The villagers watching Hartwell with suspicion as he laid yet another of his girls to rest. And then Pierre’s ‘death’ . . . Had they known Hartwell longed for a son? Suspected? What better way to deceive them, to win their sympathy for his plight, by pretending he had lost the one thing he cherished most?
With mounting revulsion, I looked at Sidewinder, who was frozen at the foot of the bed. His face was blank, his eyes watering.
I felt sick in my stomach and sick in my heart. It was the most depraved, the most sadistic thing I had ever heard.
‘You faked your son’s death! Kept him prisoner! You murdered your daughters.’ My throat was tightening, my neck painful and swollen from being choked. I swallowed my tears, looking aghast at the three bodies. ‘Such precious lives – gone.’
‘Precious? What good were the girls anyway? A female child couldn’t continue the family name, would never have understood business. But a son—’
Get out, Sarah. He’s insane. Get out, NOW!
But I was rooted to the spot. I couldn’t leave Price. How badly was he injured? Was he even breathing?
In my hand, the lantern slide grew hot – uncomfortably hot. As if needing to be noticed. To be used?
My gaze dropped to the magic lantern on the floor.
Is that what I am supposed to do?
Sidewinder looked electrified with panic. As his gaze targeted the entranceway to the upstairs hallway, the only way out, I thought he was about to flee for help. Hartwell must have thought so too, because with lightning speed he lunged for the blacksmith’s hammer.
Sidewinder’s face convulsed with fear. Spinning, he made a dash for the exit, but stumbled, falling heavily to his knees.
Behind him, Hartwell dragged the hammer from the floorboards.
I stood back, horror-stricken, as Sidewinder desperately scrabbled forward, hauling himself to his feet. Grabbing the door frame, he pulled himself up, throwing a panicky glance over his shoulder. Hartwell was standing in the centre of the room, insane and murderous, the blacksmith’s hammer at his side.
There was a chilling moment of eye contact between the two men.
And then, with a savage roar, Hartwell charged. The white-haired warden barely made it three feet into the corridor before Hartwell seized his shoulders and spun him round.
There was a spray of blood, metal smashing hard into the side of Sidewinder’s skull. He dropped, slumped face forward to the floor with a horrible, heavy thud.
‘Lying bastard had it coming,’ Hartwell spat.
From beyond the house came the growing sound of horns and beating drums.
Hartwell turned to look at me, his eyes shining like white-hot metal.
‘Well, Sarah,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Just us now.’
– 36 –
END GAME
With staggering swiftness, he was upon me, his rough hand stifling my scream.
A bolt of pain exploded in my ribs as he landed a punch and brought me to my knees. Gasping for breath, I looked up, and there was Hartwell looming over me.
Oh no, oh no, please, oh no.
In one hand, he held the blood-spattered hammer.
Perhaps it was panic, perhaps it was the lingering after-effects of inhaling the Devil’s Snare, but I saw what happened next in blurry slow motion.
A dark figure sprang from the shadows.
The hammer hissed past my face.
And the hellish nursery echoed with a grunt of shock as the dark figure crashed into Hartwell and took him down, hard, onto the floor.
I gulped in a breath, scrambled quickly up. ‘Harry!’
His face was grey and bloodied, but he was alert – alive. In a flash, he was on his feet, as dark and as tall as a storm, and backing away from Hartwell, who lay stretched out on the floor, blinking groggily.
Without a flicker of hesitation, Price kicked the hammer away from Hartwell’s grasp and then rushed to my side, shaking and trembling.
‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he whispered, putting a tender hand to my face. ‘My dear Sarah.’
Gently, carefully, he held me close. I clung to him, pressing my head against his chest, feeling the tremors run through his body. For a moment, my emotions were so strong that I was barely capable of speaking. In that one moment, all I wanted – all I needed – was him. Just Harry.
We separated finally, smiling exhaustedly at one another. A team once more.
Wiping the blood from around his mouth, Price took a moment, quietly staring at the three dead girls with a mixture of sadness and fear. They lay there on the bed, amongst the other soft toys, in miserable disarray. Scattered and crumpled.
The fear dropped out of Price’s face. What took its place was another emotion: a limitless, plunging sorrow. Genuine heartache shimmered in his eyes. But as his gaze found Hartwell, who was now stirring, his expression hardened with something else: the ghost hunter’s fury.
Innocent children had been murdered. Lives ruined.
A price would be exacted.
