But Barbara and I were both uneasy, for very different reasons.
‘I’m scared he’ll start sleep-walking again,’ said Barbara to me, as we settled down in front of the telly, leaving Kevin sitting reading in bed, upstairs.
‘So am I. What d’you reckon we ought to do?’
‘I think I want him to sleep in our bed . . .’
‘Oh, go on, Barbara. He’s a big lad now. An’ he kicks an’ snores. It’s not like he was three years old still. We won’t get a wink . . .’
‘And I want you to sleep in his bed.’
That really made me fed up. She’s very nice to snuggle up to, our Barbara. It’s the one thing that can really make me feel safe. The buggers can’t get to me, when I’m snuggled up to Barbara’s back. Or so I delude myself.
But I knew she was right. Nothing had changed, really, since our Kevin first went walkabout in the middle of the night. And our Barbara’s a very light sleeper. If he stirred, she’d know.
I lay awake a long time that night; restless for Barbara and finding Kevin’s bed too soft. I was just finally drifting off when I heard Barbara yelling my name, frantic.
‘Joe, help me, help me, I can’t hold him.’
She was yelling from downstairs, by the front door. I went down those stairs so fast I tripped over me socks and nearly went headlong. The pair of them were fighting like fiends for the front door latch. As I watched, Barbara reached up and clamped her hand over it, and young Kevin opened his mouth, bared his teeth and bit her on the arm. I’ll never forget the red blood trickling down her bare white arm. Only it looked black under the lights of our hall.
I grabbed Kevin, maybe harder than I should, cos o’ that. He tried to bite me. His face was all teeth an’ eyes screwed up shut with an expression of . . . I don’t know what. I slapped him hard across the cheek, to bring him out of it; several times. But it didn’t seem to have any effect. He just went on trying to bite me.
‘That policeman-set he’s got . . . them toy handcuffs. Get them, Barbara.’ Toy handcuffs they might be, but made in Red China where they know how to make handcuffs. If those handcuffs went on you, there was no way you could get them off again, without somebody helping you.
She seemed a terrible long time finding them. Meanwhile we went on struggling. He was only eight, but he was slippery wi’ sweat, an’ his pyjamas nigh torn off him by that time, and he seemed to have the strength of ten, and cunning with it. By the time Barbara got back wi’ the handcuffs, I was bleeding in three places, and he’d near gouged one o’ my eyes out.
But I got them on him, an’ the fight seemed to go out of him. He just sat on the bottom stair, panting wi’ his eyes shut. Getting back strength to try again. It was Kevin’s little body, that I’d seen so often in the bath; but it wasn’t Kevin inside.
I got Barbara to fetch the nylon washing-line, an’ I tied his ankles together with it, and then tied his ankles to his wrists behind him, but not too hard, not so as to hurt him. When he felt the rope on his ankles, he started fighting again. Then when he knew it was no use, he stopped again. It was uncanny; it was like fighting a cunning little machine.
‘I’ll ring for the doctor,’ said Barbara.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want him going to that hospital again.’ It was too near that bloody cathedral, and sooner or later, some nurse would get careless and . . . ‘I want to get him right out of this,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to your Margaret’s.’
Margaret lives in mid-Wales. Even Kevin couldn’t walk that far back to that damned cathedral.
‘But Joe, they’ll be asleep. It’s the middle of the night . . .’
‘Then they’ll have to bloody wake up. Go and get some clothes on, and bring me my big sheepskin, then go and start your car. You can drive, I’ll hold him in the back.’
It was the most terrible journey of my life. Luckily her car’s a Renault Five, with only two doors, so Kevin couldn’t suddenly dive out without warning. But he could make a sudden dive for the back of Barbara’s neck as we were driving along, tied up though he was. It was like driving along wi’ a time bomb in the back; and a time bomb that could hurt itself too. His wrists were sticky wi’ blood in the dark, where the metal had bitten into him, as he struggled.
It seemed a long time before she said, ‘We’re making progress. We’re at Farndon.’
We knew Farndon well, from driving across to see their Margaret. It’s a bit of a local beauty spot, on the banks of the River Dee; Farndon on one bank, and Holt over in Wales on the other. Two of the prettiest villages you could hope to see, wi’ a fine medieval bridge spanning the river in between. I remember we crossed the bridge, under the lamplight. The river was running deep and black and smooth . . .
Then suddenly Kevin said, quite clear,
‘Dad? Dad, where am I? My wrists hurt. And my legs.’
It was the real Kevin, back with us.
‘Stop the car, Barbara.’
We pulled up in Holt. I took the cuffs off Kevin. He was frightened by the blood on his wrists, crying for his mum, and I didn’t blame him, poor little bugger.
She spent a long time cuddling him. Then she said, ‘He’s all right now, Joe. Let’s go home.’
I thought, then nodded to her, in the dimness of the courtesy light. It was still a hell of a long way to their Margaret’s. And home’s where everybody wants to be in the middle of the night, really. Specially when they’re cold, hungry, exhausted and bleeding . . .
So she did a three-point turn, only it took seven points, and then we were heading back across the river to Farndon.
And as we reached the far bank, our Kevin went berserk again. Trying to get out of the car by crawling across my back for the door. We damned near crashed; missed a lamp-post by inches. Again I had to grab him, before he tore us to pieces.
I could think of only one thing.
‘Get across that bloody river again.’
And as before, when we’d crossed, he relaxed and started to cry.
‘Joe, for God’s sake, what’s up wi’ him?’ Barbara’s eyes were wide as saucers, the whites showing all round. I could tell she was at the end of her tether.
‘Nothing that water won’t cure,’ I said.
‘What you mean?’
‘We cross the river, he goes back to normal . . . it’s . . . I read it in a book once. He’ll stay normal, while we’re across this river. We’d better go on to your Margaret’s. I’d better drive . . . you’re clapped out.’
‘Joe, what kind of book?’
I didn’t want to answer her.
‘Joe,’ she insisted, her voice rising dangerously. ‘What kind of book?’
I had to force myself to say it. It nearly made me sick, but I had to say it. ‘A book on Black Magic,’ I said, and felt a right idiot while I said it. ‘Black Magic’ used to be a brand of chocolates to us.
But she hadn’t the strength left to argue. She just burst into tears and sat on the back seat hugging Kevin, and they cried themselves dry and then they fell asleep huddled together all the way to their Margaret’s.
We knocked them up at five in the morning. I think they took one look at Kevin’s wrists and one look at Barbara’s face and nearly rang the police to report me as a child molester and general madman.
But I couldn’t have cared less. Cos I’d suddenly been struck by a horrible thought.
The last time we saved our Kevin, another kid died. I couldn’t wait to get on the blower to Muncaster police station. I asked for the duty inspector, and he was a very long time in coming. Which was as well, because I was desperately trying to concoct a story for him that would make some kind of sense and get him to take some serious action, like checking on the lock of the south-west tower.
He came. He sounded uptight, but he heard me out. Then he said, very cagily, ‘Could I have your name, sir?’ Then he said, ‘And your address?’
‘I live near Muncaster, but I’m speaking from Aberystwyth.’
‘Where in Aberystw
yth?’
I told him.
‘Can I have proof of that, Mr Clarke?’
What the hell did he want proof for? Was he nuts, or was I?
‘I can put my brother-in-law on,’ I said, irritably. ‘He’s Welsh enough for anybody. But what the hell for?’
‘Just put your brother-in-law on, please.’
My brother-in-law spoke to him, convinced him I was where I said I was.
Then he asked my brother-in-law to put me back on.
‘You’d better come back to Muncaster as soon as you can, Mr Clarke. We need to question you.’
My heart sank. ‘Why, for God’s sake.’
‘We’ve just found another small boy dead. At the foot of the south-west tower.’
Allardyce looked up at me wearily when I finally stopped. The look on his old face was indescribable.
‘Well, you asked me to tell you everything I knew,’ I said. ‘So I have.’ What else was there to say?
‘I believe every word of it,’ he said. ‘I was out in Malaya during my national service. I was in the military police. There was a lot of funny stuff out in Malaya. Lads died, you filled in a report. You put down when they died, and where they died. But if you’d put down how they died – they’d have given you a medical discharge on the grounds of raving lunacy . . . Malaya was the worst place in the world for it, you know. But you just filled in a form, and left that space blank, and left it to a higher authority. There’s things the official mind just won’t take, Mr Clarke.’
He got up, and made a futile attempt to tidy his desk.
‘Meanwhile, we can keep a twenty-four watch on the door of that tower – have to, now – and that’s all we can do. How long you going to be working on it, still?’
‘Three more fine days will see it done – the stonework, that is. The weather-vane and weathercock – they’re ready, but there’s going to be a grand do. They’ll be lowered into place by a helicopter from RAF Valley. We can do it perfectly well, but the RAF want their little moment of glory . . . next Saturday. The whole town will be on the cathedral green . . .’
‘Their little moment of glory,’ said Allardyce, dully.
I went home, though it didn’t feel like home without Barbara and Kevin. It felt like a graveyard wi’ curtains. I went to bed, and I slept badly. Dreams, dreams about that damned tower, but all jumbled up and making no sense. I wakened up towards evening, with a mouth like the bottom of a budgie’s cage that hadn’t been cleaned for a month; fried myself bacon and eggs, then couldn’t eat it.
I remember it was a dull warm evening; nothing moved in the greyness of the garden, not even a sparrow. I was locking up the house before going for a drink just to hear a human voice, when the phone rang.
It was the Reverend Morris. He sounded a bit uptight, like everybody else I had spoken to that day; but excited.
‘I’ve got on to something in the records, Joe. I looked at where they started building – well, a bit before they started building really. And there he was – the chap you were talking about. The master mason. An Italian. Jacopo of Milan they called him.’
It figured. The face in the stained glass had been a foreign sort of face – big eyes and a beaky nose, and thin prominent bones – very dark.
‘Can I come over now?’ He sounded eager – hot on the chase.
Why not? It would save me going out and getting drunk. I could stay home and get drunk instead. ‘Come over,’ I said. Then I rang up Hughie Allardyce. He might as well hear it too. He was going on duty in a couple of hours, but he said he would look in, before he went to the station.
I got them out some lagers, though the Reverend Morris seemed scared to touch his; just pretending to be one of the boys, I suppose. On his knees was a mass of notes – sweat-crumpled sheets of paper with his big scrawly pencil-writing all over them.
‘It’s only a very rough translation from the Latin – I can do it better, given time. But it goes something like this . . .’
He paused, looked at us over his reading-glasses to make sure he had our full attention, then began.
‘At that time . . . the Abbot and the Brethren had despaired of the foundations of the south-west tower, for there was evidence that the serpent in the sand was present again, and doing the Devil’s work for him.
‘Then came one who called himself Jacopo Mancini of Milan, a master mason; though not one of us had ever heard of his name he had letters in his possession from three cardinals of the Church in Rome, recommending him as a worker of miracles in the art of building. And he told us that if we gave him his way and did all things according to his instructions, he could build a tower high and safe. And so the Abbot in his despair employed him and the craftsmen he brought with him, and gave them lodgings in the Abbey itself, for no lodgings could be found for them in the town, as they were hated as foreigners.
‘And they worked, and the Abbot employed other masons from Chester and London, as none of the men of Muncaster would work with him. And there was fighting in the town, between the new men and the townsmen, because of the sins of pride and jealousy.
‘But the tower arose without hindrance, though there was one strangeness in the building of it, that the masons left small . . . the Latin says Cella . . . cells? . . . small rooms? . . . small holes? . . . at every stage of the work. And these were left empty when the masons from Chester and London went to rest at night, but in the morning they were found to be sealed up with heavy slabs, by the hand of the said Jacopo. And all the masons in the town asked what had been sealed in the . . . cella . . . and when the Abbot asked Jacopo he said writings of power to hold the tower up against the serpent in the sand, which were known only to him, nor would he let any other man look upon them, or his living would be gone. And the men of the town said they were charms of the Devil, but Jacopo told the Abbot they were taken from Holy Writ, in special places, such as the downfall of the walls of Jericho. But he would tell no more, not even though the Abbot pressed him hard.
‘And when the tower was complete, the Abbot paid Jacopo what monies were due to him, and the said Jacopo departed and was never seen or heard of in this land from that time to the present; but the bodies of his two servants were found in the town, murdered so foully that none but one monk could recognize them, and he had been the one that fed them. Then stories were told in the town that they had been the very servants of the Devil himself, and that was Jacopo of Milan . . . and there were affrays in the town against our Brethren and our house, and our Brother William of Sens was slain, and the men of the town foully cut off his head and played at football with it through the streets, and he was the one who had fed the servants of Jacopo of Milan. And the Abbot sent for the High Sheriff at Chester, who came and hanged some men of the town . . . to wit Roger of Whitegate and his two sons, and John Mason and Thomas Carpeder . . .’
The Reverend Morris sat back with a great gusty sigh of effort, nervously gathered his papers together, and waited for us to speak.
‘Very nasty,’ said Hughie Allardyce, lighting another cigarette with nicotine-stained fingers.
‘There’s something up there,’ said the Reverend Morris. He was suddenly very excited; his small eyes were gleaming behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘I didn’t think the Church held wi’ that sort of talk,’ I said abruptly. ‘I didn’t think your Church believed in Devils any more.’
‘Perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t,’ he said, ‘but we do. We see the Devil’s work in the world. I have cast out Devils by prayer before this.’
‘In church?’
‘At meetings. We hold our own meetings. In people’s houses . . .’
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. It sounded pretty unhealthy to me. All that singing and dancing and waving your arms in the air. Anything could happen to anybody at a meeting like that.
‘I’ve found out a few things, too,’ said Hughie Allardyce, quickly, as if he sensed a row was brewing.
I found that I was
avid to hear what he had to say, too. It’s infectious, that sort of attitude that the Reverend Morris had. That’s why I don’t like it.
‘We’ve had the post-mortem reports on the two young lads who died. Not a mark on them, apart from the injuries sustained falling from the tower. They walked up to the top themselves – they weren’t carried. We found the dust from the tower stairs on their feet. No sign of a struggle. And . . .’
He scrabbled for another fag, with the one he had still burning in the ashtray.
‘. . . I’ve been looking through the old newspaper reports, from the times the tower was repaired in the 1970s, the 1950s and the 1930s. In the 1950s, two little lads disappeared without trace. There was a national hue and cry. And in the 1930s, one of the masons murdered his own son; though it was reduced to manslaughter on appeal. He still got seven years for it.’
I shuddered, thinking how I’d had to treat Kevin. If things had gone wrong, I might have killed him . . . as if Hughie Allardyce had picked up my thought, he said,
‘Your lad’s still in Aberystwyth?’
‘Where he’ll stay wi’ his Mam till this is all over.’
Hughie sighed with relief, and then settled again.
‘What we goin’ to do?’ I said. ‘The town’s full of other people’s bairns.’
‘I’ll have a day and night watch on that tower,’ said Hughie, ‘if I have to do it myself.’
‘I shall talk to some friends of mine,’ said the Reverend Morris. ‘Real experts on this kind of thing. We’ll get something together that can settle it . . .’
‘And I’ll get on wi’ that stinkin’ steeple,’ I said. ‘Sooner it’s finished, the better.’
‘Things always seemed to settle down again, once the work on the tower was finished,’ said Hughie Allardyce.
But even then I knew we were kidding ourselves, with our sound common sense. I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple.
Sunshine can be a mockery. I was hanging in bright sunshine now, in the rope-sling, fitting in the last few blocks of stone where the steeple had become rotten. By tonight, it’d be finished. And the weathercock and the weather-vane were gilded and ready, and gone in an RAF truck to the helicopter place at Valley. They were being put in place on Saturday afternoon, and tomorrow was Saturday. Then we could put a big new lock on that tower door, and we’d be shot of our trouble . . . or so I was trying to tell myself.
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral Page 6
