Strange Tombs

by Syd Moore

  And they went off on that tangent till we turned into the drive. As we neared the house my car drove past me, sounding the horn as it went by. Sam was in the driving seat. Bloody cheek!

  When he got out he took a box of equipment and put it on the roof. ‘Just popped home for supplies,’ he said and ducked down to fetch a smaller crate.

  ‘In my car!’ I was outraged.

  ‘Indeed. How else was I meant to get there? Walk?’

  ‘But you’re not insured.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I am. Monty sorted it out. You can drive mine too if you like. He thought flexibility would help.’

  ‘Nice of you both to tell me,’ I said and made further disparaging remarks about Sam’s car, rust and the Flintstones.

  ‘Hello,’ said Laura when she and Imogen had caught up with us. ‘What’s all that then?’

  ‘Some surveillance equipment,’ I explained.

  Sam grinned. ‘We’ll see if we can film some of your nighttime pests.’

  As it turned out however, Sophia was not immediately thrilled by the prospect of installing cameras on the Grade II listed property. In fact she told us to leave it with her and she’d make a few phone calls.

  Sam, however, sent me a wink and followed her into the study. I took my cue and joined them, closing the door after me.

  ‘To be fair,’ he said to the events manager, ‘if you’d like us to get to the bottom of things I would suggest that Rosie and I spend tomorrow here and monitor the equipment in the evening.’

  Sophia looked surprised by this suggestion.

  ‘We can play it by ear,’ I added. ‘But this sort of methodology has had a tendency to shed light on things.’

  Sophia took this on board. ‘Well, let me see what I can do. Why don’t you come back in the morning, as I suggested. I’ll let Carole know that you’ll be joining us.’

  Sam surrendered. ‘Okay.’

  We would miss out on anything that happened this evening, which I thought was rather short-sighted of Sophia. But she didn’t look like she was going to budge so we said our goodbyes and made for the museum.

  It was a good time for us to take stock.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Back at the ranch we decided to look over some of the equipment. Sam’s feeling was that we should throw everything at tomorrow’s proposed stake-out, should we be allowed to go ahead with it.

  Bronson came in halfway through and asked us how things were going, which Sam summed up neatly and cleanly, then apprised us of what he had learnt about the Devil and the Bell legend. Which wasn’t much really and went along the same lines as all previous mentions of Himself Downstairs: during a storm, with the church unguarded, the Devil materialised as a great black form and decided to steal the largest church bell. He was on his way down the hill, making for his underworld kingdom, when his horns were spotted by the priest who shouted out ‘Stop, in the name of God!’ The Devil, in fear, then dived into the ground, leaving the bell. His speedy departure created a crater which could still be found today.

  Bronson had been nodding all the way through this and added rather ominously, ‘Yes, that’s right. And they say that when he wants to return you can sometimes hear his bell ring.’

  I tapped Sam on the arm. ‘Could that be what Chris Devlin heard last night?’

  He smiled. ‘You mean, what someone wanted Chris Devlin to think he heard last night.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I added, glad his stretching credulity didn’t lend itself to belief that the Devil rang bells. Then a thought struck me. ‘Do you remember when you were talking about Cernunnos and Baal, the other day?’

  Sam paused and nodded.

  ‘There’s a lot of devil mythology raising its little horned head in this village. And, remember how Carole mentioned that there was a pagan temple somewhere. You don’t think Bell Hill is Baal Hill, do you? Baal was a pagan god wasn’t he? Consort to Jezebel …’

  Sam nodded. ‘He was a pagan god, yes, but consort to Asherah, the goddess of fertility and the sea. Baal was also the god of fertility, and of wind, rain, lightning, seasons.’

  ‘Well maybe his crater is the entrance to his underground temple.’

  He stroked his chin. ‘That’s an interesting theory, Rosie. I’d like to explore it, I think. But after we’ve sorted out Ratchette Hall. I’m not sure that any of them had heard about Baal before I mentioned him. They didn’t appear to.’

  I cast my mind over that episode. ‘Robin did,’ I said.

  ‘Mm, yes. I forgot about that. He did, you’re right.’

  ‘Is it a stretch to imagine he’s got a hand in the “haunting of Ratchette Hall”?’

  Sam sat back and thought about it. ‘Open minds,’ he said, ‘should not be shut to possibilities, however unlikely they may appear.’

  So I took it further. ‘The vicar called me a Jezebel. He would have known the story about her – it’s biblical isn’t it?’

  But Sam laughed. ‘Murdering vicars indeed!’

  It kind of irked me. ‘But Sam, he has access to the tombs, the knights. We’ve only got his word for it he was the last one to lock up.’

  But then Bronson put down his bucket with an announcing clang. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m off to the Stars for a pint. You want to join me?’

  Well, actually that did sound great, I thought, but Sam jumped in. ‘Thank you, Bronson, but we might have a late one tomorrow night so should be fresh for it, right Rosie?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed with reluctance.

  But then Bronson sent me a sympathetic nod which made me feel suddenly rebellious. ‘Oh come on Sam,’ I said. ‘I don’t fancy cooking. Let’s have dinner there.’

  To which he surprisingly agreed.

  We settled in to a table by the inglenook fireplace complete with its well-polished horse brasses and blazing fire. The Seven Stars was a nice old inn that looked well average on the outside but inside was old and traditional, with low wattle ceilings and beams across them.

  There weren’t that many people in the pub now that the detectorists had moved on and the treasure seekers had pretty much given up all hope of finding the Howlet Hoard, which to be fair, had not been sighted for centuries. Apart from a little urn of coins that were found back in the summer. But that was a whole other story.

  Bronson went off to ‘say hello’ to Bob Acton. The old farmer was standing at the bar talking to Nicky from the village shop, who was wearing a biker jacket with lots of studs, and his pitchfork, Woody. That was Bob’s pitchfork, not Nicky’s you understand. Nicky was far too style-conscious to consider such an accessory, unless it turned up in Country Life’s ‘This season’s must-haves’. Which, come to think of it, was also not beyond the realms of possibility.

  I gave up calculating the odds on that and perused the menu, plumping for sausage and mash – I’d had salad earlier so it cancelled out the calories – which I ordered, along with Sam’s preferred dish, from Lisa, the new landlady. The previous landlord had beaten a rather hasty retreat after the last Wicker Man-ish episode in the car park, with some developers and a rather large boulder. The latter of which I was hoping might be relocated to our museum Garden of Remembrance once the Museum of London had finished with it.

  Having sorted dinner, I returned to our table where Sam was poring over his notepad.

  Wanting a bit of attention, I coughed. Then when that didn’t work I came straight out with, ‘So then Sam – what’s going on do you reckon? Could it be the unquiet dead who’ve got those writers’ knick-knacks in a twist. Or is it this Cernunnos/Baal bloke that’s making Devlin hard?’

  Sam looked up, cringed, then laughed and dropped his pen onto the table. A good sign – his attention was mine for a minute or two.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he said, crinkling those eyes of his. ‘That was a rather startling comment, I have to admit. I think the poor man was trying not to sound emasculated whilst at the same time admitting to being unnerved.’

  ‘Po
or man?’ I scoffed. ‘The guy is loaded. And personally, I think he was showing off his virility,’ I said and then winced. ‘To some men of a certain age that kind of thing matters.’

  Sam pushed his hair back. ‘And some women.’

  I frowned. ‘Like who?’

  ‘I was thinking about Margot.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘You been doing a lot of that?’

  ‘Rosie!’ he said and sighed. Then his lips pulled into a smile. ‘There are various older women I think about, but Margot isn’t one of them.’

  I didn’t know what to make of that and didn’t want to go there, so funnelled back to Devlin in order to head off further discussion on that particularly thorny subject. ‘So do you think what Chris was saying was genuine? Or was he putting it all on? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell with that accent. It makes him sound phoney.’

  Sam let himself be led back down the conversational path to the events of this morning, though I had a sense he knew exactly what I was doing. ‘He had the signs of being thoroughly shaken. But I was of the opinion, at the time, that his conviction was real.’

  ‘He believed that he’d seen something that was, er, unnatural?’

  ‘Or supernatural, to his mind.’ Sam wrinkled his nose (adorably). ‘The strange, unearthly “commotioning”.’

  I smirked, but Sam flexed his brows. ‘He’s no different in that to most of us. Our minds are open to it.’

  I wasn’t sure about that one. People weren’t born open-minded – parental attitudes transferred over pretty early on. Some however developed the state, and others, like me, had open-mindedness thrust upon them. Because if you didn’t have an open mind re some of the stuff that went on around the Witch Museum you’d either have to go and live in a sanitised bubble, like that kid in America, or board the express train to Nutsville. And that place rarely ran returns.

  ‘Witches on broomsticks, old gods, restless spirits,’ he went on. ‘They fulfil a role – to give humankind hope that it’s not living in a vacuum,’ he said, voice deepening. ‘Hope that there are things out there we don’t understand, that are beyond our current understanding. Greater beings, gods, they suggest to us creatures caught in chaos, that there is order somewhere within.’ He waved his hand about the pub, which although I have to admit had at points resembled something of an Alcoholics Hieronymus painting, actually looked fairly subdued tonight.

  I loved listening to him when he was on one like this. Funnily enough it had bored me at the beginning. Now I could see these were moments when the spirit within him stirred. It animated his face and body. It made him happy. I liked it when he was happy.

  ‘What about you?’ I ventured, curious and keen to keep him in this mode, so I could look at him easily. ‘Do you believe it? Or want to?’

  He scrunched his forehead and cocked his head to one side and gave me a funny look.

  ‘Well?’ I said and realised I was leaning on my elbow, cupping my chin in my hand, gazing at him like a love-sick teenager. Pathetic. I immediately shifted focus to the table top, picked up my cider and necked a quarter of the glass.

  Sam watched me, mirrored my move and took a sip of his own drink, then sat back into his chair. ‘I think I’m with Carole on this one. Someone is trying to wind them up.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said with a grin. Internally I was relieved, what with all his metaphysical wobbliness of late. ‘No friars in the ferns then, or banshees in the birch trees, as entertaining as that sounds?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ He tapped his chin. ‘The exploitation of superstitions and folkloric belief in order to manipulate people psychologically has been going on for centuries. We know that superstitions and superstitious belief flourish in an atmosphere of insecurity and tension.’

  ‘That sounds exactly like what’s been created at Ratchette Hall,’ I said, trying to pick up the thread and stop looking at the outline of his well-worked shoulders. ‘Insecurity and tension.’

  ‘Indeed. And that situation, in which emotions are already running high, can generate behaviour which runs contrary to rational thought.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ I said. I hadn’t really been going for this when I asked the question. But now I realised it presented too good an opportunity to miss re the ghost on tape. I still wasn’t sure if he had been genuine or if, in some way, he was trying to test me. The notion that Sam, man of open mind and healthy scepticism, was buying into the idea that we had discovered empirical evidence of a supernatural phenomenon, ran contrary to my experience of him thus far. But then Monty had chucked the ‘Sam family history’ bomb into the whole equation, which spannered everything anyway.

  ‘I mean, think about our good friend Cecil Williamson from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, God rest his soul,’ he was instructing as I came round from my thought cycle, resolved to get a question in. ‘Cecil Williamson?’ he repeated when I failed to respond.

  I scrunched my eyebrows together and summoned up a mental image of a man in tweed, round glasses and a slight Scottish accent, into folklore and magic in a very ‘Sam’ style. Possibly, possibly, possibly even more knowledgeable, if you could imagine that. ‘I thought his name was Benedict,’ I said eventually when I’d retrieved the full picture from my mental filing cabinet. ‘The curator of the Museum in Boscastle?’

  Sam squinted through his own thoughts and then shook his head. ‘No, he’s the current curator. Remember the founder? Cecil Williamson? Old guy. Well, he was old when he died.’

  Ah yes, I recalled the audio of Mr Williamson that I had listened to on a CD. He had been describing how he’d located the bones of the ‘witch’ Ursula Cadence. ‘That’s right. I remember him now. Posher, than Benedict, very magical.’

  Sam smiled at me. His eyes twinkled. I swallowed and felt something, not wind, move in my stomach, which emboldened me to take another glug of cider and leave my hand closer to his when I put the glass down.

  Unfortunately my niggly, pithy inner voice took that opportunity to whisper into my head. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That boy deserves better, remember? Someone less, less …’ I could hear it struggling for the word and simultaneously I saw an image of the museum, tattered and bruised, after a particularly nasty storm we had once suffered. ‘Someone not so weather-beaten,’ my inner voice concluded.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sam, like he’d listened in on this process. ‘Cecil.’

  ‘So what about him?’ I replied, having turned myself grumpy.

  Sam evidently had no clue of any inner turmoil in the woman sitting opposite him and went on with his story regardless. ‘Do you recall when we were returning from Boscastle? I told you about the “Witches’ Ritual” that occurred in the Second World War in Ashdown Forest? The “Cone of Power”.’

  ‘Here we go,’ I thought. ‘More lectures.’ But I rummaged through my mental drawers again, to please him. Eventually I recalled the conversation in which this reference had occurred. Originally it was framed within another larger chat about my family’s connection to the MI5 and MI6 occult bureaux. It had blown my mind at the time. Now it just made me go, ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam said, again with uncanny (possibly telepathic) accuracy. ‘Operation Mistletoe. Witches or possibly Canadian Airmen, met in Ashdown Forest and conducted a ritual to repel Hitler’s advances across the channel. So when word got back to Hitler, who was very superstitious, it worried him thoroughly.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I said. ‘Thus, manipulation.’ Might as well try and follow what he was talking about, I supposed.

  Sam’s eyes were whirring again. ‘In fact some of this business at Ratchette Hall reminds me of an episode that happened in Italy in the 1920s.’

  He was waiting for me to urge him on.

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Well,’ he said and gave a chest wiggle. ‘According to Captain Jasper Maskelyne, who had been a stage magician prior to the war, a group of soldiers were acting as an advance patrol and created a device which was more or less a gigantic scarecrow. It was twelv
e feet high and able to stagger forward under its own power. They rigged it so that as it moved, it emitted flashes. Great electric-blue sparks jumped from it and as it reeled down the streets it made several loud bangs. The inhabitants of the villages literally took to their heels, swearing that the Devil was marching ahead of the invading English.’ He went on. ‘The knock-on effect was that, as they fled, the villagers completely congested the roads and snared the retreating German troops. So the army was able to go in and take them.’

  ‘Ha,’ I said, trying to sound engaged. ‘I suppose you could say the Devil himself, as a concept, is a fantastic way of manipulating people.’

  ‘One of the originals,’ he added. ‘Sin and you’ll spend an eternity roasting in the flames of hell. If you don’t fancy that then you have to follow the rules.’

  I nodded. ‘Which brings us again to the Damebury shenanigans.’

  ‘Yes, through rather a circuitous route. Of course, the residents in question aren’t peasants. This time they are educated. But they are also story-makers. Architects of the imagination.’

  ‘Oh.’ I suddenly got his point. ‘And someone or something is trying to exploit their superstitions and imaginations?’

  ‘To the death, in one case,’ he agreed.

  A log in the fire spluttered.

  ‘Any idea who?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. I think it will be good to spend a day there tomorrow, then execute a surveillance operation in the evening.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Oh.’ He grinned. ‘I thought we could cuddle up in the study. It’s quite cosy in there.’

  I darted a glance at him. He looked absurdly genuine. Or was he taking the mickey? While I watched him he dropped his hand on the table next to mine. His little finger crept out and rubbed against my thumb.

  Had he gone mad?

  I nodded, feeling the need to breathe in deeply but not wanting to show that he had effected such a physical change in me. Did he realise what he was doing or was it an absentminded gesture? ‘You’re rubbing your finger on mine,’ I said eventually, always one for subtlety.