by S J Bolton
‘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 trail 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 hel
d 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.
He realized he’d stopped running. And that he was freezing. He had to get home, shower and change, then attend an old folks’ lunch in Goodshaw Bridge. And he had a phone call to make. In another few yards he’d be able to follow a footpath along the edge of a field, to bring him out at the end of Wite Lane.
He squeezed through the gap between two tall boulders and set off again along the field edge, heading downhill, keeping his eyes on the ground. At the corner he climbed the low wall into the stubble field beyond. In less than a minute he was at the lowest end. He jumped over the stile and down into Wite Lane. Almost home.
Huddled in front of the burned-out fireplace of the Royle cottage was the thin, trembling body of a girl. Gillian. Twenty yards away he could hear her crying. Except it wasn’t really crying. Keening. That was the only word for it: a high-pitched, heartbreakingly sad keening. The Irish called it the song for the dead.
43
‘IT’S OK, IT’S OK.’ HE’D PUSHED OPEN THE GATE, WAS stepping up the overgrown path. ‘Come on, love, let’s get you home.’ He walked through the space where the front door used to be. Gillian didn’t look up. She remained hunched over, clutching something to her chest. He crossed the uneven ground and bent down beside her. She looked up at him then and he fought a temptation to pull back. For a second the look in her eyes had scared him, had made him think that something essential inside her had slipped out the back way.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here. Come on, pet, you’re freezing.’ Gillian was only wearing a thin sweater and her wrist felt colder than stone. He put an arm around her waist and pulled her to her feet.
She continued to sob as he guided her out through the gate and half led, half dragged her along Wite Lane. The churchyard and street were deserted and his was the only car in the lane. He steered Gillian across the road and opened the passenger door. He never locked the car in Heptonclough and his keys were still in the vestry, with his clothes. He reached into the car, pulled out his coat and wrapped it round her shoulders.
‘Get in,’ he told her. ‘I need to grab my bag from the vestry, then I’ll drive you home.’
Shivering, he ran up the churchyard path, pulled the key out of his shorts pocket and opened the vestry door. His bag was where he’d left it. Grabbing a sweatshirt, he pulled it over his head. He was about to leave when som
ething made him stop and turn.
Someone had been in here. The door to the nave was open. It hadn’t been when he’d left, he was sure of it. Harry took a step towards it. It would have been one of his churchwardens, Mike or Sinclair. They were the only other people who had keys now. And yet they’d formed a habit, over the last few weeks, of telling him when they were going to be in the building. He’d seen both of them less than an hour ago. Neither had mentioned plans to come back. Still, it could only be…
He stopped in the doorway, knowing that his heart was beating too fast and his breathing was too shallow, and telling himself it was the result of a fast run over hill country. Not his churchwardens then. Neither Mike nor Sinclair would have taken every single hassock from the pews and thrown them around the building. Harry stepped into the chancel. Dozens of cushions: on the carpet, caught between the organ pipes, on the choir stalls, everywhere but where they should be.
Harry walked forward, knowing that this wasn’t just about the hassocks, that there was more for him to find, and that it was only a matter of seconds before he did. He wasn’t breathing too fast any more, he was struggling to breathe at all.
Something was growing, fungus-like, in his throat, pressing against its sides, blocking the airway as he reached the centre of the chancel and turned to look down the aisle. He was ready to be shocked. Just not that shocked. He wasn’t prepared to see a small child, broken in pieces, beneath the gallery.
Millie Fletcher! He’d seen her wearing that sweater.
For a few seconds it was impossible to do anything but stare. No air at all was getting into his body now. His head would start to spin at any moment. He began to walk forward, clutching the ends of pews like a toddler unsure on its legs. As he reached the halfway point, he realized he was trembling in relief, not fear. And he was breathing again. Not Millie, thank God, thank God, it couldn’t be Millie – or any real child, for that matter – because no part of a child’s anatomy was made up of vegetables. Oh, thank God.
