by Mark Latham
‘She will, but only if you tell us what we need to know.’
‘God bless ’er!’
‘Mrs. Galtress, there was a woman here last night. Perhaps accompanied by a gentleman. They were in trouble. Do you know who I mean?’ John was in no mood to beat about the bush. It was not a great distance from the post office to the church, even if the messenger was wounded.
‘I cannot say, sir, I cannot. Don’t make me!’
‘I can only help you if you help me,’ John said, trying his best to maintain a gentle tone. ‘This woman—a girl, with brown hair—she is the Queen’s servant, and I have been sent to find her. The Queen will be most cross if anything untoward has happened to her.’
At this, the woman quailed. ‘Not cross wi’ me, sir, oh no! I never did nothing! It were all his doing!’
‘Who?’
‘Old Father bloody Long-legs! Oh, I curse the day I married ’im.’
‘Does your hus—um, Father Long-legs—work for them? For…’ he leaned forward to whisper, ‘the Knights Iscariot?’
There was a sharp intake of breath. ‘We do not speak that name! They’ll ’ear us, and then we’ll be for it!’
‘No one can hear us, Mrs. Galtress, I promise. The Queen’s men are about. Now, what did your husband do?’
‘I never knew, not till after, I swears. Never, never. ’Ee went creepin’ up the stair, quiet as a church mouse, an’ ’ee bashed ’er over the ’ead.’
John tried to hide his dismay. ‘Did he… did he kill her?’
‘Oh no, no, no! Old Long-legs is a coward, sir, and a tyrant, too, but ’ee ain’t no murderer. I ’eard ’em come in, and they talked. They gave my foolish ’usband a purse o’ coin, and took them poor folk away.’
‘Where? Where did they take them?’ John had not heard anything from upstairs, and grew increasingly agitated.
‘Cattermole,’ she said, matter-of-factly.
‘Cattermole?’
‘Aye, Cattermole.’
‘Mrs. Galtress, I don’t understand.’
‘Top Farm,’ she snapped, transforming in an instant from fragile imbecile to stern battle-axe. ‘Cattermole!’
‘John!’ Smythe called from upstairs, and John looked in the direction of the shout. When he turned back to Mrs. Galtress, she was staring blankly through him, and holding aloft an object in her gnarled old hand. John reached out and gently took it from her.
It was a silver locket, engraved with the Hardwick crest, with an unusual watch-winder upon its side. A lump came to John’s throat.
Smythe called again, the tone more urgent.
Mrs. Galtress resumed her rocking and laughing. John sighed—he hoped he had enough to go on. As he dashed from the room, he heard a soft singing resume behind him, and the tale of Old Father Long-legs went on.
* * *
The street outside was still deathly quiet, but was no longer abandoned. A short way down the hill, twenty or so men, armed with tools and farm implements, stood gathered, silent, watching. At their head was the postmaster, Galtress, crooked and unsteady due to the gunshot wound in his right leg. Further up the hill, a smaller group of men, similarly armed and quietly assembled, glowered at the two agents with malice.
Between the two groups, John and Smythe stood back to back.
‘Any bright ideas?’ Smythe whispered. ‘Your sister would probably just shoot her way out.’
‘Let’s not resort to guns just now,’ John replied. ‘We don’t know how many of these fellows might be carrying firearms. We’ll try the official approach first, shall we?’
‘Be my guest, old boy.’
John straightened his collar, rolled his shoulders, and stepped towards the largest group, fixing Galtress foremost with his most imperious stare. ‘Now look here,’ he shouted, ‘we are on official business, and shall not be hindered. Return to your homes at once. If we have need of you for our enquiries, we may call on you in good time. Off you go!’
There was no movement from either group, no glances exchanged, no shouts or even whispers as far as John could tell.
Smythe leaned towards John and whispered, ‘Off you go?’
‘Well, it works on Father’s dogs.’
‘I rather think these dogs are loyal to another master,’ Smythe muttered.
‘Looks like you’re far from home,’ called Galtress. ‘You should have stayed on that train, because this is the end of the line for you.’ His weak pun was met by a ripple of thuggish laughter.
‘Up the hill?’ Smythe suggested, already backing up towards the smaller of the two groups.
‘Quite,’ John replied. He turned and marched briskly away from Galtress’s thugs. He reached into his pocket and his hand closed around the grip of his pistol. In the field, John liked to carry a snub-nosed Webley loose in his pocket, and a Beaumont-Adams in his breast holster. ‘Don’t shoot unless you must,’ he said. ‘We’ll run out of bullets before they run out of men—we must be clever about it.’
The men remained motionless, until at last John and Smythe moved to within a few yards of them, and they began to crowd together, closing ranks.
‘Stand aside!’ John called.
They did not stand aside. Instead, they took a step forward, with almost military coordination. A great roar went up from the crowd further down the hill, accompanied almost at once by the thudding of heavy boots. John was of two minds about how to proceed, and hands were upon him before he had decided on his course. He had built a reputation for never getting caught in sticky situations like this, and yet not for the first time this week he found himself in mortal peril. Flustered, he fired his pistol through his jacket pocket. The crowd shrank away; a man screamed in pain. From the corner of his eye, John saw Smythe fumble for a gun. Over the shoulder of the nearest thug, he saw the gleam of a shotgun barrel raised into the air.
John shoulder-barged the wounded man out of his path, and took out his pistol, trying to force his way through to the gunman—their last hope, he felt, was to be the only men on the street with firearms.
The closest thugs stepped away as their fellow fell to the ground, clasping a bloody wound at his hip. No one wanted to be next in line to be shot, but as pounding footsteps approaching from downhill grew louder and more rapid, the entire crowd took heart, surging forwards.
John’s Webley discharged again, but this time harmlessly into the air as his arm was pushed upwards. He was aware of Smythe disappearing under a wave of bodies, fists flailing and legs kicking. Someone hit John hard in the stomach, taking the wind from him. He was pulled about so that he was face to face with Galtress, whose head bobbed about upon a long neck as he shouted a spittle-flecked invective into John’s face. His sharp eyes and pointed nose gave him the look of a heron, jabbing its beak at a thrashing fish.
‘You shot me!’ he screeched, then, to the group: ‘We’ll be paid well for this. They’ll regret coming here—they’ll regret crossing us!’
All of the villagers shouted in agreement. Strong hands twisted the gun from John’s grasp, and a moment later he was being carried along in an irresistible tide. Smythe was alongside him, face swollen and bloody. They were being dragged down the hill, and before long John saw their likely destination.
Outside the inn on the corner of the street, another two men were waiting, the cellar doors of the pub held open, ready for their prisoners. John tried to steady his breathing, and thus his thoughts; to formulate a plan. His eyes darted about, looking for a way out.
Across the road from the pub was a small farrier’s yard, and tethered next to the gate was a horse. It had no saddle, but was tied to a post by its halter. As they were wrestled closer and closer to the beer cellar, the options available decreased dramatically. John knew the horse was their best chance of getting away from the mob; he also knew that neither of them had been searched thoroughly. He just needed a free hand to go for his second gun.
He feigned a stumble and, on cue, the thug who had hold of his arms yanked him upright. As
soon as John’s hands were level with the man’s chest, he flicked his wrist, and one of Cherleten’s favourite gadgets came into play. A derringer on a spring-loaded device was propelled from his jacket sleeve, and appeared in his right hand. The thug barely had the time to register the tiny gun’s presence, and John gave him no chance. The pistol flared, so close that the man’s shirt was powder-burnt before the blood began to flow.
The shot was not a powerful one, but the weapon’s report was enough to send the surprised group scattering, swelling away from the two agents like the ripples of a lake around a cast stone, and converging again almost as quickly. John wrenched his pistol from his holster, cracking his elbow into the nose of the first man who tried to take it away from him. Smythe, more badly beaten, staggered towards John, groping about for a weapon of his own.
The crowd parted as a bearded old farmer levelled his shotgun. John shot him dead where he stood, with a ruthless precision born of hundreds of hours on the practise range. He did not relish the killing, he never did, and he was acutely aware that these were poor folk in thrall to monsters. Yet even if John’s mission was not of national import, it was personal. They had turned Lillian over to the vampires, and would do the same to John and Smythe. He would kill as many as it took to rout them, and count the moral cost later.
The death of the farmer scattered the crowd, though none of the men ran far.
‘The horse,’ John hissed, and ran at once across the street. Smythe followed close, but awkwardly, finally finding a small-calibre pistol that had been secreted at his ankle. The surgeon waved the gun in the general direction of the crowd, causing half the men to duck as the barrel swept across their lines.
John helped Smythe onto the back of the unsaddled horse. Already the crowd had begun to reassemble, making a desperate bid to block their escape route. The horse shifted beneath John and whinnied with panic as the men began to circle her. That panic turned to self-preservation when Smythe fired once again, and the sound of the gun spurred the horse on, through the crowd and up the hill, with the two agents holding on for dear life.
The crack of a shotgun sounded behind them; masonry billowed from the front of the post office as the agents rode past. Soon, the sound of the crowd’s shouts and jeers were lost, and all John could hear was the crisp echo of hooves on cobblestones. Smythe patted him on the back to let him know he was all right, and with grim determination John took the horse into a canter, his only aim now to find the Cattermole farm, where Lillian had been taken.
* * *
Lillian sat for what seemed the longest time, trying not to doze, for when she did she was beset by terrible dreams, of bestial things howling in darkness, of running with packs of malformed monsters with sloping backs and twisted limbs. She struggled to stay awake, and watched lines of shadow slide across the barn floor as the weak sun marched its progress across the sky.
Strength began to return to her. With it came hunger. It was unlike anything she had ever known: a deep, voracious hollow forming within her belly, as though she had been starved for days. The stench of death drifted to her nostrils, although it must have been there all along, and with a nauseated revulsion Lillian pushed Arthur’s body aside. It rolled away from her into the dirt, and for a second she fancied the eyes had life in them yet. The face contorted and twisted, as though Arthur were trying to form words, to speak to her one last time. She set aside her horror and leaned towards Arthur’s shrunken face, unsure of her own senses. The pangs of hunger began to overwhelm her, reaching up from the pit of her stomach like a hand forcing its way through her gullet, grasping for any morsel to sate it. And the word she fancied came from Arthur’s dead lips terrified her.
Feed.
She shrank away from the body, scrabbling backwards on her hands and knees, eyes wide, her entire body shaking. When the convulsions came, they were violent and painful. She was thrown to the ground as if by unseen hands; she thrashed about, slamming her knuckles into the barn wall so hard that wood splintered, her head cracking upon the floor. Her vision swam, and became a vista of liquid purple flame, blocking out reality. Gibbering Riftborn and phantoms plagued her; spirits of the long-dead spoke to her in voices cold and measureless; every surface writhed and moved, the life of mould and woodworm and hitherto invisible creatures now revealed to her, as though everything upon which she gazed was through a magnifier of unprecedented power and clarity. She could smell hay rotting in the loft overhead, the damp grass from outside, the bovine stench of nearby farm-sheds. She smelled most of all the rot of Arthur’s body, and with it came the hunger again, the insatiable desire to claw at him, to gnaw upon his bones. Had de Montfort not warned her of the ‘ghouls’? The eaters of the dead? Had his experiment, this ‘Iscariot Sanction’, gone horribly wrong, and she had become such a creature? She saw a vision of herself, staggering through a mausoleum, heaving stone slabs from sarcophagi as she went, tearing parchment-dry flesh from skeletal remains, cramming it hungrily into her mouth.
She was going mad.
When the hunger returned, she bent double and vomited, before staggering away out of the barn, head spinning in delirium. She fell, and was immersed in freezing water that brought her to her senses so quickly she felt her brain jolt in her skull. She dragged herself from an algae-ridden pond, fingers clawing at sodden earth as she heaved herself onto a mossy bank, and closed her eyes until the visions and voices subsided. When next she dared open them, the barn in which she had been held was a black shape upon a hill some five hundred yards away. Behind her was a dark copse of skeletal trees, and the vista in between was of rolling fields in mist, dotted with livestock, and of the endless moors that stretched beyond the fields up to the swirling rose-blushed horizon.
She saw farmhouses in the far distance with a clarity that seemed impossible. But those havens were too far away; Lillian’s need was too immediate, overwhelming. She did not think, only acted. She fixed her huntress eyes upon the indistinct shapes of a small herd of cattle nearby. As she moved towards it, staggering at first, her weaving path became straighter, her poise more confident; her bare, wind-chapped legs at last felt strong as iron, carrying her towards the only thing in the world that mattered.
Blood.
FIFTEEN
Finding Top Farm had not been easy. Several hours spent riding the lanes on an unsaddled horse, hiding from other travellers, had proven laborious. Logic dictated that the name was a colloquial one, and probably referred to the farm’s physical position, and so John and Smythe had wended their way along the high lanes, looking for hillside farms bordering the moorland around Commondale. The first farm they had tried as a likely candidate had proven deserted, save for two vicious dogs shut up inside that threw themselves at the doors and windows ferociously. The occupants of the house had been dead for some time, their bodies drained of blood and left to rot on the kitchen floor, where the dogs had gnawed at their bones. One of the dogs was so sick that John killed it as a kindness. The other, he set free—better it take its chances on the moors.
As sunset approached and the two agents were succumbing to tiredness and hunger, Smythe’s keen eyes had spotted a small wooden sign in a hedgerow, pointing up a tree-covered bank.
HILLTOP FARM.
They had not been far from the village—their path had been a winding one, taking them to the limits of the district and then back, dangerously close to Commondale. They had decided that, even if Hilltop Farm was not the one they sought, they would have little choice but to rest there for the night. When the door was answered—somewhat cautiously—by an old woman named Cattermole, John almost laughed giddily out of sheer relief.
* * *
‘Might as well ’ave some stew as you’re ’ere,’ the Widow Cattermole said, shuffling into her spacious kitchen and pointing at a large pot over the fire. John and Smythe needed no second invitation and were soon seated by the fire, stuffing broth-soaked bread into their mouths hungrily.
‘Your hospitality is appreciated,’ John sa
id, half his stew already devoured. ‘We have had a trying day.’
‘I’m sure,’ said the old woman.
‘We were told that you may have had… a disturbance here last night. We came to investigate.’
‘Investigate, eh?’ the old woman chuckled. ‘And did they send you? I’ve told them ’undred times, there’s nowt they can do to me. I’m an old woman, and I’ve got nowt left to give, and none left to give it to. I keep meself to meself, and if that i’n’t enough for ’em, they know what they can do.’
She folded her arms and nodded to signify her final word had been said.
John and Smythe exchanged looks. John cleared his throat. ‘Actually, Mrs. Cattermole, we have come from London. We are here to find out what’s been happening in the north… we are here to help.’ Trusting the woman was a risk, but John reasoned that she did not seem best disposed towards the Knights Iscariot, and she was but an old woman, living alone on an isolated farm. Even if she wished to give them away, it would take an hour or more for her to reach help, and she posed no threat to them alone.
‘London, eh?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Took your time.’
‘Yes, we’ve rather heard that once or twice already,’ Smythe intervened.
‘Well, you’re ’ere now, I s’pose,’ she said. ‘I ’spect you’ve seen the goings-on in t’ village?’
‘We have,’ John said. ‘It concerns us greatly.’
‘Right it should! Used to be nowt but good folk round ’ere, or so you’d think. But they changed soon enough when their own necks were on the block. Oh aye, Commondale is a village o’ traitors, and it’s not the only one. Bloody disgrace!’
‘Mrs. Cattermole, we do not wish to drag you into these affairs and endanger you unnecessarily. We have reason to believe that you have information vital to our investigation.’
‘Oh?’ The old woman looked suspicious.
‘We spoke with one Mrs. Galtress, at the post office,’ John said.
