I heard Mimi’s little feet running along the floorboards. Auntie Ida’s footfalls followed.
“Leave the rabbit inside the door,” she said. “Mr. Crawford will have brought it down. I’ll stew it tomorrow.”
Auntie shut Finn up in the house. He made such a fuss she had trouble pushing the door closed on him before she locked it.
We walked down the Chase. Father Mansell had left the Wolseley at Glebe House.
“You needn’t have bothered to come down,” Auntie Ida was saying. I was trying to remember where I’d seen a black box like the one the rector had described.
“Oh, I fancied the stroll,” said Father Mansell. “Looks as though it’s going to be a beautiful day for your outing. They say we’re in for a heat wave.”
“Hoo, they say all sorts of things,” said Auntie Ida. “Now, are you sure you’re all right to pick us up from the six forty? We can always catch the bus.”
It was in the room with the painting of Old Peter, on the chest of drawers, next to the basket of baby clothes.
“No bother at all, Mrs. Eastfield. Glad to be of service, and I’ve a couple of jobs to do in Daneflete today anyway. I’ve got to check some printing they’re doing for me at Cottle’s, next to the Longship. Might even pop in for a little tipple. Then I’m going to call in on Edgar Selwyn at Prospect Hall. I haven’t seen him for a while.”
They chattered on, and then, just as we turned left to go up the hill, who should come running down it at top speed but Roger and Pete, so fast that they couldn’t stop. They whizzed past us, yelling their heads off.
“I’ll stop here till they come up again,” I said. “See you, Mimi. Have a nice time. Cheerio, Father Mansell.”
Father Mansell touched his hat, and Mimi wiggled Sid at me and I waved to him. Auntie Ida pointed in the direction of the church, shook her finger, then turned back towards the hill.
Roger and Pete were bent over with their hands on their knees, catching their breath and laughing.
“You nearly went over there, mate,” said Pete.
I sat down on the grass verge and waited for them to stop panting.
“Cor, got a real stitch,” said Roger, rubbing his side. “I won, though.”
“Yeah, but I’ll win you tomorrow,” Pete said, tumbling down on the grass on his back.
“Where they all going, then?” Roger asked me.
“Auntie Ida’s meeting this friend in Lokswood. Father Mansell’s giving them a lift to Daneflete station. We’d better start walking up, or Auntie Ida’ll be worried we’re going down the church.”
We dusted ourselves down and started to climb the hill. Sure enough, although they were a long way in front, Auntie Ida turned round, shaded her eyes with her hand, and looked down at us. When she was certain we were coming up behind, she turned again and continued walking with Mimi and Father Mansell.
“Look, I don’t want to go down the church,” I said. “I want to go back to the house. Can we just listen out for Father Mansell’s car to go off first?”
“What on earth do you want to go back there for?” said Pete.
“I want to try and get in and look for something,” I said. “A box. I can’t look for anything with Auntie around.”
“How’re you going to find a box in that great big old place? Could be anywhere. What’s in it, then?” said Pete.
“Just history stuff. It’s a tin box. I think I might know where it is already, so we won’t be long.”
We carried on walking up the hill. As we passed Glebe Woods, we heard car doors slamming, an engine starting up, then the Wolseley scrunching over the gravel. As it poked its nose out of the drive to Glebe House, I saw Auntie Ida lean forward in the passenger seat, looking to see if we were still coming up the hill. I gave her a wave, then the car turned to the left and they drove off up the lane.
“Come on!” I shouted. We turned on our heels and ran all the way back down the hill, so fast that we couldn’t stop our legs taking us down into the Chase all on their own.
As we got up to the house, Finn started barking. We went into the porch at the front, and I tried rattling the huge door. I heard the dog’s claws padding towards us over the floorboards, and he gruffed and whined at us from the other side.
“Let’s try the windows,” I said to Roger, pulling him away from the spot on the path where he was staring up at the carving of the crying baby.
“Look, they’ve all been nailed up, every one of them,” he said as we moved from one window to the next towards the back of the house, framing our faces with our hands and peering through the glass into the rooms as we went. Long rusty iron nails had been hammered into the ledges hard up against the frames so that the windows couldn’t be opened.
“Someone must’ve been really scared of burglars,” said Pete.
“Must be boiling hot in there,” said Roger as we got to the back garden. “Won’t any of them open at all? Poor old dog must be baking.”
“Auntie’s left him some water. He’ll be all right,” I said. “Remember I told you I opened my window the other night? It was a heck of a job. The nails was so rusty, they broke. Look, that’s my bedroom.”
I pointed upwards to the damaged window frame. Among the dandelions on the path we found splinters of wood, so rotten they crumbled in our fingers.
“Look here!” said Roger. “Look at this! What’s happened here?”
We were standing in the cobbled yard between the two wings of the house; a mass of ivy had spread itself over the eaves and up onto the roof. Somehow, whole branches, their torn ends still white and fresh, had been ripped off and lay on the path on a carpet of scattered leaves.
“Somebody’s climbed up it,” said Roger.
“Right up to the roof,” Pete added, pointing. “Look, those tiles have slipped.”
“Was it your auntie?” asked Roger.
“What would she flippin’ well have gone up on the roof for? To get a suntan?”
We moved on around the house, thumping on the nailed-up windows, with Finn barking at us occasionally from inside, until we reached the far side of the garden where Auntie had forbidden Mimi and me to go because of the well. Under the trees were drifts of stinging nettles and knotted brambles as vicious as barbed wire. The blackberries were sweet after the few days of sunshine.
On the outside of the end wall of the house was an enormous stone chimney, rising up from below ground level. The house was badly sunken in on this side, for along the bottom of the wall, on either side of the chimney, were the very tops of windows, crisscrossed with iron bars. The glass was cracked and dirty and almost obscured by weeds, grass, and old rotting leaves.
To one side of this massive chimney was another, smaller chimney of bricks, obviously added much later. I pressed my face to the nearest window and saw that this more recent chimney rose up behind the big black stove in Auntie Ida’s kitchen.
“Look,” said Roger. “Someone’s been digging.”
A few feet from the wall, heaps of fresh damp earth were piled up around three sides of a dark hole.
“Careful,” he said, approaching gingerly. “Might be the well.” He knelt down on the flattened grass, spread out his hands on either side, and leaned over. “Chuck a stone in, Pete!”
It landed almost immediately, with a soft thud.
“Don’t sound like a well to me,” I said, kneeling down beside Roger and peering over the grassy edges of the hole. “It ain’t deep enough, unless they’ve stuck a lid on. Here, lower me down.”
“Don’t be stupid. If there is a lid, it’s most probably rotten, and then you’ll fall through and drown.”
“Hang on to me arms.”
“You’re bonkers. Here, Pete. Come and help.”
They held my hands, and I wriggled backwards. My feet touched a firm surface that gave a little as I moved. I straightened up, only in up to my knees.
“Be ready to grab me,” I said, “and give us a stick.”
Pete found a short piece of
dead branch. I scratched with it around my feet. Most of the soil had been removed. I found I was standing on wooden planks that sank in slightly when I changed position. I moved with care. The stick scraped over metal, two muddy rings linked by an old iron chain.
Suddenly a piece of plank sheered off. My foot dropped into a jagged hole. I felt a jab of pain, lurched, and grabbed the boys’ arms. They pulled me out. My ankle was bleeding.
“It’s trapdoors, with rings you pull them up with,” I said, blotting the blood with my filthy sock. “They’ve got them just the same in the street round the back of the Half Moon at home. The men from the brewery roll the barrels down off the cart and into the cellar.”
“I still think it’s the well,” said Roger. “That’s what your auntie said. And they’ve put these door things on to stop people falling in.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, “but we’d better move away. Come on, Pete. The wood’s gone rotten. Be careful.”
Pete stared over the edge. “Who’s dug it all out, then?” he said. “Was it Mrs. Eastfield? What does she want a blimmin’ great hole in her garden for?”
The house was nailed and barred so completely we could find no way in. I was really irritated.
“Do you want to look at the old pillbox from the war?” Roger suggested as we walked up the hill towards Bryers Guerdon. “Dad said soldiers sat in there eating sandwiches, playing cards, and looking out for Hitler.”
The stream, overhung with trees on the hilltop side, ran under the road and marked the boundary between two fields, one on the flat land at the top of the hill that led all the way to the main road, and the other on the slope.
“It goes along the back of the pillbox”— Roger pointed out its course with his finger —“and through all the fields from Bryers Guerdon to South Fairing and Daneflete. Then it gets much wider and ends up in the estuary.”
The barred gate into the field was farther down the hill, so instead of walking back, we squeezed through a gap in the hedge. The sloes and hawthorns scratched our arms and legs half to death.
The tall yellow wheat, almost ripe for harvesting, was spread out before us, moving gently in curving waves under the blue, cloudless sky. Among the stalks, clusters of poppies held their scarlet flower cups up to the hot sun.
“This way,” Roger cried, plunging into the wheat.
“Ain’t the farmer going to blow his top if he sees us squashing his field?”
“No, it’s only old Ferguson. He’s a great big bloke with a face like a big purple balloon. He’d never catch us. He can’t run for toffee.”
Pete and I trailed upwards through the field behind Roger, stamping down the wheat as we went. I tore up some poppies and held them in a loose bunch.
The pillbox was a plain concrete bunker standing in front of the stream and the hedgerow behind it. It had been abandoned for so many years that the wildflowers and nettles grew tall and lush for yards around it, and the briars, bristling with rose hips, rose as high as the windows, open slits that faced the marshes and the river and the sea beyond.
A thick extra wall stood about two feet away from the doorway. Roger said it was to shield the soldiers from bomb blasts and to provide a bit of extra shelter from the wind and rain, but it looked like the entrance to a gents’ toilet to me.
Inside, it smelled like a gents’ toilet as well. I held my breath.
“I bet that Mr. Ferguson’s wee’d in here,” I said, gulping in air.
“And more than once,” said Roger.
It was impossible to see anything in the darkness at first, but little by little I made out the shapes of old smashed bottles, sweet papers, newspapers, and other rubbish trodden into the damp earth floor.
“Pete and me were going to make a camp here once,” said Roger, “but we didn’t want to sit down —”
“Or eat anything,” added Pete, “in case we got a disease.”
“Imagine if you was a soldier and had to stay in here all night long, waiting for the invasion,” I said. “It must have made you want to be sick.”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t have wee’d in it then,” said Roger. “They’d have gone outside.”
Pete began to hop from one foot to the other. “Why did you have to start talking about widdling?” he said. “I’m nipping out for a minute.”
I’m not sure how long it was before Roger and I fell silent, beginning to feel that there was something outside, something that wasn’t Pete.
When did we start to hear the low, swishing, crunching noise of something coming nearer and nearer still, pushing its way through the wheat? When did we first notice the smell, like something old, damp, and rotten, stronger even than the smell inside the pillbox? Why did we look at each other with great wide-open eyes, not daring to blink, not daring even to whisper?
Why did my skin tingle and my breath become a shallow tremor?
We slid our eyes towards the doorway.
A huge black shadow was moving slowly across the concrete slabs of the outside wall, in the shape of a long, crawling man. As it neared the entrance, the shadow loomed up, so massive that it shut out every inch of sunlight on the wall.
A hand, with thin, almost transparent, blotched flesh, crooked, bony fingers, and curved black fingernails like iron claws, reached out and curled around the edge of the doorway.
It waited for a moment, then made a rattling, rasping sound as if it were drawing in breath, or smelling.
There was no way out. My legs began to tremble. The flowers fell from my hand. My head swam. I felt myself swaying.
Suddenly I realized Roger was holding me up. My knees had given way. I had sunk down halfway to the floor.
“It’s gone! It’s gone!” croaked Roger.
“Pete! Where’s Pete?” I panted. We roused ourselves and rushed out through the doorway.
Pete was crashing through the bushes on the other side of the ditch, then he jumped over it and landed on the bank.
“We going home now?” he chirped.
“Yeah,” said Roger weakly. “Yeah, mate.”
“Blimey, what’s the matter with you two? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
As Pete leaped through the wheat on his way to the gap in the hedge, Roger and I stood and stared at the flattened trails through the field. One track, ours, curved towards the lane. In the other track something large and heavy was moving, on all fours, towards the edge of the graveyard beyond the hedgerow at the bottom. Where the wheat had been crushed, the channel ran blood-red with the scattered petals of broken poppies.
We put together some matchbox boats for Dennis and Terry, like the ones Dad had made in the flood, a little twig pushed through a square of paper for a sail stuck on with a small ball of Plasticine. The Plasticine has to be placed just right or the boat will keel over.
We pushed them round the pond with garden canes and had quite a nice little fleet going, until Dennis picked an argument with Terry, went crazy, chucked handfuls of stones in the water, and sank half of the boats. When Terry wailed, Dennis hit him with his cane and made a huge red mark. Mum came running out of the house and walloped him.
Dinner was toad-in-the-hole and mash, but I hadn’t much of an appetite. Mum felt my forehead and asked if I was coming down with something. After dinner we turned on the hose. Dennis and Terry loved it, whooping up and down the garden in their pants, shrieking, while Cora and I chased after them, spraying their legs with jets of cold water, but with no heart for laughing.
Cora became more and more quiet as the afternoon wore on.
“I’d better get back,” she said as we hid behind the shed to avoid the washing-up. “Auntie Ida and Mimi’ll be home by now.”
I walked with her up Ottery Lane. The shadows of the trees were long on the road.
“I’m going to try and find that tin box,” she said. “It’s got a load of Mr. Scaplehorn’s things in it. I bet there’s stuff in there we should know.”
“You’re going to have to be careful, though,” I sa
id, “or you’ll end up with another black eye.”
Cora looked down at the ground. “I should have said before,” she said. “Maybe I’m going mad, but last time I went in that room, I heard this woman, singing… .”
“Was it your auntie Ida?”
“No, she’d gone outside in the rain, to the chickens.”
“Maybe somebody else is living in the house. Have you asked her?”
“Roger, there ain’t nobody else living in that flaming house, I’m telling you!”
“They could be hiding.”
“Why would anybody be flippin’ well hiding? Use your blinking common sense.”
“Are you saying it’s a ghost, then?”
“How the flaming hell would I know? I — I asked her who she was.”
“Flippin’ heck! Did she say anything?”
“‘Kittie.’ She said, ‘I am Kittie.’”
“We’ve — we’ve seen some queer things, Cora.”
“Forget it. I’m most probably just going bonkers. That flippin’ house’d drive anybody up the wall.”
“Shall I call for you tomorrow?”
“No, don’t worry. I’ll bring Mimi up. Cheerio.”
Cora crossed over the main road by herself.
I knew it wasn’t Roger, or Pete, or me it was hunting. It wanted smaller children than we were. That’s why it left us alone in the pillbox. It took little ones like Anne and — and Mimi, like the small souls in the graveyard.
I reached the brow of the hill. As I stood and listened to the trickling of the stream running underneath the lane, an evening blackbird warbled its loud, clear song from the hedgerow. I took a few paces forward and shivered. Crossing over the hidden water, I felt I was moving from somewhere that was safe and comforting to another place altogether, a place that was uncertain and dangerous.
I gazed across the marshes. Among the soft grey reed beds, the warm light was glimmering golden on the water in the pools. Perhaps there are places people should never live in, never even go to, no matter how beautiful they seem to be.
Long Lankin Page 17
