Long Lankin

by Lindsey Barraclough

  Against the side wall behind her chair was a large wooden chest, so old it was almost black. Carved on the front was a row of arches, and inside each arch was a little wooden person in old-fashioned clothes, looking out with tiny hole eyes.

  The floor sloped even more crazily than at Guerdon Hall. I was surprised the furniture had stayed where it was and hadn’t slid down the boards and ended up in a heap at one end.

  “Sit down there,” Mr. Thorston told Pete, pointing to a small cane-bottomed chair. Mr. Thorston’s head barely cleared the dark heavy beams, and he had to bend quite low to get through the door into the next room.

  Pete sat down, writhing and moaning.

  “Shut your cakehole,” Roger whispered loudly, “or you’ll wake up Mrs. Thorston over there.” Then, behind his hand to me, “I never knew there was a Mrs. Thorston still in the land of the living.”

  Through a crack in the door, I could see a round wooden table and chairs, and a dresser brimming with cups, plates, and jugs. Mr. Thorston was in yet another room beyond. We heard splashing water, mixing, stirring. He returned carrying a tin cup. Dipping his finger in, he dabbed a thin paste onto the pink bumps that had swollen up on Pete’s face.

  “Just a bit of bicarb,” said Mr. Thorston. “Here, hold the cup yourself. Every time you feel stinging, slosh some mixture on.”

  “Rub them over with an onion,” someone said. To our great surprise, we realized it was Mrs. Thorston. No sooner had she uttered the words than she dropped her head again.

  “No fear,” said Pete, rudely snatching the cup. “This stuff’ll do, thanks.”

  Mr. Thorston turned to Roger and me. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he said. “And what’s the hurry? For heaven’s sake, give an old codger a chance to get to his own front door.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Thorston,” said Roger. “Pete, say sorry.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Thorston,” said Pete, as though he really thought Mr. Thorston should be saying sorry to him.

  “Sorry, Mr. Thorston,” I joined in. “We only wanted to ask you a couple of things.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Thorston. Very sorry, Mr. Thorston,” said Mrs. Thorston from her chair in a childlike, quavering voice, without raising her head. She was so odd she made me want to giggle, but I knew I mustn’t. Not Pete, though. He just couldn’t stop himself having a bit of a smirk at poor Mrs. Thorston’s expense. Roger kicked his ankle, and some of the bicarb spilled out of the cup onto Pete’s knee.

  “You all right, Gracie?” said Mr. Thorston.

  “I’m all right, Hal. You all right?” returned his wife, her head on her chest, her eyes closed.

  “Now I know you are two of Rosie Jotman’s boys, but who might you be — from the East End, if I’m not much mistaken?”

  “I’m Cora Drumm, Mr. Thorston,” I said, “and Mrs. Eastfield is my great-auntie Ida. Her sister Agnes, my gran, went and died in the war. Me and me little sister Mimi — that’s Elizabeth — we’re stopping with Auntie Ida for the time being ’cause our mum ain’t at home at the moment.”

  “And how old is Elizabeth?” he asked, looking at me intently, his eyes narrowing.

  “Oh, please say Mimi, Mr. Thorston. Mum and Dad called her Elizabeth after the queen, but she don’t look nothing like an Elizabeth. She’s four, but she’s very small for four.”

  He sat for a moment, staring at a spot on the floor, then he got up and went back through the door into the other room without saying a word. Roger and I pulled questioning faces at each other. Pete slapped more fingerfuls of bicarb onto his face until it was covered with thick white blobs.

  “You look a right stupid bonce,” Roger hissed at him. Pete flicked his fingers in Roger’s direction, but the mixture landed on the floor. I stretched out my foot and rubbed it in.

  Mr. Thorston came back carrying a plate glistening with yellow waxy lumps. He passed across the window, bending to show us the plate more closely, and a ray of sunlight caught the pieces of wax as they dripped strings of molten gold into a thick syrupy pool.

  “Would you like some?”

  “Cor, thanks, Mr. Thorston,” cried Roger. “Look, Pete, honeycomb!”

  “Come and sit round the table in the other room,” said Mr. Thorston, “then it won’t matter if you get messy.”

  Pete looked as if he wasn’t sure he should eat something that had come from his enemies the bees, but in the end the plateful of shining honeycomb was too much to resist.

  We sucked and slurped, swallowing the sweet running honey and spitting out the largest pieces of wax into our sticky hands.

  Mr. Thorston smiled as we gorged ourselves, and he told us he had three hives and a machine out in the shed that spun the combs to extract the honey. Then he disappeared out of the back door for a few minutes and returned with an enormous veiled hat, big thick gloves that stopped the bees stinging his hands, and a metal smoker that made them sleepy so he could get into the hives.

  “Even with all this stuff on,” he said, “I still get stung sometimes, but it doesn’t bother me.”

  A voice reached us from the next room: “What do you want to show them all that stuff for? They don’t want to see that stuff.”

  “It’s all right,” Mr. Thorston called out. “I’m putting it away in a minute. You all right, Gracie?”

  “I’m all right, Hal. You all right?”

  Mr. Thorston soaked an old towel in water in the sink, and we cleaned ourselves up. Pete asked to put on the big hat and looked a proper charlie in it.

  “Now, then,” said Mr. Thorston as we helped him wipe down the table, “why have you come all the way down here to see me?”

  As we sat round the table once more, Mr. Thorston looked expectantly at Cora, then at me. I wish we’d thought of some excuse not to bring Pete. I didn’t want to say too much in front of him, but how could I tell Mr. Thorston that? As he studied my face for the third time, I sort of rolled my eyes in Pete’s direction. Then I noticed the whisper of a smile around Mr. Thorston’s mouth.

  “Now, Peter,” he said, getting up. “I need a big strong boy to do a really important job for me. If I let you out the back — nowhere near the hives, mind — you’ll see some peas and runner beans that need picking, and some lovely red tomatoes. Come with me.”

  Mr. Thorston took Pete into the kitchen and gave him a large basket. Pete came to the door with his blotchy face to show it to us and stuck out his tongue as if it was a really special task he’d been picked for and we hadn’t.

  “Save the tomatoes till last,” said Mr. Thorston, “or you’ll squash them with the beans. Take this little box, and you can put some raspberries in there, but watch your fingers. There might even be some late strawberries. You’ll have to poke about under the leaves. See what you can find to take home with you.”

  Pete ran off, all excited.

  Mr. Thorston came back carrying some glasses and a jug on a tin tray. “That’ll keep him busy for a while,” he said. “Now, who fancies some lemonade? Grace! Would you like some lemonade?”

  She said nothing.

  The lemonade was smashing, not fizzy like the stuff in Mrs. Aylott’s. It wasn’t even transparent, but pale yellow and not too sweet. Even after we’d had a drink, Cora and me still sat there like a pair of prize idiots, not daring to open our mouths.

  Mr. Thorston looked thoughtful. He leaned towards us. “You said you wanted to ask me something,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, we —” Cora stuttered.

  “It’s all right.” Mr. Thorston sighed. “If you and your little sister are staying at Guerdon Hall, Cora, I expect you’ve — er — noticed some — some odd things. Am I right?”

  Cora waited a moment, then blurted, “When we ask people questions, they don’t want to tell us nothing, but — but we’ve already worked it out. We know about Long Lankin, Mr. Thorston. I’ve — I’ve seen him. I’m — I’m really worried about Mimi. I want us to go back to London.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Thorston, drawing in his breath and
sitting back in his chair. “Does — does your aunt Ida know?”

  “No. At least — she doesn’t know how much we’ve found out and — and she couldn’t know the things we’ve seen. I couldn’t tell her, neither.”

  He studied our faces for a moment before he spoke. “Of course you must understand the adults are only trying to protect you. Obviously they don’t want any harm to come to you, and don’t want you to be frightened. It’s as simple as that. It’s also a case of ignore it and it’ll go away, but don’t take any unnecessary risks. Don’t let the children go down there, just in case.

  “It’s been especially hard for your auntie Ida, Cora, living in that old, old family house. She has been touched by tragedy so often — her own child, her brother —”

  “You mean the one killed in the First World War — on the stone on the wall in the church?” I said.

  A shadow seemed to pass over Mr. Thorston’s face. He looked at his hands. The veins were raised and swollen under the thin skin, and deep grooves ran down his thick yellow nails. His head drooped slightly, and I noticed his shiny scalp was peppered with brown spots. “Oh, no, no, I wasn’t thinking of Roland — but yes, she lost him, too, of course. Much earlier than that — she must have been about five, I would think, maybe older — her little brother, Thomas Guerdon, disappeared.”

  Our mouths dropped open.

  “Crikey!” I said. “Would that have been in about 1902? Would that’ve been anything to do with them having one of those things — you know, exorcism — done?”

  “Goodness, where did you find that out?” said Mr. Thorston. Then he went on before I could answer him. “Cora, to be blunt, I am awfully surprised she agreed to look after you and — and especially your little sister.”

  “She hates us being there,” said Cora, “but I don’t think she had much of a say in it. Me mum, well … then me dad — well, there wasn’t nowhere else really. Dad just dumped us on her. She’s the only family we got — proper family, I mean. Me nan went back to Glasgow. We used to stop with Auntie Kath, but she won’t have us no more.”

  Mr. Thorston went quiet for a moment, stroking the white wires of his beard and staring at the window behind us.

  Then he said, “How much do you know?”

  Cora and I looked at each other. She shrugged her shoulders. I shrugged mine. Then we began. And once we started talking, it all flooded out in a rush. We blurted out everything we could remember — about Cora seeing somebody by the lychgate, about Mrs. Eastfield being so angry, the gypsy tree, and how Cora had seen something crawling in the garden. We mentioned the children in the graveyard, expecting Mr. Thorston to laugh, but he sat there quietly pulling at his frayed cuffs while he gazed at us. We told him we were pretty sure we’d seen Piers Hillyard, and how we first found the words Cave bestiam, and how Father Mansell told me what they meant, and all about the letters we’d read out of Mr. Scaplehorn’s box, and the leather notebook, until Mrs. Eastfield took the box away, which was how we’d known about the exorcisms. Then we had to stop to catch our breath.

  “We might have left a few things out,” I said.

  “Hmm …” Mr. Thorston poured some lemonade for himself, drank it down, deep in thought, then spat out a lemon pip into the empty glass. “Now, can you remember what you saw in that box?”

  “Right,” said Cora. “There were these letters from some bloke at the bishop’s, and then something he wrote himself saying you’d given him some stuff to copy. That’s how we knew to come here.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Thorston, leaning back, “you managed to read quite a lot one way and another.”

  There was a bump from the other room. The cat had jumped off Mrs. Thorston’s lap. It walked in through the doorway and on into the kitchen.

  “You all right, Gracie?”

  “I’m all right, Hal. You all right?”

  “You can understand, I suppose, having read what you have, why Piers Hillyard lost his wits. He believed that he was responsible for unleashing this — this monster into his community. He was consumed by guilt that he had given Lankin a Christian burial, even though he did it for the best possible reasons —”

  “Because he didn’t want a poor innocent man to be buried at a crossroads and not be able to go to heaven,” I said, remembering what Dad had said when we stood by the lychgate.

  “That’s right. Hillyard obviously felt that something strange, something unnatural, had been awakened when he brought the coffin through the lychgate, the boundary between hallowed and unhallowed ground. Then, later, when things happened, when babies and little children began to disappear, he carved Cave bestiam — Beware of the beast — in a wild frenzy, everywhere — on doorframes, furniture, panelling, using any knife or tool he had to hand, and he scratched it all over the walls of the church as well.”

  “Er … and that stuff behind the altar?” I started. “Lib — libera —”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mr. Thorston. “Libera me de morte aeterna, libera me de ore leonis. They are words taken from the text of the Latin Mass for the Dead.”

  “And underneath they were in English,” said Cora. “‘Deliver me from eternal death, deliver me from the mouth of the lion.’”

  “A cry from one man’s desperate soul, taken up hundreds of years later by another.”

  “And what about the thing over the front door at Guerdon Hall — the thing with the baby’s head on?” asked Cora. “Did he do that an’ all?”

  “It was saved from the fire,” said Mr. Thorston. “We know that much. You can see the scorch marks — and you’re sure you saw Hillyard? How do you know it was him?”

  “There’s this picture at Guerdon Hall —”

  “Ah, yes — the portrait — Old Peter. It’s still there, then.”

  “Auntie took it down off the wall and hid it, but I found it. His name’s on it in these teeny-weeny gold letters. And he’s definitely the bloke in the churchyard, honest he is.”

  “I believe you, Cora. Others have seen him, too. Of course,” Mr. Thorston went on, “you must understand that All Hallows, in the old days when Hillyard was rector, was rather different. The walls of the church were covered in brilliant paintings — scenes from the Bible and suchlike. The paintings survived the Reformation, possibly protected by the Guerdon family, but after the dreadful events concerning Lankin and the fire in 1584, All Hallows was locked up and abandoned for many many years.”

  “Oh,” cried Cora. “That was the number on the painting, next to Piers Hillyard’s name — it said 1584.”

  “The year it was painted — the year he died,” said Mr. Thorston. “Then, in the 1640s, during the Civil War, another rectory was built — Glebe House, farther up the hill beyond the stream, and the church reopened.

  “The new rector, Walter Gomeringe, was a strong supporter of Parliament, and he swept in like a new broom. It was a period of terrible unrest, a bleak time for England. People were frightened, superstitious. Neighbour turned against neighbour. The iconoclasts arrived, whitewashed the painted walls of All Hallows, and smashed the statues, but they never completely destroyed Hillyard’s warnings, hidden deep in the stones.

  “You mustn’t forget,” he went on, “that churches were often built on ancient sites, sacred long before known history and known time. Who knows what strange forces the people of prehistory detected in the place where All Hallows stands? I’m pretty certain that if you were to go down deep enough, below the medieval, then the Anglo-Saxon bones, deeper and deeper still, you would come upon layer upon layer of ancient remains, going back how far … how far … I couldn’t say.

  “The Guerdons only did what hundreds of other people have done, before and after them: built a church on a site that was already connected, in some way now lost to us, to the unseen, but sensed, world of the spirit. They may well have demolished an ancient house of worship to do it. As for the lychgate, maybe there has always been some kind of portal there — who knows?”

  We sat lost in thought.

>   Cora broke the silence. “Mr. Thorston,” she said, “the bathroom at Auntie Ida’s —”

  “Yes, I know it. I’m pretty sure that would once have been the Guerdons’ own chapel. You see, they were recusants.”

  “What?”

  “Well, through those difficult years, people were expected to change their way of worship, their faith, with each new monarch — it all started when Henry the Eighth split from the Church of Rome when he wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Edward the Sixth remained staunchly true to his father, but his sister, Bloody Mary Tudor, restored the Catholic faith. When she died, Elizabeth came to the throne; she became head of the Church of England. It was very difficult for people. Of course, many blew with the wind, but some refused to, and they are known as recusants. They risked serious consequences, as you can imagine, but some English families managed to steer their way through the storms by means of power and influence and fortune, continuing to worship in their own way, smuggling priests into their own homes and hiding them if things got hot. If the Guerdons harboured priests at Guerdon Hall, there might well be a priest’s hole there.”

  “A what?” Cora and I said almost together.

  “In 1585, in the reign of Elizabeth, an act of Parliament made it a treasonable offence to house a Catholic priest, so people devised ingenious means to conceal them if the place was searched — secret spaces, hidden rooms, and suchlike.”

  We sat quietly, trying to take in Mr. Thorston’s words. Suddenly Mrs. Thorston spoke from the other room.

  “I can hear you. I know what you’re talking about in there.”

  For a moment Mr. Thorston seemed worn out. He rubbed his forehead with his hand. “You all right in there, Gracie?”

  “I’m all right, Hal. You all right? What about the witch?”

  Mr. Thorston looked towards the open doorway, sighed, then got up from the table and went to fill the jug.