Long Lankin

by Lindsey Barraclough

  “Our old nurse, Joan, was fast asleep as usual. It was so hot that day, and she was almost completely deaf. She never noticed anything that went on. But there was a new maid-of-all-work from Hilsea only started a couple of days before — she must have opened the back door to let in some air — she probably thought the whole business of locking the doors was nonsense, as most strangers do — we were used to a stifling house — we just thought that was how houses were.

  “We were hidden away in the priest’s hole, squashed together, laughing, when Tom screamed — it was terrible — we tried to get out but we couldn’t work the hidden doors — they’re so old. There are two doors, one after the other, and we couldn’t get the first one open again. We were trapped for what seemed like hours, banging and banging on the panelling and shouting, exhausted, before Roland managed to release it, but we were too late — too late.”

  Auntie sat there, wringing and unwringing the soaking handkerchief.

  “Then, some time later, I let it slip to my mother that I used to go and see Tom in the churchyard and that maybe she’d like to go down and talk to him and it might make her feel better. Her fury was unimaginable, like nothing I’d ever seen. She had the most appalling temper.

  “My father felt — he felt guilty — for Tom. He felt he should have taken his family away from this house, but … somehow he couldn’t do it. I think I understand that now.

  “Then, when — when Roland was killed in April 1918, Father spent most of the rest of his life, which wasn’t long, staying at his London club, and then Agnes ran away with Jack Swift. Eventually Mother died as well, in the house in Onslow Gardens. Everyone — everyone left.”

  It was ages before Auntie could speak again; then, when she did, I could hardly hear her. I don’t think she could bear to say it.

  “It’s all my fault — all of it — my neglect. I left Susan and Anne in the house alone. If I’d told Susan why she had to keep the door locked, instead of losing my temper with her, she wouldn’t have opened it, and Anne would have been all right. We had a land girl, Vera, staying here just before it happened. I lost my temper with her as well. She was so fond of Annie. She would have watched her, if I had just explained, but I didn’t expect anyone to believe me… . If I had just told her to keep Annie safe when the tide went out, to guard her when the mud went dry… .”

  Auntie Ida wiped her face and got up out of the chair. She swayed a little, waited a few seconds, then went over to the dresser and opened the right-hand drawer. It was stuffed full of old bills and letters. Auntie shuffled through them. Creased brown envelopes, pieces of paper, and yellowing postcards spilled out of the drawer and drifted down to the floor. She found the letter she was searching for and didn’t bother to pick up the scattered things or even close the drawer.

  The address is written in a child’s hand. A painstaking effort to be neat.

  My fingers shake as I remove the folded page from its envelope. I remember thinking, when it arrived all those years ago, that the small splash marks all over the cheap lined paper were careless smudges. They irritated me at the time. Now I run my eyes down the letter and I see that they are teardrops.

  With an anguished heart, I hand the letter to Cora.

  Limehouse

  London E14

  14th August 1940

  Dear Auntie Ida,

  I am so sorry. I do not know how to tell you how sorry I am. I have never been so sorry in all of my life. Everyone is so angry with me. Mum won’t talk to anyone, specially not to me. She cries all the time and I make her cups of tea but she leaves them to go cold. Dad goes down the pub and won’t come home, or when he does, he’s had too much beer and shouts at me and wallops me, and says Annie was his favourite and he’s going to leave us.

  But Auntie Ida, I want to tell you what happened so you’ll know. Then you can write a letter to Mum and Dad and say it wasn’t all my fault, not all of it, so they won’t be so horrible to me and Dad won’t go away.

  I miss Annie so terribly. She used to follow me all over the house and in the street, and sometimes I’d shout at her to go away, but I didn’t mean it like it sounded, and now she really has gone away and there’s this empty space behind me and I keep thinking if I turn round she’ll be there saying “Soo, Soo, Soo,” and I can’t stop crying, thinking about her and missing her and wishing she was here. All I’ve got of her is Sid. He sleeps next to me in bed and he smells of her.

  I tried to be so good for you because you were kind taking us in with the bombing. I didn’t take Annie down that church like you said not to — it was that girl, Vera, that one you gave the sack to afterwards. I heard you shouting at her for it. She shouted back that the house was horrible and she wouldn’t have stayed anyway. See? I heard it all.

  Then, that day I was just trying to work out “Carolina Moon” on the piano, Annie was having her nap upstairs, and you’d gone out to the barn to milk Tilly. It was so hot, Auntie, I was sweltering, and this was the bad thing I did: I opened the back door to let some air in, even though you told me to keep it bolted till you knocked, but you never said why it always had to be locked. You never said anything. I could see the barn from the window, so I knew I’d have time to nip up and close the door before you got back, but I’m so sorry I opened the door.

  I was messing about on the piano when I heard something coming down the hall. I was worried you had finished in the barn without me seeing you and you’d be really cross with me for opening the door when you specially told me not to, specially because the tide was out, you said, but I didn’t know why you said that.

  There was this really nasty smell, like old earth and dead things, sort of mouldy, and a slithering noise, like something crawling along the floorboards. The smell got stronger and the sound got louder till it was right by the door.

  My mouth went watery like metal and my hands went all sticky.

  I couldn’t turn round to look. I was so scared I was frozen to the stool. I could feel my blood throbbing and my neck was so stiff tight, it hurt.

  The parrot said, “Hello” in his little goblin’s voice.

  I forced my head up and looked in the mirror over the piano. I saw something so, so terrible in the room behind me, looking at me. I’ve never seen anything like that in all my life before. My breath rushed out and I did the next bad thing. I picked up that brass lion from the top of the piano and threw it at the horrible thing in the mirror with all my might and cracked the glass. I’m so sorry I did that to your mirror, Auntie Ida, but I didn’t know what to do.

  What was that horrible thing, Auntie Ida? Did you know it was coming so I had to keep the door bolted? Why didn’t you tell me about it? I’d have kept the door locked if you’d said. I’d have been terrified the monster would come in. Did you think I wouldn’t believe you?

  It went out of the room. The door slammed shut. I heard feet slapping on the boards, heading for the stairs, then it started to climb. My tongue was like a hard lump in my mouth. I wanted to shout but no words would come out. I was stuck on the piano stool, sweating, so scared I couldn’t move.

  I heard it on the landing, and doors opening and shutting. There was scuffling, a dragging sound, banging, horrible noises.

  Then I got my feet to work. I rushed to the door, and that’s when I started shouting, “Annie! Auntie Ida!”

  Fast as I could I ran up the stairs. Our bedroom door was wide open. The bed was empty. Sid was on the floor. Annie was gone.

  Please, please, Auntie Ida, do you know where she is? Please tell those old soldiers to keep looking for her. I want to hear her say “Soo, Soo, Soo,” and buy her one of those little red lollipops she likes.

  Please make it better for me with Mum and Dad. Please. Please write them a letter saying it wasn’t my fault.

  Your loving niece,

  Susan

  Cora sinks into herself. “Poor Mum,” she sobs. “Poor Mum … did you send a letter?”

  “No …” I say, numb with remorse, “I didn’t
send any letter.”

  Auntie hid her face in her hands and moaned.

  I mopped my own tears, my running nose, on my cuff. Nobody ever told Mum she wasn’t to blame, and every day since Annie was lost, she has suffered for it.

  “It was all my fault,” said Auntie, “and I still don’t learn, Cora — I didn’t tell you, either. I hoped and prayed that Lankin was finished.”

  “How can he be finished, Auntie Ida?” I sobbed. “What is he?”

  “He has ruined life after life,” she said, bringing her hands down from her swollen, red face and staring at the far wall. “Not just the lives of the little children he stole away, but many, many others.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “The only one who has ever come close to an answer was Jasper — Jasper Scaplehorn. You read some of his research — I don’t know how much.”

  “I — I don’t know how much there was.”

  “I went to see him at Glebe House not long after Annie disappeared. I was desperate, consumed with misery. I hoped that Jasper, with all his knowledge, could help me, that together we could do something, but — but the poor, dear soul had burdens of his own.”

  It was one of those still, warm summer evenings. Jasper and I sat together in the drawing room at Glebe House.

  On the floor, in front of the two tall windows, rectangles of light stretched themselves out over the fat, faded pink roses on the worn carpet. Between the windows, the French doors stood wide open, framing the lawn as it sloped down the hill to the woods. Beyond the treetops, the land swept away across the wide, flat marshlands to the shimmering estuary in the far distance. There was no way of knowing, on that hazy horizon, where the earth finished and the sky began, or what was water and what was not. Over this vast expanse of grey, thin rosy pink fingers were feeling their way from the west, where the sun was beginning to go down.

  It was a rare hour of respite from the constant drumming of British or enemy planes, wheeling like great black birds in and out of the clouds.

  Jasper sat as always, legs out and ankles crossed, in that old, scratched leather wing chair of his, with the bowl of his wineglass cupped in his long fingers. Beside him on a small leather-topped table was a jumble of papers; some had spilled off the pile and fallen onto the carpet.

  Jasper was tall, with a striking nose, hooked like a Roman emperor’s, and thick wavy hair. In the First World War, Jasper was a young chaplain, hardly older than some of the lads he’d had to pray over. I think he went out to Flanders with dark brown hair and came back with grey.

  If you’d happened to peep in through the window that evening and had chanced upon us sitting there with the long shadows spreading over the grass just outside and the warm sunshine sparkling on our glasses, you might have thought we made quite a contented, comfortable couple. But after a little while, if you’d stayed there long enough, and looked closely enough, you might have noticed how tense we were. I remember the loud slow ticking of the slate clock on the mantelpiece, and how I anxiously turned towards it as, on every quarter-hour, it chimed with a soft rolling peal of bells.

  “Jasper …”

  Jasper drew in his legs, then nearly spilled his wine as he put the glass down on the floor beside his chair.

  “Let me warm up the soup I’ve brought,” I said. “It’s carrot — really good.”

  He pulled his jacket straight, gave me a quick, nervous smile, and shook his head.

  “When did you last eat?” I asked gently.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Or sleep?”

  “Sometimes, in the afternoons, I find I have drifted off in this chair. It’s enough.”

  A warm draught lifted the fringes on the flowered curtains that draped a full ten feet from their iron rail. I left my chair and moved to the open French windows. He joined me with his glass and the bottle of wine.

  The shouting and whistling coming from the upper field meant that Peter Bardock had his men out on manoeuvres. They would wind up soon and finish their evening in the Thin Man.

  It grew steadily darker. The deep, blue vault of the sky arched above us, and the moon hung there in a sprinkling of stars, but to the southwest all the heavens were aflame. Jagged bars of scarlet partly hid the low golden ball of the setting sun. As we stood looking out at the garden, our faces were flushed with its light.

  “Is he sleeping — out there — Lankin?” I wondered.

  “Maybe it’s a kind of sleep,” said Jasper, “but it’s an existence we can’t even imagine, a hovering between worlds. I think if a baby or a very young child comes close to his dwelling place, then he somehow connects with this strong life force. He begins to hunt for the child.”

  Jasper filled his glass again.

  The dusk deepened, until a band of turquoise across the horizon was all that was left of the day. A few bats swooped and darted in their scattered flight over the garden. Jasper lit a couple of lamps, but the glow around them was pale and cold, intensifying with greenish shadows the pallor of his face.

  It was getting late. The breeze that had been so comfortable before was now chilly. I reached for the cardigan I’d slung over the back of my chair, and Jasper, taking the hint, partly closed the doors, then went back to his armchair.

  “But is he properly alive?” I asked.

  “He is alive, but not in the way that you or I are. He straddles the plane between the living and the dead. Lankin can’t be wholly spirit. He needs some kind of sustenance to preserve his immortality in the physical world. Of course, the bodies of very young children are full of the energy of growth. In theory, I suppose their flesh could sustain a creature such as Lankin for many years in this half-world he inhabits. We can be pretty sure that he had already drunk the blood of the infant John Guerdon as part of a ritual spell to cure his leprosy.”

  Jasper drained his glass and poured into it the remnants of the bottle. The hand that held the glass was beginning to tremble a little.

  “Why don’t I get you some soup —?”

  “No, no. I don’t want it,” said Jasper. “Let me go on.” He sipped the last of his wine. “I — I believe Lankin is a creature of the boundary between land and water, partly in the social world and partly in the untamed wilderness of bog and marshland, confined by the water that flows around the margins of his territory.

  “Even as a living man, we know he dwelt on the edge of society, an outcast, a bastard, avoiding the habitation of normal men. Maybe the process of becoming this thing that he is started even before he died.”

  I turned my empty wineglass around in my hand.

  “As far as we know,” Jasper continued, “Cain Lankin was found on the marshes by Piers Hillyard, not long after Aphra Rushes was burned at the stake.

  “The rector and the sexton’s men were so frightened of catching leprosy from the corpse that no thorough investigation was made, and I doubt whether they had the resources to determine the cause of death, anyway. We must assume that the body had all the appearance of death, but remember, it did not start to decompose when it was hung in the gibbet.”

  “So possibly, at that point, for some reason, Lankin was on the verge of being taken up — fully — into this half-world?” I ventured.

  Jasper shifted in his chair. “Well, yes, possibly,” he said. “During his life, he was partially assimilated, but then some cataclysmic event, some travesty of the accepted spiritual and social norm, might well have caused him to pass into it completely.

  “Lankin’s transition may have come about as a result of many things. He must have been in a highly charged emotional state. He failed to rescue Aphra Rushes from the bell tower and probably saw her burned to death, even if from a distance —”

  “Jasper,” I said, “Piers Hillyard himself was most specific. He seems to have been convinced that by allowing this body, the body of a murderer, to pass through the lychgate into consecrated ground, he was responsible for establishing Lankin’s permanent existence in this half-world. He had an un
nerving physical experience, and a feeling of utter dread, if his account is to be believed, when he and this lad, Shem, dragged Lankin’s coffin into the churchyard. And it was only after that that Lankin began to move the box from inside. Could that be the cataclysmic event you mention?”

  “Well, gates are definitely significant,” said Jasper, “even in ordinary, everyday places. But down here, where there are uncertain, shifting boundaries between one element and another, doorways and gates would be even more important — portals between the worlds, perhaps.”

  “The villagers must have sensed there was something sinister about the lychgate. It has been abandoned and chained up ever since. They made another entrance to the churchyard farther down,” I said.

  “Well, then, perhaps they would have done better to leave it open.” He stared into space.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As I said before, maybe Lankin was becoming this — this creature even during his lifetime. Possibly there was some kind of folk memory of something similar happening in the past that stirred up the villagers’ fear. They were desperate for Hillyard to let him rot in the gibbet, but he insisted on removing him on the third day. Maybe — maybe if he had been left in the cage after that third day and had not passed through the gate, his body would have started to decompose naturally. Or if he had been buried at the crossroads and riveted down, we would not be here together in this room today — but Hillyard’s compassionate heart prevailed. If what it took for the transformation to be complete was for Cain Lankin to pass through the ancient, elemental portal where the lychgate stands, I can only think … that maybe if he passed back through it … the other way …”

  “But he would never do that, knowing it might be the end of him, would he?”

  “You’re right, Ida. How on earth could it be done?”

  The night had closed us in. Behind the windows, the living darkness crept around the house, and the weak light from the two lamps in the room was all that kept it at bay. An owl hooted from somewhere in the woods.

  “I’m so weary, Ida,” said Jasper.