by Sarah Rayne
‘In there?’ gasped Clem, pointing to a room with a half-open door.
‘No!’ said Ella at once.
‘Why not?’
Ella stared at him. Because that’s where the ghosts are, she thought. Terrible ghosts. It’s the place where I mustn’t go, not ever. But she managed to say, ‘Because we’d be trapped. Let’s go up the stairs. We can hide on the landing and if he comes in to look for us, we’ll wait until he goes into one of the rooms—’
‘But the plane,’ said Veronica in a frightened voice. ‘How long is it until the plane comes?’
‘Half an hour,’ said Clem. ‘We’ve got plenty of time. Once he’s gone we’ll run back downstairs and outside. We’ll be on Mordwich Bank ages before the plane comes.’
They went cautiously up the stairs; they were rickety and the wood had rotted completely away in places so it was necessary to tread carefully. Veronica was crying, a snuffly whining cry, that made Ella say sharply, ‘Do shut up or he’ll hear you.’
They reached the landing, which had tall narrow windows with seats set into them, and crouched down behind the banisters.
‘He’s coming,’ whispered Ella suddenly. ‘I can hear his footsteps.’
The footsteps came nearer and a figure stood in the doorway below. It was too dim to see him very clearly, but Ella knew they were all remembering his face – it had been somehow misshapen as if a hand had wiped over it before it had quite set and smeared some of the features. She shuddered and pressed back into the shadows, her heart thudding. Clem was gripping the banisters, staring down at the man, and Veronica’s face was tear-stained. If Veronica did not start crying again they would probably be all right – the man would think they had run off into the grounds and he would go away.
But he did not. He stood very still for a moment – as if he’s sniffing the air like an animal, thought Ella in horror – and then, very deliberately, as if he knew exactly where they were, he crossed the hall towards the stairs.
Chapter 3
For a dreadful moment none of them knew what to do, but as the man stepped on the first stair a shaft of sunlight from one of the narrow windows fell across him and they saw again the frightening stare in his eyes and the dreadful wrongness of his face. Ella could not bear it. She looked back at the wide passage behind them. There were five or six doors, some half-open, others hanging crookedly on their hinges, but one near the far end was firmly closed. She touched Veronica’s hand, then Clem’s, and pointed to it.
They tiptoed towards the closed door. The man was coming quite slowly up the stairs. Sunshine poured in through the windows so it was just possible he could not see them through its glare. Praying the door would not squeak, Ella opened it. It did squeak, but only faintly, and they tumbled inside, closing it. The room was empty. There was a deep bay window and a massive chimney breast, which had half fallen away from the wall; there were piles of bricks and bits of timber, and a gaping blackness where the hearth would have been.
‘Will he come in after us?’ whispered Veronica, cramming her fist into her mouth.
‘He might, but we’ll hide behind that crumbly brickwork by the chimney,’ said Clem. ‘Have you still got that red hair ribbon, Vron? Put it in that far corner so he’ll think we’re over there. Then we’ll dodge out while he’s looking, and run for our lives. All right?’
‘But will we get out before the plane comes?’ whispered Veronica, doing as Clem said.
‘Yes, there’s masses of time.’ Ella said this confidently, but she had glanced at her watch and seen with horror it was already twenty to twelve. Her heart thumped with panic. What would happen to them if they did not get out before the plane sent its dreadful bomb onto the village?
Grabbing Veronica’s hand, she pulled her into the small space behind the chimney breast. They had to squeeze to get in. A sooty stench came up from the hole in the floor and Veronica shuddered. Clem tried to squash in with them, but there was no room, and he looked frantically about him, then ran across to a tall bookcase and crammed in behind it.
‘He’s coming down the passageway,’ whispered Ella, urgently.
They waited in terrified silence, their hearts pounding, hardly daring to breathe. The footsteps paused at each door and then moved on. Ella stared at the dull surface of the closed door, willing the man to walk past it, to decide it would just be another empty room. But empty rooms had things in them, things that must never be seen . . .
Next to her, Veronica was trembling and Ella put an arm round her. As she did so, a faint sound came to them from the village, and fear swept over her again. It was St Anselm’s clock chiming the quarter-hour. There were only fifteen minutes left before the plane came with its dreadful cargo. What would happen if they were still here then? Was Clem’s father right, and did the plane really have all that stuff that could give people dreadful diseases? The notice board had said it was called Geranos. If they breathed in the Geranos would they die? If they ran out now they would have plenty of time to scramble over the wall of Cadence Manor and be up the hillside and far enough away to be safe. But they could not run out because of the man. Perhaps he might not mean them any harm: he might be trying to find them to warn them to run out before the plane flew over. But then why hadn’t he simply called out?
He was outside the door now – the handle was being turned. The door swung inwards and he was there, staring into the room, and of course he was not here to warn them at all. His eyes glared with madness, and a smile – a truly dreadful smile – widened his face. Ella pressed down into the tiny corner, but he knew where she was, of course – he knew where they all were. There was a movement over her head, and when she looked up, the nightmare face was looking over the top of the broken brickwork. The smile came again, and one hand reached down.
Veronica let out a scared whimper and tried to cower back, but Ella was suddenly angry. A fierce burning anger scalded through her entire body and made her feel ten feet high and as strong as a giant. She sprang up and flew at the man, pushing him as hard as she could, screaming at him to leave them alone. His eyes widened with shock and, caught off balance, he stumbled back, missing his footing and half falling against the bricks of the collapsed chimney breast. The anger gave way to triumph and Ella ran straight at him, her hands clenched into fists, shouting to Veronica and Clem to help her, yelling that they had only ten minutes left to get out.
Veronica hung back, but Clem, his eyes huge with panic and excitement, ran from behind the bookcase and kicked the man, sending him slithering a little way across the floor.
‘Harder!’ shouted Ella, and Veronica came out from the hiding place.
This time, in the panic and confusion, one of them must have kicked a bit harder because the man rolled all the way across the floor to where the floorboards had collapsed over the old hearth, right onto the edge of the black jagged hole. He made a scrabbling movement at the ground with his hands to stop himself from toppling into the yawning blackness. Ella heard Clem and Veronica both gasp in horror and she thought Clem started forward as if to help the man. But the anger was still filling Ella up, and before either Clem or Veronica could do anything, she bent down and pushed the man as hard as she could. With a dreadful kind of grunting scream, he fell down, down into the bad-smelling blackness of the chimney shaft. There was a whoosh of sound as he fell, and clouds of soot and dust and fragments of bird skeletons flew upwards. Ella and the other two flinched, coughing and gasping, then Clem scrambled to the edge of the hole and peered down.
‘Can you see him?’ said Veronica, fearfully.
‘Um, yes, I think so. He’s lying all sort of broken,’ said Clem. ‘He’s right at the bottom.’ When he looked back at them his face was white and he seemed as if he might be about to be sick.
‘We’d better go down to see,’ said Ella.
‘We haven’t got time,’ said Clem, sounding frightened. ‘It’s nearly twelve o’clock.’
‘We’ll run for all we’re worth,’ said Ella. ‘But
we need to know if he’s dead.’
They ran down the stairs, their footsteps echoing loudly in the empty old house, leaving prints behind them.
‘Which is the room underneath?’ gasped Clem.
‘In here.’
‘How do you know? Mightn’t it be that one?’
‘No,’ said Ella quickly. ‘No, it’s this one, I’m sure.’ Before Clem could argue she pushed open a door on the ground floor and peered in. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the room.’
‘Is he there?’
‘Yes. The chimney’s half fallen away – there’re bricks all over the floor, but I can see him. He’s sort of wedged inside it like Clem said.’
‘Is he really dead?’ asked Veronica.
‘I think so. But we ought to make sure.’
‘I’m not going to,’ said Veronica at once. ‘I’ve never seen a dead person.’
‘I have,’ said Clem. ‘I saw my grandmother. I went to say goodbye to her in the funeral place.’
‘We know you did, you went on about it for ages afterwards.’
‘Well, she looked like he looks now,’ said Clem, peering warily into the room. ‘People die with their eyes open and you have to close them or they go on staring at nothing for ever.’
‘Shut up about dead people,’ said Ella on a sob, and Clem looked at her curiously.
But he only said, ‘I think he’s dead, but we ought to get somebody to make sure. A doctor or something.’
‘There’s no time,’ began Ella, then stopped, because from outside the old manor house, on the hillside above them, came the sound of St Anselm’s clock, this time chiming twelve. The sounds were slow and measured, pealing out into the deserted village street. But through the chimes came another sound – a faint, far-off growl. For a moment none of them realized what it was. Then in a voice of horrified fear, Clem said, ‘It’s the plane. It’s exactly on time.’
The plane that carried a sinister cargo – a cargo that might poison and even kill every living thing in Priors Bramley – was coming towards them.
The three of them ran for all they were worth, scrambling out of Cadence Manor, and going full pelt towards the wall enclosing the grounds. The plane was approaching; they could hear the purr of its engine, building to a menacing growl as it came closer. Once Veronica clapped her hands over her ears, but Ella snatched her hands away because they needed all their energy to run.
‘There’s the wall,’ gasped Clem. ‘We can get to it in time—’
‘We can’t,’ cried Veronica. ‘And what if there’s barbed wire?’
‘There won’t be,’ said Ella. ‘And once we’re over the wall it’ll be all right – come on, Veronica!’
Afterwards, they did not remember how they had managed to climb the wall and drop down onto the grass on the other side.
‘No barbed wire,’ gasped Clem, as they ran towards the stile. ‘They’d think the wall was enough.’
‘Never mind the wall, hurry up!’
Later, Ella found her hands and knees were bloodied and torn, but at the time there was only the frantic need to get away. They got to the stile, and scrambled over it, then ran all the way up the hillside to Mordwich Meadow, flinging themselves down on the grass, sobbing for breath, but with their eyes turned up to the sky.
The plane was almost directly over the village now, and as they watched, it began to circle. ‘It’s an Auster,’ said Clem, awed. ‘My uncle told me it would be – he was in the RAF in the war. They use that kind of plane for observation – mapping battlefields and things like that. It’s got high wings so the pilot can see straight down to the ground.’
As he said this the plane swooped low over the village in its shallow valley and, against the brightness of the morning, something white and billowing came looping down. They could see a black and lumpen parcel attached to it.
‘That’s it,’ said Clem. ‘That’s the bomb.’
‘It’s on the end of a parachute,’ said Veronica.
‘That’s to give the pilot time to get clear. My uncle said there would be a canister of Geranos, or maybe two canisters, and they’d explode when the plane gets clear.’
The plane was going away; they could see the outline against the clear sky.
‘How long before the bomb goes off?’ asked Veronica worriedly.
‘I don’t know. Not long, I shouldn’t think.’
‘It can’t reach us up here, can it? That Geranos stuff, I mean?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
As Clem said this, the air seemed to stir and shiver, and there was the distant sound of glass shattering somewhere within the village. A thin mist gusted upwards, like the spray from a churning lake.
Ella shuddered and clenched her fists, but Veronica sat up straighter and said, ‘Listen.’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear it? Just very faintly?’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ began Ella, then stopped, because she could hear it as well.
A jangling discordance of music rose above the sounds of masonry falling and glass smashing and the fading note of the plane: music coming from the ancient church deep inside the dying village.
They sat in Mordwich Meadow for a long time. They were too upset to eat the sandwiches Ella’s mother had made, but Ella said it would be wasteful to throw them away and Veronica said it would be bad manners, so in the end they crumbled them up for the birds. Below them, Priors Bramley had settled back into its remote silence, although the mist lingered in wisps and curls on the air.
‘I did hear it,’ said Veronica stubbornly. ‘That music. I did.’
‘I heard it too,’ said Clem.
‘Then he’s alive, that man.’ Veronica’s eyes were round with the horror of it. ‘He got into the church and he’s playing the music. That’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard of. But we’ll have to tell somebody. They’ll have to go in to get him out.’
‘Vron, he’s dead,’ said Clem. ‘His back was all twisted and his eyes were open.’
‘Then who was making that music?’
‘It wasn’t real music,’ said Clem. ‘It was just a lot of jumbled notes. I think it was the organ pipes shuddering from the explosion. Like when you twang a string and it goes on thrumming for ages. The pipes might go on thrumming and twanging for ages.’
The thought of that ugly confused music thrumming all by itself in the deserted village was almost more than Ella could bear. She stared down at the cluster of buildings and at the thin moisture that lay everywhere. When they had looked down at the man’s body lying in its broken-doll tumble inside the chimney shaft she had been sure he was dead. Now she was not. His legs had stuck out at painful angles as if they were broken and his head was twisted to one side. But what if he had only been knocked out, and had come round and dragged himself as far as the church, hoping to get help?
But even if he had, it was too late now. The village was sealed and no one would go there for a very long time. It might be a year before the motorway was started, or even longer. If the man was alive he might scream for help until his throat burst, but there would be no one to hear him. And eventually he would die in there, he would die . . .
Ella was suddenly aware of two things. One was that she was quite hungry after all, and it was a pity they had fed all the sandwiches to the birds.
The other was that she was very glad indeed she had managed to kill the man in Cadence Manor. She had been terrified of him for a long time.
It was nearly a whole year since she had first seen the man. She and her mother had walked into Priors Bramley to the wool shop. It was late afternoon – a Saturday – and not many people were around.
‘Which is why it’s a good time for us to come,’ said Ella’s mother. ‘The shops are still open, but people are all in their houses by this time, making their supper.’
Most people called the evening meal ‘tea’, but Ella’s mother said ‘supper’ was the correct term. They would not aspire to dinner in the eve
ning, which would have sounded pretentious, but supper was quite acceptable. Ella was not sure what pretentious meant, but she was careful to do what her mother said, even though people at school laughed, and said la-di-da and swank, and who did Ella Ford think she was?
It took Mum ages to buy the wool. All the colours had to be looked at and then there was a discussion as to which was the best quality. Ella became bored. She thought she would walk along the street and look at the church. Clem said it was really old and there were lots of interesting things in it: his father had told him all about it.
‘Well, come straight back,’ said her mother, when Ella asked if it would be all right to walk along to St Anselm’s. ‘Don’t speak to anyone you don’t know.’
Ella did not speak to anyone as she walked along because there was no one to speak to. She went slowly, liking the jumbly little shops of Priors Bramley and the jutting-out windows. The sun was setting, so there was a red glow in the sky, which made the village feel like something out of a fairy tale.
Here was the church. The red sunset was here as well, washing the leaves and the old grey stones of the walls with crimson. Ella went through the lich-gate, thinking if the door was open she would just peep inside the church. It would be all right; churches were places where people were always welcome, even tatty old churches like this one.
She was halfway along the path when she realized someone was playing music inside the church. It was organ music, of course, like they had at St Michael’s. Ella liked the music at St Michael’s; she enjoyed the hymns. She had never been in the organ loft there because the vicar would not allow children to go in, so it would be really good if she could peep into St Anselm’s organ loft; she could be one up on Clem and the others.
The church was quite a small one, much smaller than St Michael’s, but Ella saw at once it was not tatty in the least, in fact it was beautiful. She looked round, trying to see everything so she could tell Clem and Veronica on Monday. There were stone arches and carved panels with stories from the Bible. And there were narrow windows at the sides and behind the altar, with beautiful pictures in vivid blues and scarlets and greens. The sunset shadows lay everywhere, making soft harlequin patterns on the floor, the stained-glass colours of the windows glinting through them like jewels.
