by Gene Kemp
Whistler answered whistler at long intervals, like the sentries of a besieging army. There was no moving in as yet.
The church clock had struck the quarter as Ned Challis entered the village and cycled past the entrance to the school. He cycled as far as the Recreation Ground, perhaps because that was where Kevin would have gone in the daytime. He cycled bumpily round the Ground: no Kevin.
He began to cycle back the way he had come, as though he had given up altogether and were going home. He cycled slowly. He passed the entrance to the school again.
In this direction, he was leaving the village. He was cycling so slowly that the front wheel of his bicycle wobbled desperately; the light from his dynamo was dim. He put a foot down and stopped. Motionless, he listened. There was nothing to hear, unless – yes, the faintest ghost of a sound, high pitched, prolonged for seconds, remote as from another world. Like a coward – and Ned Challis was no coward – he tried to persuade himself that he had imagined the sound; yet he knew he had not. It came from another direction now: very faint, yet penetrating, so that his skin crinkled to hear it. Again it came, from yet another quarter.
He wheeled his bicycle back to the entrance to the school and left it there. He knew he must be very close. He walked up to the playground gate and peered over it. But the moon was obscured by cloud: he could see nothing. He listened, waited for the moon to sail free.
In the playground Kevin had managed to get up, first on his hands and knees, then upright. He was very much afraid, but he had to be standing to meet whatever it was.
For the whistlers had begun to close in slowly, surely: converging on the school, on the school playground, on the cage of shadows. On him.
For some time now cloud masses had obscured the moon. He could see nothing; but he felt the whistlers’ presence. Their signals came more often, and always closer. Closer. Very close.
Suddenly the moon sailed free.
In the sudden moonlight Ned Challis saw clear across the playground to where Kevin stood against the climbing frame, with his hands writhing together in front of him.
In the sudden moonlight Kevin did not see his uncle. Between him and the playground gate, and all round him, air was thickening into darkness. Frantically he tried to undo his fingers, that held the little bottle, so that he could throw it from him. But he could not. He held the bottle; the bottle held him.
The darkness was closing in on him. The darkness was about to take him; had surely got him.
Kevin shrieked.
Ned Challis shouted: ‘I’m here!’ and was over the gate and across the playground and with his arms round the boy: ‘I’ve got you.’
There was a tinkle as something fell from between Kevin’s opened fingers: the little bottle fell and rolled to the middle of the playground. It lay there, very insignificant-looking.
Kevin was whimpering and shaking, but he could move of his own accord. Ned Challis helped him over the gate and to the bicycle.
‘Do you think you could sit on the bar, Kev? Could you manage that?’
‘Yes.’ He could barely speak.
Ned Challis hesitated, thinking of the bottle which had chosen to come to rest in the very centre of the playground, where the first child tomorrow would see it, pick it up.
He went back and picked the bottle up. Wherever he threw it, someone might find it. He might smash it and grind the pieces underfoot; but he was not sure he dared to do that.
Anyway, he was not going to hold it in his hand longer than he strictly must. He put it into his pocket, and then, when he got back to Kevin and the bicycle, he slipped it into the saddlebag.
He rode Kevin home on the crossbar of his bicycle. At the Challises’ front gate Mrs Challis was waiting, with the dog for company. She just said: ‘He all right then?’
‘Ah.’
‘I’ll make a cup of tea while you take him home.’
At his own front door, Kevin said: ‘I left the door on the latch. I can get in. I’m all right. I’d rather – I’d rather –’
‘Less spoken of, the better,’ said his uncle. ‘You go to bed. Nothing to be afraid of now.’
He waited until Kevin was inside the house and he heard the latch click into place. Then he rode back to his wife, his cup of tea, and consideration of the problem that lay in his saddlebag.
After he had told his wife everything, and they had discussed possibilities, Ned Challis said thoughtfully: ‘I might take it to the museum, after all. Safest place for it would be inside a glass case there.’
‘But you said they wouldn’t want it.’
‘Perhaps they would, if I told them where I found it and a bit – only a bit – about Burnt House …’
‘You do that, then.’
Ned Challis stood up and yawned with a finality that said, Bed.
‘But don’t you go thinking you’ve solved all your problems by taking that bottle to Castleford, Ned. Not by a long chalk.’
‘No?’
‘Lisa. She reckons she owns that bottle.’
‘I’ll deal with Lisa tomorrow.’
‘Today, by the clock.’
Ned Challis gave a groan that turned into another yawn. ‘Bed first,’ he said; ‘then Lisa.’ They went to bed not long before the dawn.
The next day and for days after that, Lisa was furiously angry with her father. He had as good as stolen her bottle, she said, and now he refused to give it back, to let her see it, even to tell her what he had done with it. She was less angry with Kevin. (She did not know, of course, the circumstances of the bottle’s passing from Kevin to her father.)
Kevin kept out of Lisa’s way, and even more carefully kept out of his uncle’s. He wanted no private conversation.
One Saturday Kevin was having tea at the Challises’, because he had been particularly invited. He sat with Lisa and Mrs Challis. Ned had gone to Castleford, and came in late. He joined them at the tea-table in evident good spirits. From his pocket he brought out a small cardboard box, which he placed in the centre of the table, by the Saturday cake. His wife was staring at him: before he spoke, he gave her the slightest nod of reassurance. ‘The museum didn’t want to keep that little old glass bottle, after all,’ he said.
Both the children gave a cry: Kevin started up with such a violent backward movement that his chair clattered to the floor behind him; Lisa leant forward, her fingers clawing towards the box.
‘No!’ Ned Challis said. To Lisa he added: ‘There it stays, girl, till I say.’ To Kevin: ‘Calm down. Sit up at the table again and listen to me.’ Kevin picked his chair up and sat down again, resting his elbows on the table, so that his hands supported his head.
‘Now,’ said Ned Challis, ‘you two know so much that it’s probably better you should know more. That little old bottle came from Whistlers’ Hill, below Burnt House – well, you know that. Burnt House is only a ruin now – elder bushes growing inside as well as out; but once it was a cottage that someone lived in. Your mother’s granny remembered the last one to live there.’
‘No, Ned,’ said Mrs Challis, ‘it was my great-granny remembered.’
‘Anyway,’ said Ned Challis, ‘it was so long ago that Victoria was the Queen, that’s certain. And an old woman lived alone in that cottage. There were stories about her.’
‘Was she a witch?’ breathed Lisa.
‘So they said. They said she went out on the hillside at night –’
‘At the full of the moon,’ said Mrs Challis.
‘They said she dug up roots and searched out plants and toadstools and things. They said she caught rats and toads and even bats. They said she made ointments and powders and weird brews. And they said she used what she made to cast spells and call up spirits.’
‘Spirits from Hell, my great-granny said. Real bad ’uns.’
‘So people said, in the village. Only the parson scoffed at the whole idea. Said he’d called often and been shown over the cottage and seen nothing out of the ordinary – none of the jars and bottles of
stuff that she was supposed to have for her witchcraft. He said she was just a poor cranky old woman; that was all.
‘Well, she grew older and older and crankier and crankier, and one day she died. Her body lay in its coffin in the cottage, and the parson was going to bury her next day in the churchyard.
‘The night before she was to have been buried, someone went up from the village –’
‘Someone!’ said Mrs Challis scornfully. ‘Tell them the whole truth, Ned, if you’re telling the story at all. Half the village went up, with lanterns – men, women, and children. Go on, Ned.’
‘The cottage was thatched, and they began to pull swatches of straw away and take it into the cottage and strew it round and heap it up under the coffin. They were going to fire it all.
‘They were pulling the straw on the downhill side of the cottage when suddenly a great piece of thatch came away and out came tumbling a whole lot of things that the old woman must have kept hidden there. People did hide things in thatches, in those days.’
‘Her savings?’ asked Lisa.
‘No. A lot of jars and little bottles, all stoppered or sealed, neat and nice. With stuff inside.’
There was a silence at the tea-table. Then Lisa said: ‘That proved it: she was a witch.’
‘Well, no, it only proved she thought she was a witch. That was what the parson said afterwards – and whew! was he mad when he knew about that night.’
Mrs Challis said: ‘He gave it ’em red-hot from the pulpit the next Sunday. He said that once upon a time poor old deluded creatures like her had been burnt alive for no reason at all, and the village ought to be ashamed of having burnt her dead.’
Lisa went back to the story of the night itself. ‘What did they do with what came out of the thatch?’
‘Bundled it inside the cottage among the straw, and fired it all. The cottage burnt like a beacon that night, they say. Before cockcrow, everything had been burnt to ashes. That’s the end of the story.’
‘Except for my little bottle,’ said Lisa. ‘That came out of the thatch, but it didn’t get picked up. It rolled downhill, or someone kicked it.’
‘That’s about it,’ Ned agreed.
Lisa stretched her hand again to the cardboard box, and this time he did not prevent her. But he said: ‘Don’t be surprised, Lisa. It’s different.’
She paused. ‘A different bottle?’
‘The same bottle, but – well, you’ll see.’
Lisa opened the box, lifted the packaging of cotton wool, took the bottle out. It was the same bottle, but the stopper had gone, and it was empty and clean – so clean that it shone greenly. Innocence shone from it.
‘You said the stopper would never come out,’ Lisa said slowly.
‘They forced it by suction. The museum chap wanted to know what was inside, so he got the hospital lab to take a look – he has a friend there. It was easy for them.’
Mrs Challis said: ‘That would make a pretty vase, Lisa. For tiny flowers.’ She coaxed Lisa to go out to pick a posy from the garden; she herself took the bottle away to fill it with water.
Ned Challis and Kevin faced each other across the table.
Kevin said: ‘What was in it?’
Ned Challis said: ‘A trace of this, a trace of that, the hospital said. One thing more than anything else.’
‘Yes?’
‘Blood. Human blood.’
Lisa came back with her flowers; Mrs Challis came back with the bottle filled with water. When the flowers had been put in, it looked a pretty thing.
‘My witch-bottle,’ said Lisa contentedly. ‘What was she called – the old woman that thought she was a witch?’
Her father shook his head; her mother thought: ‘Madge – or was it Maggy –?’
‘Maggy Whistler’s bottle, then,’ said Lisa.
‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs Challis. ‘She was Maggy – or Madge – Dawson. I remember my granny saying so. Dawson.’
‘Then why’s it called Whistlers’ Hill?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Mrs Challis uneasily. ‘I mean, I don’t think anyone knows for certain.’
But Ned Challis, looking at Kevin’s face, knew that he knew for certain.
Spring-heeled Jack
GWEN GRANT
To Anna, the day they moved was the most exciting of her life.
She raced up and down with pictures and pans and odd things that had been left out of boxes.
At last, it was finished. The flat was empty and the bare rooms looked slightly tawdry with everything gone. The rain lashed the wide windows and Anna closed the door behind her, glad they were leaving.
Her mother fussed about the times of the buses.
‘If we get one straight into town, we’ll be at the house in oh, what, fifteen minutes? Yes, fifteen minutes. Come on, Anna. We’ll have to get a move on.’
They hurried along the desolate street. Because of the rain, none of Anna’s friends were out playing and her mother had kept her too busy to go round knocking on doors and saying goodbye.
‘It isn’t as if you’re going to the end of the world,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll probably see them just as often,’ but Anna had a feeling she wouldn’t.
Despite everything, she could only feel pleased they were moving.
She looked back once. The block of flats sat in its place in the row of blocks. They looked like an unimaginative Stonehenge. High up one concrete wall, she could see their bare windows, blank faced without her mother’s net curtains.
By the following week, someone else would be living there but Anna, her mother, father and brother Jason, they would be living in the small terraced house they were now making their way to.
By six o’clock the little house glowed with light and warmth. An enormous coal fire leapt and twisted up the chimney and Anna kept breaking off her work to look at it.
She had never lived where you could have a proper fire before and she found it enchanting.
She’d read about making pictures in the fire and now she could do it for herself. Those pieces of coal at one side, they looked like rocks. Rocks that a determined prince would ride up perhaps, to rescue a damsel in distress. Down the sides of the black lumps, a liquid rope of fire turned into long golden tresses.
Unthinkingly, Anna ran a hand over her own plain brown plaits.
‘Come on, Anna. Get a move on.’ Her mother nudged her impatiently, splintering her day-dream. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to look in the fire when we’ve got sorted out a bit more,’ and then her eyes fell on the clock. ‘Look at the time,’ she said in breathless amazement. ‘The dog hasn’t been for a walk yet and here I am with not a drop of milk in the house.’
She crossed the small untidy room to ferret for her purse on the mantelpiece.
‘Look, love,’ she said. ‘Get Toby and go down to the shop at the bottom of the road and get us a pint of milk. Kill two birds with one stone, that way.’
Anna put her hooded duffel coat on and tied a blue and white striped scarf round her neck.
‘Come on, Tobe,’ she called to the nervous dog, who was looking for his vanished basket.
‘Poor old Tobe,’ she crooned, patting his rough head.
When Toby saw the lead, he forgot about his missing bed and started to jump. Outside lay a whole new world and it was one he couldn’t wait to investigate.
Anna opened the old wooden door carefully. She was used to a modern glass door with metal leaves curling their way up the frosted panel, but she liked the old door. It wasn’t a very nice colour. Dark green.
‘Hospital paint that,’ her dad said. ‘Probably giving it away. Can’t imagine anybody buying that colour, can you, Jean?’ he asked his wife and she looked round the dark green kitchen and thought of the dark green lavatory and dark green back bedroom and nodded her head.
‘Wherever it came from,’ she said. ‘I wish it hadn’t.’
‘Shan’t be long,’ Anna said, looking up at her dad standing in the doorway, the light behind him
making him seem cut out of the night.
‘And watch your step,’ he called. ‘Don’t talk to no strangers and come straight back.’
‘I’ll be all right, Dad,’ Anna said and she and Toby walked down the street.
At first Anna was so busy looking round her, she found the darkness didn’t bother her at all.
Theirs was a shortish street leading on to a much longer street of houses that tumbled down a steep hill. Two houses and a long dark passage. And another two houses and a long dark passage. That was how they were set out.
It was only drizzling now and Anna’s feet squelched wetly on the shining pavement. Toby hurried along, nose to the ground, somehow managing to pick up an interesting smell every now and again despite the rain.
It was while Anna was walking past one of the passages that she thought she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head sharply but there was no one there. No one that she could see, anyway.
The dark gaping mouth of the passage stared back blindly.
Anna took a deep breath and shook herself sternly.
‘You’re just frightening yourself for nothing,’ she said to Toby in a sharp voice.
Toby looked up, his head on one side.
‘There’s nothing there, old Tobe, is there?’ Anna asked the dog and the dog stared down the passage, curled his top lip back and started to snarl. The snarl turned into a choking wail as he pulled on the lead, his head straining towards the dark hole.
Anna pulled him back, hesitated a second and then took to her heels. She flew down the street, Toby running unwillingly alongside her. She could feel the dog’s head turning as he pulled on the lead but she kept running.
In two short minutes, she was standing in the safety of the lighted shop doorway.
Anna leant against the shop window, her breath catching in her throat. Her heart was beating so heavily, it hurt.
After a minute or two, she felt able to go into the shop. The woman behind the counter stared at her but all she saw was a girl with cheeks rosy from running, her hair beaded with silvery speckles of rain where the duffel hood had fallen back from her face.
