by Harper Fox
The old man shrugged. He popped out of existence as neatly as he’d appeared, leaving a trace of ozone and plum-cake tobacco on the air. Lee drew a breath of relief, and reached to remember the piece he’d written to wrap up the series and share his plans for the next, which could remain his own now that he’d decided to rebuff the advances of the noble Broadcasting Corporation, whose armour would shine again in easier times, he was sure...
The canes leapt into the air. No rattling this time: just a single, synchronised hop. They hovered. Then, one by one, in an impossibly dextrous movement, they whipped into a row, descending order of size, right to left, just as Anna had found them.
The colonel would have needed five hands to pull the manoeuvre off. Toby began to sob in outright terror, and that wasn’t such good ambience: Lee nodded gratefully to the sound engineer, an unimpressionable woman in her fifties, who took hold of the boy and steered him towards the door. “All right,” he said, “looks like we’re still in business. Anna, how are the readings?”
“Normal. Everything’s normal, except...” She pointed at the canes, still poised above their rack. “Except that. Is the colonel still here, Lee?”
“I don’t think this is him.”
“Oh, shit. Who?”
“I don’t know. Come away from there, will you, just in case?”
“Of what? Getting brained by a poltergeist?”
Lee grinned. Anna shied away from onscreen work, but once out in front of the cams she was a natural comic, wide-eyed and entertaining. He waited until she had backed up, then went on, as calmly as he could, “Would the disincarnate entity present in this room like to let me know its purpose? I mean no harm. I’ll help if I can.”
The smallest cane flipped from its vertical alignment to a flat, steady plane. Something nudged it towards him, intent unmistakeable. “Oh, okay,” he said, putting out a hand. “If you must.”
He snatched it deftly as it shot by him at waist height, suddenly anxious that no-one else be forced to touch or come near it. This was a message for him alone, whether he wanted it or not. As soon as the cane was in his hand, it lost all weird kinetic power and was nothing but a stick, a cool dead weight.
Masterfully carved, though. Reluctantly he examined the head. Blackthorn, he thought—traditional choice of the pellar witches for their fearsome blasting-rod staves. This was too little and slender to blast anyone. But the top had been fashioned into the head of a man with a wolf’s snarl and furred, pointed ears—or, if you preferred, a wolf’s head with traces of humanity upon it, a were-beast caught in a moment of change.
Anna broke the silence, just as it had begun to settle like frost around Lee’s heart. “Look,” she said wonderingly, coming to stand in front of him. She’d forgotten her fright, and, Lee thought, the presence of the camera. She was the same shocked girl who’d come to find him in the Drift farmhouse kitchen, her sturdy disbelief in tatters. She stretched out one fingertip and brushed it across the wolf-man’s neck. “There’s a little join in the wood here, Lee. I reckon this one’s the flute.”
The wolf-whistle. Lee let his gaze settle somewhere beyond Jack’s lens, deep into the strange space where his visions bred. “You know,” he said softly, “whoever you are, you’re really not bloody funny.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“I believe that today—just for once—I’ll decline the pleasure.”
“Be good for the ratings, boss.”
“Bugger the ratings,” he told her. “If I hear the flute, someone who loves me dies, right? How can I risk that in a place like this, universally adored as I am? There’ll be a massacre.”
She stared at him in disbelief for a moment. Then she groaned, and the whole room dropped from tight-wired tension to an ordinary summer’s afternoon. The canes rattled down into the rack. Lee opened up his hand and the blackthorn staff shot neatly sideways to rejoin its companions. And that was that: show over, fireworks of unnerved laughter shooting up from the crew and the couple of family members who’d come to watch the proceedings. Someone began a ragged cheer, which they all picked up. Lee stepped into the noise and chatter with relief, Jack swinging the camera to follow him. He supposed it had been a good day’s work, an indisputable poltergeist display for the Spirits of Cornwall records. As for the wolf’s-head cane, the flute and the curse—absurd, only wanting Lon Chaney Junior to stumble in roaring. He’d work out what it all meant when he was less blisteringly tired. Automatically he took up position for his close-out piece. He thought he had that much left in him, at any rate. There was only one way to find out.
To his astonishment, Anna bombed the shot. She strode in to seize him around the waist. She was vivid and bright in the monitor screen, her summer tan a contrast to his own pallor. His eyes had lost their silver and without it he was washed out, ordinary, at a loss to see why people carried placards with his name on them. After a startled moment he returned her embrace, glad of her warm intervention. “And with that final contribution to a record-ratings series of Spirits of Cornwall,” she said, giving him a squeeze, “talented clairvoyant Lee Tyack-Frayne is signing off for a good long holiday with his handsome beast of a husband. I would too, if I got the chance.”
“Me too,” Jack added surprisingly from behind the Sony: then, while Lee and Anna gaped, continued, “What—I can’t come out?”
“Sure you can,” Anna said, bewildered. “Er—are you?”
“Actually, I’m not sure. I might just fancy Gid.”
“Cut, cut, cut,” Lee said, breaking into laughter. But he could relate to Jack’s problem. “Well, don’t we all?”
“Yeah. What is he on at the moment, anyway, Lee? Vitamins, Viagra, raw steak? He’s bloody irresistible.”
“Thank God I don’t have to resist him.” Lee shook his head, smiled at each of his rogue staff in turn. “We won’t be using that last part—any of it. Come on, the pair of you. I think I’ll record my outtro in the garden.”
Anna looked at him anxiously. “What? No, you’re done for the day. You don’t have to venture out among the masses.”
“I think I do, or they’re gonna venture in here. Somebody got that gate open. I promised the Beaumonts there’d be no home invasions.” He set off towards the hallway that led to the front door, wide open in the fragrant summer heat. The garden path was crowded, a tentative queue from the lane outside making their way towards the house. Lee didn’t employ security staff. He’d never needed them. “Hoi,” he called amiably, emerging onto the steps. “You lot do realise you’re in someone else’s garden, don’t you?”
The ringleader—who was indeed, to Lee’s amused mortification, carrying an I heart placard—crunched to a halt on the gravel. “Oh,” he said, delighted. “It’s you.”
In his mid-sixties, crew-cut, resplendently tattooed. Well, it took all sorts. Solemnly Lee shook his hand: found out that his name was Dan, then where he’d come from to see the show being filmed today. Signed the book the beaming guy had thrust out at him. Cheaper than a bouncer by a long chalk: his new friend, something quite different from a fan, turned to the group bottlenecking behind him and announced without a trace of shame, “Hoi, you lot! You’re in somebody’s garden here, you know. Lee wants you all back in the lane, right now.”
Lee followed them. He wasn’t quite sure why. He wanted to give them something for their journey, for supporting his show. He hated the idea of sending anyone home empty-handed. Peripherally he noticed Anna, gesturing to Jack to come out too and keep rolling. Once the last straggler was safely off the manicured Beaumont lawns and flowerbeds, he drew the gate closed and joined them in the oak-shaded lane. “Look up there,” he said, pointing to a window on the second floor. “That room’s been shut up for about a hundred years, the family here told me. Nobody knows why. But one early morning in 1974, a milkman on his rounds looked up and saw a man standing there, wearing nothing but a long powdered wig.”
His little audience gave an obliging gasp. Unable to resist,
he went on, “Still, it was the seventies. Maybe a naked guy in a wig wasn’t all that unusual.” They gawped at him, then broke into snorts of laughter. This was good. Lee didn’t get to joke around much for the purposes of the show. Most of the stories they covered were by their very nature too poignant for comedy, events that had turned the living souls of Cornwall into spirits. His own lifted, the oppression he’d felt inside the house clearing off like fog in the sun. He wondered if he could ask the Beaumont ghosts for one last favour. “There’s another tale you might like, too. A servant girl called Peggy used to haunt that attic room up there. The love of her life, a boy called Johnny, had to leave her to try and make his fortune at sea, but he never came back, and poor Peg eventually died of a broken heart. It does happen, you know.”
He glanced around. Several of the group were nodding vigorously. “Well, I’m not so sure we’ll be seeing Peggy at her window anymore. But if you just take a quick glance up there right now...”
A big punt, for sure. At worst they might take his suggestion, his bit of harmless flim-flam, and think they saw something up there amongst the cobwebs and torn curtains. In the right kind of group like this one, with everyone primed...
“Bloody hell,” tattooed Dan whispered. “Look!”
Goddess bless Peggy and the wild, weird ways of the quantum universe, its ripples and eddies and tides. Up in the window, she and a shocked-looking lad in ragged sailor’s uniform were clutching each other, waving down at the lane. “Are they actors?” someone rasped, fear and delight cracking together in the question, and Dan spared a moment for a withering look. “Of course not, ya great tuss! You can see right through ’em!”
You could, too. They were fading by the second. Smiling, letting his attention drift, Lee eased back a little way from the wondering, chattering group, half of them missing the thing they wanted to see in their struggle to pull out cameras and phones in time. Movement in the living-room window was snagging at his attention. One of the crew, probably, unhitching the lighting frame and setting the curtains straight to leave the place as they’d found it, minus a disembodied maidservant at any rate...
No. It was the colonel. He was as solid as the window frame around him, and he was gesticulating frantically at Lee. Go! Get away from here! Not a hostile motion but the action of a military man, trying desperately to signal across distance to a friend. Danger. A warning. Go!
Too late. Music drifted into the lane. No-one reacted to it or looked around. Jack had the Sony trained on the attic window. Anna was gazing upward too, her expression unreadable, as if, despite everything, her grief-filled agnosticism had been easier to bear than the things she saw while working with Lee. Nobody else was hearing the long, low notes of flute music, shimmering like silks in the hot air.
Someone who loves you will die. In one way and another, making a sobering truth out of his clowning back in the house, Lee was surrounded by people who loved him today. Anna and Jack had walked through paranormal fires with him. He looked after his crew, and they repaid him with a loyalty and affection he couldn’t have foreseen. Dan, six and a half foot tall and built like the end of a barn, had written I heart Lee on a piece of card for all the world to see.
And those people—his crew and his fans—were the very least of Lee’s problems, the smallest of the privileges in a life so rich in love he could hardly breathe when he thought about it, thought about his home and his daily world. Your handsome beast of a husband.
A police Rover was parked at the end of the lane. Gideon had said he’d be busy today, but it would be just like him to have blown off his last task of the day and come roaring out here to collect him, knowing how tired he got towards the end of a series run. Lee stared at the ground. He wouldn’t look at anyone. Wouldn’t think of anyone if he could possibly help it. “Hey,” he said, in a last-ditch effort of distraction, “the ground sounds a bit hollow here. There’s a story of a tunnel running from the mansion house right down to the church. Could be a smuggler’s tale, but some geomantic experts say that tunnel legends like that are race memories of ley lines, energetic connections between one ancient site and...”
“And another. Of course. Marvellous!”
Lee jerked his head up as if yanked by a cold grasp in his hair. Helplessly he stared into the face of Rufus Pendower, the copper he and Gid had laughingly called Sergeant Weird-Shit until each had realised the depth and pain of Pendower’s crush on Lee. After that, they’d spoken of him with wary gentleness, only allowing Gid’s feigned jealousy to flare up in the bedroom. Could Rufus do this for you, then, my ’andsome? How about this? And this? Pendower’s secondment to the Devon squad had come to both of them as a relief. But here he was, smiling into Lee’s face, his own lit up with delight. “How are you, Locryn? I was on my way through Launceston, and I thought I’d just pop in and see how the filming was going at Beaumont Hall. It’s the most marvellous location, you know—all kinds of stories. And the name itself, the beautiful hill...”
Lee tuned him out. Bloody Rufus and his names! Even Lee’s old Cornish one became a weapon, a little piece of his identity Rufus could insist upon and keep. No-one else calls you by your proper Kernowek title, but I’ll call you Locryn on every possible occasion, caressing you with it, so gently and invisibly that no-one but you and I will know. Lee was too weary to deal with the unwanted secret today. The flute music had stopped, possibly only the wind in the trees to begin with. “It’s Lee,” he said, a touch of desperation in his voice. “I’m fine, Rufus, thank you. I’m just trying to wrap up my show here.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, of course. I’ll stand back. You, er... You don’t look terribly well, I’m sorry to say. Do you know that your nose is bleeding?”
It wasn’t. At least, one red drop only had hit the front of Lee’s shirt. Nothing to speak of, and maybe he’d just chosen the wrong tree to stand under, a cherry, perhaps, filled with greedy, incontinent birds. “Listen, everyone,” he said, gesturing to the little group to gather round. “There’s a tunnel beneath our feet here. A dowser could locate it, and its old energy line. The colonel’s in the window and he says I have to go. The monster’s in the schoolyard. I see a little boy with his proud father, and the father’s just a pair of initials, a big M and an R.” He chuckled, and blood ran down his throat and down his nose, laying a second big splash to his shirt and then a third. “That’s stupid, isn’t it? But Gideon taught me how to work out stuff like this, so don’t worry. M, R, a kind of wheat or grain... Yes, Emmer. And the child... Emmerson. Emmerson primary school, three and a half miles northeast of here, just off the Churchwood road. There’s still time. The monster’s found a way inside, the window to the canteen. The monster’s climbing in.”
“Lee?!”
He’d crashed to his knees on the track. Anna was crouching in front of him. She was holding his face between her hands. “Cut, Jack! Cut! What did you say it was called—this school? With the monster in the yard?”
“Emmerson. Emmerson.” Lee couldn’t stop saying it. He twisted away from her and threw up, distantly grateful that she got behind him and shielded him from the group, and still he couldn’t stop. “Emmerson. Send someone. Send police. Emmerson.”
“Police are right here.” She spared a hand from him to jab a finger at Pendower. “Hoi, you! Sergeant whoever-you-are. He’s having a flash. You’d better get someone to this school he’s talking about, pronto. Don’t just bloody stand there.”
“I... I know about his flashes,” Pendower said. “I know him. I have to look after him.”
“Mate, he’ll be looked after, I promise. If you know him, you’ll know he’s never wrong. Get back to your car, and get on your bloody radio and get police to that school, or you’ll answer for it. Right now, for godsakes! Go!”
Chapter Two
And Damned If You Don’t
The police Rover was a new one. Gideon had finally written off the old girl in which he’d tanked around the moorland lanes for years, driving her roof-deep into floodwater to
rescue Roger Quentin’s Saluki hound, then Roger himself, who’d fecklessly dived in after the dog. Detective Inspector Lawrence hadn’t been pleased, but the local-hero sergeant headlines hadn’t hurt her department any, and she’d come out in person to Dark to hand over the keys to the sleek new truck.
Surely Gideon had got more speed out of the old one! He’d been working in Bodmin Town when Anna had called, closing off paperwork in the Tollgate Road HQ. He’d surfed the leading edge of the school-run traffic, just in time before the roads congealed, and hit the A30 at a satisfying top-gear seventy. Lee had been taken ill after a long day’s shooting at the old Beaumont mansion. Anna and Jack had taken him to Launceston Community Hospital, a tiny place but equipped with a decent minor-injuries unit. Fine. Well, acceptable: Lee was in good hands until Gideon could get to him, and the symptoms Anna described were familiar. A full-on, overwhelming vision, sharp enough to make him sick and give him a pouring nosebleed. He’d raised the alarm on something happening at a Launceston primary school. Police had been called. At a long stretch, all in the course of a day’s work for Gideon’s poor beleaguered lad, whose talents could cost him so dear.
But Anna had called again, this time patched through to him from Tollgate over the Rover’s radio. Lee, desperately anxious, had refused to be admitted at Launceston, convinced that some aspect of his vision had yet to be played out. He’d tried to leave. Two officers had turned up from the police station down the road, and he’d been arrested.
