Itchcraft (15 page)

Itch closed his eyes.

Chloe inhaled sharply. ‘You have to be kidding . . .’ she said quietly.

The bus to Bodmin Moor was leaving shortly, and Itch and Chloe both needed a packed lunch. Jude was asleep and Nicholas deep in an animated phone call which he was having in the garden, so they were making it themselves.

‘Dad’s lost it,’ said Chloe. ‘Why is he outside? It’s cold and miserable . . .’

‘Something I’m sure he’s noticed,’ said Itch, slicing bread. ‘I think this call has been going on for some time. I heard him talking downstairs very early. Maybe he’s keeping himself awake.’ The light from the kitchen illuminated the first few metres of the garden and they watched as their father paced up and down.

‘He looks stressed,’ said Chloe. ‘Who needs to be shouting at eight o’clock in the morning? Pass the tinfoil, Itch.’

‘It’s aluminium foil, Chloe – big difference.’

‘Actually, they’re the same.’

‘Aluminium is 13, tin is 50. You can check—’

‘They’re both shiny and keep sandwiches fresh,’ said Chloe. ‘Which makes them the same. So pass, please.’

Outside, the onset of hard, swirling rain was forcing their father to shelter near the house. As he walked past the window, they picked up snippets of conversation.

‘I think he’s talking to Themba from the mine in South Africa,’ said Itch. ‘Something isn’t right . . .’

He saw that Nicholas
did
look stressed. His brow was furrowed, his eyes closed in exasperation as he listened. Eventually he hung up and slumped onto a garden chair. Chloe knocked on the window and beckoned. He smiled and nodded and, seconds later, came in, dripping and weary. Chloe put a mug of tea in front of him and he grabbed it gratefully.

‘Thanks, Chloe, exactly what I needed.’ He inhaled the steam, took a sip, then a mouthful.

‘What’s up, Dad?’ asked Itch.

Nicholas sighed. ‘That was Themba from the mine at Palmeitkraal. I’m still trying to work out what happened, but it seems that the sale of the mine didn’t go through. There was a new bid from somewhere at the last minute, so the university won’t be getting it after all.’

‘Poor Sammy and Themba,’ said Chloe. ‘Where will they go?’

Nicholas shrugged. ‘Not sure, Chlo . . .’ He looked at their food preparation. ‘You off somewhere?’

Chloe pointed at a sheet of paper stuck to the fridge. ‘You signed the form. It’s Itch’s “Rocks of Ancient Cornwall” project, remember? He and Jack are off to look at some stones on Bodmin Moor. Me and Lucy are going along too – she says they’re actually pretty cool. We’re meeting up at the bus stop.’

Nicholas glanced outside as the rain hit the windows with a renewed force. ‘Of course I remember. And you’ve picked a lovely day for it. Bring me back a spoon or something.’ He followed them to the door. ‘And Itch, remember to text that number you were given.’

Itch nodded and Chloe herded him through the door. ‘I’ll remind him,’ she said, and kissed her father goodbye.

The bus to the moor took a long time; the roads were slow and there were many stops. Itch, Jack, Chloe and Lucy sat at the back, Itch already eating a roll from his packed lunch.

‘It’s only ten thirty,’ said Chloe. ‘You’ll have nothing for lunch.’

‘It’s breakfast,’ he said, his mouth full.

‘Well, if
you’re
starting . . .’ said Lucy, and she produced a huge packet of crisps. ‘Anyway, this isn’t my project, or Chloe’s . . . We can do what we want.’ She handed the bag to Chloe, who grinned. ‘And I did all this last year. If they hadn’t changed the questions, I’d tell you the answers.’

The windows were steaming up, and Jack drew a rudimentary map with her finger. ‘This is the road to Launceston, and this is the one to Minions.’ Her finger left a dripping zigzag trail on the window, water running down the glass as it pooled where her finger stopped. ‘And these are the Hurlers.’ She stabbed her finger in a circular pattern.

‘They are pretty amazing actually,’ said Lucy. ‘They’re stone circles like Stonehenge. It’s supposed to be impossible to count them.’

‘Why?’ said Chloe.

Jack stood up and wrote
Rock, stones and magic
in big swirly writing. ‘It’s the devil’s work!’ she said, laughing. ‘They’re cursed or something. My dad has a song about them – I might put it in the project when we write it up. He was singing it this morning. Something like:

‘Come take this warning
,
Cried the priest:
All good hurlers
Are the devil’s feast
.
He will curse where you stand,
Mark his circle upon our land.’

Chloe and Itch applauded and Jack bowed. ‘I used to think hurling was like being sick,’ she said. ‘Then Dad showed me the game on YouTube. It was pretty neat, actually. The hurlers on the moor were cursed for playing on a Sunday and turned to stone. That’s the legend, anyway.’

‘We have to take photos and answer some questions. That’s it, really,’ said Itch.

‘And report to the police,’ added Chloe.

‘And that,’ said Itch. ‘I told them about the trip and they seemed fine about it.’

Since Itch had told Fairnie about the contact with one of Shivvi’s divers and her claim that it was Flowerdew who had killed Revere and Van Den Hauwe, security had been stepped up. No one wanted a return to the intense MI5 patrols of the previous year, but the colonel had insisted that action be taken. Itch had to report every trip he made to the police, along with any suspicious social media contact. This would apply to his school trip to Spain too; the local police had already been alerted. Itch guessed that his phone, emails and Facebook were monitored anyway, though Fairnie had been evasive on this point.

As the bus arrived in Minions and turned into the car park, Itch texted the number he’d been given. He received a
Confirmed. Thank you
, and they all trooped out into a howling gale, the rain now horizontal across the moor. They pulled their hoods down over their eyes and followed the signs.

‘Let’s make this quick,’ Jack shouted into the wind as they walked single file up the track towards the stones. She pointed at some old ruined buildings that loomed out of the low cloud. ‘I know there are old mine works here, Itch, but not this time, OK?’

He nodded and, heads bowed, they almost missed the people hurrying in the opposite direction. They looked up as the first one splashed past holding onto his peaked cap, his waterproof flapping in the wind. He was followed by three others, a woman and two men, all of whom looked shaken and upset.

‘It’s terrible, what’s happened!’ wailed one of them. ‘Never seen anything like it!’

‘It’s shocking, really shocking,’ called another. ‘We’ve called the police!’ And they hurried back down the hill, helping each other pick their way through the rapidly expanding puddles.

Itch, Jack, Chloe and Lucy stood and stared after them. Itch took his sister’s arm. ‘Come on, Chlo – it’ll just be a dead sheep or something. They’re probably panicking because they’re low on fudge, or haven’t eaten a pasty for five minutes . . .’ He steered her up the track, their trainers now squelching through what was becoming a stream, and noticed a small group of people standing just off the path, huddled together and pointing.

Itch followed their gaze to a scene of chaos. Through the swirling, drenching low cloud they could see the Hurlers – three rings of large granite slabs . . . but every stone had been upended. Each one had fallen, leaving a large earthy hole where it had been rooted for millennia.

‘It’s like a battle scene,’ said Jack.

As they headed towards the stones, Itch thought his cousin was absolutely right – that was precisely what it reminded him of. The dead and injured of this battle were the ancient stones of the moor; they had stood in an organized pattern, but were now thrown down in disarray. The first one they came to had stood at least two metres tall, but had been prised from the ground, exposing a darker, less eroded base. Itch peered into the gaping hole it had left, expecting to find a clue to its fate of some kind, but found only the gritty, peaty soil of Bodmin.

The Hurlers lay at regular intervals and Itch led a procession that trooped from each lichen-covered granite slab to the next. At each one, scuffed and broken soil seemed to be evidence of the effort that had been needed to topple each monolith.

‘Who would do this?’ wondered Chloe.

Before anyone could think of an answer, there were shouts from behind them, and a man in a cagoule came running over. ‘No one touch anything!’ he bellowed breathlessly from under his hood. ‘This is a crime scene! Come away from the stones!’ He rushed up to Itch, his eyes darting everywhere, rain dripping off his glasses. ‘You’ll have to leave,’ he said. ‘This is terrible. Please go!’ And he ran from stone to stone, becoming more agitated at each one.

‘Itch, come and look at this . . .’ called Lucy. She was standing by a slab on the opposite side of the circle, and he ran over. It too was grey and weathered, but now had large red letters sprayed on it. Some of the paint had run off the granite and onto the grass.

‘
Meyn Mamvro
,’ read Itch. ‘Is that a name or something?’

Chloe and Jack joined them, as did the breathless man in the anorak.

‘Who are you?’ said Lucy.

But the man just stared at the stone, mouthing the words, ‘Meyn Mamvro . . .’

‘Excuse me,’ said Lucy. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It makes no sense,’ he replied. ‘No sense at all . . .’ And, hearing an approaching siren, he ran off towards the car park.

‘Do you know what?’ said Itch. ‘I don’t fancy being here when another police investigation starts. I think they’ve seen enough of me too. Let’s disappear before they get here.’

Jack took some final photos of the stones, and they followed anorak man back in the direction of the main road.

There was no phone signal on the journey back; they had to wait till they reached Jack’s house. They had dried out a little on the bus, but Zoe insisted on hanging up their jackets and throwing their sweatshirts in the dryer. Jack produced her laptop and they sat round the kitchen table.

She typed
Meyn Mamvro
into the search engine, and they all read the first entry that came up:
Cornish: Stones of the Motherland
. There was silence in the kitchen.

‘
Stones of the Motherland?
What’s that about?’ said Jack.

‘Doesn’t really help much,’ said Itch. ‘It might mean nothing, anyway. Let’s see your pictures, Jack.’

She uploaded her photos and they stared at the images. ‘Well, it’s not going to be the project Miss Coleman thought she was getting,’ said Jack. She added a picture of a fallen stone to her Facebook page and added the
Meyn Mamvro
stone too. ‘Might as well put it out there. Someone will know what it’s all about.’

Zoe Lofte produced mugs of tea and hot chocolate, and they all took it in turns to explain what they had seen. She shook her head. ‘What a shocking thing to do,’ she said. ‘It’s Cornish, but seems a bizarre thing for the Cornish Nationalists to do. They’d want to look after the stones. Maybe it’s just vandals . . .’ She walked away as Jack’s phone bleeped.

‘Text from Debbie. She says to look at her page,’ said Jack, already clicking on it. Debbie Price and Natalie Hussain had been given a different site for their project: Carn Kenidjack at the far southern end of the county. Debbie had volunteered for it as her family planned to be there for half-term anyway. Her photos made everyone gasp, and Zoe turned round.

They were more images of scattered stones and broken granite. Kenidjack had been a meeting point, a local curiosity that became known as the ‘Hooting Carn’ because of the weird noise the wind made as it swirled around the rocks. Now it was a pile of rubble.

‘But that’s terrible,’ said Zoe, looking over their shoulders.

‘And look at that . . .’ Jack scrolled to another picture. A broken slice of rock lay propped up against some rubble, red letters sprayed across it.

‘
Meyn Mamvro
,’ said Lucy.

‘This is going to get nasty,’ said Itch.

Itch was right. Over the next week there were reports of ancient sites across Cornwall being destroyed. Images of overturned granite, piles of scattered stones and toppled slabs filled first the local news, then the national bulletins. In each case the words
Meyn Mamvro
had been scrawled somewhere on the site. Theories were everywhere: an anti-capitalist demonstration; an individual with a grudge against the county; even a witches’ coven.

‘The truth is,’ said Nicholas over breakfast, ‘no one has a clue. No one has heard of
Meyn Mamvro
before – it doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does if you believe in aliens,’ said Chloe. ‘There’s a Facebook group that think these places are landing sites for spaceships.’

Her father laughed. ‘Well, it makes about as much sense as anything else,’ he said.

Itch came into the kitchen and poured himself some orange juice. ‘Been any more attacks?’ he asked.

Nicholas shook his head. ‘Police have closed most of the sites and roped off the tors. But some are so remote, it’s impossible to protect them properly. Volunteer groups are camped out on some of them apparently. Police are checking owners of tractors and JCBs – it’s clear that heavy lifting gear was used; deep tyre marks were found at most of the sites.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Itch. ‘Should take most of the year . . .’

‘Got a theory?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Nope. You know Miss Coleman got a visit from the cops?’

‘You’re kidding!’ said Chloe.

‘Lucy just messaged me. Apparently they turned up at school yesterday. It was a staff training day or something, and they wanted to know about our half-term project. They said that so many of our year had posted images of the
Meyn Mamvro
rocks, it seemed a bit of a coincidence.’

‘Well, if they think your class is athletic enough to shift all these rocks, they clearly haven’t seen you do games,’ said Chloe.

‘That’s definitely what she would have told them,’ said Itch, smiling. ‘And shown them that the CA has done exactly the same work many times before. Lucy’s still got hers somewhere.’