Long Lankin (45 page)

My head throbs. My knees are buckling. I feel giddy.

“They’ve gone through this trapdoor, into the garden. They’ve escaped.”

“Through the trapdoor? The log shaft? Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Auntie cries, turning, hurrying back, pulling me with her to the wooden steps, stumbling in the darkness.

I trip over the long handle of the axe she is dragging behind her. It is the huge one that was hanging on hooks by the back door.

My head is spinning. Auntie Ida yanks me, slipping, stumbling, up the wooden steps. We squeeze ourselves back through the gap in the panelling. She pulls me down the hall. With horror, I see Finn, still and silent, slumped at a strange angle across the bottom of the staircase.

Gasping, I lift my face and see Lankin snatch Mimi away from Pete. Pete shrieks, falls to his knees, and covers his face with his hands.

I pick myself up and stumble down the garden after Lankin.

Mimi’s little body dangles limply under his arm. He knows where he is going, darting over the dry mud at the bottom of the empty creek, then leaping over the barbed-wire fence on the other side and into some huge brambles.

For a second, he stops and looks back at me. Grey saliva dribbles down his chin.

The creek is too wide, the mud too soft. I can’t get across.

He drops onto all fours, stretching himself out like some huge insect, and moving so quickly, with Mimi’s floppy head just skimming the ground, that in a moment he is gone.

I bolt back past Pete to the front of the house, pick up my bike from the ground, and hurry on, pushing it over the bridge and hopping onto the saddle in the Chase. The hard lumps of baked mud make it impossible to go fast. I drop the bike and run. My side and throat hurt, but I speed on, round the end of the Chase and down towards the church.

I stop at the lychgate, shoulders heaving, catching my breath, hearing that buzzing noise in my ears like a million flies swarming. The sun burns my cheeks.

We dash through the back door, standing wide open, and into the garden. Auntie won’t let go of my dirty, sweaty hand. My breath is sharp in my throat. She rushes me along the path and around the side of the house.

Pete is alone, cowering next to the outside wall of the huge chimney. Tears pour out of his eyes and down his filthy cheeks in two pale streaks.

“Peter, Peter, where are they?” shouts Auntie Ida, kneeling in front of him, dropping the axe, and shaking him by the arms.

His bottom lip trembles. He wipes his eyes with his fists.

“Come on, you two!” cries Auntie, picking up the axe and starting to run to the front of the house.

“What was that shaft?” I call after her.

“They used to use it for getting stuff down into the kitchen — in the old days,” she shouts breathlessly over her shoulder. “It’s — it’s probably the way Lankin got out after the killings. He must have started to dig it out again.”

“But how did he know that’s where we’d come out?”

“There’s no other way — he knew that. Hurry, Cora!” We turn the corner and race along the weed-covered gravel. “Oh, please don’t let it be too late!”

We thunder over the wooden bridge. The creek is dry. The tide is out.

Pete follows us, pulling up the front of his shirt to wipe his face.

Auntie Ida staggers with the huge axe in her hands. “I never — I never thought he’d come through the roof!” she pants. “Oh — my chest — you carry on — my chest —”

“Let me take that!”

“No — no —” She leans on the axe and takes in great gulping breaths. “All right — I’m all right now — let’s go. . . .”

We run on. Glancing towards the marshes, towards the church, Auntie doesn’t see Roger’s bike lying in her path until it’s too late.

She goes sprawling. The axe flies out of her hands.

She clutches at her chest. Her face reddens. Pete and I help her to her feet. Her chin is cut and her knees grazed through her ripped stockings.

“I’m all right. I’m all right. We must go on! I’m all right!”

Pete reaches for the axe. “I’ll take this, Mrs. Eastfield. I’ll carry it for you.”

“Give it to me!” she snaps. “I said,
give it to me
!”

She snatches the axe out of his hands, turns it upside down, and sticks the head under her armpit like a crutch.

“Come on — come on — we must hurry! I’m all right. Hurry!”

We are at the end of the Chase. Auntie Ida is hobbling, her face a strange greyish white.

“Peter,” she says, gritting her teeth, “do you know where Father Mansell lives?”

In a daze, he nods.

“Go and get him! Quickly!”

Pete turns and starts running up the hill.

Auntie Ida and I press on to the church. As we enter the churchyard, her breathing is heavy, her face pinched.

She stops, panting, for a moment, drawing in her strength. I squeeze her arm, and as I do so, my eye is caught by a smudge of pink just above the ground on this side of the lychgate. The small tight rosebud I’d seen hanging over the grave slab just after we came to Auntie Ida’s has bloomed and is dying.

We see Roger standing by the old coffin-shaped tomb with the stone lid half off, where Pete put the wreath we’d made.

Auntie and I draw closer. Roger bends down and picks something up from the ground. It’s Sid.

“I think he’s taken her in here,” he says, pointing to the tomb.

“I’ll go first,” says Auntie Ida.

She gives me the axe, lifts her injured leg in her hands, and, grunting, hoists it over the side of the stone box. Then, taking some deep breaths and holding on to the sides of the tomb, she lifts the good leg over. With her backside resting on the edge, she braces herself for a minute, then lowers herself in, crying out in pain as she lands.

“Give me the axe!” she calls up, her voice sounding muffled from under the ground.

I lift it with both hands and drop it in after Auntie Ida, then climb up onto the stone lid and swing my legs over the edge. The lid shifts a little as I look down the inner walls of the tomb into the dark earth. The hole is edged with the fine threads of white roots.

“Just jump, Cora,” I hear Auntie say. “It isn’t deep. Bend your knees when you come down. I’m here.”

With my eyes shut tight, I launch myself into the hole. Auntie steadies me as I land. I open my eyes and, for a moment, can’t see in front of me. My mouth tastes of soil.

“Follow me,” whispers Auntie, stooping to crawl through the tunnel, dragging the axe behind her.

Steadying myself, I crouch down like Auntie, reaching out on both sides, feeling hard earth, stones, and ancient bones. My hand runs over something round and smooth. I turn my head. It is a half-buried, dirt-brown skull. Two eye sockets, stopped up with earth, gaze back at me. A fat worm moves like a tongue in and out of the old yellow teeth. The lower jaw is missing.

Roger flops down behind me. “How did he do this tunnel?” he breathes.

“Lankin tried to rescue Aphra Rushes from the church by digging his way in with his bare hands,” whispers Auntie Ida. “Then Piers Hillyard buried him in his rough coffin in the very same place. Lankin had begun to dig his own grave without knowing it and then, later, must have clawed his way out of it.”

The tunnel is narrow and short. In only a few paces, we have reached the foundations of the church.

Some of the stones have been hacked out for an entrance. A makeshift door, a piece of rotting wood, is propped up in front of the hole. Auntie removes it and leans it against the tunnel wall, then peers into the darkness.

“The smell . . .” she says, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

She crouches down and, with great care, puts one leg, then the other, over the rim of the hole and passes into the dark space on the other side. Then she reaches back for the axe.

Roger and I follow.

We are in the crypt beneath the church. It reeks of the sweet odour of rotting flesh and burning wax.

I peer round a stone pillar, wipe soil out of my eyes, blink, and am dazzled.

The walls are flickering with light. A myriad of candle flames splutter and spit from niches and ledges, coffin lids and tombs, sending up wandering strings of smoke to curl under the vault of the ceiling.

My moist hands clasp and unclasp the handle of the axe as my blurred vision clears. Then I let out a long, low gasp.

In front of us is a vast pile of bones in a high jagged heap — skulls and leg bones and vertebrae, knee bones and jaws, whole and broken, crushed, splintered, sharp, the larger ones gathered from the tombs of the undercroft, the ancient tombs of the Guerdons, my family, now standing broken and empty. The only Guerdons Lankin has spared lie safe in the plot near the old gate in the graveyard above us.

But most of the bones in this massive pile are very small, delicate even. All are discoloured — dark brown, yellow, ivory, dirty grey.

The floor is littered with fragments, scraps of cloth, little pieces of shoes.

On the far wall, the huge black shadow of the pile quivers in the candlelight.

Sitting cross-legged on top of this grisly mound is Long Lankin, sitting on this ghastly throne made of the bones of the poor damned children condemned to wander in the half-world so long as he himself has life. One by one, they were called to play in his garden of souls.

Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone
— somewhere there, in that wretched charnel heap, are shreds of my own self — my ancestors, my brother, and . . . and my son.

Lankin looks down at us, holding Mimi out towards us, mocking us. Her small thin body is limp and drooping. He lifts her floppy arm and shakes her little hand at us.

He can wait. He has her in his grasp. Even if we were able to climb the shifting bone pile, how could we stop a creature who has defied death for generation upon generation? He gloats at us, drawing back his thin, wasted lips and showing us his pointed yellow teeth.

He is smiling.

We stand completely rigid, staring in horror. I take a glance at Auntie. She looks defeated, bleak with pain. I feel utterly helpless.

Suddenly Roger hisses out of the side of his mouth, “Help me, Cora. Pull out the bones. Make the heap fall down.”

“What? Don’t be stupid. What about Mimi?”

“Leave her to me,” whispers Auntie Ida with a hint of excitement in her voice. “You help Roger.”