Saxon's Bane (27 page)

C
LARE GROANED AND
rolled over onto her back and stared up into the gloom with an avalanche of pain filling her head. The line of animal masks stared back at her, implacable. The cloaks had been pulled down from beneath several of them. That would explain the cloth beneath her and balled under her head. She couldn’t remember untying her legs, either. A rational, feeble corner of her mind waved a flag labelled ‘amnesia’.

The vomit erupted almost without warning, leaving Clare with barely enough time to turn her head to one side to spew over the floor, and with each spasm her head tightened into a sheet of agony. When her heaving subsided she wiped her face on a cloak and dropped it over the mess. The line of light under the door beyond was fading; already the sun must be out of the valley. Clare lifted a hand to explore a prickle under her chin, and felt the posy that Eadlin had pinned to her shirt in the garage. She pushed her nose into it, hoping to mask the smell of her own vomit, and found comfort in the token of friendship. Thanks, girl, but it didn’t work, she tried to say out loud, but her tongue seemed too big and no words emerged.

Water. The need for it filled Clare’s mouth the way the pain filled her head. As delirium reclaimed her she wondered if they’d let her drink before the horrors began.

“Y
OU SHALL NOT
drink.” The most frightening mask above her has the face of Professor Eaton. “You stole the Saxon.” The line of masks either side of Eaton is an infernal jury that stares down at her, merciless in their judgement. “Guilty,” pronounces a rat. “Guilty, guilty, guilty,” they all intone in turn. “He shall die,” the wolf calls, as strident as any Inquisitor.

But the body that swings from the pole as they carry him to his execution in the marsh is not Aegl but Fergus Sheppard.

T
HE CROWD ON
the green was thinning out. Now the lure of the raffle was over, families were drifting home to rest between the day’s delights and the evening’s fireworks. Already Russell could see clear across to where Eadlin’s tricorn hat weaved through the stalls on the far side as she searched. His phone call had brought her back in a rush.

Fergus? The Heavenly Twins had paused to think. Oh, he was fooling around with Dick Hagman in his bogeyman costume. He’ll be back; his stick’s still here. But thank God the Jack-in-the-Green has finally gone. That ghastly man Herne has been pestering us all afternoon. It made Julia Foulkes feel quite ill. The Vicar’s taken her home…

Russell ignored the rest of the conversation and scanned the crowd, senses tuned. The debris of the day showed more clearly across the grass as the festivities drew to a close. The village’s immaculate green was now littered with crumpled napkins, paper plates and plastic forks, tumbling scraps of raffle tickets, and a discarded lump that might be a baseball cap. Russell turned it over in his hands, sniffed at the bruised nosegay of May blossom, and lifted his eyes in time to see Dick Hagman let himself out of the Green Man’s delivery yard and slam the gate behind him. Hagman was still dressed in his bogeyman costume, but stood more upright now, with the hump hanging flaccid down his back where it had been relieved of its firkin. Hagman turned away from the gate, wiping greasepaint off his face with a bar towel, and froze when he saw Russell watching him from the top of the lane.

“Dick! I need a word!” But Hagman ignored his call and scurried away in the opposite direction, glancing back over his shoulder as he went. Russell let him go, more concerned with what, or who, he had left behind him. Russell pulled out his mobile and called Eadlin.

The Green Man was too quiet as they approached. The village’s second pub should have been as packed as the White Hart. Eadlin pushed at the door, and peered through the glass, puzzled by the notice taped inside. ‘Closed for May Day.’

Russell rattled the locked gates into the delivery yard, and looked upwards. They were too high for him to jump up or climb over. “Jake’s up to something, that’s why. Fergus is in there, I’m sure.”

“Then you’d better give me a leg up.” Eadlin stood back, looking up, planning her climb.

“But that must be seven feet!”

“Easy. Make a basket.” Eadlin demonstrated her posture for helping riders to mount, and stepped into his hands.

“If I wasn’t so worried I’d be enjoying this.” Russell’s voice was muffled.

“Just get your face out of my chest and heave.” Eadlin held herself with her stomach balanced across the top of a gate until she was sure the yard was empty, then rolled over and climbed down the gate’s frame on the far side. She held her finger across her lips as she let Russell into the yard, and pointed towards a frosted glass window on the first floor. A shadow moved beyond the glass, and a rush of water came down an outside pipe as a toilet was flushed.

“Bugger, it’s locked.” Eadlin tried the door from the yard into the pub, and they both looked around for inspiration. The sound of a shower started above them.

“Oh God, no.” Eadlin stared at one corner of the yard, where the Jack-in-the-Green stood on its stretcher, ready for its procession to the bonfire. “Surely he wouldn’t...”

They both pulled the Jack off its stretcher, working with feverish haste as they realised the truth of the tightly wrapped bundle bound to the chair inside. Eadlin swore quietly and continuously under her breath,
bastard, bastard, bastard,
as they laid Fergus out on the ground, pausing only to lay her hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse.

Russell opened his mobile and started dialling.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling an ambulance, what do you think?”

“Wait a bit.” Eadlin leaned forward to smell Fergus’s skin, and lifted his eyelid. “He doesn’t need an ambulance. He needs to sleep it off.”

“The police, then. For fuck’s sake, Jake was going to murder him. This has gone too far.”

“But Jake will say he was only trying to frighten him. Claim it was a practical joke that got out of hand.” Eadlin lowered her voice as the shower sounds ended above them. “Give me your keys. I’ve got an idea.”

P
EOPLE FLOWED DOWNHILL
as the sun set, drifting from the green towards the common on the outskirts of the village, almost as if some human tide had turned. Farmers on the green packed their produce stalls into the backs of Land Rovers, yielding to hot dog stands on the common. In the fading light Jake Herne led the Jack-in-the-Green through the village, waving his good hand theatrically to acknowledge the ribald cheering, as if his place had always been to lead the Jack rather than carry it. Jake kept his plaster cast hidden under a swathe of cloth. Behind him, Russell Dickens had volunteered to take his place as pallbearer, ahead of Dick Hagman.

Hagman had sweat trickling down his face, mingling with the beer sprayed over them by the crowd. He’d deliberately picked up the heavy end, stretcher-style, in case the big oaf in front of him questioned the weight, and he was fighting to keep the Jack upright. Unsighted behind its pyramid of leaves, Hagman heaved a mighty sigh of relief when he finally felt grass beneath his feet and knew that they were on the common. He even managed to join in the cheers and banter as the Jack was laid on the platform of wooden pallets that had been prepared for it.

“Bury it.” Jake’s whispered instruction needed no repetition. Hagman kept stacking wood around the Jack, even though some in the crowd objected, shouting that they wouldn’t see it burn.

“Paraffin?” Russell sniffed at a bundle of wood in his hand.

“It got wet in the rain.” Hagman’s voice was high with tension, but Russell shrugged and kept building. It was fully dark by the time the bonfire was finished, and Russell started to move the crowd back behind the safety tape that had been staked out perhaps seventy yards from the bonfire and the line of firework frames.

“Come on, you lot,” Russell shouted, “we can’t start until you’re all behind the line,” and slowly the crowd obeyed, muttering about “bloody killjoy ’Ealth and Safety”.

Jake savoured the moment. It was his traditional right to light the bonfire, as the dancer in the Jack, but this year he made a spectacle of it. He held aloft a flaming torch, staring at it as if it were a talisman, before lowering it slowly towards the pyre, then pushing it in like a sword thrust.

The bonfire caught quickly. At this signal Russell and Hagman lit other corners, and the little blazes ran along prepared lines of oil, linked together, and flared. Within moments the bonfire was a solid mass of flame.

Hagman started to panic when the smell reached him. Soon afterwards the stench brushed a coughing path through the spectators as the smoke drifted across the common.

“What the hell are you burning in there, Jake?” someone called from the crowd.

“Smells like old boots!”

“Or the leftovers from the pig roast!”

Hagman covered his nostrils and looked nervously at Jake, surrounded by the stink of his guilt, but Herne merely gestured behind him into the bushes and nodded. Hagman understood the signal, knowing what was hidden there. He pulled a cardboard tube from his pocket and threw it into the edge of the flames on the side nearest the crowd. It was a simple pyrotechnic, designed for theatrical effect. All that the watchers behind the tape saw was a momentary, dazzling flash and bang, followed by a ball of smoke that rose up from the fire. It was enough to distract everyone’s attention, and as their eyes readjusted to the darkness they saw a new figure beyond the bonfire.

Even Hagman was impressed, and he’d known what was coming. The figure stood motionless, flickering in and out of vision as the flames rose and fell. Its body looked wholly black, so that it would have appeared as an absence of light rather than a presence but for its monstrous goat’s head and scimitar horns, with its eyes reflecting the red light of the flames. Its silhouette showed no limbs, but gave the impression that the infernal head was supported on a wedge of blackness whose broad shoulders tapered towards the ground.

In the crowd there was nervous male laughter and isolated screams from some of the women. The figure radiated a sense of evil that went far beyond the mummery of a May Day bonfire party. As they watched, the wedge supporting the head changed shape as its unseen arms slowly lifted, spreading the robe into bat-like wings. As the robe lifted, its sole decoration was revealed in the firelight as an inverted cross, the antithesis of a Christian symbol, gleaming in some silver material on the front of the Satanic chasuble.

Count to twenty,
Herne had said.
We’ll shock them and end it
. But Hagman was distracted. There was a shout of “No, for the love of God, no!” as John Webster ducked under the tape and strode towards them, bellowing “Stop this obscenity!”

From another corner of the common, Julia Foulkes also brushed aside the tape, her scream of “murderer!” slicing through the air. All her famous poise and control had snapped, and as she started to run towards the fire Hagman had no doubt that this fragile woman was at that moment capable of violence. Hagman turned nervously back towards Herne, wondering if Jake had gone too far with the goat’s mask.

Hagman swung his second pyrotechnic back-handed towards the fire, but his aim was poor and rushed, and it arced into the furnace heart. The explosion released a wall of heat across the grass and sent a volcano of burning debris tumbling outwards. In the centre of the fire a final slab of blazing wood fell away, releasing a cascade of smouldering material that ignited in a crackling eruption of flame. Inside this new flare was the shape of a human torso and head, burning furiously with much of the skin already gone and the jawbone hanging open in a silent scream. Within seconds the body slid out of sight, collapsing into the flames as the fire settled and a new shower of sparks erupted into the sky.

Ten yards from Hagman, Webster and Julia stopped in their tracks, the certainty of what they had seen written over their faces.

A short distance upwind, Russell swore emphatically and ignited the opening sequence of the firework display, sending the first mortar coughing into the air. It exploded above them with a punch that hit Hagman deep in his panicking chest, scattering distraction in a perfect parabola of colour.

Beneath the bursting fireworks circles of people radiated out from Hagman and the fire. An outer ring of the crowd looked upwards, murmuring their “oohs” and “aahs” in ignorance of the drama. A closer arc of watchers at the tape stared towards the fire, whispering their uncertainty about what they had seen. There had been something in the fire, some trick of the heat perhaps. Whatever it was, Julia Foulkes had been shocked out of her rage, and was speaking into a mobile phone with the crystal authority of an English gentlewoman.

Beyond Julia was an inner ring of people, a pentacle spaced almost equally around the fire, but there was no consistency in their behaviour.

Dick Hagman backed away from the heat, whimpering.

Russell Dickens launched fireworks with furious urgency, rushing the display into a continuous, frenetic finale.

Jake Herne had jettisoned his mask and robe, but stood with his arms outstretched, palms upward in supplication, chanting in an ugly, incomprehensible tongue. His theatrical air had evaporated with that momentary exposure of the body. Jake Herne was begging.

Almost opposite him, John Webster sank to his knees and implored the Almighty’s blessing on whichever poor soul had been in the fire. His words met and battled with Herne’s in the crackle of the flames.

Unseen by any of them, Eadlin Stodman stood in the fringes of the woodland. She too held her arms outstretched with palms lifted and hands open to receive. Her chant resonated with the earth and folded itself into the plume of smoke rising into the night.

From high above the village, the sound of detonations rushed up the valley, panicking a sleeping horse into a mad charge across its field. The thunder funnelled between the narrowing hills until it hit the field shelter and shook Clare’s delirium like the clash of a hundred spears against their shields. Clare woke into darkness where the pain in her head flickered in colours of purple, shot with the acid yellow smell of her own vomit. Thirst clogged her mouth in crumbling cascades of brick red but she tried not to acknowledge it. There would be water, later, she remembered that. It was the horrors that came before the water that Clare didn’t want to remember. On the floor of the store she squirmed herself tighter into the nest of Satanic robes, and winced as the spears hit the shields again.

Far to the south, beyond the undulating farmland, blue flashing lights were called into life when Julia snapped her mobile phone shut. As the firework display ended and the May Day bonfire began to collapse in on itself, police sirens converged on Allingley.