The Guardian Stones (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

“One down and four to go.” Grace unpinned the hat decorated with an artificial spray of flowers she'd worn to church. She tossed it on the chair by the fireplace.

“Do you really think it will be that easy?” Edwin laced up his boots. No church-goer, he'd attended because Grace took it for granted that he would and he hadn't wanted to offend her. When in Noddweir…By rushing home to change his suit for more casual clothing, he had missed Bert Holloway's homecoming.

“Bert said the Finch brothers persuaded him to come with them. They finally said he was holding them back and left him behind.”

“Where were the boys headed?”

“Home, he said. To Birmingham. So they're accounted for at least.”

“Still, there's Isobel….”

Grace dropped onto the other end of the settee occupied by Edwin. “Bert says she ran away too. The Finch boys told him. They decided if a girl dared to run away, why shouldn't they?”

“Which is not to say she hasn't run into trouble.”

“My guess is that Issy, Mike, and Len are practically to Birmingham by now. It's too much of a coincidence, them all vanishing at practically the same time.”

“And Reggie?”

“Copycat. He gets around better with that leg than you might think. You look doubtful, Edwin.”

“The fact that one child is accounted for—”

“Three. Bert confirmed the Finch boys ran off, remember.”

“All right. Three accounted for doesn't necessarily mean that the same explanation holds for Isobel and Reggie.”

“What other explanation is there? Someone lurking in the forest? Who just happens to start preying on village children at the same time other children start running away?”

“When you put it that way, it seems unlikely.”

“I should say so.” Grace had dressed for church in a plain navy blue dress with gold buttons and slightly padded shoulders. Her red lipstick matched the flowers in her hat. “It's not polite to stare,” she said with a smile.

“Oh…was I….?” Edwin felt his face flush and he concentrated on tying his boot laces with fumbling fingers.

***

While seeking the barrow Martha had described, Edwin thought about the plight of the missing children. Children he didn't know, most of whom by all accounts he was fortunate not to know.

Foolish of him. Had he picked up some of Elise's indiscriminate compassion for every black sheep she found in her classroom? He had been pleased to educate his more mature and marginally civilized college-aged charges, not save them from themselves. He often pointed out to Elise the irony of their teaching positions—she filled kids with hope for the future and then Edwin taught them history, a long, bloody parade of hopeful futures gone bad.

He squelched through the marshy depression behind the house with the red shutters. Whose house was it? Susannah someone-or-other. He couldn't recall what surname Martha had mentioned. As he passed the pond he heard the plop, plop, plop of frogs hitting the water just ahead. He wasn't quick enough to catch a glimpse of them.

The great tragedy of Elise's life, apart from the ending of it, had been their—his—inability to have children. Usually Edwin appreciated irony, but in this case it was simply cruel. That a person who cared so much about children and was so good with them could not have and raise her own, that perfectly normal human function, yet so much abused if the truth were known.

If Edwin believed in the supernatural, he would be convinced there was a malevolent force abroad in the world which eventually stole from every person exactly what they most cherished. He often thought so, sitting alone in his hotel room in London. Luckily, though, he was not a religious man. It was, he knew, only his own bleak nature speaking.

He made his way to the far side of the pond. Martha claimed that the barrow in the forest wasn't far and, better yet, sat within sight of a path, so Edwin had decided to seek that one first, before the elusive barrows mapped by Reverend Wilson. And before returning to the stones.

The air warmed, filled by the hum of bees feeding on the clover and flowering weeds in the boggy clearing. Laurel and tall, thick bushes replete with thorns sealed the edge of the forest.

Edwin walked back and forth before he spotted the narrow rut of the path. Pushing aside leafy branches, he stepped into cool but humid shadows. His eyes dazzled by the sun, he might have been passing from day into night. Beyond the tightly woven barrier the forest opened up. After his eyes adjusted, Edwin saw that the rocky track wound off into oaks and beech.

His new boots were already pinching his feet. He detested shopping. He always rushed to finish, arriving home with a shirt of some ghastly cut he'd snatched up on account of its pleasing color, a beautifully patterned tie that didn't match anything he owned, or a pair of expensive boots that weren't quite the right size.

He'd tried the boots out back in Rochester, in Durand-Eastman Park by Lake Ontario. He'd told himself they were tight but just needed breaking in. The path he was on now, narrow, rutted, studded with rocks, and crossed by treacherous roots, reminded him of those he and Elise had often walked.

She used to jokingly tell him to keep his eyes out for the local ghost, the White Lady, knowing very well that her husband, for all his scholarly interest in folklore, prided himself on being the least superstitious man alive.

The White Lady, reputed to haunt the park, was said to be the spirit of a mother whose young daughter was raped and murdered there. Some claimed to have seen her rising in a silver mist from the lake or appearing as a hazy glow at the bottom of a ravine, as she wandered the park endlessly seeking her daughter's murderer. Edwin regarded the White Lady as a common tale of the sort popular all over the world.

The legend reminded Edwin of the missing Isobel. He hoped she had merely run away as Grace insisted and had not met the fate of the White Lady's daughter.

In spots the path passed through thick stands of rhododendron so that he walked as if through a narrow dark green canyon, able to see only the canopy of leaves overhead, coruscating with brilliant sunlight when a breeze agitated the leaves. In open places he walked through pools of light. He was glad the sun was shining brightly. These wild places, these gloomy woods could almost make an intelligent man like Edwin expect to see apparitions.

He walked for longer than he expected, feet increasingly sore, without seeing anything resembling a barrow. Had he passed it? He couldn't have taken a wrong turn, because he hadn't turned off the path, as far as he could tell.

Maybe the countryside simply didn't like foreigners and intentionally hid its secrets from him.

Finally he saw a knoll off in the trees to his right. Could that be the barrow?

The path was barely visible. Pushing through thick bushes he noticed the barrow was covered by saplings. He climbed gingerly over rotted trunks that blocked his way.

Then he saw the shape lying at the base of the barrow.

“No!” he said. “No!”

He told himself to calm down. He could barely see through the intervening thicket and its welter of leaves fluttering in the wind.

Wait. The shape moved. Hadn't it?

Edwin remembered the trick Mike Finch had played on Constable Green, leaping out of the bomb crater after feigning death.

“Don't think you're going to surprise me,” he called, striding forward. “You stay right where you are!”

Chapter Fourteen

Violet underhanded pebbles into the water at the bottom of the bomb crater while she waited for Bert Holloway to catch up. Each pebble vanished with a hollow glug that sounded loud in the quiet of the forest.

Bert had spotted Violet going into the forest and tagged along. She didn't mind. He might be chubby and slow, but he wasn't loud and nasty and crude, and he made her daisy chains even though the other boys poked fun at him for it.

Bert told her that after the Wainmans picked him up following his return they had argued all the way back to the farmhouse, and once they got inside they started yelling at each other. It frightened him, so he crept out. He didn't know what he was going to do. He couldn't run away properly but he couldn't bear staying there either.

“Things will look better in the morning,” Violet advised him, because that was what her mother always said, although not as much lately. “It's such a nice day. Maybe later we'll look for daisies.”

When Bert caught up with her, Violet led the way up Guardians Hill. She had grown up playing in the forest and was in no danger of getting lost.

They came to a flat terrace, an indentation in the side of the hill filled with saplings and weeds.

Bert's eyes widened. “This is one of them places evil fairies make burnt sacrifices when the moon is full,” he whispered. “Len Finch told me so. He said they like to sacrifice fat boys because they burn for a long time, and because they can catch them, seeing as how fairies have short legs.”

Violet giggled. “Oh, Bert, you shouldn't let Len scare you.”

Bert broke a limb from a sapling and poked around in the weeds, uncovering several lumps of charcoal. “See.” He picked a lump up and held it out to Violet, who put her hands behind her and stepped back in horror.

“You're scared too,” he said.

“I just don't want that nasty dirt all over me.”

Bert turned the charcoal around in his hand. “Doesn't it look like part of a bone? Maybe a finger bone.” He dropped the lump and wiped his hands on his shirt.

“You'll catch it for that!” Violet scolded. Then she added, “It's charcoal. They used to make it here by burning piles of wood.”

Bert looked dubious.

“You'd rather believe in evil fairies?” Violet asked. “There was a man who came every summer to make it. He lived in the forest while he did. To keep an eye on the fire, you know.”

“Do you think it's him…?” Bert blurted out.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think he's the one who killed Issy?”

“Who says anyone killed Issy? I think she ran off, like those bad boys.”

“Well, I suppose she did.”

“Anyway, the charcoal man hasn't been back for ages.”

Bert looked around, anxious, and suggested they go somewhere else.

“Now what are you looking like a scaredy cat about, Bert?”

“When you said charcoal man I thought of a man all burned up into charcoal, roaming the forest in the dark so you couldn't hardly see him until he grabbed you.”

“So what if he did grab you? If he was made of charcoal he'd just fall right apart, wouldn't he?”

They left the terrace and climbed to the top of the hill. Violet wanted to sit on one of the stones but Bert looked scared again.

“Don't go alone, inside the stones. Isn't that what you say around here?”

“Oh, silly, we're not alone, are we?”

Instead of going into the stone circle, they sat on a fallen tree trunk cushioned with moss with their backs to it. A breeze cooled them after their climb up the steep path. Fleecy clouds grazed across the sky, aerial sheep promising more hot weather to come.

After a few moments of silence, Bert spoke round the stalk of grass he was chewing. “Won't you cop it from your mum for coming out on your own?”

“She won't miss me. She's at that meeting they're having. There's more people at the pub than there was in church this morning. I don't know what it's about. Anyhow, I'm sick of being sent up to my room to read.”

Bert grunted. “At least you don't have to listen to your parents shouting and carrying on half the night. You should hear the Wainmans going at it hammer and tongs! That's why I like the forest. It's quiet. You can sit and think.”

“Where do you think those bad Finch boys are?”

“They told me they was going back home.”

“Were they telling the truth?”

“I hope so. What if they come back?” Bert looked as if he would burst into tears.

“Did they kill poor Patch?”

Bert nodded. “Do it soon as look at you, they would. They are just horrible. They'd trip me up and call me names and make me give them all my sweets.”

“You poor thing! You should have told the Wainmans.”

“Len said if I did they'd drown me in the witch's pond,” came the gloomy reply.

Violet shuddered. “They would, too. But then why did you run away with them?”

“They didn't give me much choice, did they? It was that or the pond.”

“Look!” Violet pulled a small, sticky paper bag from her pocket. “Bull's-eyes. Have one.”

The pair sat for a while, sucking on the sweets.

“Where do you think Issy has gone?” Bert eventually asked.

“Then you don't really think she joined up with the Finches?”

Bert did not reply, so Violet continued, “Do you think the monsters got her?”

“Monsters?”

“Yes,” Violet nodded. “I heard mum talking about monsters last night. She reckons there's monsters in the village. Well, I looked all over today for signs of them but I haven't seen any at all.”

“She might have meant them rotten brothers,” Bert suggested.

“Maybe the monsters got them?”

Bert giggled. “Hope so.”

“But….but what if the monsters live in the forest?” Violet whispered.

The children looked around uneasily.

“I'm sure there's something bad in the forest.” Bert whispered back. “Let's go back.”

***

The children jump up from the log. For a moment it appears as if the girl will turn around to look directly at the stubby stone surrounded by tall grass and overgrown by a bramble bush which has left a space near the base of the stone, forming a thorny tent. But she is only smoothing wrinkles in her dress. She says something, but a breeze rustling the grass obscures her words, except for one. “…monsters..”

It is not clear whether she is afraid or is advising her companion not to be afraid. She does not move as if she is in any hurry to run away.

The two go down the slight incline at the edge of the clearing. As they descend, the tall grass gradually obscures them, first their legs vanish from view, then the torsos, finally a windblown wisp of auburn hair sinks beneath the grass.

There remain only the tops of the trees at the forest edge and the fleecy clouds drifting in the blue, eluding the thorns that reach out for them.