The Piper (10 page)

Grandad turns his head to look at her. ‘Is this making any sense to you?’ he asks her.

‘Yes, of course,’ she assures him. ‘But … how come you’ve never told me any of it before?’

He sighs and shakes his head. ‘For a long time I wanted to forget all about it. I wanted to forget every detail. I suppose I just blotted it out of my mind. It’s only lately that it’s all started coming back to me.’ He gazes around the cheerless little room that is now his world. ‘I think, since Emily died, I’ve had a lot more time to reflect on things. I … well, I suppose I’ve been lonely. Sitting here, hour after hour, a man starts thinking about the past. About all the things that have happened to him. All the things he’s done wrong …’

‘You haven’t done anything wrong, Grandad,’ says Helen.

‘We’ve all done things we regret,’ he tells her. ‘When you get to my age, you look back on them and you tremble.’

Helen suddenly feels uncomfortable. She gets up from her seat and goes over to the kitchen area. ‘I’ll make us some tea,’ she suggests. She checks that the kettle is full and hits the ‘on’ switch.

Grandad Peter studies her for a moment. ‘You’re still intent on going on this … school trip?’ He says the last two words as though they’re some kind of curse.

Helen frowns. ‘I don’t know. My name’s down for it. Mum’s paid the deposit … And most of my friends are going. I usually go along with what they want to do.’

‘You can’t be like that about it, Helen. You need to stand up for yourself.’

Helen is slightly annoyed by this sudden change of direction. She wants him to go on with the story, she’s gripped by his tale – but he seems determined on making his point. ‘Take it from me, Helen, the Marsh is like nowhere else you’ve ever visited. Some places you go and you just know, deep inside, that something isn’t right. That something evil exists there and has done for generations.’

She sighs. ‘I don’t suppose I’d be going to the exact same place,’ she reasons. ‘I mean, what would be the chances of that?’

‘But perhaps it’s nothing to do with chance,’ he tells her. ‘Perhaps it’s fate.’ He gazes at her. ‘Sometimes, things are just meant to be and we have no control over them.’ He watches as she busies herself making two cups of tea. ‘I bet you didn’t expect to spend your afternoon like this,’ he mutters. ‘Listening to an old man’s ramblings.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s an incredible story. Really creepy.’ She brings over the teas and sets one down beside him on the small table. Then she settles back into the rocking chair and sips at her own drink.

‘So you believe me? You don’t think I’ve gone batty?’

‘Course not.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘The music though … that’s so weird. Could there have been some reason for it? You know, like Sally’s father said, maybe a band practising nearby… or… or maybe somebody just playing the same record over and over.’ She thought for a moment. ‘You did have records then, I suppose?’

Grandad Peter smiles ruefully. ‘We had gramophone records,’ he said. ‘But … this wasn’t a recording. I knew that much.’

‘And how come nobody else noticed it?’

‘Because only the children could hear it,’ said Grandad Peter. ‘On that first night, I thought that Mrs Beesley and Adam were just pretending that they couldn’t. But later on, I understood that the adults didn’t hear the music simply because it wasn’t intended for them. It was only for the children.’ He lifted his own mug and sipped at its contents.

‘The days slipped by,’ he said. ‘On the third day we were there, war was declared. We heard Neville Chamberlain announcing it on the wireless and we knew then that there could be no avoiding it. The war would change everything that we knew. But out on the Marsh, we seemed so detached from it … so remote. It was as if it was all happening in an entirely different world.’ He set down his mug. ‘Almost before we knew it, we’d been there nearly a week. I worked around the farm with Adam. I got to like him, respect him. There was a good soul lurking behind that gruff exterior. But I could also tell that he was hiding something from me … and that he was conflicted about it. He wanted to warn me, I think, but he was too scared of Mrs Beesley and too devoted to Mr Sheldon to go against them. So he took solace in whisky. Most nights he was too drunk to do anything more than sleep.’

‘And … Daisy?’ prompted Helen.

‘Daisy developed her friendship with Sally. They made good companions. They both loved reading and … they both heard things.’

‘The music?’

He nodded. ‘Oh, I heard it too, most nights. Faint, but always in the background. It was different for Daisy. I could see that something in the music had gripped her. She seemed to grow paler by the day, with dark rings around her eyes. She had a haunted look. And more than once, I caught her whispering to that damned doll …’

‘You must have been scared.’

‘Not in the daytime. When the sun shone, the Grange seemed agreeable enough. But at night, everything changed. The place had an eerie quality to it. Unnerving … sometimes terrifying. And I began to ask myself, was I imagining things? Or was something at work, just out of reach, just on the other side of a paper-thin veil? Trying to exert a hold on the Grange. On Daisy. On me. Growing stronger, night by night …’

Peter woke in terror once again. He lay there, waiting for his breath to settle to a more normal rhythm, while he gazed around the attic room. The same dream, the one about the canal, the wolf and that hideous face rising up out of the water…

He sat up suddenly as an already familiar sound came to his ears: the sound of a flute playing
that
tune. He’d heard it every night he’d been here, but it sounded much closer now, he thought, as though the musician was somewhere nearby, maybe just outside the house. And then a terrible conviction took hold of him, the idea that Daisy was in some kind of trouble. Perhaps it was simply the awful dream that had spooked him and yet, he felt with a nagging certainty that whatever that music was, it was something bad. And he remembered the faraway look on Daisy’s face the first time she’d heard it. When she’d said how much she liked it …

He groped around in the dark until he found the matches, and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts he managed to get the candle alight. He took up the holder, threw aside the covers and headed for the door, wincing at every creak of the floorboards beneath his bare feet. He unlatched the door and peeped out onto the top landing, which looked decidedly forbidding in the uncertain light of the guttering candle. He walked slowly towards the stairs, keeping the flat of one hand in front of the flame, terrified of it being blown out and finding himself standing in total darkness. Only now did it occur to him that it would have been wiser to put the box of matches into his pyjama pocket and he thought about going back for it, but the sense of foreboding in him deepened, so he started down the rickety stairs, placing one foot in front of the other as quietly as he could manage.

He reached the first-floor landing and angled round to start along it. He stopped to listen for a moment. In one of the rooms on this floor, somebody was snoring, a low, rumbling sound that seemed to resonate on the air. Mr Sheldon, perhaps? Outside, that infernal music continued to play, repeating the same phrase over and over again, with a maddening intensity. Then he heard the other sound. The rattling of metal against metal, as though somebody was shaking a length of chain and now he was sure that it was coming from Miss Sally’s room. But he stopped at Daisy’s door. He lifted an arm to grasp the handle and turned it. The door creaked slowly open.

The cold hit him instantly. He was aware of his breath clouding as it left his mouth. Why was it so cold in the room? The rest of the house didn’t feel like this.

He stood in the doorway, looking around, horribly aware of the flame of the candle he was holding reflecting in scores of watching glass eyes. The dolls. Then he noticed that the huge bed in the centre of the room was empty and his heart skipped a beat; but almost instantly he relaxed when he saw Daisy kneeling up on the window ledge, staring intently out into the night. The window was open, the night air stirring her hair, but she seemed oblivious to it. Peter entered the room and closed the door behind him. He set down his candle on a table and turned back to Daisy. Now he saw to his surprise that so engrossed was she with whatever it was she was looking at, she seemed to be unaware that she was crushing a couple of Sally’s valuable dolls beneath her knees.

‘Daisy?’ whispered Peter. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’

She didn’t seem to hear him. She kept her gaze fixed on whatever it was that had caught her attention. He took a step closer and spoke louder.

‘Daisy?’

Now she turned to look at him and he felt his sense of unease deepen as he saw that she had a look of excited bliss on her face. She was smiling serenely at him.

‘Peter,’ she said, in that same dreamy tone he remembered from before. ‘Come and look. They’re here again.’

‘Who?’ he asked, but he knew even before he walked across to the window what he was going to see out there. And still he tried to reason with her. ‘At this time of night? You … you must be mistaken.’ He moved closer. ‘Daisy! Wake up!’

She seemed to snap out of her dreamlike state, but she stayed where she was at the window, staring down at something he couldn’t yet see. ‘Come and look!’ she repeated triumphantly and pointed. Peter followed the line of her finger.

He felt a cold chill shudder through him, because she was right, she’d been right all along, he could see them out in the mist-shrouded garden, three ragged figures, all girls. They were quite a way off and they appeared to be dancing, dancing to that tune. And now that he thought about it, the music was louder than ever. The girls had their arms up and their heads back and they were lurching joyfully around to the sound, as though transported by it. There was something about their gangling arms and legs that didn’t seem quite right, but they were too distant for him to make out much detail. And then, further off, at the top of the garden, Peter caught a glimpse of another figure, a man, perhaps, though in the mist it was hard to be sure. His arms were up in front of him and something in his hands glinted in the moonlight, but even as Peter registered this, the figure began to move away, heading along an avenue of shrubs at the top of the garden, still playing his tune and the children wheeled around to follow him, dancing along in his wake, as though the music was summoning them, compelling them to follow.

‘Let’s go,’ whispered Daisy. ‘Let’s go and dance with them!’

‘No,’ hissed Peter. ‘We mustn’t.’ He didn’t know exactly what was happening out there, but he knew in his heart that it wasn’t something he wanted to be involved with, not for one moment.

‘But it looks such
fun
!’ cried Daisy.

‘No it doesn’t,’ he told her. ‘And you heard what Adam said. It’s dangerous out there. There’s water…’

‘They look like they know where they’re going,’ observed Daisy. ‘Come on, let’s just join in for a minute.
Please
.’

He shook his head. He caught a last glimpse of the girls as they danced away into the mist. The music was finally diminishing in volume. Peter closed the window, then took Daisy’s hand and helped her off the seat. As she stepped down, a couple of the dolls fell onto the floor.

She looked down at them in dismay. ‘Did I do that?’ she gasped. ‘Mrs Beesley will be angry.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ he assured her. He set down the candle for a moment and picking up the fallen dolls one-by-one, he sat them carefully back on the ledge where Daisy had been kneeling. None of them seemed to be damaged. ‘What were you thinking?’ he asked. ‘You know they’re worth a lot of money.’

‘I don’t know.’ Daisy had the look of somebody who’d just woken from a deep sleep. ‘I don’t even remember getting out of bed,’ she said. ‘I think I was having a bad dream …’

You too? thought Peter, but he said nothing. ‘Well, never mind about that, let’s get you back into bed before you freeze to death.’ He led her over to the big four-poster and saw that the small doll she’d been holding the other day was propped up against the pillows, gazing intently up at him. ‘Where’s Eva?’ he asked.

‘I threw her away,’ said Daisy, as though it was of no account. ‘She was broken anyway.’

Peter looked at her in disbelief. ‘We could have tried mending her,’ he said.

‘Tillie told me not to bother.’

‘Tillie? Who’s Tillie?’ he asked her, but somehow he already knew the answer, even before she pointed to the little doll on the bed. And he thought he remembered Mrs Beesley mentioning the name before. Wasn’t that the doll that Miss Sally used to talk to?

‘She’s my new doll,’ said Daisy.

‘She’s not your doll,’ Peter reminded her. ‘And besides, a doll can’t tell you to do anything.’

Daisy gave him a smug look. ‘That’s what you think,’ she said.

The expression on her face disturbed him. It was the look of someone who had a secret and wasn’t prepared to share it.

‘Why did you call her Tillie?’ asked Peter. ‘Did Mrs Beesley tell you to call her that?’

Daisy shook her head. ‘I call her that because it’s her name,’ she said.

‘Well, anyway, back into bed,’ he told her, and he helped her to climb up onto it and settled her under the covers. He picked up Tillie, meaning to put her with the others on the window ledge, but Daisy grabbed his wrist and the strength in her little hand shocked and surprised him.

‘Leave her here,’ she said. It wasn’t a request, more a command.

‘I … I don’t know what Mrs B will say if she catches you.’

‘I don’t care. I can’t sleep without Tillie.’

He frowned. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. He replaced the doll against the pillow and made as if to leave, but Daisy still clung onto his wrist.

‘Will you get in with us?’ she asked. ‘Just until we fall asleep.’

‘I shouldn’t really,’ he told her, but he was pretty cold himself so, after a few moment’s hesitation, he climbed in beside her and snuggled up tight. They lay there in silence for a while.