Something was badly wrong here. His few faltering steps seemed to have taken him depthlessly far into the earth, not just off track. He had nightmares like this, where he followed the twists of narrowing tunnels until they were pressing on his shoulders, the back of his neck and his head, pushing him onto his belly and squeezing him tighter still, until he realised he’d passed the point where he could turn around. Birth trauma, his counsellor in London had suggested, but Lee thought it was simply that Cornwall abounded with caves, tunnels and fogous, and he’d been in more than his fair share of them, at the hands of villains and in the course of his career. Either way, the dreams scared him sick. Left him shuddering with gratitude when he woke up in Gideon’s arms.
He was more than ready now to wake up. He buried his face in his hands. The walls of the tunnel began to tighten around him, even though he was standing still...
“Come on through here, Lee. Everything’s all right.”
He looked up, letting go of the breath that would have been a howl of pure fear. The entrance to the crypt was directly ahead of him. The room was still pulsating with strange red light, but that was sunshine, shiny disco balls, by contrast with the darkness in Lee’s head. There were the three packing crates. Ruth Cadwallader was sitting on one of them, safely back in her pyjamas and dressing gown. “Come on,” she said again, beckoning and smiling. “I don’t know, Bill. You must have done something right in your life, for a fine man like this to face his worst fears and come after you.”
“That’s just it,” Lee said tentatively, coming to stand beside her. “I honestly don’t think he has. I don’t know why I followed him.”
“Because you always will. It’s very strange—I seem to know all kinds of things I didn’t know before. I wish I had—I’d have put them in Hideous Hauntings.” She reached out, pulled the second packing crate towards her and patted it companionably. “You’ll always come, no matter how unworthy the cause. That’s why you have to let Gideon stop you. It’s very important, Lee. Your sanity will depend on it one day.”
“Okay, but... if my sanity’s the issue, I think it’s too late. Is there a circular route through that tunnel, out of here and back again?”
“It’s circular for the moment. Until Bill and I get sorted out.”
“You and Bill?”
“That’s right. Haven’t you worked out yet that I’m in the spirit world?”
“Yes, I... I’ve worked that out. The shapeshifting and the magical typing were a bit of a giveaway. But the thing is, this house isn’t haunted, is it? I mean... you don’t generally haunt here.”
“No. Why on earth should I? Horrible little place.”
“Why tonight, then?”
She patted the crate again, and looked across at poor cringing, shivering Bill. “Sit down, Lee. Why do you think?”
“Well, if you’re in the spirit world, and he can see you and interact with you...” The penny dropped. “Oh, Bill. I think you’d better sit down. I’ve got some bad news for you.”
“What?” Bill demanded. He was at the far end of whatever rope nature had provided for him, beginning to look insubstantial with terror and stress. “Fuck almighty, what? What could possibly be worse than being stuck down here with you two nutcases?”
“What were you doing before? Can you remember?”
“I told you. I was minding my business, asleep in my armchair in front of the telly. I’d had my burgers and I’d smoked a few fags, and I’d polished off some beers and the end of that bottle of Bells my old woman left behind, because it’s Halloween, isn’t it, and that makes me think of my Daz, little... little shit though he is.” He suddenly lifted his fingers to his face. “What the fuck’s this?”
“Tears, I think,” Lee said, equally astonished. “Then what happened?”
“I don’t see what business it is of yours, but I got a kind of a tight, sick feeling in my chest. Just a touch of heartburn, that’s all. But it went down my arm, and up into my neck, and then... and then...” He swallowed, and sat down hard at last on the crate. “Oh, fuck.”
Lee picked up the second crate. He carried it over to Bill, set it down and sat beside him. He put an arm around Bill’s shoulders, and after a reflexive sneer of surprise and disgust, the old sod leaned against him and buried his face against his shoulder. “It’s all right,” Lee said, patting his ragged crop, which he’d been razor-clipping himself since Mrs Prowse had left, taking her pudding basin with her. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid?! I’m dead! I’m fucking dead, I am!”
“I know, and it must be a shock. But...” Lee glanced across at Ruth, who was benignly observing. “But you’re not alone. Is he, Mrs Cadwallader?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“Okay. What does he have to do?”
“Well, he has to tell the story of why he’s not alone. Specifically, why he’s not alone with me.” She settled more comfortably, tucking her hands—quiet now, all their work done—into the sleeves of her dressing gown. “And he has to tell it to you, the only human link who could possibly bring about such a telling between him and me—the only true medium. It’s a good thing you happened along here tonight, Lee Tyack. Because left to my own devices, I’d have just eaten his soul.”
Bill sobbed. He closed a meaty fist in Lee’s jumper, crushing the grinning pumpkin head. “Keep her away from me!”
“I can’t, Bill. You know that. You’re going to have to talk.”
“What good will that do me?” Bill sat up, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I don’t bloody understand it. Of all the things I’ve done, this is nothing. She was nothing.”
“Careful, mate. Nobody’s nothing. And maybe she minded very particularly, whatever it was you did to her.”
“Wouldn’t anybody mind?”
“Yes, absolutely. I don’t know why it’s different with her.”
“Don’t you really?” she broke in, leaning forward. “Perhaps you both fail to take into account the power of a writer’s imagination.”
After watching it chase Bill Prowse around a crypt in terrifying werewolf form, Lee was all too keenly aware of it. But it wasn’t his problem. “Maybe that’s the thing, Bill. Maybe it’s because she was a writer.”
Was it his use of the past tense that made Bill focus, and lean forward too, as if to meet her on even ground at last? “I remember,” Bill said. “She’d come here to do her writing. A book about the Nancarrows, it were going to be—one of our best Cornish tales. She weren’t even from Cornwall.”
“That’s right,” she said brightly. “I was from Hastings.”
“Posh, Hastings is. So here she comes, and she rents this house. Imagine that, being able to rent a house for a whole winter, when she’s already got a posh paid-for house of her own! I couldn’t pay a bloody week’s rent at a time on my flat in Scorrier.”
“That’s because you drank away your benefit money before you even had it, Bill,” Ruth reminded him, nodding kindly. “For what it’s worth, I don’t hold with people having second homes, especially in places like Cornwall where the people who live here can’t afford to buy. I had to find a tenant for my flat—which was very nice, certainly, if not exactly posh—before I could come down for my research trip here.”
“Well... we had no clue about all that, did we?”
“You didn’t bother to find out.”
Lee ran his hands over his hair. He didn’t really want to know, but... “Who’s we, Bill?”
“Me and a gang of my mates. This was bloody years ago. We were just kids. We heard that this old bird had rented the house to write a ghost story, and as far as we were concerned, she was just another rich emmet come to take away what should be ours.”
“Jesus, Bill. When are you gonna stop blaming foreigners because you’re unemployable?”
“What?”