Part 35 (2/2)

But would the handwriting have been the same? Once more his whole being strained to believe these letters were the work of a lunatic hoaxer. Some s.a.d.i.s.tic son of a b.i.t.c.h, who got his kicks watching the villagers of Skelbrooke make fools of themselves.

Yeah, well maybe a week ago, he might have believed the hoax premise. Not now. A few days had left him a whole lot smarter, hadn't they?

With the pulse thudding in his neck with all the dark power of a funeral drum he turned the pages. Yeah, there was the pinte of porter one. The next letter demanded one red ball. The third a quarter of cake (oh, that one's a variation on my collection, John thought sourly. You wanted something different for a change, you filthy little b.a.s.t.a.r.d). The sourness threatened to become bitter rage again.

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, steadied himself, then opened his eyes to read the fifth letter: Dear Messr. Kelly, No soul should exist alone. And I, like all people, desire companions.h.i.+p. Therefore, I will take little Mary Kelly away with me as a friend. You will leave her in the graveyard by the sepulchre of Posthumous Ellerby on Sat.u.r.day night. If yew do not yew will be very sorry.

See, John? All your winning lottery numbers have come up at once. Herbert Kelly had kept the last letter secret from his family. Kelly had received a letter demanding that he leave his daughter in the Necropolis.

The mental strain had nearly broken Kelly. But he'd come up with a plan. Before the deadline in the letter expired he'd taken his youngest daughter, Mary, as far away from Skelbrooke as possible. But what about Keith Haslem? He'd tried to outrun the evil influence of the letters but he'd failed, winding up felled by a brain hemorrhage. Maybe you didn't run far enough, old buddy. Maybe if you put a whole ocean the size of the Atlantic between yourself and Skelbrooke you're beyond the reach of Baby Bones or whatever the malevolent little tumor full of pus called itself.

John imagined Kelly's dilemma as he struggled to find a solution. At times, it had gotten so bad he'd broken down. Dianne Kelly had seen her father weeping in the orchard. The man had truly gone to h.e.l.l and back as he weighed the options: stay here, ignore the letter, hoping that ill luck wouldn't visit the Water Mill in spades. Or maybe he considered the unthinkable. Lead his daughter by the hand to the cemetery at midnight, and then leave her for whatever waited there. But no. Kelly had taken a tough option: he'd abandoned his wife and eldest daughter for a new life in Canada with Mary.

John looked up from the file. A vibrating rug of moths pressed against the window, straining to get through the gla.s.s to the light.

I'm walking in Kelly's shoes now, he told himself. The letter has arrived demanding I leave Elizabeth in the cemetery at midnight on Sat.u.r.day. That's just two days away.

Do I ignore this?

Do I take Elizabeth away?

Come on, Newton: think. Think!

What the h.e.l.l do I do?

CHAPTER 31.

1.

The night was h.e.l.l. John slept in short nightmare haunted s.n.a.t.c.hes. His mind seemed intent on recapping the last few days. He dreamt of Elizabeth cycling down the lane where she'd fall to gash her chin. But in this dream version of events a dark phantom shape pursued her before seizing her and throwing her to the ground. He dreamt of letters being borne into the garden by shadows. Then he was standing by Jess Bowen's grave surrounded by a million red b.a.l.l.s that became a million staring eyes. The weeping statue leered at him with a goblin face.

He'd woken, panting in the airless bedroom; hair matted against his head in a sopping cap. Outside, an owl hooted. A fox gave a snapping bark like a demon laughing out on the lawn.

At last he slid away into restless, churning sleep. The nightmares returned; he was back in the Necropolis. The ground curled up round him in waves; tombstones became teeth ready to grind his bones to a milky paste. And behind it all; behind every tombstone, behind every sinister cherub, behind every rotted Christ, he sensed the dark unchanging intelligence that had sent out its insidious demands for the last five thousand years. The fear it generated in men and women in the village became a vast, wet wound from which it sucked with all the gluttonous hunger of a vampire.

Moments later his mind broke through into consciousness again. He lay twisting the sheet in his hands, thinking about the letter that demanded he leave Elizabeth in the Necropolis. How long would it take to get flights to Australia or Thailand or Chile? Any d.a.m.n place provided it was far enough away from Skelbrooke and whatever sucked on the wound that bled a bright red terror.

2.

”You were late getting to bed last night,” Val said on the Friday morning.

”I read the doc.u.ments in the briefcase.”

”Anything of use?”

”There might be.”

The conversation over breakfast was tight. Val repeatedly eyed him as if another head had sprung out of the side of his neck. He guessed she was still perplexed, if not downright alarmed, by the way he'd attacked the briefcase with an axe. But he had to know what was inside.

And now you do know. Kelly received letters just like yours.

Paul had left early for school, his face still dark and thunderous. Elizabeth had made her bed. Now she walked the dog around the meadow on his leash.

”It's going to be a hot one today,” Val said, striving to be conversational.

With the letter preying on his mind he was in no mood for small talk; he nodded, however.

”John, is there something troubling you?”

”Nothing out of the ordinary,” he lied, then immediately wondered why he shouldn't tell her the truth.

In case you have to leave with Elizabeth in a hurry, he told himself. He looked at Val, his lips pressed together as if holding back what he really wanted to say. I love you, Val. But I can't bring myself to tell you what I know. That there's something out there we can't understand. And that something has demanded that I hand over our daughter. At best you'd laugh in my face; at worst you'd have me committed. I need to be free to act in our family's best interests. Good G.o.d, I might even have to flee the country. The surge of love for his wife grew so intense he had to look away.

Minutes later Val drove out through the gates with Elizabeth in the pa.s.senger seat bound for school. Now John sat in the house with only his worries for company.

The temperature climbed fast. The sun came crunching through the windows like some Martian heat-ray. Even closing the blinds didn't help. With the heat oppressing him on the outside and pure dread chilling him from within, he spread the doc.u.ments from Herbert Kelly's briefcase onto the desk.

This time he opened the file marked The Skelbrooke Mystery. On flimsy paper was what might have been a chapter of a book. Again he was acutely conscious of the fact that Herbert Kelly might have typed these pages in this very room. More than once he looked back, half expecting to see a tall figure standing there. John dragged the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand then began to read.

THE SKELBROOKE PHANTOM.

by HERBERT C. KELLY A coroner's report of 1787 records matter-of-factly that 'George Spurlock poisoned himself on account of him seeing the face of Baby Bones looking at him through the parlor window gla.s.s.' Delving deeper into church records and other archive material, we find earlier references to a shadowy figure known as Baby Bones. Although more ancient doc.u.ments refer to the character with variations of the name, such as 'Baby Bones', 'Bonnie Bones' or 'Jack-Of-Bones'. A Norman manorial indenture of 1190 names an evil spirit 'that sorely troubled aldermen, yeomen and peasant alike' as 'Father Bones'.

Like many English villages Skelbrooke attracted the attention of supernatural ent.i.ties. What is so unusual is that whereas the dragon, wyrm, hobgoblin, knucker, c.o.c.katrice and other fabulous beasts of legend dwindled into obscurity in neighboring villages, the myth of Baby Bones never lost its grip in Skelbrooke. At intervals of between fifty and eighty years it would issue demands of t.i.thes or payments from certain villagers chosen at random. How it delivered these demands is rather mysterious in its own right.

Legends tell that a child or 'an idiot' would vanish from the village, only to return within days talking 'at first in tongues' then issuing demands for beer and food in a 'voice that wasn't his own'. Baby Bones required that loaves, cakes, and flagons of beer be left on the splendidly named Crackling Hill, which is now the site of the large cemetery known as the Necropolis.

John paused. Kelly had written a background to the Baby Bones myth. He guessed from its reader-friendly style it was intended for publication in his regular newspaper column; also the lightness of tone suggested that it was written before Kelly received the letters. He read on.

Failure to comply with the demands that came via the mediumistic children or village idiots resulted in the village suffering months of ill fortune. Letters written by the parish priest in the fourteenth century lamented 'a grievous conflagration that reduc'd the village households by half and claim'd the eldest son of the feudal Lord Geoffrey Thomas D'Montaine.' On most occasions, it must be stressed, Skelbrooke met the demands with good humor in an ancient festival that greatly predates, yet antic.i.p.ates, the modern Halloween 'trick or treat.'

After a while, Baby Bones began to issue its demands via letters delivered during the witching hour. These, written in an archaic hand are always anonymous, always request some petty trifle such as cake or chocolate, yet are concluded with a threat if the demands are not met. However, on occasion our local neighborhood phantom would revert to employing a human messenger. The last recorded instance was in 1850 when an orphan child by the name of Jess Bowen returned after apparently 'wandering off into the woods for some long days'. True to form, the young child marched into the village speaking nonsense. Then one night he made his rounds, knocking on a door here a window there, before demanding that the householder leave a freshly killed goose on Crackling Hill. The voice that came from the child's mouth held such a deep timbre 'as the ba.s.s notes of a great cathedral organ' it struck terror into all that heard it. However, upon the boy knocking at the door of Benjamin Greensmith of Skelbrooke's Water Mill events took a brutal turn.

On hearing the deep voice thundering its demand from the lips of the half-starved orphan child Greensmith seized a shovel and struck the boy a 'frightful blow' to the head, killing him instantly.

In a spirit of rebellion the villagers refused 'pay their dues' to Baby Bones: not a single goose was left on Crackling Hill. Within twenty-four 'hours, however, Greensmith's infant daughter had drowned in the Water Mill pond. The village priest fell from his horse and lay paralyzed until the day he died. A month later an epidemic of cholera struck Skelbrooke (but not touching any neighboring village or town). By Christmas forty-three of its inhabitants had died and were buried in pits filled with burning lime at the crossroads. Benjamin Greensmith left Skelbrooke on New Year's Day, 1851, an emotionally broken and financially bankrupt man. He would die a year to the day after he killed the orphan boy by swallowing acid.

In order to make amends, little Jess Bowen was exhumed from a pauper's grave and reburied at the village's expense in the Necropolis. The grave was adorned with a formidable granite slab and a rather sentimental statue of a weeping boy. But this charitable act begs the question, were the villagers 'closing the stable door after the horse had bolted?'

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