London Pride (4 page)

‘Come
on
!' Fred hissed back at her. ‘D'yer wan' us to be caught?'

‘No,' she said, finding her voice. But perhaps she did. If they were caught, they couldn't….

‘Well then!'

‘It's just…'

‘Shut up and run,' Sam said, loping back to her and threatening her with his face.

‘And look sharp about it,' Fred said, equally fierce, pulling her by the hand and dragging her along.

So she had to follow them. There was nothing else she could do when they were bullying her so. She knew there must be an excuse, a reason for not going, something she could say to stop them, but her heart was banging like a side-drum and she couldn't think of anything. They were running along the inner wall towards the Salt Tower before she'd recovered from the shock of their sudden appearance, and by then her mind was jammed shut and incapable of any independent thought at all.

Despite the moon it was hideously dark, and below them the space between the wall and the White Tower was completely empty except for ghostly shadows and the eerie whispering of the plane trees. Sam had the key in his hand and was thrusting it into the black void of the doorway, making a scraping, grinding noise that sounded very loud and alarming out there in the night air.

But nobody heard it except them and the door opened just a little too easily.

‘Come on,' Sam whispered. And they all went in.

It was dank and smelly and horribly silent. And when the door shut behind them with a reverberating clang the darkness was total. Oh please God, Peggy prayed, speaking instinctively to her protective deity, don't let there be ghosts please, don't let anything happen. And she backed until her hands were touching the chill stones of the wall.

The twins set about their evening's enjoyment immediately, making ‘ghostly' wailing noises, and lunging at anything they could sense moving in the darkness.

‘Look behind yer! Ooooooh! Ooooooh!'

‘You don't sound like ghosts a bit,' Peggy said into the darkness, alarmed but trying to be scornful. ‘You sound like owls.'

‘Look beside yer!' Sam's voice warned on a note of rising hysteria.

She turned despite herself, her skin prickling, for there was something moving and breathing right next to her. And the next minute there was suddenly light in the darkness, and there was Fred, leaning against the wall with an electric torch held underneath his chin. The odd angle of the light made his face look just like a skull, all grinning
teeth and huge nostrils and glinting eyes set deep in awful black sockets.

‘Don't!' she said.

He grinned at her more vilely than ever, delighted by the fear in her voice.

‘Wooooh!' Sam howled, his face just discernible in the mist of diffused light at his brother's shoulder.

‘I'm off upstairs,' Fred said, lowering the torch. Now that he'd scored first blood, he knew he could
really
frighten her. ‘There won't be any ghosts down here. Stand ter reason. Not in a doorway there won't.' He was already feeling his way up the spiral staircase.

‘They walk through walls, don't forget,' his brother said, panting at his heels, ‘so why not doors?'

‘Up here!' Fred's voice echoed down the stairwell. ‘This'll be the place.'

If it was, Peggy had no desire to see it, but she followed the ascending flicker of the torch, feeling her way along the rough stone of the walls, because it would have been even worse to be all by herself in the pitch darkness. The unseen stones were rough and cold and as tacky as slugs under her fingers. She tried not to think that ghosts were trying to ooze between them.

‘Here we are!' Fred sang above her head. And she stumbled on and found herself in the upper chamber.

Downstairs in the darkness had been bad enough but this place was worse. There was a faint metallic blue light filtering in through the high window, and the silence was so profound she could hear it hissing. As her eyes grew accustomed to light again, she could make out the brooding mass of a huge stone fireplace opposite her, solid and black-shadowed, and the stones of the tower wall which were a weird unearthly grey and seemed to be flickering and shifting as she watched them. A ghost could come walking through those walls at any moment, she thought. There'd be nothing to stop it. Oh please God, don't let a ghost walk through the wall.

Sam was prowling about shining his torch at the stones. ‘Over 'ere somewhere is where they used ter call up the devil,' he said. ‘Here it is. Look. That's black magic that is.'

The other two went to join him, Peggy trying not to appear too reluctant, Fred with swaggering eagerness.

The torchlight was shining on a complicated carving cut into a broad stone next to another door. It consisted of a circle inside a square, with lots of crisscrossed lines inside the circle and letters and figures all round the square. Despite her apprehension Peggy examined it closely. It had been a mistake to let them see how frightened she was downstairs. From now on she was going to keep her feelings hidden.

‘That's not black magic,' she said, reasonably. ‘Somebody's cut his name on it, look. “Draper of Brystow”. And those figures are times tables. You can see.'

‘No they're not,' Sam insisted, annoyed by her calm. ‘They're black magic. Everyone knows that. Because why? Because this is the very room where the ghosts walk. They used to torture people in 'ere.'

‘No they never,' she said stoutly, hoping it wasn't true.

‘They did,' Fred said. ‘They used to stretch 'em on a great wooden rack. When they'd finished with 'em their arms was so long they used to trail on the floor when they walked. When they come back – you know, as ghosts,' making the word as hideous as he could, ‘that's how they look. With their arms all long and horrible.'

‘They don't,' she said, but she wasn't quite sure. It all sounded just a little too likely in a room like this.

‘They had a torture mask to put women in an' all,' Fred gloated.

‘Yeh!' his brother said. ‘When they talked too much. It had all spikes inside and they used ter wind it up tighter and tighter until all the spikes was sticking in. When
they
come back as ghosts, they come back all covered in blood.' It was frightening him to think of it and Fred was looking quite green.

She didn't argue at that, in case somebody walked through the wall and put her in a mask. She was feeling more and more upset by everything they said.

‘I'll tell you somethink else,' Fred said, ghoulishly. ‘If the mask didn't work, they used ter wall 'em up alive.'

The idea of being walled up alive was so terrifying that she couldn't keep her feelings hidden any longer.

‘They never,' she said, her eyes bolting with fear. Oh what a dreadful thing to be walled up alive. It was making her feel panicky just to think about it.

‘Straight up. Bricked in they was an' left ter croak.'

Fear swelled in her throat until she thought she was going to croak herself. She could imagine it, boxed in, with bricks all round her and no light and no air, boxed in, struggling to breathe, waiting to die. Oh it would be a dreadful, dreadful thing to be walled up alive.

‘Come on,' Sam said, seizing his advantage because he could see how frightened she was. ‘They got the instruments a' torture in the room above this. I'll show yer.'

He was through the second door and blundering about in the passage behind it, before she could say anything.

Fred went leaping after him, waving the torch. He was taut with fear himself and it was making him swagger more than ever. ‘There's the stairs,' his voice called out of the darkness. ‘Come on, Peg. I dare yer!'

Left on her own with her imagination, Peggy was so frightened she hardly knew what to do. In the horrible half light the great stones of the Tower walls seemed to be moving towards her, inch by inch, ready to crush her. I shall be shut in for ever, she thought, and she could already feel herself being buried alive under all those awful stones with ghosts walking about everywhere, trailing their long arms and covered in blood. Oh please God don't let me be buried alive. I couldn't bear it.

‘Wait for me!' she called, running through the archway towards the stairs. Her heart was beating so wildly she could feel it in her throat and her knees were so wobbly it was an effort to walk leave alone climb stairs, but she couldn't stay there on her own waiting to be crushed under those walls. She couldn't.

The second staircase was steeper and narrower than the first had been, but she stumbled up, feeling her way along the stones, peering through the dusty half-light. Then she was round the first spiral and the curve of the walls suddenly cut off the light. She was on her own in total, terrifying darkness, with the hair standing on the nape of her neck and panic crushing her chest like a vice. She turned on the sloping step and flung herself downwards again.

‘I'm going back down,' she called, trying to be sensible even then.

‘What?' Sam's voice answered, eerily from the darkness.

‘I'm going back down.'

But she hadn't gone more than four steps before something really dreadful happened. Somebody punched her in the small of the back.
Somebody
punched her. It was such a violent blow and so terrifying when she was already trembling in panic, that she stumbled and fell forward, losing her footing and her control at the same time and screaming like a banshee. ‘It's the ghost! The ghost! On the stairs! Aaaaah! Aaaaaah!'

Panic and fear were constricting her throat like a noose. She was shaking all over. Even her stomach was shaking. There was nothing in the world except that awful shattering terror. She had to get out. To get out now. To get away. Now. Now.

Somehow or other her feet carried her downwards, stumbling and slipping, and then she was in the moonlight again and there was the high window gleaming before her and she threw herself at it, scrambling onto the stone sill and beating at the glass with both fists. ‘Help! Help! Dad! Oh please somebody help me!'

After that it was as if she was frozen to the glass. She went on beating and screaming, weeping incoherently, on and on, even when she was aware that there were figures on the path below her, looking up and waving their arms. She was locked in with a ghost somewhere behind her and the walls about to bury her alive and she couldn't bear it. ‘Help! Help! Oh please help me!'

Doors banged, and there were heavy feet on the stairs, men's feet, not ghosts', feet with boots on, crunching, and men's voices. ‘Hold on! We're coming!' and then her father was picking her up, cuddling her close, carrying her away.

‘Oh Dad! Dad! Dad!' she wept, clinging to him. ‘I'm
so
glad to see you.'

‘Hush, my pretty,' he soothed as he carried her down the spiral staircase. ‘Hush now. You're all right.'

They were out in the fresh air, with the moon bright and
clear above their heads. Bright and clear and comforting.‘Oh Dad!'

He sat down on the grass underneath the nearest gaslight and cuddled her on his lap and set her beret straight and brushed the wet hair out of her eyes and produced a clean handkerchief and told her to blow her nose like a good girl. And her sobs gradually subsided.

‘Now then,' he said, when she was calmer, ‘tell yer ol' Dad all about it.'

‘There was a ghost on the stair,' she said, still clinging round his neck.

‘Did you see it?'

‘It punched me in the back.'

‘Did you see it?' he insisted gently.

‘No,' she said. ‘It punched me in the back.'

‘Ah, then it wasn't a ghost,' he said easily, patting her shoulders. ‘It was that ol' trip stair. Caught a lot a' people out has that ol' trip stair.'

The twins were being marched out of the tower by their father. They looked much smaller than they'd done when they were tormenting her, smaller and crestfallen. And they were both crying.

‘A trip stair?' she said, beginning to take comfort.

‘Oh yes,' her father said. ‘Caught a lot a' people out has that. Grown men an' all. Uneven you see. Makes you trip up and when you start ter fall, well that's like being hit in the small a' the back. See? Just a trip stair. That's all. Now blow yer nose again like a good girl. Time we was getting home. Yer Mum'll wonder where you are.'

It sounded so reasonable. A trip stair. Yes, that must be it. And yet it had felt just like somebody punching her in the back.

They began to walk towards the Casemates.

‘You won't tell Mum I was …' she hoped, trotting along beside him.

‘Not a word,' he said. ‘It'll be our secret.'

‘But what if the twins go saying things?' she worried.

‘The twins'll have sore backsides by now,' he said, ‘if I'm any judge of the Ser'nt Major. I don't think the twins'll want to tell anyone about it, and especially not your mum, or I might lam into 'em an' all.'

‘Are we very late?' she worried. ‘Mum'll be ever so cross, won't she?'

But Mum was surprisingly mild. She was sitting by the stove, darning one of Joan's black stockings. ‘You been a long time,' she said as they walked into the kitchen, but the words were an observation not a rebuke.

‘Got talking,' Dad said, stooping to kiss her cheek.

‘You going back to the Club?' Mum asked.

‘No,' Dad said. ‘I'll give it the go-by tonight.'

Mum folded up the stocking and put it back into her workbox. ‘Time that child was in bed,' she said. ‘She's all eyes. Up you go, Peggy. We'll be along presently to tuck you in. Did you have a good day?'

By now Peggy had recovered enough to give a sensible answer. ‘Yes, Mum,' she said. ‘The Keys was ever so good.'

‘I've left the landing light for you,' Mum said. ‘Mind you don't wake the others.'