Long Lankin (43 page)

“Keep still, Mimi. Don’t move an inch!”

I kick at the bottom of the wall between Mimi’s feet. The blow is so feeble that I expect nothing and sigh with frustration. All I can do is try once more. The second kick is a little harder.

To my amazement, there is a grating sound, and half the wall slips sideways behind the other half. My foot falls into nothing. Cold, damp air rushes in from somewhere under the ground.

“Crikey! You’ve done it!”

“Hang on. I’ll see what it is.”

Cora wriggles down and pushes forward through the hole with her feet, making extra space for the rest of us. We breathe more easily.

“There’s a bit of a landing, then wooden steps going down — quite steep, I think. This must be how the priests escaped.” Cora snakes her body through the hole. “Mimi, come here. Come down to me. We’re going to get out this way. Come here. I’ll carry you.”

Mimi’s too poorly to complain or cry. I twist myself round and manage to bend and help her through the hole into Cora’s arms.

Lankin is hammering furiously on the wood, making a kind of strangled roaring sound in his throat. There is room now for the door to swing open if he hits the right panel.

“Go on, Pete, hurry up,” I urge him. “Get through the hole. Quick, quick! I’ll follow you.”

Pete is all over the place. He can’t get his bearings, bumps his head, and cries out.

“Rub it hard. Rub it really hard! You’ll be all right, mate. Just get in there. Go on.”

I push him through, then fold myself double, turn, and go through backwards so that I can shut the hole behind me. It’s tight. I crouch on the little landing, feeling a draught rising from the steep empty space under my heels.

Despite Lankin’s heavy beating from the hall, I can hear Cora and Pete descending carefully, one step at a time, down under the ground.

I have to work out how to shut the door, but I can’t see anything.

I catch hold of the edge of the panel and try to slide it back to the left, but it only gives an inch or so. Feeling for a jammed spring, I run my fingers around the sides, but all I find are thick tangles of dusty webs. Grunting with effort, I try once more to wrench the square of wood across the opening.

A wave of panic sweeps over me. I thump on the wood with my fist.

“You all right?” comes Cora’s echoing voice.

“Yeah, all right,” I pant. “Just trying to close the door. It’s a bit stiff.”

I feel in the dark, over my head, to the left and right, for some kind of mechanism. In desperation, I thrust my hand back through the hole and grope around the inner wall.

Somebody grabs my hand. I shriek with fright and fall back so quickly onto the landing that half my backside hangs out over the steep staircase. I lose my balance. My arms flail about, trying to find a grip. Just as I’m about to go sprawling backwards, someone snatches my right arm, then my left.

“Roger, you all right?” Pete calls up. “What is it?”

The hands pull me back towards the door, holding me until I’m steady and kneeling on the landing. I stay there, shaking, gasping for breath. The hands are small, like a woman’s. They let me go. I am rigid with fear; my heart thuds in my chest.

Lankin’s blows become muffled as the second door is slowly drawn shut, but not by me.

“Nothing!” I shout back hoarsely. “Just coming.”

Mimi’s fingers are knotted so tightly in my hair that my eyes water.

I feel my way in the dark with the toes of my shoes. The stairs twist sharply to the right, then left again, so steep I have to lean backwards and take them one at a time. The dense mats of hanging webs brush our faces. Mimi shifts her weight and throws me off balance. I wait, hoist her into a different position, my hair roots straining, and make sure I’m steady before going any farther.

The sound of tiny pattering feet reaches my ears, and I realize I can see the vague movements of scurrying mice. I am no longer blind in the dark. Somewhere there is a source of light. In the murky gloom, I make out the lines of the steps, which are becoming damp and slightly slippery. Then I see the grey edge of a panel, on a slant, blocking my way. Holding Mimi tight with one arm, I push it and it falls to one side, crashing to the ground and crumbling into pieces.

In some large empty vault to my right, drops of water echo as they fall to the floor with a hollow plopping sound. I catch a gleam of brightness among the confusing, colourless shapes.

“I’m down!” I call, my foot crunching on a pile of small bones.

Directly ahead, beyond a low archway, some broken barrels lie half-sunken in mud, the curved pieces of wood sticking up like the rib bones of a great decaying fish.

To the left the passage goes off into blackness under the house. Mimi is flopping on my shoulder, a dead weight. With heavy arms, I carry her across the dank ground towards the echoing chamber.

Pete clings to my cardigan as we peer through the open doorway.

The room is alive. In the washed-out half-light, mice scatter into the dirty corners, and long-legged spiders retreat into cloudy webs that hang in sheets like old, torn banners from the ceiling. Beetles creep along the dust-laden shelves, drop into the big black iron pans, and plop into holes, while two glossy rats slide out of an untidy stack of logs piled against the back wall and disappear into the shadows. Something slithers off the huge, cracked wooden table and flops with a light thud onto a floor littered with broken pottery, shards of glass, small bones, and other, unidentifiable rubbish, once lifted by floodwater, moved, shifted, muddied, and left adrift to settle where it would.

A shaft of light glances downwards from an alcove to the side of the curved arch of the wide fireplace. Iron chains and hooks dangle in rusty loops from the chimney. Below the chains is a long metal frame, veiled with rippling cobwebs, which supports a heavy bar, pronged at one end.

Small grimy windows are set high up, hard against the angle of the ceiling, the same windows we saw almost buried at the bottom of the wall when we went searching around the house for a way in. Daylight barely penetrates the thick, green-stained glass.

We are directly under Auntie Ida’s kitchen. Auntie Ida and Mimi and I sit at the table in the room just above, drink our tea, eat our dinner, wash our clothes, and listen to
Woman’s Hour
on the wireless — only a floor away from this cellar.

Pete tucks himself close behind me as we step through the open doorway and over the threshold. On my left I make out in the dusky light a stone staircase spiralling upwards.

Roger follows us into the room.

“This — this is the old kitchen,” I stammer.

He swallows. “Crikey — where — where it all happened.”

“What? What are you talking about?” says Pete. Roger and I cannot answer him. “What about these stairs?” he continues. “I’ll go up and see if there’s a way out.”

“Careful, mate!” says Roger as, gingerly, Pete begins to climb from one step to the next, kicking down small lumps of crumbly mortar and pieces of old brick and wood as he goes. A couple of times we hear him stumble, muttering to himself.

Then, as if waking, Mimi raises herself in my arms, untwines her fingers from my hair, and gazes over my shoulder into the empty space beyond the wooden stairs.

“She’s here,” she whispers in my ear.

“What? What are talking about?”

“Behind you.”

Roger and I turn our heads and look back. My blood runs like ice.

Standing in the dim passage beyond, framed by the dark rectangle of the doorway, is a young woman, her face half in shadow. She begins to sing.

Roger is trembling so violently, I can feel it against my arm.

The girl starts to speak softly, hoarsely, in a kind of breathless babble.

“. . . the silver basin on the table . . . one for you, Cain Lankin, says the false nurse, and one for me . . . the thin dagger — a flash in the firelight — crimson splashes in the basin — an infant screaming in the night —

“Who is behind the door? Pull her out! Pull her out! Ha! Little Kittie Wicken, is it! Ha! Little Kittie Wicken, that bad girl, is it! She won’t tell or I’ll call up Old Nick, the Prince of the Power of the Air, I will, and he’ll rip that biddy biddy baby out, he will, and serve it up for you, Cain Lankin, my dear. . . . He will drag little Kittie down to the lake of fire and brimstone because she’s a wicked sinner, with that biddy baby in her belly that should not be there. . . . I know who put that biddy biddy baby in your belly. I know, I do.

“Stop your snivelling. Stop your grizzling. She can be of use to us, Cain Lankin, my dear. She can fetch the moon-white mistress from her sleep, and if little Kittie Wicken snitches, out that biddy baby comes and we’ll stick him with this bloody pin.

“I can do it, Kittie Wicken. I can do it while I live. I can do it if I die. I will search you out. I can play with living and with dying, I can. Be sure of that, Kittie Wicken. I have charmed the spirits, I have.

“Look at little Johnny, Kittie, poor little boy. . . . The infant is crying for his mother. Fetch her down for us, fetch down the mother, Kittie Wicken. Poor little Johnny . . .

“If you whisper to a living soul, I will make a charm and bring you to the feet of the Demon.”

Kittie steps forward. A little light outlines half her head in a golden curve. One eye remains in darkness; the other glistens with a feverish glow.

“I should have fetched the men, but — but I stole away aloft. My lady slept in her chamber, her hair golden on the silken pillow, her cheek flushed like a summer rose. ‘My lady’— I touched the small white hand on the counterpane —‘the baby cries for you; he will not lie still.’

“The baby shrieks from below. My lady throws aside her coverlet, searches for her robe.

“A footstep on the stair . . . the babe for you, Cain Lankin, and ah — the mother for me — here she comes — her lord gone — that’ll learn him when he comes back — that’ll learn his high lordship — good little Kittie Wicken brings her down. Sew your lips, Kittie, or I’ll find you out. One for you, Cain Lankin, and one for me — and away before the light. . . .”

“Is that you, Cora?” Pete shouts down. “What are you saying?”

“There goes my lady — crawling up the stone steps — the mantle ripped — a trail of blood . . . too late . . . too late . . . I should have fetched the men. . . . I should have fetched the men. . . .

“‘. . . scarlet blood drying in dark pools on the floor . . .’”

“It’s bricked up up here!” Pete calls down. “We can’t get out!”

“. . . he came for my little baby . . . snatched him from me and took him across the creek . . . my little Robin . . . my angel from heaven, my little lost boy . . . I brought my lady down to them. . . . I was afeared of the cunning woman, of the long man. . . . I should have fetched the men. . . .”

The woman slips away backwards and is swallowed up by the black tunnel. Mimi moves her fingers up and down in a tender wave before laying her head back on my shoulder.

Pete blunders down the last couple of steps and looks frantically around the kitchen.

“Didn’t you hear me? It’s bricked up up there!”

“The pantry,” I say in a daze. “The staircase leads to the pantry.”

“Eh?” hisses Roger.

“The end wall of the pantry upstairs was bricked up, a long time ago.”

“What’s the matter with you?” says Pete, looking around wildly. “I’m going to climb up that chimney.”