The House at World's End (4 page)

‘He was the gas meter man, not a burglar.’

‘But if he had been. Don’t you trust us? Oh Mum, it’s such a Place. The World’s End… But there’s a school in the next village but one, a small school that looks like the kind of place where you can get sums wrong without being told your life is a total disaster. And when you get out of hospital you can come and live there.’

‘I won’t be able to walk or do anything for ages.’ Poor active, lively Mum, who never used to sit down all day until she fell exhausted into bed. Why didn’t broken backs happen to people like Rose Arbuckle, who would enjoy the excuse to do nothing?

‘We’ll put your bed under a window that looks out on the meadow, and you can watch the horses.’

‘Will there be horses?’ She looked at Carrie.

‘There will if it kills me.’

That night, Carrie lay in bed and heard Aunt Val playing tinkly piano music - she was happy now - and heard the stir of wind and the sound of his galloping hooves. The grey Arab trod the air outside her window, his large dark eye like liquid velvet. She rose in her waking dream and slid on to his back.

‘Soon.’ She stroked the flat arch of his neck. ‘Soon,
Penny, I’ll call you from the World’s End. Will you come to me there?’

He blew warm breath into the night, wanting to go.

‘There’s a stable there. I’ll clean it out and whitewash it and put down fresh straw. Even if I never do get a horse, I can be with you there. At the end of the world.’

Aunt Val began to sing, gargling the high notes. Michael cried out in his sleep, and somewhere on some garden wall, some cat howled like a wolf. Penny-Come-Quick turned and galloped away into the sky.

In the Elysian Fields that night, Carrie met Bucephalus, the battle charger of Alexander the Great. ‘I never let anyone else ride me.’ He had been telling his proud story for two thousand years. ‘Only the conqueror of the world.’

‘Wasn’t much of a world in those days.’ Clever Hans, the Talking Horse who had once made a living doing arithmetic problems, was bored by war horses. ‘If they sailed out of the Mediterranean Sea, they thought they’d drop off the edge.’

Penny wandered about, nodding to friends, nibbling a neck as he passed, dropping his delicate head to graze on the sweetest grass in the Universe. Sitting loosely on his back, her fingers twined in his silken mane, Carrie met a Derby winner, and Black Bess, who had carried the highwayman Dick Turpin, and a small blind costermonger’s pony who was waiting for the old man who had bought oats for his feedbag when he had no bread himself, and covered him with his own coat when it rained.

Carrie told them about the house at World’s End, and how she and Tom and Em and Michael were going to make it their place, to live their kind of way.

‘I think I could turn and live with animals
…’ She quoted the poem to them. They were quite interested.

They moved in as soon as the summer term was over.

Uncle Rudolf bought them sleeping-bags and tin mugs and plates and an iron kettle and cooking pot, since at first it would be more like camping out than living in a house. Aunt Val gave them fly spray and a half-gallon bottle of Milk of Magnesia, and a lot of advice about wet feet and not letting a dog lick your face.

Nobody listened. They were not listening to any voice from the past. They had their ears pricked forward to the new adventure ahead.

Carrie wanted to throw away her hateful school uniform, but Tom, who had suddenly become very grown up, said No. There might be lean times coming. They would need every stitch next winter.

‘Not my gym tunic.’

‘Em can make it into a skirt’ Em could sew. Their mother’s sewing machine, an indestructible heap of old iron, had been one of the few things saved from the fire.

‘If you’re going to order everyone about and tell them what to do, I’m not coming,’ Em said. ‘And nor are the cats.’

But someone had to be head of the house, and Tom was the eldest, and he wasn’t going back to school next year (although his mother thought he was). The first night at World’s End, when they had considered the bedrooms,
with their bird’s nests and their few sagging old bits of furniture and their windows broken by village boys, Carrie and Em had been glad when Tom decided they should all sleep downstairs. And when they had blown out the candles and lay in their sleeping-bags on the flagstone floor of the front room which had once been the lounge of the Wood’s End Inn, they were both very glad to have Tom there to say, in his deepest voice, ‘Don’t worry. Old houses always creak.’

‘But it’s outside, Tom,’ Michael said. ‘It’s - it’s trying to get in.’

‘If you’re going to get hysterical, the very first night—’

‘I am not historical. There’s somebody crying outside.’

‘A dog,’ Tom said.

‘A cat?’ But Carrie knew that all the cats were in. Maud and Paul and Nobody and the stray orange kitten they had found on the day of the picnic.

‘A lost baby …’ Michael whispered. ‘The ghost of a baby looking for the churchyard…’

‘It’s the inn sign creaking over the door,’ Em grunted. ‘Shut up and let a person sleep.’

The creak-squeak of the sign in the wind was now quite friendly. But that other sound … inside the house. On the staircase. ‘Old houses always creak,’ Tom had said. But he could say what he liked. There was no doubt about it. There
was
someone on the stairs.

When the others had fallen asleep at last, and Carrie lay awake, wishing she could make a hole for her hip in the floor, like you can in the sand, someone - something-tiptoed up the stairs. Quite slowly. Step by step.

‘What’s that?’ she shouted, and everyone sat up. Charlie barked once, a shrill, aimless bark, then dropped his head again.

‘I’m going to see.’ Since Tom was head of the house, he had to say that, and since he said it, Carrie had to say, ‘I’ll come with you. Charlie?’ He would not even get up. Why didn’t he whine and raise his hackles, as dogs were supposed to do when they smelled ghosts? Life was not like books.

Tom lit the stub of a candle. Carrie walked behind him with her hand over her eyes, looking through her fingers as if she were watching a horror film. They opened the door to the narrow hall. There was another door opposite which still said ‘Public Bar’, a passage leading back to the kitchen and store rooms, and the wide stairs going straight up at the end of the hall.

Tom walked towards the stairs bravely, but Carrie knew his bony shoulders and the knobby back of his neck well enough to know that he was scared. He raised the candle. The flame blew in a draught from a broken window. Shadows moved on the staircase, but there was no one there. Then as they stood in the dark hall and looked up, they heard three more footsteps towards the top of the stairs.

But there was no one there.

For a moment, Tom and Carrie still stood staring up, with their mouths open. Then they looked at each other. Then without a word, they ducked back into the front room.

The four of them spent the rest of the night keeping the fire and the candles going. They didn’t talk. They listened. They heard no more footsteps, but they all knew, without having to discuss it, that they could not stay another night in this house.

Their short sweet dream was over already. Their beautiful World’s End was a place of nightmare and terror.
Carrie sat stiffly with her back against a table leg and her arm round Charlie’s fur shoulders. It was the first night for ages that she did not even think about calling the Arab horse. She was much too frightened.

When the first light of dawn began to spread through the small panes of the old leaded windows and across their tired faces, things began to look better.

‘Perhaps we imagined it,’ Tom said. He had been to the back of the house to fill the kettle, and had found nothing strange. No trail of blood on the stairs. No feeling of ice-cold fear in the passage, or in the raftered, stone-floored kitchen with its low sink as big as a small bathtub and its ancient round scarred table, cut with the initials of people who had lived there.

‘Who’s going up to look?’ Em asked, getting back into her sleeping-bag and curling like a maggot.

No one offered. If anybody - or anything - had gone up in the night to those cold, cobwebby bedrooms, nobody wanted to see it.

‘Because I know there’s nothing there,’ Tom argued. ‘Let’s give it one more night.’

‘No.’ Em stuck her jaw out over the edge of the sleeping-bag. ‘You can’t make us.’

Michael said, ‘I’m not afraid. But the girls are.’

Carrie said, ‘No, Tom. It’s not fair on the younger ones.’ She was not going to tell them about the face she had imagined at the window on the day of the picnic. The footsteps on the stairs were enough without that. Because now she was beginning not to be sure whether she had imagined the white face, or actually seen it.

‘But where could we go?’ Tom poured out the tea. Ashes had got into the kettle. It tasted disgusting. ‘We can’t go back to Uncle Rudolf’s.’ As soon as they had left,
Valentina had filled their rooms with a whole rabble of her nastiest relations, to make Uncle Rudolf feel that
his
family had been keeping
hers
out. ‘We’d have to camp out’

‘Or sleep in the stable,’ Carrie said. ‘If we could only get a horse before winter it would be warm.’

‘Oh, knock it off,’ Tom said irritably. He liked horses. They all liked horses. But Carrie overdid it.

Michael began to wail. He was hungry, and he wouldn’t drink tea without milk. ‘I want to go home!’

‘This is your home, boy.’ Em’s hair had been especially wild and wiry when she crawled out of her sleeping-bag. To flatten it, she had pulled a red woollen cap low down on her forehead. Her deep blue eyes stared under it at Michael. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’

‘What are we going to doo-oo-oo?’ Michael went on wailing.

Tom put his hands to the sides of his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said crossly. ‘Shut up. I don’t know.’

‘Some head of a house,’ Em jeered.

‘If you want orders,’ Tom told her, ‘go to the village and get us some milk, and something to eat.’

‘Make Carrie go.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You can both go then.’

They did not want to go together, or alone. No one wanted to do anything. It was all spoiled. Their wonderful idea of living here, of living the way they wanted to without grown-ups to interfere, of making the poem come true:
‘I think I could turn and live with animals…’

They went outside on to the uncut grass, dewed with morning cobwebs, and looked glumly at the old stone house. It stared back at them glumly with its cracked
windows, an upstairs blind hanging half-way down crookedly, like a drooping eyelid. They felt just as miserable and rejected as when they had stood on the potato patch in the rain and looked at the black ruin of their Army hut. Once more, they had no one to turn to, nowhere to go.

Carrie and Em dragged their feet up the lane, in the other direction from the wood. Over the rise of a small hill was the village where there were a few shops, and a church, and some houses and cottages full of people they would now never get to know.

The dairy was a white-painted shed at the back of a farmhouse on the edge of the village.

‘New round these parts?’ Mr Mossman was as broad and heavy as one of his own milk churns. His wide red face was like the sinking sun, his hands were like hams, with sausages for fingers. His rubber boots were as wide as tree trunks, with thick ribbed soles that marked the ground like a tractor.

‘We’re the people at the World’s End,’ Carrie said, since Em was not going to answer. Em was still at the age when you can’t make yourself speak to a stranger, or sometimes even someone you know.

‘Oh, you’re
those
people.’ Mr Mossman nodded the tweed hat which sat too small on the top of his bushy grey head, with the brim turned up all round. He nodded several times, as if there had already been a lot of talk in the village. ‘Yes,
that’s
who you are,’ he said, as if he were telling Carrie, not she telling him.

‘Yes. I mean - well, we
were,
but—’

‘Too far gone? Can’t cope with such a blooming ruin?’
Mr Mossman was good at putting words into other people’s mouths. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you do.’ He folded his hands over the thick jersey that was stretched across his stomach like a jib sail full of wind. ‘What you want to do is this…’

He began to lecture about shoring up and tamping down and reeving in and mucking out, but Carrie interrupted him. ‘We can’t,’ she said shortly. ‘It’s haunted.’

‘Oh, fish now, what’s this? I know that old place. Used to get my beer there when it was still in business. It’s no more haunted than I am.’

There’s a ghost on the stairs.’ Carrie watched to see if he would laugh.

He did laugh, but not a jeer. He opened his mouth very wide, like a split melon, and laughed through what were left of his teeth.

‘Been like that for years, old chump! Poor old Neddy Drew, who was caretaker there, used to say it kept him company.’

‘The ghost?’ Em whispered, looking up at him from under the red wool cap.

‘No, chump, the stairs! They’re old, see. In the daytime, when it’s warmer, the boards expand. Then at night they shrink away from the old loose nails. Crack, crack, crack.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My dear Miss What’s-it,’ Mr Mossman said, sticking out his front even farther and tilting the tweed hat over his grey forelock, which was like a Welsh pony, ‘I know everything. Stay round here and you’ll find
that
out.’

‘Oh, we will, we will! Oh
thanks.’
Carrie and Em could not wait to get back and tell the others. They rushed out with the milk, and ran down the village street to the shops
where they could buy bread and bacon and butter, and a stamp to write to their mother. They were stared at by the long-faced grocer, questioned by his sharp-eyed daughter, and tut-tutted at by the old lady in the post office, which was only a fire guard nailed to the counter in the sweet-shop.

‘You really going to live in that old scarecrow of a place?’ She took her spectacles out of the cash box to examine Carrie and Em better.