Soul Stealer Page 6

  “I thought for a moment he had recognized you,” Pip said.

  “He will not,” Sebastian replied. “He and I were never formally introduced in my father’s time. I was but a boy. Likewise Scrotton. I have previously seen him from afar but he knows me not. Yet,” Sebastian added, “we must beware, for they are assuredly in league and, together, may be a potent force with which to reckon.”

  Three

  The Suggestion of Chimerae

  The first biology homework they were given was to find, identify, and draw a living creature of their own choice which they had to obtain from the wild. Tim decided on a woodlouse, not only because they were plentiful around the firewood stack behind the coach house but also because a woodlouse was simplicity itself to draw. Sebastian and Pip, however, were more ambitious. Sebastian decided to concentrate on an earthworm while Pip, having been captivated by the water fleas, decided to search for other minute water-dwelling creatures.

  “You’ll need to look in permanent water,” Tim declared. “What about the Roman pond? It doesn’t come more permanent than 2,000 years old.”

  Pip cast her mind back to the summer when Sebastian had waded in the dark water and duckweed, feeling with his toes to find a silver Roman coin from the mud, cast in there as an offering to the gods sometime in the third century.

  Putting on her Wellington boots and carrying a red plastic bucket, Pip set off in the direction of the spring, crossing Rawne’s Ground, the largest of the fields. With autumn approaching, the grass was short and tussocky, eaten down by the sheep which now stood in a huddle against a far hedge, watching her as she made her way to the pond. The soil around it had been paddled into a slick black cloying quagmire by the sheep’s hooves.

  Pip dipped the bucket into the water, letting it fill to the quarter mark.

  Across the field, the sheep started to amble towards her. Pip ignored them. Whenever she had come into the field, the sheep had always come up to her, their eyes vacantly watching her with the vague, blank expression of their species. Even the elderly ram, who had only one short stub of a horn, had paid her little attention.

  The edge of the pool, where the feeder spring bubbled to the surface, was surrounded on three sides by a low curbing of cut stone, the water running off through a stone-lined channel at the other end. During the summer, when the grass was long, the stones had been hidden, but now they were to be plainly seen, fitting perfectly together without any mortar.

  It was, Pip considered, incredible to think that Roman soldiers had stood on these very stones. Reaching down, she tugged a clump of sedge free of the mud, adding the plant to the bucket in the hope the roots might be teeming with minute life. She knew most of whatever she found would, like the Daphnia, be too small to draw without a microscope, but she did have a powerful magnifying glass and hoped that might suffice for water bugs that could be seen by the naked eye.

  As the roots broke the surface, Pip caught sight of something dull red in the mud. Bending, she picked it up, rubbing it clean in the water. It was a piece of pottery decorated with the outline of an animal. She studied it closely. The creature appeared to be some fabled beast with a tooth-lined jaw, the rounded ears of a rat and an almost feline tail. It was running. In front of it, where the pottery had broken, severing it, were the hindquarters of another creature in full flight, its hind legs stretched out.

  She placed the pottery shard in her pocket and stepped out of the pool. A large bubble of rank-smelling gas broke the surface of the water where the mud was pulling at her boot.

  “Devil farting!” exclaimed Tim with a grin.

  Pip jumped, struggling to keep her balance, her boots splashing.

  “You don’t knock, you creep up on people. After what we’ve been through this summer… it’s not funny. Anyway,” she added, “what’re you doing out here?”

  “The woodlouse is boring,” Tim admitted. “I came to see if there were any newts in the pond. Now you’ve muddied it up with your stomping about, my chances of catching one are ten percent less than nil. Let’s head back and get drawing.” He nodded at the bucket. “There must be something in all the gloop.”

  As they turned away from the spring, another, larger bubble of gas erupted from where the water was rising. It drifted slowly to the surface, floated for a moment on the current, and then burst. The gas inside ignited with a brief, faint green flame that danced over the water before fading into thin air.

  Pip leaped back, almost dropping the bucket.

  “What was that?” she said, her voice high-pitched with fear.

  “Marsh gas,” Tim replied nonchalantly. “Made by rotting vegetation. It can ignite itself. They call it will-o’-the-wisp. Don’t be so uptight. It’s nothing to fret about.”

  Pip was unconvinced. “I thought marsh gas was methane,” she answered.

  “It is,” Tim confirmed.

  “Well,” Pip replied. “Methane burns with a blue flame. Anyone with a natural gas cooker knows.”

  “Trick of the light,” Tim answered. “If you’re so worried, look at the pendant.”

  Pip looked down inside her T-shirt. The crystal was as clear as a shard of window glass. She touched it. It shivered violently.

  “Run!” she yelled and, dropping the bucket, took to her heels. Tim followed. The sheep, seeing them in flight, broke into an easy lope behind them.

  They had gone halfway to the field gate near the house when Tim called out breathlessly, “Hang on a minute, sis! My legs weren’t made for running in Wellies. Anyway, what’re we running from?”

  He glanced back over his shoulder. The sheep were still following but were some fifty meters away and little more than sauntering along in their usual clumsy manner, like mopheads with legs.

  “I don’t know,” Pip replied. “The pendant went clear.”

  “That was by the pool,” Tim answered. “What is it now?”

  Taking a quick look, Pip said, “Going cloudy.”

  “And vibrating?” Tim asked.

  “No,” Pip replied.

  “Then we’re safe,” Tim declared, and he slowed to a jog.

  Breathing heavily, her lungs aching, Pip also slowed to a walk, casting a cautious look behind her as she did so. The sheep were following them at a steady pace, the ram leading the flock. As she looked at it, it bleated once, loudly. In its open mouth, she saw the sharp, pointed canines of a predator. From one of its canine fangs hung strands of tattered, bloody flesh. The wool along the side of the ram’s head and its muzzle were matted with gore as if it had just had its head sunk deep in the carcass of its last kill.

  Pip accelerated to a sprint, Tim at her side. Her feet snagged on tussocks of grass, slipping where the sheep had cropped the field short. Her legs ached with the effort of wearing the heavy boots. At every step the rubber struck her shins, chafing the skin raw.

  Reaching the field gate, Pip hurled herself at it, climbing the five wooden bars with a speed she did not know she possessed. Tim vaulted it in one, his left boot flying off into the air. Landing on the far side, they stood next to each other, gasping. Pip felt her knees weaken. The sheep trotted up to the gate and stood in a jumble.

  “They’re just sheep,” Tim said, staring at them shamefacedly. “What were we running for?”

  “Look at their teeth,” Pip said, but no sooner had she spoken than the ram bleated again, one of the ewes responding to him. Their teeth were the normal, flat incisors and worn molars of grazing animals, their heads clean of anything but a few bramble twigs ensnared in the wool.

  “Guess you’ll have to do a woodlouse, too,” Tim remarked, adding, “or a snail.” He pulled his Wellington boot back on. “There’s one on the gatepost.”

  “Who’s going back for Mum’s bucket?” Pip wondered aloud, looking hopefully at Tim.

  “All right, I’ll get it,” Tim replied wearily. “A few lamb chops on the hoof don’t spook me.” He waved his hand at the sheep. “Mint sauce,” Tim shouted derisively as they trundled off over
the field.

  Just before six o’clock that evening, Sebastian appeared in Tim’s bedroom, still wearing his school uniform.

  “I see you are addressing the extramural task set by Miss Bates,” he remarked, glancing over Tim’s shoulder as he drew the outline of the woodlouse on his sketch pad, the picture appearing on his computer screen.

  “I presume you mean,” Tim said sharply, “doing your homework? Really, Sebastian. You’ve got to make an effort with the lingo.”

  “Your computer,” Sebastian replied, ignoring Tim’s criticism, “is truly a remarkable example of human inventiveness and ingenuity.”

  “It’s cool,” Tim answered bluntly, giving Sebastian a pointed look.

  Sebastian smiled and said, “When needs must, I shall adopt the modern idiom. However, to use such lackadaisical language all the while seems alien and gauche to me.”

  “Well,” Tim came back at him, “that was quite a mouthful.”

  Beneath the drawing, he added the words: Woodlouse, a land-dwelling crustacean, order Isopoda, class Malacostraca, saved his drawing to the hard disk and printed it out.

  “In my father’s time,” Sebastian said as the printer ejected the sheet of paper, “the woodlouse was known as the sow-bug or pill-bug. A powder of desiccated sow-bugs taken with warm milk was considered most beneficial in instances of stomachache or constipation.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Tim exclaimed, aghast. “You mean you ate them?”

  “Medicinally, yes,” Sebastian answered. “Or they were made into a salve or ointment, although I forget their curative properties when applied thus.”

  “Never mind the lesson in medieval medicine,” Pip said, entering the room with a drawing of a large snail which she slipped into Tim’s scanner. “Have you told Sebastian what happened this afternoon?”

  “The sheep in the field scared the daylights out of Pip,” Tim replied.

  “That’s not fair,” Pip retorted. “It wasn’t like that at all. We went to the Roman pool to collect some water and bugs.”

  “Marsh gas bubbled out of the mud,” Tim went on, “and ignited.”

  “Ignis fatuus,” Sebastian said. “The fire of fools. It has misguided many unwary travelers into mires and quicksand, they who have followed its blue light assuming it to be a distant habitation.”

  “Show us what you found,” Tim suggested.

  Pip took the shard out of her pocket and handed it to Sebastian.

  “The gas burned green,” Pip butted in.

  “This is Roman,” Sebastian declared, “a fragment of what is known as Samian ware. It was made in Gaul, which you now call France.” He held it under Tim’s reading lamp.

  “The marsh gas burned green,” Pip repeated, her exasperation growing.

  “What is it?” Tim asked.

  “It bears a depiction of the chimera,” Sebastian said, “a Greek mythological monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the ability to breathe fire.”

  Pip was beginning to lose patience and said, “Excuse me, can we leave the archaeology lecture and get back to the here and now? The point is that, by the pool, the pendant went clear as window glass. The marsh gas burned green and, although it was lost on my computer-nerd sibling here, the sheep had the teeth of a tiger and…” She fell silent as the implication of what she had just said dawned on her.

  “I saw the chimera,” she half whispered. “Didn’t I?”

  There came a knock on Tim’s bedroom door and Mrs. Ledger looked in. “Supper time,” she announced then, seeing Sebastian, added, “Would you like to join us, Sebastian?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Sebastian replied, smiling politely.

  “I see you’ve had your hair cut,” Mrs. Ledger observed. “Quite a change, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  The moment she had gone, Sebastian’s smile vanished. “You say the marsh gas burned with a green flame?”

  “Yes,” Pip confirmed. “As green as…”

  It was then she remembered the ancient lantern Malodor had used, its flame burning the color of weak emerald.

  “And did this noxious gas reach your nostrils?”

  Pip nodded apprehensively.

  “In that case,” Sebastian continued, “it explains your vision of the sheep. They were not, as it were, wolves in sheep’s clothing and truly carnivorous, but a projection of your fears,” he explained. “You saw what, at that moment, you most feared, albeit you knew it not.”

  “You mean they were just a figment of my imagination?” Pip asked.

  “Not exactly,” Sebastian replied. “More a figment of your imagination after it had been manipulated.”

  Pip stopped on the landing, her hand on the wall to steady herself.

  “Manipulated!” she exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

  “Influenced,” Sebastian replied curtly.

  “How?” Pip asked, in a tremulous voice.

  “Perhaps by the marsh gas.”

  “Perhaps!” Pip repeated. “You mean you don’t know?”

  Sebastian did not respond.

  “It’s not Malodor returning?” Pip half whispered.

  Still, Sebastian did not answer but, as they descended the stairs, he advised, “Do not approach the pool unless I accompany you.”

  “Bet your boots we won’t!” Tim replied.

  To this, Sebastian responded, “Why should I wager my footwear?”

  Three plates of poached eggs, baked beans, chips and crisp slices of bacon were already on the kitchen table when they sat down. Sebastian looked at the beans and prodded them tentatively with his fork. Mrs. Ledger watched him.

  “Don’t you like baked beans, Sebastian?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sebastian replied as Tim nudged his ankle under the table with his foot. “I find them to be most…” Tim kicked harder. “They’re very nice.”

  Mrs. Ledger sat down opposite them with a cup of tea.

  “Tell me, Sebastian,” she said, “what’s your surname?”

  “Gillette,” said Tim.

  “I’m sure Sebastian’s got a tongue of his own, Tim,” Mrs. Ledger remarked tersely. “And where exactly do you live now, Sebastian? I know you once lived here.”

  “At Pleasance Farm,” Sebastian replied, “the other side of Foxhanger Hill. I live there with my mother’s cousin.”

  Tim and Pip exchanged a glance. They had suspected there might have been an ulterior motive to the invitation to supper but had not expected as thorough a grilling as the bacon slices had received.

  “Does your relative own the farm?”

  “No, Mrs. Ledger,” Sebastian went on, “my mother’s cousin’s husband is the rancher.”

  “Your family must be long established in the area,” Mrs. Ledger remarked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Sebastian answered.

  Pip and Tim looked at each other: six hundred years could make Sebastian’s a local family.

  “And do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “I am an only child,” Sebastian announced.

  He watched Pip as she cut off a piece of the crisp bacon, speared it on her fork and dipped it in the poached egg yolk. It was then Tim realized that Sebastian was not quite sure of how to use a knife and fork.

  “And your father…?” Mrs. Ledger asked.

  “Mum!” Pip hissed, interrupting her mother and shaking her head in an attempt to halt this inquisition.

  “He’s gone away,” Sebastian announced tersely.

  Mrs. Ledger said, “I am so very sorry, Sebastian. I hadn’t meant to pry. It was most rude of me,” and she changed the subject.

  “That was close,” Tim remarked as they went upstairs to his bedroom.

  “Your mother is indeed most probing,” Sebastian declared, “yet this is the way of mothers. They must be sure of their children’s friends.”

  “Still,” Pip said, “I think that’ll be the end of the quizzes.”

  Throughout the night, it rained torrentially, a
strong wind blowing down the river valley to drive the rain hard against Pip’s bedroom windows, keeping her awake. About midnight, she heard a knock on her bedroom door. It was Tim, who had also been unable to sleep.

  “If it keeps on like this,” he said, “the river will break its banks by morning. That ditch around the house…” he continued.

  “You mean the old ha-ha,” Pip cut in.

  “… whatever,” Tim went on. “It’s already filling up like a moat. By morning, it’s not going to be a ha-ha but an uh-oh!”

  Pip glanced out of her window. Through the film of rainwater running down the pane, she could see the lights of a downstairs room reflecting on the rising water.

  “It’s like being in a castle,” Tim remarked, “especially with these stone mullions in the windows. All we need now are tapestries hanging from the walls, chain-mail vests in the wardrobe, a court jester with one of those ukulele things…”

  “A mandolin,” Pip corrected him. “Sometimes, Tim, you really are thick.”

  “… not to mention a few ditties,” Tim continued undeterred, “a couple of manky bear skins spread across the floor and an English longbow or two leaning in a corner with a quiver of arrows.”

  “How about a damsel in distress?” Pip suggested sarcastically.

  “That’s you, sis,” Tim answered.

  “Or an ugly fire-breathing dragon?” Pip went on.

  “Still you,” Tim added, smiling.

  The mention of animal skins spread across the floor brought to Pip’s mind a picture of Sebastian’s chamber deep underground beneath the house. Suddenly, a spasm of worry ran through her.

  “If the water rises much higher,” she said anxiously, “what will happen to Sebastian’s secret chamber? Or Sebastian? Down there, he won’t know the river is rising. He could drown like a rat in a box.”

  She began gently but insistently tapping on the wall panel. In just a few seconds, the mechanism behind it clicked and it swung open on silent, well-lubricated hinges.

  “What concerns you?” Sebastian inquired calmly, stepping into Pip’s room. “Your summons was quite relentless.”