A Book of Horrors Read online

  ‘Three little teenyboppers show up at his door, I bet he was very nice,’ said Jeffrey. ‘What about Moira? What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Evelyn sighed. ‘No one ever knew. She ran away from home that summer. We never heard from her again.’

  ‘Did they question him? Was he even taken into custody?’

  ‘Of course they did!’ Evelyn said, exasperated. ‘I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I’m certain they did. Moira had a difficult home life; her parents were Irish and the father drank. And a lot of kids ran away back then, you know that – all us little hippies. What did the letters say, Jeffrey?’

  He removed them from his pocket and handed them to her. ‘You can read them. He never did – they all came back to Anthea. Where’s Padwithiel?’

  ‘Near Zennor. My aunt and uncle lived there. We went and stayed with them during our school holidays one spring.’ She sorted through the envelopes, pulled out one and opened it, unfolding the letter with care. ‘February twenty-first. This was right before we knew we’d be going there for the holidays. It was my idea. I remember when she wrote this – she got the address somehow, and that’s how we realised he lived near my uncle’s farm. Padwithiel.’

  She leaned into the lamp and read the first letter, set it down and continued to read each of the others. When she was finished, she placed the last one on the table, sank back into her chair and gazed at Jeffrey.

  ‘She never told you about what happened.’

  ‘You just said that nothing happened.’

  ‘I don’t mean with Robert. She called me every year on the anniversary. March 12.’ She looked away. ‘Next week, that is. I never told Chris. It wasn’t a secret, we just— Well, I’ll just tell you.

  ‘We went to school together, the three of us, and after Anthea sent that letter to Robert Bennington, she and I cooked up the idea of going to see him. Moira never read his books – she wasn’t much of a reader. But she heard us talking about his books all the time, and we’d all play these games where we’d be the ones who fought the Sun Battles. She just did whatever we told her to, though for some reason she always wanted prisoners to be boiled in oil. She must’ve seen it in a movie.

  ‘Even though we were older now, we still wanted to believe that magic could happen like in those books – probably we wanted to believe it even more. And all that New Agey, hippie stuff, Tarot cards and Biba and “Ride a White Swan” – it all just seemed like it could be real. My aunt and uncle had a farm near Zennor. My mother asked if we three could stay there for the holidays and Aunt Becca said that would be fine. My cousins are older, and they were already off at university. So we took the train to Penzance and Aunt Becca picked us up.

  ‘They were turning one of the outbuildings into a pottery studio for her, and that’s where we stayed. There was no electricity yet, but we had a kerosene heater and we could stay up as late as we wanted. I think we got maybe five hours’ sleep the whole time we were there.’ She laughed. ‘We’d be up all night, but then Uncle Ray would start in with the tractors at dawn. We’d end up going into the house and napping in one of my cousin’s beds for half the afternoon whenever we could. We were very grumpy houseguests.

  ‘It rained the first few days we were there, just pissing down. Finally one morning we got up and the sun was shining. It was cold, but we didn’t care – we were just so happy we could get outside for a while. At first we just walked along the road, but it was so muddy from all the rain that we ended up heading across the moor. Technically it’s not really open moorland – there are old stone walls crisscrossing everything, ancient field systems. Some of them are thousands of years old, and farmers still keep them up and use them. These had not been kept up. The land was completely overgrown, though you could still see the walls and climb them. Which is what we did.

  ‘We weren’t that far from the house – we could still see it, and I’m pretty sure we were still on my uncle’s land. We found a place where the walls were higher than elsewhere, more like proper hedgerows. There was no break in the wall like there usually is, no gate or old entryway. So we found a spot that was relatively untangled and we all climbed up and then jumped to the other side. The walls were completely overgrown with blackthorn and all these viney things. It was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle – the thorns hurt like shit. I remember I was wearing new boots and they got ruined, just scratched everywhere. And Moira tore her jacket and we knew she’d catch grief for that. But we thought there must be something wonderful on the other side – that was the game we were playing, that we’d find some amazing place. Do you know The Secret Garden? We thought it might be like that. At least I did.’

  ‘And was it?’

  Evelyn shook her head. ‘It wasn’t a garden. It was just this big overgrown field. Dead grass and stones. But it was rather beautiful in a bleak way. Ant laughed and started yelling “Heathcliff, Heathcliff!” And it was warmer – the walls were high enough to keep out the wind, and there were some trees that had grown up on top of the walls as well. They weren’t in leaf yet, but they formed a bit of a windbreak.

  ‘We ended up staying there all day – completely lost track of the time. I thought only an hour had gone by, but Ant had a watch; at one point she said it was past three and I was shocked – I mean, really shocked. It was like we’d gone to sleep and woken up, only we weren’t asleep at all.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  Evelyn shrugged. ‘Playing. The sort of let’s-pretend game we always did when we were younger and hadn’t done for a while. Moira had a boyfriend, Ant and I really wanted boyfriends – mostly that’s what we talked about whenever we got together. But for some reason, that day Ant said “Let’s do Sun Battles,” and we all agreed. So that’s what we did. Now of course I can see why – I’ve seen it with my own kids when they were that age, you’re on the cusp of everything, and you just want to hold on to being young for as long as you can.

  ‘I don’t remember much of what we did that day, except how strange it all felt. As though something was about to happen. I felt like that a lot, it was all tied in with being a teenager; but this was different. It was like being high, or tripping, only none of us had ever done any drugs at that stage. And we were stone-cold sober. Really all we did was wander around the moor and clamber up and down the walls and hedgerows and among the trees, pretending we were in Gearnzath. That was the world in The Sun Battles – like Narnia, only much scarier. We were mostly just wandering around and making things up, until Ant told us it was after three o’clock.

  ‘I think it was her idea that we should do some kind of ritual. I know it wouldn’t have been Moira’s, and I don’t think it was mine. But I knew there was going to be a full moon that night – I’d heard my uncle mention it – and so we decided that we would each sacrifice a sacred thing, and then retrieve them all before moonrise. We turned our pockets inside out, looking for what we could use. I had a comb – just a red plastic thing – so that was mine. Ant had a locket on a chain from Woolworths, cheap, but the locket part opened.

  ‘And Moira had a pencil. It said RAVENWOOD on the side, so we called the field Ravenwood. We climbed up on the wall and stood facing the sun and made up some sort of chant. I don’t remember what we said. Then we tossed our things onto the moor. None of us threw them far, and Ant barely tossed hers – she didn’t want to lose the locket. I didn’t care about the comb, but it was so light it just fell a few yards from where we stood. Same with the pencil. We all marked where they fell – I remember mine very clearly, it came down right on top of this big flat stone.

  ‘Then we left. It was getting late and cold, and we were all starving – we’d had nothing to eat since breakfast. We went back to the house and hung out in the barn for a while, and then we had dinner. We didn’t talk much. Moira hid her jacket so they couldn’t see she’d torn it, and I took my boots off so no one would see how I’d got them all mauled by the thorns. I remember my aunt wondering if we were up to something, and my uncle s
aying what the hell could we possibly be up to in Zennor? After dinner we sat in the living room and waited for the sun to go down, and when we saw the moon start to rise above the hills, we went back outside.

  ‘It was bright enough that we could find our way without a torch – a flashlight. I think that must have been one of the rules, that we had to retrieve our things by moonlight. It was cold out, and none of us had dressed very warmly, so we ran. It didn’t take long. We climbed back over the wall and then down onto the field, at the exact spot where we’d thrown our things.

  ‘They weren’t there. I knew exactly where the rock was where my comb had landed – the rock was there, but not the comb. Ant’s locket had landed only a few feet past it, and it wasn’t there either. And Moira’s pencil was gone, too.’

  ‘The wind could have moved them,’ said Jeffrey. ‘Or an animal.’

  ‘Maybe the wind,’ said Evelyn. ‘Though the whole reason we’d stayed there all day was that there was no wind – it was protected, and warm.’

  ‘Maybe a bird took it? Don’t some birds like shiny things?’

  ‘What would a bird do with a pencil? Or a plastic comb?’

  Jeffrey made a face. ‘Probably you just didn’t see where they fell. You thought you did, in daylight, but everything looks different at night. Especially in moonlight.’

  ‘I knew where they were.’ Evelyn shook her head and reached for the bottle of Armagnac. ‘Especially my comb. I have that engineer’s eye, I can look at things and keep a very precise picture in my mind. The comb wasn’t where it should have been. And there was no reason for it to be gone, unless …’

  ‘Unless some other kids had seen you and found everything after you left,’ said Jeffrey.

  ‘No.’ Evelyn sipped her drink. ‘We started looking. The moon was coming up – it rose above the hill, and it was very bright. Because it was so cold there was hoarfrost on the grass, and ice in places where the rain had frozen. So all that reflected the moon light. Everything glittered. It was beautiful, but it was no longer fun – it was scary. None of us was even talking; we just split up and crisscrossed the field, looking for our things.

  ‘And then Moira said, “There’s someone there,” and pointed. I thought it was someone on the track that led back to the farmhouse – it’s not a proper road, just a rutted path that runs alongside one edge of that old field system. I looked up and yes, there were three people there – three torches, anyway. Flashlights. You couldn’t see who was carrying them, but they were walking slowly along the path. I thought maybe it was my uncle and two of the men who worked with him, coming to tell us it was time to go home. They were walking from the wrong direction, across the moor, but I thought maybe they’d gone out to work on something. So I ran to the left edge of the field and climbed up on the wall.’

  She stopped, glancing out the window at the black garden, and finally turned back. ‘I could see the three lights from there,’ she said. ‘But the angle was all wrong. They weren’t on the road at all – they were in the next field, up above Ravenwood. And they weren’t flashlights. They were high up in the air, like this—’

  She set down her glass and got to her feet, a bit unsteadily, extended both her arms and mimed holding something in her hands. ‘Like someone was carrying a pole eight or ten feet high, and there was a light on top of it. Not a flame. Like a ball of light …’

  She cupped her hands around an invisible globe the size of a soccer ball. ‘Like that. White light, sort of foggy. The lights bobbed as they were walking.’

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘No. We couldn’t see anything. And, this is the part that I can’t explain – it just felt bad. Like, horrible. Terrifying.’

  ‘You thought you’d summoned up whatever it was you’d been playing at.’ Jeffrey nodded sympathetically and finished his drink.

  ‘It was just marsh gas, Ev. You know that. Will o’ the wisp, or whatever you call it here. They must get it all the time out there in the country. Or fog. Or someone just out walking in the moonlight.’

  Evelyn settled back into her armchair. ‘It wasn’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen marsh gas. There was no fog. The moon was so bright you could see every single rock in that field. Whatever it was, we all saw it. And you couldn’t hear anything – there were no voices, no footsteps, nothing. They were just there, moving closer to us – slowly,’ she repeated, and moved her hand up and down, as though calming a cranky child. ‘That was the creepiest thing, how slowly they just kept coming.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just run?’

  ‘Because we couldn’t. You know how kids will all know about something horrible, but they’ll never tell a grown-up? It was like that. We knew we had to find our things before we could go.

  ‘I found my comb first. It was way over – maybe twenty feet from where I’d seen it fall. I grabbed it and began to run across the turf, looking for the locket and Moira’s pencil. The whole time the moon was rising, and that was horrible too – it was a beautiful clear night, no clouds at all. And the moon was so beautiful, but it just terrified me. I can’t explain it.’

  Jeffrey smiled wryly. ‘Yeah? How about this: three thirteen-year-old girls in the dark under a full moon, with a very active imagination?’

  ‘Hush. A few minutes later Moira yelled: she’d found her pencil. She turned and started running back towards the wall, I screamed after her that she had to help us find the locket. She wouldn’t come back. She didn’t go over the wall without us, but she wouldn’t help. I ran over to Ant, but she yelled at me to keep searching where I was. I did, I even started heading for the far end of the field, towards the other wall – where the lights were.

  ‘They were very close now, close to the far wall I mean. You could see how high up they were, taller than a person. I could hear Moira crying. I looked back and suddenly I saw Ant dive to the ground. She screamed “I found it!” and I could see the chain shining in her hand.

  ‘And we just turned and hightailed it. I’ve never run so fast in my life. I grabbed Ant’s arm, and by the time we got to the wall Moira was already on top and jumping down the other side. I fell and Ant had to help me up, Moira grabbed her and we ran all the way back to the farm and locked the door when we got inside.

  ‘We looked out the window and the lights were still there. They were there for hours. My uncle had a Border Collie; we cracked the door to see if she’d hear something and bark, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t go outside – we tried to get her to look and she wouldn’t budge.’

  ‘Did you tell your aunt and uncle?’

  Evelyn shook her head. ‘No. We stayed in the house that night, in my cousin’s room. It overlooked the moor, so we could watch the lights. After about two hours they began to move back the way they’d come – slowly; it was about another hour before they were gone completely. We went out next morning to see if there was anything there – we took the dog to protect us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There was nothing. The grass was all beaten down, as though someone had been walking over it, but probably that was just us.’

  She fell silent.

  ‘Well,’ Jeffrey said after a long moment. ‘It’s certainly a good story.’

  ‘It’s a true story. Here, wait.’

  She stood and went into the other room, and Jeffrey heard her go upstairs. He crossed to the window and stared out into the night, the dark garden occluded by shadow and runnels of mist, blueish in the dim light cast from the conservatory.

  ‘Look. I still have it.’

  He turned to see Evelyn holding a small round tin. She withdrew a small object and stared at it, placed it back inside and handed him the tin. ‘My comb. There’s some pictures here too.’

  ‘That tin.’ He stared at the lid, blue enamel with the words ST AUSTELL SWEETS: FUDGE FROM REAL CORNISH CREAM stamped in gold above the silhouette of what looked like a lighthouse beacon. ‘It’s just like the one I found with Anthea’s letters in it.’

  Evelyn nodded. �
��That’s right. Aunt Becca gave one to each of us the day we arrived. The fudge was supposed to last the entire two weeks, and I think we ate it all that first night.’

  He opened the tin and gazed at a bright-red plastic comb sitting atop several snapshots; he dug into his pocket and pulled out Anthea’s locket.

  ‘There it is,’ said Evelyn wonderingly. She took the locket and dangled it in front of her, clicked it open and shut then returned it to Jeffrey. ‘She never had anything in it that I knew. Here, look at these.’

  She took back the tin. He sat waiting as she sorted through the snapshots then passed him six small black-and-white photos, each with OCTOBER 1971 written on the back.

  ‘That was my camera.’ Evelyn sank back into the armchair. ‘I didn’t finish shooting the roll till we went back to school.’

  There were two girls in most of the photos. One was Anthea, apple-cheeked, her face still rounded with puppy fat and her brown hair longer than he’d ever seen it; eyebrows unplucked, wearing baggy bell-bottom jeans and a white peasant shirt. The other girl was taller, sturdy but long-limbed, with long straight blonde hair and a broad smooth forehead, elongated eyes and a wide mouth bared in a grin.

  ‘That’s Moira,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘She was. We were the ugly ducklings, Ant and me. Fortunately I was taking most of the photos, so you don’t see me except in the ones Aunt Becca took.’

  ‘You were adorable.’ Jeffrey flipped to a photo of all three girls laughing and feeding each other something with their hands, Evelyn still in braces, her hair cut in a severe black bob. ‘You were all adorable. She’s just—’

  He scrutinised a photo of Moira by herself, slightly out of focus so all you saw was a blurred wave of blonde hair and her smile, a flash of narrowed eyes. ‘She’s beautiful. Photogenic.’