“Well, that’s how it all starts, isn’t it—all this Kernow Glan bollocks. Ideas about purity, and Britain being full up, and—”
“Oh, put a sock in it, Lee,” Ruth broke in amiably. “Bill Prowse was an arse, and KG will never get a following again, not with your Gideon to make ’em toe the line, and eat them all up if they won’t. But Cornwall’s a land under pressure nonetheless. Right-wing groups don’t thrive where equal rights truly exist—only where there’s deprivation, discontent and a fight for dwindling resources.”
Lee took this in. Since summer, he and Gideon had been so focussed on the effects of the KG group that he’d seldom paused to consider causes. “That’s a fair point. I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Oh, my God. Stop it!”
Ruth turned to him. “Stop what, Bill? Reasoned debate? Feels a bit alien, does it?”
“Stop saying was about me. Bill Prowse was an arse. I still am one. I’m right bloody here!”
“Oh, all right. And I interrupted your story, too. There was I, the rich emmet, alone in my rented house. So...”
“So me and my mates decided we’d give you something to bloody well write about. If you wanted ghosts, you could have ’em. It were only meant to be a prank, for God’s sake. I’ve done way worse than this in my time...” He ploughed on with a kind of desperate courage. “We all got pissed one night, and Jerry and Mark got some sheets and made eyeholes in them. I had an old rubber mask left over from the Halloween before—fucking horrible thing, it was, hairy and stinking. But I reckoned she’d have heard the legend of the Bodmin Beast, so the lads took their sheets and I took that. And Mark picked the lock on her front door, and we all put our costumes on, and we went to stand around her bed.”
Lee stared. “Bloody hell, Bill.”
“I know, I know. Look, I’m not sure we’d even have gone through with it, except the damn mask made me sneeze, and she woke up. She must’ve had a weak heart or something. She just sat up, looked round at us all, and then she flopped back down on the bed.”
Lee whistled softly. To his shame, he was taken aback by the mildness of this crime of Bill’s. “All right. That is horrendous. But... I’ve known this man a long time, Mrs Cadwallader. He really has done much worse.”
“Yes!” Bill cried, as if Lee had offered a shining testimonial to his character. “It were an accident!”
“I wasn’t any the less dead because of that. I had things to do, Bill. I had a niece, grandchildren I’d like to have seen grow up. More importantly, though I’m sure it shouldn’t have been, I had books to write. Hideous Hauntings volume two, for example! Do you think I’d have managed to rustle up another hundred ghosts, Lee?”
“If you’d stayed in Cornwall long enough, I’m sure.”
“I could make it an autobiography now. It’s Bill’s own fault that I turned into a monstrous wolf to chase him—that mask was the last thing I ever saw.”
A short silence fell in the crypt, which felt ready to settle down for a very long one. The strange red light was fading to dusk. Then, out of nowhere, Bill began to chortle. He sat up, rubbing his hands together, and twisted round on his crate to face Lee. “Bad news, eh?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Bad news, you said. Ooh, sit down, Bill, you says. Put your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye, Bill. Eh?”
“Not exactly, but okay. What about it?”
“I’ve got news for you too, then, haven’t I, you smart-arsed bloody table-turner! You always did piss me off, living in your big house as if queers like you had more right than normal folks to a decent life. Think about it, sonny Jim. If me and the old girl over there are in the spirit world, and we can see you and interact with you...!”
Lee recoiled from him. The movement, barely more than a flinch, somehow threw him violently off-balance: the crate rocked, then smashed beneath him as if it had been nothing more than rotten matchwood in the first place. He crashed to his backside amongst the shards.
An undignified sprawl. Gideon would have roared with laughter before coming to pick him up. Before dusting him down, tenderly as he’d have done with Tamsyn, and checking him over for splinters.
He seemed to have landed in a pile of slippery metal. Pieces of it shot out from under this hands as he tried to push himself up. Bill Prowse gaped, eyes widening. “Well, bugger me!”
“Pretty, isn’t it?” the old lady said, watching Bill carefully. “I’m glad he found it. Glitter like that can’t touch us, though, Bill, not now. So many things are different. When you say these foul and stupid things to Mr Tyack—about queers and decent folk and things like that—do you really feel as though you still mean them?”
“Course I do,” Bill returned, with a pale effort at bluster. “Wouldn’t say ’em otherwise, would I? Me and my mates down the pub, we’d laugh for hours about him and his kind. I suppose... I suppose it made the lights inside seem brighter—that business about them and us, I mean. I suppose it made the night outside seem a little bit less dark.”
She stood up and held out an arm, as if inviting Bill to the dance. To Lee’s astonishment, Bill clambered to his feet and fearlessly went to her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did we come to meet here? Have you been waiting all this time?”
“No, of course not.” She looked like a doll beside him, but she tucked his arm through hers. “As Lee says, the house isn’t usually haunted—and after tonight, it never will be again. It’s just that you died, so my spirit could meet at last with yours.”
“Why did you want to meet it at all? I wasn’t a nice man. Much worse than even Tyack knows—I used to sell drugs around Redruth and places like that. Nasty stuff, addictive and cut with God knows what. I... I’ve probably killed people.”
“Ah, but I’ve only been killed once, so you were special to me. I wanted to come here and devour your soul. But now I think I’m meant to do something else with it entirely.”
He looked down at her calmly. “All right.” Then he turned and threw one last look back over his shoulder at Lee. He had a nice smile, did Bill, or must have done once, before he’d waded into his lifetime of mud. “Hoi, Tyack. I’m right sorry, I am, for all those things I said. Where do you reckon we’re going, then, Mrs Cadwallader?”
She patted his shoulder with her free hand. “I don’t know. But we’re on our way, aren’t we? My, it’s exciting, isn’t it? Come on!”
Oh God, Lee thought. Don’t leave me behind here. Take me with you! He got his mouth shut just in time. He couldn’t get up from his ridiculous sprawl on the floor, but he did understand what it would mean for him to follow the woman and the transformed, light-stricken man out of this place now. It was just that anything—anything at all—seemed better than lying here alone. “Gideon,” he whispered into the thickening dark. Bill and Ruth were gone now, even that last-exit, last-ditch tunnel closed. Strength melted out of his bones. He fell onto his back, hands clutching at scraps of wood, at straws. At nothing, nothing at all.
Chapter Six
“Zeke, get out of here. Take the car and drive back to wherever you can get a signal. Call Jenny Spargo. She’s off duty, but if you tell her Lee’s in trouble at the Underhill house near Gotheglos, she’ll know who to send.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“For God’s sake. Why not?”
Zeke looked up from his inspection of the concrete-sealed join at the base of the wall. His glimmer of Halloween mischief had vanished. He was dressed in as much of a party costume as his character allowed—jeans and a discreetly patterned shirt—but suddenly Gideon saw him in priestly black. “Perhaps a dark presence has passed through this room,” he said. “It must be something to do with the Nancarrows. They died right here.”
“Whatever passed through here took Lee with it.”
“We can’t know that.”
Gideon banged the flat of his hands off the wall. “I know. And I’m not bloody having it. Go on!”
“What good could Sergeant Spargo do?”