‘I can’t,’ he blurted out, turning to Rob as if he were appealing to an executioner to spare his life. ‘Please, get me out of here. Please!’
‘It’s all right, we will. Try and hold up. Francis – I think we need to call for an ambulance. It’s like he’s having a fit or a cardiac arrest or something.’
‘Get me out of here!’ Father Salter screamed at him. ‘Get me out of here before the Devil does for me!’
Clutching at the banister rails to support themselves, Rob and Francis manhandled Father Salter down the stairs, his shoes clumping and bumping against every step.
‘Vicks!’ Rob shouted. ‘Call nine-nine-nine for an ambulance, can you! Father Salter’s having some kind of attack!’
‘No!’ said Father Salter. ‘I don’t need – I don’t need an ambulance – please! I need to get out of here, that’s all!’
They reached the hallway, and Father Salter managed to stand up on his own, holding on to the newel post. He was still shaking, but not so dramatically.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s this house. Please, I don’t need an ambulance. I’ll be all right once I leave. It’s quietening down, it’s quietening down, now it knows that I’m going.’
Vicky and Grace and Portia had all come out to see what was going on. Vicky draped Father Salter’s raincoat around his shoulders, while Rob quickly ran back upstairs to pick up his spectacles. When he reached the landing, he looked along the corridor but could see nothing that might have frightened Father Salter. The black hooded figure of Old Dewer was still standing in the middle of the stained-glass window with his back turned and his hounds around him. The window was intact, and neither Old Dewer nor his hounds showed any signs of movement.
He went back down, handed Father Salter his spectacles and guided him to the front door. It was utterly black outside because there were no street lights around Sampford Spiney. The wind had risen and was whistling softly through the leafless trees.
‘Don’t you worry, father,’ said Francis. ‘I’ll run you straight home to Tavistock. Rob, I’ll come back here after I’ve dropped Father Salter off, if that’s okay. I’ll leave my bag here. I shouldn’t be longer than half an hour.’
‘I’m so desperately sorry,’ said Father Salter. ‘I feel so weak, and so powerless. I wanted to help you, but this force that possesses your house – it recognised me at once for what I was.’
‘It’s not your fault, father,’ Rob told him. ‘I’m just glad that you haven’t suffered a heart attack or something like that.’
‘The house – it knew what I was. It knew that I was a priest. When I saw that image of Old Dewer in that stained-glass window, I appealed to God at once to give me strength, but the house shut me off. It blocked me, in the same way that you might jam a radio signal. Usually I can feel my prayers reaching the Almighty, but not this time. For the first time ever, I could see and hear nothing in my mind but a blur of white noise.’
‘Come on, father,’ said Francis, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘The sooner and the further we get you away from here, the better.’
‘I will pray for you all tonight,’ Father Salter told them. ‘And I will say a prayer for you now, too, before I go, for your safekeeping. Some parting words of defiance, in the face of immeasurable wickedness.’
He turned around in the open doorway so that he was facing the hall, and made the sign of the cross, with his little finger and his fourth finger curled inward. ‘Princeps militiae caelestis,’ he recited. ‘Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.’
He turned back to Rob and Francis. ‘That’s a prayer to the archangel Saint Michael, the head of the Church Militant. Roughly translated, that means Satan and all your demons, go to hell.’
30
It was almost an hour before Francis returned from Tavistock. When he had taken Father Salter into the living room of his parish house, the priest had suffered another momentary fit of the shudders.
‘It was almost like his own house could sense where he had been – as if it could smell Allhallows Hall on him, the way your pet dog can smell another dog on you, and it was reacting against it. There was a crucifix over his fireplace and it dropped off the wall. He kept insisting that it was nothing supernatural and that it had dropped off before, but I think he was in denial. I reckon that he was embarrassed because he had been so frightened, too.’
‘He was sure that there was something seriously bad about this house, though, wasn’t he?’ said Rob. ‘He wouldn’t have had that fit of the shakes, otherwise, and want to go shooting off so quickly.’
They were all sitting in the drawing room. Rob had piled half a dozen ash logs onto the fire to make it seem warm and welcoming. They were drinking coffee and Jail Ale, and Grace and Portia were heating up pasties in the kitchen. Francis had stressed the importance of keeping their evening as normal as possible, and not allowing the house to frighten them.
He opened his doctor’s bag with a click and took out a blue manila folder. ‘The force that’s here – and we know now for certain that there is one – the force that’s here is the kind of force that will do everything within its power to make you feel uneasy, and then to terrify you, and if it can it will drive you hysterical. It feeds off fear
