‘Francis… you’re losing your hair.’
Francis looked down at his jacket. ‘Bloody hell. So I am.’ He brushed the strands off his shoulders and then he propped his wand against the panelling and ran both hands through the wings of hair on either side of his head. When he took his hands away, he was holding clumps of white hair in both of them, and there were bald patches around his ears.
‘A-barth an Jowl!’ he exclaimed in his thin, rasping voice. In desperation, he started to pull at his hair and more and more of it came out, until the left side of his head was almost completely bald.
‘It’s him that’s doing this! Him – or it! He knows that I’m a gleaner and that I’m looking for him and he’s trying to stop me!’
‘Then maybe you should stop,’ said Rob. ‘He might do something worse to you than make your hair fall out.’
‘No! I’m going to find him! I’m going to find him and I’m going to decontaminate him! He might be able to scare off a Catholic priest but he’s not going to frighten me away! I’m a Cornishman and Cornishmen are frightened of nothing, especially devils!’
He picked up his wand again and walked stiff-legged around the hallway, knocking loudly at the panelling. ‘Where are you, you bylen? Where are you hiding yourself? Show me where you are, you coward, and I’ll show you what I’m made of!’
Vicky and Grace and Portia came out into the hallway to see what the shouting and the banging was all about. Rob waved his hand to indicate that they should just let Francis continue to circle around, knocking at the walls, and not interrupt him. Vicky pointed to her own head to show him that she could see how much of Francis’s hair had fallen out, and mouthed the words What’s happened to him? But all Rob could do was shrug.
Francis stopped knocking the panelling at last, and stood in the centre of the hallway, breathing hard. He tugged in anger and frustration at the remaining hair on the right side of his head, and most of that came out too. There were tufts of white hair all over the hallway floor, as if two furious albino cats had been fighting each other.
Rob went up to him. He didn’t know what to say.
‘He’s here all right,’ Francis panted. ‘He’s here, he’s close, and he’s fully awake now. Hell on earth, my heart’s beating like a hammer and I’ll bet it’s him that’s causing it.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to do what I set out to do. I’m even more certain of what’s needed, now that I’m pretty damn sure what he is.’
He coughed again, and wheezed like a pair of old bellows, and then he took hold of Rob’s arm, made his way unsteadily across the hallway and sat down on the chair.
‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’ Rob asked him.
Francis nodded, and kept on nodding. ‘I have to be up to it, because nobody else is going to do it, are they? Nobody else is capable. Who’s going to rescue Ada and your brother and your little boy if I don’t?’
He coughed again. ‘I’ll have to collect quite a few things. I’ll need water from the Druid’s Bowl, which is like the Druidic equivalent of holy water, but I’ve a bottle of that already, so that will save me a trip up to Cosdon. Candles, plenty of candles, and a turfing iron, as well as sheep shears. I’ll have to have wolfsbane. And cloves. And slugs, of course. My friend Dorothy will have plenty of those in her garden.’
He stayed seated for a while, his chest rising and falling. Vicky came up to them and said, ‘Are you all right, Francis? You’ve lost nearly all of your hair.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve made a mess of your floor.’
‘I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about you. You look terrible.’
‘I’ll be all right. I’ve had to deal with hostile forces before. None quite as hostile as this one, I’ll admit. But I’ll survive. Once I’ve cleared it out of here, I’m sure my hair will grow back. If not, I’ll just have to buy myself a toupee, won’t I?’
Rob said, ‘Don’t make light of this, Francis. Are you really sure you’re going to be able to manage it?’
Francis stared up at them, unblinking, with his colourless eyes. His expression was even more biblical than when Rob had first seen him.
‘I have to, Rob. It’s my destiny. Sometimes you’re confronted with things in your life and you realise that you have to deal with them. You don’t have a choice, because that’s what you were born for. I could leave here now and drive home and try to forget that I ever discovered the force that’s holding this house in its grip. But how could I ever forget it? If I don’t decontaminate Allhallows Hall tomorrow, I’d be guilty of criminal negligence – manslaughter, even – because I could have saved Ada and your brother and your little lad, but I would have been too much of a meregyon to try. Meregyon, that’s Cornish for sniveller.’
He stood up, leaning on his wand for support, and cautiously patted the side of his head to see if any more hair was going to fall out.
‘I may look weak but I have plenty of strength in me,’ he assured them. ‘I knew what I was getting into when I became a gleaner. There’s nothing Harry Potterish about wizardry, believe me. The dark forces you’re up against, and the things you have to do to send them back where they belong, like strangling a badger or turning a live hare inside
