‘It’s only me. I’m just making sure that you’re okay. Is your door locked?’
‘Hang on.’
Rob waited while Grace came to the door and tried the handle. ‘Yes, it is locked. I locked it myself last night before we went to bed, in case anybody else tried to get in. But where’s the key?’
‘Look down on the floor.’
‘Yes… it’s here. How did you know that? Have you got X-ray vision or something?’
‘No, the same thing happened to us. Didn’t you hear me? I was shouting and banging for ages.’
‘We were dead to the world, Rob. We were both exhausted and we’d had a bit of a smoke, to be truthful.’
She opened the door. Behind her, Portia was sitting up in bed with the quilt pulled up to her neck. The bedroom smelled of Chanel No 5 and stale skunk.
‘This house,’ she said. ‘I think we’ll have to leave today. We don’t want to abandon you, Rob, but I’m not sure that we can take any more.’
‘Can’t you at least wait until Francis has done his decontamination thing? He should be here about eleven. If it works… well, maybe this house won’t be haunted any more. Maybe we’ll get Timmy and Martin back, and Ada.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Yes. No. Who knows? But Francis seems to be sure that he’s worked out what’s possessing Allhallows, doesn’t he – this force or whatever it is, and how he’s going to get rid of it.’
‘All right, Rob,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll stay until then. But if he can’t get rid of it, we’ll have to go.’ She lowered her voice and added, ‘Portia might come across as tough, but she’s practically having a nervous breakdown. Especially since she had that nightmare about a man kissing her.’
‘I understand,’ said Rob, and looked over Grace’s shoulder to give Portia a wave and a smile, as if to reassure her that they weren’t talking about her. Portia gave him a half-hearted wave back.
*
When Francis arrived, lightning flickered over the distant village of Buckland Monachorum as if it had been specially arranged by God, or by the director of some Gothic horror film. It was five miles away to the south-west, although Rob counted at least ten before he heard the first bumbling of thunder.
Underneath the hood of his raincoat, Francis was wearing a beige woollen beanie. As he came in through the front door, he pointed at it and said, wryly, ‘Can you believe it, practically all of my hair had dropped out by the time I got home. I looked like a moulting guinea pig. What was left of it I shaved off. Now you wouldn’t be able to tell me apart from what’s-his-name from Star Trek, Captain Picard.’
He humped a large grey hard-shelled suitcase over the front step, and then wheeled it into the centre of the hallway, lining it up with the library door.
‘I have everything I need in there. Three dead cats, for a start.’
‘You what?’ said Rob. ‘Three dead cats? You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘I’m afraid not. They’re an essential part of the ritual. But don’t worry – I didn’t kill them myself. They were strays given to me by my friend the vet in Launceston, and they’d already been put down. It was either here or the crematorium, so they wouldn’t have known the difference.’
‘I see. What else have you brought?’
‘Druidic chanting beads, made of obsidian and moss agate and gold. An antique Celtic shield, with a pentagram embossed on it, and a sword to go with it, of about the same age. When I bought the sword, I was told that it had been used to decapitate baby dragons as soon as their heads appeared out of their mothers’ wombs. As you can imagine, I took that with a large pinch of salt, but all the same it carries a solar cross on its handle. That means that when it was forged it was invested with great natural power.’
He laid his suitcase down flat on the floor, and Rob could hear something clanking inside it.
‘I also have a copy of The Great Book of Lyre. Jonathan Lyre was a great twelfth-century wizard. His main claim to fame was exorcising Buckfast Abbey. It was haunted by scores of malevolent misty spirits that the Cistercian monks had been unable to exorcise themselves. His book contains the recitation that Raphael Hix adapted for Old Thorndon Hall. And of course I have herbs.’
‘And slugs?’ asked Grace, from halfway down the stairs.
Francis smiled and shucked off his raincoat, and Vicky hung it up for him. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘Quite a few slugs. With cloves stuck into them.’
It was then that Rob realised that the blanket he had taken from the witching room was no longer lying on the floor behind the umbrella stand.
‘Grace? Vicky? Did either of you move that blanket?’ he asked.
‘Not me,’ said Vicky, and Grace shivered and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t have touched that with a bargepole.’
‘Well, someone’s taken it. I couldn’t persuade any of the police dogs to come anywhere near it, so I was going to ask Sergeant Billings if he could send it to their forensic laboratory in Exeter.’
Francis crouched down and clicked his suitcase open.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me at all if your presences came down here and took that blanket back to their witching room. They may be invisible but they have enough energy to knock you over and kick you, so they must have more than enough strength to carry a blanket upstairs. I’ve come across several instances of unseen presences throwing pots and pans around the kitchen and tipping chairs over. Folks generally call them “poltergeists”, although that’s not what they really are.’
He lifted the circular iron shield out of the suitcase, and it was so heavy that he had to use both hands. It was battered and tarnished and Rob guessed it must be hundreds of years old.
‘Would you mind shifting that chair over here?’ Francis asked him. ‘Then I can
