Rob dragged the mahogany chair into the middle of the hallway. It was too heavy to lift and it made a scraping sound on the floorboards that set all their teeth on edge.
Francis took out a compass and then he scraped the chair a few centimetres from side to side to make sure it was angled in the right direction. ‘Forgive me the noise, but I have to make sure it’s facing exactly due north.’
As soon as he was satisfied that it was positioned correctly, he reached into his suitcase again and brought out a large grey sheepskin. It was unwashed and greasy-looking, with thistles still tangled in it. He gave it a hard shake, and then draped it over the back and the seat of the chair.
‘See this? This is supposed to have been cut from one of the five grey wethers over at Sittaford Tor. One of the early gods turned them into granite to punish a shepherd who stole one of his neighbours’ sheep, but for one night only every spring they turn back into living sheep. If you’re lucky enough to catch them while they’re alive, you can shear off their wool. That’s the story, anyway.’
He placed the shield on top of the sheepskin, face down. Then he unscrewed the top of a glass bottle of water and splashed it into the shield as if it were a bowl. Into the water he emptied three white china jars of dried herbs – yarrow and camomile and wild tobacco. After he had done that, he picked up a turfing iron and stirred it thirteen times, murmuring to himself as he did so, ‘Tubu fis fri ibu, fis ibu anfis, fris brua uatha, ibu lithu,’ over and over.
Next he took out a Tupperware box and prised open the lid. It was crammed with slippery white ghost slugs, all writhing on top of each other. He had already pierced each one of them with at least ten cloves, and one by one he picked them out and stuck them to the oak panelling around the hallway, about a yard apart, just above the skirting board. They all started to creep vertically upwards, leaving silvery trails of slime up the walls.
Grace covered her eyes with her hand and said, ‘Oh my Lord. They’re disgusting. I’ve never seen white slugs before.’
‘Well, white ghost slugs are comparatively rare, so that doesn’t surprise me,’ said Francis. ‘They don’t have eyes, because they live so deep underground that they don’t need to be able to see, and their heads and their breathing holes are both at the same end of their bodies. They’re carnivorous, too, unlike most other slugs. They feed on earthworms mainly, biting them with a single tooth. But if you stud them with cloves, they can disinfect a room of almost any pre-Christian demon you care to mention.’
Grace peered at them through her parted fingers. ‘They’re horrible. They make me feel sick. And aren’t they in pain, with all those cloves stuck in them?’
‘I don’t know. They may be. But I don’t know of any other way to isolate the force that we’re up against here, and if we don’t isolate it, we won’t have any realistic chance of dismissing it.’
Now Francis took out The Great Book of Lyre, a thick leather-bound volume with roughly trimmed pages. He opened it to a page that he had already bookmarked, and laid it flat on the floor in front of the chair. Then he bent over the suitcase and lifted out a large brindled cat.
Even Rob said, ‘Bloody hell, Francis!’ The cat not only had a heavy, drooping body, with its legs dangling down, but it had three heads crowded together on its neck, all with their yellow eyes staring sightlessly at nothing at all.
‘My friend the vet did this fancy bit of needlework for me,’ said Francis. ‘He took some persuading, I have to admit, but he owed me a considerable favour. These cats, they’re the very core of this ritual. You can call it a spell, if you like, the legendary rule of three, rather than a ritual, because it goes way back to the days when Dartmoor was Druid, and probably way before that.
‘It’s even mentioned in Shakespeare, would you believe? It’s in Macbeth, when the witches are stirring up their brew. “Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d…” What many scholars today don’t realise is that Shakespeare wasn’t saying the cat had let out one mew after another. He was saying that it had mewed three times all at once, simultaneous-like, and it could do that because it had three heads.’
‘My God,’ said Katharine. ‘My friends are never going to believe this, when I tell them. If I ever do have the nerve to tell them.’
‘Is there anything you want us to do?’ asked Vicky.
‘No, my dear, nothing – except to stand behind me and give me your moral support. Hopefully, once I’ve started reciting the ritual, you’ll be able to feel the force rising out of the house. Once you can feel that, try to concentrate your minds on expelling it – out of the floors, out of the walls, out of the door and away across the moor. Your mental hostility to it will be a great help to me in hurrying its dismissal.’
Francis took nine large tallow candles out of his suitcase, fixed them into silver candleholders and arranged them in a circle around his makeshift altar. He lit them all and let them burn for a while, holding the sword in his right hand and the Druidic chanting beads in his left. Rob and Vicky and Grace and Portia gathered close behind him, although Katharine kept herself well back in the drawing-room doorway, her arms protectively crossed over her chest, almost hugging herself. She was frowning as if she were sure that something catastrophic was going to happen.
‘I’m making sure that the candles burn down a little – not like that match I
