‘Francis—’ said Rob.
Francis still had that bewildered look on his face, but then suddenly he stretched his mouth open wide and let out a harsh, horrifying shriek. The upper plate of his dentures dropped down onto his lower teeth, so that for a split second it looked as if he had two mouths. He flung up his arms and galloped with his legs and it was only then that Rob realised what was happening to him. The back of his beige beanie was rapidly being soaked in dark crimson blood and his shoulders seemed to be clamped hard against the wall.
‘Esus! Stop!’ he screamed. ‘Esus! I beg you!’ But with a complicated series of snaps and cracks like twigs breaking, his skull was pulled into the plaster, followed by his ribcage and his arms and his pelvis and his legs. Only his bones disappeared. His face was flattened into a grotesque, rubbery mask with two eyes bulging out of their sockets, and his entire skin slithered down like a flaccid sack into his tattered Aran sweater and his ripped-open corduroy trousers – a sack bulging with his lungs and his liver and his stomach and heaps of slippery intestines.
His body slid slowly to the floor and fell sideways, staring up at the ceiling with one boneless sleeve flopped across his chest like a bloody parody of a fallen scarecrow. All around the hallway, the white ghost slugs dropped off the wall and lay squirming.
The vibration drummed louder through the floorboards, and then died. There was another flash of lightning, but it was dim and more distant this time, and they didn’t hear an echoing boom of thunder for at least eleven seconds. After that, Allhallows Hall was deathly silent.
Katharine, mewling softly with shock, crept back into the drawing room, where she climbed onto the sofa and pressed a cushion against her face. Vicky and Grace and Portia stood staring at each other in terror and disbelief. They were too stunned to speak.
Rob approached Francis’s body. He felt numb, and he had no idea what to do next. There was no point in calling for an ambulance. But should he call the police? If he did, would they believe him? If he hadn’t seen Francis’s skeleton being pulled through that wall in front of his eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it himself. Yet the police would have no choice – they would have to believe it. No human being could conceivably have pulled all of Francis’s bones out of his body, including his skull. He had left a bloody silhouette on the plaster, both hands outstretched, like the rayograph of somebody caught in the flash of an A-bomb.
No, thought Rob, I have to call Detective Inspector Holley. Francis has been killed and enough of us have witnessed how it happened.
He stepped back from the bricked-up doorway. The force must be somewhere down there – down in the cellar – and that was presumably why it had been sealed. Although the vibrations had completely died away now, he was sure he could still feel some tangible energy emanating from behind that wall. It was the same scalp-prickling sensation he had when he was convinced that he was being watched, even though he couldn’t see anybody watching him.
Francis had spoken its name out loud, Esus, and that had woken it up. If nothing else, it had proved that he had correctly guessed which demonic force they were dealing with. But it had also proved that the spiritual decontamination that he had borrowed from Raphael Hix was nowhere near powerful enough to exorcise it – despite the clove-studded slugs and the holy water from the Druid’s Bowl and the herbs and the sword and the nine candles. Not even the three-headed cat had been enough to dismiss it.
Rob tried not to think the name Esus, in case the force could read his mind. He couldn’t imagine the agony that Francis must have suffered, having his skeleton ripped out of his body.
It was impossible to tell from his face, which had now collapsed so that his forehead sagged down over his nose with his eyeballs peering out from underneath it like a furtive animal.
Rob was about to turn around and say that he was going to call the police when he heard a thick, coarse, churning sound. Right in front of his eyes, the sleeve of Francis’s sweater was being dragged into the wall. It was simply disappearing, inch by inch, followed by his beanie and the empty skin that had once been his face and his neck. His intestines bulged up inside his sweater as if they were being slowly cranked into a mangle, but then with a sharp squishing noise they disappeared, too, followed by his trousers. One of his Oxford shoes tipped up, but it took only a few seconds before that vanished, and then there was nothing left of Francis at all.
Rob went slowly back to rejoin Vicky and Grace and Portia. Portia was nearly hysterical, shivering and biting her thumbnail. Vicky looked up at Rob in fear and bewilderment and said, ‘Now what? Now what are we going to do? How are we ever going to get Timmy back now?’
36
They all made their way into the drawing room, where Portia sat down on the sofa next to Katharine and hugged her, trying to calm both of them down. Vicky took a seat on Herbert’s throne while Grace went over to the painting of the hooded figures and stared at it as if she might be able to pick out which one of them had pulled Francis into the bricked-up cellar.
Rob paced up and down in front of the slowly collapsing fire,
