‘It’s too late. Stay here. Wait.’
Rob stayed where he was, staring at the small ragged heap that was all that was left of Father Salter. He was trembling with anger and guilt, but he accepted Vicky’s intuition. She had sensed several times before when something bad was about to happen to them, or that somebody they had met was not to be trusted.
Portia and Katharine were sitting on the sofa together, wide-eyed, silent and shocked. Grace said, ‘What are we going to do now, Rob? It looks like nothing is going to get rid of it. I mean – if even God can’t get rid of it—’
It was then that they saw Father Salter’s remains stirring as if they still had life in them – his shredded clothes and his ripped-up lumps of flesh and his piles of intestines. They began to slide across the polished oak floorboards, heading towards the cellar doorway. To begin with they left behind them a shining slug-like trail of blood and mucus, but as they neared the wall this trail rapidly dried up, leaving no trace.
When his remains reached the wall, they slid straight into the plaster, and disappeared, exactly in the same way that Francis had been absorbed. Apart from his open briefcase, there was nothing in the hallway now to show that Father Salter had ever been there.
‘This is a nightmare,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll have to call the police now, won’t we?’
‘What’s the point?’ said Rob. ‘If two exorcists can’t get rid of this demon, what can the police possibly do? Arrest it?’
‘But that’s two people dead, Rob.’
‘Yes, and if this demon didn’t have our Timmy trapped I would call the police. Then I’d walk out of this house and I’d never come back. But we’re almost one hundred per cent certain that Timmy’s here, and we’re equally sure that Martin’s here, too, and Ada.’
‘So what are we going to do?’
‘Somebody has to clear him out of this house, somehow, and it looks like the only person left to do that is me.’
38
Rob poured himself a glass of his father’s Jameson’s whiskey and phoned John Kipling.
He stood by the library window with books scattered on the floor all around him, looking out over the kitchen garden. It was still raining, but in curtains of fine drizzle.
Vicky sat at the table listening to him. She had tied up her hair and in her ankle-length coffee-coloured dress she looked more like the Lady of Shalott than ever.
‘John? It’s Rob. Rob Russell. I’ve got some really bad news, I’m afraid.’
Haltingly, Rob told John how Father Salter had attempted to dismiss the force that they believed to be secreted in the cellar, and how it had ripped him into a fountain of bones.
John said, ‘Oh, Jesus. That’s terrible. That’s just terrible. What are you going to do now?’
‘I don’t see that I have any choice, John. I’ll have to try and get rid of the damned thing myself. What other chance do I have of getting our little Timmy back? And our Martin? And Ada?’
‘Rob – do you have any idea what you’re up against? He may be walled up in your cellar but he’s still on his home ground, and that makes him more powerful around here than any other presence you could think of, and that includes Old Dewer.’
‘John, Vicky and I have been hit and kicked and bitten by dogs that jumped out of a stained-glass window. Of course I know what I’m up against, and that’s the whole reason I’m calling you. Father Salter told me that he’d talked to you about this presence, whatever you call it. I’m wondering if you know anything at all about it that could help me. Anything.’
‘I’m not entirely sure, but I might. Yesterday I was searching through some old parish records from Sampford Spiney, going right back to the late sixteenth century. They’re all stored online these days, which makes it a whole lot easier. It seems that in June 1695 the parish priest of St Mary’s was visited by one Matthew Carver from London, who said that he was – here, I’ve noted this down – “a remover by royal appointment of sundrie supernatural abominations”.’
‘What’s that? A jobbing exorcist?’
‘It sounds like it, doesn’t it? Apparently he had been paid by the Crown to purge some of the navy’s ships in Plymouth harbour of evil spirits. Their crews had been going down “with all manners of the foulest pox” and suffering any number of fatal accidents, like falling out of the rigging or getting themselves impaled by anchors. The suspicion was that they had been infected with these evil spirits by the French, sometime during the Nine Years’ War.’
‘So what was he doing in Sampford Spiney, this “remover of abominations”?’
‘The parish priest recorded that Matthew Carver was a guest of the Wilmingtons at Allhallows Hall. He said that they had hired him to track down and remove the malevolent spirit called Old Dewer by some locals, but known also by other names, such as the Flute Player or the Fluter. He said that the Wilmingtons wanted this spirit exorcised because he had been randomly slaughtering their sheep and blighting their crops.’
Rob said, ‘Wait a minute – Matthew Carver – that name rings a bell. There’s a gravestone with that name on it in St Mary’s churchyard. There’s a Latin inscription on it, too, something about time standing still.’
‘Listen, Rob, I don’t want to jump to any erroneous conclusions,’ John told him. ‘What you’re proposing to do – it’s mind-blowingly dangerous, I mean it, and you could get yourself killed, like poor old Francis and Father Salter. But my first thought when I read about Matthew Carver was that the Wilmingtons didn’t call him in to chase the Fluter away. Instead they’d asked him to catch him, or it, so that they could use its power to turn Nicholas
