He opened the front door and crossed the courtyard to the larger of the granite barns, kicking aside a lump of stone from the shattered cherub. The rain was little more than a fine mist now, and he hoped that it would be enough to put the Fluter into a panic. That was always supposing that he really was hydrophobic, and that his fear of water wasn’t just an old dummons’ tale.
Forcing open the collapsed barn door, he went inside and crossed over to the gardening tools that he had seen when he was looking for Timmy. There was a shovel, a pitchfork, a pair of shears, two rakes and a sorry-looking broom with hardly any bristles, but what he was after was the pick. He walked back to the house with it, hefting it from one hand to the other, like a Viking warrior pumping himself up to meet his enemy with his battleaxe.
Back in the hallway, he stood in front of the sealed-up cellar, his eyes closed, his head bowed, trying to detect any vibration or any sensation that the force was aware he was there, and what he had in mind. After all, hadn’t Father Salter said that it was so sensitive to its surroundings that it could hear a twig snap, even while it was imprisoned here in the cellar of Allhallows Hall?
The drawing-room door opened a few inches and Vicky called out softly, ‘Rob?’
‘I’m okay. Close the door, darling. Please.’
‘No. Here, look. Take this. Just in case.’
He walked back to the door and saw that she was holding out a ten-inch carving knife from the kitchen. He hesitated, but then he took it, and said, ‘Thanks. With any luck, I won’t need it.’
She gave him a sad smile and then closed the door. He tucked the carving knife into his belt and went back to the sealed-up cellar.
He paused, took a deep breath, and then he almost ran towards the wall, holding the pickaxe high over his head. Using the silhouette of Francis’s head as a target, he smashed it into the plaster. A lump the size of a breadboard clumped onto the floor, exposing the rough yellowish bricks underneath.
From inside the cellar, he heard a hoarse, grating groan, more like the cry of an agonised sea creature than the cry he would have expected from a malevolent spirit. The floorboards began to shudder underneath his trainers and a prickly wave of static came flying out of the wall. He felt as if he were facing into a blizzard of very fine sand.
He narrowed his eyes. You’re in there, you bastard, and no matter what you do, I’m coming in to get you.
He struck the wall again and again until his shoulder muscles began to hurt. Most of the plaster dropped off easily, because it was mixed with horsehair, and the mortar between the bricks was not only old and crumbled but had clearly been slapped on by somebody in a hurry.
He knocked out two bricks, and then another three, and once their support had gone, almost all of the bricks underneath the header collapsed. He knocked them into the darkness with the point of his pickaxe, and he could hear them rattling and bouncing down the cellar steps. The remaining bricks stood knee-high and he kicked at them three or four times until they fell over.
The groaning had stopped, but the vibration and the prickly feeling of static in the air continued. He tugged the flashlight out of his inside pocket and pointed it into the cellar. He could see dusty brown cobwebs drooping down from the ceiling and he wondered how long they had been there. How had spiders managed to crawl in here, once it had been bricked up? Maybe those cobwebs were hundreds of years old.
He climbed over the broken bricks and started to make his way down the cellar steps, kicking aside more bricks as he went. When he breathed in, the air in the cellar smelled stale and dusty, but he could smell something else, too, something deeply unpleasant, like a chicken breast turned green.
The floor beneath his feet was littered with human bones, scores of them, and tattered clothes, and the clothes were stuck together with putrescent black slime. He saw at least five skulls, so Francis and Father Salter had not been the first to be pulled through the wall.
He pointed the flashlight upwards, and he could see the huge oak joists that supported the floor above him. They were all thick with woolly spiderwebs, and in some of the webs he could see the transparent skeletons of long-dead spiders.
The left wall of the cellar was lined to the ceiling with shelves. They were crowded with a collection of old wine bottles, all of them empty. Presumably the Wilmingtons had taken all their wine upstairs before the cellar was bricked up, and stored it in the larder.
Seven or eight large picture frames of tarnished gilt were leaning against the right wall, and standing guard beside them was a mangy stuffed fox with green glass eyes and a semicircular cobweb connecting its nose to its front feet.
Most of the cellar, though, was taken up with a massive tent-like structure of brown tarpaulin. This was suspended from the ceiling with an elaborate array of iron hooks and a cat’s cradle of greasy ropes, and pinned to the floor with rusted iron stakes driven at yard-wide intervals into the hem all around it.
Rob carefully picked his way between the bones and shone his flashlight at the tarpaulin. It was completely opaque, and so he could see nothing inside it, although the rotten-chicken smell grew even more pungent as he approached it. The smell clung to his sinuses and he could taste it on
