Familiar and Haunting

  After the last stroke of midnight, there was silence, but Kevin still stood waiting and listening. A car or truck passed the entrance of the school drive; he heard it distinctly, yet it was oddly faint, too. He couldn’t place the oddness of it. It had sounded much further away than it should have done—less really there.

  He gripped the bottle and went on listening, as if for some particular sound. The minutes passed. The same dog barked at the same dog, bark and reply—far, unreally far away. The little owl called; from another world it might have been.

  He was gripping the bottle so tightly now that his hand was sweating. He felt his skin begin to prickle with sweat at the back of his neck and under his arms.

  Then there was a whistle from across the fields, distantly. It should have been an unexpected sound, just after midnight, but it did not starde him. It did set him off across the playground, however. Too late he wanted to get away. He had to go past the jungle gym, whose cagework of shadows now stretched more largely than the frame itself. He saw the bars of shadow as he approached; he actually hesitated, and then, like a fool, he stepped inside the cage of shadows.

  Ned Challis, on his bicycle, had reached the junction of the by road with the road that, in one direction, led to the village. In the other it led deeper into the country. Which way? He dismounted. He had to choose the right way—to follow Kevin.

  Thinking of Whistlers’ Hill, he turned the front wheel of his bicycle away from the village and set off again. But now, with his back to the village, going away from the village, he felt a kind of weariness and despair. A memory of childhood came into his mind: a game he had played in childhood, something hidden for him to find, and if he turned in the wrong direction to search, all the voices whispered to him, “Cold—cold!” Now, with the village receding behind him, he recognized what he felt: cold … cold …

  Without getting off his bicycle, he wheeled round and began to pedal hard in the direction of the village.

  In the playground there was no pressing hurry for Kevin anymore. He did not press against the bars of his cage to get out. Even when clouds cut off the moonlight and the shadows melted into general darkness, even when the shadow cage was no longer visible to the eye, he stood there, then crouched there, in a corner of the cage, as befitted a prisoner.

  The church clock struck the quarter.

  The whistlers were in no hurry. The first whistle had come from right across the fields. Then there was a long pause. Then the sound was repeated, equally distantly, from the direction of the river bridges. Later still, another whistle from the direction of the railway line or somewhere near it.

  He lay in his cage, cramped by the bars, listening. He did not know he was thinking, but suddenly it came to him: Whistlers’ Hill. He and Lisa and the others had always supposed that the hill had belonged to a family called Whistler, as Challises’ house belonged to the Challis family. But that was not how the hill had got its name; he saw that now. No, indeed not.

  Whisder answered whistler at long intervals, like the sentries of a besieging army. There was no moving in as yet.

  The church clock had struck the quarter as Ned Challis entered the village and cycled past the entrance to the school. He cycled as far as the recreation ground, perhaps because that was where Kevin would have gone in the daytime. He cycled bumpily around the ground: no Kevin.

  He began to cycle back the way he had come, as though he had given up altogether and were going home. He cycled slowly. He passed the entrance to the school again.

  In this direction he was leaving the village. He was cycling so slowly that the front wheel of his bicycle wobbled desperately; the light from his dynamo was dim. He put a foot down and stopped. Motionless, he listened. There was nothing to hear, unless—yes, the faintest ghost of a sound, high-pitched, prolonged for seconds, remote as from another world. Like a coward—and Ned Challis was no coward—he tried to persuade himself that he had imagined the sound, yet he knew he had not. It came from another direction now: very faint, yet penetrating, so that his skin crinkled to hear it. Again it came, from yet another quarter.

  He wheeled his bicycle back to the entrance to the school and left it there. He knew he must be very close. He walked up to the playground gate and peered over it. But the moon was obscured by cloud; he could see nothing. He listened, waited for the moon to sail free.

  In the playground Kevin had managed to get up, first on his hands and knees, then upright. He was very much afraid, but he had to be standing to meet whatever it was.

  For the whistlers had begun to close in slowly, surely, converging on the school, on the school playground, on the cage of shadows. On him.

  For some time now cloud masses had obscured the moon. So he could see nothing, but he felt the whistlers’ presence. Their signals came more often, and always closer. Closer. Very close.

  Suddenly the moon sailed free.

  In the sudden moonlight Ned Challis saw clear across the playground to where Kevin stood against the jungle gym, with his hands writhing together in front of him.

  In the sudden moonlight Kevin did not see his uncle. Between him and the playground gate, and all round him, air was thickening into darkness. Frantically he tried to undo his fingers, which held the little bottle, so that he could throw it from him. But he could not. He held the bottle; the bottle held him.

  The darkness was closing in on him. The darkness was about to take him, had surely got him.

  Kevin shrieked.

  Ned Challis shouted, “I’m here!” and was over the gate and across the playground and with his arms around the boy. “I’ve got you.”

  There was a tinkle as something fell from between Kevin’s opened fingers; the little bottle fell and rolled to the middle of the playground. It lay there, very insignificant-looking.

  Kevin was whimpering and shaking, but he could move of his own accord. Ned Challis helped him over the gate and to the bicycle.

  “Do you think you could sit on the bar, Kev? Could you manage that?”

  “Yes.” He could barely speak.

  Ned Challis hesitated, thinking of the bottle, which had chosen to come to rest in the very center of the playground, where the first child tomorrow would see it, pick it up.

  He went back and picked the bottle up. Wherever he threw it, someone might find it. He might smash it and grind the pieces underfoot, but he was not sure he dared to do that.

  Anyway, he was not going to hold it in his hand longer than he strictly must. He put it into his pocket, and then, when he got back to Kevin and the bicycle, he slipped it into the saddlebag.

  He rode Kevin home on the crossbar of his bicycle. At the Challises’ front gate Mrs. Challis was waiting, with the dog for company. She just said: “He all right then?”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ll make a cup of tea while you take him home.”

  At his own front door, Kevin said, “I left the door on the latch. I can get in. I’m all right. I’d rather—I’d rather—”

  “Less spoken of, the better,” said his uncle. “You go to bed. Nothing to be afraid of now.”

  He waited until Kevin was inside the house and he heard the latch click into place. Then he rode back to his wife, his cup of tea, and consideration of the problem that lay in his saddlebag.

  After he had told his wife everything, and they had discussed possibilities, Ned Challis said thoughtfully, “I might take it to the museum, after all. Safest place for it would be inside a glass case there.”

  “But you said they wouldn’t want it.”

  “Perhaps they would, if I told them where I found it and a bit-only a bit—about Burnt House. …”

  “You do that, then.”

  Ned Challis stood up and yawned with a finality that said bed.

  “But don’t you go thinking you’ve solved all your problems by taking that bottle to Castleford, Ned. Not by a long chalk.”

  “No?”

  “Lisa. She reckons she owns that bottle.”

 
“I’ll deal with Lisa.tomorrow.”

  “Today, by the clock.”

  Ned Challis gave a groan that turned into another yawn. “Bed first,” he said, “then Lisa.” They went to bed not long before the dawn.

  The next day and for days after that, Lisa was furiously angry with her father. He had as good as stolen her bottle, she said, and now he refused to give it back, to let her see it, even to tell her what he had done with it. She was less angry with Kevin. (She did not know, of course, the circumstances of the bottle’s passing from Kevin to her father.)

  Kevin kept out of Lisa’s way and even more carefully kept out of his uncle’s. He wanted no private conversation.

  One Saturday Kevin was having tea at the Challises’, because he had been particularly invited. He sat with Lisa and Mrs. Challis. Ned had gone to Castleford and came in late. He joined them at the tea table in evident good spirits. From his pocket he brought out a small cardboard box, which he placed in the center of the table, by the Saturday cake. His wife was staring at him; before he spoke, he gave her the slightest nod of reassurance. “The museum didn’t want to keep that little old glass bottle, after all,” he said.

  Both the children gave a cry. Kevin started up with such a violent backward movement that his chair clattered to the floor behind him; Lisa leaned forward, her fingers clawing toward the box.

  “No!” Ned Challis said. To Lisa he added: “There it stays, girl, till J say.” To Kevin: “Calm down. Sit up at the table again and listen to me.” Kevin picked his chair up and sat down again, resting his elbows on the table, so that his hands supported his head.

  “Now,” said Ned Challis, “you two know so much that it’s probably better you should know more. That little old bottle came from Whistlers’ Hill, below Burnt House—well, you know that. Burnt House is only a ruin now, elder bushes growing inside as well as out, but once it was a cottage that someone lived in. Your mother’s granny remembered the last one to live there.”

  “No, Ned,” said Mrs. Challis, “it was my great-granny remembered.”

  “Anyway,” said Ned Challis, “it was so long ago that Victoria was the queen, that’s certain. And an old woman lived alone in that cottage. There were stories about her.”

  “Was she a witch?” breathed Lisa.

  “So they said. They said she went out on the hillside at night—”

  “At the full of the moon,” said Mrs. Challis.

  “They said she dug up roots and searched out plants and toadstools and things. They said she caught rats and toads and even bats. They said she made ointments and powders and weird brews. And they said she used what she made to cast spells and call up spirits.”

  “Spirits from hell, my great-granny said. Real bad uns.”

  “So people said, in the village. Only the parson scoffed at the whole idea. Said he’d called often and been shown over the cottage and seen nothing out of the ordinary—none of the jars and bottles of stuff that she was supposed to have for her witchcraft. He said she was just a poor cranky old woman; that was all.

  “Well, she grew older and older and crankier and crankier, and one day she died. Her body lay in its coffin in the cottage, and the parson was going to bury her next day in the churchyard.

  “The night before she was to have been buried, someone went up from the village—”

  “Someone!” said Mrs. Challis scornfully. “Tell them the whole truth, Ned, if you’re telling the story at all. Half the village went up, with lanterns—men, women, and children. Go on, Ned.”

  “The cottage was thatched, and they began to pull swatches of straw away and take it into the cottage and strew it round and heap it up under the coffin. They were going to fire it all.

  “They were pulling the straw on the downhill side of the cottage when suddenly a great piece of thatch came away and out came tumbling a whole lot of things that the old woman must have kept hidden there. People did hide things in thatches, in those days.”

  “Her savings?” asked Lisa.

  “No. A lot of jars and little bottles, all stoppered or sealed, neat and nice. With stuff inside.”

  There was a silence at the tea table. Then Lisa said, “That proved it: she was a witch.”

  “Well, no, it only proved she thought she was a witch. That was what the parson said afterward—and whew! Was he mad when he knew about that night.”

  Mrs. Challis said, “He gave it ‘em red-hot from the pulpit the next Sunday. He said that once upon a time poor old deluded creatures like her had been burnt alive for no reason at all, and the village ought to be ashamed of having burnt her dead.”

  Lisa went back to the story of the night itself. “What did they do with what came out of the thatch?”

  “Bundled it inside the cottage among the straw and fired it all. The cottage burnt like a beacon that night, they say. Before cockcrow, everything had been burnt to ashes. That’s the end of the story.”

  “Except for my little bottle,” said Lisa. “That came out of the thatch, but it didn’t get picked up. It rolled downhill, or someone kicked it.”

  “That’s about it,” Ned agreed.

  Lisa stretched her hand again to the cardboard box, and this time he did not prevent her. But he said, “Don’t be surprised, Lisa. It’s different.”

  She paused. “A different bottle?”

  “The same bottle, but—well, you’ll see.”

  Lisa opened the box, lifted the packaging of cotton wool, took the bottle out. It was the same bottle, but the stopper had gone, and it was empty and clean—so clean that it shone greenly. Innocence shone from it.

  “You said the stopper would never come out,” Lisa said slowly.

  “They forced it by suction. The museum chap wanted to know what was inside, so he got the hospital lab to take a look; he has a friend there. It was easy for them.”

  Mrs. Challis said, “That would make a pretty vase, Lisa. For tiny flowers.” She coaxed Lisa to go out to pick a posy from the garden; she herself took the bottle away to fill it with water.

  Ned Challis and Kevin faced each other across the table.

  Kevin said, “What was in it?”

  Ned Challis said, “A trace of this, a trace of that, the hospital said. One thing more than anything else.”

  “Yes.”

  “Blood. Human blood.”

  Lisa came back with her flowers; Mrs. Challis came back with the bottle filled with water. When the flowers had been put in, it looked a pretty thing.

  “My witch bottle,” said Lisa contentedly. “What was she called—the old woman that thought she was a witch?”

  Her father shook his head; her mother thought. “Madge—or was it Maggy?”

  “Maggy Whistler’s bottle, then,” said Lisa.

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Challis. “She was Maggy—or Madge—Dawson. I remember my granny saying so. Dawson.”

  “Then why’s it called Whistlers’ Hill?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Mrs. Challis uneasily. “I mean, I don’t think anyone knows for certain.”

  But Ned Challis, looking at Kevin’s face, knew that he knew for certain.

  Miss Mountain

  Whatever else might be spring-cleaned in Grandmother’s house, it was never her storeroom. Old Mrs. Robinson lived in a house with only two rooms upstairs, besides the bathroom. One was her bedroom; the other, the storeroom. This room fascinated her grandchildren, Daisy and Jim. It was about eight feet by six and so full of stuff that even to open the door properly was difficult. If you forced it open enough to poke your head round, you saw a positive mountain of things reaching almost to the ceiling: old suitcases, bulging cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes, stringed-up parcels of magazines, cascades of old curtains, and a worm-eaten chair or two.

  Grandmother was teased about the state of her storeroom. She retorted with spirit, “There isn’t as much stuff as there seems to be, because it’s all piled up on the spare bed. The room’s really a guest room. I’m only waiting for a bit of t
ime to clear it.”

  Then everybody would laugh: Daisy and Jim and their father, who was Grandmother’s son, and their mother, who was her daughter-in-law. Grandmother would join in the laughter. She always laughed a lot, even at herself.

  If they went on to suggest lending a hand in the clearing of the storeroom, Grandmother stopped laughing to say, “I’d rather do it myself, thank you, when I have a bit of time.” But she never seemed to have that bit.

  She was the nicest of grandmothers: rosy to look at, and plump, and somehow cozy. She liked to spoil her grandchildren. Daisy and Jim lived only just round the corner from Grandmother’s little house, so they were always calling on her, and she on them.

  Then suddenly everything was going to change.

  The children’s father got another job that would mean the whole family’s moving out of the district, leaving Grandmother behind.

  “Goodness me!” Grandmother said, cheerful about most things. “It isn’t the end of the world! I can come and visit you for the day.”

  “Not just for the day,” said young Mrs. Robinson, who was very fond of her mother-in-law. “You must come and stay—often.”

  “And the children shall come and stay with me,” Grandmother said.

  “Where shall we sleep?” Jim asked.

  “You’ll have to clear the guest room,” Daisy said.

  “Yes, of course,” said her grandmother, but for a moment looked as if she had not quite foreseen that and regretted the whole idea. But really the clearing out of the storeroom ought to have been done years and years ago.

  Grandmother said that she preferred to do all the work herself, but everyone insisted that it would be too much for her. In the end she agreed to let Daisy and Jim help her. Perhaps she thought they would be easier to manage than their parents.

  How much the storeroom held was amazing, and everything had to be brought out and sorted carefully. A lot went straight into the trash; some things—such as the bundles of magazines and the curtaining—went to the church hall for the next rummage sale; the chairs went onto the bonfire. Grandmother went through all the suitcases and got rid of everything; the suitcases themselves were only fit for rummage. The cardboard boxes, Grandmother said, were going to be more difficult, so for the moment they were piled up in a corner of her bedroom.