Page 28 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
6
Tall, Dark and Cadaverous
Cass Leigh’s novels form the sludge at the bottom of a very murky pond indeed…
Guardian
It was a March night so cold that I walked in an ectoplasmic cloud of my own breath and everything, including me, was crispy-crunch-coated with frost. Even the circle of light from my big rubber torch just hung in the air like a yellow reptilian eye.
There was a reasonablemoon, but lots of grubby-looking rubber bone-shaped clouds kept writhing about in front of it.
I was wrapped in the ankle-length purple velvet cloak again, not for effect, but simply because of its warm quilted lining. Perhaps it was a trifle over the top for a nocturnal ramble, but definitely in keeping with a night in Spook Hall.
The whole ambience of the night was right for inspiration asI let myself in through the unlocked front gate, pondering subplots involving a vampire full of ancient wisdom, demonic energy, and twisted logic.
…something called to Keturah, compelling her reluctant feet to follow the gravelled drive to where the dark shape of the old house squatted among its dank weeds like a drowned widow…
He would live, my vampire (if vampires can be said to live?),in a wing of the old house, a dark family secret passed from generation to generation.
I felt strangely excited as I neared the house, though it was not the first time by any means that I’d spent the night hours in a deserted mansion, even if itwasone I’d been trying to get into for years and rumoured to be the most haunted in Britain. (But then, aren’t they all?)
Perhaps even now the shadeof Miss Kedge was watching me pick my way up the overgrown drive while rubbing her transparent little hands together with anticipatory glee. There were reputedly so many ghosts up there that the drive might be the only place where there was room for her to stand.
Jack told all the old ghost stories down at the pub, but most of them I’d already read in old books on the subject, especiallyKedgeHall – The Haunted Manor.You’d expect Jack to be immune to all that superstition too, since his family had been servants there for centuries, but the lodge had been dark as I passed, so he must have been abed rather than doing a midnight round of the property, braving the spirit world. Or just too lazy, now that there was no one to check up on him?
Emerging into the gravelled circle before thelow, half-timbered manor house I consulted the map, then followed the path round the side, through an unlocked gate set in a little archway, and into the courtyard beyond.
This bit was new to me, though once years ago I’d seen the front of the house, the single time the rose garden was opened to the public in aid of some charity Miss Kedge favoured. Retirement homes for knitted tea-cosies, orsomething.
The kitchen door was half-shadowed by encroaching stems of wisteria, and after fumbling for several minutes to insert the key with cold, gloved fingers, I discovered that it was unlocked.
Some caretaker! I could probably just have walked up here any night during the last year, without the wasted time or expense of working on Jack.
Still, I was in. Casting my torch beam around thekitchen I observed with some surprise that the seventeenth-century room had been done out in Ye Olde Worlde style, but with all mod cons and every piece of kitchen gadgetry known to woman. Reclusive Miss Kedge might have been, but clearly she liked her comforts and could afford to indulge herself.
The light switches didn’t work, so the electricity supply must have been disconnected. I wishedI’d brought a bigger torch, especially after I’d opened the doors to a larder and two sculleries (scarily dark-cupboard-like) before finally finding one that opened on to a promising corridor.
The heavy, expectant dark silence awaited me, so I followed my torch beam along the flags until something groaned deep within the stone wall under my groping hand, and I dropped the thing.
It bounced oncewith a faint tinkling, then went out. So much for unbreakable rubber-cased torches, I thought, berating myself for a clumsy idiot, because all old houses moan and creak with every small change in the temperature, and if walls groan it’s usually because there are dodgy water pipes in them.
Then as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized that it wasn’t after all total: a faint light outlinedthe edge of a partly opened door ahead of me.
I groped my way along the (now mercifully silent) wall, and emerged warily into the great dark maw of a hall, where the flickering stub of a candle set on a Sèvres saucer had been left on a dusty refectory table.
‘Jack?’ I called softly, but answer came there none, unless you count the creaking of the floorboards somewhere aboveme, which surelymust be the maligned caretaker come to make his last evening rounds. Hence the unlocked door, of course: I’d simply arrived before he’d expected me to, but I had wanted to get here before midnight when allegedly all the fun starts.
Who would have thought Jack was this conscientious? What a creature of surprises he was turning out to be!
Still, now my torch was broken the candle was handy, andJack might even have a supply on him that I could borrow. Picking the saucer up, I climbed the stairs and found myself standing in a long, dark gallery that seemed to run endlessly away from me in both directions, the windows down one side making barely lighter rectangles.
It wasjustlike my recurring nightmare, except there was no menacing door awaiting me at one end. (Or if there was, I couldn’tsee it.)
Then a distant light slowly began to grow, and a giant shadow moved with unnerving stealth across the wall: someone was coming.
‘Jack?’ I hissed.
Why was I whispering? Did I think the ghosts might wake up if I yelled? And why was Jack’s shadow so much more imposing than his small and wiry self?
