Something Wicked This Way Comes Read online

  “Well, I’ll sign over the keys to you now, but there are a few bits of paperwork which will need your involvement since you’re on-site. The rest is being handled by the charity’s solicitor, but everything in Vainguard belongs to Becky’s now, so someone will need to go through and check for any valuable assets.”

  I nodded, but I was getting to the point where I couldn’t take much more in. “Email me, please.”

  “Sure. We’ll set up times for you to come into the office for the paperwork.”

  “Thank you.” I took a slow breath, counting to myself until I was calm. “Well, I’m going to be here more than a few days, obviously. Don’t suppose you know where I could get lunch?”

  “A decent one? Carlisle.”

  “Seriously?” Right now, a One Stop and a cold Cornish pasty would do me.

  “Or Hawick. There’s a pub and a tea shop and a little Spar in Newcastleton as well, I think, but nothing decent nearer.”

  “Bloody hell. I’ll never get any teachers to move here.”

  He cracked up, and I laughed with him.

  LATER, I drove over the border towards the village of Newcastleton, four miles to the northwest. That haunting sense of unease I had shrugged off on the roof returned to me as I drove. The hairs rose on the back of my neck, and I was glad to arrive in the little village. It was pleasant, just touristy enough for a hotel and a couple of teashops.

  I bought myself a sandwich and went to sit by the war memorial, under the blue-and-white saltire flag. Familiar names leapt out at me from the plaque below the statue of a soldier in a tam-o’-shanter: Armstrongs, Elliots, Forsters, Scotts. Had Martyn Armstrong and his brother come from this area originally, or was it a coincidence?

  I couldn’t go and book into my guesthouse until three, so I took my time, enjoying the sunshine. It was a pretty little place, one long street of grey-and-white houses, a handful of short side roads with a green behind them running down to the Liddel Water, and hills rising up on either side. I wondered why it even existed and why there was no castle despite the name. Had there been some lonely Roman frontier fort here—a small castrum within its wall to leave a ghost of its name haunting the village?

  Then, as I wandered back towards my car, I spotted the road sign for Hermitage Castle.

  Not Romans, then, but simply an old castle town somewhere nearby. I dismissed my romantic notions. Here was something slightly more recent to distract me.

  My phone had no signal, but I dug out my road atlas and squinted at the map until I found it. It looked about fifteen minutes’ drive away.

  Well, that would kill an hour or two.

  The main road was busy—this was the height of tourist season even in a backwater like this, and by the time I made it to the turning for Hermitage, I had figured out the basic etiquette of passing places and why you didn’t want to miss one and have to reverse back to it when confronted with a timber lorry.

  The lane itself was narrow and the castle a shock. I had been expecting a bit of crumbled tower and walls, but Hermitage was a block, almost windowless, that squatted on the landscape like a challenge. I wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be reassuring or intimidating.

  Approaching it, I was again overwhelmed by that sick sense of déjà vu.

  I had been here before. I found myself anticipating each earthwork and step, each slant of the shadows and rise of the ground. I knew this place, though I had no memory of ever coming here.

  It couldn’t have been a childhood holiday. Felix had a penchant for Cornwall, as he liked to put it, and my dim memories of holidays with my parents were all of camping on flower-strewn, rocky Scottish coastlines and odd images of Christmas trees in bustling old cities.

  Could we have passed here on the way back from one of those trips?

  Cold sweat suddenly slicked my spine, and the world retreated a step, going quiet and distant. I drove my fingernails into my palm again, over the earlier marks, and pushed the thought away—focused on staying in this place, this moment, rather than chasing the puzzle.

  It was hard. Twice in one day was a bad sign. I’d spent years perfecting my calm. I didn’t want this and had no intention of giving in to it.

  I made my way through the small keep, up steps and down, doggedly reading every page in the guidebook. At first, I was merely noting dates and features—the comforting blur of medieval naves and staircases and post holes that bulks out every glossy tourist guide. But slowly, as my own fears retreated, the dark history of this place came into focus.

  It had been possessed by reivers and border wardens, the stone heart of one of the bloodiest regions of the Borders, where every household armed itself against the constant threat of raids both over and along the border. The raids had been violent and cruel, but the darkness did not stop there.

  The castle had passed through English and Scottish hands, from family to family as lord after lord fell to treachery—his own or others—or war. No one had been immune to the patterns of betrayal and slaughter. In 1320 the lord of the time, a chancer who had switched his loyalties from English to Scottish and back again, had been stripped of his title for attempted regicide and suspected witchcraft. A bland little note in my guidebook explained that later legends had claimed that this wicked Lord de Soulis had consorted with demonic spirits and slaughtered children, including the daughter of the Elliot clan chief of the time, before being boiled alive in lead by angry locals. This legend, it told me, was more properly associated with an earlier lord of the same family who was known to be murdered by his servants. Whichever lord it had been, his demonic familiar, Robin Redcap, was supposed to still lurk around the castle, and the dungeon—which I was standing above—was haunted by the cries of the children kidnapped so the spirit could feast on their blood.

  The castle was cold and unfriendly, even on a summer’s day. Hermitage was open to the sky now, and the sunshine slid through to cast light on the old walls, but it still seemed dark. It was quiet in that way that only the oldest places can be—not dead but a sleeping lion, its ferocity muted but not yet forgotten, its threat still apparent, as if too firm a tread would wake all those centuries of rage and violence to life again.

  Sobered, I returned to my car. I didn’t know what to make of this country. Every region had its dark history, of course, but here it still seemed close to the skin, like a bone fractured but not quite snapped, one that could puncture through into the modern world at any moment.

  Or perhaps that was because my own past was haunting me today.

  I’d caught a lull between other visitors and was the only one in the tiny car park. All the same, I wanted to be somewhere safer. I felt exposed under the bright sky and the dark loom of the hills.

  Well, it was mid-afternoon. Perhaps it was time to find my guesthouse and crash for a few hours. Some of my malaise was probably caused by the long drive. I no longer had the same phobia of cars that I’d had in my early teens, but driving still wore me down emotionally as well as physically. I could have a nap, phone Felix with my initial impressions, and take tomorrow as a new day.

  A look at the road map showed a route that would take me back to Blacklynefoot without going back through the busy village.

  My guesthouse was on a farm a few miles down the lane, about half a mile from Vainguard. Was this the moor road that Rob had mentioned, where Niall Forster had lost control of his car?

  Even if it was, that had been winter, in bad conditions. I would be fine.

  I set out, fiddling with the car radio until I got a signal—some local station that turned staticky whenever the road dipped. I rolled the windows down to enjoy the sun. It was a very narrow road, and I took it carefully, keeping note of the passing places in case I needed to reverse. I sang along with the radio, trying to enjoy the moment, and watched as the shifting vista of the hills unfolded ahead of me.

  It should have made me calm, but I was still unsettled. I started thinking about what I would say to Felix, running through possible conversa
tions in my head.

  But another conversation kept running in the back of my mind. Even as I imagined describing the creepy chapel to Felix, hearing his warm appreciation of the eccentricity take the genuinely unnerving edge off it, other words kept intruding, on a loop.

  There’s someone in the road! Stop!

  We’re sliding—I can’t!

  The wall! The wall!

  I knew what they were and willed them away fiercely. The past was not another country to me, but a well I could still fall down, and I had to keep climbing out of it.

  Then I came around another corner and seeing these hills from this angle hit me like a sledgehammer. I stood on the brakes, shouting.

  The wall! The wall!

  I had been here before, as a child and in every nightmare since. I knew this place. This was the road, that was the view over my parents’ shoulders, and there was the wall, the middle stones slightly less weathered than the rest—more recently replaced. I could never mistake this for anywhere else. I knew it. This was where my parents’ car had left the road.

  The place where they had died.

  Chapter Five

  THE GREEN shape of the summer hills began to fade, replaced by frosted brown. I slapped myself hard around the face and grabbed for my phone as the world billowed around me.

  Two stabs got my emergency contacts up.

  Not Felix. He’d sent me here.

  Kasia.

  I pressed her name and clung to the phone with sweat-slick hands as that conversation cycled past me again.

  I was a child in the back seat, wiping holes in the condensation on the window so I could see the views. My parents were in the front, arguing softly as we drove—not angry, just a disagreement.

  No, I had to pull out of this.

  “Leon,” Kasia said.

  “Kash,” I breathed out, and only realised then how fast I was breathing. “Kash. I’m on the moor road. I’ve been here before.”

  Her voice was crackly, distant. “Leon, are you panicking?”

  “Kash.”

  “Pinch your cheek, and open the glove box. Look for some breath mints.”

  “I can’t.”

  “We should have taken the main road, Jami. This hasn’t been gritted. I really don’t think it’s safe.”

  “We’ll be fine, love. Getting off the beaten track. Seeing the world!”

  “It’s starting to snow. What if we get stuck? It’s the middle of nowhere.”

  “Plenty of houses around. Don’t worry, love. It always works out.”

  An exasperated sigh, followed by a laugh. “One of these days you’ll get us into a mess we can’t get out of.”

  “Leon! Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said, but my voice had gone slow and slurry. I knew what was happening. “Fighting… flashback….”

  There was a noise behind me—the blare of a horn. I couldn’t tell if it was now or then.

  Kasia said quickly, “Sweetie, you need to keep yourself in the here and now. Have you stopped?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Turn the radio up. Did you find any mints?”

  “No.”

  The fields rolled past, a thousand subtle shades of beige under a grey sky, with frost still gleaming in the shadows. It felt like it would go on forever and ever, with no escape from this moment.

  “There’s someone in the road!”

  I must have said it aloud, because Kasia said urgently, “Who?”

  I needed to explain that it was memory, not reality, but then a loud sarcastic voice erupted into my swaying world.

  “Any chance you might be moving soon, mate? Don’t know if you noticed but you’re blocking the whole bloody road to take a fucking phone call.”

  I stared up at Niall Forster, who was glowering at me through the window.

  When I didn’t respond, he rolled his eyes and said with exaggerated slowness, “Move your damn car, moron. It’s a single-lane track, and I can’t get past you. Seriously, how the hell do you think you’re going to be able to manage kids up here if you can’t even drive down the damn road?”

  “I heard that,” Kasia said. “Making friends and influencing people already? Give him the phone, Leon.”

  “No.”

  “Phone, Leon.”

  Niall Forster vanished into the memory of seeing my father’s shoulders tense as he wrenched at the wheel and fought to get the car back under control as we drifted. “We’re sliding! I can’t!”

  “No,” I said again, but I couldn’t stop this—never could, no matter how many times I dreamt it. “No, no.”

  “The fuck?” Niall Forster rumbled softly, and I felt his hand brush against my clammy palm, as he peeled my fingers away from my phone. “Hey. Your friend’s ill. Can you call back?” Then in a changed voice, “Oh. Okay, got it. What should I do?”

  I dropped my head down against the steering wheel and thought I felt a hand press reassuringly against the back of my neck. The car door opened. I heard the click of the catch on the glove box, and then someone was pressing mints between my lips. “Chew on those. Your sister says you’re having a flashback and probably starting to dissociate, but you’re here and now. It’s 2017, and you’re near Blacklynefoot. Hey, what else should I be doing?”

  “The wall! The wall!” Then, in one last scream, “Leon!”

  “Okay. I’ve got something in the truck. Is it safe to leave him?”

  The crash as we hit, the noise of metal tearing on stone, and the whole world spinning.

  Kasia’s voice, now on speaker phone. “Okay, Leon, your new friend will be back in a moment, but I want you to focus on the taste of the mints and the sound of my voice. I’m sitting here on the edge of the cricket pitch at Eilbeck House, which is where we both grew up. I’m working on my tan. Felix is walking up from the back gates with the dogs. My boys are running wild across the pitch with Taneka. I give it about five minutes before Felix stops and starts teaching them how to bowl. Think of this. Think of home. Everything that came before is over.”

  It wasn’t working. The whole loop was starting again, and panic was setting in. I needed it to stop, needed to break out of this, needed—

  The most pungent, eye-watering chemical stink I had ever smelt cut through the memory.

  No flashback in the history of the world could have survived that smell.

  I breathed in, gagged, and started coughing. The stink withdrew slightly, and a large hand thumped my back.

  “What the hell was that?” I demanded.

  “Half a bottle of iodine spray. On a rag.”

  “Is he back?” Kasia demanded.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting up gingerly. The echoes of the flashback were still rippling around me, and I was careful not to look at the view in case it triggered me again. “Who drives around with fucking iodine in the boot of their car?”

  “Farriers. Treats fungal infection in the hoof.” He was looking at me as if I was a fungal infection, and I couldn’t really blame him. So far in our brief acquaintance, I’d inadvertently taunted him about his dead daughter, provided him with a spectacular display of mental instability, then had a go at him after he rescued me.

  “What my brother means to say,” Kasia put in, “is thank you very much for coming to his rescue. He is profoundly grateful.”

  I groaned, dropping my head against the wheel. “Yes, yes. Of course. Sorry. And for earlier. Sorry. Shit.”

  “Believe it or not, he’s also an English teacher and usually more eloquent than that.”

  “You’re really not helping,” I told her without raising my head. “Look, I really appreciate the help, but we’re both blocking the road now, and I’d really like to get going to find my guesthouse, so thank you very much, and now I must be off.”

  He let out a short bark, something between a snort and a laugh. “You’re not fit to drive.”

  “I am perfectly capable—”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  They were, and I couldn
’t think of anything I wanted to do less than propel a car down this road of all roads, but I had my pride. “I really don’t—”

  He reached over me and took the keys out of the ignition.

  “Hey!”

  “I’m going to park up the van. Shove over, talk to your sister, and I’ll drive you back.” He was out of the car and gone before I could argue, so I dropped my head back against the headrest and groaned. “Fuck.”

  Kasia laughed, a little shakily. “Scared the shit out of me, brat.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for the rescue.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Mr Concerned and Growly.”

  I groaned again. “He took my keys. I’m going to bloody hotwire the damn car and—”

  “No, you’re not.” Her voice dropped. “What happened?”

  “Drove around the corner and recognised the road. It’s where my parents crashed.”

  She gasped. “You’re sure?”

  “I knew it. I’ve been fighting flashbacks all day and couldn’t work out why. Then I hit this stretch of road, and….”

  “I’m going to carve Felix’s spleen out and serve it up to him at high table.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I said instantly. “He can’t have known. I didn’t know until I saw it.”

  “But how…? This is crazy.”

  I could think it through a little. “We were driving back from Edinburgh after the New Year. I knew it was a little back road somewhere between Edinburgh and Manchester, but I had no idea where at the time. Kids don’t read road maps. But there’s a castle, and my dad….” I swallowed. “From what I do remember, he always loved going around the long way, finding weird places to—”

  “Hey,” she said, the same soft tone she used with her boys when one of them was hurting. “We’re here now, living in the future.”

  It had been one of those odd half jokes, half mantras we’d shared when we were younger and more broken. It had been a while since either of us had to evoke it seriously. “I’m sorry I screwed your day up.”

  “Yeah, you better be.” Her tone was still soft. “God, Leon, of all the awful coincidences. Look, give up on this stupid project of Felix’s and come home. You don’t have to torture yourself for him.”