Twisted Winter Page 2

  “Nice dog,” said the man.

  “Thanks,” I said, although Chips wasn’t behaving well. He was pulling really hard, his paws scrabbling in the gravel, as though he couldn’t wait to get to the road. “He’s a bit nervous.”

  “Can’t blame him,” said the man. “Kept a lot of dogs in my time. Not now, of course.” He had a funny way of talking, lots of pauses. “They don’t like me now.”

  I was only half listening. We were nearly at the gate. And waiting on the pavement, peering in, was Miles. He spotted me. I saw his head go up.

  The man stopped, and I stopped too, even though Chips was nearly throttling himself, galloping on the spot, breathing in harsh panting gasps. I needed an excuse to hang around while the old man locked the gates. I wanted to keep him talking so Miles would know we were coming out of the cemetery together. The orange streetlight fell across the nearest gravestone, and lit in curling black relief the word:

  DARK

  I pointed at it. “That’s funny, isn’t it? Why d’you think it just says ‘Dark?’”

  The way he answered, you could tell it he thought was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. “Because that’s what it is,” he said. He paused. “Down there.” And I was realising with an incredulous shudder that he wasn’t being funny, that he meant it, when he jerked his head and added, “Go on. Out,” and I was on the pavement under the streetlamp, and Miles Bennett was grabbing me.

  Miles was grabbing me, but he wasn’t punching or kicking me, or doing anything on purpose to hurt me, even though his fingers were digging into my arms. He was clinging to me like a drowning man, his face was pushed up against mine, and he was hissing in a high-pitched strangled whisper, “What is it? Oh God, what is it, what is it?”

  I looked back. The old man was pulling the gates shut – from the inside. Bars of orange streetlight fell across his face, and I saw – both of us saw – he didn’t have eyes.

  Miles left me strictly alone after that. I’m fifteen now, and he’s at sixth form college. Sometimes if I’m in town with my friends, I’ll see him, but he’ll cross the street to avoid me. I can tell he still remembers.

  Chips is a great little dog. Cars and buses don’t worry him any more. He sleeps on my bed at night, and Mum and I love him to bits. But I don’t walk him in the cemetery, and I threw the dog whistle away. And I don’t like orange streetlights.

  They make everyone look dead.

  The Party

  Susan Cooper

  It was never quite clear whose idea it had been to have a party. Nobody in The Close had ever held a formal celebration of Hallowe’en before, though each of the six families laid in a healthy store of sweets and bars of chocolate every year. They knew that inevitably the youngest residents would appear in costume at each front door just before dark, shrilling “Trick or Treat!” with an apologetic, smiling parent dimly visible beyond. Last year, most admiration had gone to nine-year-old Freddie Thomson as a rotting mummy, accompanied, some said, by an ingeniously disgusting smell.

  But this year, through some forgotten adult negotiation, there was instead an elaborate party at the Ransoms’, and all the grownups were in costume as well. The Ransom children and their friends in The Close found this disconcerting. The focus of life in the weeks before Hallowe’en had always been on them, not on Dad’s pirate costume or Mum’s witch mask. Besides, Dad looked like an overgrown kid and Mum looked, well, embarrassing.

  To distract the young, Charlie and Ruth Ransom had kitted out their barn for the party with every Hallowe’en-related game they could think of. (It was a fake barn, of course, since like almost every house in The Close it was only ten years old.) They had a barrel of water with apples floating in it, for bobbing-for-apples; they had more apples hanging on strings from the fake beams of the barn’s roof; they had pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey; they had a row of pumpkins for a family decorating contest. There were many prizes to be won, all of them inside envelopes decorated with gold, silver or red rosettes.

  “Money,” Charlie had said to Ruth.

  “Oh no,” Ruth said. “No, no, no. A prize has to be something beautiful, something that shows we’ve taken trouble.”

  Charlie said, “Money.”

  “Money is vulgar.”

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “Ask Verity,” he said.

  Verity was their thirteen-year-old daughter.

  “Darling,” Ruth said to her, “if you won a Hallowe’en prize, would you like it to be a really pretty scarf, or some lovely ear-rings, or chocolates, or money?”

  Verity said, “Are you joking?”

  So the prize envelopes contained five-pound notes. Sometimes more than one. The residents of The Close were a prosperous group, and Charlie Ransom, a commodities trader, managed somehow to appear more prosperous than most whatever the state of the national economy. The same could be said of his neighbour and close friend Julian Hogg, who happened also to be the property developer who had erected The Close in the first place.

  On Hallowe’en the Hoggs were the first guests to arrive at the Ransoms’ door, at the top of the handsome marble steps, between the gleaming marble pillars.

  “Trickatreat!” screamed six-year-old Tristram Hogg, a diminutive Spider-Man, as the front door opened. He rushed forward, brandishing his red plastic loot-bag. Then he stopped, and stood very still.

  The door had been opened by a bent, truly hideous hag, with long grey hair wisping round a drooling mouth and bristly chin. Behind her was darkness, lit only by a dim red bulb.

  Tristram backed away, reaching for his mother.

  “Come inside, my dear,” croaked Mrs Ruth Ransom. Then she gave a girlish little giggle, behind the awful immobile face.

  Shirley Hogg, tall and slinky in a low-cut purple dress of a design worn by a certain TV presenter, shifted her cowering son to one side and embraced the hag. “Brilliant, Ruthie,” she said.

  Little Tristram Hogg breathed again. Slowly, he managed to smile. “Mrs Ransom! You’re super ugly!”

  “And the ugly lady must pour me a drink instantly,” said his mother, “if I have to look at that face all night.”

  Up the long driveway came the next elaborately masked family, to gather in the dimly lit barn hung with strands of filmy plastic cobweb, and the party became loud and happy, as the children bobbed for apples and carved grinning mouths into pumpkins that nobody would ever eat. Soon three other sets of Close neighbours had arrived, the Thomsons, the Macaulays and the Fothergills, in costumes ranging from a caveman to a rap star. The caveman, dressed in two sheepskins, was Mr Macaulay, who believed improvisation was more virtuous than buying, and who had impressive muscles to display.

  Julian Hogg snatched a triumphant bite of one of the hanging apples, having craftily chosen to become a bulging-eyed frog with a mask that covered only the top half of his face. He was wearing a green velvet jacket whose colour exactly matched the shade of the frog mask; his wife had spent weeks shopping for it. Julian Hogg had a talent for persuading people to give him what he wanted.

  He said to Charlie Ransom, chewing, “No Mrs Wallace yet?”

  “She said she’d come,” Charlie said.

  “I need to talk to her. For my Belgians it’s very nearly a done deal. Are you sure your Swiss friend will be in on it?”

  “Guaranteed.”

  They looked at each other, the frog and the pirate, and raised their glasses silently.

  Mrs Wallace was a very different person from the other residents of The Close, and her house was very different from theirs and about four hundred years older. It was the original manor house of the estate which Julian Hogg had bought from Mrs Wallace ten years earlier, after her husband had died and left her with a great deal of property and no money. There were no Wallace children to hinder the sale. Julian had agreed that Mrs Wallace should be allowed to go on living in the manor for the rest of her life, and on the many acres surrounding it he had built the handsome houses of The Close, including his own. Mrs Wallace’s only
remaining possession was an ancient thirty-acre stretch of woodland known locally as Hunter’s Wood.

  Now Julian Hogg wanted that woodland too. He had enlisted two partners from Europe, and developed exquisitely detailed plans to cut down all the trees and build an American-style shopping mall. With three major towns a few miles away, Hunter’s Wood was the perfect site. They would call it Castle View, for the distant outline of Windsor Castle on the flat Berkshire horizon. Mrs Wallace seemed unaccountably hostile to the scheme, but Julian was confident that the money would bring her round.

  Shrieks of laughter erupted from the room behind them, where a Hallowe’en game was in noisy progress. Julian’s son George, totally hidden inside his expensive Darth Vader suit, came tugging at his father’s arm.

  “Dad, Dad – it’s your turn – feel inside the box! Come on, tell us what you feel!”

  Julian joined the cheery circle, noting with satisfaction the difference between his family’s impressive Hallowe’en outfits and the home-made masks of the principled Macaulays. George directed his father’s hand to the hole in the black-draped box on the coffee table, and Julian dutifully reached inside.

  “It’s awful!” hissed Freddie Thomson, giggling. “It’s really disgusting!”

  Julian groped, and felt. Olives, he thought. Some things never change. Olives in olive oil. He made a revolted face, and a suitable sound to match.

  “Eeeuw!” he said. “Eyeballs! Cats’ eyeballs!”

  The children happily shrieked in triumph, and then it was Charlie Ransom’s turn, his daughter having forgotten that he was the one who had opened the tin of cocktail sausages that he would soon identify, shuddering with horror, as babies’ fingers.

  But just as he began, there was a disturbance at the front door: a sudden eruption of unexpected music, drowning out the soft background pop oozing from the stereo. It was live music, a high, lively sequence of notes played on a pipe and a stringed instrument that most of them had never heard before, and in from the front hall came two tall dancing figures dressed in chequered orange tights with black face-masks across their eyes: two Harlequins, playing a tabor and a lute.

  Charlie Ransom’s wife was calling him from the door, and in her voice he heard a faint note of panic.

  “Charles! Mrs Wallace is here!”

  But already everything had stopped, everyone had turned, entranced, to see the happy Harlequins – and the tall lady at the door, allowing James Macaulay to take her cloak. Part of her height was her eighteenth-century wig, a high pile of curls above a brilliant, elaborate long dress, and in her hand was the stem of an astonishing brocade face-mask studded with glittering stones. She held the mask over her face and reached out a graceful hand to Ruth Ransom and her bristling chin.

  “Happy Hallowe’en, Mistress Witch!” said Mrs Wallace. “My nephews brought you some music!”

  The Harlequins had effortlessly taken control of the room; the children loved them, copying every move as they danced round the room, playing. All the games were forgotten, even the babies’ fingers.

  Then for a moment the music stopped. The Harlequins paused, looking back at the front door. Mrs Wallace had her hand on the shoulder of one more figure, swathed in a black hooded cloak.

  “And one more Hallowe’en friend!” Mrs Wallace said warmly.

  “Allow me,” said James Macaulay politely, reaching round for the black cloak – and as the hood fell back, the whole house seemed suddenly gripped by a deathly chill. The Hallowe’en mask inside the hood was an appalling face of vicious evil, deeply lined, the mouth curled in a snarl, the eyes glaring. Its malevolence was more powerful than any monster mask they had ever seen, perhaps because its lines were so human.

  They all stared. It was an ancient, twisted, baleful face, and on its forehead were two stumps, bleeding. For a moment, everyone in the room was afraid.

  Julian Hogg stood motionless, feeling as though an icy hand had gripped him by the back of the neck.

  The smallest Fothergill child began to cry.

  At once the Harlequins began their music again, a cheerful, jaunty tune. The man in the mask, a dark figure in black jeans and turtleneck, bent his terrible head towards Mrs Wallace in a little bow, and they began to dance. The tension in the room dropped at once, and the children began their capering again.

  Julian Hogg shook his head, bemused, and went to find himself another drink.

  The room filled with music and laughter; it was a happy Hallowe’en. After a while the lights dimmed, and the hosts, the witch-hag and the pirate, brought in a bowl of fruit punch flickering with little flames. There were glass cups to be dipped into the punch, and straws for those people forced to drink through a hole in a rigid mask. The straws were very popular; they glowed in the dark.

  The children clustered round the punch-bowl, reaching for straws. Mrs Wallace and her partner paused beside them, and she dipped a cup into the fruit punch and drank. Then she carefully fitted a straw through the cruel snarling mouth of her friend in the twisted mask, and held up a cup so that he could drink too.

  The children watched, warily.

  Freddie Thomson was not a rotting mummy this year, but a unitard skeleton. He was lost in admiration, gazing up at the man’s head. “That’s the best monster mask I ever saw. Where’d you get it?”

  “Not a monster,” said the man, removing the straw from the hole in his mask’s awful unmoving mouth. His voice was husky, with an accent that sounded vaguely West Country. “It’s Herne. You know Herne.”

  “The ghost in Windsor Great Park,” said Verity Ransom, who knew everything. She was a ghost in floating white silk, with a feathery white mask across her eyes. “Herne the Hunter. He haunts a big oak tree. But he had antlers.”

  “I had antlers,” said the man in the mask. He gave his head a little jerk, and a drop of blood from one of his forehead stumps flicked on to Verity Ransom’s ghostly white silk.

  “How do you do that?” said Freddie Thomson in awe.

  Mrs Wallace said, “The Great Park story is more recent, Verity. This is a much older legend, from our own old wood, Hunter’s Wood. Haven’t you heard it? A woodsman cut off Herne’s antlers, long, long ago, so Herne’s ghost protects the trees from anyone else who tries to cut them down. Whenever those ancient trees are in danger, his stumps bleed, and they tell him to come after the attacker.”

  “And he comes,” said the masked man softly. “Oh yes, he comes.”

  He bent his knees a little, so that his terrible head was at the same level as the children’s heads, and he turned, slowly, facing them one after another.

  Mrs Wallace said, “I wouldn’t want him coming after me, would you?”

  The children were backing away. “No!” said a small Fothergill devil fervently.

  Blonde Mrs Fothergill, an outsize Alice, reached for the little boy’s hand. She said reproachfully to Mrs Wallace, “You know, I really feel – ”

  The man in the mask turned his face to her, with its wide yellow eyes and glistening wounded forehead.

  “Herne the Hunter,” he said in his soft husky voice. “When there is danger, he comes hunting, and none can stop him.”

  The small Fothergill made a whimpering noise.

  Verity Ransom said in her high clear voice, “Don’t be frightened, Petey. It’s just Hallowe’en. That nasty old witch over there is really my mum, you know that. And this is just a Herne mask – look, you can see the string.”

  She pointed to the neck of the man in the mask.

  Freddie Thomson peered critically at the neat bow of tape just visible in the man’s dark hair.

  “Yeah, there it is,” he said. “And I can see a fold where the mask doesn’t quite fit.”

  The man in the mask chuckled, in a totally different voice. “Darn! I’ve got to be more convincing!” And he gave a high screech and dived at the children around him. They scattered, howling happily, and the chase became a game. The Harlequins joined in, still playing, and the party was back in full
swing.

  Mrs Wallace found Julian Hogg’s chunky green-clad form at her side.

  “Good evening,” he said. “So nice to see you. It’s Julian, inside this froggy outfit. I’m hoping you and I will come to a mutually profitable agreement later this week. Your lawyers have heard all the details from my people, of course.”

  Mrs Wallace held her brocaded mask up to her face, and her eyes glinted at him through it.

  “You know my feelings about Hunter’s Wood,” she said. “They go back a very long way. Those great trees are ancient, beyond counting. The wood is a powerful place, not to be touched. Time keeps it.”

  “But times change,” Julian said genially. “And people change. We have to think of the future, Mrs Wallace.”

  “Yes, I’ve done that,” Mrs Wallace said. “I spoke to my lawyers. I intend to give Hunter’s Wood to the National Trust, to be preserved for the people and the ages.”

  Below the bulging green eyes of his frog mask, Julian Hogg’s thin-lipped mouth tightened. Then he smiled.

  “Come now,” he said, “we can’t have National Trust tourists parking up and down the borders of The Close.”

  “I’m sure that won’t happen,” said Mrs Wallace. “The Trust is very discreet and careful. And they will take very good care that nobody cuts down the trees of Hunter’s Wood.” She lowered the stem of her mask for a moment, looking at him over its glittering edge. “Not even you, Julian Hogg.”

  Julian said, “You’re forgetting that I own the Manor House.”

  “In which I have the legal right to live for the rest of my days,” Mrs Wallace said peaceably.

  “Indeed,” said Julian. “But the agreement doesn’t specify how much of it you occupy. If I can’t buy Hunter’s Wood, I shall be forced to convert the manor into an apartment building. And you’ll find yourself living the rest of your days – legally – not in a splendid spacious house but in a one-bedroom flat.”

  He gave her another smile, and this time it was unpleasant and triumphant.

  The Harlequins’ music jingled on, and the children hopped to and fro.