House of Bones (19 page)

John and Courtney laid the scaffolding pole across the lawn. John skirted around to the opposite side and took hold of the other end of the pole. Then they lifted it up so that Mr Cleat could reach it with both hands.

“Right, Cleaty, grab hold of the pole, and grab it tight!” shouted Courtney.

Mr Cleat did as he was told. “You'll have to be quick,” he said – and he was right, because he was visibly sinking into the ground in front of their eyes. The grass had reached his waist now, and his belt-buckle had disappeared into the weeds.

Courtney ducked under the scaffolding pole so that it was supported by his shoulders, and John did the same. “Now, heave!” said Courtney, and between them they tried to raise the pole like a pair of weight-lifters.

John squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth. His shoulder muscles strained so much that he could hardly bear the pain. The pole itself was heavy enough, without having Mr Cleat hanging on to it – especially since Mr Cleat was being dragged down by one of the most powerful supernatural forces ever known.

He did his best, but the weight pressing down on the back of his neck was so great that he thought
the pole was going to break it. And all the time the wind was howling and the rain was blasting straight into his face and Mr Cleat was screaming, “
Get me out of here! It's killing me! Get me out of here
!”

John and Courtney both pushed up on the pole with all the strength they could muster, but gradually they were driven down on to their knees, and even lower, until their faces were being forced down into the wet grass and weeds.

“It's no use!” shouted Courtney. “We'll have to think of something else!”

He eased his head out from underneath the pole, which was now less than half a metre above the lawn. John did the same.

“
What are you doing? What are you doing? You can't just let me go under
!”

John said, “There was some wooden boarding next to the scaffold – maybe we could lay it flat on the lawn and crawl across it to reach him.”

Mr Cleat was still desperately clinging on to the pole. “
Get me out of here! I don't want to die! John, help me, I cant even feel my legs! I can't feel anything
!”

He had sunk into the lawn right up to his chest, and he seemed to be going down faster and faster. Now that he was so deeply buried in the soil, the Druids must have had a better grip on him. At the rate they were pulling him into the ground, he had less than a minute left to escape.

“
Please – don't leave me
!” he sobbed. “
I know that I was wrong! I know that I'm to blame! I should have stopped him! I know I should have stopped him! But please
!”

Courtney came sprinting back from the side of the house with a large, flat scaffolder's plank. He dropped it across the lawn until it was well within Mr Cleat's reach. Mr Cleat let go of the pole and lunged out for the plank. He gripped the end of it with both hands, although the grass was up to his armpits. Between the rumbles of thunder and the gusts of wind, John could hear him shrieking for breath.

“Right – I'm going to crawl out on to the plank and try to pull you up,” Courtney shouted. “You understand what I'm saying? So don't panic – I'm coming to get you.”

“Wait!” said John. “You're heavier than me, and you're stronger then me, too. I'll go out on the plank and you hold on to my ankles. Lucy, Uncle Robin – you can hold on to Courtney's waist.”

Mr Cleat kept screaming and screaming. John climbed on to the plank and began to crawl along it on his hands and knees. It was difficult to balance on it because it was wet and slippery with mud and Mr Cleat was tugging at it so frantically.

He was only halfway along it when he felt it begin to tip forward.

“John!” shouted Uncle Robin. “Hurry up, John! The board's being pulled in too!”

Mr Cleat looked at John wild-eyed. He stopped screaming and held out one hand. “Save me,” he said, so quietly that John could hardly hear him.

John reached forward and managed to touch Mr Cleat's fingertips. There was a split-second when he thought he might be able to get a grip on him. But then the board tipped even more and he almost fell off it. He put out his hand to stop himself from falling and momentarily touched the grass. It rippled as if it were a living beast and he snatched his hand away at once.

“John! You'll have to come back!” Courtney told him.

John stared at Mr Cleat and Mr Cleat stared back at him. John tried to edge forward a little further but Courtney was holding his ankles tight and wouldn't let him.

“
No
!” screamed Mr Cleat, as John crawled away from him, “
No
!” Courtney managed to pull John off the plank and safely away from the ley line.

They watched in helpless horror as Mr Cleat gripped the builder's board even more tightly and tried to pull himself up on to it. He was whimpering with determination and fear. He managed to shift one hand so that it was a little further up the board, but the forces that were dragging him into the ground were far too powerful. His elbows sank into the lawn, and then
his shoulders, and as they did so the board tilted upward and was dragged in with him.

At the last, his lungs must have been too tightly compressed for him to speak. Nothing was showing but his head, and the plank which reared up in front of him at an angle of forty-five degrees. Looking sadly up at the sky, he was mute, and utterly beyond help. Then the grass swallowed him, and he was gone, leaving nothing behind him but the plank. That, too, was pulled into the ground, until only a metre and a half protruded from the lawn, like a headstone in a cemetery.

Lucy turned away and Uncle Robin put his arms around her. Uncle Robin himself was grim-faced. “Come on,” he said. “It's time we went.”

Another fork of lightning flickered out of the sky and went to earth on the other side of the street. There was a moment's hush, when all they could hear was the rain falling and the wind
shushing
in the trees. Then even the rain seemed to pause.

Seconds later, however, the whole garden was shaken with a high-explosive blast of thunder.

“Let's
go
!” shouted Courtney. “This plan of yours isn't going to work, John, and I just want to be out of here!”

What happened next, though, seemed almost miraculous. The instant the thunder died away, they heard the crackling of more lightning. They
stopped and turned, and all had the same instinctive feeling about what was going to happen.

A second's silence. Then, out of the clouds, came a long, thin leader-stroke of lightning, searching hesitantly this way and that, a skeletal voodoo-arm made of pure electricity. It looked as if it were going to strike the weathervane on top of the house, but it suddenly jerked sideways and touched the top of the scaffolding pole in the garden.

Then the main bolt of lightning hit the pole and it was almost like the end of the world. Two hundred thousand volts, blinding all of them before tearing down the length of the pole and into the earth beneath. There was an ear-splitting crack of superheated air – hotter for one hundredth of a second than the surface of the sun.

The lightning must have scored a direct hit on the ley line, because a line of bright fire rushed off in both directions, north and south. Where it went north, it set fire to trees and bushes and blew up one garden fence after another. They could hear greenhouses exploding. They could hear walls collapsing. Where it went south, it scorched its way across the lawn and made the earth ripple and rumble like an earthquake. There was a terrible bursting noise, and Mr Cleat's body was flung right out of the ground and into the air, smoking and burned and hideously disjointed. The plank burst
out, too, and was thrown blazing into the next door neighbours' garden.

The lightning tore towards the house but when it reached the outside walls it seemed to disappear.

They waited and waited and nothing happened. “Maybe that's it,” said Courtney. “Maybe that's all it needed to do.” Lucy took hold of John's hand. She was shivering with shock. She turned and caught sight of Mr Cleat's smoking body lying in the rain and quickly turned her face away. Although it was so dark, it was still possible to make out a horribly twisted grimace.

Courtney laid his hand on John's shoulder, and it was then that 66 Mountjoy Avenue blew up.

“
Get down
!” Courtney shouted, and the four of them dropped to the ground as the windows shattered and they were caught in a blizzard of broken glass. The entire roof was blasted up into the air – tiles and timbers scattered everywhere, and a huge ball of orange fire rolled up into the clouds. The chimney stacks collapsed, the side walls dropped outwards into the garden, the scaffolding fell, and the staircase tumbled sideways.

After that, the whole house burned with a grim ferocity, as if it were determined to consume itself before anybody else could have it. Tiles came crashing from the sky, burning curtains flew through the rain like vampires. The house crackled and spat as it burned itself up. Floors fell through,
beds blazed, doors and walls were lost to the greedy flames.

“Mr Vane's still in there,” said Lucy.

“So what are you going to do?” said Courtney. “Rush in and save him? After what he's done?”

John said, “We don't need to save him. He can live for ever.”

“Not if his body's burned,” Uncle Robin put in. “Even immortals can be destroyed by fire. Fire or impaling – that's what kills them. Why do you think they used to drive stakes into vampires' bodies and burn their coffins?”

“We have to go and look,” said Lucy. “We can't just leave him to burn. That's murder.”

“And what he did, that wasn't murder?”

“Of course it was. But that doesn't mean that we've got to behave as badly as him, does it? I mean, it's not up to us to try him and execute him, is it?”

“I don't think it's up to us to save him, either.”

All the same, they made their way around to the front of the blazing house. It was only when they reached the front garden that they realized how devastating the damage was. 66 Mountjoy Avenue was nothing more than a few partially upright walls and a criss-cross collection of blazing timbers. Flames and sparks whirled up into the thundery sky, and the fire was so hot that the rain did nothing at all to damp it down.

Surprisingly, all that was left was the porch –
inviting you to walk in between the stone lions, up the steps, and open the front door right into hell.

“He can't be alive,” said Lucy. “There isn't a hope.”

They were still standing outside the house when neighbours and bystanders started to gather. The sky was beginning to clear, and in the distance the sun was shining on the wet rooftops of Tooting.

“I've called the emergency services,” said an elderly man with a golf umbrella, and they could already hear the whooping of sirens in the distance.

“What happened?” asked a grey-haired woman in a spotted rain hat. “Was it gas?”

“Unexploded bomb, that's what I reckon it was,” said a postman. “There was dozens of 'em round here, during the war.”

Flames leaped up from the inside of 66 Mountjoy Avenue, nearly twenty metres high. A big woman in a hat came up to them and said, “Anybody hurt? I'm a first-aider.”

John didn't know what to tell her. Mr Vane and Mr Cleat were both far beyond first-aid – as were all the hundreds of people who had bought houses from them over the years. First-aid? How can you give first-aid to a reliquary of human bones? No amount of bandages and liniment could ever heal what the Druid spirits had done.

John suddenly felt very tired.

The fire engines arrived, and the police, and the paramedics. John and the others were pushed to the sidelines while the flames were put out and the bodies taken away.

Courtney took hold of John's hand and grinned at him. “You did it, man. I didn't think you could. But you did it. I don't think anybody's going to be hearing from those Druids again, do you?”

Detective Inspector Carter said, “Cases like this, they get right up my nose.”

John didn't know what to say. He had been answering Carter's questions for over half an hour now, and he had tried to be as truthful as possible. On the other hand, he hadn't told him anything about the Druids and the ley lines. He and the others had agreed not to. They knew that the police wouldn't believe them. And, more importantly, they still had to go round to each of Mr Vane's houses and close the gateway to the world beneath the ground.

The police might not believe in Druid spirits from the Iron Age, but once they realized that all of the houses were somehow connected, John and his
friends wouldn't have a chance of getting into them and doing what they had to do.

Detective Inspector Carter swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee from a styrofoam cup, and pulled a face. “Cases like this, they start out simply baffling, you know what I mean?
Police are baffled by bricked-up bones mystery
. But instead of getting less baffling, they get even more baffling, until they're so baffling that you've forgotten what it is that you were baffled by.”

John said, “I've told you everything that happened.”

“I know you told me everything that happened. But what happened doesn't make any sense. I've got a blown-up house, I've got a dead man lying in the garden, and the more you explain it to me the less I understand it.”

He pulled out a chair and sat down. “Let's go over this one more time. Mr Vane told you to meet him yesterday afternoon at 66 Mountjoy Avenue?”

“He said that he was going to be showing some clients around, and he wanted me to see how a professional did it.”

“But when you got there, there were no clients, only him?”