The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (12 page)

‘You obeyed orders,’ said Sir George. ‘Sometimes it was very difficult and you thought the orders were wrong, but you obeyed them because you knew that the men who gave them were doing their duty. And it’s the same now. The men who took the cattle were obeying orders from the government. They were doing their duty. When they killed the animals in the big foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, people screamed and threatened to shoot themselves, but making a fuss doesn’t help. We have to obey orders and we have to do it quietly,’ said the old man.

But when he was alone he would stand by the window, not moving, wondering if there was any point in going on.

It was a sad time everywhere. Cousin Howard went back to his library to see if he could find out something about the Hoggart – but, to tell the truth, he found researching Hoggarts a lot less interesting than helping to set up Open Days. Madlyn went down to Ned’s bungalow and played computer games and tried to cheer up Ned’s uncle, who had come out of hospital and blamed himself for not having noticed that there was something wrong with the cattle.

‘I can’t think why I didn’t see it,’ he said. ‘They seemed just fine to me.’

The village too was quiet – a listless, sad quietness. And in the park the uncropped grass grew long, and longer; the roses in the hedges smelled of disinfectant; and it rained and rained and rained.

When the cattle had been gone for more than a week, Ranulf called the children up to the nursery.

‘It’s Sunita. She thinks there is something we should do,’ said Ranulf. ‘Go on, Sunita, you tell them.’

Sunita had been looking out of the window at the empty park. Now she turned and, though she spoke gently as she always did, they could see that what she was saying mattered to her very much.

‘I think we should go and say goodbye to the cattle. I think we need to go and see the place where they are buried and wish their spirits a safe journey.’

‘Pray over them, you mean?’ asked Madlyn. ‘Like a funeral service?’

‘Well, yes … but not only like that.’ She hesitated. ‘In India cows are sacred because they provide milk and give their hides. But they’re sacred too because ...’ She looked down, suddenly embarrassed. ‘Because they carry the souls of the dead to heaven. They’re sort of connected with heaven. In the old days people’s bodies were sometimes taken for burial on the back of a bull or a cow to help them on their journey. I can’t put it into words, but they’re … special. And I don’t think they should just be buried and forgotten without a ceremony.’

‘A sort of leave-taking,’ said Ned.

‘Yes. And I think we wouldn’t feel so wretched ourselves if this were done. Saying goodbye is important.’ She paused and looked at the children. ‘What do you think?’

Rollo was the first to speak. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said firmly. ‘We were silly not to do it before. We must go as soon as we can.’

Lord Trembellow had made no secret of the fact that the cattle were buried in his gravel pit: he was proud of helping the vets get rid of the infected beasts. But the pit was fifteen kilometres away, on the other side of the hill to Trembellow Towers.

‘It’s too far to walk there and back,’ said Ned. ‘But there’s a bus one way at least. If the ghosts don’t mind being invisible there shouldn’t be any trouble.’

They decided to go on their own without saying anything to the grown-ups, and their chance came two days later when the Percivals were asked out to dinner with the Lord Lieutenant of the county, who lived in a mansion which was an hour’s drive away from Clawstone. Both George and Emily hated going out to dinner, which meant changing out of their usual clothes and eating things which disagreed with them and staying up late.

But they went, and as soon as Uncle George’s Bentley was out of sight, the children and the ghosts hurried down to the bus stop by the church.

The sun had gone down by the time they reached the road leading to pit Number Five. There were traffic cones in rows across the path, and a notice saying ‘Out of Bounds’ and another one saying ‘No Admittance’.

When they got to the entrance to the pit itself, they found it roped off. The windows of the workmen’s hut were boarded up. The hillside with its gashes looked threatening and sinister; flood water from the recent rains had collected into large puddles; old tin cans floated on the oil-stained water.

Rollo shivered and Madlyn looked at him anxiously. Had it been a mistake to come?

Certainly it made everything seem worse, seeing where those warm-blooded, lovely creatures had ended up.

The ghosts had glided on ahead. Sunita was looking very purposeful as she searched for the burial site. The Feet followed her, keeping close to her heels.

The rough track, with its churned mud and heavy wheel marks, veered round to the left and led into a wider piece of waste ground.

‘There,’ said Ranulf. ‘That will be where they’re buried.’

They had come to a large patch of flat ground, covered with recently turned-over earth. Diggers and crushers stood nearby, like great dinosaurs.

Sunita nodded. ‘Yes. This must be the place.’

She began to move backwards and forwards over the burial site. Her arms were stretched out, her head was bent intently over the earth.

‘It’s strange,’ she said after a few moments, ‘I can’t seem to—’

She broke off suddenly and clutched Brenda. The children drew closer to each other; the other ghosts took a step backwards.

‘Oh heavens, what is it?’ said Madlyn.

The pit had suddenly filled with the most appalling sounds … sounds like none they had heard before: horrible, troubling, somehow not decent.

First, a ghastly gurgling sort of grunt … Then a rasping, squawk-like screech … and lastly a kind of honking hoot which changed halfway into a croaking squeal.

‘Who’s there?’ shouted Ned.

The noise stopped abruptly. The silence was absolute.

‘Maybe it was an animal?’ suggested Rollo.

But what kind of animal? And there had been more than one.

‘I’m not going to let it stop me,’ said Sunita. ‘If it’s werewolves, we can deal with them. They can’t hurt ghosts.’

She began once more to glide round the patch of freshly dug earth, trying to make contact with the spirits of the creatures who lay below. Madlyn had brought a bunch of flowers; she held them in her hand, waiting till Sunita should give the signal and the ceremony begin.

But Sunita kept gliding steadily round the edge of the burial ground, then across it, and they could see that she was becoming troubled and uncertain.

‘I don’t understand it,’ she murmured.

Five minutes passed, and then ten. It grew darker and colder, and Sunita became more and more bewildered and unsure.

Then the noise came again. It was louder than before, and even more horrible, and it died away in a hopeless kind of gurgling splutter.

And from behind a large digger there emerged … three grandmothers.

At least, they looked like grandmothers – the old-fashioned kind: plump, with grey hair and black clothes, and they carried not one handkerchief each but a whole bunch of them.

‘Of course!’ said Brenda. ‘I know who you are. You’re banshees.’

‘Yes, of course we’re banshees. And you’re ghosts. But I can tell you this: whatever you’re doing you’re wasting your time,’ said the eldest of the women.

‘It’s a disgrace,’ said the middle one. ‘We’re going to complain when we get back – the
Banshee Bulletin
used to be a reliable newspaper but it seems it’ll print any sort of rubbish nowadays. They don’t check their facts. And poor Greta’s in a dreadful state.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said the youngest. ‘My insides are all knotted up and my throat’s as curdled as custard.’

‘People make a fuss about constipation, but it’s nothing to what happens when a howl gets stuck inside you,’ said the eldest banshee.

‘We came three hundred miles to have a good wail and – well, you heard us,’ said the middle one. ‘If the Banshee Choral Society had been there, we’d have been struck off the register, making a noise like that.’

‘But why? Why can’t you wail?’ asked Brenda, who felt herself close to these women.

‘We can’t wail because there’s nothing to wail
about
.’

‘There’s nothing to wail
for
.’

‘Wailing doesn’t happen for nothing, you know. There has to be a reason.’

Sunita now glided closer to the women. She looked relieved, as though a weight had fallen off her shoulders.

‘Yes, I see, I see,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t understand it. I thought I’d lost my power to connect. But they aren’t here, are they?’

‘You can say that again,’ said the eldest banshee. ‘There’s nothing under that earth except more earth and more earth still.’

Rollo had stepped forward; he was trembling with excitement. ‘You mean they aren’t dead?’

The banshees shrugged. ‘As to that, we couldn’t say. But they aren’t
here
and that’s for sure.’

T
hey had forced open the door of the workmen’s hut and the banshees were making tea.

It was a crush with all of them inside – unlike the ghosts, the banshees were solid – but the fug was cosy. They had missed the last bus back to Clawstone, but the banshees had offered to drop them off on their way home.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Ranulf yet again. ‘Why say the cattle are buried here when they aren’t? What is Lord Trembellow up to?’

‘If it was Lord Trembellow,’ said Mr Smith. ‘He may have been had.’

But why?

No one could understand it. The Feet had climbed on to the eldest banshee’s knee and refused to get down.

‘I feel I’ve seen them somewhere before,’ she said, patting the hairy toes.

‘Yes, I feel the same,’ said the middle sister. ‘Somewhere where we went to do a job. A funeral, I suppose, but I can’t think where.’

And the youngest sister nodded and said that she too felt that The Feet were familiar.

But Rollo could think of one thing only. The fate of the cattle.

‘Where can they
be
?’ he said again and again, and Madlyn sighed because it seemed to her cruel that Rollo should once again be given hope. If the animals weren’t buried here they would be buried somewhere else.

‘All the same, it’s really strange,’ said Ned. ‘Why pretend to bury them?’

They had searched the site, using their torches, but found nothing. After the torrential rain, any hoof marks or tracks there might have been would have been washed away.

The banshees sipped their tea. The fug in the hut increased.

‘We need some more water for the kettle,’ said the middle banshee.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Rollo.

He took the kettle and went out to the tap at the back of the hut. Wedged behind the standpipe was a long thin metal object. He pulled it out and shone his torch on it. It seemed to be the nozzle of a spray-gun. Well, that didn’t help much. The workmen had probably used it to spray paint on to the lorries.

Rollo sighed. If only he could find some real evidence – something to prove that the cattle had been here – but there was nothing.

He picked up the kettle and went back into the hut.

Sir George had been in bed for an hour when he heard a knock, and Rollo, in his pyjamas, put his head round the door.

‘I have to speak to you,’ he said.

‘Good heavens, boy, it’s the middle of the night!’

‘Yes, I know. But it’s terribly important.’

Sir George put on his bedside lamp. He had indigestion after his dinner party, and a headache from the wine.

‘Well, come on then. What is it?’

Rollo came and stood by the bed. ‘We went to say goodbye to the cows,’ he said, ‘and they aren’t there.’

Sir George roused himself. ‘You did what?’

So Rollo told him about the visit to the gravel pit.

‘But Sunita couldn’t get in touch with the spirits of the cows, and the banshees couldn’t wail and that means that the cows aren’t buried in the pit.’

Sir George looked at Rollo. The boy’s face was lit up and excited, and he hated throwing cold water on his hopes.

‘Look, Rollo, I have every respect for the ghosts. Ghosts are important and venerable. But they’re ghosts. And banshees are banshees. They don’t belong to the real world. The world where animals are infected and have to be buried safely and put away.’

‘Sunita knows about the cattle. She
knows
. We have to find out what happened to them and where they are.’

Sir George sighed.

‘Rollo, when we want something very much we will believe all sorts of things. You want to believe that the cattle are still alive and so do I, but—’

‘They are alive. I know they are. They’ve been stolen and taken somewhere. I know. You should see my zoo magazine … animals are always being stolen.’

Sir George shook his head. ‘What would be the point of stealing them? No one could get money for them – they’re the only herd of white cattle in the country. They’d be recognized at once.’