The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A great deal of nonsense has been written about banshees. In some books they’re described as fairies, in others as witches or ghosts. They’re supposed to be death portents, which means they appear when someone is about to die, but it could also mean that they look so awful that a person who sees them dies of shock, which is not the same at all. There are legends about banshees who wash out the bloodstained linen of the dead, and others about banshees who belong only to the royal families of Ireland.

But most books are agreed on one thing: banshees are very sorrowful and sad and what they do, if they possibly can, is wail — the proper kind of wailing which involves howling and weeping and the wringing of hands.

Banshees need to wail like footballers need to kick balls and opera singers need to sing and acrobats need to turn somersaults. If they don’t get a chance to wail they seize up. But though they are strange and gloomy, and like dark places, banshees do not cheat. If they wail it is because there is something to wail about — and usually this means that somebody has died.

But what sort of somebody? A banshee who is serious about her work isn’t going to wail for some thugs who have hit each other on the head with broken bottles and landed in the local cemetery, or for a car thief who has smashed himself up going joyriding in a stolen car.

And as people became more and more unpleasant and slaughtered each other in stupid wars, banshees these days quite often found themselves wailing for animals.

The Johnston sisters were elderly and lived together in a small house in a quiet street in a London suburb and at first you might have thought they were exactly like so many old ladies who live together, bothering no one.

But if you looked carefully, you could see … signs. The sisters’ eyes were slightly swollen and their noses were reddened at the tips from years of weeping, and there were bald patches on their scalps where they had pulled out tufts of grey hair in their grief.

There were other signs too: the collars of their black dresses often seemed to be damp and they drank enormous quantities of tea. To make tears, the body needs a lot of liquid — and there is nothing better for making tears than tea.

They were drinking tea now, sitting round the blue teapot with its knitted cosy, and dunking ginger biscuits, when they heard the newspapers dropping in through the letter box. There was the Evening Herald, the Radio Times — and the Banshee Bulletin.

And it was in the Banshee Bulletin that they saw an extraordinary piece of news.

‘My goodness, how amazing!’ said the eldest of the sisters. ‘Who would have thought it?’

‘Yes indeed,’ said the middle sister. ‘Quite extraordinary. And so sudden.’

‘It’s the last thing I would have expected,’ said the youngest sister. She was delicate and took things hard.

There was a pause while they poured themselves another cup of tea. Then:

‘You don’t think … we ought to…?’ said the eldest sister.

‘It makes one wonder, certainly,’ said the middle sister.

The youngest sister swallowed the last of her biscuit. ‘I haven’t had a good wail for a long time. I feel quite bunged up. But it’s a long way.’

‘Yes, it’s certainly a long way.’

‘And we’re not young any more.’

‘No, we’re definitely not young any more,’ agreed the others.

There was another pause, during which more tea was drunk and ginger biscuits were dunked. Then:

‘I do feel perhaps it’s our duty to go,’ said the eldest sister. ‘Goodness knows what kind of banshees they have up in the north. They probably live in caves and wear skins.’

So the next morning the three ladies set off in their small black motor car. They had been careful not to clean the car because they wanted to merge into the background (banshees are very fond of merging) and they had packed it with food for the journey and rugs and a change of underclothes.

But the most important thing they took was an enormous cardboard box crammed full of clean and freshly ironed handkerchiefs, and this was sensible. A working banshee cannot have too many handkerchiefs — and the job they were going to do in the distant north was one of the biggest they had ever taken on.

Rollo went on behaving well. Seeing Madlyn in such despair and anger had shaken him badly.

But he was not the same as he had been before. He was very quiet; no one heard him laugh; and he spent a lot of time with Sir George in his study, listening to stories of what it had been like to be a soldier in the war.

‘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.’