Haunted

THE PRAYING
DOWN OF
VAUGHAN
DARKNESS

Henry Davies – Days in the Life Diary Project

Wednesday 11th April

THIS IS THE beginning of our ‘Days in the Life Diary Project’. Mrs Preece our history teacher says that we have got to describe our lives for three days. This means we must write down everything about ourselves – where we live, who we meet, what we do, what we eat, the stories we hear, and everything that happens to us. Mrs Preece says that we must hand it in by Friday afternoon, and that the result will be a fascinating historical document and very interesting. Not much interesting really happens, actually. But Mrs Preece says to write down everything, even stuff that everyone knows, and include any documents that come our way. So here goes, and do not blame me if it sends you to sleep.

Mum and Dad and me live in a town called Kington in what is called the Welsh Marches, which is where England and Wales meet. England is green and nearly flat, and Wales is browner and made of little mountains. Our house is quite old, on a street in the town, but the mountains rise at the end of the back garden.

Sometimes we go into the mountains, which in summer are green and nice-looking, and covered in larks twittering and all that. But if you go there in winter you can find yourself in a deep valley where the sun never reaches. In valleys like that the frost lies white and icy for weeks, and sometimes you feel there are other reasons for being cold beside the weather. Today we had porridge for breakfast and I went to school and we had sausages for supper and I can’t remember what we had for lunch and not much happened.

Thursday 12th April

This morning we had porridge for breakfast. Then I went to school on my bike and there was a visiting author. The visiting author was called Montagu Taplin. He had a scrubby white beard and he smelled like a room where nobody has opened the windows for weeks. He writes stuff about local history, which means what happened round Kington hundreds of years ago. This did not sound too interesting at first, because not much happens in Kington these days, and it used to be smaller than it is now so probably even less happened then.

Montagu Taplin sat at a table in the library and read us a story from a pad of mothy old paper. The story was a bit old-fashioned, but I was surprised at how interesting it was. So afterwards I went up to him, holding my breath because of the smell, and got a photocopy. The story is called The Praying Down of Vaughan Darkness, and Mrs Preece said to include all documents in our ‘Days in the Life Diaries’ so here it is.

Narrative of Montagu Taplin

In a valley of the hills west of Kington stands an ancient house called Hergest Court. It is sited on a low hill frowning over a river, which broadens into a dark mere. Almost six hundred years ago there lived in this house a certain Thomas Vaughan.

Thomas Vaughan was a great lord and a wicked one. He stole money from farmers’ chests and wives from their husbands’ beds, took children and sold them into slavery, and killed without mercy. In those wild and lawless lands in those wild and lawless times, no-one could prevent this. People came to call him Vaughan Darkness, and chased him from his house, so he took to the crags and caves of Radnor Forest. And in time they set a hunter called Simon ap John after him.

Simon ap John hunted Vaughan Darkness down in a badger sett, bound him and brought him to Kington. Here he was tried, found guilty of robbery and murder, and (as was the custom of the time) sentenced to hang.

The town of Kington loved a hanging. It was revenge for the wronged. It was entertainment for the curious. And above all it was a lesson for the wicked; or, in the case of Harry Morgan, the said-to-be-wicked.

Harry Morgan was twelve years old, and had been offered by his step-parents to be a monk in Hereford. The reason Harry was said to be wicked was that he did not want to be a monk and live with a lot of old men in a draughty abbey. But his parents were dead, and he lived with his Uncle Davies and Aunt Gwyn, and his Uncle Davies and his Aunt Gwyn wanted him to be a monk because they had their eye on the Hope, which was a farm that belonged to the abbey, and if they gave Harry to the abbey, the bishop (they thought) would give them the farm they wanted.

So Uncle Davies dragged Harry by the ear through the crowd on the day of the hanging of Vaughan Darkness, to show him what happened to ungrateful boys who did not do as they were told.

The people of Kington knew about the plan for Harry to become a monk, and thought it was a good idea, and that being ungrateful was a bad idea, and that he could do with a lesson. The crowd parted so Harry could get a front-row view. Inside a fence of oak palings was a clear circle of cobblestones. In the centre of the circle stood a gallows. Standing on a cart under the gallows was a huge man with a dark and bitter face and a rope around his neck. The other end of the rope was tied to the crossbeam of the gallows.

‘There you are, see,’ hissed Uncle Davies. ‘Vaughan Darkness on the cart at last. They’ll whip up the horse, and he’ll dangle.’

There was a priest beside the cart, gaunt and blue-nosed in his cassock. ‘Darkness, repent!’ he cried.

Vaughan Darkness grinned, or perhaps it was a snarl, and fixed the priest with his burning black gaze. ‘I’ll see you in hell,’ he said, not as defiance, but as a matter of fact. The crowd groaned, for in those days hell was real, and burning, and lasted for ever. The executioner whacked the horse with his stick. The cart jolted forward. Harry shut his eyes.

He heard a thump, then the creak of a rope with something heavy swinging on the end of it. When he opened his eyes Vaughan Darkness hung there, dead.

‘Behold the results of wickedness, which begins with disobedience,’ said Uncle Davies. ‘We won’t be seeing him again.’

But there, as it turned out, he was wrong.

* * *

The brown earth settled over Vaughan’s grave. Winter became spring. And before the grass had its roots well into the mound, strange things began to happen.

Simon ap John the hunter was chasing a stag over the hills when he heard a terrible ripping and snarling from across a ridge. When he went to see the cause, he found all of his hounds with their throats torn out. In the middle of the circle of corpses was a great black dog. When the dog saw Simon it made a horrid bound and sank its fangs into his neck. Simon told this story with his last breath to the shepherd who found him. He added that the dog had had eyes in which red fires burned like the pits of hell. The shepherd passed this on, mentioning that the dead man’s wound had stunk of brimstone and corruption; brimstone being one of the chief ingredients of hell fire, with a stink somewhere between burning and bad eggs.

Most people thought the shepherd had made this bit up, and that Simon had been unlucky enough to meet a pack of wolves, which at that time still roved the deep hills of Wales. Then something else happened.

A pedlar was lying at his ease in a hedge. He was watching a carter take a load of straw along the road, and pitying him the hard work of carting. It was a still grey evening, soft, with no wind. The pedlar thought he heard a faint roaring in the hills. The roaring came closer. There was a cracking, like branches breaking in a wind. The pedlar felt a breath of breeze on his face and looked up. He saw a black whirlwind howl down the hillside, whisk cart, horse and carter high in the air, and dash them into the ravine by the road. The odd thing about the whirlwind (said the pedlar) was that it seemed to have threads of fire running through it, red as the pits of hell, and it left behind it a stink of brimstone and corruption.

People believed pedlars even less than they believed shepherds, for pedlars were usually trying to sell splinters of wood as bits of the True Cross, or dog teeth as the molars of saints. They could not check his story with the carter because the carter was in the ravine, crushed under the wreckage of his cart and his horse and the load of straw.

Soon after this, the hangman was out looking after his cattle on Bradnor Hill. A sharp-eyed fowler, snaring larks, saw what happened. Apparently a huge black bull rose out of the ground and charged at the hangman. The fowler saw the hangman run away, the bull chasing him, head down. The head jerked up. And there was the hangman, spinning on a horn like a Catherine wheel on its pin. The bull tossed the hangman into a gorse bush, lifted its gory muzzle and bellowed. As it bellowed the fowler caught sight of its eyes, which he said were red as the pits of hell. When he ran to help the hangman – who, of course, was beyond help, being dead – he could hardly breathe for the stink of brimstone and corruption.

But Harry Morgan did not hear about any of this. For Harry was in the abbey at Hereford with the top of his head shaved bald, learning to be a monk.

At this time it was generally believed that the Devil had a house in Radnor Forest. So people were used to events that were hard to explain, and nobody paid much attention to stories of dogs and whirlwinds and bulls. But at last people did begin to murmur that the hunter who had been killed was the hunter who had captured Vaughan Darkness, and the carter who had been killed was the carter who had driven the cart on which Vaughan Darkness had stood to be hanged, and the man gored to death by the black bull had been the hangman who had hanged Vaughan Darkness. And they began to wonder.

The man who wondered the most was a judge. He wondered very hard, because he had been the judge who had run the trial of Vaughan Darkness and condemned him to hang. The deaths of the hunter and the carter and the hangman made the judge nervous. He soon grew tired of looking under his four-poster bed for dogs and whirlwinds and bulls. So one Thursday he put a holy relic in every pocket, watered his horse at a holy well and rode to Hereford to see the bishop.

The bishop was having breakfast. He looked up from his plate, waving a chicken leg. ‘Judge!’ he cried.

The judge bowed so deeply that his relics clanked. ‘Lord Bishop,’ he said, ‘we must be rid of the wicked sinner Vaughan Darkness.’

‘But he has been hanged, and burns in hell,’ said the bishop, taking a mouthful.

‘He walks,’ said the judge.

‘Dear me,’ said the bishop. ‘We’ll have to take care of that. Now, then. Breakfast?’

The judge tucked into a large and delicious breakfast of mutton chops, sausages and three kinds of pie, and started (somewhat greasy) for home.

The road was a stripe of mud that ran through a forest. It was autumn, and the last flies of the year buzzed in low slants of sun between the oak trunks. In a clearing something had died. A cloud of bluebottles rose from the corpse, along with a stink of brimstone and corruption. One of the flies buzzed into the judge’s face. He swatted at it, expecting it to fly away. But it buzzed back straight and true. He felt a stinging pain in the soft part of his neck beside his windpipe. The pain got worse and worse until there was nothing else. The last thing he saw as his mind faded were the eyes of the rest of the swarm. They were red as the pits of hell.

Brother Anselmus woke in his cell. A cold moon was peering through the slit window, and a bell was ringing. A monk’s life was ruled by bells, and by the vow he had taken to bury his old self, the self that had been Harry Morgan. Harry was a dutiful boy, who kept his promises. But he could not get used to being a monk called Anselmus, and he knew that people had noticed this fact and were not pleased with him.

So he shuddered into the robe of prickly black cloth, and splashed cold water on his face, and tried not to let himself think about how much he hated getting up in the middle of the winter night to go and mumble prayers in a cold chapel.

Someone rattled at his door. A head appeared round it, pitted with shadow by the lantern its owner was carrying. ‘Anselmus,’ it said. ‘Come. The Lord Bishop will see you now.’

This was the Bishop’s Chaplain, a very important man who normally would not even have noticed Harry. Harry trotted after him, searching his heart for a sin he had committed dreadful enough to get the attention of a real bishop, and found none except not really wanting to be a monk. Perhaps that was bad enough.

He was still wondering when he arrived in a chamber where the bishop sat. The room was bright as day, lit with twenty candles. The tubby old bishop fixed his cunning eyes on Harry. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘are you pure in heart?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Harry.

‘Then we need you to help us. We are faced with a terrible Thing.’

Harry was pleased to be asked to help, but he wondered why the bishop was calling on him. ‘What thing?’

‘A Thing of darkness, come from hell,’ said the bishop in a deep, solemn voice. ‘A Thing that must be summoned and prayed down. We have been watching you with interest. We are sure that you are the boy for the job, Andrew.’

‘Anselmus,’ said the chaplain.

Harry, thought Harry. ‘What job?’ he said.

‘You will be one of those who travel to Cwm to pray the Thing down,’ said the bishop. ‘If – that is when – you succeed, your name will be great. I know your uncle would like our farm at the Hope. If the ghost is confined,’ he said casually, ‘we will make sure he gets it.’

The chaplain said, ‘He is young. He does not know praying down.’

‘Then explain it to him.’ The bishop rose and waddled away to bed.

The chaplain sat in the bishop’s chair. He did not offer Harry a seat. He said, in the bored voice of a teacher, ‘Summonings take place at Cwm because it is a lonely place, and if the devil blasts it, only the Summoners will be hurt. It is done as follows: twelve candles are lit in the church. Twelve priests, nuns or monks stand near them. The Chief Summoner calls the Thing from hell on the stroke of midnight. The Summoners pray the Thing into a bottle and seal it therein with molten lead, and the whole is buried under running water so that the Thing can walk no more. And when the Thing is under the water, the priests and the nuns will be richly rewarded, and your uncle can have that farm he keeps pestering the bishop about.’ The chaplain frowned. ‘Though, of course, many perish during a praying down. And sometimes if the Thing has eaten enough souls it is content and goes back to hell, and troubles us no more. Well, that’s all. Away with you.’

Harry stood staring at the chaplain’s tight-shut face. Summon a ghost and pray it into a bottle? So Uncle Davies could have his farm? There was ice in his heart, and his knees tried to knock together.

‘Go!’ cried the chaplain.

The bishop’s people gave Harry a breakfast of bread and a boiled egg, and told him that from now on he was fasting. They led him outside to where two horses were breathing steam in the half-light. The bishop’s groom boosted him into the saddle of one of the horses and mounted the other. They rode through the mucky streets and into the forest.

The sun came up and printed the long shadows of the trees over the ground. Harry thought they looked like fingers out to grab him and rode round them whenever possible. At noon the bishop’s groom took out some bread and cheese. He did not offer any to Harry. ‘You must fast,’ he said. ‘Orders from the chaplain.’ He chewed a bit. ‘Not that it will do you any good. The bishop’s sending every priest and nun he wants to be rid of to Cwm.’ He laughed, mouth open. ‘He’s promised them money. But we reckon he won’t have to spend it, because at midnight you’ll be a nice snack for Vaughan Darkness, and that’ll be the end of you.’

Sometimes if the Thing has eaten enough souls it is content, the chaplain had said. Perhaps there would be no praying down. Perhaps the Summoners were going to Cwm as ghost-food. Harry shivered, and thought of kicking his horse into a gallop and fleeing into the wood. But if he did that everyone would say he had run away from the ghost that was plaguing them, and nobody would help him, and he would starve. He had a choice, it seemed: starve, or be eaten . . .

No. The only way out was to summon the ghost, pray it down, and get Uncle Davies his farm. Then he could run away if he wanted to. Let the ghost appear, he thought, pushing the terror into the shadowy corners of his mind. He would pray it down as best he could with the others. And having kept his side of the bargain, he would do as he liked.

On they rode, on and on. The November night came down. The trees thinned, and the land rose, and the road ran into a deep valley. Rags of cloud chased past a pale sliver of moon. At last the sides of the valley drew away and it seemed to Harry that they had come into a bowl of ground surrounded by mountains. He had never been so tired and hungry, or so frightened. Soon, he consoled himself, he would meet his fellow Summoners. They would help him. They would all help each other.

The moon was setting behind the mountains. The only light out here was a dim yellow glow, perhaps a candle behind a horn pane, in the bowl’s centre. Twenty minutes later the hooves clattered on cobbles.

‘Off,’ said the groom.

Harry slid down from his horse’s back, found that his legs would not carry him and collapsed in front of what he now saw was a church gate. Hands pulled him up by the arm and dragged him through. He saw tombstones, the dark shape of a building. Then sounds began to echo around him, and he knew he was in a church, and the hands dropped him onto something less hard than stone, a mat, perhaps; and he went to sleep.

Someone was shaking him. He woke. There was a little more light, and more voices echoing on stone. He was colder even than before. The shaker’s face was lit by the yellow flame of a rush light. It had small eyes, and a bulb of a nose, and it gave off a smell that reminded Harry of a wine cellar. ‘Come, child,’ said a wheezy voice. ‘It is time to do our duty to God and the bishop.’

Harry scrambled to his feet. The flames cast shadows: twelve shadows in all, nine monks and priests including him, and three nuns. Some of them seemed to be eating. What about their fasts? But, of course, these were the worst priests and nuns the bishop could find, sent to have their souls devoured by a Thing from hell. His heart sank. These were not good companions for a life-or-death battle.

From somewhere came a high, lost moaning and a scratching like fingernails on stone. ‘What’s that noise?’ he said. His voice sounded higher than he had meant it to.

‘Wind in the trees,’ said the priest with the bulb nose.

‘But the scratching.’

‘Twigs on the roof,’ said another voice, sarcastic. ‘Can it be that he believes in ghosts?’

Laughter from the priests and nuns. Some of it real, thought Harry. Some of it not; the kind of forced laugh you might give if you were trying to persuade yourself not to be frightened of something. He wanted to shout that they should have kept to the rules. But that sarcastic voice would only sneer, and the others would laugh nervously, but they would not argue. Their souls would be eaten, and his with them. He squeezed his eyes shut so he would not cry.

‘Let us begin,’ said Bulb-Nose.

‘Very well, Marcus, your holiness,’ said the sarcastic voice, and the others laughed again, and Harry’s heart sank still lower.

‘Candles, then,’ said Marcus. ‘Books. What else?’

Another voice said, ‘Never mind the mumbo jumbo. Let’s get it over with and take our money and go home.’

No, no, thought Harry. They must do things the right way, or they would be in terrible danger. He said, ‘What about the lead?’

‘Lead?’

‘For melting. And the bottle to put the ghost in.’

There was a silence. Then the sarcastic voice said, ‘Well, well, he really does believe. Now listen to me, child. We are here because the bishop wants to be rid of us.’ That was what the groom had said. ‘But the bishop is a superstitious old fool. We do not believe in being eaten by ghosts. So, at the praying down, Marcus will recite the summons, and, of course, the ghost will not come, and we will tell the bishop that the ghost said sorry and went away, and we will get our pay. I believe in money, not ghosts,’ he said.

There was laughter, but the silence in the church seemed to suck it up. In the quiet, Harry was almost sure he heard a voice far, far away, a harsh voice with a long echo. It was laughing too.

Harry told himself it was probably an owl. Ghost or no ghost, getting ready would take his mind off the waiting. ‘I’m going to melt some lead,’ he said.

‘If you must,’ said Marcus.

In an alcove in the church wall Harry found a bottle, a little brazier, some charcoal, a saucepan and some odds and ends of lead. He put the brazier on the stone bench that ran down the church wall, lit the charcoal, blew it into red embers, put the lead in the saucepan and balanced the saucepan on the brazier.

‘It is time to light the candles,’ said Father Marcus, sounding bored. ‘Have you quite finished, Anselmus?’

‘Coming,’ said Harry, hot-faced, blowing the brazier.

The candles stood on the altar, pale as bones. The Summoners walked up one by one, lit a single candle each and went to stand on alternate sides of the altar steps. Harry went last because he was the youngest. The warmth of the brazier had left him, and he was cold with terror. His hands were shaking so much that he could not bring the taper to the candle. The nuns sniggered. He managed on his third try, using both hands. Twelve flames made a cheerful golden glow; but Harry could not help thinking that up in the vaulting of the roof the shadows wriggled in a way that was . . . not quite right.

Silence fell, broken only by the moan of the wind and the heavy tick of the clock. There was a clunk and a whirring, the first stroke of midnight boomed in the freezing air. Father Marcus held his book to the light of the candles and began to read.

The words were in Latin. Like everyone else in those days, Harry had been taught Latin at school. ‘Come up, come up, foul spirit.’ Father Marcus paused to blow his nose. ‘Visit us, we command thee, that we may strive with thee and compass thee about, and put thy being in this world into a bottle, and thy being in the other world into the Pit. Vaughan Darkness, we command thee to attend us in Saint Michael’s holy church of Cwm.’

‘Amen,’ said the priests and nuns.

The last stroke of midnight died away. The candle flames stood still as golden spearheads and the clock ticked on. A nun said something to another nun. Nothing is going to happen, Harry told himself, warm with relief. Nothing at all—

The church doors burst open with a crash. Wind shrieked in the gargoyles, and icy air flooded up the aisle, bowing the candle flames into flat red lines of fire. The gust died. The doors slammed shut. The candle flames stood straight again and the silence returned.

Harry’s skin crawled.

The clock had stopped ticking.

Someone – some Thing – had come into the church.

Harry held his hands in front of his face as if he were praying and peeped between his fingers. A patch of shadow by the door seemed thicker than it should have been. Terror crawled over him like spiders. The shadows drew together. They took on a shape. It was the shape of a man: an enormous man, with huge shoulders and a great black cloak that merged with the darkness behind him. The figure flowed up the aisle and hung over the double line of Summoners like a thundercloud. A voice spoke, so deep that it seemed to come from the vaults under the paving. ‘Who summons me?’ it said.

Now there was real silence, unbroken even by breathing. Harry saw Father Marcus suddenly start forward, as if one of the nuns had pinched his bottom.

‘You?’ said the phantom, in a voice full of scorn.

Father Marcus’s face was greenish in the candlelight. He lifted the book in his hand and began reading in Latin. ‘Avaunt, foul fiend, let thy many sins pursue thee like the hounds of hell into yonder bottle—’

A laugh like vault doors slamming. ‘And who are you to tell me where I must go?’ said Vaughan Darkness. ‘You do not even believe in ghosts, you say. Why should something that does not exist do as you tell it? But perhaps we can make you believe.’ The shadowy hand made a small gesture, like one flicking away a fly. Marcus the priest jolted backwards, tumbled up and over the altar and smashed through the east window, his scream fading into the far distance.

One of the candles on the altar flicked out.

‘Next?’ said Vaughan Darkness.

Through his fingers, Harry saw two of the nuns sidle away into the shadows. Himself, he was too scared to move.

The nuns began laughing, high and mad. Two more candles flicked out.

Another priest stepped forward, mumbling Latin words. The ghost loomed over him, dark and terrible. ‘Hmm,’ it said. ‘Can that be bread and cheese I smell on your breath? Can it be that you have broken your fast? Aye. Farewell.’ A hand of shadow came out, rested above the bald patch on the priest’s head, and pressed downwards. The paving slabs under the priest’s feet seemed to soften. He sank into the floor, screaming until the screams were muffled by the stones closing over his mouth.

A fourth candle died.

‘Some years in the vault will teach him the meaning of fasting,’ said the ghost. ‘Oh, are you leaving us?’

For six priests and the remaining nun were creeping down the aisle. Now they broke into a run, heading for the doors. The ghost waved a corner of his cloak at them. They fell flat on the paving, like puppets with their strings cut.

It seemed to be getting darker in the church. Harry turned to the altar. Between the fingers of his praying hands he saw the flames of seven more candles die to tiny red coals and vanish.

Eleven candles gone. Only one still burned on the altar. He fixed his eyes on it. It shone pure and clear. He felt its warmth and light flow into him.

The wind moaned in the vaults. The shadow of Vaughan Darkness loomed over him, glaring down with eyes red as the pits of hell.

But in his mind Harry saw the sun bright as the candle, shining from a clear sky on to the green hills of Wales. He heard larks singing, and smelled the grass growing. He saw that this Vaughan was mere death, a nothing, emptiness. So he looked into the terrible red eyes and said, ‘Vaughan Darkness, into the bottle with you.’

The eyes flared, but gave out no light. ‘The others I destroyed,’ said Vaughan Darkness. ‘You I will eat.’ A red mouth opened in the shadowy head.

But all Harry saw was a filthy rat cornered in a patch of shadow by a hay cart. ‘I have fasted,’ he said. ‘I believe in you, but not in your power, for you are nothing and cannot live in my world. So you have no command over me.’

In his bright hay meadow he bent and picked up the squirming, snapping, red-eyed rat by its scaly tail, and carried it squealing across to the bottle, crammed it in, and took the pan of molten lead from the coals and poured the lead in on top of it. There was a roar and a hiss and a dreadful scream. The great shadow writhed in the light of the last candle. It was a bull, then a dog, then a whirlwind. The whirlwind shrank to become a fly, slow and sleepy in the winter chill. Harry stepped on it. There was a slight crunch, and a wisp of vapour that stank of brimstone and corruption.

He lay down in front of the altar and went to sleep.

They found him there the next morning. The eleven priests and nuns were dead or raving mad. Harry was mad too, they decided. For he declared that he would no longer be a monk. When they asked him why, he showed them a bunch of fresh flowers, the kind you would pick in a hay field in June; though it was November, and a cold one at that. And nobody could make him tell where he had got them.

They took the bottle with Vaughan Darkness stoppered up in it to Hergest Court. They dug a hole in the bed of the mere and buried the bottle in it. Then they covered the place with a great stone, bearing the sign of the cross and a Latin inscription forbidding anyone to move it, ever, and let the water back in to cover it.

As for Harry, he collected his wits and the bishop’s reward.

His uncle and aunt died of the plague soon afterwards, and he took on the farm at the Hope, and in time became the father of a large family and lived to a great age, loved by all.

Well that was the story the author told us. I thought it was quite good, but it took me a long time to read. It is supper now. We are having stew, and after that I am going to bed. With the light on.

Friday 13th April

Not much happened today. We had porridge for breakfast and pasta salad for school lunch, which was disgusting. We were supposed to finish these ‘Days in the Life Diaries’ in the afternoon but me and Craig didn’t get ours done because we had to go for our guitar lessons. So Mrs Preece said we could finish them tonight as long as we got them to her house by six o’clock because she wants to read them before Monday. That’s OK because she lives near me and Craig.

Anyway, I was biking home when I heard a roar and a clatter and it was Dave. Dave is a friend of my dad’s and he drives a JCB 4CX digger and he says that next year when I am twelve he will let me have a go. Everyone rings Dave when there is digging to be done. They even get him to dig the graves in the churchyard. People say, doesn’t it spook you? But Dave says a hole is a hole, and what people put in it is up to them.

So Dave slowed down and said, ‘Coming for a ride?’

I said, ‘Where?’ Thinking, not really, because I have the ‘Days in the Life Diary’ to finish.

But then he said, ‘Hergest Court,’ and I thought perhaps this is an interesting coincidence. So I put my bike in the bucket and Dave used his mobile to ring Mum to say I would be back for tea, and off we went, me sitting in the spare seat of the cab.

As we drove along I said, ‘What’s the job?’

Dave said, ‘They’ve drained the mere at the Court, and there’s a lot of silty old muck in there that needs shifting and there will be probably be eels.’ Dave knows I like catching eels. So we went down Hergest drive and he put the digger alongside the mere, which is only a pond, really, and he started digging out all this black mud, and there were eels in it, which was excellent. I was chasing this big eel through the grass when I heard the digger bucket bang against something hard. So I ran back to have a look. The bucket was deep in wet mud, jerking away at something. ‘Stone!’ Dave shouted, frowning through the open window of his cab.

It was then that I remembered the stone in Montagu Taplin’s story. So I started to yell, ‘Stop, Dave!’ but Dave could not hear over the noise of the digger, and anyway, Dave thinks a grave is just a hole in the ground, and a story is only a story, so it would have been a waste of breath. He got the bucket under whatever it was and lifted. Up it came; a great big lump of black mud with a stone in the middle of it. The stone looked a bit square, as if someone had shaped it. I really hoped it would not have writing on it. I decided not to go and look, just in case it did.

As Dave swung the bucket to put the load in the dumper truck, something fell out of the lump. Whatever it was winked in the sun like glass. Like part of a bottle, really. And when I went to look at it I saw it was an old, old bottle, broken now. The mud smelled horrible, like a mixture of corruption and brimstone, whatever that is. But I picked up the bits because I thought I’d find out where Montagu Taplin lives and show them to him.

I took my bike out of the bucket and waved to Dave and pedalled off home as fast as I could.

All the way home I was telling myself that Montagu Taplin’s story is only a story. It made me nervous, though, and the only way I could stop myself feeling nervous was to tell myself that it was all a load of rubbish. So I put the bottle bits in the recycling bin and came inside to finish writing my ‘Days in the Life Diary’. Craig next door is coming round any minute now and he is going to hand in his ‘Days in the Life Diary’ to Mrs Preece at her house and he says he will take mine along too.

It is nearly tea time, and Craig will be here any minute, so I must stop now. Dad has just shouted up the stairs to say there is some sort of dog out by the back fence and it will be into the bins soon and the bins are my job and he is busy, and the wind is getting up so it will probably rain, so I should go and chase it away now before I get wet and it rips the bags. I have opened my bedroom window to shout at it, but it hasn’t done any good. I can hear it panting, and there is some sort of cow bellowing, so maybe it has been chasing the dog out of the mountains, or something. The dog sounds big. It must have got into one of the bins already, because even from up here at the window I can see that there are flies everywhere, and there is a terrible stink of brimstone and corruption.

There goes the doorbell. That will be Craig. I’ll give him this and then I’ll do the bins. It’s been quite interesting to write, after all. That dog is really, really barking. I wonder what it wants? Soon find out.

This is the ‘Days in the Life Diary’ handed in by Craig Evans to Mrs Preece, with his own work, at five o’clock on April 13th. At five-past five on the same evening, the Davies house was destroyed by a freak whirlwind. The entire Davies family vanished, and no trace of them has been seen since.