* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NIGHT SKY WAS splattered with stars. I was halfway across a beetroot field, swinging my arms and following my nose, when I remembered that I had left my haversack in the cloakroom of the Spangles Reference Library. The journey to the HQ from the owl sanctuary had taken three days, as far as I had been able to tell. The special agent had mentioned something about a forty mile stretch: but he was a crafty devil. For all I knew the HQ may have been just around the corner.
But I seemed to be in open country, and the night was pitch black save for the twinkling stars. A town like Spangles would surely be lit up at night by festive lanterns: it was that sort of place. I had no choice but to continue striding ahead. By morning, I thought, I should reach some sort of landmark: a town or village, a crag or a promontory, a windmill, a tower or a tor.
As I plunged through the darkness, I kept the image of the philatelist Plunkett in the forefront of my brain. I knew where he lived, of course: I knew everything about him, as I had been demonstrating to the Turquoise Badge Ten. Plunkett Hall was a strangely proportioned brickish monstrosity, perched on a clifftop on the wildest shores of the Soaking Wet Sea. Curious passers-by, who were few, were warned by a sign bolted to the massive granite wall surrounding the landward sides of the house that Trespassers Will Be Fed To The Vultures. The house had few windows, and those few were tiny, mere narrow slits of smoke-blackened glass. Ferocious, cloven-hooved beasts, their fur matted and rank, their fangs dripping with gore, patrolled the grounds, howling and howling. Once a month, one of the philatelist's eerie servants would issue forth from the house armed with a flamethrower, and incinerate any poor sprig of greenery which had managed to grow in the blasted wastelands of the garden. Plunkett himself was rumoured never to have set foot outside the house since he had retired to it twenty years before. How he passed his days, none knew: the handful of biographies I had read all petered out with his arrival at the house. Plodding onward, I shuddered at the thought that, once I had retrieved my haversack, my mission impelled me towards that cursed place. I had no wish to provide dinner for a bale of vultures, so I would need to think up a convincing excuse to enter Plunkett Hall as a legitimate visitor.
If only Fig were with me now, I thought, and as I did so I tripped over a clump of bracken and fell to the ground, jolting my ribcage and spraining my wrist. The night seemed more suffocating than ever: unspeakable desolation poured down from the stars. I sat down on a tuffet and burst into tears.
I do not know for how long I wept. I was engulfed by a nameless and terrible grief. My body was wracked by great heaving sobs which emptied my lungs and had me scrabbling in the earth as if trying to effect my own burial. Hours and hours seemed to pass, but there was no glimmer of dawn. I imagined myself marooned in an endless and illimitable night. At the very peak of my misery, as I drew my head up to bay woe, woe and woe at the sky, I was startled to see a figure in the distance, moving towards me. It was spectral and wraith-like, shimmering with an uncanny glow. I stood up, exhausted but now alert, tingling with wonderment. The spectre approached with inhuman speed, and within seconds came to a halt inches from my face. I squinted at it through the last drops of my tears. It looked something like a combination of Fig and Poxhaven: but then it spoke, and it sounded like my dead headmaster, Monsignor Sinkpail.
"Here is your satchel," it said, handing me my haversack. However unearthly the apparition before me, there was no doubting the weight and solidity of the haversack: I didn't remember it being so heavy. I rested it on the ground.
"Your satchel is a heavy burden," said the spectre, "I have carried it many miles. I have brought it to you from its locker, out of the library, past the baths, the chemist's shop, the Town Hall, the pigeon lofts and the owl sanctuary, along Blister Lane, turning right at the duckpond, then up Pang Hill until I reached the waterworks, where I struck off down Amnesiac Lane towards the graveyard, hopped over three fences and headed west to Bodger's Spinney, where I dipped my cup in the stream and rested awhile. Using my internal compass, I then made my way to a mysterious village, where the dandelions are blue and the air is thick with the stench of vinegar. I dithered in the square, and was at a loss until I espied a little news-vendor's kiosk, where I was able to obtain a gazetteer of the village and its hinterland, which I studied carefully until sunset. I slept there, uncomfortably, on the plastic roof of the kiosk. When morning came, consulting the gazetteer, I whisked myself along the towpath of the canal, crossing it at Sawdust Bridge and following thereafter the course of the Great Frightening River. I camped on the knoll. The remains of your sausage gave me sustenance. There are many butterflies to be found there: I netted and ate half a dozen of them. By now your satchel was weighing me down. I hared on, past the fireworks factory and the dental institution, and found myself in a thicket of nettles. I inched my way through it with the aid of my secateurs. Then I caught the funicular railway up to the top of Pilgarlic Hill, and hurried down the other side on foot, splashing through puddles, until I reached the pig farmer's house. I hid in his orchard and snoozed, until the pig farmer set his hounds on me: I was able to escape from them by spraying their snouts with a concoction of bleach and aniseed, but not before they had bitten mouthfuls of fabric from my spectral trousers. From there, I strode with giant steps across fields of barley, turnips, bracken, furze and javelin weed, past an abandoned quarry, and on through a knot of allotments, where again I rested, finding shelter in a hut empty but for the broken and rusted remnants of a lawnmower, the skull of a badger, and a tattered instruction manual. What the instructions were for, I do not know: I cannot read. I dozed, begged a bottle of lemonade from an early-bird allotmenteer, and trudged towards the west, skirting the Shabby lime-kilns and the serried belvederes of Haemoglobin Towers, until, night crashing down again, I hit upon this astonishingly large tract of beetroot fields, where at last I have found you. My task is almost done. It remains for you to lodge what I have just said in your brain, and for me to bid you farewell with the words which, if you say them with sufficient conviction, will gain you entrance to Plunkett Hall. You must knock at the gate, and wait, and wait, and when, at last, one of Mr Plunkett's servants opens the little shutter three feet above your head, and, in fearsome, gravelly tones, bids you state your business, you must say: hello, I've come about the tap. My deed is done. Farewell."
The spectre did a little hop, and dissolved.
Well! It might as well have given me a map. Mentally following the journey it had described, I realised just where I was. The world remained enwrapped in night, and I was once more alone, but my spirits were lifted immensely. I had got my bearings: I was no more than half an hour's walk from Plunkett Hall. I resolved, when dawn should break, to head straight there, to say the given words, and, once inside, to play it, as they say, by ear.
For the time being, squatting on the tuffet, I threw open my haversack to inspect its contents. I was pleased to note that all the items Scrimgeour had so carefully packed were undisturbed and still intact. I could not account for the fact that they had been padded out with numerous grey sacks filled with waterlogged sand, but I decided not to dizzy my poor brain by puzzling over such inexplicable phenomena: I simply removed the sacks one by one, placing them carefully to one side in the channels between the rows of blooming beetroot.
Before moving on to the next part of the story, it would probably be appropriate for me to indulge in some speculation about the provenance of the spectre: but I will not do so.
* a novel by frank key *