The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

THE OUTSIDER by Rick Kennett

When the Earl of Woodthorpe cut down a gum tree in his Manor grounds and air-freighted it out to Australia, most people assumed his mind had thrown a rod. I knew otherwise.

I’d always thought of doing the rounds of the haunts of England, so when the Antarctic winds of June hit town I decided to do more than just think about it. Stowing my bike in cold storage, I packed a few necessities like The Gazetteer of British Ghosts, Poltergeists Over England, Haunted Britain and such like items—along with a few clothes—before grabbing the first big silver bird heading north into Summer.

I landed on my feet in London by finding a rent-a-bike place that had me thumping up the A 40 motorway toward Buckinghamshire on a 750 Norton that afternoon. Over the following week I toured sites of supernatural interest: hotels, cottages, stately homes, wishing wells. My camera clicked like a mad cicada, though never once getting a phantom in the view finder.

Undeterred, I continued my tour, and somewhere between Devon and Dorset I ran into the Earl of Woodthorpe—at about 90 KPH.

It was seven o’clock on a straight road. The sun was low in the west, and suddenly there was this long, silver car pulling out from a gateway to my right. There was no time for brakes, to throttle back, or to even have an articulate thought. The car’s bumper smacked my front wheel. The world twisted into a blur as the Norton and I went sprawling.

Shock’s a crazy place.

Somewhere in its shattered time sense a middle-aged woman said, “I’ll fetch a blanket,” as I lay bundled on a couch, shivering. “I… I swear, I didn’t see him, My Lord,” said a younger man’s voice as I lay facedown on the road.

There was the smell of leather upholstery.

The sound of tires.

The feeling of movement.

And somewhere in all of this the woman kept fluttering about, sounding apologetic, feeding me broth.

“Best call Dr. Rutherford, Mrs. Winton,” said a tall bloke with an aristocratic look.

“No, just let me rest,” I heard myself say. Nothing was broken or missing; and I hate fuss, especially when I’m dying, or think I am.

I remembered being partly ushered, partly led, partly helped along corridors lined with paintings, and up an oak staircase as a clock somewhere chimed eight.

I woke up in a bed the likes of which I’d only seen in period costume movies. The room, with its paneled walls, ornate ceiling, and heavy furniture of another time, had a beautiful view over the morning. Whoever owned this place had a backyard that wouldn’t stop. It was all lawns and trees and hedgerows, stone outbuildings, ponds, paths, hillocks and dips.

A knock on the door. A voice I’d heard before said, “Breakfast, Mr. Pine.”

Having already dressed, I opened the door to allow the broth pusher of the night before—Mrs. Winton—to enter with a clatter of cup, saucer, and tray, and with the welcome smell of bacon and eggs.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning, sir. How have you mended?”

“I’ll survive. Look, er… sorry if I asked this last night, but, ah, exactly where am I?”

“Woodthorpe Manor, sir. The country estate of the Seventeenth Earl of Woodthorpe.” She placed the tray on the table by the window with practiced neatness. “I hope you like orange juice.”

“Yes. Thank you. Is His Earlship about at the moment?”

“His Lordship,” Mrs. Winton replied without emphasis, “left for the Continent last night. He asked me to pass on his most sincere apologies—once again—and to assure you that all expenses in respect of your motorcycle will be met.”

I fumbled a chair out from the window table, feeling awkward under her eyes. “Where’s the bike now?”

“Keenen, the head gardener, has taken it to the village garage: Scudamore’s. They’ll have it mended in a couple of days, sir.” She hesitated, then added, “Until then you may stay here as His Lordship’s guest.”

I was going to say, “That’s nice of him,” but instead I said, “Are my bags here?”

“Still downstairs, sir. I’m afraid the one containing your books burst in the accident.”

“Hey?”

“Nothing to worry about, sir. Duncan, His Lordship’s chauffeur, picked them all up.”

“Good old Duncan,” I muttered.

I started in on my eggs, but barely had the yoke running when I felt her eyes again. I looked up and Mrs. Winton cleared her throat.

“Pardon me for asking, sir, but are you Australian?”

“Guilty. What gave me away? My accent or the jars of Vegemite in my other bag?”

Mrs. Winton said nothing, only stood there as if wanting to say more but not knowing how to start. I already felt out of place here, and this wasn’t helping. I tapped the cosy on the teapot. “Sit down and pour yourself a cuppa. I won’t tell His Earlship.”

I was half surprised when she did take the seat opposite, and totally surprised when she said, “Are you a psychical researcher?”

I stared at her for a good five seconds, then remembered she’d seen my books. “Well, I have done what I like to call ‘ghost hunting’ in the past, but…”

“Is that why you’ve come to England?”

She said it as if I’d come to extradite some fugitive antipodean apparition. I said, “Not exactly. I’m just doing the spooky tour of England, the places I’ve only read about: Borley, Cloud’s Hill, Raynham Hall, 50 Berkeley Square. You know, places like that. I am interested in the supernatural, but… no, no more ghost hunting. I’ve found out the hard way that the occult is too unpleasant at close quarters.”

“But it must be a real experience to hunt a ghost.”

“It is. That is if that’s what you call trying to shove a cranky water elemental into a crystal geode, or facing up to a demon with all your runes round the wrong way, or nearly being strangled by a book illustration. No, no more ghost hunting for me, Mrs. Winton. Not even if you threatened me with money. From now on I’m strictly a tourist.”

“Oh.”

“You sound disappointed. Do you have a ghost in the house?” I got ready to run in case she said yes.

“There are no ghosts under His Lordship’s roof, sir, and that’s the plain and simple truth. It may make us look a bit out of step, what with every Manor and Lodge hereabouts sporting a haunted bedroom or a ghost’s gallery, some of which I dare say are trumped up for the tourist pound. Not that I’m a scoffer, sir. I’ve been in service since I was a lass, and know a lot more than most about the quality homes; and I can tell you, sir, that some of the best have things walking in them that aren’t right things, if you follow my meaning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I best be about my duties. Even with the family away there’s still a lot to be done.”

Mrs. Winton left me then to my own memories of things that walked that weren’t right things. It really spoiled my breakfast.

I got lost trying to find the front door.

There was a North Wing and a South Wing, an East Front and a West Front. There were wide corridors of thick carpet and polished oak paneling, and a long gallery of ancestral portraits that glared after me as I tiptoed past.

Once through the massive columns of the East Front I struck out on the first path I found, letting it take me where it would.

At first it wound its way through the trees scattered about the southeast lawn, at one point passing a scraggly palm looking decidedly unimpressed by the English climate. On the side of a hillock was a square of trees that looked very familiar. I’m no treeologist, but these looked like fair dinkum Australian gums—the smooth, light gray/dark gray-spotted bark, the eucalyptus tang of the leaves, the little plaque saying “Australian Gum.”

The path sloped, then forked farther along. The left-hand path led me to a lawn surrounding a marble structure I could only think of as a summer house with delusions of grandeur: open-sided, circular and gleaming white, its steps splaying out from three openings in its half walls, mock-Grecian columns, scrolled and fluted, supporting a domed roof.

Chiseled over one of the openings was THE SECOND PAVILION, below that ANNO DOMINI 1827. There were stone seats running along the inside wall and a circular slab raised at its center. Nothing I didn’t expect… except, there was this arrow scratched into the stonework between two of the columns. It was pointing to nothing but the tops of distant trees somewhere in the lower part of the grounds to the northwest. I started walking in that direction. I had no idea what I might be walking to, but it gave me time to think.

Here I was in the proverbial English country garden. To my left were outbuildings I took to be stables or garages, and the glittering glass of a greenhouse where the Earl probably grew his prize-winning marrows. To my right were ponds and grass and trees, what amounted to a private wood. Private. The word made me pause, to wonder, not exactly for the first time—What was I doing here?

Of course the Earl felt responsible for the accident and all, but…

I put myself in his place. A grand, ancient home crammed with paintings, silverware, jewelry, antiques, history; and into this he allows not only a stranger but a “colonial” of dubious social standing. Wouldn’t it have been safer, as far as the Earl was concerned, to simply put me up at the nearest hotel until the bike was fixed?

Something wasn’t quite kosher here. In fact the more I thought on it the more that uncomfortable out-of-place feeling increased.

It was a maze.

I somehow knew this even before I reached the ivy-crept stone wall. Possibly it was the wrought iron gate and the roofless walls I could see beyond it. The gate looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, and in fact there were rust marks showing it’d been chained shut until very recently. But when I pushed the gate it opened with a shiver and a screech, so I edged in.

The walls were all weatherstained and mossy, in some places even cracked and pitted. It was cold. Quiet, too. So quiet that I found myself stepping softly to lessen the echo of my footsteps in the stone paved alleys.

Every now and then I stopped to scrape dirt into piles against the walls as markers. The alley I followed had began to fork and twist fantastically, and the prospect of getting lost had become real, perhaps even dangerous.

Sometimes the path crossed another, making me wonder if I wasn’t going round and round and round. Farther in, the alleys widened occasionally into little gardens, all dead from long neglect, oblongs of dust and empty flower beds. And every time I found one I found more of the same coldness and a sense of sadness that the sun, sitting on the east-facing walls, couldn’t burn away. All I could see of the world was the sky holding one small cloud. It was just enough to show me that I was spiraling in toward the center. So I pushed on, now noticing a slight downwardness as I passed other oblong boxes of once-was gardens and the craters of dry pools with dry ruts leading in and out.

Small statues stood guard at random places, and there was even the occasional stone bench. It was while passing one of these that I thought I heard slow footsteps in the next alley. I stood up on the bench, but the wall was still too high. So I yelled, “Hello! Is anybody there?” For a long time I listened for an answer, hearing nothing, yet sure there was someone or something behind that wall. The silence grew, and I was wishing now I hadn’t called out. Then a wind leaped up with an almost human cry, stinging my face and hands with dirt. Something winked across the sun and was gone, leaving silence again, and an odd impression of dry heat and vast distances that passed as quickly as it’d come.

The alley was still, and for a long time I sat on the bench, wondering if it mightn’t be wiser to search my way out. No, I’d come too far to turn back just because a bird had startled me. And the wind? A freak gust. So I told myself, and so I continued on.

The alleys were still cold but had less shadow in them by the time I saw tree tops looming over the walls ahead. Not long after that I hit a path running beside a curving wall that these trees grew behind. I guessed they were the trees I’d seen from “The Second Pavilion.” But this curving wall, this inner circle, was beyond guessing. Following it round I came to a gate.

This was not like the one at the entrance. This inner gate was big, solid and sported a padlock perhaps a century old or more. It was as good as any Keep Out sign. Above the gate was a piece of stonework that had the look of being tacked on as an afterthought. On it was carved RETINE QUOD AQUA COERCETUR.

It was all Greek to me, or rather Latin, though the third word was obviously water. I noted the words down on a parking ticket I’d gotten in Oxfordshire, then set off following the rest of the wall. It took me a few minutes to get back to the gate. I’d found only that one gate in my circuit of the wall, though at one point I thought I heard something like tinkling bells coming from somewhere.

By now I was beginning to feel hungry and more than a little thirsty. Great Britain isn’t known for its deaths by dehydration, so, not wanting to start a trend, I tried to recall the paths that had led me in.

There was no pattern to the maze, no every-third-gap-on-the-left-continues-the-path sort of thing. I just had to do my best in following memory and my little markers of heaped up dirt. Between them I wound up in more dead ends than there are in any two cemeteries. But I persevered, and what with finding dirty marks that I hoped were my earlier footprints, I eventually worked my way out.

There was a small truck in the drive by the steps of the East Front. There was an oil stain and a piece of mirror among the plant cuttings and soil in its tray. Keenen the gardener, I presumed, had returned from taking the Norton to the garage.

I slunk in through the great marble columns, half expecting to be turfed out by some snotty-nosed butler. I was coming down bad with doses of class consciousness and culture shock, an easy frame of mind to fall into with these imposing surroundings. So, gathering all my nerve, I pushed open the door and strode in as if I owned the place. Truth to tell, I felt less like “Lord Ernie” than “Ernie Pine, lower class interloper,” and I couldn’t help looking around to make sure no one saw me.

There was no one in sight, but muffled voices, raised as if in argument, were coming from behind the grand staircase.

A gray-haired man wearing a bib-and-brace stood in the doorway of what I supposed was the housekeeper’s under-the-stairs office. He was almost back to me, and as I approached I recognized Mrs. Winton’s voice coming from within.

“But he’s a gift.”

“But he ain’t black,” said the man. “And any road, if His Lordship—”

“Who ain’t black?” I asked.

The man turned sharply, and for several seconds just stared at me as though I’d committed some unforgivable social blunder. Mrs. Winton leaned out through the door and smiled.

“Mr. Pine, we were beginning to wonder if you’d lost yourself in the maze. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Aye, not the first,” echoed the old man, looking away.

I muttered something about it being formidable, though there were other adjectives that came to mind more readily—weird, for instance. I was introduced to the grayhaired man, the Manor’s head gardener, Keenen (“Keenen, sir, just Keenen”).

“About the bike,” I said.

“Took your machine into town first thing, I did,” said Keenen, “and Scudamore’s workshop they be onto it promptly.”

“Meanwhile, Mr. Pine is welcome to stay here,” said Mrs. Winton.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Mrs. Winton fluttered her hands. “Think no more of it. It’s only right that we should put you up while you’re off the road. Isn’t that so, Keenen?” But before he could answer, she continued, “And you won’t be the only stranger at the Manor soon as there’ll be outside contractors coming in tomorrow to see to the grounds. Now, sir, what did you think of our maze?”

“A quiet place, isn’t it,” I said, trying to think of something nice to say about it. “Why is the center closed off? What’s in there?”

Keenen and Mrs. Winton glanced at each other like parents desperately trying to put off explaining the facts of life to their pregnant daughter.

“Well… it was built like that,” said Keenen lamely, at last.

“The inner gate was locked and probably had been for a long time.”

“It shouldn’t have been,” said Mrs. Winton, and I caught her funny look at the gardener. “You were some time in the maze, Mr. Pine. Nothing happened, did it? That is, did you lose your way?”

“Only a couple of thousand times.”

“No singing?” said Keenen, looking down.

“Pardon?”

“I think there’s a diagram of the maze in the library,” said Mrs. Winton. “Perhaps you’d like to have another go tomorrow?”

“Isn’t there rain forecast for tomorrow?”

“Not until the evening. Well, I think it’s about lunch time. You must be starved, Mr. Pine. Afterward we’ll see if we can find the diagram of the maze.”

While Mrs. Winton cut bread in the kitchen, I asked, “By the way, what does this mean,” and I read slowly from the back of the parking ticket: “‘Retine quod aqua coercetur’?”

“It means ‘Keep that which is bound by water,’ ” she replied without a moment’s hesitation, as if the phrase had been in her thoughts all along.

The library, like everything else in and about Woodthorpe Manor, daunted me. It wasn’t that it was large (in fact it was much smaller than the average public library), it was that all of these volumes—five thousand, Mrs. Winton told me, and some of them incredibly old and rare—were a private collection.

And there was that word again: Private. And here was I. It didn’t add up.

Mrs. Winton made straight for one of the glass cabinets lining the walls, unlocked it and after a moment’s search took from between two books a leather wallet. In this was the plan of the maze with its convoluted paths, its statuary, brooks, and miniature gardens all plotted out. The middle, however, was blank.

“What’s in there?” I remembered asking this before without getting an answer.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs. Winton said. “It’s been closed for many a year.”

I thought it odd that in all her time at the Manor she’d never once been curious enough to find out what was behind the wall and trees in the center of the maze. Perhaps she had no interest in things outside her own sphere. Perhaps she had asked once and had been rebuffed. Perhaps she was lying.

“If you wish to make a copy, there are pens, pencils and a sheaf of quarto in that drawer.” She indicated a nearby writing desk. “Unfortunately the photocopying machine is in the town being repaired.”

“Duncan ran it over, too, did he?”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Pine, I’d best be about my duties.”

I was glad I didn’t have to “dress” for dinner, being as it was in the servants’ hall. Wearing a tie is against my religion as a confirmed slouch.

There were just Mrs. Winton, Keenen, and myself at table. The only other people on the estate at this time were those who lived in the lodge, the gatekeeper and his wife, and their two sons who served as groundsmen during the night.

The talk got around (rather quickly, I thought) to the maze: Yes, I copied out the diagram… Perhaps I’ll have another go at the maze tomorrow if it doesn’t rain… Well, yes, I think it will rain tomorrow, Mrs. Winton. I can smell it…

Keenen kept pretty quiet during the meal, just picking at his food, though drinking steadily, making casualties of two bottles of rough red. “Drinking with a purpose” was a phrase that came to mind. I got the impression he was sulking, probably after an argument with Mrs. Winton which probably had me in it somewhere. This line of thought seemed to be confirmed when, during a lapse in the housekeeper’s conversation about the various notables who had dined and slept at the Manor over the centuries, Keenen muttered, “And you’re only the second Australian we’ve—”

He jolted as though kicked. He glared at Mrs. Winton in a half focused way. She continued her dinner as if nothing had happened. I would hate to have played poker with her.

I excused myself not long after that and wandered upstairs to the library. I paused halfway up, listening for the explosion I thought must erupt in the servants’ hall. But all remained quiet. They probably were at each other again, but in a restrained way, which befitted this stately home.

I’d noticed that the library had been catalogued on the Dewey decimal system and that the cabinet where the maze diagram was shelved was labeled 133, the listing for books on occult matters. I guessed it was a Woodthorpe family joke as “occult” can also mean “hidden.”

Luckily the cabinet was still unlocked. That afternoon I’d seen a first edition of Elliot O’Donnell’s Screaming Skulls with which I hoped to read myself to sleep. While looking for the O’Donnell, I came across a folder bound in red buckram that had the appearance of a scrapbook or diary. Conscience and curiosity tugged me in opposite directions. Curiosity won.

The date on the first page was 26th July, 1823. The handwriting was crabbed, and for the most part illegible; a sure sign, my conscience took glee in reminding me, that it’d been meant for the writer’s eyes only. I leafed over the pages, pausing here and there to attempt to decipher a passage, a sentence, or even just a word, usually without any luck. But partway down the second page was a word beginning with K, followed by something like Birdfellow. Whoever or whatever this may have been, both names were referred to several times throughout the diary. Another name that was repeated, though only in the last few pages, was “Mother Gwynne.” She seemed somehow to be associated with that Latin phrase about being bound by water, as it was referred to (in semilegible printing) on two separate pages immediately following her name. Around the middle of the diary I managed: “The Ground Keepers have communicated their distress in that there are Shapes abroad.” Nowhere was the writer identified.

Before I left the library I noticed in passing that the folder had been shelved tightly against Wentworth Day’s Here Are Ghosts and Witches.

I sat at my window for a long time, alternately reading Screaming Skulls, trying to decipher more of the diary, and watching the long summer twilight come in, all English and still new to me. Nothing like sunset at home, where night falls out of the afternoon sky like a black weight.

In the distance were the tops of the trees standing inside that inner wall of the maze. Perhaps it was the fading light or my eyes tired from reading, but I could’ve sworn they were nodding and tossing although there Wasn’t a breath of wind anywhere.

Next morning I woke up early and ragged, having had nightmares of screaming skulls half the night.

A phone was ringing somewhere downstairs, and ten minutes later as I passed the drawing room door I heard Mrs. Winton saying, “… booked a room, as per your instructions, My Lord…”

I scratched up a bit of breakfast for myself, and was just cracking into a boiled egg when Mrs. Winton entered the kitchen. She said, “Oh, Mr. Pine…” and for several seconds more found nothing else to say. Then, “Have you been here long?”

“Three minutes, unless your egg timer’s slow.” I wondered if she’d meant Did you overhear me on the telephone? I said, “Was that His Lordship?”

“Yes. It was.” She made a pretense of looking out the window. “It’s going to be a lovely day today. If you’re going for a hike around the grounds, I’ll make you a packed lunch. What would you like?”

Subtle, yes, in a sledgehammer way. Half an hour later I picked up a small hamper bag from the entrance hall table. It was heavier than a roast beef sandwich had a right to be, so I checked it out. Sandwiches. Bottle of cordial. Binoculars.

“All right,” I muttered to myself. “All right, I’ll play your silly game,” and headed for the maze.

Keenen was outside the stables, arming his contracted gardeners with hoes, rakes, and other implements. He glanced my way as I passed, then turned back quickly to his charges. It was a sure-thing bet that he knew as much as Mrs. Winton why I was being guested here at the Manor, against, as I was beginning to suppose, the Earl’s instructions. It all had to do with the maze.

I stopped at its entrance, remembering its complexity, feeling defeated, already lost. I didn’t have much faith in my copy of the diagram. Still, I stepped through the gate—straight into a sticky splash of whitewash. A few steps on was another splash, and another, and another. Soon I was following a trail of whitewash and the prints of gardeners’ Wellingtons past the dead flower beds and dry ornate fountains, over dwarfish bridges and dusty ruts, in and out of wall gaps, past stone benches and statuary and a sundial that was an hour behind the times.

Following this whitewash paper chase, it took me only ten minutes to reach the center. Unsurprisingly, the ancient padlock was gone, the iron gate ajar.

Retine quod aqua coercetur.

“I think those Indians are friendly, General Custer,” I muttered, and pushed hard on the gate.

It grated open onto a lawn run amok. The sight of all that long grass made me think instinctively of snakes. Then I remembered where I was and that Britain has just one poisonous snake whose track record is ten people in a hundred years. Hoping there wasn’t an adder out there that could count to eleven, I waded in.

It’d once been a sloping lawn, and what it sloped down to was a pond that was perhaps fifteen meters across. I stumbled down to the edge, where the water was deep green with algae. With a long stick I tried to find the bottom, and couldn’t. I looked out over the lake. It was utterly flat, undisturbed by fish or bird, and I began to wonder what I might see break the surface if I sat down to wait.

But I didn’t want to sit down. Instead I set off along the stone path running beside the lake, kicking moss pads into the water. At one place I almost joined them as I tripped over a rusty ring fixed into the stone. It sported a rag of rope, giving it the look of a mooring point, which I supposed it to be. But whatever, it’d been a hell of a time since anyone had taken a punt out here.

Farther along were the wooden remains of what may have been a small summer house halfway up the slope. Once upon a time this had been a pleasure garden of the most stylish kind. Today all it had were its memories (whatever they were) and an air of ruined elegance. Why, with the rest of the grounds so carefully manicured, had this garden been forgotten?

I spotted the island.

It’d been hidden by the foliage. In an instant I had the binoculars out of the bag and up to my eyes.

An island, a tiny island overgrown with grass and bushes. But here and there they were threaded through by pathways, and in a couple of places the weathered stone of some broken structure poked into view. Something moved.

I joggled the glasses, trying to sharpen focus. I could’ve sworn something had flitted past a break in the bushes. But, no. Nothing out there moved now. Perhaps it’d been imagination, or maybe a bird flitting from one branch to another. If it had been a bird, it was the only animal life I’d seen so far in this garden. The pond, if properly cleaned out, would’ve been ideally suited for ducks and carp; probably had been once, though that would’ve been long, long ago. I continued on, hoping to find a bridge to the island. Instead I found something else.

It lay in the water ahead. Stenciled letters and numbers along one side of the rubber raft proclaimed it a navy surplus job, which put the kybosh on my “good fairies” theory. Obviously it was a setup, and it was obvious by whom. Only the why of it all remained as murky as the pond. But here was the raft and over there was the island.

Paddling slowly, I did a circuit of the island, looking for a place to land. In a sort of little cove I found a jetty. But its fungus-covered poles, rotted boards, and smell of decay kept me paddling. Finally I found a bit of pebbly beach and ran ashore there.

There was a path of discolored stones winding round and round, looking like a maze within a maze. The notion seemed to fit the landscape. But no other path crossed this one, so I supposed it led to a definite destination. I was right, and I came to it suddenly—what had to have been the original for the white marble Second Pavilion out in the grounds. But this one was much smaller and a ruin. Its foundations had sunk, cracking the walls, toppling one of its columns, and opening the roof. The interior was a green riot of weeds.

I wandered around it, trying to find an answer to this garden’s isolation. Not that I knew what I was looking for, nor was I sure it was here just because this was the middle of the maze. It just seemed a more likely place than any other.

All I found was a bone, half buried in the dirt. Although I wasn’t sure what sort of bone it was, I was fairly sure what sort of bone it wasn’t. It wasn’t human. Trying to remember my biology lessons I thought it might be the wing bone of some large bird. A swan seemed the likeliest. I dug into the dirt a bit deeper, but couldn’t find any more of the beast.

It was good to sit in the English sun, eating roast beef sandwiches and drinking orange cordial on that extraordinary within-a-maze island, my back propped against marble ruins. But soon clouds were scudding over from Cornwall, and before I was even through the inner gate heavy raindrops were pattering down.

Getting wet wasn’t my only problem. The whitewash marks on the path were blurring as the rain increased, and before long the best I could do was to look for white streaks on the stonework.

I was pretty much a white streak myself as I splashed through the East Front and shook the water off like a dog. The smell of brewing coffee and a cheery crockery clatter did nothing for me at all. But I stopped outside the kitchen door in the hope of overhearing something.

Keenen was saying, “It’s come on to rain.”

Has It? I thought, and squelched upstairs to change.

The distance to the local village of Harringford-in-the-Vale was longer than I thought. But the rain had gone, the afternoon sun was out, and I felt I needed a good long walk to anywhere away from Woodthorpe Manor.

Coming down from changing I’d met Mrs. Winton like a specter on the stairs. “Went into the maze again?” she asked at once, a question I dodged with a few unpleasantries about English weather. She took the hint, but I knew she wouldn’t let up for long. I could see now with the clarity of 20-20 hindsight that her curious behavior had started the moment she’d clapped eyes on my ghost books, and was compounded by my blabbing about my ghost hunting experience. Yes, and how disappointed she’d looked when I voiced my attitude toward further ghost hunts. So now it was subterfuge and manipulation. And it all centered about the maze. The only thing that puzzled me was why she’d waited for a ghost hunter to fall accidentally into her clutches when Britain is the home of the ghost hunter. The only difference I could see was one of nationality, but I couldn’t think how it would have a bearing on the matter. A ghost is a ghost is a ghost, no matter who hunts it.

Perhaps I could’ve, perhaps I should’ve, confronted Mrs. Winton then and there on the stairs, ask her if she was having me look into a haunting without me knowing I was doing it. But then she would’ve just said, “How lovely, the sun’s back out. Run along and play in the maze again.” I could’ve threatened to leave, of course, but that seemed childish somehow and might’ve only made matters worse. Besides, I’d never find out what it’d been all about, and that would’ve driven me crazy. The only way to tackle the situation was to arm myself with some information, and the only place to get it was in town.

Harringford-in-the-Vale was an inn, a church, a huddle of shops, a scatter of cottages along a main road or “high street” that was neither as main nor as high as it had been before the advent of the motorway bypass. But it did possess a side street, and at the end of this side street I found Scudamore’s Engineering Workshop, a do-it-all, fix-it-place that repaired just about anything; a grand sort of name for what looked like a First World War airplane hangar. Fact is, I thought I could make out SOPWITH in faded paint over the doors.

Asking about, I was told Mr. Scudamore himself was working on the Norton. I found him off in a corner of the workshop, refitting the exhaust system, handling the machinery with an expertise that had me wondering if he’d learned his engineering from James Landsdowne Norton personally. He seemed old enough. He said, “So you’re Ernie Pine. His Lordship telephoned, said he’d put you up at the inn, but when I called there they’d not heard of you.”

“No. The last two days I’ve been staying at the Manor.”

He peered at me over the bike’s petrol tank as if I’d just admitted to being Jack the Ripper. “Do what?”

“The housekeeper and the head gardener have conspired to keep me at the Manor for as long as they can.” I explained why, adding, “Is there any sort of story connected with the maze, particularly the garden and the island inside?”

“Didn’t know there was a garden and island inside it. That there maze been locked up for donkey’s years, ever since some kids got in one night and came out screaming, not knowing why. They never was really right in the head after that. Grew up with a proper hate for crows and magpies, and didn’t like hot winds, neither. Made ’em go mad, almost like a fit. Sorriest thing I ever saw, watching young Johnny Wilkes one hot summer day, crawling about and bawling his eyes out for no reason he could ever tell us.”

“But there’s no ‘ghost story’ to explain what happened to those kids in the maze?” I asked.

“Not really. There’s the legend of the blackamoor’s ghost that run amok in the Manor maybe a hundred and fifty year ago until it got nailed down someway by a North Country witch woman, but that has naught to do with the maze.”

“Her name wouldn’t have been Mother Gwynne, would it?”

“There’s naught saying who she was. The Woodthorpes don’t speak of the matter.” He fell to thinking for a moment, then said, “But I think I might once seen a picture of him, when I was a kiddie and up at the Manor for a Christmas do. They’d set a marquee on the lawn, but I got away somehow and played a game of hide-and-seek with myself in the Manor House where I weren’t supposed to be.” He chuckled at his memories. “Well, one way or another I managed to get right up under the roof, and I found this painting there, just lying there on its face. So I picked it up.” All expression of happy memories disappeared as he said, “I tell you I near died of fright, because it weren’t the sort of painting a six-year-old expects to find in the roof of the manor House at Christmas. It was the head of a black man, like a ebony block all chopped about to make a face. His hair and beard was gray, especially the beard, all stringy-like and had a little pouch tied into it.”

“If he was the one haunting the Manor way back when,” I said, thinking things through, “it could be that the witch woman stopped it by having his body buried on the island maze. There’s a notion in magic that spirits lose strength if they have to cross water.”

“It’s a thought, isn’t it,” said Mr Scudamore.

It was indeed, and I was thinking on it as I asked my way to my next port of call—the local vet.

The Norton was thumping along beautifully as I approached Woodthorpe Manor late that afternoon. The sun hung low in the west, and this time I wasn’t flattened by a sudden Roller.

Throttle back. Lean it through the gateway. Twist the grip, crackle up the drive.

The two groundsmen were emerging from the lodge to begin their evening rounds as I passed. Big boys carrying big sticks, they stared for a moment, then waved. I’d never met them, though I expected Keenen had spun them some story to explain my presence at the Manor. Perhaps they were even in on the conspiracy. Paranoid as that might sound, with what I’d heard from Mr. Scudamore and especially from the vet I was prepared to find almost anything under the bed now.

A face pulled away from an upstairs window as I pulled up outside the East Front. Now, I thought, perhaps now that I look on the verge of leaving, Mrs. Winton might be forced to resort to honesty.

She must’ve flown like a broomstick to get from that upstairs room to the entrance hall where I met her a few seconds later.

“Well,” she said after looking at me as if for the first time.

“Yes, well, I suppose I’ll be off now.” I was grinning inside, lying through my back teeth and loving it.

“Right now?”

“I’ve imposed long enough.”

Her expression was saying Please impose!

“Oh, by the way,” I continued, “I found this on the maze island,” and produced from my jacket pocket the bone. “Did you know the local vet used to work at the London Zoo? He was able to tell me that this is part of the wing bone of the Australian emu bird. Now how do you suppose—”

I would never have guessed Mrs. Winton to be the fainting kind.

“It’s like Burke and Hare.”

I said nothing to Keenen’s comment, apt though it was. The sun was going down, the shadow of the marble ruin creeping over us. I just kept digging.

Mrs. Winton had revived after a moment, and I’d helped to get her into a sitting position on the stairs. “You should never have taken the bone from the island,” she said, settling herself against the banisters. “It was the only thing that really held him there; that and the water, though the water won’t stop him now once the sun goes down.”

“You should’ve told me all this—and a lot more besides—in the first place.”

“You would’ve left.”

“I should leave now.”

“He’ll run amok.”

“All the more reason to scram.” I let that sink in a moment. “He’s the black man whose ghost haunted the Manor a hundred and fifty years ago, isn’t he?”

She nodded. “Actually he’s from New South Wales. His name was Korrabilla, but they called him Birdfellow because he practiced bird-magic.”

“I see. It takes an Australian ghost hunter to hunt an Australian ghost.”

“Do you think we haven’t tried in the past, Mr. Pine? A dozen investigators over the past five years haven’t even known where to start. All they could tell His Lordship was to let sleeping dogs lie. But they haven’t looked across the grounds on still evenings to see the trees in the center of the maze tossing and tossing. They’ve never felt as if there’s an animal out there crashing against its cage, and that one day it’ll break out.”

“And the bone?” I held it up at eye level.

Mrs. Winton flinched. “I suppose you’ve been talking to Mr. Scudamore.”

“Yes.”

“Back in 1823 the Eleventh Earl brought this Birdfellow back from a voyage into the Pacific.”

“Which explains the palm and the gum trees in the grounds,” I said.

She nodded again, nervously. “The Earl though to train him as a servant, and perhaps even have him work magic. But Birdfellow ran away only a week after coming to the Manor. It must’ve been a terribly alien place to him—England, I mean. He didn’t know how to survive in one of our winters, and so he died. But it wasn’t long before his ghost began plaguing the Manor in the shape of a monstrous bird like an ostrich.”

“Emu,” I said.

“Was it? Servants and tenant farmers ran off, and livestock died. So the Earl called in the witch known as Mother Gwynne. She told him the body had to be surrounded by moving water, and to bury that,” she gestured at the bone I was holding, “with him as it was his source of magic. That stopped the haunting, though it didn’t put him to rest; possibly Mr. Scudamore told you about the children who wandered into the maze one night?”

I nodded.

“When the brooks running into the maze dried up five years ago, the pond water stopped moving, and the ghost began to come out into the maze itself. If it wasn’t for the bone, the ghost would’ve broken loose. It’s going to break loose tonight.” She peered despairingly through the banisters.

I sat down beside her. “What if I put the bone back.”

“The spell’s broken,” she said, and she was probably right. “Mother Gwynne said he couldn’t rest because he wasn’t buried in his own land, so you might think the obvious thing would be to ship his remains back to Australia. But she warned that the moment his bones leave the island he’ll come chasing them.”

What had been so wrong with winter back home?

I tried to remember all I knew about Aboriginal burial customs, which took about ten seconds. All I came up with was something to do with trees, a half-formed idea at best. Then, scraping the bottom of my brain, I recalled that during an inquest into Black deaths in police custody the court was instructed to refer to the dead only as “Deadfella” and “Deadlady,” as it was Aboriginal law that no record of the name, no image or belongings of the individual must be allowed to exist after death. I said, “There may be a second reason why Birdfellow doesn’t rest. Is there anything connected to him that’s still in the house: writings, drawings, paintings, belongings?”

“There’s only the diary I hoped you’d find on the library shelf and a portrait painting up in the roof.”

I suddenly remembered where trees might come into all of this. “Better find it and bring it with the diary to the southeast lawn. Get the groundsmen to hollow out one of the gum trees with axes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Shift old Birdfellow’s bones.”

The front door opened. Keenen entered, his footsteps echoing in the hall, slowing to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He saw the emu bone in my hand and went very pale.

“But I won’t be shifting the bones alone,” I said, and meant it.

“It’s like Burke and Hare.”

I said nothing to Keenen’s comment. The sun was going down, the shadow of the marble ruin creeping over us. I just kept digging, and presently our shovels brought up vertebrae. Birdfellow had been buried facedown, an ancient way of burying the feared dead.

We dug with small spades, with our hands and with the care of archaeologists, gathering up the arms, legs, pelvis, ribs, every vertebra, every finger and toe bone. And of course the skull and its gray, stringy beard with the little kangaroo skin pouch tied into its strands. “This contains magic powders,” I said to Keenen, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about as I placed the pouch in the canvas sack with the bones. One of the eye teeth on the lower jaw was missing, had probably been knocked out as part of manhood initiation ceremonies. But to make sure we sifted the bottom of the grave until just on sunset when we made a hurried retreat from the island.

As we reached the gate in the inner wall, I yielded to temptation and turned around for one quick look. There was a shadow over the island, somehow darker than the night coming on; a shadow that seemed to flex out across the water. I hurried Keenen through the gate, pulling it shut on its rusty hinges. We were out of the garden, but not yet out of the woods. There was still a long, crooked course ahead of us to the southeast lawn.

A couple of minutes later and several alleys into the maze we became aware of a growing dryness in the air, a smell of deserts and a sense of open spaces.

“The ghost is following its bones,” said Keenen.

I nodded. “God knows what’ll happen if it finds them, and God help us if it finds them with us.”

“I think it’s about to catch up,” whispered Keenen.

We dodged through a gap into a dead end to hide.

The bones in the sack rattled of their own accord. We hugged it tightly, smothering the sound. Then Keenen went “Ugh!” as something writhed inside the bag. We flung it from us. It hit the ground with a dry crunch, then began to squirm as if something alive was inside, fluttering, pushing, clawing to get out. I kicked it back against the wall where Keenen and I stood on it, hearing bones snap. It was only then that I realized there was the sound of birds in my head, getting closer.

We lay down with our faces to the wall, making ourselves small and silent with our arms wrapped around the bag. The bird sounds and the desert dryness grew, seemed to beat against the wall we hid behind, then faded. We waited a minute, maybe two, but heard, felt smelled no more.

We did the bone-bag shuffle back into the main alley. Keenen, while wed been digging up Birdfellow’s grave, told me he’d had Mrs. Winton coaching him on the ins and outs of the maze from the library diagram since the night of my arrival (an unsurprising revelation), so I followed on blind faith. He took what he explained was the roundabout way out as the ghost would be stalking the more direct route, at least at first. Both of us wanted to carry the sack by its extreme edges, but we knew it would only rattle again. So we held it close, all the time afraid of sudden squirmings.

We had torches, but didn’t dare use them. There was half a moon out, which helped sometimes. But a lot of the alleys were still in deep shadow.

A kookaburra’s laugh, a strident oooohahahaaaoooorrrr of mental noise right between the ears, no telling direction or how close. We froze.

“It’s trying to psych us, make us panic,” I said, not admitting how good a job it was doing on me. “It’s probably reached the entrance and now knows we’re still here.”

Keenen wet his lips. “If it’s at the entrance, we’re trapped. It can just sit there and wait.”

“Yeah, that’s a thought.” It’s what I would’ve done if I were the ghost. But then… I wasn’t the ghost.

We were huddling in the shadows of a five-way junction of alleys, looking this way and that and over our shoulders when it happened. The bag wriggled and a skeletal arm ripped out, thrusting into the air, wavered a moment, then clutched at Keenen’s throat.

The old man yelled—and the arm fell back into the sack with a laugh of clattering bones.

“No more!” Keenen yelled. He threw the sack from him. “No more! No more!”

He ran.

And so did I, because panic is contagious.

A blur of walls, of benches and statues. A blaze of stars as I ran headlong into a dead end.

I collapsed, dazed and shaking, eyes watering from the blow to my nose. And in all this, the raucous cawing of crows heard with the mind and a human scream heard with the ears.

Then silence.

For a long time only silence.

Something was scraping along the pavement outside in the main alley, coming nearer. A scrape, a pause. A scrape, a pause, coming on, coming near. I tried not to imagine what it was. I wished I had a stick to smash its bones to dust.

The only moonlight in this alley was far up one wall. All else was dark. I felt for the torch in my pocket. I had to will my hand to switch it on.

It was almost at my feet, that one arm, bones white in the light, dragging the bag behind it. The bag reared up as I stood there, staring stupidly. The bony fingers spread and struck.

The torch went spinning, hit the wall, went out. Finger bones, cold and clicking, smelling of the grave, dug into my face. The bones in the bag knifed through the sacking, into my leg, into my side.

I pulled away, bringing my head against the wall, smashing the hand against stone. Its grip loosened. I wrenched it from me. But the finger bones closed about my hand, trying to crush it, make me cry out so the spirit of these bones stalking the alleys would come.

I pushed to my knees with all my strength, swinging the arm, bringing the bag around after it in a half circle, smashing it against the wall. Bones splintered with a lovely crack! But the grip was still there. I swung the bag again and again. “Goddamn it! I’m trying to help you!” Finally the arm itself snapped and the bag sagged to the ground like a K.O.ed fighter, the skeletal hand dead in mine.

As quick as I could, I shoved all the bones I could find back in the sack. There were noises in my head like tinkling bells, the bush chimes of the bellbird getting louder and louder. I limped from the dead end alley, dragging the bag behind me.

“Now where?” I asked myself. I had no idea which way I’d run, not even which way was in and out. Birds were singing, chiming in my head, louder than before. I struggled off as fast as my leg and side allowed, leaving a trail of blood old blind Harry could’ve followed. I was trying to find a familiar statue or flowerbed. But everything looked so unfamiliar. Behind me the maze pushed back into angles of darkness where a form, a shape glided and flitted. Parrots screeched. I’m dead, I thought.

But a long moment passed and nothing happened.

Something white lying on the path back down the alley caught my eye. It was a bone fallen from the sack, and it occurred to me then that maybe other bones had fallen out of rips in the bag, and that the thing tracking me had been stopping to pick them up with an exalting cry of parrots.

Hoping this was true I dropped a rib here, a collar bone there to keep it busy as I worked my way through the maze. I was beginning to feel the loss of blood, starting to get cold, dizzy, and tired. It wouldn’t be long, I knew, before I’d get to the point where I’d throw down all the bones, sink down into sleep, and never wake up.

The most useless thing in the world is a sundial at midnight.

But the moment I stumbled up to it I hugged its pedestal, knowing now there was a fighting chance. It was a landmark I remembered. Nearby was one of my dirt mounds from yesterday, farther along another and another. Across this dead oblong garden and through that gap, over to the right and round to the left, a back-track here and—

I dropped an ankle bone at the gate, hoping it would slow it down just that little bit more. It was still some distance to the southeast lawn and I was in no condition to sprint.

There were lights on in the house, far away. The grounds were moonlit, except for the slim sticks of tree shadows.

“Hello!” said someone from a distance. I stared behind me, disoriented, saw the gate to the maze swinging wide.

The next thing I knew I was being picked up off the grass where I’d collapsed. Someone said, “Quick!” and someone else said, “For Gawd’s sake don’t look back!”

They carried me and the bones between them like so much hand luggage toward a waiting smell of petrol. I must’ve been holding on to the bag with a death-grip as they didn’t even try to take it from me. They just ripped open the bag, and I saw as if from a long way away the two groundsmen tumbling bones into the newly hollowed out gum tree.

There was just one more thing to be done—and damnit!—it should’ve been done already.

Mrs. Winton, hands fluttering with nerves, stepped back from the painting of Birdfellow, an old black man with a mysterious pouch tied into his stringy gray beard. Beside the painting, face up and open, was the diary.

Mrs. Winton looked down at them, shook her head sorrowfully.

“It has to be,” I said, surprised at the croak my voice had become. “No images, no record of name, nothing of the dead must be allowed to exist after death. It’s their way of life. It’s that portrait and his name in that diary that’s keeping him earthbound and angry just as much as not giving him a proper tree burial in 1823.”

From the direction of the maze came the sound of something big galloping across the manor grounds toward us.

A match scratched a spark. The petrol-soaked painting and diary whoofed into flame. In that sudden glare I glimpsed the emu, far bigger than any in nature. Its neck was an elongated travesty of a human neck, and far above it a human face of ebony and gray. In that instant I read in its features anger, and then… happiness?

Birdfellow’s portrait had crisped, the book, each word and name shriveling, had become an open flower of fire.

A few seconds later I looked back into the silent darkness and knew we were alone.

Later that night they found Keenen wandering the maze, eyes vacant and staring. It was many days before he was reeled back to reality, before doctors were able to convince him that his eyes had not been clawed out. He never went back to the Manor, having now an aversion to birds and their noises. Where in the world he’ll find a place without birds is a place I can’t imagine. Certainly not the maze island which now teems with water fowl.

I would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall the afternoon Mrs. Winton explained things to His Lordship, in particular why one of his trees on the southeast lawn had been so strangely mutilated, then plastered over. But on that afternoon I was still in the local hospital being treated for, among other things, serious loss of blood and what the doctors described as nervous exhaustion.

“If there’s anything to be learned from all this,” Keenen said, the day they wheeled me down to his ward for a visit, “it’s that you should always put things back where you found them.”

And it was just such a thought that had me laugh near to breaking my stitches when I read that the Earl of Woodthorpe had cut down a gum tree in his Manor grounds and was air freighting it out to Australia. Naturally, most people assumed the Earl’s mind had thrown a rod.

I knew otherwise.