Dark Spell (4 page)

“Okay. What is this place?”

“The castle was under siege and the people outside got fed up, so they started to tunnel in under the castle wall. This is their tunnel.” Callie gestured round them. “But the people
inside
found out, so
they
dug a tunnel to intercept the one coming in. The first bit – where it’s really low – is that tunnel. Come on, let’s go to the end.”

They had to go carefully: this part of the tunnel was much wetter, trails of moisture on the walls shining in the weak light, and the floor was very slippery.

Josh reached up to the roof. The surface was
velvety-soft
– not at all what he had expected. When he looked at his fingers they were black, and he realised that the roof was caked with soot.

As he stretched to touch it again, a vivid picture suddenly formed in his mind, of what it must have been like down here for the men who had dug it out.

No light but guttering candles and lamps. The stink of tallow and cheap lamp oil. The noise, endlessly repeated
,
of picks and hammers on rock. The constant drip of water. The fear of rock falls
…

“Come to the end,” Callie said, breaking in on his thoughts.

The tunnel ended in a flight of stone steps that must once have led to the surface but had long since been blocked off. Above Josh’s head, thin shafts of sunlight speared down into the dim tunnel in a circular pattern that looked strangely familiar.

“Recognise it?”

What was it?

He went up the steps so he could look more closely.

“The manhole cover!” he realised suddenly. “We’re under the pavement across the road.”

They turned to go back. The lights seemed dimmer somehow – must be because they’d been staring at the sun coming through the grating, thought Josh.

“What happened when the two tunnels met?” he asked.

“There was a battle, of course… well, a fight at any rate. I don’t suppose there can have been enough people down here for a proper battle. It must have been terrible, though – no room to fight properly, nowhere to run, no escape.”

Without warning, the lights went off.

Callie gasped, heard Josh beside her draw in his breath sharply. Around them was utter darkness.

“Power cut?” said Josh.

There was a pause before Callie answered. “Must be.”

Their voices were swallowed by the dead air.

“Wait until I get to you,” Josh said.

Callie had been at the bottom of the steps when they were plunged into darkness, but he was two – or was it three? – steps above her.

He groped forward with his feet, feeling for the edge of each step, arms outstretched, trying to find Callie.

The silence was oppressive now, no sound but the drip of water.

“Josh?” whispered Callie.

“Here,”
whispered a voice to her left, and then, “Here,” said Josh much more loudly, but on her right.

Imagination. Stop it.

“I’ve got my hands out. Stand still so I can find you,” he went on.

Callie gave a little gasp as something touched her left wrist, and a second later Josh bumped into her from the right.

“Sorry.”

“Okay.” She sounded breathless.

“We can wait until the lights…”

“No!” exclaimed Callie vehemently, clutching his hand tightly. “Let’s go.”

They shuffled forward like cartoon zombies, arms out in front of them so they wouldn’t blunder into the rock walls.

“What?” said Callie suddenly.

“What?” Josh echoed.

“You said my name.”

“No I didn’t,” Josh insisted. Callie clutched more tightly at his hand. “You all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said in a strained voice.

Callie
.

You have come to us.

Callie stopped dead. “Did you hear that?”

“I didn’t hear anything.” There was a clang as Josh bumped into the ladder.

You’re imagining things
, Callie tried to tell herself.
Don’t be stupid. There’s only you and Josh down here. No one else. Nothing else
.

“Do you want to go up first?” Josh asked.

“Yes!” She couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice.

Something brushed, moth-soft, against her cheek, and she failed to suppress a scream.

“Callie, what is it?”

Callie
.

You are ours.

Panic overwhelmed her. She dropped Josh’s hand, flailed for the cold metal of the ladder and scrambled up it, heedless of anything but the need to escape
the darkness, escape the whispering voices that were suddenly all around her.

“Callie!” Josh yelled. He felt for the ladder and pulled himself up.

There was a glimmer of grey here, not light, but a lessening of the darkness. He could hear Callie whimpering ahead of him, and make her out as a vague crawling shape on the floor of the passage just ahead of him. He reached forward to touch her and the lights came back on.

Blinded, he threw up his hands to shield his eyes.

“Callie, are you okay?” he asked, but there was no sound but his own voice, and when he opened his eyes properly there was no one there.

Josh hurried up the tunnel. How had Callie got out so fast, so silently? He was relieved when he emerged into air and light and saw her sitting against a wall, knees hugged to her chest, face chalky white.

“Are you okay?”

Callie nodded, hugging her knees tighter to disguise the fact that she was shaking uncontrollably. She couldn’t have stood up if her life had depended on it.

“It was pretty creepy, the lights going out like that.” He gave her a sideways glance, watching for some reaction. “What happened to you down there?”

Callie swallowed, unsure if her voice would work.

“Claustrophobia. I suppose I panicked.”

“I didn’t know you had claustrophobia.”

“Neither did I.”

They sat in silence for a while. Callie gradually loosened her grip on her knees. As they watched, a group of tourists reached the steps at the entrance to the mine.

“They won’t get far in the dark,” Callie said, still sounding a bit odd.

“But the lights came on again – remember? When you were crawling out of the top bit.”

“No they didn’t. It was still dark when I got out.” She gave a shaky laugh. “And I certainly wasn’t crawling. I was running as fast as I could.”

She’s confused,
Josh told himself.
She was so frightened back there she doesn’t remember what she did.

Callie had unlaced her hands from around her knees now, and was rubbing at her sooty left hand and wrist.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, getting to her feet.

“Should we tell Mrs Dunlop about the lights?” Josh wondered aloud.

Callie shook her head. “Let’s just go. You said they came back on. Someone else can tell her if they go off again.”

Back on the street, Josh would have liked to pause and look at the circular grating again, but Callie kept up a determined pace and ignored it.

“Do you want to have a walk round the cathedral?” he asked.

“No,” said Callie firmly. “I’ve had enough of ruins for today.”

“Fudge doughnut?”

“Much better idea.”

By the time they had eaten the doughnuts and licked the last of the custard off their fingers, Callie seemed, outwardly at least, back to normal.

“What time is it?”

Josh checked his phone. “Nearly one.”

“Rats! I’ve got to go. I promised George I’d go down to Fife Ness with him this afternoon. You know – the place on the coast where he’s got his birdwatching patch. He wants help with some birding thing. Dunno what, but I’ll have to get the next bus to The Smithy. Do you want to come? You probably don’t, it won’t be very exciting. You’d be better staying in town.”

“No, I’ll come. I like George. He’s cool.”

“You must be joking.”

“No, he is. He knows lots of stuff. About birds for instance, and plants. I don’t know anybody in Edinburgh who knows things like that. It’s interesting.”

Callie laughed. “Wait until I tell him he’s cool. He’ll love that.”

As they walked through The Smithy garden, Josh said, “Are you sure they won’t mind me just turning up for lunch?”

“Course not.” She shoved open the front door and Luath came to greet them, wagging his plume of a tail. “He still remembers you, or he’d bark.”

Josh tried to remind himself how friendly Luath was, instead of noticing afresh how big he was.

“Rose? George? I brought Josh for lunch.”

“Oh well done, dear. I wondered when we’d see him,” said Rose, appearing, inevitably, from the kitchen. “Goodness, why are you both so grubby? You look as though you’ve been down a tunnel. Why are you laughing?”

Josh ate so much of Rose’s chicken pie and strawberry fool that he could hardly bear to get out of the car at Fife Ness.

“Come on, you pig,” Callie teased as he levered himself up with a groan. “Or shall I see if I can borrow a golf trolley to push you round on?”

“Yes, please,” he said, squinting into the sunlight at the golf course off to their left. “If a golf ball comes this way and hits me, I might just explode.”

“Exercise, that’s what you need,” said George.

Josh doubted it, but he dutifully followed George and Callie.

“Right,” said George, opening the holdall he’d been carrying. “Hatchet or saw?” He held them up for Josh to inspect.

“Er… hatchet please. I think. What are we doing?”

“Stalking holidaymakers,” said Callie with an evil grin.

“Not quite that exciting,” said George, handing another hatchet to Callie and keeping the saw himself. “Cutting branches that are in my way when I’m trying to ring birds. It’s all right, I’ll show you what to do.”

It was hot work, hacking away at the gorse and scrubby trees that George wanted trimmed. Stopping to mop her brow, Callie noticed a sooty mark on her left wrist. She rubbed at it, but it wouldn’t come off.

Witch-girl
…

She whirled round to see who had spoken, but there was no one there. She could hear George and Josh on the other side of a huge gorse bush, laughing, but the voice had come from the opposite direction. She swallowed, holding tightly to the hatchet, looking about as if she expected someone to leap out of the undergrowth.

“Callie!”

She jumped at the sound of Josh’s voice.

“What?”

“You must be slacking. We can’t hear you chopping.”

“Just having a quick rest.” She shook her head at her overactive imagination, and started hacking away at branches again.

Half an hour later, the trimming was finished to George’s satisfaction and he was settling down in the shade with his binoculars to see which birds were around.

Josh and Callie wandered off along the shore. Unlike Pitmillie beach, it was almost deserted.

“Wind’s going round,” Callie observed. “Should be good for body boarding tomorrow if you still fancy it?”

“Definitely.”

After half an hour or so they made their way back to George’s birdwatching patch and found him finishing a mug of tea.

“Nothing around. Too hot, I expect. They’ll all be lying low in the shade,” he said with regret. “We may as well go, but we’ll go back by Dane’s Dyke just in case there are any birds around there.”

“George, tell Josh the story. The one you used to tell me when I was small.”

“The one I regretted telling you, you mean.”

“What story?” asked Josh.

“It’s not a story really, Callie, it’s local history,” George corrected her. As they walked on, he began to talk.

“Long ago, the Danes came raiding in Fife over and over, and there’s supposed to have been a great battle here in eight hundred and eighty something. I forget the exact date. It’s not very clear what happened: either they won and killed King Constantine of Scotland, or they didn’t win and they didn’t kill him. Nobody seems to know either way.” He led them up onto a grassy bank about a metre high. “Anyway, you’re standing on what’s been known as Dane’s Dyke ever since.”

From the name, Josh would have expected something impressive: a wall maybe, or a defensive earthwork at least a couple of metres high. The bank they stood on was covered in grass and scrubby weeds. It stretched off in a gentle curve, getting lower and lower until it merged with the ground around it.

It really wasn’t that interesting. However, he didn’t want to seem rude, so…

“What is it? Was it some sort of defence?”

George beamed. “Everyone assumed so, but it turns out it’s more than that. There was some excavation done a few years ago, and it turned up human bones.”

“It’s a grave?”
That
was more interesting.

“It seems to be – or part of it is, anyway.”

“He hasn’t told you the best bit,” Callie said. “Go on George. Josh won’t think you’re nuts. He already knows there’s more to this part of Fife than meets the eye.”

Now Josh was
really
intrigued.

George hesitated for a few seconds, then started to speak again.

“When I was a couple of years older than you I used to come birdwatching down here with an old chap called John Fordyce who’d lived in Crail all his life. One day he took me along Dane’s Dyke, right to the far end.” George pointed towards the sea. “Up at the top of the bank he showed me a big stone slab. He levered it up and there was a human skeleton underneath.

“Well, you can imagine what went through my mind; I thought I was being shown the scene of a murder at first. Then I looked at the bones properly and realised they must be pretty old. They were dark brown, some of them were broken into fragments. Even to me, it was obvious they must have been there for a very long time.

“John Fordyce called the place The Longman’s Grave, said it was where a great Danish warrior was buried. The Longman had sworn to protect his men, and the legend was that he did so even after they were dead, to stop them roaming the earth as ghosts. John
claimed the Longman still took – what was it he called them now –
the unquiet dead
, that was it – down to the underworld occasionally, to keep our world safe from them.

“I asked my parents about the grave as soon as I went home. They’d come across the name, of course – you can find that on maps – but they’d never heard of there actually being a grave there.”

“Can we go and have a look now?” asked Josh eagerly.

“No,” said George. “That’s the strange thing. I was never able to find the grave again. Not a sign. I’ve looked for it on and off for years. There are references to Longman’s Grave in a few books, but nothing about a slab or a skeleton. I know what I saw, but I stopped talking about it to other people after a while, because I could see they didn’t believe me. They thought I was just making it up.”

“Why didn’t you ask John Fordyce?”

“It was a few weeks before I got the chance to look for the grave again, and he’d died in the meantime.”

“But I thought you said bones had been found in the dyke a few years ago?” Josh said, confused.

“Yes, but that was at the other end,” Callie replied.

The bank had been getting lower as they walked and now it petered out, merging into the landscape.

“I’ve looked too,” said Callie.

“I used to wish I’d never told you the story, you pestered me about it that much when you were small,” said George ruefully. “Anyway, Josh, if you’re thinking of going digging for it yourself, it’ll have to be another day – I’ll need to be getting back now.”

“Anybody home?” Callie yelled as she went into her own house.

“Just me,” replied her father, David, his voice coming from the back garden.

She found him sitting in the sun with the newspaper, a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits.

“Had a nice day?” he asked.

“Yeah. Just mucking about with Josh.” She shoved a biscuit into her mouth. “We’re going body boarding tomorrow, but I don’t think he’s realised how cold it’ll be. Can I lend him your wetsuit?”