Guardians Of The Haunted Moor (21 page)

The
growl spiralled up into a roar. Gideon had heard it before, just as
he’d felt the passing of that vast force, breathed the ozone and
blood-bright copper it left in its wake. Something swept once round
the cornfield, a wing or a thunderclap. He clutched at Zeke and
they braced each other, and then with a swirling, gale-throated
howl, the thing was gone.

Granny
Ragwen was on her knees with Dev. He was whispering to her, his
face a mask of blanched-out fear. She got up unsteadily, brushing
bits of corn from her velour. For the first time in Gideon’s
acquaintance with her, she looked a little discomposed. “Right,”
she said, straightening her beads. “He ought to be all right now.
I’ll wait with him here. But you have to go home now, Constable. He
says he was angry when your Lee got inside of his mind. He says
he’s done something bad to him. You have to go.”

***

Gideon
took a flying leap across the stile, barely noticing it was there.
He pounded down the lane to where Zeke’s car was parked: reached
out and hauled his brother past when he slowed to try and find his
keys. “No! By the time you’ve turned it round we could be
home.”

“
I don’t know. Perhaps we should—”

“
My truck’s at the end of the lane. Come on!”

They
reached the Rover together, stride for stride. To Gideon’s
disbelief, Zeke blocked his track to the driver’s door. “What the
hell are you doing?”

“
Tell me you’re fit to drive.”

Gideon
couldn’t. Shame rushed over him. Not once in his career had he let
his emotions incapacitate him. But Lee hadn’t picked up either of
the speed-dialled calls he’d punched in on his way from the field.
“It’s three streets away,” he said faintly. “I’ll run.”

“
Shut up and get in. He’ll be all right, Gideon—Dev Bowe’s
insane.”

“
I don’t know.” Gideon scrambled into the passenger seat. His
limbs were heavy and awkward, and he wasn’t used to this side of
his truck—felt trapped in a mirror world, everything in the wrong
place. He gasped as Zeke tramped the gas and stalled. “For God’s
sake. Are
you
fit
to drive?”

“
Perfectly. Forgive my natural concern about my
brother-in-law.” He tried again, found a biting point and sent the
truck roaring out into the road. “Doesn’t this thing have a
siren?”

Gideon reached across and switched it on. Snapped on the
lights for good measure, trying not to remember a rainy December
night when Lee had taken a moment out of crisis to light up with
mischief himself at the broken rule. Bill Prowse’s street flashed
by, then Sarah Kemp’s... And then Zeke was tearing down Moor Lane,
and between one blink and the next Darren Prowse was in the middle
of the road. “Zeke,
stop
!”

Zeke
stamped on the brakes. The truck gave a squeal and laid a year’s
worth of rubber onto the tarmac, her rear end slewing through
ninety degrees. By the time she came to a stop Darren’s hands were
planted on her bonnet, Gideon braced to the dash, staring down into
his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“
Gideon!”

“
Sorry.” He snapped out of the belt he’d somehow remembered to
fasten and half-fell out into the road. “Darren, this is the
absolute limit. What the bloody hell are you—”

“
You can’t go in there!”

The
boy’s voice was an octave up out of its usual range. He was sheet
white. He transferred his grip from the grille of the truck to
Gideon’s chest, the exact same gesture of hopeless warding-off.
Gideon detached him blindly. “Go in where?”

“
Your house. I saw
him
coming out of it—that nutcase from up at the
farm.”

“
Dev Bowe?”

“
Yes! And I didn’t mean to—but he’d already broken in, so
I—”

Gideon
picked him up bodily and dumped him into his brother’s arms. “I
don’t care what you’ve done. Zeke, keep him out of my way.” He
began to run. He could see his own front door now, not twenty yards
off, locked tight and intact with his whole world behind it. He
didn’t believe for a second that Dev Bowe could have harmed Lee.
Lee’s gifts didn’t always work to order, but he’d have seen a
danger like that on its way from a mile off, even in half-drugged
dreams, surely...

Rufus
Pendower was on the doorstep. This was bloody surreal. He caught
sight of Gideon and dashed back down the garden path and into the
road, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “Stop!”

“
Pendower!” Gideon met him halfway, barely avoiding a
collision. “What’s going on here?”

“
I came to find you. But no-one’s answering the door, and I
could smell—”

Gideon
shoved him aside. He could smell it too, pungent and high. Gas. Too
strong for a leaking pipe under the pavement. A huge concentration
close at hand. Pendower caught his arm, and he swung round to punch
him out of the way.

Something did it for him. The air turned into a fist.
Pendower flew backwards. The same force plucked Gideon off his
feet: swapped heaven for earth, street for sky, and dropped him and
everything neatly into the pit.

Chapter Ten

His
brother said, “Gideon, hush.”

There
was no need. It was a lovely afternoon. Sun beat down strongly on
the cliff track at Drift. The hush was over everything, and Gideon
was part of it. This was where Lee drew his imagery from when he
opened up his mind. This was the borderland: if Gideon just kept
walking, he’d find the Mên-an-Tol Stargate, slip through it and be
home, and once there he need never come back.

Imperative that he never came back. He fixed his gaze on the
church so that he wouldn’t slide into the yawning void on his left.
Jago Tyack was standing in the churchyard beside Lee’s father’s
grave. He held out one hand, pointing. “It’s a corpse path, you
know. If you see someone on it, they’ll be gone within a
year.”

That was
bollocks, of course. Gideon dealt with bigger local legends than
that all the time. He’d grown very fond of Jago, though, after a
bumpy start, and he only smiled at him in passing. Lee was on the
corpse road, with Tamsyn in his arms. It was only a trail of
flattened grass through a meadow. Gideon felt suddenly sick and
weak, the skin stinging oddly on his face and hands. He sat down on
the coffin-shaped stone to wait.

Elowen stepped out of the hedgerow. She took the baby from
Lee’s arms. Gideon lurched to his feet.
Don’t,
he wanted to shout.
Don’t just give her away like that!
But Lee hadn’t, had he? He’d had his reasons, just
as the dog had hers for multiplying herself into four and guarding
the cradle, warning him against the masked lamb. Gideon had to
trust and believe. The hardest thing he’d ever had to do, against
all of his instincts as a copper and a man. His reward was the
ability to move. The baby was gone but Lee was at home. Gideon
stretched out his limbs and covered the distance between Drift and
Dark in a dozen long strides. He ran down Moor Lane once again, and
his house exploded, knocking him flat in a rain of masonry and
grit.

“
Hush, Gid. It’s all right.”

It
fucking wasn’t. His brother was kneeling in front of him, trying to
wipe his face with a handkerchief. Gideon knocked his arm aside. He
made a seismic effort to get up, but someone was holding him tight
from behind. He was making a dreadful arse of himself, yelling and
fighting like a downed bull. He couldn’t seem to stop. “Lee! Oh,
God, let me go. Lee’s in there. Lee!”

“
I’m
not
in
there, you moron! Now calm the fuck down and keep
still.”

Gideon’s
throat closed. It was scoured and full of dust. He sucked in a
truncated gasp and broke into anguished coughing, painful as
sandpaper in his gullet, but at least it shut him up. In his own
sudden silence, he replayed the last voice he’d heard. Recognised
at last the grip around his ribs, the warm body propping his spine.
He twisted round as far as he could. Lee tried to stop him then
surrendered, submitting to his frantic embrace. “Gideon,
sweetheart...”

“
What happened? Where were you?” He could barely get the words
out for sobs. Lee’s response was just as incoherent, and he
couldn’t give it his attention anyway—was too lost in the living
scent of him as he laid his face to Lee’s shoulder. He wrapped his
arms around Lee’s waist, clenched his hands hard enough to leave
bruises on beloved skin for a week.

A sound began to penetrate the fizzing rumble in his ears. At
first he put it down to the damage done to his eardrums by the
blast. A staccato chatter—
da-da-da-da-da
, like a tractor-engine
trying to start. Familiar to him from a hundred homecomings—his
daughter’s first efforts to get out a word that meant him and him
alone, because she’d greet her other father with a skull-piercing
single-note
eee
!
that might or might not one day turn into
Lee
. Both of them got the wild,
arm-waving semaphore of joy, but
da-da-da-da-da
....

He
jolted upright. Lee aided his indecorous lurch round onto his
backside. His mother was standing in the road in front of him, dust
blowing around her. She was clean and obviously unhurt, but her
face was a mask of shock, and the paramedic propping her up had
wrapped a blanket round her anyway. She was holding Tamsyn in her
arms.

Gideon
got to his feet. He couldn’t have done it for any other cause—every
muscle in his body complained, and Zeke had to reach in and hoist
him from behind. Gideon planted a kiss to the old lady’s cheek.
“Ma. You brought her home.”

“
Lee and I did,” she said weakly. “Lee and I.”

“
Can I take her?”

“
Yes, my dear. Of course.”

It was
more like a catch. Tamsyn, having worked out that this bloodstained
apparition really was her father, launched herself out to grab him.
He seized her: held her little body fast between his hands for a
moment, staring into her face. Her machine-gun sounds blended into
one huge shriek of delight, and he wrapped her in his arms. “Lee,”
he managed after a moment. “Where’s Pendower? Is anybody
hurt?”

“
Apart from you, you mean? Pendower took a flying brick to the
back of his head. He’ll be all right. He’s on his way to hospital
now.”

“
That man has no luck.”

“
I doubt he’ll volunteer to investigate weird shit in Dark
again any time soon. All our other neighbours were out at work,
thank God.” Lee grabbed his arm as he swayed. “What do you
want?”

“
Five minutes with you and our kid. Please.”

Lee led
him away, parrying protests from Zeke and the ambulance crew. He
parted the gathering crowd of their neighbours and friends, guided
him up the pavement to a low wall sheltered by rose bushes and a
patrol car parked by the kerb. “Sit down.”

Clouds
were dispersing in Gideon’s mind. He subsided onto the wall, still
clutching his daughter, who promptly grabbed a fistful of rose
petals and shoved them into his face. “You weren’t in the flat. You
weren’t there.”

“
That’s right, Sherlock.” Lee sat down beside him. “I had a
text from your mum this morning. She said Elowen had contacted her.
She was the only one of us Elowen dared speak to.”

“
My ma can text?”

“
Pretty well, though the autocorrect still foxes her a
bit.”

“
When did you get it? This text?”

“
It was on my phone when I woke up this morning.”

Time
rolled back effortlessly inside Gideon’s head. He was sitting on
the edge of his bed, not this wall opposite the gap where his house
had used to be. Lee was checking his mobile—to see what time it
was, Gideon had assumed. Then he’d asked Gideon to fetch his meds.
“You bloody lied to me.”

“
Yes, I did,” Lee said firmly. “And get this through your thick
head—I’d lie to you again, without batting an eyelid, if I had the
time over. I didn’t know what Elowen wanted and nor did your ma. If
she’d just been coming to talk, to mess around with us some more, I
didn’t want her anywhere near you, breaking your heart again. But
she was coming to bring back Tamsyn.”

“
Christ. Why didn’t you
phone
me?”

“
I had to be sure.” Lee too focussed on the burning ruin across
the road, and his voice cracked. “Elowen met us just down the road
in Liskeard. And once I had Tamsyn, all I could think about was
bringing her home. Having her waiting there for you. We’d just made
the turn into the street when—”

“
That’s just it. You
would
have been at home with her—if we’d done what I
wanted, if we’d gone charging over to France and grabbed her back
by main force. This is her nap-time. You’d both have been at
home.”

Lee
closed his arms around both of them, completing the sacred circuit
of touch. The baby quieted and clutched Gideon by his collar, Lee
by his silver chain. The wail of the arriving fire engine faded
out, and all Gideon could hear was his lover’s breathing and the
rush of the wind among the roses. “We weren’t home,” Lee said,
kissing him. “We’re here. We’re right here.”