Sally was a very quiet dog and hardly ever barked.
‘It’s all right,’ Lil said, trying to reassure the pair of them. ‘It’ll blow itself out soon.’
Sally rose slowly. Her tail was down and she became rigid, her lips pulling into a snarl.
‘Don’t worry, Sal. We’ll be fine. It’s just the silly old wind; nothing to –’
As she spoke, there was a loud splintering and Sally started to bark.
Lil ran to the window. Looking down, she saw the roof of the shed being ripped from its sides and go spinning across neighbouring gardens. Sally barked even louder and darted forward. Clamping her teeth on the leg of Lil’s jeans, she pulled as hard as she could.
Lil barely noticed. Plant pots were shooting from the unroofed shed like rockets and one of the walls had lifted off the base. It flipped over the garden wall and sailed sideways.
‘Unreal,’ she breathed.
Sally let go of the denim. She barked some more, but when that had no effect, she pushed her nose under the trouser leg and nipped the girl’s ankle.
Lil yelped as the dog reclamped her jaws to her jeans and started to drag her away from the window, forcing the girl to hop after.
There was an almighty rumble, louder and deeper than any sound Lil had ever heard. It juddered right through her and the pain in her ankle was forgotten. The house shook as a massive slice of the cliff face calved away and came thundering down the slope, on to the Wilsons’ garden. Soil and stones slammed against the cottage and Lil’s bedroom window exploded inwards. The spot where she had been standing only moments before was speared with broken glass and rubble. The gale came screeching into the room, whipping up the bedding, wrenching the curtains from the rail and scattering yesterday’s birthday cards.
Sally resumed her urgent, frightened barking as she backed against the door, with Lil frozen and gawping by her side. As she stared, a text beeped into Lil’s phone.
Finally back!!! OMG u won’t believe what just happened!!!!
In the midst of her fear, Lil almost laughed. She looked around at the devastation and prepared to take a photo of it to send to Verne. Then she saw the scene outside the gaping window and her mouth fell open.
The darkness was choked with swirling debris, and other things that had been seized by the unnatural hurricane. Ancient coffins had been ripped from the exposed ground high above. They bounced down the collapsed cliff, rupturing and splitting open, spilling their occupants and surrendering them to the ferocious wind. Now dozens of nightmarish figures were flying in the sky. Old bones, some still wrapped in the tattered remnants of the clothes they had been buried in, were whirling through the air like autumn leaves. Skeletons somersaulted and tumbled on the wind, colliding, entangling, spinning round each other as though performing some ghastly, supernatural dance. Sticklike arms flailed, legs kicked and skulls were thrown back as jaws sprang open. They appeared gruesomely alive.
Lil raised her phone and started filming that eerie waltz. This was better than Verne’s zombie apocalypse. But it was too dark for the figures to show up on the screen. Lil scowled and moved a little closer to the shattered window. She changed the camera settings and the shapes began to emerge. Zooming in, it showed billowing, ragged shrouds and rotted scraps of Sunday suits streaming like ribbons. The unearthly gale made marionettes of the skeletons. They pirouetted in a maniacal ballet, swooping low over the garden, then plucked up once more to spin above the roofs.
‘Now that is mirificus,’ the girl murmured.
The funnelling wind tore round and round and the collisions became more violent. The bodies began to disintegrate as the brittle, mummified flesh and sinew that bound them snapped in the storm. Arms fell out of sleeves and heads spun away from necks.
Anxious not to miss a moment, Lil continued to record. The one body that remained intact seemed to be looking straight at the lens. There was something foul and wicked about that dead face with its long, lank hair and Lil didn’t like it. There was malice in the blank eye sockets and the jaw was waggling as if with laughter. Lil tried to keep from shivering with revulsion to maintain a steady picture. Verne would never believe it. She didn’t believe it herself.
The phone began to zoom in on that hideous skull and Lil frowned in irritation and tried to correct it. Too late the girl realised it wasn’t the phone at all – the skeleton was racing towards her.
The fearful corpse came crashing through the broken window, bony hands reaching out. Lil didn’t have time to scream. That terrible face smacked into hers. The skull struck her forehead so violently she was thrown to the floor. A blast of decay blew from the open mouth into her own and the mane of dirty hair wrapped about her head. The phone slid from Lil’s fingers and she lay unconscious, insensible to the storm and Sally’s frantic barking – and yet she was aware of a creeping, unnatural cold that entered her mind, and with it a hissing voice.
‘Know me,’ it said. ‘In life, I was Scaur Annie. See that what my eyes saw; make my ears yours. Drink full my spite and hate. We two shall be one. Melchior Pyke’s power is waking. We must stop him. He shall not win, not this time. Scaur Annie will thwart him again.’
‘Scaur Annie . . .’ Lil murmured.
‘Live them days long buried, long dead,’ the voice inside her head commanded. ‘You be Scaur Annie. See what I saw. Hear what I heard.’
‘I . . .’ Lil breathed. ‘We . . . us . . . be Scaur Annie.’
Outside, the squalling gale began to die down. Lil’s head lolled to one side and she remained motionless as her mind went journeying back, to relive the events of a summer night that was filled with anger and fear four hundred years ago.
She opened her eyes to savage, angry yells, and scrambled backwards on all fours. But she wasn’t Lil any more and she wasn’t in her bedroom. Hundreds of years had peeled away. She was Scaur Annie, a seventeen-year-old barefoot girl in a coarse woollen kirtle and a tattered smock.
A guttering rushlight illuminated the interior of a humble wooden shack, built on the grassy slope of the cliff, with ragged hangings to keep out the biting gales. Bunches of drying herbs and seaweed were suspended from the sloping roof; beautiful shells and the skeleton of a two-headed lamb dangled among them. Clay pots and jars were ranged against one of the walls, and a rough straw mattress covered in sacking lay by another. It was dark outside, but harsh voices filled the night.
‘Come out, you filthy-faced hag!’
‘Best you do, or we must come in and fetch.’
‘Shall we drag you out by your hair an’ beat you with sticks?’
‘Step out and make answer!’
‘Witch!’
Scaur Annie scrambled into a corner of the hut, pulling her knees under her chin.
‘Get gone from my door!’ she cried. ‘Get gone, masters – else I’ll have at you. I’ll pray long an’ loud at Them what rule under the waves. Them’ll send shadows to pull you under. Your boats’ll be upended and you’ll drown in the cruel salt deep. Nowt but widows and bairns’ll be left. Think on it!’
The hostile shouts and threats outside turned to anxious murmurs.
‘She’s workin’ up to ill-wish an’ grief-charm us,’ one of them said fearfully.
‘We must stop her ’fore she spells it!’
‘Aye. Burn the witch in her den. Fire will staunch her evil. Lob your lanterns at it.’
Annie heard a lantern crash against her door. The oil splashed across the timbers and at once greedy flames leaped between them. Another lantern struck the roof and rolled all the way across, dropping down behind the back wall, leaving a burning trail in its wake.