Soul Stealer (11 page)

“Strange things, warts,” Tim remarked.

Sebastian looked at Pip and winked.

No sooner had Tim arrived home than he hurriedly changed out of his school uniform, pulled his mountain
bike out of the garage and pedaled hard in the direction of Brampton. He parked his bicycle against the streetlight outside
the hairdresser’s, locking the frame to the lamp standard.

Getting directions from the post office, Tim set off down the main street. Between a pub called the White Hart and a baker’s
shop with an old-fashioned gold-painted Hovis sign hanging over the door, he found a narrow, cobbled lane. Fifty meters along
it, just past a small workshop repairing lawnmowers, hedge trimmers and chainsaws, he arrived at the turning into Peelings
Lane.

It was an ancient street, little changed in a hundred years. A sluice of running water raced down the center of it which,
Tim reckoned, had once served as a communal sewer. The houses on either side were old workers’ stone cottages. A few had been
renovated, but most were poorly maintained, the paint on the doors flaking, the stonework in need of repair and the gutters
cracked. Where summer rainwater had run down the walls hung tendrils of slimy algae. Here and there, clumps of moss grew on
the windowsills.

Number fourteen was completely derelict. There was grimy broken glass in most of the windows; the door was rotted through
and secured by an ancient, rusty padlock. Tim peered in through the windows. The rooms were completely devoid of furniture,
the floorboards warped, damp and mold blotching the walls. A side gate, hanging on one hinge with a cracked plastic number
14 nailed to it, gave on to a minute garden in one corner of which was a long-disused outside lavatory without a roof. Tim
squeezed through. The garden was a mass of rank and dying weeds.

Taking care not to snag his jeans on a nail protruding from a window frame lacking a window, Tim clambered into the cottage.
Within, it smelled of cat’s pee, fungus, and damp plaster. He cautiously climbed the stairs, testing each step before putting
his weight on it. The two upper rooms were as empty as those below, save for drifts of dead leaves that had blown in. In one
corner, beneath a gaping hole in the ceiling, was a pile of bird and bat droppings.

Tim was about to descend the stairs once more when something on the floor caught his eye. At first, he thought it was a piece
of tinfoil that had blown in with the leaves but, as he bent down, he found it was a silver oblong of dirty metal, about two
centimeters by one wide. It reminded him of a dog’s aluminum collar tag, but thicker and heavier. Rubbing it to clean it,
he saw it had been stamped with a symbol:

Slipping it into his pocket, Tim left the cottage.

As he came out of the gate on to Peelings Lane, an elderly man appeared, walking falteringly towards him. He wore a tattered
flat tweed cap and had a rough-haired mongrel terrier trotting ahead of him on a lead; in his free hand he held a supermarket
shopping bag from the top of which hung the green fronds of a bunch of carrots.

“Excuse me,” said Tim. “Can you tell me who lives here?”

“Look for yourself, boy!” exclaimed the man sourly. “Nobody lives ‘ere. Except them damn cats. It’s been empty for at least
fifteen years, that ‘as.”

“Who did live here?” Tim asked politely.

“Ain’t no business of yourn,” replied the man suspiciously. “What you wan’ to know for?”

Tim, thinking fast, said, “I’m… I’m doing a project for school. We’re looking at who’s lived in which houses and how many
old families there are in the town.”

“Oh! In that case,” replied the man, softening his tone, “you’ve come to the right chap. I can remember all of ‘em. This ‘ouse…
Now let me see, nummer… nummer…” He looked down the lane to count off the houses, ignoring the number on the gate. “Nummer
fourteen was lived in by…” He paused. “Well, to be quite ‘onest, I don’t think I can remember who it ever was lived in by.
Come to think of it, I don’t think it’s ever been occ’pied in my lifetime. An’ I’m seventy-three an’ lived ‘ere all me life.
It must be, well, I don’t know, just one of they things.”

“But it must belong to someone,” Tim replied, bending down to stroke the mongrel, knowing that this would put him in the old
man’s favor. “You can’t have a whole house with no owner.”

The mongrel pushed its head into Tim’s hand. Its fur was rough and greasy.

“Like dogs, do you?” the old man inquired.

“Yes,” said Tim, to keep the conversation going. “What’s his name?”

“’E be Towser,” replied the dog’s owner, continuing, “can ‘appen. You know, when somebody dies an’ nobody knows who owns the
‘ouse an’ they ain’t got no relatives, or nobody knows who they are, it just sort of stands there. ‘Twas another place like
that in Brampton, years since. A small shop, it was. The old lady who
owned it emigrated. Australia! That’s what they said, anyways. Never seen ‘ide nor ‘air of ‘er since. Suppose that’s the case
with this ‘un. Maybe one day the council’ll knock it down.”

Tim continued stroking Towser, his fingers getting greasier and greasier. Towser, he considered, certainly needed a bath.
Yet Tim knew that as long as he paid attention to the dog he would have its master’s attention as well.

“Only thing that lives in there now is them damn cats,” the old man continued. “Nasty wretches! Not big, mind you. Lean, sinewy
little beggars. Wily as foxes. An’ fierce. Fierce as devils, they are! Vicious. Get bit by one of they an’ you’ll know about
it. Now,” he went on, warming to the theme, “Towser ‘ere is a ratter. Champion ratter. Ain’t a rat gets by ‘im. ‘E’s got the
courage of ten other terriers. But when it comes to they cats, ‘e backs off. I don’t blame ‘im. They say discretion’s the
better part of valor. So ‘tis for dogs as well as men. I tell you,” the old man finished, leaning forward towards Tim as if
to prevent one of the cats overhearing him, “if I were a young mum with a little one in a pram, I’d not park it out in my
garden anyplace around ‘ere. I’m sure they cats’d ‘ave the baby.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Tim caught a movement on the far wall of the garden. At the same instant, Towser stiffened.

“There’s one!” the old man said. “C’mon, Towser! Time we was off.”

Without saying goodbye, the old man tugged on Towser’s leash and the two of them headed off down the lane at as brisk a pace
as the old man could manage.

The cat was a small nondescript animal with no distinguishing marks except a white left forepaw. It made no attempt to move
towards Tim but just stood looking at him in the uninterested way cats have. Tim felt strangely uneasy. Glancing up and down
Peelings Lane, Tim noticed there was not another creature in sight. He was alone with, he thought to himself, one of the Killer
Cats of Brampton.

After a minute, the cat settled down, curling its tail around its hindquarters and closing its eyes.

Tim set off down the lane. At the small workshop, from the murky rear of which he could hear someone unsuccessfully trying
to start a lawnmower, he looked back. The cat was following him. Tim had the distinct feeling it was making sure he was leaving
the area. Only when he passed the door of the saloon bar of the White Hart did the cat stop and, its tail held jauntily high
in the air, make its way back towards Peelings Lane.

“If Scrotton ever plays truant,” Tim said later as he, Pip and Sebastian walked across Rawne’s Ground towards the Garden of
Eden, “the truant officer will be in for a major — like seriously major — shock when he gets to Peelings Lane, and Scrotton’ll
be boiled in a vat of headmaster’s oil.”

“He’ll never be reported,” Pip replied. “Yoland takes attendance, so Yoland decides who’s playing hooky. He has only to enter
him as present in the book and no one’s the wiser.”

“As for the house,” Tim remarked, “if Scrotton does
live there, I’d not be surprised. It’s as filthy as he is. Stink of cats all over the place. Piles of bat poop, dead leaves…”

“He does not,” Sebastian interjected with certainty. “I believe the house to be a sanctuary.”

“A sanctuary?” Pip repeated. “I thought that was a church or something.”

“Throughout England,” Sebastian went on to explain, “there are places where the wicked may go into hiding for safety. Often,
these are caves or hollow trees yet, on occasion, they are buildings. In my father’s time, such a place was referred to as
a
templum maleficarum
— a sacred precinct of evil.”

“Caves I can understand,” Tim said. “They last forever. But a house? That can fall down, a builder can repair it…”

“Scrotton has given this address because he knows, as a
templum maleficarum,
it will never be repaired,” Sebastian said. “If you return in twenty years, it will look exactly the same, protected by the
next evil soul to use it. A
templum maleficarum
is often frequented by the powers of evil.”

Tim felt his skin crawl. He might, he considered, have bumped into one on the stairs. It was a thought upon which he preferred
not to dwell.

“As for the cats,” Sebastian added, “they are the guardians of the sanctuary who keep the inquisitive away. You were fortunate
not to have had to deal with one of them. They are notoriously vicious.”

“I saw one,” Tim admitted. “It followed me when I left.”

“Did it possess a white left forepaw?”

“Yes,” Tim said, the hair on his forearms prickling.

“Then it was a guardian,” Sebastian confirmed. “Yet fear not. It will not have pursued you beyond its territory.”

They passed the oak bench and, on reaching the river bank, took a narrow path that ran parallel to the river.

“So,” Sebastian said, “show me the object you found in the building.”

Tim produced the metal oblong, saying, “Probably nothing. Just a gas or electricity meter seal. That sort of thing.” He handed
it to Sebastian.

On receiving it, Sebastian stopped walking. He studied it very closely then, with a yellowish cloth taken from his pocket,
rubbed it vigorously between his finger and thumb. In seconds, the metal gleamed as if it had just been cast.

“Did you notice anything else?” Sebastian inquired.

“Just the bat dung, dead leaves…” Tim answered. “Certainly no sign of anyone living there. The house doesn’t even have a bathroom.
The lavatory’s a tumbledown stone shack in the garden.” He pointed at the metal oblong. “What is it?”

The sun was lowering towards the horizon, the shadows lengthening. In the fields across the river, a faint mist hovered a
few centimeters above the grass.

“The metal from which this is fashioned is an amalgam of platinum, silver and gold,” Sebastian announced. “It is known as
white gold.”

“But what is it?” Pip wanted to know.

“It is a spell key. When some spells are cast, for each part of the spell, there must be a key which acts as a catalyst to
start the reaction.”

“What is the sign on it?” Pip then asked.

“It is an alchemical symbol referring to a melting furnace.”

“But what’s a spell key doing in a dump in Brampton?”

“I suspect,” Sebastian replied, “that Scrotton has been there and accidentally dropped it.”