Soul Stealer (8 page)

Suddenly, Yoland stopped talking and, pointing at Sebastian, said, “You!”

Sebastian looked up. “Yes, sir?”

“What do you think you’re doing, boy? Pay attention.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Sebastian.

Yoland looked at him closely for a moment. Tim’s heart missed a beat. Pip felt the skin of her brow tighten with fear. They
were both thinking the same thing:
had Yoland recognized Sebastian?

“You haven’t been here before,” the teacher remarked.

“No, sir,” said Sebastian, “I arrived late.”

“Did you indeed,” said Yoland. “I do not like late pupils any more than I do inattentive ones.” He opened the class register.
“Name?”

“Sebastian Gillette, sir.”

The teacher turned to Scrotton. “Go to the office and ask the secretary for Gillette’s entry slip.”

Scrotton disappeared to return a few minutes later with a computer printout. Yoland studied it and entered the details in
the register, commenting as he did so, “I had no idea there was a cottage at Rawne Barton.”

“It was the coach house, sir,” said Tim, jumping in to help Sebastian out of difficulty. “It’s being converted, sir, into
an office for my father and a vacation home. We’ve rented it to the Gillettes for the winter, sir. They’re renting it while
they look for a house to buy.”

“Are they now?” Yoland responded with a feigned lack of interest.

He took the register and the bell rang for first period.

As they made their way towards the math department, Tim sighed with relief and said, “Good guys one, Yoland nil.”

“I thought for a moment he had recognized you,” Pip said.

“He will not,” Sebastian replied. “He and I were never formally introduced in my father’s time. I was but a boy. Likewise
Scrotton. I have previously seen him from afar but he knows me not. Yet,” Sebastian added, “we must beware, for they are assuredly
in league and, together, may be a potent force with which to reckon.”

T
he first biology homework they were given was to find, identify, and draw a living creature of their own choice which they
had to obtain from the wild. Tim decided on a woodlouse, not only because they were plentiful around the firewood stack behind
the coach house but also because a woodlouse was simplicity itself to draw. Sebastian and Pip, however, were more ambitious.
Sebastian decided to concentrate on an earthworm while Pip, having been captivated by the water fleas, decided to search for
other minute water-dwelling creatures.

“You’ll need to look in permanent water,” Tim declared. “What about the Roman pond? It doesn’t come more permanent than 2,000
years old.”

Pip cast her mind back to the summer when Sebastian had waded in the dark water and duckweed, feeling with his toes to find
a silver Roman coin from the mud, cast in there as an offering to the gods sometime in the third century.

Putting on her Wellington boots and carrying a red plastic bucket, Pip set off in the direction of the spring,
crossing Rawne’s Ground, the largest of the fields. With autumn approaching, the grass was short and tussocky, eaten down
by the sheep which now stood in a huddle against a far hedge, watching her as she made her way to the pond. The soil around
it had been paddled into a slick black cloying quagmire by the sheep’s hooves.

Pip dipped the bucket into the water, letting it fill to the quarter mark.

Across the field, the sheep started to amble towards her. Pip ignored them. Whenever she had come into the field, the sheep
had always come up to her, their eyes vacantly watching her with the vague, blank expression of their species. Even the elderly
ram, who had only one short stub of a horn, had paid her little attention.

The edge of the pool, where the feeder spring bubbled to the surface, was surrounded on three sides by a low curbing of cut
stone, the water running off through a stone-lined channel at the other end. During the summer, when the grass was long, the
stones had been hidden, but now they were to be plainly seen, fitting perfectly together without any mortar.

It was, Pip considered, incredible to think that Roman soldiers had stood on these very stones. Reaching down, she tugged
a clump of sedge free of the mud, adding the plant to the bucket in the hope the roots might be teeming with minute life.
She knew most of whatever she found would, like the
Daphnia,
be too small to draw without a microscope, but she did have a powerful magnifying glass and hoped that might suffice for
water bugs that could be seen by the naked eye.

As the roots broke the surface, Pip caught sight of something dull red in the mud. Bending, she picked it
up, rubbing it clean in the water. It was a piece of pottery decorated with the outline of an animal. She studied it closely.
The creature appeared to be some fabled beast with a tooth-lined jaw, the rounded ears of a rat and an almost feline tail.
It was running. In front of it, where the pottery had broken, severing it, were the hindquarters of another creature in full
flight, its hind legs stretched out.

She placed the pottery shard in her pocket and stepped out of the pool. A large bubble of rank-smelling gas broke the surface
of the water where the mud was pulling at her boot.

“Devil farting!” exclaimed Tim with a grin.

Pip jumped, struggling to keep her balance, her boots splashing.

“You don’t knock, you creep up on people. After what we’ve been through this summer… it’s not funny. Anyway,” she added, “what’re
you doing out here?”

“The woodlouse is boring,” Tim admitted. “I came to see if there were any newts in the pond. Now you’ve muddied it up with
your stomping about, my chances of catching one are ten percent less than nil. Let’s head back and get drawing.” He nodded
at the bucket. “There must be something in all the gloop.”

As they turned away from the spring, another, larger bubble of gas erupted from where the water was rising. It drifted slowly
to the surface, floated for a moment on the current, and then burst. The gas inside ignited with a brief, faint green flame
that danced over the water before fading into thin air.

Pip leaped back, almost dropping the bucket.

“What was that?” she said, her voice high-pitched with fear.

“Marsh gas,” Tim replied nonchalantly. “Made by rotting vegetation. It can ignite itself. They call it will-o’-the-wisp. Don’t
be so uptight. It’s nothing to fret about.”

Pip was unconvinced. “I thought marsh gas was methane,” she answered.

“It is,” Tim confirmed.

“Well,” Pip replied. “Methane burns with a blue flame. Anyone with a natural gas cooker knows.”

“Trick of the light,” Tim answered. “If you’re so worried, look at the pendant.”

Pip looked down inside her T-shirt. The crystal was as clear as a shard of window glass. She touched it. It shivered violently.

“Run!” she yelled and, dropping the bucket, took to her heels. Tim followed. The sheep, seeing them in flight, broke into
an easy lope behind them.

They had gone halfway to the field gate near the house when Tim called out breathlessly, “Hang on a minute, sis! My legs weren’t
made for running in Wellies. Anyway, what’re we running from?”

He glanced back over his shoulder. The sheep were still following but were some fifty meters away and little more than sauntering
along in their usual clumsy manner, like mopheads with legs.

“I don’t know,” Pip replied. “The pendant went clear.”

“That was by the pool,” Tim answered. “What is it now?”

Taking a quick look, Pip said, “Going cloudy.”

“And vibrating?” Tim asked.

“No,” Pip replied.

“Then we’re safe,” Tim declared, and he slowed to a jog.

Breathing heavily, her lungs aching, Pip also slowed to a walk, casting a cautious look behind her as she did so. The sheep
were following them at a steady pace, the ram leading the flock. As she looked at it, it bleated once, loudly. In its open
mouth, she saw the sharp, pointed canines of a predator. From one of its canine fangs hung strands of tattered, bloody flesh.
The wool along the side of the ram’s head and its muzzle were matted with gore as if it had just had its head sunk deep in
the carcass of its last kill.

Pip accelerated to a sprint, Tim at her side. Her feet snagged on tussocks of grass, slipping where the sheep had cropped
the field short. Her legs ached with the effort of wearing the heavy boots. At every step the rubber struck her shins, chafing
the skin raw.

Reaching the field gate, Pip hurled herself at it, climbing the five wooden bars with a speed she did not know she possessed.
Tim vaulted it in one, his left boot flying off into the air. Landing on the far side, they stood next to each other, gasping.
Pip felt her knees weaken. The sheep trotted up to the gate and stood in a jumble.

“They’re just sheep,” Tim said, staring at them shamefacedly. “What were we running for?”

“Look at their teeth,” Pip said, but no sooner had she spoken than the ram bleated again, one of the ewes responding to him.
Their teeth were the normal, flat incisors and worn molars of grazing animals, their
heads clean of anything but a few bramble twigs ensnared in the wool.

“Guess you’ll have to do a woodlouse, too,” Tim remarked, adding, “or a snail.” He pulled his Wellington boot back on. “There’s
one on the gatepost.”

“Who’s going back for Mum’s bucket?” Pip wondered aloud, looking hopefully at Tim.

“All right, I’ll get it,” Tim replied wearily. “A few lamb chops on the hoof don’t spook me.” He waved his hand at the sheep.
“Mint sauce,” Tim shouted derisively as they trundled off over the field.

Just before six o’clock that evening, Sebastian appeared in Tim’s bedroom, still wearing his school uniform.

“I see you are addressing the extramural task set by Miss Bates,” he remarked, glancing over Tim’s shoulder as he drew the
outline of the woodlouse on his sketch pad, the picture appearing on his computer screen.

“I presume you mean,” Tim said sharply, “doing your homework? Really, Sebastian. You’ve got to make an effort with the lingo.”

“Your computer,” Sebastian replied, ignoring Tim’s criticism, “is truly a remarkable example of human inventiveness and ingenuity.”

“It’s cool,” Tim answered bluntly, giving Sebastian a pointed look.

Sebastian smiled and said, “When needs must, I shall adopt the modern idiom. However, to use such lackadaisical language all
the while seems alien and gauche to me.”

“Well,” Tim came back at him, “that was quite a mouthful.”

Beneath the drawing, he added the words:
Woodlouse, a land-dwelling crustacean, order Isopoda, class Malacostraca,
saved his drawing to the hard disk and printed it out.

“In my father’s time,” Sebastian said as the printer ejected the sheet of paper, “the woodlouse was known as the sow-bug or
pill-bug. A powder of desiccated sow-bugs taken with warm milk was considered most beneficial in instances of stomachache
or constipation.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Tim exclaimed, aghast. “You mean you ate them?”

“Medicinally, yes,” Sebastian answered. “Or they were made into a salve or ointment, although I forget their curative properties
when applied thus.”

“Never mind the lesson in medieval medicine,” Pip said, entering the room with a drawing of a large snail which she slipped
into Tim’s scanner. “Have you told Sebastian what happened this afternoon?”

“The sheep in the field scared the daylights out of Pip,” Tim replied.

“That’s not fair,” Pip retorted. “It wasn’t like that at all. We went to the Roman pool to collect some water and bugs.”

“Marsh gas bubbled out of the mud,” Tim went on, “and ignited.”

“Ignis fatuus,”
Sebastian said. “The fire of fools. It has misguided many unwary travelers into mires and quicksand, they who have followed
its blue light assuming it to be a distant habitation.”

“Show us what you found,” Tim suggested.

Pip took the shard out of her pocket and handed it to Sebastian.