A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [3]
“It’s naught but a ruin,” Hugh scoffed. “At least, naught until we work the spells. Come on.”
He started forward toward the nave, but when they didn’t follow, he said in disgust, “I should have brought my sisters.”
They crept at his heels then, hoping that whatever struck him down would spare them if they could only appear small enough. Bill, trying for bravado, said, “It’s stood empty long enough for bones to rot.”
Robbie squeaked.
An owl flew out of the empty west window above their heads, gliding on silent wings across the moonlit sward.
“I told you there were owls,” Hugh whispered. “Has to be, if there’s spirits here. And a black cat.”
“We could have brought Cinders,” Tad offered.
“And have Ma down on you like a thunderclap?” Robbie demanded. “He’s her cat, not yours.”
“Not to harm him, silly. Just to borrow.”
“I thought people sacrificed to the Devil,” Johnnie asked.
“Only if you want something. Do you?” Hugh retorted.
“No,” Johnnie admitted, minding his footing as they went through the gaping door.
Now they were in the shadows cast by the massive columns, in the long roofless nave with moonlight visible above. The moon was past the full, but it helped, a little, with the gloom. The high walls seemed to stretch forever, pinning them in the eye of God.
“We aren’t desecrating the altar, are we?” Tad was an altar boy. “Vicar won’t care for that.”
Even Hugh was having second thoughts. “We’ll begin in the cloister. There should be a way to it along there. Nobody can say we didn’t show respect.”
With more relief than they cared to admit to, the other boys hurried after him in the direction of the doorway leading into the cloister.
There was brighter moonlight here, but the gallery was ominously dark. It seemed to be peopled with the unseen dead. Whispers of sound came to their ears, like monks walking to compline and condemning the souls of interlopers on sacred ground.
“The wind,” Hugh told them when his followers stopped to listen. “See? Over there. We can use that stone in the center. It’ll work a treat.” He glanced up at the moon, then went sprawling. Scrambling to his feet, he looked down. But nothing he could see had tripped him up.
He’d have sworn a hand had caught at his ankle. The fingers had felt cold on his flesh.
Shaking off his own fears, he blamed them on his companions.
“Didn’t anybody think to bring a candle? We’ll break our necks, without.”
Tad held out three, with a fistful of matches. Hugh lit them with a flourish, dripping wax onto the round stone and then setting the candles into each puddle. They formed a rough triangle.
He opened the schoolmaster’s book at random and found a page where there was a drawing of a great iron kettle on the boil and an oven red hot to one side.
He scanned the words, found them very unlike a spell, and turned the page. Ah, much better. This was what he’d seen a week ago and determined to try out. He’d only a nodding acquaintance with Latin, but if God understood it, so would the Devil.
He stood up straight, his hands above his head, palms out in supplication, and began to intone the words on the page, turning them into gibberish as he struggled with them. An echo, soft and unintelligible, sent a shiver down Robbie’s spine, and he clutched his brother’s hand.
The words rolled on, and Hugh thought his voice had deepened toward the end as his confidence grew.
But nothing much happened, and he was disappointed.
He tried twice more with other spells, and still the Devil was afraid to come to him.
Tad said, tentatively, “He’s busy elsewhere?”
But Hugh wasn’t to be deterred.
“It’s not sacred enough ground here in the middle. We need to stand closer to the church wall,” he told them, as if he knew what he was doing. “See, just over there.”
They turned to look, then got up from their haunches and followed him into the shadows, carefully shielding their candles. But the night wind blew out one of them, just as Robbie tripped, plunged headlong into the cold grass. He began to scream, high-pitched and terrifying.
They turned to clamp a hand over his mouth,