Most children in the village have never seen an exorcism but she remembers one from her young days. Above all, it had been a noisy affair. She remembers the noise. The ghost had screamed a lot. It had opened its mouth and horrible sounds issued from between its teeth. She remembers its teeth very vividly. And the red tongue quivering inside its mouth. That ghost had had a very large mouth which had contained a lot of noise. Then there was the struggling, the violent jerking, and at the very end of the ceremony, the twitching. A lot of mess though, as her brother had remarked.
‘Do you think they want some of those books? With the pictures in them? We have some your cousin once found in the region from which these three emerged. Shall we give them to the ghosts?’
Her brother lifts his tall battered hat and wipes some plaster dust off his bald head with a dirty tea towel he carries in his pocket.
‘With pictures of other ghosts?’
‘That’s what they often come looking for.’
‘You could be right. We should put them out, where they can find them.’
‘That’s what we’ll do then. I’ll bring it up at the council meeting.’
‘Good.’
‘Yes, good. We probably won’t need knives after all.’
CHAPTER 4
Board-combers into Bundles
It seemed the villagers had put a pile of photograph albums purposely where the three could find them. Chloe leafed through a couple of them, but of course they meant nothing to her. They were mostly black-and-white photos, many out of focus and misty. A lot of the people in them wore suits, or full dresses. Others were in uniform. A great many of the subjects had obviously posed for the photo. These were pictures from the beginning and middle of the last century. They were from old wars, one of which Mr Grantham had fought in. To Chloe they were ancient history.
Those pictures which had no human subjects were of totally unrecognisable landscapes. Foggy, dark mountains. Dense, dark forests. Bleak, cold-looking, dark oceans. Why anyone would want to take a picture of such uninteresting scenes was a mystery to Chloe.
Then suddenly she came across one which, when she opened it, had ‘Property of Susan Atkins’ written inside.
Susan? That was the name of Mr Grantham’s fiancée. But there must have been a million Susans out there, past and present. It was unlikely to be Mr Grantham’s Susan. However, the album was small and would fit easily into the bag Chloe was now carrying. It was light too. She would take it back and – if they ever got out of here – show it to Mr Grantham.
Alex was in the process of stopping a villager in a sewing-machine car. The driver jumped out and ran away on being confronted by the boy. Alex then went down on his knees to inspect the vehicle. Chloe showed him the album and asked him what he thought.
‘Those old photos were probably taken with Brownie box cameras,’ he said to his sister as he wobbled a pedal made of cast iron, pushing it down to see how the gears worked which eventually turned the wheels. ‘I saw one once in a backstreet shop. Those places are probably not as bad as they look. It’s just that the cameras weren’t that good.’
‘How come you always think you know so much?’ said Jordy, joining them. ‘Smarty.’
Alex said, ‘Only about things like this.’ He spun the governor wheel of the sewing-machine car, so that an armature whirred rapidly. ‘When this sewed dresses and things, that was the arm that made the needle go up and down. Now it gives this vehicle its forward motion.’
Jordy grunted. ‘He talks like a robot. He is a robot.’
‘You leave him alone,’ Chloe defended her brother.
Jordy was about to protest that he didn’t mean anything by it, when he noticed a movement coming from the wardrobe village. A lot of the stumpy, thick-chested inhabitants had gathered under a rafter and were muttering and pointing towards the trio. It seemed they had weapons in their hands: hockey sticks and cricket bats. Some even had long knives, the edges of which glinted wickedly. They began to move towards them and Jordy felt a sort of hard lump in his throat and a panicky feeling in his stomach.
‘Uh-oh, trouble,’ he said, trying to keep his tone even. ‘We might have to make a run for it.’
‘What’s upset them?’ asked Chloe, seeing the mob. ‘Why are they doing this now?’
Jordy said, ‘I dunno, but they’re