churchwardens, see if the figures can’t be taken down sooner than planned. I can speak to my archdeacon. If he supports me I can probably stop it happening next year.’
The fingers of her right hand had closed on top of his on the driver door. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to give you a hard time. But they’ll be here for another seven days.’
‘No. They’ll be here for four.’ Did she realize she was touching him?
‘Bonfire Night’s on—’
‘The good folks round here don’t light their bone fire on November the fifth,’ he answered. ‘Apparently they don’t set much store by defeating the Catholic plot to blow up parliament. They party on the second of November.’
‘All Souls’ Day?’ she asked him.
‘I thought you weren’t a churchgoer? But you’re right. November the second is All Souls’ Day, when we pray for the departed who may not yet have reached God’s kingdom. Only up here they call it something else. They call it Day of the Dead.’
41
31 October
THERE OUGHT TO BE A BIG MOON ON HALLOWE’EN.IT FELT right somehow. The moon Tom was looking at now, rising so quickly he could almost see the trail of silver light it left behind, wasn’t quite full but looked huge in the sky all the same. It was the ghostly galleon of poems, gleaming down at him from just above the tallest archway in the abbey ruin.
Hallowe’en was usually a pretty big thing in the Fletcher house, probably due to Tom’s mother being American. Not this year, though. Nobody celebrated Hallowe’en in Heptonclough; everyone was too busy getting ready for the Day of the Dead celebrations on the second of November. So the Fletcher children had one solitary jack-o-lantern sitting on the sitting-room window ledge, facing the garden where no one but them could see it.
Tom was sitting at the window in his room, hidden behind the curtain. When he did that, nobody could see him. Just lately, it was proving a useful way of finding out all sorts of things he wasn’t supposed to know.
Like, for instance, that his mother had been trying hard to get all the bone men taken down from the ruins. Joe and he had counted twenty-four of them that morning, five more than when they first appeared. His mother absolutely hated them and had been on the phone to Harry just ten minutes ago. She’d come very close to falling out with him.
Twenty-six. He’d just counted twenty-six bone men around the abbey ruins. There’d only been twenty-four this morning. Sometime during the day two more had been added. Excellent!
That morning, at breakfast, Joe had asked if they could make one of their own. Their mother had said a very firm no, glancing at Tom nervously, but he honestly wouldn’t have minded. He thought they were quite cool, even funny in their way. There was one with jodhpurs, a pair of old wellies and a riding hat. One of its hands held a stick that was supposed to be a riding crop and it had a kid’s stuffed fox, like Basil Brush, under one arm.
Oh shit. Oh Jesus. One of them just moved. Tom blinked, rubbed his eyes, looked harder. One of the bone men – made up of nothing but clothes and old rubbish – was crawling along one of the walls. He got ready to jump down, to run and fetch his parents. Then stopped. It was gone. Had he imagined it?
If he had, he was still doing it, because there was another one, climbing through the lowest window of the tower. It was the one Joe thought was the funniest, the one wearing a lady’s flowered dress and a big straw hat. Tom could see the hat, almost as clear as daylight, wobble on the figure’s head. Then it jumped into the shadows and disappeared.
What the hell was going on? Were they all going to get up and move? Tom was kneeling upright now, not caring if someone saw him, actually hoping they would. Another movement, over by the outside wall. Then two of them, moving together – or was one carrying the other?
‘Dad!’ he called, as loudly as he dared, knowing Millie was asleep across the hall. ‘Dad, come here.’
Then a hand touched him and he almost leaped through the glass. Thank God, someone was here, someone else could see. He tugged the curtain aside to see who had come into his room.
Joe. Tom reached down a hand, pulled Joe up beside him and tugged