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  She felt herself go weak, recognizing her own helplessness. He could take her anywhere he wanted and she was powerless to stop him. He was afraid of Papa, of course; the owner of the Gabor lands would have him thrown into gaol, flogged, maybe even hanged for kidnapping. But Bemorra was no child-stealer. She had gone with him willingly. Until now! Maybe he would set her down somewhere close to the Manor.

  Bemorra was walking almost arrogantly as he neared the wood, a hunting fox returning to its lair in the knowledge that it has eluded its enemies, lived to fight another day. The foremost trees cast weird shadows in the moonlight, grotesque monsters that seemed to reach out with twisted arms to grasp those who dared to trespass in their domain. Owls hooted mournfully and somewhere a vixen screeched for a mate. Truly this was a place of the wild that had its own savage laws.

  It was dark beneath the trees, only odd patches of moonlight filtered through entwining branches that still clung stubbornly to their dying foliage. A path that was little more than a track made by generations of badgers, one that the man with his child burden trod unerringly. For this was Bemorra's stronghold and he was home at last.

  A twig cracked, a sharp report that broke the stillness, had Bemorra pulling up sharply, sniffing the air. He stiffened, smelling danger where danger had no right to be. The stale odour of human sweat, the presence of unwashed bodies!

  A low snarl escaped those bearded lips and in the same instant he was leaping for the dense undergrowth, his weather-beaten flesh impervious to bramble thorns. Isobel Mainwaring clung frantically to her human mount, shut her eyes tightly but even that did not shut out the vivid stab of flame, her eardrums almost bursting to the deafening discharge of a flintlock musket. Voices, shouting, crashing noises as though some of the Manor oxen had blundered into this dense wood.

  ‘What did I tell you, Maxwell, the rogue badger always returns to its sett! Did you hit him, man?’

  ‘Canna be sure, sir. I was shootin' low, afeared of hitting Miss Isobel.’

  ‘Fool, you missed. After him!’

  Two voices that Isobel Mainwaring recognized through the singing of her ears; Papa's and that of Maxwell, his head gamekeeper. She wanted to scream out ‘I'm here, Papa’ but her lips would not move, clamped shut as surely as if Bemorra's scaly fingers were pressed tightly over them. Clinging on, branches whipping her face, brambles clawing at her, but they did not hinder Bemorra's flight.

  Running, jumping, a stag fleeing from the huntsmen who were hard in pursuit. There seemed to be men everywhere but somehow Bemorra broke the cordon, zigzagged across a tract of felled timber. More shots, pistol balls whining through the air like angry hornets but every shot was wide of its target, the marksmen panicking, some attempting to reload their weapons as they stumbled after the fugitive, spilling powder and shot from their flasks.

  Isobel saw it all in the moonlight, felt the change in Bemorra as she clung to him in frenzied terror. No longer was he the placid imbecile of Gabor, the harmless simpleton. His body was rippling with an animal fury, a wild beast with the killing urge, so devilishly primitive. Those lips snarled and foamed a thousand curses, the arm which clasped her tightening its grip with a terrifying intensity. And Isobel Mainwaring knew that he had no intention of giving her up - ever!

  They were climbing again, a steep shale slope that showered miniature avalanches in their wake. Bemorra clutched at silver birch saplings to keep his footing whilst less than a hundred yards behind Squire Mainwaring and his men were struggling desperately to overtake them.

  Isobel heard just one shout. ‘Don't shoot. He's heading for the old quarry; we'll have him cornered there!’

  Sure enough, minutes later Bemorra, now cradling his captive to his breast like a babe in arms, emerged from the steep birch covert onto a narrow ledge. Behind and above him the quarry face rose steep and silvery grey with not so much as a seedling bush to offer a handhold. Below him the sheep drop down the quarry walls terminated in a black expanse of water that was wide and deep, a place that folks shunned for rumour had it that Gabor Pool was bottomless, quarried out to an immeasurable depth by the ancestors of the present Mainwaring family.

  Bemorra shuffled his way along the narrow ledge until he could go no further. His pursuers, pistols at the ready, were already crowding onto the other end, a single file with the Squire in the lead. Truly the stag was at bay!

  Bemorra set Isobel down, holding her by the wrist, a fiendish grin on his dark features, muttering so that only she heard him. ‘The dark waters are ready for you, my child, the water nymphs of Gabor eager for young children. Three already they have had but still they demand more and I must carry out their wishes. Go to them quickly!’

  Squire Mainwaring froze in horror. Isobel tottered on the ledge, clutching at the air as she lost her balance. Her long-drawn-out scream chilled the blood of the watchers as they saw her fall, slowly turning over, seeming to float, then hitting the surface with a splash that sent up a fountain of black water that spurned even the reflections of the moonbeams. And then she was gone, Gabor Pool closing back over her until not so much as a ripple marked her passing.

  Bemorra had changed yet again, the beast in him instantly tamed. Now, the emotionless, almost pitiful wretch stood quietly, watching the angry men edge their way out to him, eyes filmed over as though he was blind, impervious to their cursings so that he might have been deaf also.

  They led him back down the treacherous slope and around to the shores of the dark pool, a huddled group standing in silence, each afraid to divulge his own thoughts. Mainwaring was numbed with shock, half-hoping that his child's drowned body would not float up to the surface because he did not want to gaze upon it. He could have ordered his gamekeeper and his woodman to strip off and dive down in search of it but he knew his commands would be disobeyed even under the direst threats: for none who entered Gabor Pool came out alive. The place had a grim reputation; one had only to stand there to sense the malevolence which lurked beneath the surface and this was but another chapter in its dark history.

  Dawn was paling the moonlit sky when the party finally straggled out of Gabor Wood down the rutted mud track to the village. Bemorra, head hung low, wrists lashed behind his back, his first feel of the rough hempen rope that would soon cut into his neck; the imbecile again, not knowing why they did these things to him.

  And Squire Mainwaring, a broken man, who would take his revenge in the way that the Crown had granted him for he was the law in this part of the land. But he had no stomach for it, for nothing any of them could do to Bemorra now would bring Isobel back.

  Every inhabitant of Gabor village had turned out for the hanging, women and children alike, for they knew the Squire expected it of them. Anyway, there would be free bread and ale for all, just as there had been when that highwayman had been executed in '73. It had to be regarded as a social occasion otherwise the proceedings were morbid, depressing.

  It was shortly after nine o'clock on 4th November 1775 when Bemorra stepped off the gallows in Gabor Wood to a mutter of hostility from the watching menfolk, revulsion mingled with hatred from the women as they hid their children's faces. A creaking as the rope took the strain, fighting to snap a neck that was resisting every turn and swing, being stretched but not broken, the skin chafing and bleeding.

  Now he was facing the audience, his grizzled, bearded face screwed into a mask of cold fury, pale blue eyes seeking out each one of them until they were forced to look away. Oh God, this wasn't the Bemorra they knew, the simpleton who had grinned at their jibes, run away when children hurled stones at him. He was the devil incarnate, blue lips moving in mute curses, frothing and dribbling spittle tinged with crimson. The crowd moved back aghast but they could not escape the torrent of soundless words nor hide from the scathing stare of the dying man. Whipping them with an inexplicable force that had them cringing, scattering them like leaves in an autumnal gale; power that every one of them sensed, that had them afraid.

  And they heard him, every one
of them on that grey November morning; they knew that Gabor and its lands were cursed, had been so for centuries and that there would always be one amongst them to carry on the curse. That their lot was death and destruction, tragedy throughout the forthcoming generations as a punishment for the tyranny of the Mainwarings that had existed since Saxon times.

  A living dangling corpse, its neck becoming elongated by the second but there was no pain reflected in those eyes. Just a hatred that was centuries old and would not die. Men paled, women and children sobbed their terror, and when finally Bemorra's neck snapped it was an anticlimax; for that which should have ended was only just beginning.

  Two men appointed by Squire Mainwaring cut the body down shortly before midday, handling it with revulsion as they loaded it into a cart for the mile-long drive to the top of Gabor Hill.

  Now the men worked fervently, eager to complete their task and be away, as they hauled Bemorra's body up onto the huge fingerpost, hung it by the neck again, strapped up the arms.

  ‘I don't like it, Jed.’ The driver took the reins, was whipping the team almost before his companion had taken his seat. ‘Them eyes, the way they keep a'lookin', seein' even though they's dead. You can almost feel 'em!’

  ‘Aye.’ The one known as Jed fumbled, trying to extract a pinch of snuff from a silver box. ‘Today has been a bad day for Gabor. Bemorra was bad enough alive but dead he's worse because you get the idea he understands and that stretching 'is neck didn't do no good. I wished I'd had nowt to do with this business, I can tell you.’

  By night the owls glided silently up onto Gabor Hill and pecked at the flesh of the hanging body, leaving deep gouges where they had fed. And when dawn came the chattering jays and magpies fought over the spoils, gouging out the eyes and ripping the furred tongue through the open mouth.

  Then they too fled as a buzzard loomed large in the sky, a huge hawk with ragged moth-like wings, coming lower as it spied the carrion which it had scented earlier.

  It alighted gracefully on the pine post, tore a strip from one of the haggard cheeks and swallowed the crimson ribbon as a songbird might have eaten a worm. Greedy, tearing and munching, neither knowing nor caring about Bemorra and his curse.

  And after the buzzard had left, the squabbling crows and jackdaws flocked in to clean up the remnants of flesh, to pick the bones clean so that long before the body was removed and buried anonymously in unconsecrated ground it was a mere skeleton.

  But man and corvids were too late to destroy the evil seed that Bemorra had sown and for a full century afterwards Gabor became a place of the damned. Fire swept the village destroying most of its cottages yet somehow missed the Mainwaring home; followed by an outbreak of smallpox that brought to an end the line of ill-fated landowners and most of the villagers.

  Only then did it seem that a new Gabor might be rebuilt out of the ashes of the old village. For Bemorra had had his revenge from beyond the grave and now surely the curse was lifted.

  It was a good sign when the gypsies returned to camp in Gabor Wood for they could sense an evil presence more than most. Truly Bemorra was dead and gone. But not forgotten.

  CHAPTER ONE - THE FACE IN THE POOL

  ‘Well, this is Gabor House and that is Gabor Wood.’ Ron Halestrom stood on the crumbling Manor steps and there was an air of satisfaction in his tone. ‘And,’ he added. ‘we own 'em both!’

  Marie Halestrom glanced up at her husband, nervously toying with the teeth of a comb she had been holding for the past half hour. Dark-haired and attractive, she was the kind who did not often voice her feelings but one read them just by looking at her. She had long learned that it was useless trying to hide anything from Ron and she wasn't going to try now.

  ‘It's beautiful …’ a sentence she deliberately did not finish.

  ‘But …’ There was a half-smile on his olive-skinned features, his dark eyes narrowing. ‘It's beautiful, but …?’

  She pursed her lips, flipped the comb teeth again so that they made a faint twanging noise. ‘There's … something about the place.’

  ‘Which is precisely what nervous females say in B-rated horror movies.’ Flippant but still pushing her. ‘Every place has something about it, even a slum-semi. Something bloody awful. This place has character!’

  ‘It's … creepy.’ She looked away. ‘It's Amanda I'm worried about. You know how perceptive she is and being deaf increases her other senses. I know she'd feel it. Because she's like me.’

  Ron Halestrom sighed. His wife never let up on the fact that Amanda was the child of her previous marriage, one that had ended in disaster, almost as though she held it against him. And since their daughter had been away at a special boarding school, that friction had increased and was rubbing off on a lot of other things as well. Like the move out here to Wales from the city, a town house to a mansion. Clerk to author in five years. One book and an awful lot of luck had been responsible for a complete upheaval of their lives; he just had to keep it in check.

  ‘I reckon she'd like it.’ This needed tactful handling otherwise Marie would be hauling him back to city life. It wasn't the house, it was the environment, the sheer rugged wildness of their surroundings which had her in awe. Beyond her limited urban comprehension, he decided. ‘Look at the size of her playground.’

  ‘That's what worries me.’

  ‘It's a fine place for a kid to grow up in, away from the claustrophobic pressures of city life. But,’ a sharp edge crept into his voice. ‘you being you would prefer us to remain on a conventional estate where there's a supermarket within walking distance and a host of other mod cons. Right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ There was no point in lying. ‘That and … well, I've been talking to the woman in the village shop. She told me quite a lot about this place!’ Marie's lips tightened and Ron Halestrom thought he detected a slight shudder running over her body.

  ‘About the Mainwarings and a guy called Bemorra, a local nitwit in the eighteenth century who terrorised the inhabitants, and was hanged for infanticide. He was supposed to have cursed the place. Half the village burned down and then there was an outbreak of smallpox. That was over two centuries ago.’

  ‘You knew but you never said a word!’ Indignation, a slight flush creeping across her freckled features. ‘That was … very sly of you.’

  ‘I didn't for one moment think you'd be interested.’ Another cut-and-thrust argument was building up; better to get it over and done with. ‘In fact, I didn't think you gave a damn about spooks and nasties and all that sort of thing. You never even bothered to read my book.’

  ‘It was horrible. Sick. Rubbish. I can tell that by the cover.’

  ‘Then why should these Gabor stories worry you? They're only legend. Rubbish.’

  ‘It's Amanda I'm concerned about.’

  ‘But she's deaf and anyway she's most unlikely ever to hear the stories.’

  ‘And how did you come to hear them?’ Marie's eyes narrowed. ‘You've hardly gone into the village at all, a budding recluse if ever I saw one.’

  ‘I made a point of … researching them.’ Halestrom was becoming angry now, all discretion gone to the winds. ‘I made a study of them six years ago. Before I met you, in fact. Bemorra formed the basis for my book The Strangler and you've got a lot to thank the old boy for whether he existed or not. Without him we wouldn't have made the money we have, we wouldn't have been able to buy Gabor House nor a lot of other things. So just stop being so bloody ungrateful!’

  ‘Sometimes I really hate you!’ She walked up the steps, brushed past him and entered the long panelled hallway. ‘You're a parasite, living off everybody else, even stealing these people's superstitions for your own ends. You've used me too, brought me here to this creepy place in the middle of nowhere just because you like it. Well, it's time you realised that Amanda and I have lives of our own. You're the most selfish bastard I've ever met!’

  Ron Halestrom stood there in the spring sunlight, shrugging his shoulders and listening to Marie's f
eet angrily hammering their way upstairs. In all probability she would stop in the bedroom for the rest of the day, tomorrow would be a day of sullen silence, and by the weekend things would be getting back to normal. At thirty-six he was just beginning to learn about women and each lesson was unpredictably painful. But at least he had brought Marie to Gabor and she'd stay because she didn't have any choice. And that was all that mattered.

  It took them a week to settle into Gabor House. As Ron had predicted, Marie simmered for a couple of days and then began arranging the house as she wanted it. It was so different from their last home: six spacious bedrooms, a study lined with bookshelves, kitchens and cloakrooms. Beautiful, but old, and much in need of restoration, a process that would take years. The garden so overgrown that it was difficult to determine where it ended and the woodland began. But there was plenty of time; Ron Halestrom had all the time in the world. Just a week until half-term and then Amanda would be home from boarding school. She wouldn't notice the dilapidation, the decay, the wilderness. For her it would be a big new adventure. Everything would be fine.

  It was on the Thursday afternoon that the Reverend John Pickering called, a tall, stooping, white-haired man in his early seventies, a widower who clung to convention and wore his long dark overcoat and black Homburg hat even though it was May. Ron Halestrom spied him coming up the long drive, pausing every so often to inspect a shrub, smiling his satisfaction or frowning his disapproval according to what he discovered, shaking his head and chewing on the stem of his long black rustic pipe.

  Ron Halestrom heard Marie answer the door, footsteps and voices in the hall, and decided that he had better go and make the vicar's acquaintance. It had to come sooner or later in a place like this and he wanted to get it over with, opting for a tactful middle-of-the-road approach to keep the clergy at bay.