‘I don’t know what you expect us to do about that,’ said Seawoll.
‘Not thee, Alexander,’ said Brook, and she nodded at me. ‘The Starling is the man I need.’
On the afternoon of 18 May 1945, a Royal Canadian Air Force Lancaster bomber out of RAF Linton-on-Ouse was doing bumps and circuits – a training manoeuvre where the plane circuits an airfield, comes in for a landing but after the wheels make contact with the tarmac they accelerate again and take to the air. At some point the crew got bored – after all, they were young men in a strange country currently in possession of a go-anywhere machine. And so they went for a sight-see around the beautiful English countryside. Because they were supposed to be sticking close to their airfield, they didn’t have a navigator on board. Perhaps this is why they got themselves lost, and after circling Glossop for a while they crashed into a hillside on the moors to the east. Seawoll said that he’d visited the site as a boy. You could still see the scar the plane made when it hit and read the memorial plaque that marks the spot. The crew were all buried in the Canadian section of the military cemetery at Brookwood.
The crash took place ten days after Germany surrendered. It wasn’t the first aircraft to crash in the Peak District, and it wouldn’t be the last.
According to Brook and Seawoll, there were biplanes out there, single-engine fighters, transport planes and at least one Superfortress. Even a Meteor, the first British jet fighter, and a Vampire – which I thought was a cool name for the second.
And some German bombers, too – having got lost while attempting to flatten Manchester and hit the hills on their way out. Brook advised me to Google translate some phrases while I still had Wi-Fi.
All these crashes was why I found myself sitting on a stile built into a drystone wall on top of a ridge a couple of thousand metres east of the ruins of the Volcrepe Mill and its cargo cult bomber. Behind me, the sun had fallen into a golden gap between the clouds and the horizon. Ahead, the moors rose up as darkening shadows vanishing into the mist. To the south of me, down a steep slope, the traffic on Snake Pass passed by in a fitful distant grumble. Sensibly, the cars had their headlights on and I watched their rear lights vanish into the low cloud like will-o’-the-wisps. Which is totally a real thing, by the way, and not to be messed with.
I chose this location because by the stile was a large boulder that had been incorporated into the wall – something I could enchant to serve as a beacon. I’d spent the last couple of hours enchanting it to do just that. Me and Nightingale had once used a similar approach to create a ghost attractor at Harrow-on-the-Hill Tube station. I’d done some experimentation since then, seeing if I could get more attraction for my magic. The lux variant I was using didn’t even radiate in the infrared, but it did imbue objects with power.
Ghosts feed off the ambient magic that accumulates around human activity. Why? Don’t ask. We don’t know. One day someone much cleverer than me might, but I probably won’t understand the maths. That ambient magic is what we call vestigia. Stone, metal and some plastics retain vestigia better than wood or other organics, which is why old houses tend to be haunted and old horses hardly ever are.
I reckoned that the ghosts of the airmen, if there really were any, would have been subsisting off the little vestigia retained by the metal components of their crashed aircraft. Up on the moors, with no human activity to renew them, they must be getting pretty thin. Brook thought one good point source of magic should be enough to draw them down.
‘Most of them, anyway,’ she’d said. ‘Some will not come however loud we call.’
We’d named the ghost attractor at Harrow the Hangover Stone, because it was set up early in the morning. But this was more of a beacon.
There were small enchanted stone beacons every two hundred metres down the slope to the west and along the valley down into Glossop proper. I’d enchanted a section of the cockpit of the cargo cult bomber directly – it was steel rather than aluminium, and thus a good receptor.
It was a lot of magic to expend in one day, even with such a low stress spell as my lux variant. For the first time in years I felt it necessary to log my magic use. Overdo magic and you can end up with a brain like a diseased cauliflower. Doctors Vaughan and Walid’s latest theory is that, under stress, the magic starts to open little holes in your brain.
‘Like microscopic singularities,’ Abigail had said, with far too much enthusiasm for my liking.
Beverley has made it clear that she loves me for both my body and my mind and expects me to keep the latter intact.
I slapped the side of the stone and gave it a last zap for good luck.
Gondor calls for aid, I thought.
Since there was bugger all for them to do, Seawoll and Danni had sloped off for dinner at Seawoll’s father’s place – although Danni had popped back up with a flask and a home-made bacon roll at half six. I’d eaten the roll while it was still hot, but I waited until I was done before opening the flask. It was tea – milky and sweet.
While I waited for the ghosts to arrive I moved away from the beacon, turned my phone on and called home.
‘Hi, babes,’ said Bev. ‘What you up to?’
In the background I could hear muffled voices, then a thump and then Maksim yelling, ‘No, no, the lining goes over there!’
‘I’m up on the moors fishing for ghosts,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s just Maksim making some last-minute preparations,’ said Beverley. ‘He’s worse than my mum and your mum combined.’
I heard the distinctive sound of a diesel engine starting up and thought of Indigo’s big diggy thing.
‘Is that a JCB?’ I asked.
A door closed nearby and the sound became muffled. Beverley putting some walls between her and Maksim’s ‘preparations’.
‘Are you coming back tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘I hope so,’ I said.
‘You’d better,’ she said. ‘Or there’ll be trouble.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said Beverley to someone at her end, and then to me, ‘I’ve got to placate the neighbours.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Laters.’
‘You’ve got to say it – before you go,’ said Beverley.
I sighed.
‘Say it!’ she said again – with emphasis.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘I should hope so,’ said Beverley, and she hung up.
I shut down my phone and went back to the beacon.
The setting sun briefly turned Manchester into a glittering city of gold and then it was dark. Just to maintain the mood, it began to drizzle.
The first ghost arrived just as I finished my tea – he didn’t seem happy.
‘I say,’ he said. ‘Where the devil am I?’
He’d started as the barest impression of movement in the mist, but as he approached the beacon he took on form and colour. A sandy-haired young white man with a cheerful open face that looked all of fifteen but probably wasn’t. He wore a deflated yellow life jacket over a sheepskin jacket, but under that I saw he’d gone up with his tie neatly done in a Windsor knot.
‘You’ve been in a crash,’ I said. ‘You need to get to the debriefing.’
‘Prang, eh?’ he said. ‘That explains …’ He faltered. ‘I must have hit my head because I feel like I’ve been waiting forever.’
‘It’ll all be explained at the debriefing,’ I said. ‘Over the wall – follow the beacons.’
‘Jolly good,’ he said, and vaulted over the stile. ‘Good to see you West Indian chaps getting involved,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fun.’