For a moment, he wondered if he would be willing to carry out his threat if the innkeeper talked about his visit. He decided that, all things considered, he would.
It was past midnight. Will sat comfortably in the long grass behind the Carter house. As Fernald had told him, the rear yard was littered with broken carts and their fittings. They made weird shapes in the light of a low sickle moon.
Maddie was across the high street, watching the front of the house. Will expected that if the Stealer made an appearance, he would do so from the fields behind the village, where the surrounding trees would give him a convenient, concealed approach and escape route. He was hardly likely to come down the main street itself. But it was as well to make sure, and Maddie was positioned where she could see the part of the street that was hidden from Will’s view.
He leaned his back against a tree stump. His cowl was up so that his face was in shadow, and his cloak was gathered around him. He remained motionless, knowing that the cloak and absolute stillness were his sureties against being seen. From anything further than three metres away, he was totally invisible. Even close to, he blended into the tree stump itself, appearing like a pile of fallen branches, or a large, irregular bush.
This was the second night they had kept a vigil over the Carter house. By day, they had stayed back in the trees, hidden from sight. After the first night, Maddie had been impatient, fretting at the long hours of inactivity.
“He’s not coming,” she said. “We’ve missed him.”
Will shook his head. “This is a large part of what we do,” he told her. “Watching and waiting. Be patient. It’s only been one night. He could come tomorrow. Or the next night. But he’s coming.”
“How can you be so sure?” Maddie asked.
He considered the question in silence for a few moments, then gave her an unblinking look.
“I don’t know. I just am. It’s a hunter’s instinct, I suppose.”
Now as he sat here waiting, that instinct was telling him that tonight would be the night.
Forty-one
He heard them before he saw them.
There was a faint sound of movement through the long grass and low-lying bushes behind him. Instantly, he froze. He lowered his breathing rate so that no movement or sound was perceptible.
He resisted the almost overpowering temptation to turn and look. Instead, he strained his ears, listening to the faint rustling and swishing of clothes through the grass. Two of them, he thought. He couldn’t say how he knew that. It was just the result of years of experience, years of stalking and waiting for prey.
The men, assuming they were men, were only a few metres behind him now, and several metres off to one side. Their attention would be focused on the Carter house, he knew. The odds were well against their seeing him, sitting huddled in the cloak. The wind was sending clouds scudding across the sky, alternately concealing then revealing the moon.
The men paused for a few seconds, presumably studying the house and the village itself.
“No one around,” said a voice. It was startlingly close to Will, and only his discipline and training stopped him from starting in surprise. The voice couldn’t be more than two metres away.
They were on the move again and they slid past him, almost close enough to reach out and touch. There were two of them, as he had guessed. One was wearing a dark cloak. The other was all in black. As he moved, Will saw that there were long, uneven strips of diaphanous black cloth trailing from his arms and shoulders. They swirled and stirred in the wind, giving him the appearance of a tattered, unearthly being—a creature from the graveyard.
As the cloaked man crouched, the tattered figure produced a tight-fitting hood and pulled it over his head. He glanced sidelong at his companion and Will could see that the mask covered his face and was marked with lines of white paint, delineating what looked like a skull. Finally, he donned a wide-brimmed, floppy black hat, looking for all the world like some tattered, ghostly scarecrow. He bent low and began moving through the long grass towards the house. He would be a terrifying sight to any child who woke and saw him. Will imagined the throat-closing fear that would assail young Violet in the next few minutes. He was tempted to stop this abduction, and save her the horror of it all. But he knew that if he caught these two, the rest of the gang would fade away—with the children they had already abducted. Much as he hated the idea, he had to let poor Violet endure the next few hours. The slaving gang must have a hideout somewhere. If he could track them to it, he and Maddie could release all the captives and destroy the gang once and for all.
The black figure was by the house now, almost lost in the shadows. Will wondered if Maddie had seen the two men and hoped that if she had, she wouldn’t try to signal him. They had devised a simple signalling method, but it could only be used when the kidnappers were not placed where they could see Will or Maddie. The evil-looking intruder was standing at the side window of the house. Mentally, Will nodded, although there was no actual movement of his head. He had reconnoitred the house the previous evening, looking for possible points of entry. The side window was the most suitable. Its lock was weak and primitive and the window itself was shielded from the sight of any passer-by in the village high street.
The cloaked man, crouched only five metres away from Will, moved nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Obviously, he was keyed up, watching and waiting for something to go wrong.
The black tattered figure eased the window open. He put one leg over the sill and slipped inside the house. Again, his companion shifted nervously, waiting for a shout, a scream of fright, an uproar from the darkened house. But there was nothing.
Minutes passed. Will focused on the open window—now a dark square hole in the side of the house. Then he saw movement. A small figure in a white nightshirt clambered over the sill, followed by the black, predatory scarecrow. He held her by one arm, never letting her loose. As they made their way across the field to where Will and the Stealer’s companion waited, Will saw her stumble. Her abductor heaved her to her feet and Will could see she had a sack over her head.
The cloaked man stood to greet them. He uttered a low laugh as he saw the frightened girl stumbling awkwardly in the grip of the tattered figure.
“Get that sack off her head,” the Stealer told him. “We’ll move faster if she can see where she’s going.”
“How did it go?” his friend asked.
The black figure shrugged. “She had a brother who woke up as I went into the room. But once he saw who I was, he shut up quick smart and pretended to go back to sleep. I told him if he raised the alarm, or told anyone what he’d seen tonight, I’d come back for him and cut out his eyes. Scared the living daylights out of him.”
The cloaked man was busy undoing the sack and removing it from Violet’s head. She was a pinch-faced little girl, with badly cut brown hair. She was gagged with a thick piece of cloth and Will could see tears running down her face. But she remained silent, her large, frightened eyes moving from one man to the other.
The Stealer was dragging off his skull mask now. He let out a sigh of relief as he shook his head to loosen his hair, which had been matted down under the tight mask.
“That’s better,” he said. “I must say, Victor does a good job getting those kids scared of the Stealer. That’s the third time I’ve had one wake up and just freeze in terror.” He laughed softly.
Scum, Will thought. Victor, he assumed, was the name of the Storyman, who sowed such terror in the hearts of the children of these villages.