The Haunting of Bellamy 4

By Monica Dickens

It is October but, despite cold and rainy weather, life at the Wood Briar Hotel is busy. With school being in full swing and her weekends occupied by helping her parents at the guesthouse, Rose has her hands full. Things get even busier and Rose's life more exciting when a touring theatre group visits the area and decides to stay at the Wood Briar. Rose becomes friends with fascinating actors and dancers and for some time she forgets about the Great Gray Horse and his world.

But Favour, the splendid ancient horse, summons her again for a new and enthralling mission. Rose must gather all the clues and find out what happened in the mysterious Room 4 of the Bellamy Hospital in order to protect the innocent patients from the spell of the happenings of the past.

Will Rose be able to solve the terrible mystery? Will she escape the dangers that await her in the magical world? Will her double life go unnoticed at school?

In The Haunting of Bellamy 4, third part of The Messenger series, Rose's adventures in both magical and everyday world become even more captivating as she learns to overcome some of her fears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781448214044

Monica Dickens

Monica Dickens, MBE, 10 May 1915 - 25 December 1992, was the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and author of over 40 books for adults and children. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in - she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London before she was presented at court as a debutante - she decided to go into service and her experiences as a cook and general servant formed the basis of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939. She married a United States Navy officer and moved to America where she continued to write, most of her books being set in Britain. Monica Dickens had strong humanitarian interests and founded the Cape Cod and the Islands Samaritans in 1977, and it is for this charity that she recorded this audio edition of A Christmas Carol to benefit Samaritan crisis lines, support groups for those who have lost someone to suicide, and community outreach programs. In 1985 she returned to the UK after the death of her husband, and continued to write until her death on Christmas Day 1992.

Book preview

Chapter One

Rose was in a train, flying through the night. Dark woods swept past her, sleeping fields, car headlights on a road, the yellow windows of houses far apart. The lights and empty streets of a tiny town came and went quickly. The station passed in a flash. When she turned her head to the left, the reflection of a staring face that must be hers stared back, riding with her across the countryside.

Beside her, someone stirred and yawned. Just ahead, the steam whistle on the engine shrieked into the night: one – one two – a long blast as the carriage began to jar and shudder.

The brakes screeched. Rose was thrown to the floor with her arms on the opposite seat. The lights went out. A woman began to scream, but her voice was lost in the noise of the crash, and the terrible sounds of grinding and tearing. The carriage tilted sideways, then forward and down, and Rose was flung on her back as it rolled over, and pinned by the legs when the roof crashed in and the carriage jolted and was still.

Above her, she saw a jagged hole of black sky. The brutal noise had stopped. There was an unearthly silence for a moment, and then the hiss of steam and people’s cries and groans, like the voices of despair rising from the pit of hell.

‘My legs!’

Rose woke in terror, and could not believe her bed, her room, her window full of moonlight. This seemed like the dream. The train was the reality. Her legs were leaden and aching, as if she were pinned down to the bed.

The door opened and her mother was there in her nightdress.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I – oh, it was – ’ Rose’s heart was thumping. She could still feel the tilting and lurching, hear the whole orchestra of crashing and tearing and smashing, and then the dead silence and the voices rising.

‘You had a nightmare.’ Mollie sat down in a patch of moonlight on the bed. ‘What was it?’

Rose shook her head on the pillow. She felt sick and giddy, as if her bed had really tilted and rolled.

‘As bad as that?’

‘Worst I ever had.’ She shuddered. Her heart was still racing.

‘Poor Rose.’ Her mother took her hand. ‘Look, don’t be afraid. Quiet down. It’s all right. I’m here.’

‘The train – it was a train accident. It was rushing along and then it crashed. There was all that noise, and then silence.’

‘How horrible. But nothing like that’s going to happen to you. It was only a dream.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re thirteen. That’s a funny age for dreams, and you’ve got a specially vivid imagination. Perhaps you’ve been working too hard, at school and in the hotel. Perhaps I shouldn’t let you—’

‘Yes you should.’ Rose loved helping her mother to run Wood Briar Hotel. No one was going to take that away from her.

‘Go back to sleep then.’

‘I’m afraid.’

‘No, it won’t come again. It’s over now. Look, I’ll leave the door open. You sleep.’

But Rose lay for a long time staring at the bright window, and if she fell asleep, she didn’t know it.

Next morning her legs were still a bit shaky, and she felt tired, starting out on her bike to school. When her friend Hazel Riggs joined her at the crossroads in Newcome Hollow village, she said, ‘Don’t ride too fast, Hay. My legs ache.’

‘Touch of flu? It’s going about. You’d better ask the nurse for an asprin.’

‘I’m OK. I just had a rotten night.’

‘Huh?’ Hazel turned to inspect Rose as a curiosity. She never had sleepless nights.

‘Had a terrible nightmare. You know how they can stay with you.’

‘I never dream.’

‘Good or bad?’

‘Nope.’

‘If you don’t dream, they say, and exercise your brain while you’re asleep, you go insane.’

‘Oh dear, then I’m insane.’

Rose was glad that Hazel pushed on ahead, thick legs in bright blue tights working hard, bottom broad on the bike saddle. She needed to think. The dream was still very vivid. The night speeding by, the white face reflected in the carriage window, the whistle, the jolting, the grinding screech of brakes, all the terrible sounds. She didn’t want to think about it, yet she had to keep pulling it into her mind, like torturing yourself with the memory of a mistake or an insult.

Where did it come from, and why to her? Was it anything to do with the Great Grey Horse?

On her thirteenth birthday, Rose had become a messenger of the splendid grey horse Favour, who had been coming and going on the earth for centuries, using human messengers who were this magic age to carry out his eternal crusade to rescue the victims of evil and unhappiness. Rose had already been sent twice by the horse into a tremendous adventure. His call to a new challenge might come at any time.

‘Do you suppose this was it?’

That afternoon, when Mr Vingo came ambling back from a walk in the rain, Rose told him about the nightmare, or what she could remember of it, since it was already disappearing. He was the only person she could talk to about her secret life with the horse, because he himself had been a messenger once, long ago.

‘Do you?’ He went on stabbing a thick finger at single notes on the piano in his room and marking them down on long sheets of manuscript music paper.

Mr R.V. Vingo lived in the round turret bedroom over the side verandah of Wood Briar. He was a composer. He was setting to music an old legend about the Great Grey Horse who had long ago galloped to save the valley people from rising flood waters.

‘I don’t know. Sometimes being a messenger seems so clear. Sometimes it’s all so difficult and confused.’

‘If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.’

‘You always say that.’

‘Because—’ plink in the treble – ‘it’s true.’ Plonk down in the bass of the little marmalade-coloured piano that leaned away from the wall on the uneven floor of the turret room.

‘Ro-o-ose!’ Mrs Ardis the chambermaid, in a carolling mood, was calling from the corridor below the spiral turret staircase, wanting her to help fold laundry.

‘I’d better go,’ Rose said, ‘since you don’t seem to care about my nightmare.’

He humped his massive shoulders up into his rather long black hair that seemed to hang round his big head, rather than grow on it. Sometimes he was helpful. Sometimes he wasn’t. For a large, slow-moving man, he could be very elusive.

‘I’ll just forget it then. Boy, this winter is going to be dull if nothing’s going to happen.’

‘Dull!’ Mr Vingo crashed a chord and spun round on the stool, which was much too small for his bulk. ‘Don’t ever let me hear you say that about your life, Rose of all roses. Don’t get arrogant, because you have been chosen by the horse to do his work. If you do, he’ll humble you.’

‘By scaring me with nightmares?’

‘Worse than that. By not calling you to him any more. By not taking you on those journeys through time and space, to discover where the wrongs are, and how you can right them. Perhaps he sent the dream. Perhaps he didn’t. But I’d keep it in mind if I were you.’

The dream faded, and Rose had other things on her mind.

At school, a group of actors called Here Today had come to give a performance. It was a mixture of songs and dances and sketches, with some serious slashes of drama and some really funny jokes – what the programme described as ‘Essential Trivia’. There was a tap-dancing girl called Ilona with a round face and very short hair and outrageous earrings. She pulled people out of the audience and somehow taught them a few steps, until she had half a dozen giggling people – boys as well as girls, and even a teacher, Mr Scott with his dusty beard – tapping and hopping in a line with her, while the banjo kept time with them, rather than they with it.

There was a spry older man, quite bald, who did small parts and carried the props in and out and played the drums and nipped forward at the side of the stage to tell you what was going on. There were two other women who played the piano and guitar and banjo as well as dancing and acting, and good-looking Christopher who was the hero or the villain, and sometimes both in one sketch, switching from side to side of the stage and from chair to chair.

There was also Toby, a loose-jointed young man with a flop of sandy hair, who wandered in and out of all the acts and was always lost or out of step or off key, his long, rubbery face folding into lines of despair, then transforming itself into joy when he thought he’d got it at last, only to find everyone else was now doing something else. In the sketches, the characters he played, pulling his face into a different shape for each one, always got cheated, or pushed around, or said the wrong thing, or didn’t get the girl. Downcast, his gangling body flopped about like a marionette with loose strings, but he often ended up getting the best of the others by luck or innocent cunning, and radiated joy again.

Rose’s American friend Abigail thought Christopher was a knock-out. Hazel, who was sitting with them, giving music, comedy or tragedy the same stodgy reception, said it was better than Current Affairs. Rose was fascinated by Toby, who made her want to cry for him at one moment and laugh with him the next.

At the end, anyone was allowed up on the stage to talk to the actors and look at the props and bits of costume with which they did quick changes – moustaches and glasses and wrap-around skirts and cloaks and feather boas and a collection of hats for Christopher’s instant switches. Abigail, who was learning the flute, went up to talk to Tina who played the guitar. Hazel pulled Rose to leave the hall with her – she had an irritating habit of pulling and poking and nudging you – but Rose shook her off and went unobtrusively through the crowd to the stage.

Her natural shyness had become less painful since the splendid grey horse Favour had shown his confidence in her as a faithful messenger, but she was too timid to go up on the stage. She stood under it and looked up at Toby, who was chatting enthusiastically with a lot of people and scrawling autographs and clowning about and demonstrating how he did his fall like a felled tree. ‘Timber!’ He ended up with his face on the floor quite near Rose.

‘Hullo,’ he said politely, as if they had met standing up.

‘Hullo.’ He didn’t get up. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I don’t think so.’ He sat up and leaned on one long arm, his untidy hair half over his face. ‘One day I will be. Everyone thinks I’ve got the perfect technique, but actually, each time I do it I take