Long Lankin
by Lindsay Barraclough
Bodley Head, 2011
Young Adult
455 Pages
I found it tough to get rolling with this book. The largest hurdle was the first-person, present tense narration that switches arbitrarily between characters. I was not sure who I was supposed to identify with and the tense was awkward. Luckily the present tense eases up as the story gets deeper.
Barraclough does build a strong foundation for her characters; we discover the protagonists are poor by the holes in clothes and their accents without having it spelled out for us. At first, we are uncertain of history of the characters as the reader is dropped directly into the horror story along with the lost souls as if they were in an old Hammer Film. Although set just after The War, I believe this would qualify as a true gothic with all of its literary elements.
This is a book more for adults than teens, despite the child protagonists. Thick with atmosphere, but with many pages of long dialogue describing the background of how the girls landed in such a godforsaken situation, mostly through overheard grown-up conversation is not quite as exciting as watching the MacNeil/Lehrer report over dinner. But don’t let this deter you; if you can stick it out, the slow pace gives way to gut-churning fear at the end.
Cora and her little sister Mimi are dropped off at Guerdon Hall to live with their Aunt Ida Eastfield, (their Grandmother’s sister,) and her dog Finn. At the top of the hill, they meet Roger Jotman and his little brother Pete, who believe Ida is a witch who turns children into chickens. Right away, they find a broken sign bearing the scratched inscription Cave Bestiam at the back door to the old mansion.
It is the post war era in Britain, a world where kids play in bomb craters and pill boxes left over from the conflict and the children’s philosophy says: “We don’t ask why at this house, it just gets you in trouble.”
Aunt Ida has rules, they discover. The girls are only allowed outside when the tide is in, (strikingly strange, since most grown-ups would be afraid of children drowning, allowing them to play only when the tide is out,) the house is stuffy and all the windows are nailed shut, the doors must be kept locked, and they are never allowed to play down at the old church. Of course, that is the first place they go. There they find what they call the Gypsy Tree, decorated with ribbons and tiny shoes and other articles that look like they once belonged to children. There is a frightening, disfigured man there, too.
To add to the dismal atmosphere, Cora hears singing when there is no one at home. It is a woman’s voice, and she sings a horrific song about a murderous thing called Long Lankin. There is also a crazy cat-lady down the lane who tells the kids “He’s back!” Then a creepy old portrait of a man with a hand more like a claw in the hallway, Old Peter Hilliard, who looks just like the man in the churchyard.
At the halfway point of the book, nothing much has happened. The tension is thick enough to choke on, and the slow build up leaves one feeling like you are standing in a Henry James novel. The mystery of Petrus Hilliardus, 1584 written on the painting leads to an old, burned rectory, and we see the girls miss both their mother (has she been committed?) and deadbeat father. Now Cora’s little sister is talking to ghosts, and their aunt is violently obsessed with keeping the girls from the church.
The monster has no grand entrance in this book, but rather slinks murderously up our back stairs as we grow used to the quiet calm. One dark night, in the moonlit backyard, we finally see Lankin… creeping toward the house. The scene is chilling, watching from the open second story window as it crawls forward, smelling, sensing… then meeting Cora’s eyes above him.
The book from this point, now that the stage is set, begins the revelation of Long Lankin’s history in the town of Bryers-Guerdon. The pieces first come in the form of a tin box hidden in the old wing of the house. Cora is in desperate fear of being beaten (again) if she is caught with it. Aunt Ida is not sparing of the rod, but is legitimately scared of losing a third child to the horror that has devastated her entire family. The box tells of Bryers-Guerdon, a land grant to a knight, listed in Domesday, the lord cursed by a witch, and the name Cain Lankin.
Said the lord unto his lady as he rode away,
“Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the hay;
Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin
Make sure the doors are bolted well
Lest Lankin should creep in.”
The next part of the book is mostly pure explication as we visit different people and places to piece together how Lankin came to be, why the cemetery is filled with spirits, and all about how the girls fall under the Guerdon family tree.
There is a dark and grisly horror story in the burial of Cain Lankin and the captivity and burning of the witch Aphra Rushes. Lankin should have been buried at the crossroads and pinned down with iron. But the priest chose wrong.
They cried out against me, but I allowed the body of a murderer to pass through the Lychgate to burial in consecrated ground. In that moment, Cain Lankin passed into the half-world between the heavens and earth.
There is a close call where the older children are cornered in an old pillbox by Lankin, and we are also introduced to various holes in the defenses of the house. Something has been trying to get in through the roof. We are also quietly shown hidden passages and a bricked over pantry.
Then: Another Dead Dog. Thanks Lindsay, was it really necessary?
He ate my brother.
Barraclough’s ending does not disappoint. An atmospheric chase through the cellars and the old kitchen, “where it all happened so long ago,” culminates in a struggle with Long Lankin itself. A gaping hole in the graveyard, a mountain of bones, and the beast has mimi…
If you are looking for scary stories to carry you through the October Country this autumn, Long Lankin will envelop you in a dreary Sunday-dusk feeling for weeks, then scare the Dickens out of you at the end!
Here’s the song:
