A Ghost in the Machine by Caroline Graham Page A

into the house and had left several hours later carrying the crates, now dismantled and roped together.
    A short while after this, more men arrived with ladders and scaffolding and were in and out for three days, knocking and hammering. The minute they left, the village was in there, starting with the chairman of Neighbourhood Watch and his consort. Others followed in order of seniority. Alas, all were disappointed. They were courteously received, shown into the rather small living room but not encouraged to browse. And so it continued for the next ten years.
    This meant few of the locals were destined to see the constructions assembled in all their glory, for the windows in the machine room were tall, extremely narrow and very high up. Even by jumping in the air one still only got the barest glimpse of a dangling loop of rope. Or a massive iron claw.
    But Mrs. Crudge, who was allowed to wax the floor-boards on which the machines were precisely placed, relayed sensational descriptions as to their extraordinary appearance. Apparently there were large cards printed and set in glass boxes next to each exhibit, giving a detailed history as to their fearsome capabilities. Some of the boxes had illustrations that Mrs. Crudge said fair turned her stomach. Worse than the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. Not what you’d call a nice sort of hobby at all. And she was quite right. For the war machines were not a hobby for Dennis, but an all-consuming passion.
    He remembered vividly the moment this sprang into being. He was fourteen and until then had shown no genuine interest in anything at all. He played no sports and had no friends – at least none he brought home. Eventually, somewhat shamefaced, his parents admitted to each other that their only child was as dull as ditchwater.
    There was only one TV set in the house and Dennis’s father kept a firm eye on the control knob. So Dennis read, simply because he could and it was something to do. As her son seemed indifferent to subject matter his mother changed his library books when she changed her own. She tried to select an interesting mixture: teenage fiction, true adventure – sailing, mountaineering and so on – biology and the natural world, or history. It was in this section she had come across a work entitled The Soldier’s Armoury: Twelfth to Sixteenth Century.
    Dennis opened it, sucked in his breath and cried, “Wow! Just look at this!”
    The page in question showed a contraption for breaking knees, elbows and neck, then screwing the captive’s head round till his spine snapped. Mrs. Brinkley had barely drawn a protesting breath before her son, tightly hugging the book, rushed to his bedroom and, unlike the unfortunate man in the illustration, never looked back.
    Over the next twenty years Dennis rooted out every scrap of information extant on the period in question. His shelves were crammed with relevant books. Holidays were spent in museums all over the world poring over manuscripts describing battles and photographing weaponry, armour and all the cumbersome but lethal machinery of early war-making. The artefacts were very fragile and only once, in a library in Verona, had he obtained permission to trace a document. This was a map showing the Battle of Montichiari (one thousand lances, seven hundred archers). As Dennis touched the faded, ivory parchment he felt the warm golden earth, running with the blood of warriors, incarnate beneath his fingertips.
    Gradually he built up a small collection: a sheaf of exquisitely balanced longbows; a gun carriage supporting a vast crossbow so heavy that two men were needed merely to handle the bolt; a rusted helmet with a horsehair crest and hinged side pieces.
    He was almost forty before it occurred to him that there was nothing to stop him owning a facsimile of one of the great early war machines themselves. He drew up precisely detailed plans, even though they would never be put to any practical