Authors: Neil Spring
Until one night in 1937, when I arrived home from a late work supper in Soho to find Mother crouching in darkness at the top of the stairs.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, feeling at once intrigued and alarmed. But she didn’t answer me. She didn’t flinch. Even as I reached the stop of the stairs and knelt beside her, raising my hand to take the wet sponge from her grasp. The wallpaper was damp and smudged.
I asked again, ‘What
are
you doing? It’s approaching midnight.’
My voice was strained, and I could see now that Mother’s eyes were wide and empty and shining like glass.
Then she did flinch. Blinked once. ‘Sarah, dear … there you are.’
I could hear the uncertainty and confusion in her voice, could see it in her eyes as they dropped from my face to the wet sponge in my hand. The mystery took hold of me as I helped her to her feet and led her downstairs, remembering that years ago she had done this before.
‘The wall needed to be washed,’ she said quietly from her chair next to the fire. ‘The damp is getting in again. It’s rising.’
Somewhere in my heart I felt a knot loosen as Charlie advanced into the room and paced restlessly around the coffee table. ‘There is no damp,’ I said patiently.
Mother’s gaze faltered. Charlie leapt into her lap and hissed at me.
‘Tell me how I can help you,’ I said, feeling my stomach tighten. Mother was my best friend. No thought was more distressing, more alarming to me, than the possibility that she might be losing her faculties.
‘My dear, you’ve already helped. I hope you know I’m grateful
for everything you’ve done for us,’ she said, directing a wistful glance at my father’s old piano. ‘I don’t want to be a burden on you, not on anyone.’
Any irritation I had harboured down the years at knowing she had once secretly accepted money from Price dissolved. She could never be a burden on me, and the idea that she thought of herself in this way was too horrific, too sad.
‘You and I,’ I said softly, ‘we’re a team. And I have a good job now, one that will keep us secure.’
‘I do
want
to work,’ she said with a trace of sadness, and I nodded my encouragement. She was one of the bravest, proudest women I had ever known. ‘But Sarah …’ She paused, struggling to release the words. ‘I worry that there is something the matter with me. Sometimes I feel … different, not myself. Like tonight. I wake and find myself downstairs, collecting the mail, moving things.’
‘Sleep-walking?’ I smiled, wanting to feel relieved. ‘That’s common enough. And you’ve always been the first to collect the mail.’
‘No.’ Her voice was stern, her eyes wide and uncertain. ‘Not always. It’s worse now. I find myself … doing things, dreaming things. Things I can’t remember. Do you understand? I washed the wall on the landing, and another in my bedroom, without any memory. I don’t even know how long I was sitting there doing it! I did it in my sleep.’ She held up one hand. ‘I know how this sounds, but sometimes I feel as though something is taking me over, taking control.’
As I registered the shakiness in her voice, my worst fear took hold: her mind was deteriorating. All of her wisdom and intelligence and companionship, everything that made her mine, was suddenly in jeopardy. I wanted to reassure her with an explanation, but an explanation resolutely refused to come. So instead
I said in an unsteady voice, ‘Perhaps you need some rest.’
‘Rest? How can I rest with those terrible noises in the house?’
‘Noises?’
‘A very faint tapping, scratching sound,’ Mother explained. ‘Coming from the walls. Every month or so. It’s driving me mad!’
And now my heart was pounding. Our cat’s eyes tracked me as I stood up abruptly and approached Mother’s chair. ‘Then you’ve heard it too?’ I ventured.
‘I thought it was in my head. Sarah, why did you never say?’
‘I did, remember?’ Her blank expression told me she didn’t. I took her hand and knelt beside her. ‘After that I didn’t mention it again. I didn’t want to scare you. I thought it might be mice, or—’
She stared at me silently until eventually, in a cracked voice, she whispered, ‘There’s something wrong with this house, isn’t there?’
I deflected the question with another of my own. ‘How long have you been feeling not yourself?’
‘A long time – years. But never as odd as I feel now.’
I gazed hard into her fearful eyes. ‘Please try to remember. It might be important.’
After a long moment’s consideration she nodded and said, ‘Since you went to that place with Harry Price. That house on the Suffolk border … What was it called?’
I froze, and watched her lips with mounting horror, as Mother mouthed the two words I had hoped never to hear again.
*
Harry Price was the last person I wanted to ask for help.
What little I saw of him in the newspapers made me glad to be separated from him. The only time I felt any real envy was
when I heard that he had become the first Chair of the British Film Institute. His ‘experiments’ were becoming increasingly outlandish, with newspaper articles recounting his bizarre escapades in Europe, where he had investigated the case of a talking mongoose that could apparently read people’s thoughts and sing hymns. Next came his inquiries into fire-walking and the Indian rope trick and his examination of the bite marks of a ‘devil girl’ from Romania.
1
Knowing his beginnings, it made me sad to see that my old employer had been reduced to such cheap popularisation. But, as I was to discover shortly, any sympathy I had was grossly misplaced. For just when it seemed he could stoop no lower, Price was preparing news that would awe a generation and secure his name in history forever. At a terrible cost to us both.
*
Perhaps it was denial that made me close my eyes to the problems at home – a reluctance to reassociate myself with phenomena that defined a life I had left behind. I told myself we didn’t yet need outside help, that Mother and I were all right on our own. And there were many distractions at work which helped me convince myself of this lie. The months flicked by in a blur of late nights at the office, film premieres and parties. At the Silver Slipper in Regent Street, with its polished glass dance floor and walls painted with lush Italian scenes, I danced away troubles I hoped would never catch up with me.
Until one evening in late November.
It was close to 8.30 when I locked the office and stepped out into the cobbled alleyway that cut through to Old Compton Street. Soho was dead. This in itself wasn’t unusual for a Thursday evening, but I was keen to reach the bright lights of Leicester Square as quickly as possible. After an absence that had
lasted far, far too long, I had arranged to meet Amy for a trip to the cinema to see
Modern Times
, the new Charlie Chaplin film, and I didn’t want to be late. We had a lot to catch up on. Afterwards, if there was time, we would go for cocktails together in one of the bars opposite the new Windmill Theatre, and laugh together at the married men who were enticed there by the nude shows. They were hilarious to observe, like guilty schoolboys.
Walking on, I spotted up ahead a broad-shouldered uniformed police officer who was standing watch by the side of a gated townhouse. Stamping his feet and looking about him, the poor man looked rigid with cold. And something about his general demeanour hinted to me that all was not well. My curiosity led me right to him.
‘I hope there’s not been any trouble?’ I asked.
‘Trouble?’ His breath frosted on the air. ‘That’s putting it mildly.’
I tried to catch his eye, but he was glancing furtively to either side of me, then behind me, almost as though he was afraid that at any moment someone might leap out at us from the dark.
As it transpired, that was exactly what he was afraid of.
‘You’d best be moving on now,’ he added. ‘It’s not safe out.’
‘Not safe?’
‘Not for women like you – perhaps not for any of us.’ He looked up. ‘You must have read about the attacks?’
I hadn’t. I explained to the officer that I had been so busy at work that week I hadn’t had time to read the newspapers. The way he was shaking his head now, looking away from me and pursing his chapped lips, led me to the conclusion that something was very wrong. I didn’t care at all for the look on his face. I had seen that look before, in the pale faces of the Foysters at Borley Rectory.
‘Are you guarding this house?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Not guarding, miss. Waiting.’
He cast a quick glance behind him.
‘It’s all right,’ I said with quiet diplomacy. ‘There’s no one around.’
His sharp eyes locked on me. ‘Sure about that, are you, miss? I’ve seen him,’ he said suddenly. ‘Once this week already – Monday. Came charging out of the dark, he did.’
‘Who did?’
‘Whatever he – it – is. Dark and fast – such a terrible size. I didn’t see its face. It was no human, I know that. There was a sighting late last night, on this street. A young lady living at this house answered the door to a figure – said he was covered in a dark cloak. A man like a giant bat. Stood right where I am now, just staring at her with blazing red eyes and shooting blue and white sparks from his mouth.’
‘Was she all right?’ I asked. ‘No one hurt, I hope?’
‘Before the poor lady could cry for help, the attacker had clutched for her dress with steel claws. Then he ran off.’
Steel claws? I checked my watch. Amy would be wondering where I was. I returned my gaze to the sociable policeman and was about to bid him goodbye when something – it sounded like a dustbin lid – somewhere behind us clattered to the ground. Nothing remarkable about that, I told myself. It was a cat, probably, or an urban fox. But the policeman’s pupils had become wide circles. ‘Tell me more,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything.’
His name was Officer Westron, and as he recounted his own peculiar encounter, I found myself wanting to produce a notepad and pen and take down every last detail. I felt as if I was back at Price’s side, questioning anxious witnesses like Reverend Smith
and the Foysters whose lives had brushed with the unknown. And though a piece of me wanted to walk away – to find Amy at Leicester Square and enjoy an evening on the town – I couldn’t resist asking yet more questions.
‘It was a tall figure, and thin. Moved too fast for me to see – leapt out at me from the alleyway. Jumped right over that wall.’
I took a sharp intake of breath as I remembered something Price had said, years ago, about a ghost that could leap over fifteen-foot walls – a man with steel claws who shot fire from his eyes.
The Terror of London. One hundred years ago, sightings of the ghost were common.
‘Spring-Heeled Jack,’ I said under my breath.
By the expression on his face, Officer Westron must have thought I was speaking another language.
‘Reports of The Terror appear across history,’ I explained. Sometimes he is said to be gigantic in size. In London he came to prominence in the winter of 1890 when
The Times
ran a series of articles about unexplained assaults on women by a demonic figure, much like the one you say happened here last night. And now … it’s happening again. Maybe.’
‘But how do you know about this?’ His tone wasn’t suspicious, more fascinated.
I hesitated, unsure how to answer.
‘You might be able to help us,’ he continued.
‘No.’ My answer came out without thinking. ‘No, I have to go. I’m meeting a friend.’
‘Wait, please.’ Westron reached out an arm. ‘Come down to the station with me.’
Help the police? On a matter of psychical investigation? The idea shimmered, beckoning. This predicament was both crazy
and comfortingly familiar. During my Laboratory days Price and I were frequently called upon to give evidence against fraudulent mediums prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act. But that was my other life, behind me now. So why did I suddenly feel so confident, so curious?
‘It won’t take long,’ Officer Westron insisted.
Against my better wisdom – perhaps out of a sense of duty – I nodded and stepped forward.
*
‘How do you intend to take control of this situation?’
Detective Mayfield was silent. Since my arrival at Charing Cross Police Station, I had heard very few answers. Only questions, which Officer Westron and his superior evidently thought I might help answer.
I tried again.
‘Any physical evidence?’
‘We found a gentleman’s cane in the alley. That was all.’
‘Do you have any suspects?’
‘Who could possibly match the profile? I mean –’ Mayfield threw up his fat hands in exasperation – ‘how can any man appear out of nowhere, outrun six officers, leap fifteen feet into the air, and just … disappear?’
‘A man can’t,’ I said directly, ‘but the human mind is very capable of imagining that he can. Tell me, did your officers actually
see
this figure leap into the air?’ I rose from my chair and turned to face the mild-mannered officer Westron, who was installed behind a much smaller desk, scribbling on a notepad. The vulnerability in the young man’s expression was so pronounced, so incongruous with his otherwise sturdy, robust appearance, that I couldn’t help wondering if he was in the wrong profession. ‘Officer, were your eyes on him when he leapt?’
He blinked.
‘I didn’t think so.’
The detective looked puzzled. ‘But they chased him into an alleyway and found he was gone.’ He shook his head. ‘The only way out was over the wall.’
‘The only way out
as far as you know
,’ I corrected him. ‘How many reports have there been now?’
‘Seven. And many more in the newspapers.’
‘Then witnesses may be unreliable, prone to seeing what they have heard from others,’ I said, and before the words were out of my mouth I was remembering the hysterical crowds that had surrounded Borley Rectory when Wall had published his article on the haunting. They’d become drunk on their imaginings. The same thing could be happening in this case. The power of suggestion could make people believe anything.
Another question occurred to me.
‘Do any of the eyewitness testimonies match?’