Authors: Neil Spring
No lights were on, no sound came from within, and from behind the windowpanes there was no sign of any movement. Stepping into the wide, pillared porch, glad of the shelter, I stared at the heavy black door behind which we had worked so hard and for so long. All that counted for nothing now.
I stepped forward and tried the main door, expecting it to be locked, but to my surprise it opened immediately. Inside, the
gloomy hallway reached ahead towards the wide staircase. I took the route slowly, fumbling in the dark, tripping over objects invisible in the gloom, until I reached the top floor and the outer office. The door here was locked, but only until I threw my weight against it and the force of the attack granted me access. Stumbling into the outer office, the door swinging shut behind me, I turned on the spot and looked around.
There, on an old desk, was an electric torch. I reached for it, clicked it into life and illuminated the abandoned Laboratory.
Among the dust and shifting shadows I saw only the remains of what had been: files of paper strewn around the tables and the floors, boxes packed and placed in corners ready to be taken away. This was no longer a functioning establishment. Price was moving on, clearing up. He had been warned, perhaps, of the danger looming, the attacks that were destined to rain down on him.
There, at the corner desk, I had sat, sometimes for hours at a time, waiting for him to return to me from his endless appointments, worrying about the state of his health, wondering how on earth I could ever tell him what had happened to me during the period he was away unwell. Over there we had examined together the mysterious locked box that had allegedly belonged to Joanna Southcott; and there, at the threshold of the door that led into the main corridor, Price had stood and announced that we would discover the mysteries of the universe together.
As I entered the network of corridors and rooms I had first seen with Mother almost twenty years before, the memories came rushing back. I saw the jostling crowds, heard the clamour of journalists shouting Price’s name, the flashbulbs on their cameras making his eyes wide with delight and suspicion. The contrast with my present surroundings was stark. The place
seemed in every way to have lost its colour. Its shelves, once crowded with rare books, were empty now, layered thick with years of dust. Old furniture lay hidden beneath dirty sheets. The Laboratory corridor, once adorned with prints, was bare now, its pictures packed away, I imagined, in some of the many tea chests that stood around my feet.
2
Why was everything packed up? Where was he sending it all?
I waded deeper into the Laboratory, drawn by an intuitive certainty that somewhere among this debris of the past were the answers I sought.
Now coming up on my right was the seance room, where I had witnessed many an episode of unmasked fraud. It too had changed beyond recognition. The seance cabinets that had held our innumerable test subjects had been dismantled and lay discarded in the corners, and the room’s windows were dark no longer, their shutters rolled back and admitting the deathly glow of the moon. But the worst feature remained. The seance chair dominated the room. I remembered Rudi Schneider sitting in it the night he had promised to reunite me with my father; I remembered the kindness of his tone as he whispered to me, ‘You have your father’s eyes.’ I remembered the shock of realising that he, too, had lied to me.
The painful memory sent me across the corridor to Price’s office. I found the door unlocked, and as I stepped into the room I was struck by the thick scent of pipe tobacco and then a new, more alarming thought: what if he’s already here? In the building with me, now?
I went quickly to the filing cabinet where I remembered he kept his most extensive photographic collections and heaved the heavy drawer open. The sight of the files inside, crammed full of papers and photographs, took me back to an age long since
passed, when working at the side of London’s foremost psychic investigator was thrilling and exhilarating. How I wished I had recognised the danger sooner.
‘Come on, come on,’ I whispered. It had to be here: something that would substantiate Wall’s accusations. I did not have to search long. At the back of the drawer, behind the many thick files packed with spirit photography, was a folder slimmer than the others, conspicuous by the fact that it carried no label. With mounting trepidation I opened it.
The first photographs – of buildings I recognised from Berlin and Cologne – were harmless enough. But clipped behind these were the damning images that confirmed what Wall had told me, images of Germany’s symbolic power: the Kongresshalle in the Luitpoldhain in Nuremberg, the Köningsplatz and the Brown House, the National Socialist Party’s headquarters building in Munich, a flag bearing the swastika.
I threw the file down in disgust. I wanted to tear myself away from these rooms, to never again to see the man who occupied them or to contemplate the fact that I had associated myself with the place. But I had yet more to discover, for I knew that if Wall was correct then proof of Price’s deceptions in the Borley Rectory affair would be here somewhere.
I turned to leave, to explore the workshop, when the corner of an object protruding from beneath Price’s desk caught my eye. I had never known him to keep anything under his desk, so it struck me as odd. Intrigued, I went over, crouched down and shone my torch on it. It was a wooden trunk. It was too heavy to pull out, but I managed to prise open the lid to make a gap sufficiently big to peek through. The light of my torch revealed the evidence I had dreaded, but somehow known I would find.
‘
What
are you doing in here?’
I leapt to my feet, away from the trunk.
I could see a figure outlined against the doorway at the far end of the room, and then he switched the light on, revealing himself.
‘Harry, I, I—’
‘Don’t speak, Sarah. Don’t say anything.’
He came towards me.
Price stopped a few steps away, the desk between us, dividing us, protecting me from him, for I now believed he was capable of anything. Did he know? Had he seen me looking in the trunk? His gaze moved down to the floor. From where he was standing I doubted very much he could see it.
He stared back at me appraisingly. He seemed to be deciding what he should do.
Finally, after a long silence, I said, ‘Harry, tell me it’s not true.’
‘Tell you what’s not true?’
‘That you were planning to relocate this Laboratory to Bonn in Germany; that you’ve been courting the Nazi Party; that you asked Hitler if you could attend Nuremburg; that you’re not really a scientist at all; that you’ve no qualifications to speak of; that you lied to me, to everyone, about who you really are; that you lied about your family background, your secret paper bag business.’
Price said nothing but his eyes were frosty, glinting with the possibility of malice.
Suddenly I was no longer afraid. I reached down to the wooden trunk and opened it to reveal its horrifying contents. Bones. Human bones. Where they had come from, I had no idea. But now I was as certain as I could be that Wall was right: that Price had collected these, taken one of them to the dig and switched it with the animal remains he was confident we would find in the ground.
3
I took out something that looked like a finger bone and brandished it at him, raising my voice, ‘Tell me,
tell
me it’s not true!’
He stepped back, his face uncertain.
‘You lied to me about Borley from the very beginning. You invented phenomena at that house, fabricating evidence. You leased the building with the express intention of capitalising on its haunted reputation. Captain Gregson bought it for the same reason and torched it as an insurance fraud. It was you drawing on the walls. And you deliberately made us think that we had found human remains in the excavation. That’s why we never found the rest of the skeleton. There was no skeleton!’
He seemed dazed by my accusations. ‘Where on earth did you hear these things?’
‘From Vernon Wall. It’s over, Harry.’
I expected he might say something then to defend himself. But instead he moved slowly away from the desk and went over to the window, all the time keeping his back to me. He moved like an old man, unsure of himself, as if at any moment the floor might vanish beneath him. He coughed, a wrenching, painful sound. He stopped before the cabinet filled with the contraptions of fraud he had confiscated from so many mediums throughout his career. Then he said in a thin voice, ‘Sarah, do you suppose there really is a world awaiting us after this one?’
‘I used to think so,’ I replied, ‘if the phenomena at Borley were anything to go by.’
He turned and regarded me. ‘Yes, well … in that case, perhaps we are all in trouble.’
‘Harry?’
He crossed to the window and stared out into the howling night. ‘It’s all very clear to me now, Sarah. We’ve been wandering in the dark, going the wrong way, you and I, for so very
long.’ He faced me. ‘Because it’s the bunk they actually want, not the debunk.’
His statement made me go numb. I hesitated. Seeing the confusion in my face, Price filled the silence between us.
‘Don’t you understand? The hopes of these wretched people cry out for it – to hold the hand of their dead brother, to hear again the voice of their father. They remember because they must. And mediums rescue them from their pit of sorrow.’
‘What are you saying?’
He gave a slight shrug. ‘Supply and demand, that’s all it is. They provide a service. And who was I to take away their business? If it’s answers people demand then answers they will have!’
‘So you fabricated evidence?’ I demanded.
He nodded reluctantly. ‘Do you remember the photograph of the flying brick?’
I cast my mind back. A few years earlier an article had appeared in
Life
magazine with a photograph of the Rectory ruins, half demolished. It appeared to show a single brick, suspended in mid-air. Price, who was present when the image was captured, later wrote: ‘if this was a genuine paranormal phenomenon, then we have the first photograph of a poltergeist projectile in flight.’
4
‘It was thrown,’ he confessed, ‘by a workman just out of the frame.’
Even as he spoke, I had a sense that this was only the tip of the iceberg. How much more had he embroidered and embellished?
‘Harry, I want to believe that you are better than this.’
‘The phenomena at Borley met the public’s insatiable demand for mystery,’ he continued, warming to this wretched attempt to justify himself. ‘Let’s not fool ourselves now, Sarah; all who lived in that house, every one, twisted the truth to suit their own ends.
Reverend Smith and his wife, so sincere, so polite, so concerned that their house be inspected for spooks, but only because they thought there was profit to be had. Mrs Smith wanted to write a book on the whole thing. And as for the Foysters, where do I start? Each as deranged as the other.’
At hearing him say as much, my anger flared. ‘That “deranged” old man is living in poverty now, Harry, because of what you did – stealing his manuscript, turning it into a book for your own selfish reward. How could you do that?’
‘Because it was necessary.’
‘Judas!’ I spat the word out.
And I understood then why he had done it. It had not been for his amusement, or even for money. He had done it to be noticed. And when the world had stopped paying attention to that, he had taken the next available route to fame. Why show them fraudulent mediums when he could show them a genuine haunted house, fill it with ‘official’, ‘credible’ observers, only to solve the case and lay the offending spirits to rest? It was marvellous and appalling in equal measure. And I was one of the few who knew.
One of the few
. The thought made me nervous.
‘If it’s any consolation to you, I wasn’t responsible for all of it. How could I have been? The first sightings of the nun were in 1900. I hadn’t even heard of Borley then.’ He began to move towards me slowly, intent in his cold eyes.
‘Harry, wait—’
He kept coming.
‘Harry!’
And then a thought hit me. ‘Who was Joseph Radley?’
The question made him freeze. He paused, frowned. ‘You know very well who he was. Radley was my assistant.’
‘Tell me what happened to him!’ I screamed.
There was a further pause, and then Price said, ‘Joseph Radley was employed by the Society for Psychical Research, though I did not know it at the time. He was a spy, Sarah, a traitor. They sent him here to keep tabs on me, to check my work wasn’t outpacing theirs. And when I discovered the fact, shortly after we first met – well, it made his position here untenable.’
‘Untenable? He hasn’t been seen since! Not by anyone! What did you do to him? My God! What
are
you?’ But I hardly needed to ask. The answer was staring back at me with dangerous eyes that never wavered, not once.
And as he advanced towards me once more, I knew what I had to do. It was now or never.
So I told him. Finally I told him the one thing I had been incapable of telling anyone, the one secret I had carried with me all this time since that dusty summer of 1929 and that fateful night when we had visited the Rectory for the first time, the night of the seance when afterwards, under cover of darkness, he had come to me.
I told him the truth as plainly as I am telling it now.
That I had been a mother.
That, from the summer of 1929, I had carried his child.
He was staring at me with his mouth wide open. And because he seemed quite incapable of asking me anything, I gave him the answer to the question I knew he wanted to ask. ‘It was a boy, Harry. His name was Robert.’
On hearing this, his face changed, its expression melting from bewilderment to wonder and finally to hope. His eyes darted left to right, as if he expected the child to appear in the far recesses of the room.
Had he known? Marianne Foyster certainly had; but Price? I doubted it. He would not have noticed at the time, for in the
months I was carrying his child he was in hospital, recovering from his heart attack. Certainly, if he had known then he had long since buried the truth in the deepest part of his mind where he wouldn’t have to feel the guilt that attended such a thing. I made him acknowledge it now, in the room where we had first encountered one another. He listened attentively, his face powder-white, as I reminded him how, on the night he had come to me pleading that I take him back to London, I had lain awake after he retreated to his room, thinking of him, and shortly before dawn I had gone quietly to his room and slipped into his bed.