The Secret of Crickley Hall (53 page)

The national dailies carried the story of the 'mystery boy' found in the ruins of a building and who had lost his memory due to a blow to his head (it was thought). It made the front pages for more than a week, his photograph, which had been taken while he was in hospital recovering from his injuries, printed large for the first three days, the caption beneath appealing for anyone who knew the boy's identity to come forward. No one ever did. The picture released to the press was too bleached out, worse when it was reproduced, and a bandage covered his forehead, so that even the market traders for whom he had done odd jobs failed to recognize him.

The boy had been unable to tell the authorities anything about himself—what his name was, who his parents were, how he came to be in the bomb-gutted house where he was found. His photograph was even circulated among the troops in England and abroad, but still no one claimed him for their own. Eventually it was suggested that perhaps both his parents had perished in the earlier Blitz, and the boy, lost and confused, had roamed the streets ever since. There appeared to be no other explanation.

Public interest waned and the story was relegated to a couple of column inches on the inside pages, while the frontpage headlines returned to more urgent world events.

The anonymous boy spent the next six months in hospital recovering from his injuries—his left leg had been badly broken—and the doctors hoped his memory would return of its own accord. But it never did.

Because of his size and his evident maturity, the patient's age was approximated at fourteen years, and Maurice, whose memory was fine, did not disagree with them (he was by now thirteen years of age anyway). Henry Pyke, the Air Raid Precautions warden who had discovered Maurice and carried him up from the cellar, had taken a special interest in the boy and had visited him several times a week at the hospital. As time went by and the 'lost' boy remained unclaimed, the warden began to bring his wife to see him. Theirs was a childless marriage and for years they had longed for a son or daughter. They grew so fond of Maurice, who was shy and well-mannered and had a wonderful shine to his eyes, that they decided that if the boy's parents or relatives were not found soon, then they themselves would apply to adopt him for their own. And that was precisely what happened. The authorities had not known quite what to do with the amnesic boy, and the Pykes had provided the ideal solution. They would allow the couple, who were in their early forties and now unlikely to have a child themselves, to foster the boy for a year or so with a view to full adoption.

Maurice Stafford, who had not forgotten his name or how he had returned to London, nor the horror he had left behind in Crickley Hall, was renamed Gordon Pyke.

The Pykes were gloriously happy with their new-found son, who hobbled around on crutches while his injured leg strengthened, and the boy did his best to conceal the unpleasant side of his nature, a task that was not difficult for him over the first few months. But then the nightmares had begun, prompted, he had always felt, by the fresh attacks on the city, this time pilotless rockets sent over from the coasts of Europe by the desperate Germans. The doodlebugs, as the first V-1 rockets were nicknamed, brought hell back to the capital. The drone of their engines was feared, but the silence when the engines cut out and the flying bombs dropped through the sky were feared even more.

Henry Pyke was killed while on duty in a school hall acquisitioned by the ARP when a doodlebug fell on it and completely destroyed the building. Seven other people lost their lives with him.

The nightmares that came to plague young Gordon Pyke were intense and damaging. They made his nerves bad; they made him neurotic and paranoid.

These terrible dreams varied in content but were constant over the years. In one (the first one he had), he is on a train and he can see Magda Cribben's white face outside the window. Her mouth is open but he can't hear her shouts. Her pale fingers claw at the glass as the train begins to move, slowly at first, then picking up speed, leaving Magda behind, her face ugly in its contortions. He is always struck by an acute loneliness as the train leaves the woman far behind. In another, he is standing at the foot of the stairs in Crickley Hall and all the other orphans who had been evacuated with him are higher up, each to a step, and he feels deep shame as they stare down at him, for he knows they are all dead. When they beckon him, silently inviting him to join them on the stairs, he doesn't move. He can't, he's paralysed. So the dead start to come down to him and he can see the emptiness in their eyes, the lifelessness of their corpses; he can smell their decay. In yet another, he is flagellating Augustus Cribben's nude body with a bamboo cane, and as he does so, the skin parts, wounds open, Cribben's abused body becomes raw red meat and no longer recognizable as human. But he can't stop the flogging, he wields the cane until the meat begins to pulp, then disintegrate, and the gore puddles at the feet of the thing that is no longer a man but now a mashed carcass that starts to corrupt and rot and fall away until finally it is nothing more than boneless lumps of flesh in the spreading pool of blood. Even then he cannot stop; he continues to thrash the bloody mounds, and the cane itself becomes red and slippery until it slides from his hand and he falls to his knees in the muck he has created. He always woke up at that point, shivering yet sweaty, clammy, peering round frantically, searching for anything lurking in the darkness of his bedroom. The final nightmare in the cycle of four has him up to his neck in cold water that is as black as the space around him. A circle of dull grey light comes from high above, and when he feels the slimy walls they are circular. Naturally he is frightened in this predicament, but the real fear comes when he realizes there is something in the inky water with him. He can't see it, but he can sense it. As something brittle, like the decayed fingers of a claw, wraps itself round his wrist he starts to scream and it becomes a real, waking scream that seems to rebound off the walls of his room.

Yes, the dreams were bad, for their consistency as much as their nature, but it was the second appearance of the ghost that had him gibbering on the floor of his bedroom, his curled body pushed tightly into a corner, his hand scratching frantically at the wallpaper and his teeth chattering, his eyes bulging.

It was late at night and he was lying in bed, just beginning to doze, hoping that his sleep would be dreamless, when he heard the familiar sound.

Swish-thwack.

He was afraid to open his eyes, but also afraid not to. He could feel the room had become icy and the air was foul, as if a large rat lay dead and mouldering beneath the floorboards.

Swish-thwack.

He forced his eyes open.

Because of his nightmares, he always slept with the ceiling light on, so anything in the room was plainly visible. Only too visible. The figure of Augustus Cribben was coming slowly towards the bed, and this time it was not transparent, it was as firm and solid as when Cribben was alive. Only twin gleams of light could be seen of the shadowed eyes, but the lips plainly moved as if the vision was speaking.

It had to be a ghost, but it looked so real!

The cane came down hard on the bedspread and, impossibly, he saw dust rise from the material. The cane came down again and this time it hit his leg, the one that had been broken by his fall into the cellar, and although the pain was mostly absorbed by the cover, it was still strong enough to release the scream that had struggled to escape him the moment he saw the ghost.

He leapt out of bed and cowered in the corner of the room where he stayed, blubbering, until his adoptive mother burst through the door and ran to kneel beside him. It took Dorothy more than an hour to convince her adoptive son there was nobody else in the room.

His behaviour from then on was alarming. He twitched every time she touched him and shrank away when she tried to take him in her arms and comfort him (now widowed, Dorothy needed comforting herself, especially from the son she had always longed for). Gordon wouldn't speak to her either and he refused to meet her gaze: he hunched his shoulders, leaning over the walking stick he now used (the break in his leg had never healed properly), and his eyes darted craftily as if he had some secret to keep. He became agitated whenever it was time for bed and for three nights running she had to rush into his room, brought there by his dreadful screams. On each occasion she found him huddled in the corner of the well-lit room, his body shaking, his eyes wide.

Only then did Dorothy seek medical help for him and her GP immediately sent the boy for psychiatric treatment.

'They'll soon sort him out,' was the doctor's opinion.

But once in the mental home, Gordon, like Magda Cribben before him, withdrew into himself even more, blocking out the world so that nothing could reach him, especially the lunatics he was forced to share the ward with. He could not escape the ghost, though, nor the nightmare dreams of Crickley Hall, but in time he learnt to control his reaction to them.

When Cribben's ghost now appeared, Gordon would stifle his own screams with a fist to his mouth and a hand over his eyes. The horror was still there, but self-preservation had always been his strength. He wanted to leave this place of mad people and to do so he knew he had to appear inwardly and outwardly normal. He did not care for their drugs and physical restraints.

When the nightmares came, he learned to be still when he awoke from them, not to cry out or complain, to weep silently beneath the bedclothes until repetition hardened him even against tears.

He could not tell his personal psychiatrist of what he had done and what he had witnessed at Crickley Hall—if he did he probably would not have been released for years, if ever. So when he came out of what had become his own self-imposed shell, he made up stories of explosions and houses toppling down onto him and big holes opening up to swallow him and the sound of sirens, air-raid warnings constantly ringing in his head.

The medical profession had become used to dealing with shell-shocked victims during and after the war, and the psychiatrist easily recognized the condition in Gordon Pyke. He also knew of the boy's history, how he had suffered from amnesia, forgetting how he had become parentless and alone: who knew what trauma he had endured before? Gordon had finally started to talk freely and seemed to be making a sudden, rapid recovery. After five months of confinement, Gordon was released.

However, the relationship with his adoptive mother was never the same again: after all, it was she who had agreed to his internment in a mental hospital. He rarely spoke to her now and, as he grew older and taller, his attitude towards her became menacing. She started to be afraid of him.

Although the war was long over, conscription was still mandatory for eighteen-year-old males and when he reached that age, he received his call-up papers for National Service. Fortunately, as he saw it, he was rejected by the military because of his invalid status—he still used a walking stick. His psychiatric history would probably have excluded him anyway. So now, Gordon Pyke, who had decent school reports (ironically, he was placed in a lower year—which was more suited to his real age—because of his absence from school due to injury and time in the psychiatric hospital), found a job as a junior librarian in a library not far from where he lived.

The hauntings and nightmares continued through the years and they were always terrifying, even though he had become used to them. Perhaps inevitably, the hauntings aroused in him an interest in the supernatural. Were ghosts possible, did he
really
see the ghost of Cribben, or did he imagine it? He read the books on the subject stocked in his own library and they gave him an appetite for more. He visited bookshops that specialized in the supernatural and paranormal. If others had witnessed such apparitions, the phenomenon not just in his own mind, then maybe the haunting
was
genuine. In several books he discovered that ethereal bodies were created when the consciousness of a dying person leaves the body and exists somewhere between the spiritual and the physical, often because of the trauma of death itself, or because there is something left unfinished for them in the real world.

It caused him to wonder if that was why Augustus Cribben was plaguing him now. If that were the case, then why did the ghost appear to him? How could he help Cribben resolve something left unfinished? It was a question to which Pyke had no answer.

•

Gordon Pyke, once known as Maurice Stafford, shifted restlessly in the driver's seat of the Mondeo. His leg was giving him particular gyp tonight. Always did in cold or wet weather, but this was worse than ever. He rubbed his knee with his big hand. He had to curb his impatience. Let the family settle in for the night.

He wiped mist from the side window with the sleeve of his coat and peered through. Rainwater was running fast down the lane, creating its own shallow river. Lightning flared and the crack of thunder soon followed, so loud it made him want to duck his head.

This is so right, he thought, so much like the night he and Magda had fled Crickley Hall. Would there be another flood? he wondered. Well, that would make things perfect.

To restrain his agitation, he went back to his memories.

•

His adoptive mother, Dorothy Pyke, with whom he still shared a house, had passed away from a fatal dose of flu that led to pneumonia when Gordon was twenty-eight. It was a relief to him—they had despised each other for years. Surprisingly, in view of their strained relationship, she left the house and the small amount of money she had managed to save from her widow's pension to him. But then, who else did she have to leave anything to? He soon sold the house and moved into a small rented flat, placing the modest amount that came from the sale and the money he had inherited into a deposit account in a bank.

Now that he could afford it—his salary as a librarian was pitifully low—Pyke took to visiting prostitutes, particularly searching out the older variety who were more than happy to provide the kind of service he required. In fact, it made the job easier for them because they did not have to pretend enjoyment. The deal was that they had to keep perfectly still and exhibit no passion whatsoever while he used their bodies. (Initially, he had tried the younger whores but was always disgusted by their squirming and sighing, feigned or otherwise.)