The Secret of Crickley Hall (54 page)

For a while—less than a year—he was married. Pyke, with his apparent courtly manners and his gentle eyes, was attractive to certain women. He was tall, and well built too, which added to the attraction. His new wife, Madeleine, was almost pretty despite the thick horn-rimmed glasses she wore and the size of her teeth that kept her lips permanently parted. An avid reader, she was a member of his library and her borrowing of books increased after he had mildly flirted with her one day as he stamped her choices for that week. At first enthralled with her husband, she did her best to please him, but as the weeks went by she began to resent his lengthy silences and his constant brooding. In sleep he was often unsettled, sometimes waking up with a start, his pyjamas damp with perspiration. But never did he explain his dreams to her.

His method of making love was decidedly odd and a great disappointment to her. He demanded that she remain passive when they had sex (Madeleine was a virgin and hadn't known quite what to expect, though she was sure it wasn't this), that she should not respond in any way to his attentions. If she expressed the slightest passion, if she breathed too sharply or too deeply, he would abruptly bring the engagement to an end. Although he did not rage at her, he would become even more distant.

It did not take long for her to realize that all his good manners and apparent kindliness were a sham, meant for others to think well of him, whereas in reality he was a cold, remote man who was indifferent to everybody else. But what finally repelled her was when he told her she was to submit to beatings. With a stick. A stick that had lain hidden on top of the bedroom wardrobe, a thin yellowish stick that must have been purchased from a school supplies outlet, for one end was crooked so it looked like a headmaster's cane.

She refused. He beat her anyway.

Madeleine, her back, arms and legs stiff with throbbing red stripes beneath her blouse and skirt, packed her bags and left him the following day. Pyke didn't care much: he had expected this plain and timid little thing to be pliant to his will. Because of her dowdiness, her lack of glamour, she would be grateful to be moulded to his liking. Her wails of protest and her pitiful tears when he flogged her that night had spoilt his pleasure, for he had begun to crave the stimulation of inflicting longed-for pain again. Madeleine was a grave disappointment to him.

The divorce took ages to go through (as it did in those days) but by then Pyke had found someone else to help satisfy his needs, an ageing homosexual he had met in a Soho dive. It was almost perfect, because the man was only a little older than Augustus Cribben had been, and he gloried in pain, begged for chastisement. Although Pyke was always aroused, there was never any sex between the two men: Pyke didn't consider himself 'queer'.

It was only when he went too far in one of their sessions, beating his partner in sado-masochism so brutally that he turned the man into a bloodied, howling mess, that the arrangement was swiftly brought to an end. The unfortunate victim, who had suffered far greater pain than he had ever imagined or desired, threatened to go to the police and have Pyke arrested for attempted murder. Pyke ran and never went back to the seedy drinking club where they had met. Fortunately, he had used an alias (ironically, the name Maurice Stafford) during their association and the beatings had only ever taken place in the other man's humble little flat above Berwick Street market.

The hauntings and the nightmares persisted, although the ghost gradually became less dense, as if it were losing power, and the dreams became less vivid, but nevertheless still harrowing. Over time he learned to accommodate both. But eventually a strange compulsion to see Crickley Hall once again nagged at him and he could not understand why. It wasn't sentimentality: he still feared the place and was unable to erase the memory of that last terrible night from his mind. He felt that his own guilt lay there, waiting for him to return and acknowledge it.

One year, when he was in his mid-thirties and on a summer break from the library, he took the early-morning train and went back to Hollow Bay. He caught the bus from the station to the harbour village and stared hard at Crickley Hall when he went past. It was as grey and grim as ever, but he felt no sensation whatsoever: good or bad, it was just a sombre unprepossessing pile standing on the other side of the river with the gorge rising sheer behind it. He alighted from the bus at the bottom of the hill, then walked back up. Crossing the short wooden bridge, he took the path to Crickley Hall's front door and, without hesitation, knocked the gothic door knocker loudly.

There was no answer, nobody came. When he knocked once more and still no one came to the door, he looked through all the ground-floor windows, even those at the back of the house where the gorge wall, with its thick vegetation, rose dramatically just feet away from the building itself. The house appeared unoccupied, for dustsheets covered the furniture and the kitchen's counters and tabletop were bare. Pyke was disappointed that no emotion was aroused in him; yet somehow he felt drawn to the place, even though there seemed to be no answer for him there. The hauntings remained a mystery.

Back at the village, he visited its only public house, the Barnaby Inn, and ordered himself some sandwiches and a gin and tonic. While there, and on his second drink, he got chatting to an elderly, roughly dressed man who looked like a local, the kind of regular customer who had nothing better to do than spend his lunchtime and evenings in a pub, a solitary drinker who welcomed conversation with anyone who would give him the time. When Pyke enquired about the village, the old boy inevitably mentioned the great flood that had engulfed it during the war, the biggest and most awful event in Hollow Bay's history. Sixty-eight folk were killed that night, eleven of 'em orphans, who'd been evacuated from London to Crickley Hall, the big house up the hill. Their guardian drowned with 'em as well. Only person to survive were a teacher, guardian's sister apparently, an' she must've got away before the floodwaters came down the gorge. They say she's never spoke a word since the day she were found. Shock, they reckoned. Shock, because all them kiddies in her charge was dead, as well as her own brother. Couldn't remember her and her brother's name after all this time though.

Keenly interested, Pyke had asked what had become of the woman. Although he hadn't known Magda's true age at Crickley Hall, Pyke guessed she was probably into her sixties by now. That is, if she were still alive.

Last I were told, came the reply, she were put away in the loony bin. Ilfracombe had the only one in them days. Can't say what become of her after that.

Pyke found Collingwood House by journeying to Ilfracombe and making enquiries at the seaside town's main library. He was given directions to the mental home and he walked nearly two miles to get there, his bad leg protesting most of the way. It was an old redbrick building sparse in embellishment and quite unlike the psychiatric hospital he had been confined to as a youth. This was a mental
home,
a place for lost causes. In the olden days it would have been called a lunatic asylum.

Inside, he could have sworn there was the tragic smell of mental decay, although it was surely a combination of boiled cabbage, detergent and piss. Again he was reminded of his own incarceration all those years ago and he had an urge to flee the building; but he was too curious to leave.

At the reception desk, he enquired if a Magda Cribben was still a patient, and the receptionist checked a list and informed him that yes, Cribben—only surnames in those days—was a long-term resident (she emphasized resident as though patient was an ugly word). He used to be one of her pupils, Pyke told the uninterested girl, and he had only recently learned of the ex-teacher's circumstances. He had been very fond of Miss Cribben, so would it be possible for him to visit her?

He waited while the receptionist conferred on the internal tine with someone of authority and when she finished her conversation she said yes, although it was not strictly visiting hours, he would be allowed to see Cribben, and that was only because Cribben rarely received visitors—in fact never, as far as the receptionist knew, and she had been employed at Collingwood House for the past five years. A male nurse dressed in white jacket and trousers duly arrived and led Pyke down a long corridor on the ground floor. The walls were painted a lifeless grey and there were scuff marks and scratches along its length as if the inmates had struggled all the way when being taken to their rooms or padded cells. As he followed the nurse, whose thick biceps were evident beneath his tight, starched sleeves, Pyke was warned that, frankly, it was pointless to visit Cribben because she was a zombie—the nurse's own appraisal of his patient's condition—and hadn't said a word to anybody since she'd arrived at Collingwood House back in 1943. He knew this because colleagues had passed it on when he himself joined the staff. Pyke wondered if she would recognize him after all this time.

He was startled by her gaunt figure and her ashen face and hands. Magda never had much weight, but now she was skeletal, and although her complexion had been pallid before, now it was almost bloodless. She seemed to have shrunk—but then he had grown taller. The hardness had not retreated from her features with age and the lines on her tight skin were many and deeply etched. Her cheeks were sunken, but her jaw was still strong. She was dressed in black, which was no different from before, and the hem of her skirt ended just above her bony ankles. Her eyes, though, were as black and sharp as ever. Yet they showed no reaction when he entered the tiny cell.

Even when the nurse had left and they were alone there was no acknowledgement. She was sitting bolt-upright on a hard wooden chair beside her narrow bed and there was nowhere else for him to rest except the bed itself. He stood, putting all his weight on his good right leg.

Pyke started by reminding her of Crickley Hall and all the things they had done together, a sly conspiratorial smile on his face, nothing on hers. He talked of her brother and the harsh regime that had governed the orphans' home that was also a school and there was no recognition. But he was glad at last to speak to someone about his hidden past, even though he might just as well have been yakking to himself for all the response he got. Her eyelids did not flicker when he mentioned the murder of the young teacher and how, together, they had disposed of the body. He felt satisfied when there was no response, for this was good, their secret was safe. He had always worried about someone else knowing of his crime, but Magda was not only mute, she seemed to have forgotten the deed. Her mind was blank, she had lost all memory of it. She had even forgotten that last horrendous night that haunted him still because of his own guilt. After all, it was he who had informed on the other children. It was he who had betrayed them.

He left Magda Críbben with mixed feelings: disappointed that he had no one with whom to share the past—and they were exciting times for him—but also relieved that there was no one left to expose his former life as Maurice Stafford.

Although his exterior inspection of Crickley Hall had been fruitless, he remained drawn to it, for his few months there as a boy had marked him for life, an experience that had shaped his nature—and, though he could not know it, his destiny.

When Pyke returned to London and his job as librarian, he asked for a transfer. Somewhere in North Devon, he indicated. Meanwhile his interest in things otherworldly continued and he soon found himself fascinated by all aspects of the occult. But the dreams came back with full force and Cribben's ghost had regathered its strength, although now it appeared as a murky blackness, barely resembling the figure of a man, more of a noxious ragged mist, a strong unpleasant odour always preceding the manifestation. Despite its lack of clear definition, Pyke always knew it was Cribben's shade, for its overwhelming malevolence was the same and with it there always came the familiar
swish-thwack
sound, only as a kind of distant echo it was true, but nevertheless there to remind him of the punishment cane, the harbinger of pain that had terrified the orphans of Crickley Hall so. The dreams also revived their intensity—and their clarity—so that sleep became an ordeal once more. Pyke suffered his second psychological breakdown.

Considered to be a danger to himself as well as others when his rages got out of control, he was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward of a large London hospital. Fortunately for Pyke, treatment for mental illness had improved significantly since he was a boy and within three months his condition had improved enough for him to be discharged (the doctors weren't to know that his apparent return to normality was because the hauntings and the power of the nightmares had waned again, making it easier for him to cope).

His position at the library had been generously held open for him, although the chief librarian regarded Gordon Pyke's request for a transfer to the West Country a priority: the slower pace of life would be of benefit to his neurotic employee. As luck would have it, a vacancy for an assistant librarian shortly came up in the large Devon town of Barnstaple and Pyke duly went down to the beautiful county and took the job.

Growing older did not dim his interest in psychic phenomena and spontaneous psychic activity. If anything, his fascination with the subject increased as the years went by, for he longed to know what lay beyond death and he needed to be assured that Cribben's ghost was not hallucinatory, a figment of his own imagination (which would mean he truly was mad). He read the works of respected psychical researchers from which he learned that certain people could attract and concentrate psychic forces. He also learned that nobody yet knows the boundaries of what is considered normal, nor the extremities of that which is considered supernormal. He learned practical methods of detecting the possible presence of a ghost by the simple use of a thermometer or thermograph: when a ghost is present it seems to create a partial vacuum which results in a drop in pressure and temperature (the atmosphere certainly became cold whenever Cribben's spirit appeared to him). And it was also reaffirmed to him that a ghost is generally an earthbound spirit trapped in the physical world because of trauma at death or unfinished business (what could Augustus Cribben have left unfinished? he asked himself yet again). He also learned that a violent act can sometimes leave a psychic imprint on a place that later will attract supernatural activity (even
he
, so very much alive, was strangely drawn to Crickley Hall, so why not spirits too?).