by Neil Spring
The words skewered me, not just because they were cruel. Because they were true.
Before taking employment with Price, I had been drifting, or, as Mother would put it, ‘a wanderer with my head in the clouds’. Taking the job had been a chance to better myself, and to find meaning in Mother’s ceaseless grief for my father; to show her, I suppose, that the answers to life’s problems weren’t to be found with spiritualist mediums communing with the dead, but with honest and open scientific inquiry.
‘I’m curious, Sarah; what exactly is your new position?’
‘That’s not your concern.’
‘It is well remunerated?’ He saw my set expression and added, ‘I mean, does the role satisfy you?’
‘Very much.’
I could see Price dissecting the lie, reading the concern in my eyes about how we were possibly going to pay the bills at the end of the month.
‘And your mother – how is Mrs Grey faring?’ he asked pointedly. ‘Still squandering every spare household penny on fraudulent mediums?’
I swallowed hard. ‘Actually, she has put all that behind her.’
He cocked his head and peered at me through a cloud of cigar smoke.
‘She has moved on with her life,’ I told him with conviction. ‘We have both moved on.’
‘And yet . . .’ Arms spread wide, he cast his gaze around the empty theatre. ‘Here you are!’ He grinned. ‘Old habits – eh, Sarah?’
Fearing the truth was written on my face, I forced myself to look away. Nothing could be more demeaning than to grant him the satisfaction of knowing I missed the laboratory, our work. His dark and exhilarating world. Him.
‘Dearest Sarah,’ he said softly, ‘although you never came close to the eighty words a minute I desired and your dictation was a little woolly, you were – and we both know this – without doubt the most capable, the most reliable investigative companion I could ever hope to find.’
I was startled – he really thought that of me?
His gaze fell to my lips, just for a second, before flicking back up. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘I have missed you.’
My mind swirled. His face was open and defenceless. Looking at that face, the hawkish nose, those gimlet eyes and projecting ears, I couldn’t help but think of his son. The son he didn’t know about. The son I had carried and delivered alone, in secret, and then given up for adoption. April 1930. Concealing the lie had been easier than I’d imagined: Price had been admitted to hospital with heart problems for an extended period, and I’d taken myself away to Yorkshire as my body swelled. Would our son grow up to resemble Price? Would he behave like him?
I hoped not. God, I hoped not.
‘Why don’t you come back? Come back to the laboratory and work for me.’
My throat closed and my pulse kicked up a gear as I saw not the laboratory but a convent. A nun reaching for the tiny swaddled package in my arms. My hands, my own hands, handing over my beautiful baby – half me, half Harry.
Price kept his eyes on me through the haze of smoke around his head. There was something vulnerable in his expression and for a moment – a very short moment – I felt an aching sorrow for him. He had never even seen his baby boy’s face. Never would.
It would be many years before Price learned of his son; and to my shame, he would go to his grave believing I had aborted the pregnancy.
And whose fault was that?
I swallowed the guilt. Some men do that – they make us liars, even to ourselves.
‘Come back?’ I shook my head. ‘That’s not going to happen. That is completely out of the question.’
‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘what if I told you I was in touch with a clairvoyant capable of contacting life forms in distant solar systems? Or that I am due to examine a young girl who can break tables without even touching them and levitate chairs? Then there’s a house in Battersea suffering from the most violent poltergeist disturbances. What if I could show—’
I cut him off with a glare.
‘You’re not even a little curious?’
‘No.’
‘There’s nothing I can do to persuade you?’
‘Nothing.’
There was a long, contemplative pause. He looked at me with a glimmer of disappointment, which suggested he didn’t approve of my decision but valued his dignity too much to argue.
‘Pity,’ he said at last, before turning abruptly and striding up the middle aisle, towards the exit. ‘Still! Your choice. You’re entitled to it.’
Cross, I turned my back on him, and saw, on the screen, a hypnotist putting a woman into a trance. Immediately, I remembered the intense sensation of relaxation when Price had put me under, not so very long ago.
What had I told him when I was in that trance?
My frustration turned to fury. He was impossibly manipulative; I wouldn’t stand for it. ‘Harry, wait!’
He was at the double doors, one hand grasping a handle, and he half turned back towards me.
I pointed at the movie screen. ‘Switching the film on like that. Deliberately trying to frighten me. Why? Why would you do that?’
The way he scowled at me then made me think of the way he had reacted to Mr and Mrs Smith on our very first investigation of the rectory in Borley. Price’s impression was that the distraught couple were deeply superstitious, that they wanted to believe in spirits. ‘It’s the bunk they want,’ he had told me. ‘Not the debunk.’ So Price made sure they got it. He never explained to me precisely how he made the pepper pot slide across the surface of the highly polished lunch table, but he did later admit to the trick – and I felt sure that the part of him that had delighted in pulling the strings at Borley, the conjurer within, also delighted in deceiving me this very night.
‘I did nothing of the sort,’ Price replied stonily.
‘Harry, I’m telling you it actually gave me quite a jump. Not at all funny.’
‘I did not touch the projector,’ he declared indignantly.
I took a moment to process this. ‘But you went up to the cine-chamber.’
‘Indeed, and it was deserted. Remember, the projectionist left – which is precisely what I’m going to do now.’ He placed his hat on his head, pulled it low over his brow, and turned to leave. ‘Goodnight, Sarah.’
‘But . . .’ I felt the skin on the back of my neck shiver into bumps. ‘If you didn’t turn the projector on, Harry – who did?’
He looked back one final time and unleashed a cajoling smile.
‘As I suspected, Sarah . . . still curious.’
RESIDENTS TO RETURN TO GHOST VILLAGE
Gates to open at hamlet evacuated during Great War
From our special correspondent, Vernon Wall
A village that has been uninhabited for eighteen years is to be opened to its former residents next Sunday.
Isolated in the middle of a low valley, deep in the Wiltshire countryside, stand the crumbling remains of Imber, a so-called ‘ghost village’ which was evacuated in 1914.
At the outbreak of the Great War, villagers were forced to pack up and leave. Within a month, Imber vanished off the map as it was turned into a military training area.
Surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence, a locked gate and Keep Out notices, Imber has since remained permanently out of bounds to the public. But once a year, the guns fall silent, the gates are opened, and civilians are allowed to visit relatives’ graves and attend a service in Imber church.
Next Sunday, dozens of locals are expected to make the trip.
David Whitaker Brown, honorary custodian of Imber church, said, ‘A whole community of people sacrificed their homes for the war effort. Of course, when they did so they believed, once the war was over, they would be allowed to come back.’
According to local folklore, some former residents did return to their homes –
as ghosts. Visitors have reported hearing music and laughter in empty buildings, and the sound of doors slamming in cottages where there aren’t any doors.
Jane Wharton’s great-grandfather was the local blacksmith. She says the evacuation broke the man’s heart, and that he passed away during the move. Jane, who returned to the village to lay flowers on his grave, told this reporter that many other former residents shared her great-grandfather’s pain.
‘Imber was a lovely little village that has been devastated,’ she said. ‘I don’t think my gramps could face it. I believe he killed himself and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the village was haunted by old residents who never wanted to leave.’
The roads through Imber on Salisbury Plain, as well as the church, will be open to former residents. The Friends of Imber Church will be holding a special remembrance service within the building.
For the rest of the year, Imber remains a ghost village, accessible only to the army.
It’s difficult to imagine this war zone of shell-damaged, dangerous buildings being returned to civilians any time soon, if ever. But former residents continue to live in hope.
– 5 –
HOME AGAIN
When I arrived home, quietly closing the front door behind me, I didn’t notice the ivory envelope that was about to change my life. It was waiting for me on the hall table, under the mirror, but as I hung up my coat, dishevelled and tired, intending to go straight to bed, something made me halt: a dark shape in the parlour, hunched in Father’s antique wingback armchair, next to the gramophone.
Mother.
She had a glass of brandy in one hand and a photograph of my father in his army uniform in the other. Her thinning white hair was unwashed and uncombed, her eyes staring ahead, red-rimmed and hollow.
‘Sarah, I’ve been worried to death.’
The antique clock on the wall ticked loudly; I looked and saw it was two thirty. No explanation would be good enough, not at this time in the morning, so I spared her the elaborate excuses.
‘I’m quite all right,’ I said with a sinking heart, and, taking the tumbler from her hand, I pressed a gentle kiss onto her forehead and whispered, ‘Bed now, Mother – for us both.’
A silent nod. Somehow that was worse than a series of questions. Probably she would remain here in her chair until the morning, her head slumped forward, until a rough snore startled her awake. Then I would hear her treading groggily up to bed.
I went out of the room, once again failing to notice the crucial envelope on which my name was scrawled, and stood for a moment in the shadowy hallway. There was so much we didn’t tell one another.
Mother knew nothing of the baby I had given up. My little treasure. I remember that time all too vividly, the quiet desperation of an expectant single mother with no one to turn to. The idea of parenting the child alone – an unplanned child, born out of wedlock . . .
No. Shame and fear had put the idea beyond reach for me, obliterating my hopes for a good life. As a single mother, my prospects would have been horribly grim. I’d have been ostracised, brought disrepute upon the family. Scandal. No one would have wanted to marry me.
In my panic, I became convinced adoption was the best solution, partly for myself, but mainly for the child; it was the only way to protect him – to give him the best start in life. I had to do what was best for the boy, however painful, however distressing that would be for me.
It was my duty.
What I remember most about the birth is the nuns at the convent telling me not to feel guilty, that giving up the precious life that had grown inside me was a selfless act. The baby would have a better chance in life with parents who were ready for him, so it was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?
That didn’t stop me worrying that he would grow up to hate the thought of me, and it did nothing to diminish the heartbreak, or the daily struggle with my guilt.
I had told Price nothing. He was married – to the wealthy daughter of a respected jeweller. If the truth had come out about our child, disgrace would have fallen hard upon his good name.
What I had done – giving up our child, sacrificing that sudden fiery, consuming need to be a mother – I had done for the child, to protect him; but I had also done it for Price.
The thought came to me that evening, as it was always going to; it had just been lying in wait:
When are you going to go back to Queensberry Place? When are you going to go back and work for him?
And quickly after this:
Impossible, infuriating man!
He might have had the decency to offer me a lift home. Though probably my pride would have prevented me accepting anything from him.
Are you sure, Sarah? Sure you’re not ‘still curious’?
In setting out on my own paranormal investigation, I had willingly unlocked a door. But go back to Price’s laboratory? No. It was out of the question. That was what my head told me, and it told me so resolutely. My heart, however, told a different story. My heart whispered softly but certainly that I would, once again, venture with Harry Price into the unknown.
The pain in my ankle had dimmed to a dull ache. Upstairs, I went into my bedroom – a comfortable mess – to inspect the damage, and to wash off my make-up. The face staring back at me from the tarnished mirror was exhausted: dark pits around my eyes, blonde hair hanging shapelessly around a pallid face. I scrubbed it clean, but I couldn’t scrub it smooth; the lines that spoke of strain and sadness remained.
When I finally stepped out of my clothes and settled into bed, I lay there, knees drawn up, half listening to an early news bulletin on the wireless: speculation about Hitler’s fortunes at the forthcoming federal election in Germany.
Enough. I switched it off.
But I couldn’t sleep. My head was whirring. What was beneath the stage at the Brixton Picture Palace? What hadn’t the projectionist wanted me to see or know?
Possibly nothing. By anyone’s standards, a cine-chamber was an unusual place to work, almost as unusual as Price’s laboratory – and unusual places made people do unusual things.
Albert’s abrupt disappearance troubled me still, though. Notwithstanding his agitated state, would he really have abandoned the Picture Palace knowing there were two strangers still inside?
That didn’t sound much like the man who had hunted me down in the empty auditorium and confronted me. That man would have escorted Price and me from the premises, would have taken care to lock up. Unless . . .
Unless he saw something that absolutely terrified him.
My mind flashed to the antique projector in his lonely chamber, and the box of colourful glass lantern slides.
‘The slides,’ he said, ‘I paint them when I’m alone.’
Of course. That was the object I had found on the floor in the auditorium – one of his lantern slides. Until this moment, I hadn’t made the connection. I got out of bed and fished it from my coat pocket.
As I held the lantern slide between my fingers, a compulsion made me raise it to the light. Between the two sheets of glass was pressed a black and white image. It was badly scratched, but it appeared to be of a boy and a girl. She looked about twelve or thirteen, wearing an expensive-looking dress, hair curling around her ears, smiling as she stood before some ash trees. Next to the girl was a younger boy. Handsome. About ten years old. The rest of the detail was difficult to make out but the whole image brought a mystifying lump of sadness to my throat.
Remembering the box of lantern slides in the projection booth, I reasoned Albert must have dropped this, and I decided I would return it to him the next day.
I fell asleep after that, thinking of the Picture Palace after dark. I awoke in the night with the vision of a field of swaying grass, watching the slow turn of the mill wheel. Alone. Waiting for someone. Birds chirped, a church bell tolled distantly, and the sun sank ever lower to
the horizon, blazing orange.
Not just a dream, but a memory?
– 6 –
OLD FRIEND
Fleet Street. Monday. I had arrived to find myself caught in a frenzy of noise and bustle, journalists hurrying along in crumpled grey suits and trilby hats, scurrying from the pubs to get back to their typewriters. Somewhere behind me, a newspaper seller was shouting a headline from the early edition, fighting to be heard over the clatter of horse-drawn carriages and motor cars.
It was the letter at home that had brought me here. A message from an old friend.
A boy on a delivery bike clattered past me. It had been a hard day at work and an exhausting weekend. I knew what I needed now was to relax, but then I saw what I was looking for – an arched alleyway leading to the Middle Temple; a warren of dark-bricked barristers’ chambers and silent gardens.
Glad to escape the stink of hot oil and paper and ink, I passed through the arch into this gothic sanctum, threading my way through passageways and courtyards that were so quiet it was hard to believe I was still in central London. It was almost as if I had wandered into another realm – an oasis of gas-lit passages and wide lawns dotted with dim shapes of trees.
I eventually emerged into a Dickensian courtyard of handsome buildings and stately windows. To my left, a sign attached to the nearest wall informed me that this was Pump Court; above this sign was an ornate sundial bearing the date 1686 and a curious inscription:
‘Shadows We Are and Like Shadows Depart.’
I knew from this curious landmark that I had come the right way. All I had to do now was pass through the cloisters up ahead, and I’d find the medieval Temple Church.
I pressed on, passing through another archway, grander than the last, and saw the church, with its rare circular nave – one of the oldest and most beautiful churches in London. Squinting through the sickly yellow fog, I could just about make out the figure of a man nearby. He was sitting on a black iron bench.
