by Neil Spring
‘Why? To try to reclaim his property?’
I empathised with the commander’s doubtful tone. As motives, these sounded irrational, and not very likely to succeed. ‘There must be more to it than that,’ I said, remembering that Albert had told us Hartwell would go directly to the manor. That house intrigued me; I had a very strong inclination that we should make it a focus of our efforts. ‘Perhaps there’s something inside Imber Court that Hartwell wants. Something he left behind. Something he’s hiding. Commander, if you can’t call off the rally, please give us access to the house.’
My face must have reflected the urgency in my tone, because the commander studied me for what felt like a very long moment.
‘Sir, please. We were told Hartwell would head there, so that is where we must go.’
For a moment, a grimace of indecision flickered across his face, then made way to an expression of rather touching admiration. ‘The path approaching the house should be clear. However, the land adjacent to Imber Court, and the land immediately behind, is scattered with all sorts of debris. There may even be land mines.’
‘We’ll approach from the front.’
‘It’s a kill house, a shell. There’s nothing inside it.’
‘Have you been inside yourself, Commander?’
‘No, but—’
‘Who confirmed it was empty?’ Price cut in.
There was an awkward pause, the commander avoiding eye contact.
‘Well, well,’ Price said, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. ‘Our friend Warden Sidewinder has led you on quite a merry dance, hasn’t he? Commander, if Hartwell should approach that house, as we believe he will, don’t stop him. We must know his secret. I fully expect Sidewinder to follow.’
The commander was nodding, the heat of anger rising in his chiselled face. He looked a little embarrassed too. After all, some of this was his responsibility. It was clear he had protected Sidewinder’s interests, and I wondered why.
‘If this is true, there will be a full investigation,’ the commander said stonily. ‘Be under no illusion, Sidewinder will be held fully to account. But I need hard evidence. Proof.’
Price nodded, although I sensed he was only just managing to conceal his frustrations. He thought the commander was weak, spineless, and I was beginning to think so too. ‘I have a little practice in coercing artful deceivers into confessing,’ he said. ‘Can you get Mr Wall and the boy somewhere safe?’
The commander nodded. ‘I’ll arrange secure transportation for them back to camp, and I’ll grant you access to Imber Court. But remember what I said about the land to the side and the back of that building. Do not venture out there, or you’re likely to have your legs blown off!’
Price tipped the rim of his fedora. ‘You have my word.’
‘Good.’
The commander flicked a curious glance at Price’s coat pocket. ‘Mr Price, are you carrying a weapon?’
Price gave him a mulish look.
‘I can’t have a civilian taking live fire arms in there.’ He held out a hand. ‘Let me have it.’
Price reluctantly drew the service revolver from his pocket and handed it carefully to the commander. Then the ghost hunter turned and marched towards his car.
The commander shouted after him to wait. ‘Mr Price! You’ll need the keys to Imber Court’s gates.’ He caught up with Price and drew him aside for a private word. Despite the commander lowering his voice, I overheard his first words: ‘There’s something vital you must know about Pierre.’
*
Behind a padlocked gate and a wire fence topped with razor wire, Imber Court awaited us. It was a great hulk of a house, home for over two centuries to the Hartwell family. Here, generations of children had laughed and played. But now it was deserted.
Morning was breaking over Salisbury Plain, throwing a strange purple hue over the terrain when we got out of the car. Unlocking the gate, Price looked back at me and said, ‘You’re sure you want to do this, Sarah?’
The wind whispered, rustling the dead leaves at our feet and catching at a loose piece of corrugated sheeting, making it clatter. It was enough to make my skin prickle with anticipation. I wasn’t backing out now, but there was something I was burning to know.
‘The commander told you something, Harry. About Pierre. What was it?’
Price stared silently ahead at the looming, decrepit mansion.
‘Harry?’
It began to rain harder. Price fished in his pocket for something and pressed it into my hands: the lantern slide I had found in the Brixton Picture House, the night I tripped and fell from the stage.
He lowered his voice to a tone of utmost gravity. ‘Once we’re inside that building, keep this on you. At all times.’
I glanced at the slide, then at the mansion, then at Price, confused.
‘Just do it, please,’ he said, squeezing my fist around the slide. ‘Trust me. And make sure you tell me immediately if you experience any more visions. Understand?’
I blinked. ‘I thought you said they were hallucinations, that they didn’t matter.’
‘Yes, hallucinations . . .’ His voice had lost some of its conviction, I thought. And the way he was looking at me – I couldn’t read it.
‘Now come on,’ he said, in that typical Harry Price style. ‘Hurry!’ And off he marched.
I pocketed the lantern slide. And as Price unlocked the gate leading to Imber Court, a sense of disquiet gnawed at me, and this time I didn’t think it was paranoia. Price knew more about the whole investigation, had always known more, and he had deliberately kept me in the dark. For reasons known only to himself, he was still keeping me in the dark.
With the gate unlocked, Price went to the car for his equipment. Within moments, he had the blacksmith’s hammer in one hand. In the other, he carried the battered briefcase, which contained his equipment, candles and matches. He asked me to hand over the Devil’s Snare, and I did so. The magic lantern was my responsibility for the moment, and I tried not to give away how heavy it was as I took it from the back seat.
The faint glimmer of dawn seeped across the bruised sky, illuminating the convoy at the neck of the valley. I could make out many motor cars and tractors, and a stream of protestors – farmers, their employees, former residents of the village. There were men on foot too, and riding horseback. The sight of that convoy only strengthened my resolve to end this nightmare.
Yet when I turned to look again at the manor house, its crumbling pillared entrance festooned with moss and ivy, its many wide and arched windows, that resolve was drowned out by another feeling.
‘Harry, I have the strangest sensation of déjà vu. But I know I’ve never been here.’
He said nothing; he just watched me.
‘It’s probably just subjective knowledge,’ I said. ‘Subconscious.’
‘Probably,’ he echoed, and I caught a quick smile on his lips.
‘Harry?’
With a whirl of his coat he turned, quickening his stride through the rain towards the boarded-up mansion.
I took a nervous breath. Here we go.
– 34 –
KILL HOUSE
Time seemed to slow down as we unlocked the main gates and approached Imber Court. A strange stillness settled all around us.
There, over the pillared entrance, was the family coat of arms. The instant I saw it I was overwhelmed with an intense feeling that I knew the mansion, inside and out. I could almost picture the creaky warren beyond those crumbling walls – the vast cellars, the soaring attics and the winding staircases. But perhaps, I told myself, my memories were of a different house altogether.
Most of the windows were covered with wooden boards and corrugated iron sheeting, and yet the house seemed to be willing me to enter.
You’re imagining it, I told myself, but as Price led us in through th
e main entrance – an oblong of deep shadow – the sensation became undeniable. Come to me, the house seemed to be saying. Come on in, Sarah. It’s perfectly safe.
We were standing now in a vast hallway, the air fetid with mildew and rot. There was a tremble in my hand as I drew out my pocket torch and clicked it on. Perturbed, I surveyed our surroundings. How to describe them? Bleak. Ruinous. The floor was thick with dust, the walls blackened with scorch marks. Dry leaves had blown into drifts against the skirting boards. And on the far wall, a great mirror was shattered and pocked with shellfire.
‘It’s quiet,’ I said nervously.
Price gave me a dark look that seemed to say, It’s always quiet in the eye of the storm.
As I looked around the hallway I fancied I could almost – not quite, but almost – discern the bulking, handsome furniture, dark panelling and old portraits that once must have stood here; could very nearly hear the shrieks and shrill laughter of the many Hartwell children whose graves had been so cruelly desecrated.
‘So, which way?’ asked Price.
I was about to answer ‘How should I know?’ when I thought that actually, inexplicably, I might know the way; that if I trusted my feet, they would lead me to where we needed to be.
Swallowing my trepidation, I led us slowly by torchlight through the musty half-darkness towards a once-grand oak staircase that looked ready to collapse.
‘Up there?’
‘Yes,’ I said, starting up the stairs as fast as I could manage with the magic lantern weighing down my left hand. All my thoughts were now on the projection slide in my coat pocket, and a curious tingling sensation that had begun in the nape of my neck. You know this house, and this house knows you.
Once we arrived in the upper hallway, I looked around quickly, and caught a familiar smell, something very much like baby powder, and immediately I felt a profound sadness, as though someone no longer alive was trying to communicate with me, to whisper secrets to my heart. A lost soul: a mother perhaps, or her baby. Or both.
The feeling quite confounded me, but I felt it as keenly as the sensation that in entering this house I had somehow stepped back in time. An unpleasant sensation, and an impossible one, because I was adamant I had never set foot inside Imber Court.
‘Try down there,’ I said, nodding towards a dark passageway, and once again my neck tingled. We went slowly, the floorboards groaning beneath us, passing a bathroom of shattered ceramic tiles and a small room that was penetrated by a single shaft of cold, bluish light, slanting in through a hole in the roof.
We rounded a corner and I was struck by an unnerving feeling that somebody connected with this house knew me, and had something they needed to tell me, or show me. Who, and what, I had no idea, but as we approached the wall at the end of the corridor, the feeling only became more powerful.
Something about that wall: dark, rough, uneven.
‘No, this isn’t right.’
‘It’s a dead end, Sarah. Let’s try downstairs.’
My hand gave an involuntary spasm, as if shocked with a bolt of energy.
‘No, there is a room back there! I just know it.’
Price gently, apprehensively, put a hand on my shoulder, but I turned away from him sharply. My instincts were screaming at me not to give up; there was something here. So, hardening myself, I put down the magic lantern and pushed against the wall.
‘Oh my God. Harry, did you see that?’ I stepped closer, examining the wall. The bricks had shifted – ever so slightly, but they had shifted.
Price was staring now.
‘I told you, Harry.’
But how on earth did I know?
He quickly put down his briefcase.
‘Sarah, stand back. Let me try.’
With backbreaking force, he shouldered the wall. Impressive. Then struck it with the hammer. Some of the bricks came loose and dropped into the clotted blackness behind. What was back there? A compartment? A secret room?
‘How – how did you know?’ Price asked.
I felt an urge to confide in him that the lantern slide was guiding me, but hesitated.
‘Did your father bring you to this house? Before the evacuation?’
‘No.’
He was looking intently at me. Waiting.
‘Harry, this house is alive. I know how that sounds, but I have the strangest feeling we’re meant to be here, just like I had a feeling I was meant to visit the picture house in Brixton. It’s all connected.’
‘I believe you,’ he said, not looking at me now, but at the crumbling wall. ‘Do you know what’s behind here?’
‘No.’
His eyes lit up with curiosity, one eyebrow pulling up. ‘Do you think we’re in danger if we look?’
I shrugged, and with that Price began working more of the filthy bricks free. Finally, one powerful kick brought what was left of the wall tumbling down in a puff of dust.
An awful smell hit me. It was close and heavy. Filthy and earthy. A smell of too many years, of memories long entombed.
With a curious dread, I edged forward, staring hard into the shadows.
‘Harry, what the hell is that?’
Two glistening green eyes were peering out at me. It was a Victorian doll, propped up on a wrought-iron bedstead, and I could make out two others in the gloom behind it.
Their glinting eyes looked out at us from white porcelain faces. The smallest was a baby doll wearing a white bonnet. The largest, in the middle of the three, wore a ruffled white dress and had tumbling black hair, tied up in a green ribbon. Its lips were blood red. But the eyes . . . the eyes were the worst. Glassy. Soulless.
Something about this unnerving tableau was nagging at me. My instinct said these dolls did not belong in this dark and dreary house. They were propped up amongst heaps of blankets and other soft toys: monkeys, bears and rabbits.
The strangest thing was, aside from the shattered mirror downstairs, these were the only personal belongings we had seen anywhere in the house.
‘Was this a nursery?’ I asked, hearing the awe in my voice.
‘Whatever it was,’ Price said, ‘Hartwell went to great lengths to keep it away from the army, probably with Sidewinder’s help. I’ll wager that, if he does come here, it’s this room he’ll want, and we will be ready for him.’
Slowly, we advanced. My pocket torch threw a wavering beam around the room, picking out a hulking wardrobe, a rickety desk, a boarded-up window framed by rotting, moth-eaten curtains.
My breath caught. To convey the sudden weirdness of what happened next is almost impossible for me. I saw a woman, her back to us. She was motionless, facing the desk. Oddly, there were papers there now. Drawings – human sketches made with charcoal on white paper – that had not been there seconds before.
Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew instinctively who this was. I made a careful mental note of her attire: the drab tunic, the ankle-length hobble skirt. Garments from an earlier time – twenty years at least.
Slowly, she turned to face me. Marie Hartwell – much, much younger than the woman who had hanged herself in the bell tower.
With deep sadness and an awful dread, I trained my gaze on her, yet she seemed completely oblivious to my presence. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying. And she was cradling something. A child.
The child wasn’t moving.
Her mouth opened in an expression of cold horror. For an instant she seemed paralysed by fright.
Then she, and the child in her arms, vanished.
I blinked, shaking my head.
The rickety desk was now as it had first appeared, its surface devoid of any drawings.
‘Sarah?’
Feeling a crawling fear in my stomach, I looked over at Price. ‘Oh Harry, I think unspeakable events happened here.’
He stopped scanning the room
and moved closer to me. ‘Sarah,’ he said quietly, ‘did you see something?’
‘Marie Hartwell.’ My voice cracked. ‘Oh God, Harry, we’re on the verge of something.’
My neck was tingling again. I put down the magic lantern and fished the lantern slide from my pocket. I felt an instant heat. And something else – a visceral revulsion.
I was about to inform Price when a distant horn blasted outside.
Dropping his briefcase and the blacksmith’s hammer, Price tore himself away, heading into the corridor, to the nearest window that wasn’t boarded over, and looked out.
I followed and saw that beyond the stream and the avenue of elm trees, hordes of demonstrators were assembling on the village’s mud-churned main street, climbing out of vehicles, dismounting from horses: men in tweeds, housewives, children in their school uniforms. They had made their way to the very centre of Imber in the sheeting rain, waving banners and green flags. A line of soldiers was keeping them back from the wrecked buildings.
‘Not much time,’ Price said, troubled, and with haste he strode back into the secret nursery and crouched by the magic lantern on the floor. ‘Help me, Sarah.’
My heart squeezed with apprehension as I understood what he intended to do.
*
A gale was beginning to rage across the downs, almost whipping away the voice booming from the loudspeaker: ‘The road along which you have passed has been cleared to ensure your safety. Under no circumstances should you leave the road. The ground has not been cleared and it is not safe!’
Price’s head snapped up from the lantern. ‘A few small adjustments, and there, it’s ready! Just one more vital factor . . .’
He bounded out into the corridor; there was the flick of a cigarette lighter and I became aware of a crackling sound, then a familiar and unpleasant odour.
Burning.
When Price retreated back into the room, which I had decided was indeed a nursery, he had a handkerchief pressed over his mouth and nose. ‘Someone’s coming. I caught a glimpse of them through the window,’ he whispered.
