by Paul Finch
However, he then became thoughtful and added: “Perhaps we’ll go down there on our last morning, and see if any of you can actually meet the challenge of Rhossili Rectory without first needing to fuel yourself with courage of the Dutch variety.”
This became our unofficial plan for the end of the week: on our last morning, before boarding our bus, which was due to leave Rhossili village at nine-thirty a.m., we would pack up and make a last visit to the beach, to see if anyone was brave enough to walk through the Rectory on his own. Not everyone was happy about this: Flickwood for one, who after agonising in silence for a whole day, finally admitted that he wasn’t going to do it because just worrying about it would ruin what remained of his week. The rest of us weren’t unduly concerned as this meant Flickwood could wait at the village car park, where the bus was due to arrive, and look after our bags. But I don’t think anyone was hugely enthused by what we’d agreed to do – especially not when that final morning arrived. We were all in that slightly giddy state when you feel you’ve had a worthwhile holiday and are looking forward to going home and resuming normal life. In fact, if anything, going down to the Rectory now seemed like an inconvenience. We’d had a good old drink and singsong in the pub the night before, and most of us were simply happy to sit on the car park wall, waiting for the bus. But oddly, it was Sir James who now seemed most interested in the Rectory.
“Well gentlemen,” he said consulting his pocket watch. “We have fifty minutes. Time enough to investigate the mysteries of the universe.”
It was the first grey day we’d had, and windy. Ripples passed through the marram grass lying to either side of the cliff path as we dutifully descended in single file. Twists of blown sand scuttled across the beach below. The slate-tinged sea crashed and boomed, throwing up fountains of spume. I was at the rear with only Sir James behind me, and when we got down to the bottom and trekked along the beach, he remained in that position, muttering under his breath. At first I barely noticed – the closer we drew towards that distant, solitary structure, the more apprehensive I was feeling. I had that absurd but familiar sensation that my only escape route, the path to the cliff-top, was falling further and further behind me. Only after several seconds of these ruminations did I realise that Sir James wasn’t muttering to himself, he was talking to me – albeit quietly.
“That’s what we’re about today, Mr Pendleton … the universe. One has a duty to glance into the great beyond if one has the chance. One must always seek to answer the unanswerable questions.”
“I don’t know about that, Sir James,” I said, glancing around. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the old building as it loomed closer. “I was wondering if we … well, if we’ve actually got time for this. Suppose the bus comes early?”
He either didn’t hear this, or was so absorbed in his own thoughts that he failed to detect any anxiety on my part. “There are times in every man’s life when he must take a leap into the dark, if nothing else to reassure himself that the darkness doesn’t go on indefinitely.”
I tried to laugh. “But we’re not doing that today, are we? I mean this is just a game, isn’t it? A little joke?”
Abruptly, he seemed to wake. “A joke, of course.” He nodded robustly. “But what a wonderful way to round off an exhilarating week, wouldn’t you agree?”
I couldn’t actually have agreed less. But it would have seemed churlish to dispute with him when he was clearly so keen. He was stiff-shouldered, almost ramrod straight, as we followed a path up from the sand onto the plateau, which was knee-deep in a thick, furze-like grass. The rim of Sir James’s fedora flapped backwards in the breeze as we marched along it. His eyes were still fixed on the approaching ruin, bright and flat as coins.
Close up, the Rectory seemed larger than it had before, which suggested that “walking through it” as Sir James had said, wouldn’t necessarily be quick or easy. It must have had three floors, and probably a cellar as well, and there’d be multiple rooms on each level. It might have been comforting to see gulls perched along the edges of its steeply angled roofs, of which there were several, or among its numerous misaligned chimney pots, but strangely – given that it was summer – there was no sign of life at all. It was even more disconcerting to note that what I’d thought were empty window frames contained closed timber shutters, though all had rotted black thanks to the damp sea wind. The front door was also firmly closed, crisscrossed with a higgledy-piggledy mass of planks, which looked as if they had been nailed there swiftly rather than carefully. Every other aspect of the house was as odious as you’d expect for a structure abandoned for so long: its walls were of weathered red-brick and coated with fungus-like moss. Its eaves hung with threads of shriveled brown ivy. All its pipework was rusted and broken. Fallen slates scattered the cement paths leading around either side of it.
After some muted debate, we took the path on the left. This led us through to a side-garden, though it was actually more like a jungle of semi-decayed foliage, which rose far over our heads. There was an open entrance to the house on this side: a low doorway, which at first looked as if it was only about three feet tall, but then we approached and saw that it stood at the base of a flight of cellar steps. Clearly there had once been a solid door fitted there – both its jambs had perished but they were also splintered, as if someone had forced entry. Thrill-seekers like ourselves, I supposed. Beyond this entrance lay only skulking darkness.
We stood there, the hair prickling our scalps. I know it sounds like a cliché, but the notion that we were being observed was overpowering. We glanced constantly over our shoulders, but the dense green tangle that shrouded us masked any sight of the beach or the rolling surf. The distant explosions of the waves were only just audible.
Gibbon cleared his throat. “What are we … erm, what’re we supposed to do now that we’re here, Sir James?”
“Hmmm!” Sir James leaned on his cane. “As I understand it, there are no set rules. Except that … well, you walk through from one side to the other.”
“Is there an open door on the other side?” I asked.
He shrugged as he gazed into the unlit recess. “I imagine there must be. Someone’s broken this one open. Almost certainly they’ll have broken one on the other side.”
Almost certainly. Two simple words, yet they conveyed far more menace than they had any right to. Almost certainly – but perhaps not? And who would be the first one to discover that he’d wandered into what was actually a cul-de-sac, with some sinister presence close behind him?
“Who goes first?” Sir James asked, so sharply that we all jumped. In retrospect it seems ridiculous to have been so frightened. The house was larger than we’d thought, but if one were to dash through it, he’d be out the other side in less than twenty seconds – assuming he could find a clear route. And yet still no-one volunteered, though Sir James had apparently anticipated this. He produced a fistful of fresh-cut grass stems, and said we were to draw one each.
How inevitable was it, I wonder, that the one I selected would have another one tied to the end of it? I remember peering at it with some vague feeling that life was a conspiracy.
“Go ahead, Mr Pendleton,” Sir James said in a faux grave tone. He regarded me with something like a fond smile, but his eyes were hard and shiny, as if they would brook no refusal. “Let’s see some of this famous northern grit, shall we?”
The others were watching me, white-faced, so I tried to make light of it, shrugging, pretending it would all be in a morning’s work – though inwardly I had this dull, almost numbing consciousness that my ordeal had now begun and was irreversible.
I descended the cellar steps stealthily, but still imagining the reports of my footfalls echoing ahead of me through the eerie structure, certain to disturb anything that wasn’t already disturbed.
“Remember,” Sir James said from behind – he and the others already felt a significant distance away, “on no account, turn back and look.”
I repeate
d this to myself over and over as I strode forward into the blackness, hands groping out ahead of me. No looking back. No looking back. Whatever happened, whatever I heard, I would not look back. My intent was simply to bullock my way through, blinded by darkness or not, keeping going with my head down until I was out the other side. But immediately I saw that it wouldn’t be this simple. No sooner had I entered that first underground chamber than the dull grey daylight started to penetrate past me, revealing a bare brick corridor, whitewashed sometime in the past but now festooned with cobwebs and densely cluttered with items of broken furniture – tables, chairs and stools, several covered in mildewed rags or stacked with wooden crates. There was even a row of coat pegs on one of the walls, with an old canvas coat hanging from one of them. I tried to ignore this as I negotiated my way past, though I now kept replaying in my head a scene from some silent comedy I’d watched – Buster Keaton or Harry Langdon – in which a hanging coat is left to its own devices, only for a pair of feet to appear at the bottom, gloved hands to emerge from the sleeve cuffs and a cowled head to appear above the collar, the coat then detaching itself from the hanger and creeping furtively after the hero and heroine.
I glanced back several times at the coat, just for reassurance that it was still hanging there innocently – only to remind myself in a moment of shock insight that was something like a dash of cold water, that I should not be looking behind me at all!
Only now did it strike me how much of a challenge this was going to be – never looking back as I slowly, cautiously progressed. But was it the case that I was never supposed to look back, or did it only apply when or if I heard the voice? I was still debating this with myself when I reached the end of the cellar corridor, where there was a T-junction – two opposing passages heading off into noisome darkness, and a stone switchback stair with a rusty handrail leading upwards. Here, I loitered haplessly. Again, that fetid ‘empty house’ stench was ripe. I didn’t want to go upstairs – if there was no exit from up there, that would be quite a detour; but neither did I want to venture along either of the next two passages. There was no glimmer of light from them, and the stench seemed even thicker. The more I pondered it, the less likely it seemed there would be another door on the cellar level.
I glanced upwards, and saw a faint silver radiance, no doubt a combination of numerous chinks of daylight filtering around shutters or through the gaps between heavy, dust-thick drapes – certainly no guarantee that my escape route lay that way. But, with no real choice, I ascended slowly, again stepping as lightly as I could. It was impossible not to picture the labyrinthine spaces above me – more rooms, more corridors, all dusty and empty save maybe for similar relics of furniture to those I’d seen below. Perhaps some of these would be nothing more in the gloom than large, eerily-shaped objects covered with sheets, and I would have to sidle narrowly past them. I was suddenly desperate to be back outside with the others, or in the village car park sitting on the wall with Flickwood, even if he did have a basin crop – at least the air would be fresh and there’d be a human presence on all sides of me. But still I ascended, thrusting these ideas aside. It was just a derelict house, I told myself. That was all there was to it.
At the top of the stairs I entered the entry hallway. I could see more clearly in here because though the front door, which was about thirty yards away, was blocked from the other side, there was a fanlight over the top of it – it was covered by a stained sheet, though this admitted a muted glow. I could see enough to distinguish that the parquet floor was covered with leaves, and that there were several dark doorways on either side of it. I turned my gaze from one of these to the next. The room I sought would most likely be the kitchen, but behind which portal did it lie?
The first led me into an old lounge area, now a gutted shell. Bare boards lay where there had once been a carpet, and the paper on the walls hung only in strips as if someone had been vigorously rending at it; looking closely, the few strips remaining appeared to have been shredded by the claws of an animal. But my biggest shock came after my eyes had attuned properly to the dimness, and I turned to the large fireplace and noted a bath chair to one side – with what looked like a figure reposed in it.
The impression was so lifelike that I almost turned and fled, though somehow I resisted this and edged a little closer, eyes goggling – before it struck me that the chair contained nothing but a bundle of blankets. Even then I wasn’t completely put at ease. The blankets, which were exceedingly old and dirty, had been dumped in the bath chair rather than folded and placed there neatly. As such, the corner of one musty old quilt had risen up at the point where a human head would be and drooped forward a little, creating what looked like a peaked hood. It was difficult to believe there’d be sufficient space under there to conceal a human. But even so, I found myself crouching and peeking warily in, half-expecting to see some hideous, mouldering visage. Strangely, the empty hollow I saw instead was even more unsettling.
I straightened up, reminding myself that it wasn’t my purpose to investigate this house, merely to pass through it. Clearly there was to be no exit via this room, nor in the next, which might have been an old dining area. In some ways, the murky half-light in these chambers was actually worse than full darkness would have been. I could make out pale oblongs on the walls where pictures had once hung, broken figurines on mantelpieces, fireplaces where the grates were stuffed with old newspapers and feathers. Everything was grimy, dingy and damp – in short, dead. And yet it was easy to imagine that my presence here had invoked a kind of hostility. I was just passing through a pair of double doors into a morning room of sorts, when I stopped cold.
That sounds so melodramatic, I now realise – but at the time I literally froze, listening as intently as I could, my heart pounding.
From one of the other rooms, almost certainly the lounge, had come the sound of wheels creaking. Only slightly – a couple of metallic squeaks and then silence again, but I was in no doubt that I had just heard the bath chair moving.
Before I knew what I was doing – again ignoring the vital instruction “don’t look back” – I’d stridden out of the morning room, back along the hall and into the lounge. I’m not sure where this temporary courage came from. Possibly I was expecting that one of the other chaps had sneaked into the house after me and was playing games, even though I felt certain Sir James had come here with a much higher purpose. Once I was back in the lounge, I was almost disappointed to find it exactly as I’d left it. There was nobody else in there, just the dimness and the dust. The bath chair might have moved from its original position, but if so it was infinitesimal. It remained motionless as I stared at it. And then I noted something different about it – the raised ‘hood’ had collapsed forward. Which suggested that, infinitesimal or not, there had been some movement.
I hurried on my way, determined to get the ordeal over as quickly as possible. I crossed back through the morning room and along a very dark corridor towards what simply must be the kitchen. But now I had to pass the foot of the main staircase, which, rather unconventionally, was located in an entirely enclosed stairwell, the black entrance to which sat at a facing angle to the kitchen door. I paused before passing it. It seemed too likely that someone – a friend thinking of playing a joke, or maybe some dangerous vagabond – could be lurking in there just waiting to jump out on me.
I cast around to try and provide myself with a weapon, but nothing came to hand. Deciding that delay was only protracting the torture, I bunched my fists and went boldly forward, passing the stairwell entrance without even glancing into it, and turning into the kitchen, which had been fitted in ‘naval galley’ fashion in that it was long and narrow with worktops down either side. It was in a filthy state; everything aged and decayed, fallen tiles exposing bare brick walls. But a door stood open a crack at the far end, and daylight glimmered around it.
Relieved, I hurried down there, yanking the door open – only to find that I was in a concrete annex comprising three m
ore rooms. The first, to my left, looked like a scullery, as three of its sides were equipped with deep, empty shelves. The second, directly in front of me, looked like a utilities passage – it was filled with shattered masonry and flooded to a depth of maybe an inch; all types of rusted, sawn-off plumbing jutted from the rotted plaster crumbling from its walls. Thirdly, to my right, was what appeared to be a coal room, little more now than a bare stone chamber, but it was from in here, thanks to a high letterbox-shaped window of frosted glass, that the light was issuing.
“What’s behind you?” the voice whispered in my ear.
I’d just been pondering the improbability of there being no rear door to this house, when I realised that I had been spoken to. It’s quite incredible how, despite all the warning advice you’ve been given to never look round, that first moment you feel certain someone has stepped up behind you, your immediate instinct is to spin and confront them. And I was so close to doing just that.
Good Lord, only some sixth sense prevented me!
I froze again, beset by a terror that words can barely describe. There was no question in my mind about this being one of the others fooling with me, for the voice had not come from earthly vocal cords. It had drifted into my hearing range with a sibilance born of wind, ice, dust, emptiness, despair. It was overwhelming, that sense – that something more awful than I could possibly imagine was immediately behind me, and that I only needed to turn my head slightly, and – but no!
