Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘You not got any beast you need to feed, Mr Walker? You not felt its hunger?’

  I fidgeted in my seat as he revved the engine.

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like that mad Father O’ Connell you mentioned.’

  Once in reverse, Peter swung the Land Rover round to face the way we had come.

  ‘Hold onto your gun, Inspector, we’re not finished yet.’

  ‘Now where the hell are we going?’

  ‘Back to the place where I first discovered what it means to feel cursed.’

  16

  Peter’s remark I received with a smirk, which seemed not inappropriate for such an old-fashioned word as ‘cursed’. It was beneath me to gild his specious ghost story with a sinister significance it did not deserve.

  Meanwhile Prince dug his claws into my lap.

  ‘Er, is this, like, the same way we came in?’ I asked, bumping up and down inside the pitching Land Rover.

  It seemed completely wrong that I should be invited to go down paths entirely unknown to me in directions not of my choosing. The ridiculousness of it all deserved to be challenged. But no sooner had I spoken than Prince and I were shot against the windscreen.

  ‘What the hell!’ I cried, peering over the truck’s road-splashed bonnet. ‘Why have we stopped?’

  Squirming about on the seat, Prince whined at his master not to wander too far from the vehicle. I did the same.

  Peter took his gun and strode over to the pheasant pens. Fox-proof electric wires had been flattened and stones kicked aside where something or someone had crashed through the defences, I noticed. My wary companion trod spiky green bluebell leaves to do a quick survey of the damage. Next minute, he climbed back into the truck and handed me a brown leather pouch.

  ‘Whoever broke down the wire must have paused for a drink,’ he said, driving on.

  It entirely baffled me to see how it was in any way significant. The fence bothered him less than his find.

  ‘H’m, well, yeah,’ I replied. ‘It’s like holding a big dried up prune.’

  ‘That’s because it’s made from deer hide.’

  The disgusting object was a canteen in the shape of a gourd. Over time it had grown stiff and unyielding, even shrivelled. When I sniffed it, a cold earthy smell met my nostrils, an odour that pertained rather disagreeably to the dank leaves and beechmast that littered the wood’s blackest corners. It was hard not to think that, through his overreaction, my madcap driver would have me believe that I was touching something of calamitous significance? At its top was a loop where it had once hung from belt or saddle.

  ‘Seems very, very old. So whose is it, do you think?’

  Suddenly Peter accelerated the Land Rover up the track at full speed. That business of who or what had damaged the defences remained unsettled for the moment. But before I could protest, I was ordered out of the vehicle. Next to a brimming, green-blue lake stood a disintegrating wire mesh cage, I discovered. The roof of the pen had fallen in long ago and grass grew through a wooden hutch built half out over the water. Nearby a perforated wooden crate, that lay with its lid off, was lined inside with rotting feathers.

  At that moment, neither my presence there nor my present company pleased me in the slightest.

  ‘Honestly? A pond is what you want to show me now?’

  I tripped on the broken stump of a giant hogweed. We were outside Chatcombe Wood but not its atmosphere. Behind us, the wall of trees bent and scratched branches in the wind that blew off the open fields. If I clung to the Land Rover’s ill-fitting door it was because I was determined to dismiss my fears. No branches ever grew claws. Still I had to force myself to be all ears in case I missed something. It was always a relief to leave a wood – I couldn’t bear not being able to see past the shadows.

  ‘Just hear me out,’ said Peter, taking my arm. ‘Let me tell you what happened here years ago.’

  ‘Not before I get back in the truck.’

  *

  ‘You’re looking at Bert’s duck pen,’ said Peter, leaning on the Land Rover’s steering-wheel. ‘Back then, he was the cantankerous old gamekeeper who lived in a funny little round house not more than a mile from here as the crow flies. Philip knew when Bert toured the estate each day which gave us time to prepare out ghost hunt.

  ‘Never before had I seen such bright stars. In town you never get to observe the night sky properly, do you Mr Walker? It was a revelation. In those days I believed in neither the spiritual nor the supernatural.

  ‘After an hour I could barely tolerate my own nervousness, but fancying in every shadow some fresh phantom I soon began to discount any notion of meeting a dead woodsman.

  ‘ “Wait!” warned Philip. “I hear something.”

  ‘He was right. What sounded like a smoothly continuous flow of water started our way. With the gentle, lively ripple I soon distinguished hundreds of squeaks and squeals.

  ‘Philip parted strands of oilseed rape in the field where we were crouching and pointed further up the track. Trudging along the edge of the wood was a large, powerful figure and with him came hundreds of rats. The spring in his step was sprightly for one who limped a little. The long grey hair that protruded from his floppy, wide-brimmed hat pronounced him old, but not from time elapsed or length of life. Indeed, something about him struck me as remarkably ageless.

  ‘From one gauntleted hand swung an oil lamp, in his other a blade.

  ‘ “Bet you he stole that lamp from the sheds at Father O’Connell’s bungalow,” whispered Philip. “They use them by the dozen up there to help incubate the pheasants’ eggs. He’s a thief as well as a ghost.”

  ‘A violent shock set my cold blood on fire. With no real predilection for the unnatural, I was less inclined to cast him as a spectre than some strange wanderer or pilgrim. I never before saw such fine leather boots, even if their turn-down tops and toes had dried out and cracked with excessive use.

  ‘I was unsure which part of me burnt hottest with embarrassment. I felt it more as a total assault on my entire nerve-system, the result of perceiving or being asked to perceive a distinctly maleficent and hellish presence. Exiled from one world, he found it hard going in the next.

  ‘We watched him dip his old deerskin canteen in the pond. Hunched and hideous in his rat-coloured cloak, he screwed tight the gourd’s stopper, then sniffed and hissed. Bad lungs were enough to edge each breath with a wheeze. To me, every one came across as a snarl.

  ‘ “We should go,” I murmured, “in case we get into trouble.”

  ‘But before we could call off the whole silly venture, the stranger began to raid the ducks in their duck-house. He made the devil of a racket. He severed one bird’s neck with a slash of his silver dagger. That’s when I caught a glimpse of his face. As I’d thought, despite the silvery hair, moustache and goatee, he was no more than forty or so years old. One bleak, sunken eye gleamed in the moonlight with a steely, battle-hardened fury, but the other socket was a wall of white caused by disease or injury. Below the dead eye, half his cheek had been sliced by some sharp, angular edge drawn breadthwise across his face. The ugly scrape had cut to the bone that framed one corner of his jaw. He would never kiss a woman properly again where his mouth was so deformed.

  ‘In attire he was still proud and strong, almost noble.

  ‘ “He has the air of a soldier,” declared George.

  ‘ “Or he’s the vision of one,” said Philip.

  ‘ “You serious?” I said.

  ‘ “I mean he could be a phantasm of someone dead and buried long ago.”

  ‘ “Seems flesh and blood to me.”

  ‘ “If Father O’Connell were here he’d say we were looking at a bogle.”

  ‘ “So, please, tell me what in hell is a bogle?”

  ‘ “It’s an old word for bogy man, bugbear or phantom. Sometimes it is the Devil himself.”

  ‘ “Er, well, yeah, I never saw a poor lost soul look so human?”

  ‘ “Don’t you see?” said
Philip. “Bogles go about the world disguised as men.”

  ‘ “But what man is he?”

  ‘ “Doesn’t he remind you of a Cavalier in that high-crowned hat with its feather? He could be a survivor on the run after being defeated in battle or else an escapee from prison.”

  ‘I could no longer think rationally, Mr Walker. Maybe it was my lack of imagination, but for me the rats appeared to gather in a circle around us.

  ‘ “For God’s sake, run!” I screamed. “Run for your life.”

  ‘But when I glanced behind me, I saw Philip delay. Fascinated by the dishevelled figure, he had stopped to whirl his bolas behind him.

  ‘Back in Coberley Hall we convened a summit of war.

  ‘Philip held up rope and wire.

  ‘ “We have to capture and kill him,” he said.

  ‘ “But what if he’s only a tramp? Or a real-life soldier back from a war?” I objected.

  ‘ “We have to hang him up and skin him alive. Before that, we’ll hold a saucepan to his slit veins and make soup with his blood.”

  ‘ “Do you even know how to gut a bogle?” I asked.

  ‘ “Like a deer.”

  *

  ‘Next morning, on the way to Chatcombe Wood, I detected a change in Philip. He was no longer the diffident, shy schoolboy whom everybody avoided at school, he had acquired an electrifying sense of purpose which gave him unnatural energy and drive. He was, dare I say it, entirely happy.

  ‘ “First smear your hands with mud. We mustn’t leave our scent on the trap or alert the beast to our presence.”

  ‘ “All this for a figment of his imagination,” I whispered to George, who agreed.

  ‘Philip drew out his knife and cut a notch in a stake. This was no more than a piece of kindling but he drove it half into the ground with a stone opposite a beech sapling.

  ‘ “This way, he has to pass through a gap between tree and pond.”

  ‘ “See how blurred and out of line these prints are,” I said. “I reckon you winged him with your bolas. He really is hobbling now.”

  ‘One loose, torn sole had split into two where it had left cloven ridges of soil among the many deer spoor. Here and there were great, bear-sized holes, trailed by a spur.

  ‘Thanks to our peg in the ground and its trigger, the top of the sapling stayed where we lodged it. Its tip bent right down to the ground ready to trip its snare. Then we returned to Coberley Hall to wait for nightfall.

  *

  ‘All that evening I listened out for any scream that might arise from the wood. Of course, in reality, Chatcombe was over a mile away, lost in the black landscape. At midnight three of us set off for the duck pond, each armed with bolas or pike.

  ‘We arrived within sight of the trees when we heard shouts. It was a shock, Mr Walker, I’m damned if it wasn’t, because until then I’d had no faith in our wild scheme. The beech sapling had sprung high, higher than I’d imagined possible, I’m damned if it hadn’t. Our captive dangled upside down by one foot from the snare so that his coat had fallen down over his head which now rested at a dangerous angle to the ground. With one great hand he was trying to claw blindly at the noose round his ankle.

  ‘We raced out the field and across the stony track where I grabbed the captive by his waist. Philip danced about with his knife poised in the air while he tried to decide where best to strike him. He favoured the heart.

  ‘ “Wait!” I said. “Shouldn’t we offer terms?”

  ‘ “Are you mad?” cried Philip. “He’s the enemy.”

  ‘ “No, he’s right,” said George. “We have to observe the conventions. Uncover his head. In the English Civil War besieged garrisons were more often than not given the chance to surrender their weapons.”

  ‘ “Oh, so we’re soldiers now, are we?”

  ‘ “Shine that torch over here!”

  ‘I gave a kick. Off came the cloth to reveal the incandescent, pugilistic face of Bert the gamekeeper.

  ‘ “You!”

  ‘ “Not me,” cried Philip.

  ‘ “We didn’t do it,” said George. “Honest, we didn’t.”

  ‘ “Cut me down, you bastards, before I give you all a good thrashing.”

  ‘By torchlight the gamekeeper’s mean little face was a ruddy mixture of bright red and purple with rubicund veins set to explode across his temple.

  ‘ “It’s lucky we came along,” I blurted, desperate to think of a lie in time. “You could have died.”

  ‘ “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  ‘None of us said anything at first. Bert sat rubbing his bloody ankle with a groan as we pulled off the loop of wire.

  ‘ “Well, if it wasn’t you who set that blasted trap, who was it? I’ve been hanging upside down for an hour.”

  ‘Philip stepped forward to pat poor Bert on the shoulder.

  ‘ “It was that tramp who lives in the woodsman’s shack.”

  ‘ “What tramp?”

  ‘ “He’s been there ever since Leslie died. We saw him stealing your ducks.”

  ‘Bert dusted dead leaves out of his grey hair and straightened his jacket. It took the three of us to lift him back on his feet.

  ‘ “How do you know about that?”

  ‘ “It’s all over the village.”

  ‘He looked aghast.

  ‘ “Okay, boys. Now scram. Go to bed at once.”

  ‘We marched back along the track and kept up the charade until the gamekeeper was safely out of sight.

  ‘ “We’ve done a terrible thing,” I said. “Now we’ll have to make amends for interfering in something we don’t understand, but it’s not too late. Please God, don’t let anyone be hurt. He cannot be what he seems.”

  ‘From then on, we slouched back to the house like cowards. We left the wood which had grown darker behind us.

  ‘ “Who cares about any tramp, anyway?” said Philip, his chest heaving with disappointment.

  ‘That was all he said, which soon came back to haunt us.’

  *

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, gazing at the wrecked duck-house. ‘You boys turned a tramp into some Gothic fantasy so you could go on a mad manhunt? But what harm could come of it? Honestly?’

  ‘Soon afterwards word got around that a tramp really had died in Chatcombe Wood. He had no identification on him, no tattoos or anything to say who he was, I’m damned if he didn’t. What struck me most, Mr Walker, was how little it took for a man to vanish off the face of the Earth, so to speak.’

  ‘H’m, well, you know, it’s not easy to keep body and soul together. Anyway, was it not his decision to live like a wild animal?’

  ‘But not to die like one.”

  ‘No, but who would?’

  ‘The thing is, after being strung up by a tree he had been gutted in the same way a deer would have been. His butcher had inserted a claw or blade at the penis and then sliced him all the way up to his chin. By splitting apart his chest somebody or something had pulled out the entrails, but not before they had slit open his veins and drained all the blood. It was an act of such despicable callousness that people said he must have been clawed to pieces by a fiend. Of course the police scoured the woods for a weapon but found nothing. Officially the coroner returned an open verdict which still stands to this day, but unofficially the police attributed the killing to another tramp. They came to the conclusion that some powerfully built drifter had quarrelled with him over the use of the shack that night.’

  ‘You literally saying what I think you’re saying?’

  Peter rolled his eyes at me.

  ‘You saw what happened to Sullivan O’Leary. He was missing his boots, too. Back then there were no escaped wild boars, but that killing was by someone or something equally cruel.’

  ‘You serious? Some thing?’

  I could barely stomach his gall and impudence. For me to share his childish and grotesque world, he would first have me believe in some poor soul whom he had not the slightest compunction t
o liken to a dead Cavalier, it seemed.

  Suddenly I heard Prince whine and whimper in the cab of the Land Rover. He rubbed his ghastly wet black nose round mine and sniffed bad things I couldn’t.

  ‘We should leave this place at once,’ I said, urging Peter to restart the engine.

  It seemed to me that he would have me speculate wildly with reckless incaution about some imminent danger that could not possibly be true. Bafflingly, he spoke as though such a malign presence had first cast its shadow over the estate years ago.

  ‘All I know, Inspector, is that the bogy man we imagined came to life, I’m damned if it didn’t. But I can see I’ve stretched credulity too far for you already.’

  ‘In a way, yeah,’ I said, as I suffered appallingly on my badly sprung seat. ‘Who found the tramp’s savaged body, to your knowledge?’

  ‘Bert did. Shortly afterwards he completely lost his nerve. It was the shock of it all, I suppose. He had to leave Coberley for ever because he couldn’t bear to set foot in Chatcombe Wood again. He said it was cursed.’

  ‘By your lone dragoon? I very much doubt that.’

  Peter glanced at the seat and the old leather gourd at which Prince kept sniffing and growling.

  ‘We won’t know until we meet him again.’

  17

  Unsettling as Peter’s story was, I bade him convey me post-haste back to Coberley Hall. There came into my head a strange dizziness and my chest felt fit to burn. Even as my brain worked my pulse too hot and hard, I did wonder, with each successive jolt of the Land Rover, how many beats per minute my heart could bear.

  It was that unpleasant.

  Ten minutes later I braced myself for the final skid on the forecourt.

  ‘Thank you, my man,’ I gasped, groping for my gun. ‘It was kind of you save me the walk.’

  As best I could, I eased my bruised buttocks off my seat to fall out the door, tried to do it with proper dignity.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Walker,’ said Peter, hunching his heavy shoulders over the steering-wheel, ‘as a police inspector would you consider yourself good at getting to the heart of the matter?’

  Just because I had listened to his absurd anecdote about a killer years ago, he seemed to think that he deserved yet more of my precious attention.